Finding The Mind: Appendixes

11-07-10 This has been Re-written in my computer files

The challenge:

… the goal of the method is the emergence of explicit metaphysics in the minds of particular men and women. It begins from them as they are, no matter what that may be. It involves a preliminary stage that can be methodical only in the sense in which a pedagogy is methodical; that is, the goal and the procedure are known and pursued explicitly by a teacher but not by the pupil. The preliminary stage ends when the subject reaches an intelligent and reasonable self-affirmation. Such self-affirmation is also self-knowledge. It makes explicit the pursuit of the goal that has been implicit in the pure desire to know. From that explicit pursuit there follows the directives, first, of reorienting one’s scientific knowledge and one’s common sense, and secondly, of integrating what one knows and can know of proportionate being through the known structures of one’s cognitional activities. Bernard Lonergan (1958, 401 and 2000, 426)

In the concrete situation, among the living, however, the law of the dialogue cannot be enforced. The opponent will not listen at all, or he will respond with rhetoric and thereby break the possibility of communication, or he will enter the argument but not be moved existentially even when he is beaten intellectually. Eric Voegelin (1957 Vol. 3, 12)

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Appendix sections:

Introduction
Polymorphism and the Human Attitudes Surrounding our Four Desire-Quests—General Analysis
The Basic Structure of Self-Transcendence

Self-Transcendence

Openness to Understanding (desire-quest-1: what is it?)
Attitudes: Naiveté and Scepticism

Openness to Knowing the True-Real (Desire-Quest-2: is it really so?)
Attitudes: Dogmatism and Relativism

Openness to the Good/Worthwhile (desire-quest-3: is it really worthwhile? What should I do and should I do it?)
Attitudes: Optimism and Pessimism

Openness to the Ultimate Good (desire-quest-4: is it really-ultimately worthwhile?
Attitudes: Sacralism and Secularism

General Analyses (continued)

The Attitudes as Manifest in the Classroom

Preparing for Naïve Dogmatism

Preparing for Sceptical Dogmatism

Three Attitudes Regarding Meaning and Truth

Notes

Introduction

Teachers should teach only what we have mastered. Also, those of us who do not know about or have some understanding of the fundamental attitudes developed herein depend on their movements in our students (and ourselves) anyway. Such criteria and dependence, and the self-transcendent movement of the attitudes themselves, are a part of what is known in education as the hidden curriculum.

In Finding the Mind we discuss the differences between common sense and theory, and we explore the biases that often occur in both persons of good common sense and in theoreticians, and that we should look for in ourselves (Lonergan 1958 and 2000). We do so to raise some questions for you about your own comportment. We also hope to clear the way for you to understand and, if you are a teacher, to teach the cognitional theory and the theory of knowledge relatively free of such biases. And we mean to inspire the underlying changes in yourself that we speak of as a part of your longer philosophical journey. In those texts, as in this appendix, I hope to inspire in the reader some awareness of what polymorphism of mind might mean to me, to you and, if you are a teacher, to our students. Though such awareness provides no automatic cure for our biases, it can help in the longer project of self-correction—a part of that longer journey:

From that explicit pursuit there follows the directives, first, of reorienting one’s scientific knowledge and one’s common sense …. (1958, 401 and 2000, 426).

We also discuss the difference between the expression of the theory as suprastructure, on the one hand (for us, your shadow-questions) and, on the other hand, the actual infrastructure of your interior operations (for us, your desire-quests) as you experience them. As example, the infrastructure I refer to here is what you are thinking with now while you read this text. Your desire-quests are to be found in the part of your awareness that is wondering about what I mean as you read my narrative. As such, the Foundational Review text (unpublished at this writing) and, of course, Lonergan’s own work in Insight, a Study of Human Understanding, provide a much fuller background preparation for going through the experimental text (1958 and 2000; and 1985, 57-58) (1).

Nevertheless, for our present concern, we still need to keep in mind distinctions and relations between, first, theory as such; second, this theory and its expression; third, your own interior operations as operative and un-objectified; and fourth, the process of relating this or any cognitional theory to those interior operations for both (1) object- and theory-verification in the data, and (2) as the beginnings of the process of self-appropriation-affirmation and its called-for self-correctives.

We need to discuss this theory, then, in the light of your own ongoing foundational review--regardless of how or with what texts or teachers you undertook or are undertaking that review—and the differentiating insights you hopefully have incurred in and about your own thinking from that study. A teacher who has not, first, differentiated their own minds in terms of theoretical and common sense discourse and, second, cleared their own minds of a bias against theory (general bias), should stop here and recover those insights from Finding the Mind (the shorter or longer text) or from Lonergan’s own treatment of the biases, and particularly general bias in Insight (1958 and 2000). A full understanding of knowledge and knowing (Lonergan’s virtually unconditioned as applied to the self) is also essential for being able to teach from a position of full mastery of this material.

That being said, setting up the conditions for self-appropriation-affirmation to begin to occur can be approached through a primer such as is offered in Finding the Mind, the experiment--in critical fashion, as personally applied to and by the self, and as directed by a teacher in possession of the broad outlines of a good theory.

Below are some basic requirements for teaching this philosophical material:

1. Have a professional-scientific regard for theory in any field, including in the social sciences (clear of general bias);

2. Have differentiated common sense, theory, interiority as realms in your own thought—where the differentiation is easy, spontaneous, and an entirely-conscious movement of your own mind;

3. Know this theory and the pedagogy “by heart.” Have a thorough working understanding of this theory: general empirical method) and the experimental procedures in Finding the Mind or some other work where the same outcomes generally are a part of the curricular goals;

4. Be crucially aware of the open and communicative space between the general theory and its conceptual expression, and the live classroom where there are no fixed data, and where the same meaning may be expressed in many different ways;

5. Know the difference between (a) an objectivist-scientific understanding of the theory-to-data relationship and (b) a full self-appropriation-affirmation, with its epistemological and metaphysical components and implications;

6. Know your students, and let them know you through preliminary class-group sessions—create a trusting relationship in a loose student-influenced time-frame;

7. Be ready to mediate the theory into the particular needs and specific questions of our students in the context of each new classroom experience;

8. Be intimately aware of the attitudes developed briefly below and more thoroughly in The Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person (Piscitelli 1985).

Optimum: Know yourself in terms of the full meaning of intellectual conversion and self-appropriation-affirmation. Be able to articulate your experience and self-knowledge to yourself and to others.

Classroom Essentials

1. Provide an interactive learning aesthetic and, again, a trusting and psychologically safe environment.

2. Provide plenty of time for students to develop trust in one another and for students’ experiencing, questioning, and dialogue.

Shorter Goals for Student

1. a beginning treatment of general bias—and a working knowledge of the distinction between commonsense and theory;

2. the knowledge and affirmation of this theory using the student's own crisis narrative as data for critical analysis and critical-objectivist affirmation;

3. ability to use/apply the theory to other texts and narratives: the appropriation in the student of a clear-headed route to continuous self-discovery of philosophical meaning surrounding the set of desire-quests and its structure that resides in the student’s own mind;

4. an easy articulation of the basics of the theory and that route, e.g., affirmed by the teacher through some variable sort of assessments;

5. a beginning awareness of the philosophical aspects of any narrative including the potential problematics involved with commonsense notions of knowing in our time (epistemology). (This means a break with the idea that a full study of the mind is not merely an “in here” psychological affair but is rather fully philosophical.)

6. some clear idea about the differences between the shorter and longer journeys we explore here and what they mean to the student

This experiment, of course, emphasizes the self-knowledge part of the project--where knowledge is what the reader commonly means by it through their experience of it. The Finding the Mind text (the shorter journey) leaves the fuller epistemological and metaphysical insights to the longer journey, though we do touch on these here and there, and though these aspects of the project are (and must be) embedded in the text--where you can "see" them if you are already aware of the philosophical dimension of any writing or conversation. (Also, see appendix 5, The Pervasiveness of the Good for a beginning route to identifying one’s own already-established metaphysical viewpoint.)

However, optimally in our case, and though the experience and context can vary considerably from person-to-person, the teacher will have personally gone through the process of self-appropriation-affirmation and know exactly, and from personal experience, what that means in terms of knowledge, self-knowledge, and explicit metaphysics. Such knowledge will allow clarity of the difference between (1) merely a scientific-objectivist understanding of the theory, or even of the interior structure as self-discovered and verified in objectivist fashion, and (2) the fullness of the self-appropriation-affirmation experience which will include, but be more than, a critical-objectivist understanding or even of self-as-object knowledge.

Again, though knowledge of any content arena is never exhausted, to teach something well, the teacher must have mastered the subject matter to a degree that enables the teacher to recognize the absence or occurrence of the appropriate and relevant insights in the student with regard to the material and goals under consideration.

In our case, and at the time of this writing, mastering the subject fully is relatively uncommon if not rare. That is, such mastery means to have personally experienced the process of self-appropriation-affirmation—as performance, as fully conscious knowledge of that performance, and as conscious self-identification with that performance and knowledge; to be able to give an adequate theoretical and experience-based account of it; to have understood clearly its epistemological and metaphysical implications; and to be able to foster the experience and the coming-to-awareness in our students from many directions.

It is also to know that the experience is the same for everyone in some basic respects, but also quite different in other more particular respects, and with regard to the history of thought and development in the individual student particularly with regard to what we refer to here as the conversion experience on several planes. (Those planes are not only religious.)

Also, and though we certainly have not worked out every aspect of what “conversion” means, a teacher should have in their grasp what Lonergan (and Piscitelli) mean by intellectual conversion (2).

Further, as suggested above, knowledge of the theory with a critical-objectivist understanding of the process, and including self-verification of the theory (as is fostered in the experiment in Finding the Mind), is amenable to testing and assessments. I have referred to this pedagogical movement here as an aspect of the shorter journey. However, the key to recognition of the ongoing occurrence of the fuller process is not to be found in the teacher, in the pedagogy, or in the assessments, no matter how good they may be. Rather, the key is in the student-experimenter—though of course the teacher listens closely to the students’ dialogue and responds accordingly with further inspiration in mind.

Thus, objectivist assessments become less-and-less appropriate, and more-and-more antithetical to the student’s development, as the student enters into what I mean by the longer journey. The quote below again points to the great difference between the shorter journey, proffered in our experiment, and the longer journey, or living the philosophical life--the fuller context of ongoing philosophical development, corrective, and discovery:

… while the reasonableness of each scientist is the consequence of the reasonableness of all, the philosopher’s reasonableness is grounded on a personal commitment and on personal knowledge. For the issues in philosophy cannot be settled by looking up a handbook, by appealing to a set of experiments performed so painstakingly by so-and-so, by referring to the masterful presentation of overwhelming evidence in some famous work. Philosophic evidence is within the philosopher himself. It is his own inability to avoid experience, to renounce intelligence in inquiry, to desert reasonableness in reflection. It is his own detached, disinterested desire to know. It is his own advertence to the polymorphism of his own consciousness. It is his own insight …. (Lonergan 1958, 429 and 2000, 453-54)

Providing for paper-and-pencil check-the-box testing and assessments in the classroom for aspects of what I mean by the longer journey is clear evidence that the teacher and those who write the curriculum have little or no understanding of philosophy and are not equipped to teach this material.

Furthermore, in terms of a basic classroom or small-group situation, a teacher should spend considerable effort developing a trusting and intimate environment for use in an easy and flexible time frame. Such preparations are essential conditions for the experiment to have its optimum effect.

Polymorphism-Confusion and the Human Attitudes Surrounding our Four Desire-Quests—General Analysis

MAIN SOURCE: Though I have changed some of the technical terms and developed some of the material, I draw the below articulation of the theory of philosophical attitudes from Emil Piscitelli’s work: The Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person (later renamed as: The Foundations of Philosophy [1985]).

Like the set of desire-quests/shadow-questions we discuss in part II of Finding the Mind, a series of four pairs of human attitudes also can be located in the interior domain of our own conscious demeanor and in highly-variable developmental states. Thus, each of our four shadow-questions/desire-quests treated in part II of the experiment has a pair of dialectically related attitudes that shape and inform the dynamism of, and that prepares our approach to our daily experience. And like the desire-quests, such attitudes can be expressed in theory, experimented with, and self-identified in the interior domain.

...............................Higher Viewpoint.....................
............................Desire-Quest (1-2-3-4)..................
Lower Viewpoint <--dialectical attitudes--> Lower Viewpoint

(We will repeat the above basic structure in different ways below.)

By dialectical, we mean in part tensional. The lower viewpoints relate to (a) each other and (b) to the higher viewpoint by their tensions-in-extreme, mutually-informing, and upwardly-directed dynamism (3).

Further, like Lonergan’s treatment of the four biases in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1958 and 2000), a study of the attitudes helps to explain with some clarity what it means when we regard that our minds are polymorphic.

Polymorphism (having many forms) is not itself confusion but rather is often the root source of it. Our polymorphism, then, is rooted in the mind's complexity and is the source of the wide range of developmental highs and lows, of our self-transcendence and its absence, of great possibilities and of horrible derailments that all are potent to the human mind and, thus, to our living. Our own focus is merely on the philosophical aspects of those highs and lows which of course, and not so merely, can grandly affect all of the other developmental moments namely, in the arenas of our social, psychological, ethical-political, and spiritual being.

And our polymorphism (and potential confusion) is rooted in the relationship between our fundaments (what is basic, given, immediate, and structural to us) and our foundations (what we learn). Our foundations include (a) what we learn about what is basic, given, immediate, and structural to us (our fundaments), which can differ from (b) what we learn from those fundaments.

We are polymorphic, in part, because the human whole that we are has several developmental, interactive, and dynamic layers of activity with multiple-meanings and intentions that work together in and through that whole to be named: the complexity of human living.

We are envisioning here, I hope, a little bit of what Plato meant when he suggested that we know thyself, and that an unexamined life is not worth living. If our polymorphism is not necessarily equivalent to our internal confusion, at least: without reflective thought aimed at self-understanding, it probably will be; and the worst for our being un- or only half-conscious of it.

First, we are in the process of relatively normative development across a wide range of human meaning and venues. As any teacher knows, such development can be hindered and become derailed for many reasons and have many specific and quite individualized causes that interact intimately with the philosophical complexity we are exploring here, e.g., any one of a number of meanings associated with a person's particular history.

Second, in our learning in our time we have "inherited" philosophical aspects of (particularly) the Western tradition through the hidden curriculum. That learning is/has-been embedded in family, formal schooling, and the culture-at-large. If so (and we probably have), we are now in the process of self-correcting (in half-conscious resonant fashion) several already-learnt foundational assumptions that have come down to us in that history of thought and that we accepted--long before we were able to approach them with a qualified reflective critique in hand. As such, they have become embedded and already reside in our thinking as beginning assumptions that come to influence all other specific thought, speech, and acts that we do.

At least some of our philosophical foundations-those that we inherited from our above-said sources--may need correcting because, as uncritically accepted, such assumptions may also be in conflict with what we learned from what is fundamental to us (given, immediate, etc.). Hence, at that un- or half-conscious, resonant level of our internal life, we are not only polymorphic, but also we are confused in our learning about such basic ideas, i.e., what constitutes reality, knowing, the good, truth, and how the learning process actually works in us.

And so, if we understand Plato's above maxims rightly, the argument goes: without self-reflective thought to bring the conflict to the table of our own conscious-now self-knowledge, such inner confusion will remain a source of inner anxiety--sometimes asleep, and sometimes passive, sometimes quite active, but always there influencing, and waiting to be self-understood, self-acknowledged and self-reorganized towards a sense of wholeness and inner peace.

And third, we are cultural-historical. This means at least that each of us has different and somewhat unique experiences to draw from and to relate to others’ experiences in different ways, in different kinds of expression, and for different purposes. For instance, we all partake of food; however, each partakes of different foods at different times, in different places, and ways, etc.

Thus, we need to distinguish between our culinary taste (and merely that), and then what is truly bad and good for our health, and the food substances that match everyone’s health needs. Such insights must include, then, the fact that in some cases, what is exactly good for one is exactly not good for another. In such cases, we need to back up, as it were, into more general categories for coverall theories. For instance, broccoli may be good for everyone--except those who are allergic to it. Nutrition, however, is necessary for all, if continuing-to-exist is our assumed criteria for our judgments about well-being.

In exploring the mind’s structure and dynamism, and in the midst of such complexity as our food-analogy suggests, we can find many attitudes that are substantial to the learning structure and process that we are. And we can identify our relative tastes (personalities, habits, histories, etc.). But then we can identify what is fundamental to us and to our philosophical health—what is truly bad and good for our general human intentional development and well-being.

The attitudes we are exploring here have to do with that development and well-being.

Again, the attitudes have a dialectical component and, thus, they begin as linked but also as opposed to one another (Lonergan 1958 and 2000; and see note 3 below). As dialectical, then, the attitudes are dynamic and tensional (they are the source of much of our inner tension, both good-for-us and bad-for-us) and they are nothing if not complex. As such, they demand of us a letting-be, or a loosening and even a fostering of what is given and spontaneous in our thought-in-life.

The dynamic, developmental, and dialectical nature of the basic structure with its attitudinal tensions suggests to us that, diminishing or quashing of that dynamism can cause psychological malaise, calcification, or even a kind of spiritual death--where the death is of that dynamism. So again, for human beings, internal tension can be, but is not necessarily, a bad or unhealthy thing.

The relationship between the four sets of desire-quests and their attitudes are that dynamism; and they are at work in us always, all at once, and commonly in an undifferentiated way. They are, again, unmediated mediators--the starting points for our self-understanding, for they are what we must employ in order to achieve that understanding. Thus, we say they are fundamental to what commonly goes by the name: awareness or, more technically, consciousness.

On a deeper plane of our existence, then, and generally stated, what is immediate to us is that we desire-quest to understand and to know fully (desire-quests-1-2), and to be involved with what is really and ultimately worthwhile (desire-quests-3-4). All of our life's worries find their source in that deeper movement.

The complexity of being that we are, however, allows for variable and even conflicting foundations, and for a more-shallow plane of living and being that, again, can conflict with the intentions of our deeper being. That is, we have a “get on with it” existence. We want stasis in our lives. We don't want to have to think much about the what or the why of our living, and certainly not what our philosophical comportment happens to be. Good grief,...what on earth could that be?

And so our desire-quests, though grounded in our deeper desires and fears, and though their intentions are pervasive to what it means to be human, can be diverted and even quashed. They can take on the content and lesser intents of our more shallow comforts and anxieties, and become herded into that living--worse for having its familial, academic, social, and-or cultural failures. Having their own developmental dynamism, they also can fail in that development leaving us chronological adults, but distorted and misshapen in a multitude of ways for being childlike in that adulthood. Thus, we can be involved in subverting what we may call here our fundamental or deeper selves—those fundamental desires, fears, aims, and intentions that are about our afore-mentioned well-being:

To understand, to know, to be involved with what is really worthwhile.

As potential in their dynamism, then, the four desire-quests and their sets of dialectical attitudes are that through which we develop, become self-conscious (in the positive sense), and self-correct into full and reflective human beings—to become open to understanding, knowing, and being involved in what is really worthwhile and to foster our fundamental aim towards our own self-transcendence in our living. OR they are that through which we fail or quash our potential for qualified development and participation in each present situation. In other words, we can flower as human beings, or we become un-, half-, or false-thinkers.

In our definition and discovery of such openness and self-transcendence as a common human experience (now named) is the overall and common thrust and aim of the dynamic desire-questing structure that we are (Piscitelli 1985). Again, and in our own terms, we find that what is immediate to us is that we are mediators and that such mediation is nothing if not dynamic.

If it is true that a definable set of dialectical attitudes are present as a state of affairs in all human beings (and it is), then those attitudes (and their multi-layered polymorphism cum confusion) will be present in the student who is taking on the material and activities in the experiment herein. That is, students will approach the material with whatever combination of attitudes and content they are involved with in-the-moment. The learning begins from men and women “as they are, no matter what that may be” (Lonergan (1958, 401 and 2000, 426).

It follows that, because the material and experimental activities in Finding the Mind are philosophical and self-reflective in nature, they may inspire a momentary deepening of uncomfortable confusion for the student who is not accustomed to such venues of thought. Indeed, a student may live in a home-and-work environment where such thought is not appreciated or, worse, is considered as intrusive and destructive of the heretofore comfortable status quo.

Of course, fortunately or not, any learning can be experienced as intrusive. However, unless a student is forced from some outer source, such intrusions into students’ common living are ultimately the responsibility of the student. We and our students need to accept and even look for and expect some momentary confusion--if our own insights are to be substantial ones, and break through to carry us to a new horizon of clarity.

On the other hand, teachers should be quite aware of the potential psychological disorders and philosophical changes that the student will go through when taking on any serious philosophical study. We should be aware that, through a basic honesty of spirit, and according to the way philosophical learning acts, students cannot help but take their new insights home and express them, covertly or overtly, in that environment. In other words, philosophical insights commonly have their psychological, social, political and spiritual fallout in the personal lives of our students.

On the good side, the experiment may present the conditions for a break with the aspects of the attitudes that tend to inhibit the student’s lifelong learning, development and, in that development, self-understanding-knowledge-valuing—for the fundamental attitudes are potential to be both mental prisons and spiritual doves that can take flight towards our own openness and, at times, self-transcendence.

The attitudes can nip our inquiry in the bud or foster our endless confusion. But then, as developmental-dialectical, those same attitudes can proceed to unfold and flower in the way they are meant to--to become the full blossoming of potential that the immediacy of human inquiry intends itself to be.

It is helpful for the teacher, then, to be aware of and to understand the nature of the attitudes so that we can consciously-now prepare the ground for conscious process to unfold--at least to begin its unfolding in its own normative way--and for the benefit of the student, not to mention for those of us who love to see our students understand and grow.

Below, we briefly explore the attitudes that group in pairs around each of our four desire-quests/shadow-questions; and I suggest ways that teachers can help students recognize openness and self-transcendence when it occurs "before our eyes," and to move through the attitudes consciously-now to attain a modicum of openness of mind or, in its more profound expression, of an identity with our own being open, and our process of desire-questing and insighting, and of self-transcendence. In our case, the openness is to understanding, knowing and valuing--what our students can about their interior structure and its dynamics, and what about us is preliminary to and informs our ongoing thought, speech, and actions in all of its complexity of meaning.

At some point, and in inspiring conscious self-reflection in the student, we want to help him-her identify fully with that structure and its dynamics--and perhaps even understand their own attitudes and how we work through them towards our own self-transcendence.

(Learning about the attitudes in a critical way [towards self-appropriation-affirmation of them] will take another entirely different experiment and-or curricula than we find in Finding the Mind or in brief fashion herewith. That text is named: Opening the Mind [unpublished at this writing].)

For our present more introductory concerns, our narrative here is to alert the teacher of the broad outlines and the dynamics of the fundamental attitudes (Piscitelli 1985).

