Verbum: The Critique of Conceptualism

In his highly technical Verbum articles, originally published in Theological Studies from 1946 to 1949, Lonergan identified and challenged a regnant “conceptualist” misreading of Thomas Aquinas’s cognitional theoryFootnote ¹⁰ and recovered what is now widely considered to be Thomas’s genuine intellectualist position on knowing.Footnote ¹¹ This recovery made possible a truly workable psychological analogy to the Trinitarian processionsFootnote ¹² and laid the foundation for the cognitional theory Lonergan developed in Insight.

As mentioned previously, Lonergan’s term “conceptualism” denotes an inordinate focus on concepts at the expense of insight or understanding. Such a position on Thomas Aquinas’s theory of human cognition, as well as a habit of mind supported by that position, was characteristic of early-twentieth-century neo-scholasticism. Lonergan identified John Duns Scotus, at least as interpreted by Sebastian J. Day, as the ur-conceptualist,Footnote ¹³ primarily because Scotus explicitly denied insight into phantasm and because his intuitive rather than discursive, position on knowing further obscured the role of insight in our knowing. This intuitional gnoseology was then uncritically absorbed by later Thomist commentators, a mistake transmitted by each generation to the next down to the Thomists of Lonergan’s era.

The only contemporary Lonergan explicitly associated with conceptualism, however, was his confrere Louis Billot, whom Lonergan cited early on in the Verbum articles.Footnote ¹⁴ There, Lonergan alludes to a parallel Billot drew between imagination and conceptualization. For Billot, the procession of the inner word in the act of conceptualization occurs in a manner exactly like the procession of the image in the act of imagination. This is a serviceable parallel on the basis of metaphysical analysis alone but not one justified by psychological facts, and not one found anywhere in the writings of Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, Lonergan writes, “Conceptualism consists precisely in the affirmation that concepts proceed not from intellectual knowledge and so intelligibly but, on the contrary, with the same natural spontaneity as images from imagination.”Footnote ¹⁶ This affirmation assumes an immediacy and directness in the procession of the inner word akin to Scotus’s intuition, and Lonergan notes that such a position overlooks “what is peculiar to rational creatures,”Footnote ¹⁷ an oversight—foundational to conceptualism—of the discursive and intelligent movement of our knowing.

This was Aquinas’s view of the process of knowing as interpreted by the conceptualists: presentations of sense spontaneously produce a phantasm, or an image in the mind’s eye, from which a universal concept spontaneously emerges, and the possession of this concept is what constitutes knowledge.Footnote ¹⁸ Knowing is therefore a simple act of confrontation between subject and object, analogous to taking a look, so that there are no intervening acts of understanding between the apprehension of a phantasm and the production of the concept.Footnote ¹⁹ Where there is understanding, or insight, it is subsequent to the possession of knowledge and the object of understanding is just that universal concept. Insight into phantasm, then, has no role in knowing. The concept therefore has priority over insight.

The implications of this position are far-ranging. As Lonergan notes, “If formative abstraction [which results in a concept] is not preceded by apprehensive abstraction [i.e., insight into phantasm], then the application of universal rationes to particular things must be blind….”Footnote ²⁰ The concept, in other words, expressing no insight into particulars, has no basis for application to particulars. No matter how clear, how defined the concept may be, the gap between it and the concrete would remain unbridgeable. Moreover, such an account overlooks the human subject, so that knowing is a process that occurs within the subject but is not a product of her intentionality.

Conceptualism also has unfortunate, programmatic implications. The conceptualist position is not simply a position on knowing but sets forth a norm for the kind of intellectual work a theologian or philosopher ought to do. One “takes a look” and gets the concept. Concepts become definitions, which coalesce into propositions. Propositions beget further propositions, not by attention to the concrete or by acts of intelligence, but by following the rules of logic. The logic handbook rather than the intelligence of the human subject, is king. Karl Rahner, SJ (1904–1984), described this procedure in very similar way:

Propositions are the bricks, syllogisms are the mortar, and the goal is a cohesive structure in which every part relates properly to every other and most especially to the authoritative teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.Footnote ²² This approach buttressed a more general neglect of the acts of human knowing in favor of the products of knowing.Footnote ²³ It was likewise congenial to the conceptualist zeal for certitude, the labor of deductively linking definitions and dogmatic judgments at the expense of the “still greater effort to understand….”Footnote ²⁴ The resultant syntheses of the conceptualists were metaphysically subtle, even abstruse, and cohesive to the point of rigidity.Footnote ²⁵

Conceptualism accordingly fortified the neoscholastic tradition that had formed Lonergan and the other theologians of his generation. Lonergan bristled under this tutelage, but he did not oppose concepts, propositions, logic, or metaphysics per se. The site of conflict between the conceptualists and Lonergan’s own intellectualist interpretation of Thomas lay “in the issue to which conceptualists attend almost exclusively, the abstraction of concepts.”Footnote ²⁶ Although they may have agreed with Thomas’s conclusions, their aridity betrayed an “oversight of insight”; reproducing his conclusions did not, as it turns out, reproduce the intelligence that enlivened Thomas’s writings.Footnote ²⁷

In Lonergan’s reading of Aquinas’s cognitional theory, our knowing begins with presentations of sense—a point on which the conceptualists were correct.Footnote ²⁸ But these presentations do not lead directly to essential definitions. In order to understand these presentations, we ask questions about them, and the form of the question is decisive, insofar as the question anticipates the answer.Footnote ²⁹ To answer the question, we employ the imagination to form phantasms.Footnote ³⁰ The desired insight is released by contemplating and by creatively adjusting these phantasms.Footnote ³¹ Lonergan uses an example from geometry: “To understand circularity is to grasp by intellect a necessary nexus between imagined equal radii and imagined uniform curvature. The terms to be connected are sensibly perceived; their relation, connection, unification is what insight knows in the sensitive presentation.”Footnote ³² We understand what a circle is by phantasm, an abstraction of the circularity we have sensed in many different things, which we adjust in various ways in response to our questions until we come to an insight of circularity, which we can then apply to particulars. Insight “adds to our knowledge a grasp of intelligible unity in sensible multiplicity,… [a] unity specific and proportionate to the sensible multiplicity presented….”Footnote ³³ The negligence of this idea of insight into phantasm is foundational to the conceptualist position on knowing, just as the adherence to it is foundational to Lonergan’s cognitional theory.

