Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism, Volume 18 (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan) by Philip J. McShane

Author:Philip J. McShane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2016-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

3 The Intellectual Pattern

An intellectual pattern of consciousness is intellectual by its detachment, by the non-intervention of subjective concerns. A scientist cannot do his work properly if he is worried about something else. He has to be given totally to his job of planning and executing his experiments, making his observations; the whole man has to be just at that. Similarly in philosophy, one has to be engaged entirely by the problem. And that engagement is not a personal engagement; that is, it is not what suits me, what suits my temperament, what brings out my idiosyncrasies that will make me a good scientist or a good philosopher in the objective sense. The more impersonal, impartial, detached, pure, so to speak, purely intellectual the work is, the better it is from an intellectualist viewpoint. One can speak of a total engagement in intellectual work, but it is an engagement of submission. One is committed to a submission to norms: to the norms of logic, to the norms of scientific method, to the norms of philosophic procedure. One is headed to a universe, to the object. The subject has more or less to disappear. The subject enters into the picture only as another item in the objective universe, and one of no greater importance than any other. If Aristotle were writing simply about Aristotle or Kant simply about Kant, they would not be of interest to all mankind in the following centuries. It is precisely insofar as one is given over to an objective universe in which one is just one item along with endless others that one is doing good work.

Again, just as he is committed in his objective scientific or philosophic inquiry, so too the subject has a responsibility. But it is a limited responsibility. He can frame his conclusions either as positive or negative, as certain or probable, or he can say that this is a question that he cannot solve. He is committed to arrive at results of a certain kind. In fact his work will be regarded as strictly intellectual, strictly scientific, strictly philosophic, insofar as he is not obliged on external grounds to arrive at results of a certain kind. For that reason, Catholic philosophers are looked upon more or less as hired men to defend the Catholic Church. There is a question mark put against them as philosophers simply because they are Catholic; they have to arrive at those conclusions anyway. They are not simply this purely detached intellect working out of the intellectual pattern of experience, as represented by the example I gave of Newton or the famous example of Thales who, seeing the stars, could not see the well at his feet.

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