The Pervasiveness of the Good

Notes and their numbers are for this web-published document only and do not refer to the sourcetext: Finding the Mind. (See end of document for notes.)

Section Titles:
Introduction

Our Polymorphism of Thought
Difficulty in Defining and Distinguishing the Good as Objective

Back to the Beginning—the Good as Pervasive

Development and Dialectic
Receiving: Trust as Given and Early Identity
Internalized Principles as Received, Developed, and-or Transformed
Building New Principles
An Unexamined Life
Our Project and Human Development

Quali-Meaning, Parts and Wholes

Positivism, the Good, and a Moment in the Differentiation of Mind
Right Distinctions, Wrong Philosophical Separations
Quali-Meaning as Pervasive
Common Appropriation of Scientific Distinctions

Wisdom and Love: The Exceptions in Common Parlance

Wisdom and Genuineness
The Question to Unearth Philosophical Hypocrisy
From Wisdom to the Personal
Unwanted Philosophical Discourse
Blowback
Developing the Implications of the Philosophical-Foundational Split
Quali-Meaning as Personal History
The Pragmatics of the Good, or The Insider’s View
The Practical Results of giving up or Waiting, from the Outsider’s View

Incision Applied to Our Analysis of the Mind

Development and the Good
The Good in Concrete Events and Language Expressions
Meaning (And Good as Meaningful) as Potent for Knowable-True Reality
Knowledge of True-Reality as Underpinning the Good
Passions, Philosophy, and the Pervasiveness of the Good
Applying the Structure to our Study
Choosing Not to Choose
Blank Slate or Meaning Accrual

Conclusion

Quote for Reflection

For an explicit and adequate metaphysics is a corollary to explicit and adequate self-knowledge. It follows upon the affirmation of oneself as a unity of empirical, intelligent, and rational consciousness, upon the heuristic definition of being that reveals intelligent and reasonable affirmation to be knowledge of reality, upon the account of objectivity as experiential, normative, absolute, and principal, that strips counterpositions of their apparent plausibility. However, such adequate self-knowledge can be reached by man only at the summit of a long ascent. For self-knowledge involves a self-objectification, and before man can contemplate his own nature in precise but highly difficult concepts, he has to bring the virtualities of that nature into the light of day. (Lonergan 1958, 535; & 2000, 558)

The Pervasiveness of the Good

Introduction

In the above quote, B. Lonergan regards:

For self-knowledge involves a self-objectification, and before man can contemplate his own nature in precise but highly difficult concepts, he has to bring the virtualities of that nature into the light of day.

An abiding desire for the good is one of those virtualities of our nature that our reflection here is about. Though highly dependent on developmental patterns and concrete historical circumstances, our desire for, our pursuit of, our questions about, and our resonant recognition of the good come with being human. Undergoing the experiment in Finding the Mind should bring this fact into high relief for you.

Further, if our reach is always beyond ourselves (and we know from our study that it is), we can say that such a reach is of our intentional self-transcendence. With regard to the good, and in the words of Simone Weil:

All the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good. (in Hughes 2009, referred to in Mitchell 1991)

Weil, of course, is not speaking only of persons of faith or of commonsense or of mystics, but of all persons, including but not limited to all scientists.

Also, we can place the content of the following reflection in the context of what C. Hughes refers to in his paper, “Differentiation and its Discontents,” as an exploration of one of those discontents (2009). That is generally, we are trying to find the right relationship between two fields of meaning that were once undifferentiated but that, as a product of historical development, in our time, have become separated, one from the other. Such separations, or differentiations of mind, Hughes notices, can cause discontents within those who are both inheritors and purveyors of those differentiations but who have yet to think-through and understand how to interrelate and then integrate-to-live-in those differentiations to maintain a needed sense of wholeness.

Our attempt, then, is (a) to show how two meaning fields are related, (b) to keep needed distinctions in place and in their proper venues of discourse while, at the same time, (c) to show how these two identified fields should and can be re-integrated in our thought and, again, in their proper venues of discourse.

