(9) The Work in Context & Aims

The Present Work In Context

The present work is the first of what I hope will be four, interrelated volumes. The other three are written, but are still in draft form. I will refer to the other three volumes in the last chapters along with some reflections, implications and applications of the present work.

Further, Lonergan encouraged others to continue his work, and many writers have done so. Though the present work stays with the basic pattern and its theoretical expression, I also follow a branch of theory that takes Lonergan’s work and moves into the study of language, human attitudes and cultural foundations developed by Emil Piscitelli (1977 & 1985).

In my work, I explore the basic structure given in Lonergan’s transcendental method and developed in Piscitelli’s work on language and method as foundational dialectics. However, the present work is highly specific to pedagogical method that takes as its fundamental aim an enlightening moment in your own interior life. Other references are to my own ongoing work on childhood cognition, Conscious Structure and the Foundations of Democracy, and Opening the Mind. All three at this writing are unpublished works-in-progress.


Aims

The fundamental aim of this work is educational in general, and to bring about self-appropriation in you specifically. Again, the theories we will use to forge that process were mainly developed by the philosopher Bernard Lonergan in his Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1958, 2000), Method In Theology (1972), and many of his other works presented in various Collections.

The present work contains precise pedagogical procedures for its aim—of guiding you to clearly identify in you what Lonergan discovered in himself and gave theory to—transcendental method, or the structure, dynamism, light, and intelligence of your own spirit.

To follow the metaphor of rooms, the procedures aim to help you identify the general structure of the rooms in your own house and what generally occurs there—and specifically the dark one that you are thinking and looking out of now as you read this text; and you are reading this text with a wealth of prior under-meaning that you have already insighted and understood, and with the light of your active intelligence already operating as you read.

Further, you already know that this room of yours is chock full of your specific psychology, of your own feelings, images, and thoughts, and of your own unique history that you share with others in your life. And you know that each person’s history opens out to vast, unknown and often mysterious fields of meaning through and towards which we move. We commonly call those fields of meaning “later,” or “tomorrow,” “the future,” “our vision,” “that,” or just “whenever,” “it,” “whatever,” or “the universe.”

However, the room you look out of, or quest from, or intend-attend-to-meaning from, also has a not-so-mysterious general architecture and set of recurrent activities that, though developmental, are regularly patterned and remarkably clear. Further, you share this general architecture with every other human being. Such a structure and set of activities constitutes a method of consciousness, transcendental method, which you can discover and appropriate for yourself:


Such appropriation, in its technical expression, resembles theory. But in itself it is a heightening of intentional consciousness, an attending not merely to objects but also to the intending subject and his acts. (Lonergan, 1972, p. 83)


To use Lonergan’s metaphor, then, my aim is to help you “heighten” your awareness to include the broad but definite outlines of your common awareness in some detail (Lonergan, 1972, pp. 15, 25, 83 & 290). To use another metaphor, the light of your intelligence shines in and through you. However, like the water in a fount falls back into itself, Lonergan’s “heightening” means that the light of your mind is turned back on itself—on its source--the light shining on the light; but as light shines on light, your awareness blends with itself and, rather than “adding on another lighted room,” increases the room you are already in.

Generally, the room and its light have a “pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results” (1972, p. 5). But regardless of what metaphors or theoretical names we use for the mind’s structure and method, the qualifying point is that you will learn the theories, and the pedagogical method provided herein; to “turn inward,” to remain critical in the process; and to locate, inspect, analyze, and name the room and the light in yourself and for yourself. Further, a full understanding of this process will render that you will know the process as real.

Thus, I also aim to help you develop your own reflective and self-reflective capacities; but more importantly to provide you with solid knowledge of your own concrete, continually verifiable, non-mysterious basis from which all of your questions probe the mysterious and call for all knowledge. We will use whatever metaphors or technical language we need, then, to help you explore and hopefully make a quiet and intimate discovery of the structure of your “inner room” and the activities of the light within it with some precision. By the end of the exercises in later chapters, you should be able to recognize and name the structure and its operations in yourself and others, regularly and with said precision, and become increasingly aware of what that knowledge means in other arenas of concern, e.g., as a trans-cultural base.

Moreover, I aim to help you develop your own critical capacities and with them, a beginning differentiation of mind that will easily distinguish theoretical from common discourse. The questions, “How is human consciousness structured?” and “What are its activities?” may be answered critically by exposing the general pattern and dynamism of your own personal consciousness with and to an adequately developed theory. The application of a theory to concrete data will make the project critical and move the theory from speculative to verifiable, and on to verified. Though the focus will rightly be on your own structure-of-mind, your knowing of that structure can only be called precise and critical through the use of an adequate theory. Only through employing a good theory and its accompanying method can a teacher or a writer provide the technical architecture and pedagogical procedures for you to enter your interior functions regularly, and with your critical capacities at the helm. Common knowledge is good; but theoretically precise knowledge is better—in this case at least. So my aim is also to increase your appreciation for theory, in order to remain completely critical in applying that theory to your own and others’ mind.

A relevant part of your learning, then, is to develop your habit of recognizing the difference between theoretical and common discourse—of developing what Lonergan calls a theoretically differentiated consciousness (1972).

