INTRODUCTION--Finding the Mind--Pedagogy for Self-Appropriation/Affirmation

11-18-12 UPDATE:  Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory, was published in May 2011. That work draws the verification procedures from the below work and is developed around what I call the shorter philosophical journey.  I have written two online introductions to that work: one for "newbies" to either Lonergan's work or to philosophical study in general and the other for those who have some experience with Lonergan's work. Those two introductions are linked below. Also linked below are the appendixes for that published work:

For those unfamiliar with Lonergan's work or with philosophical study:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S9QV5Q1NZNjyVlQCHXnmq0M1rM1EmUlru2dbhznV-H0/edit?hl=en_US

 For those familiar with Lonergan's work and with philosophical study:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mAmi7cjJW8mDAp4hdfVlUL_FmBjGqou0MVNHMibRqzE/edit?hl=en_US

Links for all appendixes to Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory (2011)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dpLN8xSbJy9cQTfvCYOHTVn9BdlAN-3aiF8UnVwCJRw/edit

NOTE to all Readers of below work as introduction to the longer philosophical journey: All 3 chapters are continued in the "Older Posts" section.

Introduction

“. . . so prolonged has been my search, so much of it has been a dark struggle with my own flight from understanding, so many have been the half-lights and detours in my slow development, . . .”
Bernard J.F. Lonergan (1958/xv, 2000/9)

"There is the first step in attending to the data of sense and of consciousness.”
Bernard J. F. Lonergan (1972/35)

We cannot know if we have inherited philosophical distortions unless and until we do some serious personal, cultural, and historical self-inspection. Hence, your commonsense getting-on-with-it, as good as it might be, will benefit from taking a backseat for awhile to your reflective thought, and to theory formation that just may chart a better course for qualified change in-for-and-from you. (From the Conclusion of this Introduction)

WHY TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD?

Why Transcendental Method?

If I could tell you what transcendental method (TM) is in a few short sentences so that you would thoroughly understand it, I or others would not need to write books about it. So let us begin.

TM is a theory, where the data of reference for the theory is the human mind; and of course, this includes your mind. Further, TM is something you can explore and know about; you can, and often do, speak of it in common and-or theoretical terms; and you can verify it every time you or someone else thinks, speaks, listens, or writes—this book is about that verification process.

Further, the import of TM is not in the knowing about it, though knowing-about is helpful in a psychological and even theoretical sense. Rather its fullest import is in its call for that rare and satisfying moment of personal illumination that occurs when the theory and the knowing meet the full reality of the datum which, in this case, is the living you.

Such an illumination is a high moment of critical self-knowledge that comes at the end of a self-directed learning process; however, it also begins another process that constitutes a unique kind of self-integration; for the light that illuminates is our object, and if we come to understand it, that light illuminates its own procedural self; and, again, the light and the procedure is in you.

Furthermore, teachers and parents among my readers will recognize the moment of illumination, or the insight that I speak of as the “Aha! moment” —that moment when a child’s face lights up, and we have no doubt that they “got it.”

The differences are that the moment of our own focus has the “Aha!” itself, and its surrounding operations, as its content-in-operation; and that we will refer to this Aha! in its critical form and with this content as the illuminating moments of self-appropriation and self-affirmation. We do so because this Aha constitutes a new and broader self-awareness, a new kind of unity and, consequently, a new beginning, not only for your own self-understanding, but for your unfolding understanding of everything else you can possibly ask about, come to know, create, talk about, or do.

In the briefest of explanations, then, first, you already have transcendental method working within you. TM-the-theory is a clear and technical definition of TM-the-reality where your Aha! moments occur.

Second, then, transcendental method is the structure and complex dynamism of the desire and motivation behind the light—the light that is most obvious to us when we are actually having an insight or set of insights.

And, third, self-appropriation is the discovery of, and self-affirmation is the critical knowledge of transcendental method -the-reality. Both constitute a fully illuminated and conscious embrace of that dynamic and motivating complex where the mind's procedures and the illumination of insight continue to occur in a fashion familiar to all but the comatose among us.

Teachers

Teachers

Moreover, if I may speak again to the teachers among my readers, if we find that TM is already a part of everyone’s everyday thought, speech, and act, then TM is the operating centerpiece of all educational experience. It follows that, if the field of education is to benefit from knowledge of transcendental method, teachers will need, first, to thoroughly understand TM by going through the self-knowledge and self-appropriation-affirmation process; and second, to become so comfortable with the subject matter that recognizing TM and its clarifying power within yourselves and others becomes a part of your everyday thought.

Also, in going through the self-appropriation process, we are also partaking of learning and the self-correction process in its fullest meaning: “I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand” (Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 107). Here, however, you explore and do to discover and understand not only this or that worthwhile content or skill. But also, you gather in yourself—as content, as skill and procedure, and as self-conscious self-identity in the doing of thinking-consciousness. TM as content is a theory, your own inner self, your interior functions, and the motivation behind your very thinking, saying, and doing.


And so, self-appropriation is the exact-same as the fuller meaning of learning-as-doing, but also is more than that learning--because self-appropriation is doing to understand about that understanding and doing. The potential, then, is not only to know-about, but to identify-with that is an altogether unique, new, and fuller illumination of self and other.

Though in this introduction I can say this--so that you can hear the above and even perhaps remember it, the rest of the text is about your doing for a deeper, fuller, and more critical understanding to occur in you over the course of your reading.

Scientists

Scientists

If I may speak to the scientists among my readers, as you might have guessed by now, as a data-point of theoretical reference, transcendental method is nothing less than completely personal and completely intimate and, if you understand it fully, you must understand this as so. At the very least, the personal—even intimate--aspects of the present work should explain to you why I have used first-person in my writing of many of the passages here.

However, TM is not only personal. Rather, like any theory, TM is developed first as speculative and experimental, where terms and relations are worked out in well-defined technical-theoretical concepts. Verification procedures are then offered here for any scientist to take up so that, like any theory, this speculative theory can become verified theory. In this way, TM is a product of the most critical and discerning aspects of scientific method--generalized from, and then applied back to, the data—in this case, of human consciousness.

Further, TM’s other name is general empirical method where empirical method's data, again, is generalized to include the discernible universal aspects of human consciousness as its data of concern and, in this case, of the scientist’s interest. Again, the scientist can turn the speculative theory into a verified theory by going through the verification process. Your discovery and verification of TM in you, then, which is the central guiding purpose of this book, is thoroughly and completely dependent on the critical application of scientific method to the data under review—the human mind and, as inference, your human mind. TM (or GEM), then, is a speculative theory that calls for verification in order to become a critical theory.

Furthermore, let us speak for a moment to the larger historical projects of learning, of the sciences, and of culture. That is, the critical self-discovery of TM that is self-appropriation-affirmation also has within it a remarkable moment that holds the potential to lay bare what is common to all in critical-theoretical fashion, or what Lonergan refers to as the trans-cultural base (1972). However, if this is so, then we hold within our range the potential to heal and unify the heretofore broken relationship between the now-disparate fields of formal and informal inquiry, on the one hand, and the completely subjective and personal domains, on the other—not to collapse these fields of discourse, but to show how they are related and unified. For self-appropriation adheres to both a completely critical-objective moment and a completely personal-intimate moment of human understanding and of coming to know in a most critical fashion. TM uses common and scientific procedures to refine a working theory of knowledge, and then sticks to that theory, or applies it, to come to know our own conscious order.

Transcendental method--not as a theory, but as your experience of the quest already in operation in you--continues to radiate from within you. As such, TM is the fully fueled engine at the center of all of your inquiry, including your self-inquiry, and including your casual awareness of your present surroundings, and your interest as you read these words right now. Through TM-the-theory, then, you can also come to know your own knowing processes in a critical way, or know TM-the-operating-reality in you, whatever you want to name it.

Here we move beyond mere “intuition” or the hints of resonance to a full awareness-of and conscious identification-with the most intimate workings of our own hearts, minds, and spirits. If so, and because all discovery, science, education, and culture begin in the passion of that inquiry, then TM is also the empirical base of all science and education, both formal and informal, in all institutions, and in all cultures.

The SPIRIT of INQUIRY

The Spirit of Inquiry

Further, TM is a technical term for what we refer to as “the spirit of inquiry” and that is, in turn, the beginning of all knowledge. If so, then that spirit has a critical verification component that is most evident in the history of common understanding in all persons for as long as history has been around.

That is, first, when we are at our best at being critically minded about our concrete affairs, we commonly seek to distinguish mere belief, wishes, or feelings, from the “genuine article,” “the real thing,” and the “hard facts” of the matter. Regardless of our many common failures and mistakes, such a method is embedded in our commonsense procedures, so that we can speak and act accordingly as a matter of habitual wisdom.

