INTRODUCTION--Finding the Mind--Pedagogy for Self-Appropriation/Affirmation

11-18-12 UPDATE:  Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory, was published in May 2011. That work draws the verification procedures from the below work and is developed around what I call the shorter philosophical journey.  I have written two online introductions to that work: one for "newbies" to either Lonergan's work or to philosophical study in general and the other for those who have some experience with Lonergan's work. Those two introductions are linked below. Also linked below are the appendixes for that published work:

For those unfamiliar with Lonergan's work or with philosophical study:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S9QV5Q1NZNjyVlQCHXnmq0M1rM1EmUlru2dbhznV-H0/edit?hl=en_US

 For those familiar with Lonergan's work and with philosophical study:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mAmi7cjJW8mDAp4hdfVlUL_FmBjGqou0MVNHMibRqzE/edit?hl=en_US

Links for all appendixes to Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory (2011)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dpLN8xSbJy9cQTfvCYOHTVn9BdlAN-3aiF8UnVwCJRw/edit

NOTE to all Readers of below work as introduction to the longer philosophical journey: All 3 chapters are continued in the "Older Posts" section.

Introduction

“. . . so prolonged has been my search, so much of it has been a dark struggle with my own flight from understanding, so many have been the half-lights and detours in my slow development, . . .”
Bernard J.F. Lonergan (1958/xv, 2000/9)

"There is the first step in attending to the data of sense and of consciousness.”
Bernard J. F. Lonergan (1972/35)

We cannot know if we have inherited philosophical 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. (From the Conclusion of this Introduction)

WHY TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD?

Why Transcendental Method?

If I could tell you what transcendental method (TM) is in a few short sentences so that you would thoroughly understand it, I or others would not need to write books about it. So let us begin.

TM is a theory, where the data of reference for the theory is the human mind; and of course, this includes your mind. Further, TM is something you can explore and know about; you can, and often do, speak of it in common and-or theoretical terms; and you can verify it every time you or someone else thinks, speaks, listens, or writes—this book is about that verification process.

Further, the import of TM is not in the knowing about it, though knowing-about is helpful in a psychological and even theoretical sense. Rather its fullest import is in its call for that rare and satisfying moment of personal illumination that occurs when the theory and the knowing meet the full reality of the datum which, in this case, is the living you.

Such an illumination is a high moment of critical self-knowledge that comes at the end of a self-directed learning process; however, it also begins another process that constitutes a unique kind of self-integration; for the light that illuminates is our object, and if we come to understand it, that light illuminates its own procedural self; and, again, the light and the procedure is in you.

Furthermore, teachers and parents among my readers will recognize the moment of illumination, or the insight that I speak of as the “Aha! moment” —that moment when a child’s face lights up, and we have no doubt that they “got it.”

The differences are that the moment of our own focus has the “Aha!” itself, and its surrounding operations, as its content-in-operation; and that we will refer to this Aha! in its critical form and with this content as the illuminating moments of self-appropriation and self-affirmation. We do so because this Aha constitutes a new and broader self-awareness, a new kind of unity and, consequently, a new beginning, not only for your own self-understanding, but for your unfolding understanding of everything else you can possibly ask about, come to know, create, talk about, or do.

In the briefest of explanations, then, first, you already have transcendental method working within you. TM-the-theory is a clear and technical definition of TM-the-reality where your Aha! moments occur.

Second, then, transcendental method is the structure and complex dynamism of the desire and motivation behind the light—the light that is most obvious to us when we are actually having an insight or set of insights.

And, third, self-appropriation is the discovery of, and self-affirmation is the critical knowledge of transcendental method -the-reality. Both constitute a fully illuminated and conscious embrace of that dynamic and motivating complex where the mind's procedures and the illumination of insight continue to occur in a fashion familiar to all but the comatose among us.

Teachers

Teachers

Moreover, if I may speak again to the teachers among my readers, if we find that TM is already a part of everyone’s everyday thought, speech, and act, then TM is the operating centerpiece of all educational experience. It follows that, if the field of education is to benefit from knowledge of transcendental method, teachers will need, first, to thoroughly understand TM by going through the self-knowledge and self-appropriation-affirmation process; and second, to become so comfortable with the subject matter that recognizing TM and its clarifying power within yourselves and others becomes a part of your everyday thought.

