~ Communications as an Ongoing Process

It’s been some years since Canadian Jesuit Bernie Lonergan wrote the following words, and yet they are as poignant to the mind and as pregnant with potential as they were back in 1971.

“Community is not just an aggregate of individuals within a frontier, for that overlooks its formal constituent, which is common meaning. Such common meaning calls for a common field of experience and, when that is lacking, people get out of touch. It calls for common or complementary ways of understanding and, when they are lacking, people begin to misunderstand, to distrust, to suspect, to fear, to resort to violence. It calls for common judgments and, when they are lacking, people reside in different worlds. It calls for common values, goals, policies and, when they are lacking, people operate at cross-purposes.

Such common meaning is doubly constitutive. In each individual it is constitutive of the individual as a member of the community. In the group of individuals it is constitutive of the community.

The genesis of common meaning is an ongoing process of communication, of people coming to share the same cognitive, constitutive, and effective meanings. On the elementary level this process has been described as arising between the self and the other when, on the basis of already existing intersubjectivity, the self makes a gesture, the other makes an interpretive response, and the self discovers in the response the effective meaning of his gesture. So from intersubjectivity through gesture and interpretation there arises common understanding. On that spontaneous basis there can be built a common language, the transmission of acquired knowledge and of social patterns through education, the diffusion of information, and the common will to community that seeks to replace misunderstanding with mutual comprehension and to change occasions of disagreement into occasions of non-agreement and even-tually of agreement.”

- Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971), 356-357.

the 36th Annual Lonergan Workshop starts June21st at Boston College