I.
71. Lonergan, Insight, 275–82.
72. Ibid., 276.
73. Snell and Cone, Authentic Cosmopolitanism, 23–31.
74. This need not be unintelligent. Descartes’s whole project, one shaping the modern problematic for both empiricists and idealists was modeled on the image of the mind “in here,” the world “out there,” and ideas as a veil “in between.” The best thinkers followed suit, all of them trying to solve the theoretical problems of epistemology and metaphysics with an image borrowed from an utterly distinct mode of meaning. See Snell, Through a Glass Darkly, 9–40.
75. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 59.
76. Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death, 195.
77. Jaeger, Paideia, 155.
78. Ibid., 165. For the notion of philosophy as a way of life, see Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?
79. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 80.
80. Ibid., 75.
81. Ibid.
82. Snell, “Protestant Prejudice.” See also Snell, “Saving Natural Law from Itself.”
83. Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason, 5–7.
84. Novak, “Bernard Lonergan,” 248.
2
Beyond Common Sense
Natural Law as Theoretical Anthropology
The transition from common sense to theory occurs as a differentiation in consciousness when the same reality is attended to differently. As a result, the symbolization of that reality changes, as does the control of meaning and the corresponding account of objectivity. Rather than description, theory offers explanations; rather than the concrete, theory pivots between the concrete and the abstract; rather than bodies, theory deals with things. Such differentiation can be noted in intellectual history, but also in our own consciousness, as both persons and communities alternate between common sense and theory as their needs and interests demand.
Just as common sense underlies an account of nature and natural law, so too does theory. In this chapter I explore natural law in its theoretical mode, although theoretical articulations are so prevalent that they function as something like the default, as natural law per se, and can make a strong case to best represent and continue the classical natural law tradition, especially in its Aristotelian-Thomistic trajectory. A textbook on natural law, for instance, will very likely present the theoretical mode, perhaps why the usual Protestant objections generally respond to that account. Given its prevalence, I offer nothing like an exhaustive history but only a taxonomy, an account of types, claiming that classical natural law operates in the theoretical mode of meaning in its heuristic and control of meaning. Obviously this leaves out a good deal that is interesting in the various historical figures and proponents, but my claim is a metatheoretical one about how the classical tradition conceives of objectivity, knowledge, reality, and meaning.
From Common Sense to Theory
If common sense can be summarized as (1) intelligence organized toward experience and practical life, (2) with intelligent achievements promulgated through community and convention, (3) and with an epistemology and metaphysics of body, then theory differentiates itself at each point, for as our intellects follow different exigencies of questioning, so too do differing modes of meaning emerge.
Theory as Meaning
For an infant, or a kitten, the world consists entirely of bodies, there being nothing other than bodies in their conscious grasp or intention; moreover, the bodies in their conation are generally directly in front of them, present at that moment. The infant cries when the bottle drops or a parent leaves the room because those comforting bodies no longer exist for the infant. In time, the baby grasps that the bottle has not gone out of existence but is just on the floor, so she looks down and points; her father still exists on the other side of the door or behind the hands covering his face, and peek-a-boo becomes a game of delight. Still, the world contains bodies and only bodies, even those no longer immediately present: “It is the world of what is felt, touched, grasped, sucked, seen, heard. It is a world of immediate experience, of the given as given. . . .”85 Eventually, the infant will not need to point at a bottle just dropped but says “ba-ba” or “milk,” thereby entering a new world, one mediated by meaning.
With language, we intend that which goes beyond the immediately present. Not only does language allow us to inhabit a world bequeathed from others in the tradition, but the world mediated by meaning goes beyond experience, for the meaningful is that which can be “intended in questioning,” and questioning is not a function of experience but of intelligence.86 While common sense and theory tend to encounter the same objects, “the objects are viewed from different standpoints” or exigencies of our interest.87 Common sense considers objects as they relate to us—the world of the hot water and the fast moving car—spontaneously exercising intelligence to accumulate insights in a cumulative and self-correcting process making sense of the world, particularly as we live and act in that world. Insights are spontaneously communicated to ourselves and others in the non-systematic, descriptive terms of ordinary language concerned more with accomplishing our purposes than of explaining the essence of things. For the meaning of common sense, the Socratic queries into the universal nature of moral properties, or the Aristotelian distinctions between formal and material cause, or the mathematical understandings of mass or thermodynamics are just simply “not objects.”88
Theory as Invariance
When one moves beyond experience into the world of theoretical meaning, sense data is related not to us but to other data (the periodic table with its atomic numbers and weights, for instance) with “no immediate relation to us, to our sensible apprehensions.”89 Explanatory science often goes beyond what we sense, even beyond what we can imagine, which is disorienting to common sense—“What do you mean there might be 5, 8, 10, or 26 dimensions, or even more? How is that possible?” In moving into the relations of data, the theorist “builds up a world that is entirely different from the world of common sense, and he does so because of his pursuit of an ideal of which knowledge is universal, in which it is so exactly formulated that any strict logical deductions from his statements will also be found to be true.”90
This