And second, ever since the scientific revolution the centerpiece of the sciences has been a fundamental adherence to scientific method which, generally speaking, is nothing less than this same critical method raised to the level of defined tenets, theoretical meaning, and technically defined system. Here such a method systematically avoids knowledge pronouncements until all relevant questions have been settled, and until all the relevant evidence is in. And even then, scientists consider their knowledge general and waiting for factual verification, and still tenuous--they continue to reach for more revelations and insights about the data and for better technical definitions according to new discoveries, and at the behest of their recalcitrant drive to understand more and better.
But if the spirit of inquiry and its verification component is evident throughout history, then that component can and should be applied to itself in its most critical (scientific), discerning (comprehensively critical), and personal way, precisely because it is the scientist’s mind we are speaking of—that mind is de facto included in the data arena.

However, such an application will not be rooted in or take place in the natural or physical sciences, but rather in the field of theoretical philosophy—the field that takes human understanding, theory, and knowledge, etc., as its content. Even if a natural scientist takes up the project (and I heartily invite you to do so here), with the spirit of inquiry as content, that scientist, by that fact, leaves their own field and enters the field of philosophical inquiry, or the field of foundations for all of the sciences, and for philosophy as well.

Such an exploration and verification project is developed in the theoretical reference herein to transcendental method (and-or general empirical method); to a working theory of knowledge that takes common procedures and the sciences in human history as its grounding referent; and to the process of self-appropriation and self-affirmation of the person doing the very difficult work of critical-theoretical development combined with personal application, without losing either (Lonergan, 1972).

Such a process is afforded critical pedagogy in the present work. But again, why?

First, a study of transcendental method will reveal to you in clear and critical fashion how your own horizons develop (and have developed), how those horizons influence your regard for self-others, and how they expand and deepen through continued self-reflection, or fail to do so. In a more remote way, learning about TM and going through the self-appropriation-affirmation process itself tends to inspire in us enduring, thoughtful, and respectful practice. And so in a broader sense, the critical self-knowledge that the process affords can add a new dimension to what it means to have a full and good education. Thus, the process both emerges from the great wisdom (and educational) traditions and brings a new and critical element to those same traditions.

Second, TM is a verifiable theory, and the data for verification is your own mind in all of its personal intimacy. Verifying a theory against the presented evidence as we verify any theory, then, is a part of the verification process for TM. However, the study also affords us a clear awareness of the potential within us for biases, diversions, oversights, on the one hand, and normative, insightful, and self-transcendent veins of thought within of each of us, on the other. In this way, we are afforded an avenue towards conscious enhancement of our own self-corrective practices that are already a part of our minded processes--and most probably well-worn in you already. Such practices can manifest in our deepening sense of centering self-awareness, and even of self-love—a self-love that can easily spread to others through a fuller knowledge of what is common to all of us. I issue no guarantees; however, a deepening awareness of self has always correlated with a deepening awareness of others. And again, such awareness presents us with a new aspect of what it means to have a good education.

Third, TM-the-theory regards TM-the-spirit of creativity that is so evident in children, but that, however thwarted, continues to live in all of us. Facing the day is your own TM on the move. Though TM-the-spirit of creativity can be ignored, battered about, and hindered, getting to know it through TM-the-theory carries the potential of framing the actual structure and its dynamism, of bathing it in the light of self-awareness, and, in doing so, of healing and releasing its pent-up powers in us, to us, and for us.

Fourth, again, transcendental method-as-theory is a reflective articulation of what we commonly call the spirit of inquiry in all of its comprehensive aspects. As such, knowledge of and conscious identity with TM-the-reality is nothing more and nothing less than a conscious embrace of the human motivational activity that comes before all knowledge, before all knowledge fields, and before all expressions of knowledge—no questions, no knowledge. Knowledge of transcendental method, then, is knowledge of the foundations of all past, present, and future knowledge.

Fifth, reflective practice is central to the religious and wisdom traditions of many if not all cultures, and has been for all of history. In this sense, our text does not pit intelligence and knowledge--as some sort of desiccated abstraction from human living--against faith and-or religious insights. Rather, the study reveals their relationship in clear and precise terms and, thus, is amenable to, even complementary to, those traditions--but without taking a doctrinal stand on any.

Further, our text is complementary to these traditions in the sense that, through the reading, we locate and give explanation to the basic structure and developmental processes at work in reflective and self-reflective practice, as well as in fostering a development of those practices. And we locate in the same basic structure and process the broad outlines of the religious quest--as a quest for the Mysterious Other—in whatever form human beings have expressed that inquiry over all of history.

On the other hand, and though we can locate the religious quest, our present embrace of transcendental method is completely empirical and critical—and only that. Again, from this basic position, I make no claim to religious knowledge or to the truth or falsity of any religious doctrine. That is, TM-as-theory is a theory of the quest that, historically, includes ultimate concerns that human beings have had over all of human history. In this way, TM helps explain, but avoids identifying with, either side of the post-modern polemic between transcendence and immanence; between religious doctrine and scientific knowledge; between Nature and God; or between empirical claims and the living of religious faith.

In this way, and again, a study of TM is completely appropriate to both secular and religious education, where one identifies with empirical method, and the other includes the above in the theoretical fields, but also identifies with living within the horizons of a religious quest, and of our faith journey.

Further, a study of transcendental method and the occurrence of self-appropriation can foster the conditions for a complementary and insightful dialogue to occur between those beginning in empirical method and those beginning from a position of faith.

Also, the language of transcendental method recalls and recovers the language of transcendence for the field of education where the loss of symbols of transcendence have become “devitalized, stale, opaque,” and commercialized (Hughes, 2003). It does so, again, without requiring the reader to identify with, or fail to identify with, one-and-only-one set of religious doctrines.

Thus, again, I take no doctrinal stand on religious issues here; while at the same time I claim and will show that a discovery of TM is a discovery of the human quest towards the mysterious-beyond that all scientists and religious persons participate in, though in vastly different ways. As such, the discovery of transcendental method is both critical-empirical and a discovery of the empirical fount and foundations of all religious doctrine.

Sixth, TM is a qualified and verifiable theory—it does not call for belief, but for experimentation, verification, and self-verification. TM shows us the centerpiece of critical knowledge within ourselves as distinct from but intimately related to feelings, belief, dreams, and even faith. As such, TM can and should be brought to the table of all education, and for all to understand for themselves—for yourself—as first and foremost for and about you, and me, about each of our students and, by implication, about all of human culture and history.

At the very least, then, none of the above is detrimental to children or adults and, in fact, all will further our openness towards our continued and qualified understanding and human development. If so, then knowledge of transcendental method, and an ability to teach about it in educational institutions, can only enhance all educational reform towards what has come to be known as best practice.

And seventh, self-appropriation-affirmation, as both a critical-theoretical and quite personal experience, completes the scientific revolution in Western inquiry and thought that began several centuries ago. It can serve to enhance the creative dialogue between all sorts of thinkers and cultures by laying bare the architecture of the centerpiece of thought that we all share as human.
Thus and more, I argue, is “Why Transcendental Method.”

DOING PHILOSOPHY--Philosophy's Ill Repute

DOING PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy’s Ill Repute

Exploring transcendental method-the-theory, verifying the theory, and going through the process of self-appropriation-affirmation are unapologetically philosophical. I say unapologetically because, in the present common air of thought, philosophy has somewhat of a bad reputation. Of course, not everyone thinks alike; however, for many reasons, some claim that philosophy (and a study of foundations) is no longer relevant; and some claim that philosophers live in ivory towers, are unconnected with the “real world,” and have their heads in the clouds.

However, and to relate philosophy to your own personal and daily activities, philosophy was-is-will-be born of your own thoughtful reflection and self-reflection; and though you may not have identified philosophy’s clear trail of footsteps in yourself or others around you, philosophy is already a potential if not a reality in your own thought. That is, philosophy springs from your own spontaneous and abiding love of knowledge--of your knowing what is and is not so in real and concrete circumstances--and that love has already brought you to any knowledge or even wisdom you already have and can rightly lay claim to. By way of contrast, I presume you have experienced your own ignorance from time to time, and that you do not love it.

At its core, then, and regardless of its many uneven jaunts into theory over the centuries, philosophy has always been an affair of the heart as we strive for human authenticity—to know more about and to become better at who and what we are and can be. Though philosophy has its theoretical side, it is also intensely personal, intimate, and comprehensively relevant to all human living in history—including to all kinds of theoretical jaunts. If so, and if philosophy has an ill-repute, then it has been wrongly understood, or perhaps judged only on its sometimes-massive mistakes and failures, or in terms of those who have used philosophy as fog, or to steer us in the wrong direction, even if that steering was with the fullest of good intentions.

In this way, only if your own mind, heart, and reflective powers live in an ivory tower does philosophy live in one; and only if you are incredibly thoughtless, and if you abandon your own potential towards reflection and self-reflection, and dynamic unity of mind, can philosophy be thought of as irrelevant to you.

