Bibliography
Anderson, R. “Encouraging All Voices to be Heard: Constructing Collaborative Student Teacher Portfolios.” Paper presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the National Reading Conference, New Orleans, LA, 1995.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin Books, 2006.
______. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1975.
Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by Martin Ostwald. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962.
Coles, Robert. The Spiritual Life of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Crowe, Frederick. E. “The Future: Charting the Unknown with Lonergan.” Lonergan Workshop 17 (2002): 1-21.
Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997.
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Doran, Robert. Subject and Psyche. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994.
Duchant, E. Understand and Teaching Reading: An Interactive Model. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
Dunne, Tad. Spiritual Mentoring: Guiding People Through Spiritual Exercises to Life Decisions. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1991.
Fitzpatrick, Joseph. “Bernard Lonergan: Educationist and Philosopher.” Lonergan Workshop 17 (2002): 85-94.
Flanagan, Joseph. Quest for Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Lonergan’s Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Foucault, Michael. Civilization and Madness: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind. Bantam Books: New York, 1985.
Gigerenzer, G. “Moral Intuition: Fast and Frugal Heuristics?” Moral Psychology The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity 2 (2008): 1-26.
Goleman, Donald. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam, 1997.
Hughes, Glen. Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Hutchinson, E. D. (1949-1950). A Study of Interpersonal Relations: New Contributions to Psychiatry. Ed. P. Mullahy. Hermitage Press: New York. (Three articles originally published in Psychiatry and referenced in Lonergan 1958, 4, and 2000, 28).
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1902, 1982, 1987.
King, Catherine B. Appendixes for: Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory/An Experimental Primer for Foundational Review and Self-Appropriation-Affirmation (in press). Lanham MD: University Press, 2011. www.findingthemindappendixes.blogspot.com
______. “Image as Meaning: General Empirical Method and the Development of Image.” Paper presented at West Coast Methods Institute, Annual Fallon Memorial Symposium 18, Los Angeles, August 2003.
______. “Opening the Mind: Foundational Review. A Handbook for Developing Philosophical Self-Knowledge.” (unpublished manuscript)
______. “Opening the Mind: An Exploration of Philosophical Attitudes. (unpublished manuscript)
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Langer, Suzanne. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942, 1993.
Lonergan, Bernard J. F. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958.
______. Lectures on Education. Boston: The Lonergan Center, 1959. (Delivered at Xavier College, Cincinnati, Ohio)
______. Method in Theology. Minneapolis: Winston Press, Inc., 1972.
______. Philosophy of God, and Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973.
Lonergan, Bernard J. F. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Insight. Ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Lonergan, Bernard J. F. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Eexistentialism. Vol. 18, ed. Phillip J. McShane, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Lonergan, Bernard J. F. “Healing and Creating in History.” In A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, 100-109. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
______. “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness.” InA Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, 169-83. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
______. “Prolegomena to the Emerging Religious Consciousness of Our Time.” In A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E Crowe, 55-73. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
______. “The Ongoing Genesis of Methods.” In A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick. E. Crowe, 146-65. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
______. “The Human Subject.” In A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, 27-31. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
______. “Christology Today: Methodological Reflections.” In A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, 74-94. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
______. “Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation.” In A Third Collection, Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, 35-51. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
______. “Religious Knowledge.” In A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, 129-145. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.
Lonergan, Bernard J. F. “Insight: Preface to a Discussion.” In Collection: Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Vol 4, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, 142-52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
______. “Dimensions of Meaning.” In Collection: Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Vol. 4, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, 232-245. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Lonergan, Bernard J. F. “The Analogy of Meaning.” In Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964. Vol. 6, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 181-213. Toronto: Toronto Press, 1996.
______. “The Philosophy of History.” In Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964. Vol. 6, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 54-79. Toronto: Toronto Press, 1996.
______. “Is It Real.” In Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965-1980. Vol. 17, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, 119-139. Toronto: Toronto Press, 2004.
Maxwell, Nicholas. From Knowledge to Wisdom. United Kingdom: Pentire Press, 2007.
Online: Retrieved June 29, 2009 from http://www.countrybookshop.co.uk. Also, see “Thinking About Science" series from CBC radio. Retrieved June 29, 2009 from http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html
McShane, Philip Field Nocturnes CanTower 47: (http://www.philipmcshane.ca)
Mertens, Donna. M. Research Methods in Education and Psychology: Integrating Diversity with Quantitative & Qualitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998 and 2005.
Mezirow, Jack & Associates. Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.
Mitchell, S., ed. The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Quoted in: “Differentiation and its Discontents,” paper presented at Lonergan Conference, Boston College, June, 2009.
Montessori, Marie. The Absorbent Mind, trans. Claude A. Claremont (New York: The Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1984, p 69.)
Morelli, Elizabeth. “The Authority of Interiority.” Paper presented at the annual Fallon Memorial Lonergan Symposium, Santa Clara University, CA, 1999.
Morelli, Mark and Elizabeth Morelli, eds. The Lonergan Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Ornstein, Allan C. & Hunkins, Francis. P., eds. Curriculum: Foundations, Principles, and Issues. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1998 and 2004.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. London: University Press, 1923 and 1958.
Piscitelli, Emile J. 1977. Language and method in the philosophy of religion: A critical study of the development of the philosophy of Bernard Lonergan. PhD. Diss., Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
______. “The Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person: Foundational Dialectics.” The Lonergan Workshop 5. (1985): 289-342. (Later referred to as “The Foundations of Philosophy: The Person, Education, and Dialectics”) Retrieved: April 17, 2008. http://mysite.verizon.net/thelogos/Dialectic.pdf
______. Creating, healing, and praxis: Three dialectical vectors and four constitutive human communities—the family, the academy, the political, and religious communities: Dialectical foundations. Lectures presented at Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale, VA, 1986.
Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. See also“Thinking About Science" series from CBC radio. Retrieved June 29,2909 from http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html
Sinnott-Armstrong, W. Ed. Moral Psychology. The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity. Vol. 2. London: The MIT Press, 2008.
Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of Mind. New York: Harper, 1960.
Stekel, William. Compulsion and Doubt. Vol. 1, translated by. E. A. Gutheil. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1949.
Sullivan, Harry Stack. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1953.
Voegelin, Eric C. Order and History, 5 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957.
______. The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958 and 1987.
______. Plato and Aristotle. Vol. 3, Order and History. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1957.
______. Science, Politics, & Gnosticism. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007.
Von Senden, M. Space and Sight. Methuen & Co. Ltd. London, 1960, 25.
Weil, Simone. The Iliad or the Poem of Force. Wallington: Pendle Hill. (A Pendle Hill Pamphlet number 91) 1983.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Appendix 18: For Those Familiar with Lonergan's Work
11-07-10 This essay has a newer version in my computer files. CK
Appendix 18
For Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verification of Cognitional Theory/Primer for Self-Appropriation-Affirmation
From Introduction
More specifically, by basic I mean those who understand Lonergan’s and others’ work in terms of Lonergan’s contributions to philosophy but, more importantly, to philosophical self-knowledge--especially in terms of the biases, of epistemology, and of the application of both (at least) to your personal development and critical correctives of your own foundations (writ small). Also, I mean by basic those who understand how the work imports on the foundations of groups, e.g., institutions, corporations, etc. (writ large). I also refer to our attitudes as theoretically developed by E. Piscitelli in his work on foundations (1985).
Further, this work is not a theoretical treatise on education but rather is pedagogyy-about finding the basic structure within one's own expressions and then clearing the way, hopefully, within the self. Of course, I hope I have adequately treated the theoretical aspects of the work; however, I have written more to mediate a specific formulation of that theory into the lives of those who are unfamiliar with theory, or with philosophical study--especially as a critical-personal venture--and to foster critical self-reflection, than to present a theoretical treatise on the philosophy of education to scholars and theoreticians.
Furthermore, the experiment in the main text is interspersed with references to relatively brief appendixes (this one and others online: King 2010). Those appendixes address (a) pedagogical notes for teachers and (b) various issues and questions written to further challenge reader foundations--questions that should arise as readers go through the experiment herein. The appendixes, and the pedagogical and foundational references in the text (including in the preface and introduction), are meant to promote further self-reflection beyond the experimental and verification phase where the theory will be verified and the basic structure discovered in the reader’s own narrative as objectified in writing.
Though I do not fully treat or address reader foundations here or in the appendixes, both experiment and appendixes are written to draw attention to, and to raise questions about, the reader-experimenter’s interior life and about their (a) personal philosophical development and (b) potential self-corrective. The appendixes also point to the fact that we all are potential for such development, though we may be completely unaware of it, and though we may, and probably will, begin our study in this state of relative unawareness--of our own foundations. People familiar with Lonergan’s work will recognize the terms: latent and problematic metaphysics, and polymorphism of mind (1958 and 2000).
The appendixes offer some further explorations, then, into the vast foundational context that holds together and already informs--sometimes well, sometimes badly--our concerns and activities in our daily life-events, and that underpins any relatively streamlined experiment such as the one offered in the main text, should the reader want to take that longer journey.
Thus, where I refer to this text as the shorter philosophical journey, the appendix narratives are meant to further introduce readers to, and perhaps even engage readers in, the beginnings of what I refer to as the longer philosophical journey. Though I have developed what I think is some new thought and theoretical distinctions here, and though I have not scoured every corner of ancient, medieval, or post-modern philosophical work, this distinction--between shorter and longer journeys--and the critical pedagogy-experiment itself, are what make this work unique to the field of philosophical study.
The experiment in the shorter-journey text, then, leads the reader to make the concrete and critical connection between the theory and the reader’s basic structure as it constantly emerges in our expressions and, in so doing, to verify the theory in personally-developed data. However, the writing of the shorter-journey guide is premised on the fact that a relatively brief text and experiment cannot do the foundational-pedagogical work (philosophical development and self-corrective--conversions, major insights, etc.) that is hoped for, for example, in the use of a moving viewpoint Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Understanding (1958 and 2000).
Hence, I distinguish the shorter from the longer philosophical journeys in order to clarify the kinds of insight-experiences that a reader-experimenter new to theory and to philosophical study, and to a Lonergan-type call for self-understanding-knowledge (also unique in its critical philosophcal intent), can expect and not expect in either journey. And I spend a good amount of narrative making sure that the attentive reader understands something about both journeys and how they relate to one another--and that taking on the shorter does not necessarily secure the benefits of the longer.
Thereby, this relatively shorter text raises the issues of foundational development and corrective for the reader to at least know-about their foundational milieu--as a beginning moment in what may be and hopefully will be a personal--and intimately so--engagement with that longer journey.
That being said, I do not ignore a reader’s polymorphic-epistemic situation. Rather I explore briefly, but I hope with some clarity, the reader’s latent philosophical (metaphysical) situation (the reader’s critical-and-good judgments about their own verification of data in common situations) and potential philosophical polymorphism; and I overtly rely on the reader's common experience of developing, of self-correction, and of making good judgments about the good-true-real for this shorter-journey experiment. (See chapter 2: section on Philosophical Methodology, Relying on Your Latent Assumptions.)
While you may not yet understand my distinction between the shorter and longer journeys, I trust this distinction will resonate with your own problematic attempts to mediate general empirical method and other aspects of Lonergan’s (or indeed, any philosophical) work to a variety of audiences--some theoretically astute, and some not. And I trust that, generally speaking, you are quite familiar with the philosophical exploration, development, and self-correctives--the whole sweep of the philosophical project--that constitutes the longer journey, as a journey, and as the central thematic in Bernard Lonergan’s corpus of writing. I include, of course, the difference between (a) general-empirical and (b) transcendental methods where the later bridges the empirical movements of the virtually unconditioned and proportionate being with our religious beliefs, with the experience of religious conversion and, more generally, with spiritual and religious concerns (1958 and 2000) and with knowledge born of the conversion experience.
Briefly, the shorter journey provides the objectifying and verifying experiment; but it does not and cannot include a prolonged treatment of the underpinnings of foundational self-understanding and self-corrective. Whereas: the longer-journey is about just that. The shorter-longer distinction draws a clear, artificial but, I hope, helpful line between (a) gaining objective knowledge and (b) gaining interior self-development. Here, a clear beginning pedagogy can be undertaken for educational institutions where a three-credit format is common—one that does not avoid or obscure the import of foundational (a) development and (b) self-corrective.
My point to the Lonergan-savvy reader is this: We can all acknowledge substantial disagreements, conceptual differences, corrections to Lonergan’s and others’ works, and newly discovered nuances in our understanding of the critical work that can inform this longer journey for any of us. However, to all, at least let us recognize the pedagogical value of offering a clearly stated and step-by-step shorter journey--one with well-defined goals that can be accomplished in a relatively brief classroom setting, and that can exist and move others forward within the greater dialogic context. That context is of (a) those many differences evident in our current philosophical discourse (or lack of it); (b) the various available (and known to us) conversion experiences hoped for in the midst of prolonged philosophical study for our students, however conceptualized and-or however embodied those experiences come to be; and (c) other aspects of that aforesaid longer journey in all of its warps and weaves.
By comparison and as a conscious aspect of the text Finding the Mind as a guide to the shorter journey, this work is modest, then, and I argue it must be. The work is more of a clarifying distinction between nuanced aspects of a much broader and comprehensive project, than it is a further development-of that project (though some new ideas and language are offered here). That is, I mean to lead the reader to find and verify the basic structure in his-her own concrete and objectified expressions and to verify the theory, but only that--as an initial entrance into their own interior domain and what I am referring to as the longer journey, and with a starting point at whatever foundational milieu readers may have and, at present, already bring to the study.
Polymorphism of mind is a given starting point for any teacher; unravelling that polymorphism is a necessarily-long journey; and in that journey we can find well-defined moments and plateaus, as it were, that can contribute to, rather than further obscure, the needed moments of that longer journey. Taking on the shorter journey can bring the reader to one of those plateaus in a clear and critical way.
On the other hand, in providing for this relatively brief entrance, I have remained conscious-of and faithful-to the need for readers to understand the difference between (a) commonsense and (b) theoretical consciousness, and between their own (a) topical-extroverted thought and (b) undercurrents of their foundational reality, and to begin carving out for themselves what Lonergan refers to as a theoretically differentiated consciousness and further differentiations of mind (1972).
In the narrative in the main text, then, I refer to, but do not engage the reader fully in, what is generally known in Lonergan circles as the various foundational explorations and conversion experiences or massive changes of horizon that, we know, can be inspired by guided and critical self-reflective practice.
