What has Jerusalem to do with Lesbos?

WCMI April 2014 WHAT HAS JERUSALEM TO DO WITH LESBOS? What I wish to do in this short presentation is to argue that Lonergan’s critical realism is intimately bound up with his philosophy of biology, a philosophy that can fairly be termed Aristotelian. I came to this conclusion in my efforts to work through the relevant chapters of Insight in particular, the eighth on Things and the fifteenth on Elements of Metaphysics where Lonergan presents genetic method. Although they are not in a finished state, I am making my thoughts available, for anyone interested in the interpretations I have of some of the more difficult passages in Lonergan. I would welcome criticism. At first I was surprised by my conclusion. Lonergan seems to be quite silent on Aristotle’s biology. On second thoughts, though, it is not too surprising. A way of understanding what Lonergan is doing is that he is recovering and rethinking the concept of nature, and this is obviously something important for theologians, who may wish to understand the relations between nature and grace. Today I have two sections. First of all, I wish to locate Lonergan’s thought within the context of Aristotle’s research programme, and second, I wish to discuss a ‘slogan’ that Lonergan has recourse to: organisms are solutions to the problem of living in an environment. REVISITING ARISTOTLE’S BIOLOGY After spending twenty years in the Academy, the man who was to author The Metaphysics took a four year Sabbatical on the island of Lesbos. After making a careful study of the living organisms in tide-pools Aristotle returned to Athens, and in his biological works, which make up nearly a third of the corpus, urged greater attention to this research programme– there are Gods here too, he exhorted. For various reasons that project did not flourish, though it is true that in the middle ages St. Albert was to write De Animalibus. It seems that Aristotle ignored the nervous system so as to privilege the heart as the seat of the immanent principle of movement and rest. Moreover, the teleology of the Physics scandalized the Renaissance. For Aristotle, motion was not just ‘something’ but a something that was ‘going somewhere.’ His physics was written in the light of the biology, and his metaphysics in the light of the physics. In the neo-Kantian text that Lonergan discusses, Aristotle tends to be neglected. After introducing genetic method, then, Lonergan chose to clarify his position by contrasting it with that found in Ernst Cassirer’s Problems of Knowledge. Lonergan takes seriously Cassirer’s criticisms of the idea of the thing, and although 1 WCMI April 2014 Lonergan is never that specific, it is worth thinking here of living things. Lonergan has in mind what might be called a neo-Kantian critique of neo-Aristotelian biology. Lonergan is keen to defend the ‘basic agreement’ he has with Aristotle who spoke both of forms and ends. Cassirer’s strategy entails four steps. First of all he considers a debate in the history of biology. Second, he shows how both sides of the debate have something valuable to contribute. Third, he shows that if this contribution is taken in the realist sense then antinomies arise. Fourth, he aspires to give a more comprehensive viewpoint by abandoning realism so that his own critical idealism is vindicated. The fundamental issue concerns teleology, and this can be illustrated first of all by Cassirer’s treatment of Aristotle versus Spinoza. Aristotle had claimed that although Zeus does not send the rain in order that the crops might grow, still we do have sharp front teeth in order to bite, and broad flat teeth in order to chew. Spinoza—as we might recall from that citation in chapter fifteen—denies that birds have wings so that they can fly. So, that’s the conflict. Kant regarded an organism as ‘an organized product of nature’ in which ‘all is reciprocally ends and means.’ We might think of the way that branches are for the leaves, yet leaves are for the branches. On the other hand, Kant’s notion of science leads him to see the world of our experience through the lens of synthetic a priori categories and thus constituted by causal laws. There is an impasse, between an Aristotle affirming ‘intelligent’ causes and a Spinoza affirming ‘blind’ necessity. However, antinomies only arise if judgement is taken as constitutive rather than regulative. There is no conflict if we take the idea of teleology as a useful, heuristic ideal: as if there is purposiveness. Purpose, so to speak, is methodological, but not metaphysical. This can be taken as the critical idealist position. The debate that Lonergan is attentive to is that of mechanism versus vitalism that was surprisingly revitalized at the beginning of the last century: Cassirer discusses the experiments of Hans Driesch. His experiments on the embryos of sea urchins showed that perfectly normal organisms could result from severe distortion. When embryonic cells were crushed between glass plates a whole organism half the size came from an embryo cut in two. It was deduced that ‘something’ non-material was the cause. Driesch was to refer to this, first as soul, then as entelechy. This led to fierce opposition from Mechanists but the result was stalemate. Cassirer will not side with the dogmatism of either the Mechanist or the Vitalist. However, we cannot do without functionality and organization. Once again, critical idealism is vindicated. It presents itself as the higher synthesis of opposing counterpositions. Catholic thought had been associated with vitalism. As Lonergan would certainly have known, in 1906 Maritain had travelled to Heidelberg to study with 2 WCMI April 2014 Driesch and had made the experiments known—Lonergan explicitly referred to the ‘famous’ experiments. Maritain had styled himself as a ‘critical realist’—a word never used in Insight. When Lonergan, at the end of his chapter on Things, attacks ‘uncritical realists’ who espouse an ‘intuition of being,’ he surely has Maritain in mind. Unlike the Vitalists who reject statistical explanation and the theory of evolution, Lonergan sought another way to carry forward Aristotle’s research programme, that is, by formulating an anti-essentialist conception of finality or nature. ORGANISMS AS SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS Lonergan does give an evolutionary account of the emergence of ecologies (he refers to schemes of recurrence) but criticizes thought associated with the name of Darwin that reduces organisms to the gradual accumulation of small variations. Instead, Lonergan speaks of biological species as solutions to the problem of living in an environment. This may appear quite provocative, but I would draw attention to a work by Theodosius Dobzhansky on Evolution in the Tropics where the author of the canonical text of the modern Darwinian synthesis appropriates Toynbee’s very similar language of ‘challenge and response.’ Organisms are solutions to problems in four ways, and how they do this introduces a fifth aspect. Firstly, there is what might be called the problem of hylomorphism: the biological organism is a higher integration of physical and chemical processes. Lonergan will explain carefully why reductionism fails: biology can explain what is merely non-systematic at the lower level. Here, the prototype of emergence is the act of insight that arises with respect to an appropriate image. In a sense, nature does take leaps. Second, there is the problem of organization: being alive means that the organism has organs and these organs are integrated. In other words, the organism must function. For example, we know that a termite is not blind, not just by examining its eyes, but by observing that it behaves in the same way in the light as in the dark. Third, there is the problem of growth or development: the way that organisms behave at any stage of its development falls into a pattern of behavior of a given repertoire, but at later stages the range of this repertoire is extended. This is why Lonergan will introduce the term of art, the flexible circle or ranges of schemes. Of course, this includes sexual maturity whereby the organism is set the problem of finding a mate, reproducing, and perpetuating the species. Termites, in fact, do acquire the power to see when they reach the stage of sexual maturity. 3 WCMI April 2014 Fourth, there is the problem of the environment. Increasingly this environment is populated by other organisms that represent both threats and opportunities. Lonergan speaks of an ongoing series of problems set and solved in increasingly bold and resourceful ways. The mimic octopus, which has managed to acquire a more rudimentary form of mimicry (it can imitate a sea snake by raising a tentacle), develops the more impressive feat whereby complicated contortions give it the appearance of a lion fish. The fifth point, then, regards the way that successful functioning delineates the path of future development. Insofar as there is success within a limited range of schemes, further development may take place, and the range becomes extended. Lonergan’s illustration is of trees in a cramped forest putting forth branches skywards rather than sideways. The moral seems to be that nothing succeeds like success, and this too in the problem solving ability of the organism. Organisms are excellent solutions to the problem of living in an environment. Now, the center piece of Lonergan’s metaphysical biology that he offers as a counter to critical idealism involves the concepts of integrator and operator. These receive terse formulations—Philip McShane devotes 300 pages of commentary to just one ‘famous page’ in which Lonergan introduces the integrator. I must limit myself to a single point. I suggest that in the integrator and the operator we have an explanatory account of what was described by the four solutions to problems. Integration refers to the problems of hylomorphism, organization, and the environment. This is what it means to be a higher system. Operation refers to solving the problem of growth—a matter of increasing differentiation. Higher system is on the move. In response to critical idealism Lonergan argues that this can be verified: There are routine processes, and throughout them one can verify the same classical and statistical laws. There are changes of state, and during them statistical laws are modified but classical laws remain the same. But there also are emergent processes, and the classical laws that can be verified at their inception are not the classical laws that can be verified at their end. There are correlations that can be verified in the adult organism. There are correlations that can be verified in the fertilized ovum. But the two sets of correlations are not identical. In determinate materials, there has occurred a change in what can be grasped by insight, formulated as law, and affirmed as verified. One set of conjugate forms has given place to another. The process from one set to the other is regular. But this regular process is not in accord with classical law, for there are no classical laws about changes of classical laws; nor is it in accord with statistical law, for it is not an indifferent choice between a set of 4 WCMI April 2014 alternative processes; and so one is forced to recognize the fact of a third type of process to be investigated by a third, genetic method. Lonergan will continue in the next paragraph to argue that finality is not merely a regulative ideal, as Kant supposes but ‘as real as anything else.’ CONCLUSION So in conclusion I want to leave you with the picture of a seminal moment in metaphysics. Imagine a summer holiday by the tide-pools. Not Lesbos this time but Jersey, off St. Malo. In the 1930s the man who was to author the Elements of Metaphysics travelled there with his friend, and fellow Jesuit Jean Marie Le Blond. Much later, in 1980 Lonergan was cryptically to remark that Le Blond’s 1939 Logique et Méthod chez Aritôte was ‘seminal.’ After noting much agreement with the idealist position Lonergan refers to a ‘much deeper issue.’ The context again is cryptic: Eric Voegelin’s reference to ‘hypostatization’ connoting ‘existing in external reality.’ Lonergan means the finality that the critical idealist cannot accept as real. In that late paper, A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion, Lonergan will now refer to his philosophy as critical realism. Le Blond had translated Aristotle’s biology, and may have been an inspiration, for he had written of biological (and economic) schemes. Lonergan does not seem to be wrong in describing Le Blond as seminal as mainstream thought in Aristotle’s philosophy of biology also recognizes his influence, and indeed, are very interested in clarifying the idea of teleology. In this conversation, I believe, Lonergan’s seed is yet to be sown. 5