The now-differentiated two fields of meaning are:

1. meaning-intelligibility (as is aspired to in the sciences)

2. meaning-intelligibility that is also potentially qualified, good-bad, excellent or not, etc.

If Hughes, Lonergan, and Weil speak any truth at all (and I think they do), then a critical and comprehensive exploration of human intelligence will find that the human desire for the good can be distinguished from, but in fact cannot be separated fully from, any human endeavor or field of human inquiry, and certainly not from the study of human beings and history themselves. This is so whether a study or field is objective-knowledge-oriented or one explicitly intending and-or fostering personal self-developmental and/or corrective.

Also, by the good, I mean to include all conceptual derivatives of the term as meaningful and existential, for example, the better, best, excellent, the valuable, the qualified, the worthwhile, etc. Correlative to the good, of course, and a foil for understanding it better, is the bad and, similarly, its many conceptual and nuanced derivatives, e.g., worse, worst, the terrible, the horrific, the ghastly and evil, or the negative--not mathematical negative, as in negative or positive integer, but in the common usage of negative as opposed to the good as positive.

With Weil above, let us also consider that, at least, we will only find hints of the ground for the good in the specific and concrete goods that we aspire to in our daily lives, or even in extreme crises where heroes are made; though the accumulation of goods and their opposites in such cases in history should tell us something about ourselves.

We can add to that, this: In our time (and through our intellectual inheritance) we find it relatively easy to think of (a) intelligence, the intelligent, and the meaningful intelligible as at least distinct from, and sometimes as rightly separated from (b) the intelligible as good-bad (or as we will refer to later: quali-meaningful). The above separation/distinction is a needed one in our time, especially in the sciences and in common venues where data analysis is commonly about what can be known as true and real, independent of the scientist's or professional's, etc., wishes or fears, or even our hypotheses, should those hypotheses turn out to be wrong-headed.

Philosophically speaking, however—that is, with reference to objectivity, or when we consider the potentially true-reality of any object--the separation of the good-bad from the merely intelligible has come to have a different effect than when we separate, say, apples from oranges or houses from office buildings. In the case of apples and houses, etc., and their colors, shapes, uses, etc., we have no trouble maintaining the philosophical assumption that they all can hold their places in our understanding of what can be and often is objective-true-real. Thus, we assume but need not proclaim that: it is true that the Empire State Building in New York City is a real office building, and not true that it is a house. Or it is true that this is a real apple and it really is not an orange.

Our common philosophical assumptions about the color of apples and the shapes of buildings notwithstanding, philosophical separations often do begin to show up when we talk about the distinctions between (a) the intelligible and (b) the intelligible good-bad. That is, in our common conversations, we easily can separate what we mean by (a) intelligible objects, from what we mean by (b) the good and-or bad qualities of those objects or even the good-bad as such. However, and unlike colors and shapes of buildings and fruit, in the case of the good-bad, our notions of true-reality also tend to become separated-away from their objects. That is, (a) we consider that the intelligible is potentially true-real, while (b) the good-bad is not and cannot be.

Further, in the case of the good-bad, we use an endless assortment of more or less differentiated names and expressions to forge this separation. For instance, the good is merely subjective, relative, sentimental—nice and pleasant—even admirable--but far and away from anything that we consider as factual-objective, or as true reality etc. We can see the red color of an apple or the shape of a building; but we cannot see or otherwise sense the good, so it must not be real (etc.).

In our present study (Finding the Mind [2011]) we are trying to understand something about the mysteries of the human mind. And so, at once we can recognize (a) the good as a deeply embedded part of human activity for all of history as well as (b) the seeming groundlessness of the good in our current philosophical, scientific, and common discourse. We can recognize the easy and even authentic separation of the good-bad from the intelligible in common conversations (a proper distinction in many circumstances); but also we want to explore the relationship of the often-philosophically-separated good-bad to the intelligible and potentially objective-true-real in all that we think, say, and do.

As an historical point, to leave out the good-bad from our analysis of the mind (in our study) from the beginning is to accept unthinkingly the now-differentiated underlying philosophical separation and to leave out what is a huge part of the data under consideration—us as human beings and the fullness of what it means to be human. As a part of our study, we also know (and, after undergoing the experiment, can verify for ourselves) that, in fact, human beings seek to know the good-bad and to be involved with the good—from whatever developmental horizon we find ourselves in, and however that good might manifest itself in our cultural history.

