Self-Appropriation in Lonergan and Voegelin—Part 2 

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. This essay is taken from his book, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, and is available from the University of Missouri Press. This is the second of two parts. It appears, with permission of the publisher. The previous chapter, Noetic Science, may also be read here at VoegelinView.

Voegelin's Existential Exegesis

It is obvious that in his later writings Lonergan has entered the territory of Voegelin. We see Lonergan articulating the reality of tension as the equivalent of Voegelin's in-between participatory reality; suggesting the negotiation of the psychic depths, reminiscent of Voegelin's portrait of consciousness opening to the unfathomable psychic reaches below, as depicted in Plato's Timaeus; and showing the centrality of the divine human encounter.¹⁹ Voegelin, however, has a somewhat precise and perhaps novel idea of meditation as it is related to his version of self-appropriation. Voegelin, of course, has explored his own territory in a more concerted and detailed manner by a style evocative of the very existential consciousness being investigated.

Voegelin does not mention the "self" often, and when he does, he usually refers to the creation of imaginary selves as "second realities," as substitute, false selves, exemplifying what Lonergan calls the existential gap. The idea of a false self, however, points, by contrast, to a true self. And Voegelin indeed speaks of a "true self": the self that experiences the divine pull and responds with the loving search for being; the self whose reaction to the anxiety of existence is not flight but instead the search for the ground; the self who exists in the tension, the in-between, of time and the timeless, the human and the divine; the self who is aware of participating in the order of being.²⁰

Rare is the thinker — philosopher, prophet, or saint — who can successfully elucidate the true self and the participatory, in-between structure of the human experience with its worldly and transcendent poles. When such elucidation occurs, it is because the thinker has had differentiating insights into transcendence as the ground of being and into the soul as the sensorium of transcendence. This identification, for Voegelin, is the key moment in his version of self-appropriation, which is nothing less than the "truth of existence." The latter term Voegelin defines as "the awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it as the conditia humana."²¹

The thinkers of first rank with differentiated consciousness (Plato, for example), or their followers, articulate their experiences in the language of symbols or of reflective distance, which are eventually written down.²²  Such texts become normative for a genuine tradition of higher culture. They are truly mediators. But the texts themselves can be misinterpreted. The tradition can become inauthentic and adhere to dogmas, in the negative sense, that are cut off from the engendering experiences. There is always the temptation to interpret the texts about the in-between of participatory existence (which is concomitant with the luminosity of consciousness) as though they refer to bodies in the external world, which are the content of the Intentionality of consciousness (modeled on perception). This temptation follows almost inevitably from the fact that since human consciousness is incarnate, human language tends to mirror the externality of bodily relations in space and time.²³

Every person, according to Voegelin, experiences the anxiety of existence, including the mystery of death, and every political society needs to address it by creating symbols of participation in the wider network of reality (in the community of being shared by person, society nature, and the divine). When these symbols break down and are no longer effective, then the society faces a severe crisis of anxiety, usually leading, at least since Hellenic times, to philosophies of hedonism (in order to avoid pain), to contract theories of government based on a psychology of the passions, and, more nefariously and more typical of recent times, to activist ideologies and movements that would mold idols of transcendence in speculative gnostic systems or in radical revolutionary regimes.²⁴

It is at this juncture that the philosopher is motivated to respond to the disorder of the age by meditative exegesis, namely, the effort, in the meaningful concreteness of the present, to recover the original noetic experiences behind the language of higher intellectual culture and the original pneumatic experiences behind the language of higher religions and to expose the distortion of meaning, the closed existence, and the contracting of reality of the contemporary climate of opinion.²⁵

Comparative Assessment

Self-appropriation, then, for Lonergan and for Voegelin regards the same reality: the self as inquirer. Lonergan objectifies inquiry as structure, as Intentionality, and as existential state. Voegelin objectifies inquiry as process. What are the specific advantages of the respective focus of each thinker?

Voegelin's existential exegesis draws the reader into the historical drama surrounding the origin of a text and brings home in a compelling fashion the struggle against the forces of disorder that would block access to formative texts of differentiated consciousness. Whether engaged in a historical narrative or a reflective essay, the reader is invited to enter into the very process of inquiry being discussed. And since Voegelin conceives of the process of inquiry as a theophanic event, he presents entry into the process of inquiry as also entry into the dynamics of divine movement and human countermovement. Voegelin's style is uniquely crafted through meditative reflections to honor the participatory nature of human consciousness in the experiences of wonder, questioning unrest, search for the ground, and the pull of transcendence. Voegelin never lets the reader lose sight of the fact that the reality in which we participate is mystery. Conversely, Voegelin's skills as a critic are fine-tuned to expose in historical case studies the flight from anxiety and from an encounter with transcendence and to analyze the various deft maneuvers of concupiscence to deflect the drive to the beyond onto some finite domain of being as an imaginary substitute, thereby seeking to hide the flight from anxiety.²⁶

