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Lonergan and Historiography

The Pitfalls of Attempting Psychohistory

Perhaps of all the fields in the history of thought, psychohistory is the most controversial, the least developed, the least settled, and yet, in cer­tain of its practitioners, the most inclined to aspire to totalitarian ambition over other fields.  Can psychohistory really contribute to the knowledge of the past? Even if it can do so, in what sense can it be said actually to con­stitute a definable field of historical studies? Notwithstanding the extrava­gant reductionist claims and glaring errors of the more zealous partisans of psychohistory, which may seem to discredit it, the answer to the first question, we shall argue, is a clear yes. The answer to the second question must be a more guarded yes.

Psychohistory confronts four major difficulties. The first problem is a methodological one: drawing hasty conclusions from scanty textual evidence. The psychohistorian has typically less data to work with than does the therapist engaged in ongoing sessions with clients. The danger is by no means entirely unique to psychohistory, but psychohistory, usually claiming a scientific status, is plagued with the temptation to apply theo­ries a priori in handling concrete historical events.

This points to a second problem, the propensity for psychohistory to be a crypto (if not pseudo) science in the disguise of historiography, to regale in the environs of ideal-types and not to take seriously enough the necessary attachment of good historiography to the terra firma of what Weber named situational analy­sis. As Jacques Barzun so perceptively states it, some versions of psycho-history are programs of “psychologizing with the aid of history,” where the aim is not to study res gestae (things done), not to explain persons, novelty, or actual events, but to abstract from historical particularity to ascertain average trends and deterministic processes.9

Third, the prospec­tive psychohistorian is faced with a legion of competing psychological theories, styles, and schools. Even the attempt to provide a descriptive or an explanatory account would seem immediately to run into the dazzling battleground of dialectics. Just as the danger lurks that the psychologist dabbling in history will be sloppy in pursuing historical method, so the peril lies in wait that the professional historian delving into psychohistory will be unfamiliar with the most recent advances and the most intricate problems in psychology only to opt for a kind of crude dogmatizing with a convenient model in hand (often Freudian).

Finally, there is the problem of being intoxicated with reductionism, compressing the entire history of thought into the dynamics of the sensitive psyche, and, most disastrously, falling prey to ad hominem arguments against certain thinkers, labeled as sick, so as to explain their ideas in (negative) psychological categories.

Psychohistory’s Genuine Possibilities

Having leveled these caveats against psychohistory, we might wonder if there are any positive contents left. Yet psychohistory seems to have a rich soil in which to nourish its genuine possibilities. It has enormous possibilities–perhaps, thus far, more than actuality–both as a hand­maiden ancillary to other fields in the history of thought and as a worker in its own domain. In the latter area it can cultivate a unique sensitivity to the role of symbols, dreams, and myths in the historical drama of persons and communities, to psychic transformations in the history of conscious­ness, and to the concrete imprint of psychic aberration on the landscape of historical situations.

Legitimate psychohistory–psychohistory, that is, as true historywould employ judiciously selected psychological theo­ries, and the more adequate the philosophical grounding, the better. And it would apply them through a sophisticated extension of common sense to explain real change, movement, and events; its model would not be scientific deduction, but the self-correcting process of learning. Let us turn to some illustrations.

Psychohistorical studies can illuminate intellectual biography in two regions. First, there is the specter of what Lonergan calls “scotosis.” This malady is caused by a kind of censorship that represses images and in­hibits performance. The repression can involve biological needs, but also a flight from experiences of dread, guilt, and the transcendent; it usual­ly entails a tension between demands of the nervous system for images and affects and a person’s conscious orientation in living.10

The repres­sion and the inhibition can inaugurate a process of psychic breakdown, thereby creating a type of hidden personality structure–a twilight land of consciousness. There is a blind spot in one’s understanding, a bias that tugs at one’s thought and influences one’s action. It can, for example, in­fect moral sensitivity, contribute to moral impotence, color one’s affective response to linguistic and symbolic expressions, generate excessive reli­gious pretensions, and restrict the asking of questions in those areas that evoke experiences of anxiety and dread.

Psychohistory, then, can fathom why a certain range of questions was effectively beyond a person’s hori­zon or why another range of questions was particularly attractive. It can shed light on half-understood motives and explain certain anomalies in a thinker’s ideas. But psychohistory can provide only limited assistance to the biographer who wishes to account for cultural and intellectual creativity.

In writing a cultural or an intellectual biography, for instance, it may be enlightening to become aware of Michelangelo’s sexual feelings, or interesting to learn about Saint Augustine’s relation to his mother, or helpful to know of Max Weber’s sexual repression, but countless people have had such psychological experiences or disabilities and very few of them be­come a Michelangelo, a Saint Augustine, or a Max Weber. Psychohistory, in brief, can contribute to explain the nature of a person’s experience.

But what is most telling and significant from the standpoint of cultural and in­tellectual history is the meaning of that experience for the person, how he or she reacted to it, what he or she did with it.11 Psychological problems–at least those short of psychosis–limit the range of viable alternatives in a person’s life, but they do not absolutely determine the actual choice of alternatives.

It is the obligation of the cultural and intellectual biographer to zero in on those factors, events, and decisions that actually do form the creative personality, that constitute the unique achievements of such towering figures as Michelangelo, Saint Augustine, and Max Weber. By identifying psychic aberration, psychohistory can assist the disciplines of cultural and intellectual history, but it is no substitute for them because it is incapable of accounting for cultural and intellectual products precisely as cultural and intellectual products.

Exploring Symbols, Dreams, and Moods

Nevertheless, in a second area, psychobiography has a more positive task: exploring the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual creativity through the symbols, dreams, affective moods, and stories that partake of the drama of a person’s existence and self-interpretation. These psychic expressions, as revealed in diaries, autobiographies, letters, poems, novels, and artworks, can give the attentive and knowledgeable psychobiographer some access to the interior dimension of a person’s self-development, which is always a unique historical and existential journey.

Along similar lines, psychohistory can investigate the historical relation­ship between psychological situations and technical, social, and cultural realities. In conjunction with specialized histories of religion, art, litera­ture, philosophy, politics, and social institutions, it can trace the historical flowering and wilting of those heuristic insights, those archetypical and anagogic symbols, and those myths and stories that flow together as the communal memory, inspire a vision of the future, legitimate institutions, mold the shape of art and literature, and support the love of wisdom.

If the transformation from compactness to differentiation in the history of consciousness witnesses an increasing distinction between self and oth­er and between self and community, then psychohistory has fertile ground where it can compare significant historical variations in psychological situations, in psychological problems, and in modes of psychotherapy.12 It can consider, for instance, changing historical patterns of technological, economic, and social differentiation, of child rearing, and of cultural attitudes toward guilt and shame. Perhaps, with some philosophical modifications, the work of Jung and of his followers, such as Eric Neumann, can serve as instructive ideal-types for psychohistorians to examine the luxu­riant flora of the history of consciousness.13

Presumably, such studies will locate modern psychological cases in wider and different perspectives. One may question, for example, as does Peter Berger, to what degree the psychoanalytic notion of the “unconscious” is a modern phenomenon re­sulting from a bifurcation of public and private selves.14 Why have archa­ic images and symbols, once celebrated in public ritual, been apparently relegated to the dreams of isolated individuals in modern civilization?

Examining Communal Psychic Experiences

The last point raises the question of the topic of psychic aberrations in the history of a community.15 Psychohistory can indeed elucidate the correspondence of psychic disturbances and communal neuroses with numerous historical factors and trends: stresses and strains imposed by technological, social, and political constellations; cultural censorship; the failure of cultural and institutional remedies in the face of adverse psy­chic situations; flight from the dread accompanying attacks on the central core of a communal horizon; and repression of religious symbols and ex­periences.

Psychohistory can expose the psychological elements ingredi­ent in cultural and intellectual decline; it can uncover psychopathological complications that color symbols and languages, that invade the realm of popular culture, that penetrate literary themes, that define the nucleus of deviant subcultures, and that constrict the range of questions asked. It can illuminate the psychic vectors behind such movements as medieval and Reformation messianism and modern political ideologies.16 It can reveal how such psychological needs as overcoming anxiety and achieving secu­rity have historically weighed down religions and ideologies.

The psychological need for security, or any pathological condition, how­ever, cannot explain the existence of religion, art, literature, philosophy, science, and scholarship. Religion is rooted in experiences associated with the loving openness of the pure question and attached to archetypal and anagogic symbols.17 Art and literature portray the generic human wonder in its elemental sweep, exploring, against any narrow, limited, and secure viewpoint, the possibilities of human living (see next section).18 Philoso­phy, science, and scholarship are grounded in the pure desire to know, which challenges the boundaries of every concrete horizon.

Psychohisto­rians, rather than delving into the ultimate origins of religion, art, litera­ture, philosophy, science, and scholarship, probe the psychic reservoir and undertow of cultural and intellectual creativity or diagnose the psychic dis­tortions that inhibit and impair these forms of cultural and intellectual life.

The Project of Human Self-Interpretation

Bernard Lonergan defines culture as “the set of mean­ings and values that inform a way of life.”19 If culture is so defined, then it would seem quite appropriate to apply the term “cultural history” to descriptive approaches sweeping across all the diverse landscapes of popular culture, art, literature, religion, tastes, manners, morals, science, scholarship, philosophy, and theology.

Cultural history would be distin­guished from such other broad categories as technological, social, or po­litical histories because its primary concern would be the project of human self-interpretation. In short, it would seem appropriate to include under the rubric of the “history of culture” both the history of the cultural infra­structure and the history of the cultural superstructure.

And yet Lonergan does on at least one occasion restrict “cultural history” to art, literature, religion, and language.20 Why? He provides no answer. Perhaps Lonergan believes that the cultural infrastructure carries meaning and value much more immediately and spontaneously to the pulsing flow of human liv­ing than does the cultural superstructure. His particular use of the term, furthermore, seems to reflect the old root meaning of “culture,” which is “to cultivate and to educate;” stemming, as it does, from the Latin cultus, “culture” has continued to be associated with a “care directed to the re­finement of life”; and its qualities of excellence of taste, eloquence, polish, style, manners, clothing, decorum, and apparel are preeminently qualities of the cultural infrastructure.

Now, of course, the normative dimension to culture in the sense of cultivation is not a set of standards “out there” forever captured in some classicist culture that is to be the true measure of civilized life. True culture, true paideia, is a task driven by a heuristic ideal.21 Its norms are emblazoned in the process of the search for meaning and the quest for value, animating precivilized societies as well as civili­zations.

