The Startling Strangeness of Things

Wherein Taylor talks about coffee and mugs yet again.

Coffee is a dangerous place to begin a metaphysics.

Not because coffee is dangerous. Coffee is a mercy. Coffee is one of the deep little sacraments of the morning, not in the technical ecclesial sense—please do not write letters to anyone’s Bishop—but in the older, wilder, more human sense: a sign that wakes the body, focuses the mind, summons the soul back from whatever vaporous dreamworld it was wandering at 5:17 a.m., and says, with a dark and moody kindness: brother, attend.

So there I am, as I am wont, mug in hand.

Warmth against the fingers. Ceramic curve. Steam rising like some minor liturgical veil. Sweet fragrance. Brown-black depth. The little clink of the mug against the hardwood. The whole house still half-asleep, the world not yet a rumble, email not yet victorious, children not yet asking for shoes they cannot find and certainly did not put where you told them to put them.

I think I am holding a thing.

A mug.

Obvious. Ordinary. There. Mine.

And then Lonergan comes crashing into the kitchen like a Jesuit with a philosophical search warrant and says: are you sure?

Not are you sure it exists? That is not his first move. He is not playing cheap parlor games with reality. He is not asking whether I am dreaming the mug, hallucinating the mug, or trapped in the Matrix with an especially well-rendered pour-over. Lonergan’s question is stranger and more devastating:

How did you come to know it as a thing at all?

Because the mug does not simply leap into my mind as “mug.” Before the mug, there is color, resistance, warmth, weight, curvature, memory, expectation, use, habit, language, hand, world. Before “mug,” there is a manifold of data. Before “thing,” there is experiencing. Before “real,” there is the long road through attention, inquiry, insight, reflection, and judgment.

And that, friends, is where the morning gets interesting.

The ordinary is not obvious

One of Lonergan’s great gifts is that he takes the ordinary world and makes it strange again—not by dissolving it into mist, not by turning it into “mere appearance,” not by throwing us into the bog of skepticism where everyone speaks with great seriousness about whether spoons exist.

No. He makes the ordinary strange by showing how rich it is.

The ordinary is not thin. It is thick. It is layered. It is charged with intelligibility. The world is not a flat inventory of visible objects sitting under fluorescent light waiting to be catalogued by bored angels. The world is a wilderness of being, a thunderstorm of relations, a dance of schemes and patterns and histories and possibilities. Every mug, every maple leaf, every toddler shoe, every startup pitch deck, every icon, every spreadsheet, every tired commuter on the bus is more than what first appears.

We live, most of the time, as if knowing were looking.

Open eyes. Object appears. Knowledge achieved. Boom. Done. Like taking a screenshot of reality.

But Lonergan says: nope. Too easy. Too animal. Too much like thinking the world is real because it is “already out there now,” pressing itself upon us, shining, sounding, resisting, seducing, threatening, delighting. That kind of knowing is not nothing. Animals live by it. We live by it too. We are embodied creatures, not disembodied syllogism dispensers floating through abstract space wearing tweed jackets of pure reason. We look. We smell. We taste. We touch. We bump into furniture in the dark and learn humility the hard way.

But human knowing is not merely looking.

Human knowing asks.

What is this? Why is it so? Is this really the case? What follows? What am I to do?

That movement—from data, to question, to insight, to judgment—is the quiet engine underneath our world. It is happening all the time. Usually unnoticed. Usually unthanked. Like gravity. Like plumbing. Like mothers.

Lonergan wants us to notice it.

And once you notice it, you cannot unnotice it.

Bodies and things

In Chapter 8 of Insight, Lonergan takes up “Things.” The title sounds almost comically simple. Things. As though after hundreds of pages of insight, empirical method, common sense, space, time, bias, and the vast machinery of human understanding, he decided to kick back and talk about stuff.

But “things” are not simple.

Or rather: things are simple only after the mind has done quite a lot of work.

Lonergan distinguishes between bodies and things. A body is what is known in something like the animal pattern: the already-out-there-now, the object as encountered in relation to me as a body. The body is what I can bump into, eat, flee, grasp, chase, fear, desire. It is the world of immediacy. The street in front of the child. The hot stove. The shadow in the alley. The thing that moves toward me quickly and may require me to jump backward with great haste and little dignity.

But a thing is different.

A thing is a unity, identity, whole.

Not merely a patch of color. Not merely resistance. Not merely a cluster of sensations. Not merely a practical object useful to me here and now.