Insight into a phantasm is an act of intelligere, and its occurrence is simultaneous with, yet distinct from, the inner word, which is an emanatio intelligibilis,Footnote ³⁴ an inward expression of what we apprehend in the act of insight.Footnote ³⁵ Although the inner word is simultaneous with the act of understanding, the act of understanding is causally prior; it produces the inner word.Footnote ³⁶ Further, the procession of the inner word is active, not passive, and actual, not potential.Footnote ³⁷ This is a point Lonergan underlines with a memorable image:

The inner word formulates a “direct understanding, parent of the definition, in which the mind clicks, one gets the idea….”Footnote ³⁹ Further, as Lonergan elaborates this idea in Insight, direct understanding can be expressed by more than one inner word.Footnote ⁴⁰ The “inner word” that expresses the insight in turn has a “twofold relation” to the “outer word,” the communicative signs by which we convey meaning to another: “The inner word is an efficient cause of the outer; and the inner word is what is meant immediately by the outer.”Footnote ⁴¹ Lonergan stresses that the correspondence of inner and outer word is not “point to point,” but is “at best, like the correspondence between a function and a derivative….”Footnote ⁴² The pivot from inner to outer word is no more automatic than the pivot from insight to inner word. It is also an intelligent process, a truth known by any writer who has struggled to find the right word.

Besides direct understanding, there is also, “reflective understanding, parent of the judgment, in which one sees that one cannot but judge something to be so.”Footnote ⁴³ Lonergan likens this critical and reflective act of intelligere to Newman’s illative sense.Footnote ⁴⁴ Like direct understanding, reflective understanding is an emanatio intelligibilis,Footnote ⁴⁵ and similarly is first of all an inner word, not an outer word. A judgment is an inner word, Lonergan notes, because a judgment is concerned with the real, and so the primary correspondence of the inner word is not so much to the outer word, but rather to the reality expressed by the inner word.Footnote ⁴⁶ When a human subject arrives at judgment, then she has knowledge of being.Footnote ⁴⁷ Knowing, which terminates in a judgment, is therefore a correspondence of a mental synthesis of distinct concepts into a single intelligibility (i.e., a proposition) to a real synthesis of actual being.Footnote ⁴⁸ In judgment, one posits one’s own mental synthesis as a correct understanding of the real: “This is so.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Two acts of intelligence—direct and reflective understanding—find expression in two inner words that are the terms of the wonder of inquiry and critical wonder.Footnote ⁵⁰

For Aquinas, knowing is therefore a compound activity, not a simple one, in which acts of understanding intervene at key points in the process of moving from sensory presentations to knowledge. Knowing is not like taking a look but is a complex movement from the potential meaning of sense to the actual meaning of human knowing.Footnote ⁵¹ Knowing, in other words, is not a confrontation between subject and object but “involves an identity in act of knower and known.”Footnote ⁵² Knowing occurs by “assimilation”Footnote ⁵³ so that the “form of knowing must be similar to the form of the known, but also it must be different; it must be similar essentially for the known to be known; but it must differ modally for the knower to know and not merely be the known.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Lonergan judged this to be the correct interpretation of Aquinas; he also judged Aquinas to have a correct interpretation of human knowing. Furthermore, Lonergan believed that only an interpreter who had correctly understood her own performance of knowing could grasp Aquinas’s position: “Aquinas was speaking of understanding and … an interpretation in terms of general metaphysics misses the point; to follow Aquinas here, one must practice introspective rational psychology….”Footnote ⁵⁵ A cognitional theory developed upon the basis of an accurate understanding of one’s own interiority therefore becomes first philosophy rather than metaphysics. Billot’s mistake, and the mistake of many other Thomist commentators, was to begin with the metaphysical parallel of conceptualization and imagination in order to work out the inner word and its relation to intelligence rather than to begin with psychological facts with an understanding of understanding.

This critique of conceptualism, and the theory of cognition Lonergan developed in tandem with it, was a breakthrough that would lead eventually to his transcendental method. And yet, although Lonergan increasingly came to understand the human subject as historical and as a historical agent, he never returned to his critique of conceptualism in order to integrate it explicitly into his theory of historical decline in Insight or anywhere else. This is noteworthy. Lonergan believed that misconceptions about human knowing degrade one’s ability to assess one’s performance of knowing and thereby occasion and reinforce failure in that performance. Historical decline is partly the result of patterns of cognitional failure in individuals, which reverberates socially and worsens over time. Failed accounts of knowing, which reinforce these patterns, would therefore contribute to social decline. Conceptualism, then, would seem to contribute to decline somehow, but Lonergan did not draw this inference.

