I. The Role of Understanding in Lonergan and Ricœur

In this section I shall refer first to understanding as preunderstanding and then to understanding in the form of cognitional operations. In developing these remarks, I shall refer first to Lonergan and then to Ricœur.

Those who are familiar with Lonergan's work understand that the focus of his reflections on understanding consists mainly of an invitation to us, his readers, to catch ourselves in acts of understanding. This is not a simple thing to do. Lonergan's Insight consists of 770 pages that invite us to objectify our being present to ourselves in the acts of understanding and, in so doing, to resolve basic issues in epistemology and metaphysics. This involves, among other elements, a subtly executed reflexive moment in which we begin to objectify for ourselves cognitional operations: experience, understanding, and judgment. That we employ these operations can be empirically confirmed. That is, in any act of understanding we can discern how we actually employ this structured pattern of interrelated operations, not in their isolation, but in their recurrent and interrelated operative pattern. It objectifies what we do when we come to affirm something: “I've got it!” The key, then, is to catch ourselves in the act of understanding.

The first five chapters of Insight drew on developments in modern science in order to elaborate how, throughout the acts of inquiry that define modern science, these operations are actually employed. In his first chapter of Method in Theology, Lonergan tells us why the outline of this pattern of cognitional operations is so important: it provides the empirical basis and data upon which one identifies method and delineates an epistemology. Based on an understanding of these operations, we can then explain why we call knowing knowing. In order to elaborate, Lonergan fleshed out three questions: “What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it?”Footnote ¹¹ The epistemological issues over which we have carried on debates for three hundred years are a function of cognitional operations in act. Epistemology is a second-level question, one that reflects on data. The data arises in response to the first question, namely, “What am I doing when I am knowing?” The answer to this is, “I am executing the recurrent schemes of operations of experience, understanding, and judgment.” We know that these first two questions are followed by a third question, “What do I know when I do it?” With this question, the question of metaphysics arises for Lonergan, namely, “What is affirmed as known?” or “What exists?” Lonergan maintained, however, given our understanding of understanding in act, that metaphysics, as a critical and methodical discipline, is derived.Footnote ¹² It is based on a prior set of questions: “What am I doing when I know? Why is that knowing?”

Now, why is the first question—namely, “What are you doing when you are knowing?”—a prior foundation for identifying what invites us together in a conversation? The answer is that each one of us does it; whatever act of understanding we are involved in, each of us employs these operations and their pattern. It becomes a powerful tool, then, not only for assessing how and when understanding is at work, but also for resolving conflicts in understanding. For Lonergan, conflicts that arise with regard to what we affirm can oftentimes be traced back to how we attend to data, assemble the data in some form of intelligible explanation, and make a judgment that relates the intelligible explanatory form back to the data, such that a new unity is seen in the data that enriches our understanding of reality.Footnote ¹³

My remarks to this point are simply a summary reminder of a strategy critical in Lonergan's approach to understanding. Given a familiarity with this breakthrough in Lonergan, we discover that he was not alone in identifying such a strategy through “the conflict of interpretations” that plague human discourse and encounters. I use the phrase “conflict of interpretations” purposely. It is the title of a book that gathers together a series of Paul Ricœur's hermeneutical essays.Footnote ¹⁴ In the programmatic essay “Existence and Hermeneutics,” Ricœur stated that “the unity of human speech is the problem today.”Footnote ¹⁵ Especially if there is an ethical aim and desire, how do we “discover a common ground upon which men [and women] of intelligence might meet” (in Lonergan's words),Footnote ¹⁶ or aim “at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions” (in Ricœur's terms)?Footnote ¹⁷

Though preoccupied at first with an entirely different question from Lonergan's, Ricœur formulated an approach to understanding and an assessment of its importance that were remarkably parallel to Lonergan's first three cognitional operations, an approach and an assessment that themselves identified the role of “cognitive operations,”Footnote ¹⁸ but now operations specific to a mode of action.

Throughout his philosophical career, Ricœur struggled with a basic question, namely, “Are we really free?” Is human initiative really possible? He continued to work at elaborating a philosophical anthropology.Footnote ¹⁹ The course of his investigations would lead him to reflect upon the world of human language itself and how we use a variety of linguistic strategies in order to say something about our own self-understanding as agents. He recognized that, prior to their developing a refined theoretical discourse, human cultures used symbols in order to express meaning. Symbols have a way of conveying, albeit indirectly, an interpretation of our sense of self and of our relationship to the world we inhabit.