But is this not precisely a process present also at the core of the cultural superstructure and its critique of meaning? Recalling the point ar­gued earlier in this chapter—that terminological debate in this case could mire us in the swamp of needless subtlety–we shall, accordingly, retire from the fray and simply adopt Lonergan’s convention of equating cul­tural history with the history of the cultural infrastructure.

The history of culture, in this sense, examines the causal relations among the horizons of the everyday world, art, literature, and religion, explains the changing patterns of cultural life, including the genesis and decline of cultural perspectives, and traces the mutual influences between the cul­tural infrastructure and technical and social realities.22 The cultural historian must display a certain artistic talent, for one of his or her tasks is to portray the mood of a period—to detect any discern­able trends or styles embracing tastes, fashions, conventions, sentiments, attitudes, morals, and manners. Cultural history is unquestionably one of the most subjective of historical disciplines.

The historian of culture must have the capacity to empathize with the subject matter–to cultivate the skill of reexperiencing past images, feelings, sentiments, and values. But this is decidedly not subjectivity in any pejorative sense. The cultural in­frastructure is bound with the intention of truth. The element of entertain­ment in culture, especially in popular culture, cannot obscure the main thrust of culture as “serious play.”23

Thus Lonergan, as we have seen, stresses that aesthetic consciousness shows forth the human wonder–the wonder which is the source of all knowledge. Aesthetic consciousness represents the human affective response to the truth of the human condition, exploring the possibilities of human living that transcend the boundaries of the merely here and now.

Both artist and historian operate within the horizon encompassed by the intention of truth. The historian’s apprecia­tion and evaluation of cultural history, then, is in itself no more an unwant­ed intrusion of subjectivity than is the artist’s creation “merely subjective.” Aesthetic consciousness has its own form of objectivity, its own way of apprehending reality, and hence its own philosophical content.24

The Cultural Historian as Philosopher

The cultural historian therefore also enters the terrain of philosophy. He or she articulates the pretheoretic, spontaneous self-interpretation of a people—its existential history and its existential philosophy. He or she makes thematic the attitude of a people toward its past and lays out its basic implicit philosophical assumptions and substantive philosophical conflicts.

In effect, he or she translates the symbols, artistic reflections, and nontechnical language of the cultural infrastructure, to the extent possible, into the more precise expressions of the cultural superstructure, albeit through a scholarship that is at once dramatic and artistic, preserv­ing, in particular, a sense of the cultural infrastructure’s adventure into the known unknown. In this domain, the cultural historian can profit from a familiarity with philosophical analysis.

Historiography of this sort bears a different relation to intellectual his­tory, history of consciousness, and history of philosophy, depending upon the extent of development of the cultural superstructure in any given soci­ety or period. When it investigates cultures with little or no superstructure of sci­ence, philosophy, theology, or scholarship, cultural history can serve in the stead of intellectual history and the history of philosophy because it uncovers the crucial intellectual assumptions–the fundamental world­view–of those cultures.25 It also supplies the history of consciousness with evidence of compact cultural horizons.

When cultural historians study those transformations of symbols, art, and literature that have played a conspicuous role in breakthroughs to differentiated consciousness, the history of culture can be fruitfully incor­porated into the history of consciousness. Gerardus van der Leeuw, for instance, has recorded the gradual evolution of music, song, literature, and drama into distinct art forms out of an original unity of art that radi­ated around the primitive dance.

Lonergan himself, employing the work of Bruno Snell, has sketched how early Greek poetry staked out new ar­eas of the mind, which later became scholarship, science, and philosophy: epic sagas opened the way to history, the cosmogonies paved the road to Ionian speculation, the lyric cleared the path to Heraclitus, and the drama led to Socrates and Plato. In later antiquity, the genres, styles, and tone of poetry, in turn, breathed in the atmosphere of literary criticism and theo­ries of poetry.26

Finally, the cultural history of more advanced cultures–those with highly sophisticated superstructures–complements intellectual history because the cultural infrastructure and the cultural superstructure overlap. The critical enterprise of cosmopolis (the dimension of culture commensu­rate with the norms of basic horizon) requires the joint cooperation of both cultural history and intellectual history to evaluate the meanings and val­ues that have constituted human self-interpretation in these differentiated cultures.

The cultural superstructure rides on the achievements, orienta­tions, and innermost convictions revealed in the cultural infrastructure. So the historian can argue for a correlation between Plato’s Forms and the highly detached art of fourth-century Hellas. Or the historian can suggest an isomorphism between the structure of the great Summas of Scholastic thought and the cosmion of a Gothic cathedral.

At the same time, intel­lectual developments affect tastes, sentiments, and morals, inform and reorder canons, styles, and themes of art and literature, and reverberate in the world of religion.27 Neither the paintings of Michelangelo nor West­ern mysticism, for example, can be understood apart from Neo-Platonism. Dante cannot be interpreted apart from Thomas Aquinas, Alexander Pope from Newton, science fiction from modern natural science, or the Theatre of the Absurd from Existentialism.

The Significance of Sculpture, Architecture, and Painting

That the cultural infrastructure has intellectual content and its own dis­tinct mode of apprehending reality is vividly demonstrated in the case of aesthetic consciousness, which tends to collapse its insights, judgments, and evaluations onto the level of experience.28 Lonergan’s excursions into this territory in his philosophy of education lectures, drawing upon Susanne Langer, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Henri Bergson, suggest, in bold outline, the metaphysical perspectives the sensitive cultural historian can encoun­ter. We can focus on Lonergan’s discussion of sculpture, architecture, mu­sic, poetry, and drama.

Following Merleau-Ponty, Lonergan describes the human body as “feel­ing space.” Prior to the axes of objectified reference (north, south, east, and west; up and down) the baby learns to control the movement of its different members, thereby constituting kinesthetic space, feeling distrib­uted through space. This organizing space is the space that I am: the space of a subject. The statue is an objectivation, a visual representation of this interior space: it is an objectivation of the embodied presence of the self. Thus is explored “that volume (defined by the nude statue) of sensing, feeling, reaching, longing space which is the human body.”29

Architecture, on the other hand, expresses objective axes of reference for the group. If one’s world, as Heidegger has it, consists of places and ways to get there and back, then architecture is an expression of the center of the communal world, its fundamental orientation and basic values, its home.30

The physical horizon of the Middle Ages was dotted by castles and cathedrals. The contemporary Western city, on the contrary, displays its life-orientation through the domineering skyline of stock exchanges, banks, and office buildings.31 As the cultural historian learns about the idea of the self in sculpture, so he or she discovers the self-interpretation of a society in architecture. Would not the study of the connection between sculpture and architecture by the cultural historian reveal the outlook a people has toward the relation of self and society?32

Painting takes one beyond the space of the ordinary world, omitting all kinesthetic elements and all auditory elements.33 Lines, volumes, in­tersecting planes, shadows, and light, with their varying proportions, are all composed into a pattern of balances, tensions, and resolutions, and in accord with the vital logic of art they create a unity of vision.

Painting, perhaps more than other spatial art forms, is a release of potentiality–an upsurge of energy exploring the possibilities of human living. Within the limits of the artistic scene, bounded by its frame, is portrayed the vision of the artist limited by his or her horizon, and usually by the horizon of his or her age. One can see, revealed on canvas in the last century, for example, the inner tensions of positivism and romanticism winding their way through the changing colors, forms, and textures of Realism, Impres­sionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism.

Music, Time, and Historicity

Music, unlike the art forms of sculpture, architecture, painting, drama, and poetry, is without spatial image; it demands or represents time rath­er than space, or, more precisely, it represents an image of experienced time, a nonspatial shape corresponding to the manner in which feelings multiply and change, rather than an image of one-dimensional, measured and spatial time.

The time of music is the psychological time of Aquinas’s nunc and Bergson’s duree puré. It is the time of the in-between, the time of historicity, an overlap of time spans reaching back into the past through memory and reaching out into the future (and toward the beyond) through anticipation. The movement of the music expresses rhythm, turmoil, and peace by the blending of themes with their oppositions, tensions, and reso­lutions.34

If music represents time rather than space, then is not the history of music, or, perhaps more accurately, the history of the interaction of mu­sic and art in a culture, also the history of the human attitude to time and to history? Van der Leeuw, for instance, argues that Schopenhauer’s and Wagner’s emphasis on the essence of the arts as music–which, for them, was pure movement and direct imageless intuition of reality–reflects a nature mysticism or pantheistic reduction of transcendence to immanence, a stance that is harmonious with modern immanentist philosophies of his­tory. It is a stance, however, according to van der Leeuw, that contrasts to primitive consciousness, where dance “comprehends within itself all music, but at the same time living, moving image and form.”35

Lonergan’s philosophy of history implies that the role of music in culture, and par­ticularly its relation to the imaginative arts, is indicative of its understand­ing of historicity. Would the differentiation of music in a culture parallel a heightened appreciation of historicity? Would the excessive separation of music in a culture point to an imbalanced interpretation of the tension of immanence and transcendence?

Epic and Lyric Poetry as Expressions of Community and Self

Poetry (or, to take its Latin root, fiction) explores the possibilities of hu­man existence by exploiting the fact that words have a retinue of associa­tions, which are tactile, kinesthetic, visual, vocal, auditory, affective, and evocative.36 This very resonance of words with the full panoply of human experience is the reason why different forms of poetry bear an affinity to music, architecture, or sculpture–and to the intellectual content expressed by them.

Epic poetry, like music, concerns time and history. The epic is one of the oldest vehicles of what Lonergan calls existential history–the living memory of a people that constitutes them as a people. So it was that Ho­mer was the educator of Greece. The epic, as a narrative of a group’s past, delights as it informs and instructs; it is at once factual, aetiological, moral, and pedagogical. It contains the structure, spirit, ethos, and potential of el­ementary group consciousness–the common fund of psychic, intellectu­al, moral, and religious resources that coalesce into the vital core of group meaning.

For poetry, along with art, has an extraordinary role to perform in the self-interpretation of a community: poetry makes the tradition come alive. It is indeed an aesthetic apprehension of the origin and story of a group that is most operative and efficacious when the group debates, judges, evaluates, and decides–and especially so in time of crisis.37

Poetry as drama and lyric poetry may be juxtaposed as are architecture and sculpture. Drama and architecture deal with the community; lyric po­etry and sculpture focus on the self. Architecture, says Lonergan, is the home of a people, expressing its limits and establishing its bounds, where­as drama is the image of a people’s destiny, the linkage of successive situations by sets of decisions that are not, however, the decisions of any one of the participants. Drama as destiny displays both the freedom of human decision and the limits of freedom. Whereas sculpture is a visual revelation of the interior feeling space of a subject, lyric poetry, which emerged out of the chorus of the drama, explores the moods, orientations, and existential dis­positions of the self.38

Religious History without Reductionism

The intellectual content of the cultural infrastructure is also exhibited in the sphere of religion with its overriding concern for the nature of re­ality, and it is the history of religion–at least when it goes beyond bare descriptive accounts of dates, persons, and events–that illustrates most clearly the dialectic and evaluative character of cultural history. The subject matter of religious history poses its own distinct hermeneutical problems.

