We're going to begin our next session.
We have first Justin Schwartz, who is here.
He is here from Regis College downtown.
And he's an evangelical from Nebraska.
No, last time I moved from was Illinois. Okay.
But he's an American here, studying at a Jesuit school, studying a Catholic
theologian, but who has a lot to say about the topic.
So that's why he's here to talk to us today.
So welcome, Jesse.
Thanks. James had to say a few words possibly
about why in the world am I into Bernard Vonarden.
What are you doing studying a Catholic?
Some people might say I did an Mdiv and Ma in Lincoln, Illinois,
at Lincoln Christian University, and myself, I was struggling with questions of
development and doctrine, the role of philosophy and theology,
experience in theology, religious conversion he'll talk about.
So just how does theology philosophy go?
To the other, it seemed to be a lot of the issues that I had questions about.
He had the same exact questions.
So study a mind that's been through your questions.
Hopefully you'll understand Wanigan himself.
He said he studied Aquinas for eleven
years, trying to reach up to the mind of Aquinas.
So difficult project.
But I did my Mdiv in historical theology. Totally different.
I wrote my master's thesis on origin, on free will and judgment.
And so I've moved into something completely different.
Now up here in Canada, I came to Toronto
to study at the Lonergan Research Institute at Regis.
So that's a little bit about me.
So here we go.
What are we talking about when we talk about experience?
Are we even talking about the same thing?
You say experience, I say experience, she says experience.
I think this symposium has left the question open, probably on purpose.
Perhaps there is a caution on the matter
because of a lack of refinement on what experience is.
So at the symposium, a stated focus on
experience in theology and how questions of how exactly it should fit within the
theological enterprise demand some clarity.
So the aim of my presentation is to
attempt to bring some clarity to the discussion at this symposium on this topic
of experience through a presentation of Bernard Lonergan's conception of
experience and its role within a general framework of how we come to know.
I'll do this in several steps.
First, I will summarize Lonergan's approach, named intentionality analysis,
which yields what he calls a cognitional theory.
Second, I will describe and define experience according to Laundergen.
Third, I will describe how experience fits within Laundergan's outline of the four
intentional levels involved in fully human knowing, which we'll get to.
So some main takeaways from this
presentation to clarify experience are these I'm going to go through first,
experience is involved in all of our knowing.
Second, experience by itself is not fully human knowledge and requires
more, and I'll talk about interpretation and judgment.
And third, as the title of my paper, Objectivity is the Fruit of authentic
subjectivity, which sounds really weird when you first hear it.
And fourth, experience is involved when all people practice theology.
So a little intro on Lonergan.
Bernard Lonergan was a Roman Catholic
Jesuit priest who lived from 19 four to 1984.
A polymath, he wrote and published in the
areas of philosophy, theology, economics, methodology, culture, and more.
Perhaps best known for his 1958 book Insight a Study in Human Understanding,
his other magnum opus, Method in Theology, was published in 1972, was the culmination
of his lifelong interest in theological method.
The goal of Insight was to be the foundational basis for a theological
method, while method and theology actually finishes that project.
So at the basis of these works, laundergen
answers a question that I think is of interest here today.
What am I doing when I'm knowing?
The answer to this question yields what he calls a cognitional theory.
So to answer the question, what am I doing when I'm knowing?
Laundergen abandoned what we might call a faculty psychology,
which uses metaphysical terms such as intellect and will.
A faculty psychology is like this.
It has metaphysical entities that are
basically unavailable for us to use for examination.
So in general, most theologians have used
the concepts of a faculty psychology, such as Thomas Aquinas or Wesley.
They speak of the will,
the intellect, these faculties of the human that are basically unexaminable.
So Lonergan believed that in order to know how we come to know anything, we need to
pay close attention to the things that go on in our consciousness.
So basic presupposition.
He listed the following as these basic pattern of operations that go on.
I think you'll get a feeling for what these are seeing,
hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, inquiring, imagining, understanding,
conceiving, formulating, reflecting, marshaling, and weighing the evidence,
judging, deliberating, evaluating, deciding, speaking, and writing.