But how does one get at meaning by means of symbols? How does one interpret symbols? The problem became all the more acute when Ricœur realized that symbols are not just univocal. Symbols are complex, multiple, and of different kinds—they are polysemic. Different symbols express different patterns of relationships with our world, of our very sense and meaning of the world, and of how we see ourselves belonging to the world.Footnote ²⁰ More complex is the task of interpreting symbols of other times and cultures.

From his reflections on symbols, Ricœur's analyses extended to address more developed strategies of meaning. Symbols oftentimes consist of words. More complex again are sentences and texts, and then there is the organization of disciplines of learning. All these are linguistic phenomena. Ricœur pursued his analysis of meaning, freedom, and human action through such multivalent strategies of language because he felt that our use of language in its various forms and strategies reflects commitments on our part to forms of self-understanding, or to ways by which we craft for ourselves our own narrative identities and attest to horizons of meaning. If Lonergan found an empirical basis for understanding in our operations of understanding, Ricœur too sought an empirical basis for interpreting action in how we use language and its strategies in order to cultivate and create meaning. Each was led to identify cognitive operations at the basis of such acts of understanding and meaning.

Ricœur recognized, as did Lonergan, that the answer is not found by beginning with developing on its own a better theory of knowing, that is, by cultivating as a first step and directly a better epistemology. To begin there is to spin one's wheels for a long time. In his own reading of recent hermeneutical tradition, Ricœur emphasized that the tradition had overlooked the insight that epistemology comes second. Prior to questions that respond to “Why is doing that knowing?” or prior to the distinction between such terms as “subject” and “object,” there is the more fundamental experience of belonging to the world. In fact, the notions of subject and object that so often govern our interpretation of human reasoning actually emerge from a prior existential attentiveness to ourselves, an awareness of “the structure of being-in-the-world that is more fundamental than any relations of a subject to an object.”Footnote ²¹ But we do not have direct access to that experience. If it is prior, it is also mediated. As Lonergan had come to understand that there is a prior question to “Why is doing that knowing?” so too did Ricœur discover that prior to the assumption that there is an “I” in face of an “object” there is interpreted experience of a world to which I belong, a world that sustains and carries me along.Footnote ²² Such acts of interpretation, which have become modern social and historical disciplines, have in turn become data on behalf of elaborating “the general problematic of understanding.”Footnote ²³ That is why Ricœur, while adverting to this experience of belonging, does not begin there. He begins with how language, and its forms of expression, symbols, metaphors, and texts, give us access to that level of experience. But just as Lonergan's journey through his many works consisted of a meticulous elaboration of interiority, so too did Ricœur's route, leading toward the fields of meaning prior to conceptual acts, become the matter of an arduous journey, “the long route which begins by analyses of language.”Footnote ²⁴ As Lonergan invited us to attend to ourselves in acts of understanding, Ricœur invited us to attend to ourselves, to the resonances of a depth dimension of our belonging to existence, in our use of the diverse forms of language. Language and its operations are the empirical evidence of a desire to exist.

When one surveys Ricœur's work, especially as he developed a more refined understanding of praxis and human action, one notices how he identified a set of cognitive operations. These operations represented a basic scheme that continues to show itself in act through our efforts to objectify the relationship between our self-understanding and our participation in the world. In the first volume of Time and Narrative, he named these operations mimesis₁—mimesis₂—mimesis_3, or prefiguration—configuration—refiguration.Footnote ²⁵ These operations, in my judgment, are remarkably parallel to Lonergan's triptych of experience, understanding, and judgment. Prefiguration is a basic competence to recognize amid forms of movement the distinct character of action. When someone acts, I recognize that person's human action. Configuration refers to a way of making action intelligible. In a narrative, it is the predicative operation of a plot that integrates what people do and what happens in an ordered schema of action and allows us to follow a sequence of action, the story line. Refiguration represents an act of judgment. It summons our response as readers. Narratives as a work of meaning open up possibilities for action. They help us to imagine ourselves as capable selves in relation to the world. The story ends in a moment of judgment. It is closed when we attest to what is the good to be done. That is why Ricœur has maintained that the book is closed not when the last word is written but when it is picked up by a reader who enters into the world disclosed in the narrative act.Footnote ²⁶ But that act of appropriating the world is an act of judgment that takes the form of an attestation. It affirms something, a world that summons a self in the full integrity and authenticity of one's freedom.Footnote ²⁷

In short, similar to Lonergan and his outline of cognitional operations leading to a judgment of fact,Footnote ²⁸ Ricœur, given his abiding interest in the question of human freedom, has outlined a structured pattern of operations in the sphere of human action that leads to an affirmation of what is true, but true in the mode of attestation of authentic agency.Footnote ²⁹ Given the remarkable resources available in both thinkers, in order to address the encounter between theology and the world of science and technology, I propose that we read both together in a mutually enriching encounter.