A thing is what intelligence grasps as one. A thing has identity through difference. A thing remains itself across shifting appearances, contexts, uses, relations, histories. The mug looks different in morning light and evening shadow. It feels different when full and empty. It was once clay, then formed, fired, glazed, shelved, purchased, washed, chipped, loved, forgotten, found again. It may be known by the potter, the chemist, the merchant, the child, the collector, the archaeologist, the tired father trying to caffeinate before the world begins its daily campaign of entropy.

All of those are not different “bodies.” They are partial entries into the same thing.

The thing is richer than any one encounter.

This is the startling strangeness: I do not know the mug merely because I see it. I know it because my intelligence gathers the data, asks after unity, grasps pattern, and judges. “Yes. This is a mug. This is the same mug. This mug is chipped. This mug is mine. This mug contains the coffee without which civilization may not proceed.”

And the mug is only the beginning.

Because if this is true of mugs, it is true of trees. If true of trees, true of bodies. If true of bodies, true of persons. If true of persons, then dear God help us, because much of modern life is a colossal machinery for treating persons as bodies and pretending nothing has gone wrong.

The fake realism of merely looking

Lonergan’s language about “startling strangeness” appears early in Insight, where he says that one has not really discovered the difference between two realisms if one has no clear memory of its startling strangeness.

The two realisms matter.

There is an incoherent realism, “half animal and half human,” that thinks reality is what is simply “out there” to be looked at. This realism feels tough. It feels practical. It wears boots. It says things like “just give me the facts” and “I call it like I see it.” It has no time for clouds, no patience for philosophers, no love for the slow work of understanding.

But it is incoherent because human beings do not, in fact, know the real merely by looking.

We know by experiencing, understanding, and judging.

The other realism—the intelligent and reasonable realism—is harder won. It says the real is what is known when we have attended to experience, asked the right questions, reached insight, reflected, weighed the evidence, and judged. The real is not less real because intelligence is involved. It is more properly known.

This is where Lonergan is so easily misunderstood.

He is not saying that reality is invented by the mind. He is not saying the mug becomes real because I declare it so, like some caffeinated sovereign issuing ontological decrees before breakfast. He is saying that my knowledge of reality depends on the full structure of knowing. Reality is not manufactured by judgment. Reality is known in judgment.

Without that distinction we lurch between two disasters.

On one side, a crude materialism: only what can be seen, measured, priced, touched, weaponized, optimized, scaled, monetized, or eaten is real.

On the other side, an airy idealism: reality is trapped behind the mind, and all we ever know are our own ideas, impressions, interpretations, projections, vibes.

Lonergan is after the saner and more demanding path: pay attention, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible. Reality is not found by fleeing the mind, nor by worshiping the mind, but by appropriating what the mind is already doing when it knows.

That word—appropriation—is magnificent and mildly terrifying.

It means making one’s own what one already is.

Not acquiring a theory like one acquires a new gadget. Not downloading a philosophical app. Not choosing a school because its merch looks cool. Rather, turning around and attending to the operations already alive in oneself: seeing, imagining, wondering, questioning, understanding, formulating, reflecting, judging, deciding, loving.

Lonergan is not giving us an alien theory of what humans ought to do. He is inviting us to discover what we already do when we are awake.

And yes, awakening is strange.

The inner word and the world

In Verbum, Lonergan’s great study of Aquinas, he digs into the “inner word.” That phrase can sound pious or decorative, but it is neither. It is sharp as a chisel.

The inner word is not first the spoken word. Not the noise out loud. Not the scribble on the page. Not the tweet, the post, the deck, the memo, the exquisitely weaponized email.

The inner word is the term of understanding.

We ask. We inquire. We wrestle with the image. We stare at the data. We turn the thing around in the mind. We get nowhere. We get irritated. We refill the coffee. We go for a run. We come back. And then—flash, click, dawn, thunderclap, subtle little birdcall of intelligence—insight.

Ah.

That’s it.

Then comes formulation. Definition. Inner word. The mind saying what it has grasped.

But even that is not yet the whole of knowing. Understanding gives us what may be so. Judgment asks: is it so? That second question matters. It saves us from falling in love with our own cleverness, which is perhaps the most common intellectual sin and should probably have its own feast day, or anti-feast day, or penitential IPA.

Insight alone is not enough. We need judgment.

