RESTRUCTURING The VIEW

Restructuring the View

Though this work has a thorough theoretical component, let us use the theory to help us examine and perhaps restructure the view. Let us expose the intimate relationship between, first, theory and theoretical philosophy and, second, your intimate and subjective-personal experience in your common discourse. The exposure and restructuring is made manifest through a thorough foundational review and a set of empirical-personal exercises, with the particular place and time that you find yourself in when you arrive at the chapters and exercises, either alone or in the company of others. This restructuring and relationship-finding is highly relevant, but also fraught with dangers, all of which we will explore within these pages and with your advantage in mind.

In his Method In Theology, Lonergan warns of these dangers while exploring the emergence of three strands of humanism in the development of human consciousness in history. First, Lonergan speaks of one strand as the embrace of being educated linguistically, and its relationship to becoming human; second, he speaks of a moral strand that emerged and came to rest “not on kinship, or noble blood, or common citizenship and laws, or even on education, but on the fact that another, particularly a sufferer, was a human being;” and he speaks of a third strand regarding the movement of literature that seeks to lead a differentiated theory out to new realms of meaning, but also to find a way to integrate theory with common experience and discourse, while maintaining appropriate and adequate distinctions (1972, pp. 97-98).

In this last strand, Lonergan distinguishes within a complex and differentiated culture—as you probably now live in--those who now live immersed in a theoretical world, but who have yet to develop in their own minds a clear distinction between theoretical discourse, on the one hand, and the common, personal, and intimate discourse we are involved in on a daily basis, on the other. A developed and restructured view can include the clarity that would regard this clear differentiation and right relation, and can follow with an equally clear integration.

In a general sense, then, many have differentiated their thinking and grown from commonsense into theoretical consciousness and, from having been immersed in a theoretical field, are able to discourse quite well in theoretical circles. However, those same many have yet to find a mature relationship between the two discourses: commonsense and theoretical (and other discourses as well). In concrete communications, neither a scientist nor a person of good commonsense can find a mature relationship within themselves, or their counterpart human beings and fields of discourse, if neither has clearly distinguished one field of discourse from the other, and forged a conscious relationship between fields, in their own minds:



A third strand came from the world of theory. For if creative thought in philosophy and science is too austere for general consumption, creative thinkers are usually rare. They have their brief day, only to be followed by the commentators, the teachers, the popularizers that illuminate, complete, transpose, simplify. So the worlds of theory and of common sense partly interpenetrate and partly merge. The results are ambivalent. It will happen that the exaggerations of philosophic error are abandoned, while the profundities of philosophic truth find a vehicle that compensates for the loss of the discredited myths. But it will also happen that theory fuses more with common nonsense than with common sense, to make the nonsense pretentious and, because it is common, dangerous and even disastrous. (1972, p. 98)


On the one hand, then, theory has its limitations, is not a panacea for human living, and can create an arrogant attitude on the part of some scientists—and that, I suggest, is where we are in many fields at the beginning of the 21st century. On the other hand, the misuse of theory or its “fusing” of even good theory with common non-sense can cause long-term and ingrained distortions--when theory is misunderstood and-or misapplied to concrete human living. From such errors comes the common saying: A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

So both scientists and persons of good common sense have some work to do. That is, scientists need to understand the substance and import of commonsense thought and procedures, while maintaining the clarity of their scientific thought and language in their fields of discourse. Also, all scientists emerge from and return to common living and its discourse and so, to have contempt for that living is to have contempt for oneself and for the “mother” of one’s tradition of thought.

On the other hand, persons of good commonsense need to understand the import of theory and of theoreticians (and for the theoretical mind-set) for present and future development and for its many concrete applications in the fields of commonsense discourse and living. We are hypocrites who love technology but also hate the theory-science that is the father of that technology. If the scientist or the person of good commonsense does not want to participate in the discourse of another field, then they at least need to be silent about that field and give it the respect it is due.

Further, human history is a build-up and continuous transformation of human thought applied to more and more complex situations that were also, in their turn, informed by a complex of human thought. In this way, again, we can be born into massive distortions as a part of the common discourse of our time without understanding a thing about those distortions.

And again, Lonergan refers to unauthentic traditions (1972). Those distortions and that unauthentic tradition commonly become familiar to us as a set of unquestioned norms; and as children and young people we tend to embrace what is common and normal to us, without asking how or why--commonsense must get on with living; and stopping to think in any serious way, indeed, seems to take away from that living. Without critical questioning of our traditions, provincialism rules the day, we project our ways out onto others, and our thought becomes calcified against different ways of being in the world.

The question is: How are we to know if such massive distortions are at work in our lives and, if they are, how to correct them if we remain only in the realm of our own commonsense discourse? And again, how are we to know how to communicate with those who are so different from us? How are we supposed to distinguish for ourselves what is merely a cultural habit and what is truly fundamental to human living? And so theoretical-philosophical analysis considers both kinds of discourse--common and theoretical--and, therefore, is something different from both.

Consider for a moment, then, your involvement with the present work, and this work in the context of larger movements of philosophical history. My own aim here is at least to illuminate, transpose, simplify and popularize the innovative, unique, and highly relevant philosophical contributions of a 20th century philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, as well as those of others’. Further, I aim to pluck your inherent potential to reflect and self-reflect; to raise and qualify the level of discourse in your own life; and to help bring philosophic dialogue, and perhaps some deeper goods, truths, and the self-corrections they might imply, to the common discourse around you. I have no control over this occurrence, and do not seek such control; however, I do hope that it occurs from within the self-directions of your own spirit.

Furthermore, you and your surrounding discourse rest in the context of other loosely defined groups with similar, sometimes overlapping, sometimes quite separate, arenas of discourse. All of these other groups have complex and unplanned intra-group dialogue. In this way, our potential is to set up the conditions for a widening circle of openness and awareness, and of implicit self-correction and self-edification--of our common sense errors that are, in fact, common non-sense; of our biases, distortions, half-truths, and downright lies, that affect and infect our roots, our directions, our vision and, ultimately, our future and that of those around us.

We cannot know if we have inherited such distortions unless and until we do some serious personal, cultural, and historical self-inspection. Hence, your commonsense getting-on-with-it, as good as it might be, will benefit from taking a backseat for awhile to your reflective thought, and to theory formation that just may chart a better course for qualified change in-for-and-from you.

Such qualified change is a long-term and ever-widening project—admittedly, but also hopefully. Essential conditions for its fruition include a singular focus on your personal development of your own reflective powers; of your own critical and theoretical consciousness; of your own understanding of the personal, intimate and now-remarkably clear context from which such consciousness emerges; and finally of your own willingness to engage in your own foundational self-critique over a long period of time, and from a remarkably clear beginning point.

Furthermore, your involvement with the project is personal, and intimately so. It is theoretical, and critically so. And it has emerged from a tradition that begs you to think-back on it, and to go forward anew from it—with your mind in mind. However, from a writ-large view, and at the same time, your involvement is de facto a creative movement—an instance of concrete self-transcendence--within the continuing history of common and philosophical thought. In this way, there is no cultural development without individual development occurring at its core—in each of us.

In our final chapters, we will develop the political and cultural implications of our present project further.