Lonergan, and the Future of Philosophy

        The topic of the paper may be broached by noting two modes of discourse in Plato's philosophy. On the one hand, Socrates champions the use of logical argumentation, or "dialectic." He often insists on a brief question-and-answer format, eschewing long speeches; examples may be found in the early dialogues. “Would you be willing, Gorgias, to continue our present method of conversing by question and answer, postponing to some other occasion lengthy discourses of the type begun by Polus?”[1] Or as Alcibiades says, “Socrates admits frankly that long speeches are beyond him and that Protagoras has the better of him there, but in discussion and the intelligent give-and-take of arguments I doubt if he would give any man best.”[2]

        On the other hand, Plato elsewhere presents his thought in the form of a "plausible story." The whole of the Timaeus, for example, belongs to that genre, and is introduced somewhat apologetically in the following words: “Enough if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others, for we must remember that I who am the speaker and you who are the judges are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and inquire no further.”[3] But the "plausible story" model can also be identified in the myths that occur throughout Plato's work.

        A tension, even a paradox, may be noted in Plato: when he is speaking most seriously and explicitly, he identifies philosophy with logic and dialectic. Yet the myths, however diffidently offered, often constitute the climax or the central turning point of the dialogues; indeed, they often remain the most memorable parts of Plato's thought, like the myth of the cave.

But the present concern is not Platonic exegesis. Rather the question is a present one: Is philosophy best defined as a science which proceeds by logic? Or is philosophy better described as a "plausible story"?

I. The Question in the History of Philosophy

        The question is one which has a long and momentous career in philosophy; it is explicitly raised already by Parmenides. By a supernatural force Parmenides is brought up to the goddess, who instructs him as follows: Seek the way of truth; avoid the way of seeming. In other words, seek science and apodictic knowledge; avoid mere probabilities and plausible stories. Though framed in the language of myth, the visit to the goddess foreshadows the end of myth. A new science of definition and logic will replace the vagaries of myth; yet the goddess also undertakes, after introducing him to the way of truth, to instruct him also in the way of seeming, so that he may be in no way deficient.

        Thus is set, to a great extend, the program of Western philosophy: Seek the way of truth, avoid the way of seeming; that is, seek scientific and logical knowledge, and avoid mere conjectures and plausible stories.

        Traces of this program can be found in Plato when he turns away from the shifting knowledge of the senses to focus on the abiding knowledge of the Forms; in the divided line of knowing, with the two upper parts, reason (or dialectic) and understanding, corresponding to the Way of Truth, and the two lower parts, visible bodies and their shadows and reflections, constituting the Way of Seeming;[4] and in the myth of the cave itself, where the cave stands for the Way of Seeming, and the outer air the Way of Truth.[5] Plato is also following the directions of the goddess when he excludes the poets from his ideal republic; yet he remains a man at war with himself, as is evidenced in his reluctance to exclude Homer.[6]

Aristotle fulfils the program much more rigorously and fully than Plato, by eliminating myth altogether from his treatises. The Posterior Analytics, devoted to an explicitation of the method of science, clearly identifies it as a study of the universal and the necessary, even the eternal. When he begins the Nicomachean Ethics, he makes an apology, because the material of particular human actions cannot measure up to the Way of Truth:

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of; for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions.... We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better.... for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.[7]

        Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle in this venture. He criticizes Plato's method specifically for its employment of myth.[8] He proposes to make of theology itself an Aristotelian science, as is clear from the beginning of the Summa (I,1,2). He faces the objection that theology must, like the Nicomachean Ethics, deal with individual deeds; but brushes them aside as peripheral to the real work of theology (I,1,2 ad 2).

        Descartes, in founding modern philosophy, in many ways makes a clean break from medieval philosophy; yet on this account he does not depart from his predecessors at all. If anything, he is even more devoted to the program of the goddess than his forebears. He goes so far as to say in the Discourse on Method that he will treat as tantamount to false anything which is merely probable. "I esteemed as well-nigh false all that only went as far as being probable.”[9] This is seeking the Way of Truth, and avoiding the Way of Seeming, with a vengeance.

