Professor Piscitelli 1985

Home

CHAPTER V

Insight As a Theory of Knowledge: Basic Method And Metaphysics

The self-affirmation of the knower is an essential moment in the argument of Insight. It provides the basic breakthrough that the later developments depend on: the conception of basic method, a metaphysics of proportionate being, ethics, and a philosophy of God. The self-affirmation of the knower is the appropriation of one's intelligent and rational self-consciousness that, when conceptualized, is the expression of basic method. The self-affirmation of the knower represents the moment of verification for cognitional theory.

According to Lonergan the primary purpose of the self-affirmation of the knower is to establish the truth of the privileged judgment: I am a knower. It is defined in terms of the analysis of cognitional structure and includes three elements: A self that is affirmed as a concrete and intelligible unity-identity-whole or a thing in contrast to a body (things are not opposed to persons insofar as both are to be known objectively). By self-affirmation is meant a self that affirms and is affirmed; the self to be affirmed is characterized by the cognitional operations that have been identified in insight as activity: sensing, perceiving, imagining, remembering, inquiring, understanding, conceiving, reflecting, grasping the virtually unconditioned, and judging. Lonergan does not reinstate the universal and necessary judgments of the pre-critical, rationalist tradition. The self-affirmation of the knower is not the judgment that I necessarily exist or that I am necessarily a knower; but that as a matter of fact I am a knower. The inference is put in the following form:

If I am performing the activities of sensing, perceiving, imaging, inquiring, understanding, conceiving, reflecting, judging; then I am a knower.

But in fact, I am performing those conscious activities.

Therefore, I am a knower.

Insofar as the self-affirmation of the knower is a judgment, it conforms to the criteria expressed in the universal form of judgment as an expression of the virtually unconditioned.

1) The unconditioned is the statement: I am a knower; prior to its affirmation the statement is constituted as a conditioned by the question for reflection: Am I a knower?

2) The link between the conditioned and its conditions can be displayed in the inference given above: If I perform the specified, conscious activities, then I am a knower; but I do perform these activities; therefore I am a knower. In this case the link between conditions and the conditioned offers no special difficulty because it is an analytic hypothesis. In other words the reader has either experienced these conscious acts or he has not; the reader has either understood what he has experienced by reflecting on these conscious acts or he has not. The conditions are the conscious acts already investigated, personally experienced, and understood.

3) The fulfillment of the conditions is the problematic element. Although the nature of consciousness is a matter of philosophical dispute, Lonergan's study of insight as an intelligent and rational activity settles a central issue in the dispute: Intelligent and rational consciousness has a dynamic and progessivist nature. Anyone who really understands the constitutive role of direct and reflective insight in his/her own purely intellectual pattern of experience must also recognize that consciousness is not constituted by an inward look in which the subject makes him/her self the "object" of a perceptual or spiritual gaze. Lonergan's description of insight as activity has made the naïve position untenable. The moving viewpoint of Insight has demonstrated that there is no human knowledge that can be reduced to a "look" in which the subject confronts an object "outside" of himself. The confrontation theory of knowledge does not fit the facts of consciousness.

Human knowing possesses features that render all confrontation theories of knowledge false: It includes three interrelated factors (experience, understanding, and judgment) each of which presupposes and complements the previous one. The higher viewpoint of Insight is a cognitional structure in which the act of judgment cannot be reduced to the act of thinking (understanding); thinking cannot be reduced to experience in the immediate or naïve sense. The analogy of looking introduces a metaphorical description of the act of understanding when what is called for is an explanation of the experience of insight. The experience of understanding is different from the immediate experience of seeing. Acts of perception obviously differ from acts of understanding and reflection. The analogy from perception obscures the complexity of the dynamic, self-structuring, tri-partite activity of intelligence in human knowing.

The activities of understanding and judgment proper to human knowing cannot be described accurately as seeing, perceiving, or looking. They are not experienced as confronting an object. Direct insight is an immanent conscious act that unites the knower with the known in an act of understanding. Reflective insight attains the real through judgments that assert propositions as true. The cognitional process differs in mathematics, science, and common sense. In each case the process involves a union of knower and known in understanding and a knowledge that comes to the real as known in the judgment.

Human knowing is a self-structuring dynamism in which intelligence and rationality permeate its acts. To affirm myself as a knower is to affirm the self-structuring intellectual and rational self-consciousness operative in knowing. Self-consciousness is human because of its intelligence and rationality. I am present to myself through my intelligent and rational activities. An active structuring of meaning is present in the unconscious; but its meaning derives from intelligence and must be deciphered by intelligence. Intelligence is not just an unconscious dimension of the psyche; for it is always present to itself through its own intelligent and rational demands.

Cognitional process is not primarily a succession of contents or objects, but a succession of acts. Beyond the content or object of each intelligent act there is an intelligent awareness (in direct and reflective insights) that constitutes the act as intelligent. The acts have their objectification in the abstract concepts of theory and in the judgments of reflection. Beyond the objects of consciousness and the conscious acts is the presence of the subject to itself. The presence of the self to itself is the fundamental meaning of consciousness; it is the one who is conscious, attentive, intelligent, rational, responsible, and affected by love.

Empirical, Intelligent, and Rational Consciousness

Consciousness means presence: for a subject to be conscious means that the subject is present to himself through his acts. In common usage the term, presence, is ambiguous. For example, a table is present in a room, meaning it shares the immediate space with other objects in the room. In this case presence means spatial proximity. The presence of an object with another object is not consciousness presence. A table can be present to me; and in this case presence implies conscious acts. A cat's presence to me and I to him imply two acts of consciousness and two ways of being present; there is a mutual presence of cat to me and of me to cat. The mutual presence of the cat to me and of me to the cat from the cat's viewpoint is an empirical presence: I never expect to have an intelligent conversation with my cat. Empirical presence means an experienced but not an intelligent consciousness. From my point of view empirical consciousness discloses a presence of myself to myself: for neither the table nor my cat could be present to me unless there were a prior, originating, and grounding presence of my self to my self. The primary meaning of consciousness is the presence of the self to itself through operations that attain an object. The originating meaning of consciousness is the self-presence that grounds every other form of presence in human consciousness. The secondary meaning of consciousness is the mediation of self-presence through conscious acts. The tertiary meaning of consciousness pertains to the object or content of the conscious activity.

The self-presence of the subject is the primary form of presence because it is I who am conscious. Acts are said to be conscious when they mediate the object to the subject: I am conscious through conscious acts. The object is that of which I am conscious through conscious acts. Neither objects nor other persons can be present to me without the mediation of conscious operations. Consciousness is experience grounded in self-presence. If consciousness is experience, then consciousness is the experience of experience, the experience of understanding, the experience of reflection, and the experience of deliberation and decision. Insight undertakes an examination of consciousness as experience in order to understand: experience, questioning, understanding, reflection, judging, and deciding. The self-affirmation of the knower arises in a reflection on my conscious acts so that when I judge that I am a knower, I am saying that I am one who experiences, understands, judges, and decides. What I know is my self as knower. When I decide to live and act in accordance with self-knowledge, I have appropriated my rational self-consciousness.

The presence of one person to another, the mutual presence of persons through intersubjective communication is a form of presence not considered in cognitional theory. The reason it is not is that the process of knowing is under a measure of abstraction in the quest for a method of inquiry. Collaboration is an element of method, but its interpersonal presence is defined by the mutual objectives of the common work. Interpersonal communication can include but goes beyond knowing. The presence of the self to itself is incomplete without the concomitant presence of the self to itself through meaningful speech. A cognitional theory based on an understanding of consciousness as self-presence makes the empirical component of human consciousness constitutive of consciousness. If true, since there is no empirical component in God, God could not be said to be conscious. If the experience of intersubjective understanding goes beyond the empirical, then consciousness could be meaningfully predicated of God.

First the levels of consciousness as three distinct acts of the cognitional process: experience, understanding, and judgment must be differentiated. Corresponding to the three levels, there are three levels of cognitional awareness: Empirical consciousness proper to sensing, perceiving, remembering, and imagining; intelligent consciousness proper to inquiry, insight, and conception; rational consciousness proper to questions for reflection, grasping the virtually unconditioned, and judging; and rational self-consciousness proper to deliberation, judgments of value, and decision. Intelligent consciousness arises with the spirit of wonder expressed in the question that is satisfied only with insight's grasp of intelligibility and the expression of it in the concept. Rational consciousness arises with the spirit of critical reflection expressed in the question for reflection satisfied only with the grasp of sufficient evidence understood as sufficient in the virtually unconditioned from which the judgment rationally follows. Behind, grounding, and motivating the cognitional activities is the unrestricted desire to know, the intention of human consciousness appropriated in the self-affirmation of the knower.

Beyond the three distinct and interrelated levels of cognitional awareness is an underlying unity pervading them. The underlying unity of consciousness refers to the fulfillment of the conditions necessary for the self-affirmation of the knower. Though difficult to explain, the unity is easy to indicate: it is the conscious self, the subject, the agent responsible for the conscious acts. I am the agent possessing the unrestricted desire to know and present to myself through diverse and multiple acts and objects. The self-identity is given immediately. Insight mediates the immediacy of the subject's self-presence through the self-affirmation of the knower. The "I" is given immediately in the presence of the self to itself in self-consciousness: It is the datum of inner experience or subjectivity. The datum is always concomitant with a mediating operations of consciousness. The "I" is a unity-identity-totality. There is no consciousness without an object; there is no consciousness without conscious acts; there is no consciousness without the one who is conscious.

