Our Questions and the Loss of Attunement
Whether or not the shift I speak of occurs fully, and whether or not we ever establish a better-attuned, foundational understanding that will inform our common education and living, human awareness is, at its core a quest. That quest becomes more active when inquiry becomes more articulate, and when our articulate questions become distinctly expressed. Further, in its most general form, our awareness puts forth a set of questions, and those questions call on meaning that will inform all of human thought and discourse. Those questions are in their most generally stated form:
What-who is (meaning)?
What is true/not true about that meaning?
What is good and bad about it?
What is truly worthwhile (best) to do?
What is ultimately truly good and worthwhile to do? (Lonergan, 1972; Piscitelli, 1985; King, 2003).
In fact, in varying intensity, and in more or less differentiated form, the quest and all of these questions fuel the “undertow” that informs our approach to everything and everyone in the world. That is, a general undifferentiated undertow-thrust becomes more and more distinguished to emerge as wonder and further as a set of questions (with a myriad of specified content) that we can then identify as the general substructure and ordering dynamism of our awareness. These kinds of questions are asked and re-asked in ever-new contexts of persons in dialogue and community with one another, now and throughout history.
On the other hand, our questions are informed by our range of development and by our variably achieved horizons within that development. Again, a horizon is that from within which we cannot see (or know) beyond it. What is obvious to someone in one horizon, is non-existent to someone in another. Also, people are people and not inert material--we have our desires and fears to worry about. Thus, we often are quite willing to rearrange at will “What is true/not true?” to serve our own ill-conceived notions of “What is best?”, and regardless of what others think, say, or do. "Don't bother me with facts," or with the more remote possibility of gaining a new horizon.
Such is the general movement of self-transcendence, on the one hand, or its absence, on the other.
Self-fooled or not, and whatever are the particular contents of such arguments, the fundamental intentions of all parties (the gravity at work in the football game), are to get to a higher and more definitive truth, shorn of untoward meaning, and to set up the conditions for a higher good to occur, again, whatever our horizon and whatever we think that good is or would be, and whether we are ever ultimately right or wrong about it. That is a question that needs to be worked out in the extant, concrete circumstances.
Moreover, we can understand such movements of thought in terms of the broad outlines of human consciousness--the trans-cultural base and its normative but developmental, and certainly violable, functions for both persons and cultures (1972, p. 20). That is, we can take up a dialectical and diacritical analysis of theoretical, scholarly, and common discourses in any cultural arena from the point of view of an adequate, theoretical, and personally self-verified analysis of conscious method and the trans-cultural base (self-appropriation-affirmation) that such analysis affords.
Thus, our study will reveal that the question of the good/worthwhile is a fundament, albeit a developmental and historical one. This question resides in all human beings and is the prime instigator (the undertow) behind all qualitative judgments (the good-bad) and all actions (deliberation of the worthwhile/not worthwhile doing). As such, we discover that, from an empirical point of view, the good is not extrinsic to the reality of the sciences or of any and all human affairs in history. Rather, aspects of the good-bad (qualitative judgments) predate and inform all science historically (writ-large), and predate and inform all scientists personally (writ-small).
In other words, like it or not, all science lives in a very old and veritable bed of qualitative development and qualitative judgments all around. We all already are interwoven with good-bad aspects of intelligence—not only because we choose to be, but because the question for the good-bad is a basic part of our conscious structure. It should come as no surprise to you, then, to suggest that to actually BE intelligent is to have a well-developed ability to make qualitative (good) judgments about the good and bad of things, people, places, events, and our own selves.
Further, all of our good-bad judgments and actions are set in a vast history of, and are a diverse product of, our prior questions and insights concerning value, qualification, excellence--the intelligent as what is qualitative (good/bad) and as an intrinsic part of what is or is not worthwhile to do. If this is so, and if we fail to understand ourselves in this way, and to think and act in terms of it, then we are "out of tune." That is, what we are and do does not match what we think we are and do.
If we fully understand the good as a developmental fundament for all human being-in-question and in all things, then we will understand all scientific analysis and studies as already immersed in and emerging from aspects of the good, rather than being somehow “outside” of such questions and their necessarily “biased” influence on the contexts and contents of the real we are exploring. Again, we will explore this issue further as our work unfolds in later chapters.
In this way, the present study can serve to attune the question of the good-worthwhile with our intelligence that is purported to be--and can remain--purely scientific. In so doing, we can bring the question of the good back to the foundations of both science and education while, at the same time, remaining entirely critical. Here and in fact (for you to discover for yourself as fact), the question of the good was and is always operative as a developmental, dialectical, and diacritical fundament inseparable from either scientific method or any given analysis or prescription in the natural and physical sciences, or in the human sciences and the human affairs they are concerned with. Such attunement does raise many knotty questions for our fields of knowledge; and we will explore them further as our work unfolds in later chapters.
Also, cognitional analysis and its personal verification will reveal many positive movements and events. Here, self-transcendence is no overly-abstract idea but commonly occurs and will continue to occur in you, in other persons, in the development of institutions, in the common dialogue between persons, and within and between diverse fields of study—all guided by some vision of excellence, or the good-better-best.
So the dialectical pendulum embedded in personal dialogue and history swings slowly back and forth with the ever-potential and sometimes-actual concrete expression of self-transcendence in the balance. However, at present it does so in the Western mind that does not know, and therefore does not fully have, its bearings. It has foundations and it has fundaments; but, for many reasons, its foundations are ill-attuned or not attuned at all with its fundaments. Without such attunement, the self-corrective process that is so central to self-transcendence in human intelligence, integration, and application, cannot do its job well, and sometimes cannot operate at all, or becomes diverted towards self-destruction. As such, the creative hope that is woven into the workings of history becomes stalled, diseased, or dependent on a regeneration of feeling rooted in ignorance, rather than in reflectively gained knowledge, for its revival.
In other words, our underlying assumptions about hope, good, truth, and our ability to self-transcend that might emerge from engaging in the dialogue, can become sabotaged before the dialogue even gets started. As such, and to recall our ball-field analogy, we can find ourselves sitting in the parking lot while the game is being played instead of in the stands where we can see and appreciate the game. When players are tripped, we can find ourselves expecting them to fall upwards instead of down to the ground. Of course, we cannot watch and enjoy the game (or live our life) with such wrong-headed assumptions in place—but we end up missing a considerable depth in our living.
Another analogy: we can have a compass, but without well-tuned philosophical foundations, we have no way of knowing where we are right now or, subsequently, our relationship to North.
More concretely, if we continue to self-transcend in fact, our bad assumptions lead us to assume that we do not self-transcend, or we fail to even ask; and we have no idea about what that might mean, or how important such a notion might be to our daily life, to others, or to the full sweep of human history and our living in terms of its mysterious-beyond-unknown.
Like those who refused to listen to Galileo’s evidence because of what they already felt, thought, and wanted to be true, many are, in fact, separated away from ourselves complements of our post-modern philosophical inheritance. A claim to groundlessness (or to the meaninglessness of foundations and a dialogue about them), then, cannot account for the consistency or recalcitrance of our questions that seek to know our beginnings, our middles, our ends, and beyond, and to continue to qualify our lives as we go through them from start to finish.
Such groundlessness is often “founded” in a common confusion. Here, the possibility of even having knowledge, including knowledge of the good, must mean being in possession of the beginnings of the chicken and the egg. No knowledge of the beginning-end equals no knowledge of the chicken or the egg. From this ill-tuned view, being in possession of some intelligence about the chicken and the egg and their relationship to one another is not enough to claim knowledge of the truth about the real of that chicken and egg. From this “all or none” confused point of view, we cannot “really know” anything unless we first know which came first: the chicken or the egg, and everything else there is to know. All “real knowledge” awaits this more comprehensive Knowledge-of-All. Thus, everything else in-between is just silly conjecture, arbitrarily construed “interpretations,” or someone’s hubris expressing itself.
However, in concrete and quite practical fashion, we develop knowledge about lots of things, e.g., about chickens and eggs; and we continue to develop other knowledge about them, and everything else on the planet—all within a greater context of also knowing that there are many other things that you (and we) still do not know, or that we have not yet related chickens and eggs to, etc. In other words, unless your mind has turned into an impenetrable steel trap, you go about your life in the full knowledge that you (and we) know many things and persons, but still do not know many, many other things and persons. (You here means you individually, or writ-small; and we means you and everyone else, or writ large.)
As knowledge, such intelligence has a critical component; for instance, might you know that a chicken is not an egg or a dog, and vice versa? To extrapolate, can we not suggest a theory of knowledge, then, that accounts for such intelligent activities as well as for their limited but solid critical components? The limited means we do not yet know which came first—the chicken or the egg, ad infinitum. And the solid means we can close around the facts—that there are great differences between a chicken and an egg or a dog, and that we know many of those differences. And again, can we understand the question of the meaningful good as an intrinsic, inseparable, but also a distinguishable part of our meaningful development of what goes by the name intelligence and knowing? (And again, we will develop these themes in more detail in later chapters.)
Under such assumptions writ-small, however, and under distorted inherited foundational conditions writ-large, whatever we know for the moment, we also “know” stands in quicksand (bad philosophical foundations). One implication of this view is that we can change course with the wind—arbitrarily and without hesitation; and such changes are fully endorsed by the philosophical air we have breathed in for several centuries now. And so, the pendulum swings wildly, carrying us so far to one extreme that skin gets burned and blood gets spilled without compunction; and then the pendulum swings back, flying past the center (where self-transcendence might occur), and on to the opposite extreme, where more skin gets burned and more blood gets spilled without compunction. Only this time, the violence is imparted from a different set of people--those who do not like the view from the other extreme, but who don't have the philosophical or spiritual tools to either balance or to self-transcend. Certainly we can know that human history is nothing if not dynamic--and violent.
On the other hand, within the given aspects of that same dynamism we can also take up the more difficult project of dialectic, diacritic, and hopefully of concrete self-transcendence, as the potential, normative, but also violable order of the human condition in history. Of course love of self and of others transcends all. However, since the scientific revolution, what we think of and about knowledge and the good have been hanging in the balance.
We cannot account for evil here or in any book. However, a working knowledge of the trans-cultural base and its vast implications towards individual and cultural self-transcendence, potentially and in the unfolding of time, can smooth the way for insights and understanding, for tempering the violence of swinging pendulums in history, and for our creativity to emerge unfettered from the problems of knowledge and the good.