        Kant has similar aspirations. He wants to put philosophy, once for all, on the sure path of science on which mathematics, among the Greeks, and physical science, much more recently, have already entered. He confides to a friend, "I doubt that many have tried to formulate and carry out to completion an entirely new conceptual science. You can hardly imagine how much time and effort this project requires...”[10]

        Hegel as well insists on the Way of Truth. He deprecates as ignorant anyone who will prate of "philosophical opinions." Philosophy is not opinion; it is science.

But philosophy possesses no opinions, for there is no such thing as philosophical opinions. When we hear a man speaking of philosophical opinions, even though he be an historian of philosophy itself, we detect at once this want of fundamental education. Philosophy is the objective science of truth, it is science of necessity, conceiving knowledge, and neither opinion nor the spinning out of opinion.[11]

Someone as late as Husserl in the 20th century can speak of philosophy as die strenge Wissenschaft.

Thus far, Western philosophy, with few exceptions, has striven rigorously to follow the dictates of the goddess.

II. Recent Challenges

But the late 19th and the 20th century issued a grievous challenge to this long tradition. Alternative geometries undermined the claim of the Euclidean to be the sole geometry. Whitehead reflects that none of the physical principles he had learned as a student were any longer accepted, at least in the way he had learned them, by the time he became a philosopher[12]. Einstein demonstrated that it was one of the alternative geometries that actually described the universe. Gödel showed that no logical system could be self-sufficient. Above all, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle challenged even the certainties of the physical sciences. Lonergan articulates well the momentous shift that was taking place:

The clearest and neatest illustration of the breakdown of classical culture lies in the field of science.... The significant difference is not more knowledge or more adequate knowledge but the emergence of a quite different conception of science itself. The Greek conception was formulated by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics; it envisaged science as true, certain knowledge of causal necessity. But modern science is not true; it is only on the way towards truth. It is not certain; for its positive affirmations it claims no more than probability.[13]

Postmodernism specifically rejected the trust in reason and logic displayed by the Enlightenment.

As a consequence, philosophy must go back to the drawing board. Does it represent the Way of Truth? Or does it correspond more to the Way of Seeming. Is it a logical science? Or more a plausible story?

III. Philosophical Method

        In order to engage in the re-thinking that is necessary, it will help to go back to the actual procedures of philosophers, and try to analyze critically what they are doing. As Lonergan urges, don't listen to what they say; look at what they do. I would suggest that there are four main methods at work in philosophy:

        1) An appeal to experience.   A goal of any philosophy must be to offer an account that coheres with experience. Consequently, most philosophies begin in some experience or other. But "all of experience" is at once too diffuse, too multiple and too vast to be tackled. Hence a philosophy is likely to focus on one area of experience or another.

        Marjorie Grene makes a plausible case that this formative experience for Aristotle was his cataloguing of biological specimens.[14] From this experience he learned that all knowing begins in the senses; that reality divides into specific kinds of things; that these forms are not found in any noetic heaven, but in individual things themselves; that these things, or substances, are agents, which act and grow; and that this action and this growth are for an end, which is their own perfection. One can already discern here the outlines of the four causes.

        For Lonergan the relevant experience is obviously that of the mind at work. While he does not appeal exclusively to that experience, that is where he begins; it is the central and decisive appeal in his thought. In this he belongs to the turn to the subject, which is modern, as opposed to the "turn to the world,” which we find in the ancients and medievals.

        2) Logical Argument. The use of logic, as pioneered by the Greeks, and especially by Socrates, has always been another important method used by philosophers. Socrates insists on the brief question-and-answer format precisely because it alone will allow purchase to logic. Often he leads an interlocutor through a long list of deductions – then shows how the speaker has come around to contradicting himself! Aristotle carefully catalogues all the types of syllogisms, and distinguishes clearly their valid and invalid forms. But it is Descartes and the rationalists like Leibniz and Spinoza who follow him who attempt to make this the sole method of philosophy.