In the process of making judgments scientific understanding is verified by reflecting on the sensible data, in critical theory the judgment: I am a knower, is verified by reflecting on what is given in consciousness. What is given in consciousness is not only the datum of the "I" and concomitantly the operations of the self's performance. The performance of the subject fulfills the conditions necessary for self-affirmation in the judgment: I am a knower.

The self-affirmation of the knower begins with the question for reflection: Am I a knower? The question demands that inquirer be satisfied with nothing less than the virtually unconditioned. That question moves the inquiry beyond theory to the question of truth; and in this case the truth concerns the identity of the self. Is the theory of knowledge in Insight true? Is it true about myself? Can I verify the theory in my conscious activities? The question for reflection discloses the presence of the intelligent and rational inquirer that I am. The question for self-reflection is a privileged question; for if I can ask it, I already know in an elementary way what it means to be a knower. I know that the question demands the real. I know that the reflective question demands the virtually unconditioned. I recognize that the different activities of consciousness characterized as constituting knowledge are my activities. These acts are mine as part of my conscious experience and they become mine more intimately when I understand what I am doing when I am knowing. They become fully mine when they are appropriated; and then I know what I am doing when I am knowing; I know that I am a knower (self-affirmation).

Once I raise the question of reflection and verify my knowing acts in my experience, I cannot avoid the judgment: I am a knower, unless I wish to forsake my own intelligence and rationality. The flight from understanding creates illusions, and the flight from self-understanding creates the illusion of illusions. When consciousness becomes self-consciousness, the philosophical question for reflection becomes unavoidable.

If "I" has a rudimentary meaning from consciousness, then consciousness supplies the fulfillment of one element in the conditions for affirming that I am a knower. Does consciousness supply the fulfillment for the other conditions? Do I see, or am I blind? Do I hear, or am I deaf? Do I try to understand, or is the distinction between intelligence and stupidity no more applicable to me than to a stone? Have I any experience of insight. . . ? Do I conceive, think, consider, suppose, define, formulate or is my talking like the talking of a parrot? I reflect for I ask whether I am a knower. Do I grasp the unconditioned, if not in other instances, then in this one? If I grasped the unconditioned, would I not be under the rational compulsion of affirming that I am a knower, and so either affirm it, or else find some loophole, some weakness, some incoherence in this account of the genesis of self-affirmation? As each has to ask these questions for himself, so too he has to answer them for himself. But the fact of asking and the possibility of answering are themselves a sufficient reason for the affirmative answer.

The self-affirmation of the knower is a factual judgment that anyone who reflects on his cognitional activities can raise and answer. The self-affirmation of the knower is contingent because it is based on a fact, albeit a privileged fact, the subject's existence given in consciousness but not known until affirmed in the judgment. The judgment is privileged because it discloses what I am: an intelligent and rational knower.

Though the self-affirmation of the knower is a possibility for any human being, it is, de facto, the achievement of only a few. It happens in men and women who are given to wonder about their experience, who allow their unrestricted desire to know its full range of freedom, and who will not allow their learning that began in wonder to end in blind routine. Such men carry on the philosophic enterprise begun by the Greeks and that created the Western intellectual tradition. According to the Western tradition of philosophy a human being is more fully himself when he is faithful to the unrestricted desire to know.

A man can question everything; but if he calls the power of questioning into question, he is faced with two alternatives: Either to affirm himself by appropriating his own intelligence and rationality and live by wonder and inquiry or to call the wonder into doubt and by doubting destroy it and one's self. Contemporaneous with the question is the attitude of the questioner. The alternatives are clear: There is the positive attitude of faith or trust that reaches beyond the immediate self to grasp the intention of a wonder that constitutes the self in a dynamic and authentic orientation, or the negative attitude of a destructive doubt, an unbelief, that runs counter to human intentionality, the orientation of the unrestricted desire to know. The latter is a refusal to know that ends not only in the loss of reality but also in the loss of the self. Intellectual suicide is a more painful affair for the self who inflicts it upon himself and for the others to whom he is related.

In its common manifestation the suppression of the unrestricted desire to know is a refusal to allow the intention of one's intelligence and rationality to have its full range of freedom resulting in the close-mindedness of the sophisticated intellectual or the opportunism of "practical men" who content themselves with a curious mixture of animal faith and ideological fervor. Such men and women unreasonably require others to follow their lead. They appeal to the facticity of human behaviour to justify their unreasonable positions as if the fact of deviation should be elevated to a norm. The fact of human deviation witnesses to the self-delusion of everyone who forsakes his or her own intelligence and rationality. The self-affirmation of the knower is more than a privileged fact, an unconditioned at the center of self-consciousness; it is a fact that is also a value. It discloses an originating value from which other values flow and to which they can be referred. The value of knowing is a constitutive value; it is constitutive of the person. "Before one can really treat others as persons, one must know; and to treat others as persons, one must invite them to know." The Socratic imperative, "Know Thyself," is not an invitation to solipsism but a reflective invitation to be a moral person.

The self-affirmation of the knower allows the meaning of human intentionality to disclose itself as an intellectus quaerens fidem. In the light of the basic position established by the self-affirmation of the knower, the critical positions on knowledge, objectivity, and being and reality will be developed. The positions will make possible an expansion of basic method into the transcognitional notions of conversion and self-transcendence. The quaerens of the intellectus quaerens fidem is present in the desire to know appropriated in the self-affirmation of the knower.

The Critical Philosophical Positions

The self-affirmation of the knower establishes a set of critical, explanatory positions. It is more than a theory because it grounds every theory. It articulates the scientific and philosophical ideal; it is an explanation of explanation. The difference between the affirmation of the knower and the affirmation of the truth of a scientific theory is not a difference in procedure, but in starting point. In the empirical sciences the data is empirically given and empirically verifiable with sensible consequences. In the self-affirmation of the knower the data is consciousness as self-presence. Though cognitional theory has no sensible consequences, it has procedural consequences. Insight proceeded by gradually unfolding the movement from a description of consciousness as an act of knowing to an explanation of the interrelated, conscious acts in the knowing process. Because the data is the data of consciousness as self-presence and the understanding in self-affirmation is self-understanding, the position established in the self-affirmation of the knower is the source of basic method. The basic positions established by the self-affirmation of the knower are fundamentally irrevisable and conditionally necessary. The irrevisability established by self-affirmation is based on the fact that a revision must appeal to the process of knowing as explained: Every revision must appeal to data, assert that previous theories are not adequate to account for the data, propose new theories to account for the data, ground the theories in a grasp of the virtually unconditioned expressed in a judgment. A revision must restate the cognitional theory established in the self-affirming knower. The self-affirmation of the knower reflectively appropriates the principle of revision and it expresses the conditions for its possibility.

Can the principle of revision be revised? Only if the nature of human consciousness undergoes a radical change. This remote possibility is not apodictically excluded by the position of Insight; however with no evidence but imaginative fancy, it is unlikely. When the data under investigation are ever expanding, empirical data, then revision becomes theoretically necessary as witnessed by the history of the sciences. However when the data are the data of consciousness that, as basic, provide the conditions for the possibility of any inquiry (including the present inquiry), then radical revision is not a likely possibility. A prospective reviser must appeal to some newly given empirical fact or datum or deny the consciousness by which he is present to himself. Minor revisions remain possible because a better understanding and articulation of what human consciousness is always possible.

An explanation on the basis of consciousness can escape the limitation of constant revision. I do not mean, of course, that such explanation is not to be reached through the series of revisions involved in the self-correcting process of learning. Nor do I mean that once explanation is reached, there remains no possibility of minor revisions that leave the basic lines intact but attain a greater exactitude and a greater fullness of detail. Again I am not contending here and now that human nature and so human knowledge are immutable, that there could not arise a new nature and a new knowledge to which present theory would not be applicable. What is excluded is the radical revision that involves a shift in the fundamental terms and relations of the explanatory account of human knowledge underlying existing common sense, mathematics, and empirical scicnce.

The self-affirmation of the knower is a self-authenticating act that is critical and explanatory. Self-affirmation is the mind's grasp of its own principles rooted in the pure, detached, unrestricted desire to know that grounds the methods of inquiry. The self-affirmation of the knower is the reflective appropriation of the basic method immanent and operative in the human mind. The truth of the basic method stands or falls on the performance and validity of the self-affirmation of the knower. It is as critical for the philosophical grounding of the empirical and the human sciences. Self-affirmation provides the breakthrough required for a critical entry into a metaphysics whose elements, reflecting the objective structure of the known, are isomorphic to the structure of knowing. If the structure and limits of the known can be determined by a metaphysics proportionate to human knowing, then the intentionality of the knower can be explored as providing the intellectual grounds for religious belief and the transcendent mystery of existence. A reflection on human intentionality allows basic method to be expanded beyond the philosophical limits of what an unaided and an ahistoric reason could know or reasonably believe.

As reflective self-appropriation, the self-affirmation of the knower is more than an intellectual conversion; for it makes the philosophic life possible. In its initial stage intellectual conversion can be described as a turning away from mere appearance, from what seems to be true, to the real, to what is, in fact, true. Philosophical conversion is the reflective appropriation and thematization of the unrestricted desire to know that grounds intelligent and rational activity. As philosophical self-affirmation implies that the unrestricted desire to know is a ground and origin of values. For that I am a knower is a priviledged fact and a priviledged value. When intellectual conversion becomes reflective, it grounds a philosophical way of life allowing the self to make the demands of intelligence and reasonableness the central commitment of his life.