Therefore, Lonergan turns to an intentionality analysis.
So I want to make clear what he's talking about.
So, taking inspiration from the branch of
philosophy named phenomenology, in a sense, intentionality analysis is
concerned with the objects that we intend through consciousness.
The word intend should not be confused for
its usual meaning, which means deliberate, like, I intentionally did that.
I deliberately did this.
What he's referring to is the fact that
each of these operations requires an object.
So, for example, I cannot see without seeing something,
I cannot imagine without imagining something.
The eye is to seeing, the ear is to hearing.
So Longergen further explains to say that the operations intend objects is to refer
to such facts as that by seeing, there becomes present what is seen.
By hearing, there becomes present what is heard.
By imagining, there becomes present what is imagined, and so on, where in each
case, the presence in question is a psychological event.
Importantly, objects are not simply physical things before us in a real sense.
Everything we know, we know through consciousness.
I've spoken of objects and on the other side of the equation, operations imply an
operator, and the operator we call the subject you, me or someone else.
We are subjects.
So the operations are performed
consciously, and it is through these operations that the operator is conscious.
So basically, we intend objects, and
through intending them, we're conscious of ourselves.
So the operations are diverse and so are the objects intended by them.
Lonergan identified four levels of consciousness and intentionality.
So this is not straight one to one, but he's using an analogy of levels.
So it's an image for you to grasp onto.
So four levels.
First, the empirical level, the level of experiencing.
So at first we sense, we perceive, we imagine, we feel, and so on.
And all those things are real to us.
Second, the intellectual level or the level of understanding.
What happens there inquiring understanding, conceiving and so on.
Third level is the rational level, the
level of judging, which is where we reflect.
We marshal and weigh evidence.
We pass judgment on the truth or falsity
of something, the certainty or probability, maybe, of a statement.
And the fourth level is the responsible level, the level of deciding.
So this is where we consider possible courses of action.
We evaluate them and decide whether to carry them out.
Should we do such and such if we have decided it's good?
This is how Lonergan describes the
subject's movement through these levels, quoting him.
Our consciousness expands in a new dimension when, from mere experiencing, we
turn to the effort to understand what we have experienced.
A third dimension of rationality emerges
when the content of our acts of understanding is regarded as of itself a
mere bright idea and we endeavor to settle what really is.
So a fourth dimension comes to the fore when judgment on the facts is followed by
deliberation on what we are to do about them.
End quote.
So, more succinctly, we could say that
every act of knowing involves a pattern of experiencing, understanding and judging.
So let's do a little bit on experiencing.
So if someone is in a deep coma or is undergoing dreamless sleep, they
can't come to know any because they're not experiencing any.
So we'd have to say experiencing is necessarily a part of knowing.
But contrary to the claims of empiricist
philosophy, experience is not in itself constitutive of knowledge.
You need more than just experience to have knowledge.
So what we experience is by itself not much more than scraps of data.
Second, understanding to the data of our
experience, we put the question, what is it?
Right, like a little kid dad. What is that?
What is that?
They have all this experience, but they don't understand what it is.
Lonergan calls this the question for intelligence.
Our answer comes in the form of what he
calls an insight, that moment of connection, that grasps.
AHA, I have it.
So we have an insight whenever we come to understand something, though not
everything might be that dramatic as AHA, I've got it finally.
So merely arriving at an insight is not knowledge either.
That's not constituent of knowledge.
Our answer to the question what is it?
Might well be correct.
But of course it might not be, it could be incorrect.
So we don't just stop there
for judging with regard to our insight, we ask the question is it so?
This is what he calls question for
reflection in a sense of one reflects back upon the data with the possible answer to
the question to verify if it is in fact so.
So the question to refer reflection is
answered for the further insight, what Lonergan calls a reflective insight.
Does my hypothesis account for the data that is formed?
So through different different levels of
intentionality, we move up through questioning.
This is, I think, key experience is on the basic level of knowing.
And yes, it is involved in all knowing.
And Pierces say this is what knowledge consists of.