The Critique of Instrumental Reason

We now turn to Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason with a view to relating it to conceptualism. Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason was a central element of the Critical Theory he helped to develop. Critical Theory aimed to integrate scholarship from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, and economics. It also sought to bridge theory and praxis. The overarching goal was to identify and expound upon the nexus of relationships within a society that allow for its reproduction, which occurred not just economically, but also culturally and within the conscious subjectivity and the unconscious of individual human beings.Footnote ⁵⁶ These aims, laudable though they were, still remain to be fully actualized.Footnote ⁵⁷

Horkheimer and his colleagues undertook this project within the Institute for Social Research, which Horkheimer directed for many years.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the institute was a broadly Marxian venture, Horkheimer’s reception of Karl Marx was complex. He was clearly inspired by the writings of the early left-wing Hegelian MarxFootnote ⁵⁹ and pursued something like a Marxian ressourcement in order to address the crisis Marxism found itself in during the Stalinist era.Footnote ⁶⁰ Common themes in Marx’s early works—such as alienation and a materialist understanding of history—are easy to find in Horkheimer’s writings. Yet Horkheimer rejected much else that is commonly (sometimes misleadingly) associated with Marx, such as determinism, dialectical materialism, and the exclusive attention to the economic base as the sole explanatory factor for social phenomena. Horkheimer also embraced Freudian psychoanalysis as an appropriate tool for social theorizing.Footnote ⁶¹ Horkheimer’s intellectual synthesis is incisive and erudite but was very much out of step with the orthodox Marxism of his era.Footnote ⁶² His critique of instrumental reason, which would necessarily apply not only to capitalism but also to much of Marxist orthodoxy, reflects this.

What is instrumental reason?Footnote ⁶³ For Horkheimer, instrumental reason is a set of cognitive activities related to practical living—including quantification, calculation, technical experimentation, and predictionFootnote ⁶⁴—employed to coordinate means to ends that are usually taken for granted. The focus of instrumental reason is on the means, not the ends.Footnote ⁶⁵ Instrumental reason is ubiquitous in human history, long predating industrialization and the rise of the bourgeoisie. It originates from the desire to control nature, the desire—long thwarted in human history—to make predictable a world that is often harshly unpredictable.Footnote ⁶⁶ The desire for rapid, efficient, and reliable modes of production lends itself to increasingly mechanical forms of labor and an increasingly mathematical understanding of the natural world meant to safeguard our control over natural resources.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet the natural world has always resisted our attempts to control it, and for this reason, even prior to the modern era, instrumental reason has frequently been a violent imposition of human order.Footnote ⁶⁸

What distinguishes the modern era is that instrumental reason attained an unparalleled level of dominance with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose genius for instrumental reason resulted in technological and institutional innovations that enabled ever-growing productivity and increasingly expansive and increasingly liberal trade networks. Never before was instrumental reason so powerful as a mode of thinking or so capable of achieving its ends. Indeed, instrumental reason became so dominant in its reflection on means that it crowded out reflection on ends, eliminating critical consideration of whether the ends sought were reasonable in the first place.Footnote ⁶⁹ The result was a bourgeois culture that possessed great technical power yet was intellectually incurious, culturally conformist, and politically passive, qualities that left it vulnerable to fascism.Footnote ⁷⁰ Moreover, even apart from fascism, the bourgeois coordination of means and ends became ruthless in its exploitation of the resources at hand, whether natural or human, resulting in waves of colonialism, the widespread use of slavery, and the devastation of ecosystems.Footnote ⁷¹

The ruthlessness of instrumental reason is decisive in what Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno call “the dialectic of enlightenment.” The dialectic begins with human beings in a situation of powerlessness and fear, living under the dominance of nature, tyrants, and religion or superstition. In such a situation, one’s desire for mastery over one’s life, the yearning for autonomy, is persistently frustrated. Horkheimer and Adorno term this situation “barbarism.”Footnote ⁷² The miseries of barbarism elicited an “advance of thought” aimed at expanding freedom and control, so that we are no longer dominated by nature or by tyrants or by religion.Footnote ⁷³ This advance of thought progresses partly, often primarily, by means of instrumental reason, and results in genuine prosperity and expanding liberty for some and sometimes for many. But this enlightenment is also myopic and contradictory. As James Bradley has pointed out: “[Enlightenment] … all too easily gives itself an absolute status over and against its objects, thereby constantly collapsing into new forms of the very conditions of primeval repression which it earlier set out to overcome.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Enlightenment tends toward such an absolute status, first, because instrumental reason brings low the authorities that once held it in checkFootnote ⁷⁵ and, second, because instrumental reason works: we do gain control over what we once feared. But the widespread and uncritical application of instrumental reason ironically leads to a new, more intransigent form of barbarism than what enlightenment sought to overcome. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the terrors of the twentieth century were not a resurgence of premodern superstition, but were the dark side of enlightenment, a barbarism empowered by instrumental reason.Footnote ⁷⁶

Consider the application of instrumental reason to nature. Enlightenment is a program of disenchantment—the eradication of delusion in favor of systematic knowledge of the natural world.Footnote ⁷⁷ Disenchantment overcomes the “barbaric” terror of capricious nature gods and demigods. Horkheimer did not reject disenchantment, per se. But he and Adorno pointed out that disenchantment was often conjoined to other, more questionable commitments: namely, that knowledge, “which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters … What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This goal of dominance nurtured a decided preference for the quantifiable over the qualitative in our thinking. Indeed, “anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Equivalence and quantity have become the rule.Footnote ⁸⁰ The old, enchanted world contained much that was incalculable and much that was useless from the perspective of instrumental reason, and so was swept away. This radical program of disenchantment transcended the barbarism of enchantment, but a new barbarism arrived in its place, one of shocking insensitivity to natural beauty and a capacity for breathtaking destruction of the nonhuman world. The fearfulness of enchantment may have been barbaric, but the fearlessness of disenchantment may be worse.