History testifies that our self-transcendence, our creativity, and our desire for and return to a sense of wholeness are recurring, even when our foundations are out of tune with the reality of our existence. However, as we proceed, such creative movements can become more and more difficult to attain and to ensure, especially when they affect the writ-large politics, education, institutions, and social order surrounding individual persons. That is, philosophical (and spiritual) health or illness is intellectually generational and its manifestations can be so well-accepted as to have become the norm in our everyday thinking and expression. As such, the illness is difficult to self-identify and, once identified, requires a long-term regime of self-to-culture treatment for cure. With a corrective attunement, at least we will know it matters and why.
Further, creativity and self-transcendence occur in optimum fashion when persons, institutions, and cultural movements set up the conditions for them. Or, they occur when we develop our reflective, self-reflective and critical capacities, and when we lend those capacities to the analysis, identification, and diminishment of our present philosophical fog, hindrances, roadblocks, and cul-de-sacs that have come to systematically inform our otherwise wise commonsense and theoretical enterprises.
At present, the fog is thick, the roadblocks are high, and the openings in our cul-de-sacs are all grown over, all acting like cancers on the body-politic of the writ-large mind that we generally refer to as our "culture." In many cases, we lack an understanding of foundations, or we deny that such an under-stream and underpinning could even exist or, much less, could influence us with such pervasive power. In such cases, we fail to even ask the questions that would explore, consider as evidence, and reveal to us, our own (writ-small) or the West’s (writ-large) distorted foundations, or such a transcendental method or trans-cultural base. As such, the theoretical clarity of such self-verified knowledge by the various traditions, including education, remains potential and perhaps far-off, indeed (Ornstein & Hunkins, 2004).
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Human Authenticity
Human Authenticity
Our philosophical assumptions are feeling-rooted, intellectually generational, and deeply habitual. Though they form a good part of our thought and outlook, for many reasons, many of us avoid making them an object of thought or of our critical attention (as we are doing here). Qualitative personal change on this ground, then, will take more than one reading and a few exercises by a few albeit well-meaning and committed people. And yet, such critique and attunement is continually called for by the divisions and seemingly un-surmountable problems we face in our daily dialogue in all but a few venues. What we are naming attunement between our fundaments and our foundations Lonergan refers to as authenticity —of person (minor, or writ-small) and of culture and its institutions (major, or writ-large):
What is fundamental is human authenticity, and it is twofold. There is the minor authenticity of the human subject with respect to the tradition that nourishes him. There is the major authenticity that justifies or condemns the tradition itself. The former leads to a human judgment on subjects. The latter invites the judgment of history upon traditions. . . . the unauthenticity of individuals generates the unauthenticity of traditions. Then if one takes the tradition as it currently exists for one’s standard, one can do no more than authentically realize unauthenticity. Such is unauthenticity in its tragic form, for then the best of intentions combine with a hidden decay. . . . So it is that commonly men have to pay a double price for their personal attainment of authenticity. Not only have they to undo their own lapses . . . but more grievously they have to discover what is wrong in the tradition they have inherited and they have to struggle against the massive undertow it sets up. (1985k)
Insights that resonate with our tendency towards such authenticity send their roots down-deep, tend to occur on their own schedule, and often come when we least expect them. They also can bypass or conflict with other, less authentic, desires and fears--pools of thought we may be harboring. Thus, qualified change in you or me will necessarily emerge slowly; and it will often follow roller-coaster confusion, moments of clarity, of disturbance and of joy, and in fits and starts. Moreover, though momentary weakness and confusion is essential for growth, the present work draws on this moment, fosters your conscious awareness of this point, and makes exact, direct, and concrete connections for you and to you, hopefully with only a modicum of such weakness and confusion.
However, in the writ-small arena, and if the exercises ring true for you as they should, foundation-to-fundament self-correction will begin to occur in the resonant, spontaneous way that such deeply-set correction commonly does; and the results of the initial process will remain as a fount for your further qualified questions, insights, thought and dialogue—to expect and to find a higher plane where your confusion dissipates and you are noticeably stronger, but where you might even search for more of both in order to reach for another even higher plane.
The process will not connect you forever to a logical necessity, or to a specific theoretical formulation that explains all once-and-for-all, or to some hidden super-knowledge that no one else can know, on principle. Rather, the process will connect you to a continually accessible, self-verifiable, and concrete beginning point for all other study, and for all other writ-small and writ-large analysis, critique, and knowledge.
In the writ-large arena, I and other culture-watchers--who consciously draw on an awareness of transcendental method and its operations in history as a critical resource--have witnessed the rumblings of great change, and the spread of good thinking about fundament-to-foundation self-understanding. Though rarely named, such change is already manifest in many students, readers, and others, and feels to some like a slow but exponentially increasing flow towards conditioning a major corrective and creative emergence. However, any paradigmatic change at the writ-large level, if it occurs, will begin slowly in a few and then many writ-small arenas where individual insights occur, and incrementally, especially in curriculum development in education, and especially where the foundations of the natural and human sciences are concerned.
However, if foundational attunement indeed occurs on a large scale, it will indeed constitute a paradigm shift--both corrective and creative. The results will be that what we are referring to as attunement will enter the professions and culture through education, and the present experienced fragmentation in individuals, theoretical fields, and cultures (especially in Western-influenced arenas of thought), over time, will become less and less formative. That is, currently disparate arenas of thought and dialogue will continue to internally differentiate, specialize, and explore the mysteries of the unknown in their areas of interest. However, we will also have within our grasp the recovery of a dynamically interrelated, empirically established unity for our disparate fields of discourse and for our varied cultures that are now becoming “cultures of communication.”
The common ground is the basic outline of culture itself writ-large, and the developmental structure and dynamic unity of human consciousness writ-small. We can at once discover and verify the basic structure for ourselves, while at the same time knowing ourselves to be open in our continuing commonsense, theoretical, artistic, dialogical, diacritical, ethical, political, and spiritual concerns--culture. It is not the data or the methodical differences, but the full gamut of untoward philosophical differences that are keeping us apart.
The sciences and professional fields are one thing, however, cultures are another. As the substance of a shift in philosophical paradigms, a full understanding of transcendental method as a writ-large trans-cultural base will provide access to a much-needed attunement of the philosophical underpinnings of all things cultural. In terms of cultural analysis in many arenas, it will engender more recognition of differentiation, and lack of it, and of non-philosophical attunement in others than it will engender a further need for philosophical self-correction. Whether recognition-of or self-correction-towards attunement, however, knowledge-of the trans-cultural base is knowledge of the legitimating empirical reference and centerpiece of all human knowledge and its communication--it reveals to us the broad outline of human authenticity.
I hope you will understand your place in such authentic, creative, and self-transcendent movements in history, especially if you are a teacher.
Our philosophical assumptions are feeling-rooted, intellectually generational, and deeply habitual. Though they form a good part of our thought and outlook, for many reasons, many of us avoid making them an object of thought or of our critical attention (as we are doing here). Qualitative personal change on this ground, then, will take more than one reading and a few exercises by a few albeit well-meaning and committed people. And yet, such critique and attunement is continually called for by the divisions and seemingly un-surmountable problems we face in our daily dialogue in all but a few venues. What we are naming attunement between our fundaments and our foundations Lonergan refers to as authenticity —of person (minor, or writ-small) and of culture and its institutions (major, or writ-large):
What is fundamental is human authenticity, and it is twofold. There is the minor authenticity of the human subject with respect to the tradition that nourishes him. There is the major authenticity that justifies or condemns the tradition itself. The former leads to a human judgment on subjects. The latter invites the judgment of history upon traditions. . . . the unauthenticity of individuals generates the unauthenticity of traditions. Then if one takes the tradition as it currently exists for one’s standard, one can do no more than authentically realize unauthenticity. Such is unauthenticity in its tragic form, for then the best of intentions combine with a hidden decay. . . . So it is that commonly men have to pay a double price for their personal attainment of authenticity. Not only have they to undo their own lapses . . . but more grievously they have to discover what is wrong in the tradition they have inherited and they have to struggle against the massive undertow it sets up. (1985k)
Insights that resonate with our tendency towards such authenticity send their roots down-deep, tend to occur on their own schedule, and often come when we least expect them. They also can bypass or conflict with other, less authentic, desires and fears--pools of thought we may be harboring. Thus, qualified change in you or me will necessarily emerge slowly; and it will often follow roller-coaster confusion, moments of clarity, of disturbance and of joy, and in fits and starts. Moreover, though momentary weakness and confusion is essential for growth, the present work draws on this moment, fosters your conscious awareness of this point, and makes exact, direct, and concrete connections for you and to you, hopefully with only a modicum of such weakness and confusion.
However, in the writ-small arena, and if the exercises ring true for you as they should, foundation-to-fundament self-correction will begin to occur in the resonant, spontaneous way that such deeply-set correction commonly does; and the results of the initial process will remain as a fount for your further qualified questions, insights, thought and dialogue—to expect and to find a higher plane where your confusion dissipates and you are noticeably stronger, but where you might even search for more of both in order to reach for another even higher plane.
The process will not connect you forever to a logical necessity, or to a specific theoretical formulation that explains all once-and-for-all, or to some hidden super-knowledge that no one else can know, on principle. Rather, the process will connect you to a continually accessible, self-verifiable, and concrete beginning point for all other study, and for all other writ-small and writ-large analysis, critique, and knowledge.
In the writ-large arena, I and other culture-watchers--who consciously draw on an awareness of transcendental method and its operations in history as a critical resource--have witnessed the rumblings of great change, and the spread of good thinking about fundament-to-foundation self-understanding. Though rarely named, such change is already manifest in many students, readers, and others, and feels to some like a slow but exponentially increasing flow towards conditioning a major corrective and creative emergence. However, any paradigmatic change at the writ-large level, if it occurs, will begin slowly in a few and then many writ-small arenas where individual insights occur, and incrementally, especially in curriculum development in education, and especially where the foundations of the natural and human sciences are concerned.
However, if foundational attunement indeed occurs on a large scale, it will indeed constitute a paradigm shift--both corrective and creative. The results will be that what we are referring to as attunement will enter the professions and culture through education, and the present experienced fragmentation in individuals, theoretical fields, and cultures (especially in Western-influenced arenas of thought), over time, will become less and less formative. That is, currently disparate arenas of thought and dialogue will continue to internally differentiate, specialize, and explore the mysteries of the unknown in their areas of interest. However, we will also have within our grasp the recovery of a dynamically interrelated, empirically established unity for our disparate fields of discourse and for our varied cultures that are now becoming “cultures of communication.”
The common ground is the basic outline of culture itself writ-large, and the developmental structure and dynamic unity of human consciousness writ-small. We can at once discover and verify the basic structure for ourselves, while at the same time knowing ourselves to be open in our continuing commonsense, theoretical, artistic, dialogical, diacritical, ethical, political, and spiritual concerns--culture. It is not the data or the methodical differences, but the full gamut of untoward philosophical differences that are keeping us apart.
