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.