I should add that, over 2000 years ago Plato, who was no slouch when it comes to reflection and self-reflection, knew philosophy as an essential development in any complex and growing culture, especially when faced with finding a new relationship with peoples and cultures other than one’s own. In fact, philosophy as a distinct avenue of thought grew out of the many new questions that spontaneously emerged from mixing many cultures and their different ways together, and from the confusion of thought that commonly surrounds such mixing.

Philosophy emerged as a way of sorting everything out. Those like Plato, who defined and took up philosophy as a way of life, were searching for a view of the whole, for some over-riding truths, for some unity and continuity underpinning the confusion, and for a way to organize human life on both a writ-small (you and me and each person) and writ-large (you, me, and everyone else as a group or as in groups) level that could reflect that sense of unity, continuity, and good.

In this way, philosophy is essential to persons and to culture in history--if we are to avoid becoming like herds of Lemmings running off cliffs, or if we are to avoid getting on a horse and running off in several different directions at once, or if we are to avoid blowing ourselves up. In such a complex world as ours, it will take a great deal of good reflection by many folks to keep from doing that.

Further, our present work is at least about bringing transcendental method to secular and religious education through teachers who have gained a fundamental, and fundamentally clear, understanding of TM and how it works within all of us and in history. In this regard, Plato also regarded philosophy as never being far from our inquiry about the divine (Pieper, 1963; & Piscitelli, 2006). Thus, and again, at several junctures in the present work, we will explore the religious elements of philosophical thought; not as doctrine or dogma, but as the fundamental quest of mystery and for ultimate meaning that is evident in all cultures in history (Hughes, 2003).

So to give philosophy’s critics their due, and in our regard for philosophy’s residential status and prima fascia contributions, let us keep the baby that is our self-reflection, and throw out the bathwater that is philosophy’s many flights, faults, false starts, and their effects. That is, let us recall the current, sometimes deserved, ill-repute of philosophy as the short-view fad that it is, or as undeservedly demonized, and as perhaps rooted in the fear that philosophy inspires in many--of raising new questions against old received ideas. Further, let us place our understanding of philosophy in the greater context of how it manifests as reflective thought in all human history, how it threatens dogma and hidden agendas and, further, how we find philosophy’s origin in the intimacy of our spontaneous desire for knowledge and truth, and in our development of our own self-reflective potential.

Such recall, and the development of your philosophical capacities of self-reflection, will serve you well in your movement towards the critical self-knowledge that the present work is about and that is called self-appropriation and self-affirmation.

PHILOSOPHY as INTIMATE

Philosophy as Intimate

First, our reflection and discussion points throughout and our exercises in later chapters are intimately personal. That is, you will be exploring something about yourself that has been an intimate part of your thought and action since you were born. That is, you will be exploring how you go about understanding, appreciating, and coming to know. So understanding TM and going through the performance of self-appropriation is to become aware of, to appreciate, to know and to become fully and consciously identified with what you already experience every day, for example, as you read these words.

Further, TM is intimate to you as the dynamic structure through which all meaning passes--called through your attending, transformed through your insights, integrated and stored into your memory and matrix of undermeaning that you then draw on to think. The meaning that "insights" and passes through into your matrix of undermeaning, then, is intertwined with your complex of feelings and images that you have developed throughout your history through and in the presence of that same dynamic structure. Further, the complex is in intimate communication with the meaning of your physics. Said in other language, your feeling-image-understanding complex has a dynamic framework that already works within you, that is intimate with your physical order, and that you can come to know about and consciously identify with; and its activities occur from the beginning to “grow” your meaningful history.

Furthermore, heart, mind, spirit, and soul are common terms referring to real dimensions of your interior life. In ordinary discourse, however, such meaning is rather poetic and is not commonly defined or distinguished clearly, one from another. Their meaning blends, they overflow with literary or poetic meaning, and they refer generally to the spontaneous radiation of a consortium of meaning from within you as you go about your daily life.

So when I speak of your undermeaning or understanding complex in this text, I mean a more differentiated articulation of the meaning that is the full gamut and history of your feeling-image-thought-knowledge complex, and that which is continually and intimately essential to you; I mean that the content of your understanding is woven tightly into your feelings and images, even into your physics, like blue is woven into the sky, and that the dynamic structure holds the whole thing together and keeps it going. I mean that which is the richly meaningful fount of all your ongoing thoughts, speech, and actions; for there is no looking out at anything without that looking-out already being informed by your history of meaningful thought. And I mean that, though we speak little of love in this text, your understanding complex, and your philosophical reflections and self-reflections that emerge from it, are a maturing expression of you as a whole person whose developing understanding always was and continues to be the radiating catalyst for the loving events in your life, and everything in-between.

To recall philosophy again: Philosophy is also intimate to you because philosophy—the love of knowledge—is what you are doing when you are exploring—and getting to know--your sensing, your feelings, your images, your understanding, your valuing, your prior history and knowledge, and TM--the fount of all that, again, is the operating centerpiece of all your thought, speech, and act. In a basic sense, your love of knowledge is present to you even in your basic awareness, e.g., as you read this text.

Furthermore, the discussion points and exercises herein are written to help you clearly distinguish and define those heretofore blended, condensed, and perhaps poetically expressed dimensions of your interior functions—heart, mind, spirit, your stream of consciousness, etc. Also, I give examples throughout the text, and change the language here and there, to help with the clarity of the technical definitions we also develop. However, I do not discount feelings, and will mean generally the same things that you mean when you refer to your own heart, mind, and spirit, and perhaps even your soul. Our object is the general but quite personal dynamic structure that underpins and pertains to any or to all four of these references.

On the other hand, and though the theory, the discussion points, and the verification exercises are aimed to hit the mark, our project will not put an end to the questions you and I might ask about, for instance, what the human reality in history is and means. For that reality is only what the theory points to in reflection. As reflection on the general-universal aspects of the mind’s structure and method, then, the theory is only a reflective part of the reality. In fact, general theory and scientific method developed from within the unfolding of history, and from that same whole and human reality--a development of critical method and reflective practice in the fullness of human being--and not the other way around.

In this way, then, we will understand theory, and philosophical theory, as a general and reflective mode of thought that comes back to inform and to illuminate not only itself in history but also the whole human reality from which it emerged in that history. This movement of thought, of course, will include the outreach of all of the sciences.

Moreover, we will learn about a theory that pertains to broad aspects of your intimate interior life; and the exercises will guide you towards applying that theory to your life at the service of your fuller self-understanding. In this way, the process invites a moment of self-understanding that is at once totally objective (through the use of a well-developed theory and a critical method of verification on specified data) and, at the same time, totally personal and intimate (as the data happens to be you and the internal regalia that happens also to be universally human). Thus, the theory is a generalization of the conscious structure and activities that constitute your personal self—the self that you already are.

In this way, and rather than applying to and verifying the theory of any other thing in the world in a laboratory, the verification and application of the theory are to your own mindedness. Thus, like water from a fountain sprays up, only to fall back into itself, your mindedness goes “up” to understand a theory of mind; you use the theory to help you objectify the data that constitute your mind, and you use your mind to understand your mind; and you “fall-back” on yourself to understand yourself more fully. In critical self-reflection, then, we reflect about ourselves-as-object, and then become larger and unified again with that reflection as one.

The acts of verification and application, then, are meant to lead not only to your self-knowledge, where you objectify and verify your conscious structure as you objectify and verify anything else, but to a new dimension of meaning: To the intimacy, unity and integrity of a now-fully conscious self-awareness. Here, in the falling-back of mind-on-mind, your objective knowledge of self becomes integrated with your subjective self in an act of insightful attunement—an insight into insight, an understanding of understanding and, again, an illumination of the illuminating experience. Such insight and understanding follow on your theory-directed questions and your pedagogy (if you use one) to constitute a new and fully self-known self-identity. In self-aware reflection, you can attune yourself to the complex structure and activity that you actually are, as a piano can become attuned to the structure and rhythms that constitute music. Both minds and pianos, of course, can be badly tuned. In the case of a self-reflective person, and of self-understanding and knowledge, you are the piano and the tuner, as well as the music.

Further, TM-the-theory is entirely technical and entirely precise. However, such technicality and precision combined with the personal-intimate comes with an empirical requirement. That is, as a teacher, I can write this book the best way I can. But as a “midwife,” I can only say that verification cannot be performed for you by someone else. Rather, and though the verification exercises can be done in the company of others, the empirical component is that the verification of transcendental method-the-theory can only be fully known to you if performed for you, with-you, and by you. If not, then TM remains just another floating theory of mind like any other speculative theory.

Indeed, for many reasons, many continue to think of TM in that way—just another floating theory developed in just another philosophical or religious camp, complete with camp followers. In our earlier chapters, we will explore and critique some of these reasons. However, let me say here that an embrace of any critical science precludes dogmatic judgments, and it precludes avoiding reasonable experimentation and verification procedures if they are offered—and they are, here in this work.