But that's not really correct for fully human knowledge.
Experience in itself is not knowledge, but merely data that demands questioning.
What we experience is material that brings about questioning through our wondering.
We ask what or why is it?
And this leads to insight and the
formulation of a hypothesis, some explanation.
And then we naturally move to not simply
formulating an explanation, but asking whether our explanation is true or not.
He's talking about what he says is the natural drive of our intelligence.
We naturally start with some sort of data and we just ask the question Why?
Or what?
And then it's only natural for us to move
on from there, to say, well, is it true or is it not true?
What's going on there?
So we have to move our hypothesis back to
the data test to see if our explanation holds and accounts for all of the data.
We need to answer all of the pertinent questions and answer with yes, no, or
maybe, I don't know, I don't have enough data, I can't explain it.
So a key point in all this and what makes
intentionality analysis so helpful, I think, is that really we experience all
these things that I'm talking about and you can verify them in your experience.
Lonergan's toolkit isn't simply some
theory that's abstract, but something we can verify in ourselves.
And in fact, he sets out in his book
Insight, he just says, I'm asking you as the reader to self appropriate, don't take
me at my word, but see if this is what's happening within you.
Okay. Why?
Well, I think we can all agree we experience new
objects, data, things, we don't know what they are.
That's an experience I've had.
We experience ourselves wondering and asking questions about them.
I can agree with that.
We might not do this as often as small children who say Why?
Why? But we still do this.
We experience ourselves trying to come up with explanations.
We experience having insights.
I've got it.
And we have experience trying to attempt to verify them.
We have flashes of connections.
When we finally figure out a question we've been trying to answer,
I'd say, these things happen to us, and we can't deny that they do.
It would be quite odd to do so.
Honorgan has this funny paragraph where he says, it would be really weird for someone
writing a journal article to be like, I've never had an original thought.
I've never wondered.
I've never looked at this piece of
scripture and thought, what does that mean?
I've never tried to come up with an explanation for that.
I've never tried to show how my interpretation is the best interpretation.
It's like, if you deny that goes on, what is going on in you?
So he's trying to make an appeal to
experience in a sense of like, this is something that goes on within us.
It's not just something way up here.
Some have never had an unpublished thought.
Yeah.
Maybe they stole it from someone else.
Lonergan's intentionality analysis kind of
summarily lays out why objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.
Again, weird, because usually when we
think of objectivity in the modern world, we.
Think.
Not having the subject involved at all, trying to be far away and being an
observer and not involve yourself in the situation.
But if fully human knowing is the result of moving from the level of experience
to understanding to judging, then all objectivity involves some sort of
subjectivity because it involves the subject some way or another.
To deny that is kind of strange.
If we end with experiencing, we just say, just stop there.
Okay, I've got data.
What do I do with this data?
If we end with understanding, we merely have something notional.
A hypothesis might not be real.
If we end with judging and with an affirmative answer to our question, we'd
probably say we've come to what is the actual state of the things?
Or is not the actual state of the things?
Are we in conformity to reality or not?
The real question dealing with
subjectivity is, what I want to afford is what kind of subjectivity?
Hence, I've qualified subjectivity with a term authentic.
Lonergan calls his system a critical realism.
Now, it's a realism because he thinks
what's outside of us is real can be verified.
But it's also critical because we have to
test to see if our experience is in accordance with reality.
Just because you may put a stick in the
water and it bends in the light, doesn't mean you have to get rid of all your
experience and say, all my faculties are unreliable, such as maybe the cart.
So to talk about this, he emphasizes this with what he says the be imperatives, like
ve imperatives, which accord with each level
experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding.
So be attentive to the data of experience.
Be intelligent, asking questions and making formulations.
Be reasonable using your judgment and be responsible.
What are you going to do when we're biased?
Or we could say inauthentic and don't follow this movement of our intending.
We mess up and we make mistakes.
So it is following the natural movement of
our intelligences that will result in objectivity.
But of course sin is involved.
So we have biases and inauthenticity and things that need to be corrected.
So there will be other theological
emphasies that need to be put in here, which he will do later.
