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.