The sciences and professional fields are one thing, however, cultures are another. As the substance of a shift in philosophical paradigms, a full understanding of transcendental method as a writ-large trans-cultural base will provide access to a much-needed attunement of the philosophical underpinnings of all things cultural. In terms of cultural analysis in many arenas, it will engender more recognition of differentiation, and lack of it, and of non-philosophical attunement in others than it will engender a further need for philosophical self-correction. Whether recognition-of or self-correction-towards attunement, however, knowledge-of the trans-cultural base is knowledge of the legitimating empirical reference and centerpiece of all human knowledge and its communication--it reveals to us the broad outline of human authenticity.
I hope you will understand your place in such authentic, creative, and self-transcendent movements in history, especially if you are a teacher.
BACK to PEDAGOGY
Back to Pedagogy
Above, I have briefly addressed the much larger and long-term project of a philosophical dialogue towards attunement and authenticity. Nevertheless, my focus in this work is limited to specific, writ-small pedagogy--for the personal verification of and identity with some basic data of consciousness—your own conscious introduction to your already-experienced radiant centerpiece of self-knowledge, communication, and even love, and to the very basics that can precede the occurrence in you of self-appropriation-affirmation. These insights constitute a first step towards what I hope will be a long series of illuminating insights into the fundaments and foundations of your own mindedness, and into creative-transformative activities in both aspects of your personal habitat—writ-small and writ-large.
Writ-small change in individuals is entirely worth the effort for its own sake. However, in my view, foundational change in the writ-large community of institutions, fields, and cultures can follow, in time, from an understanding and fully conscious embrace of the self-corrective processes in the writ-small individual person, one at a time, and should you decide to take up such a worthwhile project.
Above, I have briefly addressed the much larger and long-term project of a philosophical dialogue towards attunement and authenticity. Nevertheless, my focus in this work is limited to specific, writ-small pedagogy--for the personal verification of and identity with some basic data of consciousness—your own conscious introduction to your already-experienced radiant centerpiece of self-knowledge, communication, and even love, and to the very basics that can precede the occurrence in you of self-appropriation-affirmation. These insights constitute a first step towards what I hope will be a long series of illuminating insights into the fundaments and foundations of your own mindedness, and into creative-transformative activities in both aspects of your personal habitat—writ-small and writ-large.
Writ-small change in individuals is entirely worth the effort for its own sake. However, in my view, foundational change in the writ-large community of institutions, fields, and cultures can follow, in time, from an understanding and fully conscious embrace of the self-corrective processes in the writ-small individual person, one at a time, and should you decide to take up such a worthwhile project.
Your Personal Expectations
Your Personal Expectations
Though our focus is writ-small and, thus, for one person, you and I should keep in mind that our own personal development is not without context, and that you and I are inseparable from that context. Indeed, whether we are aware of it or not, we are a part of its richness. And so as a prolonged exercise in philosophical self-reflection, we can never stray too far from our awareness of the writ-large import of our own philosophical inheritance, or our philosophical foundations.
We located the beginning of philosophy-proper with the pre-Christian Greeks, with Socrates calling for theoretical explanations from within the pages of Plato’s dialogues, and with Aristotle breaking with the dialogue form of expression to develop his formal theoretical treatises. Unlike in our time, however, in Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical climate there was no question that philosophy is a personal adventure of the first order. For them, the personal was comprehensive and not merely "subjective" and thus unconnected with reality, as many in our present philosophical clime assume.
Philosophy has taken many turns and twists over its long history, especially during the enlightenment years in the European West. Since that time, philosophical movements of mind, especially in the West that concern theory development, have often drifted away from, or even rejected, relating theory to the mind, or to the personal, or to the personal dimensions of knowledge. Thus, if you are reading this text, you probably inherited at least some of the post-modern Western frame of mind—a frame that is at least partially unauthentic, as our present work, in part, is about exploring with you.
Briefly, and in part, from this view theory is objective; and anything personal is subjective. Also, we know by looking; and so it follows that the mind, which cannot be “seen,” is also personal and subjective. And the two—object and subject--we assume, are not related, or at least not easily so, and remain unlinked. That is, we can talk about the mind, but we cannot really go at it in critical-objective fashion like we can, say, the planets or biology.
However, from this frame, and remembering the Greek philosophers, we are drawn to ask, first, whether a philosophy that claims to be scientific, theoretical, methodological, and critical must also claim to be wholly non- or impersonal; or, second, whether a philosophy that claims to identify with the personal, in fact, can also be objective-theoretical?
The answer is one or the other; OR the argument calls for some further distinctions and-or some inspection of the frame of mind from which the choices emerge. I suggest that the third—making some further distinctions, and inspecting the frame of mind (assumptions) that produced the choices--is most appropriate and may lead us to some major insights.
Whereas the philosophical Greeks would not have raised this question seriously, we must raise it systematically--precisely because of the many twists and turns that philosophy has taken over the centuries. Such twists and turns are grounded in the fundament of development. However, if such twists and turns occurred, they most probably arrived in our minds already on the wings of the common discourse we have been immersed in since the cradle.
In our earlier chapters here, we explore in broad outlines the trail that has led us to the separation--even divorce--of science from the personal as well as from the “unseen” mind, not to mention from the good. Briefly, however, and though it may be problematic for some readers at this point, I must ask you in this introduction: Can any object be known without that knowledge being rooted in a person-knower—a person who has raised a wealth of prior questions from within a huge complex and conditioning context of meaning, and whether that meaning is developed within a theoretical, common, artistic, or any other kind of venue?
If your answer to this question is yes, then I must ask you to consider how you define knowledge (remembering the chicken and the egg above) and, under that definition, how it might be the case that we can talk about objective knowledge without a person who is the knower of that knowledge?
On the other hand, if you answer this question no, then let me ask you this: Might either a philosophy, or any other science or knowledge field that claims to be completely impersonal, or that aims at such a state as a general tenet, also be hinting rather loudly at being philosophically out of tune--knowledge--without a person who knows? The implied claim, again, is that their knowledge field and science is only legitimate if non- or impersonal, presumably without scientists—or knowers who are knowing-subjects and who have a huge background of not only looking, but of meaning accumulation behind that knowledge--including a wealth of what goes by the name: value judgments?
It is not that such meaning accumulation must be biased, on principle, if admitted by the knower who is a person, or that knowledge cannot have both truly objective and subjective components to it. Rather, and as complexly problematic as this might seem to you at present, the personal meaning accumulated in ourselves as knowers—over a lifetime of experience--is also the only source of any kind of objectivity that a person-knower, or a knowledge field, might be able to claim in the first place.
On the other hand, it certainly does not follow that, by acknowledging the subject-knower-person, our biases disappear or are not problematic, or that we must ignore the possibility of bias, or that our accumulation of meaning may not have not gone awry, or that we may not lack some sort of development or other with regard to what we are claiming to know--or that whole fields might not be seriously off-kilter.
Rather, and as complexly problematic as this might seem to you at present, the acknowledgement of the intimacy between the subject-knower and the object-truly-known suggests this: That prior meaning accumulation and personal development need to be the target of our ongoing critical discernment in all knowledge fields. First, biases can be recognized, guarded against, and shed and, second, adequate development and meaning accumulation may be consciously fostered as the source of real objectivity in the whole complex of human meaning, not to mention in the development of wisdom in human affairs.
By raising these questions we open the door to the sticky question of what knowledge and truth are—in fact—which may already begin to smell like a logical tautology to some readers and-or a hopelessly subjective and ungrounded argument, on principle. However, we will develop our questions, our evidence, and our pedagogy for your own understanding in non-tautological fashion, and in earnest in our later chapters.
Again, do you think any philosophy and-or human science can be legitimate in aiming-at or claiming-to-be non- or impersonal; or can we have science without a scientist, or philosophy without a philosopher? And again, if we find we must claim the personal in order to legitimately claim any objective knowledge at all, first, must we then introduce several forms of “subjective bias” as necessary components in any scientific or philosophical study and, thereby, a diminishment of truth and its fullness? And second, if our philosophical study is of the mind, must we lose our claim to any critical-objective knowledge before we even get started--because we cannot "see" the mind?
If you do not see the problem here, I will lay it out for you: If you already rest in the assumption and maintain that philosophy and philosophical study is a flight of fancy, and that the mind cannot really be studied in any truly critical or factual way, then this entire project, though you may find it interesting, will be a waste of time for you because the study is necessarily and hopelessly bias-infested and has no claim to reality, on principle. On the other hand, if you are willing to challenge your own assumptions in these matters, then you just may be surprised and even delighted by what you find—I suggest you will.
I will raise these questions again as our project unfolds. However, with our sticky problem of knowledge in mind, again, the present work brings forward the ancient mandate Know Thyself and the equally ancient maxim: An unexamined life is not worth living. We will need to reconsider these in the light of the history of philosophy since those earlier times. And since we have opened the question of the personal--that the Greeks assumed was a part of knowledge--we will need to be more definitive, declarative, and theoretical. We need to bring the personal back in line with the theoretical and the objective for you, for me, for the scientist, and for the philosopher in our time. For if human understanding, valuing, and knowing are all personal, but also can be fully objective and even scientific, then a human being who personally understands, values, and knows our own knowing processes is well-grounded indeed; and especially if that knowing has a critically appropriated and verified theoretical base.
Again, in writing the present work, I draw mainly from the philosopher Bernard Lonergan whose works I refer to often. I also draw on the work of my teacher, Emil Piscitelli [2] as well as that of others who continue to bring transcendental method to many audiences [3]. In all of these works, the writers recover, and bring into post-enlightenment relief, the basic insights of both the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. They do so by assuming and charting out a view of the whole, with ourselves and the scientist in it; by calling out the potential reflective and self-reflective philosopher-person in all of us; and by understanding generally what we question, insight, and understand as having real comprehensive, metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual import. The assumption is that, though your study here may have profound subjective influence, it is not only the work of your subjective psychology. And the assumption is that knowledge can be and often is of more than some merely-sensed and person-less objectivity.
Further, such writers rise to the challenge that the question and problem of knowledge bring along with them (the epistemological call for grounded and critical clarity) with a working theory of knowledge and a complementary, self-verifiable, and attuned cognitional theory. Also, they and we call to our readers for nothing less than an empirical, critical, and personally verifiable appraisal and judgment by those who would question and understand it--you and I.
