Some Technical Terms
If looking at something means that you understand it, then everyone only need look to understand. It follows that everyone with good vision starts with the same view. But everyone does not understand in the same way. So our “views” must be influenced by something other than from merely looking (or otherwise sensing). Those views are, in part, your philosophical inheritance.
Looking = Understanding and Knowledge of Sense
VERSUS
Thinking Processes = Understanding and Knowledge of Meaning
Further, in technical terms, I refer to your philosophical inheritance as some basic assumptions you hold (your philosophical foundations) and how, in reflection, you view your own fundaments, i.e., your understanding (cognition), epistemology (knowledge), metaphysics (being), ontology (reality), the ethical and political dimensions of being (the good writ-small and writ-large), ultimate being and good, and the ultimate good of being. And yes, you have inherited views on all these things; these views are named philosophical foundations; and they tend to float around in most of our thought like smog in a busy city. (Though we are exploring briefly here, we devote some chapters to these issues and meanings.)
Fundaments: Aspects and functions you are born with and develop over time. Fundaments develop, but their presence as a part of our conscious order does not change according to new learning.
Foundations: Philosophical and other assumptions that you learn with regard to your fundaments and that underpin your more topical thought, e.g., you have philosophical views (fundaments), but those views are developed and shaped differently (philosophical foundations); and you have social relationships that develop (or not) (social fundament), but those relationships vary according to many different factors (social foundations). So it is with several aspects of your human being, e.g., intellectual, ethical, political, spiritual, etc.
Moreover, our views drawn from our philosophical inheritance (foundations) may or may not be “in tune” with the fundaments that you have been born with and that have been developing in you all along, or how you actually go around questioning and knowing things—a statement that assumes there is such a reality, such questioning, and such knowing. However, on these very assumptions, you may discover (question and come to know) a difference between what you actually are and do on a quite regular basis, on the one hand, and what you think you are and do, on the other.
Hence, I distinguish here and in a later chapter your philosophical fundaments--what are the facts of the case and how you think and act in terms of them--from your philosophical foundations as inherited—what you assume and think are the facts of the case. Foggy, distorted, or attuned, in this writing your foundations are both what are attuned with your fundaments and-or what you have received from, or what has come “down” to you in, your philosophical tradition, as the philosophical facts of the case. If our inheritance is not attuned with our fundaments, then we can be in possession of confused and bifurcated foundations. Whether or not they actually are attuned remains to be seen. Regardless, your being in or out-of-tune philosophically has vast and entirely concrete implications for all of your thought, speech, and act.
In fact, one of your actual fundaments is your ability to spontaneously self-correct; and we will refer to your self-corrective process many times in the present work. However, we make a distinction between your philosophical fundaments and your philosophical foundational inheritance. An exploration of these, and your re-attunement of one with the other, if that is called for, can only help you in your self-understanding, and perhaps also in your future self-corrective movements. Again, the philosophical maxims are “know thyself” and “an unexamined life is not worth living.” Indeed, your interior activities can only be enhanced by your self-reflective knowledge of them and of some of the technical terms that embody them.
The present work will provide a beginning place of self-awareness of your own fundaments and how they operate, of a self-critique of your own inherited philosophical foundations, and a roadmap for a new attunement between yourself and what you think about yourself.
Of course, there is much more to it; and many more technical terms to learn and relate to your own experience; and your inherited foundations may already include some variously named pitfalls, e.g., subjectivism, positivism, relativism, or many other distorting notions that, as your in-place assumptions, may already affect your views of things, including the work you are reading right now. Thus, the work provides an adequate set of theories, a technical-conceptual language, and pedagogy to guide you and to keep you both personally engaged and in a methodical and critical frame of mind.
However, we are exploring the very assumptions that you already bring to this reading. As such, we must first briefly explain, expose-to-the-light, and attempt to avoid potential pitfalls that may be a part of those assumptions. We do so while, first, taking full advantage of science, critical method, and the critical habits of the scientist; and second, while taking full advantage of the insights that accompany the post-modern movement into ad infinitum interpretive meaning and conceptual expressions, and the various notions of uncertainty that accompany those interpretations. We also avoid the pitfalls of empiricism while, at the same time, drawing on meaningful and critical evidence to make our discernments, and ultimately our judgments, about what is, in fact, true—in this case, about our own minds (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000; 1972).
Our exercises, then, are experiential, exploratory, empirical, participatory, interpretive, and language-based; the self-appropriation aspect of the theory is unique as an implied dimension of the data itself; and for its fruition the project depends entirely on your ability and willingness to experiment and to self-reflect for the theory’s concrete verification and confirmation procedures.
Finally, though our exercises require that we incorporate in them a specified theory and its technical language, we claim no specific or calcified theoretical conception or doctrine as the only appropriate theory. Rather, the point of the reflection and discussion points embedded in each chapter, and the exercises in their own chapter, is to go “under” or beyond our specified theory, logical order, and conceptual expression, and to return to your original and recurring experience of your own consciousness, otherwise known in poetic language as your heart, spirit, mind, and soul, regardless of what technical language we give it.
You will of course be interpreting yourself. However, with an adequate set of theories and verification procedures, the interpretation can be adequate to the data and to your recurring experience of it and thus, a right and good one.
Friday, December 22, 2006
PHILOSOPHY as HISTORICAL, COMPREHENSIVE, CRITICAL
Philosophy as Historical, Comprehensive, and Critical
My work here is fundamentally pedagogical method, not for Lonergan the man or for a specified one-concept theory, but for what Lonergan discovered and gave theory to in his journey through the greater philosophical project known as the love of knowledge. So in the present work we find ourselves ensconced in a philosophical tradition.
Further, to be critical in and of that tradition, we must first look backwards to that tradition to gauge ourselves in it; but then self-consciously move forward carefully with our new questions to envision, and then create anew, our future. We are then, in fact, involved here with philosophy as a part of an historical emergence, hopefully, of greater and fuller understanding of history and of ourselves as a part of that history.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the study of philosophy and the overt development of reflective and self-reflective habits are unfortunately uncommon fare in many cultural pockets and even in some institutions known as “academic.” This is so for many reasons, some of which we will explore in our earlier chapters.
Also, for all of their good, modern communications and technology have sped up our already too-fast and too-busy lives. At present, we can say that many among us are only vaguely aware of the state of our own philosophical landscape and our potential towards greater thought, if at all, or of our own various philosophical biases that might already inform the thought that we do have. We can say that many endorse reflective practice but fail to live it; that many frown on self-reflection, in turn taking for granted the influence of others’ past reflection on their own lives; and many have discarded any study of foundations, oddly, as groundless—but on what grounds, or for what reasons, they do not say--and I suppose we are not supposed to ask that question. Many even assume they have no biases, while at the same time loudly regretting bias in others. And many live in a fictive bubble, assuming no such area of import on their own or others’ thought—like living in a house where we are unaware of either the basement below or the wide view from the windows upstairs. Need I mention Plato’s rendition of education as an often-unwelcome journey from a cave and out into the blinding light.
Further, we can say that many are unaware of the possibility that becoming aware of our own biases holds the potential for a thoroughly enlivening transformation or, again, for an attunement of our assumptions with how our spirit of inquiry actually works.
If some or all of the above is true, for many of our young people, education in quasi-Western cultures has failed by its philosophical forgetfulness—might I say ignorance--and through fragmentation of and derailments in the academy. That is, we have failed by overlooking and-or dismissing the liberating elements in education that have for centuries been central to the thrust of many Eastern and Western cultures. In the West, this oversight or dismissal is grounded in wrongly broad-brushing the entire thrust of Western culture, philosophy, and education with the political and moral color of their few real failures.
For instance, in the later years of the 20th century, and perhaps even now, some dismissed all that is good about the Western tradition because of its “Euro centric,” white-male bias; or because Western culture has been fraught with intellectual and moral relativism, or been interpreted as merely another word for capitalism, or been identified with stone-like ideological “meta-narratives;” or been thought of as truncated and distorted by “secular humanism,” etc., etc.