In my view, for many who may be interested, we need to provide a distinct venue for initial verification that does not obscure or omit but openly regards such study and experiences before full engagement is actually approached--or even if the reader decides naught. Thus, this work is fully focused on readers first making their solid connection-verification of the theory, and on using their own recurring experience as data with its implication and suggestion of an interior reality. I refer to aspects of the longer journey throughout; however, we can only hope that the reader will follow through in that further foundational self-development and corrective.
. ~
Those who are familiar with Lonergan’s work will recognize, then, that the experiment in the shorter journey of Finding the Mind emerges as a flower overtly attached to a deep-set root system--a system that constantly draws and develops in us all--whether we are aware of it or not (our philosophical and other foundations). And if reader-engaged, the appendixes, quotes, and references (mainly, to Lonergan’s work but also to several others’) offer treatment of the whole-self, as it were, and refer in more intimate fashion to that root. The root, as you well-know, is our own potential development, corrective, and coming-to-consciousness of self and world; or--a horrible term to introduce to novices--at the very least: explicit metaphysics.
The distinction between the two journeys, then, is made with caution. The appendixes are provided online, as this on is--should readers wish to approach the self-reflective project in a more comprehensive and prolonged fashion or, again, to continue on in what I refer to as the longer journey (King 2010).
Thus, if you have a basic understanding of Lonergan’s contributions to cognitional theory, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, etc., you can read the experiment for critical self-discovery herein as a treatise on pedagogy for self-appropriation-affirmation and understand something new, even if you do not read the introduction or appendixes (though again some of the treatments and technical terms are new and may interest you anyway).
Also, if you already understand the cognitional theory and its unique personal applications (self-appropriation-affirmation) and including its vast philosophical implications in the formal fields of study, you might want to skip over the theoretical development in part II. Though note that in our treatment, the good-bad complex is intimately related to all four desire-quests and their shadow-questions.
Questions Rather than Levels
Further, we take the desire-quests, or the development of differentiated inquiry as a spontaneous experience, as our theoretical focus and expression. That is, I conceptualize the basic structure here in terms of four desire-quests (internal-actual, remote, but regularly expressed) and then as shadow questions (theoretical expression), and not in terms of levels of consciousness. The relationship between desire-quests and their shadow questions portrayed in the main text and the other appendixes is pedagogical; while the difference between (a) the desire-quests/shadow-questions and (b) levels of consciousness should be clear to those who have already studied Lonergan’s work in a comprehensive way and who understand the difference between a metaphysical approach and an approach from an understanding of interiority and of intentionality analysis. (See note 1 in this appendix 18.)
Also, in Collection (1988), and speaking of E. Coreth's work on metaphysics, Lonergan explains the primacy of the question:
Though the term levels is appropriate for some explanations, the term question (and for us our term desire-quests) goes to the heart of general empirical--interior--point of view.
Furthermore, and as a pedagogical point, I develop the division of concepts, between (a) shadow-questions and (b) desire-quests, to support the division between (a) theoretical conceptualization and (b) reader self-discovery (their own experience of the desire-quests as they occur in the reader). The experiment begins with the reader’s own experience. Conceptually, these terms refer to the same basic structure. As pedagogical, however, the two-fold division of concepts encourages reader self-reflection by making formal (as a part of the superstructure) the distinction between (a) theoretical conceptualization and (b) their own interior life as they begin to objectify aspects of it via their guided self-reflection.
On the other hand, again, it is common to my experience that even those who have a basic understanding of Lonergan’s contributions can have vastly different views about and expressions of that understanding. And some pretend to know but really do not, or just can use more refinement of understanding and ability to express knowledge.
Furthermore (in Lonergan’s technical language) counter-positions are recalcitrant--set in place, commonly for a long time, as learned-received, now-assumed, and as a part of our polymorphic foundations for our thinking that inform our life-event matters (1958 and 2000). We can also refer to the difference between (a) our more object-oriented understanding of the counter-positions (and-or philosophical attitudes) and (b) the project of self-identity and internal development—of long-term developments and self-correctives integrated as new and transformed meaning into our personal complex of foundational memory, its implications, and its now-spontaneous formation of our speech and actions (Piscitelli 1985).
In other words, and depending on the narrative circumstances, old problematic foundational lenses (e.g., some names are mechanist determinism, naïve realism, idealism, relativism, dogmatism, etc.) can hide within the warp and weave of our latent-to-problematic philosophical viewpoint and influence our thought and how we frame meaning, in any context, and for a very long time (Lonergan 1958 and 2000; and Piscitelli 1985).
A critic of any Lonergan-inspired text--a text written from the point of view of interiority and explicit metaphysics--first should consider the above, and be open for potential internal change--even internal transformation--before taking a final view of such a critique.
The philosophical lenses we bring to our experiment herein provide no exception. Thus, depending on the person, and without a fuller longer-journey foundational review, development, and corrective, reading and understanding the experiment and-or the appendixes will rest-in and be influenced-by any one of a number of personal, well or badly developed, foundational contexts. This is so even in those who people Lonergan studies—and, I argue, like no other. And relationship between our latent and problematic philosophical foundations is living and complexly so. As such, conceptual or even substantial differences evident in many scholars’ writings about Lonergan’s work may never be settled in our lifetimes--and maybe in some sense they should not be, the mysteries of developmental and dialectical functions being what they are.
Over and above such manifest differences, however, is a person’s self-understanding. The experiment herein reaches for that reader self-understanding, again, without regard yet for a full treatment of their foundational milieu. In this text, again, we separate-out and talk about, but do not ignore, readers’ foundational concerns. The experiment contains only what can be empirically and critically established, and repeated in scientific-objectivist fashion, using collected data from reader's own experience.
The experiment can be undertaken alone or in any classroom setting, in a reasonable amount of time, and from almost any foundational situation--even from an initial denial of the existence of foundations.
The main text (with its online appendix-extensions) (King 2010) is layered, then, so that, with frequent references to the appendixes and other resources, (1) we can approach and complete the experiment in critical fashion while (2) we maintain awareness of the integrative relationship between (a) that objectivist-experimental, critical (but extroverted) verification procedure and (b) a more prolonged and “painstaking” treatment of the reader’s philosophical foundations (1958, xxiii and 2000, 17).
In this way, we can develop one aspect of self-knowledge in a relatively brief format (the experiment as the shorter journey) with a clearly established finishing moment (as a plateau), while preserving a close, even intimate relationship to the longer journey--to the narrative-about and reference-to more comprehensive foundational study and insights, correctives, horizon development, and self-knowledge.
Speaking of his book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan comments:
As you know, the “manner” refers to readers’ foundational lenses and to potential deeply felt changes in them and in us. Underlying this treatment of the shorter and the longer journeys, then, is my hope that the abbreviated experiment herein can bring a broader audience of reader-experimenters one-step-closer to the fuller set of direct and reflective insights that constitute what Lonergan means by self-appropriation and self-affirmation—including awareness of needed personal-foundational transformations only achieved through long-term philosophical reflections.
Such is the aim of setting up the context and conditions for some development and-or corrective to occur, rather than merely for something personal to be learned-about in a topical way, even if that topical learning is scientifically-experimentally sound.
Further, we are exploring what happens when a human being is in the process of knowing. Since knowing is central to the project of any teaching, our audience includes those involved in teacher education.
Thus, my aim is to provide pedagogy for bringing Lonergan’s central and unique philosophical contribution to the field of education and, through that field, to teachers--while regularly referring to foundational development and self-correction. Thus, again, the work is meant to avoid “telescoping” philosophical study or “vulgarizing” Lonergan’s work (McShane 2009).
Intentionality Analysis and Levels, but not Potencies
In Method in Theology, in section 9 labeled A Technical Note (1972, 120-24), Lonergan clarifies the distinction between a classical-metaphysical view underpinning theoretical developments, and what he refers to as a view from the performance of an intentionality analysis. I take this to mean the difference between analyzing from the point of view of (a) the writer having understood, clarified and dispensed with the older metaphysical view and (b) the writer having objectified, become conscious of, understood, and appropriated-affirmed elements of their own interior functions (as evident in their ongoing experience of their own functioning). And I take it to mean: the writer as having become comfortable, even spontaneous, in incorporating this interior-based intentional-ist view into their thinking, conversations, and writings. The view includes the inherent limitations of human knowledge and an understanding of the difference between what we know and what we belief, opine or merely think, etc.
Lonergan’s narrative in that section will grate on those who thoroughly understand more recent feminist transitions (as they do me) as cultures go forward in their cultivating process. Nevertheless, in this extended part of my introduction aimed at those familiar with Lonergan’s work and contributions, let me at least put forth that I am familiar with this transition and that the present experiment is just that—an experiment where the reader-experimenter begins with the data of consciousness as to-be-collected first in the written narrative of the readers’ own experiences, and only then moves to theoretical developments for later applications. Those developments are couched in intentionalist rather than classicist language and their philosophical assumptions.
Further, in Method in Theology, Lonergan counter-poses the metaphysical view with the view from interiority:
Here, I take Lonergan to mean that, in terms of philosophical foundations, reference to the active potencies, with no reference to empirically-established data, personal or otherwise, reveals an under-lying classicist or metaphysical view. Whereas, from an interior-view (explicit metaphysics, as appropriated and known empirically), intentionality analysis goes forward from that view, accounting now for intentional acts as experienced by the writer. Indeed, in the present work, we start with the reader-experience of raising questions and refer to the transcendental notions that, in fact, are revealed in those questions (generally stated as) questions for intelligence, questions for truth, questions for reflection, questions for deliberation, etc. Further, our rendition of the theory (using the four generally-drawn shadow-questions) is meant to make the transition back from theory-to-experience for the reader as easily drawn as possible.
The present work, then, takes the above distinction between philosophical-foundational viewpoints fully into account and is written from the point of view of interiority; and it provides a venue for readers to begin on their own journey of understanding and coming to know their own philosophical foundations.
~
Note (for this appendix only)
1. Lonergan refers to levels of consciousness at several places in both Insight (1958 and 2000) and Method in Theology (1972); e.g., experience, understanding, and judgment, are determined as levels of consciousness that come together to complete our knowledge. Your understanding of what Lonergan means here is essential to the fuller project of self-understanding. Also many writers have taken up the levels metaphor as central to their understanding of conscious order and to what Lonergan means by it, e.g., What is it? and Is it so? However, note that these expressions are in question form and that Lonergan refers to inquiry, the questioning process, and our kinds-of and specific questions again and again in his writing.
In the Finding the Mind text, I do not use the metaphor of levels to depict conscious structure, but rather use the term desire-quests. However, and to avoid confusion, I would like here to determine the difference between (a) the conceptualization of specific questions and (b) a reference to desire-quests and their framework—both as general.
Thus, we note that our anticipations born of desire-inquiry are distinct--one from the other and as operative within the experiencing-understanding–judgment-deliberation-decision-act complex. As generalized, we can see a structure emerge, that some refer to as having levels. Thus, our desire-quests are unified, structured, and integrated--at first in need of differentation, and then interrelationship, and then a re-integration (Piscitelli, 1985). In real life, our desire-quests often go unnamed and are often undifferentiated and overlapping, making them sometimes difficult to isolate for analysis.
Nevertheless, the unnamed but experienced desire-quests as generalized into theoretical expression (now named shadow questions) can be teased out of any discourse--they are all a part of a process we experience as knowing and then moving towards speaking-acting. As such, the distinctions and relationships between the shadow questions also can be understood as demarcations of different levels of consciousness. Therefore, the two terms (levels and inquiry, or desire-quests) are an attempt to capture different nuances and aspects of the same reality that constitutes the general structure of the human mind. A level refers more to a relationship between desire-quests or kinds of questions than to a concrete experience and will emerge only as differntiation occurs.
I have found in teaching that the term inquiry or desire-quest or question is a more concrete metaphor than level as either tends to allow students to better follow an unbroken link from their experience, to their conceptualization of that experience in their crisis narrative, to identification of the desire-quests in their narratives, to self-identity. (Perhaps Lonergan would refer to the term inquiry as a primitive term [1958, 11-12 and 2000, 36-37].)
As such, in my experience, and as a commonly unnamed but now-described function occurring regularly in conscious operations, desire-quests and their framework are easier to locate and identify in my students’ experience than anything resembling a level. Thus desire-quests and shadow questions, as differentiations of the more inclusive general term inquiry, are described structural demarcations in personal consciousness. Such demarcations suit the pedagogical purpose of helping novice philosophers and those interested in the critical details of self-appropriation-affirmation (or a primer such as is our main text) locate and connect the theory and the language more easily with their own concrete experience of thinking.
Further, we are linking desire to quest to avoid a common but incorrect philosophical notion that would separate questioning, questing, or intelligence from the fullness of feeling, image, and whatever else we might mean by desire or fear, for that matter. As desire is human, it enters human consciousness and our intelligence in a way that is difficult to distinguish from what it means to quest, e.g., a question of the type What is it?, is our desire to understand as manifest in-process.
Though different, in fact, feelings and images are inexorably linked in human beings' to our interior life as intelligence on the move. What we might mean by intelligence as distinct from feeling-image is, in fact, intimate with feeling-image. As distinct, these are a working set of mutually transformative aspects of that interior life and, thus, of what it means to be human.
We want to maintain an understanding of that relationship-in-difference throughout our work in our main text and in these appendixes.
Appendix 18
For Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verification of Cognitional Theory/Primer for Self-Appropriation-Affirmation
To doubt questioning is to involve oneself in a counterposition, and so questioning is beyond the doubter's capacity to doubt coherently.... questioning itself is the beginning. (Lonergan, "Metaphysics as Horizon," Collection, 1988, 190)
From Introduction
More specifically, by basic I mean those who understand Lonergan’s and others’ work in terms of Lonergan’s contributions to philosophy but, more importantly, to philosophical self-knowledge--especially in terms of the biases, of epistemology, and of the application of both (at least) to your personal development and critical correctives of your own foundations (writ small). Also, I mean by basic those who understand how the work imports on the foundations of groups, e.g., institutions, corporations, etc. (writ large). I also refer to our attitudes as theoretically developed by E. Piscitelli in his work on foundations (1985).