Instrumental reason operates much the same when its object is a human being. Enlightenment renders democratic rights and liberties in the political sphere, at least in principle, but its economic liberalism so often curtails them in practice. The ever-expanding demands of production and consumption necessitate control not only over nature but also over workers and consumers. The application of instrumental reason to human beings may be physically coercive—turning a gatling gun on striking railroad workers, for example—but more often, and more subtly, instrumental reason aims at producing cultural and political inertia. Again, instrumental reason exhibits a bias in favor of the quantifiable and equivalent, understood to be reliable and predictable, and here as well the qualitative must be cleared away. By removing “the incommensurable” within us, or among us, human beings can be “forced into real conformity.”Footnote ⁸¹

The pressure to conformity can, however, go much further than guiding habits of consumption and often fosters prejudice, as the history of antisemitism demonstrates.Footnote ⁸² Ancient as European antisemitism is, once combined with regnant instrumental reason it took on a new cast, absurdly identifying Jews both with the excesses of instrumental reason (they were merciless capitalists) as well as hindrances to instrumental reason (they were lazy, parasitic, subversive, Communists).Footnote ⁸³ Because European Jews allegedly were incapable of conformity and so were incommensurable with the Gentiles, they did not truly belong to the nation-state and so could rightly be made stateless. Combined with all manner of pseudo-science and paranoid conspiracy theories, this led to the attempted destruction of a people on an industrial scale with industrial means. Having replaced the revelatory authority of religion with the reasonable authority of the state, and thus idolized the nation-state, the credibility of possible religious hindrances to this violence—the love commandment or the imago Dei—had long since evaporated. The liberal program of enlightenment thus transitioned to a fascist program of genocide with surprising facility.Footnote ⁸⁴ For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Shoah was not a revival of the medieval pogrom, but was barbarism driven by and enabled by the instrumental reason of enlightenment.Footnote ⁸⁵

By giving itself an absolute status, instrumental reason has eliminated other modes of thinking, namely critical reason, and thereby fostered an ironic “eclipse of reason,” an eradication of genuine thinking. Under such conditions, Horkheimer writes, “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Here, Horkheimer has in mind the industrial strategies of Fordism and the managerial strategies of Taylorism. These strategies shape us as thinkers permeating our habits of thought: Stereotypes replace intellectual categories. Judgment is no longer based on a real act of synthesis but on blind subsumption.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Even what might appear to be theory has become so formalized that “all basic concepts, emptied of their content, have come to be only formal shells.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In a passage remarkably similar to Lonergan’s critique of conceptualism, Horkheimer writes, “Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of all the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based.”Footnote ⁸⁹ But going beyond Lonergan, Horkheimer notes that this automated thinking enables “ideological manipulation” and propaganda.Footnote ⁹⁰ It “conforms to anything.”Footnote ⁹¹

Horkheimer’s criticism in this vein extended even to Thomism. In a series of lectures, published in 1947 as Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer included an extended, chapter-length critique of the Thomism of his day, which along with a thoroughly secular positivism, provided no cure for our ailments and, indeed, exemplified an eclipse of reason rather than its restoration.Footnote ⁹² Thomism and positivism seemed to be adversaries, yet they shared a common dogmatism, a self-imposed limit to thinking.Footnote ⁹³ Horkheimer acknowledged that many Thomists were important historians and thinkers—no doubt having in mind someone like Étienne Gilson. Yet he contended that many others were mere cultural revanchists, creating the appearance of metaphysical speculation in what was a pragmatized perversion of Christianity.Footnote ⁹⁴ Horkheimer notes that “the neo-Thomist teachings consist less of Christian stories and dogmas than of arguments about why religious beliefs and modes of living are advisable in our present situation.”Footnote ⁹⁵ In their obsession with conformity and practicality, they were in perfect accord with the liberal bourgeois positivism they detested. Further, even in their metaphysical speculation, they betrayed what they meant to defend. Yes, they employed the very same Aristotelian categories as Aquinas did. But in the thirteenth century this was cutting-edge science—not so in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹⁶ Their greatest betrayal of the original impulses of Christianity, however, was their eagerness to partner with authoritarians, their endorsement of fascist leaders even though these leaders instrumentalized religion and often despised Christianity.Footnote ⁹⁷

Although Horkheimer does not mention him, it is interesting to recall Louis Billot on this point. An important Thomist in his day, he taught dogmatic theology at the Gregorian University in Rome (as Lonergan did, many years later) and he was an important anti-Modernist voice during the Modernist Crisis. But Billot is best known as the only cardinal to resign his office in the twentieth century. He did so for political reasons.Footnote ⁹⁸ Billot’s politics were monarchist, counter-revolutionary, intégraliste;Footnote ⁹⁹ he staunchly opposed representative democracy.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the polarized atmosphere of fin de siècle France, Billot rejected republicanism along with the anti-clericalism and laïcisme of many who supported the Third French Republic.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, Billot was sympathetic with L’Action Française (AF), a radical monarchist, antisemitic, proto-fascist movement that emerged during the Dreyfus affair. Despite growing tensions between AF and the Vatican in the mid-1920s, Billot continued to give his support to the organization. Even after a fellow cardinal sent out a pastoral letter discouraging participation in AF, Billot sent a note of encouragement to a prominent AF journalist, which Billot then allowed to be made public.Footnote ¹⁰² When in 1927 Pope Pius XI moved to place the organization’s newspaper on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Billot offered his resignation. This was quite a fall. He had placed the papal tiara on the head of Pius XI in 1922.Footnote ¹⁰³

Billot died in 1931. Had he lived, how might Billot have understood or participated in the events of the next fourteen years? Charles Maurras, the founder of AF, was an eager supporter of Vichy and its reactionary agenda, and Billot had long admired Maurras’s political project.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Likewise, Billot’s fellow Catholic integralists were all too eager to support Pétain’s ostensibly Catholic embrace of order and family values. And then, Billot’s politics (if not his reading of Thomas) were consistent with those of another conservative French Thomist, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, who taught at the Angelicum and whose enthusiastic public support for the Vichy regime is well known. Given that Billot was willing to resign his cardinalate for the sake of his authoritarian politics, it seems reasonable to assume that he would have welcomed the destruction of the Third French Republic and supported a Vichy regime that aligned with all of his political commitments. It is hard to imagine him doing otherwise.