Unfortunately, the critique has some truth to it. For instance, from the classical meta-narrative view, Western-style education has often fostered naïve and colonial assumptions with vast political implications, e.g., that no other adequate views or people existed; or, if others do exist, that they are somehow less qualified or even less human, and as if they are unimportant and have no cultural, ethical, or political voice in their own comportment. Of course, these “other” folks need to be governed—by Those Who Know Better. In a word, Western education and social polity has often fostered a provincial arrogance that, in a whole-person view of the fundamental purpose of a liberal education, perhaps marks Western education’s most fundamental failure.
To the extreme argument for completely dismantling what European intellectual geography gave us: First, such cultural critique has its feet sunk deep into Western thought-soil that, at its best, produces institutions and people that are quite able and free to take it upon them selves to raise critical questions about the same culture that produced us. We cannot afford to throw out the whole Western tradition because some of it has been short-sighted, wrongly developed, wrongly understood, wrongly exclusive, wrongly practiced, and wrongly imposed. We want to cut the disease out, and not kill the entire tree.
And, second, the Western tradition produced theory and the scientific revolution made theory systematic--and we would be unwise to throw that out, even if we could, and even though we cannot overlook the harms that have flown into human history on the powerful wings of those who would misinterpret the theoretical enterprise and its effects, who would systematically divorce that enterprise from ethical questions, or who would use it for ignoring, excusing, and doing evil. It stands that the introduction of theory alone, and the differentiations that accompany it, mark the Western tradition as an instance and watershed of human and cultural development unparalleled in human history—a true revolution of the reflective and critical spirit.
Like philosophy itself, then, we should not throw out the baby—theory and its critical method as the great contributions of Western thought that they are--because of the dirty bathwater that came along with it, i.e., its accompanying cultural and philosophical distortions.
Furthermore, though Lonergan’s and the present work flow in and from the Western tradition, neither is merely or wholly Western in its sweep. That is, from the point of view of theory, and of critical method, and only from those views, this work identifies and sets up the condition to verify a trans-cultural base in every human being regardless of development, cultural background, or world view.
Thus, Lonergan recovers and employs what remains authentic at the core of the Western tradition—theory and empirical method--and brings it home to the personal domain, thereby setting up the conditions to complete what began as a revolution--scientific--and what can become another true renaissance. On the other hand, we can still distinguish theory and the empirical sciences from their broader context of culture that both emerged from, and from the search for religious meaning:
. . . modern sciences are defined by their methods and their fields and, clearly enough, the same method cannot be employed both in investigating what lies within human experience and in investigating what lies beyond it. (Lonergan, 1985)
We also need to consider fundamental sets of assumptions; various transformative insights that take into consideration vastly different but related data; the horizon-development of the person using the methods on several “levels” of living; and the fact that, in human sciences and history, we are not only studying how the future might turn out, but that we are somewhat involved in creating it.
Further, despite its many failures, the Western tradition is built around a clear identification with intelligence and excellence as twin driving forces that tend to subordinate to them familial identities and orders, kingship, unquestioned ideologies, or mere personality worship. Further, such identities extend into theory, method, knowledge, truth, secularity, rule of secular law, and our post-World War II notions of human rights. And all come into tension with the love of family, community and country, and with our love of the divine and worship of a mysterious deity, however we view it. It is no accident that much of the above identifications emerge from now-received foundational philosophical elements that produce, underlie and maintain vibrant republics and democracies (Piscitelli, 1986; & King, 2003c).
These elements are tensional and dynamic and already inform Western-democratic civilization’s thrust towards individual and cultural well-being, of balances and transparencies of power, and of free dialogue and expression. Further, the tradition enfolds within it a basic trust in the wisdom of an educated and viable body of “The-People” and, moreover, of increasing our knowledge and excellence within that dialogue, expression, and wellness of being. These notions go beyond what is “merely Western,” as they are all essential elements of the 21st century--if we are to create and live in a humane world together.
Our study, again, is not a prescribed adventure coming “down” from set ideological or classical "first" principles, self-evidence, or from presumably divine doctrines. Rather, in our study we will find that our theoretical development of the human mind, and our verifiable discoveries about ourselves, ground and frame, in critical-theoretical fashion, but do not fully define, the meaning that emerges, and that has already emerged, in such 21st century political movements.
Furthermore, as sticky as the notion might be at present, truth is a common personal and political foundation for democracies, and is an essential element in any understanding of philosophy and of our foundations. For you are a “people,” and your recognition of a fiction, a falsehood, or a lie depends on your prior embrace of being able to recognize what is probably, most likely, or really true—or not.
In this way, the pursuit of truth is also an essential element in the health of a democratic body-politic, for the fundamental hope is that truth, as diverse and as hidden as it can be, will rise from the freedom a democracy affords to human thought, speech, assembly, and the press.
Moreover, if the foundations of knowledge and truth have become fuzzy in our present political climate, we can still develop a new and clear foundation for understanding both; and we can come to know the fount where these foundations live in a moment of critical self-reflection and identification afforded in the present work. Such reflections can serve to critique and clarify what knowledge and truth actually mean to us in our everyday lives.
My work here is fundamentally pedagogical method, not for Lonergan the man or for a specified one-concept theory, but for what Lonergan discovered and gave theory to in his journey through the greater philosophical project known as the love of knowledge. So in the present work we find ourselves ensconced in a philosophical tradition.
Further, to be critical in and of that tradition, we must first look backwards to that tradition to gauge ourselves in it; but then self-consciously move forward carefully with our new questions to envision, and then create anew, our future. We are then, in fact, involved here with philosophy as a part of an historical emergence, hopefully, of greater and fuller understanding of history and of ourselves as a part of that history.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the study of philosophy and the overt development of reflective and self-reflective habits are unfortunately uncommon fare in many cultural pockets and even in some institutions known as “academic.” This is so for many reasons, some of which we will explore in our earlier chapters.
Also, for all of their good, modern communications and technology have sped up our already too-fast and too-busy lives. At present, we can say that many among us are only vaguely aware of the state of our own philosophical landscape and our potential towards greater thought, if at all, or of our own various philosophical biases that might already inform the thought that we do have. We can say that many endorse reflective practice but fail to live it; that many frown on self-reflection, in turn taking for granted the influence of others’ past reflection on their own lives; and many have discarded any study of foundations, oddly, as groundless—but on what grounds, or for what reasons, they do not say--and I suppose we are not supposed to ask that question. Many even assume they have no biases, while at the same time loudly regretting bias in others. And many live in a fictive bubble, assuming no such area of import on their own or others’ thought—like living in a house where we are unaware of either the basement below or the wide view from the windows upstairs. Need I mention Plato’s rendition of education as an often-unwelcome journey from a cave and out into the blinding light.
Further, we can say that many are unaware of the possibility that becoming aware of our own biases holds the potential for a thoroughly enlivening transformation or, again, for an attunement of our assumptions with how our spirit of inquiry actually works.
If some or all of the above is true, for many of our young people, education in quasi-Western cultures has failed by its philosophical forgetfulness—might I say ignorance--and through fragmentation of and derailments in the academy. That is, we have failed by overlooking and-or dismissing the liberating elements in education that have for centuries been central to the thrust of many Eastern and Western cultures. In the West, this oversight or dismissal is grounded in wrongly broad-brushing the entire thrust of Western culture, philosophy, and education with the political and moral color of their few real failures.
For instance, in the later years of the 20th century, and perhaps even now, some dismissed all that is good about the Western tradition because of its “Euro centric,” white-male bias; or because Western culture has been fraught with intellectual and moral relativism, or been interpreted as merely another word for capitalism, or been identified with stone-like ideological “meta-narratives;” or been thought of as truncated and distorted by “secular humanism,” etc., etc.
Unfortunately, the critique has some truth to it. For instance, from the classical meta-narrative view, Western-style education has often fostered naïve and colonial assumptions with vast political implications, e.g., that no other adequate views or people existed; or, if others do exist, that they are somehow less qualified or even less human, and as if they are unimportant and have no cultural, ethical, or political voice in their own comportment. Of course, these “other” folks need to be governed—by Those Who Know Better. In a word, Western education and social polity has often fostered a provincial arrogance that, in a whole-person view of the fundamental purpose of a liberal education, perhaps marks Western education’s most fundamental failure.