Further, this work is not a theoretical treatise on education but rather is pedagogyy-about finding the basic structure within one's own expressions and then clearing the way, hopefully, within the self. Of course, I hope I have adequately treated the theoretical aspects of the work; however, I have written more to mediate a specific formulation of that theory into the lives of those who are unfamiliar with theory, or with philosophical study--especially as a critical-personal venture--and to foster critical self-reflection, than to present a theoretical treatise on the philosophy of education to scholars and theoreticians.
Furthermore, the experiment in the main text is interspersed with references to relatively brief appendixes (this one and others online: King 2010). Those appendixes address (a) pedagogical notes for teachers and (b) various issues and questions written to further challenge reader foundations--questions that should arise as readers go through the experiment herein. The appendixes, and the pedagogical and foundational references in the text (including in the preface and introduction), are meant to promote further self-reflection beyond the experimental and verification phase where the theory will be verified and the basic structure discovered in the reader’s own narrative as objectified in writing.
Though I do not fully treat or address reader foundations here or in the appendixes, both experiment and appendixes are written to draw attention to, and to raise questions about, the reader-experimenter’s interior life and about their (a) personal philosophical development and (b) potential self-corrective. The appendixes also point to the fact that we all are potential for such development, though we may be completely unaware of it, and though we may, and probably will, begin our study in this state of relative unawareness--of our own foundations. People familiar with Lonergan’s work will recognize the terms: latent and problematic metaphysics, and polymorphism of mind (1958 and 2000).
The appendixes offer some further explorations, then, into the vast foundational context that holds together and already informs--sometimes well, sometimes badly--our concerns and activities in our daily life-events, and that underpins any relatively streamlined experiment such as the one offered in the main text, should the reader want to take that longer journey.
Thus, where I refer to this text as the shorter philosophical journey, the appendix narratives are meant to further introduce readers to, and perhaps even engage readers in, the beginnings of what I refer to as the longer philosophical journey. Though I have developed what I think is some new thought and theoretical distinctions here, and though I have not scoured every corner of ancient, medieval, or post-modern philosophical work, this distinction--between shorter and longer journeys--and the critical pedagogy-experiment itself, are what make this work unique to the field of philosophical study.
The experiment in the shorter-journey text, then, leads the reader to make the concrete and critical connection between the theory and the reader’s basic structure as it constantly emerges in our expressions and, in so doing, to verify the theory in personally-developed data. However, the writing of the shorter-journey guide is premised on the fact that a relatively brief text and experiment cannot do the foundational-pedagogical work (philosophical development and self-corrective--conversions, major insights, etc.) that is hoped for, for example, in the use of a moving viewpoint Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Understanding (1958 and 2000).
Hence, I distinguish the shorter from the longer philosophical journeys in order to clarify the kinds of insight-experiences that a reader-experimenter new to theory and to philosophical study, and to a Lonergan-type call for self-understanding-knowledge (also unique in its critical philosophcal intent), can expect and not expect in either journey. And I spend a good amount of narrative making sure that the attentive reader understands something about both journeys and how they relate to one another--and that taking on the shorter does not necessarily secure the benefits of the longer.
Thereby, this relatively shorter text raises the issues of foundational development and corrective for the reader to at least know-about their foundational milieu--as a beginning moment in what may be and hopefully will be a personal--and intimately so--engagement with that longer journey.
That being said, I do not ignore a reader’s polymorphic-epistemic situation. Rather I explore briefly, but I hope with some clarity, the reader’s latent philosophical (metaphysical) situation (the reader’s critical-and-good judgments about their own verification of data in common situations) and potential philosophical polymorphism; and I overtly rely on the reader's common experience of developing, of self-correction, and of making good judgments about the good-true-real for this shorter-journey experiment. (See chapter 2: section on Philosophical Methodology, Relying on Your Latent Assumptions.)
While you may not yet understand my distinction between the shorter and longer journeys, I trust this distinction will resonate with your own problematic attempts to mediate general empirical method and other aspects of Lonergan’s (or indeed, any philosophical) work to a variety of audiences--some theoretically astute, and some not. And I trust that, generally speaking, you are quite familiar with the philosophical exploration, development, and self-correctives--the whole sweep of the philosophical project--that constitutes the longer journey, as a journey, and as the central thematic in Bernard Lonergan’s corpus of writing. I include, of course, the difference between (a) general-empirical and (b) transcendental methods where the later bridges the empirical movements of the virtually unconditioned and proportionate being with our religious beliefs, with the experience of religious conversion and, more generally, with spiritual and religious concerns (1958 and 2000) and with knowledge born of the conversion experience.
Briefly, the shorter journey provides the objectifying and verifying experiment; but it does not and cannot include a prolonged treatment of the underpinnings of foundational self-understanding and self-corrective. Whereas: the longer-journey is about just that. The shorter-longer distinction draws a clear, artificial but, I hope, helpful line between (a) gaining objective knowledge and (b) gaining interior self-development. Here, a clear beginning pedagogy can be undertaken for educational institutions where a three-credit format is common—one that does not avoid or obscure the import of foundational (a) development and (b) self-corrective.
My point to the Lonergan-savvy reader is this: We can all acknowledge substantial disagreements, conceptual differences, corrections to Lonergan’s and others’ works, and newly discovered nuances in our understanding of the critical work that can inform this longer journey for any of us. However, to all, at least let us recognize the pedagogical value of offering a clearly stated and step-by-step shorter journey--one with well-defined goals that can be accomplished in a relatively brief classroom setting, and that can exist and move others forward within the greater dialogic context. That context is of (a) those many differences evident in our current philosophical discourse (or lack of it); (b) the various available (and known to us) conversion experiences hoped for in the midst of prolonged philosophical study for our students, however conceptualized and-or however embodied those experiences come to be; and (c) other aspects of that aforesaid longer journey in all of its warps and weaves.
By comparison and as a conscious aspect of the text Finding the Mind as a guide to the shorter journey, this work is modest, then, and I argue it must be. The work is more of a clarifying distinction between nuanced aspects of a much broader and comprehensive project, than it is a further development-of that project (though some new ideas and language are offered here). That is, I mean to lead the reader to find and verify the basic structure in his-her own concrete and objectified expressions and to verify the theory, but only that--as an initial entrance into their own interior domain and what I am referring to as the longer journey, and with a starting point at whatever foundational milieu readers may have and, at present, already bring to the study.
Polymorphism of mind is a given starting point for any teacher; unravelling that polymorphism is a necessarily-long journey; and in that journey we can find well-defined moments and plateaus, as it were, that can contribute to, rather than further obscure, the needed moments of that longer journey. Taking on the shorter journey can bring the reader to one of those plateaus in a clear and critical way.
On the other hand, in providing for this relatively brief entrance, I have remained conscious-of and faithful-to the need for readers to understand the difference between (a) commonsense and (b) theoretical consciousness, and between their own (a) topical-extroverted thought and (b) undercurrents of their foundational reality, and to begin carving out for themselves what Lonergan refers to as a theoretically differentiated consciousness and further differentiations of mind (1972).
In the narrative in the main text, then, I refer to, but do not engage the reader fully in, what is generally known in Lonergan circles as the various foundational explorations and conversion experiences or massive changes of horizon that, we know, can be inspired by guided and critical self-reflective practice.
In my view, for many who may be interested, we need to provide a distinct venue for initial verification that does not obscure or omit but openly regards such study and experiences before full engagement is actually approached--or even if the reader decides naught. Thus, this work is fully focused on readers first making their solid connection-verification of the theory, and on using their own recurring experience as data with its implication and suggestion of an interior reality. I refer to aspects of the longer journey throughout; however, we can only hope that the reader will follow through in that further foundational self-development and corrective.
. ~
Those who are familiar with Lonergan’s work will recognize, then, that the experiment in the shorter journey of Finding the Mind emerges as a flower overtly attached to a deep-set root system--a system that constantly draws and develops in us all--whether we are aware of it or not (our philosophical and other foundations). And if reader-engaged, the appendixes, quotes, and references (mainly, to Lonergan’s work but also to several others’) offer treatment of the whole-self, as it were, and refer in more intimate fashion to that root. The root, as you well-know, is our own potential development, corrective, and coming-to-consciousness of self and world; or--a horrible term to introduce to novices--at the very least: explicit metaphysics.
The distinction between the two journeys, then, is made with caution. The appendixes are provided online, as this on is--should readers wish to approach the self-reflective project in a more comprehensive and prolonged fashion or, again, to continue on in what I refer to as the longer journey (King 2010).
Thus, if you have a basic understanding of Lonergan’s contributions to cognitional theory, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, etc., you can read the experiment for critical self-discovery herein as a treatise on pedagogy for self-appropriation-affirmation and understand something new, even if you do not read the introduction or appendixes (though again some of the treatments and technical terms are new and may interest you anyway).
Also, if you already understand the cognitional theory and its unique personal applications (self-appropriation-affirmation) and including its vast philosophical implications in the formal fields of study, you might want to skip over the theoretical development in part II. Though note that in our treatment, the good-bad complex is intimately related to all four desire-quests and their shadow-questions.
Questions Rather than Levels
Further, we take the desire-quests, or the development of differentiated inquiry as a spontaneous experience, as our theoretical focus and expression. That is, I conceptualize the basic structure here in terms of four desire-quests (internal-actual, remote, but regularly expressed) and then as shadow questions (theoretical expression), and not in terms of levels of consciousness. The relationship between desire-quests and their shadow questions portrayed in the main text and the other appendixes is pedagogical; while the difference between (a) the desire-quests/shadow-questions and (b) levels of consciousness should be clear to those who have already studied Lonergan’s work in a comprehensive way and who understand the difference between a metaphysical approach and an approach from an understanding of interiority and of intentionality analysis. (See note 1 in this appendix 18.)
Also, in Collection (1988), and speaking of E. Coreth's work on metaphysics, Lonergan explains the primacy of the question:
No doubt the proper place to begin is at the beginning, but some say one issue and others say another is the proper begining. So there is a question about the beginning and, indeed, no matter where one starts, one starts from some question. For Fr Coreth, then, questioning itself is the beginning....the condition of the possiblity of any and all questions is an awareness that goes beyond the already known to an unknown to be known (p. 190).
Though the term levels is appropriate for some explanations, the term question (and for us our term desire-quests) goes to the heart of general empirical--interior--point of view.
Furthermore, and as a pedagogical point, I develop the division of concepts, between (a) shadow-questions and (b) desire-quests, to support the division between (a) theoretical conceptualization and (b) reader self-discovery (their own experience of the desire-quests as they occur in the reader). The experiment begins with the reader’s own experience. Conceptually, these terms refer to the same basic structure. As pedagogical, however, the two-fold division of concepts encourages reader self-reflection by making formal (as a part of the superstructure) the distinction between (a) theoretical conceptualization and (b) their own interior life as they begin to objectify aspects of it via their guided self-reflection.
On the other hand, again, it is common to my experience that even those who have a basic understanding of Lonergan’s contributions can have vastly different views about and expressions of that understanding. And some pretend to know but really do not, or just can use more refinement of understanding and ability to express knowledge.
Furthermore (in Lonergan’s technical language) counter-positions are recalcitrant--set in place, commonly for a long time, as learned-received, now-assumed, and as a part of our polymorphic foundations for our thinking that inform our life-event matters (1958 and 2000). We can also refer to the difference between (a) our more object-oriented understanding of the counter-positions (and-or philosophical attitudes) and (b) the project of self-identity and internal development—of long-term developments and self-correctives integrated as new and transformed meaning into our personal complex of foundational memory, its implications, and its now-spontaneous formation of our speech and actions (Piscitelli 1985).
In other words, and depending on the narrative circumstances, old problematic foundational lenses (e.g., some names are mechanist determinism, naïve realism, idealism, relativism, dogmatism, etc.) can hide within the warp and weave of our latent-to-problematic philosophical viewpoint and influence our thought and how we frame meaning, in any context, and for a very long time (Lonergan 1958 and 2000; and Piscitelli 1985).
A critic of any Lonergan-inspired text--a text written from the point of view of interiority and explicit metaphysics--first should consider the above, and be open for potential internal change--even internal transformation--before taking a final view of such a critique.
The philosophical lenses we bring to our experiment herein provide no exception. Thus, depending on the person, and without a fuller longer-journey foundational review, development, and corrective, reading and understanding the experiment and-or the appendixes will rest-in and be influenced-by any one of a number of personal, well or badly developed, foundational contexts. This is so even in those who people Lonergan studies—and, I argue, like no other. And relationship between our latent and problematic philosophical foundations is living and complexly so. As such, conceptual or even substantial differences evident in many scholars’ writings about Lonergan’s work may never be settled in our lifetimes--and maybe in some sense they should not be, the mysteries of developmental and dialectical functions being what they are.
Over and above such manifest differences, however, is a person’s self-understanding. The experiment herein reaches for that reader self-understanding, again, without regard yet for a full treatment of their foundational milieu. In this text, again, we separate-out and talk about, but do not ignore, readers’ foundational concerns. The experiment contains only what can be empirically and critically established, and repeated in scientific-objectivist fashion, using collected data from reader's own experience.
The experiment can be undertaken alone or in any classroom setting, in a reasonable amount of time, and from almost any foundational situation--even from an initial denial of the existence of foundations.
The main text (with its online appendix-extensions) (King 2010) is layered, then, so that, with frequent references to the appendixes and other resources, (1) we can approach and complete the experiment in critical fashion while (2) we maintain awareness of the integrative relationship between (a) that objectivist-experimental, critical (but extroverted) verification procedure and (b) a more prolonged and “painstaking” treatment of the reader’s philosophical foundations (1958, xxiii and 2000, 17).
In this way, we can develop one aspect of self-knowledge in a relatively brief format (the experiment as the shorter journey) with a clearly established finishing moment (as a plateau), while preserving a close, even intimate relationship to the longer journey--to the narrative-about and reference-to more comprehensive foundational study and insights, correctives, horizon development, and self-knowledge.
Speaking of his book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan comments:
More than all else, the aim of the book is to issue an invitation to a personal, decisive act. But the very nature of the act demands that it be understood in itself and in its implications. What on earth is meant by rational self-consciousness? What is meant by inviting it to take possession of itself? Why is such self-possession said to be so decisive and momentous? The questions are perfectly legitimate, but the answer cannot be brief…it is not the answer itself that counts so much as the manner in which it is read. (1958, xix and 2000, 15)
As you know, the “manner” refers to readers’ foundational lenses and to potential deeply felt changes in them and in us. Underlying this treatment of the shorter and the longer journeys, then, is my hope that the abbreviated experiment herein can bring a broader audience of reader-experimenters one-step-closer to the fuller set of direct and reflective insights that constitute what Lonergan means by self-appropriation and self-affirmation—including awareness of needed personal-foundational transformations only achieved through long-term philosophical reflections.