The ready availability of the data (your own mind) offers that the continually concrete verification and grounding of the theory can occur in anyone who takes up that challenge. So you should expect to use your own mind to become critically aware and knowledgeable of your own mind and, with the use of the theory, of minds in general.
Furthermore, philosophy includes our questions about the formal and theoretical dimensions of cognition, consciousness, metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics and ontology, etc. In this way, philosophy includes, but takes us far beyond the tenets of, contemporary psychological, sociological, cultural, historical, or anthropological exploration, though of course not beyond the actual foundations of those explorations. For all fields assume some view of all philosophical matters, i.e., notions about what a “fact” is, and about human understanding, knowledge, truth, the good, and being--all underpin all knowledge fields as the basic ground for all dialogue.
Also, know thyself is not only a Platonic mandate, but also is implied in the very meaning of philosophy--the love of wisdom--both as a formal field of study and as a personal development of the powers of human thought. That is, such a philosophical mandate to examine and to know thyself now must begin with knowing what we think knowledge is, rather than beginning with unspecified and perhaps uncritically inherited assumptions about such fundamental matters. So, because of philosophy’s comprehensive subject matter and place in history, philosophers must now always begin by knowing and being able to explain our own philosophical assumptions—assumptions which ordinarily remain hidden in other discourses in other knowledge fields, including in ordinary as well as theoretical discourse.
And so our present project may sound daring in expecting from you at least your openness towards exploring your own assumptions and towards forging a new relationship between the subjective, the personal, knowledge, facts, and the objective-theoretical, whichever order you put these into. However, the project also promises an explicit explanation and pedagogical method towards your understanding and critical verification of, and ultimately your sense of unification and wholeness of, what may seem, for the moment, quite daring. Many have become quite comfortable with this central and substantial aspect of self-knowing, and so can you.
Following the ancient philosophical call, throughout the work we will point you towards developing a new awareness of your personal-intimate life. We will set up the conditions for you to examine your assumptions as you discover your own intimate relationship to the theories explored here. And you will be guided as you employ your theoretical precision and critical-objective judgment in the verification process—a judgment that the present work thoroughly depends upon for its successful fruition. In this way, I expect you to begin distinguishing between a theory of insight, of mind, or of consciousness, on the one hand, and the actual light, dim or momentarily blinding, that illuminates your mind when you understand anything at all, on the other.
While the theory points to that light as its object, the light continues to occur in you and me whether anyone develops a theory about it--or not. Thus, and though the theory is the product of someone's light, the theory is not that light; the object as potentially known is not merely an object, and will not be merely a known object; and it is through that light (the actual occurrence of insighting in you), and only through that light, that you will come to understand and identify with the theory, with the data of others’ minds, and consciously with your own processes that are both the object of the theory and the proximate source of that light. Hence, if you fully participate, you will partake in both the theoretical and the personal-intimate sides of the historical philosophical enterprise we find ourselves in at present.
To that end, and besides the chapter devoted entirely to verification exercises, the chapters in this work include Reflection and Dialogue Points that are set off from the narrative in relevant places in the text. Your participation in the writing and dialogue given in these Points constitutes your self-reflective foundational review in progress; and that participation will help you develop your thought in a way that will best prepare you to fully understand the later theory-to-self verification procedures.
Further, though differences abound, we begin by assuming what our fundaments (yours and mine) are and do. These are the thinking and acting processes you already do and are doing now while you read this text, i.e., looking, wondering, resourcing/resonating-with your past understanding, marshalling and weighing evidence, evaluating, etc. And we will assume that our philosophical assumptions (foundations—yours and mine) are already learned and established, inherited, life-long, and commonly go un-critiqued throughout our lives, at least in any thoroughgoing way (Lonergan, 1958, p. 402; & 2000, p. 426).
Hence, the problem of philosophical attunement or lack of it presses on our daily dialogue like hot air presses on the inside of a balloon--in our spontaneous orientation towards integration--and more so for those involved in philosophical explorations that fail to call for self-reflection, e.g., "modem" philosophy or other thought that has come down to us from the Enlightenment.
In order to expose those foundations in a critical way, again, you will need to go through the Dialogue and Reflections Points provided in each chapter. You will also need to go “out” to theory, and then to return to your interior life with the theory in hand, with a clear understanding of the role of theoretical excursions and of the difference between these and other kinds of excursions, and for incurring a clear and critical architectural analysis of-and-for that interior life. And so you will need to commit yourself to understanding the difference between your rich and common discourse, on the one hand, and the clarity and distinctions presented in theoretical discourse, on the other. The two discourses are not opposed, though many often think of them as so (1958 & 2000). An early chapter is devoted to developing the distinction between common and theoretical thought and discourse for and in you.
Carving out the distinction between commonsense thought and theory, and then philosophical theory, Lonergan writes about common-sense eclecticism that is an assumed but often problematic method of foundational discourse in many fields of study:
If it (commonsense thought) rarely is adopted by original thinkers, it remains the inertial centre of the philosophic process. From every excess and aberration men swing back to common sense and, perhaps no more than a minority of students and professors, of critics and historians, ever wander very far from a set of assumptions that are neither formulated nor scrutinized. (1958, p. 416; & 2000, p. 441)
As pedagogy, and as essential to this unique exercise, we want to return to the subjective-personal and to the field of common and sometimes-uncritical discourse. However, we do not want to lose the critical nature of theory along the way. Also, Lonergan is speaking of philosophical assumptions in people who consider themselves theoreticians and professionals in the various fields, as well as of persons of good and wise commonsense. Thus, a full participation in the present project will require your understanding of theory-as-such. Such participation is not from the point of view of presenting us with a logical tautology, on principle, but as an understood-for-yourself and personally self-verified theoretical philosophy, and from your development of theoretical consciousness as clearly distinct from a common mode of thought and discourse.
Further, performing a foundational review means: from the position of having a clear theory in hand, we begin to tease out these assumptions in our own thought by asking the critical questions that define our foundational-philosophical areas of activity and concern. In so teasing, however, a philosopher, a scientist, a historian, a professor, a student, and a person of good commonsense must, again, approach the project from an attitude of openness, and be willing to put your own heretofore un-inspected philosophical inheritance up for guided self-critique, and in the line of fire from your own and others’ questions about those foundations that so inform and influence your feelings, images, thought, analysis, speech and act.
Moreover, the point is not to persuade or force, but to take yourself and your philosophical inheritance with the seriousness both deserve, to pay close attention to your own interior activities, to discuss openly with others, and to encourage questions and insights within yourself and in others for the sake of everyone’s further understanding. A willingness to self-critique about your present personal foundations, then, or to get to know yourself, is an expectation of philosophy as a long-term historical concern, and of this project as a more proximate concern. Again, this is not merely a psychological adventure, but rather the project is unapologetically a full-fledged philosophical project. In part, the present project is about gathering in this difference for you.
And so, even though I may be remote in time and space from your reading of this text, as your teacher for the moment or, with our hats off to Plato, as a potential midwife for the occurrence of your insights, I expect you, and you should expect of yourself, to be open to such movements of thought throughout your reading of the present work.
Though our focus is writ-small and, thus, for one person, you and I should keep in mind that our own personal development is not without context, and that you and I are inseparable from that context. Indeed, whether we are aware of it or not, we are a part of its richness. And so as a prolonged exercise in philosophical self-reflection, we can never stray too far from our awareness of the writ-large import of our own philosophical inheritance, or our philosophical foundations.
We located the beginning of philosophy-proper with the pre-Christian Greeks, with Socrates calling for theoretical explanations from within the pages of Plato’s dialogues, and with Aristotle breaking with the dialogue form of expression to develop his formal theoretical treatises. Unlike in our time, however, in Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical climate there was no question that philosophy is a personal adventure of the first order. For them, the personal was comprehensive and not merely "subjective" and thus unconnected with reality, as many in our present philosophical clime assume.
Philosophy has taken many turns and twists over its long history, especially during the enlightenment years in the European West. Since that time, philosophical movements of mind, especially in the West that concern theory development, have often drifted away from, or even rejected, relating theory to the mind, or to the personal, or to the personal dimensions of knowledge. Thus, if you are reading this text, you probably inherited at least some of the post-modern Western frame of mind—a frame that is at least partially unauthentic, as our present work, in part, is about exploring with you.
Briefly, and in part, from this view theory is objective; and anything personal is subjective. Also, we know by looking; and so it follows that the mind, which cannot be “seen,” is also personal and subjective. And the two—object and subject--we assume, are not related, or at least not easily so, and remain unlinked. That is, we can talk about the mind, but we cannot really go at it in critical-objective fashion like we can, say, the planets or biology.
However, from this frame, and remembering the Greek philosophers, we are drawn to ask, first, whether a philosophy that claims to be scientific, theoretical, methodological, and critical must also claim to be wholly non- or impersonal; or, second, whether a philosophy that claims to identify with the personal, in fact, can also be objective-theoretical?
The answer is one or the other; OR the argument calls for some further distinctions and-or some inspection of the frame of mind from which the choices emerge. I suggest that the third—making some further distinctions, and inspecting the frame of mind (assumptions) that produced the choices--is most appropriate and may lead us to some major insights.
Whereas the philosophical Greeks would not have raised this question seriously, we must raise it systematically--precisely because of the many twists and turns that philosophy has taken over the centuries. Such twists and turns are grounded in the fundament of development. However, if such twists and turns occurred, they most probably arrived in our minds already on the wings of the common discourse we have been immersed in since the cradle.
In our earlier chapters here, we explore in broad outlines the trail that has led us to the separation--even divorce--of science from the personal as well as from the “unseen” mind, not to mention from the good. Briefly, however, and though it may be problematic for some readers at this point, I must ask you in this introduction: Can any object be known without that knowledge being rooted in a person-knower—a person who has raised a wealth of prior questions from within a huge complex and conditioning context of meaning, and whether that meaning is developed within a theoretical, common, artistic, or any other kind of venue?
If your answer to this question is yes, then I must ask you to consider how you define knowledge (remembering the chicken and the egg above) and, under that definition, how it might be the case that we can talk about objective knowledge without a person who is the knower of that knowledge?
On the other hand, if you answer this question no, then let me ask you this: Might either a philosophy, or any other science or knowledge field that claims to be completely impersonal, or that aims at such a state as a general tenet, also be hinting rather loudly at being philosophically out of tune--knowledge--without a person who knows? The implied claim, again, is that their knowledge field and science is only legitimate if non- or impersonal, presumably without scientists—or knowers who are knowing-subjects and who have a huge background of not only looking, but of meaning accumulation behind that knowledge--including a wealth of what goes by the name: value judgments?