My aim in the balance of this article is to flesh out these insights in the form of concrete illustrations. In order to develop my remarks on Lonergan, I shall use the example of science and theology; to develop my remarks on Ricœur, I shall refer to technology (as a mode of action) and theology.

Illustration I: Lonergan and the encounter between modern science and theology. This first illustration attempts to elaborate how an understanding of understanding-at-work can help to promote an encounter between modern science and theology.

Let us refer to two familiar but distinct discourses employed to refer to “beginnings.” The Judeo-Christian scriptures begin with a creation narrative: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .” (Gen 1:1). Modern science extends an interpretation of its data back 13.7 billion years and identifies a moment of singularity, the Big Bang.Footnote ³⁰ How do these two narratives speak to one another?

The difficulty arises when both disciplines, science and theology, assume that these narratives make a claim about the same kind of truth. How is a dialogue to be opened up? The initial answer is, “By means of theology.” As Lonergan has stated, theology mediates culture to religion.Footnote ³¹ This being said, theology does not encounter modern science directly; that encounter is itself a mediated one, and it is mediated by philosophy. The starting point for a dialogue between modern science and theology consists of finding common ground upon which an encounter may take place. To discover that common ground, I return to Lonergan's understanding of understanding. Both believers and scientists are engaged in a work of understanding.Footnote ³² This has immediate implications for the meaning of “common ground,” for once we shift our attention to the topic of understanding and our acts of understanding, then a third interlocutor comes to the conversation, namely, a philosophy that invites us to attend to ourselves in acts of understanding.Footnote ³³

This third partner invites us to do two things. First, philosophy invites us to be attentive to how the emergence of our own distinct discourses, especially in the modern age, represents distinct strategies of meaning at work. Secondly, it invites us to attend to how the strategies of meaning that are familiar to us in our own acts of understanding are also at work in the acts of understanding in the discourse of the other. With this in mind, the hope is that both partners will come away from the dialogue mediated by philosophy with a self-understanding and an understanding of the world that is mutually enriching.Footnote ³⁴ Finding common ground, therefore, invites us to shift from the diversity of the findings that engendered the need for dialogue to our awareness of an act of understanding that is at work in our efforts to craft works of meaning, whether these be the disciplines of modern science or those of modern theology.Footnote ³⁵ I have already alluded to Lonergan's elaboration of the empirical basis that is evident in all acts of understanding of any discipline: the dynamic and recurrent scheme of cognitional operations that he named experience, understanding, and judgment. At the same time, the disciplines remain distinct. They are distinct because the different disciplines, though enacting the same pattern of cognitional operations, are defined by the relation between particular questions that arise and responses to these questions.Footnote ³⁶

Let us examine this more specifically. Modern science, through such disciplines as physics, biology, and chemistry, affirms something. Still, the very fact of the diversity of these disciplines indicates that judgments reached in each affirm different kinds of insights. These insights are related to the distinct sets of questions (organized in theories and models) that interpret different kinds of data (experience). But the consistency of the pattern of operations, experience—understanding—judgment, remains. As a result, in each of the diverse scientific disciplines, an empirical basis is evident that allows us to reflect not only on the findings but also on how there arise distinct kinds of judgment.

Furthermore, there is a relationship among the judgments that allows for the relationship among the disciplines. We recognize that the judgments and insights acquired in one have a relationship to the judgments and insights acquired in the other. Chemistry, for example, provides data for biology. As a result, within the scientific field of the disciplines themselves we can refer to an intrinsic openness to a desire to understand. The evidence for this is a higher-order integration in our understanding of the world as we move from one discipline to the other.Footnote ³⁷

Given the persistence of the pattern and the distinct kinds of judgment, a basis is set for identifying an epistemological question, namely, “What is known?” But the “known” here is not just about the findings; it is about knowledge as such. Without either the scheme of operations or the subsequent epistemological question, we could not distinguish between what each of the sciences comes to know and the significance of that knowledge with respect to our wider acts of meaning. It was precisely such a differentiation that emerged in the order of questions that led in modern times to the separation of philosophy from theology, and in turn to the separation of the modern sciences from philosophy. As a result, philosophy could attend to its proper responsibility, that is, accounting for what it means to reason well. We reach an era in which, as Lonergan has argued, philosophy assumes its responsibility as philosophy.