Technological, social, and psychological conditions cannot be divorced from religious history, but, for Lonergan, the key factor in religion is reli­gious experience: the experience is sui generis, for it cannot be essentially reduced to material, social, or psychological causes.39 The experience, an undertow of consciousness permeated by a loving openness to reality, underpins the pursuit of truth and the attempt to realize the good in the face of anxiety.

Religious experience is the focal point around which revolve the outward manifestations of a true religious community as an histori­cal entity. Although varying in intensity and outlook, religious experience remains the constant behind the history of religious expressions, whether of the rites and symbols of undifferentiated consciousness or of the theolo­gies of differentiated consciousness.40

And yet it is most adequately con­veyed as an experience through intersubjective, artistic, literary, symbolic, and incarnate modes of expression. For this reason, it is legitimate–and necessary–to consider the history of religion as a part of the history of culture. But because religious experience is sui generis, the history of religion is likewise sui generis, the study of which requires its own specialization.

Must we not conclude that an explanatory history of religion must recognize religious experience as a constitutive element in that history? True, the project of religious history is thus beset with enormous diffi­culties. How can the historian discern a person’s interior religious state? His or her sincerity? His or her religious maturity? The genuine religious substance of a religious community?

Moreover, the history of religion is saturated with distortions of meaning, psychic aberrations, egoism, fanati­cism, pretensions, and erroneous philosophical presuppositions. Must not an evaluative history of religion discriminate between those religious ex­pressions, events, and movements springing from genuine religious com­mitment and those marred by bias?41

The historian’s approach in these matters, arduous as it may be, does not differ, in principle, from the assessment of individuals and movements in other historical contexts: the historian must pursue the self-correcting process of learning and exercise due prudence and reserve in rendering historical judgments about religious consciousness. The only other alterna­tives would be either patently prejudiced partisan accounts or a positivist history of religion, which would, in effect, reduce religious experience en­tirely to natural or social causes.

To be sure, differing, and even contradic­tory, interpretations will arise that reflect diverse personal backgrounds, communal traditions, and intellectual predilections. But here Lonergan’s functional specialty of “dialectics” offers an open forum for critical analysis of these opposing interpretations of the history of religion, where investi­gators can ask whether the opposing viewpoints stem from what Lonergan calls “perspectivism” or from fundamentally incompatible philosophical, moral, and religious horizons.42

What is Meant by “History of Ideas”?

Lonergan frequently uses language to describe what we have termed cultural history (and intellectual history). Thus, he often speaks about “cultural context,” “cultural milieu,” and “climate of opinion.”43 On the other hand, he has virtually nothing to say explicitly about the history of ideas. To deal with this field, we must, accordingly, draw inferences from his thought and pick the fruit of his cognitional theory. Perhaps the clos­est Lonergan comes to identifying the history of ideas is in his category of “doctrinal movements”–where “doctrinal” seems to be much broader in scope than the functional specialty of that name. But is it so broad as to encompass both history of ideas and intellectual history?

“Doctrinal movements,” according to Lonergan, include “mathematics, natural sci­ence, human science, philosophy, history, theology.”44 And does this to­tal restriction of “doctrinal movements” to the cultural superstructure do violence to the possibility that the history of ideas can embrace, even if in a less prominent fashion, cognitive activity on the level of the cultural in­frastructure?45 What precisely differentiates history of ideas from intellectual history and cultural history? How, or to what extent, does history of ideas comple­ment intellectual history and cultural history? Can the discipline of his­tory of ideas avoid the extremes of heady idealism or radical empiricism? In what sense can “ideas” have histories?

We must first note that Lonergan defines an idea as a content of an act of understanding.46 The history of ideas would seem to be principally the history of understanding, the history of insights, and neither the history of concepts, which are formulations of insights, nor the history of words, which are expressions of acts of understanding. Concepts and words, of course, are not merely instruments; they are intimately bound up with the whole process of thinking, for insights require formulation, and under­standing does not occur without a sustaining flow of linguistic expres­sion. Still, concepts (“inner words”) and words (“outer words”) must take a back seat to the act of understanding.47 It is for this reason that an idea may not be entirely exhausted by any particular linguistic expression.

In­deed, gradual shifts in the meaning of linguistic expressions may spawn a growing cleft between an idea and a particular linguistic expression. The transmission of meaning can occur only through the continuous–and precarious–interpretation of expressions of meaning. Lonergan, we can judge, by denying a simple one-to-one correspondence between idea and word, would have to reject an approach to the history of ideas in which one merely attended to “what the texts say.”

By the same token, given his cognitional theory, Lonergan must likewise caution against excessive fas­cination with concepts in the history of ideas. To cut concepts off from their engendering insights runs the risk of reifying those concepts into things, and the historian who falls into this trap can easily force a thinker into a preconceived mold by assuming that the thinker deals with obviously recognizable pure concepts-in-themselves; the temptation is strong in this mode of historiography to determine a priori–that is, from the context of the historian’s own horizon–the concepts in the history of ideas.

The historian must be capable of grasping the total range of possible meanings as a precondition for successful interpretation; but he or she must also be able to pluck actual meanings from the tree of possible meanings by sur­veying the concrete context and real intentions of an author. The historian, for example, cannot assume a priori that Plato’s concept of politeia in his Republic centers around modern questions of constitutional forms.

Ideas Must be Considered in Their Historical Context

Nor is it sufficient to consider objects of understanding themselves (which are prior to concepts) as though they emerged in a vacuum. Loner­gan does not regard ideas as “Platonic” entities floating around by them­selves in an ethereal land, independent of developing minds and historical situations. “Insight,” he mentions, “comes as a release to the tension of inquiry.”48 A thinker’s ideas are conditioned by the questions he or she raises, and the questions he or she raises are conditioned by his or her social environment, cultural milieu, and general historical situation.

If the historian of ideas is to avoid an atemporal, antihistorical orientation, then the historian must concentrate analysis on an author’s questions and the various contexts for those questions. Thus, we must conclude that Lonergan’s cognitional theory warns against the tendency in the history of ideas to focus upon concepts, and even to reify ideas, to the detriment of giving due consideration to those questions, concerns, and interests, those forma­tive influences, and those creative acts that lie precisely behind the great “systems of ideas.”49

The study of the history of ideas has come under severe attack on these grounds from writers influenced by Anglo-American ordinary language philosophy–among them, John Dunn and Quentin Skinner, who have documented, with penetrating criticism, the range of foibles to which his­torians are prone as they succumb to a kind of atemporal analysis of the history of ideas.50

But might too enthusiastic a pruning of the branches of the history of ideas by these philosophers to protect it from the blight of idealism endanger the very existence of the plant? Skinner himself goes so far as to object that there can indeed be no history of ideas in any meaning­ful sense:

“Any statement . . . is inescapably the embodiment of a particular inten­tion, on a particular occasion, addressed to the solution of a particular problem, and thus specific to its situation in a way that it can only be naive to try to transcend. . . . There simply are no perennial problems in philosophy; there are only individual answers to individual questions, with as many different answers as there are questions, and as many dif­ferent questions as there are questioners.”51

This question poses the foundational issue about the nature and signifi­cance of questioning. Although Skinner and Lonergan both acknowledge the decisiveness of questioning, their paths diverge radically after that. Lonergan departs from what appears to be Skinner’s nominalism–his de­piction of almost hermetically sealed horizons–by stressing the intention of truth and not the intention of an immanent content of consciousness (a concept, for example), as the crucial factor behind questioning.

In Lonergan’s view, a thinker can transcend his or her situation, though never in an absolute way, by being caught up in a question: his or her search for truth defines an horizon that encompasses more than his or her insights and formulations; he or she is open to more than the immediate objects of understanding. We allude to this fact whenever we remark that a thinker operates not only within a relative horizon but also within basic horizon. Hence, is it completely unfair, as Skinner alleges, for an historian to say that a certain figure in the history of thought anticipates the ideas of a later writer, even when the earlier figure would have been unable to formu­late the ideas from the resources of his or her relative horizon?52

The en­tire sweep of the original author’s questions may have been open to later insights and developments, and his or her own insights themselves may have been pregnant with meanings that could neither be expressed nor be developed within the limited framework of his or her linguistic world. Moreover, is the audience of a thinker necessarily and inevitably restrict­ed to people of his or her own age? A political pamphleteer will perhaps have a narrow set of questions in mind and a restricted audience, but the pamphleteer will stand in contrast to the extended range of questions of a Plato or a Kant, who addressed themselves to all lovers of wisdom.53

Ideas Tie Together With Heuristic Concepts

In our discussion of the history of ideas, we have been compelled to place ideas within the context of questioning. Yet there is a further aspect to the matter. How exactly does the intention of truth establish the link among differing contexts? We must introduce here Lonergan’s notion of heuristic concepts. We shall suggest that there is a peculiar type of idea (an “heuristic idea”) that ties together–logically and perhaps historically–a whole sequence of particular ideas. Now, according to Lonergan’s theory of knowledge, a thinker does not simply intend ideas; the thinker intends “what is,” and to know “what is,” he or she must engage in both operations of understanding (the con­tents of which are ideas) and operations of judging. Only when the thinker makes true judgments does he or she become a knower.

It is in light of the fact that a question is intentionally related to reality that we must consider the phenomenon of ideas. The questioner is not oriented to a reality that is an undifferentiated totality; the questioner is oriented to a reality that has within it distinctions (kinds of things)–not distinctions arbitrarily im­posed by the mind, but distinctions grounded in reality itself. The inquirer must have some elementary understanding of reality and of its differen­tiations; otherwise, his or her questions would be completely amorphous and he or she would never get beyond the rudimentary state of absolute wonder and awe associated with the pure question.