Also, in going through the self-appropriation process, we are also partaking of learning and the self-correction process in its fullest meaning: “I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand” (Darling-Hammond, 1997, p. 107). Here, however, you explore and do to discover and understand not only this or that worthwhile content or skill. But also, you gather in yourself—as content, as skill and procedure, and as self-conscious self-identity in the doing of thinking-consciousness. TM as content is a theory, your own inner self, your interior functions, and the motivation behind your very thinking, saying, and doing.


And so, self-appropriation is the exact-same as the fuller meaning of learning-as-doing, but also is more than that learning--because self-appropriation is doing to understand about that understanding and doing. The potential, then, is not only to know-about, but to identify-with that is an altogether unique, new, and fuller illumination of self and other.

Though in this introduction I can say this--so that you can hear the above and even perhaps remember it, the rest of the text is about your doing for a deeper, fuller, and more critical understanding to occur in you over the course of your reading.

Scientists

Scientists

If I may speak to the scientists among my readers, as you might have guessed by now, as a data-point of theoretical reference, transcendental method is nothing less than completely personal and completely intimate and, if you understand it fully, you must understand this as so. At the very least, the personal—even intimate--aspects of the present work should explain to you why I have used first-person in my writing of many of the passages here.

However, TM is not only personal. Rather, like any theory, TM is developed first as speculative and experimental, where terms and relations are worked out in well-defined technical-theoretical concepts. Verification procedures are then offered here for any scientist to take up so that, like any theory, this speculative theory can become verified theory. In this way, TM is a product of the most critical and discerning aspects of scientific method--generalized from, and then applied back to, the data—in this case, of human consciousness.

Further, TM’s other name is general empirical method where empirical method's data, again, is generalized to include the discernible universal aspects of human consciousness as its data of concern and, in this case, of the scientist’s interest. Again, the scientist can turn the speculative theory into a verified theory by going through the verification process. Your discovery and verification of TM in you, then, which is the central guiding purpose of this book, is thoroughly and completely dependent on the critical application of scientific method to the data under review—the human mind and, as inference, your human mind. TM (or GEM), then, is a speculative theory that calls for verification in order to become a critical theory.

Furthermore, let us speak for a moment to the larger historical projects of learning, of the sciences, and of culture. That is, the critical self-discovery of TM that is self-appropriation-affirmation also has within it a remarkable moment that holds the potential to lay bare what is common to all in critical-theoretical fashion, or what Lonergan refers to as the trans-cultural base (1972). However, if this is so, then we hold within our range the potential to heal and unify the heretofore broken relationship between the now-disparate fields of formal and informal inquiry, on the one hand, and the completely subjective and personal domains, on the other—not to collapse these fields of discourse, but to show how they are related and unified. For self-appropriation adheres to both a completely critical-objective moment and a completely personal-intimate moment of human understanding and of coming to know in a most critical fashion. TM uses common and scientific procedures to refine a working theory of knowledge, and then sticks to that theory, or applies it, to come to know our own conscious order.

Transcendental method--not as a theory, but as your experience of the quest already in operation in you--continues to radiate from within you. As such, TM is the fully fueled engine at the center of all of your inquiry, including your self-inquiry, and including your casual awareness of your present surroundings, and your interest as you read these words right now. Through TM-the-theory, then, you can also come to know your own knowing processes in a critical way, or know TM-the-operating-reality in you, whatever you want to name it.

Here we move beyond mere “intuition” or the hints of resonance to a full awareness-of and conscious identification-with the most intimate workings of our own hearts, minds, and spirits. If so, and because all discovery, science, education, and culture begin in the passion of that inquiry, then TM is also the empirical base of all science and education, both formal and informal, in all institutions, and in all cultures.