According to Horkheimer, this penchant for baptizing reactionary politics in the waters of Scholastic theology was not driven simply by malice or even stupidity, but by a willful thoughtlessness exemplified in their defensiveness, their pragmatism, their attachment to antiquated categories that are systematized and defined but expressed no understanding of the concrete. What mattered to them was not the reality the conceptual system expresses, but rather the possession of a dogmatically authoritative conceptual system as a tool for orienting an all too often reactionary political praxis.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the person of Billot, we see an operative instrumental reason converge with conceptualism. That is, we see a scholar deploying concepts systematically and logically, concepts that are nevertheless emptied of insight, and thus available for ideological, reactionary uses.

Both Horkheimer and Lonergan were concerned that increasingly thoughtless, automated forms of inference that relate us to already existing categories but not to the concrete were crowding out the intelligence that advances genuine thinking. Lonergan’s critique of conceptualism grasps the cognitional fundament of the problem—placing priority on products rather than the acts of intelligence—but is narrowly focused on interpreting Aquinas and so does not consider the social or political outcomes of this habit of mind. Horkheimer’s account of instrumental reason run amok mentions this problem, but Horkheimer’s considerations of human cognition are fragmentary and lack anything like the depth Lonergan provides. Lonergan recognizes that conceptualism empties concepts of their intelligence; Horkheimer grasps that emptied concepts are all too easily coopted by cultural revanchists and political reactionaries. Emptied of their intellectual heft, these concepts become nothing more than yet another means for ill-defined ends. The fact that the conceptualists also manifest instrumental reason become unreason is not accidental, in other words.

Conceptualism, Instrumental Reason, and Social Decline

Horkheimer has provided a highly suggestive description of conceptualism colluding with instrumental reason. We now seek a systematic explanation of this collusion. How do they collude? And how does this collusion produce social decline?

Addressing the first question requires a brief review of Lonergan’s intentionality analysis, which we already touched on. In Verbum, sensory perception evokes wonder. This wonder is formulated into questions, a tension of inquiry that is released in the moment of insight into phantasm. This is the direct understanding. Possession of understanding then evokes another moment of wonder, a second inquiry to answer whatever questions or objections remain, a process that terminates in reflective understanding, or judgment. In the 1950s, Lonergan transposed the cognitional theory of Verbum into the milieu of twentieth-century philosophy. This was Insight, in which Lonergan theorized knowing as a compound of experiencing, understanding, and judging.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ These three acts, which are themselves compounds of conscious activities and states, are successive expansions and intensifications of consciousness as the human subject moves from wonder to an apprehension of reality.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Lonergan developed the language of “levels of consciousness” to speak about the movement upward from experience to understanding to judging. At this point, there were only three levels.

Lonergan’s cognitional theory can be verified, but only through a difficult process of self-appropriation in which the human subject attends to her own conscious intentionality, understands these operations, and comes to affirm herself as a knower. Self-appropriation occurs through heightened attention to one’s performance of knowing, to the brief and shadowy acts that build toward knowing.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ For example, when a human being wakes up in the morning, she is greeted with presentations of sense—the alarm clock, the light through the windows, the smell of coffee—as well as presentations of consciousness—her anxiety about her job, her thoughts about what she needs to do today. These presentations of sense and consciousness are what Lonergan means by experiencing. These presentations raise questions. So, to shift the example, let us say that I am at home and something beeps. I wonder, What is that? The question triggers a search of my memory, resulting in an insight or understanding, which is a grasp of relations in answer to the question. I remember that I put the laundry in a while ago, so it may be the washing machine that beeped. But an understanding may be incorrect, so I ask further questions: Could it be the dishwasher? Or my phone alarm? Or the carbon monoxide detector? So I check the washing machine. The washing cycle is complete. The wet clothes are ready to be moved to the dryer. It could be that the beeping came from the washing machine. But is it so? I check my phone and the carbon monoxide detector and I discover that neither are the culprit. I arrive at the judgment, therefore, that the noise came from the washing machine. This is the act of judging, in which one achieves knowledge, which is an apprehension of being or reality.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Through this movement from the presentations of sense and affect to the moment of judgment, wonder continues to play a role in promoting inquiry from one step to another—all of it driven by the pure and unrestricted desire to know.

What we find in Insight is a theory of cognition; in that work, he placed great importance on the intention of being, which is what drives our questioning toward a judgment of what is true and what is false. In Method in Theology, however, Lonergan also came to recognize the intention of value.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This led Lonergan to rework his understanding of human judgments of value and decision-making, which in Insight were understood awkwardly as functions of the unfolding of human intentionality toward truth. Between Insight and Method in Theology,Footnote ¹¹¹ Lonergan expanded his account of conscious intentionality in order to incorporate our intention for value alongside the intention for being, which drives our knowing. This is the realm of responsibility, “on which we are concerned with ourselves, our own operations, our goals, and so deliberate about possible courses of action, evaluate them, decide, and carry out our decisions.”Footnote ¹¹² We decide what is valuable, what our relationship to value will be, and how we will best actualize value in our lives and in our world. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the intention for value calls us not merely to understand the world, but to change it. This gives us a fourth level of conscious intentionality beyond the three levels pertaining to cognition.

The image of “levels” is meant to help us grasp that operations group together according to a certain pattern, and certain groups lead into others. The levels are sets of conscious and intentional operations, and the image of levels illustrates a relationship of “sublation” among them. The higher sets of conscious intentional operations are expansions, or sublations, of the lower ones.Footnote ¹¹³ So, we have experiences of sense and consciousness, which provide data that is then understood, which provides an expression of understanding that is then judged to be true or false, certain or probable, which provides knowledge about our world that raises questions of value, which are then resolved through evaluation, deliberation, and decision. Lonergan also notes that “as different operations yield qualitatively different modes of being conscious subjects, so too they yield qualitatively different modes of intending.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Human intending differs qualitatively when we experience presentations of sense from when we inquire, understand, conceptualize, or from when we judge or decide.