When these elemen­tary insights, which are the presuppositions of intellectual endeavor, be­come sufficiently penetrating, they can be formulated in such a fashion as to guide inquiry in a conscious, reflective manner, thereby constituting a method, an avenue to reality, a way of analysis: an heuristic structure. Such formulated insights Lonergan calls “heuristic concepts.” The histori­cal period when a heuristic concept is formulated is truly a period of the differentiation or discovery of a realm of reality (e.g., the Greek “discovery of the mind”). Heuristic concepts specify that intellectual search is direct­ed at the “nature of” some x (e.g., the “nature of fire”).

It is therefore the intellectual activity that is informed and propelled by a heuristic structure that will create an ongoing context over time.54 A heuristic structure will embrace, within a single orientation, numerous ideas, definitions, formu­lations, and revisions:

“Fire was conceived by Aristotle as an element, by Lavoisier’s prede­cessors as a manifestation of phlogiston, and by later chemists as a type of oxydization. But though the explanations differed, the object to be ex­plained was conceived uniformly as the “nature of” a familiar phenome­non, and without this uniformity it would be incorrect to say that Aristotle had an incorrect explanation of what he meant and we mean by fire.”55

Thus, although the particular ideas, the particular definitions, indeed, the particular questions, regarding the “nature of” fire undergo change during different historical epochs, they all partake of a movement in the history of ideas–a movement unified by a recurrent question about the nature of fire. To be sure, new questions, ideas, and concepts can alter the method of inquiry itself; but, Lonergan insists, new concerns, develop­ments, and discoveries do not radically transform the method because they determine not a new goal, but rather new procedures and techniques for reaching the same goal.56

The Notion of Basic Horizon

We encounter a similar relationship in the notion of basic horizon. There is one basic recurrent question underpinning the entire history of ideas–namely, the pure question (the unrestricted desire to know)–that generates the method, or structure, of basic horizon. There is a comprehensive preunderstanding (heuristic anticipation but not intu­ition) of all reality, or else the pure question could not be asked, because there is also a fundamental ignorance of reality, or else the pure question would not have to be asked.57 The pure question implies particular ques­tions.

Basic method implies particular methods. Basic horizon implies rel­ative horizons. Identity in history implies difference. So also, if we now define a “unit-idea” in the “history of ideas” as the prior insight formulated by an heuristic concept, then in the history of an “idea” there will be found (or can be found) a certain identity amid diversity—a single horizon amid fluctuating perspectives, a constant ori­entation amid changing procedures, a single question amid differing in­terests.58

Hence, the intention of truth is the source both of continuity and of diversity in the history of ideas. It is the source of continuity because ideas, concepts, and judgments are answers to questions and a horizon is defined by the range of questions more so than by answers. It is the source of diversity because it challenges the adequacy of every idea, con­cept, and judgment.

Continuity in the history of ideas is the foundation of a tradition that cuts across different ages–a fact that Skinner under­plays–thereby allowing one to chart a course between the assertion of the relativity of truth and the positing of eternal truths. In this vein, Lonergan argues that truths are relative:

“to the context of a place and time; but such contexts are related to one another; history includes the study of such re­lations; in the light of history it becomes possible to transpose from one context to another; by such transpositions one reaches a truth that extends over places and times. The historian of ideas, then, can legitimately con­sider human thought in terms of contexts, or sets of interwoven questions and answers, that mold a viewpoint around a central theme.”59

The Constant Problems in History

The history of ideas, however, must be careful to trace the actual his­torical connection among ideas. In other words, it must deal with ongoing historical contexts.60 It must establish why ideas emerged, flowered, and declined. It must ask: to what extent is continuity the result of actual his­torical influences and to what extent is it the product of the recurrence of certain basic questions in historically unrelated situations?61 What is the interaction among distinct sets of ideas within the same historical pe­riod?62

It must also discriminate between the historical development of ideas–that is, the accumulation of insights and the exploration of new problems–and the occurrence of oversight, the distortion of meaning, and the loss of insight. In short, it must conduct a genetic and dialectical analysis. To execute these properly historical tasks it must cooperate with other disciplines to study the mutual interpenetration of ideas with social, political, and cultural trends. What, then, can we say about the respective roles of the history of ideas and of intellectual history and cultural history? How are we to delimit their respective spheres of inquiry?

Cultural and intellectual historians, we have proposed, focus on gener­al assumptions of an age–on trends, movements, and conflicts of thought that involve the interaction of various cultural and intellectual communities, with technological, social, and political elements–thereby provid­ing a pervasive background for the drama. The approach of the historian of ideas, by contrast, is thematic. He or she concentrates on particular is­sues, questions, and problems that may span diverse eras of cultural and intellectual history.

The cultural historian, for example, may explore the Baroque or romanticism. The intellectual historian may inspect Scholasti­cism or the Enlightenment. The historian of ideas, on the other hand, will examine the idea of history, the idea of the great chain of being, the idea of perception, or the idea of authority63 Underlying these sequences of questions and answers is a certain logical, and often historical, continuity in problems.

Because the historian of ideas must be reasonably familiar with the nature of the problems themselves, his or her work is frequently undertaken as an adjunct to the study of particular issues in philosophy, social and political theory, science, and theology. By a thematic approach the historian of ideas can lend clarity and preci­sion to cultural and intellectual history (especially when certain interests, concerns, and ideas dominate the attention of an age) and to specialized histories of such disciplines as science, philosophy, and theology.

Arthur Lovejoy’s method of investigating “unit-ideas” and the logical connections among ideas, for example, presents intellectual historians with a powerful analytic tool, and it can assist philosophy in wrestling with salient prob­lems by isolating recurrent issues.64 But to guard against the fatal tempta­tion to be excessively abstract, logical, and atemporal, the historian of ideas must complement his or her work with an appreciation of cultural and intellectual history. General intellectual and cultural currents undoubtedly affect, influence, and condition the stream of questions and answers consti­tutive of the history of ideas.

And even scholars engaged in an evaluative history of ideas, who are concerned primarily with the truth of ideas, must pay attention to the cultural and intellectual milieu, the intellectual biogra­phies of thinkers, and the questions and insights that generate concepts if they are to eschew a dogmatic and simplistic attachment to concepts–the end products of thinking.

Seeking the Zeitgeist

The subject matter of intellectual history, as we have been defining it, is what Lonergan variously calls the “intellectual climate of opinion,” “intel­lectual milieu,” “intellectual context,” or “intellectual atmosphere”–the fundamental ideas and assumptions of a period as articulated by theorists, scholars, philosophically sensitive artists, and such metaphysical poets as Rilke and Eliot.65 This is similar in substance to John Green’s claim that “the primary function of the intellectual historian is to delineate the presuppo­sitions of thought in given historical epochs and to explain the changes which those presuppositions undergo from epoch to epoch.”66

We must discern the status of the Zeitgeist–its main carriers, its dy­namic properties, its most crucial kind of presuppositions. To speak of the “fundamental assumptions of an age” is clearly to speak of the assumptions that stipulate common problems and concerns among intellectual disciplines. But the intellectual historian must ask whether the Zeitgeist is more of an ideal-type than of an actual description of historical reality.

Some periods of history may display innovation, challenge to old premises, fragmentation, and confusion, whereas other periods may ex­hibit relative stability. Some cultures may tend toward uniformity, whereas other cultures may be pluralistic. Rather than divining cultural essences in the mode of German Idealism, it is the task of the intellectual historian to investigate the historically dynamic factors that account for the genesis, the transformation, and the demise of intellectual currents of thought.

Yet–to call attention to Lonergan’s insistence of the utility of ideal-types–even when an interpretation of the basic presuppositions of the age is, and can only be, a highly abstract ideal-type, it can still serve as a very useful and critical device to explain intellectual movements.67 Although we cannot gainsay that technological, social, and political de­velopments influence intellectual life a great deal–the printing press, the rise of the bourgeoisie in modern Europe, and the French Revolution all come readily to mind–we must affirm, if we are to follow Lonergan, that the most decisive factor in intellectual history is the pure desire to know operative in the concrete consciousness of concrete persons.

The drive to understand is not located in some group mind, some collective mental substance; it is concretely present in the questions, insights, and judg­ments of individual thinkers. To be sure, when the ideas of a thinker be­come widely known, they enter the common world, become sedimented in a cultural tradition, and thereby begin to take on a “life of their own.” But the ideas of a thinker cannot be passed on throughout the ages without the constant effort of succeeding generations of individual persons inter­preting the expressions of the author’s meaning. We are thus confronted with the ever-present phenomenon in intellectual history: a thinker being misinterpreted and misunderstood. We learn, for example, that Plato was not a Platonist, that Thomas Aquinas was not a Thomist, that Locke was not a Lockean, that Rousseau was not a Rousseauan, and that Marx was not a Marxist.68

We have seen that Lonergan’s hermeneutics would demand that an intellectual historian differentiate what a thinker actually meant from what contemporaries and successors thought he meant. To ascertain what an author meant, the historian must delve into the author’s biogra­phy, must have a keen appreciation of the intellectual climate in which he or she breathed, and must note the evidence of actual impact upon the author’s horizon from the ideas and questions of other thinkers.69

At the same time, the historian can trace the historical influence of an intellectual by observing his or her effect on language and on education, his or her legacy in the cultural tradition, his or her founding of schools, his or her molding of social attitudes and political opinions, and, most important, from the perspective of Lonergan’s horizon analysis, his or her posing of new questions, his or her opening up of new domains of inquiry, and his or her calling attention to new problems and ranges of experience.

Studying the Great and Lesser Thinkers

The great thinkers are those who transcend their inherited tradition, forming the nucleus of the creative minority, the spearhead of significant intellectual change. Thinkers of this rank may either clear entirely new in­tellectual paths (e.g., Plato, Descartes, Kant) or synthesize previous devel­opments through masterful overriding insights (e.g., Aristotle, Aquinas).70

Creative geniuses in intellectual history, Lonergan admits, do not stand alone because the insights of countless lesser figures make the time ripe for the flowering of genius.71 Still, however propitious the time may be for a new orientation or a sweeping reorganization of thought, it nevertheless requires the mental force, the creative edge, the singular dedication of ge­nius to exploit the situation. It is for this reason that intellectual historians can attain such a high caliber of explanatory power if they study periods delimited by the great thinkers.72

And yet–to keep in mind the dialectical relation of person and commu­nity–the investigation of intellectual history solely in terms of great indi­viduals is bound to be insufficient. As we have just witnessed, the stage for the dramatic achievements of genius is a space that must have been cleared by the intellectual effort of numerous predecessors and fellow workers devoted to the serious play of the mind.