Such is the aim of setting up the context and conditions for some development and-or corrective to occur, rather than merely for something personal to be learned-about in a topical way, even if that topical learning is scientifically-experimentally sound.
Further, we are exploring what happens when a human being is in the process of knowing. Since knowing is central to the project of any teaching, our audience includes those involved in teacher education.
We are concerned not with the existence of knowledge but with its nature, not with what is known but with the structure of the knowing, not with the abstract properties of cognitional process but with a personal appropriation of one’s own dynamic and recurrently operative structure of cognitional activity.… For the labor of self-appropriation cannot occur in a single leap. Essentially, it is a development of the subject and in the subject and, like all development, it can be solid and fruitful only by being painstaking and slow. (1958, xxiii and 2000, 17)
Thus, my aim is to provide pedagogy for bringing Lonergan’s central and unique philosophical contribution to the field of education and, through that field, to teachers--while regularly referring to foundational development and self-correction. Thus, again, the work is meant to avoid “telescoping” philosophical study or “vulgarizing” Lonergan’s work (McShane 2009).
Intentionality Analysis and Levels, but not Potencies
In Method in Theology, in section 9 labeled A Technical Note (1972, 120-24), Lonergan clarifies the distinction between a classical-metaphysical view underpinning theoretical developments, and what he refers to as a view from the performance of an intentionality analysis. I take this to mean the difference between analyzing from the point of view of (a) the writer having understood, clarified and dispensed with the older metaphysical view and (b) the writer having objectified, become conscious of, understood, and appropriated-affirmed elements of their own interior functions (as evident in their ongoing experience of their own functioning). And I take it to mean: the writer as having become comfortable, even spontaneous, in incorporating this interior-based intentional-ist view into their thinking, conversations, and writings. The view includes the inherent limitations of human knowledge and an understanding of the difference between what we know and what we belief, opine or merely think, etc.
Lonergan’s narrative in that section will grate on those who thoroughly understand more recent feminist transitions (as they do me) as cultures go forward in their cultivating process. Nevertheless, in this extended part of my introduction aimed at those familiar with Lonergan’s work and contributions, let me at least put forth that I am familiar with this transition and that the present experiment is just that—an experiment where the reader-experimenter begins with the data of consciousness as to-be-collected first in the written narrative of the readers’ own experiences, and only then moves to theoretical developments for later applications. Those developments are couched in intentionalist rather than classicist language and their philosophical assumptions.
Further, in Method in Theology, Lonergan counter-poses the metaphysical view with the view from interiority:
…in terms of intentional and conscious acts on the four levels of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. The lower levels are presupposed and complemented by the higher. The higher sublate the lower. If one wishes to transpose this analysis into metaphysical terms, then the active potencies are the transcendental notions revealed in questions for intelligence, questions for reflection, questions for deliberation. (1972, 120)
Here, I take Lonergan to mean that, in terms of philosophical foundations, reference to the active potencies, with no reference to empirically-established data, personal or otherwise, reveals an under-lying classicist or metaphysical view. Whereas, from an interior-view (explicit metaphysics, as appropriated and known empirically), intentionality analysis goes forward from that view, accounting now for intentional acts as experienced by the writer. Indeed, in the present work, we start with the reader-experience of raising questions and refer to the transcendental notions that, in fact, are revealed in those questions (generally stated as) questions for intelligence, questions for truth, questions for reflection, questions for deliberation, etc. Further, our rendition of the theory (using the four generally-drawn shadow-questions) is meant to make the transition back from theory-to-experience for the reader as easily drawn as possible.
The present work, then, takes the above distinction between philosophical-foundational viewpoints fully into account and is written from the point of view of interiority; and it provides a venue for readers to begin on their own journey of understanding and coming to know their own philosophical foundations.
~
Note (for this appendix only)
1. Lonergan refers to levels of consciousness at several places in both Insight (1958 and 2000) and Method in Theology (1972); e.g., experience, understanding, and judgment, are determined as levels of consciousness that come together to complete our knowledge. Your understanding of what Lonergan means here is essential to the fuller project of self-understanding. Also many writers have taken up the levels metaphor as central to their understanding of conscious order and to what Lonergan means by it, e.g., What is it? and Is it so? However, note that these expressions are in question form and that Lonergan refers to inquiry, the questioning process, and our kinds-of and specific questions again and again in his writing.
In the Finding the Mind text, I do not use the metaphor of levels to depict conscious structure, but rather use the term desire-quests. However, and to avoid confusion, I would like here to determine the difference between (a) the conceptualization of specific questions and (b) a reference to desire-quests and their framework—both as general.
Thus, we note that our anticipations born of desire-inquiry are distinct--one from the other and as operative within the experiencing-understanding–judgment-deliberation-decision-act complex. As generalized, we can see a structure emerge, that some refer to as having levels. Thus, our desire-quests are unified, structured, and integrated--at first in need of differentation, and then interrelationship, and then a re-integration (Piscitelli, 1985). In real life, our desire-quests often go unnamed and are often undifferentiated and overlapping, making them sometimes difficult to isolate for analysis.
Nevertheless, the unnamed but experienced desire-quests as generalized into theoretical expression (now named shadow questions) can be teased out of any discourse--they are all a part of a process we experience as knowing and then moving towards speaking-acting. As such, the distinctions and relationships between the shadow questions also can be understood as demarcations of different levels of consciousness. Therefore, the two terms (levels and inquiry, or desire-quests) are an attempt to capture different nuances and aspects of the same reality that constitutes the general structure of the human mind. A level refers more to a relationship between desire-quests or kinds of questions than to a concrete experience and will emerge only as differntiation occurs.
I have found in teaching that the term inquiry or desire-quest or question is a more concrete metaphor than level as either tends to allow students to better follow an unbroken link from their experience, to their conceptualization of that experience in their crisis narrative, to identification of the desire-quests in their narratives, to self-identity. (Perhaps Lonergan would refer to the term inquiry as a primitive term [1958, 11-12 and 2000, 36-37].)
As such, in my experience, and as a commonly unnamed but now-described function occurring regularly in conscious operations, desire-quests and their framework are easier to locate and identify in my students’ experience than anything resembling a level. Thus desire-quests and shadow questions, as differentiations of the more inclusive general term inquiry, are described structural demarcations in personal consciousness. Such demarcations suit the pedagogical purpose of helping novice philosophers and those interested in the critical details of self-appropriation-affirmation (or a primer such as is our main text) locate and connect the theory and the language more easily with their own concrete experience of thinking.
Further, we are linking desire to quest to avoid a common but incorrect philosophical notion that would separate questioning, questing, or intelligence from the fullness of feeling, image, and whatever else we might mean by desire or fear, for that matter. As desire is human, it enters human consciousness and our intelligence in a way that is difficult to distinguish from what it means to quest, e.g., a question of the type What is it?, is our desire to understand as manifest in-process.
Though different, in fact, feelings and images are inexorably linked in human beings' to our interior life as intelligence on the move. What we might mean by intelligence as distinct from feeling-image is, in fact, intimate with feeling-image. As distinct, these are a working set of mutually transformative aspects of that interior life and, thus, of what it means to be human.
We want to maintain an understanding of that relationship-in-difference throughout our work in our main text and in these appendixes.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Appendix 1: Language and Self-Presence
Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory/An Experimental Primer for Foundational Review and Self-Appropriation-Affirmation
The Experiment
Appendix 1: Language and Self-Presence
Sections below:
Introduction
All aspects and facets of our mind’s operations work within the framework of our self-presencing structure. That is, when you are present to this page, as you are now, and as you read this text, you also are present to yourself, at the same time, and as a correlative to your being present to anything else.
By present I do not mean as a book is present to the next book on a shelf, or a table to a chair. Rather, I mean this sort of presence as: to be aware of, or to be mediating, or to be in communication with, in some way, or to be able to respond intelligently in some way, to what or who is other to me. As beings endowed with a self-present structure, we are other to ourselves in some way as condition for becoming present to anything or any other-else.
As a larger-context aside, then, we should couch our reflection on self-presence and language in the act of meaning that any intelligible object is involved in; that is, objects mean themselves to other objects. In this most basic way, the book on the shelf is already involved in the act of meaning itself to the books around it. In quite concrete terms, one book cannot lean itself past or into the book next to it, though in a very long-term sense, they are both involved in decay where, we can assume, at some point their meaning will be that of “dust to dust,” as will our own physical presence.
In this most basic physics-way, however, the books and the table and chair, are present to one another and are involved in the basic meaning that physics is in its common and relatively predictable way. So we can regard that such physical (non-conscious) meaning-presence (or presencing) is basic to all other kinds of presence, including to those that we refer to as conscious awareness and the self-presence we are exploring here. In this most basic way, I can shake hands with you if I am physically present with you, and our hands will experience the same physics that the book is involved in when leaning on another book on the shelf.
Far beyond the above sort of physical presence, then, as conscious and thinking beings (unlike the book or the chair or the basic physics of hand-shaking) (a) we are already involved in, and can become aware of and present to, such basic meaningful relationships; (b) we can become aware of and present to other persons who are themselves aware of me; and (c) we can become aware of what it means to be present and aware.
Further, as we will explore below, besides conditioning for other-else presence, for human beings, our being self-present (in the way that we experience ourselves and others when we think, speak, and listen) is the conditioning factor for us to have language in the way that we do.
Language and Self-Presence
First, a baby begins by wondering-about and then learning-about her world of light and motion, and later of her hands, Mommy and Daddy, blocks, pets, keys, grass, floors, cribs, and kitchens, etc., and of the experiences of being carried, fed, and comforted, in an ever-expanding array of meaning accumulation (qualified or not). Such meaning constantly flows through our complex of cognitional processes, and builds up in our understanding complex (our schema), in ways that we are yet to know about in any critical way (Duchant 1991).
In that complex, however, what is newly quested-for and insighted-in our primitive development (early infancy and pre-language) is constantly being related-to and integrated-with what we have insighted-to-our understanding before or, as we say, our understanding or under-meaning. We include here in our reference to this early development an expanse of image development and a correlative wealth of feeling associations that we generally assign to early responses to what we refer to as primitive insights.
Similarly, when you read (as you are reading now), your internal desire-quests (chapter 2) spontaneously seek and probe for external meaning (insights-to-understanding, knowing, valuing) in that presencing and self-presencing experience. In this case, the words you are reading on this page are present to you and mean to-with you in the reading/other-presence experience. Intelligence is this passive awareness-of- external, and resonance-with-internal, meaning—accompanied by our spontaneous and active probing for new meaning that will then inspire new insights.
In this way, as you observe or read, you spontaneously desire-quest for new meaning to insight and, as you do, your insights-to-understanding build up to lay a foundation for further desire-questing and insighting; and the process goes forward—in exponential, integrative, and spontaneous fashion. Key here is the spontaneous dynamism of our desire-quests in either active or passive mode and, as active, almost making what would otherwise seem obsessive into normal human-intelligent activity.
Second, your array of already-understood meaning spontaneously resonates-dissonates with meaning floes, forms, and relations in the present situation or, in our case, in the text here as you read it. For instance, you already know what all of the letters and most of the words here mean. Or you know the term text, in this common con-text and, most probably, what I mean by it, along with a plethora of other meanings that I have expressed here, and with some burgeoning grey areas around its central meaning. I have used hundreds of words to write this text; and you have brought your prior understanding of all or most of them to your reading of what I have to say in writing. That is, if you understand anything at all, you are already spontaneously resonating-dissonating with what I have written. In the case of my writing a technical document (as is common for such writing), I am endowing some words here with more technical meaning for definition and clarity in this context.
However, such a phenomenon as your reading this text indicates that, at some time in your life, you had to learn (going through a long desire-questing, to-insighting, to understanding process) what the marks A-B-C and a-b-c mean (and much more about letter and words), phonetically, alphabetically, and in terms of complex contexts of meaning, all with those gray areas of meaning all-around. And it indicates that you may modify, but you need not re-learn the meanings of the letters or their order and relation, over and over again, in order to read this text with any modicum of qualified understanding. That learning (yours) grew to include quite nuanced meanings of names, phrases, sentences, contexts, etc. What you are trying to understand now as you read this page is no longer the letters, but what I might mean by how I have arranged the letters and terms in this particular order rather than some other. The build-up of meaning from that beginning basis is really quite complex.
However, you could not be reading this page with even a mild interest, or as raising further questions about my meaning (from your experience of dissonance), without already having desire-quested-insighted-understood (stored away for resonant purposes) a wealth of meaning in your long journey of building up a meaning-foundation of understanding for yourself. In our example, you look at the page and, through the auspices of your prior understanding of the word text, you are already present to, in communication with, or presencing, the letter-meaning (and my meaning “behind” it), and then the whole word text, in its larger con-text, while you quickly and spontaneously probe (desire-quest) to understand what I mean by the arrangements on the page with other letters, words, and sentences.
Further, and again, such a development is also underpinned and infused with already-developed and probably long-held (a) images and (b) feelings—all of which we will give some treatment to here and in other appendixes (appendixes 15 and 22).
Third, such a phenomenon also indicates that merely looking at something, where looking means we employ our ocular capacities—at this text, for instance—does not instantly produce understanding on its own. Rather, the phenomenon of learning briefly developed above indicates that our understanding of anything new is utterly dependent on a build-up of prior understanding that we, then, spontaneously bring into resonance-dissonance with the continuum of our new experiences of meaning (some of which we are apt to avoid so well).
Thus, merely looking at text, for instance, as you are doing now, is never merely looking, but is already a process of conjuring up, and bringing forward, in lightening-fast and extraordinarily selective fashion, all of the related (and-or conflicting) meaning of this and all the other letters and terms on this page—you need not learn these meanings again, as you did when you learned the alphabet and word-sounds as a child. Now, the meaning is already present in and to you—at-the-ready and beyond the speed of light (because we may anticipate meaning)—to inform your reading for you. Thus, we say that newly presented meaning, like opening a new book, resonates spontaneously with already-learned meaning.