Thus, and as with the experiment, our treatment of the attitudes here is often descriptive and is (comparatively) cursory—a part of the shorter journey written mainly for the teacher. The treatment is not meant to provide a full exploration or to inspire you, the teacher, to identify the attitudes within yourself (this is not formal pedagogy as the experiment is meant to be); though such identification is an important self-reflective project for any teacher to take on. (I have found it extremely helpful in my own self-development and in the classroom.)

Rather, accompanying the experiment in Finding the Mind, I offer here a primer for the teacher to begin understanding the depth of the purpose and problems associated with the fundamental attitudes (and with liberal education) and that commonly (always) come forward in us and in our students within any teaching experience. The primer is especially for a beginning understanding of the fullness of educating the whole person for human living, and for beginning the process of self-appropriation-affirmation named here.

For a fuller exploration of the attitudes, see The Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person (Piscitelli 1985) and Opening the Mind (King, unpublished at this writing). (See note 1 herewith regarding the notion of identification.)

The Basic Structure of Self-Transcendence

In part II of Finding the Mind—the experiment, we find the four desire-quests/shadow-questions laid out in discursive order and set in the context of several other interior activities and venues. In real-life--and in real persons--our desire-quests and their accompanying attitudes emerge as a part of our basic awareness, often in haphazard and, commonly, in more condensed or presentational fashion (Langer 1942-1993)—polymorphic and often all-at-once.

In a controlled experiment, however, we can use our narratives and diagrams (in part II and below) to lay out the four desire-quests/shadow-questions in order, with their accompanying attitudes, showing their fully differentiated relational order. We do so to get a clear imaginary framework to understand them better and how they relate to one another in the theory--in an objectivist-theoretical way. (I distinguish this way from the other way: an exercise in self-transcending self-discovery and, ultimately, of self-appropriation-affirmation.)

Then, from having understood the theory clearly, if we want, we can perform the experiment of actually identifying the desire-quests in our own expressions and experiences that we have written down in our crisis narratives in Finding the Mind.

As theoretically expressed, then, the four shadow-questions are laid out in fully differentiated form and can be related more easily (and critically) to the interrelated and dynamic structure in our interior domain, or our desire-quests. Then, associated with each of the four desire-questing aspects of the structure, we can locate a set of tensional, opposed, developmental--dialectically-related--attitudes. The diagramed structures below are imaginary frames for what is actually present in us and is repeated for each of our four desire-quests/shadow-questions. The /\ refer to directions of movements of meaning:

Openness:
Insight-to-understanding
Knowing
Being involved with what is really worthwhile
Being involved with what is really ultimately worthwhile

/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
Desire-Quest (four in all)
/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ tension: from below-upwards
Attitude <--horizontal tension--> Attitude (eight in all)

There is tension, then, on the planes side-to-side, as it were, horizontally, as we move from one desire-quest's lower-viewpoint attitude to the other attitude in that same desire-quest, e.g., from naivete to scepticism; and as we move from one desire-quest's set of lower-viewpoint attitudes to another set of lower-viewpoint attitudes in another desire-quest, e.g., as we move from our understanding to our knowing venue.

There is also a tension that arises or pushes upwards, as it were, vertically, from below-upwards moving through the lower-viewpoints and on towards openness, and concretely towards our own self-transcendence in living. Openness, the higher viewpoints, and actual self-transcendence, then, are what is intentional of the fundamental, unmediated, set of desire-quests that we are.

As untransformed and undifferentiated, however, we refer to the eight pairs of attitudes here as lower viewpoints (Piscitelli 1985).

We are not discussing content here yet. The content is as diverse as our daily experience and history of it. Taken together, however, the attitudinal framework constitutes the basic structure of the polymorphism of mind we explored briefly above and in other appendixes here (see appendix 5, The Pervasiveness of the Good).

Whereas, when the tension in their oppositions is worked through, differentiated, developed, and taken-up in our concrete existence, that tension is released in-the-moment through an insight or set of insights, and then through the movement of mind that manifests in our deliberations, decisions, and actual speech and-or act; and we are transformed in a movement and moment of our own self-transcendence, or its absence.

As dialectically related and released, the lower viewpoint attitudes in each of the four desire-questing venues become transformed, each intentional to become a part of our attitude of openness in that venue—openness to understanding, to knowing, to the good-worthwhile, and to the ultimate good-worthwhile.

The attitudes manifest pervasively and concretely in our thought, speech, and act. We then refer to the transformed attitudes in each desire-questing venue as a movement towards openness, towards a series of higher viewpoints and, again, towards our own self-transcendence--always, however, with content and in concrete history (Piscitelli 1985). (See note 3 below for the meaning of dialectic as used here.)

Furthermore, in order to approach a higher viewpoint in any desire-questing venue or with any content, we do not shed our lower viewpoints. Rather, we can say that we shred our lower viewpoints and reform ourselves in terms of their inner dynamism, properly-directed--that is, as associated with and as in flow with their fundamental intentions.

The tension between the pairs of attitudes (stacked four-deep, as it were) aims to drive them (us) upwards towards their mutual transformation. As our own movements of mind, that transformation, again, is essentially a process of self-transcendence towards understanding, knowing, and being involved with what is worthwhile and ultimately worthwhile. In this way, we are potential to work in and through the attitudinal oppositions and their tensions, in developmental-dialectical fashion, to transform our lower viewpoints to higher viewpoints. OR, we are potential to remain imprisoned in the polymorphism cum confusion of our lower viewpoints.

The fundamental intention, then, is to open the prison, as it were, and to transform in each desire-quest what hinders our openness and self-transcendence. The aim is to draw from each "side" of the attitudes what we need to approach and to actuate that self-transcendence, and to transform or to put behind us what imprisons us or holds us back from our full flowering and well-being as we approach our daily living.

In this way, the lower viewpoint attitudes--and their inner dynamism--are a necessary/constitutive part of our being and of our being-in-development. They are complex, again, developmental, dialectical, overlaying, interdependent, and transformative. Again, they constitute, in part, what we mean when we say that we are polymorphic. As theoretically expressed and personally known, they give us some clear definition of ourselves and a kind of interior roadmap for self-fostering our own fundamental aim towards openness and self-transcendence.

First, the desire-quests are overlaid, one over the other, where the process of unfolding can reach a full differentiation of mind and where, in self-reflection, we are potential to know and to work through each desire-quest separately and completely in any concrete situation.

Second, the lower viewpoints in each venue are fundamentally in conflict with one another as well as with our deeper desires and fears as we approach our living in the no-fixed-data arena of our existence. Those desires and fears include a continued thrust-towards or fear-of understanding of meaning, knowledge of the true-real, and involvement in the good-worthwhile (Piscitelli 1985)--in the concrete universe where each situation holds its own criteria for our involvement. Or again, as Aristotle noted, there are no fixed data where ethics are concerned.

In this way, if not transformed to a higher viewpoint, the lower viewpoints remain, again, a prison and a constant source of anxiety and self-destructive tension within us—for without developing and transforming, we remain without the fundamental satisfaction of insighting-to-wholeness of understanding and, thus, we are constantly “at odds with ourselves.” And without a movement towards differentiation of mind, the desire-quests and their attitudinal tensions can go static and coalesce around the fluctuating state of our untutored feeling-image base.

On the other hand, through our transformative thought processes, that include the movement through the lower viewpoints, that anxiety and tension can be gathered-up and released in the moment, becoming the source of great satisfaction, growth, wholeness, and strength. Aha! I understand. Yes, now I know. I did it. I said or did it right. I said or did it well. Yes.

Further, and to use the analogy of the development from a rosebud to a rose, we cannot cut into an immature mind to find the needed differentiation-of-mind, only on a smaller scale, any more than we can cut into an immature rosebud and find a fully developed rose in-miniature inside. Rather, like a rosebud goes through developments and transforms that green pulp to become a fully formed rose, so the desire-quests and their lower viewpoints begin in an undifferentiated state and then grow, develop, and transform to become their potential flower in our approaching openness, a set of higher viewpoints, and self-transcendence in concrete events in our lives.

However, the lower viewpoints are only potent for their development towards the higher—they can fail to be nourished, guided, and developed, and they can derail and even die in some sense. And in our complexity, we can even consciously reject our own developmental processes and, thus, our own well-being.

At the same time, those same attitudes--as dynamic--are the seeds to our becoming open, and to our actual self-transcendence—again, towards understanding and knowing (aesthetic-intellectual and rhetorical-philosophical self-transcendence), and towards being involved in what is really worthwhile (moral self-transcendence), and the ultimately worthwhile (spiritual-religious self-transcendence), which together are the basic intentions of our being as human.

As derailed, the attitudes also are the formative source of our remaining in our truncated, confused, closed, tension-filled, mind-set, and of our avoiding or rejecting that same self-transcendence—and for any one of a number of “reasons.”

Thus, all four sets of lower-viewpoint attitudes, eight in all, are dynamic as they are potential to transform and follow the same normative developmental pattern within the desire-questing structure—from lower to higher viewpoints in each concrete set of questions and events, from tension-filled existence to openness, to self-transcendence in concrete situations.

Further, our desires and our fears (sometimes known as our “feelings”) are also undifferentiated; they have a long history of their own; they are commonly fickle, polemical, and changing; and they fuel our tensions (as part of our motivational complex) as well as our desire-quests.

At a deeper level, our four desire-quests as quests, however, are fueled by our equally passionate need to understand, to know, and to be involved with what is really worthwhile (the good) (Lonergan 1958 and 2000; and Piscitelli 1985). The question then becomes: Which feelings, or desires and fears, are we most identified with? and further, how have our feelings been tutored (if at all) over our lifetime?

In concrete human living, the desire-quests can emerge (but need not) into specified and articulate questions in us, e.g., our sense of internal wondering about a particular event (say, a football game) can emerge into a concrete question: What happened in the game? Who won? Those questions can become more or less nuanced and articulate; and the desire-quests and questions constantly call us to develop and work through the dialectical tensions embedded in all of the lower viewpoint attitudes.

Our lower-viewpoint attitudes are oppositional but, pressed from below in the deepest regions of ourselves by our constant desire to understand, etc., also are conditioned to unfold towards our self-transcendence—in understanding meaning, knowing, and regarding and saying-doing what is really worthwhile and ultimately worthwhile in the NOW of our concrete existence.

(Below, read each of the four desire-questing venues in the diagram from below upwards.)

The Attitudes on Their Structure

DESIRE-QUEST-1

Openness to Understanding
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
What is it?
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Naiveté <---> Scepticism

DESIRE-QUEST-2

Openness to Knowing
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Is it Really So?
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Dogmatism <---> Relativism

DESIRE-QUEST-3

Openness to and Deliberation/Decision About What is Really Worthwhile?
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
What is/Is it Really Worthwhile?
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Optimism <---> Pessimism

DESIRE-QUEST-4

Openness to Ultimate Meaning
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Is it Really-Ultimately Worthwhile?
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
Sacralism <---> Secularism

Our treatment of the attitudes below is neither from a moving viewpoint (for pedagogy towards reader development) nor is it as thorough as can be found in other works (Piscitelli 1985). However, let us explore the attitudes in more detail.

NOTE: the technical terms for the attitudes, e.g., naïveté and scepticism, share some meaning with their counterparts in common usage. However, for us in the context of this study, these are technical terms with specific philosophical meaning (Piscitelli 1985).

Self-Transcendence

The attitude of openness in all four desire-questing venues is also tensional—it calls, sublates, draws from, and transforms the lower viewpoints to move us upwards towards our own potential towards self-transcendence in life situations. Openness is what we need in order to enter well the THIS-ness of concrete reality. Self-transcendence occurs in our understanding and knowing as our learning process, and in our valuing and saying and doing what is really worthwhile and ultimately worthwhile not only in our crises situations, but in our concrete, day-to-day living.

Below, let us explore each of the desire-quests and their tri-structure of attitudes. Again, the basic structure and most of its set of technical terms explored below are drawn directly from E. Piscitelli’s Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person—Dialectics (1985).

Openness to Understanding

(Desire-Quest-1: what is it?)
Lower-Viewpoint Attitudes: Naïveté and Scepticism

The two lower viewpoints of our desire-quest-1 venue (for understanding) are naiveté and scepticism (Piscitelli 1985). Their meaning is such that, as infants and children, we are first dependent on others for our well-being--on those around us to direct and protect us. As such, and as the life of human beings is complex, variable, and meaning-charged, we need to trust and believe before we can understand for ourselves.

However, if we fail to develop as we grow chronologically, or if our developmental processes derail, our initial need to trust-believe can foster our attitude of naiveté.

Trust and belief are, in part, essential aspects of human living and are one aspect of the means to the end of understanding in this venue. However, for the naive person, trust and belief become ends in themselves. Here for the naive person, understanding for myself is not an option but, rather, is antithetical to my naive attitude.

On the other hand, we also come equipped with wonder and a need to understand what we can for ourselves. If developing properly and if not suppressed, that wonder and need turn into questions quickly as we grow.

However, again, as we grow chronologically, if we fail to develop, or if our developmental processes derail, our need to understand for ourselves can derail with it. Our generation of questions can turn into the attitude of scepticism. Wonder and our developing questions are essential aspects of human living. They are, in part, the means to the proper end of understanding in this venue.

However, for the sceptic, wonder becomes endlessly circular, and questions become ends in themselves. Here understanding-for-myself is not an option but, rather, similar to the naive attitude, is antithetical to the sceptical attitude.

Initial Needs

.....to trust-believe....and....to wonder and to raise questions
(both as moments in my movement towards understanding for myself)

Derailment of Movement

Naïvete...........Scepticism (lower viewpoints)

As lower viewpoints, the two attitudes work against us to imprison us and to make common our confusion. As potential to our developmental intention, they both still hold our initial needs: To first trust-believe, then to wonder and question--but both with the aim of understanding for myself.

By taking-up what is needed in the lower viewpoints, and leaving behind what holds up back (the truncated and misdirected extremes of naïveté and scepticism), we can approach understanding for ourselves (the process of desire-questing-to-insighting) and of experiencing our own self-transcendence in this venue of meaning development.

By themselves, and if undeveloped, then, the two lower viewpoints in this first desire-quest venue are extreme versions of ourselves. That is, seeded in the beginning, and as a part of getting along in the world as children, is our need to believe and trust. However, if we do not developed along normative lines towards understanding for ourselves, our initial childhood innocence is slated to “grow” us into a naïve adult.

We cannot grow and live well by believing everyone and everything forever. For instance, believing anything a teacher, authority figure, or a text says, without good reason or without also looking to understanding for oneself, is a manifestation of the attitude of naïveté.

Seeded on the other side of the lower polemic is that wonder and our movement towards questioning that, if not developed along its normative lines, can “grow” us into sceptics. That is, on this extreme “side” of the dialectical tension in venue-1, we are willing to raise questions. However, like the naïve person believes without effort to understand, so the sceptic questions without the same--an aim and effort to understand.

Where naïveté believes uncritically, so the sceptic questions uncritically; and both attitudes are stuck in themselves--in a seemingly endless tensional circle that we set up to avoid the insights that would release us from our prison. Where the naïve person cannot live well (self-transcend) and, at the same time, believe everything and trust everyone, so the sceptic cannot live well and, at the same time, doubt everything and distrust everyone, on principle.

Embedded in both attitudes are (1) a deeply pervasive desire to understand for myself and (2) a similarly pervasive fear of losing the alleged comfort (security) that trusting and believing others, and having so many unanswered questions, seem to bring. If I understand for myself, then I won't need them any more, and, I won't be the one with the questions. We both desire and fear it. So that our autonomy of thought is a central intent of human being, even though we are born embedded in and needing a community of others in our ongoing history of events.

On the other hand, the lower viewpoints turn our deeper intentions (in this case, to understand for ourselves) quite literally on their heads. That is, naïveté desires the supposed comfort and security of having no questions, and fears giving up trust-believe. Concomitantly, scepticism desires the supposed comfort and security of never having to trust-believe anyone (even him-herself) and fears trusting-believing.

In either case, they both fear understanding for themselves and all that comes from and with it, and both desire the supposed comfort and security of either refusing to question (the end is to trust-believe) or of raising so many questions that we exhaust and frustrate those we are communicating with (the end is to question--forever).

There are many "reasons: for such upside-down desires and fears that we cannot know unless we enter and explore the individual’s life history and circumstances. However, such desires and fears are constant and tensional to one-another and go to the heart of the life-long learning (or failing to learn) situation.

The fundamental force that continues to drive our internal life upwards and outwards towards our own self-transcendence in this venue, and that provides another tensional factor in it, however, is our deeper desire to understand for ourselves. This is our call for insighting--meaning and intelligibility--embedded in our (generalized here) question: What is it? (and fear of failing to understand for ourselves).

Our lower viewpoints, then, are not to be discarded (shed) in the process of self-transcendence. Rather as dynamically related, they play an essential part in that process. First, in order to listen for meaning and the intelligible, we need to begin with initial belief-trust, not in someone or some text necessarily--though the process is essentially interpersonal--but that there is something to be understood. As authentic, then, our belief-trust becomes a means to the end of understanding, rather than an end in them selves.

To remain in a state of trust-belief, however, and in that state to suppress and quash our own questions about anything or anyone, is to become naïve. The grown-up person who has not really left childhood internally is the un-thinker, or the naïve person who has learned to ignore their own sense of wonder (or who has experienced suppression) and to drift towards those who are, for instance, strong characters, or who seem trustworthy and believable.

However, the crux of the question is: what is the trust-believe for?—so that we may understand for ourselves, or so that we may not do so?

Of course, in a world of open discourse, especially where we have parents who foster autonomy and learning or in a secular and-or critical school environment, the naïve attitude is difficult to maintain. That is, when through life experiences the un-thinker-believer in us is continually thwarted with conflicting beliefs and unbelievable people (we find out), we tend to move to the other extreme—to become sceptical of all.

Where the naive person is the unthinker, the sceptic is the half-baked thinker (Piscitelli 1985). The sceptical attitude, then, is (1) an extreme response to the uncritical believer in us—the one that, at some point, was disappointed and even thwarted—That's painful--I’ll never believe or trust again. Scepticism is also (2) a prison filled with uncritical and unreasonable questions that we rain on others but that (for us) are performatively a way to avoid our own insights-to-understanding. The sceptic performatively objects to understanding--because I would have to begin by believing, at least for a moment, and I cannot do that any more. The sceptic in us is "half-baked" because, as such, we are willing to let our questions emerge, but we are performatively closed to our own insighting processes.

OR, (3) we can have a potential moment in our development towards openness and understanding for ourselves.

The movement of mind across the polemic is such that, if I cannot depend on (trust) and believe everything and everyone forever, then I will believe no one and nothing forever. The shift from one pole (naiveté) to the other (scepticism) is commonly a failure of reasonable trust and-or belief in-the-moment and-or a faith that something can be understood. Where our scepticism would head-off initial belief (kill the baby [the insight] in its crib, so to speak), we meet that moment of belief with a weaponized question before it can occur.

Where naïveté wants to trust-believe, and has quashed-suppressed questioning, scepticism wants to question but fears trust-belief to the extreme. And both (1) initial belief and (2) wonder-questioning are necessary for insighting-understanding for our selves.
.
Neither lower viewpoint alone or in the extreme (a coverall self-conflicting set of attitudes of belief or doubt) gets us authentic questions or insights-to-understanding for ourselves—or self-transcendence. Rather, that understanding occurs from working through—transforming and unfolding--the dynamic relationship between both lower viewpoints and the thrust-upwards of the fundamental question: What is it? for insighting-to-understanding, the criteria of which are seeded, not in one OR the other, but in the dynamic and dialectical relationship between both attitudes.

So that, and using concrete imagery, when in any life-situation where understanding is called for, we can visualize a back-and-forth winnowing dynamism between the extremes of our naiveté and scepticism on a horizontal plane, or between our believing and doubting. And on a vertical plane, we can visualize a from-below-upwards dynamism as our fundamental desire-quest heading for its momentary end in concrete insights-to-understanding.

In a person with a modicum of openness to understanding, that dynamism works through both attitudes to include but transform (1) our initial need to believe, and (2) our potentially-oppositional need to question, on our way towards insighting-to-understanding, or towards our self-transcendence with regard to meaning-intelligibility: What is it?

Drawing first from the initial belief of naiveté as untransformed, the person who becomes open to understanding is willing to listen—to begin by believing so that we can be open to the meaning that may (but does not necessarily) become present to us in any concrete situation (in conversation, reading, thinking, experiencing anything). However, the fundamental desire-quest drives us beyond our initial need to believe. That desire-quest drives us to look forward to understanding for ourselves; and we do that by pressing the question beyond mere belief and towards insighting.

Initiating an authentic question for our own understanding is a moment in our development towards our own self-transcendence. However, the extreme of the sceptical attitude was a reactive response to the experience and perceived failure of believing. From that extreme counter-position, we cannot even start the process of understanding because we are blocked with a now-grown-in fear born of that failure of having once believed.

Just as our extreme naiveté alone blocks or quashes the dynamism of the desire-quest and cannot move us towards our insighting-understanding, our extreme doubt alone (scepticism) cannot assent to potential learning at the get-go. Thus, the sceptic too cannot invite or go forward towards insighting-understanding.

Maintaining the fear and doubt of the sceptic (doubt everything and everyone regardless), then, cuts us off from the upward dynamism towards understanding. We may have a good question but, rather than heading towards understanding, the sceptic uses that question as a diversion. Here if we get close to assenting and then to having an insight, we veer off into an endless “attack of questions” the substance of which are more about avoidance and providing red herrings than about anyone having insights to understanding.

On the other hand, just as we need initial belief, our doubt holds within it our potential movement towards producing authentic questions for understanding--so that our movement away from naiveté (that, in its extreme, would believe everything) towards scepticism (that, in its extreme, would doubt everything) is also essential for our understanding to occur.

The attitude of openness to understanding in this first venue, then, maintains an initial belief, but then also draws from the other side of the tension--doubt (scepticism) to “bring up” the question for understanding to the belief situation. So that again, initial belief is a means to the proper end of understanding for my self.

In self-reflective practice, and through working through the tensional relation between the initial belief of our naiveté and then the doubt of our scepticism (a dialectical tension between two extremes), we are able to move beyond both towards the attitude of openness to understanding and potential self-transcendence. Through working in and through the tension as we live life daily, we are able to attend to new and potentially conflicting meaning.

Further, achieving the attitude openness to understanding in any one situation, we must first believe so that we may listen. Our naiveté is transcended, however, when we require that belief is only a beginning—reasonable in some cases, but not enough where we have recognized that our own understanding is our fundamental aim. To understand for ourselves, we need also to draw from the moment of doubt that our extreme of scepticism holds for us. Our scepticism, however, can only be transcended when the doubter in us can accept a moment of belief and give way to the occurrence of insight.