But I'm not getting into that here today.
I'm just trying to lay down some kind of basics.
I just want you to know that it's not like, oh, we're forgetting about sin,
how this affects, how we understand things like that, maybe in times for questions.
So again, therefore experience is involved in all of what we've come to know.
So to be objective is right to
follow our questioning things in a way that is proper to the human.
Like, how do we come to know things?
Let's try and figure that out.
Let's try and follow that.
And it's going to always involve the subject.
So moving to my assertion that experience is involved when all people practice
theology, so I just want to go through some examples
and maybe you can get an experience for this.
So theology will begin with research, the
task of gathering all of the pertinent data.
A textual critic analyzes many diverse
manuscripts in multiple languages, uses diverse theoretical frameworks of what the
best manuscript tradition is by year, location tradition, and selects and grades
the best possible reading when differences occur in manuscripts.
Right? Okay.
So the textual critic has to really have a hold on what he or she is doing in the
task and be authentic in carrying out that task so that their bias doesn't creep in
and leave inaccurate data for the reader or translator of the critical text.
The critical text then moves on as data to
the translator and commentary writer for their use.
And they have to make decisions on the
work of the textual critic, such as if an alternate reading is better suited.
What did the author intend to communicate
from this, the best edition of the text that we have today?
The translator and commentary writer have to make interpretive decisions and use
theories of translation such as phrase based or word based renditions.
Those who follow the history of the
interpretation of the text have to make decisions of what is developing and going
forward, what is authentic and inauthentic to the text, and hand this on today.
All this work is simply working with past issues of the data for theology that I've
gone over and is shot through with the experience of each person working in the
theological task, dealing with how theologians make
decisions about what they believe and how they will communicate it to an audience.
Today will be fraught with even more aspects of experience.
So I think what will be of importance will
be control of the process of doing theology so that we can understand how to
be most objective and when we are straying too far into bias and inauthenticity.
So really, to do that, you kind of have to
have a grasp of how do we come to know things anyway?
How do I know when I'm going too afar and being too subjective?
Or how do I know when I'm kind of holding and trying to be objective?
Do we have things to help us with that?
So already it's been 20 minutes, 21 minutes.
I've kind of held to that.
So I'll just kind of summarize now, and James will tell me what you want to do.
Questions or not?
So, in conclusion, in this presentation, I
think I summarized Lonergan's approach name intentionality analysis,
which yields what he calls a cognitional theory.
Second, I described and defined experience,
according to Lonergan, basically the level of experience, what that entails.
And I described how experience fits within
Lonergan's outline of the four intentional levels involved in fully human knowing.
So some of the main takeaways from this presentation to clarify experience were
first, experience is involved in all our knowing.
We have to get a control on that somehow.
Second, experience by itself is not fully
human knowledge and requires at least interpretation and judgment.
Third, objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.
And fourth, experience is involved when we all practice theology.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Time for questions and comments or responses to suggestions.
Presentation.
Maybe some of its questions for clarification.
You can just feel them. You can see everybody.
Yes.
Earlier in your address, you mentioned that we know through consciousness, and
then a minute later you said, we know consciously.
I'm not sure that they're the same.
And I was wondering if we do know through consciousness.
But there is much that we know through consciousness.
We don't know. We don't know consciously.
I'm thinking here michael Polani and Tacit knowing.
And I was wondering if Lonergan has.
Any acknowledgement or any discussion of
passive knowing and how it's related to intention.
Yeah, one of the interesting things is that Pilani's is there more?
I thought that was the end of the question.
That's one question. Okay.
All right. I was hoping one the other one.
Was the Hebrew prophet speaks about knowing God.
And Calvin and others, Western two, maintain that knowing God is a knowledge.
It is genuine knowledge, it's not
speculation, and it's more sure and certain than empirical knowing.
Yes.
How is the knowledge of God, which is knowing the knowledge related to the
four fold epistemological grid of Lauderdale?
Got it. Those are my two.
Okay, good questions. Yeah.
Things I did not go into.