As you look at the text, then, that inner meaning can now, instantly and spontaneously, resonate with the marks on the page that spell out and mean text, etc., and you can flow yourself and your own meaning across the words and sentences with a modicum of faster-than-time understanding that is specific to you and your background of under-meaning. (That meaning is specific to you, but not necessarily singular.)
Thus, as suggested above, reading is not just looking at the words on the page or being present to them as a book is present to another book on the shelf; nor is hearing of language the same as merely sensing decibels. Rather, when you read, you are both conjuring a wealth of internal meaning spontaneously (and ever-so-quickly) and employing your ability to think-about new meaning through your desire-questing-to-insighting activities, more generally known as your multi-layered cognitional activities as set out in our experimental text, Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Self-Appropriation.
Presence and Self-Presence
First, through the self-presencing structure that we are endowed with, such reading and thinking-about what we are reading is in part saying the text to my self in my minded activities.
Reading = Thinking = Saying the text to myself in my internal dialogue
Second, such internal saying also implies a listening. Or, the saying-to-myself that I experience as a part of my thinking implies an already-constituted internal speaker, but also a quieter and commonly-unnoticed internal listener in me; and both are aspects of what we mean by thinking.
Hence, the structure of self-presence emerges with our exploration of the thinking-reading process and the experience of being physically and also meaningfully present to a speaking person, or a page and the writing on it and, behind the page, the author’s intended meaning. Namely, saying internally (or thinking about something or someone) implies a me who speaks and a me who listens in the one me, I, or you (Piscitelli, 1977).
Commonly, it is easy to locate our internal speaker for, beyond the images and feelings we can find in our internal lives, I refer to the voice we can notice that is constantly saying in our minds as we experience thought—about anything. We easily and commonly say, when describing our thinking about something, “I can hear myself saying…,” or, “I can hear my mother saying ….”
Perhaps not so oddly as we might think as we self-reflect, we do so even though we are not employing the physical apparatus of our hearing; nor are we creating external sounds when we think, or when we say-to-ourselves, or when we listen to ourselves speaking internally.
However, internally—in our minds—the speaker in that sentence is speaking to you or me also—and thus that speaker in us is accompanied by an implied hearer-listener who is, by definition, quiet and open to the meaning that is being said internally.
Thinking, then, in a very real sense, is I-myself speaking to myself, who, we can assume, is also listening. And so we must infer that internally, when we speak to ourselves in the way that is so common to our experience of the thinking process, we are also listening to ourselves at the same time. Thus, in this presencing process, meaning flows in and through us, and as one and the same speaking-listening person: I-me. Hence, the basic structure of thinking is that:
(1) I-me speaker-speaks (2) about something/someone (3) to I-me speaker-listener
(Piscitelli, 1977)
Third, the about in the speaker-about-listener structure is what or whom we are thinking of or about; or the about is the object of thought that we are internally conversing for ourselves. The thinking-about is any content-what-or-whoever that is present to us as object in our thinking, e.g., the text, the book, the table, the event, a person, or what another person-speaker-listener is talking about. In this way, I can be sitting in a chair, and be present physically to that chair as I am physically present to the table in front of me. However, at the same time, I can be present in my thinking to my son who lives across town, or Aristotle (through his writing), who lived over 2000 years ago.
Further, in a way, I am still physically present to my son (who is across town at present) in the very basic way that I can be aware of the (also intelligible) spatial distance between us. We are still connected in some way through that known-intelligibility of things, other persons, and events.
Also, the development of technology has brought us to question the common notion of being present to someone (if not something) where that presence means we can see, hear, or touch someone. My point here, again, is to refer to the basic intelligibility (and vast meaningfulness) of physics, its laws, and our assumptions about it. In common parlance, I am not present to my son precisely because he is across town at present and, thus, I cannot be aware of the nuances of his physical presence. For instance, he may have a sunburn since I saw him last, but I cannot see it to become aware of it. However, he can tell me about it on the phone or in an e-mail. In this way, I can change my internal imagery of him and I can draw on my sympathetic feelings for him. I can become more present to him as an intelligible presence, if not a physical one. The physics of space (he is across town) is present to me within the changing but intelligible context of my relationship to him; but not in a way that I can observe his sunburn with my own eyes.
In this way, then, and while we can presence and read the text in front of us, as you are doing now as you read this page, the text is only one example of any what or whom that we can think about or object-ify, or become present to, in the way human beings do. The about-object in the subject-object-subject tri-part structure can be anything under the sun or beyond.
On the other hand, the self-present structure—the speaker-listener aspect of the structure we briefly explored above—is already there as a prior condition to objectifying (thinking about) anything or anyone, regardless of about-content, again, in the way that human beings do—in language.
Self-Present Structure
SUBJECT—-OBJECT—-SUBJECT
(speaker)(about)(listener)
About-Object (any) Presence Other-X
Any Object-X is present to me as an intelligible what-whom I am thinking about, e.g., a book, an event, or another person
Subject as self-presencing structure: I am present to myself as an abiding internal structure regardless of what X-object I presence: I listen to the other-X who is also saying-listening to me and through me. As I listen to others’ in conversation, I am allowing them to take up the speaker position as external-prevalent so that I as listener become internal-prevalent, and as my resonant-dissonant functioning and my desire-quest-dynamism spontaneously engage in my search for new insights.
Furthermore, precisely because we are constituted by this basic and abiding self-present structure, we are able to objectify many things, including even our own selves as object-X. That is, we can think about or other ourselves as object-X in the same way that we think about or other a text, a chair, an event, or another person—from within that basic self-presencing structure. That is, in speaking to my self (thinking), I can objectify myself as the about-X in the content of my thought, as if I were another person or thing. Similarly, I can be speaking with another person, and the about-X can be either-both of us and-or any other X. For instance, if together we are planning a party for next week, we spontaneously think ourselves into that event--as others.
In this way, you can say out loud or internally to yourself, for instance, I was riding my bike. Here the any-x-content also can be me as I think about myself as object-X in a self-referential way.
Thus, we are basically and already self-present—in being constituted by the tri-part structure and subject-to-subject self-present. However, from within that self-present structure we can also object-ify-X our own selves—or take ourselves within that structure as the object of it. The subject-to-subject structure is what allows me-subject to also be an object-X from within that structure. Only if I can speak to myself as another subject-speaker in my thought processes can I other myself as object-X.
Such abilities allow you to dialogue-with, free-image-think, question, and thus other the meaning-content of the text, placing any X whatsoever in the about-X thought-space between myself as first speaker, and then as listener. That dynamism includes your own self-as-object-X. In so-objectifying, we can merely contemplate any meaning whatsoever for the sheer joy of it, and we can invite new questions and insights as we go. Suspending the plausible and engaging in fictional stories or film is a product of the vast potential creativity opened-up to us through our being able to (a) be self-present as structure and (b) object-X anything whatsoever from within that basic structure.
Again, when we speak with another person, we are allowing the other person to be our speaker where what the other person is saying (a) resonates with our full field of under-meaning and-or (b) introduces dissonance—introduces questionable data that we can either overtly ask about or leave to “fester” in our arena of under-thought where questions we may not want to address have already been raised but then shunted away from our field of open awareness.
Also, saying I-Me is an identity of self-to-self—at once, implying a unity of self: (1) as listener, (2) as a subject (to subject) who can also be an object, and (3) as speaker (Piscitelli, 1977). Thus, I can say to myself (think) that the air is cool this morning; and-or I can free-image myself (and think-about or other discursively). For instance, as object-X I can image-think myself walking in the coolness under the trees somewhere in New York’s Central Park or on the moon. As a symbolic "I" (unified subject-object-subject in humans) and as our basic given structure, I have the ability to both be present to myself as subject who is reading a text (in this case, the text is meaningful object-X) and, at the same time, to objectify-other myself with and into the text.
To say this another way, we can be self-consciously present in the meaning of the text (I can objectify myself or think myself as a part of object-X). When we think ourselves into an object-X situation, we do so while remaining self-present in the basic constancy of our internal speaker-listener relationship.
Being able to read, as simple as it may seem, is already wholly dependent on this one-and-the-same structure and on our ability to language-self-as-object that is part and parcel to being human. Using I or We is already a way of holding all of this process together as a symbolic, integral unity.
…and Language
Integral with our ability to language as human, we need do nothing to make basic self-presencing happen. Rather, we are already structured to be self-present in the speaker-listener aspect of our constitution as human. That basic self-presence is part and parcel to the structure of language itself. This is so because the differentiated structure provides the prior conditions for us to throw meaning into an object form separate from ourselves and identify it with other sensible forms. Language manifests from our ability to throw meaning as object-X, and to say that same meaning to ourselves and to other subjects.
Through the basic tri-part structure, we can also throw ourselves into that objective place. In doing so, we become not only present to ourselves as a matter of merely being human, but we become present to ourselves as thrown-object in our consciousness, ready to take on the dressing of language as expressions of us, but also as separated from us for our own understanding, appraisal and ultimately, for our own formation. I can not-only say to myself, but I can say about myself as other-object.
We are self-present, then, not only as I (subject-speaker) am already present to Myself (subject-listener) but, also as Me (as-object-X) as a spontaneous part of my thinking, or at will. The high development expressed in a self-reflectie person springs from our more basic ability to (1) already be self-present and, thus, to say to myself and (2) to be able to put our own selves into that object-X place for our own consideration. That is, as a part of my thinking, I can become present-as-object-X to the already self-present self.
In other words, because of the basic self-presencing structure that we are, and just as we can think the chair-as-object-X as apart from ourselves, we also can think ourselves-as-object-X—also as apart from ourselves. Language and communications in it (as we know it as human), then, is not only what we do, but what we are as human.
Further, we can think ourselves-as-object anywhere, anytime, and in any meaning, for example, far and away from our immediate surroundings (on the moon, or in Italy, etc.). Just as we speak-to-ourselves and to others about some object-other-thing-X (thinking-about) so we can speak to ourselves and to others about ourselves. We can objectify or think about ourselves. Further, again, we are open to vast ranges of development through such thought processes. That is, we can learn in highly developed fashion and, in that learning, we can develop our self-reflective capacities. We can speak to ourselves (and others) about our selves, reflecting and expanding our thought-arena with regard to our understanding, our identities, our learned principles, and our speaking-acting in the world.
Furthermore, our qualitative concerns emerge with regard to the vast range of choices that accompany our ability to intelligently objectify and speak-to-ourselves that objectification. At the very least, the good and the bad are rooted in our developmental patterns associated with speech and complex communications, and around our need for a refining principle or set of principles that will govern our abilities and the choices that surround those abilities.
Through our basic and dynamic tri-part structure we can express ourselves—who and what we are—but also we can objectify-other in language—ourselves and anything else, again, under the sun and beyond. The self-directed and meaningful sounds, and written words, take objective-other form in and as that language. As such, our four generalized questions (developed in Part II) can approach any meaning-X; and that any-meaning-X can also be me, in or out of the company of any other X that I choose to think about or subject I choose to speak with. Again, the fact that we can grow our moral horizons (the question of the good-bad applied to ourselves) and change ourselves according to newly established meaning depends entirely on our innate specifically-human ability to think of ourselves as an entirely different-object-X other, e.g., when we compare ourselves to another person and come up wanting.
As example, think of yourself riding on an elephant across the San Francisco Bay Bridge with a stream of cars behind you on a sunny afternoon, waving and swaying with the slow movement of the elephant’s strides. Here, you are thinking of yourself as an other, and you can think yourself, as it were, into this sunny afternoon. However, such other-thinking is not the basic self-presencing aspect of our constitution we are exploring here. It is not the same basic self-presence that conditions our fantasy elephant ride or any other self-othering that we do in the first place. That is, instead of ourselves riding the elephant, we as easily can leave ourselves out of the othering situation and imagine the Queen of England riding on that elephant.
In either case, we are still self-present, placing either ourselves or the Queen of England on the elephant in the object-X place of our tri-part structure. In either case, our speaker-listener self-presencing structure conditions that we can do such self-as-other thinking, and-or place anyone or anything on that elephant in our imaginative-thought processes—and we have done so just by suggesting it here in print that, through your own resonant-dissonant dynamism, means itself to you—and behind that, me writing this document. Thus, in lightening-speed fashion, by inner direction and-or resonance, or by outer suggestion (in this case, my writing this document and you reading it), we can place anything or anyone in that about-X place in the self-presencing structure, including ourselves or the Queen of England.
This kind of language-oriented thinking—objectifying ourselves into any place or situation, fictitious or not—is so commonly available to us as to seem uninteresting to most. However, the flexibility of our self-presencing structure to other-objectify persons, things, events, and our own selves in this way, as fully developed, is constitutive of human language. The self-to-self, speaker-to-listener structure enables us to resonate-with the othered-X as spontaneous re-cognition. It enables us to desire-quest—to raise questions and speculate about new meaning-data dissonant or not recognized in, or not yet constituted in that other, including in ourselves. And it enables us then to say-to-ourselves new meaning for the othered-objectified X–as potential new insighting activity. Without our speaker-to-other-to-listener structure, we would not be potential to experience the vast range of self-development that human beings do.
Finally, new meaning that is insighted is spontaneously added-to and integrated-with our dynamic, fluid, and developing schematic field of under-meaning. In this way, what is objectified can remain object, but it also can become the catalyst for internal growth and a change of being in ourselves, e.g., the identification with principles of intelligence and excellence and the establishment and growth of our moral horizons. We see the concrete visible, audible, and touchable (sensible) material—in our case, we see the dark forms on a white background that concretely fix the contrasting tones, and hold in place the more nuanced meaning of the learned word text here. The ordering contrast holds the ordered, learned, and communal meaning in place for us to transfer to other times, places, and persons—in this case, in print or via computer screen.
In this way, the structure of human self-presence allows you to bring the text-meaning that I am writing here into your active self-presence as the conversed other—the object-about-X of that basic self-presence in you—to resonate-dissonant with and to say the text to yourself (to read), to experience the meaning I am writing about and that you are open to and ready to experience for yourself. According to that openness and readiness—openness that is staffed with our four layers of desire-quests—we insight-to-understand the new intelligibility and meaning of the words as we read and, ultimately, we in-fluence the subjects that we are.