To the extreme argument for completely dismantling what European intellectual geography gave us: First, such cultural critique has its feet sunk deep into Western thought-soil that, at its best, produces institutions and people that are quite able and free to take it upon them selves to raise critical questions about the same culture that produced us. We cannot afford to throw out the whole Western tradition because some of it has been short-sighted, wrongly developed, wrongly understood, wrongly exclusive, wrongly practiced, and wrongly imposed. We want to cut the disease out, and not kill the entire tree.
And, second, the Western tradition produced theory and the scientific revolution made theory systematic--and we would be unwise to throw that out, even if we could, and even though we cannot overlook the harms that have flown into human history on the powerful wings of those who would misinterpret the theoretical enterprise and its effects, who would systematically divorce that enterprise from ethical questions, or who would use it for ignoring, excusing, and doing evil. It stands that the introduction of theory alone, and the differentiations that accompany it, mark the Western tradition as an instance and watershed of human and cultural development unparalleled in human history—a true revolution of the reflective and critical spirit.
Like philosophy itself, then, we should not throw out the baby—theory and its critical method as the great contributions of Western thought that they are--because of the dirty bathwater that came along with it, i.e., its accompanying cultural and philosophical distortions.
Furthermore, though Lonergan’s and the present work flow in and from the Western tradition, neither is merely or wholly Western in its sweep. That is, from the point of view of theory, and of critical method, and only from those views, this work identifies and sets up the condition to verify a trans-cultural base in every human being regardless of development, cultural background, or world view.
Thus, Lonergan recovers and employs what remains authentic at the core of the Western tradition—theory and empirical method--and brings it home to the personal domain, thereby setting up the conditions to complete what began as a revolution--scientific--and what can become another true renaissance. On the other hand, we can still distinguish theory and the empirical sciences from their broader context of culture that both emerged from, and from the search for religious meaning:
. . . modern sciences are defined by their methods and their fields and, clearly enough, the same method cannot be employed both in investigating what lies within human experience and in investigating what lies beyond it. (Lonergan, 1985)
We also need to consider fundamental sets of assumptions; various transformative insights that take into consideration vastly different but related data; the horizon-development of the person using the methods on several “levels” of living; and the fact that, in human sciences and history, we are not only studying how the future might turn out, but that we are somewhat involved in creating it.
Further, despite its many failures, the Western tradition is built around a clear identification with intelligence and excellence as twin driving forces that tend to subordinate to them familial identities and orders, kingship, unquestioned ideologies, or mere personality worship. Further, such identities extend into theory, method, knowledge, truth, secularity, rule of secular law, and our post-World War II notions of human rights. And all come into tension with the love of family, community and country, and with our love of the divine and worship of a mysterious deity, however we view it. It is no accident that much of the above identifications emerge from now-received foundational philosophical elements that produce, underlie and maintain vibrant republics and democracies (Piscitelli, 1986; & King, 2003c).
These elements are tensional and dynamic and already inform Western-democratic civilization’s thrust towards individual and cultural well-being, of balances and transparencies of power, and of free dialogue and expression. Further, the tradition enfolds within it a basic trust in the wisdom of an educated and viable body of “The-People” and, moreover, of increasing our knowledge and excellence within that dialogue, expression, and wellness of being. These notions go beyond what is “merely Western,” as they are all essential elements of the 21st century--if we are to create and live in a humane world together.
Our study, again, is not a prescribed adventure coming “down” from set ideological or classical "first" principles, self-evidence, or from presumably divine doctrines. Rather, in our study we will find that our theoretical development of the human mind, and our verifiable discoveries about ourselves, ground and frame, in critical-theoretical fashion, but do not fully define, the meaning that emerges, and that has already emerged, in such 21st century political movements.
Furthermore, as sticky as the notion might be at present, truth is a common personal and political foundation for democracies, and is an essential element in any understanding of philosophy and of our foundations. For you are a “people,” and your recognition of a fiction, a falsehood, or a lie depends on your prior embrace of being able to recognize what is probably, most likely, or really true—or not.
In this way, the pursuit of truth is also an essential element in the health of a democratic body-politic, for the fundamental hope is that truth, as diverse and as hidden as it can be, will rise from the freedom a democracy affords to human thought, speech, assembly, and the press.
Moreover, if the foundations of knowledge and truth have become fuzzy in our present political climate, we can still develop a new and clear foundation for understanding both; and we can come to know the fount where these foundations live in a moment of critical self-reflection and identification afforded in the present work. Such reflections can serve to critique and clarify what knowledge and truth actually mean to us in our everyday lives.
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.
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.
Transcultural Base: From Writ-Small to Writ-Large
Trans-cultural Base: From Writ-Small to Writ-Large
We have already spoken briefly of the broader traditional and historical meanings of philosophy, of Lonergan’s contribution to that history, and to our own pedagogical method as a part of that meaning. That is, we are not merely involved with our own personal psychology or with theory as a desiccated abstraction that is somehow unconnected with our concrete history. Rather, we are speaking in, to, and with the traditions of philosophy and political philosophy in history and, again, to the love of knowledge in both its fully concrete and fully theoretical dimensions, and both as fully empirical-critical.
Further, in his own writing, Lonergan speaks to the foundations of theoretical and scholarly study, and to the many professions that have emerged as differentiations in, and branches of, these more comprehensive fields. Some of these fields are named the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, logic, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Because transcendental method speaks to the foundations of all persons in all fields, and in history and culture, including to the foundations of philosophy itself, it also has a writ-large dimension to it.
Exploring the writ-large dimension of transcendental method, then, begins in its writ-small dimension--the concrete and dynamic structure of each person’s consciousness--and as critical, writ-large order finds its empirical ground there--or its laboratory for critical reference-verification. That is, as a philosophical movement that has writ-large import, the work involves, first, bringing to consciousness the spontaneous self-correcting activities that already underpin not only each person’s own mind but, again, with appropriate transitions from small to large, also all fields of study, culture, and history. This will include a basis for critique of all cultural institutions, i.e., bureaucracies and corporations.
We have already spoken briefly of the broader traditional and historical meanings of philosophy, of Lonergan’s contribution to that history, and to our own pedagogical method as a part of that meaning. That is, we are not merely involved with our own personal psychology or with theory as a desiccated abstraction that is somehow unconnected with our concrete history. Rather, we are speaking in, to, and with the traditions of philosophy and political philosophy in history and, again, to the love of knowledge in both its fully concrete and fully theoretical dimensions, and both as fully empirical-critical.
Further, in his own writing, Lonergan speaks to the foundations of theoretical and scholarly study, and to the many professions that have emerged as differentiations in, and branches of, these more comprehensive fields. Some of these fields are named the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, logic, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. Because transcendental method speaks to the foundations of all persons in all fields, and in history and culture, including to the foundations of philosophy itself, it also has a writ-large dimension to it.
Exploring the writ-large dimension of transcendental method, then, begins in its writ-small dimension--the concrete and dynamic structure of each person’s consciousness--and as critical, writ-large order finds its empirical ground there--or its laboratory for critical reference-verification. That is, as a philosophical movement that has writ-large import, the work involves, first, bringing to consciousness the spontaneous self-correcting activities that already underpin not only each person’s own mind but, again, with appropriate transitions from small to large, also all fields of study, culture, and history. This will include a basis for critique of all cultural institutions, i.e., bureaucracies and corporations.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
As Paradigm Shift
As Paradigm Shift
Further, a spontaneous and comprehensive corrective movement that emerges in history often goes by the name of epochal change or paradigm shift. Rather than being an arbitrary occurrence, a paradigm shift is a massively affective change of horizons that emerges from a dynamic set of circumstances from-below, commonly beginning in one person, spreading to a group of persons, and then growing in exponential fashion so that all within reach are changed by it. The shift is commonly an adjustment and increase in knowledge--perhaps as a "change of horizon" only on the writ-large level of our existence; it carries with it a refinement and potential edification of large areas of foundational thought; however, it also commonly is the source of many new emerging problems.