Furthermore, your objective theoretical knowledge of interior functions is not yet your personal verification of yourself or your intimate identity with those functions—or what we are calling self-appropriation-affirmation. First, you can understand the theory and its fine technical nuance; and second, you can verify the theory again and again in the actual minded operations of others. In this way, you can do both without paying any attention whatsoever to your own interior operations. Indeed, this distinction will define the parameters of any academic assessments that can be legitimately applied to such a project.

On the other hand, the acts of intimate self-recognition and self-appropriation-affirmation are now available for you to do, and have no degenerative import on the objectivity or continued verification of the theory whatsoever. In fact, the further acts of self-appropriation-affirmation bring a kind of continued concreteness—a very real and continuous historical grounding--to the process of theory verification that is more, not less, empirically established than any other laboratory verification of any other theory.

This personal grounding makes the scientist a more critical, rather than less critical, agent for any other work at all; for this experimentation and verification is the concrete basis of, source of, and prime analog for all other received philosophical notions, and for all other experimentation and verification. In this way, and once we have verified TM in our own operations, we find that the basic theory of transcendental method is un-revisable. This is so because to revise it, we must begin by using the operations of consciousness to do so.

Said another, way, to contradict the theory would be to contradict the same operations in you that would discover that contradiction if it were present in the first place. If we do perform such a contradiction (claim that it's not when, in fact it is) then we are also contradicting the very order of science itself--that under controlled experimentation, the theory must "match" the data to be verified. If we are to maintain the tenets of science and, indeed, of the basic order of communications itself, then we will need to stick with the basic order that relates any theory to its data field--the claim must match, or be attuned with, the performance of the data.

Again, TM-as-theory regards the personal verification of the operations of the human mind as an empirical-experimental requirement for its full understanding. Such a theory also happens to be both fully critical and unique. The acts of self-appropriation-affirmation constitute the fulfillment of the unique dimension of the theory and also constitute your own, singular, theoretical-philosophical project--finding the rock within you and standing on it with both feet--your reality and your consciousness of it. Again, such a project happens to open out to all other understanding you might care to do, as well as to your own self-corrections of that understanding. The project of self-appropriation-affirmation, then, is fully objective, but also fully personal. Further, the project is not mine or the person’s who developed the theory. Rather, the project is yours and, again, yours to do.

Accordingly, the exercises herein will take you through the theory with as much clarity as philosophical brevity will afford, through the theory’s experimentation and verification in the evidence of your own and others’ minded operations (in step-by-step fashion), and up to the door of self-appropriation-affirmation. However, I have omitted from this work any sort of guarantee that you will, indeed, have the appropriate insights that constitute what I, Lonergan, and others mean by self-appropriation-affirmation.

Similarly, while I have included reflection and discussion points, as well as exercises, assessments are developed broadly and around the form of narrative development, portfolios, and group participation. As a formal course of study, this project should not offer assessment methods that attempt to show or record whether or not someone has "self-appropriated" according to a formal grading system. Such assessments are wrong-headed to the entire project. On the other hand, I have set up every condition that I can in a book to inspire these insights in you. And with your attitude of openness, and in the hands of a good teacher, you should expect to experience some fundamental changes in your own understanding.

Again, such acts are fundamentally philosophical and constitute the centerpiece of an age-old philosophical project. Along with your own self-illumination, I want to help you understand and identify yourself with your own philosophical reality and its potential, and with the larger philosophical project that has emerged from human history over the centuries.

NOTE for Blogpage: Go to "Older Posts" to continue the introduction sections.

Philosophy as Traditional

Philosophy as Traditional

From a broader view, then, our reflection and discussion points throughout and our exercises in later chapters constitute a performance of philosophy in its most traditional sense.

That is, let us again recall Plato, who writes to us about his teacher, Socrates, who bids us to: Know thyself, and, suggests that An unexamined life is not worth living. In this way, the exercises herein employ a relatively new and qualified post-modern theory, for the age-old project of self-examination. You combine theory with your own intimate experience of yourself and personally discover, know, and appreciate your own spontaneous and deeply held love of knowledge (desire to know) as a central motivation behind all human existence including your own (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000, Chaps. X-XIII).[1]

Further, Plato has Socrates ask the questions that aim at theoretical explanation; however, he does so while remaining within the dialogue form, and while keeping Socrates as a correspondent with other characters in the text. In this way, Plato draws the reader into the text as a mental participant in the dialogue with Socrates and his correspondents. On the other hand, Plato’s student and then-colleague Aristotle steps out of the dialogue form and into writing full-fledged theoretical treatises.

Even so, both philosophers continue to identify the theoretical with the personal—Plato implicitly through his dialogical form, and Aristotle explicitly in his theoretical treatises. For instance, Aristotle maintains in his Ethics a full connection of the theory with personal virtue by identifying the person’s actions with being “on the way to becoming good:”


Thus our assertion that a man becomes just by performing just acts and self-controlled by performing acts of self-control is correct: without performing them, nobody could even be on the way to becoming good. (1972, Book Two, SN 1105b, 9-11)


In this way Aristotle maintains a distinction, but also a unity between a theory of ethics and concrete human living that both he and Plato considered essential to “doing philosophy,” to living a contemplative but fully engaged life, and to living in an authentic way.

Thus, from its ancient origins in the West with the pre-Christian Greeks, philosophy has been understood as a personal adventure with theoretical dimensions rather than, as is often the case today, as a theoretical venture with little or no connection to the real world or to the good of that world, or to the human mind in history from which it emerges. The term abstraction, then, comes to mean desiccation--divorced-from rather than enrichment-of, knowledge as intimate with our concrete human living.

Further, your participation here will include at least a beginning development of your own theoretical consciousness—not an easy differentiation of mind to fully acquire, but wholly necessary in today’s climate, and for the project enfolded in these pages. You will also gain critical and guided use of a well-defined theory of knowledge and cognitional theory named transcendental (or general empirical) method.

Some Technical Terms

Some Technical Terms

If looking at something means that you understand it, then everyone only need look to understand. It follows that everyone with good vision starts with the same view. But everyone does not understand in the same way. So our “views” must be influenced by something other than from merely looking (or otherwise sensing). Those views are, in part, your philosophical inheritance.

Looking = Understanding and Knowledge of Sense

VERSUS

Thinking Processes = Understanding and Knowledge of Meaning

Further, in technical terms, I refer to your philosophical inheritance as some basic assumptions you hold (your philosophical foundations) and how, in reflection, you view your own fundaments, i.e., your understanding (cognition), epistemology (knowledge), metaphysics (being), ontology (reality), the ethical and political dimensions of being (the good writ-small and writ-large), ultimate being and good, and the ultimate good of being. And yes, you have inherited views on all these things; these views are named philosophical foundations; and they tend to float around in most of our thought like smog in a busy city. (Though we are exploring briefly here, we devote some chapters to these issues and meanings.)

Fundaments: Aspects and functions you are born with and develop over time. Fundaments develop, but their presence as a part of our conscious order does not change according to new learning.

Foundations: Philosophical and other assumptions that you learn with regard to your fundaments and that underpin your more topical thought, e.g., you have philosophical views (fundaments), but those views are developed and shaped differently (philosophical foundations); and you have social relationships that develop (or not) (social fundament), but those relationships vary according to many different factors (social foundations). So it is with several aspects of your human being, e.g., intellectual, ethical, political, spiritual, etc.

Moreover, our views drawn from our philosophical inheritance (foundations) may or may not be “in tune” with the fundaments that you have been born with and that have been developing in you all along, or how you actually go around questioning and knowing things—a statement that assumes there is such a reality, such questioning, and such knowing. However, on these very assumptions, you may discover (question and come to know) a difference between what you actually are and do on a quite regular basis, on the one hand, and what you think you are and do, on the other.

Hence, I distinguish here and in a later chapter your philosophical fundaments--what are the facts of the case and how you think and act in terms of them--from your philosophical foundations as inherited—what you assume and think are the facts of the case. Foggy, distorted, or attuned, in this writing your foundations are both what are attuned with your fundaments and-or what you have received from, or what has come “down” to you in, your philosophical tradition, as the philosophical facts of the case. If our inheritance is not attuned with our fundaments, then we can be in possession of confused and bifurcated foundations. Whether or not they actually are attuned remains to be seen. Regardless, your being in or out-of-tune philosophically has vast and entirely concrete implications for all of your thought, speech, and act.

In fact, one of your actual fundaments is your ability to spontaneously self-correct; and we will refer to your self-corrective process many times in the present work. However, we make a distinction between your philosophical fundaments and your philosophical foundational inheritance. An exploration of these, and your re-attunement of one with the other, if that is called for, can only help you in your self-understanding, and perhaps also in your future self-corrective movements. Again, the philosophical maxims are “know thyself” and “an unexamined life is not worth living.” Indeed, your interior activities can only be enhanced by your self-reflective knowledge of them and of some of the technical terms that embody them.