Again, the two extremes are not eliminated, but draw from one another and are modified when coming into right-relation to one another through the dynamism of the tension in the extremes. Here, initial belief (emerging into listening) paves the way for the authentic question to emerge—we can engage with resonant and new meaning; initial doubt brings up the question to massage (dialectic) that engaged meaning; and, if fulfilled, the tension releases itself into an insight for understanding—and for self-transcendence in that understanding.

So the two lower viewpoints in us need one another. They are a part of the winnowing experience of the dialectical process. And we approach openness to understanding through that process--that takes what is needed in both lower viewpoints into account, while leaving behind the extremity and deadening stasis that is part and parcel to remaining in either the naïve or skeptical attitude as extreme.

Further, the attitude of openness to understanding is not afraid of the discomfort of initial confusion, or of not understanding yet or quickly. Such discomfort may be painful--we feel it as internal tension and even a moment of confusion.

And openness knows that insights don’t always come fast—they can wait for years to emerge and may occur at odd moments, indeed--at moments of rest and reflection, after sleep, even when otherwise diverted, like when taking a shower or a walk. Often in such cases, in the release of intense conscious thought from-above, as it were, we leave space for the field of inner meaning to either differentiate or to come together as a new and transformed order of meaning from its un- and semi-conscious field of activity. The release of "upper" conscious pressure allows the insight to come forward in the interior space that is now opened up for it to occur in its own way and time--when we are strong enough and ready for it.

An attitude of openness to understanding, then, gives full sway to the tension that reasonable belief and the fostering of our questions brings—questions for further meaning to form and emerge at appropriate times and that reveals itself from being present to the internal conflict in us--between initial belief and then our doubt.

A being that is open to understanding, then, is a being-in-desire-quest, open-to the insights that may not have come yet and that prepare us for, and develop into, understanding-for-ourselves. Openness does so even though those insights are not guaranteed to come. When understanding does occur in such openness, however, what we mean by self-transcendence also occurs--we move beyond our present understanding to begin anew in a broader and deeper field of understanding--in this venue of meaning and intelligibility.

On the other hand, reasonable belief and thoughtful questioning are not the static and extreme attitudes of naiveté and scepticism. That is, if for some reason we cannot find our way to understanding because meaning is not available to us, or it’s just not our concern, then our belief is not naïve and our doubt is not scepticism. Rather, and depending on the situation, we move through both attitudes towards self-transcendence--through the available relevant meaning that we are called to believe--reasonably.

Thus, both initial belief and a questioning attitude can be quite tense, but reasonable attitudes to maintain. We don’t understand a museum for having viewed one painting in it.

We should also recall from our exploration of the question, what is it?, that the meaning and intelligibility that this desire-quest-1 seeks includes qualitative dimensions of that meaning and intelligibility. This is so in most cases in the particular, and in all cases as the lifetime background development of meaning that any particular set of questions draws from. (See Finding the Mind, section II and appendix 5: The Pervasiveness of the Good.)

Regarding students, harboring an attitude of openness to understanding--in this case, towards this experiment and materials--stands in stark contrast to students entering the study with an attitude of either naiveté or scepticism (Piscitelli 1985). Further, and in terms of the transcendental precepts (Lonergan 1972), if we are to be attentive and intelligent, we cannot do so from remaining in either of the lower-viewpoint attitudes associated with our shadow question: what is it?

To harbor an attitude of naiveté, in its extreme, is not to seek insights, but to believe and trust all, in an unquestioning way, as a perverse substitute for questioning and understanding for oneself. Naiveté as an extreme of the lower viewpoint is uncritical and unreasonable belief--and in this case, a naïve student will begin by believing--all that the teacher says about our theory and its experiment, and all that is presented in a text. Here, to learn is not to question and have insights, but to say "yes" automatically to it, and to token-memorize. Memorization, of course, is an essential part of learning. However, memorization without accompanying insights is like a frame without a painting.

Also, as children, we must begin with belief. However, that initial belief is for the sake of the child being guided well, and then developing in their own understanding over a long period of growth. Thus, in a young person or adult student, naiveté manifests from a lack of that development—developing from a passive state of merely believing to an active state of identifying with our desire to understand for ourselves--and from an unqualified acceptance of whatever is being presented, or whatever the naïve person is reading, to believing and trusting critically and reasonably.

The naive person is often thought of as stupid; however, often it's not stupidity but self-imposed ignorance that is operative hiding in an all-too-willing follower.

Naïveté, then, suggests (at least generally) a history of either lack of direction and good guidance, and/or of outright suppression. The naïve person will tend to believe whatever the teacher has to say, especially if the naïve person likes the teacher. Here, it’s not about really learning anything, but in finding people they feel they can trust and believe. The naïve student does not want or need (seemingly) to understand anything for him-herself. Naiveté’s approach to the teacher and to the material begins and ends with blanket and un-thought-out acceptance. Having to think for oneself is the bane of the naïve person’s existence.4

On the other hand, to harbor an attitude of scepticism is to have once been naive, but to now hold the polar opposite view. That is, the sceptic is one who first believed and trusted, and who found that attitude wanting and even painful. Instead of instantly believing, now the sceptic begins with a half-thought-out and automatic rejection of what is being presented and, in our case, a rejection of the very possibility that the teacher may be trusted to provide the student with an avenue to understanding.

The sceptic is the naïve person who has become the unbeliever and distruster. The sceptic rejects out-of-hand any authority the teacher may have about the subject. Like the naïf, however, the sceptic does not want or need (seemingly) to understand anything for him-herself. Oddly, the sceptic seems intelligent at first, but then seems somehow blocked to understanding what is being presented. They are capable, it seems, but won't understand. The sceptic’s approach to the teacher and the material begins and ends with blanket doubt and rejection.

In this way, where the naïve person is unreasonable and uncritical about believing, the sceptic is unreasonable and uncritical about doubting. Here, the winnowing of the dialectic is dying-to-dead. Rather than looking towards self-transcendence in insights-to-understanding, naïve and sceptical persons are trapped in the prison that is the extremes of the lower-viewpoints. Neither is interested in the work and inherent risk that it takes to question and then to understand something for them selves, regardless of what it is, who is presenting it, or how it is being presented.

The sceptic, then, has moved beyond the naïve attitude towards the open attitude in his-her development that would include questioning. However, the sceptic still will not understand for him-herself. Instead of moving towards being truly open to understanding, like the naïf, the sceptic remains on the horizontal extreme that forms the lower viewpoints of our internal structure—belief or unbelief--but not understanding.

On the one hand, the naïf feels uncomfortable with undeveloped or conflicting meaning and the questions that arise from either. The naïf does not want to let questions emerge or to be pressed into thinking much about anything—for such questions disturb the sense of security that the naïve person needs to exist, even if that security is false.

Believing and trusting, for the moment at least (or even for a lifetime for some), seems “easier”—and even more so when oppressive forces (persons and ideologies) prevail to mold us and keep us in an undeveloped state.

On the other hand, the sceptic has begun to think enough to raise a barrage of questions. However, the sceptic employs their own questioning “intelligence” in convoluted ways, e.g., to forge a verbal attack with half-meaning questions and, instead of desiring insights, to ward off any new insights that threaten to occur. Where the naïf is pained by questions, the sceptic is pained by believing and believers, having once been so thwarted by having trusted and believed. The closer the sceptic gets to aligning him-herself with the meaningfulness--to assenting to what is being presented in the discourse or text, the harder and faster s-he runs away.

Naiveté: Believes and trusts, does not question, and so has no insights.

Scepticism: Does not believe-trust, even his-her own thought processes when pointed out to them; does question, but only as a defensive or
avoidance measure; and so has no insights.

Thus, both the naïf and the sceptic approach new material with a predisposition towards both truncation and closure of mind that precludes self-transcendence and, thus authentic learning, or the activity of insighting-to-understanding. Either viewpoint constitutes a static, undifferentiated, and preconditioned attitude--that the person (teacher) and-or material are already, before anything is said or done, either believable (naiveté) or not believable (scepticism). Neither attitude as a whole is open to understanding--involved with pursuing questions for their insights as they arise, and a degree of understanding that would promote the naïf and the sceptic to transcend their present tension, truncation, and closure.

Together and untransformed, the two lower viewpoints create a confused polymorphism of mind with regard to understanding that, as bound together, leaves us blocked to that understanding. In our case, the unquestioned and uncritical believer or doubter may regard the meaning-exploration of the student’s own interior life; however, neither attitude in their undifferentiated, confused, and untransformed state can forge our way in earnest towards our experiment in Finding the Mind or towards the fullness of self-appropriation-affirmation.

Openness to Knowing the True-Real: (Desire-Quest-2: Is it eally so?)
Lower Viewpoint Attitudes: Dogmatism and Relativism

In our desire-quest-2 venue (is it really so?), the person who is open to knowing does not already “know it all,” nor do they play fast and loose with what they mean when they say “I know.” Rather, such openness is willing to live in the tension of having critical questions and some understanding, but not-yet having enough reflectively and critically established understanding that would warrant knowing.

Further, openness to knowing invites affirmative (yes) and/or negative (no) judgments, but does so only when questions for reflective understanding have been raised and satisfied. Openness to knowing waits for reflective insights and the accumulation of evidence to emerge from within. The open person makes judgments (it is or is not true-real), but only after we can marshal, in our desire-quest-2 venue, the meaning from our desire-quest-1 venue—what is relevant and critical about the meaning we find there--towards our reflective understanding of what is true-real and our knowing in our judgment of it (yes, it is really so or, no, it is not really so).

As our desire-quest-1 seeks insights of direct insights-to-understanding, our desire-quest-2 for knowledge-truth-reality seeks insights for reflective insights-to-knowing. Such knowing is meaning-critical and incremental and finds its final closing expression in a yes-no judgment, or in I-don’t-know where we abandon our critical question or return to our first question to gather-in more meaning and intelligibility (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).

The person open to knowing (is it so?) moves from (a) accumulated meaning (desire-quest-1) to (b) refinement of that meaning in critical thought, to judgment of tht meaning as knowledge-truth about the real. We do so by searching for insights of relevance, plausibility, incision, and reasonability in the meaning of the presented material under question so that we can then make good and critical judgments about the real (yes-no).

Further, our desire-quest-2 venue bears the same basic structure as our desire-quest-1 venue. Instead of coming to understand, however, in this venue, we are coming to know the true-real (or not) what we have first understood in our desire-quest-1. Also, instead of moving through the attitudes of naïveté and scepticism, in this venue of knowledge-truth-reality we move through the attitudes of relativism and dogmatism.

Read the below from-below-upwards:

Yes-No Judgment
/\
Reflective Insights for Knowing Truth-Reality
/\
Openness to Knowing (Higher viewpoint)
/\ /\
Dogmatism <--Lower viewpoint tension--> Relativism
/\
Tension from below upwards
Desire-quest to self-transcend in knowing the true-real

Also, again, the movement through the venue is dialectical-dynamic. That is, we experience a kind of winnowing when we move through the tensions of the lower viewpoints of our desire-quest-1 for understanding. Similarly, in desire-quest-2, we experience a sense of winnowing when we move through the tensions of our dogmatism and relativism to self-transcend in the midst of being open to knowing.

On the one hand, we desire to know, and we long to make our judgments long before we have all of the evidence for doing so. While on the other hand, we fear the responsibility of taking a stand on truth--of what we may judge to be so or not--as well as the implications of that truth on our being.

Further, and similar to our desire-quest-1, on the road to self-transcendence we do not simply shed our lower viewpoints in order to arrive at a higher viewpoint. Rather, our openness to knowing is similarly-achieved as dependent on the dynamism of the dialectic--on the deeper intent of our being--in this case, to know--and tensional relationship between those lower viewpoints and, again the call of the higher.

In other words, the open self-transcendent attitude can only emerge transformed from our having gone through the tensions of the lower viewpoints, or from the tensional-dialectical relationship between what is central to dogmatism and relativism associated with our is it really so? desire-quest-2.

Also, as we leave meaning-development and enter the domain of our desire-quest-2, we take into account the relationship between it and our prior desire-quest-1. Whereas in desire-quest-1 we are exploring and insighting the expanses of meaning-intelligibility, in desire-quest-2 we are exploring and (reflectively-critically) insighting for the truth-reality of that same meaning-intelligibility. Exploration of meaning is one thing, while knowing true-real meaning is quite another. Not all meaning is true-real meaning.

Attitudes: Dogmatism and Relativism

In brief, the attitude of dogmatism holds our willingness to make judgments--yes it is, no it is not. However in its derailed extreme as a lower viewpoint, our judgments are quick, rash, uncritical, and motivated by anything but a desire-quest to really know the truth of the matter under consideration. The truncation of the desire-quest is a jump-to-judgment and a bypassing of the critical-reflective understanding that would call for a refinement of that judgment.

In this way, the higher-viewpoint attitude of openness to knowing shares with dogmatism our willingness to make judgments. However, as a lower viewpoint, the dogmatist mistakes the mere act of judgment for actual knowing. Basically, as dogmatic, we like the sound and feeling of knowing, even when we really do not; and we feel existentially threatened when our sense of knowing is threatened.

Unlike the attitude of openness to knowing, the attitude of dogmatism forgets that judgments without meaning are de facto meaningless. In its polemical and static extreme, dogmatism jumps past meaning exploration and reflective-reasonable consideration of evidence to makes judgments only to sound like a knower. (The dogmatist is the classic buffoon.) The dogmatist’s judgments, then, supplant the nuances-of-meaning that may be found in the issue at hand. Once the closure of judgment occurs, the dogmatist is closed-off to those nuances, failing to weigh and marshal evidence in order to arrive at actual true-knowing.

The dogmatic attitude makes judgments without reflective understanding of meaning-intelligibility, which in any critical sense, is no knowing at all.

The winnowing movement that takes us through the lower viewpoint attitudes in this dialectical venue potentially towards the attitude of openness to knowing goes something like this: When, in the course of being exposed to the demands of reasonable discourse, the dogmatist is challenged, again and again, to provide evidence for his-her judgments—for putting-up or shutting up, as it were--the dogmatist’s empty judgments become known for what they are—just so much hot air. When this exposure happens enough, the dogmatist begins to lose the confidence in his-her judgments that may have sounded and felt good in the moment, but, in fact, were discovered by all as unfounded.

In the midst of reasonable discourse (as often occurs in school), others commonly want to know and raise such questions as, how do you know or where did you get that information, or what is your evidence (that it is really so)? Under the pressure of such inquiry, the dogmatist’s judgment cannot stand, for the dogmatist has supplanted a desire-quest for reflective understanding of meaning, and a weighing of that meaning, with a bevy of quick and often loud but empty judgments.

When called out, as it were, the dogmatist has to either defend their judgments with poorly developed evidence or with “evidence” that they do not have; or they have to back-down and lose face. Such experiences cause the dogmatist embarrassment and, when that happens enough, the dogmatic attitude tends to break down.

When the dogmatic attitude begins to break down, the dogmatist becomes confused and regressive and, under the pressure of the horizontal tension (between the two lower viewpoints in this venue: dogmatism and relativism), can run from one horizontal extreme of attitudes to the other. That other extreme is the attitude of relativism.

If the dogmatist finds embarrassment in “knowing it all,” then I won’t ever claim to know anything at all.

On the other side of the polemic, then, relativism is our unwillingness to judge and our abandonment of even the possibility of gaining truth about the real.

This desire-quest-2 venue is fundamentally reflective (it concerns critical thought--reflective understanding). However, in relativism, and using those same reflective capacities, we subvert the true-real and unhinge ourselves from our fundamental desire to know the true-real. In its extreme, relativism is our conscious rejection of even the possibility of arriving at truth-reality, on principle.

The relativist, then, can reflect and explore meaning ad infinitum, but makes only one covert claim to truth: That there is none to be had, and certainly not in our judgments about it. (In our time, and in the afterglow of the problem of knowledge born of the scientific revolution, the relativist has the writ-large support of centuries of philosophical problematics.)

Thus, where the dogmatic attitude pretends to know all, the relativist attitude pretends to know nothing, except that we “know” one thing: that nothing can be really known. Where the dogmatist is quick to judge with little or no meaning accrual, reviewing, or marshalling, the relativist postpones judgment with an infinite regress into meaning exploration (a reversion to the what is it? question, but for the purpose of avoiding judgment, and not for the purpose of knowing).

Similar to the relationship between naiveté and scepticism in our desire-quest-1 venue of understanding, then, we subvert and distort the dynamism of our desire-quest-2--the movement upward towards self-transcendence in knowing. The inner conversation goes something like this:

If no one will believe my judgments, and if my judgments are not good enough, then I guess I cannot really know anything; and so I won’t try to know any more.

Again, knowing for the dogmatist is played fast and loose, and is more about putting forth a loud and authoritative-sounding judgment than it is in searching for and providing the evidence for having made it. The contempt of the relativist, revealed or not, is for the person who claims to know.

On the other side of the polemic, as reflective, the attitude of relativism can become the philosophical mantra of otherwise intelligent persons, for instance, academics whose life centers around meaning-exploration, but who also claim that we can have no truth about the reality of that meaning.

Like the challenged, insight-less, and thwarted naïve person, who finds that their belief does not work for them, can become the sceptic, the challenged, unknowing, and thwarted dogmatist, whose unsupported judgments only gets them into trouble, can become the relativist.

The dogmatic attitude holds our potential for and willingness to make judgments. However, unlike the dogmatic attitude, in the attitude of openness to knowing, judgments only occur when propelled by the accumulation of weighed, marshaled, relevant, and sufficient meaning.

On the other hand, the relativist in us holds our potential for meaning accumulation and willingness to gather in that meaning. Unlike the relativist attitude, however, the attitude of openness to knowing looks for a moment to put an end to meaning exploration so that knowing, through a reasonable judgment, can occur (yes-no, it is really so or not). The attitude of openness to knowing regards that we can make judgments for truth-reality, but only when relevant, sufficient, and reasonable evidence is accumulated in order to make that judgment.

Openness to Knowing

In a relatively mature and commonly open but critical mind, we can locate the experience of knowing as a kind of catalytic tipping point. If we examine our experience of common judgment-making and knowing, we can find that tipping point at a moment of insight that has definite before-and-after moments surrounding it. That is, before the fulfillment of reflective understanding occurs about the situation at hand, our judgments remain in waiting—we are exploring and accumulating the evidence—as evidence. If we are rash in our judgment, we suffer discomfort. After the fulfillment of reflective understanding occurs, we are compelled, by force of reason, to pass our judgments about the truth-reality of that situation at hand. No more evidence is needed, even though there may be some available. If we continue to withhold our judgment after the tipping point has been reached, however, we suffer malaise.

As brief and simple examples, we do not keep asking “is it snowing?” when we have looked out the window and seen white flakes coming down from the sky: Yes, it is (really and truly) snowing. If we are in a windowless room, and we think it might be snowing outside, if open and critical, we do not claim to know it is snowing until we have witnessed the evidence for it. Further if someone in another room says “it’s snowing,” we can reasonably believe that the person is telling the truth about the reality. However, that belief, though a kind of indirect evidence, is not your own possession of direct evidence for knowing.

The tipping point, then, is either the judgment to reasonably believe, or the possession of direct and conclusive evidence that calls for our judgment: Yes, it is so, no it is not so. In either case, the tipping point has occurred. In other words, the force of reason within us deems that sufficient evidence is within our possession to move from (a) the openness of not knowing to (b) the closure of knowing.

In our example, after the catalytic reason-moment has occurred, you wouldn’t look outside to see the snow coming down, and still wonder or ask: is it snowing? Neither, if you have believed the person who said: it is snowing, will you still wonder about whether it is.

Another example: when we attend a trial (or watch one on television), if we are critical and open to knowing, we do not pass judgment rashly about the guilt or innocence of the accused; nor do we postpone judgment if cumulative, sufficient, reasonable, and conclusive evidence has been acquired. Rather, we wait until we have heard and considered all of the relevant evidence. And we are reluctant to judge until that evidence, again, is sufficient, clear, and conclusive. Conclusive is another way to express the catalytic tipping point—the sufficient-reason moment--where not-knowing ends and knowing occurs. The person on trial may be guilty or innocent of the crime; however, without all of the relevant evidence being presented in a critical way, we do not know truly, and he-she remains under the judgment, if not innocent: “not guilty.”

Further, when sufficient evidence is unavailable, reasonable trust (believing credible persons with good reason that it is snowing or that someone is guilty or innocent) is employed only as a background for necessary action and to avoid arbitrariness. We either believe the witnesses or we do not. They are either credible, or not. We either put on a coat and boots to go out in the snow, or we do not.

Our point is that knowing the true-real and openness to it have their psychological sufficient-reason-moment in our common living. That is, knowing is not only a formal or conceptual affair; nor is it only about the object and objectivity (it is truly and really snowing or not, and the accused is or is not truly and really guilty), but also the moment is existential, material, and concrete to us and in us—we experience it regularly in our interior domain; and the more critical and open we are, the more we experience it with clarity.

Further, as structural components, the lower viewpoints have embedded in them essential moments in that knowing; OR they can become philosophical traps that steer us away from knowing—in dogmatically making rash judgments or in refusing to judge even when we have attained sufficient, critical, and conclusive evidence.

Also, our lower- and/or higher-viewpoint attitudes inform the further movement from knowing to saying-doing (or to our desire-quests-3-4). Our

(

a) dogmatism and/or relativism, and-or our

(b) judgments of truth-reality and of reasonable belief born of our openness to knowing, underpin and inform our

(c) movement towards our desire-quest-3 for worthwhile-ness of our speech and act.

Neither the dogmatist’s meaningless judgments nor the relativist’s postponement of judgments ad infinitum can move us towards our own self-transcendence in knowing the truth about the real in this concrete case; so that the viewpoints are dynamic; and they are and mutually developmental and informing as the meaning developed in one constantly informs the others.

In other words, poor development of meaning (desire-quest-1), and-or bad judgments, or a pretense of no judgments (desire-quest-2), can only badly inform how we listen, deliberate, decide about what we say and do (desire-quests-3-4). The whole complex process, from wondering to acting, then, is affected by the self-transcendent process or the quashing or aversion of it in each and all desire-quest venues.

Below, we hear Lonergan expressing how our questions unfold and relate the process to the notion of human authenticity. (The parentheticals are mine):

Man achieves authenticity in self-transcendence. … One can live in a world, have a horizon, just in the measure that one is not locked up in oneself. A first step towards this liberation is the sensitivity we share with the higher animals. But they are confined to a habitat, while man lives in a universe. Beyond sensitivity man asks questions, and his questioning is unrestricted.

First, there are questions for intelligence. We ask what and why and how and what for. Our answers unify and relate, classify and construct, serialize and generalize (desire-quest-1). From the narrow strip of space-time accessible to immediate experience, we move towards the construction of a world-view (desire-quest-1) and towards the exploration of what we ourselves could be and could do (desire-quests-1 and 3, speculative understanding).