In addition, the cross-fertilization of ideas, the raising of questions, and the repercussions of dis­coveries can generate certain intellectual currents that define the general assumptions of the age; these assumptions, usually born by a combination of intellectual communities and sustained by social patterns and cultural styles, are probably unknown, or not very well known, by most contempo­raries, even geniuses because, for the most part, they are taken for granted and function behind the scenes. Precisely because they direct, nourish, or impede inquiry, these pervasive assumptions deeply affect most con­temporaries–even geniuses.

Here the intellectual historian can profit by complementing studies of the great thinkers with studies of representative thinkers–those serious, but average, intellectuals who, precisely because of their average attainments, illustrate the general movement of the Zeit­geist. The genius, of course, may challenge the Zeitgeist with reflective awareness or may use the categories of the Zeitgeist as a springboard to leap to intellectual heights even heretofore beyond the reach of the domi­nant horizon; but, in either case, the genius will still be responding to the general assumptions of the age and, consequently, will be decisively in­fluenced by them.

Again, to contemplate the same generic topic from a slightly different angle, we can invoke Lonergan’s analogy of history as a battle–the course and outcome of which the participants are not aware.73 The historical interconnections among various thinkers and the histori­cal links among intellectual communities can take twists and turns be­yond the intentions and the anticipations of any of the thinkers involved, though the historical pattern does not evolve apart from the operations of the individual minds. We can conclude that the intellectual historian must consider not only the “great thinkers,” but a creative minority of individu­als of varying talent implicated in an historical movement wider than any of them, and not only a creative minority but a Zeitgeist with its chorus of “representative thinkers.”

Avoiding Two Traps

The intellectual historian, however, must avoid two traps, both of which result from a forgetfulness of the desire to know as the central dynamism of history. First, fascination with the Zeitgeist must not lure the scholar to imag­ine that what counts in intellectual history is a head count of intellectu­als. Perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century most intellectuals were positivists, and yet prominent intellectual historians have characterized the fin-de-siecle as the “revolt against positivism.”74 Why? Because the most significant intellectual trend, in their judgment, was an attack on the positivist Zeitgeist. The creative minority is indeed a minority–even among intellectuals–often a combatative minority, and frequently an em­battled minority.

Early modern scientists did not immediately conquer the redoubt of Aristotelian science in European universities, and many sought a haven in their own private societies. Far from exercising a quantitative superiority, the creative minority may actually shrink to a sole towering figure: a persecuted Socrates or an isolated Kierkegaard. Nor is its histori­cal significance to be gauged entirely by its success in bringing to birth a new worldview–for it may fail. And even when successful, its triumphant march may be slow.

Lonergan approvingly quotes William James’ remark about the career of a creative theory: First “it is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discov­ered it.”75 The hallmarks of the creative minority are its searching questions and probing insights, its wrestling with fundamental assumptions, its breaking of new ground and drawing out of further implications. Thus it can foster the gestation, parturition, and development of a new Zeitgeist as the authority of the old worldview seeps away.

This is not to say that the opponents of the creative minority may not offer intelligent, even bit­ing, criticism because the assumptions being worked out by the creative minority may ultimately prove to be untenable; but the pure desire to know may demand that those assumptions be worked out, for only when they are worked out can their shaky foundations be exposed. Meanwhile, the opponents of the creative minority can formulate no viable sweeping alternative.

Second, the threat of conventionalism and of relativism looms if a scholar concentrates principally, or ambiguously, on the objective pole of intellectual horizons, thereby underplaying the intentionality of human thought and the role of insight. Such a focus can be attractive to the schol­ar because he or she can obviously observe epochal shifts of world views in certain changing theories, conceptual systems, definitions, and axioms.

This is no more evident than in the history of science. So Thomas Kuhn has forcefully argued that scientific development is not a piecemeal pro­cess by which facts, theories, and methods have been added “singly and in combination to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific tech­nique and knowledge.” Science, Kuhn holds, rather than showing steady progress, proceeds in terms of “revolutions,” the displacement of one conceptual and instrumental framework, or paradigm, by another frame­work. Five years before the publication of the first edition of Kuhn’s book, Lonergan came to the same conclusion.

According to Lonergan, when a crisis in scientific (or mathematical) thought occurs–when existing theo­ries and methods cannot satisfactorily handle the facts and the results of experimentation–then a fundamental revision of concepts, postulates, axioms, and methods ensues that leads to the germination of a radically new scientific structure.76 What needs to be emphasized here, lest one be­come enamored of the apparent relativity of reified horizons, is the subjec­tive pole of horizons: the structure of cognitive operations underpinned by the desire to know.

All scientific paradigms, for example, attain a de­gree of unity because they are products of the pursuit of scientific truth; they are grounded in the heuristic structure of scientific inquiry. Although empirical science, Lonergan maintains, does not reach definitive truth, it does converge upon truth, increasingly approximating it. Revolutions in science are implemented by insights–insights into the inadequacy of the old conceptual framework and insights into a new paradigm. The insights would include both direct insights (discoveries) and reflective insights that determine what constitutes sufficient evidence. They promote scien­tific advance, as Patrick Heelan notes, either by providing a more power­ful explanatory account than a replaced framework (as Newton’s theory subsumed Kepler’s laws), or by creating a higher viewpoint that incorpo­rates complementary scientific paradigms within a single horizon.77

What is basic to intellectual history is basic horizon, specified by its subjective pole of intentionality. Just as we must note that an individual horizon has its murky conglomerate world, its structural core, and its precarious em­bodiment of basic horizon, so we must acknowledge that the perspectives of an intellectual community will, or can, embrace an incidental compo­nent of ideas, a Zeitgeist, and a precarious attunement to basic horizon, which supplies the material for genetic (developmental) and dialectical (positions and counterpositions) analyses.

Those Who Oppose Original Thinking

The intellectual historian, then, cannot ignore the crucial role of the desire to know. But can the intellectual historian ignore either the all too common resistance to the desire to know? Muddled thinking, oversight, and warped ideas are blights on the landscape of intellectual life and thus must come under the scrutiny of an explanatory and evaluative intellectu­al history. Psychoneurosis, egoism, group bias, and common-sense short­sightedness can infect the tree of knowledge.

The intellectual historian can indeed profit by a judicious application of the findings of psychohistory and the sociology of knowledge. A dominant minority of intellectuals, to use Toynbee’s term, can block new ideas and enforce its own world view upon the cultural superstructure by virtue of the power it wields and the prestige it holds in academic institutions and intellectual circles.78 The “success” of ideas surely can be much more a sociological matter than an intellectual matter. Resistance to theories in the natural sciences is usually occasioned by the fact that scientists have invested their intellectual capi­tal in a particular viewpoint and are not prepared to declare themselves bankrupt.

Lonergan commends Max Planc’s witticism that what makes a scientific theory accepted is not the clarity of observation, exactness of measurement, coherence of hypothesis, rigor of deduction, or decisiveness of verification, but the retirement of a present generation of professors.79 A much more pronounced resistance to new ideas, however, threatens de­velopments in human science, in scholarship, in philosophy, and in theol­ogy, as well as in those scientific revolutions tied, at least on the surface, to controversial anthropological and theological implications. In human science, scholarship, philosophy, and theology, the image of human nature is directly at stake. Purely intellectual considerations, too, impede the progress of knowl­edge. These are nearly always philosophical counterpositions–inadequate statements on truth, objectivity, and reality (human, cosmic, and divine).

Implicit Philosophical Orientations

Intellectual history has a unique contribution to render critical appropria­tion of the past because the general assumptions of an age are ultimately philosophical, even when they are explicitly antiphilosophical.80 This is to suggest that intellectual historians, if they are to go beyond mere doxiographical description, should be versed in philosophical ideas and trained in philosophical analysis. Still, a balanced and comprehensive treatment of the thought of an age requires an appreciation of the implicit philosophical orientations manifested in both intellectual and cultural life.81 Intellectual historians and cultural historians are therefore partners in discerning these philosophical assumptions.

If, in the enterprise of articulating philosophi­cal assumptions, the value of intellectual history, which grapples with the questions of science, metaphysics, political and social theory, and theology, resides in the relative lucidity and precision of the subject matter, the value in this project of cultural history, which focuses on the concerns of art, lit­erature, manners, mores, and tastes, lies in the revealing character of its subject matter expressive of human interiority. Alfred North Whitehead’s perceptive comment on literature can be expanded to include the cultural infrastructure as a whole: “It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. Accordingly it is to literature that we must look, particularly in its more concrete forms, namely in poetry and in drama, if we hope to discover the inward thoughts of a generation.”82

But is there an infinite regress of assumptions? The intellectual historian (and the cultural historian) must be able to search for the most substan­tive and compelling assumptions to execute this critical task. Lonergan contends that differences in metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of history, po­litical and social philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and other fields of philosophy making ontological claims tend to be essentially differences in epistemology and in cognitional theory.83

The implication is clear: the intellectual historian can become more critical and more effective–can penetrate to the heart of a horizon and its assumptions–by explicating the dominant epistemological problems and premises.84 Informed by a solid understanding of epistemological controversies and presuppositions in a given era, the intellectual historian can be more successful in pinpointing the philosophical dynamics of the dominant intellectual and cultural con­cerns of the age.

The method is empirical insofar as the historian must ac­quire a familiarity with the concrete details of cultural and intellectual life. It is philosophical insofar as the historian should be on the outlook for the salient philosophical motifs. And it is interdisciplinary insofar as intellec­tual and cultural historians can cooperate with scholars in other branches of history both to apprehend the technical, economic, and political setting of ideas and to trace the impact of philosophical ideas, explicit or implic­it, on education, on social institutions, on public opinion, and on ruling elites.

Shedding Light on the Present

Explanatory intellectual history serves the critical mission of cosmopolis by uncovering the compelling philosophical assumptions operative in past intellectual cultures; it thereby sheds light on present intellectual as­sumptions by allowing for comparison and contrast and by indicating the historical origin of present perspectives. Evaluative intellectual history con­tributes to the same mission by encountering the past—by taking a stand on the truth of the crucial assumptions of the Zeitgeist of an historical peri­od. Perhaps we can say that evaluative intellectual history–conforming to the principle that evaluation is mediated by explanation and description–carries out more thoroughly the investigation of substantive philosophical issues in intellectual culture, determining with exactitude ultimate presup­positions.

Furthermore, dialectical analysis demonstrates what have been the irreconcilable world views–both contemporaneous and successive. Evaluative intellectual history also takes on the form of dramatic narra­tive, and necessarily so, for the search for meaning is at the center of the drama of existence. Particularly effective, and possibly a genre of historical and philosophical literature sui generis, would be an evaluative intellectual history in the mode of indirect communication.