For an example, we can point to discovering that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around. As paradigmatic the shift that accompanied this set of insights did not only concern the scientific community; nor did it only signify a scientific correction. What made it paradigmatic was that it occurred in the hearts and minds of many people who came to recognize its profound implications on received philosophical, moral, social, political, and religious foundations and their doctrines at different but closely related times.
A paradigm shift has occurred, then, when entire populations and nations, vast numbers of persons in a field of study, or virtually everyone, change our "world view," or bring qualified but sometimes unwanted change to the fundamental assumptions that inform our thinking about everything else. For instance, again, a paradigm shift occurred on a grand scale when Galileo’s insights filtered “down” to everyone’s thinking; namely, that the earth is not the center of the universe but rather circles the sun, instead of the other way around.
Such a massive repositioning of thought, that affects the way we view everything else, constitutes a paradigm shift. Further, though these shifts have great topical implication and effect, they occur in and affect us at the level of what we have called foundations—the underlying order and flow of human thought related to philosophical matters and concerns that inevitably inform, shape, influence, and define our world view that, in turn, frames and affects all of our topical, concrete living.
Paradigm shifts occur at the level of foundations. To use an analogy, fundaments and foundations are to human living as gravity, the shape of a field, and the rules of play are to the football game being played on that field.
ANALOGY
Gravity ..............Philosophical Fundaments
Game Fields..........Philosophical Foundations
Further, what you may mean by human understanding, the good, knowledge, truth, the universe, being, time and space, and transcendence are your foundational orders of thought that are both received “down” from your culture and its language, and that “come up from” the actual workings of your fundaments. And again, those fundaments already underpin and spontaneously feed and bleed-into your attitude and approach to all of your more topical concerns and concrete living. We can experience a conflict, then, between our given fundaments, and our learned foundations.
Thus, like playing a game within the outlines of an already-established football field and its rules, we commonly assume and rarely question either the position of the chalk-lines on the field or the gravity that so influence the game and how it is played. Similarly, we rarely self-inspect our given fundaments, their actual influence, or the philosophical inheritance that interprets those fundaments, rightly or wrongly, into our foundational thought. To use common language, we commonly assume or take for granted both our fundaments and our cultural and philosophical inheritance that interprets them for us, or what we are naming: our foundations.
Further, we commonly begin by assuming that our foundations always match, or are in tune with the reality of, our fundaments. Enabling you to inspect and perhaps correct such assumptions is a part of the aim of the present work. You might find that your received and learned foundations are in tune with the reality of your given fundaments; however, you might find that they are not. Certainly, your knowing either way will be beneficial to you--one by increasing your self understanding, one by opening the way for self-correction, and both for your critical acumen.
Furthermore, like gravity and the position of the chalk-lines of a football field constantly feed into every aspect of the game being played there, both our fundaments and our foundations, and their subsequent attunement or mis-attunement, feed into every aspect of our lives as its background ordering or disordering influences. Moreover, to be foundationally attuned to the fundaments of a football game is to accept as given and to work within the demands of gravity and, further, to adjust the shape of the game-field, the game-rules, etc., according to the physical givens that will governing the play.
However, unlike adjusting to the physical givens and parameters of a football game, we can live for long periods of time, and through many generations, under the influence of foundations that are partly or completely at odds with our actual given fundaments. In this way, a paradigm shift in any given cultural milieu can emerge from either an altogether new discovery or idea and-or, like Galileo’s insights, from the massive corrective of old ways of received thought. For again, it was not so much the scientific discoveries and the novelty of Galileo’s ideas that shook the Western world, but rather the implications of his discoveries on the whole venue of what we had wrongly assumed about our knowledge, and about how the world worked up to that point, e.g., the undifferentiated mix of our assumptions about physics, politics, social, moral, and religious meaning and, of course, about what knowledge means.
A paradigm shift, then, is like changing some dimension of the game-field or the rules that we have always assumed were right and best, that have come down to us from those whom we trust and respect, and that we have become quite accustomed to playing by. Such graphic change feels to some like gravity has actually shifted its forces under our feet. We are, as it were, (almost, but not quite) wholly invested in the way things are already done.
Invested or not, however, and no matter how we deny it, such massive change finds its way into every crevice of human thought and living; it raises the level of cultural anxiety considerably; it has massive implications on everything we think and do; and it calls for adjustments that usually take a long time to become comfortable with, both personally and in the broad sweep of a cultural landscape. Further, such world-view change is not for the weak-of-heart and, as a source of reaction, can leave some of us frozen for new meaning, or in a lifelong attitude of denial and-or skepticism, pessimism, and even nihilism. It certainly shakes up the given power structure.
Gravity and game-fields, again, are analogies and metaphors for our philosophical fundaments and foundations. However, the concrete facts of either are neither analogies, nor metaphors, nor similes, nor game-fields but can be discovered as real and really affective aspects of all human living. Further, we can make and change the outlines of a game-field; and so there is some flexibility, if not a limited arbitrariness, to be had in this making. However, no game field is made and no game is played on earth without an implicit regard for gravity as a normative function that, if misconstrued, has immediate and obviously conflicting results; e.g., players run on the field rather than fly around it and, if the ball goes up, we rightly expect it to come down somewhere and at some reasonable time. So it is with how our fundaments work.
On the other hand, our philosophical foundational inheritance is learned, variable, historically specified, rests on more or less differentiated fundaments, and may be distorted and ill-attuned to our fundaments that are already in place and operational. For us, then, our philosophical fundaments are more like gravity which, in our lifetime of experience, does not change and which we spontaneously adjust to; and our foundations are more like the shape of the field or the rules of the game, which we develop and can change according to our needs and other extant realities.
For instance, human understanding, and its underside human misunderstanding, like gravity, are both fundamental aspects of all human living, culture, and history and are already given as a part of what it means to be human. All change (shape of the field and game rules) is made within the more basic field of discourse where human understanding or misunderstanding occurs. In this way, how we understand human understanding and the lack of it, right or wrong, defines an aspect of our philosophical foundations; the fact that we understand or misunderstand defines an aspect of our fundaments; and a correct and verified interpretation of human understanding and its opposite, a misunderstanding of human understanding, is the starting place for our qualified adventures in our reflective self-understanding.
The analogy of the game field limps away from the reality of our philosophical fundaments and foundations, then, at the question of attunement. That is, when we play a game, we spontaneously attune ourselves with gravity—and our correct learning about gravity’s operations is correct because it is attuned with gravity's actual operations as they go forward. However, unlike gravity and gaming, our assumptions about our philosophical fundaments (our foundations) are much more complex and, because of our complex learning inheritance, are not always spontaneously or completely attuned to what those fundaments, in fact, are and do.
Neither are the results of our misunderstanding of the fundaments as immediately palpable to most as are the results of our misunderstanding of gravity. The results of philosophical mis-construal, then, is not as obvious or immediate as, for instance, expecting a player in a game to fly off into the sky (fall upward) when tripped by another player. Or, considering the game rules, you may think wrongly that the ball remains in play if kicked outside the ball-field and into the parking lot when, by the rules, it goes out of play the moment it wholly crosses the outer chalk-line on the field. If you are paying the least bit of attention to the game and its rules, you will hold this out-of-field distortion for only a moment, if at all; and if you are anywhere close to sane, you will correct your misunderstanding immediately.
On the other hand, without realizing it, and with nary a corrective nearby, we can fall under the power of philosophical assumptions that are misinterpreted and thus ill-attuned with their fundamental realities, and have been for generations. Further, though our fundaments remain the same within their developmental patterns, in our myriad differences, each different culture with its unique order of communications has a set of received foundations that serves to shape their own world view—most remarkably manifest today in what is loosely deemed “Western, Middle-Eastern, and Eastern” cultures. In this way, with the issue of philosophical attunement, we can play in the parking lot, metaphorically speaking, for a long time before we realize that the ball is out of play, that the game is over up on the field, or that the players should, indeed, fall down rather than fly off into the sky.