On questions for intelligence follow questions for reflection. We move beyond imagination and guess-work, idea and hypothesis, theory and system, to answer whether or not this really is so or that really could be (desire-quest-2). Now self-transcendence takes on a new meaning. Not only does it go beyond the subject but also it seeks what is independent of the subject. For a judgment that this or that is so reports, not what appears to me, not what I imagine, not what I think, not what I wish, not what I would be inclined to say, not what seems to me, but what is so (desire-quest-2).

Still such self-transcendence is only cognitive. It is in the order not of doing but only of knowing. But on the final level of questions for deliberation, self-transcendence becomes moral. When we ask whether this or that is worth while, whether it is not just apparently good but truly good, then we are inquiring, not about pleasure or pain, not about comfort or ill ease, not about sensitive spontaneity, not about individual or group advantage, but about objective value (desire-quests-1 and 3, speculative). Because we can ask such questions, and answer them, and live by the answers, we can effect in our living a moral self-transcendence (desire-quests-3-4). That moral self-transcendence is the possibility of benevolence and beneficence, of honest collaboration and of true love, of swinging completely out of the habitat of an animal and of becoming a person in a human society (desire-quests-3-4).

The transcendental notions, that is, our questions for intelligence, for reflection, and for deliberation, constitute our capacity for self-transcendence. (Lonergan 1972, 104-05) (see also appendix 14: Relating the Four Desire-Quests to the Transcendental Precepts)

~~~
As performance (as experienced, but not necessarily known to us in objectified or self-reflective fashion), the person who is open lives in a set of potentially transformative tensions consciously moving back and forth across the high planes of (1) judgment and (2) speaking-doing.

Further, the tension is, first, on a horizontal plane--between each of the lower viewpoints in all four questioning venues. Second, the tension is on a vertical plane--between (a) our initial wonder and thrust upwards that is our desire-quests in-performance, (b) those lower viewpoints and their own horizontal tensions, and (c) the higher viewpoints that constitute the possibility and dynamism of our actual self-transcendence. Third, the tension is comprehensive as each desire-quest venue is dynamically related to the others.

Again, it is not from negating or shedding the lower viewpoints, but from the polymorphic, dialectical-tensional movement between them that self-transcendence towards actual understanding, knowing, and being involved in the worthwhile-good can occur. The lower viewpoint attitudes all hold the potential to unfold and transform in their proper moments and turns, with their proper tensional relationship to one another, and with their proper self-transcendent ends—understanding, knowing, and being involved with what is really worthwhile. Underpinning all are the deeper-set desire-to and fear-of-not understanding for oneself, the desire-to and fear of-not-knowing, and the desire-to and fear-of-not being involved with what is really worthwhile.

Our deeper desire-quests can finally emerge to break through the crust of our self-neglect and closure-of-mind to reach out with a real-live question, or sometimes with a flood of questions, with assumed requirements for critical and reasonable judgment and, in speculative and practical judgments, towards good speech and act.

These deeper desire-quests are our unmediated mediators. They are our potent source of our creativity. They can transform the naïve attitude’s lesser desire--for the false security in unreasonable trust and belief, and the fear of understanding for oneself, that would require a break with that uncritical and unreasonable trust and belief. The self-transcendent moment in desire-quest-1 holds within it not only insighting-to-understanding for ourselves, but also the transformation of all momentary desire-fear into the satisfaction of having my own insights.

And our deeper desire-quest-1 can transform the sceptical attitude’s lesser fear--of admitting a now-painful moment of initial belief—and the desire to find one’s being in being in control through rejection, even if that control means remaining insight-free, and derailing the movement of self and others towards understanding, thereby thwarting the self-transcendent moment.

Further, in our desire-quest-2 our deeper desires and fears (desire to know, fear of not knowing) can transform the lesser desire of dogmatism: To seem to others and to myself to know it all--by making too-quick judgments, and the lesser fear of not being the one who knows by virtue of making those judgments; and of having to do the hard work of reflective understanding that would get us not only judgments but real knowing.

And these deeper desires and fears can transform the lesser desires and fears of relativism: desire to feign openness to meaning and fear of being wrong by committing to a reflectively established critical judgment for the true-real. The relativist takes this stance reflectively even though, in fact, the relativist actually and regularly performs judgments-for-truth-reality anyway in all life activities. And our deeper desires and fears transform the relativist’s fear of knowing (I cannot know it all, so I cannot know any) and desire to remain uncommitted and above such movements of mind until a false end-time when all meaning has been explored.

~~~

For the student, harboring an attitude of openness to understanding, and knowing and the truth (about the real)--in this case, towards the materials and experiment--stands in stark contrast to students entering the study with an attitude of either naïveté or scepticism, and-or dogmatism or relativism (Piscitelli 1985). In terms of the transcendental precepts (Lonergan 1972), if we are to be intelligent and attentive, we cannot do so from a naïve or sceptical attitude. And if we are to be reasonable, we cannot do so from being either dogmatic or relativist in our desire-quest and its generalized shadow-question: is it so?

The four venues and the meaning that transpires through them are closely-related. As a matter of normative course, our questions for meaning, what is it?, can be and often are followed by our questions for reflective understanding, is it so?, and our judgments for truth: yes or no. So at a deeper level, our unthinking and calcified attitudes of naiveté and scepticism can not only truncate our desire for understanding, but can become encrusted with a set of hardened, stone-like attitudes—dogmatism--that carry the closure of our judgments and that are rooted in the ground of our second desire-quest and its question: is it so?

So that we can be naïve and-or sceptical, and be quite dogmatic (or relativistic) about either or both attitudes and about the meaning that would transpire through them. In this way, we can see how long and difficult the opening-the-mind process can be. This is so especially if the extremes of the lower viewpoints have been the ruling factors in a person’s life for a very long time.5 And we can see why calcification and-or hard-won developments in one venue can and often do have far-reaching influences on the other venues.

The desire-and-fear-fueled dynamism of the structure continues to operate, even in its less differentiated state. Thus, as performance, the habits of the lower viewpoints and their non-thinking or half-baked thinking in our first desire-quest, what is it?, can and often do add the lock of judgment in our second desire-quest, is it so?, to the closure of mind that both naiveté and scepticism foster in us as we approach our meaningful life-events (and especially in the classroom) from the midst of either attitude (Piscitelli 1985). So that, if we are naive or sceptical, we are probably dogmatically so.

In common parlance, this hardening of the heart, or this lock-down or closure of mind around naïveté, scepticism, or (in desire-quest-2) relativism, are about ill-conceived and badly-timed judgments, or judgments at the service of our self-imposed ignorance, or judgments that we do not and cannot make judgments. In either case, not only am I truncated in my attitude about openness to understanding and knowing, but my premature judgment bypasses what reflective understanding I might do, and holds that truncation of the desire-quest firmly in place.

Again, we are speaking here of performance and not of self-reflective self-consciousness. In such self-reflection, we will have objectified our own performance and (hopefully) have begun to understand ourselves and charted a way out of the extremes of our lower-viewpoint attitudes.

Such premature judgments (as performative assumptions), however, do not only make reflective understanding near-impossible (intending truth in our desire-quest-2), they also make the attitude of openness to understanding (intending meaningful insights) more difficult to inspire. The tensional pressure from below, as it were, from our desire-to-understand and our fear-of-not-understanding, is met with the wall of our own lesser and twisted desires and fears and our self-defeating judgments—in fact, we are saying NO to our own mind’s fundamental and immediate intention in this venue—the correlative occurrence of questions-and-insights.

Reflective understanding, the venue of our second question: is it so? and its content, extends, qualifies, and refines the meaning development of our first desire-quest: what is it? From our desire-quest-2 venue, we meet that meaning with a critical eye. From our now-critical view of our now-reflective understanding, we recover the what-meaning of our desire-quest-1 in order to gather, weigh, eliminate, hone, and marshal that meaning. We do so in order that our insights may not only be meaningful-intelligible, but also relevant, critically and conclusively established, and so that our judgments may be tried and true. As such, the truncation and closure-of-mind to meaning-understanding and its insights (in desire-quest-1) extend to affect the potential for our reflective-critical insights (in desire-quest-2).

In this way, our desire-quests-1-2 (and 3-4) venues are inter-dependent and integral both at the lower-viewpoint levels and at the transformed higher-viewpoint levels where, in 1-2, we are potential to be open to understanding and knowing. Thus, if I am naïve or sceptical about what it means to question-insight-understand, then my spontaneous judgments about presented meaning come prematurely and without reasonable criteria. Those judgments serve to encase not only my prior understanding, but also my believing or not believing.

As performance, our premature judgments hold our lower viewpoints in place making them all the more difficult to break through. And the more we identify with the confusion of our lower viewpoints and fail to undergo substantial and qualified change, the more difficult they are to break through. (This is why a break with the lower viewpoint attitudes is often experienced as a conversion or a breakthrough.)

It follows that for the naïf or the sceptic the two questions, what is it? and is it so?, are not approached separately. Rather, they are condensed together—in undifferentiated fashion in the wonder of the mind that we refer to as endearing in a child, but as a source of our confusion (and ignorant, uncritical, or un- or under-educated) in an adult.

With naïveté and scepticism, ending the process with belief or doubt is manifest in an unreflective closure—a performed judgment--that the attitudes that harbor unreasonable belief or doubt constitute the only approach to the potential what-reality that is being presented or that is the object of the conversation. That is, if the naif or the sceptic is unaware of another horizon of being (the self-transcendent higher viewpoint), and if we are basically unreflective and un-self-reflective about our attitudes (and whether we call our state of assumed affairs attitudes or not), then we can do nothing but project our own way- of-being out onto others.

The performative assumption here goes like this: Everyone else must see things the same way that I do or, if they don't, (from the sceptic's position) they are contemptible naive believers or (from the believer's position) they ask too many contemptible questions.

Those speaking from the higher viewpoint then get caught in the crosshairs of the discussion by, at once, sounding like the other side of the attitudinal spectrum from the point of view of those sides. That is, because the open person begins by considering that something may be learned/understood, they draw contempt from the sceptic, who fears and is disgusted with believing and trusting. And because the open person engages in questioning, they draw contempt of the naif, who fears the discomforts and conflicts that questions bring.

We refer to the unreflective-judgment element of this premature closure-of-mind as the further attitude of dogmatism (performed-assumed closure of mind), and briefly to its dialectical correlate on the other side of the potential un-whorl-ing in this questioning venue, relativism (Piscitelli 1985) (usually in league with scepticism).

Both attitudes in desire-quest-2 regard our knowledge-truth-reality complex (is it really so?) or our attitude of openness to knowing and truth. (The IT in desire-quest-2 refers back to the same IT in our desire-quest-1.) Thus, if a full unfolding and transformation is to occur in this venue-2, it will be multi-layered and cut across venues-1-2 as well as 3-4 where our dogmatism affects whatever thought occurs at the background of our speaking-acting.

Openness to Knowing & Truth (HV--higher viewpoint)
/\
Dogmatism <-- developmental/dialectical (LV) pendulum --> Relativism
Seed: Judgment Seed: Reflective Understanding

Derailments:

Makes judgments unreasonably Avoids judgments unreasonably

Desire to know <--> Fear of not knowing
(or in some cases, desire to NOT know and fear of knowing for the resonant implications of that knowing)

Dogmatism bypasses our potential for reflective understanding offering only premature and unexplained judgment. Dogmatism hardens our naiveté and-or scepticism and whatever shallow content has slipped through its walls to our understanding, or whatever we have decided merely to believe, even if we deny that belief, for the naif and the sceptic could not even be in the conversation had they not understood something at some time in their lives. This hardening-of-heart (the performance of closure) occurs at the service of our long-standing habits and-or our self-defeating psychological investments, for whatever reason, or for no apparent reason at all—we have failed to develop along normative lines towards our own self-transcendence.

Dogmatism also comes into play on the other side of the venue-2 tension: where relativism is concerned. That is, relativism takes up exploring further meaning only to avoid the reflective understanding that would call for a good and reasonable judgment: for knowing the truth about the real. Instead of developing reflective understanding for the purpose of coming to know and judge in any critical way, relativism offers an endless exploration of meaning--going long beyond our need to collect meaning with regard to any specific issue. It does so because, the logic of the argument goes: if the relativist cannot know it all (and relativism knows it cannot because it was once dogmatic), then it cannot know anything at all. And in that basic assumption about knowing, relativism offers an endless postponement of judgment--and performs a judgment: it is so that nothing can be known.

The relativist’s dogmatic claim (their performative judgment), then, is that there is no truth and, thus, no knowledge of the real to be had. As an end-run, the expectation of the relativist is that no judgment can be made until Absolute Certainty about Everything can be established. but then, that attitude is the (unreflectively known) performance of a judgment.

In this way, the relativist may do a considerable amount of descriptive, analytical, and even theoretical work with regard to meaning development. However, in reflection, the relativist will not claim to make a judgment about that work--where that judgment means to have arrived at knowledge of the true-real (even though, as performance, that claim is implicit). So that at the heart of the relativist's philosophical foundations is arbitrariness.

Where the operations of the relativist's fundaments are concerned, the relativist makes judgments for truth-reality regularly--fundaments are at the base of our performance. Where the relativist's foundations are concerned, however, they have learned wrongly--hence, the presumed arbitrariness of the relativist's stance emerges.

So that the relationship of dogmatism to relativism as lower viewpoint reflects the same relationship explored above: between naiveté and scepticism. That is, what the dogmatist lacks and needs to reach for the higher viewpoint is to explore meaning and to achieve the reflective understanding--that the relativist in us offers. Whereas, what the relativist lacks and needs is a reflective appropriation of the willing-to-judgment that the dogmatist in us offers.

I say reflective appropriation because the relativist claims to have no access to the truth-reality complex while, at the same time, performing that claim, and cannot do otherwise. The relativist's foundations are at-odds--self-conflicting. The reflective appropriation is of what is immediate to all human performances—in this venue-2 the common occurrence is of the is-it-so desire-quest and the subsequent judging of the truth about the concrete real as we go through life. The reflective appropriation, then, is of the relativist’s own self-confliction, and of the common and long-time performance—so that the relativist’s reflective understanding of and judgment about their own performance renders the relativist a relativist no more.

Further, as lower viewpoints, both the relativist's and the dogmatist's lesser desire-fear is about certainty. (Remember that the naif's and sceptic's lesser desire-fear concern security.) The dogmatist finds a false certainty in "knowing" where that knowing means making empty judgments. Whereas the relativist finds a false certainty in "knowing" that no knowing of the truth about reality can be had until All meaning is acquired (subscribing to a false endtime) (Piscitelli 1985).

Under the pressure of actually living in the concrete world (and making judgments-for-truth-reality there), however, the relativist's subscription for certainty really equates to an arbitrariness of that living. As such, the relativist makes judgments that, by their own core "philosophy," have no meaning or ground.

Openness to knowing, on the other hand, assumes (and in reflection understands) that our judgments for truth-reality need not mean that we have understood Everything about Everything. Our judgments (about objectively established reality) actually occur when we reach a catalytic tipping point within the context of each situation or questioning. That is, as open to knowing, we make judgments performatively where the evidence relevant to the question at hand, sufficient, and conclusive; where gaining more evidence is superfluous to making a critical judgment; and where no further relevant questions are raised against the judgment, or need to be raised to make that judgment as factual and objective, beyond our lesser desires and fears, and as real--independent of our knowing.

Examples can seem banal; however any example holds the general meaning we are trying to convey here. That is, in common living and in scientific experimentation, having enough evidence means to know the truth about specific questions, for instance, did I leave my keys in the car? Or, did Thomas Jefferson assist in the writing of the United States Constitution? Or, did Johnny come to school today? Dogmatism will judge yes or no before the evidence is in and commonly based on a vast and variable set of lesser desires or fears (and therefore lay the groundwork for poor desicion-making in our venues-3-4).

On the other hand, relativism will make the judgment either dogmatically or upon having the evidence but, regardless, when asked, will claim to know nothing of the true-real about anything (and therefore lay the groundwork for shirking responsibility in our venues-3-4).

And openness to knowing will employ meaningful and reflectively-established understanding, and then pass a critically-conceived judgment only when the evidence becomes clear, sufficient, and conclusive to do so.

Thus, as a reflective attitude, relativism creates a kind of self-contradictory meaning vacuum in us. We cannot help but make judgments--our sanity and our sense of being responsible depend on it in our daily living--but we just cannot own them reflectively. Such a vacuum can lead to a sense of meaninglessness and helplessness and, again, has its potential negative affect on the next two desire-quests and how they are played out (deliberation and decision governing what we say and do).

The relativist may understand many things quite clearly and even be a quite-responsible person when it comes down to speaking-acting. However, on the establishment of the relativist’s own principle, we cannot know the truth about that understanding or the true-good about our speaking and acting. So the relativist still operates in reality (through our fundaments and their foundations of learning), but is philosophically frozen, which can have a similarly frozen effect on the relativist’s living.

Further, and in truly confused-polymorphic fashion, we can be dogmatic (closed-minded) not only concerning our prior attitudes of naiveté and scepticism towards understanding, or about having knowledge in common concerns, but also about our attitude of relativism—as performance, relativism, again, is also dogmatic about its claims. That is, in fact, the relativist judges and does not question the truth of that claim--that there is no truth and no access to reality; or that we can have no knowledge on principle; and our judgments, if we make them, are for naught.

In relativism’s extreme version, we may or may not refuse to acknowledge that, indeed, we have made such a judgment. But we cannot claim that doing so means that we know something true and real, in a philosophical journey such as ours, about knowing as such. So again, as performance, we find the relativist in a self-contradictory situation.

Dogmatism-plain (applied to any other content and not as a basis for another attitude), on the other hand, subverts reflective understanding and makes empty judgments that, in a critical environment, will not stand. And again, the dogmatist sets him-herself up (and others who are concerned) to speak and act in terms of dogmatic judgments rather than on reflectively considered meaning and reasonable judgments. So that the dogmatist either must become more-and-more adept at fostering believability in a smaller-and smaller-social environment; or they must abandon dogmatism and become relativists-at-heart--or open to knowing.

Of course, we can make judgments and be in error about many things. And of course, we also can self-correct where we will spontaneously employ the same operations. Here we work through the attitudes that we are discussing here. The same desire-to-know we are exploring here is operative in our performed judgments about actual knowing as well as in the self-corrective process that recognizes error and takes steps to correct.

In the deepest arenas of our thought processes, however, the dogmatic attitude works to clamp down onto and to hold our naiveté and scepticism, and our relativism in place along with all of the plain polymorphic beliefs, rights, wrongs, or undeveloped content that inhabits those attitudes.

In our life-event concerns, dogmatism also truncates any or most new meaning and learning we might come by. It does so internally and through the attitudes by presenting us with relatively automatic (and ego-attached) protective barriers, and with the sense that we love so much to sound like we know. Further, we think that what "know" is all there is that is worth knowing--we already know-it-all (we may believe in our own dogmatism and dogmatic pronouncements)--thereby we avoid nuances of meaning that might enrich us. We eschew new understanding and reflective understanding, or a different point of view that may come from reading or listening to others who might think differently from us, and that may make us more aware of the larger reality beyond our own cul-de-sac of thought. For many reasons, our own truncation provides us with the only horizon we know.

Further, in our dogmatism, we experience a sense of threat (existential fear) from being asked to explain the meaning of what, in fact, we-do-not-know. Our certainty is threatened and that thread fear connects back to our need for security (in our desire-quests-1-2).

On the other hand, as relativist, we experience a sense of threat (fear) from making-a-claim-on-truth while "knowing" that we cannot know Everything about Everything on principle. Because of this relativist dynamic, the relativist may, at once, seem extremely humble (who's to know?), but also dogmatically hide a basic arrogance. Here, if everything really is arbitrary, then the situation and argument shift from what to who--has the power.

Thus, when our truncation of meaning rules (desire-quest-1 venue), our dogmatism jumps right in (desire-quest-2 venue), quickly marshaling our desires to understand and to know under an umbrella of judgments that can only contain belief and-or non-belief.

If the constellation of attitudes were to speak, they would say: I already know because I believe or do not believe --end of story. We suppress or derail the desire-quest that might be resonant in us. We nip-in-the-bud our desire to understand. We cannot experience ourselves flowering into a live question with all of its tensional meaning. We avoid exploring or reflecting on new meaning. As such, we head-off having insights of reflection that would collect and refine that meaning for our critical and reasonable judgment, or that might call for new insights in the spontaneous way that our questions do when we are open to understanding and knowing.

Our dogmatism then diverts and deflects-from-within, in supremely fast, efficient, and automatic fashion, our breaking-through to new insights in our venue-1 and our breaking-through to consider reflective insights in our venue-2.

From that dogmatic interference, we are already finished—closed to new meaning and to reflective consideration of that meaning. In its extreme, then, and as related to our naivete and scepticism, our dogmatism renders our minds not only misguided and closed, but calcified--tantamount to having a dead mind and, in a larger interpretation of human meaning, a dead spirit, fallen on the ground, unable to take sustenance.

As a manifest attitude surrounding naiveté and scepticism, then, dogmatism serves to seal-off the possibility of listening for new meaning that is at least potential in the naïf believer; and it serves to seal-off the possibility of aligning with what may be initially believed in the sceptic-doubter. The naïf merely believes wholeheartedly and ends their thinking there; and the sceptic goes off in an endless array of questions-as-accusations regarding the meaning at hand. The naif dogmatically believes, while the sceptic dogmatically disbelieves. In either case, having new insights is, as it were, out of the question.

Dogmatism then assists in the closure to meaning for naiveté and scepticism by encircling it with a crust of judgment—in performance the naïf and the sceptic, then, already knows ala selective belief or non-belief--that others or a text-for-reading can (or cannot) be believed (confusing knowing with believing). Because as performance they already know they can believe and trust in others to think for them (or not), the naïf need not go through the “difficult” process of raising questions for their own insights-to-understanding and for gaining anything that resembles critically-established knowing—that’s too painful. And the sceptic need not begin by assuming something may be understood--it cannot.

The point is that it’s too much trouble, and there is too much to know—just tell me and I will believe. Or, I will argue about meaning with you ad infinitum and never once acknowledge that something may be understood.

Again, the question, is it so?, in its undifferentiated state, already attitude-manifests a preliminary assumption and performance: I know that I can believe. I know that no one and nothing can be believed. As performatively dogmatic, the naïf cannot and does not ask: What constitutes valid criteria on which I can base my beliefs?

And as performance, dogmatism assists in the subversion of insights for the sceptic because the sceptic already knows (believes, assumes, and pre-judges) that no one and nothing can be believed or aligned with, so we will not even begin the understanding process. We do not believe, even the sceptic him-herself. Though the sceptic claims to only trust themselves, internally, the sceptic does not. In the attitude of scepticism, we cannot be open--even to our own insights-to-understanding and movements toward reflective understanding (Piscitelli 1985). The sceptic’s performative and undifferentiated dogmatism gives the seal to that closure: I know that no one and nothing can be believed or trusted.