The SPIRIT of INQUIRY

The Spirit of Inquiry

Further, TM is a technical term for what we refer to as “the spirit of inquiry” and that is, in turn, the beginning of all knowledge. If so, then that spirit has a critical verification component that is most evident in the history of common understanding in all persons for as long as history has been around.

That is, first, when we are at our best at being critically minded about our concrete affairs, we commonly seek to distinguish mere belief, wishes, or feelings, from the “genuine article,” “the real thing,” and the “hard facts” of the matter. Regardless of our many common failures and mistakes, such a method is embedded in our commonsense procedures, so that we can speak and act accordingly as a matter of habitual wisdom.

And second, ever since the scientific revolution the centerpiece of the sciences has been a fundamental adherence to scientific method which, generally speaking, is nothing less than this same critical method raised to the level of defined tenets, theoretical meaning, and technically defined system. Here such a method systematically avoids knowledge pronouncements until all relevant questions have been settled, and until all the relevant evidence is in. And even then, scientists consider their knowledge general and waiting for factual verification, and still tenuous--they continue to reach for more revelations and insights about the data and for better technical definitions according to new discoveries, and at the behest of their recalcitrant drive to understand more and better.
But if the spirit of inquiry and its verification component is evident throughout history, then that component can and should be applied to itself in its most critical (scientific), discerning (comprehensively critical), and personal way, precisely because it is the scientist’s mind we are speaking of—that mind is de facto included in the data arena.

However, such an application will not be rooted in or take place in the natural or physical sciences, but rather in the field of theoretical philosophy—the field that takes human understanding, theory, and knowledge, etc., as its content. Even if a natural scientist takes up the project (and I heartily invite you to do so here), with the spirit of inquiry as content, that scientist, by that fact, leaves their own field and enters the field of philosophical inquiry, or the field of foundations for all of the sciences, and for philosophy as well.

Such an exploration and verification project is developed in the theoretical reference herein to transcendental method (and-or general empirical method); to a working theory of knowledge that takes common procedures and the sciences in human history as its grounding referent; and to the process of self-appropriation and self-affirmation of the person doing the very difficult work of critical-theoretical development combined with personal application, without losing either (Lonergan, 1972).

Such a process is afforded critical pedagogy in the present work. But again, why?

First, a study of transcendental method will reveal to you in clear and critical fashion how your own horizons develop (and have developed), how those horizons influence your regard for self-others, and how they expand and deepen through continued self-reflection, or fail to do so. In a more remote way, learning about TM and going through the self-appropriation-affirmation process itself tends to inspire in us enduring, thoughtful, and respectful practice. And so in a broader sense, the critical self-knowledge that the process affords can add a new dimension to what it means to have a full and good education. Thus, the process both emerges from the great wisdom (and educational) traditions and brings a new and critical element to those same traditions.

Second, TM is a verifiable theory, and the data for verification is your own mind in all of its personal intimacy. Verifying a theory against the presented evidence as we verify any theory, then, is a part of the verification process for TM. However, the study also affords us a clear awareness of the potential within us for biases, diversions, oversights, on the one hand, and normative, insightful, and self-transcendent veins of thought within of each of us, on the other. In this way, we are afforded an avenue towards conscious enhancement of our own self-corrective practices that are already a part of our minded processes--and most probably well-worn in you already. Such practices can manifest in our deepening sense of centering self-awareness, and even of self-love—a self-love that can easily spread to others through a fuller knowledge of what is common to all of us. I issue no guarantees; however, a deepening awareness of self has always correlated with a deepening awareness of others. And again, such awareness presents us with a new aspect of what it means to have a good education.

Third, TM-the-theory regards TM-the-spirit of creativity that is so evident in children, but that, however thwarted, continues to live in all of us. Facing the day is your own TM on the move. Though TM-the-spirit of creativity can be ignored, battered about, and hindered, getting to know it through TM-the-theory carries the potential of framing the actual structure and its dynamism, of bathing it in the light of self-awareness, and, in doing so, of healing and releasing its pent-up powers in us, to us, and for us.