Reading, Seeing-Hearing-Sensing, and Meaning Development
Our study reaches further back into our understanding of the difference between (a) sensing sensible items and (b) understanding vast fields of meaning. That is, meaning may be of the sensible; however meaning is not able to be sensed. Though our tri-part structure manifests in the sensible sounds of words and visible writing of speech, it is neither sensible nor is it about the sensible as sensed. Rather, the tri-part structure and the desire-quests that work within it are about meaning development, even about the meaning of what we sense. The structure is about what, through our desire-quests, we are so intent on understanding and, ultimately, on saying and doing.
Being able to read, then, or hear what others have to say, is a manifestation of our basic self-presencing structure and the throwing-meaning-into and through language that emerges from it. For hearing others, we first contrast sound with silence. For reading, we first contrast light and dark. We pay our attention-to (attend to) the distinctive sounds, and the distinctive marks on the page, with our spontaneous wonder. Then hearing others speak and reading words on a page are saying-to-myself in my tri-part structure the expressions that mean a generally-communally-learned-X and that have come in its particular form from the writer-other. Without the dynamism of the tri-part structure, then, we could not read or understand the nuanced languaged-meaning of the sounds we hear or sights we see on the page.
Further, our intelligent paying-attention-to, in part, is equivalent to our resonance-dissonance on-the-move. Being ready to understand what we are reading is to have a certain build-up of meaning all-ready with which to resonate-dissonate and an openness to further meaning development.
As we become more consciously directive of such paying-attention, we bring about further resonance-with-between our already-learned understanding and presented other-meaning in the world, and the more our spontaneous self-expressions reflect that inner meaning development of dynamic combinations of feeling, image, and meaning-rich language.
Such resonance-with is not commonly or necessarily discursive, but can be symbols and, again, feelings and images that blend into discursive forms depending on our state of development and habits of thought (Hutchinson, 1950, Article: The Nature of Insight). Through resonance, we lift the meaning out of our experience, off the page, as it were, and out of the merely sentient, or out of the silence, and the disordered or pre-ordered noise and dark around us, as it were. We speak that meaning as object-other to my self as subject (we say to ourselves) and we insight what we are ready to understand. As subject, we are already self-present and a part of the convers-ation with that meaning as we insight to understand it.
Thus, we develop that meaning through the thin veil of merely sensing the sensible on the page or screen, in the instance of reading this document, which we have also understood at some point in our past. Even that sensing is more than a book against a book on the shelf. Built on the dark against light is the meaning of the shape and order of the letters—all that is its meaning and far from sensed, and all that we had to learn at some point in our lives, way beyond merely seeing dark against light or hearing sound against the backdrop of silence. Recall the child fascinated with all tactile objects around her. Again, such an understanding of self-presencing and then presencing-X suggests that seeing is never merely an ocular experience:
Seeing, understanding, and knowing, then, are not just “taking a look” (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000). Even our first year of infancy is about finding the meaningful distinctions within the whole that is presented to us as intelligible. The infant and baby are not books on shelves. Nor do they merely sense, but rather they seek to understand what they are sensing of the sensible world around them; and they build a meaning-foundation for more mature and nuanced understanding and language to continue building on in their imagery (a product of primitive insights) and in the feelings that become attached to that foundation. Again, that understanding becomes a resonant source within us. Sights and sounds by definition are sensible; however, what we have understood of them—their intelligibility-meaningfulness—is what appeals to our intelligence for desire-questing-insighting-to-understanding through symbol (see Finding the Mind: Foundational Review, Chapter 1).
Hence, we use the metaphor of a thin veil or strip not only to suggest a difference between prior and present understanding, but to regard the difference between the “sensed world” and sensibility, on the one hand, and its meaningfulness, or what we can understand of its intelligibility, on the other. For what we sense is what we seek to understand, or what we have already understood and spontaneously bring forward in resonant fashion.
Bernard Lonergan puts it this way:
Let us explore a brief example of the process and, with it, the notion of internal resonant meaning: We hear the noise of a cell phone going off. However, we have already understood it not only as some distinct noise in the background of silence, but also—now instantly, resonantly, and spontaneously—as a cell phone going off.
Rather than asking questions like: What is that?, with my resonant meaning in place, now I can ask questions like: Whose phone is that? Or: Why didn’t they turn off their cell phone? Or Who’s calling? (These are what-type questions emerging from our desire-quest-1.) Without that pre-established and now-resonant understanding of the noise’s meaning (prior insights in a burgeoning presentational and discursive field of understanding), we only hear noise—with more or less meaning to be inquired about for insight-to-understanding. What is that intrusive noise?
You hear a barking dog. If your resonance (from your prior understanding) affords that you already recognize the sound as the neighbor’s dog, your wonder may start at: What is he barking at? If you recognize it as your own dog, you already know it probably means that he is ready for his walk, and your wonder begins at whether or not the weather requires that you need a jacket, and a myriad of other thought processes. Upon first hearing a dog bark, however, a 2-year-old will wonder about the noise as such--What is it?
Further, your presently reading this text rests on a plethora of your prior insights and answers, etc., and-or on your schematic contents, coupled with the constant and lively awareness—your background resonant presencing—of the intelligible and meaningful things-persons-events around you in your regular human living—the chair you sit in, the table, the computer, the window, the carpet, your pet wagging his tail, a newspaper, your friend speaking to you, and yourself, taking a walk, reading, etc.—all at-the-ready, providing a present resonant meaning base, and creating the potent conditions for new resonance-dissonance, and for new questions to emerge within that presencing arena of meaning as your desire-quests spontaneously manifest their dynamism. Without that prior meaning, and without the implications of intelligibility in everything around you, you would be a lost person—worse than Helen Keller, who was without sight or hearing, but who at least had a mind that provided here with great feats of understanding.
Reading a text, or having a dog-moment, or even being involved in a full blown crisis, does not happen in a meaning vacuum. Rather, all that is prior, already integrated, and relevant in your past learning spontaneously, and in remarkably quick fashion, springs to inform the newly presented meaning that emerges in each situation—for your to experience and, in that experience, to say to yourself. Otherwise, we would have no notion of the order of events or what anything might mean to us.
Understanding, Misunderstanding, and Self-Transcendence
Thus, people often understand the same things differently. All conversations with others, then, begin with the dynamism of resonance-dissonance, and with the resultant potential for understanding, for misunderstanding, and for creative self-transcendence.
Especially if you are drawing from our fuller version of Finding the Mind: Foundational Review, you may begin to understand that the method of the mind is dynamic, fluid, organic, ongoing, presentational, symbolic, and discursive and, as we are developing here, quite knowable as real—manifest in the sensible, but not itself sensed. This is especially so, again, if you understand that reality is not merely what we look at “out there” via seeing alone, or by otherwise sensing, but what we have understood and (in many cases) verified about what we look at and hear, and about what we presence. The method of mind stands on the necessary conditions of a healthy brain; however, studies of the brain are not sufficient to explain the mind’s method, or the vastness of human reality that the method is open to and can come to know.
Further, the method of mind is the very process that you are using already to address and comprehend (become present to the meaning of) these words. You are not merely looking at these words. You have consciously directed or turned your attention to this text with a wealth of schematic under-meaning at your resonant-spontaneous call. Beginning with your paying attention to the text—your meaningful-presencing of it—your desire-quests cum questions continue to operate through your awareness, or your more active attending to it—through your in-tending of the meaning of what I write here, and as you read or discuss this appendix. Your desire-quests, or wonderings, are embedded in and constitute, in part, your very awareness of anything and anyone, old or new, resonant-similar and-or dissonant. Further, such awareness varies and has different degrees; and depends in good part on your prior development and, germane to any new understanding, on the openness of mind that you harbor, that is your habit, and that you bring to any situation (Piscitelli, 1985).
An Application
In our Introduction above, we said: "Far beyond the above sort of physical presence, then, as conscious, aware, and thinking beings (unlike the book or the chair or the basic physics of hand-shaking) (a) we are already involved in, and can become aware of and present to, such basic meaningful relationships; (b) we can become aware of and present to other persons who are themselves aware of me; and (c) we can become aware of what it means to be present and aware."
We commonly experience all three above in one way or another. However, the tri-part structure is revealed most clearly in (c) above because, in becoming aware of what it means to be present and aware, we have used that tri-part structure to throw-objectify that same tri-part structure. We have "conversed" it in our thought as we would any object-X, questioning it and looking for new insights in order to understand it--or to say it to myself. The tri-part structure as object, then, can remain so--an X and concept among all other X's and concepts in my thought. Or in self-reflection, I can begin to bring the actuality of it to my conscious self-awareness and, thus, bring a critical clarity to my own self-understanding.
Finally, one way to explain, in part, the dilemma of post-modern man and our dalliance with positivism is to regard ourselves in the light of the tri-part structure. That dalliance can be understood as (a) a focus on the content of object-X aspect of our intentions and (b) an obscuring of or even rejection of the subject-to-subject aspect of those same intentions and the substantial part that the whole structure plays in knowledge formation and acquisition. The outsider (metaphysical) view is a product of this two-part distortion where, in order to acquire objective knowledge focus on the X and reject the subject who knows.
On the other hand, the insider's (metaphysical) view begins from an awareness of the subject (-to-subject) as a being who, through our questions, anticipates further knowledge of all-X; and where that object-X also can be the reality of ourselves.
Conclusion
The range of our ability to develop intellectually and morally gets its flexibility from the constitution of our tri-part self-presencing structure. Only because we can objectify, and through it objectify ourselves within this subject-object-subject structure, can we lie or tell the truth, self-reflect and develop as human, become good or bad and know about it, self-transcend, or become self-conscious in the way that we do. The fact that we can tell a lie or the truth indicates that we have a moral choice to make in every telling and doing situation. Finally, history—the past, another present, and the future—becomes open and available to us because we are already self-present and because, through that self-presence, we can other-object ourselves and anything or anyone as object-X within the same subject-to-subject structure.
In the broader context of consciousness, then, you are already self-present; as you read, you are present to—or in the process of presencing—this text as object-X, and I am meaning to you across meta-time as I write—regardless of where or when you are.
Again, given the variety of learning that goes on in any given set of persons, is it any wonder that there is so much misunderstanding in the world. Without the possibility of mis-understanding, however, self-transcendence would not be a possibility for us either.
For a fuller exploration of self-presence and language, see Finding the Mind—Foundational Review (unpublished manuscript at this writing).
Complete set of appendixes will appear here before publication of Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory. Publication slated for late 2010 or early 2011.
The Experiment
Appendix 1: Language and Self-Presence
Sections below:
Introduction
Language and Self-Presence
Presence and Self-Presence
…and Language
Reading, Seeing-Hearing-Sensing, and Meaning Development
Understanding, Misunderstanding, and Self-Transcendence
An Application
Conclusion
Introduction
All aspects and facets of our mind’s operations work within the framework of our self-presencing structure. That is, when you are present to this page, as you are now, and as you read this text, you also are present to yourself, at the same time, and as a correlative to your being present to anything else.
By present I do not mean as a book is present to the next book on a shelf, or a table to a chair. Rather, I mean this sort of presence as: to be aware of, or to be mediating, or to be in communication with, in some way, or to be able to respond intelligently in some way, to what or who is other to me. As beings endowed with a self-present structure, we are other to ourselves in some way as condition for becoming present to anything or any other-else.
As a larger-context aside, then, we should couch our reflection on self-presence and language in the act of meaning that any intelligible object is involved in; that is, objects mean themselves to other objects. In this most basic way, the book on the shelf is already involved in the act of meaning itself to the books around it. In quite concrete terms, one book cannot lean itself past or into the book next to it, though in a very long-term sense, they are both involved in decay where, we can assume, at some point their meaning will be that of “dust to dust,” as will our own physical presence.
In this most basic physics-way, however, the books and the table and chair, are present to one another and are involved in the basic meaning that physics is in its common and relatively predictable way. So we can regard that such physical (non-conscious) meaning-presence (or presencing) is basic to all other kinds of presence, including to those that we refer to as conscious awareness and the self-presence we are exploring here. In this most basic way, I can shake hands with you if I am physically present with you, and our hands will experience the same physics that the book is involved in when leaning on another book on the shelf.
Far beyond the above sort of physical presence, then, as conscious and thinking beings (unlike the book or the chair or the basic physics of hand-shaking) (a) we are already involved in, and can become aware of and present to, such basic meaningful relationships; (b) we can become aware of and present to other persons who are themselves aware of me; and (c) we can become aware of what it means to be present and aware.
Further, as we will explore below, besides conditioning for other-else presence, for human beings, our being self-present (in the way that we experience ourselves and others when we think, speak, and listen) is the conditioning factor for us to have language in the way that we do.
Language and Self-Presence
First, a baby begins by wondering-about and then learning-about her world of light and motion, and later of her hands, Mommy and Daddy, blocks, pets, keys, grass, floors, cribs, and kitchens, etc., and of the experiences of being carried, fed, and comforted, in an ever-expanding array of meaning accumulation (qualified or not). Such meaning constantly flows through our complex of cognitional processes, and builds up in our understanding complex (our schema), in ways that we are yet to know about in any critical way (Duchant 1991).
In that complex, however, what is newly quested-for and insighted-in our primitive development (early infancy and pre-language) is constantly being related-to and integrated-with what we have insighted-to-our understanding before or, as we say, our understanding or under-meaning. We include here in our reference to this early development an expanse of image development and a correlative wealth of feeling associations that we generally assign to early responses to what we refer to as primitive insights.
Similarly, when you read (as you are reading now), your internal desire-quests (chapter 2) spontaneously seek and probe for external meaning (insights-to-understanding, knowing, valuing) in that presencing and self-presencing experience. In this case, the words you are reading on this page are present to you and mean to-with you in the reading/other-presence experience. Intelligence is this passive awareness-of- external, and resonance-with-internal, meaning—accompanied by our spontaneous and active probing for new meaning that will then inspire new insights.
In this way, as you observe or read, you spontaneously desire-quest for new meaning to insight and, as you do, your insights-to-understanding build up to lay a foundation for further desire-questing and insighting; and the process goes forward—in exponential, integrative, and spontaneous fashion. Key here is the spontaneous dynamism of our desire-quests in either active or passive mode and, as active, almost making what would otherwise seem obsessive into normal human-intelligent activity.
