Lonergan and the Fourth Level of Intentionality

by Terry J. Tekippe and Louis Roy, OP

In his later thought, as is well known, Lonergan made deep and significant
shifts in his approach to morality. More than in the earlier work, he
emphasizes feeling, value and the transcendence of doing over knowing. If in
the earlier work he embraces a basically Thomist schema of the relations
between knowing, choosing and feeling, in the later work he appeals to
Scheler and von Hildebrand for an intentional approach to feeling, values and
love.

Needless to say, such a momentous shift, presented in a relatively brief

compass, raises many questions of detail and synthesis for the student of
Lonergan's work. Many who have examined the topic sense loose ends here,
and the need for a systematic elaboration. But the project immediately runs
into difficulties. Does one abide by the earlier understandings, and correct
the later if they diverge? Is it better to adopt the later insights, and use them
to correct the earlier, as Lonergan himself is obviously doing? If that choice is
made, however, one faces another question: Is the epistemology of von
Hildebrand and Scheler phenomenological, intuitionist and ultimately
empiricist? If so, this counter-position must be reversed. With what
adjustments to their theory of feelings, choice and love?

The following is one attempt to construct a systematic and coherent account

of all the elements involved in the shift to value and responsibility in the later
Lonergan. It attempts, even when it becomes critical, to discern Lonergan's
deeper intentions, and put forward that interpretation of his thought which
can best be defended in the long run. No doubt, the account will not
recommend itself to everyone. May one hope, at least, that it will sharpen the
question for future discussions? The project will proceed in six steps. The first
will be to present Lonergan's position on decision and feelings in his early
work, notably Insight. The second will comment on the same area in the later
work, especially in Method in Theology. After these more exegetical efforts,
the positive construction will begin in the third step, which assembles the
activities associated with the fourth level. The fourth step is to divide these
into cognitional and decisional elements. Step five, the longest section, takes
up the place of feeling in the resulting structure of intentionality. The sixth
step, finally, is to make some comments on decision.

I. The Position of Insight

Though there is not necessarily any great disagreement among Lonergan
scholars as to the role of decision and feelings in Lonergan's early work, it is
nevertheless necessary to lay a foundation by exposing that in some detail.
In his massive work Insight, as well as in the subsequent Understanding and
Being, Lonergan presents the following understanding of ethics. As stated
most clearly in Chapter 18 of Insight, it is constituted by an extension of
knowing into doing.

The criterion of morality, then, is fidelity to knowing: one's action is to be in

accordance with one's knowledge of reality. As Lonergan puts it, "Man is not
only a knower but also a doer; the same intelligent and rational
consciousness grounds the doing as well as the knowing; and from that
identity of consciousness there springs inevitably an exigence for self-
consistency in knowing and doing." (622 [599]). This approach is clearly
cognate with that of Thomas, where the criterion of morality often appealed
to is "right reason."

If this position may be diagrammed, given Lonergan's development of

experience, insight and judgment in Chapters 1-17 of Insight, it may be
represented as follows:

Knowing Extension: Doing

Judgment Criterion of Decision
Insight Self-Consistency
Experience

How do feelings fit into this account? One must admit they do not come in for
a great deal of attention in Insight; indeed, the Index accords the subject but
a single reference. In fact, they are mentioned occasionally, but often in a
negative context. Feelings appear to exist on the first level of experience; in
speaking of "elementary experience," Lonergan mentions "... the imaginative,
conative, emotive consequences of sensible presentations." (207 [184]).
Again,

"Conation, emotion and bodily movements are a response to stimulus; but

the stimulus is ever against the response; it is a presentation through sense
and meaning and imagination of what is responded to, of what is to be dealt
with. The stimulating elements are the elementary object; the responding
elements are the elementary subject." (184; see also 185 [207; see also
208]).

In discussing Freud's work he speaks of the "... apprehension through insights

into images that are affectively charged..." (219 [196]). Moral feeling may be
disciplined by critical reflection; but in the child and the primitive these are
not yet distinguished, so that moral feeling expands beyond its reasonable
bounds (223 [199]). That feelings are psychic events with a biological basis is
particularly clear when Lonergan's discussion of species as explanatory
comes to man. "Seeing and hearing, tasting and smelling, imagining and
feeling, are events with a corresponding neural basis..." (292 [266]).