Rhetorically, it would be in a twilight area between explanatory history and evaluative history be­cause it would neither pronounce explicit judgments on the truth of ideas nor would it eschew an interest in the task of evaluation: its judgments would come in the arrangements of themes, the juxtaposition of thinkers, and the quality of problems discussed. It would traverse beyond the pale of doxiographic description and explain intellectual movements; and in order to explain fully it would evaluate.

However, its evaluation would be in that peculiar manner in which form becomes, or enters into, content. Such evaluative intellectual history in the mode of indirect communication would not be a program of surreptitiously inflicting dogmas, but it would join with other, more classical species–Platonic dialogues, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, plays by existentialists–to promote, in its own un­surpassable way, a specifically philosophical endeavor: the precious task of posing the foundational questions of philosophy.

What is History of Philosophy?

There is, as we have implied in our discussion, a close link between in­tellectual history and the history of philosophy. The kind of interpretation we have been gleaning from Bernard Lonergan’s ideas achieves lucid formulation in A. O. Lovejoy’s observation that “in the history of philosophy is to be found the common seed plot, the locus of initial manifestations in writing, of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas, and especially of the controlling preconceptions, which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectual history.”85

And is not intellectual history–at least an authentic intellectual history, which is faithful to the desire to know–philosophy in its existential sense, which is the love of wisdom? Surely it is. Yet, despite the intimate connection between intellectual history and the history of philosophy, the two are distinct.

Intellectual history is broader in scope than philosophy in its systematic sense, and philosophy in its systematic aspect retains its own internal history. The “history of philoso­phy,” as we have been employing the term, is the history of philosophy as systematic joined to philosophy as existential. The aim of philosophy in this specific sense, for Lonergan, is nothing other than to objectify basic horizon, with its data being human interiority and its form of expression being predominantly theoretical. At the same time, it includes the existen­tial style of writing that invites participation in the philosophical life and in the exploration of basic horizon.

The play of technological, economic, political, and broad cultural and intellectual factors notwithstanding, the chief component in the history of philosophy is the intention of philo­sophical truth. Accordingly, the historian of philosophy must be primarily concerned, not with cataloging and pigeonholing philosophical sects, nor with recording mere novelties of view (since these activities could just as well be handled by descriptive cultural or intellectual historians), but with recounting genuine philosophical inquiry, genuine philosophical under­standing of problems, and genuine philosophical knowledge.86 In view of the intrinsic philosophical dimension of intellectual history, critical intel­lectual history needs to draw upon the resources of such a specialized his­tory of philosophy. Let us now consider the parameters of this specialized discipline.

Breakthroughs in Philosophical Understanding

We must focus on what, for Lonergan, is the historicity of philosophical truth, bearing in mind that it is the historicity of philosophical truth that grounds a definite history of philosophy. When intellectual disciplines advance–Lonergan cites modern developments in mathematics, empiri­cal science, depth psychology, and historical theory–new data are pre­sented to the philosopher on the operations of the human mind, which, in turn, can stimulate new insights and breakthroughs in philosophical un­derstanding. And any philosophical theory is open to such further clarifi­cations and extensions.87

Philosophical questions also tend to be colored by, though not restricted to, the historical contexts, technical, social, and cultural, from whence they arise. For this reason, and to this extent, the his­torian of philosophy must be acquainted with the general historical back­ground of philosophical inquiry.88 The possibility of intellectual advance means that an explanatory approach to the history of philosophy, rather than a merely descriptive approach, is both feasible and desirable.

There are contexts of philosophical inquiry, networks of interlocking questions and answers; there can be development of philosophical understanding within contexts and beyond contexts by individuals and by philosophi­cal communities. And such philosophical contexts can be related to each other in genetic sequences by the historian of philosophy. The historian can frequently apprehend interconnections, interdependencies, presup­positions, and the sense of questions better than the philosophers under examination.

Nor are the implications, the fecundity, of a philosopher’s insights limited to his or her own horizon. The genuine philosopher sub­mits to the norms of basic horizon, circumscribing the origin and goal of his inquiry, as does the genuine historian of philosophy, and herein, in Lonergan’s words, “is the ground for finding in any given philosophy, a significance that can extend beyond the philosopher’s horizon and, even in a manner he did not expect, pertain to the permanent development of the human mind.”89

The historicity of philosophical truth sets the task of critical scholarship to appropriate the philosophical past. The discipline of the history of phi­losophy entails both rigorous scholarship and philosophical commitment. Explanatory history of philosophy underscores the scholarly side; it is the devotion to historical truth, as W. von Leyden insists, that checks extrava­gant interpretations of the past.90

Yet the ultimate purpose of this historical scholarship is not to satisfy an idle curiosity, to engage in pedantry, or to indulge in antiquarianism; it is precisely to pursue the intention of philo­sophical truth–to grasp in a philosophy a significance that transcends the philosopher’s relative horizon. Evaluative historiography, as Lonergan conceives of it, underscores this requirement of the historian of philoso­phy that he or she assess the permanent contribution of a philosophical development, that he or she makes, according to W. H. Walsh, “judgments of intrinsic importance as well as judgments about what brought about what.”91

Thus, flowing out of the historicity of philosophy is the exigency for an encounter with the philosophical past: dialogue with the great phi­losophers, wrestling with the classic works of philosophy, appreciation of the ramifications of past insights, and rediscovery of old insights all be­come necessary elements in the quest for philosophical truth itself. Philos­ophy has its own internal history, and the history of philosophy is internal to philosophy.

The Seeming Scandal of Opposing Philosophers

The march of philosophy, however, is not along a smooth path. Phi­losophies have been numerous, disparate, and contradictory.92 To be sure, psychoneurosis, egoism, group prejudice, common-sense obscurantism, and ideological exploitation of metaphysical profundities can account for some of the divergence among purportedly philosophical views, and an evaluative philosophy of history must deal with them accordingly.

But the poisoning of the love of wisdom by these corruptions is not the most essential, nor even the most perplexing, problem confronting the evalu­ative history of philosophy. For the kind of dialectical opposition among philosophical horizons that is of most concern is that which is internal to philosophy itself, namely, that which occurs in spite of fidelity to the intention of truth.

“The philosophers,” as Lonergan remarks, “have been men of exceptional acumen and profundity.”93 Lonergan, of course, does not propose that the seeming scandal of a multiplicity of opposing philo­sophical worldviews puts a damper on evaluative history. Historians of philosophy will necessarily evaluate from the respective standpoints of their own philosophical perspectives, and a corresponding diversity of in­terpretations will result.

Nevertheless such conflicts among historians of philosophy have the salutary effect of further clarifying basic philosophi­cal issues. Indeed, Lonergan proposes his own path of evaluation. The genesis of philosophical error, in his view, is the great failure to differenti­ate the complexity of cognitional operations, usually tied to confusion be­tween biological extroversion and human knowing.

A basic dialectic, then, conspicuously emerges in the history of philosophy between philosophi­cal positions, those statements coherent with the cognitional and existen­tial performance of the “subject as subject” (the subject as conscious and performing prior to any objectification of that performance), and philo­sophical counterpositions, those philosophical statements incoherent with the cognitional and existential performance of the “subject as subject.”94

In positing such a sweeping dialectic in the history of philosophy, is Lonergan suggesting that the historian of philosophy should engage in pigeonholing philosophers into camps of truth and camps of error? Can the battle of philosophies play an ultimately positive role in the drama of philosophical understanding? An example Lonergan himself uses will il­lustrate his attitude toward these problems:

“Let us say that Cartesian dualism contains both a basic position and a basic counter-position. The basic position is the cogito, ergo sum and, as Descartes did not endow it with the clarity and precision that are to be desired, its further development is invited by such questions as, What is the self? What is thinking? What is being? What are the relations between them?”

“On the other hand, the basic counter-position is the affirmation of the res extensa; it is real as a subdivision of the ‘already out there now’; its objectivity is a matter of extroversion; knowing is not a matter of in­quiry and reflection. This counter-position invites reversal, not merely in virtue of its conjunction with the other component in Cartesian thought, but even when posited by itself in anyone’s thought.”

“Thus, Hobbes over­came Cartesian dualism by granting reality to the res cogitans only if it were another instance of the res extensa, another instance of matter in mo­tion. Hume overcame Hobbes by reducing all instances of the ‘already out there now real’ to manifolds of impressions linked by mere habits and beliefs. The intelligence and reasonableness of Hume’s criticizing were obviously quite different from the knowledge he so successfully criticized.”

“Might one not identify knowledge with the criticizing activity rather than the criticized materials? If so, Cartesian dualism is eliminated by another route. One is back at the thinking subject and, at the term of this reversal, one’s philosophy is enriched not only by a stronger affir­mation of the basic position but also by an explicit negation of the basic counter-position.”95

Hobbes and Hume–and, one might add, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel–the existentialists, and the phenomenologists, all of whom focused increasing­ly on the reality of the subject, gained insights into the inadequacy of the confrontation theory of truth as formulated by Descartes.

The Unity of Philosophy Amid Myriad Conflicts

Thus a sequence of philosophers who were laboring under the assumptions of a counter­position intelligently criticized those assumptions, helping to initiate their reversal in the history of modern philosophy. It is in light of such a rever­sal that Lonergan can issue the bold claim that “the historical series of philosophies would be regarded as a sequence of contributions to a single but complex goal.”96

Moreover, such philosophers as Descartes and Hume may, while ex­pressing their findings as counterpositions, hit upon penetrating insights that enrich our knowledge of basic horizon.97 The evaluative historian of philosophy must separate the discovery from the framework in which it is embedded. If an evaluative history of philosophy were simply a matter of classifying philosophies into positions or counterpositions, then insights of momentous import would be neglected or insufficiently appreciated. We can see Lonergan practicing what he preaches in his own evaluation of Descartes. Lonergan rejects Descartes’ precept of universal doubt but then goes on to comment:

“Clearly enough, the implications of that precept fail to reveal the profound originality and enduring significance of Descartes, for whom universal doubt was not a school of scepticism but a philosophical programme that aimed to embrace the universe, to assign a clear and precise reason for everything, to exclude the influence of unacknowledged presupposi­tions. For that programme we have only praise, but we also believe that it should be disassociated from the method of universal doubt whether that method is interpreted rigorously or mitigated in a fashion that cannot avoid being arbitrary.”98

The technical historian of philosophy can witness the unity of philoso­phy beneath the myriad conflicts of doctrine–the unity of program, aim, goal, and intention. And when philosophers are faithful to that intention, the historian can duly record them in the act of reversing even their own counterpositions.