Second, your array of already-understood meaning spontaneously resonates-dissonates with meaning floes, forms, and relations in the present situation or, in our case, in the text here as you read it. For instance, you already know what all of the letters and most of the words here mean. Or you know the term text, in this common con-text and, most probably, what I mean by it, along with a plethora of other meanings that I have expressed here, and with some burgeoning grey areas around its central meaning. I have used hundreds of words to write this text; and you have brought your prior understanding of all or most of them to your reading of what I have to say in writing. That is, if you understand anything at all, you are already spontaneously resonating-dissonating with what I have written. In the case of my writing a technical document (as is common for such writing), I am endowing some words here with more technical meaning for definition and clarity in this context.
However, such a phenomenon as your reading this text indicates that, at some time in your life, you had to learn (going through a long desire-questing, to-insighting, to understanding process) what the marks A-B-C and a-b-c mean (and much more about letter and words), phonetically, alphabetically, and in terms of complex contexts of meaning, all with those gray areas of meaning all-around. And it indicates that you may modify, but you need not re-learn the meanings of the letters or their order and relation, over and over again, in order to read this text with any modicum of qualified understanding. That learning (yours) grew to include quite nuanced meanings of names, phrases, sentences, contexts, etc. What you are trying to understand now as you read this page is no longer the letters, but what I might mean by how I have arranged the letters and terms in this particular order rather than some other. The build-up of meaning from that beginning basis is really quite complex.
However, you could not be reading this page with even a mild interest, or as raising further questions about my meaning (from your experience of dissonance), without already having desire-quested-insighted-understood (stored away for resonant purposes) a wealth of meaning in your long journey of building up a meaning-foundation of understanding for yourself. In our example, you look at the page and, through the auspices of your prior understanding of the word text, you are already present to, in communication with, or presencing, the letter-meaning (and my meaning “behind” it), and then the whole word text, in its larger con-text, while you quickly and spontaneously probe (desire-quest) to understand what I mean by the arrangements on the page with other letters, words, and sentences.
Further, and again, such a development is also underpinned and infused with already-developed and probably long-held (a) images and (b) feelings—all of which we will give some treatment to here and in other appendixes (appendixes 15 and 22).
Third, such a phenomenon also indicates that merely looking at something, where looking means we employ our ocular capacities—at this text, for instance—does not instantly produce understanding on its own. Rather, the phenomenon of learning briefly developed above indicates that our understanding of anything new is utterly dependent on a build-up of prior understanding that we, then, spontaneously bring into resonance-dissonance with the continuum of our new experiences of meaning (some of which we are apt to avoid so well).
Thus, merely looking at text, for instance, as you are doing now, is never merely looking, but is already a process of conjuring up, and bringing forward, in lightening-fast and extraordinarily selective fashion, all of the related (and-or conflicting) meaning of this and all the other letters and terms on this page—you need not learn these meanings again, as you did when you learned the alphabet and word-sounds as a child. Now, the meaning is already present in and to you—at-the-ready and beyond the speed of light (because we may anticipate meaning)—to inform your reading for you. Thus, we say that newly presented meaning, like opening a new book, resonates spontaneously with already-learned meaning.
As you look at the text, then, that inner meaning can now, instantly and spontaneously, resonate with the marks on the page that spell out and mean text, etc., and you can flow yourself and your own meaning across the words and sentences with a modicum of faster-than-time understanding that is specific to you and your background of under-meaning. (That meaning is specific to you, but not necessarily singular.)
Thus, as suggested above, reading is not just looking at the words on the page or being present to them as a book is present to another book on the shelf; nor is hearing of language the same as merely sensing decibels. Rather, when you read, you are both conjuring a wealth of internal meaning spontaneously (and ever-so-quickly) and employing your ability to think-about new meaning through your desire-questing-to-insighting activities, more generally known as your multi-layered cognitional activities as set out in our experimental text, Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Self-Appropriation.
Presence and Self-Presence
First, through the self-presencing structure that we are endowed with, such reading and thinking-about what we are reading is in part saying the text to my self in my minded activities.
Reading = Thinking = Saying the text to myself in my internal dialogue
Second, such internal saying also implies a listening. Or, the saying-to-myself that I experience as a part of my thinking implies an already-constituted internal speaker, but also a quieter and commonly-unnoticed internal listener in me; and both are aspects of what we mean by thinking.
Hence, the structure of self-presence emerges with our exploration of the thinking-reading process and the experience of being physically and also meaningfully present to a speaking person, or a page and the writing on it and, behind the page, the author’s intended meaning. Namely, saying internally (or thinking about something or someone) implies a me who speaks and a me who listens in the one me, I, or you (Piscitelli, 1977).
I-Me Includes: (a) Me who speaks (b) Me who listens
Commonly, it is easy to locate our internal speaker for, beyond the images and feelings we can find in our internal lives, I refer to the voice we can notice that is constantly saying in our minds as we experience thought—about anything. We easily and commonly say, when describing our thinking about something, “I can hear myself saying…,” or, “I can hear my mother saying ….”
Perhaps not so oddly as we might think as we self-reflect, we do so even though we are not employing the physical apparatus of our hearing; nor are we creating external sounds when we think, or when we say-to-ourselves, or when we listen to ourselves speaking internally.
However, internally—in our minds—the speaker in that sentence is speaking to you or me also—and thus that speaker in us is accompanied by an implied hearer-listener who is, by definition, quiet and open to the meaning that is being said internally.
Thinking, then, in a very real sense, is I-myself speaking to myself, who, we can assume, is also listening. And so we must infer that internally, when we speak to ourselves in the way that is so common to our experience of the thinking process, we are also listening to ourselves at the same time. Thus, in this presencing process, meaning flows in and through us, and as one and the same speaking-listening person: I-me. Hence, the basic structure of thinking is that:
(1) I-me speaker-speaks (2) about something/someone (3) to I-me speaker-listener
(Piscitelli, 1977)
Third, the about in the speaker-about-listener structure is what or whom we are thinking of or about; or the about is the object of thought that we are internally conversing for ourselves. The thinking-about is any content-what-or-whoever that is present to us as object in our thinking, e.g., the text, the book, the table, the event, a person, or what another person-speaker-listener is talking about. In this way, I can be sitting in a chair, and be present physically to that chair as I am physically present to the table in front of me. However, at the same time, I can be present in my thinking to my son who lives across town, or Aristotle (through his writing), who lived over 2000 years ago.
Further, in a way, I am still physically present to my son (who is across town at present) in the very basic way that I can be aware of the (also intelligible) spatial distance between us. We are still connected in some way through that known-intelligibility of things, other persons, and events.
Also, the development of technology has brought us to question the common notion of being present to someone (if not something) where that presence means we can see, hear, or touch someone. My point here, again, is to refer to the basic intelligibility (and vast meaningfulness) of physics, its laws, and our assumptions about it. In common parlance, I am not present to my son precisely because he is across town at present and, thus, I cannot be aware of the nuances of his physical presence. For instance, he may have a sunburn since I saw him last, but I cannot see it to become aware of it. However, he can tell me about it on the phone or in an e-mail. In this way, I can change my internal imagery of him and I can draw on my sympathetic feelings for him. I can become more present to him as an intelligible presence, if not a physical one. The physics of space (he is across town) is present to me within the changing but intelligible context of my relationship to him; but not in a way that I can observe his sunburn with my own eyes.
In this way, then, and while we can presence and read the text in front of us, as you are doing now as you read this page, the text is only one example of any what or whom that we can think about or object-ify, or become present to, in the way human beings do. The about-object in the subject-object-subject tri-part structure can be anything under the sun or beyond.
On the other hand, the self-present structure—the speaker-listener aspect of the structure we briefly explored above—is already there as a prior condition to objectifying (thinking about) anything or anyone, regardless of about-content, again, in the way that human beings do—in language.
Self-Present Structure
SUBJECT—-OBJECT—-SUBJECT
(speaker)(about)(listener)
About-Object (any) Presence Other-X
Any Object-X is present to me as an intelligible what-whom I am thinking about, e.g., a book, an event, or another person
Subject as self-presencing structure: I am present to myself as an abiding internal structure regardless of what X-object I presence: I listen to the other-X who is also saying-listening to me and through me. As I listen to others’ in conversation, I am allowing them to take up the speaker position as external-prevalent so that I as listener become internal-prevalent, and as my resonant-dissonant functioning and my desire-quest-dynamism spontaneously engage in my search for new insights.
Furthermore, precisely because we are constituted by this basic and abiding self-present structure, we are able to objectify many things, including even our own selves as object-X. That is, we can think about or other ourselves as object-X in the same way that we think about or other a text, a chair, an event, or another person—from within that basic self-presencing structure. That is, in speaking to my self (thinking), I can objectify myself as the about-X in the content of my thought, as if I were another person or thing. Similarly, I can be speaking with another person, and the about-X can be either-both of us and-or any other X. For instance, if together we are planning a party for next week, we spontaneously think ourselves into that event--as others.
In this way, you can say out loud or internally to yourself, for instance, I was riding my bike. Here the any-x-content also can be me as I think about myself as object-X in a self-referential way.
Thus, we are basically and already self-present—in being constituted by the tri-part structure and subject-to-subject self-present. However, from within that self-present structure we can also object-ify-X our own selves—or take ourselves within that structure as the object of it. The subject-to-subject structure is what allows me-subject to also be an object-X from within that structure. Only if I can speak to myself as another subject-speaker in my thought processes can I other myself as object-X.
Such abilities allow you to dialogue-with, free-image-think, question, and thus other the meaning-content of the text, placing any X whatsoever in the about-X thought-space between myself as first speaker, and then as listener. That dynamism includes your own self-as-object-X. In so-objectifying, we can merely contemplate any meaning whatsoever for the sheer joy of it, and we can invite new questions and insights as we go. Suspending the plausible and engaging in fictional stories or film is a product of the vast potential creativity opened-up to us through our being able to (a) be self-present as structure and (b) object-X anything whatsoever from within that basic structure.
Again, when we speak with another person, we are allowing the other person to be our speaker where what the other person is saying (a) resonates with our full field of under-meaning and-or (b) introduces dissonance—introduces questionable data that we can either overtly ask about or leave to “fester” in our arena of under-thought where questions we may not want to address have already been raised but then shunted away from our field of open awareness.
Also, saying I-Me is an identity of self-to-self—at once, implying a unity of self: (1) as listener, (2) as a subject (to subject) who can also be an object, and (3) as speaker (Piscitelli, 1977). Thus, I can say to myself (think) that the air is cool this morning; and-or I can free-image myself (and think-about or other discursively). For instance, as object-X I can image-think myself walking in the coolness under the trees somewhere in New York’s Central Park or on the moon. As a symbolic "I" (unified subject-object-subject in humans) and as our basic given structure, I have the ability to both be present to myself as subject who is reading a text (in this case, the text is meaningful object-X) and, at the same time, to objectify-other myself with and into the text.
To say this another way, we can be self-consciously present in the meaning of the text (I can objectify myself or think myself as a part of object-X). When we think ourselves into an object-X situation, we do so while remaining self-present in the basic constancy of our internal speaker-listener relationship.
Being able to read, as simple as it may seem, is already wholly dependent on this one-and-the-same structure and on our ability to language-self-as-object that is part and parcel to being human. Using I or We is already a way of holding all of this process together as a symbolic, integral unity.
…and Language
Integral with our ability to language as human, we need do nothing to make basic self-presencing happen. Rather, we are already structured to be self-present in the speaker-listener aspect of our constitution as human. That basic self-presence is part and parcel to the structure of language itself. This is so because the differentiated structure provides the prior conditions for us to throw meaning into an object form separate from ourselves and identify it with other sensible forms. Language manifests from our ability to throw meaning as object-X, and to say that same meaning to ourselves and to other subjects.
Through the basic tri-part structure, we can also throw ourselves into that objective place. In doing so, we become not only present to ourselves as a matter of merely being human, but we become present to ourselves as thrown-object in our consciousness, ready to take on the dressing of language as expressions of us, but also as separated from us for our own understanding, appraisal and ultimately, for our own formation. I can not-only say to myself, but I can say about myself as other-object.
We are self-present, then, not only as I (subject-speaker) am already present to Myself (subject-listener) but, also as Me (as-object-X) as a spontaneous part of my thinking, or at will. The high development expressed in a self-reflectie person springs from our more basic ability to (1) already be self-present and, thus, to say to myself and (2) to be able to put our own selves into that object-X place for our own consideration. That is, as a part of my thinking, I can become present-as-object-X to the already self-present self.
In other words, because of the basic self-presencing structure that we are, and just as we can think the chair-as-object-X as apart from ourselves, we also can think ourselves-as-object-X—also as apart from ourselves. Language and communications in it (as we know it as human), then, is not only what we do, but what we are as human.
Further, we can think ourselves-as-object anywhere, anytime, and in any meaning, for example, far and away from our immediate surroundings (on the moon, or in Italy, etc.). Just as we speak-to-ourselves and to others about some object-other-thing-X (thinking-about) so we can speak to ourselves and to others about ourselves. We can objectify or think about ourselves. Further, again, we are open to vast ranges of development through such thought processes. That is, we can learn in highly developed fashion and, in that learning, we can develop our self-reflective capacities. We can speak to ourselves (and others) about our selves, reflecting and expanding our thought-arena with regard to our understanding, our identities, our learned principles, and our speaking-acting in the world.
Furthermore, our qualitative concerns emerge with regard to the vast range of choices that accompany our ability to intelligently objectify and speak-to-ourselves that objectification. At the very least, the good and the bad are rooted in our developmental patterns associated with speech and complex communications, and around our need for a refining principle or set of principles that will govern our abilities and the choices that surround those abilities.
Through our basic and dynamic tri-part structure we can express ourselves—who and what we are—but also we can objectify-other in language—ourselves and anything else, again, under the sun and beyond. The self-directed and meaningful sounds, and written words, take objective-other form in and as that language. As such, our four generalized questions (developed in Part II) can approach any meaning-X; and that any-meaning-X can also be me, in or out of the company of any other X that I choose to think about or subject I choose to speak with. Again, the fact that we can grow our moral horizons (the question of the good-bad applied to ourselves) and change ourselves according to newly established meaning depends entirely on our innate specifically-human ability to think of ourselves as an entirely different-object-X other, e.g., when we compare ourselves to another person and come up wanting.