The pure desire to know attains objectivity, not painlessly, but in a struggle
with other "impure" desires and fears. "The seed of intellectual curiosity has
to grow into a rugged tree to hold its own against the desires and fears,
conations and appetites, drives and interests, that inhabit the heart of man."
(310 [285]). In treating the law of integration, Lonergan notes that the
impulse for development may come from any level: organic, psychic,
intellectual. Of the psychic he has this to say:

"Again, the initiative may be psychic, for man's sensitivity not only reflects
and integrates its biological basis but also is itself an entity, a value, a living
and developing. Intersubjectivity, companionship, play and artistry, the idle
hours spent with those with whom one feels at home, the common purpose,
labour, achievement, failure, disaster, the sharing of feeling in laughter and
lamenting, all are human things and in them man functions primarily in
accord with the development of his perceptiveness, his emotional responses,
his sentiments." (496 [471]).

This more positive, almost idyllic, presentation of feeling, however, is

qualified as soon as development is envisioned. Then present feeling may
stand in the way of future vocation. Now the tension that is inherent in the
finality of all proportionate being becomes in man a conscious tension.
Present perceptiveness is to be enlarged, and the enlargement is not
perceptible to present perceptiveness. Present desires and fears have to be
transmuted and the transmutation is not desirable to present desire but
fearful to present fear. (497 [473]). Indeed, within the universe of being the
individual retracts, painfully, to but a point.

Intellectual development rests upon the dominance of a detached and

disinterested desire to know. It reveals to a man a universe of being, in which
he is but an item, and a universal order, in which his desires and fears, his
delight and anguish, are but infinitesimal components in the history of
mankind.... For the self, as perceiving and feeling, as enjoying and suffering,
functions as an animal in an environment... (498 [473]).

The subordinate place of feeling in morality emerges with unmistakable

clarity in the following passage:

... while we grant that moral self-consciousness has a concomitant in moral

emotions and moral sentiments, and while we agree that these emotions and
sentiments have a psychoneural basis and are subject to psychoneural
aberration, we contend that it is a blunder to confuse these concomitants
with moral self-consciousness itself. (624 [600]).
Undeniably, the morality that results from this vision is highly idealistic, but
quite austere. "Accordingly, it will not be amiss to assert emphatically that
the identification of being and the good by-passes human feelings and
sentiments to take its stand exclusively upon intelligible order and rational
value."

II. Feeling in the Later Lonergan

Having examined Lonergan's position on decision and feelings in his early

work, it is now necessary to examine his quite different treatment of the
same subjects in the "fourth level" emphasized in the later work.

To enter into the thought-world of Method in Theology, where feeling has an

altogether different role and valence, where it appears to inhabit the fourth
level, and so in some way to transcend mere human knowing, can be almost
bewildering. Frederick Crowe has catalogued minutely this shift. It may be
well to pause here for a moment to ask, Why does Lonergan appeal at this
point to Scheler and especially von Hildebrand for his approach to feelings,
value, moral deliberation and moral development?

Probably it is impossible to specify all the reasons why a thinker like

Lonergan adjusts his position; still, one may speculate. It may be that
Lonergan simply recognized that feeling played too small a role in Insight; so
in Method he affirms, "Without these feelings our knowing and desiring would
be paper thin." (30-31). But undoubtedly a key role in the shift was his
growing awareness of the move from faculty psychology to intentionality
analysis. As he revealed to Philip McShane in 1971, "There is a spreading out,
moving on, including more. Like recently what I've got a hold of is the fact
that I've dropped faculty psychology and I'm doing intentionality analysis."
(Second Collection, 222-23). Looked at in the sober light of this realization,
Chapter 18 of Insight is an uneasy amalgam of faculty psychology,
metaphysics and intentionality analysis. There is an appeal to an experience
of freedom; but the basic category is the good, with the chapter aiming at "a
cosmic or ontological account of the good." (618 [595]). Further, the subject
is treated in terms of will, "intellectual or spiritual appetite." (621 [598]).