Lonergan indeed paints a rather sanguine picture of the history of philosophy. Errors, of course, abound throughout its history; but the drama of the history of philosophy seems, for him, to be more a comedy of errors than a tragedy. Still, the mood must become a more sober one if we are reminded of the repercussions of counterpositions in intel­lectual and cultural life, and, beyond that, of their resounding echo in the realm of pragmatic affairs. The reversal of counterpositions is the reversal of decline, which in the social world exacts a frightening toll of blood and misery. Lonergan warns that ethical counterpositions either “enforce their own reversal or destroy their carriers.”99

The history of philosophy is truly at the summit of critical scholarly self-awareness: it pinpoints the most crucial intellectual assumptions in the most sophisticated and concentrat­ed manner. The cutting edge of its critical blade must be brought to bear on the substantive issues in the history of thought by cooperation with other fields in the history of thought, just as critical history of thought must inform other historical disciplines to take the consequences of ideas seriously.

We have in the present chapter extrapolated statements, indications, and hints from Lonergan’s writings about distinct fields in the history of thought and their methodological interdependence. To summarize: Psychohistory surveys the impact of psychological factors on human un­derstanding. Cultural history and intellectual history examine the Zeitgeist manifested respectively in the cultural infrastructure and in the cultural superstructure. The history of ideas approaches human thought thematically. The history of philosophy focuses upon the explicit and systematic search for philosophical truth.

No one specialty can legitimately claim suzerainty over the others. And each field specialty can be divided into the functional specialties of “interpretation,” “history,” and “dialectics,” methodologically promoting objectivity. But psychohistory, cultural histo­ry, history of ideas, intellectual history, and history of philosophy can form a partnership in the critique of meaning that is decisive for their status as humanistic studies. In their cooperative venture, they can chronicle and assess the explosive conflicts of positions and counterpositions reverber­ating in the history of thought along a continuum ranging from the more affective to the more abstract and from the twilight of consciousness to the philosophically reflective.

This, according to Lonergan, would have to be their fundamental critical role. For “human development,” he declares, “is largely through the resolution of conflicts and, within the realm of inten­tional consciousness, the basic conflicts are defined by the opposition of positions and counter-positions.”100 Thus the collaborative effort of these disciples would constitute–beyond either dry pedantry or instrumentalism–a contemporary academic praxis entering into the dynamic interplay of performance and interpretation.101

 

Notes

9. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, 17-18, 148. “Their efforts are evidently to dispose of history and civilization, of human error and achievements, rather than to contemplate them. Unwittingly, motive becomes purpose; the desire to understand is undone by the rival desire to quell uncertainty through reductive ideas.” Ibid., 84.

10. On Lonergan’s treatment of the sensitive psyche and its bias, see Insight, 210-231; on the sensitive psyche as an “upwardly directed dynamism seeking fuller realization” (which includes Jung’s notion of archetypal symbols and the symbolism of the “mys­tery” of the known unknown correlative to the sweep of inquiry), see ibid., 482, 569-72; on psychic development, see ibid., 481-83, 492-93; on the dynamics of the psyche as participating in the tension of limitation and transcendence at the heart of histori­cal existence, see ibid.,498-503; on dread in relation to the psyche, see Phenomenology and Logic, 204-6, 284-89; McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 8.

There is an intersubjective dimension to the scotosis of the sensitive psyche. René Girard, for example, in Violence and the Sacred has argued for the role of mimesis in distorting desire and imagers, creating a false sense of autonomy. For applications to Lonergan’s notion of the sensitive psyche and the transcendental imperatives, see Robert Doran, “Preserving Lonergan’s Understanding of Thomist Metaphysics: A Pro­posal and an Example,” 94-100.

11. The relation, for instance, of Michelangelo’s sexual feelings to his work must be considered within the context of his neo-Platonism. See Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo, pp. 229-31, 233-35; Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber.

12. It is interesting to compare modern psychotherapy with the communal therapy of a primitive African tribe discussed by Rollo May in Love and Will, 331-33. May cites the example of a man who was cured of impotence by participating in a frenzied village dance dressed and acting as his mother.

13. See Eric Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic; Origins and History of Consciousness. For a reworking of Jung into Lonergan’s framework, see Robert Doran, Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations. See also n. 5, above, for Lonergan’s notion of the teleological dimension of the psyche, including Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s wish fulfullment (Insight, 482). Lonergan, in Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980, 261-63, and Method, 68, commends Paul Ricoeur’s ef­fort, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, to retrieve an implicit teleology in Freud.

14. Peter Berger, “Towards a Sociological Understanding of Psycho-analysis,” Social Research 32 (1965): 39.

15. Insight, 243. René Girard has emphasized how mimesis and its distortion of de­sire and images can foster a scapegoat mechanism that can pervade political society and religion. See Eugene Webb, Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard, chap. 5; Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psycho­logical Development, chap. 5.

16. See ibid., 262, where Lonergan refers to Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium.

17. Method, 101-7; Insight, 482, 569-72, 711, 744-45; Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980, chap. 20; Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

18. Insight, 208.

19. See n. 1 above.

20. Method, 128.

21. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “cultus.” For the ancient Greek interpretation of culture, see Jaeger, Paideia.

22. On the last point, see Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 4 vols.

23. J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture; Plato, Laws, 644D-645C, 659D-660A.

24. Insight, 208; Topics in Education, 211-221, where Lonergan is influenced by Suzanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from ‘Philosophy in a New Key. See Gadamer’s perceptive discussion of the question of truth and the experience of art in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 5-150. Gadamer attacks the notion of art that de­rives from the framework of the confrontation theory of truth.

25. See, for example, Henry Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy: An Essay on Specula­tive Thought in the Ancient Near East, originally published as The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man; Mircea Eliade in Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, 3, speaks of studying an “archaic ontology.”

26. Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, chap. 1. Compare with Langer, Feeling and Form, chap. 12. Lonergan in Method, 98, refers to Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, chaps. 12-13.

27. See J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience in Classical Greece, chap. 5; Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism; Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals. Loner­gan briefly discusses the impact of the cultural superstructure on the infrastructure in Method, 97-99.

28. See Joseph Fitzpatrick, “Lonergan and Poetry”; Topics in Education, 211-17.

29. On Merleau-Ponty, Topics in Education, 225; on the statue, Collection, 243.

30. Topics in Education, 226-27. The “world,” for Heidegger, is not present-at-hand in space; but spatiality is a feature of entities within-the-world. Heidegger, Being andTime, 134-48. For an application of Heidegger’s ideas to architecture, see Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture.

31. Topics in Education, 226.

32. See Langer, Feeling and Form, 102: In highly ideal creations sculpture and architecture often have to supple­ment each other, and in the most perfect cultures, where mental reaches were far beyond actual human grasps, they have always done so to wit, in Egypt, Greece, mediaeval Europe, China and Japan, the great religious periods in India, and in Polynesia at the height of its artistic life. Modern sculpture returns to independent existence as the concept of social environment falls emotionally into confusion, becomes sociological and problem­atic, and ‘life’ is really understood–only from within the individual.

33. Topics in Education, 223-25; Hugo A. Meynell, The Nature of Aesthetic Value, chap.4.

34. Topics in Education, p. 227-28; Meynell, The Nature of Aesthetic Value, chap. 5; Method, p. 177.

35. See van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, pp. 297-98, 300-3.

36. Topics in Education, 229; see Meynell, The Nature of Aesthetic Value, chap. 3.

37. Topics in Education, 229-31.

38. Ibid., pp. 226, 231-324.

39. Method, 105 ff., 111-12, 284. Lonergan’s thought parallels that of Mircea Eliade in Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. xiii. The object of religious meaning is not an object defined by sociology or psychology; it is the transcendental objective of the intention­ality of basic horizon. See Eliade’s monumental A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries; vol. 2, From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity; vol. 3, From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms.

40. Method, 271-81.

41. Ibid., chap. 10.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 79, 161-62, 181-82, 221; Second Collection, 56, 233.

44. Method, 128. On at least one occasion (a reference to Aquinas’ idea of grace) Lon­ergan mentions the “history of ideas.” Ibid., 165-66.

45. The Analytic Table of Contents of the Dictionary of the His­tory of Ideas, (Philip P. Wiener, ed.), for example, lists ideas present in common sense, literature, myths, ideologies, and social attitudes. For a sense of the range of materials in the genre, see a collection of articles by notable contributors over the years to the Journal of the History of Ideas in Donald R. Kelley, ed., The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations. In chap. 16, Kelley summarizes the current state of the discipline, including the impact of the hermeneutical approach. Note some terminological ambi­guity, when he speaks of “the current condition of the history of ideas (more broadly intellectual history, of the history of thought) . . . .” Ibid., 146.

46. Insight, 667.

47. Method, 255; Verbum, 12-24.

48. Second Collection, 70-71, 74; Insight, 28.

49. See the remarks of Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas,” 37.

50. See John Dunn, “The Identity of the History of Ideas,” 85-104; Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 15-22.

51. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 50.

52. Ibid., pp. 28-30.

53. Skinner has been taken to task for projecting on the stage of the history of ideas an English academic and political propensity to handle issues piecemeal. See Bhiku Parekh and R. N. Berki, “The History of Political Ideas: A Critique of Q. Skinner’s Methodology,” 175-77.

54. On heuristic concepts and the “nature of,” see Insight, 60-61, 759; see Lonergan’s frequent references in Method, 90, 97-98, 173, 260, 304, to Snell, The Discovery of the Mind. And can we not presume to include among the possible contexts those of liter­ary and mythic understanding, on the level of the cultural infrastructure, which can­not simply be replaced by more intellectually differentiated species of inquiry? While these literary and mythic contexts are not rooted in abstractly formulated heuristic concepts, they are nonetheless grounded in compactly expressed heuristic insights.

55. Insight, 759.

56.Ibid.

57. See Lonergan’s reference to the “inner light” of questioning. Third Collection, 193. This seems to resemble Aristotle’s “active nous,” or agent intellect, which has the po­tential to make all things (ta panta poiein) and Aquinas’s “intellectual light.” Aristotle, De Anima, 3.5.430al4-15; Verbum, 87-99.

58. Lonergan has related how he came to conceive of Plato’s Ideas as “what the scientist seeks to discover.” Second Collection, 264. In a fragment of a lost essay on “As­sent” by Lonergan in the early 1930’s, he sees Plato’s eidos, following the interpretation of John Alexander Stewart, not as a reified concept (related to the doctrine of universalia a parte rei) but as a correlate to the activity of understanding. The document, p. 13 from the lost essay on “Assent,” is reproduced in Mark D. Morelli, At the Threshold of the Halfway House: A Study of Bernard Lonergan’s Encounter with John Alexander Stewart, xviii.

