What ‘Will’ Won't Do: Faculty Psychology, Intentionality Analysis, and the Metaphysics of Interiority

In a recent and erudite monograph, Paul Crittenden, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney, offers a stirring defense of the classical 'faculty model' of psychology, together with an incisive critique of phenomenological accounts of 'intentionality'. 1 The principal object of Crittenden's attentions is Andrew Tallon's version of 'triune consciousness'.2 But Crittenden deals learnedly with Tallon's sources, and it is to Bernard Lonergan that Tallon appeals repeatedly to warrant his rejection of faculty psychology in favor of intentionality analysis.Accordingly, Crittenden devotes ample space to an exposition and critique of Lonergan's shift from faculty psychology to his own version of intentionality analysis.3 In a quite different quarter, an ongoing conversation within the Lonergan school itself has, for two decades, regarded a complex of interrelated problems all of which turn in some way on Lonergan's move away from faculty psychology: what it is to love and be loved, whether there there are four or five levels of consciousness, whether the scholastic distinction between sanctifying grace and the habit of charity has ongoing validity.4 In the background of the whole complex of issues lies Lonergan's decisive break with the tradition of faculty psychology, with its distinction of intellect and will, in favor of the strategy he called intentionality analysis, which resolved the structure of consciousness into a series of levels.It is because that break eliminated the category, 'will', that the relationship of sanctifying grace and the habit of charity came up for renewed consideration.It is because that break conceives consciousness as unfolding through a succession of levels that the question of a fifth level arose.My present concern is the issue in the background.It is to investigate the prior issue: How does Lonergan's intentionality analysis differ from the mode of analysis-the metaphysical analysis of natural proportion-that yields a faculty psychology?Why, for what reasons, did Lonergan come to regard those differences as decisive and his intentionality analysis as superior?What happens to the 'metaphysics of interiority' as a result of this break?And especially, in what sense did Lonergan abandon the concept of 'will' and how did he account for the data explained by that concept?This study, then, is an exercise in interpretation.It does not aim to be exhaustive.Others have done detailed studies of the development of Lonergan's thinking on the notion of value 5 and on the levels of consciousness.6 My aims are complementary and restricted.What I have to say is relevant to Crittenden's brief, for it provides an alternative and wider ranging investigation of Lonergan's development, and of the advantages he recognized in intentionality analysis; but I do not aim to dispute with Crittenden.It is relevant to the conversations about love, levels, grace and charity, because it explores the changing context within which Lonergan thought V

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