Dogmatism: Judges without reflective understanding & locks naiveté,
scepticism, and relativism in place

Relativism: Questions and reflects for meaning, but without aim for critical judgment—even while we continue to make such judgments in
life-event situations

If we tend to become calcified in our lower viewpoints—we become psychologically invested and resistant for many reasons--our deeper desires and fears (to understand and know, etc.) create a counter-tendency against our lesser desires-and-fears generated from and associated with that calcification. Our internal field becomes rife with confusion, anxiety, and self-delusion.

Again, that counter-tendency, or self-in-tension, creates a constant developmental pressure from-below . The pressure pushes upward to move through the four sets of twin-opposite attitudes.

Calcified attitudes, and our polymorphic-confusion, cannot be broken apart easily. And though massively affective conversions can occur, the lower viewpoints also can soften and unfold very slowly where we hardly know what is happening to us. That calcification, however, can feel like a lump in the stomach or heart that is our resisting the normative pressure of our developmental patterns and movements. That increased pressure comes from-below in the normativity of our desire-quests towards our own self-transcendence, but is blocked by the derailments and calcification of our lower viewpoint attitudes. And it can come from-above, as it were, from our self-conscious thought applied through self-reflection--born of our now-conscious wishes and determinations about our own sense of spiritual shallowness or lumpiness , or from our first ventures into self-reflection/examination). (We need not "call" for such healing overtly. Healing can be inspired by qualified conversations, literature and the arts.)

We grow and our horizons broaden (our internal cul-de-sac of meaning becomes larger and connected with a larger reality). As we do, the reach of our interests, and our caring and loving, grows; and the more we find we must interrelate and integrate new ideas, nuance, and knowledge into our field of under-meaning that will then inform our whole spectrum of thought (and speaking and acting in the world).

Externally, our development from below upwards towards understanding and knowing also is called out by those around us who demonstrate for us a set of higher developmental patterns, for instance, from our teachers. (This is why education is basically an inter-generational affair as children learn first and most easily from those who care for us regularly.)

Further, our development is called-out by the pragmatic exigencies of the real. Reality demands our critical attention--if we are to live well or even survive. We either try to understand and know it, or we try to bend it towards our ignorance and disregard of it. However, "reality is a hard task-master." And our development is generated from within towards both understanding and creating that reality--where our set of desire-quests are immediate to our being and are constantly in conflict with our lower-viewpoints.

From a religious point of view, that calling-out is from religious leaders in history, from texts and communities, and from the Great Beyond, or from God—however our questions for and understanding of the deity, or of the Ultimate Unknown, is worked out. (See sections that relate to desire-quest-4 in Finding the Mind.)

Furthermore, we develop along normative lines in and through the attitudes. However, we may also suffer from a degree of calcification in one, more, or all arenas of our lives. As such, the tension and pressure that is the normative dialectical winnowing at work in us, and that already makes for a moving and tense internal state of affairs, can turn quickly to self-destructive movements. That is, the lower viewpoint attitudes are four-deep, polemical, developmental, and tensional with one another.

We may move through moments in our self-transcendence (horizontally and then vertically) where the tension is released in its time. Or we may calcify in one attitude; or we may run back and forth, as it were, from side to side (only horizontally). Our unresolved inner conflict, like a cancer, then adds destructive elements to what otherwise would be a normal sense of anxiety and inner disturbance (our questioning process and in merely being aware in our living).

Our polymorphism of mind, then, is both potentially creative and destructive. Such is the passionate, tension-filled dynamism that is the life of the mind.

In this way, like naïveté and scepticism are pressured from below by our desire and fears associated with our understanding, dogmatism and relativism are pressured from below by our desires and fears associated with knowing the true-real. Thus, and similar to our lower viewpoints in our what is it? venue, the lower viewpoints in our is it so? venue need not calcify. They are also potential to unfold—to work together in winnowing-dialectical fashion, in this case, towards their own transformation that will render us in an attitude of openness to knowing and in our concrete self-transcendence in actually coming to know.

It is when our dogmatism is really challenged, and our sense of knowing-all fails, that we are closest to (1) a further, unreasonable, hardening-of-heart and a turning-away from the call of knowing OR (2) a shift to the other extremes of relativism, OR (3) a breakthrough that encompasses a commitment to reflective understanding and knowing-through-judgment the true-real.

A break with dogmatism releases us from our self-delusion ( that we know all) and its hardening closure (the experienced stomach-heart-lump, and a sense of having over-extended oneself). The release is from the inner ideology that we need to sound like we know everything already. The breakthrough is commonly existential—we feel it—as well as humbling—at least temporarily we lose our sense of balance and of who we think we are. However, a breakthrough can also lay our minds open to the fresh air of new meaning floes.

We can further identify ourselves with such openness of mind and the desire to really know that underpins it. As such, what we think we are is no longer identified, for instance, with the ego-mania that informs our buffoonery. We no longer need to make premature or false judgments. Nor do we need to become a charlatan-god that (we hope) equally-ignorant-others will follow thoughtlessly, and whom they must admire. (The open-to-knowing person may have followers, but does not need a group of followers to feel certain or existentially secure.)

Also, from our calcified horizons, the transfer from believing and trusting dogmatically to expecting to be believed and trusted (without needing to understand) is seen as a part of growing up. And when others do not follow me like I followed before, then I experience disappointment--for I do not yet know the horizon of openness to knowing. From my "eyes" (my set of assumptions) I cannot see it, even if openness is right in front of my face.

In this way, a breakdown of any lower-viewpoint will have its effect on the others. For instance, that break-down of and break-up with dogmatism (and a new horizon of openness to knowing) is affective of our desire-quest-1 venue. Here, in our dogmatism, we have already judged performatively--that anyone and everything presented can (must) be either believed or doubted. Now with the break from dogmatism's hold, for instance, the naive person wants to really know; and so my naivete (about my understanding) itself comes under scrutiny for change.

Further, the approach and transformation to a higher viewpoint in venue-2 takes up the reflective understanding of the relativist-in-us and brings reasonable judgment to the table where true-reality is being worked out. Instead of endlessly exploring meaning in order to avoid judgments-for-truth, our relativism is transformed towards our self-transcendence in knowing. Here we begin to identify with that meaning as reflectively established, but now also as evidential, critical, and conclusive--for gaining and grasping the truth of the real in our judgments for knowing.

In this way, and as normative to our development towards self-transcendence, the potential authenticity buried deep within the attitudes of dogmatism and relativism works its way out to transform us--by capturing in each lower-viewpoint attitude what is essential for our self-transcendence--in reflective understanding AND in the ability to make judgments for truth and-or falsity through the venue of our question: is it so? yes-no.

Thus, dogmatism and relativism are named-so as lower viewpoints--in their undifferentiated, polymorphic-confused, calcified, and inter-conflicting state. However, like naiveté and scepticism, dogmatism and relativism are also normative and potent for being transformed to higher viewpoints of openness—one for questioning for clarity and concision in our reflective understanding (the seed of relativism), and the other for actually committing to knowing what is really so through closure around gathered and scrutinized meaning—by acquiring and grasping knowledge-truth in our yes-no judgments (the seed of dogmatism).

As powerful sources of order, together our attitudes hold within them the needed preliminary approaches to all reflective understanding and grasp of the true-real in our judgments. When moving together in dynamic and dialectical fashion, the lower viewpoints of both questioning venues (1 and 2 and in 3-4 also) are dynamic to unfold, serving to open the way to our self-transcendence--towards new meaning to be insighted and understood, and through the truth of the real to be reflectively understood and known.

In that reflective understanding and in those critical and reasonable judgments, we transcend both our dogmatism and our relativism and move towards openness to grasp ever-new knowledge-truth of the real. Such openness can then provide a sound basis for our truly responsible speech and action (in desire-quests-3-4).

Through this winnowing-dialectical process, we can transform the dogmatist in us by moving beyond our instant and uncritical judgments towards opening-up and listening for new reflective understanding that we can then make reasonable judgments about. Here, instead of being dogmatic, our judgments can be either held-off (for further exploration of meaning and evidence) or reasonable--only occurring when all prior-relevant questions for meaning are settled, when we have enough evidence to make them (we have reached a tipping point in our reflective understanding), where what must be believed (or not) is reasonably considered, when exigent circumstances demand it, and when acquiring more evidence becomes superfluous to the meaning needed to judge in critical fashion: it is or it is not so.

We reach the tipping point when and where our understanding and reflective understanding have grasped sufficient and relevant meaning; and we pass over that point in knowing when our judgment closes around that meaning: as such, we have reached the real.

Reflective insights and their judgments for truth-reality then become our foundations of knowledge. Our new questions arise, in part, from that foundation (and from our complex of experiences, our beliefs, images, feelings, etc.) Further, we draw from that foundation for our responsible (or not) speech and actions. So that foundation underpins and spontaneously informs our complex of questions in our desire-quests-3-4 that include what is really worthwhile? (to say-do), should I say-do it? will I say-do it? and finding its temporary finality in our actual speech and actions.(See Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding for a fuller explanation of knowledge as the virtually unconditioned [chapters 9-10, 1958 and 2000].)

Further, in the same dialectical winnowing process, the relativist in us can move beyond our endless questions for meaning development to regain our critical consciousness--and the now-reflectively-established assumption that we can know. The relativist already has the performance of knowing--the one that we use when we are not reflecting on the knowing process. We learned that knowing as a part of our early pragmatic experience as our foundations of under-meaning grew over our life-time. Those foundations came from the basic structure--our fundaments and, in this case, our desire-quest-2 and our fundament of knowing.

The relativist need only recapture reflectively what has been habitual all along. That regaining would then allow the relativist's vast accumulation of meaning to enter the venue of reflective understanding and judgment and, thus, of truth-reality.

The relativist-in-me can then recognize in my own interior domain the catalytic tipping point of authentic closure (or also inauthentic when we have erred) that occurs there regularly already--the one that actually and regularly bears fruit in my common activities. If the relativist would observe him-herself, the tipping point bears fruit in the occurrence of critical and timely, rather than premature and empty, judgments and, again, in the building of a foundation of meaningful-knowledge understood rightly and on which I (and everyone else in the world) speak and act.