If both Lonergan and Voegelin hold what Lonergan would call "positions" on the self, the advantage of Voegelin's perspective is that his invitation to self-appropriation highlights living the truth as an inquirer who participates in mysterious divine reality on the road of inquiry itself. Voegelin's writings would challenge interpreters of Lonergan, as it apparently did Lonergan himself, to consider more carefully and thoroughly inquiry as process and as existential state.²⁷

The advantage of Lonergan's perspective, on the other hand, is that he has perhaps the most comprehensive and detailed explanatory account in the philosophical literature about inquiry as structure. With his cognitional theory as a base, he can develop an epistemology and metaphysics consonant with the openness, dynamism, and directional tendency of inquiry. His invitation for self-appropriation is supported by a vast amount of material all geared toward promoting intellectual conversion. But what are the real benefits of intellectual conversion? Lonergan's cognitive self-appropriation offers two distinct positive challenges to interpreters sympathetic to Voegelin's enterprise.

One is captured in the injunction "develop positions."²⁸ When examining a text — whether a text of Voegelin or a text Voegelin investigates — one can employ Lonergan's cognitional theory as a powerful tool to distinguish the insights from an inadequate epistemological framework. The purpose of such a "hermeneutic of the philosophical position" would be to tap more deeply into the solid core of a thinker by eliminating obstructions. Lonergan's cognitional theory, for example, would critique Voegelin's concept of Intentionality as too narrow and rigid because it is rooted in the model of perception.²⁹ A reformulated concept of Intentionality might allow for a more nuanced treatment of such issues as the origin of symbols, the criteria of genuine myths, and the authentic role of doctrines in mediating differentiated insights. It would also show the close link between the cognitive structure discerned by Lonergan and the existential state explored by Voegelin.

Second, evaluative historical studies that seek to identify intellectual decline, including the history of political ideas and the history of symbols, will have their critical powers enormously expanded in the measure that they can recognize epistemological assumptions as decisive influences on thinkers and as contributors to precipitous cultural deformation. In evaluating Hobbes, for example, one can neither ignore the fact that he eliminates the orientation to transcendence as a constitutive factor behind political order nor ignore the fact that the first part of the Leviathan is about an empiricist epistemology as the foundation of the rest of the text.³⁰ To understand adequately the unfolding of the dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism in modernity one needs both Voegelin's existential analysis of how ideas are tied to dispositions, sentiments, and spiritual aspirations and Lonergan's cognitional analysis of how ideas are tied to epistemological counterpositions. In general, intellectual decline is a complicated cycle with roots in both existential deformation and epistemological confusion. The existential gap is a gap between interpretations and the reality of the self as both cognitive subject and existential subject.

Thus, for both Lonergan and Voegelin, self-appropriation, which recognizes inquiry as the in-between state of human existence, is in accord with the norms of human nature, is concerned with human nature, and is an enrichment of human nature — that is to say, self-appropriation is in accord with authentic selfhood, is concerned about the being of the self, and is an enrichment of the self. But self-appropriation does not transcend human nature since human nature, at its very core, is self-transcending.

Hence, Voegelin stresses how the truly great thinker's inquiry about inquiry is always framed by a "balance of consciousness," presuming both epochal differentiating insight into the process of inquiry and awareness of the participatory nature of the process of existence, including that of the philosophers understanding.³¹ The task of philosophy, whether in fifth-century Athens, thirteenth-century Europe, or the twenty-first century, like the discovery of historical existence in Israel and Hellas, has its concrete origins, in part, as a response to existential disorder. Whereas in the case of Israel the disorder is the threat of a universal empire to extinguish by brute force a spiritually advanced and creative society, in the case of philosophy the disorder also stems from intellectual culture itself, either from the sophistic intellectuals who deny the in-between status of self-transcending human being or from the court theologians who neglect the nature of the self.³² The philosopher can see the act of self-appropriation as marking a "before" and an "after" in personal, civilizational, and world history but not as thereby standing above history.³³

According to Lonergan, self-appropriation plays a role in self-constitution, but this role operates in the dialectic of performance and interpretation in the process of self-transcendence and does not differ in kind from any other genuine role in that dialectic. Self-appropriation indeed arises from the exigency of questioning and is an expression of the selfhood of the philosopher. Still, far from creating moral and religious conversion, it ordinarily stems from the latter. Philosophy itself, as the unrestricted love of wisdom, bears the hallmarks of a variety of religious experience, and it is this unrestricted eros of the mind that inspires and sustains the effort of self-appropriation.³⁴ Moreover, it is on the level of existential consciousness, where we act as moral agents and undergo religious experiences, that we are most fully subjects. And though self-appropriation points to openness as a demand, it is openness as a gift that heals the gap between openness as a demand and openness as an achievement.³⁵

We can conclude that Lonergan's cognitional theory is no more a reification of subjectivity than Voegelin's meditative exegesis is an exercise in mystical obscurantism. Both approaches invite us to engage in self-appropriation, both approaches deal with the same self, the same unity, identity whole, to be appropriated, both approaches keep self-appropriation within the process of self-transcendence — and both approaches provide us with searching texts to help mediate that self-appropriation.  

[This is the second part of a two part 2 article.   Read Part 1 here.

Also Read the related previous chapter.  Noetic Science, Part 1 here.]