• Some disagreements can be settled by gathering more evidence, checking the sources, or correcting a misunderstanding.

Others cannot.

Two serious people may study the same events and documents yet arrive at incompatible accounts of reality. More evidence does not resolve the dispute because the evidence is already being interpreted from within opposed horizons. The disagreement is no longer merely about the facts. It concerns the persons interpreting them.

In Episode 10 of this series on Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology, we examine Dialectic, the fourth functional specialty and the culmination of theology’s first phase.

Dialectic addresses conflicts that Research, Interpretation, and History can uncover but cannot resolve. It distinguishes differences that enrich knowledge from those rooted in fundamentally opposed intellectual, moral, and religious horizons.

Lonergan begins by distinguishing three ways horizons can differ. Complementary horizons belong to people performing different but mutually necessary tasks. Genetic horizons represent different stages within a process of development. Dialectically opposed horizons, however, divide people over what is intelligible, true, good, and holy.

The source of these deeper divisions is conversion, or its absence.

This episode explores:

• complementary, genetic, and dialectically opposed horizons
• horizontal and vertical exercises of freedom
• intellectual, moral, and religious conversion
• why knowing cannot be reduced to looking
• the movement from satisfactions to values
• religious conversion as unrestricted being-in-love
• how the three conversions are related through sublation
• breakdown, self-deception, and cultural decline
• encounter as a challenge to one’s own horizon
• why the three conversions produce eight radically different types of horizon
• the distinction between positions and counter-positions
• why counter-positions are reversed rather than merely rejected
• dialectic as an objectification of subjectivity
• why authentic investigators recognize truth in their opponents and error in their allies
• Lonergan’s claim that objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity

Dialectic does not settle conflict by constructing an argument everyone must accept. The opposed parties may not even share the intellectual, moral, or religious terms needed to conduct such an argument.

Instead, dialectic makes the underlying horizons visible.

Its central procedure is expressed in two commands:

Develop positions. Reverse counter-positions.

A position is compatible with intellectual, moral, and religious conversion and can therefore be developed further. A counter-position contains something incompatible with conversion and must be reversed. The object of this sorting process is always a claim or position, never the condemnation of a person.

When different investigators apply this procedure, their divergent results reveal the horizons from which they worked. Dialectic therefore functions like a crucial experiment. It brings concealed subjectivity into the open and transforms theological conflict into an encounter capable of promoting conversion.

With Dialectic, the first phase of theology is complete. Research gathered the data. Interpretation determined what was meant. History reconstructed what was going forward. Dialectic now confronts the opposed horizons disclosed by that work.

Chapters
00:00 Opposed Worlds
03:02 Three Kinds of Horizon
04:38 Three Conversions
11:01 Conversion and Breakdown
12:34 Encounter and Babel
15:46 Positions and Counter-Positions
17:25 The Crucial Experiment
19:43 Authentic Subjectivity

In the next episode, we begin theology’s second phase with Foundations. Dialectic has exposed the available horizons, but it has not yet taken a stand. The next question is therefore unavoidable: on what ground does the theologian appropriate a horizon and begin to state what is true?

How do we recover meaning in a fragmented world?
Short reflections on consciousness, conversion, and responsibility.

Read the full essays at Mediated by Meaning: https://mediatedbymeaning.substack.com

#meaning #philosophy #faith #psychology #jordanpeterson #catholic #lonergan #selfunderstanding