        3) Plausible story. This may be the actual myth or story that has already been considered; more widely, it refers to any attempt by a philosophy to give an account of reality which appeals by its coherence with what is already known or established. If one examines critically the work of a philosopher, it is relatively rare that it proves to be simply a chain of syllogisms. More often, it is simply an account of how reality is. This account must appeal more by plausibility than by apodictic proof. For example, when Socrates says that learning is reminiscence, that we are struggling to recall what we knew in a former life when we had a direct vision of the Forms, he is saying what is simply not subject to any direct and apodictic or syllogistic proof. Though he tries to "prove" this account in the Meno by his experiment with the slave, the experience is obviously open to other explanations. Of course, this is to single out but one element of Plato's theory of knowing. It has a plausibility not independently, but within Plato's whole system of thought. But the basic point remains: that system of thought is an account of reality which ultimately appeals more by its plausibility than in virtue of strict proof.

        4) Authority. This may immediately be divided into two: the authority of another, and the authority of the philosopher himself. These will be treated in turn.

        a) Authority of another philosopher. Thomas Aquinas specifically says that authority is the weakest argument in philosophy. But that does not stop him from using authorities. This is particularly obvious when he quotes "the Philosopher," by which he appeals to the authority of Aristotle. This authority may be generally supportive of a position, but it functions especially within a school. For example, a Thomist will generally respect Aristotle as an authority; and a Lonerganian or a Maritainian will respect the authority of both Aristotle and Thomas.

        b) Though a philosopher will not usually do so explicitly, often his method amounts to an appeal to his own authority as a philosopher. For example, the corpus of the medieval quaestio forms the central act of the whole piece; though it may be introduced by such impersonal phrases as Respondendum est... or Dicendum est..., clearly the Master is taking responsibility for proffering his own solution to the problem. When Lonergan in his later work says, on the subject of placing loving before knowing, "Far more plausibly it would seem... ",[15] he is using the language of plausible story, but in reality is appealing more to his own authority, because he gives no other persuasion as to the plausibility.

        Practically all philosophers will be found to use all of these methods in constructing and proposing their philosophy. The differences in method will usually be found in the emphasis they put on one or the other element.

IV. Historical Illustrations

1) All philosophers, for example, make some appeal to experience. But, as Robert Neville has shown, more often this is an appeal to a salient and symbolic experience, used then as a paradigm to

illuminate other experiences.[16] For example, the experience of change is central for Aristotle. For Whitehead the paradigmatic experience is the "moment of consciousness" which links the immediate past and present. This is the "actual entity" around which his whole philosophy is built.

        By the nature of philosophy, however, the appeal to experience is normally rather limited. Usually philosophers are speaking of more general categories, which are, to use Aristotle's phrase, meta ta physica, beyond the physical, literally metaphysical. As one reads Thomas' Summa, for example, there are occasional appeals to direct experience; but they tend to be few and far between. Most of the appeal is to principles, some of which are generally accepted in the Christian medieval world, some of which are more particular to Thomas' own philosophy.

        2) In the history of Western philosophy the appeal to logic and "dialectic" has bulked larger, at least in the self-account of the philosophers themselves, to the point that the rationalists– especially Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza – tried to draw all of philosophy under the umbrella of logic and apodictic proof. The attempt to follow out rigorously the admonition of the goddess, Follow the Way of Truth, has already been traced through Western philosophy.

        3) Less explicit appeal has been made to the "plausible story." Socrates, as already seen, admitted this element in his thought, but Plato is obviously somewhat embarrassed by it. In Aristotle and Thomas it is deliberately eliminated. Descartes, Kant and Hegel refused to give it even the slightest concession. Philosophy must be rigorously scientific, or it is nothing. Yet even there the method is operative even when it is denied. A good example may be found in Thomas' Summa. Thomas is obviously proposing that theology can be an Aristotelian science. For that reason he deliberately relativizes any particular actions of particular agents, as seen already. He goes so far as to say that the articles of the creed are the first principles of this theological science. But one may pick up any article of the Summa at random, and will not find there a deduction based rigorously on those first principles. As Lonergan says, " [Thomas’] ... familiarity with the whole of Aristotle protected him from any illusions that might be generated by the Posterior Analytics."[17]

        4) Something similar may be said of the appeal to authority. It too has been larger muted, but may well have played a larger role than explicitly admitted, whether that is a matter of appeal to the authority of another philosopher, or an appeal to one's own authority.

