(13) Mining the Purposes of Philosophy

Mining the Purposes of Philosophy Before We Get Started

The process herein holds the potential to assist you in your own personal project of self-understanding and self-correction, and to perhaps develop for yourself a focused 20-20 philosophical lens. Such correction, in turn, can also serve as a basis for healing the various schisms between the diverse fields of study where, at present, absolutist, positivistic, post-positivistic, relativistic, and the more interpretive and emergent notions of knowledge remain in conflict. Lonergan speaks to this pervasive conflict in his Method in Theology:

Now the emergence of the autonomous sciences has repercussions on philosophy. Since the sciences between them undertake the explanation of all sensible data, one may conclude with the positivists that the function of philosophy is to announce that philosophy has nothing to say. Since philosophy has no theoretic function, one may conclude with the linguistic analysts that the function of philosophy is to work out a hermeneutics for the clarification of the local variety of everyday language. But there remains the possibility—and it is our option—that philosophy is neither a theory in the manner of science nor a somewhat technical form of common sense, nor even a reversal to Presocratic wisdom. Philosophy finds its proper data in intentional consciousness. Its primary function is to promote the self-appropriation that cuts to the root of philosophic differences and incomprehensions. It has further, secondary functions in distinguishing, relating, grounding the several realms of meaning and, no less, in grounding the methods of the sciences and so promoting their unification. (1972, pp. 94-95)

Philosophy’s purpose, then, is to provide for a kind of pervasive attunement of person and field. As empirical, that attunement begins with an analysis of the actual interior functions of individual persons, and with our increasing awareness of them (personally). From this self-aware center, attunement expands to include knowledge--of our inner selves, of ourselves as knowers, and of knowledge fields. Further, attunement can expand to include movements of history and culture and, ultimately to regard with openness the mystery that is yet-unknown to us. In brief, we have to know knowledge, and ourselves as knowers, as intrinsic to the world from which many, especially in the West, have been philosophically divorced for some time.

Further, a lens is a metaphor for the interface of human questioning and understanding what there is to understand. In the present epoch, then, and in today’s philosophical milieu, philosophy’s function is to provide a corrective lens, or a set of operative and reflective assumptions, that happen to be attuned--with one another and with our own selves, with our notions of the real, with others in human history, and with the beyond that is still the mystery of human existence. This rather comprehensive project is nothing new for philosophy; however, in today’s world, such a provision must first invite readers and listeners to scrutinize the heretofore un-scrutinized, and to self-correct the uncorrected if we find it worthwhile to do so--to spend the effort to rework and realign our assumptions about ourselves and about human knowledge with what human knowledge actually is, does, and has done for centuries.

Philosophy’s function at present, then, is to show the empirical way--to locate and point to the data of the human mind, to take you there, and to show how to enter that realm of attuned meaning, again, in critical fashion.

If we are to start empirically, however, the personal component to this pointing-to is obvious; for your mind—the datum—is essentially yours and personal; and so we begin in the subject who is You. Further, part of that function is to provide objective and universal theory to the unvarying pattern in actual cognitional structure and its method of operations—transcendental method (1958 & 1972). If so, then central to that function will be to show with incisive clarity the attuned relationship between, on the one hand, the personal and subjective mind and, on the other hand, universal, verifiable theory; and so to set up the conditions for a kind of personal but also critical appropriation of the self to occur—to become aware of and to get to know in critical fashion the fundamental structures of your own mind in terms of a general theory of mind. To that purpose the pedagogy in the present work is aimed.

Further, we can bring such attunement to the fields of study that have continued to go forward for years in the midst of fragmented discourse and in an equally fragmented world, especially in the West—if “the West” still has any meaning as distinct from other forms of thought and culture (and I think it does). In this way, philosophy has a history of standing with each foot on two drifting ice floes. Without an empirical corrective, we have only to choose which ice floe to stand on. Either way, we cannot unify the ice.

Philosophy’s corrective, to attune the various knowledge fields from an empirical point of view, emerges from the empirical verification process in the individual person, of the person and, thus, of the subject-personal. From here, we can take up philosophy’s functions and apply them to the various autonomous and dynamic fields of knowledge, and ultimately to education, culture, and history writ-large.

Philosophy’s function, then, includes providing the knowledge fields with a thoroughgoing and empirically based theory of knowledge and cognitional theory (transcendental method) from which to build. Such theories, in fact, take up the data of the scientist, the fields of the sciences, and scientists’ and fields’ continual openness to the unknown. In this way, transcendental method does not merely “float” out there in always-speculative theory-land. Rather, to do their job of attunement, such theories must also be verified. And such verification, because it is empirical and of the personal, must begin there—in the laboratory that is You.

Thus, and at the core of philosophical functions, transcendental method-the-theory describes and explains how our personal cognition actually works when it is working well, and it invites you to verify the theory in and with your own mind; how a fact is a fact; how knowledge-is-knowledge when, in fact, we discover the true meaning of something that is well-defined and that works, or why not; and further, how we attain that knowledge and truth; and what such attainment means in terms of the questions we ask and keep on asking, and our failures and mistakes. In fact, and though pragmatism is an avoidance of the problem of knowledge, true knowledge in human affairs, and how we go about finding it, is quite pragmatic--meaning: it works.

Thus, the attuning purpose of philosophy begins empirically in the individual person where verification occurs, and in an attuned fashion relates “out” to fields of inquiry and culture, ultimately to the world and its history and, empirically, from our writ-small selves within the writ-large world. With such discovery and its verifying applications, first, we find the generating source of all current knowledge and its various expressions; second, we find a critical reference for what is not knowledge; third, we find the complementary source of all evolving and emergent knowledge and its various expressions, in the light of which, fourth, we continue to re-evaluate and transform our current knowledge and its various expressions in finer and better fashion.

As attuned, professions and fields are involved in the self-corrective process that now knows and embraces its own process, as well as the mysterious unknown that the process continues to regard. Further, the professions and fields still aim at continually increasing knowledge, at higher forms of excellence, and at subsequent dynamic integrative movements. With such verified, empirical, and personal knowledge at the core of that movement, we also come to know the broad outlines of any future knowledge we may attain.


Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding. (Lonergan, 1958, p. xxviii; 2000, p. 22)


The potential unity of our rightly-diverse professions and knowledge fields rests in an adequate cognitional theory and theory of knowledge, fully and critically understood and self-verified by scientists, scholars, teachers, and professionals within rightly distinct, empirically based, and continually emerging fields. A full understanding will include the products of an ongoing dialogue regarding implications of such a set of theories.

On the other hand, common discourse among wise non-scientists (post-scientific revolution) always “receives” the flow of information and philosophical influence from the sciences and scholarly fields, though that influence and information often lose some or most of their definition and technical clarity. And for philosophy, much of the information itself has been incomplete or corrupted. Of course, the formal field of education can allay such loss in the future with an adequate integration of adequate theory and of critical self-knowledge into curriculum development.

Further, the personal knowledge and self-identification process named self-appropriation moves us beyond mere belief, arbitrariness, conceptualism, “floating abstractions,” logical “necessity,” or language games, to one’s own awareness and self-verified knowledge of the continually available data of our own minds in our own history of thought. From this foundational knowledge-core all fieldwork, study, and culture can be approached, understood and critiqued. Hence, Lonergan names conscious structure and its activities: “The rock” (1972, p. 19-20).