On the other hand, and without embracing the winnowing process that draws from below and through both attitudes towards our own self-transcendence, both attitudes remain and foster our confused polymorphism of mind—they harbor unresolved tensions and leave us anxiety-ridden, again-and-again canceling one another out, and leaving our powers of reflective understanding quashed (dogmatism); and our powers of making reasonable and critical judgments about the true-real abandoned (relativism). Thus, we cut-off our path to the (a) reflective understanding and (b) reasonable judgments--that are needed and that are potential to any knowledge-learning situation (Piscitelli 1985). In other words, we attempt to cut ourselves off from truth and reality, not to mention the good of either.

~~~

Both dogmatism and relativism are commonly present in the classroom (in our students and in ourselves). Both attitudes can come into play with any content or personal interchange--including our present experiment--and both attitudes can and should (optimally) be understood clearly by the teacher, and their emergence watched for, in order to set up the best conditions for reflective understanding and new knowing to occur. As teachers, we can think knowledge is occurring when nothing of the sort is true.

However, as should be clear to you by now, we can learn about the desire-quests and the attitudes, and we can have a good grasp of the theory of either-both. However, such knowledge (though it is always at least suggestive about personal views) is far from having personally gone through, applied, and practiced openness to understanding and knowing (self-appropriation-affirmation). Furthermore, openness in any venue is not a once-and-for-all achievement. Rather, openness is just that--a practice.

Openness to the Good/Worthwhile (Desire-Quest-3: Is it Really Worthwhile? or: What should I do and should I do it?)

Attitudes: Optimism and Pessimism

Above we explored that our questions for meaning-intelligibility, what is it?, can be and often are followed by our questions for truth, is it so? And we explored how our unthinking attitudes of naiveté and scepticism can derail our questions-to-insights-to-understanding, and can become encrusted with a set of hardened attitudes that carry the too-quick closure of our judgments (undifferentiated thought from our desire-quest-2).

In this way, and in their less differentiated state, the lower viewpoint attitudes of our first two venues operate together in a pervasively self-perpetuating way (a) towards our calcification of thought on either side of the spectrum OR (b) towards our dynamic reaching for our self-transcendence.

We will see also that our dogmatism in venue-2 can also infect our movements of thought towards our deliberation and decision, speech and act in our venues-3-4.

Our closure-of-mind when it occurs in these first two venues, then, is more about what and who we are as we approach and go about our thinking about anything and anyone, rather than about what we are free to become through our thoughtfully dynamic self-reflections. No one consciously decides to become dogmatic or naïve, for example. Rather, we become that way and begin our approach and thought (such as it is) out of those assumed horizons—and as polymorphic-confused, one and/or the other, or both.

In other words, we can be in the process crushing or derailing our own deeper intentional movements in all venues of thought, and of fooling ourselves along the way, without really being conscious and aware of it; though we clearly suffer from the anxiety derived from such self-foolery.

Further, once we become aware that we are in a relatively calcified horizon, we are already in some way beyond it. So that self-awareness has an objective component; however, because it is in us and about our present comportment, that objectivity also has the potential to transform and take up our subjectivity into it. In this way, objective self-revelation is also potential to become deeply-felt self-identified-understanding and, in the end, self-healing.

In a less differentiated state, and when we are involved in such lower- viewpoint attitudes, it is just this reflection and self-reflection that is shallow or that goes missing in our mental comportment and activities. On the other hand, developments in our reflective and self-reflective capacities hold the potential to begin the re-invigorating and habitual transformations of all of the lower viewpoints that are needed for our movement towards our own self-transcendence.

In this way, our lower-viewpoint attitudes, if not developed and transformed, still inform and so render our judgments, deliberations, and decisions towards good speech and action, at the very least, similarly immature and shallow and, at worst, dangerous to us and to those around us.

For instance, naive dogmatism commonly supports the lower-viewpoints in venue-3, or what we will see are optimism and pessimism, and vice versa--rather than providing a good developmental background for self-transcendence in venue-3 or, in other language, moral conversion and its deeper thinking along moral-ethical-political strata.

Also, a crisis that, through our speech and acts (or our avoidance of them), holds life-changing consequences for us often forces us to think and rethink what we thought was given before the crisis occurred. Such thought often can become the catalyst for unraveling and exposing our lower-viewpoint attitudes towards change.

On the other hand, attitudinal development that occurs long before crises occur is more likely to render wise what we think, say, and do in those crises in the first place. Also, such crises can pervert our undeveloped views further so that we only change from one polymorphic-confused context to another, i.e., from naïveté to scepticism, from dogmatism to relativism, and-or, as we will see below, from optimism to pessimism (or of course from sacralism to secularism in our fourth venue).

Again, our four desire-questing venues and their attitudes are quite different from one another in their intent, and they are intimately inter-related. On the other hand, the dynamic movement from closure to openness, and towards self-transcendence--in all venues and sets of attitudes--is structurally the same. And again, we are developmental through the desire-quests. But as part of that development, our four venues are themselves developmental and, again, mutually informing as that development occurs. So that our development occurs in our content and with regard to the venues themselves which, in turn, will affect content.

Thus, our third desire-quest complex and venue shares the fundamental dynamic of the first two complexes of questions and venues, and is mutually informative--but with a few marked differences. In this venue-3, the lower viewpoints are optimism and pessimism. They relate to one another and to the higher viewpoint of openness to the good in the same way that naiveté relates to scepticism, that dogmatism relates to relativism, and that all lower viewpoints relate to our dynamism and orientation towards self-transcendence.

The great difference is that, where the first two venues concern understanding meaning and knowing true-reality (including the good of it), where the ending term is an internal moment manifest in the judgment; the second two venues concern speculative and practical deliberation and decision about what I am to say and do. Here the ending term is external. (What is, and is it really worthwhile?--for me to say-do?, should I say-do it?, which all ends in the subsequent actual saying-doing of it.)

Desire-quest-3 (and influenced by 4),then, is the venue of responsibility (transcendental precept: be responsible).

Lower Viewpoints: Optimism and Pessimism

In the lower-viewpoint attitude of optimism in this venue-3, we rest (dogmatically again, as performance) in the assumption that (optimistically) the-good will occur and the bad thwarted OR that (pessimistically) the bad will occur and the good will be thwarted--in both cases, no matter what I do. So that regardless, success or failure is somehow guaranteed.

Further, for the optimist, should the good occur, and though I say-do nothing, because I wished for the good and loved it from afar, I am “responsible” (I get the kudos) for it. OR for the pessimist, because I wished for it and loved it from afar, it will not occur; and so I am somehow "responsible" for the good failing to occur.

Optimism is further careless about what it has because, again, it’s somehow guaranteed and will come again as easily as before. On the polar-opposite side of this venue, in the lower-viewpoint attitude of pessimism, I must protect the good that I have from the forces that would deprive me of it and that I "know" are there waiting to deprive me of all that I have. And no matter what else happens, or what I do, the bad will occur anyway--the good will not happen on principle and, indeed, I might be accused of being responsible for the bad that happens.

Pessimism, then, fears losing the little that we have to all of the negativity, bad, and evil in the world; and desires to hold close everything we already have—again, for the pessimist, failure, rather than success, is somehow guaranteed.

Let us for a moment relate this venue-3 back to our venues-1-2. For instance, as a set of lower-viewpoints-in-act, for the naïve-dogmatic-optimist, not only is most everything believable but, commonly, everything in the flow of our life is also good and worth doing—“Life is good!” “Think good thoughts and everything will turn out okay!” (and if they don't, it's because of what you thought and your own "attitude). “Be happy!” “Just let it happen!” “Just do it!” and things will work out for you. A little closer to reality: "Throw caution to the wind."

Unfortunately, applications of such uncritical and over-reactive half-truths (or outright ignorances) don’t often work because: everything is only potentially good, or it had to be brought about through hard work, and by someone, to be so. The optimist need do nothing for the good to occur, however, because it will all be alright in the end anyway, and even if I could do something, there is too much to do.

Also, commonly the optimist flits from one project to another wearing a perpetual happy face, eschewing "negative" faces, and expecting an initial and shallow impetus to be all that is needed for the good to occur and to keep occurring. The naïve-dogmatic-optimist is the poster-child for unfinished projects, though we often are haunted by their unfinished state of affairs. And as such, we think we are serious but, in fact, seriousness and responsibility are intimate partners in our being; and both are far from the optimist’s actual view of things.

Further, we like everyone—not because everyone, indeed, is good or will necessarily do good, but because, in an uncritical way, we project our all-good view of the world out onto ourselves and also to everyone else--regardless of the reality we might find if we were truly critical and discerning about ourselves or them.

For the naive-dogmatic-optimist, for instance, human beings are basically good and, when given the opportunity, they will always do what is right. The optimist tends to be naively confident and so, as naive, we avoid thinking (reflecting and self-reflecting). Then as optimistic we avoid decisions (at least we think we do because to avoid deciding is the performance of a decision) or, as we like to say, "I allow the situation to make the decision for me."

Since everything will turn out well in the end no matter what we do, in our optimism we refuse to accept responsibility, not only for the conditions in which we find ourselves, but also for my own life.

In its worst form optimism leads to a paralysis of human action. It makes the person a spectator of life rather than an actor who shapes the destiny of life. So from an existential-moral perspective the optimist tends to become a drifter. Rather than act responsibly in a crisis, he depends upon others for action or wants to wait and see what will happen. He tends to walk away from failures when they occur and shifts responsibility for decision and action onto a "system" or other people while claiming "success" as his own. (Piscitelli 1985)

Further, contrary or negative views are diligently recast in the optimist’s convoluted interpretation of them and the motivations behind them.

As you might guess, at some point in the course of human events, and in all but the most sheltered of lives, the optimist’s sense of guaranteed-good gets a reality check. The optimist comes face-to-face with the recalcitrant-bad, the dysfunctional, the ugly, and the evil with a direct call and set of consequences in her life, or in the lives of those she cares for and loves. And so we see the seeds and emergence of pessimism in the predictable failures of the optimist:

A serious moral or political life crisis that results in a failure which cannot be blamed on anyone else destroys the world of the optimist. Now success seems no longer guaranteed. It comes to seem to the optimist that success is not much more than survival. The optimist turns into a pessimist. The optimist has actually sown the seeds of his pessimism by his false vision of the human good and his corresponding refusal to take responsibility for his life. It does not take long for the unsheltered person to realize that the world and human history do not always conform to his immediate wishes. (Piscitelli 1985)

Again, from this desire-quest-3 venue, with it's shadow-question: is it really worthwhile? et al, we can see the emergence of the transcendental precept: be responsible (Lonergan 1972), for being a responsible person in our life events is a product of being open to the good and to the reflections and self-reflections that precede saying-doing what we find is really worthwhile in those event--hard work and all.

The optimist, however, depends on the responsibility of others, or of some unknown universal force—waiting for it to happen, as it were, while taking no responsibility for it myself. Someone will always be there for you and me, so: not-to-worry.

Again, when a crisis occurs, and when the optimist’s expectations and pseudo-good crumble around her, a pessimist can then rise from the rubble of despair. Where the optimist rests on the assumption that the good is guaranteed, the pessimist rests on the assumption that the bad is so-guaranteed.

The shift from optimism to pessimism is not one of taking responsibility for the good and-or the bad, but rather of denying the potency and responsibility of self-and-others for our thought, speech, and actions. From the attitude of pessimism, we reduce the field to defensive action by taking “a pseudo-responsibility onto himself: he tries to guarantee his own survival” (Piscitelli 1985). So the everything-will-turn-out-well-in-the-end passivism of the optimist becomes the negative-defensive activism of the pessimist.

The undeveloped desires and fears that control the optimist become frustrated to become the self-destructive, neurotic (and changed, but still undeveloped) fears and desires that control the pessimist. Both attitudes lack temper and tempering.

The deeper, immediate, and basic desire for being involved with what is really worthwhile, and fear of not being so-involved, come “up” and are reinterpreted (as half-truths and-or as completely distorted) in our speech and act through the attitudes of optimism and-or pessimism. Neither attitude is freeing or is open to the really worthwhile as potentially coming into existence (though us) or as something that I can develop as a product of my increasing horizon of understanding, or something that I can set in motion or accomplished. And both attitudes are compulsive as an immediacy of spirit--they are driven by polymorphic-confused and undeveloped, lesser, desires and fears (Piscitelli 1985).

With regard to qualitative meaning as speculative and-or as practical, our openness or closure in venue-2 again becomes the catalyst in our desire-quest-3. As dogmatic, the lock-down or our closure-of-mind stretches its influence from our understanding/knowing (venues-1-2) to the optimism and-or pessimism that frames our speaking and acting (venue-3).

As relativistic, our inability to adequately and reasonable judge the true-real (venue-2) stretches its influence to our optimism and pessimism and saps our courage, paralyzing us and leaving us to "stew," wringing our hands in our polymorphic-confusion.

Both dogmatism and relativism, then, make the break with either optimism or pessimism towards openness to the good-worthwhile in our speaking and acting much more difficult to inspire. That is, both speculative judgments (future considerations) and practical judgments (what will/should I do?) are framed with a closure-of-mind around the assumptions that inform them: optimistic and-or pessimistic. The lock-down closure of our dogmatism around our optimism or pessimism makes impossible, without some sort of conversion, our being wholly open-to or seriously participative in saying-doing what is truly worthwhile, or for our developing our horizons with regard to the good-worthwhile.

For instance, the optimist will come to class, or go anywhere with those others who influence--because whatever I do, only good can come from it, regardless, or because (rightly or wrongly) I have trusted others’ good view (naiveté). If this class turns out to be a bad class, the optimist will not be responsible for having attended—it’s someone else’s fault. Whereas, the pessimist will show up to prove that the class is not worthwhile. In this case, the pessimist finds perverse value in defending a negative view and in “proving” the utter worthlessness of the class.

In both cases, thinking, speaking, and acting responsibly (the manifestation of our higher viewpoints of knowing and doing the good as worthwhile), or being open to the good, are in failure mode.

Optimism: Dogmatically assumes they are involved in the good (meaning) and worthwhile-ness without reflective understanding or generative-participatory actions. Speaks and acts without discerning thought or critical-practical judgment.

Pessimism: Dogmatically assumes the bad (meaning) without reflective understanding. Assumes worthlessness, and goes forward with only defensive actions i mind. Speaks and acts without discerning thought or critical judgment, assuming my peremptory judgments are critical.

Together and untransformed, optimism and pessimism harbor unresolved tensions that divert the intentions of our deeper desire-quests and render us in a constant self-contradictory mode (polymorphic-confused). As bound together and untransformed, our self-contradictory attitudes cannot render us open to what is really worthwhile in our speaking and acting.

In the internal structure, the migration moves from all-optimistic, to all-pessimistic, or swings in-between the attitudes depending on the situation, person, or event with possible hints of movement towards self-transcendence here and there. Here, instead of being thoughtful, we can run from one attitude to the other, being driven by our changing desires and fears (polymorphism-confusion)—an internal cacophony and sometimes dizzying array of feelings, images, motivations, and half-thoughts.

Similar to the movement in the lower viewpoints in desire-quests-1-2, where the sceptic was once naïve, the pessimist was once an optimist—an unrepentant believer in the good that will happen--if only we would “think positive.” However, again, through inevitable circumstances in human living (the bad really does occur sometimes), the optimist’s good thoughts do not always “work” in the real world. The good fails to occur, or worse the bad rears its ugly head, no matter how hard I think otherwise. Our optimistic attitude goes unrewarded (the good is somehow also deserved); and so, the optimist is set on a course towards pessimism--OR openness to the good and self-transcendence in actually initiating and-or being a living part of it.

Thus, where expecting the good to happen no matter what I do—so go with it--is the fundamental attitude of the optimist, expecting the bad to happen no matter what I do—so protect or even fight against it before it happens--becomes the fundamental attitude of the pessimist.

Again, the optimist feels uncomfortable when things go badly. It must be someone’s fault—someone expects the bad to happen, and so it does—not because there is evil in the world, but because someone didn’t have the right “up” attitude or think the right thoughts.

On the other hand, the pessimist is hounded by inner disturbance when things go well—waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were. The pessimist is quick to pounce on and point to the negative, even secretly satisfied that it happened—the existence of evil "proves" the pessimist’s pre-judged point of view.

Furthermore, where the optimist is extremely uncomfortable in the presence of the pessimist and their "down" attitude, the pessimist detests the “happy-sappy” attitude of the optimist--it only reminds the pessimist of the utter failure of their own optimism--how they once were before they “got real.”

Optimist: Sees and expects only the good, regardless
Pessimist: Sees and expects only the bad, regardless
Optimist and Pessimist: Neither is responsible

Thus, both the optimist and the pessimist approach new material (for instance, this class) with a closure of mind (dogmatism) that precludes the activity of understanding and reflective understanding of the present-good, of growing one’s horizon for the good, of responsible speculative and practical discernments, and-or of being responsible to speak or do the good.

Like the other lower viewpoints, optimism and pessimism are a set of preconditioning attitudes. The person, and-or material, and the class are assumed to be already good and worthwhile (optimism) or they are bad and not worthwhile (pessimism). Though, again, if the pessimist is present in the classroom, they have de facto valued their being there, even if that valuation is to prove the worthlessness of the class.

Neither attitude as a whole is open to the meaningful-good or bad as fact--as involved with qualitative questions, understanding and judgment about what I should or should not do (speculative and practical discernments and their judgments--nor with being responsible—recognizing one’s own failures and following through to bring the good about in speech and act. In our optimist mode, we cannot accept the possibility of failure; and in our pessimist mode, we cannot accept the possibility of the good actually being spoken, initiated, or coming about. Neither are actively involved with defining the good-bad (what is it?) in the concrete situation, or speaking-acting the good once it is understood (is it really worthwhile?).

In this venue of responsibility (of the thought that informs our actual speech and act), our deeper desires (to be involved with what is really worthwhile) and correlative fears (of failure of the good and of being involved in what is really worthwhile) can transform the truncated and gone-awry desires and fears of our attitudes of optimism and pessimism.

Also, the question of participation, or of the end-product of the desire-quest-3 complex, is it really worthwhile?, is one of praxis—of the relationship between our learning and knowing (venues-1-2), on the one hand, and our speculative-practical thought that informs our speaking and acting on the other (venues-3-4).

In a movement similar to the other venues, openness to the good-worthwhile, and to being involved with what is really worthwhile, draws us through the lower viewpoints and takes up into it what is seeded there as essential to it. And again, we get a glimpse of why, from the point of view of the optimist, openness and the higher viewpoint seem pessimistic; and from the point of view of the pessimist, openness and the higher viewpoint seem optimistic.

Briefly, from optimism, we draw that we look for, identify-with and seek to bring about the good.

However, as distinct from optimism, we know that the good is not guaranteed and that we also must be actively and thoroughly involved with understanding the good and with bringing the good about. The optimist, then, sits back and waits for the good to occur, or pretends that it and only it is present, letting it happen--ignoring the bad and finding myself extremely uncomfortable--and even denying--that bad occurs or blaming others for it.

On the other hand, the pessimist expects the bad in all cases and, again, is actually uncomfortable with the good when we find it difficult to deny. If others have brought about the good, it is because they have some bad motivations for doing so.

From the higher viewpoint of openness to the good, we are aware of the bad and the good, and their potential and, concomitantly, of my part in and responsibility for bringing the good about and actively working against the bad where I can.

For the student entering a classroom, harboring an attitude of openness to the good-worthwhile stands in stark contrast to students entering the study with an attitude of either optimism or pessimism (Piscitelli 1985).

In our case, the student's attitude towards the intelligible-meaningful-good (desire-quests-1-2) informs his-her (1) evaluating and valuing the materials and experiment for the student’s discovery and self-discovery, and-or (2) (venue-3) their thought about the outcome--speculations and judgments about what will occur, and my practical considerations about what I will actually say and do here, including implementation of the material.

And in our case, the student's attitudes that inform his-her speaking-acting regard the is it worthwhile complex of questions and manifest in motivations underpinning his-her being present (or not) in class, paying a modicum of attention to the material (or not), and participating seriously in the discussion (or not).

Here we can point to the subtle movements between (a) desire-quests-1-2 and (b) desire-quests-3-4. The interim moments emerge as speculative and practical thought (or lack of it). (See chapter 6 in Finding the Mind : Transitioning: Desire-Quests-1-2 to 3-4.) Differentiation of mind occurs, or even a conversion of sorts, as speculative and practical thought develop as connected precursors to my speaking-and-acting, rather than as my remaining in the dogmatically closed assumptions of pessimism and optimism.

In terms of the transcendental precepts (Lonergan 1972), if we are to be responsible, we cannot do so by remaining in the lower viewpoint attitudes (in this case: optimism or pessimism) associated with our general question: is it really worthwhile?.

However, and similar to the thoughtful winnowing we experience in desire-quests-1-2, we can move through their tensions towards our own self-transcendence with regard to the worthwhile in our exploration (speculative-practical deliberations: what would be worthwhile, what should I do? ?), deliberations (should I do it?) and decisions (coming to internal term as yes-no and as external term in actual speaking and acting).

Read the below diagram from below upwards.

Responsible Speech and Action
/\
Openness to the Good/Worthwhile (higher viewpoint)
/\
Optimism <--> Pessimism
(Seed: Recognition of Good) (Seed: Recognition of Bad)

Derailments of Analyses/Understanding/Knowing:

All is good, regardless. All is bad, regardless.

Derailment of Responsible Speech & Act:

Optimism: We can/need do nothing to bring about the good, no matter what we do or say. No need to act--just think good thoughts and the good will happen anyway.

Pessimism: Failure to commit or respond when called—the good will not happen on its own and others have bad intentions. Lethargy—no reason to act or active self-defense.

First, derailments occur when our speaking and acting are governed by the mish-mash of confused thought that emerges from a lack of differentiation and reflective thought and when we bring that state of internal affairs to anything nuanced or requiring a mature-adult response where what is really worthwhile saying-doing is actively pursued.

We distinguish here (as in Finding the Mind) between (a) reflective understanding as we find in desire-quest-2 and that comes to term in a judgment for truth (yes-no) and (b) the development of our thoughtful and reflective capacities with regard to "thinking before speaking and acting" and with regard to the interim movement between venues 1-2 and 3-4. I refer here to the whole movement of human development from (a) speaking-acting before thinking and (b) thinking before speaking-acting. The latter concerns the development of our "thoughtful and reflective capacities." And the latter concerns the creation of "interior thought-space" that remains potential or opens-up between (and influences) our understanding-knowing and our speaking-acting.

Second, derailments on either attitudinal pole (in desire-quest-3) are concerned with (a) obstructing critical discernment with regard to intelligent-qualitative analysis ( the future, or what is/would-be good to say-do, and what good is it?, etc. and with (b) avoiding responsible commitment with regard to activating the true-good in our speech and actions (what is, and is it worthwhile/what should I do/should I do it/decision and actual speech-act [venues-3-4]).

In the same way, then, the lower viewpoints in our desire-quest-3 venue, optimism and pessimism, also are intimately interactive with our other two desire-quests (what is it? and is it so?) and their content in a pervasive, mutually self-informing, and perpetuating way. So that in working through our desire-quest-3, we spontaneously draw from our well of under-meaning developed (or lacking) through our first two venues, whatever state of development or neglect that well-of-meaning is in.

And again, the question of value is twofold and, thus, its affect is twofold. That is, our questions of good-value hinge on our experience and state of development and already pervade our first two venues (what is it? and is it so?) as the qualitative dimension of a lifetime of meaning exploration and accrual of knowledge in those questioning venues. For instance: meaning accrued from our venues: what is good-bad, excellent or poor, etc., and is it really so?

As our approach and qualitative analysis of anything is first initiated by our interest, that interest is already a function of our long history of developmental-valuations and their judgments, or a derailment or neglect of such development. (See Finding the Mind and appendix 5: The Pervasiveness of the Good.)

With regard to our movements of thought towards our future speech and actions—generally stated as is it really worthwhile? , in our classroom situation, we can assume that the student, for any number of reasons, already values (considers worthwhile) this classroom situation by the fact of their actual presence in the chair. The student might say they value something else more; however, their de facto presence speaks of a series of judgments, deliberations, and decisions that belie that said-other as a higher value.

Thus, the student has answered for themselves whether or not the class has meaning-value (is worthwhile) to them and whether they should attend (, is it really good-bad?, would it be good for me to do?, should I do it?, will I do it?). That is, a student may be open to understanding and knowing, or they may be naïve, sceptical, dogmatic or relativistic, or any polymorphic combination of these lower viewpoints.

However, by being in the chair, they are saying with that presence as external term that they have chosen and already value this classroom experience--for any one or more of a number of reasons. And we can infer (if they have not been forced) that they have answered these questions: is it really worthwhile? (for me to do,?) and, should I do it?--at least briefly and momentarily, with the prior judgment-decision: yes. By being in the chair, they have followed through with at least a modicum of judgments, deliberations, decisions, and actions.

So in this brief example, we can see the student’s more-or less differentiated operations at work in all three desire-quest/questioning venues.

Further, for the naïf or the sceptic, and for the moment’s context and content at least, the yes of this value-judgment-as-decision) is locked-in. Thus, as example, under the umbrella of the above decision-making process, in any classroom situation, the naïf is waiting to hear a trusted teacher say something they can believe (whether that trust is warranted or not). The sceptic is waiting for a moment to interject a barrage of questions to offset anything we might otherwise insight-to-understand (because, already, I cannot trust-believe the teacher or the text); and the closure of dogmatism prevails over both in undifferentiated but operative fashion.

Furthermore, the dogmatist is waiting (or won't wait) to put forth the power of his-her personality (in loud and frequent, if empty, judgments) while internally deaf (not listening) and already impenetrable to new meaning. And while the relativist seems refreshing in their ability to listen and to entertain the exploration of much meaning, they will not make a reflectively considered judgment regardless of the evidence presented. Or if they do make a judgment, to the relativist, such judgments are merely psychological affairs and have no bearing on the complex of truth-reality. The relativist will rest comfortably (and, again, dogmatically) in the presupposition that: we can explore meaning forever; however, neither you nor the teacher can gain on the truth-reality complex.

One wonders why a relativist is present in the classroom in the first place if not for gaining knowledge of the true-real. What a waste of time if we weren't really exploring the potencies of reality. The implications are, however, that other forces and a wealth of conflicts and confusions are at work here.

In the meantime, the student who is open to understanding, to the good, and to knowing either, is waiting to proceed on that journey (understand, value, speculate, deliberate, know what to speak and act--and doing so).

In either case, the content of our understanding and knowing what (desire-quests-1-2) will underpin whatever deliberations, decisions, and actions we do (or our desire-quests-3-4 venues). The good of what, and the worthwhile-ness of speaking and acting, then, are two different but interrelated venues of meaning-good/bad/worth. And whichever attitude or mix of attitudes students are in, and for whatever reason, we can still assume their answer to the pervasive value-truth-worthwhile questions, however authentic or perverted, has brought them to this classroom and this material.

Thus, and though surrounding a differentiated desire-quest/shadow-question (is it really worthwhile?), optimism and pessimism are closely woven-in to the fabric of the other desire-quests and their attitudes, whether lower or higher. Further, the attitudes draw from the same content, and share the same structure, dynamism, and integral relationship with their question as do the other three desire-quests and sets of attitudes with their questions.

Thus, each person’s horizon, including the teacher’s, is constituted by the entire spectrum and basic set of attitudes, and with regard to the entire and basic set of four desire-questing venues. As related to the other three desire-quests and their attitudes, then, the lower viewpoint attitudes surrounding our third venue (optimism and pessimism) are equally dynamic, pervasive, and mutually self-perpetuating.

This qualitative aspect of both analysis of what-is and the deliberative meaning-background of our initiated speaking-acting adds even more complexity to the polymorphic possibilities of the human mind and to our approach to any life-situation. For we are “live,” our moral-ethical development is pervasive to all but also has its own framework for unfolding; and our moment in that development is the stage on which all speech and act are played.

Further, we look to the same general and normative structure of self-transcendence to grow within that frame, to transform and transcend the attitudes of optimism and-or pessimism, and to gain an openness to the really good-worthwhile and a commitment to saying and doing it in responsible speech and acts.7

Openness to the Ultimate Good/Worthwhile

(Desire-Quest-4: Is it Really Ultimately Good/Worthwhile?)

Our desire-quest-4 venue, is it really ultimately good-worthwhile?, is not a direct consideration in this essay for the secular classroom teacher. Nevertheless we can and should recognize here that our desire-quest-4 and its vast accumulation of quite person-specific under-meaning is pervasive as a core ground and fundamental motivating factor in the other three desire-quests. (See our exploration of desire-quest-4 in the main text: Finding the Mind.)

Though we will not explain them here, the attitudes for venue-4 are sacralism and secularism (Piscitelli 1985). The influence of the set of viewpoints in our desire-quest-4 venue, however, is pervasive and comprehensive to all human living, commonly present but remote in secular education.

Similar to the other three venues, the dynamics involved are in the dialectical-tensional relationship between sacralism, secularism and openness to what is really ultimately good/worthwhile in the student’s interior domain and ultimately its influence on what we say and do in the world.

However, such dynamics will influence what goes on in the classroom in a less direct but more pervasive fashion than the other three sets of attitudes. Nevertheless, the other desire-quest venues rest in and are constantly influenced by our sense of ultimate intent, concern, and regard, however the student understands or expresses that intent-concern-regard.

We will not explore the set of attitudes in our desire-quest-4 here, even in brief, because of its scope and because of its remote and indirect influence on our other venues. Neither our own nor our students’ sense of religious meaning (overtly negative, positive, critical, open, or ignored) will be served by a cursory treatment of ultimate-concern or religious attitudes here, or the issue of loving as related to the transcendental precepts.

For a fuller exploration, see our experiment in Finding the Mind where we explore the desire-quest/shadow-question-4 in chapters 8 and 12. See also appendix 17: Notes for Teachers Regarding Desire-Quest-4. And see Piscitelli (1977 & 1985) and other resources referred to in this narrative.

General Analyses

Let us regard, then, that the lower viewpoints of desire-quest-1 are intimately related to the lower viewpoints of desire-quest-2 as well as to the other lower viewpoints associated with desire-quests-3-4. Let us regard now that the higher viewpoint, the maintenance of an attitude of openness on any of the four planes, and any actual self-transcendence that we achieve, are dynamic and they are related to one-another, and to how we approach particular and ongoing events in our now-history.

Further, history moves onward, and we are relatively limited both in our ability to understand and to know, and in our freedom to speak and act. As such, if the higher viewpoint, openness, and self-transcendence can be spoken of as achievements, they are flittering ones, indeed, and are a lived thing--and not a once-and-for-all standing.

On the other hand, development and dialectic are keys to the dynamism that we are in history. And our judgments, decisions, and speaking-acting in specific situations constitute the turning of those keys and the intelligible instantiation of who we are. We do not speak-act dialectically, however. Rather, as our thought and attitudinal comportment turn into our concrete history, our speak-act puts an end to our dialectical and developmental movement of thought for and in that now-moment.

As such, both development and dialectic are intimate to us as we are intimate to events in human history. It is in the event as it occurs (the hard-to-capture, but nevertheless lived intelligible now) that the good actually manifests for and by us—at the right place and time, with the right persons, in the right way, etc. (Aristotle, trans. 1962).

Sometimes, that good can actually occur and we can have initiated and been a part of it. In other words, our self-transcendence in any of the venues (understanding, knowing, being involved in the good) is and can be a concrete reality inasmuch as events are finite and have finite and fulfilled, knowable contingencies. But then, standing on our laurels is not itself the continued performance of that self-transcendence.

Further, the lower viewpoints in all venues are oppositional and in tension, and so dialectically related. In this way, and together as self-transforming, they constitute our unfolding towards our openness, towards a higher viewpoint, and towards our self-transcendence. In part, aspects of either attitude in the set hold the keys to inviting meaning, insights, and acts to occur that would then settle-in and build as a foundation of understanding (under-meaning), knowledge, and habits of being.

That is, the naïf in us has initial belief. Such belief is needed as it holds the potential to our being open to new meaning. On the other hand, the sceptic in us has doubt. Such doubt holds the potential for our raising questions about that meaning--questions that, with a preparation in initial and reasonable belief, would invite new insights-for-understanding into a ground of openness.

Thus, all of the lower viewpoint attitudes are bound together complexly—folded together, as it were, and both mutually exclusive and interdependent as a foundation for our self-transcendence. For instance, to foster an attitude of openness to understanding, what the naïf in me needs to foster my transformation, the sceptic in me has, and vice versa.

Further, the lower viewpoints are dialectically related in their stark oppositions—we cannot be believers and doubters at the same time and about the same issue, though we may jump from one attitude to the other. Hence, we can see one meaning of polymorphic confusion of mind that manifests as inner confusion. And the attitudes are dynamic as they hold and direct our spontaneous and deep-set intentions—our fundamental desire to self-transcend--and our opposite need for moments of insight, expression, and for inner and outer coherence, unity, and peace. Like sleeping and waking, we stop and move and stop again--moving through our tensions and oppositions towards fostering our unfolding and then expression.

Furthermore, our desire-intent to understand may be suppressed by our lower viewpoint attitudes—by the truncation of our questioning, and by our merely believing, and ending there--as naïve. And then we may question, but then reject initial belief—so that we merely doubt, and end there—as sceptical. However, the desire to understand (etc.) is fundamental and, thus, given to us as part of the immediacy of being that we are. As long as we live, those desire-quests never completely go away. Rather they continue to press themselves from below on the naïf's and the sceptic’s, the dogmatist's and relativist's (etc.), closure of mind and affect of speech and actions.

That desire-questing is fundamental as it constitutes any awareness that we have and whether that awareness is shallow or thoughtful or somewhere in-between. Further, the desire-questing initiates our speaking and acting, and whether we are merely responsive to what stimulates us or prudent in that speaking-acting, or somewhere in-between.

Thus, our desire to understand and fear of not understanding (etc.) inform the creative tension in us that never dispenses with the possibility of openness and self-transcendence. Our desires and fears fuel the tension that fills us and, in our very awareness, continuously press us from-below towards un-whorl-ing, unfolding, and transforming from lower to higher viewpoint in the conscious intentionality that we are.

Openness and self-transcendence in any venue, again, does not mean we shed our lower viewpoint attitudes. Rather, openness and self-transcendence mean that we develop, transform, and embrace what we need from both attitudes in all four venues. Through the immediacy of our desire-questing, we work towards having new insights, and towards understanding for ourselves. Aha! I get it! In bringing that understanding and knowing to our life-participation, we reflect, deliberate, and decide to speak and act.

Openness with regard to any new material, situation-event, or person, then, requires that we work through to transform the lower viewpoints and to sort out, transform, and transcend their built-in oppositions so that our polymorphism leads us to well-being rather than to a confused and haphazard existence. We spontaneously move in this direction anyway despite the lethargy, tensions, and self-defeating mechanisms of our lower viewpoints. But then, in our self-reflective capacities, we can take up the process as conscious-now activity. That is, we can call our own adequate development from above, as it were, in giving ourselves directions from our own self-consciousness.

When any lower-viewpoint attitude prevails in us as untransformed, we remain truncated and closed-off to our own fundamental intentions. The developmental-dialectical transformation from lower to higher viewpoints is our separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were, of those lower viewpoint oppositions—of reaching into the tension we feel in us; of trusting and even actively pursuing the fundaments of our own thought processes; of rejecting our own truncation of mind; and of drawing from all lower-viewpoint attitudes only what we need to rise towards the light of insighting—to the satisfying experience of understanding for ourselves and speaking-acting well in the world.

In this way, and as sources of internal order, together the lower viewpoint attitudes hold within them, as seeds, the needed preliminary approaches to all meaning (including good-bad qualitative meaning) and all speaking-acting. Those approaches, when moving together in thought and in dynamic fashion, serve to open the way towards new meaning to be insighted and understood, deliberated about, decided on--or to our self-transcendence with regard to understanding, knowing, saying, and doing, or being-well in the world.

Further, though never a permanent achievement, achieving a modicum of openness can become relatively spontaneous and habitual as our continuing to reach for it fosters an identity-with what is fundamental to us.

On the other hand, and without the thoughtful winnowing process that draws from and transforms the lower viewpoints towards the higher and our self-transcendence, the lower-viewpoint attitudes remain oppositional (a) with one another, (b) with their confused relationship with the other three venues’ viewpoints and (c) with the deeper underlying intentions of the desire-quests that constitute the immediacy of our being.

We can remain in a tensional and polymorphic-confused state, running back and forth from naivete to scepticism, from dogmatism to relativism, from optimism to pessimism, and from sacralism to secularism. As undifferentiated, the lower viewpoints harbor the potential to cancel one another out and to leave our listening powers (both to ourselves and to others) undeveloped and truncated—and thus we find ourselves "jumping on our horse and running off in all directions." As such, we are in a confused state where we have cut-off our path to the insights and understanding, and to being involved in the really worthwhile, that are potential to any meaningful learning and-or speaking-acting situation (Piscitelli 1985).

