CONCLUSION: Introduction

Conclusion

To sum up the basic format of the present work, first, we do some preliminary preparations and “turning inward” work of which this introduction is a part. This work, again, provides a framework for a personal inspection of your philosophical foundations, or a foundational review in progress. And again, this preliminary self-reflective work is essential for you to gain a full understanding of the exercises in the later chapters.

Second, I recount a theory of knowledge that challenges your present intellectual inheritance and lays the groundwork for the knowing part of self-appropriation-affirmation that is brought forward in our exercises.

Third, though the work can be approached privately, I develop and encourage some optimum classroom conditions that include portfolio development.

Fourth, I briefly develop the broad outlines of the cognitional theory we will use.

Fifth, through the theory, I help you directly identify personal, concrete activities in your own conscious order in a safe environment and, optimally, in the company of others and under the guidance of a present and qualified teacher.

Sixth, and after the exercises, I discuss and develop further meaning, applications and implications of our discoveries though, of course, these are not exhaustive explorations.

Seventh, I suggest further study and specific readings to inspire the further questions and corrective insights that I hope will follow your engagement with this study.

Further, in the above paragraphs we have developed some technical terms and provided a beginning narrative for carving out some important distinctions in your thought--distinctions that we will develop more thoroughly as our chapters unfold for you.

We have briefly explored some writ-large concerns that are directly related to our writ-small concern in the present work—you and your own philosophical development. That is, if the present work does what I hope it will do, the difficulty in pursuing this project will arise not from the wise reader, the philosopher, or the theoretician having understood the theory that is our guide here, or even in you successfully relating the theories to your own intimate procedures of mind--I think this work, if engaged in thoroughly, will provide you with the conditions for your having a plethora of insights about such matters. Rather, for the wise reader, and more for the philosopher and theoretician, the difficulty will be in unearthing, and then unseating, the deeply set assumptions that you may have inherited over the years in your common and theoretical discourse; that have come down to you woven deeply into your culture and your professional tradition; that inform your inner eye as you read this and other documents; and that you are most likely heavily invested in, perhaps in your writing, lectures, and in your professional and common discourse. These are old and “set” ideas that you have inherited; and if distorted, such assumptions will not be easy to unearth, much less to unseat, even when you find the argument developed within these pages to be completely reasonable and even compelling.

Furthermore, a personal recovery of one’s own questioning dynamism and its structure is also a recovery of the centerpiece of all classical and liberal education. Such a recovery, that includes a theoretical component, is central to the project of self-correction writ-small and large in our time. That recovery, manifest in person and in institution, would move self-reflectively through history, separating the wheat from the chaff in conversations, preserving what is good about our inheritance, and edifying that tradition as it goes forward. For, we do not want to throw culture and the history of philosophy out; but rather we want to understand it, edify it, and bring it forward to edify our lives today.

Moreover, the basic structure of human consciousness that you will identify in yourself here, again, is trans-cultural, or common to all. In this way, a personal recovery of that centerpiece calls us towards participating in an ongoing dialogue with other persons from all traditions. Such a dialogue aims at mutual understanding and at recognizing and setting up the conditions for the creative and continual self-transcendence of all, including ourselves, from within that now-known trans-cultural base and its dialogue that is essential to and emerges from it.

The exercises in later chapters offer a key to the ground floor of that ongoing recovery process—a concrete self-reference and a rock to stand on. The door is opened through an appeal to the creative dimension of your self-interest, your identity with your own critical capacities, and an offer of concrete verification procedures in the short-term. From here, you can identify and begin to critique your own personal and cultural foundations, philosophical positions and biases, as well as begin to understand others’ positions, if you wish to do so.

This critical self-inspection is no small discovery and recovery project, to be sure (1972, p. 19). However, through the relatively brief pedagogy herein, we can recover the vibrant centerpiece of liberal and liberating education, a view towards the wholeness and openness of its most authentic attitudes, and the continuous qualifications of its objects and areas of interest, if not yet its scope or the wisdom of its seasoning.