With this in mind, let us recall the three questions that I outlined in the first section: “What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is that called knowing? What do I know?”Footnote ³⁸ The scheme of cognitional operations was the answer to the first question. A critical breakthrough, however, occurs in distinguishing the scheme of cognitional operations (the first question) from epistemology (the second question). Until the scheme as a structured and integrated pattern of cognitional operations is identified and until we become attentive to how we actualize that scheme in our every act of understanding, it is difficult to validate the empirical basis of an epistemology and to identify, therefore, the basis upon which we could then adjudicate among the different epistemological theories. The basis for epistemology is grounded in the empirical data of objectified consciousness—that is, in interiority. When epistemology asks what knowing is, it can now refer to the fact of judgment, that we claim to know something.

How does this help us promote a dialogue between science and theology? First, both the scheme of cognitional operations, experience—understanding—judgment, and the set of questions that lead from identifying the scheme to recognizing its import for epistemology provide evidence, as John Polkinghorne has argued, that the universe is intelligible.Footnote ³⁹ In Jean Ladrière's words, “It is a marvellous thing that there are answers to questions.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This intelligibility consists of the total set of scientific disciplines and their interaction with one another. With this claim of an intelligibility to the universe, we move to the third moment in the threefold set of questions, namely, “What is known?”

Given an understanding of such a sequence in the order of questions of meaning, we can understand why, from the perspective of a dialogue between science and theology, both the scientist and the theologian are invited into a philosophical arena, where such findings bring into play further questions regarding meaning, the significance of these findings for our self-understanding, and our understanding of the world. From a theological perspective, we are reminded that we are not dealing with the findings of science as such. We are clarifying, in a philosophical mode, acts of meaning. Thus the experience of discovery and progress in science becomes data on behalf of affirming not only what is going forward in science but also the meaningful character of the scientist's work. Since meaning affirms intelligibility, we shift from the experience of knowing to affirming, by virtue of the methods employed, that we have a basis for saying why that is knowing. Such an affirmation leads to metaphysics, since the scientist at least implicitly attests to the fact that the universe as a whole is intelligible. At this point, an avenue of encounter between the scientist and the theologian becomes more evident.

Still, this event of encounter is far from involving two “foreigners.” The theologian does not appear only when the scientist may arrive at the threshold of meaning where a question about God can arise. In fact, the task of theological understanding is much more comprehensive. For if the theologian is responsible for speaking intelligibly about God, he or she, unlike the scientist, is also responsible for how the question of God has emerged within the scientist in his or her unrestricted desire to understand, at least as a limit question.Footnote ⁴¹ Philosophy returns as a friendly partner in the dialogue.

The theologian is faced with two distinct tasks. The first is internal to the discipline of theology. Just as there are several disciplines that make up what is called “modern science,” so too is theology comprised of several disciplines. In Method in Theology, Lonergan reconfigured these disciplines in terms of functional specialties, placing the emphasis no longer on fields and subjects as much as on the desire to understand formulated in terms of intentionality analysis.Footnote ⁴² Thus, when the theologian enters into a dialogue with the scientist, the theologian must arrive with an understanding of a fairly sophisticated hermeneutical comprehension about creation, for example, based on the work of several functional specialties in theology. Appealing to revealed knowledge in faith does not bypass that exigency.

The second task consists of understanding how the formulation of theological judgments has its own roots in answers to questions. “Theological originality has its origins in questions.”Footnote ⁴³ The encounter with the experience of understanding sought by the scientist is an experience familiar to the theologian as well. The theologian's own discipline is informed by the same desire for critical understanding, with a view to discerning how answers to questions are sought in different times and cultures. To be sure, there is a modern form, yet the theologian must apprehend how acts and works of meaning, including those that interpret the cosmos, have shaped cultures, the development of cultures, and their emerging forms of reasoning.

We return to the narratives of creation noted at the beginning of this section. The strategy for encounter between the scientific narrative and the religious narrative will not succeed by comparing scientific findings and theological doctrines. Those findings and doctrines, in each case, need to be referred to their corresponding and underlying acts of understanding and to the inner dynamism of questions, operative in both partners, that move from the cognitional moment to the epistemological moment to the metaphysical moment. As I indicated above, this referral comes with the further understanding that the movement occurs in both directions. For the scientist, the metaphysical confidence in the intelligibility of the world implicitly accompanies the scientist who is confident that there are answers to questions. Similarly, for the theologian there is a “faith that is knowledge born of religious love” that provides the theologian with the confidence that the universe as universe is grounded in God's desire that the universe exist.Footnote ⁴⁴ I maintain that the dynamic movement in each of the trajectories can be seen to meet in the open and unrestricted desire to understand, in that philosophical locus where the question of God arises.Footnote ⁴⁵

