Lonergan and Oedipus

Abstract

My first aim in this dissertation is to elucidate Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus through the writings of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. My second aim is to elucidate Lonergan’s thought by adducing it, in action, in Oedipus Tyrannus. Instead of analyzing what a classical text means to its own time and place, I undertake a philosophy of classics, exploring various philosophical problems by using Sophoclean texts. The paper incidentally discloses an interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannus that is at odds with some of the leading authors in the secondary literature while remaining consonant with others. I use Woodruff and Meineck’s 2003 translation of Theban Plays throughout because I find the translation refreshing. It is my hope that this paper, like all good papers, raises more questions than answers. In Chapter 1, I recruit Lonergan’s three basic observations about human knowing to explain Oedipus’ cognitive journey over the course of the play. First, Lonergan notes that underpinning all human knowing is the spirit of inquiry; the pure, unrestricted desire to know, which Lonergan calls “the supreme heuristic notion.” Second, he observes that the structure of human knowing is invariant. No matter who you are – mathematician, scientist, commonsense knower, etc. – all human knowing follows a dynamic but invariant structure Lonergan calls the “self-correcting cycle of learning.” This cycle moves from inquiry to insight to judgment to decision. Third, this invariant, self-correcting cycle, underpinned by the pure unrestricted desire to know, operates within dynamically shifting patterns of consciousness, modes of human knowing, that are circumscribed by our concerns, expressed by the kinds of questions we ask. Human consciousness is “polymorphic.” Using these three points as touchstones, I elucidate the dynamism of Oedipus’ cognitional structure by tracing the self-correcting sequence of his 132 questions until he arrives at his famous insight, which is simultaneously a virtually unconditioned judgment, expressed by his cry: Oh! Oh! It all comes clear! Light, let me look at you one last time. I am exposed – born to forbidden parents, joined In forbidden marriage, I brought forbidden death (Lines 1181-1185). With the concrete situation known and understood with clarity (σαφής), Oedipus’ consciousness should now become sublated into the structure of ethical intentionality. This sublation occurs the moment an agent says, “Okay. I understand and know the situation. Now, what should I do?” Typically, an agent begins to ask questions of value, questions which, in Patrick H. Byrne’s words, intend “practical insights into possible courses of action.” The goal of questions for intelligence and questions for judgment is to grasp, respectively, understanding and a virtually unconditioned judgment of fact. Likewise, the goal of questions of value is to “grasp of virtually unconditioned value” until, ultimately, a judgment can be made about that value in a decision which implements the value in action. Instead of “ascending” into an “ethics of discernment,” however, Oedipus’ development remains arrested, in a static state of undistorted affectivity that makes moral conversion impossible. The play ends with Oedipus hovering in a liminal state, somewhere between Lonergan’s rational consciousness and rational self-consciousness. This liminal position of distorted affectivity lends credence to Marina McCoy’s claim that, “Sophocles does not reject the rational in favor of a tragic vision that is anti-rational or non-rational; rather, the rational itself includes an affective element.” In Chapter 2, I point out the various “interferences” in the dynamic, self-correcting sequence which I argue imbues Oedipus’ journey with its especially tragic and ironic dimension. I argue that the tragedy (and irony) of the play pivot on the “polymorphism” of Oedipus’ consciousness. A corollary to this argument is that we may understand some of the muddled thinking and the bitter intersubjective quarrels in the play – including but not limited to Oedipus v. Tiresias, Oedipus v. Creon and Oedipus v. Jocasta – through the prism of Lonergan’s discussion of “bias.” My discussion of bias naturally leads to an interpretation of the play that finds Sophocles indicting, not wisdom per se, as Nietzsche argued, but those who fail to understand what it means to correctly understand; those, in other words, who would deign to reduce understanding to a simple matter of “taking a look,” to use Lonergan’s phrase. I argue that the symbolism in the drama staunchly affirms Lonergan’s well-known claim that, “What is obvious in knowing