Knowing By Identity – how Lonergan & Hegel might rhyme via Peirce
Sociatus sum, ergo sum (I relate, therefore I am).
~ A. Nicolaidis
Below isn’t an argument. It’s just an outline of something I see.
If reality’s constituted dynamically & the cosmos is evolutionary, if chance is objective (not just epistemic) & probability is emergent, then dialectic refers to reality structurally (so, doesn’t just model it heuristically).
And cognitional operations — like Maritain’s connaturality, Polanyi’s tacit dimension, Newman’s illative sense, Hegel’s self-positing & intellectual intuition, Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge, Peirce’s abduction & Lonergan’s understanding & unrestricted desire — can really impart truth laden (even if fallible & probable) explanatory interpretations (not just exploratory descriptions).
That’s why the upper blade of Lonergan’s scissors, vis a vis the nature of phenomena & competence of our heuristic structures, is so very sharp! It’s implicit background knowledge has been sharpened from aeons of accumulated experience. It even guides our future inquiries by gifting us the novel questions, themselves.
This epistemic upper blade thus evades facile charges of apriorism, rationalism & fideism, especially since we are dynamical microcosms of the above-described evolutionary macrocosm.
We are, indeed, knowers; intelligibility has a reasonable context; understanding has real categories; there’s more to reality than meets the eye; and we know more than we can say!
Even though knowing is by identity, still, we can distinguish between faculties & objects as understood in potency & act. Also, beyond being similar “essentially,” there may be “modal” differences in recipients, even being oneself per “natural” existence versus being (becoming) others as other per “intentional” existence.
The concrete data of our quotidian life experiences and of our scientific experiments, as the lower blade, will thus never lack SIGNificance. Our categories of understanding are inextricably intertwined with realms of MEANING.
Above all, our desires & hopes are ordered relationally, concretely, socially & absolutely to the Totus Christus.
The Spirit gifts us – not just “what” we desire, but – “what to” desire, which is finally communion (even Trinitarian, i.e. beatific!)
note:
A. Nicolaidis (2010). Relational nature. In J. Polkinghorne (Ed.), The Trinity & the Entangled World: Relationality in physical science & theology (pg 106). Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.