Our study has certain implications about how the good is pervasive to all human endeavors in history. In the light of our study, then, our interest here is to bring the notion of the good into a little better light for our consideration, and to show how it is already pervasive to everything human including the sciences and, in doing so, to perhaps reveal a way to, again, keep the proper distinctions in place while, at the same time, recovering for ourselves the integration that has gone missing from the separation and that is one cause of our present discontent. The following reflection gives treatment to more topical distinctions about data but also to the underlying philosophical assumptions that commonly go with those distinctions as briefly explored above.


Our Polymorphism of Thought

So we have (a) the good’s regular manifestation in history and (b) our oh-so common experience of good-bad expressions in our common discourse. Add to those that (c) our analysis of the human mind (in Finding the Mind) reveals that, pervasive to our living are (1) our verifiable desire-quests for understanding and knowing the good-bad that is true-real (manifest in our basic assumptions in common discourse), and (2) for being involved in the good-worthwhile (our set of desire-quests that underpin our deliberative speech and actions).

Thus, we come upon an internal contradiction. That is, along with our said philosophical separation in our time (that the good cannot be objective but is merely subjective, relative, etc.), in our daily lives we work out of a different, basic, and latent philosophical assumption. That assumption is that, on the contrary and indeed, the good-bad can be and often is true, objective, factual, and real. Indeed, a common refrain might be: if not for the true-real good, what in the world is it all for?

As example of our the-good-can-be true-real assumption, if you spill your morning coffee all over the kitchen floor, or witness an automobile accident, you are not as concerned with the physics of the coffee on the floor, or the crumbling of the autos, as you are with the disturbance of an ordered and qualified life (or the true-real good of order in your living environment), and the true-real well-being of the people in the accident.

Our polymorphism shows up when, on the other hand, when asked to explain how the good-bad is or can be objective-true-real if we cannot touch or otherwise sense it, we commonly cannot give an account of that objectivity; and when giving it any thought at all, we must assume that, in fact, the good-bad neither can be objective, nor true, nor real.

So while our latent philosophical grounds work for us about the objective/true/real good-bad all day long and into the night, our problematic philosophical grounds tell us exactly the opposite (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).

The implications of such a contrary split in a person’s philosophical grounds are vast. But that such opposed philosophical assumptions (the good can and cannot be true-real) can live side-by-side in one person is, in part, what Lonergan means when he talks about common sense and its polymorphism of mind (1958 & 2000).

Hughes might refer to living with such internal hypocrisy as a discontent; though (if I understand him correctly) Hughes is speaking more of the problems of living in our time with so many differentiations that need to be related and integrated, rather than specifically of one person holding opposing philosophical views. For us, however, such terms and their meanings are far from mutually exclusive.

In either case (a) of field-mind meaning differentiation or (b) of philosophical assignments of objectivity-true-reality to those meaning fields, we will find that such diverse assumptions are pervasive. On the one hand, as our experiment should make clear to you, to erase our good-bad qualitative notions from human living would be like trying to erase air from breathing, color from red, or water from rain. In fact, not much is left of human history if we omit our notions of good-bad from human living and our accounts of it.

And yet, on the other hand, in our half-thought, and from our polymorphism of mind, we can still claim that the good-bad has no foundation in what we mean by objective-true-real.

Further, the objectivity of an historian is the objectivity that also includes quali-meaning as objectified data, or the historian considers and reports on how the good-bad is actually played out in that specified history. This is so both in terms of (a) what the studied people thought and did (for us, we know that the question for the good and its manifestation were and are always operative) and (b), in more remote terms, in the historian’s selective process and emphases that go into collecting and writing about historical data.

If so, and if we are to have qualified (ahem) self-knowledge, then regardless of such oppositions, and regardless of its difficulty, we must consider all of what comes with being fully human, or we must consider the virtualities—the givens of our lives. These givens include our desire-quests-to-question about the good and the bad and our place in it. Namely, we must consider that and how, with little or no self-knowledge in place, we actually do continue to desire-quest to understand the good-bad and we regularly and spontaneously play the good out in all of our speech and actions.