Conceptualism and instrumental reasons are distorted forms of intentionality, but they are not departures from it. That is, we can map them onto the levels of consciousness. So conceptualism is a flawed theory that corrupts the performance of intentionality on the levels that pertain to cognition, that is, the levels of experiencing, understanding, and judging. The boundaries of instrumental reason are not quite as clearly delimited as conceptualism—it features on every level in some way or other—but it is most properly a distortion of the fourth level, the level of decision. Instrumental reason is above all a corrupted mode of judging value, deliberating, deciding, and taking action. The real distinction between conceptualism and instrumental reason exists because they primarily operate on qualitatively distinct levels of conscious intentionality.

Yet, while conceptualism and instrumental reason are distinct, they are no more separated from each other than the levels of consciousness are. Decision depends on prior acts of judging value and judging truth. We act on the basis of what we have understood. So, if one understands the world according to the programmatic implications of conceptualism, whether in theology or philosophy or any other discipline, the product will be a logically (or procedurally or mathematically) ordered conceptual system that prizes reference to relevant authorities (or data), terminological clarity, argumentative coherence, and apparent certainty in its conclusions. This way of thinking lends itself to a mode of acting in the world that prizes this univocality, clarity, and apparent certainty, which yearns for order and predictability, which prefers calculation to inquiry or insight. This may not necessarily result in acting according to instrumental reason. But if someone builds and sells a coffin to fit a seven-foot-tall man, it seems more likely that a tall man will be buried in it than a short one.

Conversely, when we deliberate about courses of action, we sift through many insights on the way to decision, valuing some over others in response to the exigencies of the situation. Instrumental reason is inclined to value conceptualist clarity, coherence, and predictability. By leaving aside open inquiry and the rough complexities of the concrete, conceptualism offers up emptied, frictionless concepts for quick and ready integration into practical procedures. In turn, instrumental reason rewards conceptualist thinking. This may happen between persons—university administrators or industry representatives celebrate the conceptualist researcher—but it may also happen within persons: an intellectual wants to get ahead and sees some work rewarded and other work neglected. She instrumentalizes her scholarship by becoming more conceptualist, less open, less inquisitive, less willing to go where the questions lead. She succeeds, receives grants and tenure, trains her students to operate this way, and on it goes. So we arrive at a feedback mechanism, in which conceptualism offers up its emptied concepts to instrumental reason, which rewards this work and incentivizes more of it, resulting in a picture of the world more and more amenable to the assumptions of instrumental reason.

This is, in sum, how conceptualism and instrumental reason catch on each other. Can we say more about why they converge? As I mentioned in the introduction, they share an inner principle that inclines them toward convergence. Both conceptualism and instrumental reason marginalize open-ended, inquiry-driven conscious intentionality and favor procedure-driven, virtually automated mechanisms for solving problems. Conceptualism eclipses the intelligence and wonder that drive authentic human knowing; instrumental reason, the creativity and desire that drive human decision and action. Further, in the case of both conceptualism and instrumental reason, the set of operations at their respective levels have turned in on themselves and become ingrown, so to speak. What ought to be self-transcendent, open-ended processes of inquiry or deliberation become self-immanent, even self-referential, so that insight is only valid insofar as it coheres with an already established system (conceptualism) or an action is only valid insofar as it coheres with an already established procedure (instrumental reason). In both cases, systematic self-referentiality becomes the standard for validity.

The similarities between conceptualism and instrumental reason, and their coincidence in figures like Billot, suggests a relationship of elective affinity. Elective affinity, as a technical term, was coined by Max Weber, who famously argued that an elective affinity exists between Protestantism and capitalism. These two societal formations are not identical, but often coincide because, according to Weber, each reinforces the inclinations that drive the other. Of course, conceptualism and instrumental reason are not societal formations or systems of belief. Rather, they are forms of conscious intentionality. So I intend the term “elective affinity” in a qualified, analogous way, aiming to characterize the nature of a relationship between two phenomena rather than the nature of the phenomena related. That is, their common inner principle of marginalizing human agency leads conceptualism and instrumental reason toward convergence, a convergence that makes each more probable and generates an ongoing feedback mechanism between them.

Conceptualism and instrumental reason share an elective affinity, they are disposed to convergence, and they collude. How does their collusion contribute to social decline? I will address this question by incorporating the account of collusion given previously into the framework of Lonergan’s account of social decline. But, for Lonegan, decline must be understood with reference to progress. So what is progress?

For Lonergan, to make explicit what we are doing when we are knowing is to indicate a normative pattern for human knowing.Footnote ¹¹⁵ If the basis of our knowing is experiencing, then we ought to be attentive to experience rather than inattentive. If understanding is the pivot from experience to knowledge, then we ought to be intelligent, not thoughtless, in our inquiry and understanding. If judging brings our knowing to completion, then we ought to be reasonable rather than rash in our judgments. On the level of decision, we ought to be responsible in our judgments of value, our deliberations over courses of action, and our decisions.

Adhering to this normative pattern is what makes a person “authentic,” according to Lonergan’s meaning of that word. This pattern is normative for individuals; it is also normative in the history of human societies.Footnote ¹¹⁶ We come to ideas that are fruitful and timely when we are being attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. A society that implements those ideas will improve in some area or other. Life will get better for some people, perhaps even most people. That is progress. Lonergan did not believe that progress in history is ever unalloyed or permanent or that it is necessary. But progress happens and authenticity is its principle.