Thus, though similar in some respects, the relationship between our philosophical fundaments and their foundations is much more complex, affective, and even generational, than the relationship between gravity, game-fields, and rules. In this regard, there are no players, but only persons living in cultures, and both in history.
Further, often in philosophical matters, well-entrenched habits abound; and the more our philosophical foundations are out-of-synch with their fundaments, the more we resist correction, no matter what the evidence “says,” and no matter how others try to point us back to the gravity at work in the field of play.
Again, our foundations, distorted or attuned to our fundaments, are always deeply rooted in our feeling base and, thus, are woven into our psychological systems that tend to spontaneously protect what we have already understood, true or false, right or wrong. For example, in Galileo’ time and place, even after the evidence about the relationship between the earth and the sun was made available to all, some refused to change their minds to match the evidence. This was so not because of some weakness of the evidence, as a reasonable person might expect, but rather because those in authority, who had received and who still held remarkably wrong world-views, feared the far-reaching implications of this set of insights on the entire fabric of culture—a culture driven in good part by the authority of the church. The insight would shake loose a gamut of “settled” ethical, social, political, and religious assumptions and ideologies associated with the sun-earth relationship. At the core of the problem was that reigning religious authorities and a major set of assumptions embedded in their doctrines, in fact, might be wrong.
Again, on a purely psychological level, such “world views” are existential—that is, their roots go deep in our feeling-image-memory and habitual apparatus that does not take to change easily.
On the other hand, other minds and hearts found it easier to become enamored with science and its assortment of incredible applications, were more open and, for many reasons, suffered through profound adjustment to the changes and their many implications. Subsequently, and over time, a paradigm shift occurred and our world view eventually changed to accommodate Galileo’s insights and those that followed, developed, adjusted, and added on to his.
In his major work Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan writes about such deeply-held movements of thought—and what we are referring to as the question of attunement between our fundaments and foundations. He speaks of such movements in terms of our polymorphism of consciousness and of our taking positions and counter-positions:
But within the context of the philosophic process, every discovery is a significant contribution to the ultimate aim. If it is formulated as a position, it invites the development of further coherent discovery. If it is formulated as a counter-position, it invites the exploration of its presuppositions and implications and it leads to its own reversal to restore the discovery to the cumulative series of positions and to enlighten man on the polymorphism of his consciousness. This activity of discovery, of developing positions, and of reversing counter-positions, is not restricted to the men of genius of whom common sense happens to have heard. It results from all competent and conscientious work and, like natural growth, it goes forward without attracting widespread attention. So far from being the product of genius, it produces genius. For the genius is simply the man at the level of his time, when the time is ripe for a new orientation or a sweeping reorganization; and it is not the genius that makes the time ripe, but the competent and conscientious workers that slowly and often unconsciously have been developing positions and heading towards the reversal of counter-positions. (1958, pp. 418-19; & Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, 2000, pp. 443-44)
For our own technical language then, our foundations are either attuned (position), or ill- or not attuned (counter-position). They can be either without our taking them as object or becoming consciously aware of them; and we can shift from working out of attunement or ill-attunement, depending on our context. On the other hand, in reflection, the “measure” of attunement is drawn from the spontaneous flow from and the thorough engagement with our fundaments. (We will cover this relationship more thoroughly in a later chapter).
Position: Attunement between our fundaments and our foundations
Counter-position: Ill or no attunement between our fundaments and our foundations
Furthermore, paradigm shifts are insight-based--they emerge from flashpoints of genius in history that are then communicated to others; and they develop in warp-and-weave fashion in the undercurrents of thought in a culture over a long venue of time. These conditions invite disdain among many; but they also further lively creativity and a massive reconciliation in and through the dialogue and collaboration of many people and, in many cultures, of institutions.
Further, though those who suffer through them are shocked by such shifts, those who are born into the change "receive" them as a part of the intellectual environment, and take them in stride, as if this were the way things just are. In the arena and venue of philosophical foundations, the shift then consummates its occurrence in the adjustments made in the background of our thinking, in our settled, correcting re-attunements to our given fundamental realities, in our clearer sense of inner and inter-order and peace, and in the new sets of assumptions that persons of good commonsense find they have been born into to easily learn in their own epoch of thought.
Like the insights-to-understanding that flowed from Galileo’s discoveries were corrective, so such shifts can be the source of destruction, both good and bad. And such combined movements of thought can come with wholly new sets of problems, philosophical and otherwise. Further, such large-scale corrections always bring forth new questions, and they set us to spontaneously seek ways to integrate the new insights into the present world of concrete human living. Their fundamental movement, however, is not to be denied and is never thought to be arbitrary or merely another mis-construal.
And so, rather than starting on a completely new basis, in the present project I bid you to recognize the` changes of horizons and the self-transcendence that already has gone forward in your life and that continues to do so; to objectify and, therefore, to become more conscious of your own movements of thought; and to draw the appropriate threads forward from the past and present to knit both to our study, to your present, and to the future in more self-aware fashion. Threads, knitting, football and game-field metaphors aside, we here address the fundamental and foundational movements, writ-small and writ-large, which underpin all persons, past and present, all “competent and conscientious work,” and all of the vastly different fields of study and professions.
Further, the present work is aimed at uncovering the movements that hinder such creative work and that are rooted in philosophical misunderstandings, that underpin human nations, communities and cultures, and that call for open critique from the point of view of a newly available, verifiable, philosophical grounding. Therefore, and again, Lonergan’s and the present work have a self-corrective dimension that can be applied to the writ-large arena of human culture and history as both analysis and as discourse in the arena of prescription.
Further, a spontaneous and comprehensive corrective movement that emerges in history often goes by the name of epochal change or paradigm shift. Rather than being an arbitrary occurrence, a paradigm shift is a massively affective change of horizons that emerges from a dynamic set of circumstances from-below, commonly beginning in one person, spreading to a group of persons, and then growing in exponential fashion so that all within reach are changed by it. The shift is commonly an adjustment and increase in knowledge--perhaps as a "change of horizon" only on the writ-large level of our existence; it carries with it a refinement and potential edification of large areas of foundational thought; however, it also commonly is the source of many new emerging problems.
For an example, we can point to discovering that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around. As paradigmatic the shift that accompanied this set of insights did not only concern the scientific community; nor did it only signify a scientific correction. What made it paradigmatic was that it occurred in the hearts and minds of many people who came to recognize its profound implications on received philosophical, moral, social, political, and religious foundations and their doctrines at different but closely related times.
A paradigm shift has occurred, then, when entire populations and nations, vast numbers of persons in a field of study, or virtually everyone, change our "world view," or bring qualified but sometimes unwanted change to the fundamental assumptions that inform our thinking about everything else. For instance, again, a paradigm shift occurred on a grand scale when Galileo’s insights filtered “down” to everyone’s thinking; namely, that the earth is not the center of the universe but rather circles the sun, instead of the other way around.
Such a massive repositioning of thought, that affects the way we view everything else, constitutes a paradigm shift. Further, though these shifts have great topical implication and effect, they occur in and affect us at the level of what we have called foundations—the underlying order and flow of human thought related to philosophical matters and concerns that inevitably inform, shape, influence, and define our world view that, in turn, frames and affects all of our topical, concrete living.
Paradigm shifts occur at the level of foundations. To use an analogy, fundaments and foundations are to human living as gravity, the shape of a field, and the rules of play are to the football game being played on that field.
ANALOGY
Gravity ..............Philosophical Fundaments
Game Fields..........Philosophical Foundations
Further, what you may mean by human understanding, the good, knowledge, truth, the universe, being, time and space, and transcendence are your foundational orders of thought that are both received “down” from your culture and its language, and that “come up from” the actual workings of your fundaments. And again, those fundaments already underpin and spontaneously feed and bleed-into your attitude and approach to all of your more topical concerns and concrete living. We can experience a conflict, then, between our given fundaments, and our learned foundations.
Thus, like playing a game within the outlines of an already-established football field and its rules, we commonly assume and rarely question either the position of the chalk-lines on the field or the gravity that so influence the game and how it is played. Similarly, we rarely self-inspect our given fundaments, their actual influence, or the philosophical inheritance that interprets those fundaments, rightly or wrongly, into our foundational thought. To use common language, we commonly assume or take for granted both our fundaments and our cultural and philosophical inheritance that interprets them for us, or what we are naming: our foundations.
