Before we can look at the subject as a knowing subject we must look what knowing is. Bernard Lonergan explains knowing as a dynamic process which involves more than just seeing and hearing. Knowing is a process of four interrelated activities experience, understanding, judging and decision (214). Lonergan also looks at our subject “as a doer, as one that deliberates, evaluates, chooses and acts. Such doing, at first sight, affects, modifies and changes the world of objects. But even more it changes the subject” (79). We can all look back over our lives and find specific influences and experiences that shaped and molded us into who we are now. As we push the limits of our conscious minds to go back earlier and earlier in our lives we begin to see that our ability to know the event that would shape our life was not always the same.
Lonergan reminds us that infants, in contrast to adults, do not speak. They live, therefore, in a world of immediacy: of sights and sounds, of tastes and smells, of touching and feeling, of pleasure and pain. "The criteria of reality in the infant's world of immediacy are given in immediate experience" he says. "They are simply the occurrence of seeing or hearing, tasting or smelling, touching or feeling, pleasure or pain." (239) Ariane Weisel of the University of Chicago proposes, "Essentially, immediacy is the negation of media. While media are the mechanics through which connections are made and meanings are understood, immediacy is the manner in which the media are abbreviated and hidden". She continues, "There is then, a hidden paradox within the relationship of immediacy to media. That while immediacy is the shortened form of media in favor of the connection, immediacy relies on the existence of media to further reduce the theoretical distance between the elements" (Weisel). To illustrate this let us consider a highway. A highway is an intervening medium that accelerates the connection between two points thus creating immediacy. This immediacy relies on the highway as a medium to diminish the "temporal" and "spatial" distance between the same two points.
As the infants learn to speak, they begin to move into a larger world, a world mediated by meaning. “The essence of that world is” analyzes Richard McBrien, “past, present and future, the possible, the probable and the actual for the reality of the world mediated by meaning is far more complex” (McBrien) It includes the immediate experience but also goes far beyond it. “For the world mediated by meaning is not just given,” insists Lonergan. “Over and above what is given there is the universe that is intended by questions, that is organized by intelligence, that is described by language (and) that is enriched by tradition. It is an enormous world beyond the comprehension of the nursery. But is also an insecure world, for besides fact there is fiction, besides truth there is error, beside science there is myth, besides honesty there is deceit” (241). The move form one world to the next is a life changing experience much likened to the move of Plato’s prisoners, in the Allegory of the Cave, from the cave composed of dark images to the universe of light. The change is virtually the beginning of a new life for the subject. It alters the self-conscious and opens it to a whole new world of meaning.
This is a matter of dispute for the difference between the world of immediacy and the world mediated by meaning is a source of critical problems for philosophers. The world mediated by meaning is for the naive realist just an idea. For the idealist is the only world we know intelligently and rationally, and it is not real but it is ideal. For the critical realest it is the world we know intelligently and rationally and it is not ideal but it is real. The world of immediacy is just a fragment of the real world. All adults know what consciousness is in the first sense of knowledge, that knowledge is exactly the same as experience. The problem is the second, that knowledge is not just experience but also understanding and judgment. The problem is to try to understand and judge what one has experienced. Internal experience is not just of sensible experience. We also have experience of our own understanding and judgment. So we have the huge problem of how we can try to understand and judge our own presence to ourselves (Galan).
Now as our children move on into an even larger world and reach say their teen years they will begin to enter into the world constituted by meaning. "When we speak of meaning as constitutive," says Fr. Lonergan, "we do not mean that meaning is the sole constituent, but that it is a constituent. It is something without which that reality does not exist" (184). This is a world created from our ability to communicate meanings to each other. An object exists here because the meaning exists and outside of these meanings they cease to exist. We as a society give them their meanings, as Dr S.I. Hayakawa pointed out in his imagines of a primitive village, without a shared meaning we could not understand what one another were trying to say and thus could not make anything exist in this world. Legal, political, economical, theoretical realities are all types of realities that exist in the world constituted of meaning. The best example of the world constituted of meaning is money. Money exists because we allow it to. We say that a one dollar bill is worth one dollar and for it to be true you and I have to agree upon this. If you and I do not agree that a one dollar bill means one dollar, the one dollar bill would be nothing more than paper and ink, the medium that carried the meaning with it.
We all live out our lives within the boundaries of the three worlds. The worlds cross each other and coexist with each other. While we are moving in one we can easily slip into and out of one of the other. The world of immediacy becomes a part of our world mediated by meaning and the world constituted of meaning is always at hand. "For without the compassionate teaching of the other, the self would never enter into the world of meaning, but would instead be left in the world of immediacy and shadows."
Works Cited:
1)Bernard J.F. Lonergan Philosophical Positions with Regard to
Knowing “Collected works of Bernard Lonergan” Volume 6 pp 214-43
2)Bernard J.F. Lonergan The Subject “A Second Collection” p. 79
3)Bernard J.F. Lonergan The Origins of Christian Realism in “A Second Collection” pp. 239-61.
4)Ariane Weisel, University of Chicago web site; uchicago.edu
5)Richard McBrien, Catholicism, Boston College
6)Bernard J.F. Lonergan The Origins of Christian Realism in “A Second Collection” p. 241
7)Francisco Galan, The Nature of Consciousness In A Philosophical Perspective
Bernard Lonergan The Analogy of Meaning in “Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan” Vol. 6 p184