II. From Science to Technology: From Lonergan to Ricœur

The question of technology leads us into the field of human action. My hypothesis is this: If the dialogue between modern science and theology can profit from attending to acts of understanding, the dialogue between theology and technology can similarly profit from an encounter that takes place on the common ground of understanding, but now an understanding conceived in the mode of moral understanding. The previous illustration fell within the general framework of Lonergan's reference to metaphysics. Critical metaphysics is governed by a series of questions that lead up to the question, “What is known?” Based on Lonergan's presentation of ethics in chapter 18 of Insight, Joseph Flanagan has shown that a similar set of questions can lead up to the question, “What is valued?”—namely, a critical ethics.Footnote ⁴⁶ Ethics, according to Flanagan, not only sublates but is even more comprehensive than metaphysics.Footnote ⁴⁷

If this is true, then the entire set of questions that shaped the first seventeen chapters of Insight needs to be taken up again on behalf of an ethics and within the framework of human action and decision making. If the sequence of questions that led to metaphysics consisted of (1) “What am I doing when I am knowing?” (2) “Why is that knowing?” and (3) “What is known?” then the sequence of questions that leads to an ethics would consist of (1) “What am I doing when I am deciding?” (2) “Why do I decide?” and (3) “What do I choose when I make choices?”Footnote ⁴⁸ My principal concern at this point is to address the first-level question (“What am I doing when I am deciding?”) and to show how this leads to the second- and third-level questions that define an ethics. Just as Lonergan argued that a methodical metaphysics is a derived discipline, so too is ethics derived from a phenomenology of moral cognitional operations and a moral epistemology.Footnote ⁴⁹ To put the point succinctly, the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value is critical.Footnote ⁵⁰

This basic insight has a twofold significance. First, it resituates our approach to the dialogue between technology and theology and calls for a heightened awareness of responsibility based on the account of cognitional operations.Footnote ⁵¹ Second, it advances the very refinement Lonergan anticipated in the objectification of the normative pattern of operations.Footnote ⁵² Space does not permit me to enter into a full discussion of how introducing moral cognitional operations relates to the debates and exegesis of Lonergan's work. My argument, for the present, is that Ricœur has identified such a pattern of “cognitive” operations within the framework of developing a philosophy of human action and that this contribution is worthy of attention. This being said, two remarks are in order, one with respect to Lonergan's reflections on ethics, and one with respect to the elaboration of moral cognitional operations based on a reading of Lonergan.

First, an enormous body of literature exists on Lonergan's contribution to ethics. Many point to the development of Lonergan's understanding of value that occurred in the period between Insight and Method in Theology. Footnote ⁵³ In the recently published Redeeming History, Gerard Whelan identifies this development and refers to the need for further development, especially with regard to the “second phase of theology.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Further, in the context of his focus on “social concern,” Whelan proposes turning to the work of Robert Doran in order to fill out a reflection on this issue.Footnote ⁵⁵ At the same time, Doran too has recognized the remaining outstanding task of clarifying judgments of value:

Given Flanagan's argument that ethics would require that all three questions be taken up again in the form of an ethics, and given his recognition of the importance of distinguishing between judgments of fact and judgments of value, then Doran's summons to address the question is all the more imperative. In short, without minimizing in any way Lonergan's contribution to ethics, the elaboration of the basis of a distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value appears to be an abiding question.

This leads to my second remark. An initiative based on a study of Lonergan has already been undertaken in this direction. To my knowledge, Joseph Cassidy was the first to identify and actually to begin to work out an account of moral cognitional operations in the context of Lonergan studies.Footnote ⁵⁷ He identified three “evaluative operations” leading to judgments of value that he maintained are parallel to the operations leading to judgments of fact.Footnote ⁵⁸ The focus of Cassidy's study, however, was to identify an intelligible pattern to decision making and to adjudicate epistemologically among different ethical theories and approaches. My focus is slightly different. It concerns the intelligibility of affirming human action and resituating the encounter between technology and theology on the basis of an understanding of human action. I indicated earlier that Ricœur has made a philosophy of action the cornerstone of his entire work.Footnote ⁵⁹ For this reason, I draw on the scheme of cognitive operations he has identified. In my judgment, Ricœur's account is not, in a formal sense, entirely foreign to that worked out by Cassidy. Yet for my purposes it does have the advantage of drawing into the analysis a set of terms and relations, most notably those associated with human imagination, that are critical in the encounter with a modern notion of technology.