Lonergan had long realized that his key contribution to Scholastic studies was
to reverse the priority of metaphysics and epistemology. If one began with
cognitional analysis, then one might arrive systematically at a critical
metaphysics. If this was his basic insight, then it must be implemented
consistently. In any and every field the basic terms and relations must be
those of interior experience; from those, in each case, the consequent
metaphysical categories will be carefully distinguished. So Lonergan realized
he must abandon the revolution half carried through in Chapter 18, and
develop an ethics based solely on the introspective evidence.

To this end, von Hildebrand must have seemed a godsend. His approach was
altogether phenomenological, based on the observation of the actual
experience of desiring, valuing and loving. Further, he insisted strongly on
the distinction between satisfaction and value, which dove-tailed perfectly
with the distinction Lonergan had made in Chapter 18 between the empirical
good and the rational good, which he already then termed "value." Add to
this the fact that von Hildebrand came from a Christian, indeed Catholic,
thought-world, and had much sympathy with Thomas Aquinas, and the fit
appeared perfect.

III. The Fourth Level

The proposal of a viable interpretation of Lonergan's thought on the fourth

level of consciousness must begin by asking what intentional processes
parallel the structure of experience-insight- judgment which emerge so
clearly in Lonergan's earlier analysis of cognition.

What, then, are the activities of the fourth level? They are not as clearly
identified as the experience, insight and judgment of the earlier analysis.
Method speaks of "deliberation, evaluation, decision, action." (35). In the
interview with Philip McShane already mentioned Lonergan speaks of "the
apprehension of value, the question of deliberation, the judgment of value,
decision and action." (221, 223). When he develops the subject more
carefully in Method he distinguishes an apprehension of value and a
judgment of value. (37). Elsewhere in the interview he speaks of "heart,"
which is beyond mind, on the level of feeling, involving the question "Is this
worthwhile?"; the judgment of value, and the decision." (220-21).

Perhaps a representative scheme might be the following, reading from the

bottom up:

Action
Decision
Judgment of Value
Question for Deliberation
Apprehension of Value

If this is accurate, it raises a host of questions and objections. First, it seems

strange in the light of Lonergan's early work that no insight of value occurs
here. Insight is absolutely central to his earlier analysis of knowing. How can
it suddenly be absent? Or is perhaps the apprehension of value really an
insight? If so, why is it followed rather than preceded by the question for
deliberation? Or should we distinguish a reflective and a direct question for
deliberation, where the second is not explicitly mentioned? Or do we have a
whole new type of knowing here which functions without an insight? von
Hildebrand's language is actually "perception of value," and it is clear this is
an intuition.

Could Lonergan possibly be agreeing that in the field of value "knowing is

looking" after all? If we are speaking of a whole new kind of knowing, who has
done the cognitional analysis comparable to Insight? Lonergan? von
Hildebrand? Scheler? Pascal? Or does it still await doing? In Insight Lonergan
makes a great point that the structure experience-insight-judgment is
unrevisable. But here he adds a fourth level of knowing, which does appear to
be a revision, after all. Or is the earlier statement to be read that none of the
elements experience-insight-judgment can be denied - but they may be
added to?

Supposing that is correct, and the new schema is experience, insight,

judgment, knowing of value; does this require an additional metaphysical
element? Recall that, by the isomorphism of knowing, the structure of
experience, insight and judgment led to that of potency, form and existence.
Does the addition of a further element of knowing not require also a fourth
metaphysical element: potency, form, existence, value?

Such a radical revision of Lonergan's basic approach does not appear

attractive, unless absolutely necessary. The following account will attempt a
less radical reconstruction, one more continuous with the earlier Lonergan,
by treating in turn cognitional and decisional elements, the role of feeling,
and the decision.