The present work will provide a beginning place of self-awareness of your own fundaments and how they operate, of a self-critique of your own inherited philosophical foundations, and a roadmap for a new attunement between yourself and what you think about yourself.

Of course, there is much more to it; and many more technical terms to learn and relate to your own experience; and your inherited foundations may already include some variously named pitfalls, e.g., subjectivism, positivism, relativism, or many other distorting notions that, as your in-place assumptions, may already affect your views of things, including the work you are reading right now. Thus, the work provides an adequate set of theories, a technical-conceptual language, and pedagogy to guide you and to keep you both personally engaged and in a methodical and critical frame of mind.

However, we are exploring the very assumptions that you already bring to this reading. As such, we must first briefly explain, expose-to-the-light, and attempt to avoid potential pitfalls that may be a part of those assumptions. We do so while, first, taking full advantage of science, critical method, and the critical habits of the scientist; and second, while taking full advantage of the insights that accompany the post-modern movement into ad infinitum interpretive meaning and conceptual expressions, and the various notions of uncertainty that accompany those interpretations. We also avoid the pitfalls of empiricism while, at the same time, drawing on meaningful and critical evidence to make our discernments, and ultimately our judgments, about what is, in fact, true—in this case, about our own minds (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000; 1972).

Our exercises, then, are experiential, exploratory, empirical, participatory, interpretive, and language-based; the self-appropriation aspect of the theory is unique as an implied dimension of the data itself; and for its fruition the project depends entirely on your ability and willingness to experiment and to self-reflect for the theory’s concrete verification and confirmation procedures.

Finally, though our exercises require that we incorporate in them a specified theory and its technical language, we claim no specific or calcified theoretical conception or doctrine as the only appropriate theory. Rather, the point of the reflection and discussion points embedded in each chapter, and the exercises in their own chapter, is to go “under” or beyond our specified theory, logical order, and conceptual expression, and to return to your original and recurring experience of your own consciousness, otherwise known in poetic language as your heart, spirit, mind, and soul, regardless of what technical language we give it.

You will of course be interpreting yourself. However, with an adequate set of theories and verification procedures, the interpretation can be adequate to the data and to your recurring experience of it and thus, a right and good one.

PHILOSOPHY as HISTORICAL, COMPREHENSIVE, CRITICAL

Philosophy as Historical, Comprehensive, and Critical

My work here is fundamentally pedagogical method, not for Lonergan the man or for a specified one-concept theory, but for what Lonergan discovered and gave theory to in his journey through the greater philosophical project known as the love of knowledge. So in the present work we find ourselves ensconced in a philosophical tradition.

Further, to be critical in and of that tradition, we must first look backwards to that tradition to gauge ourselves in it; but then self-consciously move forward carefully with our new questions to envision, and then create anew, our future. We are then, in fact, involved here with philosophy as a part of an historical emergence, hopefully, of greater and fuller understanding of history and of ourselves as a part of that history.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the study of philosophy and the overt development of reflective and self-reflective habits are unfortunately uncommon fare in many cultural pockets and even in some institutions known as “academic.” This is so for many reasons, some of which we will explore in our earlier chapters.

Also, for all of their good, modern communications and technology have sped up our already too-fast and too-busy lives. At present, we can say that many among us are only vaguely aware of the state of our own philosophical landscape and our potential towards greater thought, if at all, or of our own various philosophical biases that might already inform the thought that we do have. We can say that many endorse reflective practice but fail to live it; that many frown on self-reflection, in turn taking for granted the influence of others’ past reflection on their own lives; and many have discarded any study of foundations, oddly, as groundless—but on what grounds, or for what reasons, they do not say--and I suppose we are not supposed to ask that question. Many even assume they have no biases, while at the same time loudly regretting bias in others. And many live in a fictive bubble, assuming no such area of import on their own or others’ thought—like living in a house where we are unaware of either the basement below or the wide view from the windows upstairs. Need I mention Plato’s rendition of education as an often-unwelcome journey from a cave and out into the blinding light.

Further, we can say that many are unaware of the possibility that becoming aware of our own biases holds the potential for a thoroughly enlivening transformation or, again, for an attunement of our assumptions with how our spirit of inquiry actually works.

If some or all of the above is true, for many of our young people, education in quasi-Western cultures has failed by its philosophical forgetfulness—might I say ignorance--and through fragmentation of and derailments in the academy. That is, we have failed by overlooking and-or dismissing the liberating elements in education that have for centuries been central to the thrust of many Eastern and Western cultures. In the West, this oversight or dismissal is grounded in wrongly broad-brushing the entire thrust of Western culture, philosophy, and education with the political and moral color of their few real failures.

For instance, in the later years of the 20th century, and perhaps even now, some dismissed all that is good about the Western tradition because of its “Euro centric,” white-male bias; or because Western culture has been fraught with intellectual and moral relativism, or been interpreted as merely another word for capitalism, or been identified with stone-like ideological “meta-narratives;” or been thought of as truncated and distorted by “secular humanism,” etc., etc.

Unfortunately, the critique has some truth to it. For instance, from the classical meta-narrative view, Western-style education has often fostered naïve and colonial assumptions with vast political implications, e.g., that no other adequate views or people existed; or, if others do exist, that they are somehow less qualified or even less human, and as if they are unimportant and have no cultural, ethical, or political voice in their own comportment. Of course, these “other” folks need to be governed—by Those Who Know Better. In a word, Western education and social polity has often fostered a provincial arrogance that, in a whole-person view of the fundamental purpose of a liberal education, perhaps marks Western education’s most fundamental failure.

To the extreme argument for completely dismantling what European intellectual geography gave us: First, such cultural critique has its feet sunk deep into Western thought-soil that, at its best, produces institutions and people that are quite able and free to take it upon them selves to raise critical questions about the same culture that produced us. We cannot afford to throw out the whole Western tradition because some of it has been short-sighted, wrongly developed, wrongly understood, wrongly exclusive, wrongly practiced, and wrongly imposed. We want to cut the disease out, and not kill the entire tree.

And, second, the Western tradition produced theory and the scientific revolution made theory systematic--and we would be unwise to throw that out, even if we could, and even though we cannot overlook the harms that have flown into human history on the powerful wings of those who would misinterpret the theoretical enterprise and its effects, who would systematically divorce that enterprise from ethical questions, or who would use it for ignoring, excusing, and doing evil. It stands that the introduction of theory alone, and the differentiations that accompany it, mark the Western tradition as an instance and watershed of human and cultural development unparalleled in human history—a true revolution of the reflective and critical spirit.

Like philosophy itself, then, we should not throw out the baby—theory and its critical method as the great contributions of Western thought that they are--because of the dirty bathwater that came along with it, i.e., its accompanying cultural and philosophical distortions.

Furthermore, though Lonergan’s and the present work flow in and from the Western tradition, neither is merely or wholly Western in its sweep. That is, from the point of view of theory, and of critical method, and only from those views, this work identifies and sets up the condition to verify a trans-cultural base in every human being regardless of development, cultural background, or world view.

Thus, Lonergan recovers and employs what remains authentic at the core of the Western tradition—theory and empirical method--and brings it home to the personal domain, thereby setting up the conditions to complete what began as a revolution--scientific--and what can become another true renaissance. On the other hand, we can still distinguish theory and the empirical sciences from their broader context of culture that both emerged from, and from the search for religious meaning:


. . . modern sciences are defined by their methods and their fields and, clearly enough, the same method cannot be employed both in investigating what lies within human experience and in investigating what lies beyond it. (Lonergan, 1985)


We also need to consider fundamental sets of assumptions; various transformative insights that take into consideration vastly different but related data; the horizon-development of the person using the methods on several “levels” of living; and the fact that, in human sciences and history, we are not only studying how the future might turn out, but that we are somewhat involved in creating it.

Further, despite its many failures, the Western tradition is built around a clear identification with intelligence and excellence as twin driving forces that tend to subordinate to them familial identities and orders, kingship, unquestioned ideologies, or mere personality worship. Further, such identities extend into theory, method, knowledge, truth, secularity, rule of secular law, and our post-World War II notions of human rights. And all come into tension with the love of family, community and country, and with our love of the divine and worship of a mysterious deity, however we view it. It is no accident that much of the above identifications emerge from now-received foundational philosophical elements that produce, underlie and maintain vibrant republics and democracies (Piscitelli, 1986; & King, 2003c).

These elements are tensional and dynamic and already inform Western-democratic civilization’s thrust towards individual and cultural well-being, of balances and transparencies of power, and of free dialogue and expression. Further, the tradition enfolds within it a basic trust in the wisdom of an educated and viable body of “The-People” and, moreover, of increasing our knowledge and excellence within that dialogue, expression, and wellness of being. These notions go beyond what is “merely Western,” as they are all essential elements of the 21st century--if we are to create and live in a humane world together.

