(24) Cutting the Gordian Knot & The Caveat

Cutting the Gordian Knot--Or a Good Beginning

You would not expect a complete overhaul of your car from merely driving it to the shop. On the other hand, driving your car to the shop is a key connection to having it overhauled. For the present project, “the shop” materializes whenever you step back and clear some mental space for thinking about your own thought. This text is like a technical manual for that thinking process. The substance of this book, then, does not live unconnected with your actual living and thinking, but serves as a reflective tool for the self-corrective process that you are already involved in.

Further, the work emerged from a larger and more comprehensive context of insights and changes-of-horizon that are available to you in your own philosophical journey. Driving your car to the shop is good; however, in the case of thinking, understanding how it works and overhauling it yourself is the only way. Though teachers, midwives, mentors and texts certainly can guide and contribute to the analysis, the substance of self-correction can only be done by you.

Car and shop metaphors aside, I draw directly from Lonergan’s and others’ theoretical work, and develop a pedagogical method for the theories’ application-verification, and for your movement towards self-appropriation. You will find in this work, then, a series of chapters devoted to your own foundational review; a development of theory and of transcendental method-the-theory; and a highly systematic set of exercises for your direct and relatively quick identification and verification of the interior structure and its activities residing in you and in all human beings.

Further, our main philosopher committed himself to a life of thought and teaching. Through that life, he discovered the structure and pattern of the mind’s procedures and developed it into a clear theoretical form; he took stock of how philosophical misunderstandings manifested in history; and he developed a critical philosophy to speak clearly to those misunderstandings. Others who learned from Lonergan have added nuance to the original theoretical formulations. On the other hand, developing pedagogical method, and learning some of what Lonergan and others have developed, requires neither Lonergan’s genius nor his effort, though effort is required. Moreover, to learn what he learned, we can begin our own self-discovery in the midst of studying his. As such, and though our struggle may be difficult, it will not be as long or as arduous as Lonergan’s was.

As an example of gathering the genius of others, English-speaking children can recite in rhyme the 26 letters it took creative geniuses to develop from the sounds and patterns of human dialogue. We then make those letters and sounds into a part of our own understanding and language, and they become spontaneous to and qualify greatly our ongoing communications. Similarly, we can understand from a pioneer-genius theoretical-philosopher the basic order of intelligence that he discovered and put to theory in his long and difficult journey. Thus we can “stand on his shoulders,” recover, and develop a new avenue of philosophical thought for ourselves.


The Caveat

Indeed, others have develop different pedagogies about what Lonergan means by self-appropriation for audiences that his writings do not reach. [9] In any case, because of his genius and effort, we need not re-create the wheel, so to speak, of developing an ever-new cognitional theory or theory of knowledge.



The caveat to providing a relatively brief pedagogy, however, is this:


It is only through the long and confused twilight of philosophic initiation that one can find one’s way into interiority and achieve through self-appropriation a basis, a foundation, that is distinct from common sense and theory, that acknowledges their disparateness, that accounts for both and critically grounds them both. (Lonergan, 1972, p. 85)


Many will understand the promise of the present work, but may want quick results. I understand this and remember well the pressing desire to get through it, and to get on with my education. Also, as a teacher, I recognize your high regard for immediate relevancy to your own life—hence, the promise of discovering the intimate ground of critical thought in your own self. I applaud that regard and want to exploit it. Thus, the exercises herein do indeed offer an intimately related-to-you, experiential relevance in a relatively brief reading.

Here’s the “however”: Especially if you are new to philosophical thought, your development of a habit of self-reflection and your engagement with further philosophic and spiritual study is dependent on you. It is dependent on your openness and continued expectation of something much more meaningful than you may have experienced up to this point in your life. Further, your full understanding of the import of the present study will depend on your development of such habits and engagements long after your engagement with this work. Thus, making the key connection so easily accomplished in the present work is of no purpose without your further commitment to your own further differentiation of mind, foundational inquiry, and contemplative habits.