So the Pilani thing, that book actually came out what's?
His main book came out in 58. No, not that one.
The bigger one. On personal knowledge.
Personal knowledge. Personal knowledge.
Yeah.
That's interesting because they both came out in 58 and Pilani.
I think he focuses more on belief,
whereas Lonergan takes the route of more generative knowledge.
I was a little fast and loose there with consciousness.
So when Lonergan talks about
consciousness, he's not talking about pictorial.
Some people would say think of consciousness as pictorially, like, oh,
you can't know consciousness because you can't take a look at consciousness.
So when he's referring to consciousness,
he just means those conscious operations, like in experiencing, understanding.
So, like, I can experience my I mean, I'm seeing I'm hearing those types of things
is what he's talking about when he says consciousness.
And so really, it's in intentionality.
So he kind of has a different concept of consciousness than some other writers.
Does that get at the first one at all?
I'm just wondering what place he has.
In his own understanding for tacit knowing.
Now.
Can you define tacit knowledge more?
Okay, yeah.
The second one knowing God.
He does have understanding of knowing versus his fourth.
Yeah.
So he has later, in something like Method and
Theology, he talks about religious knowledge and
religious consciousness and how it would be on the fourth level of consciousness.
So he goes into feelings and values and
how those are involved in the human person.
And he does get there and talk about how faith and reason are connected.
So, yeah, this wasn't a theological like, this is
how we come to know mysticism or something, the different type of knowing.
So I was just trying to kind of put a foundation for this first and then because
really, to get what he's saying on religious knowledge, you have to have an
idea what he says in the basic foundation first.
So I feel like if I was going to give
another paper or if I had more and more time, I would try and do both.
So I wasn't trying to accomplish what you're asking me to do.
But if you want to get a hint at it, in
his book of lectures, Third Collection, he has a few lectures on religious knowledge
that are pretty straightforward and simple or slog through Method and Theology.
I could point you places, but. Thank.
You for your questions.
Other questions or comments?
Yes, actually, I can just follow up because that was my question as well.
I seem to remember I asked, did you present a theta?
And I think I probably yes, you were asking me about intuition.
Intuition, non conceptual knowledge.
It goes by the psychological side.
So in terms of consciousness, I think it's important that there are two definitions,
and I think maybe you and or not are going to conflate it with you.
So the first is more medical definition of consciousness.
Right?
So if somebody's in deep sleep or a coma, medically, they're not conscious.
Whereas the other way we think in terms of
consciousness is our continual awareness of our environment.
It's more philosophical, psychological terms.
So I think they can get confusing just as we can take them to definition.
So that can help clarify.
I've only read Lolligan very briefly.
Language difficult.
Good for you.
He did a couple of chapters of
transcendental knowledge and insight, but he never seems to really go there.
He uses the term and he doesn't seem to quite a few others have written and it's
particularly relevant to the whole charismatic theology, right?
The whole idea of and again, the two
definitions of experience that has come up several times today already.
But the first definition of experience is just going through life.
And that seems to be what Monica is
referring to versus the experiential spiritual mystical type.
We call that religious experience, religious conversion.
Which is to get into relate.
But it seems to me that nonikant doesn't.
And that would be fit under intuition, non conceptual knowledge.
It wouldn't be an insight.
Insight is philosophical foundations more
so he does talk about general transcendent knowledge and transcendent knowledge.
Those are different chapters in insight.
But he's not really working on what you want.
But if you want to talk about non conceptual knowledge, that's kind of what
coming to form concepts is like for him getting an
insight and then formulating it and becoming conceptual.
So it's totally non conceptual also before.
So if that tacit, if we want to talk about
non conceptual knowledge, that's totally what's going on here.
What we're talking about is this might tacitly be going on.
But until we try and kind of conceptualize
this is one conceptualization until we try and conceptualize and analyze and kind of
bring forth what is actually going on when we ask those questions and try and
deal with it, then we might come up with conceptualizations of how is this working?
Just to sort of put a point on what you're
saying, I guess from and reflecting on your evangelical
background, how evangelicals might tend to think about experience and theology.