V. Insufficiency of Logic

What is clear, at the beginning of the 21st century, is that the "myth" of a totally logical proceeding in philosophy is no longer tenable. To put it in other words, the idea that all of philosophy can be justified by an appeal to logic and syllogistic argument was always just a "plausible story"; and its plausibility has now been undercut and rendered unviable.

For all his insistence on dialectic, Plato implicitly allows that this is insufficient by his prominent use of the "plausible story" or myth. Moreover, there are hints in Plato of a mysticism that would transcend rational knowing, which are exploited by Plotinus. For example, when challenged to discourse on the Form of the Good, Socrates says,

It will right well content me, my dear fellow, but I fear that my powers may fail and that in my eagerness I may cut a sorry figure and become a laughingstock. Nay, my beloved, let us dismiss for the time being the nature of the good in itself, for to attain to my present surmise of that seems a pitch above the impulse that wings my flight today.[18]

This may be taken simply to mean that Socrates is having a metaphysical "bad hair" day, and may on another occasion deliver himself of a fully rational account of the Good. But there is also more than a hint that this simply goes beyond the possibilities of reason on any day. The same is true when he comes to discourse on love. In the Phaedrus it is presented as a "divine madness" which goes beyond normal human capabilities; and in the Symposium it is notable that the last word is not left to Socrates the dialectician but to Diotima the prophetess.

        The same point is explicitly shown by Aristotle, who says that science cannot ground itself; it must be grounded in a higher knowing called nous, the habit of first principles. As little as he speaks elsewhere of that knowing – there is, for example, a book on science, but none on this knowing – the point is clearly stated.

        Though Thomas continues to put a great stress on science, and rejects the use of myth, he not only retains Aristotle's position of the higher knowing of intellectus, the habit of first principles, he expands this by weaving this knowing more intimately into his philosophy, and then subordinates reason to faith, with faith ultimately subordinated to the knowledge of God Himself.

                Descartes sought to found a philosophy based rigorously on reason and logic. Having subjected everything to a universal and methodical doubt, he concluded that there was one thing he could not doubt: his own thinking. For, even if he should doubt it, doubt was but another form of thinking; so, far from undercutting it, doubt merely confirmed his thinking. From this basis of the indubitable Cogito he would begin: I think, therefore I am; and from it he would deduce all the rest.

When an objector pointed out that this first principle presupposed a knowledge of “I,” “thinking” and “being,” Descartes replied with a measure of philosophical bluster: “I do not think anyone has ever existed who is stupid enough to have required to learn what existence is before being able to conclude and affirm that he is; and the same holds true of thought and doubt.”[19] What this sneer tends to cover over, while implicitly admitting, is that his system rests on a prior knowledge, and a knowledge given to common sense at that. So logic is not self-sufficient after all.

To Kant, the trick to entering upon the Way of Truth was to mate the ineluctability of logic with the variability of experience. He thought he could do this with his a priori synthetic principles, which would exhibit at once the solidity of logical and the concreteness of sense experience. In his diagnosis, this was the secret of mathematics, which shared the invariability of logic with the concrete ability to mirror the world of measurable experience. In modern science, as well, he saw this as the key: invariable principles, which yet described and predicted movements in the physical world. If he could be discover similar synthetic a priori principles for philosophy, he would have succeeded, at long last, at putting philosophy on the royal road of science which mathematics had trod for millennia, and physical science had entered upon more recently.