59. On truth as relative to context, see Second Collection, 207-8; on Lonergan’s notion of context, see Method, 313.

60. Method, 312-14. Lonergan’s distinction of a “prior context” can be used to justify the study of undifferentiated interpretations of an “x” (e.g., primitive ideas about the mind) prior to the insights that discover “x” as a distinct reality and establish a heuris­tic structure for its investigation. See Insight, p. 759.

61. Mandelbaum has criticized Arthur Lovejoy for not sufficiently differentiating the logical from the historical interconnections among ideas. Mandelbaum, “History of Ideas,” 38-40. For Lovejoy, see notes 63, 64 below.

62. See Method, 314.

63. See Collingwood, The Idea of History; Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being; D. W. Hamlyn, Sensation and Perception: A History of the Philosophy of Perception; Han­nah Arendt, “What is Authority?” in Between Past and Present: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, chap. 3.

64. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas; Great Chain of Being, chap. 1.

65. Method 79, 161-62, 181-82, 221; Second Collection, 56, 233.

66. John C. Greene, “Objectives and Methods in Intellectual History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 59.

67. Method 227. For discussion of ideal-types, see subsection “Historical Theories” in chap. 2 above.

68. See, for example, Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 3, Plato and Aristotle; John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke; Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx; Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory.

69. For a wealth of bibliographical information on recent historical studies of mod­ern philosophers, see James Collins, Interpreting Modern Philosophy, pts. 2-3. Compare Collins’s “working hypothesis” on the components of historical investigation–namely, “sources,” “historical questions,” “the interpreting present,” and “the teleology of his­torical understanding”–with Lonergan’s differentiation of the functional specialties of “research,” “interpretation,” “history,” “dialectics,” “foundations,” “doctrines,” “systematics,” and “communications.” Ibid., 24-34, 406-17; Method, pt. 2. Collins’s “working hypothesis” on components of historical investigation can apply to intellec­tual history as well as to the history of philosophy.

70. The original genius, finding “all current usage inept for his purposes,” must mold “the culture which is the background and vehicle” of the expression of his posi­tions. Verbum, p. 37. Thus both the innovative genius and the synthetic genius must have creative insight. See Lonergan’s remarks on Aquinas’ genius in bringing together in one comprehensive framework Augustine’s “phenomenology of the subject” and Aristotle’s “psychology of the soul.” Ibid., 3-4, 9. Lonergan presents perhaps a classic description of the synthetic genius of the stamp of an Aquinas:

“There is a disinterestedness and an objectivity that comes only from aiming ex­cessively high and far, that leaves one free to take each issue on its merits, to proceed by intrinsic analysis instead of piling up a debater’s arguments, to seek no greater achievement than the inspiration of the moment warrants, to await with serenity for the coherence of truth itself to bring to light the underlying harmony of the manifold whose parts successively engage one’s attention.”

“Spontaneously such thought moves towards synthesis, not so much by any single master stroke as by an unnumbered suc­cession of the adaptations that spring continuously from intellectual vitality. Inevitably such a thinker founds a school, for what he builds is built securely, and what the span of mortal life or the limitations of his era force him to leave undone, that none the less already stands potentially within the framework of his thinking and the suggestiveness of his approach.”

“Finally, the greater such a genius is, perhaps the more varied will be the schools that appeal to him; for it is not to be taken for granted that the ever lesser followers of genius will be capable of ascending more than halfway up the moun­tain of his achievements or even, at times, of recognizing that one mountain has many sides.” Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, 144.

71. Insight, 444.

72. See, for example, Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, and Richard H. Popkin, History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes. For discussion of the “from-to” per­spective in historiography, see Collins, Interpreting Modern Philosophy, 212-31. Collins rightly insists that the significance of a great thinker cannot be exhausted by such an explanatory framework and that “from-to” frameworks are open-ended and provisional. As the horizons of intellectual historians change, the context within which they analyze trends in intellectual history will change. See Method, 192, 216.

73. Lonergan’s analogy of history to a battle, the course and outcome of which the participants are not aware, is useful in considering this matter. Method, 179,199.

74. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930; Gerhard Masur, Prophets of Yesterday: Studies in European Culture, 1890-1914; Baumer, Modern European Thought, 367-400.

75. Third Collection, 102; William James, Pragmatism, 198.

76. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2. Although Kuhn men­tions methods, his discussion seems more weighted toward the objective pole of theo­ries. He seems to identify methods with techniques, and he fails to stress the role of insight, all suggesting a somewhat truncated interpretation of the subjective pole. For analysis and criticism of Kuhn, see Hugo A. Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy: Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge from Plato to Lonergan, 119-29. For Lonergan’s interpreta­tion of scientific revolutions, see Phenomenology and Logic 199-200. Lonergan cites the examples of non-Euclidean geometry, calculus, Galileo, Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Ibid., 199.

77. Patrick A. Heelan, “The Logic of Framework Transpositions,” 96-107. On con­vergence upon truth, see Insight, 328. Perhaps the most radical revolution in the history of science was the transition from the basically descriptive concepts of Aristotelian physics to the explanatory concepts of modern physics around the time of Galileo, a revolution which, in Lonergan’s language, articulated the heuristic concepts that es­tablished scientific method itself.

78. Insight, 445, 655; on Toynbee’s dominant minority, Third Collection, 10, 214. The work of Marxists and such deconstructionists as Michel Foucault can be helpful in showing how intellectual culture can mask power in the form of ideology. But if this kind of analysis goes so far as to claim that intellectual culture is nothing but an ex­pression of power, then it, as analysis, gets implicated in a performative contradic­tion and a self-referential problem. For criticism of Foucault, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, chaps. 9-10; Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy, chap. 10.

79. Phenomenology and Logic, 199-200.

80. See Lonergan’s statements of the relation of philosophy to scholarship, science, and theology in Method, 247-49; Second Collection, 166-67, 204-5. Modern scientific phi­losophy had metaphysical presuppositions even while it attacked metaphysics. See E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

81. A point stressed in Pitirim Sorokin’s vast Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vols.

82. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 75-76.

83. All other philosophical claims have correlations, explicitly or implicitly in epis­temology and cognitional theory. For example, materialists will tend to be empiricists, and idealists will tend to be rationalists. The correlation is decisive because the episte­mology and cognitional theory can be verified in cognitional fact, i.e., the data of con­sciousness: “In other words, just as every statement in theoretical science can be shown to imply statements regarding sensible fact, so every statement in philosophy and metaphysics can be shown to imply statements regarding cognitional fact.” Insight, 5. Thus Lonergan establishes a basic philosophical semantics rooted in self-knowledge.

84. It is for this reason that Ernst Cassirer, with his neo-Kantian flare for spotting epistemological problems, is particularly incisive as an intellectual historian. See Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnesproblem in der Philosophic und Wissenschaft der Neuren Zeit, 3 vols.; The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Italy; The Myth of the State; Philosophy of the Enlightenment; The Platonic Renaissance in England; The Problem of Knowledge: Phi­losophy, Science, and History since Hegel; The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe.

Cassirer was a member of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism and was most notable for extending the transcendental method beyond the sciences. It is not surprising that the early Lonergan came indirectly under the influence of the Marburg school with its emphasis on epistemology and transcendental method. He accepted John Alexander Stewart’s interpretation of Plato as a methodologist, and Stewart was adopting the approach of Marburg school member Paul Natorp.

See Morelli, At the Threshold of the Half-Way House, xv-xxiii, 194-201; Second Collection, 264-65; Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980, 213, 388; Caring about Mean­ing: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, 22, 42, 48. Nor it is surprising that William Matthews can discern the considerable influence of Cassirer on Insight, particularly on things, development, consciousness, and symbol, even as Lonergan’s “positions” were directed against Cassirer’s Kantian “counterpositions.”

See Matthews, Lonergan’s Quest, 212, 224, 228, 230-31, 239, 260-61, 265, 294, 298, 347, 350, 377-82, 401-4, 409. On a more grandiose scale Sorokin in Social and Cultural Dynamics has devised ideal-types of cultures dominated by distinct epistemological horizons, influencing thought in all fields of philosophy, in ethics, in attitudes, in art, architecture, and literature. The types are Sensate (empiricism), Idealist (rationalism as a broad category), and Ideational (re­ligious intuitionism). Sorokin applies his analysis to the oscillating cultural phases of Western civilization as well to those of other civilizations. For Lonergan’s favorable references to Sorokin, see Bernard Lonergan, “Philosophy of History,” 63-64; Under­standing and Being, 221; Topics in Education, 42, 179.

85. Lovejoy, “The Historiography of Ideas,” in Essays in the History of Ideas, 8.

86. The concern for truth as the prime characteristic of the history of philosophy has been emphasized by Leonard Nelson, “What is the History of Philosophy?” 31.

87. Insight, 411, 413; Method, 19.

88. A point stressed, if overstressed, by John Herman Randall, Career of Philosophy, 1.7.

89. Insight, 412. On the explanatory approach, which grasps ongoing contexts, even beyond the original horizon of the philosophers, see ibid., 610; Method, 165-66. This view has also been argued by Passmore, “Idea of a History of Philosophy,” 29.

90. W. von Leyden, “Philosophy and its History,” 199. Collins, Interpreting Modern Philosophy, 390-405, speaks in terms of “the intent to do historical justice.”

91. W. H. Walsh, “Hegel on the History of Philosophy,” 78; see also Passmore, “Idea of a History of Philosophy,” 15.

92. Insight, p. 411.

93. Ibid., 412. We take the connotation of the passage to mean not only that phi­losophers are brilliant but also that they are characteristically brilliant precisely as they follow the norms of the desire to know.

94. Ibid., 412-13. On the different horizons of the historians of philosophy, see Meth­od, 253.

95. Insight, 413-} 4.

96. Ibid., 412, 414.

97. Ibid., 414.

98. Ibid., 436.

99. Ibid., 626.

100. Method, 252.

101. On a contemporary application of Aristotle’s notion of praxis (“conduct”), see Third Collection, 184.

 

This excerpt is from Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence (University of Missouri Press, 2000); also see Voegelin’s Noetic Science,” “Lonergan and Voegelin: Religious Experience and Historicity Religious Experience,” and “Self-Appropriation in Lonergan and Voegelin.”

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Thomas McPartland is a Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University. He is author of Lonergan and Historiography (Missouri, 2000).

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