IV. Cognitional and Decisional Elements

In attempting to resolve the perplexities and ambiguities just noted, it is

necessary to begin with an intentional discrimination between those activities
which have to do with knowing, and those which have to do with desiring and
loving. A first point to note is that the fourth level, as schematized above,
includes both cognitional and decisional elements. That tends to reduplicate
on the fourth level functions already present on the first three. The proposal
here is that the fourth level be restricted to the decisional elements, with
cognitional elements accounted for by the first three levels. It may be noted
that when Lonergan speaks in shorthand, the four levels are referred to as
experience, understanding, judgment and decision; the fourth level is also
often called that of responsibility; all of which implies that decision is at least
the most important activity on the fourth level.

Lonergan is, of course, saying that the knowing of value is not simply the
same as the knowing of fact. But here one may make an analogy with the
knowings of common sense and science. They are not the same; in Insight
Lonergan goes to some length to enumerate their differences (198ff [175ff]);
yet they do not require a different structure of knowing.

Common Sense Knowing Scientific Knowing

Judgment Judgment (Crucial experiment)
Insight Insight (Hypothesis)
Experience Experience (Data-gathering)

Is there any reason why moral knowing should require a whole new structure
of knowing? Following up this suggestion, one gets the following structure:

Knowing Facts Knowing Value

Decision-Action
Judgment Judgment of Value
Insight Insight
Experience Experience

The judgment of value, then, is placed on the third level, that of judgment.
That appears defensible, especially when Lonergan explicitly indicates the
parallel: "Judgments of value differ in content but not in structure from
judgments of fact." (Method, 37). A judgment of value, however, clearly
presupposes an insight of value. For judgment adds merely a "Yes" or "No";
without a prior insight, there is nothing to affirm or deny. Again, insight is
always into phantasm; here, too, then, there must be a level of presentations,
or an experience of value. This gives the following structure:

Knowing of Fact Knowing of Value

Decision-Action
Judgment Judgment of Value
Insight Insight of Value
Experience Experience of Value

The next question is, Where does the apprehension of value fit in? In
Lonergan's presentation, it always precedes the judgment of value. Is it the
insight of value? Or the experience of value?

There may be some reason to identify it with insight. In Insight, Lonergan

speaks of the "... apprehension through insights into meanings that are
affectively charged..." (219 [196]). But the arguments against this appear
stronger. One text seems to dissociate the apprehension very clearly from
intelligence. "Now the apprehension of values and disvalues is the task not of
understanding but of intentional response." (Method, 245). One might make a
further argument. The intentional response is a feeling (30). But feelings are
basically spontaneous (32).
Insights, however, are not spontaneous; they are intelligently sought by
inquiry; they must, at least often, be deliberately sought by a heuristic
procedure. Therefore the apprehension of value should not be identified with
the insight of value. The following schema results:

Knowing of Facts Knowing of Values

Decision-Action
Judgment Judgment of Value
Insight Insight of Value
Experience Apprehension of Value

To put this in another way, knowing and deciding on value requires that the
knowing structure be gone through at least twice: first for a knowledge of fact
or information, secondly for a more specific knowledge of a value which is
"actionable," or a good-to- be-done. Lonergan appears to have something
similar in mind:

In both, the criterion is the self-transcendence of the subject, which, however,

is only cognitive in judgments of fact but is heading towards moral self-
transcendence in judgments of value. In both, the meaning is or claims to be
independent of the subject: judgments of fact state or purport to state what
is or is not so; judgments of value state or purport to state what is or is not
truly good or really better. (37).

Again,

"In the judgment of value, then, three components unite. First, there is
knowledge of reality and especially of human reality. Secondly, there are
intentional responses to values. Thirdly, there is the initial thrust towards
moral self-transcendence constituted by the judgment of value itself. The
judgment of value presupposes knowledge of human life, of human
possibilities proximate and remote, of the probable consequences of
projected courses of action." (38).

The advantage of this double sequence is that moral knowing can be quite
different from factual knowing - much as scientific knowing is quite distinct
from common sense knowing - and yet one does not have to formulate some
new kind of knowing not envisioned in Insight, with the consequent
requirement of a revision of the basic triadic structure of experience, insight
and judgment.