Illustration II: Ricœur and the encounter between theology and modern technology. In contrast to the kinds of questions and answers that shape work in the field of the natural sciences, technology calls for a set of questions and answers that are more attuned to the changing field of human action and praxis. Technology has become much more than the use of instruments. Socially, historically, and culturally, technology has become a new phenomenon and as such calls for a form of understanding appropriate to that phenomenon.Footnote ⁶⁰ In The Real World of Technology, Ursula Franklin notes that “looking at technology as practice, indeed as formalized practice, has some quite interesting consequences.”Footnote ⁶¹ One of these consequences is the way such praxis is linked to cultural habits, “socially accepted practices and values.” In addition, such practices play a critical role in the way we develop our social identities, “the ways in which people define themselves as groups and set themselves apart from others.”Footnote ⁶²

Modern technology consists of forms of action that integrate distinct forms of judgment and multiple aspects of human collaboration with respect to the way we understand ourselves. Not insignificant in this regard is how often the reference to technology is employed in the framework of the relationship among technology, economics, and politics.Footnote ⁶³ The texture of human praxis reflects the mutual interaction and influence of these distinct spheres of practice. Technology cannot be addressed simply at the level of a technē of practices.Footnote ⁶⁴

A critical insight with respect to a way of approaching technology was offered by Lewis Mumford, whose work gives every indication that at the heart of the question of technology is a question of social imagination.Footnote ⁶⁵ Imagination invites us to think about the possible. The current forms of technology place us squarely within the problematic of the question, “What do we hope for ourselves?”Footnote ⁶⁶ In short, how do we see ourselves, our humanity, and this humanity in relation to our belonging together to this world? Consistent with this observation is the influence of Mumford's work on Robert Doran's own notion of “world-cultural humanity.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Mumford believed that in the currently developing stage of technology we have become so focused on practices of technology that we increasingly tend to overlook the extent to which we have become “post-historic,” this in the sense that we have become forgetful of the wider cultural horizons that shape human meaning and human initiative with respect to our relationships both to others and to our belonging to this world.Footnote ⁶⁸

If this way of expanding the question of technology—from the level of practices to its impact on culture—is legitimate, then the way toward a possible encounter with theology opens up. We return to the level of an ethics that is parallel to a metaphysics. We affirm a world whose “terminal value is the whole universe.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Neil Ormerod has maintained that “the shift to metaphysics occurs when we evoke what Lonergan refers to as the isomorphism between the knowing and the known.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Ethics, I argue, occurs when we evoke the isomorphism between acting and the moral character of the universe. “Are cosmogenesis, biological evolution, historical process basically cognate to us as moral beings or are they indifferent and so alien to us? Such is the question of God.”Footnote ⁷¹ At stake, therefore, is whether responsible action is worthwhile.Footnote ⁷²

One of the major virtues of Ricœur's analysis of human action consists in the way he alerts us to the role of imagination in our view of reality. Imagination and the use of fiction do not involve a suspension of our understanding of reality—quite the opposite. Fiction enlarges and deepens such understanding. As a strategy of human language, imagination allows us to suspend our more immediate and ostensive relation to reality, that is, to the world of immediacy, and to explore more profound features of reality, features that begin to show themselves through the work of symbol, images, play, artwork, metaphors, narratives, film, and so on.Footnote ⁷³ The insights into the meaning of technology and its impact on culture as well as the insights concerning the role of imagination and praxis call, however, for a reflective, epistemic strategy. Can modern technology be approached with narrative understanding in mind?

In my judgment, Ricœur's comments suggest an approach, at least a promising strategy, that could mediate between theology and an interpretation of human action. While I have given reasons for turning to Ricœur's work in this regard, I think it still critical that we retain as a helpful heuristic Lonergan's objectification of the generalized empirical pattern of operations. Although Ricœur provides the resources for objectifying judgments of value, the fuller significance of his account of the operations is still best seen within Lonergan's elaboration of the role played by the pattern of operations in view of a metaphysics and of an ethics. It involves discerning the pattern of operations, and this is critical, as it applies to a distinct pattern of experience. What does this mean? It means that the nature of the data, the organization of the data into a model that allows for an explanatory moment, and the judgment will differ from the nature of these operations when employed with respect to a judgment of fact. Judgments of fact are distinct from judgments of value. The question in the present context, however, is, How can this pattern be transposed within the field of human action?