As you discover the general order of your own consciousness in a critical way, then, my aim is to also help you understand something of the meaning and place of theory as a different and complementary form of questioning and knowledge development. Through owning general but also precise-to-you theoretical knowledge you can inform your own personal and common knowledge, while at the same time maintaining for yourself the critical and technical edge that all scientists claim for themselves and for their fields. You need not know specific theories in order to understand the import of theory as a defined field of discourse.

Further, the Petrie dish where you can observe and understand human consciousness is, in fact, your own mind, any other living person’s mind, and any written or spoken text as expression of minds and of persons who lived once as you do. As such, your scientific laboratory is always available to you for analysis and verification. Here, the general definition of your conscious order can become known to you as theoretical, intimate, critical-personal, but also, we will see, as a factual and continually verifiable affair. Thus, your engagement with this text will combine scientific-empirical method; a well-traveled theoretical reference base; and the data of your own and others’ conscious structure and activities. Though the engagement is indeed scientific, it is accomplished within the context of your own personal journey and, if you are in a classroom, of others’ personal journeys as well. In brief, we study minds, and we also have them.

Moreover, our project takes as its object the experiential, the phenomenal, the empirical and the critical-objective dimension of your own personal awareness. As such, the project is null without the critical component of your thought, and better if accomplished in collaboration with others who are equally critical. This point should fare especially well with scientifically-minded folks in any field who take up this book to read. If this describes you, I appreciate greatly your identity with critical method; and I address this method and how this work relates to it more thoroughly in later chapters. The theoretical-philosopher Lonergan, and the writer of transcendental method, also regards critical mindedness as an essential component to such philosophical ventures:

As there is nothing to prevent a scientist from being a man of common sense, so there is nothing to prevent him from being a philosopher. Indeed, the scientist’s dedication to truth and his habituation to the intellectual pattern of experience are more than a propaedeutic to philosophy; and if every mind by its inner unity demands the integration of all it knows, the mind of the scientist will be impelled all the more forcibly to proceed to that integration along a course that is at once economical and effective. (1958, p. 424; 2000, pp. 448-49)

However, the philosophical stumbling block for most scientists is not scientific method and its application, but rather what general means in general empirical method (equivalent to TM), and what data can be legitimately approached by that method and, subsequently, how transcendental method can be applied to its specified data—the data of consciousness. Lonergan calls the method of the mind general empirical method precisely because the data is consciousness itself and not the data that the natural sciences, etc., explore. We will address more fully applying empirical method to different data as our later chapters unfold.

My aim, then, is for you to not only experience you mindedness as you already do in the intimacy of your own thought processes, e.g., while reading this text, but to become aware of and completely familiar with, and to name the different functions of, that same mindedness in a reflective and critically scientific way.

Moreover, the structure, pattern, and activities of consciousness form the potency and dynamism of your concrete self-transcendence on many levels in your personal life. Thus, my aim is for you to discover and name the common movement of something in yourself that is not new at all--your own self-transcendence—not as some abstraction or concept, but as a concrete, common, and easily recognizable event in your life.

Such self-transcendence is not accomplished in a psychological or social vacuum, however. As such, I also aim to help you foster a new appreciation for your own ongoing internal dialogue with yourself, and for your external dialogue with others in and between different cultures in history. For, it is through that dialogue and our subsequent actions that such self-transcendence commonly occurs.

On the other hand, again, I do not aim to end all mystery or to answer all religious questions in this work. On the contrary, I aim to enhance your journey in both. That is, the basic structure and activities of human consciousness are critically knowable and, thus, now far from mysterious. Nevertheless, the meaning, depth and breadth of human consciousness remains mysterious, and more so precisely because we can now know its structure, its method of operation, and its spontaneous wonder as an apparently-infinite reach.

Thus, in fact, consciousness remains mysterious: First, there are many things we still do not know about our minds. Second, we do know that through our conscious activities, we continually reach into and beyond ourselves for fuller and fuller meaning; and both areas of inquiry still remain unknown and mysterious to us.

And so, upon discovering your own structure of consciousness—your concrete and continually self-transcending spirit--you may find yourself asking: Why are we made with such a structure? What is the meaning of this journey that we are? Or you may wonder about the meaning of historical process and your place in it, or other similar questions that often flow from this one set of questions and insights.

These are difficult and complex questions; and some are about ultimate concerns that are commonly addressed by religious doctrines of every stripe. As such, some of our questions are fundamentally religious. Thus, you may understand this work as having spiritual and religious dimensions at its core, however indirect those dimensions may be. And upon your discovering and verifying the structure that you are, I think that you will reflectively raise these kinds of questions, at least for yourself.

That being said, and while I may share with you some speculations on religious meaning in later chapters, I here claim no answer to such questions, or assume or purport this-or-that religious doctrine within the parameters of this book. Though my aim is to help you develop a new and reflective foundation for asking these kinds of questions, I must leave them to you to ponder for your own self and among those who share your interests.

Furthermore, for the Lonergan scholar and in Lonergan’s terms, my aim is to support your present study and to raise some questions that may, in the end, help you in your own continuing examination of your own fundaments and philosophical inheritance—or your foundations.

I also aim to provide a pedagogical method that holds within it some heretofore unavailable exactitude about the process of self-appropriation. Thus, the work is also for teachers, for your curriculum, and for your work with your students. The work regards self-appropriation, exposing inherited biases, and becoming aware of the assumptive bonds of what Lonergan refers to as naïve realism, empiricism, and idealism[2] (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000; & 1972).