(2) An Innovative Turn: Transcendental Method

An Innovative Turn: Transcendental Method

Transcendental method is another name for general empirical method, and both refer to the actual activities of the human mind, yours and mine included. I have found this theory, with its emphasis on self-reflection, self-verification, personal self-knowledge, and identity to be innovative, unique, remarkably clear, and quite teachable. Again, included in transcendental method are a cognitional theory and a working theory of knowledge. And both are drawn from and applied to the data under consideration: the person in a history of persons or, more specifically, you and everyone else.

Of course, cognitional theories and theories of knowledge, are normal fare for any education or philosophy course at the university, or for ongoing professional development for many professions, e.g., teaching.

However, unlike in many other venues, the well-defined set of theories that is transcendental method calls us to more than “floating” explorations of unsubstantiated data. It also clarifies scientific method itself by calling us to pay attention to the data at both ends of the scientific process.

That is, transcendental method calls us to consciously employ the data of the mind for general analysis and verification under scientific circumstances, while objectifying that data for analysis and verification, and for fields of concrete application. In this way, you will connect the theory with, and verify it in, your and everyone’s everyday personal experience, using the general tenets of scientific method to guide you. Further, you will be able to use the theory-verification-analysis to edify and to direct your own thinking.

Further, the full application of the theory will point you towards a clear recognition of the learning and self-correcting operations within you. Within those operations, and using the horizon of empirical method developed in our early chapters, you will locate a structure and several operations within yourself, including the law of sufficient reason (1958, p. 322 & 2000, p. 346) that (you may recognize) is waiting to deploy in you as you read this text. For are you not wondering right now if what I am saying is true; and are you not waiting for enough evidence to make that judgment, either yes or no? The law of sufficient reason, then, refers to your having “enough evidence” to make such a judgment about this or any particular meaning-frame. And the more that law is refined in you, the more wise you become.

Moreover, in the case of applying transcendental method as a cognitional theory to a mind as data that happens to be your mind, you will invoke the personal and intimate. However, you will do so without betraying the scientific procedures we employ in our verification procedures. That is, scientific procedures can remain in place and can go forward in complementary unison with your personal self-knowledge and conscious identity with it. Thus, and though personal identity is not necessary for verification of the theory to occur using human minds, still, the process affords a new kind of self-presencing awareness that can only be described as an inner illumination by those who undergo such a full understanding, self-knowledge, and identity. With Lonergan, we refer to this fuller self-knowledge as self-appropriation and self-affirmation (1972).

Also, the set of theories we use here is unique to theoretical philosophy precisely because of its ability to include the personal, subjective, and the intimate as part of its methodology while remaining completely critical, and because of its further invitation to your inner illumination. Again, the conscious application of transcendental method is accomplished without abandoning, but by fully explaining, the experimental and the empirical-critical-objective edge that comes with being a scientist and-or a person of good and wise commonsense.

Further, the set of theories and their verification gives the basis for a full critique of relativism. Relativism in its many sophisticated forms is corrected with a theory of knowledge that matches with theoretical precision the long-standing operations of the self-corrective process common to all human beings, as well as the well-traveled procedures of both common wisdom and statistical and classical scientific fields that continue to produce verifiable discoveries of every stripe.

Such a set of theories, if tried and true, also is extremely relevant to educational theory, and to all teacher-student relations in the classroom. For transcendental method captures the very engine of student motivation—human awareness-to-wonder and its issue, the articulate question. And a critique of relativism and Absolutism puts education and knowledge back on the firm ground that our history of learning and our prima fascia constant discovery call for.

Furthermore, and from a broader view, transcendental method (as your mind in operation, and not-yet as a theory) is trans-cultural because it is the already-operating structure and dynamism of all human thought from which all cultures emerge. Thus, when you personally discover the broad outlines of the method operating in your own mind, that discovery will also constitute a personal discovery of the trans-cultural base that you share with everyone now and throughout human history. Chapters herewith relate this trans-cultural base to the meaning of history and language.

The theories, their surrounding literature, and their regard for a commitment to personal inner transformation, then, provide an empirical and critically verifiable trans-cultural base that is highly relevant to all foundational and methodological work in all other fields of study (1958, 2000, Chap. XIV; 1972, pp. 282-3). Lonergan makes this unique and innovative move in his Insight, A Study of Human Understanding (1958 & 2000), his Method In Theology (1972), and his other essays, books, and collected works referred to herein.