It is not that such meaning accumulation must be biased, on principle, if admitted by the knower who is a person, or that knowledge cannot have both truly objective and subjective components to it. Rather, and as complexly problematic as this might seem to you at present, the personal meaning accumulated in ourselves as knowers—over a lifetime of experience--is also the only source of any kind of objectivity that a person-knower, or a knowledge field, might be able to claim in the first place.
On the other hand, it certainly does not follow that, by acknowledging the subject-knower-person, our biases disappear or are not problematic, or that we must ignore the possibility of bias, or that our accumulation of meaning may not have not gone awry, or that we may not lack some sort of development or other with regard to what we are claiming to know--or that whole fields might not be seriously off-kilter.
Rather, and as complexly problematic as this might seem to you at present, the acknowledgement of the intimacy between the subject-knower and the object-truly-known suggests this: That prior meaning accumulation and personal development need to be the target of our ongoing critical discernment in all knowledge fields. First, biases can be recognized, guarded against, and shed and, second, adequate development and meaning accumulation may be consciously fostered as the source of real objectivity in the whole complex of human meaning, not to mention in the development of wisdom in human affairs.
By raising these questions we open the door to the sticky question of what knowledge and truth are—in fact—which may already begin to smell like a logical tautology to some readers and-or a hopelessly subjective and ungrounded argument, on principle. However, we will develop our questions, our evidence, and our pedagogy for your own understanding in non-tautological fashion, and in earnest in our later chapters.
Again, do you think any philosophy and-or human science can be legitimate in aiming-at or claiming-to-be non- or impersonal; or can we have science without a scientist, or philosophy without a philosopher? And again, if we find we must claim the personal in order to legitimately claim any objective knowledge at all, first, must we then introduce several forms of “subjective bias” as necessary components in any scientific or philosophical study and, thereby, a diminishment of truth and its fullness? And second, if our philosophical study is of the mind, must we lose our claim to any critical-objective knowledge before we even get started--because we cannot "see" the mind?
If you do not see the problem here, I will lay it out for you: If you already rest in the assumption and maintain that philosophy and philosophical study is a flight of fancy, and that the mind cannot really be studied in any truly critical or factual way, then this entire project, though you may find it interesting, will be a waste of time for you because the study is necessarily and hopelessly bias-infested and has no claim to reality, on principle. On the other hand, if you are willing to challenge your own assumptions in these matters, then you just may be surprised and even delighted by what you find—I suggest you will.
I will raise these questions again as our project unfolds. However, with our sticky problem of knowledge in mind, again, the present work brings forward the ancient mandate Know Thyself and the equally ancient maxim: An unexamined life is not worth living. We will need to reconsider these in the light of the history of philosophy since those earlier times. And since we have opened the question of the personal--that the Greeks assumed was a part of knowledge--we will need to be more definitive, declarative, and theoretical. We need to bring the personal back in line with the theoretical and the objective for you, for me, for the scientist, and for the philosopher in our time. For if human understanding, valuing, and knowing are all personal, but also can be fully objective and even scientific, then a human being who personally understands, values, and knows our own knowing processes is well-grounded indeed; and especially if that knowing has a critically appropriated and verified theoretical base.
Again, in writing the present work, I draw mainly from the philosopher Bernard Lonergan whose works I refer to often. I also draw on the work of my teacher, Emil Piscitelli [2] as well as that of others who continue to bring transcendental method to many audiences [3]. In all of these works, the writers recover, and bring into post-enlightenment relief, the basic insights of both the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. They do so by assuming and charting out a view of the whole, with ourselves and the scientist in it; by calling out the potential reflective and self-reflective philosopher-person in all of us; and by understanding generally what we question, insight, and understand as having real comprehensive, metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual import. The assumption is that, though your study here may have profound subjective influence, it is not only the work of your subjective psychology. And the assumption is that knowledge can be and often is of more than some merely-sensed and person-less objectivity.
Further, such writers rise to the challenge that the question and problem of knowledge bring along with them (the epistemological call for grounded and critical clarity) with a working theory of knowledge and a complementary, self-verifiable, and attuned cognitional theory. Also, they and we call to our readers for nothing less than an empirical, critical, and personally verifiable appraisal and judgment by those who would question and understand it--you and I.
The ready availability of the data (your own mind) offers that the continually concrete verification and grounding of the theory can occur in anyone who takes up that challenge. So you should expect to use your own mind to become critically aware and knowledgeable of your own mind and, with the use of the theory, of minds in general.
Furthermore, philosophy includes our questions about the formal and theoretical dimensions of cognition, consciousness, metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics and ontology, etc. In this way, philosophy includes, but takes us far beyond the tenets of, contemporary psychological, sociological, cultural, historical, or anthropological exploration, though of course not beyond the actual foundations of those explorations. For all fields assume some view of all philosophical matters, i.e., notions about what a “fact” is, and about human understanding, knowledge, truth, the good, and being--all underpin all knowledge fields as the basic ground for all dialogue.
Also, know thyself is not only a Platonic mandate, but also is implied in the very meaning of philosophy--the love of wisdom--both as a formal field of study and as a personal development of the powers of human thought. That is, such a philosophical mandate to examine and to know thyself now must begin with knowing what we think knowledge is, rather than beginning with unspecified and perhaps uncritically inherited assumptions about such fundamental matters. So, because of philosophy’s comprehensive subject matter and place in history, philosophers must now always begin by knowing and being able to explain our own philosophical assumptions—assumptions which ordinarily remain hidden in other discourses in other knowledge fields, including in ordinary as well as theoretical discourse.
And so our present project may sound daring in expecting from you at least your openness towards exploring your own assumptions and towards forging a new relationship between the subjective, the personal, knowledge, facts, and the objective-theoretical, whichever order you put these into. However, the project also promises an explicit explanation and pedagogical method towards your understanding and critical verification of, and ultimately your sense of unification and wholeness of, what may seem, for the moment, quite daring. Many have become quite comfortable with this central and substantial aspect of self-knowing, and so can you.
Following the ancient philosophical call, throughout the work we will point you towards developing a new awareness of your personal-intimate life. We will set up the conditions for you to examine your assumptions as you discover your own intimate relationship to the theories explored here. And you will be guided as you employ your theoretical precision and critical-objective judgment in the verification process—a judgment that the present work thoroughly depends upon for its successful fruition. In this way, I expect you to begin distinguishing between a theory of insight, of mind, or of consciousness, on the one hand, and the actual light, dim or momentarily blinding, that illuminates your mind when you understand anything at all, on the other.
While the theory points to that light as its object, the light continues to occur in you and me whether anyone develops a theory about it--or not. Thus, and though the theory is the product of someone's light, the theory is not that light; the object as potentially known is not merely an object, and will not be merely a known object; and it is through that light (the actual occurrence of insighting in you), and only through that light, that you will come to understand and identify with the theory, with the data of others’ minds, and consciously with your own processes that are both the object of the theory and the proximate source of that light. Hence, if you fully participate, you will partake in both the theoretical and the personal-intimate sides of the historical philosophical enterprise we find ourselves in at present.
To that end, and besides the chapter devoted entirely to verification exercises, the chapters in this work include Reflection and Dialogue Points that are set off from the narrative in relevant places in the text. Your participation in the writing and dialogue given in these Points constitutes your self-reflective foundational review in progress; and that participation will help you develop your thought in a way that will best prepare you to fully understand the later theory-to-self verification procedures.
Further, though differences abound, we begin by assuming what our fundaments (yours and mine) are and do. These are the thinking and acting processes you already do and are doing now while you read this text, i.e., looking, wondering, resourcing/resonating-with your past understanding, marshalling and weighing evidence, evaluating, etc. And we will assume that our philosophical assumptions (foundations—yours and mine) are already learned and established, inherited, life-long, and commonly go un-critiqued throughout our lives, at least in any thoroughgoing way (Lonergan, 1958, p. 402; & 2000, p. 426).
Hence, the problem of philosophical attunement or lack of it presses on our daily dialogue like hot air presses on the inside of a balloon--in our spontaneous orientation towards integration--and more so for those involved in philosophical explorations that fail to call for self-reflection, e.g., "modem" philosophy or other thought that has come down to us from the Enlightenment.
In order to expose those foundations in a critical way, again, you will need to go through the Dialogue and Reflections Points provided in each chapter. You will also need to go “out” to theory, and then to return to your interior life with the theory in hand, with a clear understanding of the role of theoretical excursions and of the difference between these and other kinds of excursions, and for incurring a clear and critical architectural analysis of-and-for that interior life. And so you will need to commit yourself to understanding the difference between your rich and common discourse, on the one hand, and the clarity and distinctions presented in theoretical discourse, on the other. The two discourses are not opposed, though many often think of them as so (1958 & 2000). An early chapter is devoted to developing the distinction between common and theoretical thought and discourse for and in you.
Carving out the distinction between commonsense thought and theory, and then philosophical theory, Lonergan writes about common-sense eclecticism that is an assumed but often problematic method of foundational discourse in many fields of study:
If it (commonsense thought) rarely is adopted by original thinkers, it remains the inertial centre of the philosophic process. From every excess and aberration men swing back to common sense and, perhaps no more than a minority of students and professors, of critics and historians, ever wander very far from a set of assumptions that are neither formulated nor scrutinized. (1958, p. 416; & 2000, p. 441)
As pedagogy, and as essential to this unique exercise, we want to return to the subjective-personal and to the field of common and sometimes-uncritical discourse. However, we do not want to lose the critical nature of theory along the way. Also, Lonergan is speaking of philosophical assumptions in people who consider themselves theoreticians and professionals in the various fields, as well as of persons of good and wise commonsense. Thus, a full participation in the present project will require your understanding of theory-as-such. Such participation is not from the point of view of presenting us with a logical tautology, on principle, but as an understood-for-yourself and personally self-verified theoretical philosophy, and from your development of theoretical consciousness as clearly distinct from a common mode of thought and discourse.
Further, performing a foundational review means: from the position of having a clear theory in hand, we begin to tease out these assumptions in our own thought by asking the critical questions that define our foundational-philosophical areas of activity and concern. In so teasing, however, a philosopher, a scientist, a historian, a professor, a student, and a person of good commonsense must, again, approach the project from an attitude of openness, and be willing to put your own heretofore un-inspected philosophical inheritance up for guided self-critique, and in the line of fire from your own and others’ questions about those foundations that so inform and influence your feelings, images, thought, analysis, speech and act.