is, indeed, looking. Compared to looking, insight is obscure, and the grasp of the unconditioned is doubly obscure. But empiricism amounts to the assumption that what is obvious in knowing is what knowing obviously is.” In Chapter 3, I enlarge the focus of my analysis from Oedipus’ single consciousness to the milieu in which that consciousness operates – Corinth, Thebes and, finally, Colonus. Viewed through a prism of Lonergan’s social theory, Thebes, and to a lesser extent Corinth, become exempla of “cities in decline,” symbolized generally by their hostility to questioning which, specifically, allows various biases to reign. I discuss the Greek concept of pollution, beginning with the familiar distinction between agos and miasma, and suggest that we may treat the idea of pollution in Oedipus Tyrannus as a metaphor for what Lonergan’s called the “long cycle of decline” and its root cause, “general bias,” the unprincipled privileging of the immediate and concrete over that which is non-present. The byproduct of this bias is “the social surd.” In an essay entitled, “The Absence of God in Modern Culture,” Lonergan notes, in cultures exists the “disastrous possibility of a conflict between human living as it can be lived and human living as a cultural superstructure dictates it should be lived.” I argue that there many junctures in the play in which the failure of insight and the triumph of oversight is compounded by if not caused by the dictates of Theban and Corinthian cultures, starting with Laius and Jocasta’s decision to murder their child, a choice which is then echoed by Polybus and Merope’s choice to suppress the truth of their son’s origin. I then point out that the most obvious operative bias here is group bias, symbolized by various characters’ commitment to violent patriarchy which neglects female voices of reason. I show, following McCoy and Christopher Long, that Colonus, courtesy of Theseus’ leadership, represents a possible antidote to this group bias through healing love. As Oedipus says of the space of Colonus in 1125, “In all my wanderings, this is the only place/Where I have found truth, honor and justice./I am well aware of how much I stand in your debt,/Without your help I would have nothing at all.” For Lonergan, if the mischief of bias is to be conquered, the ultimate ground for that conquering will come from a liberation outside the agent’s own native resources. Colonus gives us a glimpse of this third mode of self-transcendence, religious conversion, which, for Lonergan, is an unrestricted being in love with a “mysterious, uncomprehended God.” On the one hand, this viewpoint would seem to represent a juncture at which Lonergan’s thought simply does not and cannot apply to a classical text, such as Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus at Colonus. Lonergan’s notion of unrestricted being in love (with God) and his further distinctions of operative and cooperative grace would seem to be anachronistic. And yet, Lonergan claims that unrestricted being in love is “interpreted differently in the context of different religious traditions.” I argue that there is a sense in which Theseus’ almost otherworldly commitment to reverence (aidos) for the sacred space of Colonus, and his compassionate commitment to care for the stranger (xenia), more closely approximates or, at the very least, anticipates the almost supernatural dynamism of the authentic moral conversion Lonergan seems to have in mind. There are moments, in other words, in which Theseus relies on the dynamism of his own native intelligence and others in which something beyond him seems to be at work, as if a precursor to the supernatural moral disposition of the father in Luke’s “Parable of the Prodigal Son.” I conclude this chapter by noting that implicit in my argument is the premise that Oedipus Tyrannus cannot be read without adverting to Oedipus Colonus, without which the full sweep of the conquering of bias cannot be appreciated. From this premise I then deduce that the pessimistic Nietzschean reading of Oedipus Tyrannus, at the very least, requires more context. And while it is certainly possible to read Tyrannus separately from Colonus, insofar as they are not part of a traditional cycle, including Colonus in an analysis of Tyrannus discloses a further development in Sophocles’ thought that we may use to retroactively assess Tyrannus philosophically, especially vis-à-vis nihilism. Chapter 4 is devoted to a discussion of Lonergan’s metaphysics of human freedom and its relation to willingness, moral impotence and liberation. Here I apply Lonergan’s rich and complicated discussion of human freedom in Insight to offer a viewpoint that is contrary to deterministic readings of the