I propose that a response can be developed from a reading of Ricœur's first volume of Time and Narrative: “If history were to break every connection to our basic competence for following a story and to the cognitive operations constitutive of our narrative understanding . . . it would lose its distinctive place in the chorus of social sciences.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The next question is whether we see this at work anywhere: is there an empirical basis? Ricœur claimed that human action lends itself, in the mode of a narrative understanding, to an objectification of a pattern of operations, the set of cognitive operations to which I referred in my introductory comments on Ricœur in the first part of this article: mimesis₁—mimesis₂—mimesis_3, or prefiguration—configuration—refiguration.Footnote ⁷⁵

The first operation, prefiguration (experience), corresponds to our capacity to recognize action, purely at the level of data. Action is not any kind of motion or movement. We recognize in human action “the capacity of the agent to initiate changes into the world.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Still, this first cognitional operation simply conveys that we are capable of recognizing action and agency. There is, in Ricœur's words, a basic “capacity for identifying action.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This is a cognitive “competence we call practical understanding.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Given this first moment, action still calls for some form of further understanding. We seek to understand; we anticipate a sense, a meaning. We ask, “Why did this happen?” In response, we seek to narrate.Footnote ⁷⁹ We move on to the second operation, configuration.

This operation organizes the data so that it reflects a structure, an intelligible pattern.Footnote ⁸⁰ This is the plotline, configuring a structured pattern of relations that hold. A sequence of events is recognized, but time is not reduced to a linear account. Understanding consists of a structured pattern of relations. Similarly, for Ricœur, there are basic schemata to action. To elaborate this, he privileges the semantic features of a written text. These semantic relations are analogous to an explanatory form. A text is a structured pattern of relationships that includes words organized into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into larger textual units. The text holds together as a unit, and as a unit it makes sense—a recognizable pattern with meaningful connections. It is intelligible as a pattern of relations that is objectified and, as such, bears a remarkable resemblance to the pattern of action.Footnote ⁸¹ Furthermore, this moment of “sense” or semantic configuration also reflects an act of closure. In the context of this operation, the story is, in a sense, completed so that it can be read. In fact, the act of reading itself allows for a discernment of a “whole,” a unity in the data that can lead to an act of judgment. At the same time, however, an act by a subject or subjects is affirmed. This is critical, for the second operation affirms that there is initiative, that freedom is in play. But what is affirmed in such an act of freedom and claimed to be worthwhile as a mode of action? We move in the direction of a third operation, refiguration, the attestation of a world to which we belong.

If a text were simply an organized pattern of relationships, then all we would have, in Ricœur's terms, would be “sense” or a “language game” of sterile meaning.Footnote ⁸² But texts, in many ways, do not themselves stop there. Further, narrative itself as a strategy of meaning does not wish to stop there. As argued earlier, linguistic expressions are a function of a more primordial experience of belonging to life, a way of orienting ourselves in a world. Texts as modes of objectification do not lose their ties with this experience. Ricœur always returns through the expressions of language to the depth semantics of belonging to the world, and always attempts to return to an ontological reference.Footnote ⁸³ The value of a narrative is that it raises the stakes with respect to this question of this world in which and to which I and we belong, and the question of who I am and who we are.

Plots disclose a self in relation to a world. They do so in at least two ways. First, they draw on the resources of imagination in order to open possibilities of our relation to a world and to others. Narratives re-imagine a world that is more than our ostensive world. They take us out of purely linear time and, through literary strategies, deepen our relation to time and to the meaning of our participation in history. Second, and more critically, narrative plots anticipate readers. They invite readers to enter the world configured by the plot and to imagine themselves as participating in this world expressed by the configuration of the text. But what is that world?

The answer to that question, on my reading of Ricœur, is also a matter of who you are as a reader. Which texts do you love to read? We discover something about ourselves in responding to that question.Footnote ⁸⁴ We begin to discern the power of imagination with respect to our heightened awareness of ourselves and how we see ourselves “as if”: as if we were these characters, as if we were involved in these events, as if things were going in this direction, and so on. Ricœur writes that “literature proves to consist in a vast laboratory for thought experiments in which the resources of variation encompassed by narrative identity are put to the test of narration.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Or again: “Telling a story . . . is deploying an imaginary space for thought experiments in which moral judgment operates in a hypothetical mode.”Footnote ⁸⁶

But is the world configured by such a strategy of imagination true? Let us recall that we are dealing with the third cognitive operation, judgment or refiguration. In this pattern of experience, that of action, the notion of truth takes on a completely different meaning. I am not asked to affirm something as a feature of the proportional universe, as a judgment of fact. I am asked, “Is it worthwhile?” Is it good to do this? Do the imagined possibilities with respect to how we see both our world and our being in this world make a claim on me? This is asked not only of ourselves personally, but also of ourselves socially, collectively, culturally. The question refers to our sense of being moral agents, as people capable of initiative. In fact, for Ricœur truth takes the form of a response. It attests to a world. “Truth here is not necessarily verifiable truth. Attestation is the self in its commitment to the world.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Things become again more complex, for attestation does not intend a simple yes or no answer.Footnote ⁸⁸ Action is also the field of the possible. Action opens that space within which, in Lonergan's words, there is an intentional response to value. “The self, in other words, exists as a belief, as a credence, as an assurance of truthfulness. . . . it is deeply epistemological.”Footnote ⁸⁹