Further, we must consider that and how we proceed by already assuming the complete truth, objectivity, and reality of our good-bad judgments about concrete things, persons, and events in all of our common life-activities. Human history reveals the fact of the assumptions of the good--in part what Lonergan refers to as the good of order (1972).

And so in our study of the human mind we are called to account for our own polymorphism, and for how the good-bad is so pervasive to our thinking and acting in the world.


Difficulty in Defining and Distinguishing the Good—Its Objectivity

Identifying and verifying our desire-quest for the good, and defining the good as objective-true-real, however, are two different things. In our experiment, we fairly easily can identify the desire-quest in ourselves and in all other human beings. And in that identity-of, we go behind the manifestation of the good-bad in the object, as it were, to discover in ourselves the universal desire-for and anticipation-of the good as a part of our being itself.

Briefly, the desire-quest for the good is a part of our very being. Though our questions are highly developmental and culture-specific, all of our speaking and acting is inseparable from enacting good-worthwhile meaning in our history.

However, there are acts, objects, and events that we deem good and-or bad, and there is the good itself as an object that we want to understand better. The metaphysics of the good (what the good itself actually IS and how and why IT IS SO) is notoriously more difficult to pin down. Here we have our What is it/is it so? set of desire-quests, but with the good-bad as their object. Or we are exploring the good-as-object independent of human motivations or what human beings assume or anticipate about the potential true-reality of the good. Aristotle puts it this way:

Every art or applied science and every systematic investigation, and similarly every action and choice, seem to aim at some good; the good, therefore, has been well defined as that at which all things aim (trans. 1962, 3).

That may or may not be helpful, but it does describe the pervasiveness of the good in the human reality that is our present study. Also, again, the good as human motivation is dependent on highly variable developmental patterns--some creaturely, and many more particularly human--that are present in all of us—a study of which will reveal a wide range of horizons or viewpoints about, indeed, what is truly good or bad.

A good start, however, is again Aristotle’s exploration of the good in his Ethics. Here Aristotle says that the good is what we aim at. So that we assume an inherent and non-arbitrary way of choosing—a desire-quest as given, but a set of developing (learned) principles that frame, guide, and govern our human choices and actions in all concrete events where, importantly in those events, there are no fixed data:

… Thus our assertion that a man becomes just by performing just acts and self-controlled by performing acts of self-control is correct; without performing them, nobody could even be on the way to becoming good. Yet most men do not perform such acts, but by taking refuge in argument they think that they are engaged in philosophy and that they will become good in this way. In so doing, they act like sick men who listen attentively to what the doctor says, but fail to do any of the things he prescribes. That kind of philosophical activity will not bring health to the soul any more than this sort of treatment will produce a healthy body.

… let us first agree that any discussion on matters of action cannot be more than an outline and is bound to lack precision; for … one can demand of a discussion only what the subject matter permits, and there are no fixed data in matters concerning action and questions of what is beneficial, any more than there are in matters of health. (trans. 1962, 35-40) (my emphases)

First, and taking medicine as example, generally stated: we take the amount of the right medicine needed to cure the disease. However in each specific instance, the right medicine and the (best) amount will differ, for instance, for a small child or even a smaller adult as compared to a larger one. Hence, at the level of generality, the principle applies to all. However, in the specifics of initiating a cure, there are no fixed data. To heal rightly (well) then, the physician must have that last insight or set of insights that match the right medicine, and the right amount of that medicine, as a general rule and intent, to the particular patient. However, the patient’s situation and exact body weight may vary tremendously or not at all—affecting what the good really is in this one case.

Note that this is one case but that, in that case, the criteria of the good is the initiation of a cure, and that the right amount for THIS patient is really and truly good. On the other hand, that same amount may be bad (and really and truly so) in another differently-situated or differently-sized patient.