Further, cognitional elements are kept to the first three levels, and decisional
to the fourth level, which offers a satisfying consistency. After all, the
distinction of knowing and deciding is very important. As Lonergan says,
"True judgments of value go beyond merely intentional self-transcendence
without reaching the fulness of moral self-transcendence. That fulness is not
merely knowing but also doing, and man can know what is right without
doing it." (37). Indeed, not adequately to distinguish the decisional from the
cognitional elements is to fall into the Platonic error that to know the right is
perforce to do it, so that moral evil is always but ignorance. Aristotle, Thomas
and Lonergan insist that a further step is needed; one may know very well
what should be done, and yet fail to perform.

This does have one implication, however, for the operator that moves the
subject from the third to the fourth level. That can no longer be the question
for deliberation, because the question is a cognitional element, and so not
found on the fourth level. The operator must be the pure desire for value, as
specified in the desire for this particular doable good. An analogy obtains: as
the pure desire to know, specified in a particular question for intelligence,
leads to an insight; as the pure desire to know, specified in a particular
question for reflection, leads to a judgment; so the pure desire for value,
specified in a particular desire for this doable good, leads to a decision. That
decision, of course, is neither blind nor arbitrary, because it is grounded in
the experience of this particular good, the insight into this particular value,
and the judgment affirming this particular value; and yet the prior knowing
does not determine the posterior decision, precisely because this particular
value in no way exhausts the pure desire for value, which always goes
beyond and transcends any particular, concrete value.

V. The Place and Role of Feelings

One obvious lack in the intentional structure as proposed to this point is that
it has not mentioned feelings, which become so important in Lonergan's later
work. The next step, consequently, is to seek to integrate them. Can the
structure offered accommodate feeling? The initial answer is easy.
"Apprehension of value" has been placed on the first level, according to the
argument developed above. But Lonergan identifies feeling with
apprehension of value. Therefore feeling must be located on the first level of
intentionality. For Lonergan says: "Such apprehensions are given in feelings."
So apprehension of value either is a feeling, or is found in feeling.

The result is that feeling falls on the first level. An additional advantage of
what has been done so far, then, is that feeling can be constituted on the
first, or psychic, level, with a neural basis on the biological level - which
dovetails perfectly with the position on feelings in Lonergan's earlier work.

Even in Method, however, there are hints that cohere with such an
understanding. As seen already, feelings are basically spontaneous - that
would be fulfilled perfectly by psychic spontaneities. But Lonergan goes on:
"They do not lie under the command of decision as do the motions of our
hands. But, once they have arisen, they may be reinforced by advertence and
approval, and they may be curtailed by disapproval and distraction." (32). If
feelings, as sensitive spontaneities, are not directly under the control of
desire, nevertheless they are indirectly; and so the level of decision must be
higher than the level of feeling. Further, the text has already been noted:
"Without these feelings our knowing and deciding would be paper thin." (30-
31).

This appears to distinguish feelings from both knowing and deciding. If fully
human knowing is placed on the second and third levels, and decision on the
fourth, then feeling is again appropriately located on the first level. Personal
relations, Lonergan points out, are the result of commitments freely
undertaken. "These relationships are normally alive with feeling." (50). Note
first that commitments (decisions) are the cause of relations, while feelings
are the accompaniment.

Intersubjectivity is vital, functional, spontaneous (57); but it is on the first

level. But note that it is here coordinated with feeling. Note also that instinct
and feeling are associated (59). Image and feeling are associated (66, 67);
that fits in with the coordination of the two. Feelings and symbols play a role
in "organic and psychic vitality." (ibid.) That would point to the level of
experience, not that of decision. Lonergan adds that a nucleus of insights is
colored by desires, hopes, fears, joys, sorrows (72). That would cohere nicely
with the idea that feelings can accompany insights. Again, the meaning of the
symbol is potential (a category not found in Insight) (74). It is not formal or
full meaning, much less effective or active meaning. But the symbol is
associated with feeling; whereas effective meaning has to do with decision
and action. Therefore feeling is not decision, and it occurs on the first level,
not the fourth.

