Mounce,
In 2002, Vincent Colapietro criticized a paper I had written, in which I said that Lonergan treated judging as an act of intellect and deciding as an act of will. He pointed out to me that Lonergan had abandoned the distinction between intellect and will in 1968. I was embarrassed to have learned this so late in my career.
Lonergan spent many years “reaching up” to the mind of Aquinas, and in “Insight” he was still using the language of faculty psychology. By attributing acts of understanding and judging to “intellect” and acts of deciding and choosing to “will,” he was dwelling in the Thomistic tradition that had nourished him. But he was also reporting on the results of his efforts to effect “a personal appropriation of the concrete, dynamic structure immanent and recurrently operative in his own cognitional activities” (IN xvii). I believe that he abandoned faculty psychology, and the language of faculty psychology, as a result of his continuing efforts at self-appropriation. In this respect, he broke out of the tradition within which his thinking had been formed.
In “The Subject” (1968, pp. 19-20), Lonergan said that the notion of the “existential subject,” who both knows and acts, and makes himself by his own knowing and doing was “overlooked on the schematism of older categories that distinguished faculties, such as intellect and will, or different uses of the same faculty, such as speculative and practical intellect, or different types of human activity, such as theoretical inquiry and practical execution. None of these distinctions adverts to the subject as such and, while the reflexive, self-constitutive element in moral living has been known from ancient times, still it was not coupled with the notion of the subject to draw attention to him in his key role of making himself what he is to be.”
He elaborated on his rejection of faculty psychology in “Method in Theology,” and related this rejection to authenticity,
“Because its account of interiority was basically metaphysical, the older theology distinguished sensitive and intellectual, apprehensive and appetitive potencies. There followed complex questions on their mutual interactions. There were disputes about the priority of intellect over will or of will over intellect, of speculative over practical intellect or of practical over speculative. In contrast, we describe interiority in terms of intentional and conscious acts on the levels of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding” (MT 120).
The level of deciding is “the level of freedom and responsibility,” and it is by responsible deciding that a person becomes more authentic. Authenticity and unauthenticity appear at all four levels. A person must decide to be “attentive or inattentive” in experiencing, “intelligent or unintelligent” in inquiring, and “reasonable or unreasonable” in judging: "Therewith vanish two notions: the notion of pure intellect or pure reason that operates on its own without guidance or control from responsible decision; and the notion of will as an arbitrary power indifferently choosing between good and evil” (p. 121).
Lonergan said that authenticity emerges slowly. Reaching the “age of reason” at around six or seven is “only the beginning of human authenticity.” A person continues to take more personal responsibility for his own life as he goes through adolescence and young adulthood. “It is this highly complex business of authenticity and unauthenticity that has to replace the overly simple notion of will as arbitrary power. Arbitrariness is just another name for unauthenticity. To think of will as arbitrary power is to assume that authenticity never exists or occurs” (pp. 121-2).
I believe that self-appropriation and "conversions" are aspects of the slow process of moving toward a state of greater authenticity, and that Lonergan's abandonment of faculty psychology was, at least in part, a consequence of that slow process as it unfolded in his own life.