The Notion Of Being: The Unrestricted Desire To Know

The notion of being is the objective pole of the horizon reflectively appropriated in the self-affirming knower. Being is the objective of the unrestricted desire to know. The self-affirmation of the knower is the reflective grasp of the notion of being as the pure desire to know. The pure desire to know grounds the spirit of intelligent inquiry and rational reflection. It is called pure because it gives full and unbiased reign to human inquiry and reflection. The desire is a desire to know because it is not content with anything short of a grasp of the virtually unconditioned: it is content only with the known as intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed. Being, as the objective of the unrestricted desire, is all that is or can become known. The desire to know is unrestricted because its intentionality includes the unknown unknown in a radical openness to truth that defines the desire's objective, the known unknown in the question, and the known known in critically established knowledge. Lonergan calls the pure desire to know the notion of being, not the concept of being, nor the idea of being, but a notion. He distinguishes the notion of being from the concept of being and the idea of being. The idea of being is the actual understanding of everything about everything; it is an Infinite act of reflective self-understanding: It is the idea of God. The concept of being is the concept of anything that exists or can exist; the concept of being is the concept of a thing. As a result no human conception of being can express the idea of being; for that would require expressing an understanding of everything about everything. Only what is understood can be conceptualized; and what is conceptualized is some aspect of reality. The notion of being is the pre-conceptual, unrestricted desire to know operative throughout the knowing process.

As other concepts result from understanding, as acts of understanding consist in grasping what, from some viewpoint is essential, other concepts are essences. Moreover as other concepts are complete prior to the question for reflection that asks whether or not any such essence is, still other concepts are essences and prescind from existence or actuality. But the notion of being does not result from an understanding of being; it does not rest on the grasp of what from some viewpoint is essential; and so the notion of being is not the notion of some essence. Further the notion of being remains incomplete on the level of intelligence; it moves conception forward to questions for reflection; it moves beyond single judgments to the totality of correct judgments and so it does not prescind from existence and actuality.

The notion of being is referred to the intentionality of consciousness and to the reflective appropriation of the intention in the self-affirmation of the knower. The appropriated intention intends the real grasped in the true through a series of verified judgments.

The unrestricted desire to know as the intention of being (the notion) relates human consciousness immediately to the real or being. Human knowers are immediately related to being in the question, the first expression of the unrestricted desire to know. The notion of being is a heuristic notion: It is whatever can be intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed.

It follows that the notion of being goes beyond the merely thought, for we ask whether or not the merely thought exists. No less it follows that the notion of being is prior to thinking, for if it were not, then thinking would not be for the purpose of judging, for the purpose of determining whether or not the merely thought exists. The notion of being, then, is prior to conception and goes beyond it; and it is prior to judgment and goes beyond it. That notion must be the immanent dynamic orientation of cognitional process. It must be the detached, unrestricted desire to know as operative in cognitional process. Desiring to know is desiring to know being; but it is merely the desiring and not yet the knowing. Thinking is thinking being [the concept of being is the concept of any thing], it is not thinking nothing; but thinking being is not yet knowing it. Judging is a complete increment in knowing; if correct, it is a knowing of being; but it is not yet knowing being, for that is attained only in the totality of correct judgments.

The notion of being which is the intention of the desire to know is not only prior to other cognitional acts but it is also prior to all distinctions including the distinction between subject and object.

The notion of being is the intentio intendens rather than the intentio intenta of human knowing. The distinction between subject and object is made reflectively within and by virtue of an already operative notion of being. The notion of being is an intelligently and rationally conscious orientation at the center of intelligent life. It is a unique notion. The notion of being is a unique notion. Foetal eyes are oriented toward seeing, but they cannot see; and are not a notion. For a notion arises only to the extent that present understanding discerns future function in present structure. Hunger, the desire for sustenance, is clearly both oriented toward eating and a conscious desire for food. But hunger does not qualify as a notion because it is not intellectually conscious: it is not an understanding of future function in present structure. What sets up economies to make sure that hunger is satisfied is a notion: for that is the dynamism of a conscious intelligence controlled by the desire to know. A conscious and intelligent orientation results from the conception of a plan, but a conceived plan or purpose is not a notion, but results from a notion. A purpose or plan is guided by what is already known and does not determine what is to be known; therefore, it is not heuristic and is not a notion.

The pure desire to know is uniquely a notion: though it does not know being (idea of being alone knows being), it consciously, intelligently, rationally and heuristically heads toward, intends, being. Intelligent inquiry demands an intelligible and achieves the partial fulfillment of the compete intelligibility it seeks in every insight. Critical reflection demands a groundedness for insights and reaches a groundedness in the grasp of the virtually unconditioned expressed in a true judgment. The unrestricted desire to know moves consciously, intelligently, and reasonably toward its unrestricted objective, toward being that is the as yet an unknown reality towards which questions are directed and towards which answers tend as partial fulfillments.

The notion of being is appropriated by the self-affirmation of the knower. The heuristic methods of science and the spontaneous striving of common sense reveal that the unrestricted desire to know is basic to human thought and life. The power to question is not a directionless drive or an empty passion, but grounds and unifies every form of human striving. It cannot be reduced to empirical awareness nor to an already known objective. Human intentionality is an intelligent drive for reasonableness that performatively intends what is to be known and actually, even though only partially, reaches the known in the verified increments of human knowledge expressed in judgments. In the self-affirmation of the knower the intelligent and resonable subject brings the power of questioning to self-expression by recognizing in the self-affirmation the heuristic nature of the mind's procedures, the unrestrictedness of the its intention, and the unconditionality of its results. The human mind intelligently and reasonably anticipates being, all that is known and remains to be known, all that is true and real. The reflective subject comes to recognize the power of intelligence and reasonableness in the power to question that discloses and is grounded in being:

We should learn that questioning not only is about being but also is being itself, being in its Gelichtetheit (luminousness), being in its openness to being, being that is realizing itself through inquiry to knowing that, through knowing it may come to loving. This being of the questioning questioner is the latent metaphysics from which explicit metaphysics is derived; and in explicit metaphysics it is the primary analogate through which other being as being is understood.

The radical openness of being to being is reflectively grasped in the self-affirmation of the knower. Human intentionality, disclosed in the self-affirmation, is an orientation to know and love being.

Before the notion of being can have a meaning for the intelligent and rational inquirer, he must perform the acts of experience, understanding, reflection, judgment, deliberation and decision, differentiate the acts, reflect on the acts, grasp that he is a knower, and act accordingly (decision). If the knower has affirmed himself to be conscious, not just empirically, but intelligently and rationally in self-affirmation, then he can recognize and appropriate his intention of being as the pure desire to know with the exigencies that require a move beyond immediate experience and inquiry to understanding, knowing, and loving. The pure desire to know discloses the self-transcending dynamism of human intentionality. Self-transcendence is constituent of the affirming and the affirmed self in the self-affirming knower. If knowing is a self transcending act because it reaches the real partially in true judgments and fully in the totality of true judgments, then the notion of being dynamically intends the idea of being. Thus an argument for the existence of a transcendent God can be derived from the self-transcendence of human knowing.

Objectivity

The desire to know is the desire to know being. Does the desire to know actually reach a knowledge of the real? The question of objectivity cannot be ducked. The notion of objectivity is a heuristic notion to be explicated in relation to the self-affirmation of the knower and the notion of being. Without the self-appropriation of one's intelligence and reasonableness the result is a series of uncritical theories of objectivity: naive realism, positivist empiricism, idealist relativism, conceptualist deductivism, etc.. The heuristic notion of objectivity does not resolve the problem of objectivity in an a priori or dogmatic fashion. The actual determination of what is objective and how objective judgments are made is resolved by a dialectical consideration that is part of an explicit metaphysics.

Lonergan outlines the structure of the principal notion of objectivity in relation to the performance of the self-affirming knower. The principal notion of objectivity is contained within a patterned context of judgments that serve to define implicitly the terms, subject and object. An object is defined as any thing that can be designated as A, B, C,. . .X; and that thing is an object if and only if the following set of judgments are correct:

1. A is; B is; C is; . . . X is

2. A is not B; A is not C; A is not X. . . .

3. B is not C; B is not X. . . .

In contrast a subject is defined as any object for which it is true that the reality affirms or can affirm himself as a knower. A subject is said to be a subject objectively to the extent that he can add to his self-affirmative judgment the further judgments that deny his identity with anything or anyone other than him self. Besides the notions of subject and object there is the notion of intersubjectivity connected with these notions.

"Finally insofar as one can intelligently grasp and reasonably affirm the existence of other knowers besides himself, one can add to the list of objects those which are also subjects."

In its principal sense objectivity is what is known through a set of judgments that satisfy the principal notion and fall into the above determined pattern. The notion of objectivity presupposes that there are distinct beings, some of which know both themselves and others as knowers. For Lonergan the notions of subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity are derived from the self-affirming knower as the explicit and reflective appropriation of the notion of being. This notion of objectivity so derived and defined eliminates a persistent problem:

The principal notion of objectivity solves the problem of transcendence. How does the knower get beyond himself to a known? The question is, we suggest, misleading. It presupposes the knower to know himself and asks how he can know anything else. Our answer involves two elements. On the one hand we contend that, while the knower may experience himself or think about himself without judging, still he cannot know himself, until he makes the correct affirmation, "I am." Further we contend that other judgments are equally possible and reasonable, so that through experience, inquiry, and reflection there arises knowledge of other objects both as beings and as being other than the knower. Hence we place transcendence, not in going beyond a known knower, but in heading for being within which there are positive differences and among such differences, the difference between object and subject. Inasmuch as such judgments occur, there is in fact objectivity and transcendence; whether or not such judgments are correct, is a distinct question to be resolved along the lines reached in the analysis of judgment.

