Basic Pattern of our Conscious, Intentional Operations
Understanding human understanding requires self reflection and self awareness. Our consciences follows a pattern. It is also a transcendent pattern that begins with physical, biological, psychological and spiritual aspects that develop from below upward—from physical to spiritual—and ultimately resting in the creator God of all.
Lonergan lists the following as the “basic pattern of operations”: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, inquiring, imagining, understanding, conceiving, formulating, reflecting, marshalling and weighing the evidence, judging, deliberating, evaluating, deciding, speaking, writing. (MiT, 6). We are all familiar with these operations. Note that all of them are intentional-- a potentially misleading term. Usually one thinks of “intentional as being roughly synonymous with the adjective “deliberate.” Lonergan does not imply that intentional operations are deliberate; rather, he refers to the fact that each of these operations requires an object. For example, one cannot see without seeing something, nor can one imagine without imagining something, and so on. The “something” in each case is what Lonergan calls the object. “To say that the operations intend objects is to refer to such facts as that by seeing there becomes present what is seen, by hearing there becomes present what is heard, by imagining there becomes present what is imagined, and so on, where in each case the presence in question is a psychological event. (MiT, 7). Operations[1] imply an operator--that is a subject who is conscious by way of his/her four intentional operations. Lonergan describes a subject’s movement through the operations on the empirical, intellectual, rational and responsible levels as being respectively that of experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding. Our consciousness expands when from mere experiencing we turn to the effort to understand what we have experienced. Thirdly, in coming to know there emerges within the content of our acts of understanding the question as to whether one is merely dealing with a bright idea or whether one judges one is really on to something; one endeavors to settle what really is so. Fourthly, when one judges that one has judged correctly as to the facts, one begins to deliberate on what we are to do about them (MiT, 9). Every act of knowing involves a pattern of experiencing, understanding, and judging.
The fourth level, of deciding,[2] while extremely important, is not constitutive of knowing. We come to know many things without making any decision about what to do with them. (The fourth level of consciousness is also the realm of morals and ethics. To know the truth and not do the truth is a tragic failure of our calling! “MikeJ)
Notes
[1] All operations are directed towards, intend, an object; they are the operations of a subject. The subject is aware of these operations. Introspection is the word, which must be understood to signify what the subject does when the contents of consciousness are objectified: Just as we move from the data of sense through inquiry, insight, reflection, judgment, to statements about sensible things, so too we move from the data of consciousness through inquiry, understanding, reflection, judgment, to statements about conscious subjects and their operations (MiT, 8). Lonergan distinguishes his meaning of introspection (the process of objectifying the contents of consciousness) from the mistaken notion of it based on “ocular vision.” Consciousness is not a mere inward inspection. (Ibid.)
[2] The transcendental precepts: "be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible-loving" are connected with attention to data and ensuing questions: What is it? (be intelligent), is it so? (be reasonable); is it worthwhile (to be responsible); is it ultimately worthwhile? (be loving). This covers the gamut of human living. END quote
Many great thinkers have "intuited" the issues and argued persuasively. Lonergan examines the basic issues in ways that complement Aquinas' achievement and gives viable foundations for a valid knowledge.
NB If there are misformulations or oversights above PLEASE ADVISE