On the other hand, with some preliminary meaning development (your own foundational review), the present work affords a pedagogical method to help you understand the essential elements of what Lonergan discovered and gave theory to, transcendental method, and to connect that theory with your own experience in the intimate domain of your own personal consciousness, self-verification and self-appropriation.

Pedagogical method, then, is related to, but differs from transcendental method, the trans-cultural base, and the process of self-appropriation. And all four differ from the theories of such methods, bases, and processes--in the same way that actually falling down a cliff differs from talking about it later, should you survive the fall.

The distinction between your experiencing and your talking about the experience is important to keep in mind throughout this study, especially for those whose human studies emphasize statistics or conceptual expression over both individual and universal experience of consciousness and self.

Further, transcendental method is a technical name for something we all already experience--it refers to the actual method we all use to think, and the one you are using to read these words. As experience, TM is not at all unique. However, TM is discoverable and amenable to theoretical formulation—we can find it through paying attention to the regular manifestation of its own operations. We can find this structure within us through using the structure in unison with the use of an adequate theory.

On the other hand, transcendental method, adequately understood and expressed in technical terms in a theory, is again innovative and unique to the history of philosophy as, this time, it hits the mark of the actual data, and as, this time, it follows by providing-expecting nothing less than a continual verification of the theory in the continually given data—your own mind and its operations. TM is also refined and unique to developments in cognitional theory within philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and the other social sciences, and the more integrative field of education.

Such a discovery with its demand for personal self-discovery, then, has a creative element embedded within it. In this case, the theory is a creative discovery about the very process of creative discovery--in you—and calls for your becoming aware of the core that is already your illuminating awareness.

However, neither the uniqueness of the performance of self-appropriation, nor the theory of mind and of that mind's performance, is a clear-cut affair for most who initiate an interest in the process. That is, though transcendental method-as-theory is relatively new, our questions about our selves and our knowledge are centuries-old. Those questions have been followed by several bodies of thought and literature, some of which are amenable and some conflicting. Right or wrong, such thought has already settled in the assumptions that inform today’s thought and dialogue. Transcendental method, its verification, and the performance of self-appropriation will resonate well with some of your present thinking. However, it will also conflict with many extant theories and practices that have emerged from a long history of thought and that have settled in some commonly held assumptions. In philosophical studies, then, our first reactions are not necessarily our best ones.

Furthermore, transcendental method as theory, with its call for verification through personal experimentation, is a qualified culmination of that centuries-old process that now takes scientific method into its fold as both example and as an essential part of its method. TM-the-theory is innovative precisely because it opens us up to critical review of newly-refined aspects of our conscious order. On the other hand, because of a prior set of assumptions, many think scientific method, in principle, cannot be applied to the mind, or to what apparently cannot be seen.

Again, if readers are preconditioned to think that we cannot “go there” critically in the first place, then such an innovation will be already “dead in the water,” and will have difficulty gaining a sense of legitimacy and “catching on.” But the best innovations often challenge our preconditioned assumptions; and I address the question of verification of the unseen in our early chapters. So you may have to look past your initial response to the material to get to the real insights the present work just might afford for you.

Also, from the viewpoint of mind-discovering-mind in history, self-appropriation is another movement forward in the process of differentiation, and of revolutions in knowledge—a new aspect of knowledge of the know-able that, as it turns out, unifies the knower with the known as an empirical procedure. The irony is that the knowledge is of something that, as operative, is not at all new--as it is about, fail as it might, the self-corrective process we already experience, and have for centuries. In this sense, such self discovery can seem rather ho-hum and innocuous.

From the point of view of coming to a new awareness, however, transcendental method and self-appropriation are unique, new and entirely innovative. Again, this is especially so for those who have inherited, shall we say, a questionable philosophical tradition and its accompanying set of assumptions. For the innovation, if understood concretely, throws that tradition and those assumptions into a radical transformative crisis.

Moreover, if you rely on or have respect for scientific method, you will understand how important technical language is to science’s analysis, verification, and applications projects.