This scenario of the good as it is played out in the no-fixed-data details of living reflects Lonergan’s notion of the good—that it is always concrete (1972, 27). As such, we can note an ongoing tension built-in to human living--in the relationship between the general principle, even the general rules and principles we have come to live by, and the application of those generalities in the specifics of one's life.

In other words, just slapping-on general rules without further thought about contingencies and details on the part of the slapper is a prescription for folly. It is folly not only in our common experience of having done so but also, now we can see that, as a metaphysical reality, the universe is structured such that such slapping commonly won't work well.

The other oversight is to think that, once we have the principles in place, they will operate on their own and that such installing of principles is what makes us good. As suggested above, Aristotle doesn't let us get away with that oversight either--in order to be good, we must not only have developed and installed good principles but also put them into performance.

We also can suspect that we can identify good rules to follow, like the Golden Rule, or general protocols and directives, etc., but also that actually applying those rules and protocols to persons (including ourselves), things, and situations as we go through life is more of an art than a science. To take off on a common phrase: the devil may be in the details, but also therein lays the good.

Second, our study differentiates the aim for the good that Aristotle comments on. We go behind, as it were, expressions of the good, and all of the many variables of the good-bad as applied to data-objects that Aristotle refers to when he says above, “there are no fixed data in matters concerning action and questions of what is beneficial.” In that experimental journey we find in our own study of our own consciousness Aristotle’s notion of aim, or we find a well-differentiated and personally identifiable set of developmental desire-quests that intend or have intentions. As our experiment reveals, these desire-quests are fueled by a basic desire-fear complex with all its feelings and images and, again as our study reveals, include in-the-limit our desire-questing to know and to be involved in the intelligible-meaningful-good.

Further, and besides the good being identified with details in the process of applications (in the concrete), the difficulty in defining the good as a general notion is rooted, in part, in the fact that, as our desire-quests emerge into questions, they tend to conform to (a) habits and (b) conceptual frameworks. Also, that good tends to conform to (c) general developmental principles that govern all creatures (including human creatures) (Lonergan 1958 & 2000); (d) principles learned from within a complex spectrum of cultural meaning and, as further differentiated, in other diverse fields of meaning, e.g., in the sciences and professions.

The good tends to conform, but not necessarily. That is, the universe of meaning is diverse. And because a desire-quest and a question are basically a probing-search for new insights, and because even when we have insights, more questions are always raised, we remain potential to stretch beyond the confines of our present momentary and limited aim and its conceptual apparatus.

And again, as Aristotle and Lonergan suggest, as we enter the details of our lives there are no fixed data. Rather, in all of life we need to think our way into understanding and speaking-acting the concrete good in the endless details and non-repeatable events that we understand and create in human history.

So we have two discernible aspects of the good as metaphysical:

1. The desire-quest for the good (both to understand and to be involved in) is a fundamental part of what it means to be human, and humanly intelligent, in history. In other words, all human history is a response to a very human complex of questions: What is, and is it worthwhile to say-do-be?

2. The concrete field of the good—human beings speaking-acting-creating in history--has no fixed data. That is, there is generally always a person, thing, or event; and then there is this person, thing, or event, all of which differ in some way from all other persons, things, and events. The THIS is where the good is worked out.

With the above in mind, and with the insight provided by Lonergan that the good is always concrete, we become faced with a choice about our own philosophical foundations. That is, in a search for the objective good that can be known aside from how it is actually instantiated by persons in history, we must understand those persons in one of two ways:

1. First, we can understand persons as metaphysical outsiders—subjects searching for some Absolute Objective Meaning that can be identified and understood “scientifically” once and for all. That is, under this outsider-view, what we mean by objective is: without reference to ourselves as scientists or as human beings in history. And we want the good before it needs to become concrete.

2. Or second, we can understand ourselves and other human beings in history as subjects who are metaphysical insiders. That is, we can view ourselves as subjects--desire-questers who are inexorably involved in history, but who also are legitimate objects viewed from within that history. (See appendix 7.)

That is, as conscious and intelligent beings, we are subjects who are also intelligible objects to be understood from within the field of real-being. Here, our own subjectivity is a dynamic part of the objectivity we seek.