~~~

We find that venues-1-2 are specific to understanding and knowledge which are both central to what goes on in a secular classroom. Here, naiveté and scepticism surround our question for meaning-understanding (what is it?) and come into play with any potentially insighted meaning-content. And relativism and dogmatism surround our question for knowledge (is it so?).

I do not mean to discount moral-ethical education here by not focusing on the desire-quest-3-4 venues in this treatment. However, we have already explored how (a) intelligibility-meaning and (b) the good have been systematically distinguished--rightly and wrongly--in the academy; and we want to follow the rightness of that distinction here (see appendix 5) where, in your own classrooms in teaching this material, you are not teaching ethics but rather the foundations of it, and doing so as an objectifying critically-establishable activity.

Further, since the above distinction was made via the scientific revolution, moral-ethical education in the western academy (at least) in most cases has become a hidden, rather than an overt part of any curriculum--though in many cases it may not be recognized as such. Though some academies still hold ethics (by whatever name) as a part of the "core" curriculum, in others, and if taught overtly (ethics, character development, etc.) it is done so as an add-on adjunct to that curriculum.

We will focus below on venues-1-2, then, and the attitudes that come forward and that play into a student’s understanding and knowledge accumulation. That accumulation, we have argued here, in Finding the Mind, and in our other appendixes, is already saturated with meaningful-good long before we distinguish it from meaning-intelligibility in the world (See appendix 5: The Pervasiveness of the Good). On the other hand, we are offering knowledge here, and self-knowledge, and not training students in how to live an ethical life, though we can recognize fully and even foster covertly the workings of the hidden curriculum as we do.

The teacher should understand the attitudes clearly, then, and watch for their emergence in order to condition the student (as best we can) at least towards openness to understanding and knowing.

In those venues, for instance, a teacher can easily mistake belief and trust for a student’s understanding, and the emergence of doubt for a set of real questions--that is, with the student's insights and understanding as their aim. And the teacher can easily mistake relativism for an interest in nuance and meaning-development, and dogmatism for good judgment.

The Attitudes as Manifest in the Classroom

It follows from our analysis that, in any classroom, we may begin to understand just how complex we and our students are, and just how potentially polymorphic-confused is the attitudinal situation in any of us with regard to learning and, especially, to philosophical learning.