Alas, the marriage that Kant engineered almost by sheer force of thought did not hold together. Far from being synthetic, mathematics was seen more and more to be an elaborate tautology, which might or might not correspond to some aspect of the physical world; and whether or not it did so, could be discovered only a posteriori, after the fact. At the same time, as Lonergan has said, modern developments in science have mauled Kant’s Transcendental Esthetic.[20] Indeed, the shift that Lonergan has already described in science shows that it is simply synthetic, and in no way a priori. As mathematics withdraws into the a priori, and science falls into the purely synthetic, the very basis of synthetic a priori principles, on which the new science of philosophy was to built, has dissolved.

Hegel mounted an even more ambitious program to weld together necessity and contingency: he would combine the necessity of God with the vagaries of world process. Denying the distinction of Infinite and finite, he proposes a pantheistic vision of a God who is one with his creatures, and his creatures – actually, co-creators – a vital part of his own coming-into-consciousness. Philosophy, in other words, becomes the biography of God who, by ineluctable logic, comes to self-consciousness through the dialectical play of nature and Spirit. In the welter of historical particulars, Hegel, with his own divine vision, will descry that golden thread of necessity which is the successive self-constitution of God himself.

But Hegel’s shotgun wedding proved no more lasting than Kant’s. To the philosopher, it was all too contingent; while to the historian, it appeared all too necessitarian.

In none of these philosophers, then, is logic all-sufficient; and in the modern attempts to impose logic on reality, in particular, the story is one of successive failure. The blanket of logic, in the end, simply cannot be stretched enough to cover the body of philosophy. A new way must be envisioned.

VI. A New Conception of Philosophy

A way into this new mode of philosophy may be afforded by a brief look at Richard Rorty. In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature[21] he concluded that philosophy had no foundation, no matter how deeply one probes. It is merely a personal prejudice, or a group prejudice, should it be shared with others.

The point is that Rorty is right – if one is looking for a strict logical demonstration of philosophical principles. There is, indeed, no such foundation to be had. But it is precisely this logical requirement which must be abandoned in the philosophy of the future. The response to Rorty, then, must be a new kind of foundation, a non-logical one, a knowing which can claim the name of knowing, but without the panoply of logic.

Aristotle already pointed the direction to this knowing when he admitted that the syllogistic knowing of episteme, science, could not ground itself. It had to be grounded in nous, the habit of first principles, which would be the cause of scientific knowledge. But because the cause must be higher than the effect, so the knowledge of nous had to be superior and more certain than that of science.

Aristotle’s solution is unhelpful, however, in that it points to geometry as the beau ideal of knowing, a procedure where a small number of axioms and postulates can ground an indefinite logical expansion. But it is precisely this logical model which must be superseded in the philosophical method of the future.

Perhaps Descartes may prove more useful here. However ungraciously, he admits that the ultimate basis of his philosophy is a common sense knowing available to everyone. What it means to be an “I,” what it means to “think,” and what it means to “exist” are realities open to practically anyone. What Descartes overlooked was that everyone also not only knows, but knows that he knows. Descartes tried to bring to bear a weighty philosophical proof, I think, therefore I am, to what everyone already took for granted. Lonergan observed that Descartes questioned sense knowing, common sense and science in a way that he had no resources to restore.[22] He might have added that Descartes did the same thing for human knowing as a whole. We already know that we know. If we question that, we are left with no way to prove or restore it. Consequently, the philosophy of the future must be grounded on common sense presuppositions, such as “I,” “being” and “thinking,” as well as the conviction that we know that we know. Copleston in his commentary on Thomas underlines the fact that Thomas, and Aristotle before him, were philosophers of common sense.[23] The ordinary language analysts were perhaps pointing in the same direction.

VII. Lonergan and Future Philosophical Method

It may be asked how Lonergan’s philosophical approach accords with these new requirements, as the answer is, Very well. In the first place, Lonergan was never overly impressed with the power of logic. As he trenchantly observed,

In brief, like the mortician, the logician achieves a steady state only temporarily. The mortician prevents not the ultimate but only the immediate decomposition of the corpse. In similar fashion the logician brings about, not the clarity, the coherence, and the rigor that will last forever, but only the clarity, the coherence, and the rigor that will bring to light the inadequacy of current views and thereby give rise to the discovery of a more adequate position.