Further, we commonly begin by assuming that our foundations always match, or are in tune with the reality of, our fundaments. Enabling you to inspect and perhaps correct such assumptions is a part of the aim of the present work. You might find that your received and learned foundations are in tune with the reality of your given fundaments; however, you might find that they are not. Certainly, your knowing either way will be beneficial to you--one by increasing your self understanding, one by opening the way for self-correction, and both for your critical acumen.
Furthermore, like gravity and the position of the chalk-lines of a football field constantly feed into every aspect of the game being played there, both our fundaments and our foundations, and their subsequent attunement or mis-attunement, feed into every aspect of our lives as its background ordering or disordering influences. Moreover, to be foundationally attuned to the fundaments of a football game is to accept as given and to work within the demands of gravity and, further, to adjust the shape of the game-field, the game-rules, etc., according to the physical givens that will governing the play.
However, unlike adjusting to the physical givens and parameters of a football game, we can live for long periods of time, and through many generations, under the influence of foundations that are partly or completely at odds with our actual given fundaments. In this way, a paradigm shift in any given cultural milieu can emerge from either an altogether new discovery or idea and-or, like Galileo’s insights, from the massive corrective of old ways of received thought. For again, it was not so much the scientific discoveries and the novelty of Galileo’s ideas that shook the Western world, but rather the implications of his discoveries on the whole venue of what we had wrongly assumed about our knowledge, and about how the world worked up to that point, e.g., the undifferentiated mix of our assumptions about physics, politics, social, moral, and religious meaning and, of course, about what knowledge means.
A paradigm shift, then, is like changing some dimension of the game-field or the rules that we have always assumed were right and best, that have come down to us from those whom we trust and respect, and that we have become quite accustomed to playing by. Such graphic change feels to some like gravity has actually shifted its forces under our feet. We are, as it were, (almost, but not quite) wholly invested in the way things are already done.
Invested or not, however, and no matter how we deny it, such massive change finds its way into every crevice of human thought and living; it raises the level of cultural anxiety considerably; it has massive implications on everything we think and do; and it calls for adjustments that usually take a long time to become comfortable with, both personally and in the broad sweep of a cultural landscape. Further, such world-view change is not for the weak-of-heart and, as a source of reaction, can leave some of us frozen for new meaning, or in a lifelong attitude of denial and-or skepticism, pessimism, and even nihilism. It certainly shakes up the given power structure.
Gravity and game-fields, again, are analogies and metaphors for our philosophical fundaments and foundations. However, the concrete facts of either are neither analogies, nor metaphors, nor similes, nor game-fields but can be discovered as real and really affective aspects of all human living. Further, we can make and change the outlines of a game-field; and so there is some flexibility, if not a limited arbitrariness, to be had in this making. However, no game field is made and no game is played on earth without an implicit regard for gravity as a normative function that, if misconstrued, has immediate and obviously conflicting results; e.g., players run on the field rather than fly around it and, if the ball goes up, we rightly expect it to come down somewhere and at some reasonable time. So it is with how our fundaments work.
On the other hand, our philosophical foundational inheritance is learned, variable, historically specified, rests on more or less differentiated fundaments, and may be distorted and ill-attuned to our fundaments that are already in place and operational. For us, then, our philosophical fundaments are more like gravity which, in our lifetime of experience, does not change and which we spontaneously adjust to; and our foundations are more like the shape of the field or the rules of the game, which we develop and can change according to our needs and other extant realities.
For instance, human understanding, and its underside human misunderstanding, like gravity, are both fundamental aspects of all human living, culture, and history and are already given as a part of what it means to be human. All change (shape of the field and game rules) is made within the more basic field of discourse where human understanding or misunderstanding occurs. In this way, how we understand human understanding and the lack of it, right or wrong, defines an aspect of our philosophical foundations; the fact that we understand or misunderstand defines an aspect of our fundaments; and a correct and verified interpretation of human understanding and its opposite, a misunderstanding of human understanding, is the starting place for our qualified adventures in our reflective self-understanding.
The analogy of the game field limps away from the reality of our philosophical fundaments and foundations, then, at the question of attunement. That is, when we play a game, we spontaneously attune ourselves with gravity—and our correct learning about gravity’s operations is correct because it is attuned with gravity's actual operations as they go forward. However, unlike gravity and gaming, our assumptions about our philosophical fundaments (our foundations) are much more complex and, because of our complex learning inheritance, are not always spontaneously or completely attuned to what those fundaments, in fact, are and do.
Neither are the results of our misunderstanding of the fundaments as immediately palpable to most as are the results of our misunderstanding of gravity. The results of philosophical mis-construal, then, is not as obvious or immediate as, for instance, expecting a player in a game to fly off into the sky (fall upward) when tripped by another player. Or, considering the game rules, you may think wrongly that the ball remains in play if kicked outside the ball-field and into the parking lot when, by the rules, it goes out of play the moment it wholly crosses the outer chalk-line on the field. If you are paying the least bit of attention to the game and its rules, you will hold this out-of-field distortion for only a moment, if at all; and if you are anywhere close to sane, you will correct your misunderstanding immediately.
On the other hand, without realizing it, and with nary a corrective nearby, we can fall under the power of philosophical assumptions that are misinterpreted and thus ill-attuned with their fundamental realities, and have been for generations. Further, though our fundaments remain the same within their developmental patterns, in our myriad differences, each different culture with its unique order of communications has a set of received foundations that serves to shape their own world view—most remarkably manifest today in what is loosely deemed “Western, Middle-Eastern, and Eastern” cultures. In this way, with the issue of philosophical attunement, we can play in the parking lot, metaphorically speaking, for a long time before we realize that the ball is out of play, that the game is over up on the field, or that the players should, indeed, fall down rather than fly off into the sky.
Thus, though similar in some respects, the relationship between our philosophical fundaments and their foundations is much more complex, affective, and even generational, than the relationship between gravity, game-fields, and rules. In this regard, there are no players, but only persons living in cultures, and both in history.
Further, often in philosophical matters, well-entrenched habits abound; and the more our philosophical foundations are out-of-synch with their fundaments, the more we resist correction, no matter what the evidence “says,” and no matter how others try to point us back to the gravity at work in the field of play.
Again, our foundations, distorted or attuned to our fundaments, are always deeply rooted in our feeling base and, thus, are woven into our psychological systems that tend to spontaneously protect what we have already understood, true or false, right or wrong. For example, in Galileo’ time and place, even after the evidence about the relationship between the earth and the sun was made available to all, some refused to change their minds to match the evidence. This was so not because of some weakness of the evidence, as a reasonable person might expect, but rather because those in authority, who had received and who still held remarkably wrong world-views, feared the far-reaching implications of this set of insights on the entire fabric of culture—a culture driven in good part by the authority of the church. The insight would shake loose a gamut of “settled” ethical, social, political, and religious assumptions and ideologies associated with the sun-earth relationship. At the core of the problem was that reigning religious authorities and a major set of assumptions embedded in their doctrines, in fact, might be wrong.
Again, on a purely psychological level, such “world views” are existential—that is, their roots go deep in our feeling-image-memory and habitual apparatus that does not take to change easily.
On the other hand, other minds and hearts found it easier to become enamored with science and its assortment of incredible applications, were more open and, for many reasons, suffered through profound adjustment to the changes and their many implications. Subsequently, and over time, a paradigm shift occurred and our world view eventually changed to accommodate Galileo’s insights and those that followed, developed, adjusted, and added on to his.