Our study, again, is not a prescribed adventure coming “down” from set ideological or classical "first" principles, self-evidence, or from presumably divine doctrines. Rather, in our study we will find that our theoretical development of the human mind, and our verifiable discoveries about ourselves, ground and frame, in critical-theoretical fashion, but do not fully define, the meaning that emerges, and that has already emerged, in such 21st century political movements.

Furthermore, as sticky as the notion might be at present, truth is a common personal and political foundation for democracies, and is an essential element in any understanding of philosophy and of our foundations. For you are a “people,” and your recognition of a fiction, a falsehood, or a lie depends on your prior embrace of being able to recognize what is probably, most likely, or really true—or not.

In this way, the pursuit of truth is also an essential element in the health of a democratic body-politic, for the fundamental hope is that truth, as diverse and as hidden as it can be, will rise from the freedom a democracy affords to human thought, speech, assembly, and the press.

Moreover, if the foundations of knowledge and truth have become fuzzy in our present political climate, we can still develop a new and clear foundation for understanding both; and we can come to know the fount where these foundations live in a moment of critical self-reflection and identification afforded in the present work. Such reflections can serve to critique and clarify what knowledge and truth actually mean to us in our everyday lives.

PHILOSOPHY as SELF-CORRECTIVE PEDAGOGY--Writ-Small/Large

PHILOSOPHY as SELF-CORRECTIVE PEDAGOGY--Writ-Small and Large


Self-Appropriation: Writ-Small

Again, by writ-small, I mean in individual persons. By writ-large, I mean in groups, institutions, nations, cultures, etc, of persons.

In its writ-small dimension the present work is about developing in individual persons (you) various dimensions of personal self-discovery and knowledge through the occurrence of what Lonergan names insight into insight and, more fully, the process of self-appropriation-affirmation.

Thus, Lonergan refers to, and gives theoretical form to, the common experience of raising questions and having insights—and of having insights that turn us upside-down in various kinds of conversion or transformative experiences (1958 & 1972), and where we find ourselves moving from one horizon to another:

Proof is never the fundamental thing. Proof always presupposes premises, and it presupposes premises accurately formulated within a horizon. You can never prove a horizon. You arrive at it from a different horizon, by going beyond the previous one, because you have found something that makes the previous horizon illegitimate. But growth in knowledge is precisely that. (Lonergan, 1973, p. 41).

Thus, we can understand our movements from one horizon to another in a general way through someone else's explanation (as we can understand the above passage). However, if we try to define and prove to someone that we are in one horizon rather than another, or to prove something we have understood from within that horizon, the person who does not share your horizon will not understand. That person has to have actually experienced the movement of horizon for themselves to understand what we have understood in the same way.

Or, we cannot see the view from the top of the building from the point of view of standing in the street. Or to use another metaphor, the movement of horizons in us is to our topical understanding as tree roots are to its leaves. The leaves can move around every-which-way within the parameters of their place in the forest, as we can move around within our present horizon. However, when the roots are affected in some way, everything else, including the leaves, will change in accordance with the affect. Neither the leaves nor our topical understanding can suffer an underlying affect that has not occurred.

Of course, we should continue to expect to have common insights from within our present horizon, whatever that happens to be. However, armed with the above general knowledge of how horizons work, we should also have a conscious awareness of our own potential movement from horizon to horizon. Such awareness is essential, then, to our understanding of our own project of self-correction, in both writ-small and writ-large venues. The concrete signal of our own openness to changes of horizon is that we no longer immediately reject what we do not understand immediately.

In a sense, much of Lonergan's work is about teaching us about the meaning and import of our own personal potential towards self-understanding, self-teaching and self-correction, self-knowledge, and self-transcendence, in the common but oh-so-mysterious living of our lives. Indeed, and again, fully understanding transcendental method requires attention to the process of applying the fully theoretical to the data, but also to your own intimately personal experience of that data in the process of your experiencing it. We should note that the entire project aims at not only topical insights, but at fundamental changes--in your horizon.

The present work provides what I hope will be fruitful avenues towards your own foundational review, and thus for your own self-correction of your foundations. However, with some appropriate transitions, the insights about writ-large analyses and applications should follow the insights about writ-small analyses and applications.

Transcultural Base: From Writ-Small to Writ-Large

Trans-cultural Base: From Writ-Small to Writ-Large

We have already spoken briefly of the broader traditional and historical meanings of philosophy, of Lonergan’s contribution to that history, and to our own pedagogical method as a part of that meaning. That is, we are not merely involved with our own personal psychology or with theory as a desiccated abstraction that is somehow unconnected with our concrete history. Rather, we are speaking in, to, and with the traditions of philosophy and political philosophy in history and, again, to the love of knowledge in both its fully concrete and fully theoretical dimensions, and both as fully empirical-critical.

Further, in his own writing, Lonergan speaks to the foundations of theoretical and scholarly study, and to the many professions that have emerged as differentiations in, and branches of, these more comprehensive fields. Some of these fields are named the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, logic, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Because transcendental method speaks to the foundations of all persons in all fields, and in history and culture, including to the foundations of philosophy itself, it also has a writ-large dimension to it.

Exploring the writ-large dimension of transcendental method, then, begins in its writ-small dimension--the concrete and dynamic structure of each person’s consciousness--and as critical, writ-large order finds its empirical ground there--or its laboratory for critical reference-verification. That is, as a philosophical movement that has writ-large import, the work involves, first, bringing to consciousness the spontaneous self-correcting activities that already underpin not only each person’s own mind but, again, with appropriate transitions from small to large, also all fields of study, culture, and history. This will include a basis for critique of all cultural institutions, i.e., bureaucracies and corporations.

As Paradigm Shift

As Paradigm Shift

Further, a spontaneous and comprehensive corrective movement that emerges in history often goes by the name of epochal change or paradigm shift. Rather than being an arbitrary occurrence, a paradigm shift is a massively affective change of horizons that emerges from a dynamic set of circumstances from-below, commonly beginning in one person, spreading to a group of persons, and then growing in exponential fashion so that all within reach are changed by it. The shift is commonly an adjustment and increase in knowledge--perhaps as a "change of horizon" only on the writ-large level of our existence; it carries with it a refinement and potential edification of large areas of foundational thought; however, it also commonly is the source of many new emerging problems.

For an example, we can point to discovering that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around. As paradigmatic the shift that accompanied this set of insights did not only concern the scientific community; nor did it only signify a scientific correction. What made it paradigmatic was that it occurred in the hearts and minds of many people who came to recognize its profound implications on received philosophical, moral, social, political, and religious foundations and their doctrines at different but closely related times.

A paradigm shift has occurred, then, when entire populations and nations, vast numbers of persons in a field of study, or virtually everyone, change our "world view," or bring qualified but sometimes unwanted change to the fundamental assumptions that inform our thinking about everything else. For instance, again, a paradigm shift occurred on a grand scale when Galileo’s insights filtered “down” to everyone’s thinking; namely, that the earth is not the center of the universe but rather circles the sun, instead of the other way around.

Such a massive repositioning of thought, that affects the way we view everything else, constitutes a paradigm shift. Further, though these shifts have great topical implication and effect, they occur in and affect us at the level of what we have called foundations—the underlying order and flow of human thought related to philosophical matters and concerns that inevitably inform, shape, influence, and define our world view that, in turn, frames and affects all of our topical, concrete living.

Paradigm shifts occur at the level of foundations. To use an analogy, fundaments and foundations are to human living as gravity, the shape of a field, and the rules of play are to the football game being played on that field.


ANALOGY

Gravity ..............Philosophical Fundaments
Game Fields..........Philosophical Foundations

Further, what you may mean by human understanding, the good, knowledge, truth, the universe, being, time and space, and transcendence are your foundational orders of thought that are both received “down” from your culture and its language, and that “come up from” the actual workings of your fundaments. And again, those fundaments already underpin and spontaneously feed and bleed-into your attitude and approach to all of your more topical concerns and concrete living. We can experience a conflict, then, between our given fundaments, and our learned foundations.

Thus, like playing a game within the outlines of an already-established football field and its rules, we commonly assume and rarely question either the position of the chalk-lines on the field or the gravity that so influence the game and how it is played. Similarly, we rarely self-inspect our given fundaments, their actual influence, or the philosophical inheritance that interprets those fundaments, rightly or wrongly, into our foundational thought. To use common language, we commonly assume or take for granted both our fundaments and our cultural and philosophical inheritance that interprets them for us, or what we are naming: our foundations.

