(11) Your Critical Capacities

Your Critical Capacities

Again, my purpose is also to encourage your own self-discovery and the self-appreciation-knowledge process--without losing your critical-objective judgment along the way. In fact, a development of your critical-objective-judgment capacities is at the center of this entire project and is what makes the present work, and transcendental method, more than just another subjective, psychological reflection and adventure.

Furthermore, if you begin by belief and a faith that the present work can raise some questions and steer you towards some deeply felt insights, that beginning is only legitimate if you do so for your own sake, and for the qualification of your own being in history. In other words, your initial belief and faith are stillborn without those insights occurring in you, and without your letting go of the writer, the book, the theory, or the doctrine, at some point.

Also, nowhere do I ask for your uncritical belief, on the one hand, or your uncritical skepticism, on the other. With our theories in hand, I point to specified aspects of your own and others’ mind and its regular operations, as well as to spoken or written language and text in any field and culture, as continually available sources of data-for-verification.

I seek to aid you to both verify a well-defined cognitional and knowledge theory (transcendental method-as-theory) and to discover something intimately personal and highly valuable about your own internal order of thought (transcendental method--as how your mind is actually structured and how it actually operates).

With the theoretical-philosopher Lonergan, we will call your internal order of thought your interior life, or interiority; we will call your method of mind transcendental method or general empirical method, and we will call your new and full self-knowledge self-appropriation-affirmation (1972).

Bring your critical capacities with you, and don't leave this text without them.