The shift from the static to the dynamic viewpoint relativizes logic and emphasizes method. It relativizes logic. It recognizes to the fullest extent the value of the clarity, the coherence, and the rigor that logic brings about. But it does not consider logic’s achievement to be permanent.[24]

When one examines Insight, one finds that it contains remarkably little formal argumentation. The whole of the first part of the book, from a methodological point of view, is simply an appeal to the experience of the human mind at work. When he moves from such intentional analysis to metaphysics, it is true, he speaks of a “transcendental deduction”; but even that is not so much a syllogistic argument as a rather obvious conclusion: if knowing begins in experience, then there must be something in reality to be experienced; if knowing contains insight, there must be something to be understood; and if knowing eventuates in judgment, then there must be something affirmable, namely, being.

Lonergan also accords a high respect to common sense knowing, a theme many philosophers either ignore, or deliberately downplay.

Above all, Lonergan does not share the modern preoccupation with demonstrating the possibility of knowing. From the very first dichotomy of the Introduction to Insight, his interest is clearly not in whether we know, but how we know. Indeed, he judges as foolish the very attempt at such a demonstration: “Even to seek it involves a vicious circle; for if one seeks such a foundation, one employs one’s cognitional process; and the foundation to be reached will be no more secure and solid than the inquiry utilized to reach it.”[25]

VIII. The Future of Philosophy

If Kant pointed up the labors of creating a fully scientific philosophy, there is no reason to think that working out a new non-scientific philosophy will be an easy task either. It may take generations or even centuries to produce, and may require some genius or geniuses before it reaches full development. I have no intention of trying here to anticipate that development. But it may be worthwhile to review some of the basic attitudes with which the philosophical project may be approached.

At the very opening of the Metaphysics Aristotle says that wonder is the very beginning of philosophy. Such wonder is a vivid curiosity, what Lonergan has formulated as the pure and disinterested drive to know. But it is even more than that: it is an awe before the mystery of being, a reverent sense before the richness and complexity of reality.

In almost every age that urge, however, has been flanked by a scepticism which mocks it and belittles it. Santayana evokes well this dichotomy and tension is his title Scepticism and Animal Faith. It may be that, in a limited way, scepticism provides a critique to prove and refine the positions of more creative philosophers. But, taken to its logical extreme, scepticism becomes destructive of all philosophy and, indeed, of all human knowing and morality. Given the fact that it is often easier to destroy than to build, scepticism may appear to have an in-built advantage; but, in the long run, only those with a deep sense of wonder can build; the destroyers build nothing; and there will always be those, however small in number, to be attracted to and to admire creations of the human spirit.

Closely allied to this first attitude is an expectation that the world will be ordered, intelligible, even beautiful. The Greek word kosmos is translated “world,” but from it we also get “cosmetic,” which is not by accident. For the Greek kosmos was not a jumble of arbitrary elements, but an ordered universe. Perhaps the conviction goes back to Pythagoras, who held all reality to be number. The Middle Ages delighted in the many-faceted order of the universe; practically any part of the universe may be adopted as an analogy to illuminate any other, in a way that seems strange in our more specialized world. On such expectation of order, Whitehead averred, was based the faith of modern science.[26] That project, in turn, may be thought of as having determined the numbers of the universe that Pythagoras had intuited.

Once again, however, this attitude is shadowed by an opposite one, that of the philosophers who anticipated chaos and irrationality. The tendency may be seen in Darwin, who wants to make chance one of his principal explanatory categories. Lonergan obviously owes much to Darwin, but he nudges his thought in a different direction. True, he too appeals to long periods of time and great numbers of occasions; but rather than evoking chance variations, he speaks of probabilities; and he sees a new species as an intelligible solution to a problem of survival and living. No doubt the thrust toward irrationality reaches its apogee in the 20th century philosophy of the absurd; but it may also be discerned lurking in much of postmodernism.