To posit this norm implies that we can deviate from it. This deviation, or bias, is the principle of decline.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Lonergan identified four biases that block fruitful and timely insight, and which together contribute to historical decline and comprise the “reign of sin,”Footnote ¹¹⁸ which unfurls in a manner very much like what Horkheimer and Adorno describe in their dialectic of enlightenment.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The first bias is dramatic bias,Footnote ¹²⁰ in which the censor of the human psyche blocks uncomfortable or painful insights, building up complexes of thought and feeling to achieve this purpose, and sometimes in the process bringing about forms of mental illness. But often the outcome is simply a common but juvenile inability to speak directly about topics such as death or sexual intercourse. The second bias is individual bias.Footnote ¹²¹ This bias originates from infantile egoism, which is necessary for the survival of a baby, but becomes a problem if extended beyond infancy. This bias manifests an incomplete development of intelligence, so that it prioritizes the needs, feelings, and insights of the individual over anyone else; its social correlate is the subversion of societal good for personal gain, that is, crime.Footnote ¹²²

Next is group bias.Footnote ¹²³ Group bias is the expansion of egoism to one’s own group, however it may be construed. This bias emerges from the intersubjectivity that is elemental in human life—we live with and within one another and we live by means of this communal bond.Footnote ¹²⁴ As Lonergan notes, “In a school, a regiment, a factory, a trade, a profession, a prison, there develops an ethos that at once subtly and flexibly provides concrete premises and norms for practical decisions. For in human affairs the decisive factor is what one can expect of the other fellow.”Footnote ¹²⁵ But this fellow feeling can exceed its bounds, so that the only legitimate needs, feelings, and insights are those of one’s group, and those of another group are ignored or discounted. This is group bias. Despite its origin in the warmth of human fellowship, its manifestations can be horrific: partisanship, patriarchy, nationalism, white supremacy, ethnic hatred.

The result of group bias is the shorter cycle of decline: a group—say, the Bourbons—takes power. At first, they are effective rulers. Over time, however, they come to believe that they possess a unique intelligence and wisdom that justifies ignoring the insights of anyone outside their group; questions concerning why exactly they alone have so much power and, often enough, so much wealth are dismissed or even repressed. They produce ideologies and myths justifying rampant inequality. One Louis gives way to another. As time goes on, however, they overlook fruitful, timely insights, they fail to make progress, and they justify their rule not by recent achievements but by an ideological assertion of their own supremacy, that is, the divine right of kings.Footnote ¹²⁶ Increasingly detached from reality, their governance becomes dysfunctional and oppressive as they seek to maintain their own power and well-being increasingly at the expense of others. Another group, which stands just a bit lower in the social and political hierarchy, enlists the classes at the bottom to resist those in power and overthrow them. Louis and Marie go to the guillotine, Robespierre and the bourgeoisie come to power, but the poor remain in their place and the cycle runs all over again. Lonergan’s shorter cycle of decline is a familiar, and quite Marxian, tale.

The fourth bias is general bias, a preference for common sense practicality over the fruitful, timely insights of theory.Footnote ¹²⁷ The most consequential manifestation of general bias in our own time is perhaps the climate crisis; the most baffling is perhaps the anti-vaccination movement. But general bias is, more fundamentally, a bias to do with realms of meaning, not hatred of experts.Footnote ¹²⁸ Common sense is a realm of meaning that we all share. In this realm of meaning, we regard things as they relate to us, we think practically, we speak about the near term. The realm of theory, however, requires a “differentiation of consciousness,” a specialization of knowing so that we regard things as they relate unto themselves, ask questions that are not self-interested or obviously practical, and consider the longer term.Footnote ¹²⁹ An electrician works in the realm of common sense; a professor of electrical engineering, at least when she is teaching or writing, works in the realm of theory. Both are intelligent in their work, but their thinking is of different kinds. The problem comes when we dismiss theory tout court as impractical or pointless. For example, a major agribusiness needs to increase its quarterly profitability. When an internal expert informs the COO that their farming practices are destroying the topsoil and that the firm must embrace new, less profitable farming practices to prevent the loss of topsoil in coming decades, the COO dismisses this advice from the egg-headed soil experts. He needs to increase profit now and the effects of soil degradation will not take effect for several years. But if these practices persist, and if his competitors do the same, they are likely to ruin the topsoil in the long term. This is not a practical outcome, but it is ironically driven by a blinkered concern for practicality.

The result of general bias is the longer cycle of decline, which results in cataclysm.Footnote ¹³⁰ The situation demands a withdrawal from practicality, a reassessment, a theoretical moment, but day-to-day pressures seem to demand unrelenting busyness. Over time, however, history marches forward and the conditions of the present shift unnoticed beneath our feet. We scuttle with antlike industry, with efforts aimed at a reality that no longer exists. The soil has become sand, no longer producing no matter what we do to it. Neglect of theoretical insight leads increasingly to practice that is counterproductive. Lonergan writes, “The general bias of common sense generates an increasingly significant residue that (1) is immanent in social facts, (2) is not intelligible, and (3) cannot be abstracted if one is to consider the facts as in fact they are.”Footnote ¹³¹ This situation Lonergan calls the “social surd.”Footnote ¹³²

As practicality no longer responds to real conditions, dramatic bias intensifies. An irrational world frequently suggests troubling insights and so is increasingly shut out. This situation hypercharges individual bias as well: if the world is going to hell, I might as well look out for myself. Likewise with group-bias: people like us must do everything in our power to win power; we have no time to consider the underlying assumptions behind our conflicts, the deeper social problems, what injustice truly is, what social flourishing and good governance would actually be. The end of the road for general bias is ruin: war, political collapse, economic depression, ecological catastrophe, or nuclear annihilation.Footnote ¹³³ We would need theory in order to understand that this is so but have refused it as an impractical waste of time. So a society in decline “digs its own grave with a relentless consistency.”Footnote ¹³⁴