Moreover, the point is not to persuade or force, but to take yourself and your philosophical inheritance with the seriousness both deserve, to pay close attention to your own interior activities, to discuss openly with others, and to encourage questions and insights within yourself and in others for the sake of everyone’s further understanding. A willingness to self-critique about your present personal foundations, then, or to get to know yourself, is an expectation of philosophy as a long-term historical concern, and of this project as a more proximate concern. Again, this is not merely a psychological adventure, but rather the project is unapologetically a full-fledged philosophical project. In part, the present project is about gathering in this difference for you.
And so, even though I may be remote in time and space from your reading of this text, as your teacher for the moment or, with our hats off to Plato, as a potential midwife for the occurrence of your insights, I expect you, and you should expect of yourself, to be open to such movements of thought throughout your reading of the present work.
THE LOCUS OF CREATIVITY
The Locus of Creativity
It is no paradox that locking-in our interest in philosophy, in fact, unlocks our creative processes; for there is no creative process without, first, questions and, second, insights; and both are central philosophical fare. That is, if philosophers’ discoveries point us towards self-discovery, then those discoveries will, in turn, point us towards the creative processes that come with being human, that we were born with, and that underpin all history, art, science, religion, and indeed all culture. Those processes have already been going forward in us from the beginning, perhaps in fits and starts. Self-discovery is a self that discovers this: I am a creative discoverer.
However, a discovery and clear knowledge of such processes in ourselves (and in our students if we are teachers) carry the potential of removing artificial barriers put upon that creativity, and of making the movement in us and in our students more self-directed and, thus, more easily manifest. In a word, we can foster habits of openness. With such self-knowledge, we are in a position to better mold and shape the potent clay that we already are--informing, directing and edifying ourselves towards not only what we are, but what we want to be—for what we are is fundamentally self-developmental.
In this way, understanding Plato’s directives, namely to know thyself, and to examine our lives, and Lonergan’s and others’ discoveries, hold the key to our recognizing our own given and dynamic structure and its normative functions, as well as our potential--our call--to re-create and to edify ourselves through what is given to us as human.
It is no paradox that locking-in our interest in philosophy, in fact, unlocks our creative processes; for there is no creative process without, first, questions and, second, insights; and both are central philosophical fare. That is, if philosophers’ discoveries point us towards self-discovery, then those discoveries will, in turn, point us towards the creative processes that come with being human, that we were born with, and that underpin all history, art, science, religion, and indeed all culture. Those processes have already been going forward in us from the beginning, perhaps in fits and starts. Self-discovery is a self that discovers this: I am a creative discoverer.
However, a discovery and clear knowledge of such processes in ourselves (and in our students if we are teachers) carry the potential of removing artificial barriers put upon that creativity, and of making the movement in us and in our students more self-directed and, thus, more easily manifest. In a word, we can foster habits of openness. With such self-knowledge, we are in a position to better mold and shape the potent clay that we already are--informing, directing and edifying ourselves towards not only what we are, but what we want to be—for what we are is fundamentally self-developmental.
In this way, understanding Plato’s directives, namely to know thyself, and to examine our lives, and Lonergan’s and others’ discoveries, hold the key to our recognizing our own given and dynamic structure and its normative functions, as well as our potential--our call--to re-create and to edify ourselves through what is given to us as human.
EMERGING SHIFTS--Conflict & Communication Between Cultures
Emerging Shifts—Conflict and Communication between Cultures
Speaking to the writ-large arena of cross-cultural communications, then, philosophy is involved in a massive movement that is a combination, first, of drawing on what is authentic that has come down to us in philosophical and other traditions; second, of developing correctives of derailments that are embedded in those traditions; and third, of developing, communicating, and passing on new knowledge--a paradigm shift, driven by a long-term philosophical crisis, involving not only concepts and doctrines, but also our deeply-set assumptions about ourselves and the way things are--and of course our emerging questions. Especially in the West, the shift involves, again, the question of knowledge itself, and includes the hope of forging a better-oriented, more unified, and dynamic view of our selves in the world, and in community with others.
Further, those who live in non-Western cultures are also suffering through their own kinds of crises as avenues of communication between themselves and the West increase—especially with the pluralism that is so essential to Western democratic cultures and their institutions. The introduction of vastly different ways of thinking to those in non-Western traditions continues to raise discomforting questions (which sometimes manifest as violence) against the single-minded sense of seriousness, certainty, and singular religio-political doctrine that still guide many non-Western traditions.
Of course, Western and non-Western movements of thought in history differ greatly from one another; and the conflicting foundational grounds within each of these movements cannot help but come into relation through trade and technological growth--growth that enables the ongoing dialogue and mass communications we find ourselves in at present (King, 2003c). Everyone seems ready for trade and technology, but not everyone is ready for the blast of other cultural changes that such movements bring along with them.
The nuances are great; however, in a general analysis diverse arenas of thought have much to gain from one another. Underneath our topical concerns, some of us are in need of differentiation, others are in need correction, and yet others are in need of putting things back together--well, or at least better. However, the underlying trajectories of thought in Eastern and Western minds are also entirely at cross-purposes and, if unmediated by cooler heads involved in reflective practice, are slated to do nothing but violence to one another. When we are not aware of these underlying differences, we tend to project our own views and assume the same ground in our correspondents as exists in our own. When such a naive disjunctive occurs, communications between peoples is not only difficult in the topical sense, but that difficulty goes “all the way down” to our basic differences in what is commonly called a world view. Instead of walking in a park in our communications with others, as we might think, we find ourselves dancing in a minefield.
Though topical conflicts always need our attention, conflicts at the foundational level are equal to if not more important to understand, and often are the root cause of great comedy as well as tragedy in human events as we work through them in history. Deeper still, however, are our fundaments. We have discovered, and can discover, this core of human being that everyone shares and that we are calling a trans-cultural base. Though knowing about what is most common to all will not solve all of our problems, it provides us with a new basis to understand those problems--in both foundations and in topical concerns--and how we ourselves may be contributing to their exacerbation, and to chart out and develop better communications between ourselves and others over the long term.
Contributing to the problem is that, in many of our educational institutions, rather than sorting out philosophical foundations early in our educational curricula, for many reasons we tend to only hint at or to altogether avoid such issues all throughout our children’s schooling. We do so, however, at the risk of corroding the foundations of our civil discourse in the world, now and in the not-too-distant future. For such issues cannot be brought forward in the condensed heat of a crisis, even with the best of collaborative efforts. Rather, such a dialogue is only effective if it has matured and emerged as a part of a long and comprehensive educational process at the background of those cultures and persons involved. And even then, no guarantee of a rich and dynamic peace is afforded anyone.
With regard to philosophical discourse now and in the past, however, much of what we could misunderstand, we did misunderstand; and the above avoidance in educational arenas of discourse has left us to only pass along in our communications the bifurcated foundations (lack of attunement) that is our philosophical and foundational misunderstanding. Such avoidance does not address, but nor does it hinder, the inheritance of either attuned or ill-tuned philosophical foundations. And the faulty foundations that follow avoidance have deepened, become calcified, and compounded the problems inherent in many crises and shifts of thought as we have moved forward in them. Add to foundations the varieties of common human development in different cultures and we can witness such misunderstandings and avoidances in the set-in-stone polemics described in a myriad of textbooks, in any daily newspaper, and in most of our inter-field and common discourse, e.g., the on-going cross-purposes of the United States, England, and parts of Europe with Middle-Eastern and Eastern religio-political climates.
Nevertheless, at this writing we find ourselves in a philosophical window. On its negative side, the present political climate combines with our ignorance about foundations to produce a kind schizophrenic-hypocritical psycho-drama. That is, for the moment we can all live in the decadence, but also the after-glow, of civil culture; isolated in our suburban, cul-de-sac ethics, or our tribal isolation; alone in our professional disciplines or religious groups, reading our papers from the podium at a conference; and all standing in the midst of institutions whose civic ground still depends on good written constitutions, but where an understanding embrace of their meaning has all but vanished. On the other side, we face a vibrant man with his finger in the air, speaking from the point of view of his God.
The psycho-drama is that, from our temporarily and seemingly safe places, and with few exceptions, we are drawn to, but still avoid communicating with those who differ from us, with those in other fields, and with those who work in the “real world” who are themselves isolated from the “other real world” where little or no civic culture exists. We are, then, not only separated from ourselves and from our own souls (whatever that might mean)—in the same way that the personal is currently separated from science and its true and objective knowledge--but we are also separated in many ways from an ongoing, enlightening, peaceful, and even loving dialogue with others.
On its positive side, most of us still strive for and love peace and civility; and sometimes we even achieve it. And though philosophical discourse is voluntarily and sometimes happily abandoned as irrelevant in many educational venues, it is not yet altogether denied; and perhaps it even flourishes, albeit as an “encamped” species of discourse.
However, such a momentary window of time, and seemingly safe place to live for the moment, is only that--a temporary respite. Such respite can be permanent as a dynamic state only if we can really go on living well in the afterglow, without addressing the deeper and larger issues that confront us all—and we cannot—and only if we can live forever within a vacuum, separated-off from others who share our world—and we cannot. The shock of global communications is upon us.
The window, however, can give us mental space to recognize, to re-consider, to develop our foundational concerns in ourselves and in our academies and teachers, and to look for ways to provide a sane philosophical underpinning for our intellectual-ethical-political-spiritual and common discourse.
Part of the current crisis, and the potential paradigm shift embedded within it, is related, first, to the unquestioned good effects of science of the last four-hundred years and, second, to the short-sightedness that such effects have visited upon the scientist’s imagination, hubris, and sense of wholeness and, subsequently, upon our commonsense thinking about science, and about ourselves in relationship to it, to the scientist, to ourselves and to others in the world.
If we took a picture of where Western thought is at present, we would see that, in some sense, we are momentarily “stalled:” At having rightly reached forward, and to having rightly objectified the world and ourselves in it at the service of our understanding. However, this right reflective-objectification has come at a great price. That is, again, we have wrongly come to view ourselves as somehow standing outside of such objectification, again, as if true and real objectivity means we must erase the personal—we have taken a voyeur’s view of things, as well as of ourselves and other persons, while at the same time we struggle against its implications on what, at a deeper more resonant level, we know is truly appropriate to human living.
We have still to bring the scientist and science back into the folds of human history from which science emerged, first, as a related field in context with other fields; and second, as a singularly emerged part of a “bigger-picture.” And we still need to be assured that we will not lose the critical insights about both data and method that science has brought us over the years. The bigger picture, however, is of a dynamic whole that is human history on the move, and that continues to reach out to what remain mysterious to us.