Still, this may appear insufficient. Does not Lonergan explicitly place feelings
on the fourth level? More generally, is the later, more generous attention to
feeling sufficiently represented when they are restricted, as in the earlier
work, to the first or psychic level?

This objection is a valid one, and may be met with a distinction: feelings are
constituted on the first level, but may be present on all four levels. An
analogy may be made here with image or phantasm. The image is basically a
psychic reality. To confuse the level of presentations with knowing itself is to
equate knowing with looking, and incur intellectual unconversion.
Nevertheless, it is good Thomist and Lonerganian doctrine that insight is
always into phantasm; absent the phantasm, then, the insight cannot occur.
So we may say that the phantasm is present on the level of insight, though it
is actually constituted on the level of the psychic.
Similarly, the judgment regards the insight; and if the insight is inseparable
from the phantasm, then the phantasm must also be present on the level of
judgment. This may be represented as follows:

Judgment (phantasm)
Insight (phantasm)
Level of Presentation, 3D Phantasm

In a similar way, feelings are properly constituted, as psychic spontaneities,

on the first level; but they may be present on the higher levels. Just as the
intellect far outstrips the imagination, so spiritual desire far surpasses feeling;
yet, just as insight in the enfleshed creature remains ever tethered to the
phantasm, so spiritual desire in the human being is never completely
dissociated from feeling.

Knowing of Fact Knowing of Value

Decision-Action (feeling)
Judgment (Phantasm) Judgment of Value (feeling)
Insight (Phantasm) Insight of Value (feeling)
Experience: Phantasm Apprehension of Value: Feeling

The analogy between phantasm and feeling may be pursued further. The
phantasm is not a dead or unimaginative reality. In the dynamic search for
insight, it comes under the influence of intelligence, and strains, on its own
psychic level, to approximate to the insight sought. There must always be a
phantasm; but sometimes that phantasm can become very ethereal in
abstract or recondite thought, the mere wisp of an image of a symbolic
operation, for example.

Under the guidance of the pure desire for value, similarly feelings, while
remaining on the psychic level, can become highly, even exquisitely, refined;
so that one is tempted to speak, in an accommodated sense, of "spiritual
feelings." The attentive reader may have noted that in the last diagram
feeling accompanied the insight of value, the judgment of value, and the
decision of value, but not the insight or judgment of factual knowing. This is
not to deny that strong feelings may accompany even informational insights
and judgments. Nevertheless, the diagram does serve to underline that
feelings are particularly appropriate to moral knowing, decision and action.
One may begin with the level of experience, the apprehension of value. It
comprises the images of the good-to-be-done, as well as the pleasure and the
scars remembered from past moral efforts; it includes the feelings of the
irascible and concupiscible sense appetites, as well as the demands and the
yearnings of the sense appetites, and the habituations of the sensibility that
constitute the psychic residue of the recurrences of the habits of virtue and
vice. Further, insofar as man is a composite of body and soul, these very
sense desires are imbued with a yearning and an openness that is absent in
animals, and they can function as symbols and tokens of fully spiritual
desires: so, in the Song of Songs, the allure and the insistence of the sexual
instinct is used to evoke the yearning for God, and the tender love between
God and the soul, God and his people.

The level of presentations is followed by the insight of value; nor is this

insight devoid of feeling. For, again, it is an insight into the good-for-us, which
grasps synthetically the good to be done, the world in which it is to be
posited, the self who is to do it, the ripples in the world that are likely to
result from that action, and, perhaps more obscurely, the transcended or
diminished self that will result from that decision and action.

Those feelings can be beneficent as, arising naturally or through cultivation,

they drive us on to conversion; or they may be maleficent, opposing the
appropriate insight, as Lonergan has catalogued so well in Insight: "The seed
of intellectual curiosity has to grow into a rugged tree to hold its own against
the desires and fears, conations and appetites, drives and interests, that
inhabit the heart of man." (310 [285]).

