Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence by Thomas J. McPartland (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 325 Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence. By THOMAS J. MCPAR1LAND. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Pp. 303. $37.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-8262-1345-6. Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence reveals the ongoing maturation of those scholars who continue to appropriate Lonergan's work and explore its ramifications. More specifically McPartland's book participates in a serious discussion on the integration of Lonergan's notions of metaphysics, culture, and history, and his relationship to such modern and contemporary figures as Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Dilthey, Heidegger, Polanyi, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, and especially Eric Voegelin. McPartland's objective is to articulate a philosophy of history that is a differentiated form of wisdom and is capable of mediating historical existence. The result is both personal and communal. As personal, it is an authentic subjectivity that is a love of wisdom and a species of religious love that is differentiated by functional specialization and a personal existential attunement to the in-between. As communal, it is a community of lovers of wisdom, collaborating in a functionally specialized community called Cosmopolis. McPartland develops his view of wisdom by rooting it in a restoration of a metaphysics of historical existence an analysis of the horizon of a subject. As the summary presentation of Lonergan's notion of the person (chap. 1) and of metaphysics expressed as generalized emergent probability (chap. 2) reveals, only the human being who has undergone an adequate development in the great achievements of the past and the present can supply the context for this analysis. This analysis, subsequently, provides a heuristic tool that McPartland uses to reveal both what can be appreciated in various authors on philosophy and history and their limits and distortions. He sets up the heuristic in chapter 1 by identifyingtwo opposedtheories ofknowledge, the confrontational viewand the isomorphic. In Lonergan's Insight, the confrontational view of knowledge and reality is based on the senses, and is summarized by Lonergan's phrase "alreadyout -there-now-real." The isomorphic view is based on the questions for understanding, which seek insights, and questions for reflection, which seek judgments. Thus, reality is not something "out-there." It is what is grasped or mediated in the human person by a compound ofexperience, understanding, and judging. Experience constitutes the cognitive appropriation of the potency of reality, understanding mediates the intelligibility of reality, and judgment mediates the truth of reality as understood. This is not to say that this compound creates the real. It is not to say that the reality that is known is not distinct from knowing. It is not to say that cognition is not a part of reality. Rather, it is an epistemological articulation of the relationship between cognition and reality, which is precisely what prompted the modern and postmodern questions that resulted in a rejection of metaphysics and, in the end, promoted historicism. McPartland makes the two opposed theories of cognition fundamental in his dialectical analysis, and crucial in his method for the analysis of historical 326 BOOK REVIEWS existence. This which McPartland caHs a "dialectical " is used to engage various modern and authors 3) and to recover a notion of that rejects historicism In 5, it effects an n~1•in·,,t1,nn of reason and of those who live in openness to the "'inm1terpretilt1 •:m match the "basic horizon" of a human existence incarnate with a is necessary for the realization of a of historical existence mediated by a dialectical devoted to that community called must be open to the transcendental norms that caU of and the of counter7 , McPard:md sets foHh the differentiated wisdom that will -····~···---this a wisdom that is more than cognitive and in fact is a form of love. This further nuances w the meaning of authentic subjectivity and authentic historical existence. It must be noted that this has a significant limit not adequately reveals in the concrete L(isn1p~)HiS. It is rare to find "lovers of wisdom," even rarer to find lovers, even rnrer yet to find persons and communities with tu1aci:io:na1a1 "!-'"''-'~"'"·"''-' differentiation of and rn:nr•·et1~h1 ""V'-"""'"''"' Cosmopolis that fa effective in as a steward of historical...