Further, we commonly begin by assuming that our foundations always match, or are in tune with the reality of, our fundaments. Enabling you to inspect and perhaps correct such assumptions is a part of the aim of the present work. You might find that your received and learned foundations are in tune with the reality of your given fundaments; however, you might find that they are not. Certainly, your knowing either way will be beneficial to you--one by increasing your self understanding, one by opening the way for self-correction, and both for your critical acumen.

Furthermore, like gravity and the position of the chalk-lines of a football field constantly feed into every aspect of the game being played there, both our fundaments and our foundations, and their subsequent attunement or mis-attunement, feed into every aspect of our lives as its background ordering or disordering influences. Moreover, to be foundationally attuned to the fundaments of a football game is to accept as given and to work within the demands of gravity and, further, to adjust the shape of the game-field, the game-rules, etc., according to the physical givens that will governing the play.

However, unlike adjusting to the physical givens and parameters of a football game, we can live for long periods of time, and through many generations, under the influence of foundations that are partly or completely at odds with our actual given fundaments. In this way, a paradigm shift in any given cultural milieu can emerge from either an altogether new discovery or idea and-or, like Galileo’s insights, from the massive corrective of old ways of received thought. For again, it was not so much the scientific discoveries and the novelty of Galileo’s ideas that shook the Western world, but rather the implications of his discoveries on the whole venue of what we had wrongly assumed about our knowledge, and about how the world worked up to that point, e.g., the undifferentiated mix of our assumptions about physics, politics, social, moral, and religious meaning and, of course, about what knowledge means.

A paradigm shift, then, is like changing some dimension of the game-field or the rules that we have always assumed were right and best, that have come down to us from those whom we trust and respect, and that we have become quite accustomed to playing by. Such graphic change feels to some like gravity has actually shifted its forces under our feet. We are, as it were, (almost, but not quite) wholly invested in the way things are already done.

Invested or not, however, and no matter how we deny it, such massive change finds its way into every crevice of human thought and living; it raises the level of cultural anxiety considerably; it has massive implications on everything we think and do; and it calls for adjustments that usually take a long time to become comfortable with, both personally and in the broad sweep of a cultural landscape. Further, such world-view change is not for the weak-of-heart and, as a source of reaction, can leave some of us frozen for new meaning, or in a lifelong attitude of denial and-or skepticism, pessimism, and even nihilism. It certainly shakes up the given power structure.

Gravity and game-fields, again, are analogies and metaphors for our philosophical fundaments and foundations. However, the concrete facts of either are neither analogies, nor metaphors, nor similes, nor game-fields but can be discovered as real and really affective aspects of all human living. Further, we can make and change the outlines of a game-field; and so there is some flexibility, if not a limited arbitrariness, to be had in this making. However, no game field is made and no game is played on earth without an implicit regard for gravity as a normative function that, if misconstrued, has immediate and obviously conflicting results; e.g., players run on the field rather than fly around it and, if the ball goes up, we rightly expect it to come down somewhere and at some reasonable time. So it is with how our fundaments work.

On the other hand, our philosophical foundational inheritance is learned, variable, historically specified, rests on more or less differentiated fundaments, and may be distorted and ill-attuned to our fundaments that are already in place and operational. For us, then, our philosophical fundaments are more like gravity which, in our lifetime of experience, does not change and which we spontaneously adjust to; and our foundations are more like the shape of the field or the rules of the game, which we develop and can change according to our needs and other extant realities.

For instance, human understanding, and its underside human misunderstanding, like gravity, are both fundamental aspects of all human living, culture, and history and are already given as a part of what it means to be human. All change (shape of the field and game rules) is made within the more basic field of discourse where human understanding or misunderstanding occurs. In this way, how we understand human understanding and the lack of it, right or wrong, defines an aspect of our philosophical foundations; the fact that we understand or misunderstand defines an aspect of our fundaments; and a correct and verified interpretation of human understanding and its opposite, a misunderstanding of human understanding, is the starting place for our qualified adventures in our reflective self-understanding.

The analogy of the game field limps away from the reality of our philosophical fundaments and foundations, then, at the question of attunement. That is, when we play a game, we spontaneously attune ourselves with gravity—and our correct learning about gravity’s operations is correct because it is attuned with gravity's actual operations as they go forward. However, unlike gravity and gaming, our assumptions about our philosophical fundaments (our foundations) are much more complex and, because of our complex learning inheritance, are not always spontaneously or completely attuned to what those fundaments, in fact, are and do.

Neither are the results of our misunderstanding of the fundaments as immediately palpable to most as are the results of our misunderstanding of gravity. The results of philosophical mis-construal, then, is not as obvious or immediate as, for instance, expecting a player in a game to fly off into the sky (fall upward) when tripped by another player. Or, considering the game rules, you may think wrongly that the ball remains in play if kicked outside the ball-field and into the parking lot when, by the rules, it goes out of play the moment it wholly crosses the outer chalk-line on the field. If you are paying the least bit of attention to the game and its rules, you will hold this out-of-field distortion for only a moment, if at all; and if you are anywhere close to sane, you will correct your misunderstanding immediately.

On the other hand, without realizing it, and with nary a corrective nearby, we can fall under the power of philosophical assumptions that are misinterpreted and thus ill-attuned with their fundamental realities, and have been for generations. Further, though our fundaments remain the same within their developmental patterns, in our myriad differences, each different culture with its unique order of communications has a set of received foundations that serves to shape their own world view—most remarkably manifest today in what is loosely deemed “Western, Middle-Eastern, and Eastern” cultures. In this way, with the issue of philosophical attunement, we can play in the parking lot, metaphorically speaking, for a long time before we realize that the ball is out of play, that the game is over up on the field, or that the players should, indeed, fall down rather than fly off into the sky.

Thus, though similar in some respects, the relationship between our philosophical fundaments and their foundations is much more complex, affective, and even generational, than the relationship between gravity, game-fields, and rules. In this regard, there are no players, but only persons living in cultures, and both in history.

Further, often in philosophical matters, well-entrenched habits abound; and the more our philosophical foundations are out-of-synch with their fundaments, the more we resist correction, no matter what the evidence “says,” and no matter how others try to point us back to the gravity at work in the field of play.

Again, our foundations, distorted or attuned to our fundaments, are always deeply rooted in our feeling base and, thus, are woven into our psychological systems that tend to spontaneously protect what we have already understood, true or false, right or wrong. For example, in Galileo’ time and place, even after the evidence about the relationship between the earth and the sun was made available to all, some refused to change their minds to match the evidence. This was so not because of some weakness of the evidence, as a reasonable person might expect, but rather because those in authority, who had received and who still held remarkably wrong world-views, feared the far-reaching implications of this set of insights on the entire fabric of culture—a culture driven in good part by the authority of the church. The insight would shake loose a gamut of “settled” ethical, social, political, and religious assumptions and ideologies associated with the sun-earth relationship. At the core of the problem was that reigning religious authorities and a major set of assumptions embedded in their doctrines, in fact, might be wrong.

Again, on a purely psychological level, such “world views” are existential—that is, their roots go deep in our feeling-image-memory and habitual apparatus that does not take to change easily.

On the other hand, other minds and hearts found it easier to become enamored with science and its assortment of incredible applications, were more open and, for many reasons, suffered through profound adjustment to the changes and their many implications. Subsequently, and over time, a paradigm shift occurred and our world view eventually changed to accommodate Galileo’s insights and those that followed, developed, adjusted, and added on to his.

In his major work Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan writes about such deeply-held movements of thought—and what we are referring to as the question of attunement between our fundaments and foundations. He speaks of such movements in terms of our polymorphism of consciousness and of our taking positions and counter-positions:

But within the context of the philosophic process, every discovery is a significant contribution to the ultimate aim. If it is formulated as a position, it invites the development of further coherent discovery. If it is formulated as a counter-position, it invites the exploration of its presuppositions and implications and it leads to its own reversal to restore the discovery to the cumulative series of positions and to enlighten man on the polymorphism of his consciousness. This activity of discovery, of developing positions, and of reversing counter-positions, is not restricted to the men of genius of whom common sense happens to have heard. It results from all competent and conscientious work and, like natural growth, it goes forward without attracting widespread attention. So far from being the product of genius, it produces genius. For the genius is simply the man at the level of his time, when the time is ripe for a new orientation or a sweeping reorganization; and it is not the genius that makes the time ripe, but the competent and conscientious workers that slowly and often unconsciously have been developing positions and heading towards the reversal of counter-positions. (1958, pp. 418-19; & Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, 2000, pp. 443-44)


For our own technical language then, our foundations are either attuned (position), or ill- or not attuned (counter-position). They can be either without our taking them as object or becoming consciously aware of them; and we can shift from working out of attunement or ill-attunement, depending on our context. On the other hand, in reflection, the “measure” of attunement is drawn from the spontaneous flow from and the thorough engagement with our fundaments. (We will cover this relationship more thoroughly in a later chapter).

