Abstract
McCarthy’s book consists of four essays whose promotional purpose he is forthright in describing: to ‘establish Bernard Lonergan as one of the truly great minds of the twentieth century’ (p. xi). This is an exposition for a popular audience, an exercise more of praise than ‘critical appraisal’.
Largely recapitulated in the second and third, the first essay is concerned with the problem of how critically to appropriate the cultural nova et vetera, or how to sift the enduring from the erroneous in our intellectual cultural heritage. After ventriloquizing Lonergan’s own genealogy of this problem, McCarthy introduces the remedy, which in fact is presupposed in the historical narrative and reappears under different formulations throughout the book. This is the reflective affirmation of the so-called transcendental principles, including the unrestricted human desires to know and to discover the good, and the recurring patterns of self-correcting mental activity found in all human endeavour. These alone can ‘provide a transcultural, transhistorical bond uniting past, present, and future’ (p. 31). For (sic) the principles are universal and unrestricted enabling conditions of the possibility of human achievement, which, as constitutive of the cognizing subject, possess normative implications.
If there are internal transcendental norms governing the shape of all conscious experience, then authenticity becomes a matter of complying with them (hence the book’s titular formula), overcoming the distortive and divisive pressures inherent in the complex pattern of conscious thought and action. Whereas such distortive tendencies represent Lonergan’s take on the nature of sin, the transcendental norms, consisting in a chain of universal imperatives (to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible and loving), represent his take on natural law.
McCarthy goes on to praise the ‘dialectical benefits’ of the project of authenticity so conceived, as a project of reflectively affirming these principles and their existential implications, given ‘the polymorphism of human consciousness’ (Chapter 2) and the unrestricted nature of the desire to know. By correctly distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate forms of pluralism in one’s own understanding, one recognizes the successive demands for existential conversion, intellectual, moral and religious, even in a secular age (Chapter 3). This requires placing the normative implications of Lonerganian cognitional theory at the centre of one’s life, allowing them to coalesce, through grace, into a fully articulated self-knowledge.
The fourth essay proposes Lonergan’s cognitional method for critical appropriation of old and new culture to satisfy the Catholic Church’s ongoing demands for aggiornamento. As the transcendental principles synthesize the universal and the formal with the particular and personal, they enable the subject to distinguish genuine and false cultural achievement as reflected personally in the stages of her own conversion. Could the same be true for the Church if it organized its theology to be influential and responsive to the full range of human inquiry and endeavour?
McCarthy is a capable expositor with an impressive grasp of the range of Lonergan’s philosophical work. Non-devotees will probably find his exposition clearer than Lonergan’s own, albeit with similar deficiencies: repetition of schematic assertions, taxonomies and explanatory appeals to sweeping, oversimplified genealogies.