In his major work Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan writes about such deeply-held movements of thought—and what we are referring to as the question of attunement between our fundaments and foundations. He speaks of such movements in terms of our polymorphism of consciousness and of our taking positions and counter-positions:
But within the context of the philosophic process, every discovery is a significant contribution to the ultimate aim. If it is formulated as a position, it invites the development of further coherent discovery. If it is formulated as a counter-position, it invites the exploration of its presuppositions and implications and it leads to its own reversal to restore the discovery to the cumulative series of positions and to enlighten man on the polymorphism of his consciousness. This activity of discovery, of developing positions, and of reversing counter-positions, is not restricted to the men of genius of whom common sense happens to have heard. It results from all competent and conscientious work and, like natural growth, it goes forward without attracting widespread attention. So far from being the product of genius, it produces genius. For the genius is simply the man at the level of his time, when the time is ripe for a new orientation or a sweeping reorganization; and it is not the genius that makes the time ripe, but the competent and conscientious workers that slowly and often unconsciously have been developing positions and heading towards the reversal of counter-positions. (1958, pp. 418-19; & Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, 2000, pp. 443-44)
For our own technical language then, our foundations are either attuned (position), or ill- or not attuned (counter-position). They can be either without our taking them as object or becoming consciously aware of them; and we can shift from working out of attunement or ill-attunement, depending on our context. On the other hand, in reflection, the “measure” of attunement is drawn from the spontaneous flow from and the thorough engagement with our fundaments. (We will cover this relationship more thoroughly in a later chapter).
Position: Attunement between our fundaments and our foundations
Counter-position: Ill or no attunement between our fundaments and our foundations
Furthermore, paradigm shifts are insight-based--they emerge from flashpoints of genius in history that are then communicated to others; and they develop in warp-and-weave fashion in the undercurrents of thought in a culture over a long venue of time. These conditions invite disdain among many; but they also further lively creativity and a massive reconciliation in and through the dialogue and collaboration of many people and, in many cultures, of institutions.
Further, though those who suffer through them are shocked by such shifts, those who are born into the change "receive" them as a part of the intellectual environment, and take them in stride, as if this were the way things just are. In the arena and venue of philosophical foundations, the shift then consummates its occurrence in the adjustments made in the background of our thinking, in our settled, correcting re-attunements to our given fundamental realities, in our clearer sense of inner and inter-order and peace, and in the new sets of assumptions that persons of good commonsense find they have been born into to easily learn in their own epoch of thought.
Like the insights-to-understanding that flowed from Galileo’s discoveries were corrective, so such shifts can be the source of destruction, both good and bad. And such combined movements of thought can come with wholly new sets of problems, philosophical and otherwise. Further, such large-scale corrections always bring forth new questions, and they set us to spontaneously seek ways to integrate the new insights into the present world of concrete human living. Their fundamental movement, however, is not to be denied and is never thought to be arbitrary or merely another mis-construal.
And so, rather than starting on a completely new basis, in the present project I bid you to recognize the` changes of horizons and the self-transcendence that already has gone forward in your life and that continues to do so; to objectify and, therefore, to become more conscious of your own movements of thought; and to draw the appropriate threads forward from the past and present to knit both to our study, to your present, and to the future in more self-aware fashion. Threads, knitting, football and game-field metaphors aside, we here address the fundamental and foundational movements, writ-small and writ-large, which underpin all persons, past and present, all “competent and conscientious work,” and all of the vastly different fields of study and professions.
Further, the present work is aimed at uncovering the movements that hinder such creative work and that are rooted in philosophical misunderstandings, that underpin human nations, communities and cultures, and that call for open critique from the point of view of a newly available, verifiable, philosophical grounding. Therefore, and again, Lonergan’s and the present work have a self-corrective dimension that can be applied to the writ-large arena of human culture and history as both analysis and as discourse in the arena of prescription.
The Author of Transcendental (General Empirical) Method, Pedagogy, & the Transcultural Base
The Author of Transcendental (General Empirical) Method and Pedagogy
Bernard Lonergan was a philosopher, a theoretician, a methodologist, an economist, a theologian; and he was a teacher of the first order. Not one, but all. His genius, his unique and timely discoveries, his commitment to philosophy, theory, theology, the concrete human good, and to education in the broader sense mark his work as dynamic, unifying and central to the self-knowing and self-correcting process buried deep in the human endeavors we know as human being, culture, and history.
And still, in its comprehensiveness the work maintains its ground and critical source in your singular and intimate writ-small experience of raising questions, of having insights, and of the reflective processes of an individual human being involved in science, art, religion, and-or the wisdom of commonsense—in you and in me.
The present work, then, is pedagogy towards awareness, appropriation, and affirmation of that process as ground to both writ-small understanding and writ-large culture in history. Our pedagogy is based on the work of thinkers involved with the development of transcendental method. The audience for our pedagogy, then, is broad because the work itself and, thus, its pedagogy are aimed at concrete applications for any one person as an intimate-personal avenue of self-understanding and corrective.
Further, such self-understanding begins in an empirical-critical point of view, and is open at both ends to the mysterious unknown. The pedagogy for this philosopher's discoveries gains its broader import, and its historical sweep, by fostering your own intimate philosophical acumen and, over time, aims at nothing less than a paradigm shift beginning with Lonergan's basic insights circa mid-1900, and moving through into the early-to-mid 21st century, perhaps later. This pedagogy is a part of that movement. The potential shift is based on a self-corrective movement at the foundational level of all fields of study and, subsequently over time, of all of common discourse. Hence, the need for our distinction between fundaments and foundations comes into view.
In this way, at once Lonergan’s contribution to philosophy marks the beginning of a new corrective and self-corrective shift for many affected by "inherited" intellectual-philosophical derailments; for a new and creative set of insights and distinctions for others who are open to new developments in philosophical thought; and both for some others. And it marks a movement forward that will provide ground for definition and clarity in all further human knowledge. If so, and if Lonergan's basic insights continue to filter into other theoretical and common discourse, the shift will eventually constitute a new set of distinctions and a new, consciously appropriated attunement to pass down to those who will then receive philosophical assumptions in the "intellectual air" we know as intergenerational. Again, the attunement will be between our reflective philosophical stance (our foundations) and the actual given ground of that stance (our fundaments) as evident and affirmable in our personal writ-small and writ-large history.
Further, a study of Lonergan’s and others’ contribution to philosophy and education helps to reveal that ground as well as the ground of all other insights, knowledge, and paradigm shifts. The empirical ground can be found in an adequate understanding of the fundament of human consciousness—the given, basic, and discoverable structure and dynamism of your own mind, and in an adequate and critical interpretation of that fundament in the context of concrete history. Moreover, with the help of a clarified and working theory of knowledge, you can personally understand and verify that ground in the context of the history of science, of scientific method, and of the common procedures of ordinary discourse.
The Trans-Cultural Base
We refer to both cognitional theory and a theory of knowledge as transcendental or general empirical method. In his Method In Theology Lonergan also refers to the basic structure and method of consciousness in different language as a trans-cultural base. As far as all persons are conscious, the theory applies to all persons.
Again, this method and base hold within it the broad outlines of the self-corrective process writ-small and writ-large. And again, in its writ-large dimension, such understanding carries the potential to lead to a paradigm shift in the sciences and fields of study and application. The shift will consist, first, of correctives of old inherited assumptions; second, of new discoveries and, third, of a fuller and more unified understanding of the import of human thought, knowledge, faith, speech, and act in history.
Bernard Lonergan was a philosopher, a theoretician, a methodologist, an economist, a theologian; and he was a teacher of the first order. Not one, but all. His genius, his unique and timely discoveries, his commitment to philosophy, theory, theology, the concrete human good, and to education in the broader sense mark his work as dynamic, unifying and central to the self-knowing and self-correcting process buried deep in the human endeavors we know as human being, culture, and history.
And still, in its comprehensiveness the work maintains its ground and critical source in your singular and intimate writ-small experience of raising questions, of having insights, and of the reflective processes of an individual human being involved in science, art, religion, and-or the wisdom of commonsense—in you and in me.
The present work, then, is pedagogy towards awareness, appropriation, and affirmation of that process as ground to both writ-small understanding and writ-large culture in history. Our pedagogy is based on the work of thinkers involved with the development of transcendental method. The audience for our pedagogy, then, is broad because the work itself and, thus, its pedagogy are aimed at concrete applications for any one person as an intimate-personal avenue of self-understanding and corrective.
