(26) Beginning the Rest of Your Story

The Beginning of the Rest of Your Story

Such precise, critical, and intimate self-knowledge, that I hope you will gain from engaging the present work, will mean much more to you when it rests in your own highly variable differentiations of mind and sets of quite variable horizons--as known to you. However, I can know nothing about such variations from the “other side” of writing this book (1972, pp. 235-266). That is, the process of self-appropriation includes an illuminative experience and a form of quite specific and well-defined self-knowledge; however, that knowledge will emerge in a complex context of difference in readers that, as a writer or teacher, I cannot know.

So there is an advantage, but also a disadvantage to presenting such material in a book or on a website. If you have no teacher with this text, you will have to open yourself to the ebb and flow of your own internal conversation while you engage with the text. As painful and confusing as that might be at times, I can only wish you well in your journey towards the clarity of thought that self-knowledge brings.

Furthermore, the full meaning of self-appropriation by Lonergan’s standards comes at the end, not at the beginning, of a long journey. Such a journey includes a much larger nest of insights that indicate much deeper changes—transformations, conversions, illuminations--in your own thought. Again, it is wise not to expect a quick-fix. Moreover, the journey also includes a clear inspection of your own biases, some of which I set out in our early chapters (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000; Piscitelli, 1985). These inner changes that affect our outer view are sometimes breathtaking and include some various differentiations of mind and broadening of horizons (Lonergan, 1958 & 1972), all of which are clearly memorable for those who have undergone such transformation.

I assume that you can recall similar movements in your own thought at times; and I draw on that recollection to suggest that more such experiences may be available to you through the present work and others’ related writings. Further, I suggest you might become quite aware of your internal movements of mind and heart, and begin to encourage and expect them in yourself. The prime analog for such movement of mind and illumination is having had an insight, in this case not only to inform, but to transform.

Though we never know when insights will occur, we do know that they are at the center of our learning process. And though books and classrooms are set up around the assumption that such insights will occur in our students, the deeper movements we have named transformative moments or conversion experiences rarely occur in a prescribed or predictive timeframe. If you employ the reflective-essay self-assessments component of this work, it is set up around a portfolio framework because of the remote and unpredictable aspect of transformative insights, as well as for the personal enrichment that is first and foremost to its meaning.

Further, transformations do not necessarily occur from your acquiring the specific self-knowledge you gain here; from employing any similarly-refined pedagogical method; or even from verifying the theory in your own mind. The more deeply integrative insights can only come later, after such a project as the present one is undertaken; or after what Lonergan calls, again, a “long and confused twilight of philosophical initiation.” In various occurrences and expressions, those insights will set up the conditions for your own various and hard-won differentiations of mind and changes in horizon to occur. They will mark your becoming open to understanding, to knowing, to the good and to the ultimate good (Piscitelli, 1985); and they will mark your becoming open to and aware of such movements in others and in your students. They will also reveal to you the many implications of the precise self-knowledge you gain from a thorough engagement with this text.

To recall a minor example, we cannot learn multiplication tables before we have mastered numbers and counting procedures. And that mastery only comes from having suffered through a period, first, of knowing something about numbers to start with; second; of having raised a specified question in a moment of minor confusion; and third, of then having a series of hard-won insights that erase your confusion, illuminate your thought with transparent light (having an insight), and signal your coming to know and to easily relate and master the various functions of mathematics. Then, of course, there is repetition and practice that makes what you have learned a part of your spontaneous thought, speech, and actions with regard to the subject you are studying.

Whereas our confusion, insights, illuminations, and inner transformations of knowledge about mathematics are minor, our confusion, insights, illuminations, and inner transformations about philosophical issues are major, and can be earth-shaking experiences where our world of meaning quite literally turns upside down, and when old assumptions and what we think we know are so assaulted as to blow them all apart leaving us dizzy in a moment of deeply felt disorientation. That is, to come to know and master mathematics is one thing. But to come to know and master our own knowing processes is quite another.

So this text provides only a beginning knowledge of and an entrance into the core of such inner transformations. And if we cannot recognize and accept moments of deep confusion, we cannot expect to move creatively towards that minor or major inner transformation. In that confusion, and like climbing a steep mountain, we must assume that, regardless of our disorientation, a solid ledge with a much broader view awaits our arrival. In my experience with teaching teachers, this moment of confusion in our students, and its import for them, is the most often-forgotten part of the education process. On the other hand, most teachers know very well what it means to have “a teaching moment” where the student is painfully open, and where the meaning of what you are saying quite obviously saturates their hearts, souls and minds, as water saturates the prepared earth.

In this way, fully embracing your own educational journey requires a similar, but much-more complex and dynamic, openness and movement of thought. That is, in learning mathematics, and though basic addition is essential, you will not jump to physics by having learned that one and one equals two. So with philosophical insights, the insights in this text are basic, even essential; and your later insights cannot occur from having performed one set of exercises. In this way, there is no fast way to finish this text--well.

Also, we need to acknowledge: First, most of us have not raised the question about what knowing and knowledge-truth are in any serious fashion, though you already assume that you stand on a plethora of true-knowledge, especially if you are a teacher.

Second, some of your understanding may not be knowledge at all, but may be unfounded belief, inadequately formed ideas, or even downright false and wrong thinking albeit all mixed up with true-knowledge.

Third, you might not know something that you think you do. And you might know something that you think you do not.

And fourth, some earlier insights are essential to prepare the ground for later insights to come into fruition for any educational undertaking. In the case of the present text, earlier chapters provide text for your foundational review, raising appropriate questions and developing those earlier insights that, in turn, lead up to the pedagogical procedures for encouraging the insights surrounding self-appropriation to occur in you. Thus, unless you are already quite familiar with transcendental method and self-appropriation, I doubt much will happen for you without a full engagement in the earlier chapters herein.

Philosophical enlightenment will not be hurried. However, it fosters interior transformation and a new understanding of all that is meaningful. To secure any philosophical transformations that might be available to you, and that you may need, those later insights will rest, first, on your own continued commitment to and faith in your own intelligence and spirit, and in your inner and outer dialogue--even to your own initial confusion in that dialogue.

Second, such a transformation will rest on a thorough-going and memorable (to you) beginning, with the assistance of this and-or your other philosophical and educational studies.

Third, your transformation will depend on a subsequent patient inspection and critique of your present, inherited biases and philosophical foundations—the ones already at work behind your eyes as you read this text (we will address these methodically in our earlier chapters).

And, fourth, your transformation will depend on an open view towards the mystery of your own continued development and your own deepening of thought.

The present work will also provide a ground for your entering into, and a basis for your critique of, other philosophical works that are often considered difficult and even somewhat mystifying by novices, professionals and theoreticians alike, should you choose to engage in such a critique.

Again, with common attention to the text, you should find in the present work your initial set of insights connecting the theories to your own personal structure of mind. You should do so regardless of your different history, your philosophical inheritance, or your present horizons. The second set of deeper, transformative insights, however, I can only suggest to you may occur; but I know they are at least waiting for your own continued thought and self-development. Those later developments will then be grounded in your having a solid foundation of self-verified self-knowledge. If these insights indeed occur in you, they will constitute, as it were, the beginning of the rest of your story.