The differentiations of subject, object, and intersubjectivity take place within the horizon of being and these differentiations are critically and reflectively appropriated in the self-affirming knower. Although it is a turn to the subject, Lonergan's critical position does not establish a primacy of subjectivity at the expense of objectivity or intersubjectivity. The critical turn to subjectivity makes objectivity and intersubjectivity equally basic because the unrestricted desire to know intends being that includes subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity. The intrinsic relation of human knowing to reality is not the intentio intenta but the intentio intendens, not the noema but the noesis, not the content but the act.

Once the desire to know is reflectively appropriated, the mind can proceed methodically beyond data to intelligibility, beyond intelligibility to truth, through the truth as self-affirmation to the notion of being, beyond known truth and being to the truth and being still to-be-known. As the notion moves beyond, as it transcends itself, it leaves nothing behind. The notion groups experience, understanding, and judgments so that the principal notion of objectivity can be recognized as the patterned context of correct judgments that have already been made and within which true judgments are made. The notion of being is implicitly operative in the unrestricted desire to know disclosed in every intelligent and reflective judgment; the notion of objectivity is implicit in the performance of correctly judging in the light of a reflective grasp of the virtually unconditioned. If the intrinsic objectivity of human knowing is the notion of being, it is because the unrestricted desire to know consciously, intelligently, and reasonably structures itself in the threefold structure of human knowing.

In each dimension of the unfolding of the notion of being a partial aspect of objectivity is disclosed. There are three components of the notion of objectivity. There is an experiential component of human knowing and objectivity that resides in the givenness of relevant data. There is a normative component of objectivity that resides in the norms of intelligence and rationality that guide the process of inquiry from data through understanding to knowing. There is an absolute component of objectivity reached when reflective understanding combines the normative and experiential components in the grasp of the virtually unconditioned. Each component in the knowing process is a part of the complex notion of objectivity.

If self-affirmation allows the knower to know himself as a knower, if the desire to know is recognized as the notion of being, then the being that is attained in knowing can be recognized as the objectively real. Objectivity is not constituted simply by experience as empiricists or positivists think. Objectivity is not constituted by the simple demand for coherence as idealists think. Objectivity is not constituted by the grasp of absolute necessity as conceptualists and rationalists think; for the human mind cannot grasp absolute necessity but a conditioned necessity. Objectivity is constituted by the unrestricted desire to know, the notion of being, as it structures itself through experience, understanding, and reflective understanding and as it is appropriated reflectively in the self-affirming knower. The principal notion of objectivity is a patterned set of correct judgments. The notion of being is unrestricted in its questioning. The restless questioning of the unrestricted desire of human intentionality is satisfied with nothing less than all that is true and real. The desire to know is a natural desire for God.

Basic Method and Metaphysics

The self-affirming knower, the notion of being, and the notion of objectivity provide Lonergan with the basis in method to ground a critical metaphysics of being proportionate to the scope and the limits of the human mind. The metaphysics is critical, explanatory, and dialectical. It is critical because it is founded upon and verifiable in the basic structure of human consciousness operative in intelligent and rational inquiry. It is explanatory because it is founded upon the isomorphic relations of the explanatory structure of knowing acts defined in relation to one another resulting in a heuristic explanatory structuring of the known. It is dialectical to the extent that it establishes the positions of basic method as the adequate thematization of intellect's performance and excludes the counter-positions that invite their own reversal because they are inadequate formulations of the performance of intelligence.

The entry into a critical metaphysics is essentially a dialectic of performance and concept. The philosophical dialectic is located, not in the clash between system and system, but in the tension between the system as expression and the performance behind the system. The tension becomes a conflict when the expression is at odds with the performance. The dialectic of performance and concept is expressed in terms of the conflict of position and counter-position. The basic position invites development; the basic counter-position invites its own reversal by contradicting the performance of the one who holds it. The basic positions are the formulations of the nature of knowing, being, and objectivity adequate to the actual performance of human consciousness; the basic counter-positions are the formulations of the nature of knowing, being, and objectivity that are not adequate to conscious performance.

The proper tool in this mediation [concept] of the immediate [performance] is the rejection of the counter-position. Explicit judgments can contradict the latent metaphysics that they presuppose; but one has only to bring this contradiction to light, for the explicit judgment to be evident nonsense and for its opposite to be established.

The dialectic of performance and concept does not result in logical contradictions; for a system may be coherent with itself even though it expresses a counter-position. A counter-position ceases to be coherent as soon as the knower attempts to affirm it because to affirm a proposition is to affirm it as true. The basic positions make explicit the intelligent and rational performance of the inquirer and by reflecting on them he is able to judge inadequate formulations of cognitional performance. The basic dialectical positions are:

1. The real is the concrete universe of being which is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation.

2. The subject becomes known only if the self-affirmation of the knower occurs; only after the self-appropriation of one's own intelligence and rationality has taken place.

3. Objectivity is to be conceived on the basis of intelligent inquiry and critical reflection. Objectivity is not opposed to subjectivity but rather is the result of an authentic intellectual and rational subjectivity.

A basic counter-position will disagree with one or more of the basic positions. The basic counter-positions are:

1. The real is a subdivision of the "already out there now" (naive realism). Or the real is simply what is conceived as necessary and other realities can be deduced from purely logical considerations (conceptualism-rationalism). Or the real is what is grasped as a totality by intelligence and has no further need of verification once the totality is grasped in its interrelations (idealism). Or the real is what is dogmatically affirmed on the basis of immediate experience and there is no further need for intelligent scrutiny and critical reflection (dogmatic realism).

2. The subject is known, not in rational self-affirmation, but in some existential state prior to the self-affirmatlon of the knower. The subject is thought of as the "already in here now," the correlate of the "already out there now." The subject is the subject of introversion as the object is the object of extroversion. The subject could be further conceived in terms of any of the other counter-positions on the real: the conceptualist, the idealist, or the dogmatic realist positions.

3. Objectivity is conceived essentially, if not always simplistically, on the basis, not of intelligence and rationality, but on the basis of some immediate experience of sense or perception or feeling. Objectivity comes to be formulated as a property of a vital anticipation, an animal extroversion, or some kind of immediate satisfaction. Besides this naive realistic position there may occur other variations on the themes of conceptualism, idealism, or dogmatic realism.

By definition a position that runs counter to the basic positions are counter-positions. The list is not meant to be an exhaustive account of the possibilities. They are the basic counter-positions from which a more complex series of counter-positions can be derived. Other counter-positions are a complex blending of the basic types.

The basic positions depend on the performance of the self-affirming knower and on its methodic expression in the basic positions. Self-affirmation establishes a critical realism, not by providing a half-way house between the extremes of empiricism and idealism (Kant), but by establishing a critical position in which idealism is the half-way house between empiricism and critical realism. Common sense is no substitute for philosophy. A theoretic appropriation is required. Common sense overlooks the theoretic demands of intelligence and reasonableness and tends to remain with immediate experience in which the criterion of the real is the "already out there now." The reason for the tendency to regress to a naïve realism is that in common sense knowing human beings do not achieve conscious control of understanding and cannot differentiate the levels of consciousness and meaning. All human beings wonder, most reflect, and some reflect methodically; few have the inclination or take the trouble to differentiate and appropriate their own intelligent and rational consciousness.

The polymorphism of human consciousness is the native disorientation of an undifferentiated consciousness who has not appropriated the desire to know and identified with his own intelligence. The dialectic of performance and concept has an existential relevance because human consciousness is a concrete unity-in-tension: The unity is grounded in the unrestricted desire to know and conflicts arise from the interference of other desires and fears. The unity-in-tension of consciousness means that human consciousness is polymorphic.

For human consciousness is polymorphic. The pattern in which it flows may be biological, aesthetic, artistic, dramatic, practical, intellectual, or mystical. These patterns alternate; they blend or mix; they can interfere, conflict, lose their way, break down. The intellectual pattern of experience is supposed and expressed by our account of self-affirmation, of being, and of objectivity. But no man is born in that pattern; no one reaches it easily; no one remains in it permanently; and when some other pattern is dominant, then the self of our self-affirmation seems quite different from one's actual self, the universe of being seems as unreal as Plato's noetic heaven, and the objectivity spontaneously becomes a matter of meeting persons and dealing with things that are "really out there."

Human consciousness is initially polymorphic. In this state metaphysics exists only in a latent form, hidden in the undifferentiated conscious activities of the subject.

The basic positions are developed in relation to the self-affirming knower from which the metaphysics latent in polymorphic consciousness can be traced through its problematic expressions to its final explicit formulation.

It would appear that metaphysics can exist in three stages or forms. In its first stage it is latent. Empirical, intellectual, and rational consciousness are immanent and operative in all human knowing; from them spring both the various departments of knowledge and the attempts that are made to attain coherence and unity; but the common source of all knowledge is not grasped with sufficient clarity and precision; the dialectical principle of transformation [self-affirmation as the reflective appropriation of the unrestricted desire to know] is not a developed technique; and efforts at unification are haphazard and spasmodic. In its second stage metaphysics is problematic. The need of a systematic effort for unification is felt; studies of the nature of knowledge abound; but these very studies are involved in the disarray of the positions and counter-positions that result from the polymorphic consciousness of man. In its third stage metaphysics is explicit. Latent metaphysics which always is operative, succeeds in conceiving itself, in working out its implications and techniques, and in affirming the collection, the implications, and the techniques.

