that “much of moral thought is not essentially dependent upon the lived values of a moral community,” even though the third sense maintains that at least some principles or virtues are “not accessible to those who do not share the life of a community.”26
We can begin to ascertain some of the tensions in contemporary thought, for as Hart claimed that natural law required cultural formation and supernatural commitments considered bizarre within the “the modern conceptual world,” so might Hauerwas suggest the priority of the story-formed community, or Mohler that “the gospel of Jesus Christ” is “where we begin and . . . where we end.”27 Strange bed-fellows, perhaps, but all equally committed, albeit in their own distinct ways, to the inadequacy of natural law in the face of the distinctives of theology, the church, and the Gospel, distinctives which the natural law not only cannot include but which are potentially violated by natural lawyers, even if unintentionally.
Modes of Meaning and the Nature(s) of Intention
In addition to Boyle’s three senses of tradition-dependent rationality, the last of which he judges foreign to natural law accounts, I suggest a fourth sense, one which on face seems rather at odds with the universalism of natural law, what I’ll term the modes and stages of meaning. Meaning itself is tradition dependent, or historical, because meaning depends upon the operations of concrete human subjects who always operate as historical. This statement is rather more than the first sense identified by Boyle, for the claim here is not simply that the same moral principles are expressed in disparate cultural forms, something analogous to “dog,” “Hund,” and “le chien,” all of which mean the same thing. In other words, the claim is not that the differences in legal systems depend upon a deeper underlying correspondence of first principles. (I think that’s true, it’s just not what the fourth sense intends to convey.) Instead, the very meaning and way that meaning is formed changes in time and culture, thus even concepts such as “nature,” or “law,” or “reason” do not mean the same thing in all places and times, nor is the way that humans make those meanings identical, although this is not, in any way, to suggest the absence of invariant, transcultural, or normative precepts for how meaning, in its various modes, is or ought to be made.
As an example: The meaning of nature differs quite dramatically in history, as does the way human intelligence functions to form the various meanings.28 For Aristotle, “nature” is essentialistic, universal, necessary, and unchanging in its defining properties. Correspondingly, “nature” is comprehended through episteme or science, which is itself deductively necessary, derived from certain and self-evident first principles, unchanging in its conclusions or methods, governed by syllogistic logic, and strictly delineated in terms of object and governing principle. Such an account is most definitely not what is meant by “nature” in a philosophy of emergence, governed not by logic but by statistical probability, little concerned with essential properties but with patterns and functions of recurrence, and admitting less of universal necessity than of correlations, tendencies, and directions. To put it another way, Boyle’s first sense suggested different terms for something universal, like nature, whereas I mean that a common term, say “nature,” might be meaningful in radically disparate ways. Aristotle, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, a caveman, a modern person with little scientific background, Einstein, and Bohr—they might all use the term nature, perhaps even recognizing a historical continuity of the term itself (Boyle’s sense 2), but do they mean the same thing or utilize the same tools of thought in governing meaning?
For each, nature means some variable sought by the intellect, an x expected to be discovered at the end of the relevant inquiry, but the meaning of x and the way inquiry unfolds is not universal—“nature” seems to lack a nature other than as the heuristic, the “unknown towards which inquiry is heading.”29 And yet, or so I’ll claim, there is something universal, fixed, abiding, and normative governing the inquiry, although history itself would be relevant to figuring out how.
Very briefly here, with more detail in subsequent chapters, Lonergan demonstrates the historicity of knowing, including the way knowing functions within stages of meaning. For Lonergan, knowing is the result of a series of operations—experiencing, understanding, and judging—rather than any single operation. While an empiricist may confuse experience with knowing and the idealist reduce knowing to understanding, fully human knowing includes the entire nexus of operations. The operations themselves, while invariant constants of human knowing, can be directed, synthesized, or coordinated in a variety of different patterns, and thus the same operations admit of quite distinct exigencies. If nature functions as a heuristic—the unknown x to be attained when one knows—our own experience provides ample evidence that we seek the unknown in a variety of ways. The car mechanic, the stock broker, the baseball pitcher, the psychiatrist, the theologian, or the theoretical physicist all have some unknown occupying their attention, and all seek the elusive x which, when known, provides them what they are seeking to know. The what or x differs—what is causing that odd noise in the fan belt, what is a good value for this equity, what mix of speed and location will strike the batter out, what therapy will bring wholeness to the client, what kind of particle could travel faster than light?—and yet each utilizes experience, understanding, and judgment to arrive at an answer, albeit in widely different exigencies or patterns of meaning. As Lonergan puts it, “[d]ifferent exigences give rise to different modes of conscious and intentional operation, and different modes of such operation give rise to different realms of meaning.”30
The first distinction is that between common sense and theory. Both realms of meaning, for the most part, attend to the same objects from differing viewpoints.31 Common sense considers objects as they relate to us, the world of persons and bodies out there for me to observe and interact with. Common sense brings with it a descriptive realm of meaning. The water coming from this tap is hot (or so it seems to me), my uncle is short (or in relation to me), and the car is speeding toward me (thus I jump back). These descriptions do not arise from some rarified method known only to experts, but still real knowing is involved. We name these in ordinary language taught to the members of the linguistic community, but the words serve not to grasp or explain the Form of the object, but rather to facilitate communication and use relative to us.
As an example, Lonergan highlights the confusion of Socrates’s interlocutors. They really did know how to navigate the marketplace or gymnasium in Athens; no one thought them clueless or without knowledge, and they used the words in the proper and conventional ways, but Socrates pushed a different mode. Dissatisfied with conventional use, he asked for definitions—for the nature of justice or courage or piety—accepting only accounts which were universal and explanatory. Consequently, “the systematic exigence not merely raises questions that common sense cannot answer but also demands a context for its answers, a context that common sense cannot supply or comprehend. This context is theory.”32 For theory, the pattern of questions and judgments does not describe things as they relate to us, but explains things in relation to other things. Rather than suggesting the water is “hot,” as in common sense, theory creates units of temperature, comparing the water to a scale of 0 to 100 degrees Celsius rather than to my sense perception. So, too, rather than suggesting the car is moving “fast,” theory calculates velocity by the relation of data to other data (v=d/t). Remember learning the difference between weight and mass in your early schooling, and how puzzling that was to your ordinary experience? That’s the difference between common sense and theory.
We find the distinction in many domains of human inquiry, not just science. Consider the difference between the Trinity of St. Patrick’s shamrock and the homoousious of the Creed, or how we explain fairness to a child (“Would you feel good if they took your toy?”) and principles of contract in the first
