Our Questions & the Loss of Attunement

Our Questions and the Loss of Attunement

Whether or not the shift I speak of occurs fully, and whether or not we ever establish a better-attuned, foundational understanding that will inform our common education and living, human awareness is, at its core a quest. That quest becomes more active when inquiry becomes more articulate, and when our articulate questions become distinctly expressed. Further, in its most general form, our awareness puts forth a set of questions, and those questions call on meaning that will inform all of human thought and discourse. Those questions are in their most generally stated form:

What-who is (meaning)?
What is true/not true about that meaning?
What is good and bad about it?
What is truly worthwhile (best) to do?
What is ultimately truly good and worthwhile to do? (Lonergan, 1972; Piscitelli, 1985; King, 2003).

In fact, in varying intensity, and in more or less differentiated form, the quest and all of these questions fuel the “undertow” that informs our approach to everything and everyone in the world. That is, a general undifferentiated undertow-thrust becomes more and more distinguished to emerge as wonder and further as a set of questions (with a myriad of specified content) that we can then identify as the general substructure and ordering dynamism of our awareness. These kinds of questions are asked and re-asked in ever-new contexts of persons in dialogue and community with one another, now and throughout history.

On the other hand, our questions are informed by our range of development and by our variably achieved horizons within that development. Again, a horizon is that from within which we cannot see (or know) beyond it. What is obvious to someone in one horizon, is non-existent to someone in another. Also, people are people and not inert material--we have our desires and fears to worry about. Thus, we often are quite willing to rearrange at will “What is true/not true?” to serve our own ill-conceived notions of “What is best?”, and regardless of what others think, say, or do. "Don't bother me with facts," or with the more remote possibility of gaining a new horizon.

Such is the general movement of self-transcendence, on the one hand, or its absence, on the other.

Self-fooled or not, and whatever are the particular contents of such arguments, the fundamental intentions of all parties (the gravity at work in the football game), are to get to a higher and more definitive truth, shorn of untoward meaning, and to set up the conditions for a higher good to occur, again, whatever our horizon and whatever we think that good is or would be, and whether we are ever ultimately right or wrong about it. That is a question that needs to be worked out in the extant, concrete circumstances.

Moreover, we can understand such movements of thought in terms of the broad outlines of human consciousness--the trans-cultural base and its normative but developmental, and certainly violable, functions for both persons and cultures (1972, p. 20). That is, we can take up a dialectical and diacritical analysis of theoretical, scholarly, and common discourses in any cultural arena from the point of view of an adequate, theoretical, and personally self-verified analysis of conscious method and the trans-cultural base (self-appropriation-affirmation) that such analysis affords.

Thus, our study will reveal that the question of the good/worthwhile is a fundament, albeit a developmental and historical one. This question resides in all human beings and is the prime instigator (the undertow) behind all qualitative judgments (the good-bad) and all actions (deliberation of the worthwhile/not worthwhile doing). As such, we discover that, from an empirical point of view, the good is not extrinsic to the reality of the sciences or of any and all human affairs in history. Rather, aspects of the good-bad (qualitative judgments) predate and inform all science historically (writ-large), and predate and inform all scientists personally (writ-small).

In other words, like it or not, all science lives in a very old and veritable bed of qualitative development and qualitative judgments all around. We all already are interwoven with good-bad aspects of intelligence—not only because we choose to be, but because the question for the good-bad is a basic part of our conscious structure. It should come as no surprise to you, then, to suggest that to actually BE intelligent is to have a well-developed ability to make qualitative (good) judgments about the good and bad of things, people, places, events, and our own selves.

Further, all of our good-bad judgments and actions are set in a vast history of, and are a diverse product of, our prior questions and insights concerning value, qualification, excellence--the intelligent as what is qualitative (good/bad) and as an intrinsic part of what is or is not worthwhile to do. If this is so, and if we fail to understand ourselves in this way, and to think and act in terms of it, then we are "out of tune." That is, what we are and do does not match what we think we are and do.