The metaphysics latent in human consciousness is the empirical, intellectual, and rational conscious acts immanent and operative in human knowing. Originally the concrete unity-in-tension of human nature does not exist in carefully differentiated stages but in a polymorphic state whose dynamic tendencies remain intact but are confused by the lack of differentiation and distorted by the biases of common sense. In the second stage consciousness attempts to overcome the confusion by systematizing its performance and bringing it to expression. Metaphysics is problematic. Since polymorphic consciousness is the root of the problem, the need to clarify and unify consciousness cannot be made explicit; and the attempts to clarify or unify the known result in the dialectical disarray of positions and counter-positions that cannot be distinguished one from the other. In the third stage metaphysics becomes explicit: the latent metaphysics, immanent and operative in every inquirer, corrects the meaning of the self as knower in the light of self-knowledge through self-affirmation. From this breakthrough the possibility of metaphysics as a valid department of human knowledge develops. Metaphysics is recognized as underlying, penetrating, transforming, and uniting other departments of knowledge. A critical metaphysics underlies all departments of knowledge insofar as its principle is the unrestricted desire to know. It penetrates all departments of knowledge insofar as they represent the unfolding of the desire to know in terms of the heuristic structures determined by the viewpoints of the various sciences. It transforms all departments of human knowledge by allowing their unconscious, counterproductive presuppositions to be replaced by the basic positions.

Metaphysics unifies human knowledge because it expresses the self-conscious possession of an originating wonder, the source of the questions that anticipate the totality of meaning and reality; it moves towards that totality by transforming and correlating the partial answers of the sciences in the light of the originating desire of the mind for the totality of the meaningfulness and existence. Metaphysics does not give an understanding of everything about everything but discloses the intention underlying understanding: the desire to know as the notion of being, the natural desire for God.

Metaphysics is defined concretely as the integral heuristic structure of being proportionate to the human mind. At this stage of Insight it is too soon to speak about God because the metaphysics of reality proportionate to the human mind must first be developed. First a metaphysics must be determined from what humans understand and know about the world and themselves. Proportionate being is what can be known through ordinary experience through an intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. Proportionate metaphysics is an integral heuristic structure because it is an expansion of the heuristic notion of an unknown content to be determined by anticipating the types of cognitional acts through which the unknown can become known. Just as a heuristic structure is an ordered set of heuristic notions, so an integral heuristic structure is the ordered set of all heuristic notions.

This heuristic structure of metaphysics is immanent and operative in all human knowing, but initially it is latent and the polymorphism of human consciousness makes it problematic as well. None the less it can be conceived, affirmed, and implemented; and from that implementation there follow a transformation and integration of the sciences and the myriad instances of common sense. But knowing is knowing being. So the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being, as determined by the sciences and common sense, is knowledge of the organizing structure of proportionate being. As has been said, such a metaphysics is progressive, nuanced, factual, formally dependent upon cognitional theory and materially dependent on the sciences and on common sense, stable, and in its outlook explanatory.

The unfolding of the pure, detached, disinterested desire to know in inquiry and reflection constitutes the notion of being and discloses the normative structure in cognitional activity. The dynamic structure of experience and understanding heads towards and is transformed by reflection and judgment. When the reflection is a reflection on the self as knower and when the judgment is the self-affirmation of the knower, then the explicitly critical notions of knowledge, being, and objectivity can be articulated. Reflection on cognitional activities can provide the structural relations by which the unknown contents of cognitional acts can be heuristically defined. The normative structure of cognitional acts can disclose the normative structure of the contents of the acts. A critical metaphysics of propotionate being can display an open, heuristic, and explanatory structure of knowing isomorphic to the structure of the known.

Unlike the Thomist isomorphism and Insight's is critically derived from a cognitional theory appropriated by the self-affirming knower. If human knowing is affirmed as consisting in a set of interrelated cognitional acts, then the known can be structured as a set of contents related to the cognitional acts. The pattern of the relations between the cognitional acts is similar in form to the pattern of the relations between the contents of the acts:

The Heuristic Structure of Proportionate Metaphysics

Cognitional Acts	Heuristic Contents
Experience	Potency
Understanding	Form
Judgment	Act

Experience is related to understanding and both are related to judgment as potency is related to form and both are related to act. The derivation of the metaphysical elements from cognitional structure provides a critical verification of Thomistic metaphysics. At the same time that the correlation throws light on the meaning and relevance of traditional metaphysical categories, it frees metaphysics from its classicist, ahistoricist application. The integral heuristic structure of human knowing and the isomorphic structure of the known is applicable to any form of scientific or common sense knowledge. The full meaning, relevance, and applicability of the isomorphic structure is dependent on the actual performance of the self-affirming knower.

The first goal of basic method is the development of an explicit metaphysics.

To recapitulate, the goal of method is the emergence of explicit metaphysics in the minds of particular men and women. It begins from them as they are; no matter what that might be. It involves a preliminary stage that can be methodical only in the sense in which a pedagogy is methodical; that is, the goal and the procedure are known and pursued explicitly by a teacher but not by the pupil. The preliminary stage ends when the subject reaches an intelligent and reasonable self-affirmation. Such self-affirmation is also self-knowledge. It makes explicit the pursuit of the goal that has been implicit in the pure desire to know. From that explicit pursuit there follow the directives, first, of reorientating one's scientific knowledge and one's common sense, and secondly, of integrating what one knows and can know of proportionate being through the known structures of one's cognitional activities.

A critical study of knowing discloses the possibility of making explicit the latent and problematic metaphysics operative in knowing. The self-affirming knower can grasp the fundamental isomorphism that exists between his knowing and the known. In doing so he can verify metaphysical statements by grounding them in cognitional facts available to anyone who reflects on what he is doing when he is knowing. From the breakthrough of self-affirmation he is able to reorient his common sense and his scientific knowledge on the basis of a critical metaphysics. Then the inquirer is able to integrate a knowledge proportionate to the human mind through a verifiable metaphysics that remains an open heuristic structure (potency - form - act) within which proportionate being may be understood in purely explanatory terms as anticipated by the structure of knowing (experience - understanding - judgment).

When metaphysics is thus understood, then the method of metaphysics can be distinguished from the methods of the empirical and human sciences. A critical method of metaphysics results in the possibility of a critical investigation of historical metaphysical systems. A critical metaphysics can make possible the unraveling of the important disputed questions in traditional metaphysics; it can allow the methodic development of the central metaphysical notions: central (substance) and conjugate (accident) potency, form, and act; explanatory genera and species; and real or notional distinctions and relations.

Basic Method and Scientific Methods

Contemporary science is in a position to shed the eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophic counter-positions on knowledge, the real, and objectivity if the scientists themselves would reflect upon what they are doing when they propose hypotheses, develop theories, and verify them in the data. For what they are doing can be understood and verified in a metaphysics of proportionate being that reflects the actual performance of intellectual and rational consciousness. While what they are doing cannot be understood or verified in the mechanistic presuppositions of their eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors. No one empirical or human science can provide the sciences with the needed principle of unification. The need for the unification of the sciences includes the human as well as to the empirical sciences. The principle of unification is the scientific ideal common to all the sciences. The unrestricted desire to know is the scientific ideal implicit in each of the sciences whose implications are made thematic partially by a particular science but only when it becomes impossible to advance its theoretical understanding because its presuppositions imply basic counter-positions.

The historical development of the sciences and their methods corroborates the basic method and the consequent metaphysics of proportionate being. The basic method can succeed in unifying and integrating the sciences. Basic method must be distinguished from the methods of the sciences. The empirical sciences must be methodically distinguished from the human sciences. The empirical sciences deal with data insofar as they are intelligible and can be understood through the application of classical or statistical methods. The data of the human sciences pose a special problem insofar as they are related to the data of consciousness and to the results of intelligence. The results of intelligence may be either a result of understanding or of misunderstanding, of what is reasonable or of what is unreasonable, of what is responsible or of what is irresponsible. The human sciences require a dialectical critique of hermeneutics. Although a critical metaphysics can unify the empirical sciences and those aspects of the human sciences that deal with intelligibility, a metaphysics of proportionate being cannot give a dialectical critique of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity for such a critique requires a foundational inquiry, a fundamental ontology that includes the historical, existential, speaking, hearing, and loving subject. Lonergan does not equate metaphysics with the total and basic horizon of humankind. Metaphysics is adequate only to the objective pole of the horizon. The subjective pole of the total and basic horizon requires more than the self-affirmation of the knower (intellectual conversion) because human beings are more than knowers; they are speakers, hearers, and lovers.

A critical metaphysics can offer a critique of the empirical and the human sciences insofar as they claim their results are objective. Although metaphysics is a science, its method is significantly different from the methods of the empirical sciences. The basic difference is that scientific method in the empirical sciences is prior to the work of the scientist and independent of scientific results; whereas philosophical method is concomitant with the philosophical work and stands or falls with the results of the philosophical inquiry. To be scientific philosophical method cannot be content with the criterion of the sciences because scientific theories are the fulfillment of empty heuristic structures that yield a knowledge of the universe from a determinate standpoint. Philosophical method must establish the basis for any heuristic structure. The set of all heuristic structures stands to philosophical conclusions as a theory of the genesis of knowledge stands to the attainment of an all-inclusive view of the universe. In contrast empirical scientific method stands to scientific conclusions as a genetic universal stands to generated particulars.

Since "the polymorphism of human consciousness is the one and only key to philosophy,"philosophy requires a differentiation of consciousness and the appropriation of the unrestricted desire to know as the ground of every scientific ideal. Philosophy as a way of life requires a personal commitment to the demands of the desire to know and the personal appropriation of the desire in the self-affirmation of the knower.