But insight always requires the validation of judgment, in this case the
judgment of value. Again, such judgment is alive with feeling, because we are
not knowing some abstract good, but a good-for-us, a good-to-be-done-by-us.
Toward such a good we are never indifferent; our welfare, our very becoming,
is too much involved. Sometimes the feeling is longing and attraction;
sometimes dread; often a mixture of the two. One sees it in Augustine: before
his decision, he is already facing the implications of the choice to be made.
He has a vision of voluptuous nymphs, tugging at the hem of his robe,
feeling, even as he strides resolutely away from them, a pang of regret:
"never again?... really, never, never again?" But, in the moral sphere,
knowing is incomplete without doing.

In a decision we commit ourselves existentially. Every such decision involves

some good we pursue; but it also, though usually less centrally, involves what
we ourselves are becoming. But such existential decisions cannot but be
immersed in feelings. They drive us to the point of decision; they accompany
and guide the decision; and in turn they can be evoked by the decision, as we
face in delight or dismay the good (or apparent good) we have settled upon.
Without feelings, decisions would be made in a "passionless calm," the
"unruffled sequence of symbolic notations and schematic images" Lonergan
attributes to the mathematician (209 [186]). For without feeling, as Lonergan
also observes, our knowing and deciding would be paper thin. One has only
to read Augustine's account of the moment of his conversion to see the role
feelings play in decision: the mounting frustration beforehand, the sudden
urge to be alone, the resulting cascade of tears. Though feelings are
constituted on the psychic level, then, they nevertheless are deeply related
to all the levels of moral knowing and deciding - this is a valid insight of the
later Lonergan.

An interpreter's dilemma emerges with Lonergan's discussion of love. Is love

a feeling, or a decision? Is it to be properly placed on the first level, or the
fourth? The evidence in Lonergan's work appears ambiguous. It is in a section
entitled "Feelings" that he comes to speak of love. "But there are in full
consciousness feelings so deep and strong, especially when deliberately
reinforced, that they channel attention, shape one's horizon, direct one's life.
Here the supreme illustration is loving." (Method, 32). The most natural
interpretation of this passage is that loving is the supreme example of
feeling, or of deep and strong feelings. Still, Lonergan does not say in so
many words that love is a feeling; this is only being inferred from the text.
Further, when the text is examined closely, it does not speak of feelings
alone, but of feelings as deliberately reinforced. Is love then the feeling? The
deliberate reinforcement? The feelings as deliberately reinforced? Or the two
on an equal basis? The text would seem patient, at least, of the interpretation
that the supreme example of deep and strong feelings are the feelings found
in loving.

How to decide? It may be helpful to list the logical alternatives, and consider
each in turn: a) love is a feeling which has nothing to do with decision; b) love
is a feeling which is, by identity, a decision; c) love is composed of equal
parts decision and feeling; and d) love is basically a decision, accompanied
by deep feelings.

The first alternative would appear to be ruled out because decision is the act
of responsibility; if love is separated from decision, then it would be
irresponsible; whereas, for Lonergan, the self-transcendence of love is the
height of responsibility.

Further, if feelings are separated from decision, then how can they be
deliberately reinforced? The same difficulty applies to the second alternative.
If feeling is identical with decision, then feeling deliberately reinforced would
be decision deliberately reinforcing itself. If that is not absolutely
inconceivable, it does lend a strange and forced reading to the phrase.

Could love be feeling plus decision? This is getting closer to the mark.
Nevertheless, it does not appear wholly satisfactory. If the foregoing analysis
is correct - or if Thomas and the earlier Lonergan are correct - then feeling is
constituted on the psychic level, and decision on the fully spiritual level. To
put the two on an equal footing is to over-value the psychic, and to risk
falling again into intellectual or moral unconversion. This understanding,
further, is in tension with common wisdom and the mystical tradition. A
young couple is often warned that their honeymoon feelings for each other
will not last forever; that there may even be times when their feelings of love
disappear.

This does not mean, however, that love is at an end; for love is a decision, a
commitment, and is not based on anything as relatively transient as feeling.