If we fully understand the good as a developmental fundament for all human being-in-question and in all things, then we will understand all scientific analysis and studies as already immersed in and emerging from aspects of the good, rather than being somehow “outside” of such questions and their necessarily “biased” influence on the contexts and contents of the real we are exploring. Again, we will explore this issue further as our work unfolds in later chapters.

In this way, the present study can serve to attune the question of the good-worthwhile with our intelligence that is purported to be--and can remain--purely scientific. In so doing, we can bring the question of the good back to the foundations of both science and education while, at the same time, remaining entirely critical. Here and in fact (for you to discover for yourself as fact), the question of the good was and is always operative as a developmental, dialectical, and diacritical fundament inseparable from either scientific method or any given analysis or prescription in the natural and physical sciences, or in the human sciences and the human affairs they are concerned with. Such attunement does raise many knotty questions for our fields of knowledge; and we will explore them further as our work unfolds in later chapters.

Also, cognitional analysis and its personal verification will reveal many positive movements and events. Here, self-transcendence is no overly-abstract idea but commonly occurs and will continue to occur in you, in other persons, in the development of institutions, in the common dialogue between persons, and within and between diverse fields of study—all guided by some vision of excellence, or the good-better-best.

So the dialectical pendulum embedded in personal dialogue and history swings slowly back and forth with the ever-potential and sometimes-actual concrete expression of self-transcendence in the balance. However, at present it does so in the Western mind that does not know, and therefore does not fully have, its bearings. It has foundations and it has fundaments; but, for many reasons, its foundations are ill-attuned or not attuned at all with its fundaments. Without such attunement, the self-corrective process that is so central to self-transcendence in human intelligence, integration, and application, cannot do its job well, and sometimes cannot operate at all, or becomes diverted towards self-destruction. As such, the creative hope that is woven into the workings of history becomes stalled, diseased, or dependent on a regeneration of feeling rooted in ignorance, rather than in reflectively gained knowledge, for its revival.

In other words, our underlying assumptions about hope, good, truth, and our ability to self-transcend that might emerge from engaging in the dialogue, can become sabotaged before the dialogue even gets started. As such, and to recall our ball-field analogy, we can find ourselves sitting in the parking lot while the game is being played instead of in the stands where we can see and appreciate the game. When players are tripped, we can find ourselves expecting them to fall upwards instead of down to the ground. Of course, we cannot watch and enjoy the game (or live our life) with such wrong-headed assumptions in place—but we end up missing a considerable depth in our living.

Another analogy: we can have a compass, but without well-tuned philosophical foundations, we have no way of knowing where we are right now or, subsequently, our relationship to North.

More concretely, if we continue to self-transcend in fact, our bad assumptions lead us to assume that we do not self-transcend, or we fail to even ask; and we have no idea about what that might mean, or how important such a notion might be to our daily life, to others, or to the full sweep of human history and our living in terms of its mysterious-beyond-unknown.

Like those who refused to listen to Galileo’s evidence because of what they already felt, thought, and wanted to be true, many are, in fact, separated away from ourselves complements of our post-modern philosophical inheritance. A claim to groundlessness (or to the meaninglessness of foundations and a dialogue about them), then, cannot account for the consistency or recalcitrance of our questions that seek to know our beginnings, our middles, our ends, and beyond, and to continue to qualify our lives as we go through them from start to finish.

Such groundlessness is often “founded” in a common confusion. Here, the possibility of even having knowledge, including knowledge of the good, must mean being in possession of the beginnings of the chicken and the egg. No knowledge of the beginning-end equals no knowledge of the chicken or the egg. From this ill-tuned view, being in possession of some intelligence about the chicken and the egg and their relationship to one another is not enough to claim knowledge of the truth about the real of that chicken and egg. From this “all or none” confused point of view, we cannot “really know” anything unless we first know which came first: the chicken or the egg, and everything else there is to know. All “real knowledge” awaits this more comprehensive Knowledge-of-All. Thus, everything else in-between is just silly conjecture, arbitrarily construed “interpretations,” or someone’s hubris expressing itself.