Speaking to the writ-large arena of cross-cultural communications, then, philosophy is involved in a massive movement that is a combination, first, of drawing on what is authentic that has come down to us in philosophical and other traditions; second, of developing correctives of derailments that are embedded in those traditions; and third, of developing, communicating, and passing on new knowledge--a paradigm shift, driven by a long-term philosophical crisis, involving not only concepts and doctrines, but also our deeply-set assumptions about ourselves and the way things are--and of course our emerging questions. Especially in the West, the shift involves, again, the question of knowledge itself, and includes the hope of forging a better-oriented, more unified, and dynamic view of our selves in the world, and in community with others.
Further, those who live in non-Western cultures are also suffering through their own kinds of crises as avenues of communication between themselves and the West increase—especially with the pluralism that is so essential to Western democratic cultures and their institutions. The introduction of vastly different ways of thinking to those in non-Western traditions continues to raise discomforting questions (which sometimes manifest as violence) against the single-minded sense of seriousness, certainty, and singular religio-political doctrine that still guide many non-Western traditions.
Of course, Western and non-Western movements of thought in history differ greatly from one another; and the conflicting foundational grounds within each of these movements cannot help but come into relation through trade and technological growth--growth that enables the ongoing dialogue and mass communications we find ourselves in at present (King, 2003c). Everyone seems ready for trade and technology, but not everyone is ready for the blast of other cultural changes that such movements bring along with them.
The nuances are great; however, in a general analysis diverse arenas of thought have much to gain from one another. Underneath our topical concerns, some of us are in need of differentiation, others are in need correction, and yet others are in need of putting things back together--well, or at least better. However, the underlying trajectories of thought in Eastern and Western minds are also entirely at cross-purposes and, if unmediated by cooler heads involved in reflective practice, are slated to do nothing but violence to one another. When we are not aware of these underlying differences, we tend to project our own views and assume the same ground in our correspondents as exists in our own. When such a naive disjunctive occurs, communications between peoples is not only difficult in the topical sense, but that difficulty goes “all the way down” to our basic differences in what is commonly called a world view. Instead of walking in a park in our communications with others, as we might think, we find ourselves dancing in a minefield.
Though topical conflicts always need our attention, conflicts at the foundational level are equal to if not more important to understand, and often are the root cause of great comedy as well as tragedy in human events as we work through them in history. Deeper still, however, are our fundaments. We have discovered, and can discover, this core of human being that everyone shares and that we are calling a trans-cultural base. Though knowing about what is most common to all will not solve all of our problems, it provides us with a new basis to understand those problems--in both foundations and in topical concerns--and how we ourselves may be contributing to their exacerbation, and to chart out and develop better communications between ourselves and others over the long term.
Contributing to the problem is that, in many of our educational institutions, rather than sorting out philosophical foundations early in our educational curricula, for many reasons we tend to only hint at or to altogether avoid such issues all throughout our children’s schooling. We do so, however, at the risk of corroding the foundations of our civil discourse in the world, now and in the not-too-distant future. For such issues cannot be brought forward in the condensed heat of a crisis, even with the best of collaborative efforts. Rather, such a dialogue is only effective if it has matured and emerged as a part of a long and comprehensive educational process at the background of those cultures and persons involved. And even then, no guarantee of a rich and dynamic peace is afforded anyone.
With regard to philosophical discourse now and in the past, however, much of what we could misunderstand, we did misunderstand; and the above avoidance in educational arenas of discourse has left us to only pass along in our communications the bifurcated foundations (lack of attunement) that is our philosophical and foundational misunderstanding. Such avoidance does not address, but nor does it hinder, the inheritance of either attuned or ill-tuned philosophical foundations. And the faulty foundations that follow avoidance have deepened, become calcified, and compounded the problems inherent in many crises and shifts of thought as we have moved forward in them. Add to foundations the varieties of common human development in different cultures and we can witness such misunderstandings and avoidances in the set-in-stone polemics described in a myriad of textbooks, in any daily newspaper, and in most of our inter-field and common discourse, e.g., the on-going cross-purposes of the United States, England, and parts of Europe with Middle-Eastern and Eastern religio-political climates.
Nevertheless, at this writing we find ourselves in a philosophical window. On its negative side, the present political climate combines with our ignorance about foundations to produce a kind schizophrenic-hypocritical psycho-drama. That is, for the moment we can all live in the decadence, but also the after-glow, of civil culture; isolated in our suburban, cul-de-sac ethics, or our tribal isolation; alone in our professional disciplines or religious groups, reading our papers from the podium at a conference; and all standing in the midst of institutions whose civic ground still depends on good written constitutions, but where an understanding embrace of their meaning has all but vanished. On the other side, we face a vibrant man with his finger in the air, speaking from the point of view of his God.
The psycho-drama is that, from our temporarily and seemingly safe places, and with few exceptions, we are drawn to, but still avoid communicating with those who differ from us, with those in other fields, and with those who work in the “real world” who are themselves isolated from the “other real world” where little or no civic culture exists. We are, then, not only separated from ourselves and from our own souls (whatever that might mean)—in the same way that the personal is currently separated from science and its true and objective knowledge--but we are also separated in many ways from an ongoing, enlightening, peaceful, and even loving dialogue with others.
On its positive side, most of us still strive for and love peace and civility; and sometimes we even achieve it. And though philosophical discourse is voluntarily and sometimes happily abandoned as irrelevant in many educational venues, it is not yet altogether denied; and perhaps it even flourishes, albeit as an “encamped” species of discourse.
However, such a momentary window of time, and seemingly safe place to live for the moment, is only that--a temporary respite. Such respite can be permanent as a dynamic state only if we can really go on living well in the afterglow, without addressing the deeper and larger issues that confront us all—and we cannot—and only if we can live forever within a vacuum, separated-off from others who share our world—and we cannot. The shock of global communications is upon us.
The window, however, can give us mental space to recognize, to re-consider, to develop our foundational concerns in ourselves and in our academies and teachers, and to look for ways to provide a sane philosophical underpinning for our intellectual-ethical-political-spiritual and common discourse.
Part of the current crisis, and the potential paradigm shift embedded within it, is related, first, to the unquestioned good effects of science of the last four-hundred years and, second, to the short-sightedness that such effects have visited upon the scientist’s imagination, hubris, and sense of wholeness and, subsequently, upon our commonsense thinking about science, and about ourselves in relationship to it, to the scientist, to ourselves and to others in the world.
If we took a picture of where Western thought is at present, we would see that, in some sense, we are momentarily “stalled:” At having rightly reached forward, and to having rightly objectified the world and ourselves in it at the service of our understanding. However, this right reflective-objectification has come at a great price. That is, again, we have wrongly come to view ourselves as somehow standing outside of such objectification, again, as if true and real objectivity means we must erase the personal—we have taken a voyeur’s view of things, as well as of ourselves and other persons, while at the same time we struggle against its implications on what, at a deeper more resonant level, we know is truly appropriate to human living.
We have still to bring the scientist and science back into the folds of human history from which science emerged, first, as a related field in context with other fields; and second, as a singularly emerged part of a “bigger-picture.” And we still need to be assured that we will not lose the critical insights about both data and method that science has brought us over the years. The bigger picture, however, is of a dynamic whole that is human history on the move, and that continues to reach out to what remain mysterious to us.
RESTRUCTURING The VIEW
Restructuring the View
Though this work has a thorough theoretical component, let us use the theory to help us examine and perhaps restructure the view. Let us expose the intimate relationship between, first, theory and theoretical philosophy and, second, your intimate and subjective-personal experience in your common discourse. The exposure and restructuring is made manifest through a thorough foundational review and a set of empirical-personal exercises, with the particular place and time that you find yourself in when you arrive at the chapters and exercises, either alone or in the company of others. This restructuring and relationship-finding is highly relevant, but also fraught with dangers, all of which we will explore within these pages and with your advantage in mind.
In his Method In Theology, Lonergan warns of these dangers while exploring the emergence of three strands of humanism in the development of human consciousness in history. First, Lonergan speaks of one strand as the embrace of being educated linguistically, and its relationship to becoming human; second, he speaks of a moral strand that emerged and came to rest “not on kinship, or noble blood, or common citizenship and laws, or even on education, but on the fact that another, particularly a sufferer, was a human being;” and he speaks of a third strand regarding the movement of literature that seeks to lead a differentiated theory out to new realms of meaning, but also to find a way to integrate theory with common experience and discourse, while maintaining appropriate and adequate distinctions (1972, pp. 97-98).
In this last strand, Lonergan distinguishes within a complex and differentiated culture—as you probably now live in--those who now live immersed in a theoretical world, but who have yet to develop in their own minds a clear distinction between theoretical discourse, on the one hand, and the common, personal, and intimate discourse we are involved in on a daily basis, on the other. A developed and restructured view can include the clarity that would regard this clear differentiation and right relation, and can follow with an equally clear integration.
In a general sense, then, many have differentiated their thinking and grown from commonsense into theoretical consciousness and, from having been immersed in a theoretical field, are able to discourse quite well in theoretical circles. However, those same many have yet to find a mature relationship between the two discourses: commonsense and theoretical (and other discourses as well). In concrete communications, neither a scientist nor a person of good commonsense can find a mature relationship within themselves, or their counterpart human beings and fields of discourse, if neither has clearly distinguished one field of discourse from the other, and forged a conscious relationship between fields, in their own minds:
A third strand came from the world of theory. For if creative thought in philosophy and science is too austere for general consumption, creative thinkers are usually rare. They have their brief day, only to be followed by the commentators, the teachers, the popularizers that illuminate, complete, transpose, simplify. So the worlds of theory and of common sense partly interpenetrate and partly merge. The results are ambivalent. It will happen that the exaggerations of philosophic error are abandoned, while the profundities of philosophic truth find a vehicle that compensates for the loss of the discredited myths. But it will also happen that theory fuses more with common nonsense than with common sense, to make the nonsense pretentious and, because it is common, dangerous and even disastrous. (1972, p. 98)
On the one hand, then, theory has its limitations, is not a panacea for human living, and can create an arrogant attitude on the part of some scientists—and that, I suggest, is where we are in many fields at the beginning of the 21st century. On the other hand, the misuse of theory or its “fusing” of even good theory with common non-sense can cause long-term and ingrained distortions--when theory is misunderstood and-or misapplied to concrete human living. From such errors comes the common saying: A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
So both scientists and persons of good common sense have some work to do. That is, scientists need to understand the substance and import of commonsense thought and procedures, while maintaining the clarity of their scientific thought and language in their fields of discourse. Also, all scientists emerge from and return to common living and its discourse and so, to have contempt for that living is to have contempt for oneself and for the “mother” of one’s tradition of thought.