Furthermore, the vast meaning that comes from such a commitment cannot be claimed once-and-for-all from having undergone the present work. If this work focuses on the flower of Lonergan’s discovery and contribution, and attempts to pass that flower on to you, its message is also this: I expect of you, and you are called to expect of yourself, to continue tilling and tending your own garden, to unearth and to grow the insights that are potent to that ongoing process. Lonergan speaks to scientists about his and others’ “apprenticeship” with the process:


Such speech . . . is found clear and accurate and explanatory only by those that have done their apprenticeship. It is not enough to have acquired common sense and to speak ordinary language. One has also to be familiar with theory and with technical language. One has to examine mathematics, and discover what is happening when one is learning it and, again, what was happening as it was being developed. From reflecting on mathematics one has to go on to reflecting on natural sciences, discern its procedures, the relations between successive steps, the diversity and relatedness of classical and statistical methods, the sort of world such methods would reveal—all the while attending not merely to scientific objects but also attending, as well as one can, to the conscious operations by which one intends the objects. From the precision of mathematical understanding and thought and from the ongoing, cumulative advance of natural science, one has to turn to the procedures of common sense, grasp how it differs from mathematics and natural science, discern its proper procedures, the range of its relevance, the permanent risk it runs of merging with common nonsense. To say it all with the greatest brevity: one has not only to read Insight, but also to discover oneself in oneself. (Lonergan, 1972, p. 260)


I do not want to spoil such an apprenticeship by pretending that you can “cut the Gordian Knot” in your educative and philosophical journey. However, in the present work I am moving a key connection to self-discovery around to the front of the journey. I do so for the express purpose of forging an intimate and solid relationship that will provide the ground for your critical questions to emerge and for shedding light on the fuller meaning and purpose of that journey. Such light-shedding is in the context of post-modern philosophical distortions that you and many other readers have most probably inherited. However, in my view, even a merely psychological appropriation of transcendental method is a good beginning.

My point is that, after your initial foundational review in the early chapters, and after success with the exercises, substantial change will take a long time, and much work will need to be done to make the insights solid. Further, an ill-formed and long-standing philosophical background, common to most if not all in the West, will be difficult to unseat, even if you are completely open to such self-inspection and change. Though important to unseat, such ill-formation is best “written off as an error incidental to an age of transition” (Lonergan, 1958, p. 298; & 2000, p. 323).

Thus if the relative brevity of the present work seems problematic to some who have experienced the long apprenticeship of the journey, I suggest the problem is not in the brevity or in the writing, but perhaps in the less philosophical reader’s expectations of it. That is, if the person new to philosophy understands the caveat correctly, then our focus, our early brevity, and our personal related-to-your-experience dimension of the exercises, will carry the potential to add greatly to that educative and life-changing journey, should you take it on, or should you already be involved in such a journey.

In this way, the exercises are inadequate or dangerous only if you think you could or should end with them; if you are making a game out of your life; or if you are afraid of the implications of the procedures that will necessarily drive deep into the heart of your own philosophical inheritance.

However, if we can avoid these oversights, the specialized focus and relative brevity of the exercises:


1. help to development your reflective and self-reflective practices, as well as your theoretical consciousness, and show both to be essential and legitimate to your education in your present and future time;

2. reveal the specifics of how to methodically incorporate such practices into education and common discourse in clear language without abandoning critical judgment, and without de-mystifying the creative process or precluding the import of a long-term commitment to self-reflection;

3. help others to “catch” and understand their own desire to know and to examine the import of developing self-reflective habits;

4. help introduce education, theory and philosophy to common discourse as a personal, good and pleasant, even delightful, enterprise; and

5. set up the conditions for, though not the necessity of, your continued journey of self-discovery by uncovering the ordered dimension of what you already experience, but are not yet critically aware of--an endlessly fascinating and living centerpiece of your own spirit.



Further, some have weathered through the experience of having thoroughly committed to one’s own thought—to being crucially aware of questions when they raise-up, and of having insights when they emerge in your thought. Like riding a bike, having a baby, or teaching a class, such experience must be lived to be truly known and “owned.” Perhaps you have rarely or never engaged in long periods of study, and experienced yourself changing and noticing new things in your life in terms of that study--things that were always there, but that you never noticed.