We will focus here on our first two desire-quest venues, then, but also assume their qualitative dimension.

~~~

As initially untransformed, then, we and our students can swing back-and-forth, from one attitude to another, with the movement and mood of the group we are involved in and the people and material we are present to.

Moreover, all attitudes can (and will) enter the classroom as a beginning point of a students’ habitual complex—such is the state of our polymorphism of mind--and more with regard to our desire-quests-3-4 venues for worthwhile-ness and ultimate worthwhile-ness, which we treat here only in a cursory fashion (Piscitelli 1985).

Thus, as teachers we can "hear" and be aware of the attitudes present in our classroom; and we can adjust our pedagogy and expectations of the student, according to the movement of mind and the emphatic attitude that is present in the student in-the-moment. We can do so to create an atmosphere amenable for the proper unfolding of the spirit of inquiry (that resides as fundamental-foundational in everyone) and for optimal student response and critical-reflective understanding and their judgments. Again, students may enter the classroom with an assortment of attitudes:

• The naïve-dogmatic-optimist believes, trusts, and accepts (openness only to follow the mood of the class and, thus, with little consistency of self-direction). As performance, I’ll believe anything you say, assumes the naïf-dogmatist. And, I will continue speaking and acting without thought as I am closed to thinking for myself on anything but the most cursory of levels. This class has to be good, assumes the optimist, without regard for evidence one way or the other. Or the naïf will make a qualitative judgment based on irrelevant criteria, e.g., the way the teacher is dressed or combs her hair.

• The sceptical-dogmatic-pessimist disbelieves and rejects regardless of what is being said or who is saying it. As performance, you cannot get me to believe you, the sceptic assumes. And, I will protect myself against all the negative and evil in the world, assumes the pessimist.

• The relativist is thoughtful and willing to explore and collect meaning, but dogmatically refuses to move that thought into reflective understanding with the aim of judging what is or is not so. So there is an implied irresponsibility that tends to inform venue-3. You can talk all you want, but none of it is really true or real.

• The person open to understanding and its complement open to knowing--a new set of discoveries is awaiting new insights, and approached, in turn, by a requirement to raise my horizons and to make critical judgments. This person awaits the presentation of meaning so that he-she can go to work on it. As performance, I am here to learn--help me explore the material, then I will consider and judge its meaning and value for myself and in dialogue with others, assumes the open person.

• Other combinations of attitudes.

Optimally, teachers are aware of when a change occurs from one attitude to another and from closure to openness. A proper soft resistance in discourse must give way at the proper time and in the proper place to insights for meaning and to knowledge of truth.

Further, in concrete circumstances and in today’s more democratic classrooms, no teacher of any subject-matter, including classical or statistical sciences, rightly requires that students unquestioningly or automatically believe the teacher, or merely accept, without understanding, the theories presented to them in the classroom or the lab. Further, unlike many human science theories, with Finding the Mind, and its references to general empirical method (Lonergan 1958-2000, and 1972), you can have critically established evidence for the thoroughness and validity of this theory.

In this way developing students' critical acumen has entered the generally-accepted aims of teaching. Students’ critical understanding is generally considered essential for most if not all scientific and even personal endeavors. And our judgments for truth can be held off indefinitely when the evidence for making truth claims is not forthcoming; though the constant call to our speaking and acting does not often-offer the luxury of such postponements. If so, and if belief is a part of the scientific project (and it is, at the core of it), then it is belief that has been or will be put to the test many times by many others before judgments for reasonability and truth are passed (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).

Furthermore, in qualified classroom situations, teachers assume students:

•

want to know what is going on, and not merely to believe the teacher;

• have a certain amount of responsible faith that the teacher knows what he-she is doing; and, therefore, that students;

• have not judged ahead of time (dogmatism) that they will fail to understand the experiment or that the whole project is worthless (sceptical-dogmatic pessimism), regardless of what the teacher may present; and

• are able to accumulate the insights and make reasonable judgments when the time and conditions occur.

Also, in qualified classroom settings, students commonly are provided a relaxed, collaborative, and unthreatening context—people, place, and timing--to question, understand, verify, and to consider reflectively, or to apply a theory in a critical fashion, e.g., in a lab.

Furthermore, student attitudes spontaneously change depending on many factors. That is, our attitudes are fluid--they may be naïve-dogmatic, sceptical-dogmatic, optimistic or pessimistic, or open to understanding and knowing at different times and places, under different circumstances, and in the presence of different people.

For instance, our attitudes in the presence of a person who, in our estimation, has authority, or draws respect from some preconceived source, will differ from when we are present to a child or, again, to someone we do not respect or, perhaps, even know. Often the attitude depends, for instance, on the student’s place in the social order in the class and-or how they perceive it. A change in perceived social order will “set off” a different set of attitudes.

Of course, we are all polymorphic; and teachers cannot easily create, and certainly cannot guarantee, a consistent attitude of openness in ourselves and-or our students. However, we can approach each student with the question of attitude as defined in this technical way. In doing so, we can practice consciously setting-up the optimum conditions for self-understanding to occur and for a critical openness to begin to unfold in the student in all of their desire-quest venues, and thus for self-transcendence in understanding, knowing, and worthwhiling to occur. If that happens, where the student’s own critical self-knowledge is the content (as is supposed to occur in the experimentation afforded in Finding the Mind), then the process of self-appropriation-affirmation has begun.

So too, no teacher of cognitional theory and its verification activities should expect the unquestioned belief-in-the-teacher. Such belief would come from the naïve dogmatist (automatic believing subverts and replaces reflective understanding). Nor should we expect students to automatically believe the theory under consideration or its writer.

On the other hand, we should expect initial belief where that belief is a part of openness to new questions and insights and is intended to be transformed into the students’ own dynamic of understanding. If naïve belief is present and maintained, the experiment will probably be moot, for few or no real questions for understanding (insights) or critical knowledge (reflective insights followed by judgment) will likely occur in such a calcified-belief and trust-dependent situation.

The more difficult and creative part of liberal education (rather than mere specialist training), then, is not in presenting a theory well, or having the student learn it; but in teaching so that the students' attitudes unfold. Hidden or not, this unfolding is a fundamental part of the any formal or informal education or curriculum and cannot be otherwise.

We may also reasonably expect that students at least begin with a basic and initial trust and belief in the teacher’s ability to present something worthwhile knowing and doing; that again, students are open to understanding what may be insighted-understood; but that they are also critical enough not to swallow-whole anything the teacher says (on the naïve principle) without engagement of their own critical consciousness.

In this way, the student’s initial belief and trust is also essential—trust in their own capacity to raise and entertain their own questions, grasp meaning through the experience of insighting, and come to understand and know in critical and reasonable fashion.

In other words, students begin with belief (initial trust-belief: the needed aspect from our attitude of naiveté). However, that trust-belief beginning is not naiveté if rightly followed by questions for potential insights, that are expected, and that emerge from the other side of the dialectic—the doubt of the sceptic in us.

This closeness of naïveté and scepticism to openness is why an open person sometimes seems quite trusting and even vulnerable to others, and why that person may also seem off-putting in their asking of questions. I say seem because, in fact, the open person is listening with the belief that something can be understood. However, openness to understanding is not naiveté. The signal for openness (rather than naïveté) is when the student begins to raise questions spontaneously so that their initial belief can turn into insights-to-understanding.

Further, the signal for openness (rather than scepticism) is when the student's questions turn into insights and when we begin to understand—to say in our own words, or to move from severe questioning into an “I got it” mode, or come up with legitimate incursions into the meaning under review. Such questions, however, are for the sake of the student’s later understanding of the material the teacher is presenting (questions: the needed aspect of scepticism). With openness, students trust in their own powers of understanding and reasonability borne out by the genuine entertainment of live questions that spontaneously raise-up in a consciousness that is not blocked and as the material is being engaged.

Thus, the basic lower-viewpoint attitudes are intertwined, dialectical, and dynamic. They are intertwined as they reside in the human conditions, first, of initially needing to trust and believe and, second, of needing to question for our own understanding where, in both cases, having insights-to-understanding are the implicit aim.

Further, in venue-2 we need to recover, marshal and reflect on our relevant meaning (reflective understanding) in order to pass judgment (yes-no) about the truth-reality of our object of attention and in order for those judgments to be critical. And finally, we need to speak and act (drawing on a different set of questions in desire-quests-3-4) what we have developed for our understanding.

Preparing for Naïve Dogmatism

Before going forward with the experiment, a teacher can prepare naive dogmatic students. I refer to those students who are eager to forgo their questions and critical judgment in favor of “knowing” that they can trust you and the material. The naïve dogmatist goes on the assumption (false certainty) that they can believe the teacher or the theory in automatic fashion, or merely memorize the material for repeating. In fact, however, such students fail to understand or know for themselves in any critical fashion. (The attitudinal cover can be quite disarming.)

For instance, within the context of the course or sessions, teachers can openly raise the question of the student’s own questions, insights, and critical capacities and call for some self-reflection about the naïve attitude as theoretically defined. Are you merely trusting that this material is valid, and that I may be believed, or are you ready to understand and judge it for yourself?

Often a session on the attitudes, presented as an extension of section II in Finding the Mind (further theory development as option and if there is time) will help students recognize these attitudes in themselves without the teacher pointing to them directly or teasing them out indirectly.

Further, teachers can ask that students consider the quality of their educational experiences, for instance, the boredom with education and the felt-emptiness of merely believing or memorizing. And we can ask them to consider the possibility of replacing such unquestioning-belief with a healthy initial wariness and willingness to foster, to wait for, and to recognize their own insights when they do occur.

Furthermore, we can ask the student to recall (and give example of) having had an insight, and how satisfying that was; and then refer to questioning the course material as potential to producing such satisfying experiences.

Also, believing-trusting students will want to please the teacher. However, buried deep beneath that need-to-please, and beneath the fear of understanding for ourselves (for at a deeper level of our existence, we resonate that such understanding will affect all of our present relationships), are the seeds of moving from naïve belief and trust to reasonable belief and trust, and on to experiencing and recognizing the pleasure and satisfaction of having our own questions, insights, and reflective insights (of the experience of self-transcendence in venues-1-2). Further, we can help students look forward to building a critical foundation to stand on made from our own understanding and continued openness to new meaning.

Moreover, naïve students can become aware that you, the teacher, do not require or even want their unqualified and automatic trust or belief throughout the experiment, or at its end—that what-the-teacher-wants is that students raise questions against the material—not for the teacher, but for the sake of the student's understanding for themselves.

Further, memorizing a theory and some laboratory procedures is important, but no substitute for authentic learning. Or, in the case of our own material in this experiment, memorizing cannot replace the unique process of self-development/enhancement, of gaining a critical kind of self-knowledge, and even of experiencing a “heightening” of spirit and knowing what that is.

Of course, we want our students to like us; however, not at the expense of their own authentic understanding. Such a statement of the teacher’s expectation will run counter to a naïve person’s presuppositions, and may even offend at first—the naïve student may not like you as much. Thinking seems foreign and difficult, even exhausting, to a person who is not accustomed to it.

However, the dialectical “winnowing” for the naïve person is about, first, distinguishing worrying about the teacher’s “feelings,” or liking or not liking a teacher, from the higher value of learning. Where the social situation is important in the classroom, it takes on a different hue, and less of the center stage, in the classroom than in most other situations. In the classroom, everything is aimed at the learning experience.

And second, it is about distinguishing (1) initial trust and belief-as-an-end from (2) appropriate and reasonable trust and belief--as a means--as a beginning to the process of raising questions, insighting, and understanding-knowing for oneself.

Questions that reveal the naïve attitude, for instance, whom or what should I believe?, should be replaced with questions seeking insights, for instance, what does it mean? or how does it work?, or how does this relate to that? or how do you know?, or in the case of our material, is this really something I can identify in my own experience? Changing whom we believe or what text to memorize, or moving from one teacher to the next, or belief to disbelief, is like changing pews in the wrong church—such change will not get us to the right community, sermon, or movement of mind.

Further, the teacher can suggest that we greatly appreciate students’ trust; however, that trust is only authentically fulfilled when the student begins to understand for themselves, and when trust is no longer needed for a person to speak and act out of that understanding, or for the residual growth to occur that comes from it.

Again, in the teaching situation, and no matter how much the teacher enjoys the student's trust and appreciation, students’ initial trust and belief is only appropriate if it is employed for the sake of their own insighting-to-understanding—for their raising of questions and development of insights and critical judgments later on.

Furthermore, the only avenue that can take us from mere belief to the fullness of understanding is paved with, after initially believing, a student’s own courage: to feel the discomfort and risk of raising questions that call for insights, for having them, and for their sometimes-disturbing immersion in the myriad and sometimes frightful meaning of the dialogue. And we have to have the courage to suffer the expressed discord that may come from others who don’t like our questions either.

Thus, teachers can encourage needed self-inspection through explanation. If the student needs to like the teacher, and needs the respect and admiration of the teacher, then the teacher-student relationship can be on the right course--if the teacher keeps its fundamental aims clear. Again, though some social meaning always and rightly accrues in any relationship, the relationship as legitimate is basically a means to the end: education-transformation of the student.

Also, as a part of that transformation, going through the process regardless of its initial discomfort can be how that liking, respect, and admiration is gained. So that, beyond a common personal regard for others in the social sphere, that respect and admiration can only legitimately come from the student becoming truly and critically open to understanding and knowing—not because a liked-teacher said it, but because the student has questioned, understood, and come know what is probable, likely, reasonable and-or true.

Also, by uncritical judgment I mean closure of mind around mere belief-in-the-teacher, and in what is being presented, and where an employment of rote memory is all that the student regards as necessary. It follows that the naïve or sceptical person is often the bored person (also with pessimism). In terms of judgment, the dogmatic person may be able to repeat concepts, but is bored and afraid to address the more complex, fluid, and often-unrefined nature of meaning—and has either failed to raise any questions for meaning at all; or has begun with a judgment that everything we are told by the teacher must be true and, therefore, we need not question it—or understand it for ourselves.

A person without questions or an active desire for new insights is, by definition, closed- or even dead-minded (bored).

A teacher can understand that argument and conflicts are toxic to the naïve attitude—for it is out of conflict that questions must arise; and so that, the more conversational-conflict ensues, the more the naïf is called upon to suppress their own questioning process.

As a part of their dogmatism, then, the naïve student avoids questions-for-meaning "like the plague" and, with it, the subsequent fruit of their own insights. This is so even though questions and insights in the student are struggling to emerge in the deeper currents of their own thought (pressing from below on that internal lump, as it were). Somewhere in that depth, however, the naive-dogmatist also anticipates the massive change in their trust-relationships--relationships that are implied their actually having their own insights and resultant sense of autonomy.

Thus, a sense of certainty falls around the stasis of shallow meaning that the dogmatist "knows" (what I judge is true sans my own reflective insights) and that the naif wants to maintain. The naïve dogmatic person draws a kind of security from that sense of certainty, though that certainty and, thus, the security drawn from it, may be false (Piscitelli 1985). That security is at least misconceived (secure as depending on others to understand and judge for them). False security cannot suffice for the kind of security that only can come from being open to understanding and from having our own questions, insights, and reflective insights.

The "secure" naif, then, is often also the "certain" dogmatist.

Breaking with the naive dogmatic attitude, however, is a long and difficult project, especially if the student has become a chronological adult and maintained their set of lower-viewpoint attitudes for a long period of time and especially if their entire social-familial structure is set up around this person's attitudes.

A sensitive teacher can help soften a naïve-dogmatic attitude in a few sessions. And of course the nuance is that we must begin by exploiting their sense of belief and trust, though it is wrong-headed in the student at first.

However, deeply-naïve persons have often been truncated and coerced into this attitude from early childhood through may kinds of inducements, neglects, and instilments of fear. Thus, the attitude is in their bones. So that the break with such foundations will not happen overnight or with one admonition from an attitude-aware teacher, or with learning the material perfectly but on the merely-objective level (rather than challenging the student personally).

And again, a break with naïveté can be life-changing, especially if the attitude is what holds together the student’s central personal relationships. Naïve dogmatism is a habit of thought tied to deeply rooted feelings and images that are notoriously slow to change. Again, hence the name breakthrough or conversion when foundational change does occur.

Of course, we can be so naive that we even think (assume) that we are already in possession of whatever understanding we need. In this case, the naif trusts his-her own self to "understand" when little or no understanding has actually occurred. Here, trust is misplaced again; and a person's self-worth is confused and often exaggerated so that I am in no need of development: I am okay like just like I am.

To further compound the attitude is the common and confused notion that what I see is what I understand, everyone sees alike and, therefore, we need not ask questions for meaning-intelligibility in order to know. The oversight here is of what actually occurs when we are in the process of understanding--that is, we are raising questions, having insights, and understanding--and not merely seeing.

If seeing were equivalent to understanding, indeed, everyone would understand similarly. But if we know anything at all, we know that human beings often do not understand similarly or pay attention to the same sets of meanings that begin in seeing.

What is missing also is a distinction between myself as a valuable human being, de facto, and that being--myself--as in need of development--and an embrace of that development. What is missing, then, is appropriate trust--not in others to understand for me, and not in the fact that I am a human being like other human beings and worthy-valuable, but in my own potentials and abilities towards understanding for myself and all that this entails.

Such critical trust, however, is difficult to inspire (it may feel like loneliness at first)—especially when a build-up of understanding is what has been quashed by others and habitually avoided over a lifetime by being confused with ethical and political self-value—and, to add to this long-term habit of mind--including that we confuse our seeing with understanding. My realizing what I am and have been can be quite painful. And of course such a "waking up" from one's own naivete can inspire its polemical attitude: scepticism and its follow-up cover, dogmatism.

Also, once the naif understands the project of understanding, we are often overwhelmed by the apparent depth and breadth of what may be understood--a sense of newly released wonderment about everything under the sun is common. Like all habits, however, much time and great effort is needed to change, especially at the beginning of a journey to undo what has been done, or to start doing what has been avoided, and quite-literally "grown-in” over a long period of time.

And again, after such change occurs, the formerly naïve person can be faced with a sense of embarrassment and also with some really untenable personal choices. Like radical scepticism, however, radical naiveté is commonly die-hard dogmatic, and tends to defend its own ignorance, sometimes ferociously.

A good beginning is needed, however; and an attitude-wise teacher in a controlled classroom situation can create the conditions for gradual but potentially-massive change in chronologically adult students who have entered the classroom in a state of naïve dogmatism. We also need to know when to distance ourselves, and when to perform a return, if appropriate.

Again, the second nuance is that the break with naïve dogmatism, when it comes, can manifest in a move towards scepticism (and-or relativism in venue-2) and, with it, an over-rejection of the material and the teacher—the one who was trusted-believed and, in fact and in our case, who seeks to “lead out” for a transformation of all of the lower viewpoint attitudes.

So in some cases, and within the accepted tenets of classroom decorum, the teacher can understand a student’s change of attitude, loss of trust, or outright rejection of the teacher, as a needed moment in the breakdown of the naïve-dogmatic attitude. However, the naïve person can also experience with a jolt the power of their own questions-to-insights, and their subsequent insights-to-understanding, and begin to (appropriately) trust those insights and reflective insights as an alternative to naive-dogmatism and its mind-and spirit-numbing self-absorption, memorization, and empty judgments.

From such deeply felt insights-realizations (referred to as at least a part of intellectual conversion [Piscitelli 1985]), it is often impossible for that person to return to mere belief and trust sans an expectation of understanding as a now-embraced way of life.

The thought of returning to the ways of naivete, after experiencing one’s own questioning, insights, understanding and then reflective understanding-to-knowing, brings on a numbness of spirit and can feel a bit like death--which, in part, is why the over-reaction to scepticism-dogmatism often follows naïveté rather than openness to understanding.

Preparing for Sceptical Dogmatism

A good clue to identify sceptical-dogmatism, if not clear in its attitudinal body-language, is that sceptical-dogmatism will literally jump out into the classroom as fast and vocal judgments, long before any meaning has been explored. Though of course dogmatism can also be quiet and reserved, laying in wait for the right moment to show the pseudo-power of my certainty.

To prepare sceptical dogmatists, I suggest teachers raise the question of scientific thoughtfulness and open-mindedness, on the one hand, and the power of the scientist’s, and their own, reasonable judgments on the other. The scientific spirit, generally, is being open to explorations of hypotheses, while looking for an opportunity, with good reason, to make judgments about meaning and, as such, to turn hypotheses into verifiable meaning.

Though the sceptic may disbelieve everyone and everything else on principle, at the bottom of the problem, it is disbelief in the sceptic’s own insights and understanding that is in need of change.

The sceptic draws a perverse kind of security (also false) in always attacking with questions, but in never being satisfied with answers—answers from others can produce no insights, on the sceptical principle. For our scepticism, wrapped in its dogmatic hull, has blocked all or most such otherwise-normative movements of mind in both understanding and knowing (towards self-transcendence in either venues-1-2).

The dogmatic-sceptic rests in the assumption (and certainty of that assumption) that she-he cannot or need not learn something new (sceptixism)before passing judgment (dogmatism).

Further, a person involved in the sceptical-dogmatic attitude is reformed from first having been involved in naïve dogmatism. That is, in the memory of the sceptic is the painful experience of once having believed and trusted--uncritically and wrongly. The reaction to failed belief and trust (not necessarily but) often is the overreaction of radical scepticism. In that overreaction, the question, unfortunately, is still one of belief and too-quick judgment rather than of understanding and reflective understanding, to be followed by reasonable judgment.

Also, sceptical-dogmatic students like to hear early-on that no one expects mere belief or unmitigated trust from them. This suits just fine.

The internal logic goes something like this: If unqualified belief failed me, then I shall believe no longer—(but again, we disbelieve but in an unqualified way). If I believed and trusted, it was unwarranted—I shall trust and believe no longer. In this way, an unworkable governing principle (believe-trust all) is dispensed with, only to be replaced with a different but still unworkable governing principle (doubt all). Believe everything, believe nothing—and each: searching for a false security in their own way to be enclosed in an untimely judgment.

Unfortunately, radical scepticism leaves us in no better position with regard to having insights and understanding for ourselves than living in an attitude of radical naïveté does.

Dogmatism, a lower viewpoint in our venue-2, follows to clamp down on the sceptical attitude with an assumption of certainty that will make it difficult to break through in either venue.

First, however, no one likes to claim closed-mindedness as their own, even though both the naïve or sceptical dogmatist are, by definition, closed-minded. However, and for vastly different reasons, these fundamental attitudes can heartily claim open-mindedness while, in fact, being closed-off to what the teacher may be trying to teach (Piscitelli 1985).

In either of these attitudes, we have already “made up our minds” (dogmatic closure) about the teacher or the meaning, intelligibility, or value of the presented material, because, I like the teacher, so I trust and believe him-her. Or, I’m just fine like I am. Or that’s just the way I am. Or, after paying little attention, that doesn’t make sense to me, so it must be wrong. And, teachers cannot be trusted and believed anyway, followed by a barrage of partially-meaningful or meaningless questions.

The meaning-equivalent of these statements can be expressed in a myriad of more or less complex ways. And so, a reminder of what closed-mindedness looks like, and what open-mindedness really means is helpful and at least invites the student to give a bit of thought to their own attitudinal stance.

Again, in both our naïve and sceptical attitudes we commonly take pride in being open-minded, paradoxical as this may seem—it certainly sounds good and is socially acceptable to make such claims. However, either suppressing questions (naiveté) or having unlimited but insight-resistant questions (sceptic) is prima fascia evidence for a closed rather than an open mind, regardless of what we might think about ourselves.

The avoidance of understanding is the goal in both cases—one from the suppression of questions, and the other from the use of questions to avoid insights. In such cases, the overriding principles, expressed in: I will automatically believe, or I will use my questions as a defense mechanism or as a diversion, and in either case, I will allow no new question or new insights to break through my prior ‘hard’ judgments to stand anew under what is presented--are all expressions of closed- rather than open-mindedness.

Further, in our earlier quote, E. Voegelin states: “the law of the dialogue cannot be enforced” (1957, vol. 3, 12). Nevertheless, teachers in formal classrooms are in a position to harbor more hope than this statement affords in common conversations. As teachers, we cannot enforce, but we can lead-out and even inspire.

Speaking from the temporary authority of the teacher, again, the teacher can bring to the conversation a reminder of what openness means and how it acts. Such a reminder often will create an actual moment of self-reflection and openness for the student infected badly with the diseases of naïve and-or sceptical dogmatism.

In the face of named, described, and then resonating-with their actual closed-mindedness, students must at least pretend openness; and in that pretension resides the hope that real questions that are intentional of real insights and critical judgments may actually occur, at least in that moment--before the dogmatic habit of mind closes back over the opening. Otherwise, the student, “will not listen at all, or . . . will respond with rhetoric and thereby break the possibility of communication, or . . . will enter the argument but not be moved existentially even when he is beaten intellectually” (1957 12).

Second, though it may feel like a “gotcha” moment to the student, the dogmatic-sceptical attitude is challenged by the questions being turned back on them with a clear expectation on the part of the teacher of insightful answers from the sceptic. It is a rare student who is so dogmatic that gentle probing from the teacher does not have its initial (at least) affect on their present lower-viewpoint attitudes. We are all potentially open, so that the juxtaposition of a potential-to-actual insight with an insight-resistant attitude presents a possible breakthrough moment for the sceptic-dogmatist.

However, teachers should not be fooled by half-truths or guided away by diversion from the issue at hand. Under the barrage of questions is someone who does not trust, even themselves, to understand—with a crust of sceptical habit, and with dogmatic certainty holding the whole distortion in place.

The student’s deeper underlying need to understand and know is like a plant trying to grow out from under a large rock towards the sun. The untransformed lower viewpoints are the rock that is holding those deeper movements back. And so a teacher who is willing to listen to what the student thinks and who, using dialectic, teases out the truth of what they are saying (and making dents in their relativism, if present), is a balm to their sense of self-negation or contempt, though the pretense is often otherwise.

If the sceptic truly understands, then they must give up something in the process—and that something is the false security of their own habit of misleading and of putting others on the defensive with their questions; and their polymorphic-confusion of mind that, for them, is thrown over onto others--like a wet blanket covering their entire existence.

Third, sceptical dogmatism is often present in someone who has had prior training (or cultural immersion) in the natural or statistical sciences where a positivist or relativist (and dogmatic about that relativism) viewpoint inhabits the philosophical underpinnings of the entire field—but again, in a polymorphic-confused fashion. Here, a person who is trained to be open to understanding in their own data field may be quite sceptical-dogmatic (and-or dogmatic in their relativism) when discussing the philosophical issues that underpin that field as well as their own viewpoints.

Thus, for instance, otherwise open-minded students can begin a philosophical study such as this one by having already judged that all human studies that claim to be theoretical are really uncritical on principle; that such study is really some sort of pseudo-science, merely to be indulged or outright rejected; and that no real truth (meaning: truth about physics or natural science or, in some cases, statistical data) can be found in human studies or in the present study, on principle.

Also, studies of consciousness cannot be proved, so we cannot call them scientific. So goes the assumption and the argument.

With such a set of preconceptions, one must wonder about the motivation for even coming to such a class as this one.

Fourth, the teacher may remind both naïve and sceptical students that their critical judgment is a powerful and welcome occurrence in the classroom—stress critical. However, we can also note that such judgment is only truly critical if it follows their own questions and insights, and if those questions and insights flow from an open engagement with the teacher, with other students, and with the text and material under consideration.

Our judgments are moot as performance if they are employed for the purpose of jumping to conclusions, for avoiding the disturbing feeling of our own questions on-the-rise, our own insights, or for the enhancement of our own egotism and its hubris. In other words, teachers can note a distinction between, first, too-quick and arbitrary judgments and, second, truly critical judgments based on an accumulation of relevant insights—insights that the student can give reasonable explain for.

Three Attitudes Regarding Meaning and Truth

Naïve Dogmatism: Closure of mind around uncritical belief and trust resulting in the suppression of questions and avoidance of any nuance or depth of thought, e.g., questions and resultant insights. Judgments are made, but are uncritical and unreasonable.

Sceptical Dogmatism: Closure of mind around an absence of trust and belief, and an active search to continually prove the ground of their scepticism—and an avoidance of insights. Judgments are made, but are uncritical and unreasonable.

Openness to Understanding and Truth: Initial and reasonable trust and belief are followed by questions for insights-to-understanding; then by reflective-insights-to-understanding and the occurrence of critical judgments.

In the last above, we begin in trust and belief, employ our questions, and self-transcend to understanding and knowing, or to the acquiring for ourselves of full meaning and true knowledge about the issues at hand.
All three attitudes will be present at different times in different students, as well as in the teacher, for they are all moments in the structure through which we commonly transform and self-transcend in understanding and knowledge (including aspects of the good-bad in knowing). Also, the attitudes will be expressed in different ways and in the myriad of complex relationships we are involved with, including in all classrooms.

Teachers, then, should not, first, expect blind belief as a teaching principle or, second, require students to abdicate their intellectual or critical powers when approaching us or the material. Rather, a beginning trust and initial state of openness to the data and the method is optimal. However, again, students’ initial trust and their subsequent questions-for-understanding are for the purpose of setting up the conditions for insights to emerge, occur, and accumulate, and for students to make critical judgments around their meaning.

There is about any content, then, an internal dialectical dance between belief and doubt; between trust and questioning; between questioning and having insights, between collecting further evidence for reflective understanding, and having enough evidence to judge, between judging and putting off judgment--and we haven’t here explored the attitudes surrounding speculative/practical judgments, deliberation, or decision.

Such an internal dance, however, can derail at any moment in the movement. Its proper unfolding is towards self-transcendence acquired through the attitudes of openness to understanding and openness to knowing (reflective understanding) in our own selves and in our students (Lonergan 1958 and 2000; and Piscitelli 1985). As teachers in the situation and content we are approaching here, if not all educational situations, we need to be aware of this unfolding and learn how to exploit its movements in and for others, and in and for ourselves.

Also, an emphasis on and employment of students’ post-insight critical powers is needed to move beyond the primer stage and into the deepening aspects of the self-appropriation-affirmation process. Students’ judgment-to-under-knowing, informed by our insighting-to-understanding, and further informed by our having had our own wonder-questions and insights in a trusting-learning environment, exemplifies self-appropriation-affirmation. It does so by signaling that students have not only had the questions and the insights, but have consciously made them their own; or in Voegelin’s terms above we have been moved existentially.

Further, when exploring cognitional theory, especially with its surrounding philosophical issues, fostering openness in students is often more, not less, difficult to achieve, especially with those who have already been involved in scientific or philosophical studies. Again we can be quite open in our specialty field, but quite closed to philosophical issues concerning it and us.

In his many writings (and below), Lonergan reflects on contemporary Catholic theology. However, his reference to Catholicism is only one instance of an attitudinal reality that pervades all of the disciplines of study, including theology:

Contemporary Catholic theology deprecates any intrusion from philosophy. The result inevitably is, not no philosophy, but unconscious philosophy, and only too easily bad philosophy (1985, 77).

Lonergan's reference to unconscious philosophy has its correlate in the philosophical aspects of what we have referred to at the beginning of this essay as the hidden curriculum in education. An example of bad philosophy is to bring to the table the assumption that we cannot know, on principle, or be scientific and critical about, either knowledge or the order of human consciousness (a variation and degree of both naïve realism and relativism working in consort). In Lonergan’s example of contemporary Catholic theology, the unconscious philosophy is often partly made up of the remnants of a classicist world view.

In our introduction, and more comprehensively in our Finding the Mind: Foundational Review chapters (unpublished at this writing), we raise some questions about potentially-bad philosophy we can have inherited in our western or western-influenced upbringing. However, prior academic explorations often hide and, thus, tend to over-secure the distorted philosophical assumptions that (we know) have become embedded within them.

Such assumptions often come with too-firm judgments (dogmatism or closures of mind) about even the possibility of approaching and understanding critically (verified theory) such matters as intentional consciousness, or “merely subjective” explorations of cognition.

Again, often scientists’ or researchers’ openness and regard for making critical judgments about their field can become transformed into bad judgments about underpinning philosophical matters in their own or others' fields. Thus philosophical denial and its subsequent provincialism is more often than not the precursor to a dogmatic attitude reinforced by some real, but incomplete knowledge of, or real failures of, the field of philosophy or a related discipline.

For those who have a formal academic background, exploring cognitional theory often strikes at various closely-held philosophical themes and assumptions that, like dogmatic naiveté and scepticism, are difficult to bring to the light of critique for possible self-correction. In short, those who harbor such attitudes commonly do not take well to their being disturbed by philosophical questions.

The task indeed is daunting. However (I am convinced), it is entirely hopeful and within the realm of the relatively brief but controlled teaching-learning environment, and considering the recalcitrance of the self-corrective process so evident in human beings.

In the end, all teachers must meet students in the midst of where students happen to be in their attitudinal development. In speaking about the development of cosmopolis in Insight, Lonergan states, “ . . . the solution has to take people just as they are” (1958, 632 and 2000, 655). So it is with teaching.

Moreover, often a teacher’s incisive, authentic engagement and challenge of the student at the attitudinal level will begin a softening and transformation of attitudinal calcification that can very well be accompanied by a varying range of emotional disturbances and manifestations.

In the stasis-to-healing-to-openness process, things often get worse before they get better; and the student-teacher relationship can become so poisoned that it becomes better for all to part-company. The person of the teacher, who raises the penetrating questions, is often the first target for the sharp and protective teeth of a freshly distrustful or insight-resistant attitude and of a wide range of to-be-unleashed emotional disorders that can and often do underpin, inform, and interact with such attitudes when they come under the influence of change.

Teachers are commonly either not professional psychologists or, though we may inadvertently pry the lid off, we are not in a position to have understood fully if or how such problems will manifest in the classroom. Though we should hope for a tensional but pleasant relationship with all of our students, sometimes an initial resistance and even an extreme resentment, in the long run, is a positive precursor to qualified foundational change in the student.6

NOTES

1. Your understanding of how the infrastructure and suprastructure are separate (one is you as subject, the other is you as subject who has objectified your own interior structure), but also overlap and blend, is a precursor to your understanding of your own thought as you move from merely experiencing to becoming consciously identified with that thought.

To expand on the idea of identification, in Insight, Lonergan states:

Identification is performance. Its effect is to make one possess the insight as one’s own, to be assured in one’s use of it, to be familiar with the range of its relevance. (1958, 559).

The quote is from Chapter 17, “Metaphysics as Dialectic,” under the subheading of The Appropriation of Truth.

. . . there is the problem of identification. By insights one grasps unities and correlations; but besides the unity, there are the elements to be unified; and besides the correlation, there are the elements to be distinguished and related. Until one gets the insight, one has no clue (apart from the directions given by a teacher) for picking out accurately the elements that are to be unified or related. But once the insight is reached, one is able to find in one’s own experience just what it is that falls under the insight’s grasp and what lies outside it. However, ability is one thing, and performance is another. Identification is performance. Its effect is to make one possess the insight as one’s own, to be assured in one’s use of it, to be familiar with the range of its relevance. Aristotle remarked, I think, that if one understands, one can teach. But the understanding that enables one to teach adds identification to insight. By that addition one is able to select and arrange and indicate to others the combination of sensible elements that will give rise to the circumstances. One is able to put the questions that elicit from the pupil indications of his blind-spot and, then, to proceed afresh to the task of bringing him to the prior insights he must reach before he can master the present lesson. (pp. 558-59)

2. Lonergan and many writers who comment on his work isolate and develop different notions of conversion. And we develop the notion of conversion and some of the different conversions here. For further developments with regard to conversion see the works of Lonergan, Emile Piscitelli, Robert F. Doran, and others.

Briefly, Lonergan develops intellectual, moral, and religious conversions. Piscitelli relates Lonergan’s cognitional theory (and the conversions) to a study of language and the foundations of education. Here Piscitelli develops a more differentiated account of Lonergan’s intellectual conversion with regard to meaning and then truth (our desire-quests-1-2).

First, Piscitelli identifies intellectual (science) and aesthetic (art) conversions in the desire-quest-1 venue where we approach meaning for understanding. Second, Piscitelli identifies rhetorical (actually knowing and speaking the truth) and philosophical (critical appropriation of the knowing-truth-reality complex) as a part of our desire-quest-2 venue. Moral and religious conversions remain somewhat the same as named conversions and await a theoretical differentiation of the interpersonal arena. However, again, Piscitelli relates both sets to educated attitudes and to language. In other work, Doran develops a notion of psychic conversion (Doran 1994).

Lonergan’s notion of intellectual conversion, then, is equivalent to, but less differentiated than Piscitelli’s series of four conversions associated with desire-quests-1-2: aesthetic, intellectual, rhetorical and philosophical.

3. In his chapter “Elements of Metaphysics” in Insight, Lonergan states: “ . . . the anticipation that the relations between the successive stages of changing system will not be directly intelligible grounds dialectical method” (485).

Also in his essay “The Dialectic of Community,” Lonergan defines dialectic:

The name, dialectic, has been employed in a variety of meanings. In Plato, it denoted the art of philosophic dialogue and was contrasted with eristic. In Aristotle, it referred to an effort to discover clues to the truth by reviewing and scrutinizing the opinions of others. For the Schoolmen, it became the application of logical rules to public disputation. Hegel employed the word to refer to his triadic process from the concept of being to the Absolute Idea. Marx inverted Hegel and so conceived as dialectical a non-mechanical, materialist process. Summarily, then, dialectic denotes a combination of the concrete, the dynamic, and the contradictory; but this combination may be found in a dialogue, in the history of philosophic opinions, or in historical process generally.

For the sake of greater precision, let us say that a dialectic is a concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change. Thus, there will be a dialectic if

(1) there is an aggregate of events of a determinate
character,

(2) the events may be traced to either or both of two
principles,

(3) the principles are opposed yet bound together, and

(4) they are modified by the changes that successively result
from them. (1958, 217 and 2000, 242)

4. A theoretical note: We are using our terms naiveté and scepticism, etc., in a technical manner. You probably have heard these and other technical terms in common or “dictionary” usage; and in that usage, they should maintain their meaning even if that meaning is ill-defined. However, when we draw from a theory as we are doing here (Piscitelli 1985), the terms (these and others) maintain the refined and correlative meaning defined in the theory. As such, when we use theoretical terms that overlap into common usage, like naïveté, scepticism, or attitudes, we need to secure which meaning-discourse we are involved in—theory or common-sense—and use the meanings consciously and according to that discourse. Such is the difference between common sense and technical-theoretical usage of terms.

5. The question of the relationship between the lower viewpoint attitudes and normative development is at issue here. As a general rule, we answer the questions for desire-quest-3 (What should I do? Should I do it?) long before we can understand why or become relatively autonomous in our thought-to-act relationship. So that to have listened and heeded (manifest in our “behaviors”) before we have understood “why” and before we initiate a modicum of autonomy about our speech-actions, is not necessarily dogmatic. Rather, our traditions and the instructions of our parents, the law, social-cultural orders, etc., set patterns to follow they can then become objects of our understanding.

This fact places us squarely in the context of community and raises the question of what an authentic tradition is and how questions are treated in that context (freedom of thought, or not, etc.).

Dogmatism, for example, is a pejorative term. The question then becomes whether a culture/community is dynamic and developmental, or calcified and closed to the constant reaching-out that is implied in our basic structure that is our unmediated mediation.

6. The attitudes are not “merely psychological,” but have their vast political import. For instance, totalitarian movements are well known for their contempt for truth and justice; and in the below quotes we can see how the attitudes play out in of those movements. Writing about Stalin and Hitler in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explores the loss of truth and the creation of fiction in totalitarian movements:

The chief value, however, of the secret of conspiratory societies’ organizational structure and moral standards for purposes of mass organization does not even lie in the inherent guarantees of unconditional belonging and loyalty and organizational manifestation of unquestioned hostility to the outside world, but in their unsurpassed capacity to establish and safeguard the fictitious world through consistent lying. The whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement. (1975, p. 382)

Further, in a note to the same text, Arendt takes a quote from Goebbels as characteristic of “the notion of the role of diplomacy in politics” in totalitarian governments. Goebbels states in his diary written during World War II: “There is no doubt that one does best if one keeps the diplomats uninformed about the background of politics. . . . Genuineness in playing an appeasement role is sometimes the most convincing argument for their political trustworthiness” (Arendt’s citation: The Goebbels Diaries [1942-1943], ed. by Louis Lochner, New York, 1948, 187.) (383) (circa 80)

7. Of course, we must always consider that a negative response to the teacher can have grounds and motivations other than philosophical-attitudinal.

Also, I expect some negative response to Finding the Mind and its presentation from several Lonergan scholars and along several lines of critique; and that some—but not all--of these arguments will have their roots in sceptical dogmatism.

For instance, where Lonergan sometimes uses the term “levels” to distinguish the orders of consciousness, I refer to the different “questions” that underlie the levels.

Lonergan, of course, used both references to help explain consciousness; however, a sceptical dogmatic who is “invested” in the conceptual language that includes “levels,” where “questions” are a new concept or only remotely recognized, will end his-her interest in the project post haste from the attitudinal-well of, first, avoiding new insights and, second, a belief in, or even psychological obsession with, their own prior judgments hooked to specified and memorized conceptual orders (investments) that may be challenged by understanding consciousness from a different point of view or with a different conceptual framework.

My view is that the term levels , though we may recognize them in our own mental activities, is already an abstraction from the immediacy of the desire-quests that we are. That being said, I welcome, of course, any critique and dialogue about the present venture.

Finding The Mind: Appendixes

Friday, October 8, 2010

Appendix 17: Notes for Teachers/Desire-Quest-4 (the religious quest)

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Appendix 12: For the Teacher