play. In Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, Charles Segal advises us that to offer any fresh approach to Oedipus Tyrannus one must “remove a few layers of misconception.” Segal’s first misconception is this: “This is not a play about free will versus determinism.” He adds that “the issues of destiny, predetermination, and foreknowledge are raised as problems, not as dogma.” I will suggest here that if this assessment is accurate, the unintended irony of the play is that it nevertheless affirms a principle (dogma?) in spite of itself: that human freedom is enlarged by human intelligence, insofar as intelligence specifies, via practical insights and practical judgments of facts and values, a range of choices for the will to select. It follows that ignorance, bias and moral impotence, in blocking or shrinking this range of choices, limit our effective freedom to the point at which we are incapable of fully actualizing our essential freedom. Here I recruit Lonergan’s provocative image of the “surrounding penumbra” to describe “moral impotence,” in which he says, “Further, these areas are not fixed; as he develops, the penumbra penetrates into the shadow and the luminous area into the penumbra while, inversely, moral decline is a contraction of the luminous area and of the penumbra.” This image is particularly apt in describing the ways in which Oedipus enlarges the “luminous area” when he is authentically questioning, only to watch it contract into darkness when he is not – an equation symbolized by the Sophoclean trope of blindness. Finally, in an “Epilogue,” I conclude with some observations about the way in which Sophocles is often presented in undergraduate philosophy classes. I concur with Yoram Hazony who writes, in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, “I do not believe the dichotomy between faith and reason is very helpful in understanding the diversity of human intellectual orientations.” Likewise, it is unclear to me as to whether couching Athens as somehow opposed to Jerusalem is good pedagogical practice. In a similar mode, equally unclear to me is whether couching Sophocles as somehow opposed to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle is good practice. Yes, contradistinction has its pedagogical merits, but it can also wash away nuance. I then suggest, by way of a conclusion, that if we must have a dichotomy, a better alternative, even pedagogically speaking, may be to use Lonergan’s dichotomy of the friendly or unfriendly universe. For ultimately, we are faced with one existential question: is our universe a friendly one? In Method in Theology, Lonergan asks, poignantly: "Is moral enterprise consonant with this world?...is the universe on our side, or are we just gamblers and, if we are gamblers, are we not perhaps fools, individually struggling for authenticity and collectively endeavoring to snatch progress from the ever mounting welter of decline? The questions arise and, clearly, our attitudes and our resoluteness may be profoundly affected by the answers. Does there or does there not necessarily exists a transcendent, intelligent ground of the universe? Is that ground or are we the primary instance of moral consciousness? Are cosmogenesis, biological evolution, historical process basically cognate to us as moral beings or are they different and so alien to us?" The phrase “friendly universe” comes a bit later in the text, when Lonergan adds, “Faith places human efforts in a friendly universe; it reveals an ultimate significance in human achievement; it strengthens new undertakings with confidence” (117, my italics). Notice the connection Lonergan adduces between religious conversion, or the unrestricted being in love with God, as the ground of the friendly universe. And yet, as I mentioned earlier, this unrestricted being in love is, as Lonergan points out, “interpreted differently in the context of different religious traditions.” After all, Socrates was no Christian; but he did believe the universe was friendly. In this context, I argue that Sophocles ought to be aligned with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, not to mention most Biblical texts, against the truly opposed counter-position, “nihilism.” While it is certainly true that, in Oedipus, Sophocles heard that “eternal note of sadness on the Aegean,” as Matthew Arnold once wrote, Sophocles also seems to have heard in Colonus a note of compassion and wisdom and love and the hope for a construction of a community in which human striving is not in vain. As Oedipus tells his daughters, But there is one small word that can soothe – And that is ‘love.’ I loved you more than Anyone else could ever love, but now Your lives must go on without me. (1610-1619)