If so, even a thorough reading of this book will fail to put you into the experience that many others have experienced while living in the midst of such a journey. Insights are cumulative, exponential, organic and qualitative; massive changes of horizon and true conversions in many venues of thought are potential in us all; and our minds and spirits are developmental as we move through what our history presents us with and what we present ourselves with, and can come to notice, in that history.

Thus, just as an acorn, with one watering, cannot jump from being a seed to being a fully-branched and balanced oak tree, neither can a mind, with one book or one set of exercises, jump from a relatively undifferentiated and homogeneous unity to being a well-differentiated and critically self-aware, mature and dynamic unity. Furthermore, we cannot integrate well what we have not yet well-distinguished. Lonergan speaks to such movements in terms of the integration of insights:


. . . Higher integration is on the move, for growth is not merely an increase in bulk but also an increase in differentiation . . . The first principle is that a developing integration moves from the generic to the specific. The second is that integration cannot precede the unfolding of its underlying manifold, just as the accumulation of insights follows the successive presentations of relevant data, so psychic integration has to follow the states of development . . . .
(1958, pp. 454-57; & 2000, p 480)


Similarly, when learning mathematics, we cannot understand later functions until we have distinguished, related, and mastered the earlier ones. As such, committing to a brief foundational review and going through the exercises successfully will not give you the distinctions that are, in fact, available to you through further thought and study.

However, an intellectual faith in the beginning will put us rightly--and rightfully—with mathematics, or with any new learning, either merely informational or wholly transformational. Without such faith in your own learning, no learning can be had. We should expect to learn things, then, and to cross Rubicon-Rivers in our thoughts that, at present, we have no awareness of.

Further, for teachers, our procedures can secure a personal motivation in many that might otherwise be diverted by more fun or seemingly less-esoteric activities; or fall to current and common biases that exist in every academic arena and culture. For example, through receiving an inadequate education for many reasons, many students entering high school or college classrooms are already divorced from the personal yet universal elements of their own movement of education. Our students are often “disconnected” and “isolated” from “school.”

We often fail to identify with or embrace the import, even the fun, of the emergence of our own questions, our insights, and our inner dialogue as key to our own selves and the intimate nature of our education. Or, students’ dialogue often seeks its own lowest common denominator-interest outside of the institution of education. Further, students can already harbor contemptuous biases against theory, philosophy, and anything else going by the name education—biases that have been passed down to them uncorrected by parents and teachers and in the common culture. And, finally, students can often have no sense of what our own personal development of questions and insights feels like or what such expression might look or sound like.

In the present text I seek to put you and your students in conscious touch with the form and emergence of your own questions, insights, and expressions. I do this, hopefully, in a way that will heal the dualism at the basis of our philosophical inheritance (early chapters), if it indeed exists, and connect your conscious awareness with the fount of your own felt spirit.

Moreover, speaking from my own experience, Lonergan’s reference to a “long twilight of philosophical initiation” is far from overstatement. So I am not trying to “cut the Gordian Knot” here. Rather I am trying to help you begin to untie it as you go forward in your journey. As such, I suggest your early foundational review and concrete verification of--and identification with--your interior pattern of mind constitutes a good beginning. And we should be able to accomplish that here.

Such a beginning has heretofore been unavailable to students in secular or religious institutions or in teacher education programs. Again, some exceptions can be found under somewhat covert circumstances; or with those teachers who have left “Lonergan-friendly” institutions; or with those who enter the argument through a believing or doctrinal-religious lens where epistemology seems not-so-crucial, even though, in today’s intellectual climate, epistemology is crucial. Again, a chapter here is devoted to an exploration of a thoroughly empirical theory of knowledge. However, the present work is aimed at that good beginning, and that good beginning only.

