(27) The Rest of Your Story

The Rest of Your Story

I have written the exercises to be fruitful for you regardless of what foundations, foundational ignorance or knowledge, horizons or biases you bring with you to the text and-or to the classroom; and regardless of what theoretical or research field you may already be involved with.

For those of you who are already involved in a theoretical profession, even that of philosophy, I suggest you not be put off by the pedagogical nature of this work. The exercises should help you enter your deeper processes of thought by raising reflective questions about a myriad of perhaps heretofore-neglected ideas, notions, issues, feelings, images, and even moods. Indeed, if you are relatively unreflective, you are more likely to gain an interest and remain interested with a beginning that connects a theory directly with your concrete experience of yourself. You will want a beginning that is far from “too abstract” and “jargon-filled;” and that shows cognitional theory and philosophy to be a concrete, accessible, and intimate dimension of your own life. I have tried to write to your intimate experience throughout this work.

Further, an educational-philosophical journey is life-long and, by definition, cannot be cut short with a declarative “Finished!” I encourage authentic collaboration here and, indeed, the book’s format is highly amenable to group work in a classroom. However, for adults at least, what can be legitimately abbreviated in today’s world is the maintenance of an extended, uncritical trust in a particular mentor or set of mentors—that is, a guru. In a democracy, we tend to be quite motivated towards being self-educable.

Moreover, adults need not dive into endless volumes of texts in the formal fields of philosophy, history and education, though I highly recommend you choose a good bibliography and begin such an engagement, e.g., with Plato or Aristotle. As those who have done so know, such an engagement will give you a critical edge in all of your other thought, reading, writing and verbal communications.

My point is that, when knowledge of the broad outlines of knowledge itself are understood and reflectively embraced, our trust in others, even “authority figures,” can become reasonable and critical, and find its proper place in any of our relationships. Such self-understanding and self-trust, far from suggesting isolation, brings into focus the importance of community, critical dialogue, and collaboration with others; and it raises the question of reasonable belief and trust and its relationship with our own understanding, as distinct from blind belief and trust in profoundly articulate, charismatic, and overly-authoritarian teachers and leaders. In Socratic terms, of course, we are talking about the difference between being involved with the receiving end of sophistry, or with philosophy; with the Pied Piper and the charlatan; or with truth and those who have fallen in love with it and seek to purvey it.

Also, commonly in complex cultures and in skeptical times, adults and even some children are already critical, to some degree or another. Our ability to reflect, to critique, to wade through our immediate responses to engage in a lively but peaceful dialogue with others, weds us to our maturing democratic environment, and to the plurality of ideas and cultures within it.

The informal educational journey we generally refer to as life. And the formal educational journey is long, sometimes broken, and often fraught with diversions. However, for adults just coming aware of their own reflective powers, the journey’s beginning is best made solid, secure and sound by an exercise of initial self-trust that has its right end in self-understanding, self-verification, and an appreciation of one’s own and others’ being and spirit of inquiry. The journey towards self-appropriation takes up and goes beyond all of these moments and movements of thought.

Further, if you are working in a classroom with others, and in the hands of a good teacher, the potential embedded in the present project is towards taking up an early interest and study about knowledge and self-knowledge throughout history. In this way, I hope that you will recognize the importance and intimacy of philosophy throughout history, however wrongheaded some of it is, as a recurring example of such self-reflection writ-large and small; and that a divorce of philosophy from the good-true-knowledge-reality complex is a distortion of philosophy’s true meaning and intent.

Philosophers are persons; and philosophy has at times been guilty of being solipsistic, “too-abstract,” armchair and ivory-tower-ish, short-sighted, or ego-maniacal and, thus, filled with what the philosopher and historian Eric Voegelin calls “libido dominandi” (1957). I might add that such a charge is not reasonably reserved-only for the field of philosophy. However, in its best sense, philosophy is none of these things. Rather, from having discovered and verified your own fount of questions (intentions, etc.), and the spontaneous desire behind it in an intimate but critical moment of self-regard, you might discover in your own self-reflective moment that you are, in fact, continually reaching beyond yourself (transcending) and suffer for not being on the side of certainty and necessity against ignorance and unfulfilled contingency in every case (Hughes, 2003). That is, we are built as reaching, self-transcendent, beings. From a good beginning, we can understand ourselves as opened out to all that is still meaningful and mysterious to us.

So like any human adventure, philosophy does not know everything about everything, philosophers have made many mistakes, and the field is prone to becoming quite derailed. However, philosophy throughout history has been the love of knowledge (or more fully, wisdom) at work in the depths of what is best in human beings, and in the midst of our striving to understand ourselves, others, and the universe. Such discoveries can develop in conflict with biases of any stripe already present in any of us. After all, in reading the present work, you are already involved with philosophy—believed by many to be merely an unnecessary leftover of progress, a handmaiden to religion, and an unwanted adjunct to the “soft” sciences. And with those sciences, philosophy has nothing important to say and, for all its speculation, it cannot know what knowing is, on principle. Philosophy is a merely subjective affair, empty and doctrinal, or much too contingent--or so many think in the current air of philosophical confusion.

However, an engagement with the present work places within your grasp the philosophical self-corrective--the gem of all post-modern philosophical interest—knowledge of knowledge from a theoretical and critical point of view, coupled with personal self-understanding and self-knowledge in transcendental method. Here you can identify the intimacy of your own self-reflection with that of all human thought, study, and act. Thus, you should be able to at least begin repositioning your understanding of natural, physical, and human sciences, education, philosophy, spiritual studies, and the historical context from which all study emerges, not to mention yourself.

In the arena of your own thought, the present work will also hopefully help you take reflection, self-reflection, and your own internal life with the seriousness they and you deserve. If you are new to philosophy, just opening this chapter and getting this far in it shows you are awakening your given potential towards reflection and self-reflection. You are directing your attention to the quality of your own intimate and personal history, thoughts, insights, beliefs, opinions, feelings, moods and questions, your knowledge, your visions, and the quality of your dialogue as you communicate with others. What is going on inside of your mind, heart, soul, and spirit is important. From this new regard will flow a new sense of responsibility for your own creative, reasonable, truthful and responsible thought, speech and act.

Rather than cutting the Gordian Knot of philosophical apprenticeship and initiation with a set of abbreviated and singularly-focused exercises, then, I seek to inspire in you a new self-appreciation--a delightful regard for the occurrence of your own questions and insights--and to lay bare the rock on which your life-long, intimate, educational journey stands; from which that journey can be known; and from where you can begin anew, self-reflectively, powerfully, and in truth.