This is why the world is not merely imagined. It is not merely named. It is known when intelligence and reason come to their proper term.

And this is also why words matter so desperately.

Outer words point back toward inner words. Speech is not just sound. Writing is not just marks. Language is the bridge by which one person’s inner world reaches toward another. Misuse the word and you do not merely make a communication error. You poison wells. You collapse bridges. You make common life stupid.

We are drowning in words and starving for judgment.

Feeds, posts, clips, hot takes, metrics, charts, summaries, predictions, synthetic voices, synthetic images, synthetic confidence. A million little bodies of data dancing before us in the pale glow of the screen.

But where are the things?

Where is the unity? Where is the identity? Where is the whole? Where is the patient labor of asking what this really is? Where is the reflective pause before judgment? Where is the question after the question? Where is the intellectual charity that says: I have not yet understood?

Without that, we do not become more realistic. We become more easily manipulated.

Things within things

Another wild move in Chapter 8: things within things.

A thing is not sealed off from the world like an object in a museum case. Things are nested. Layered. Participating in larger schemes. The coffee in the mug is itself a thing, and the mug is a thing, and the hand holding the mug is a thing, and the person whose hand holds the mug is not less than a thing but more than thing in the merely explanatory sense: a subject, a self, a moral agent, a beloved, an embodied soul, an image of God moving through time with wounds and hopes and laundry.

Things are in things.

The bean is in the coffee. The farm is in the bean. Soil, rain, labor, markets, roasting, shipping, brewing, attention. All of this is present, not as a sentimental fog, but as intelligible relation. To know the coffee more fully is not to stare harder at the surface of the cup. It is to ask better questions.

Where did this come from?

Who grew it?

What labor made it possible?

What ecology sustained it?

What habits brought it into my morning?

What does my receiving it require of me?

Suddenly the mug is not a mute object. It is an entrance into the world.

This is one of the reasons I love Lonergan. He refuses to flatten the universe. He will not let us settle for the cheap little realism of “I saw it, therefore I know it.” He keeps pressing toward intelligibility, toward the further question, toward the fullness of things.

And once you begin to see things this way, ethics is no longer pasted onto knowledge from the outside. Responsibility arises from knowing more truthfully.

The more I understand a thing, the less casually I can misuse it.

The more I understand a person, the less easily I can reduce him to a category, a vote, a demographic, a risk score, a customer profile, a political enemy, an economic unit, a theological problem, an avatar, a body.

AI and the temptation of bodies

Here is where this all starts growling at the present moment.

Modern technological life is extraordinarily good at bodies.

Not bodies in the full human sense, but bodies as detectable objects. Data points. Signals. Inputs. Outputs. Profiles. Patterns. Clickstreams. Voiceprints. Token streams. Heat maps. Market segments. Risk surfaces. Facial geometries. Productivity measures. Engagement curves.

We can see so much.

But seeing is not yet knowing.

A system may detect, classify, predict, rank, summarize, recommend, generate. Some of this is useful. Some of it is extraordinary. Some of it is beautiful in the way a well-built tool can be beautiful. I am not interested in lazy denunciations of technology. We are tool-making creatures. Fire, wheels, books, chant notation, printing presses, operating systems, sourdough starters, espresso machines, neural nets. Glory be. The human animal loves tools and occasionally even survives them.

But the danger is not that tools exist.

The danger is that tools train the soul.

And a tool trained only on bodies may tempt us to forget things.

Worse: it may tempt us to forget Subjects.

A person becomes a pattern. A child becomes a performance indicator. A worker becomes productivity exhaust. A patient becomes a billing code. A parishioner becomes attendance data. A founder becomes a pitch archetype. A student becomes a probability distribution. A neighbor becomes a political signifier. A face becomes a bounding box.

This is not realism. This is barbarism with dashboards.

Lonergan’s Chapter 8 pushes back. Gently at first, then with increasing force.

Do not merely look. Understand.

Do not merely detect. Ask.

Do not merely correlate. Judge.

Do not merely optimize. Be responsible.

The thing is richer than its appearances. The person is richer than the thing. And the subject is not captured from the outside.

Creation as intelligible gift

For certain worldviews, this line of thought opens into something even deeper.

The world is not just intelligible. It is gift.

The Catholic Creed says God is maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. Not of vague spiritual moods. Not of disembodied abstractions. Heaven and earth. Visible and invisible. Matter and spirit. Bodies, yes, but bodies gathered into things, things held within creation, creation spoken through the Word, creation groaning toward transfiguration.

