(30) NOTES to Preface

Notes

1The attitudes I speak of throughout this work are drawn from Emil Piscitelli’s “The Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person, Foundational Dialectics” (1985) as well as my own works-in-progress. The preliminary chapters of the present work are also aimed at exploring and challenging different student biases and horizons in classroom situations in order to maximize the import of the review and exercises.

2Naïve realism and idealism are technical terms in Lonergan’s work depicting inherited and now ingrained assumptions about reality, and about how understanding occurs and what we understand when it does. Our foundational review addresses these assumptions in earlier chapters and in other works. See also those references in Lonergan’s Insight, A Study of Human Understanding (1958 & 2000) and Method in Theology (1972).

3We will develop the notions of commonsense and general bias in later chapters.

4In my meaning of reflection and self-reflection I am close to what Daniel Goleman means by emotional intelligence, in his work by the same name. In his chapter, “When Smart Is Dumb,” Goleman states, “Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence. . . the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy” (1997, p. 43).

My own meaning, however, does not limit intelligent “monitoring” to merely psychology or to feelings, but includes being able to apply our “monitoring” intelligence and its functions to that intelligence and its functions and, further, to clearly depict what we mean by “true.” Also, “psychological insight and self-understanding” are not merely about psychological aspects, but are about collecting evidence in order to know objective facts about them. And, I assume Goleman would agree, neither collecting evidence nor knowing objective facts are operations of mere feeling. Further, our intelligent attention is turned on itself as well as on our philosophical foundations, such as what your assumptions are about subjectivity, objectivity, knowing, truth, the good, and reality.

Also, I endorse “recognizing a feeling as it happens.” However, I also suggest that fully objectifying a feeling or set of feelings in language gives such feelings their full expression and venting and, therefore, tends towards a more fluid integration of not only our psyche but also our and others’ intelligence and the testing-against-reality that a contemplative self-knowledge and edification requires.

5For cognitive and moral theorists, a thorough reading will reveal, and you will be guided through the verification process to know for yourself, that the complex of questions surrounding the notion of the good is built-in to human consciousness as a part of its general structure--what I refer to as the good-should-ought complex understood to manifest in a range of developmental horizons and contexts.

Further, in any of the natural or human sciences, analysis is rightly distinct from the scientist’s qualitative and prescribing adventures. In the case of analyzing conscious order, it follows that critical analysis is not yet a qualification or a prescription. However, and though our questions for the good are developmental, from the point of view of cognitional theory, a manifest fact of conscious order is that human beings ask questions for the good-better-best, for qualification, for excellence, etc. In this way, the researcher’s covert qualifications, agendas, and prescriptions, an acknowledgement of the question-for-the-good in human conscious order do not negate the quest for the good. Rather, these movements manifestly add evidence that the quest for the good is present as data to be analyzed in conscious order.

Moreover, the good-should-ought complex is not only a part of a critical analysis of human consciousness, but also is the constituent empirical ground for all human analytical as well as qualitative, normative, and prescriptive ventures. Thus, such ventures can legitimately be distinguished from other analyses. However, with an adequate analysis of human cognitional activities, we can no longer view qualitative, etc., questions as mere adjuncts to the real interests of critical persons, as merely subjective, as sentiment, or in any way as peripheral to the project of human being and, by definition, to its acknowledged plum: science.

6From the point of view of some religious orientations, such positions can signal a moment in a more comprehensive and critical movement towards real religious conversion.

7For teachers, I also suggest a study of Emil Piscitelli’s Fundamental Attitudes of a Liberally Educated Person (l985) and my own work on this subject, Opening the Mind (2003b) (in progress and slated to be the third volume of this four-volume work). Both works draw directly from transcendental method but expand into an exploration of the biases, or a flight from understanding (see those references in Insight [1958 & 2000]). Piscitelli reveals the general structure of the dialectical human attitudes surrounding the questions drawn out in transcendental method. The dialectical attitudes are basic to historical human development (fundaments), and affect the emergence or avoidance of questions and subsequent insights we may encounter as we approach the continual crisis that is human living and historical existence.

In the present work I draw from both Lonergan and Piscitelli and expand their theoretical framework to show how the self-reflective processes relate to what Lonergan calls the unfolding of consciousness; how the orders come to develop; and how our attitudes both inhibit and inspire that unfolding in our ongoing relationship between ourselves, others, the world and the order of ultimate concern. Also, we will take up the notion of normative functions in later sections of the present work.

8I suggest Lonergan was referring to those who, for instance, could read books like Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, with relative ease.

9For example, see Tad Dunne’s Spiritual Mentoring, Guiding People Through Spiritual Exercises to Life Decisions (1991), The Lonergan Reader (1997), or Brian Cronin’s Foundations of Philosophy (The Lonergan Institute). I am sure there are others that I am not aware of.

10By conversion I follow Lonergan’s meaning while leaving room for further nuance. Certainly conversion is a complex and prolonged occurrence punctuated by remarkable moments of clarity and followed by decisive movements of mind toward future spontaneous speech and actions. As such, conversion is a heartfelt but also clearly understood “transformation of the subject and his world.” Here, everything changes--subject and world--and yesterday’s meaning falls away to be understood as some former self understood through today’s new eyes (Lonergan, 1972, p. 130).

11Self-affirmation and self-appropriation are technical terms for a kind of self-knowledge. These themes are central to the present work, and will be developed in much more nuance in several sections as our chapters unfold. For now, the terms themselves hold the fundamental meaning of the actual occurrence of the phenomena of self-affirmation and self-appropriation: To affirm means to come to know objectively via having conclusive and repeatable evidence. Applied to the self, we affirm what we come to know about the self. And to self-appropriate means to do more than to know. It means to consciously come to understand, to value, and to identify-with central aspects of the personal self that we already are and that already constitute our very being, but that we have, before, had no conscious knowledge of or identity with. The subject not only identifies with the objectification of the self, but the subject-as-subject becomes consciously illuminated. For Lonergan’s use of this term, see Insight (1958 & 2000) and Method (1972), for those references.