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.

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