It follows that, while the reasonableness of each scientist is a consequence of the reasonableness of all, the philosopher's reasonableness is grounded on a personal commitment and on personal knowledge. For the issues in philosophy can not be settled by looking up a handbook, by appealing to a set of experiments performed so painstakingly by so and so, by referring to the masterful presentation of overwhelming evidence in some famous work. Philosophic evidence is within the philosopher himself. It is his own inability to avoid experience, to renounce intelligence in inquiry, to desert reasonableness in reflection. It is his own detached, disinterested desire to know. It is his own advertence to the polymorphism of his own consciousness. It is his own insight into the manner in which insights accumulate in mathematics, in the empirical sciences, in the myriad instances of common sense. It is his own grasp of the dialectical unfolding of his own desire to know in its conflict with other desires that provides the key to his own philosophic development and reveals his own potentialities to adopt the stand of any of the traditional or of the new philosophic schools. Philosophy is the flowering of the individual's rational consciousness in its coming to know and take possession of itself. To that event its traditional schools, its treatises, and its history are but contributions; and without that event they are stripped of real significance. (Insight p. 429, Ch. xiv, 4.6)

The personal commitment is an intellectual and philosophical conversion.

When intellectual conversion is reflectively appropriated, it is a philosophical conversion. A philosophical conversion is the ground for the critical metaphysics that rejects the counter-positions on knowledge, being, and objectivity and establishes the basic positions on these central notions. A critical metaphysics can secure and bring to expression the invariant, isomorphic structure of knowing and being that has eluded modern systems of empiricism, idealism, conceptualism, and positivism. The contribution of the scientific method to philosophy is its unique ability to supply philosophy with instances of heuristic structures that a critical metaphysics can integrate into a single view of the concrete, unfolding universe.

Basic Method and the Structuring of All Heuristic Methods in Metaphysics

The strategy of Insight is to construct an explanatory metaphysics grounded and verified in a critical theory of knowledge. Lonergan describes the strategy globally by using a spatial image and a military metaphor:

A statement of the evidence for metaphysics has to be in dynamic terms. If a spatial image and a military metaphor may be helpful, the advance of metaphysical evidence is at once a breakthrough, an envelopment, and a confinement. The breakthrough is effected in one's affirmation of one's self as empirically, intelligently, and rationally conscious. The envelopment is effected through the protean notion of being as whatever one intelligently grasps and reasonably affirms. The confinement is effected through the dialectical opposition of the notions of the real, of knowing, and of objectivity, so that every attempt to escape is blocked by the awareness that one would be merely substituting some counter-position for a known position, merely deserting the being that can be intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed, merely distorting the consciousness that is not only empirical but also intelligent, and not only intelligent but also reasonable.

In general the movement of method towards metaphysics involves the breakthrough of the self-affirmation of the knower; for without it the meaning and verification of metaphysical terms and relations remain uncritical. The envelopment concerns the subject-object correlation: the desire to know (subject) intends being (object); but the differentiation of subject and object occurs within being and knowing. For to know is to know being and to be is to be knowable. The notion of being is the condition for the possibility of distinguishing subjectivity and objectivity.

The final move is to establish a dialectic of position against counter-position: since every position is derived from the self-affirmation of the knower and the notion of being, then every basic position invites the further development of the theorems concerning what knowledge is, what reality is, and what objectivity is. The counter-positions invite their own reversal; for they contradict the performance of the self-affirming knower and by that performative contradiction implicate the knower in a position that runs counter to self-affirmation. The dialectic of position and counter-position represent a confinement of critical metaphysics to the basic positions by forcing the reversal of the counter-positions. Critical metaphysics includes both the true and cognitionally verifiable positions and dialectically the counter-positions.

The threefold movement of breakthrough, envelopment, and confinement creates the possibility for an integral heuristic structure that provides the method of metaphysics. There are four specific moments in the erection of an integral heuristic structure of proportionate being, the proper domain of metaphysics:

Once this foundation [breakthrough, envelopment, confinement] is laid and as long as it is retained effectively, one can proceed rapidly with the erection of the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being. In the first moment dialectical criticism transforms one's common sense views and scientific views to provide the secondary minor premiss of the argument. In the second moment cognitional theory brings to light the four methods of possible inquiry, the condition of their use, and the possibility of their integration, to yield the principal minor premiss. In the third moment, metaphysical understanding unites the principal and secondary minor premiss, much as a physicist unites a differential with empirically ascertained boundary conditions, to obtain the integral heuristic structure relevant to this universe. In the fourth moment there is invoked the isomorphism of knowing and known: the pattern of relations immanent in the structure of cognitional acts also is to be found in the contents of anticipated acts and still will be found to obtain when the heuristic contents of anticipated acts give place to the actual contents of occurring acts.

In the first moment of metaphysical inquiry a dialectical critique establishes the basic positions on knowledge, on being, on objectivity and reverses the counter-positions. Common sense and scientific views are transformed by dialectical criticism. Their transformation consists in their being recognized as expressions of the unrestricted desire to know. Scientific or common sense views are considered genuine to the extent that they represent an expression of the intention of the unrestricted desire to know; while they are considered fallacious to the extent that they are recognized as expressions of the polymorphism of human consciousness. The transformation is complete when common sense and scientific knowledge are integrated and appropriated in the self-affirmation of the knower.

In the second moment of metaphysical inquiry cognitional theory brings to light the four heuristic methods of scientific inquiry and reveals the possibility of their integration within a metaphysics of proportionate being. The four heuristic methods integrated by metaphysics arise from the application of understanding to the data of inquiry as the inquiry moves through higher viewpoints integrating more and more data. The four heuristic methods constitute the "lower blade" of Insight. The four heuristic methods integrated by basic method expressed objectively as metaphysics are classical, statistical, genetic, and dialectic method.

From the basic viewpoint classical method arises because understanding leads to the formation of systems and systematic understanding; classical method is the heuristic anticipation of a constant system. Understanding develops systematically. From the basic viewpoint statistical method arises with the recognition that there are two kinds of understanding: the direct act that leads to the formulation of systems and the inverse act that recognizes that on a particular issue there may be no intelligibility to be understood and systematized. Statistical method is a heuristic anticipation that some data does not conform to any system. Statistical method is based on an understanding of the event-character of the universe. Genetic method is a heuristic anticipation of an intelligibly related sequence of systems whose intelligibility is grasped in the heuristic notion of development.

The recognition of classical and genetic methods leads to the distinction between a constant system (classical-synchronic) and changing systems (genetic-diachronic) where there is an intelligibility linking the systems. There may be no intelligibility linking the systems, not merely because of the event-character of the universe recognized by statistical method but because human consciousness has introduced an unintelligible element. With this recognition the dialectical method emerges. Genetic method runs parallel to classical method; dialectical method runs parallel to statistical method. Statistical method recognizes the event character of the universe, so dialectical method recognizes the event character of human consciousness. Eventfully consciousness understands or misunderstands, develops adequate or inadequate theories, does or does not grasp the virtually unconditioned, and is or is not faithful to the unrestricted desire to know and human intentionality. Dialectical method anticipates heuristically that the relations between different stages of changing systems sometimes will not be intelligible either because of the entry of a counter-position on knowledge, reality, or objectivity in the sciences or because of the presence of one or more of the biases of common sense.

The four heuristic methods taken collectively exhaust the lower blade methods employed by human intelligence (the upper blade) to explain any given set of data. For data must either conform (classical method) or not conform (statistical method) to system; systems must either be related intelligibly (genetic method) where basic positions invite development or unintelligibly (dialectical method) where counter-positions invite their own reversal. The four lower blade methods exhaust the relations between direct, inverse, and reflective and deliberative understanding. They are comprehensive and open, heuristic methods that "do not dictate what data must be; they are able to cope with the data no matter what they may prove to be."

In the third moment of metaphysical inquiry, understanding unites the first two moments by unifying the four heuristic methods in their common ground in insight. Common sense and scientific views of the universe are transformed in the light of the integral heuristic structure of the universe: The contents are isomorphic to the methods and are to be known by heuristically anticipating acts of understanding and knowing. The integral heuristic structure includes the intelligibility and lack of intelligibility (empirical residue remains unexplained in scientific understanding and in a metaphysics of proportionate being); it includes intelligence and the lack of intelligence (the philosophic counter-positions). The integral heuristic structure intends a universe of real things and persons in their interaction, their development, and their decline.

In the fourth moment of metaphysical inquiry the isomorphism of the knowing with the known becomes apparent. An understanding of isomorphism leads to the possibility of articulating the fundamental metaphysical elements of an integral, heuristic structure of being. The elements of potency, form, act provide the explanatory framework in which present scientific developments can be organized and to which future scientific developments can be organized heuristically. For the same patterns of relations immanent in the invariant, dynamic structure of cognitional acts (experience, understanding, judgment) are to be found in the contents of the heuristically anticipated acts corresponding to potency, form, act and continue to be found whenever conscious anticipation is fulfilled by actual contents. The cognitional, structural relations of experience, understanding, judgment, are reflected in the metaphysical elements of potency, form, and act. The four moments represent basic method's achievement of a critical metaphysics of being proportionate to human experience.

Metaphysics As Dialectic

Basic method is the ground of the critical method of philosophy and the methods of the sciences. Lonergan's basic method is the expression of a critical analysis and self-appropriation of the structure and functioning of the human mind. It is as relevant to the human sciences as it is to the empirical sciences. The human sciences present the philosopher with a more complex situation: Metaphysics must deal with dialectical issues and the problems connected with interpretation and history. Metaphysics as dialectic anticipates an exploration of the central notions of Lonergan's work. He is raising the question: Can philosophy determine a single base of operations from which philosophical positions can be judged correctly? From the vantage point of basic method any historically verifiable philosophical position can be analysed and judged on how adequately it has thematized conscious, intelligent operations. If the basic positions on knowledge, reality, and objectivity, however formulated, approximate the differentiations of cognitional structure; then they are verifiable in cognitional fact. As verifiable in cognitional fact, the critical metaphysics of Insight can judge other metaphysical positions on the basis of the established basic positions.