A Byzantine instinct helps here. The world is not raw material for domination. It is not a prison from which spirit must escape. It is not merely stage scenery for private salvation dramas. It is creation. It is charged with Divine generosity. It is to be received, blessed, offered back.

Bread and wine become Eucharist.

Water becomes baptism.

Oil becomes healing.

Wood becomes cross.

Pigment and board become icon.

Human voice becomes chant.

Matter is not the enemy of holiness. Matter is where holiness descends, hides, burns, waits, rises.

This is not a departure from Lonergan. It is one of the places his philosophy begins to sing with theology. If knowing moves from experience to understanding to judgment, then loving creation requires that we actually know it—not sentimentally, not exploitatively, not as tourists of being, but attentively and intelligently and reasonably and responsibly.

The real world is not less wondrous because it can be understood.

It is more wondrous because intelligibility is one of its glories.

The battle inside the self

There is, however, a problem.

Me.

Also you.

Also all of us scallywags.

We do not spontaneously live in pure unrestricted desire to know. We block questions. We dodge insights. We cherish stupidities because they serve our egos, our tribes, our appetites, our plans. We prefer the immediate win to the longer truth. We settle for what Lonergan calls bias: dramatic, individual, group, general. The whole ugly carnival.

Bias is not merely having bad opinions. Bias is the refusal of relevant questions.

That is why it is so deadly.

A blocked question today is a missing world tomorrow.

If I refuse to ask what is really going on in my marriage, my work, my parish, my company, my nation, my own soul, then I do not merely lack information. I deform reality as it is available to me. I begin living in a smaller world, then defending that smaller world with all the fury of a man who suspects, deep down, that he has misplaced the truth.

We do this constantly.

We reduce things to bodies because bodies are easier to manage.

We reduce people to types because types are easier to dismiss.

We reduce reality to what serves us because service is easier than truth.

But the unrestricted desire to know keeps whispering. Sometimes roaring. Sometimes showing up in the middle of the night like a prophet with insomnia.

What is it?

Why?

Is it so?

What are you doing?

Who are you becoming?

The startling strangeness is not merely an epistemological discovery. It is a moral summons. Once I know that knowing is not merely looking, I become responsible for my inattentions. Once I know that judgment requires more than impression, I become responsible for my lazy certainties. Once I know that persons are not bodies for my use, I become responsible for the violence of reduction.

There is no going back.

Or rather, there is always going back. We do it constantly. But now we know what we are doing.

Make yourself your own

Lonergan’s great project is not just to explain knowing. It is to invite self-appropriation.

Make yourself your own.

Not in the modern therapeutic-branding sense. Not “curate your identity,” “live your truth,” “build your personal platform,” “treat the self as a lifestyle startup with better lighting.”

No.

Make yourself your own by discovering the operations by which you already move toward truth and goodness. Attend to your attending. Understand your understanding. Judge your judging. Decide about your deciding. Become present to yourself as one who experiences, understands, judges, chooses, loves.

This is difficult.

Reality is difficult.

But the difficulty is not a defect. It is part of the Glory. A cheap account of the world would be false to the world. A cheap account of the person would be false to the person. A cheap account of God would be idolatry with footnotes.

So Lonergan gives us the harder road.

The road of attention.

The road of intelligence.

The road of reasonableness.

The road of responsibility.

The road on which the ordinary becomes luminous because we have finally stopped treating it as obvious.

The mug again

The coffee has cooled now.

The mug sits beside the keyboard, no longer steaming, less dramatic, still itself. A body, yes, in the field of sense. But more truly, a thing: unity, identity, whole. Known a little. Not exhausted. Never exhausted. A humble ceramic ambassador from the vast republic of being.

And I am here too.

Not merely a body in a chair.

A knower. A chooser. A lover. A sinner. A father. A husband. A teacher. A creature. A man with coffee breath and metaphysical ambitions, still trying to pay attention.

This is the wildness hidden in the ordinary: the world is not waiting merely to be looked at. It is waiting to be understood. And beyond understanding, judged. And beyond judgment, loved.

Lonergan does not make things strange by making them unreal.

He makes them strange by showing us how real they are.

So yes, hold the mug. Drink the coffee. Bless the morning. Read the data. Ask the question. Chase the insight. Make the judgment. Refuse the reduction.

Practice resurrection.