Further, such self-understanding begins in an empirical-critical point of view, and is open at both ends to the mysterious unknown. The pedagogy for this philosopher's discoveries gains its broader import, and its historical sweep, by fostering your own intimate philosophical acumen and, over time, aims at nothing less than a paradigm shift beginning with Lonergan's basic insights circa mid-1900, and moving through into the early-to-mid 21st century, perhaps later. This pedagogy is a part of that movement. The potential shift is based on a self-corrective movement at the foundational level of all fields of study and, subsequently over time, of all of common discourse. Hence, the need for our distinction between fundaments and foundations comes into view.
In this way, at once Lonergan’s contribution to philosophy marks the beginning of a new corrective and self-corrective shift for many affected by "inherited" intellectual-philosophical derailments; for a new and creative set of insights and distinctions for others who are open to new developments in philosophical thought; and both for some others. And it marks a movement forward that will provide ground for definition and clarity in all further human knowledge. If so, and if Lonergan's basic insights continue to filter into other theoretical and common discourse, the shift will eventually constitute a new set of distinctions and a new, consciously appropriated attunement to pass down to those who will then receive philosophical assumptions in the "intellectual air" we know as intergenerational. Again, the attunement will be between our reflective philosophical stance (our foundations) and the actual given ground of that stance (our fundaments) as evident and affirmable in our personal writ-small and writ-large history.
Further, a study of Lonergan’s and others’ contribution to philosophy and education helps to reveal that ground as well as the ground of all other insights, knowledge, and paradigm shifts. The empirical ground can be found in an adequate understanding of the fundament of human consciousness—the given, basic, and discoverable structure and dynamism of your own mind, and in an adequate and critical interpretation of that fundament in the context of concrete history. Moreover, with the help of a clarified and working theory of knowledge, you can personally understand and verify that ground in the context of the history of science, of scientific method, and of the common procedures of ordinary discourse.
The Trans-Cultural Base
We refer to both cognitional theory and a theory of knowledge as transcendental or general empirical method. In his Method In Theology Lonergan also refers to the basic structure and method of consciousness in different language as a trans-cultural base. As far as all persons are conscious, the theory applies to all persons.
Again, this method and base hold within it the broad outlines of the self-corrective process writ-small and writ-large. And again, in its writ-large dimension, such understanding carries the potential to lead to a paradigm shift in the sciences and fields of study and application. The shift will consist, first, of correctives of old inherited assumptions; second, of new discoveries and, third, of a fuller and more unified understanding of the import of human thought, knowledge, faith, speech, and act in history.
Treatment of the Good & the Worthwhile--& Dialectic
Treatment of The Good & The Worthwhile--& Dialectic
Moreover, in the above passage, the philosopher Lonergan speaks of an undertow, and an unconscious movement towards the good. This means that our reflective processes about the good (and bad) already spontaneously emerge in all but the comatose among us, and that they do so in terms of some developing set of principles of intelligence and excellence or, more generally, some movement of our embedded, but developmental, questions for the true-good (1972, pp. 282-83).
In other words, our questions for the good emerge within a horizon, and our horizons can change. As cultural and as developmental within a culture, our horizons differ vastly; but as desirers, questioners, and seekers of the good, we are all the same. In part, the unconscious undertow is our fundamental quest for the good, as concretely expressed and regardless of content, which is already part and parcel to all human endeavors. Again, though horizons and content differ greatly, the search for the good is trans-cultural.
In this way, when we speak of notions of correction and self-correction, we mean that both are inherently involved with our questions of analysis, qualification, self-qualification, and of value and self-value and, more comprehensively, of the true-good--all within a broader context of horizon development.
Furthermore, all commonsense and theoretical dialogue is underpinned by foundations and fundaments, and the interaction between them. If so, then all dialogue already holds within it the concrete evidence for the self-reflective process to begin—a process that aims at personal, philosophical self-correction—and qualification. In fact, in all human concerns, the broad structure of self-correction is ordered around our questions generally stated as: What/who is it, is it so, and is it good/bad/worthwhile (Lonergan, 1972; & Piscitelli, 1985). Through the framework of these questions, we continue to self-transcend at times, despite a profoundly disparate philosophical inheritance, and despite disagreement in our reflections on the question of what really is good-bad at any one moment in human history.
Again, though we all seek the good, we do so from profoundly different horizons and contexts. This diversity of views emerges as a dynamic polemic of soft differences and hard extremes, and as dialectical movements of inner thought and outer discourse where, in either case, we “go back and forth” over an issue; and we continuously change and self-correct. Such dialectical movements are concretely manifest in common discourse, for instance, as “separating the wheat from the chaff,” as “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” and as other references to winnowing out a discoverable clear truth and good in a highly complex arena of meaning.
I leave you to supply your own examples of the process of dialectic manifest in any specific dialogue. However, the same general structure of questioning and dialectic can be found in both writ-small and writ-large environments—in all persons, studies, fields, and theoretical work in a wealth of conferences, books and articles in field journals, and in political and ethical dialogue by concerned persons across the globe.
What is actually good or bad in any concrete situation is a question for all of us in that situation; however, the prior question for the good-bad is always the initial source of all argument-to-decision-making in that situation.
Thus, rather than "adding on" the question of the good to any analysis that we do, we will see that all critical analysis and argument emerge from, include, and return to the question of the good from whatever horizon the correspondents are working within. From this understanding of the good we can see that the need for a dialogue about horizon analysis comes clearly into view.
Moreover, in the above passage, the philosopher Lonergan speaks of an undertow, and an unconscious movement towards the good. This means that our reflective processes about the good (and bad) already spontaneously emerge in all but the comatose among us, and that they do so in terms of some developing set of principles of intelligence and excellence or, more generally, some movement of our embedded, but developmental, questions for the true-good (1972, pp. 282-83).
In other words, our questions for the good emerge within a horizon, and our horizons can change. As cultural and as developmental within a culture, our horizons differ vastly; but as desirers, questioners, and seekers of the good, we are all the same. In part, the unconscious undertow is our fundamental quest for the good, as concretely expressed and regardless of content, which is already part and parcel to all human endeavors. Again, though horizons and content differ greatly, the search for the good is trans-cultural.
In this way, when we speak of notions of correction and self-correction, we mean that both are inherently involved with our questions of analysis, qualification, self-qualification, and of value and self-value and, more comprehensively, of the true-good--all within a broader context of horizon development.
Furthermore, all commonsense and theoretical dialogue is underpinned by foundations and fundaments, and the interaction between them. If so, then all dialogue already holds within it the concrete evidence for the self-reflective process to begin—a process that aims at personal, philosophical self-correction—and qualification. In fact, in all human concerns, the broad structure of self-correction is ordered around our questions generally stated as: What/who is it, is it so, and is it good/bad/worthwhile (Lonergan, 1972; & Piscitelli, 1985). Through the framework of these questions, we continue to self-transcend at times, despite a profoundly disparate philosophical inheritance, and despite disagreement in our reflections on the question of what really is good-bad at any one moment in human history.
Again, though we all seek the good, we do so from profoundly different horizons and contexts. This diversity of views emerges as a dynamic polemic of soft differences and hard extremes, and as dialectical movements of inner thought and outer discourse where, in either case, we “go back and forth” over an issue; and we continuously change and self-correct. Such dialectical movements are concretely manifest in common discourse, for instance, as “separating the wheat from the chaff,” as “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” and as other references to winnowing out a discoverable clear truth and good in a highly complex arena of meaning.
I leave you to supply your own examples of the process of dialectic manifest in any specific dialogue. However, the same general structure of questioning and dialectic can be found in both writ-small and writ-large environments—in all persons, studies, fields, and theoretical work in a wealth of conferences, books and articles in field journals, and in political and ethical dialogue by concerned persons across the globe.
What is actually good or bad in any concrete situation is a question for all of us in that situation; however, the prior question for the good-bad is always the initial source of all argument-to-decision-making in that situation.
Thus, rather than "adding on" the question of the good to any analysis that we do, we will see that all critical analysis and argument emerge from, include, and return to the question of the good from whatever horizon the correspondents are working within. From this understanding of the good we can see that the need for a dialogue about horizon analysis comes clearly into view.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)