What's the difference here?
What's the thing we take with different
way moderate is talking from the way people generally think about the question.
Well, I think he's trying to ground it,
really and say we have all sorts of experiences.
We have experiences all the time and we have to pay attention to those
intentionalities pay attention to those experiences that you have really.
And whether it's reading scripture or
prayer and worship, doing theology, those things matter.
He'll talk about religious experience and
the experience of, in fact some other worldly love in a sense of that what
changes our lives is the principle of we loving God more than all other things.
He talks about as religious conversion.
He'll talk about moral conversion as loving others more than yourself.
What's good for you, you do.
What is the right thing that is good overall?
Then he wants to talk about
epistemological knowing, a type of knowing.
Conversion of knowing is not like taking a look.
We don't think of knowing something as like, just reading the text of the Bible.
And I know it, I know what it says because I read it.
As. Opposed to it requires interpretation.
So I think there are a lot of layers.
It's just kind of complicating it more.
My tradition was at least in some of the churches I was was
just like, anyone can come to the Bible, and if you just look at it,
if we take away all our traditions, all our previous understandings, if we just
brought the Bible together and read it, we'd be able to agree on everything.
So that's more of knowing is like taking a look more empirical.
So to me, I'm like, yeah, it's not that simple.
So there's one application great.
Yeah, curious about this.
It's sort of an inside your own head, individual approach.
But how would you see applying this
in a collective sort of how would you do this as a group in understanding
not just theology and not just the Bible, but forgive me, your neighborhood?
Sure.
So, actually, funny,
actually, the main thing he wants to lay out here is what he calls functional
specialization, where he lays out we'll just say theology.
For example, I was kind of doing somewhat
you have, like, research, interpretation, history, dialectic, what he wants to call
foundations, doctrine, systematic communications.
And he wants to say that we live in a world of specialization.
You've done studies in a special area.
I can't do the specific studies of a textual critic.
That other person has done a lot of that work.
So what he's trying to do is
and essentially this is a foundation for this kind of thing, where he's trying to
lay out a framework of collaboration so people can work together and say, hey,
I know what I'm doing in textual criticism.
You know what you're doing,
interpretation, you know what you're doing in history.
And I can like a relay race passing a baton.
So then I can then take my results and give it to you and give it to you and move
all the way down to how to properly communicate today.
Because a lot of the issues are how do you take a premodern text?
And then doctrines are really in theory.
So there's that move and development through history from non theoretical to
theoretical and back down to the common person, which is non theoretical.
You're not going to get up there and read aquinas or something to people for a
sermon or hopefully you just don't even read your sermon.
It's really a call for
it's missing in other parts, the community aspect that's required because you need a
community to be authentic as a human being.
You can't just do things as an individual.
The church is a community.
Your neighborhood is a community. We live and breathe.
We're born into communities.
So we're first in a community before I'm even an individual.
Right.
I. Think what he's really just trying to lay
out is how to be authentic human being, in a sense.
But it's theological, too, in a sense. Theologically.
How do we be the human beings we're supposed to be?
If God, in a sense, if we take kind of the analysis I gave, like, if we're created in
such a way that we come to know this way and understand this way, and we
deviate from that, that's where bias and things happen in community and we fail.
If we follow this and through the grace of
God and redemption, hopefully things get better.
So he has a robust social analysis of
decline and redemption, things like this.
Anyway, that's just kind of a start.
I hope that's helpful in some way.
I just see the breakdown of, say, a
prejudice that a church would hold towards their neighborhood or toward their
neighbors would be because they have an unverified explanation about who they are.
They've skipped that step and gone to action.
Yes.
And you'll have communities themselves that are biased, right?
Different communities.
But sometimes there's authentic
individuals within communities who call for change.
I feel like kind of like part of your
message here is monitoring thought of everything.
Is that.
I'm just trying to answer the question.
Okay.
I can't give everything in a 20 minutes, but I can't answer.
Thanks very much for bringing it bringing
a very different perspective to the table to get us thinking.
So Justin is finished now, janelle and.