The question of technology is, as a consequence, not simply defined by the encounter between one set of values and another set of values, no more than the dialogue between science and faith is a matter of the direct encounter between the findings of one discipline and the beliefs of another. More deeply, it is a question of the integral structure of cognitional operations that lead to judgments that integrate understanding in relation to data. Such understanding, we remind ourselves, is intentional.Footnote ⁹⁰ Lonergan, for his part, affirmed feeling as intentional response to value. But what are feelings if not this heightened awareness of a self who discovers in the relationship between self and world the worthwhileness of human action and freedom. The self, in Ricœur's terms, discovers oneself as a capable self. An ethics is affirmed and becomes possible, and its ontological correlate is the subject who desires to exist responsibly.Footnote ⁹¹

In light of these cognitional operations, imagination reconfigures our sense of the possible. It does so in two directions. First, in the direction of the contribution of the social sciences. Understanding consists of the configuring of relations, the schemata (in Ricœur's terms) of our understanding of the links and relationships that define structures of acting.Footnote ⁹² If this is true, then judgment, as an affirmation about what we are to do, takes into consideration the schemata of modern economics, modern urban planning, modern management studies, modern political science.Footnote ⁹³ Here, the wider framework within which I have defined the question of technology turns toward the questions of the intelligibility of the concrete good that Lonergan addresses in chapter 18 of Insight. The social sciences are evidence that, in understanding the operations of praxis, we do in fact affirm that understanding how to act is worthwhile and that acting itself is worthwhile.

The second direction involves our relation to a horizon of meaning. The social sciences consist of intelligible schemata with respect to the way we configure the data of human action. But such sciences, as modes of ordering relations, are not neutral. They also configure, as Ricœur argues, a relationship to the world, a horizon of meaning. These disciplines implicate modes of self-understanding, a sense of belonging to the world and a relationship to others. Just as in my remarks on modern science and theology, we now discern a place from which a theological question arises, not after the work of such disciplines but from within their own forms of effecting understanding. However, once again, theology does not simply encounter technology at the limit of the discourse of human and social sciences. Our competency to recognize action, the first cognitional operation, is intentional at the outset and as such is already inscribed by a horizon of meaning. A reflection on technology does well to bring that to the fore.Footnote ⁹⁴ The entire structure of action is inscribed in all its modes with a reference to hope—namely, that action is worthwhile.Footnote ⁹⁵ In light of this, Ricœur asks: How do we “relate Christian hope to this open, uncertain, and ambiguous adventure which is life?”Footnote ⁹⁶ It is a question of our relation to time and how we imagine our relation to time.

In this respect, the reference to the first creation narrative of Genesis (1:1–2:4b) comes again to the fore in a new way. For as a preface to the entire Hebrew Scriptures,Footnote ⁹⁷ this text takes form as a narrative and liturgical expression of an attestation of hope. It places the reader squarely before the force of God's own creating Word.Footnote ⁹⁸ Do we attest to this as a force that can transpose our time and engender new possibilities? It was the discovery of a new self attested to in hope that led Augustine himself to complete his Confessions with three books that consisted of a commentary on the first verse of Genesis. Augustine discovered in his conversion, in the innermost depths of his own interiority (book 10), the mobility of God's Word that accompanied him, a Word that is uttered and has encompassed his life from the beginning of time itself.Footnote ⁹⁹

III. Concluding Remark

My aim has been to foster a critical dialogue between theology and the discourses of science and technology. The topics of science and technology deserve a fuller, detailed account and a fuller recognition of their complexities. However, my goal has been quite modest: to delineate a strategy for thinking the question of science and technology with the help of collaborative readings of both Paul Ricœur and Bernard Lonergan. More particularly, guided by Lonergan's reflections on cognitional operations, I have referred to each in terms of the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value. In addition, I have framed my presentation of these operations within the three basic questions that lead to a metaphysics and to an ethics. As both Lonergan and Ricœur have shown, this leads us to the threshold where theology, as a science in its own right, is invited to provide an account of its own contribution, one that is defined by the presence of the voice of the other already interior to its own experience of hope.