Myth, Mystery, and Metaphysics

The development of an explicitly critical metaphysics is an uncommon, personal achievement. It emerges first from the early stages of a latent and then from a problematic metaphysics operative in the human mind. The basic factor determining the three stages of metaphysics is the inner dynamism of the human spirit: its drive to raise and answer further questions, its ever expanding and ceaselessly striving movement into a known unknown whose presence is indicated by the myriad unanswered questions that the intelligent and critical inquirer can pose. The dynamism of the human spirit requires some correspondence on the psychic level; for human beings find in their experience, even in the most primitive conditions, that they are carried beyond the familiar domain of everyday life to the recognition of a "beyond," an experiential intimation of the presence of a known unknown. The unrestrictedness of the desire to know reaches into the experiential dimension of ordinary life, transforms it, and discloses its extraordinary character.

It is this desire, not in contemplation of the already known, but headed towards further knowledge orientated into the known unknown. The principle of dynamic correspondence calls for a harmonious orientation on the psychic level, and from the nature of the case such an orientation would have to consist in some cosmic dimension, in some intimation of unplumbed depths that accrued to man's feelings, emotions, sentiments. Nor is this merely a theoretical conclusion, as R. Otto's study of the non-rational element in the idea of the holy rather abundantly indicates.

The domain of affect-laden images and overdetermined meanings is the primary field of myth and mystery. A critical metaphysics proportionate to what humans can actually know is not able to determine the actual goal of human intentionality in its historically religious quest for meaning, truth, and goodness. The goal might transcend the achievements of human intelligence alone and lie beyond the realm of a proportionate metaphysics. The dynamism toward the known unknown exists and is recognized in metaphysical reflection and religious experience.

A critical metaphysics based on the unrestricted desire to know recognizes the genuine reality of mystery in human life so that it can be distinguished from its mythic expressions. In Insight Lonergan's definition of myth is negative: As a result of the polymorphism of human consciousness, myth distorts the meaning of the dynamism of the human spirit in its quest for the divine. In this context myth means undifferentiated consciousness. In Insight myth is opposed to scientific knowledge and to mystery. There are two approaches to the known unknown: the critical metaphysical and the mythical religious approach. The critical metaphysical is dialectically related to the notion of mystery the full dimensions of which are disclosed in the experience of history. Lonergan's point is that critical metaphysics excludes myth in the negative sense and provides for the distinction between myth and mystery. In Insight metaphysics is a corollary of the self-affirmation of the knower; myth is the result of the absence of self-knowledge. The negative notion of myth recedes in proportion to the advance of the critical positions on knowledge, the real, and objectivity. As the counter-positions are eliminated, mythic consciousness opens up the possibility of a recognition of genuine mystery. Mythic consciousness becomes the consciousness of mystery.

Myth is related to metaphysics dialectically. To the extent that it is the result of an undifferentiated consciousness expressed in the desire to know, to say, and to be, it recedes as a differentiated self-appropriation comes to ground an explicit metaphysics. In Insight myth is the enemy of self-knowledge. As intelligent consciousness attempts to free itself from its mythic, purely dramatic, experiential matrix by means of theoretic expressions of meaning, it reaches out to allegory as the first expression of its liberation. Allegory is the halfway house between mythic-symbolic expressions and the theoretic expressions of human meaning. Allegory represents the attempt to find the logos (rational account) directly in the muthos (story in the dramatic, experiential pattern of language).

Critical metaphysics is opposed to myth but not to mystery. It does not eliminate the presence or significance of the known unknown. Metaphysics does not eliminate the need to search for an experiential fulfillment of the desire for ultimate meaning in the holy. Metaphysics discloses the human mind to be a vast movement into an unknown toward which every question tends and by which wonder is engendered. The reality metaphysics studies must be transposed into the language of symbol before it can resonate with human living. The transformation of metaphysics into the language of religious symbol results in a deeper appreciation of mystery.

Because the integrating activities of experience and intelligence form a dialectical unity in tension, the dialectical side of metaphysics comes to light.

1. It follows that the intellectual activities are either the proper unfolding of the pure, detached, unrestricted desire to know (genetic method) or else that unfolding is distorted or blocked by the interference of other desires (dialectic method) and

2. that the experiential acts from which intellectual contents emerge and in which they are represented, expressed, and applied either are involved in the mysteries of the proper unfolding (genetic method) or distort these mysteries into myths (dialectic method).

By identifying mystery with the movement of the human intention toward the known unknown expressed in the dramatic images and symbols of the striving of desire in experience, Insight affirms mystery to be the permanent and necessary category of the dynamic, dialectical unity-in-tension that is the human being. As a person deepens his self-knowledge, he opens himself more and more to the presence and significance of the known unknown. Human being as an embodied, intellectual consciousness requires the symbolic appropriation of the reality of mystery purified of the "negative" aspects of myth. The negative aspects of mythic consciousness are not restricted to a more primitive form of human existence but are a permanent problem for human beings because they are a consequence of the undifferentiated matrix of experience and the polymorphism of human desires.

So we are brought to the profound disillusionment of modern man and to the focal point of his horror. He had hoped through knowledge to ensure a development that was always progress and never decline. He has discovered that the advance of human knowledge is ambivalent, that it places in man's hands stupendous power without necessarily adding proportionate wisdom and virtue, that the fact of advance and the evidence of power are not guarantees of truth, that myth is the permanent alternative to mystery and mystery is what his hybris rejected.

In Insight theory is the highest human potentiality, but the fulfillment of intelligence is love. Love requires interpersonal, symbolic speech. Intelligence banishes myth as undifferentiated consciousness, but intelligent love reinstates mythic-symbolic discourse as the primary expression of the reality of religious mystery.

The Notion of Truth

The notion of truth was implicitly operative in Insight's argument; now the notion of truth is explored explicitly. The notion of truth is presented under the following headings: the criterion of truth, its definition, its ontology, its expression, and its appropriation. The proximate criterion of truth is the effective grasp of the virtually unconditioned that grounds a true judgment; the remote criterion is the fidelity of intelligence to the pure, unrestricted desire to know. Complementary to the criteria of truth is the quest for the truth of the self: the appropriation of the truth of the self as knower on the three levels of consciousness as experience,in personal acts of understanding, reflection, and judgment; as understanding and conception in the process of learning; as reflection and judgment when guided by the pure, detached, disinterested desire to know and satisfied by nothing less than the virtually unconditioned.

Since human knowing structures itself as experience and imagination, understanding and conception, reflection and judgment; the expressions of knowing reflect the same structures. The material multiplicity of experience and imagination is expressed in the instrumental multiplicity of utterances; theorectical insights are expressed in the technical language of theory and definition; reflection and judgment is expressed in the affirmative and negative utterances of a fully constituted discourse. The complementarity of language and consciousness is not an identity. Knowing has as its goal what is true and it follows its own criteria. The criteria for expression is not just the true but the rhetorical adequacy for communicating it.

The importance of expression is restricted to rhetoric because the act of understanding or insight must be distinguished from its expressions and because in Insight expression is conceived primarily in the context of knowing or of communicating an already known truth. The truth of expression requires not only an insight into the matter at hand but also insights into the viewpoints of the audience. In Insight truth pertains primarily to judgments and not to expressions. The methodic viewpoint of Insight limits language in its role of constituting meaning. Although methodic confusion results if the grounding acts of understanding are not adequately distinguished from the acts of expression in language, from a religious viewpoint human speech is a bearer of more than human meanings and truths. Beyond being an object of the unrestricted desire to know, religious mystery can enter into human speech and become a divine revelation.

The Truth of Interpretation

The truth of interpretation is about the application of basic method to the human sciences. Although Insight has a limited view of historical consciousness and its importance for the human sciences, it recognized the need to establish a heuristic method applicable to the practice of historical method. Insight poses, not just the question of a correct understanding, but the question of the truth of an interpretation which moves it beyond a relativistic, historicist to a theoretic notion of interpretation. Just as the methodic move from common sense to theory is possible, so the move from a common sense understanding of historical interpretation to a theoretic understanding of it is possible. Through a common sense historical understanding, the historian can predict with some accuracy what might or might not have been thought, said, or done in a particular historical period. The historian expands his own common sense understanding to include the common sense of another time or another culture.

The extension of common sense understanding to history is called the historical sense. The historical sense labors under the same difficulties as common sense; for as a purely descriptive knowledge it cannot give a critical account of its own presuppositions, and it is prone to the same biases as common sense. The philosopher cannot be content with a descriptive and possibly bias prone approach to the human sciences, hermeneutics, or history. To move the use of hermeneutics in the human sciences to the explanatory level the human scientist and historian must appropriate a philosophy of human nature that amounts to the self-appropriation of intelligence and rationality. Basic method is the critical foundation for the specialized forms of hermeneutics.

Insight provides the basic method for conceiving and determining the habitual intellectual development of an audience on the basis of a critical appropriation of intelligence and rationality. Applying basic method to the problem of interpretation results in a technique by means of which historically conditioned expressions can be interpreted to escape their relativity to particular audiences at particular times. Basic method does this by correlating linguistic expressions to the inner acts of meaning grounding them. The truth of interpretation involves two basic questions: the question about the meaning of a truth-value and the question about the expression of a truth-value. To deal with the question of the meaning of a truth-value the heuristic notion of the universal viewpoint is developed; to deal with the question of the expression of a truth-value, a theory of levels and sequences of expression are worked out. Finally the canons for a methodic hermeneutics analogous to the canons of empirical method are formulated.