On the other hand, persons of good commonsense need to understand the import of theory and of theoreticians (and for the theoretical mind-set) for present and future development and for its many concrete applications in the fields of commonsense discourse and living. We are hypocrites who love technology but also hate the theory-science that is the father of that technology. If the scientist or the person of good commonsense does not want to participate in the discourse of another field, then they at least need to be silent about that field and give it the respect it is due.
Further, human history is a build-up and continuous transformation of human thought applied to more and more complex situations that were also, in their turn, informed by a complex of human thought. In this way, again, we can be born into massive distortions as a part of the common discourse of our time without understanding a thing about those distortions.
And again, Lonergan refers to unauthentic traditions (1972). Those distortions and that unauthentic tradition commonly become familiar to us as a set of unquestioned norms; and as children and young people we tend to embrace what is common and normal to us, without asking how or why--commonsense must get on with living; and stopping to think in any serious way, indeed, seems to take away from that living. Without critical questioning of our traditions, provincialism rules the day, we project our ways out onto others, and our thought becomes calcified against different ways of being in the world.
The question is: How are we to know if such massive distortions are at work in our lives and, if they are, how to correct them if we remain only in the realm of our own commonsense discourse? And again, how are we to know how to communicate with those who are so different from us? How are we supposed to distinguish for ourselves what is merely a cultural habit and what is truly fundamental to human living? And so theoretical-philosophical analysis considers both kinds of discourse--common and theoretical--and, therefore, is something different from both.
Consider for a moment, then, your involvement with the present work, and this work in the context of larger movements of philosophical history. My own aim here is at least to illuminate, transpose, simplify and popularize the innovative, unique, and highly relevant philosophical contributions of a 20th century philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, as well as those of others’. Further, I aim to pluck your inherent potential to reflect and self-reflect; to raise and qualify the level of discourse in your own life; and to help bring philosophic dialogue, and perhaps some deeper goods, truths, and the self-corrections they might imply, to the common discourse around you. I have no control over this occurrence, and do not seek such control; however, I do hope that it occurs from within the self-directions of your own spirit.
Furthermore, you and your surrounding discourse rest in the context of other loosely defined groups with similar, sometimes overlapping, sometimes quite separate, arenas of discourse. All of these other groups have complex and unplanned intra-group dialogue. In this way, our potential is to set up the conditions for a widening circle of openness and awareness, and of implicit self-correction and self-edification--of our common sense errors that are, in fact, common non-sense; of our biases, distortions, half-truths, and downright lies, that affect and infect our roots, our directions, our vision and, ultimately, our future and that of those around us.
We cannot know if we have inherited such distortions unless and until we do some serious personal, cultural, and historical self-inspection. Hence, your commonsense getting-on-with-it, as good as it might be, will benefit from taking a backseat for awhile to your reflective thought, and to theory formation that just may chart a better course for qualified change in-for-and-from you.
Such qualified change is a long-term and ever-widening project—admittedly, but also hopefully. Essential conditions for its fruition include a singular focus on your personal development of your own reflective powers; of your own critical and theoretical consciousness; of your own understanding of the personal, intimate and now-remarkably clear context from which such consciousness emerges; and finally of your own willingness to engage in your own foundational self-critique over a long period of time, and from a remarkably clear beginning point.
Furthermore, your involvement with the project is personal, and intimately so. It is theoretical, and critically so. And it has emerged from a tradition that begs you to think-back on it, and to go forward anew from it—with your mind in mind. However, from a writ-large view, and at the same time, your involvement is de facto a creative movement—an instance of concrete self-transcendence--within the continuing history of common and philosophical thought. In this way, there is no cultural development without individual development occurring at its core—in each of us.
In our final chapters, we will develop the political and cultural implications of our present project further.
Though this work has a thorough theoretical component, let us use the theory to help us examine and perhaps restructure the view. Let us expose the intimate relationship between, first, theory and theoretical philosophy and, second, your intimate and subjective-personal experience in your common discourse. The exposure and restructuring is made manifest through a thorough foundational review and a set of empirical-personal exercises, with the particular place and time that you find yourself in when you arrive at the chapters and exercises, either alone or in the company of others. This restructuring and relationship-finding is highly relevant, but also fraught with dangers, all of which we will explore within these pages and with your advantage in mind.
In his Method In Theology, Lonergan warns of these dangers while exploring the emergence of three strands of humanism in the development of human consciousness in history. First, Lonergan speaks of one strand as the embrace of being educated linguistically, and its relationship to becoming human; second, he speaks of a moral strand that emerged and came to rest “not on kinship, or noble blood, or common citizenship and laws, or even on education, but on the fact that another, particularly a sufferer, was a human being;” and he speaks of a third strand regarding the movement of literature that seeks to lead a differentiated theory out to new realms of meaning, but also to find a way to integrate theory with common experience and discourse, while maintaining appropriate and adequate distinctions (1972, pp. 97-98).
In this last strand, Lonergan distinguishes within a complex and differentiated culture—as you probably now live in--those who now live immersed in a theoretical world, but who have yet to develop in their own minds a clear distinction between theoretical discourse, on the one hand, and the common, personal, and intimate discourse we are involved in on a daily basis, on the other. A developed and restructured view can include the clarity that would regard this clear differentiation and right relation, and can follow with an equally clear integration.
In a general sense, then, many have differentiated their thinking and grown from commonsense into theoretical consciousness and, from having been immersed in a theoretical field, are able to discourse quite well in theoretical circles. However, those same many have yet to find a mature relationship between the two discourses: commonsense and theoretical (and other discourses as well). In concrete communications, neither a scientist nor a person of good commonsense can find a mature relationship within themselves, or their counterpart human beings and fields of discourse, if neither has clearly distinguished one field of discourse from the other, and forged a conscious relationship between fields, in their own minds:
A third strand came from the world of theory. For if creative thought in philosophy and science is too austere for general consumption, creative thinkers are usually rare. They have their brief day, only to be followed by the commentators, the teachers, the popularizers that illuminate, complete, transpose, simplify. So the worlds of theory and of common sense partly interpenetrate and partly merge. The results are ambivalent. It will happen that the exaggerations of philosophic error are abandoned, while the profundities of philosophic truth find a vehicle that compensates for the loss of the discredited myths. But it will also happen that theory fuses more with common nonsense than with common sense, to make the nonsense pretentious and, because it is common, dangerous and even disastrous. (1972, p. 98)
On the one hand, then, theory has its limitations, is not a panacea for human living, and can create an arrogant attitude on the part of some scientists—and that, I suggest, is where we are in many fields at the beginning of the 21st century. On the other hand, the misuse of theory or its “fusing” of even good theory with common non-sense can cause long-term and ingrained distortions--when theory is misunderstood and-or misapplied to concrete human living. From such errors comes the common saying: A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
So both scientists and persons of good common sense have some work to do. That is, scientists need to understand the substance and import of commonsense thought and procedures, while maintaining the clarity of their scientific thought and language in their fields of discourse. Also, all scientists emerge from and return to common living and its discourse and so, to have contempt for that living is to have contempt for oneself and for the “mother” of one’s tradition of thought.
On the other hand, persons of good commonsense need to understand the import of theory and of theoreticians (and for the theoretical mind-set) for present and future development and for its many concrete applications in the fields of commonsense discourse and living. We are hypocrites who love technology but also hate the theory-science that is the father of that technology. If the scientist or the person of good commonsense does not want to participate in the discourse of another field, then they at least need to be silent about that field and give it the respect it is due.
Further, human history is a build-up and continuous transformation of human thought applied to more and more complex situations that were also, in their turn, informed by a complex of human thought. In this way, again, we can be born into massive distortions as a part of the common discourse of our time without understanding a thing about those distortions.
And again, Lonergan refers to unauthentic traditions (1972). Those distortions and that unauthentic tradition commonly become familiar to us as a set of unquestioned norms; and as children and young people we tend to embrace what is common and normal to us, without asking how or why--commonsense must get on with living; and stopping to think in any serious way, indeed, seems to take away from that living. Without critical questioning of our traditions, provincialism rules the day, we project our ways out onto others, and our thought becomes calcified against different ways of being in the world.
The question is: How are we to know if such massive distortions are at work in our lives and, if they are, how to correct them if we remain only in the realm of our own commonsense discourse? And again, how are we to know how to communicate with those who are so different from us? How are we supposed to distinguish for ourselves what is merely a cultural habit and what is truly fundamental to human living? And so theoretical-philosophical analysis considers both kinds of discourse--common and theoretical--and, therefore, is something different from both.
Consider for a moment, then, your involvement with the present work, and this work in the context of larger movements of philosophical history. My own aim here is at least to illuminate, transpose, simplify and popularize the innovative, unique, and highly relevant philosophical contributions of a 20th century philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, as well as those of others’. Further, I aim to pluck your inherent potential to reflect and self-reflect; to raise and qualify the level of discourse in your own life; and to help bring philosophic dialogue, and perhaps some deeper goods, truths, and the self-corrections they might imply, to the common discourse around you. I have no control over this occurrence, and do not seek such control; however, I do hope that it occurs from within the self-directions of your own spirit.
Furthermore, you and your surrounding discourse rest in the context of other loosely defined groups with similar, sometimes overlapping, sometimes quite separate, arenas of discourse. All of these other groups have complex and unplanned intra-group dialogue. In this way, our potential is to set up the conditions for a widening circle of openness and awareness, and of implicit self-correction and self-edification--of our common sense errors that are, in fact, common non-sense; of our biases, distortions, half-truths, and downright lies, that affect and infect our roots, our directions, our vision and, ultimately, our future and that of those around us.
We cannot know if we have inherited such distortions unless and until we do some serious personal, cultural, and historical self-inspection. Hence, your commonsense getting-on-with-it, as good as it might be, will benefit from taking a backseat for awhile to your reflective thought, and to theory formation that just may chart a better course for qualified change in-for-and-from you.
Such qualified change is a long-term and ever-widening project—admittedly, but also hopefully. Essential conditions for its fruition include a singular focus on your personal development of your own reflective powers; of your own critical and theoretical consciousness; of your own understanding of the personal, intimate and now-remarkably clear context from which such consciousness emerges; and finally of your own willingness to engage in your own foundational self-critique over a long period of time, and from a remarkably clear beginning point.
Furthermore, your involvement with the project is personal, and intimately so. It is theoretical, and critically so. And it has emerged from a tradition that begs you to think-back on it, and to go forward anew from it—with your mind in mind. However, from a writ-large view, and at the same time, your involvement is de facto a creative movement—an instance of concrete self-transcendence--within the continuing history of common and philosophical thought. In this way, there is no cultural development without individual development occurring at its core—in each of us.
In our final chapters, we will develop the political and cultural implications of our present project further.
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