How does the collusion of conceptualism and instrumental reason contribute to these cycles of decline? Let us take up group bias and the shorter cycle first. First, recall the centrality of stereotype-thinking for instrumental reason. Now, conceptualism is not an accurate account of human cognition, but it does provide an apt phenomenology of certain failed attempts at knowing, such as stereotype-thinking. Ethnic or racial prejudice is, fundamentally, a prioritizing of a universal concept over insight into the concrete. Knowing another human being becomes a matter of perception resulting in a universal concept without any intervening questions or insights. Prior assumptions are mistaken for perceptions, which are mistaken for reality. Now, shorn of technical terms: prejudice would be when I see a human being and I think, “Jew.” Whether my associations with this universal concept are positive or negative, this is the reductive stereotype-thinking Horkheimer laments. When conceptualism becomes stereotype-thinking, instrumental reason is all too disposed to use it for its purposes, often to terrible effect. Given the prevalence of stereotype-thinking, a latent, performed conceptualism is not simply an arcane problem among interpreters of Thomas Aquinas but articulates the cognitive aspect of a global human problem.

Regarding the longer cycle of decline, the collusion of conceptualism and instrumental reason works differently. As Horkheimer pointed out in his critique of certain Thomists, it is possible to take concepts that were expressions of intelligence in one context and use them in a perfunctory, thoughtless way in another. By speaking at length about substances, accidents, notional distinctions, efficient causes, formal causes, and supposita, and by relating these terms in chains of logically flawless arguments, they sounded like they were intelligent, perhaps may even appear to be doing theory, but they lacked the understanding of realities unto themselves that would make their theory vital. The result is a set of meanings that are thoroughly coherent and controlled but that despite this may give no genuine insight into concrete reality. This can easily be employed to reinforce rather than challenge general bias because it provides no genuine theoretical insight even as it might make us feel that we have fulfilled our theoretical obligations. Indeed, such empty pseudo-theoretical work can be taken in any direction one wants. This is not, by the way, a problem exclusive to theology or philosophy—one can find analogues across the disciplines.

Consider two examples in the field of economics, which so often informs policymaking. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman recalls a paper by the economist Bruno Frey on the “psychological assumptions of economic theory”; in sum, the “agent of economic theory is rational, selfish, and his tastes do not change.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Kahneman found this thesis astonishing: “To a psychologist, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable. Our two disciplines [i.e., psychology and economics] seemed to be studying different species….”Footnote ¹³⁶ Following Richard Thaler, Kahneman calls the members of this alien species, Econs. As Kahneman argues, the Econs are so distant from the concrete realities of human life that the discipline consistently fails to explain or predict economic behavior. In 2002, Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in economics for this insight (and others). In 2024, he died. The Econ, however, has not yet met its demise. It is not hard to see why: the field of economics has long been path-dependent upon the Econ, and the predictable and uniform Econ fits better into mathematical economic models than the unpredictable and complex homo sapiens. Moving the whole discipline onto this new foundation, or reconstructing it entirely, is daunting. Even if this were accomplished, developing economic with reference to the psychological facts of human desiring, consuming, and producing would be far more difficult. Predicting economic outcomes and making policy proposals would be anything but straightforward.

So we are left with a consensus in economic theory that centers upon an abstract human subject who does not bear much resemblance to psychological facts, which sounds very much like conceptualism. Further, the theory built around the Econ facilitates economic prediction and policy recommendation, an important set of means available for instrumental reason. But this theory lacks an understanding of the end of economic activity, which is inescapably the well-being of the very human being eclipsed by the Econ. In other words, conceptualism and instrumental reason effectively block the way to replace the Econ with the homo sapiens as the primary agent of economic theory—all for the sake of practicality. But such practicality is questionable: we are building a fine world for the Econ, who does not exist, and a troubled one for the homo sapiens, who does. Is that practical? Or is this a manifestation of the social surd?

The second example comes from the economist Partha Dasgupta. He recounts a moment in 2004 in which eight rather important economists met in Copenhagen to determine how global leaders could best spend $50 billion over five years. Outlining ten possibilities, spending to intervene on global warming was dead last.Footnote ¹³⁷ Dasgupta explains that they did this, despite knowing the enormous magnitude of global warming for the global economy because they “[discounted] future costs and benefits at a positive rate. Reducing global carbon emissions or investing in technologies for carbon sequestration would involve huge costs now, but the benefits from averting economic disruptions would be enjoyed only 50 to 100 years from now.”Footnote ¹³⁸ According to their models, other investments would return enough wealth over that same period to outweigh the real costs of inaction on climate. “Doing something about climate change now, the calculations imply, would be to throw money away on a comparatively bad project.”Footnote ¹³⁹ These projections, however, depend entirely on the assumption that “global consumption per head will continue to grow over the next 150 years and more even if net emissions of greenhouse gases follow current trends; which is to assume that climate change poses no serious threat to the future.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ That assumption, which was questionable in 2004, is a bitter joke today.

Again, we see the collusion of conceptualism and instrumental reason. On one hand, the economists developed a cohesive, internally consistent, well-defined systematic model, which had all the appearance of a theoretic explanation of economic reality, but in fact provided clarity and precision about, well, nothing more than the model. What makes this conceptualist is not the use of a model, or the use of mathematical theorems, but rather the dependence upon a single model, even a single flawed assumption within this single model, to make a recommendation about a very complicated state of affairs that the model could not adequately render. The reality adverted to in their model was systematic self-referentiality, nothing more than the output of a complex equation; basic assumptions went unchallenged, and the complex, multifactored truth of the matter was left aside. Nor was this an innocent mistake; this flawed model and the recommendations that emerged from it served existing economic and political arrangements. That is, this group of economists handed over to instrumental reason nothing more than systematically arranged concepts and relations emptied of insight into the concrete, and they offered no theoretic challenge to the devastation of our planet.Footnote ¹⁴¹