The Universal Viewpoint

The universal means a potential totality of genetically and dialectically related viewpoints. It is the basic criterion of the truth of an interpretation. The heuristic structure of the universal viewpoint virtually contains the ranges of the possible alternative interpretations. As the potential totality of all viewpoints, it is concerned with the principal acts of meaning that ground conceptions (insight) and judgments (reflective understanding). The universal viewpoint directs the attention of the interpreter to his own experience, understanding, and critical reflection. The universal viewpoint is an ordered totality of viewpoints because at its base is a knowledge of the self (self-affirmation of the knower) and provides the basis for a critical metaphysics.

In the universal viewpoint the totality of viewpoints is potential: the totality is a heuristic structure; its contents are sequences of unknowns; and the relations between the unknowns are determined generically but not specifically. In the universal viewpoint the principle of order (the acts of consciousness) and what is ordered is potential: what is ordered advances from the generic to the specific, from the undifferentiated to the differentiated, from the awkward, the global, and the spontaneous to the expert, the precise, and the methodical. The universal viewpoint is universal not by virtue of its excessive abstractness but by virtue of its potential completeness. It includes the particularity of the particulars by virtue of a basic knowledge of the particular knowing subject who affirms himself to be a knower.

There are no interpretations without interpreters. There are no interpreters without the polymorphic unities of empirical, intelligent, and rational consciousness. There are no expressions to be interpreted without similar unities of consciousness. Nor has the work of interpreting anything more than a material determinant in the spatially ordered set of marks in documents and monuments. If the interpreter assigns any meaning to the marks, then the experiential component in that meaning will be derived from his experience; the intellectual component will be derived from his intelligence; the rational component will be derived from his critical reflection on the reflection of another. Such are the underlying necessities and from them spring the potential completeness that makes the universal viewpoint universal.

The appropriation of one's intelligent and rational self-consciousness makes it possible for an interpreter to understand what he is doing when he is interpreting a text and judging its truth.

An interpreter who has reached the universal viewpoint interprets the meaning of another's utterances by his own ability to distinguish and recombine elements in his own experience, in his ability to move from his accumulation of insights to another's, in his critical grasp of judgment, of its grounds, of its nature, and of its accumulations that allow him to interpret the judgments and habitual orientations of another person in relation to his habitual orientations and in relation to the interferences of his polymorphic consciousness. The interpreter who has reached the universal viewpoint cannot only interpret the meaning of another's utterances but can also identify the grounds of its meaningfulness or lack of meaningfulness. For the grounds lie in the openness or lack of openness in the speaker or writer, in his understanding or lack of understanding, in his reflectiveness or lack of reflectiveness, and in his ability or lack of ability to free himself from the illusions of polymorphic consciousness. The power and value of the universal viewpoint is not in its ability to know everything; for it cannot, but in its understanding of intelligence as the principle that leads to a knowledge of anything and its value is in the wisdom that comes from that knowledge.

The universal viewpoint is the core of meaning in any meaningful utterance or series of utterances. The core of meaning is the notion of being as subjective and objective.

The core of meaning is the notion of being and that notion is protean. Being is (or is thought to be) whatever is (or is thought to be) grasped intelligently and affirmed reasonably. There is, then, a universe of meanings and its four dimensions are its full range of possible combinations:

1. of experiences and lack of experiences

2. of insights and lack of insights

3. of judgments and the failure to judge, and

4. of the various orientations of the polymorphic consciousness of man.

Now in the measure that one grasps this protean notion of being, one possesses the base and ground from which one can proceed to the content and context of every meaning. In the measure that one explores human experience, human insights, human reflections, and human polymorphic consciousness, one becomes capable when provided with the appropriate data, of approximating to the content and context of the meaning of any given expression.

The notion of being allows the interpreter to order the totality of meanings heuristically. The interpreter's grasp of the notion of being is in direct proportion to his critical ability to recognize and formulate genetic patterns of accumulating experience, insight, higher viewpoints, and judgments as well as his ability to correct by dialectical analysis the aberrations arising from the philosophic opinions of scientists and the biases of common sense. The universal viewpoint is the genetically and dialectically ordered totality of all potential basic viewpoints.

Levels and Sequences of Expression

Insight does not explain linguistic expression in terms of language, but in terms of the meaning of meaning. The validity and limits of the universal viewpoint of basic method is established to break out of the relativisms of contemporary, scientific thinking on method. Basic method is the critical foundation for the relations determining the levels of expression and meaning. To develop the notion of levels and sequences of expression, Insight distinguishes between sources, acts, and terms of meaning:

Sources of meaning lie in the experiential, intellectual, and rational levels of knowing. Acts of meaning are principal or instrumental; principal acts are formal or full inasmuch as they are constituted by acts of defining, supposing, considering (formal) or by acts of assenting or dissenting (full); instrumental acts are sensible manifestations of meaning through gesture, speech, and writing. Terms of meaning, finally, are whatever happens to be meant; they form a universe of meanings that includes not only a universe of being but also the totality of suppositions and of false affirmations and negations.

The distinction between different levels of expression rests on a consideration of the sources of meaning in the one addressed. The basic concern is the communication of a meaning or a truth through a linguistic expression. Lonergan's position might wrongly be misunderstood as a subtle form of psychologism, but the structure and the acts of meaning as well as the terms that are meant are grounded in the virtually unconditioned self-affirmation of the knower, in the notion of being, and in the critically conceived notion of objectivity. Except for those committed to a notion of the real as "the already out there now," the position of Insight on interpretation goes beyond the fallacies of reductionist psychologism and naïve objectivism.

The guiding principle and primary concern in the communication of meaning is the response of the interpreter. In everyday life expressions the response may be obscure if the parties in communication do not have a great deal in common. As expressions become specialized, differences in understanding and judgment become obvious. Advertisers and propagandists aim at psychological conditioning and ignore understanding and further questions; literary communication conveys insights and stimulates reflection indirectly by associating images, metaphors, symbols, memories, and feelings with objects; the skillful essayist explorers the resources of language to attract, hold, and absorb the reader's attention. A direct concern with the reader's understanding appears in scientific and theoretical writing: it aims at provoking insights, organizing and systematizing what is understood. A direct concern with the reader's judgment emerges in philosophical writing. Philosophy is concerned with the reader's performance; it requires him to make the power of reflective thought thematic and normative for further thought; it attempts to persuade and convince him to live a life of thoughtfulness.

Insight's classification of the levels of expression is potential and not actual: It does not impose a conceptual a priori structure into which all modes of expression must fit. It leaves to the interpreter his own ingenuity and subtlety in determining the writer's sources and intention. Four components of expression are distinguished:

There is an intersubjective component of expression that emerges and is transmitted apart from insights and judgments. There is a supervening component of intelligence that admits various degrees of explicitness and deliberateness. There is a higher component of truth or falsity that may emerge at the term of a series of insights as insight emerges at the term of a series of imaginative representations. Finally, there can be the entry of a volitional component, and its relevance is a fourth variable.

The two newly recognized variables in expression are the intersubjective and the volitional. These components are not integrated into Insight's understanding of expression. It is difficult to see how they could be integrated without a more comprehensive understanding of language as constitutive of meaning. The self-affirmation of the knower is the ground, not only of a basic method for metaphysics but also in a basic notion of value.

To summarize the treatment of expression in Insight: First, the heuristic determination of the notion of interpretation based on basic method envisages expression, not as an event divorced from the sources of meaning in human consciousness, but as outer expressions distinct from inner expressions of meaning. The inner expression of meaning is a flow of conscious events that originate in the cognitional and volitional sources of meaning of the speaker or writer and terminates in the sources of meaning in the hearer or reader. Second, the levels of expression and the meanings are genetic. It took centuries for language to develop into its many forms and nuances; it took the alternatives of history to disclose the possibility of a scientific and theoretic language; and finally it took a philosophical language to express the sources of meaning in consciousness with its ability to relate itself to itself, to others and to the world through the notion of being. Still the dialectical relationship between consciousness and language, subjectivity and intersubjectivity remains relatively unexplored in Insight because its primary focus is on method.

The position on the truth of interpretation is an application of the central thesis of Insight: the search for the upper-blade method of human inquiry that requires the thematization of the human mind's basic structure. Insight's notion of the truth of interpretation will be expanded into the domain of historical consciousness in Method In Theology; but when it is, it will take account of the existential subject rather than the purely intelligent and rational subject.

If the question of interpretation is understood in terms of the basic positions rather than the counterpositions, then the interpreter realizes that the totality of documents and monuments to be interpreted constitute the material and not the formal dimension of interpretation. For the form of interpretation will always be in the sources of meaning that are constituted by the interpreter's own experience, understanding, reflection, and judgment that, when made thematic, are understood to constitute a universal viewpoint that is the potential, heuristic determination of all levels and sequences of expressions. The application of basic method to the question of interpretation is corresponds to a metaphysical view of reality. Metaphysics is the objective-explanatory, conceptual expression of an integral heuristic structure of being proportionate to human intelligence. The existence of a heuristic structure of interpretation brings under metaphysics the meaningfulness and truth of every possible expression of meaning and truth. It is the truth behind the classicist ideal of knowledge.

The universal applicability of a metaphysics grounded on the heuristic structures of consciousness is limited to the objective-pole of basic method. A critical metaphysics includes every possible, objective conclusion of the empirical and the human sciences; but it cannot specify their conclusions, predict their results, or establish their validity. Once the results are reached by the sciences, it can judge their truth in terms of a philosophical dialectic that excludes the counter-positions: empiricism, idealism, conceptualism, relativism, naive realism, or any combination of the aberrations derived from basic method. The theory of interpretation in Insight establishes a critical metaphysics as the dialectical limit for an historical hermeneutics. As such it falls short of a basic hermeneutic theory that, if it is to be adequate to the total horizon of human beings, must include a fundamental ontology based on the historic intention of knowing, saying, and loving.