As example, think of yourself riding on an elephant across the San Francisco Bay Bridge with a stream of cars behind you on a sunny afternoon, waving and swaying with the slow movement of the elephant’s strides. Here, you are thinking of yourself as an other, and you can think yourself, as it were, into this sunny afternoon. However, such other-thinking is not the basic self-presencing aspect of our constitution we are exploring here. It is not the same basic self-presence that conditions our fantasy elephant ride or any other self-othering that we do in the first place. That is, instead of ourselves riding the elephant, we as easily can leave ourselves out of the othering situation and imagine the Queen of England riding on that elephant.
In either case, we are still self-present, placing either ourselves or the Queen of England on the elephant in the object-X place of our tri-part structure. In either case, our speaker-listener self-presencing structure conditions that we can do such self-as-other thinking, and-or place anyone or anything on that elephant in our imaginative-thought processes—and we have done so just by suggesting it here in print that, through your own resonant-dissonant dynamism, means itself to you—and behind that, me writing this document. Thus, in lightening-speed fashion, by inner direction and-or resonance, or by outer suggestion (in this case, my writing this document and you reading it), we can place anything or anyone in that about-X place in the self-presencing structure, including ourselves or the Queen of England.
This kind of language-oriented thinking—objectifying ourselves into any place or situation, fictitious or not—is so commonly available to us as to seem uninteresting to most. However, the flexibility of our self-presencing structure to other-objectify persons, things, events, and our own selves in this way, as fully developed, is constitutive of human language. The self-to-self, speaker-to-listener structure enables us to resonate-with the othered-X as spontaneous re-cognition. It enables us to desire-quest—to raise questions and speculate about new meaning-data dissonant or not recognized in, or not yet constituted in that other, including in ourselves. And it enables us then to say-to-ourselves new meaning for the othered-objectified X–as potential new insighting activity. Without our speaker-to-other-to-listener structure, we would not be potential to experience the vast range of self-development that human beings do.
Finally, new meaning that is insighted is spontaneously added-to and integrated-with our dynamic, fluid, and developing schematic field of under-meaning. In this way, what is objectified can remain object, but it also can become the catalyst for internal growth and a change of being in ourselves, e.g., the identification with principles of intelligence and excellence and the establishment and growth of our moral horizons. We see the concrete visible, audible, and touchable (sensible) material—in our case, we see the dark forms on a white background that concretely fix the contrasting tones, and hold in place the more nuanced meaning of the learned word text here. The ordering contrast holds the ordered, learned, and communal meaning in place for us to transfer to other times, places, and persons—in this case, in print or via computer screen.
In this way, the structure of human self-presence allows you to bring the text-meaning that I am writing here into your active self-presence as the conversed other—the object-about-X of that basic self-presence in you—to resonate-dissonant with and to say the text to yourself (to read), to experience the meaning I am writing about and that you are open to and ready to experience for yourself. According to that openness and readiness—openness that is staffed with our four layers of desire-quests—we insight-to-understand the new intelligibility and meaning of the words as we read and, ultimately, we in-fluence the subjects that we are.
Reading, Seeing-Hearing-Sensing, and Meaning Development
Our study reaches further back into our understanding of the difference between (a) sensing sensible items and (b) understanding vast fields of meaning. That is, meaning may be of the sensible; however meaning is not able to be sensed. Though our tri-part structure manifests in the sensible sounds of words and visible writing of speech, it is neither sensible nor is it about the sensible as sensed. Rather, the tri-part structure and the desire-quests that work within it are about meaning development, even about the meaning of what we sense. The structure is about what, through our desire-quests, we are so intent on understanding and, ultimately, on saying and doing.
Being able to read, then, or hear what others have to say, is a manifestation of our basic self-presencing structure and the throwing-meaning-into and through language that emerges from it. For hearing others, we first contrast sound with silence. For reading, we first contrast light and dark. We pay our attention-to (attend to) the distinctive sounds, and the distinctive marks on the page, with our spontaneous wonder. Then hearing others speak and reading words on a page are saying-to-myself in my tri-part structure the expressions that mean a generally-communally-learned-X and that have come in its particular form from the writer-other. Without the dynamism of the tri-part structure, then, we could not read or understand the nuanced languaged-meaning of the sounds we hear or sights we see on the page.
Further, our intelligent paying-attention-to, in part, is equivalent to our resonance-dissonance on-the-move. Being ready to understand what we are reading is to have a certain build-up of meaning all-ready with which to resonate-dissonate and an openness to further meaning development.
As we become more consciously directive of such paying-attention, we bring about further resonance-with-between our already-learned understanding and presented other-meaning in the world, and the more our spontaneous self-expressions reflect that inner meaning development of dynamic combinations of feeling, image, and meaning-rich language.
Such resonance-with is not commonly or necessarily discursive, but can be symbols and, again, feelings and images that blend into discursive forms depending on our state of development and habits of thought (Hutchinson, 1950, Article: The Nature of Insight). Through resonance, we lift the meaning out of our experience, off the page, as it were, and out of the merely sentient, or out of the silence, and the disordered or pre-ordered noise and dark around us, as it were. We speak that meaning as object-other to my self as subject (we say to ourselves) and we insight what we are ready to understand. As subject, we are already self-present and a part of the convers-ation with that meaning as we insight to understand it.
Thus, we develop that meaning through the thin veil of merely sensing the sensible on the page or screen, in the instance of reading this document, which we have also understood at some point in our past. Even that sensing is more than a book against a book on the shelf. Built on the dark against light is the meaning of the shape and order of the letters—all that is its meaning and far from sensed, and all that we had to learn at some point in our lives, way beyond merely seeing dark against light or hearing sound against the backdrop of silence. Recall the child fascinated with all tactile objects around her. Again, such an understanding of self-presencing and then presencing-X suggests that seeing is never merely an ocular experience:
Seeing … is not a passive process, ... ‘Seeing’ is itself a process of formulation; our understanding of the visible world begins in the eye. All sensitivity bears the stamp of mentality. … Visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision. Their complexity, consequently, is not limited, as the complexity of discourse is limited by what the mind can retain from the beginning of an apperceptive act to the end of it. (Langer, 1942-1993, pp. 90 & 93)
Seeing, understanding, and knowing, then, are not just “taking a look” (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000). Even our first year of infancy is about finding the meaningful distinctions within the whole that is presented to us as intelligible. The infant and baby are not books on shelves. Nor do they merely sense, but rather they seek to understand what they are sensing of the sensible world around them; and they build a meaning-foundation for more mature and nuanced understanding and language to continue building on in their imagery (a product of primitive insights) and in the feelings that become attached to that foundation. Again, that understanding becomes a resonant source within us. Sights and sounds by definition are sensible; however, what we have understood of them—their intelligibility-meaningfulness—is what appeals to our intelligence for desire-questing-insighting-to-understanding through symbol (see Finding the Mind: Foundational Review, Chapter 1).
Hence, we use the metaphor of a thin veil or strip not only to suggest a difference between prior and present understanding, but to regard the difference between the “sensed world” and sensibility, on the one hand, and its meaningfulness, or what we can understand of its intelligibility, on the other. For what we sense is what we seek to understand, or what we have already understood and spontaneously bring forward in resonant fashion.
Bernard Lonergan puts it this way:
Is this universe of being, known by true judgment, the concrete universe? I should say that it is. To know the concrete in its concreteness is to know all there is to be known about each thing. To know all there is to be known about each thing is, precisely, to know being. For me, then, being and the concrete are identical terms.
However, this view of the concrete has a presupposition. It presupposes that concepts express insights and that insights grasp forms immanent in sensible presentations. To put the matter the other way about, it presupposes that the sensible has been intelectualized through schemes, sequences, processes, developments. On that supposition, human knowledge forms a single whole, and the totality of true judgments is necessarily knowedge of the concrete. On the other hand, if one ignores or neglects insight, then human knowledge splits into two parts.... (Collection 4, 1988, 148)
Let us explore a brief example of the process and, with it, the notion of internal resonant meaning: We hear the noise of a cell phone going off. However, we have already understood it not only as some distinct noise in the background of silence, but also—now instantly, resonantly, and spontaneously—as a cell phone going off.
Rather than asking questions like: What is that?, with my resonant meaning in place, now I can ask questions like: Whose phone is that? Or: Why didn’t they turn off their cell phone? Or Who’s calling? (These are what-type questions emerging from our desire-quest-1.) Without that pre-established and now-resonant understanding of the noise’s meaning (prior insights in a burgeoning presentational and discursive field of understanding), we only hear noise—with more or less meaning to be inquired about for insight-to-understanding. What is that intrusive noise?
You hear a barking dog. If your resonance (from your prior understanding) affords that you already recognize the sound as the neighbor’s dog, your wonder may start at: What is he barking at? If you recognize it as your own dog, you already know it probably means that he is ready for his walk, and your wonder begins at whether or not the weather requires that you need a jacket, and a myriad of other thought processes. Upon first hearing a dog bark, however, a 2-year-old will wonder about the noise as such--What is it?
Further, your presently reading this text rests on a plethora of your prior insights and answers, etc., and-or on your schematic contents, coupled with the constant and lively awareness—your background resonant presencing—of the intelligible and meaningful things-persons-events around you in your regular human living—the chair you sit in, the table, the computer, the window, the carpet, your pet wagging his tail, a newspaper, your friend speaking to you, and yourself, taking a walk, reading, etc.—all at-the-ready, providing a present resonant meaning base, and creating the potent conditions for new resonance-dissonance, and for new questions to emerge within that presencing arena of meaning as your desire-quests spontaneously manifest their dynamism. Without that prior meaning, and without the implications of intelligibility in everything around you, you would be a lost person—worse than Helen Keller, who was without sight or hearing, but who at least had a mind that provided here with great feats of understanding.
Reading a text, or having a dog-moment, or even being involved in a full blown crisis, does not happen in a meaning vacuum. Rather, all that is prior, already integrated, and relevant in your past learning spontaneously, and in remarkably quick fashion, springs to inform the newly presented meaning that emerges in each situation—for your to experience and, in that experience, to say to yourself. Otherwise, we would have no notion of the order of events or what anything might mean to us.
Understanding, Misunderstanding, and Self-Transcendence
Thus, people often understand the same things differently. All conversations with others, then, begin with the dynamism of resonance-dissonance, and with the resultant potential for understanding, for misunderstanding, and for creative self-transcendence.
Especially if you are drawing from our fuller version of Finding the Mind: Foundational Review, you may begin to understand that the method of the mind is dynamic, fluid, organic, ongoing, presentational, symbolic, and discursive and, as we are developing here, quite knowable as real—manifest in the sensible, but not itself sensed. This is especially so, again, if you understand that reality is not merely what we look at “out there” via seeing alone, or by otherwise sensing, but what we have understood and (in many cases) verified about what we look at and hear, and about what we presence. The method of mind stands on the necessary conditions of a healthy brain; however, studies of the brain are not sufficient to explain the mind’s method, or the vastness of human reality that the method is open to and can come to know.
Further, the method of mind is the very process that you are using already to address and comprehend (become present to the meaning of) these words. You are not merely looking at these words. You have consciously directed or turned your attention to this text with a wealth of schematic under-meaning at your resonant-spontaneous call. Beginning with your paying attention to the text—your meaningful-presencing of it—your desire-quests cum questions continue to operate through your awareness, or your more active attending to it—through your in-tending of the meaning of what I write here, and as you read or discuss this appendix. Your desire-quests, or wonderings, are embedded in and constitute, in part, your very awareness of anything and anyone, old or new, resonant-similar and-or dissonant. Further, such awareness varies and has different degrees; and depends in good part on your prior development and, germane to any new understanding, on the openness of mind that you harbor, that is your habit, and that you bring to any situation (Piscitelli, 1985).
An Application
In our Introduction above, we said: "Far beyond the above sort of physical presence, then, as conscious, aware, and thinking beings (unlike the book or the chair or the basic physics of hand-shaking) (a) we are already involved in, and can become aware of and present to, such basic meaningful relationships; (b) we can become aware of and present to other persons who are themselves aware of me; and (c) we can become aware of what it means to be present and aware."
We commonly experience all three above in one way or another. However, the tri-part structure is revealed most clearly in (c) above because, in becoming aware of what it means to be present and aware, we have used that tri-part structure to throw-objectify that same tri-part structure. We have "conversed" it in our thought as we would any object-X, questioning it and looking for new insights in order to understand it--or to say it to myself. The tri-part structure as object, then, can remain so--an X and concept among all other X's and concepts in my thought. Or in self-reflection, I can begin to bring the actuality of it to my conscious self-awareness and, thus, bring a critical clarity to my own self-understanding.
Finally, one way to explain, in part, the dilemma of post-modern man and our dalliance with positivism is to regard ourselves in the light of the tri-part structure. That dalliance can be understood as (a) a focus on the content of object-X aspect of our intentions and (b) an obscuring of or even rejection of the subject-to-subject aspect of those same intentions and the substantial part that the whole structure plays in knowledge formation and acquisition. The outsider (metaphysical) view is a product of this two-part distortion where, in order to acquire objective knowledge focus on the X and reject the subject who knows.
On the other hand, the insider's (metaphysical) view begins from an awareness of the subject (-to-subject) as a being who, through our questions, anticipates further knowledge of all-X; and where that object-X also can be the reality of ourselves.
Conclusion
The range of our ability to develop intellectually and morally gets its flexibility from the constitution of our tri-part self-presencing structure. Only because we can objectify, and through it objectify ourselves within this subject-object-subject structure, can we lie or tell the truth, self-reflect and develop as human, become good or bad and know about it, self-transcend, or become self-conscious in the way that we do. The fact that we can tell a lie or the truth indicates that we have a moral choice to make in every telling and doing situation. Finally, history—the past, another present, and the future—becomes open and available to us because we are already self-present and because, through that self-presence, we can other-object ourselves and anything or anyone as object-X within the same subject-to-subject structure.
Subject (speaker) Object-X (anything/person) Subject (listener)
In the broader context of consciousness, then, you are already self-present; as you read, you are present to—or in the process of presencing—this text as object-X, and I am meaning to you across meta-time as I write—regardless of where or when you are.
Again, given the variety of learning that goes on in any given set of persons, is it any wonder that there is so much misunderstanding in the world. Without the possibility of mis-understanding, however, self-transcendence would not be a possibility for us either.
For a fuller exploration of self-presence and language, see Finding the Mind—Foundational Review (unpublished manuscript at this writing).
Complete set of appendixes will appear here before publication of Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory. Publication slated for late 2010 or early 2011.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)