Position: Attunement between our fundaments and our foundations
Counter-position: Ill or no attunement between our fundaments and our foundations

Furthermore, paradigm shifts are insight-based--they emerge from flashpoints of genius in history that are then communicated to others; and they develop in warp-and-weave fashion in the undercurrents of thought in a culture over a long venue of time. These conditions invite disdain among many; but they also further lively creativity and a massive reconciliation in and through the dialogue and collaboration of many people and, in many cultures, of institutions.

Further, though those who suffer through them are shocked by such shifts, those who are born into the change "receive" them as a part of the intellectual environment, and take them in stride, as if this were the way things just are. In the arena and venue of philosophical foundations, the shift then consummates its occurrence in the adjustments made in the background of our thinking, in our settled, correcting re-attunements to our given fundamental realities, in our clearer sense of inner and inter-order and peace, and in the new sets of assumptions that persons of good commonsense find they have been born into to easily learn in their own epoch of thought.

Like the insights-to-understanding that flowed from Galileo’s discoveries were corrective, so such shifts can be the source of destruction, both good and bad. And such combined movements of thought can come with wholly new sets of problems, philosophical and otherwise. Further, such large-scale corrections always bring forth new questions, and they set us to spontaneously seek ways to integrate the new insights into the present world of concrete human living. Their fundamental movement, however, is not to be denied and is never thought to be arbitrary or merely another mis-construal.

And so, rather than starting on a completely new basis, in the present project I bid you to recognize the` changes of horizons and the self-transcendence that already has gone forward in your life and that continues to do so; to objectify and, therefore, to become more conscious of your own movements of thought; and to draw the appropriate threads forward from the past and present to knit both to our study, to your present, and to the future in more self-aware fashion. Threads, knitting, football and game-field metaphors aside, we here address the fundamental and foundational movements, writ-small and writ-large, which underpin all persons, past and present, all “competent and conscientious work,” and all of the vastly different fields of study and professions.

Further, the present work is aimed at uncovering the movements that hinder such creative work and that are rooted in philosophical misunderstandings, that underpin human nations, communities and cultures, and that call for open critique from the point of view of a newly available, verifiable, philosophical grounding. Therefore, and again, Lonergan’s and the present work have a self-corrective dimension that can be applied to the writ-large arena of human culture and history as both analysis and as discourse in the arena of prescription.

The Author of Transcendental (General Empirical) Method, Pedagogy, & the Transcultural Base

The Author of Transcendental (General Empirical) Method and Pedagogy

Bernard Lonergan was a philosopher, a theoretician, a methodologist, an economist, a theologian; and he was a teacher of the first order. Not one, but all. His genius, his unique and timely discoveries, his commitment to philosophy, theory, theology, the concrete human good, and to education in the broader sense mark his work as dynamic, unifying and central to the self-knowing and self-correcting process buried deep in the human endeavors we know as human being, culture, and history.

And still, in its comprehensiveness the work maintains its ground and critical source in your singular and intimate writ-small experience of raising questions, of having insights, and of the reflective processes of an individual human being involved in science, art, religion, and-or the wisdom of commonsense—in you and in me.

The present work, then, is pedagogy towards awareness, appropriation, and affirmation of that process as ground to both writ-small understanding and writ-large culture in history. Our pedagogy is based on the work of thinkers involved with the development of transcendental method. The audience for our pedagogy, then, is broad because the work itself and, thus, its pedagogy are aimed at concrete applications for any one person as an intimate-personal avenue of self-understanding and corrective.

Further, such self-understanding begins in an empirical-critical point of view, and is open at both ends to the mysterious unknown. The pedagogy for this philosopher's discoveries gains its broader import, and its historical sweep, by fostering your own intimate philosophical acumen and, over time, aims at nothing less than a paradigm shift beginning with Lonergan's basic insights circa mid-1900, and moving through into the early-to-mid 21st century, perhaps later. This pedagogy is a part of that movement. The potential shift is based on a self-corrective movement at the foundational level of all fields of study and, subsequently over time, of all of common discourse. Hence, the need for our distinction between fundaments and foundations comes into view.

In this way, at once Lonergan’s contribution to philosophy marks the beginning of a new corrective and self-corrective shift for many affected by "inherited" intellectual-philosophical derailments; for a new and creative set of insights and distinctions for others who are open to new developments in philosophical thought; and both for some others. And it marks a movement forward that will provide ground for definition and clarity in all further human knowledge. If so, and if Lonergan's basic insights continue to filter into other theoretical and common discourse, the shift will eventually constitute a new set of distinctions and a new, consciously appropriated attunement to pass down to those who will then receive philosophical assumptions in the "intellectual air" we know as intergenerational. Again, the attunement will be between our reflective philosophical stance (our foundations) and the actual given ground of that stance (our fundaments) as evident and affirmable in our personal writ-small and writ-large history.

Further, a study of Lonergan’s and others’ contribution to philosophy and education helps to reveal that ground as well as the ground of all other insights, knowledge, and paradigm shifts. The empirical ground can be found in an adequate understanding of the fundament of human consciousness—the given, basic, and discoverable structure and dynamism of your own mind, and in an adequate and critical interpretation of that fundament in the context of concrete history. Moreover, with the help of a clarified and working theory of knowledge, you can personally understand and verify that ground in the context of the history of science, of scientific method, and of the common procedures of ordinary discourse.

The Trans-Cultural Base

We refer to both cognitional theory and a theory of knowledge as transcendental or general empirical method. In his Method In Theology Lonergan also refers to the basic structure and method of consciousness in different language as a trans-cultural base. As far as all persons are conscious, the theory applies to all persons.

Again, this method and base hold within it the broad outlines of the self-corrective process writ-small and writ-large. And again, in its writ-large dimension, such understanding carries the potential to lead to a paradigm shift in the sciences and fields of study and application. The shift will consist, first, of correctives of old inherited assumptions; second, of new discoveries and, third, of a fuller and more unified understanding of the import of human thought, knowledge, faith, speech, and act in history.

Treatment of the Good & the Worthwhile--& Dialectic

Treatment of The Good & The Worthwhile--& Dialectic

Moreover, in the above passage, the philosopher Lonergan speaks of an undertow, and an unconscious movement towards the good. This means that our reflective processes about the good (and bad) already spontaneously emerge in all but the comatose among us, and that they do so in terms of some developing set of principles of intelligence and excellence or, more generally, some movement of our embedded, but developmental, questions for the true-good (1972, pp. 282-83).

In other words, our questions for the good emerge within a horizon, and our horizons can change. As cultural and as developmental within a culture, our horizons differ vastly; but as desirers, questioners, and seekers of the good, we are all the same. In part, the unconscious undertow is our fundamental quest for the good, as concretely expressed and regardless of content, which is already part and parcel to all human endeavors. Again, though horizons and content differ greatly, the search for the good is trans-cultural.

In this way, when we speak of notions of correction and self-correction, we mean that both are inherently involved with our questions of analysis, qualification, self-qualification, and of value and self-value and, more comprehensively, of the true-good--all within a broader context of horizon development.

Furthermore, all commonsense and theoretical dialogue is underpinned by foundations and fundaments, and the interaction between them. If so, then all dialogue already holds within it the concrete evidence for the self-reflective process to begin—a process that aims at personal, philosophical self-correction—and qualification. In fact, in all human concerns, the broad structure of self-correction is ordered around our questions generally stated as: What/who is it, is it so, and is it good/bad/worthwhile (Lonergan, 1972; & Piscitelli, 1985). Through the framework of these questions, we continue to self-transcend at times, despite a profoundly disparate philosophical inheritance, and despite disagreement in our reflections on the question of what really is good-bad at any one moment in human history.

Again, though we all seek the good, we do so from profoundly different horizons and contexts. This diversity of views emerges as a dynamic polemic of soft differences and hard extremes, and as dialectical movements of inner thought and outer discourse where, in either case, we “go back and forth” over an issue; and we continuously change and self-correct. Such dialectical movements are concretely manifest in common discourse, for instance, as “separating the wheat from the chaff,” as “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” and as other references to winnowing out a discoverable clear truth and good in a highly complex arena of meaning.

I leave you to supply your own examples of the process of dialectic manifest in any specific dialogue. However, the same general structure of questioning and dialectic can be found in both writ-small and writ-large environments—in all persons, studies, fields, and theoretical work in a wealth of conferences, books and articles in field journals, and in political and ethical dialogue by concerned persons across the globe.

What is actually good or bad in any concrete situation is a question for all of us in that situation; however, the prior question for the good-bad is always the initial source of all argument-to-decision-making in that situation.

Thus, rather than "adding on" the question of the good to any analysis that we do, we will see that all critical analysis and argument emerge from, include, and return to the question of the good from whatever horizon the correspondents are working within. From this understanding of the good we can see that the need for a dialogue about horizon analysis comes clearly into view.