(25) TRANSFORMATION: Teacher & Text as Midwife

Transformation--The Teacher and the Text as Midwife

This book is not about a philosopher or about me. Rather, this book is about you, your interior life, your students (if you are a teacher), and your decision to take up your own development as a self-directed series of qualifying events (1972). But in this statement resides the difference between teachers and texts that teach information and those that perform the function of what Plato has Socrates call Socrates himself: A midwife. To midwife, then, is not to transform the student, but to provide the optimum conditions for that transformation to occur.

Further, if you pay even the briefest attention to a teacher or a text, you will probably increase your knowledge and learn some valuable information, if only here-and-there. However, if the substance of your understanding and your life change in terms of a teacher or a text, you are, in a very real sense, giving birth to your given capacities to increase, qualify, and renew yourself--to transform--through that teacher and through that reading. When you take up such change for yourself, then you are in fact educating yourself in the fullest sense of that term through the engagements you choose to undergo. The same teacher or text, of course, can inform or transform--one or the other, neither, or both, depending on openness or closure in the person.

Teaching, midwifery, and transformations are helpful metaphors; however, our use of the midwife-metaphor helps to tease out the more-than-mere-information birthing situation that transformative knowledge is about (Mezirow, 2000). That is, rather than expounding content-knowledge or creating a new person or a new baby, the writer, the text, the teacher, the gardener, and the midwife help you birth what is potential in you already. Such learning, then, is essentially a kind of self-creative process, and can also be referred to as a kind of conversion or series of conversions. [10]

Further, though any philosophical enlightenment has great intellectual, moral, socio-political and spiritual import, stillbirths occasionally occur, as Socrates well-knew. As such, in any philosophical birthing situation, what you choose to become after such an undertaking remains an open question and will be played out concretely as you go forward in your own life.

Moreover, I cannot and would not force questions, information, or insights on you; and I cannot and would not expect you merely to believe what I have to say. Rather, in the tradition of Socrates, Plato and many others, I hope to teach you information; but also to help midwife a potential transformation in you; and only if that is what you want for your self. And, of course, as with any teaching-learning situation, I have continued to learn through the process of writing this book.

Furthermore, central to this work is what Lonergan means by self-appropriation-affirmation. [11] Of course, these terms and the events they refer to are related to both kinds of learning—informational and transformational; and we will explore what these terms mean as our text unfolds. However, for now I suggest first that self-appropriation-affirmation are dimensions of critical self-knowledge, and that the theoretical-philosopher Lonergan struggled long to bring the process to us.

Second, the process will acquaint you personally with a new development in a very old philosophical project (1972, pp. 6-13, 17, 34, 83-85 & 260-66).

Third, the full meaning of self-appropriation-affirmation is a relatively new development in our knowledge and has emerged historically from what is known as the scientific revolution. Self-appropriation takes the wisdom of commonsense and empirical method (the centerpiece of all science) and applies them to the data of the mind—your mind. As such, again, the general in general empirical method refers, not to a change or reduction of empirical method, but to the movement of the method from natural-physical data to the data that is your mind, or human consciousness. Thus, science’s empirical method becomes philosophy’s more comprehensive general empirical or transcendental method (1972) in terms of the data under consideration.

Of course, the scientist and the philosopher rightly remain quite different in both the data we approach and in the kinds of questions we ask of the data, and of each other. However, the person of good commonsense and the scientist at work in any field provide the philosopher and the learning theorist with a plethora of examples of how human beings think when we are at our best and when we are being critical (1958, pp. 423-30 & 2000, pp. 448-455). In this way, a person of good commonsense, the employment of critical scientific method, and the scientist working with any data provide excellent examples for a theory of mind-in-process, for an appropriate critical method to adhere and refer to, and for expressions of our operating assumptions towards the knowing-truth-real complex for our philosophical explorations.

Good commonsense coupled with well-developed theory and critical method, then, are applied to the data of philosophical concern—the mind and how human knowledge actually works. That data is also your own learning procedures and, further, the object of our questions about meaning-metaphysics, intelligence, the good, knowledge, truth and reality.

Further, and more importantly, recent theoretical discoveries constitute for the philosophy of science a critical movement towards their empirical method’s heretofore hidden fullness and fruition. And this fruition can, in fact, alter the way scientists understand their own foundations and, consequently, their own fields of data.

Fourth, as I have suggested above, self-appropriation constitutes not only a development of, but also a self-corrective of, philosophical movements in the modern and post-modern history of thought. It therefore marks a new beginning within that history. And so, if understood adequately, self-appropriation will provide the philosophical cornerstone for a new century of thought (1958-2000, & 1972). It does so by completing the scientific revolution and by unifying it with all other historical movements; by defining knowledge-truth from an empirical point of view, but in the context of our more comprehensive vision; and by inviting each of us to personally verify the theory in and with our own minds, and, in self-reflective fashion, through the very knowing apparatus that is under review.

In this way, self-appropriation brings theory together in a right relationship with common sense and its regard for the self-related particular. Such a self-reflective completion is not a “philosophical trap,” but determines a new beginning where all further meaning is open to our inquiry.

Transcendental method and the process of self-appropriation, then, are more than merely informative teaching. They also hold within them the potential for self-transformative. Further, they reveal the central core of how we are, and how both information and transformation occur; and they provide the critical link in bringing full clarity to knowing as objective empirical process in both commonsense and in science.

I hope this work will teach, but also will midwife your potential towards transformation and self-knowledge, and help constitute for you a new beginning. This beginning will not be built in sand, but rather in what Lonergan calls “the rock” that is your own understanding, critical judgment and appreciation (1972, pp. 19-20).

To midwife, then, means I cannot fulfill that potential in you, for you. However, because of the thorough contribution of others, we need not struggle with our development of such potential alone and in the dark philosophical climate that has heretofore surrounded us.