Moreover, coming to understand your own interior functions is like discovering a city in what you once thought was an inaccessible wilderness of images, feelings, and fog--if you thought about it at all. There is form in the fog, however, and it is reached through your own questioning, critical, and self-corrective process. If you find yourself initially facing fog, keep reaching into that fog with your questions, and know that, in time, the fog will lift and the sun will break through to reveal your interior structure and functions.

Further, in our exercises, you will use the theory to consciously enter those interior functions and to recover for yourself the personal, operating centerpiece of the knowing process that you are. Self-appropriation means that, rather than merely questing from the midst of our own interiority--as you are doing now as you read these passages--now you can come to know something clear and substantial about that questing. At the same time, we should begin by understanding that the theory is experimental and factual. That is, again, we do not begin with a classical view; an unquestioned self-evident or “first principle;” a set meta-narrative; a deductive syllogism from logic; or an Unquestioned Absolute. Rather, we start with intellectual faith and with your experience--the theory is experimental, and then you verify it for yourself, in yourself. At that point, you may dispense with faith and call your experiment verified.

That being said, I argue that the brevity of this work is a legitimate dimension of philosophical study, as long as the reader new-to-philosophy understands such brevity in its comprehensive context of a lifelong journey. As such, I assume that you will consider and take seriously what Lonergan might mean by “long twilight” and “philosophical initiation” and, further, that you will take up the present work with those considerations and anticipations in mind as a matter of foregone principle.

Further, I need not entertain only an audience of scientists, philosophers or theologians who, arguably, live in, some might say, ivory towers, complements of our “floating” problem of knowledge. Though anyone unfamiliar with Lonergan’s writings can certainly benefit from a full engagement with the present work. Regardless of who or what you are, all of us enter any study with philosophical assumptions already informing our approach and thought, including our approach to the present study. The present work should help you reach down into the deeper rivers of your own thought and identify just what your own philosophical assumptions are. Only then can you edify and correct them.

Moreover, if you understand what I hope you will from a full engagement with this book, the underground rivers of your present philosophical inheritance, adequate or not, will sooner or later need to integrate with the many insights that you gain from that full engagement. As such, your old inheritance may conflict with your new insights. That is, forgoing a thorough-going foundational review, the relatively simple set of procedures presented in this work has implications that most probably will fester, later, and in relation to your present assumptions. This is what I mean by your potential for experiencing at-least-temporary deep confusion, and for having more substantial and earth-shaking insights. My hope is that, if and when the conflict comes, it will be both creative and productive for you. Prepare for such insights to occur; and know their importance when they come, in both writ-small and writ-large communications and developments.

Furthermore, one quote at the beginning of the Introduction to this text is from Frederick E. Crowe’s essay on The Future: Charting the Unknown with Lonergan. Crowe remarks when exploring “the future of the structural principle”:


My hope is that by the end of this century the basic idea of the four levels will be part of our general culture; so much so that to explain them, and still more to prove them, will be quite boring. Pupils leaving primary school will be as familiar with this structure as they are with, say, the golden rule. (Crowe, 2002, p. 15)


Our exercises may at times seem rather mundane, tedious, or even boring. In fact, it is my hope that such boredom will signal your fuller understanding—the experience is often similar to your discovering something, somehow, that you already knew. However, its import is not mundane. I suggest again that the insights you gain will quite probably sit on top of an inherited philosophical mountain and, in time, send their roots into the earth and rivers of your past assumptions, where correlations and conflicts will create the conditions for confusion and for further insights to occur in their own time.

Moreover, the arguments and pedagogical suggestions explored in Insight, Method In Theology, and Lonergan’s other works are inexorably intimate, concrete and, as Frederick Crowe suggests, follow a long arch of historical vision. As such, quickly gaining and holding reader-interest (and student-interest for teachers) in that intimate concreteness holds great pedagogical potential. In today’s climate, a text that shows that philosophy is about bringing critical-scientific insights together with intimate-personal insights brings philosophy home to us where it belongs--and with it, education. Its potential is for attuning over time the philosophical ground you already have; for setting up the conditions for later developments; and for catching-early and prolonging a self-motivated interest in reflection, in self-reflection and in philosophical self-other understanding.