Bernard Lonergan's Philosophy of Religion: From Philosophy of God to Philosophy of Religious Studies

Chapter Two The Philosophical Aspect of the Concept of Experience

23 Chapter Two The Philosophical Aspect of the Concept of Experience Up to now I have been analyzing religious experience in Lonergan’s philosophy of God in a general way, providing the necessary background for understanding the shift he effects in the early 1970s. Among our more important finds is what that shift does not imply. First, it does not imply that Lonergan abandons his proof in his later writings. Second, it does not imply that he overlooks religious experience in his early writings. Neither is denied as the other comes up for reflection. What may look like a denial of the logistics of proof is but an admission of its subtext of meaning. Where proof and religious experience pass each other by in Insight as though complete strangers, in Philosophy of God, and Theology they embrace like long-lost relatives. The implication of this union is that both can coexist with the different concerns by which they exist. If the modernist crisis delayed the full budding of religious experience in Lonergan’s early philosophy of God, its cessation did not eradicate his personal concerns that made keeping it at bay tolerable during the modernist scare. It is not purely accidental that the last chapter ends with remarks about the centrality of truth in Insight, propositional and otherwise. This Lonergan never abandoned even in the twilight of his philosophy of God. That is why we must now delve more deeply into Lonergan’s concept of experience before even beginning to think about greeting the dawn of his philosophy of religion. The generalities of the previous chapter lead us only so far. They merely hint at a union concerning whose dynamics we are left largely in the dark. In the next two chapters, then, I attempt to cast light on that dynamic, ironing out some of the details I have mentioned en passant. This should help us ride the incoming tide of his philosophy of religion more 24 THE PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECT OF THE CONCEPT OF EXPERIENCE adeptly. Because Lonergan in Philosophy of God, and Theology recognizes Insight to be the terminus a quo of the problematic, I begin my treatment there. We are thus discharged from the task of having to trace the history of the concept from the early 1940s to the early 1950s. I, for one, have failed to detect anything radically different in that body of literature to warrant such an undertaking here. Except for the obvious advantage of equipping us with a comprehensive knowledge of experience in Lonergan, I have serious doubts that this kind of endeavor would contribute anything to our discussion bordering on the revolutionary. THE READER’S EXPERIENCE IN INSIGHT The term experience has more than one meaning in Insight. Experience can be either noematic or noetic. An experienced quale in Lonergan counts as experience every bit as much as the conscious experience that receives or acts upon qualia. More emphatically, experienced qualia are as experiential as the experience that allows for qualia to emerge in consciousness. If I am unconscious , I do not experience the activity about me. Something may bring me out of my unconscious state, say, intense heat, but as unconscious I am oblivious to data that are extraneous and happen to be non-intrusive for whatever reason. Once I become conscious of that activity, in its sheer presentedness, it enters the conscious flow of my experience. This accounts for the noematic sense of experience, which is very much a part of Lonergan’s vocabulary. In this study I bracket the noematic, particularly as it pertains to the data of sense. I focus rather on the noetic, which strikes me as more crucial for understanding Lonergan’s philosophical intentions. One can detect at least three meanings to this noetic aspect of experience in Lonergan: a general and a specific meaning as well as one available only to the reader.1 My including the latter may seem spurious since all writers assume their audiences interpret what they read in the light of their manifold experiences. Some writers forge better approximations than others. But the “successful” fusion is the business of the reader. Undergirding this process is an often tacit and necessary rhetoric of persuasion to lessen the initial gap between a text’s affirmations and a reader’s horizon. Insight falls in a branch of writing that makes this implicit framework explicit. The reader’s experience is focused on as primary, although Lonergan takes pains to emphasize that he...