Also, because of the innovative dimension of transcendental method, we will need to maintain some protective regard for the technical-conceptual expression that the writer of the theory gives it—at least until such distinctions show up in equivalent metaphorical form in our common language and in our relevant educational materials. Though the learning process has been around for a long time, and though Lonergan is no guru and TM no fad or cure-all, the technical expressions we use here are essential to the process of self-appropriation that employs both the method and those terms, at least for the moment.

Thus, to maintain the newly-refined meaning, we need Lonergan’s and others’ theories and technical terms, or at least we need a set of theories that maintains similar critical fidelity to its prime reference point—your mind and its method. Or at least we need a similarly clear expression of human cognitional procedures that includes a regard for the interior life and a call to experiment and self-verification from the point of view of theoretical refinement. Also, we need such maintenance of newly-refined meaning to actually accomplish the level and quality of self-knowledge that the technical terminology, self-appropriation-affirmation, refers to and, in some sense, embodies.

Further, such knowledge needs a working theory of knowledge to wrench itself from our inherited, assumed, and wrong-headed break between person (as biased subject) and objective reality, and to make way for our self-knowledge to mean something more than merely a floating excursion into self-indulgent fantasy.

Moreover, precisely because of the critical aspects of knowledge applied to the critical aspects of the knowing process, no one can experience self-appropriation without going through a fairly well-defined, self-reflective process. As such, the theories embodied in transcendental method included herein are entirely adequate to the task of self-to-theory-to-self explanation that aims at initiating the illuminating insights of self-identity. That is, the data are the structure and operations of your mind; this set of theories matches the data and can be verified as such; and the pedagogy herein leads you to experimentation and critical verification of the theory in your own minded operations, and up to the door of what Lonergan means by self-appropriation.

That being said, neither Lonergan nor I claim a lock on the many nuances of human cognition, on good theory, or on their technical expressions. On the contrary, Lonergan invites subsequent theoretical-conceptual developments that meet with experiment and critically verified elements in the general “framework for creativity” that he discovered and gave theory to (1958; 2000; 1972). Thus, though the theory and its call to self-verification are unique and innovative, neither marks an end to comprehensive theory or to our developments in self-knowledge. Human consciousness remains a great and deepening mystery to us.

Similarly, the pedagogical method developed herein is towards your clearly understanding transcendental method-the-theory, towards your clearly understanding how TM relates to your own mind, and towards your clearly understanding what you are doing when you are aware, questioning, having insights, and coming to know. I offer a relatively abbreviated but methodically clear reference to Lonergan’s theory of knowledge; to his cognitional theory, and to transcendental method; and to the trans-cultural base as reference to the actual method of conscious activities that underpin all cultures.

With Lonergan and others, I also issue a call to contemplation and to self-knowledge as elements of your increasing wisdom. And with Lonergan and others, I offer transcendental method and the trans-cultural base as a theory of conscious and field activities, and self-appropriation as a technical term referring to a culminating epochal moment in an age-old philosophical process that unites the knower with the known in empirical fashion. Further, I offer a pedagogical method towards the process of self-appropriation as an innovative, unique, and intimate experience in your own self-knowledge and self-appreciation. Transcendental method as theory is nothing less than the mapping out of the human spirit that lives in us all.

Again, I point you towards Lonergan’s and others’ comprehensive work throughout the text. Also, others have offered “exercises” drawn from Lonergan’s work (Dunne, 1991, and others). As such, mine is not a unique project. However, my project is unique in its development and expression of an exact pedagogical method for discovering the exact outlines of transcendental method in your own experience.

The present work is also unique in its applicability to educational curriculum development and assessments in a secular and-or religious educational setting. The exercises may also be easily adapted to and incorporated into high school or earlier grades, as well as in college-university courses in philosophy, education, foundations, cognitional theory, or related introduction-to and-or foundational coursework.

Discovery of and conscious identity with transcendental method reached through an adequate (critical) pedagogical method bring with it a new movement of foundational review, of newly forged differentiations-of-mind, and of new sets of standards and horizons from which to approach any further inquiry and, more comprehensively, your life and your students’ lives. Though, again, these new movements will remain potential following the insights you glean from your philosophical journey with other texts and with the present work.