Fourth, again, transcendental method-as-theory is a reflective articulation of what we commonly call the spirit of inquiry in all of its comprehensive aspects. As such, knowledge of and conscious identity with TM-the-reality is nothing more and nothing less than a conscious embrace of the human motivational activity that comes before all knowledge, before all knowledge fields, and before all expressions of knowledge—no questions, no knowledge. Knowledge of transcendental method, then, is knowledge of the foundations of all past, present, and future knowledge.

Fifth, reflective practice is central to the religious and wisdom traditions of many if not all cultures, and has been for all of history. In this sense, our text does not pit intelligence and knowledge--as some sort of desiccated abstraction from human living--against faith and-or religious insights. Rather, the study reveals their relationship in clear and precise terms and, thus, is amenable to, even complementary to, those traditions--but without taking a doctrinal stand on any.

Further, our text is complementary to these traditions in the sense that, through the reading, we locate and give explanation to the basic structure and developmental processes at work in reflective and self-reflective practice, as well as in fostering a development of those practices. And we locate in the same basic structure and process the broad outlines of the religious quest--as a quest for the Mysterious Other—in whatever form human beings have expressed that inquiry over all of history.

On the other hand, and though we can locate the religious quest, our present embrace of transcendental method is completely empirical and critical—and only that. Again, from this basic position, I make no claim to religious knowledge or to the truth or falsity of any religious doctrine. That is, TM-as-theory is a theory of the quest that, historically, includes ultimate concerns that human beings have had over all of human history. In this way, TM helps explain, but avoids identifying with, either side of the post-modern polemic between transcendence and immanence; between religious doctrine and scientific knowledge; between Nature and God; or between empirical claims and the living of religious faith.

In this way, and again, a study of TM is completely appropriate to both secular and religious education, where one identifies with empirical method, and the other includes the above in the theoretical fields, but also identifies with living within the horizons of a religious quest, and of our faith journey.

Further, a study of transcendental method and the occurrence of self-appropriation can foster the conditions for a complementary and insightful dialogue to occur between those beginning in empirical method and those beginning from a position of faith.

Also, the language of transcendental method recalls and recovers the language of transcendence for the field of education where the loss of symbols of transcendence have become “devitalized, stale, opaque,” and commercialized (Hughes, 2003). It does so, again, without requiring the reader to identify with, or fail to identify with, one-and-only-one set of religious doctrines.

Thus, again, I take no doctrinal stand on religious issues here; while at the same time I claim and will show that a discovery of TM is a discovery of the human quest towards the mysterious-beyond that all scientists and religious persons participate in, though in vastly different ways. As such, the discovery of transcendental method is both critical-empirical and a discovery of the empirical fount and foundations of all religious doctrine.

Sixth, TM is a qualified and verifiable theory—it does not call for belief, but for experimentation, verification, and self-verification. TM shows us the centerpiece of critical knowledge within ourselves as distinct from but intimately related to feelings, belief, dreams, and even faith. As such, TM can and should be brought to the table of all education, and for all to understand for themselves—for yourself—as first and foremost for and about you, and me, about each of our students and, by implication, about all of human culture and history.

At the very least, then, none of the above is detrimental to children or adults and, in fact, all will further our openness towards our continued and qualified understanding and human development. If so, then knowledge of transcendental method, and an ability to teach about it in educational institutions, can only enhance all educational reform towards what has come to be known as best practice.

And seventh, self-appropriation-affirmation, as both a critical-theoretical and quite personal experience, completes the scientific revolution in Western inquiry and thought that began several centuries ago. It can serve to enhance the creative dialogue between all sorts of thinkers and cultures by laying bare the architecture of the centerpiece of thought that we all share as human.
Thus and more, I argue, is “Why Transcendental Method.”

DOING PHILOSOPHY--Philosophy's Ill Repute

DOING PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy’s Ill Repute

Exploring transcendental method-the-theory, verifying the theory, and going through the process of self-appropriation-affirmation are unapologetically philosophical. I say unapologetically because, in the present common air of thought, philosophy has somewhat of a bad reputation. Of course, not everyone thinks alike; however, for many reasons, some claim that philosophy (and a study of foundations) is no longer relevant; and some claim that philosophers live in ivory towers, are unconnected with the “real world,” and have their heads in the clouds.