A third attitude has to do with faith. Over the centuries faith and philosophy have taken on many different relations. In the Patristic period and the Middle Ages, theology was the queen of the sciences, and philosophy its handmaid. An hostility of faith toward philosophy is shown in the early Reformation, especially by Luther; and the opposite hostility of philosophy is evinced in the Enlightenment, and much of modern thought.

A couple of times Thomas Aquinas quotes Isaac Israeli to say that reason lives in the shadow of intuition. For all that it was called a handmaid, reason never ranged as widely or ventured so high as in the Middle Ages. Reason had hardly been “emancipated” from faith when one of Kant’s first moves in discerning the proper province of reason was to restrict it, literally clipping its wings, and forbidding it to soar in the metaphysical air. As if to turn Isaac into a prophet, reason progressively sickened and died without the sheltering shadow of faith; so that it came even to despair of its own capabilities. This has led, in more recent times, to the rather bizarre sight of the First Vatican Council proclaiming that reason can, by its own power, know the existence of God, almost simultaneously with Nietzsche proclaiming the death of God; and the vision of a pope of Rome calling philosophers back to their ancient vocation of sounding the deep wells of being and reality.

What is notable about all three of these attitudes of wonder, of an expectation of order, and of a faith that makes a large space for reason, is that they are pre-philosophical. They come from common sense, or perhaps from religion, and one must bring them to the philosophical project. Should one approach the philosophical threshing floor without them, no amount of philosophical argumentation will demonstrate them. They will be had only by what Lonergan calls a conversion.

Of the three dichotomies of wonder versus scepticism, order versus chaos, and faith versus doubt, I would choose for my philosophy wonder, the expectation of order, and the protective shelter of faith. Those were also Lonergan’s commitments.

But I believe Lonergan was overly sanguine about the future of philosophy when he envisioned a progress by which all positions can be affirmed, and all counter-positions can be reversed. It is my own less optimistic fear that sceptics will do their destructive work until the end of time, that there will always be those who anticipate chaos rather than order, that there will never lack philosophers to claim that God does not exist, or that he has spoken no word.

Conclusion

The philosophical project must be re-launched on a new basis. The dream of a fully logical and apodictic procedure must be abandoned. Like modern science, philosophy will be content to present a plausible account or a reasonable hypothesis about reality. Logic will not be absent, but it will play a much more modest role. This philosophy will ground itself, not in demonstrated principles, nor even in self-evident ones, but in the commonplace convictions of common sense. What we have come to realize, in short, after 2,400 years, is that the Way of Truth is the Way of Seeming.

Terry J. Tekippe

[1]Gorgias 449 in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 232.

[5]Republic 514-17, Hamilton and Cairns 747-49.

[6]Republic 595; see also 607; Hamilton and Cairns 820; see also 832.

[7]Nicomachean Ethics 1094 in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 1730.

[8]Commentary on the De Anima, Bk I, Lect. 8, in K. Foster and S. Humphries (trs.), Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951).

[9]Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, v. 1 of E. Haldane and G. Ross (trs.), The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1968), p. 86.

[10]Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, 1759-99, tr. A. Zweig (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 77.

[11]Lectures on the History of Philosophy, tr. E. Haldane (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), v. 1, p. 12..

[12]Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 210.

[13]Collection in F. Crowe and R. Doran (eds.), Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, v. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 238.

[14]Marjorie Grene, A Portrait of Aristotle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 55-58.

[15]Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 340.

[16]Robert C. Neville, God the Creator (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 3-4, 168-80.

[17]Philosophy of God, and Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973), p. 32.

[18]Republic 506, Huntington and Cairns 741-42.

[19]The Search after Truth, Haldane and Ross, v. 1, pp. 324-25.

[20]Insight: A Study of Human Understanding in F. Crowe and R. Doran (eds.), Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, v. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 664.

[21]Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

[23]F.C. Copleston, Aquinas (London: Penguin Books, 1955), pp. 38-44, 108-110.

[26]A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925), pp. 5-6.