Again, in spiritual direction dirges are often counselled not to place too much
stock in feeling. Strong feelings are typical of the early stages of conversion
and commitment. But they may soon wane. God may even be testing and
purifying a person, to make sure that person is in love with God, and not the
feelings of devotion. Often it is when the person feels most dry and desolate
that God is working most deeply within a person to purify his or her love. It
remains, then, that the last option is the preferable one.

Love - at least as it passes beyond mere lust, adolescent infatuation, or being

in love with the feelings of love themselves - is basically a decision, which is
typically (though not necessarily) accompanied by deep and strong feelings.
As can be seen, this coheres well with the diagram already offered.

Knowing of Fact Knowing of Value

Decision-Action (feeling)
Judgment Judgment of Value (feeling)
Insight Insight of Value (feeling)
Experience Feeling: Apprehension of Value

VI. The Decision

Up to now, minimal attention has been given to the decision itself. A first
need is to distinguish the "decision" and "action" that Lonergan lists. Decision
is an "inner" event; action is usually an "outer" event, though it may also be
inner - I decide to think about something. Decision and action may be almost
coincident in time, as when a person "suits the action to the word," acting
immediately on a proposal. But at other times, decision may precede action,
either because the action itself is a series of operations spread out in time, or
because the action is delayed - I decide now to take a vacation next January.
But decision itself deserves fuller consideration. To this point, the analysis
has been rather static. Even going through the structure of knowing twice,
the presentation envisions decision as an immediate, once-for-all act. This
may hold for what is called a "snap decision" - as in the "impulse buying"
supermarket advertisers try to foster. But in any larger decision - and
especially in a conversion - that act of decision is spread out over time, and
achieved incrementally. An eventual decision, for example, may begin in an
attraction or an allurement. "The woman saw that the tree was good for food,
pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom," Genesis says of Eve.
Already here is a judgment of value, and an incipient decision. At times that
attraction goes no further - an act of the will called a "velleity." At times the
attractions and repulsions of an action can seem almost equally balanced. To
refer again to Augustine's richly psychological account, he saw the chaste
vision of purity beckoning him forward, even while his past mistresses
plucked urgently at the back of his robe. Decisions can also wax and wane, as
any dieter can testify: for a while one "gathers one's intent" and embraces a
proposal firmly; but later temptation, discouragement or distraction will
weaken one's resolve. As Lonergan says, conversion is "authenticity as a
withdrawal from inauthenticity, and the withdrawal is never complete and
always precarious" (Method, 284).

Lonergan often paralleled a metaphysical and a psychological analysis; that

leads to a further suggestion. Thomas Aquinas distinguished actual and
sanctifying grace. The one is a more momentary assistance to the will, the
other the agent of an habitual change in the will. Translated into
psychological terms, that would reinforce the sequence of a series of
decisional acts, with only the last constituting a full-fledged decision. As a
series of actual graces may lead to habitual justification, so a sequence of
incipient and partial decisions may pave the way for a final and transforming
decision.

VII. Conclusion

The path that has been traversed in the proposed reconstruction may be
traced with greater discernment. The first move was to note the parallel
between the judgment of fact and the judgment of value, and to coordinate
them on the third level of knowing. This move is now seen to be the key:
once it is accomplished, almost everything falls naturally into place.

Immediately cognitional elements can be removed from the fourth level,

which is more coherently limited to responsible decision. The insight of value
then finds its proper place. "Feelings," as "apprehensions of value" lock into
position on the first level, cohering with Lonergan's earlier, and the Thomist
position; but, by the analogy of phantasm, they are seen to be present on the
second, third and fourth levels, satisfying the larger and more positive role of
feelings in Lonergan's later thought.

The integration of Lonergan's earlier and later work on feelings and moral
knowing involves difficult choices. Others will no doubt desire to combine the
elements in other ways, or with a differing emphasis. This attempt has aimed
at the maximum coherence with Lonergan's early commitment to a Thomist
analysis of knowing, while still being open to Lonergan's later discoveries and
the fruits of a phenomenological analysis of feelings and decisions.
Tekippe, Terry, J. and Louis Roy. Lonergan and the Fourth Level of
Intentionality in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70 (1996) 225-42.
22 May 1997.