However, and to relate philosophy to your own personal and daily activities, philosophy was-is-will-be born of your own thoughtful reflection and self-reflection; and though you may not have identified philosophy’s clear trail of footsteps in yourself or others around you, philosophy is already a potential if not a reality in your own thought. That is, philosophy springs from your own spontaneous and abiding love of knowledge--of your knowing what is and is not so in real and concrete circumstances--and that love has already brought you to any knowledge or even wisdom you already have and can rightly lay claim to. By way of contrast, I presume you have experienced your own ignorance from time to time, and that you do not love it.

At its core, then, and regardless of its many uneven jaunts into theory over the centuries, philosophy has always been an affair of the heart as we strive for human authenticity—to know more about and to become better at who and what we are and can be. Though philosophy has its theoretical side, it is also intensely personal, intimate, and comprehensively relevant to all human living in history—including to all kinds of theoretical jaunts. If so, and if philosophy has an ill-repute, then it has been wrongly understood, or perhaps judged only on its sometimes-massive mistakes and failures, or in terms of those who have used philosophy as fog, or to steer us in the wrong direction, even if that steering was with the fullest of good intentions.

In this way, only if your own mind, heart, and reflective powers live in an ivory tower does philosophy live in one; and only if you are incredibly thoughtless, and if you abandon your own potential towards reflection and self-reflection, and dynamic unity of mind, can philosophy be thought of as irrelevant to you.

I should add that, over 2000 years ago Plato, who was no slouch when it comes to reflection and self-reflection, knew philosophy as an essential development in any complex and growing culture, especially when faced with finding a new relationship with peoples and cultures other than one’s own. In fact, philosophy as a distinct avenue of thought grew out of the many new questions that spontaneously emerged from mixing many cultures and their different ways together, and from the confusion of thought that commonly surrounds such mixing.

Philosophy emerged as a way of sorting everything out. Those like Plato, who defined and took up philosophy as a way of life, were searching for a view of the whole, for some over-riding truths, for some unity and continuity underpinning the confusion, and for a way to organize human life on both a writ-small (you and me and each person) and writ-large (you, me, and everyone else as a group or as in groups) level that could reflect that sense of unity, continuity, and good.

In this way, philosophy is essential to persons and to culture in history--if we are to avoid becoming like herds of Lemmings running off cliffs, or if we are to avoid getting on a horse and running off in several different directions at once, or if we are to avoid blowing ourselves up. In such a complex world as ours, it will take a great deal of good reflection by many folks to keep from doing that.

Further, our present work is at least about bringing transcendental method to secular and religious education through teachers who have gained a fundamental, and fundamentally clear, understanding of TM and how it works within all of us and in history. In this regard, Plato also regarded philosophy as never being far from our inquiry about the divine (Pieper, 1963; & Piscitelli, 2006). Thus, and again, at several junctures in the present work, we will explore the religious elements of philosophical thought; not as doctrine or dogma, but as the fundamental quest of mystery and for ultimate meaning that is evident in all cultures in history (Hughes, 2003).

So to give philosophy’s critics their due, and in our regard for philosophy’s residential status and prima fascia contributions, let us keep the baby that is our self-reflection, and throw out the bathwater that is philosophy’s many flights, faults, false starts, and their effects. That is, let us recall the current, sometimes deserved, ill-repute of philosophy as the short-view fad that it is, or as undeservedly demonized, and as perhaps rooted in the fear that philosophy inspires in many--of raising new questions against old received ideas. Further, let us place our understanding of philosophy in the greater context of how it manifests as reflective thought in all human history, how it threatens dogma and hidden agendas and, further, how we find philosophy’s origin in the intimacy of our spontaneous desire for knowledge and truth, and in our development of our own self-reflective potential.

Such recall, and the development of your philosophical capacities of self-reflection, will serve you well in your movement towards the critical self-knowledge that the present work is about and that is called self-appropriation and self-affirmation.

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.

NOTE for Blogpage: Go to "Older Posts" to continue the introduction sections.