However, in concrete and quite practical fashion, we develop knowledge about lots of things, e.g., about chickens and eggs; and we continue to develop other knowledge about them, and everything else on the planet—all within a greater context of also knowing that there are many other things that you (and we) still do not know, or that we have not yet related chickens and eggs to, etc. In other words, unless your mind has turned into an impenetrable steel trap, you go about your life in the full knowledge that you (and we) know many things and persons, but still do not know many, many other things and persons. (You here means you individually, or writ-small; and we means you and everyone else, or writ large.)

As knowledge, such intelligence has a critical component; for instance, might you know that a chicken is not an egg or a dog, and vice versa? To extrapolate, can we not suggest a theory of knowledge, then, that accounts for such intelligent activities as well as for their limited but solid critical components? The limited means we do not yet know which came first—the chicken or the egg, ad infinitum. And the solid means we can close around the facts—that there are great differences between a chicken and an egg or a dog, and that we know many of those differences. And again, can we understand the question of the meaningful good as an intrinsic, inseparable, but also a distinguishable part of our meaningful development of what goes by the name intelligence and knowing? (And again, we will develop these themes in more detail in later chapters.)

Under such assumptions writ-small, however, and under distorted inherited foundational conditions writ-large, whatever we know for the moment, we also “know” stands in quicksand (bad philosophical foundations). One implication of this view is that we can change course with the wind—arbitrarily and without hesitation; and such changes are fully endorsed by the philosophical air we have breathed in for several centuries now. And so, the pendulum swings wildly, carrying us so far to one extreme that skin gets burned and blood gets spilled without compunction; and then the pendulum swings back, flying past the center (where self-transcendence might occur), and on to the opposite extreme, where more skin gets burned and more blood gets spilled without compunction. Only this time, the violence is imparted from a different set of people--those who do not like the view from the other extreme, but who don't have the philosophical or spiritual tools to either balance or to self-transcend. Certainly we can know that human history is nothing if not dynamic--and violent.

On the other hand, within the given aspects of that same dynamism we can also take up the more difficult project of dialectic, diacritic, and hopefully of concrete self-transcendence, as the potential, normative, but also violable order of the human condition in history. Of course love of self and of others transcends all. However, since the scientific revolution, what we think of and about knowledge and the good have been hanging in the balance.

We cannot account for evil here or in any book. However, a working knowledge of the trans-cultural base and its vast implications towards individual and cultural self-transcendence, potentially and in the unfolding of time, can smooth the way for insights and understanding, for tempering the violence of swinging pendulums in history, and for our creativity to emerge unfettered from the problems of knowledge and the good.

History testifies that our self-transcendence, our creativity, and our desire for and return to a sense of wholeness are recurring, even when our foundations are out of tune with the reality of our existence. However, as we proceed, such creative movements can become more and more difficult to attain and to ensure, especially when they affect the writ-large politics, education, institutions, and social order surrounding individual persons. That is, philosophical (and spiritual) health or illness is intellectually generational and its manifestations can be so well-accepted as to have become the norm in our everyday thinking and expression. As such, the illness is difficult to self-identify and, once identified, requires a long-term regime of self-to-culture treatment for cure. With a corrective attunement, at least we will know it matters and why.

Further, creativity and self-transcendence occur in optimum fashion when persons, institutions, and cultural movements set up the conditions for them. Or, they occur when we develop our reflective, self-reflective and critical capacities, and when we lend those capacities to the analysis, identification, and diminishment of our present philosophical fog, hindrances, roadblocks, and cul-de-sacs that have come to systematically inform our otherwise wise commonsense and theoretical enterprises.

At present, the fog is thick, the roadblocks are high, and the openings in our cul-de-sacs are all grown over, all acting like cancers on the body-politic of the writ-large mind that we generally refer to as our "culture." In many cases, we lack an understanding of foundations, or we deny that such an under-stream and underpinning could even exist or, much less, could influence us with such pervasive power. In such cases, we fail to even ask the questions that would explore, consider as evidence, and reveal to us, our own (writ-small) or the West’s (writ-large) distorted foundations, or such a transcendental method or trans-cultural base. As such, the theoretical clarity of such self-verified knowledge by the various traditions, including education, remains potential and perhaps far-off, indeed (Ornstein & Hunkins, 2004).