However, our basic structure (we are conscious being-subjects who intelligently objectify and act in terms of the good) does not and cannot split the universe of being into (a) subjects whose full being and acts somehow stand outside of being and where the scientist takes a kind of godseye view, and (b) objects that are potentially objective-true-real from that outsider view. Rather, we are subjects who are true-real beings, whose acts in history can be known as true-real, and whose choices (to speak and act) are governed by aims and principles of the good.

If we re-read Aristotle’s quotes above, we may see that the metaphysical view that underpins his statements seems to be that we are metaphysical insiders rather than outsiders. For Aristotle, the good is not assumed to be “merely subjective,” but rather the good is assumed to be a part of the true-reality that we aim at. The good as constantly expressed in human history (we know now by way of our identity of our desire-quest for it) is not and cannot be separated in some way from what is the true-reality of human history.

Aristotle, of course, did not have the problem of knowing (epistemological) that we do thanks to the scientific revolution. Nevertheless, it does not follow that the advent of the problems of the scientific revolution mean that the “the-good-is-merely-subjective” view is the correct view, or one that can ever reconnect our good-speech/acts with what we assume is objective-true-reality. We are not God. We only have and live in human history. We are, in Lonergan's terms, fundamentally heuristic.

Further, searching for the “holy grail” of the good that, from an outsider’s view, transcends our mere subjectivity to gain some sort of Metaphysical and General Certainty on the part of the scientist speaks more of Simone Weil’s view of our deep desire for the infinite good, rather than to our ability to discover it in this life outside of the no-fixed-data arena of meaning—or rather than to the reasonability of our expectations of finding it—as some “thing” separated from actual human history and our concrete activities in it.

We find the difficulty we speak of (in the heading of this section), then, perhaps in our view of our selves in relationship to the good, to the good of being, and both to what we mean by potentially objective-true-real. I leave you with that question: of your own metaphysical foundations, and proceed with our reflection on the good drawn from an insider’s philosophical view. We will resume our exploration of our insider/outsider views later in this essay.


Back to the Beginning—the Good as Pervasive

We may begin with sensitive consciousness, our desire-fear complex, and our human potential to develop. Then we find ourselves situated in a human community where (as Aristotle puts it) we are equipped to receive the habits and traditions about what-is and what-is worthwhile-to-say-do that those persons in our culture have developed and passed down to us. And, we can add, we are prepared (spontaneously) to speak and act into our history of being, and to begin a self-reflective and developed inquiry into what we have received as habitual.

Even that receiving, however, is drawn through our wondering apparatus though that apparatus may be in seed form and remote from the outer direction we find ourselves in—What am I supposed to say-do? As receiving children, the basic structure is far less differentiated than what you have at your spontaneous disposal at present. We can suggest that our needs as children--to speak and act before we understand--in part, accounts for our attraction-to and dependence-on those around us for our well-being. The long road of education, especially in quasi-democratic cultures where taking personal responsibility is key, in its broader movement calls for a migration from such outer to inner direction.

Drawing from our experiment in Finding the Mind, in critically-controlled self-reflection, we find our four basic desire-quests in place and already operating in and for us, and as basic to our desire-quest to also understand ourselves, or our own set of desire-quests (as we are doing in our experiment). We can infer from this discovery that, though highly developmental and culture-dependent, we were born with these desire-quests as potential to be developed in their historical setting, but also to be a part in forming and developing the culture we live in, in that history.

As such, our desire-quests for knowing the intelligible-good-bad (desire-quests-1-2) and for being involved in the really worthwhile (desire-quest-3) and the ultimately worthwhile (desire-quest-4) are pervasive to one-another both in form and meaning-content. Thus, they are mutually self-developing. In other words, our desire-quests all work together, are more or less differentiated (they are developmental along with the meaning that passes through them), and their meaning is pervasive--as content, it informs all of our desire-quests.

In brief, and in fact, we begin our human being in an undifferentiated state with regard to the intelligible and the good-bad. Only later-on in our movement of growth can we consciously separate the good-bad complex from the intelligible (as we do in our experiment and in our cognitional analysis where we ask what-is-it regardless of how we might evaluate it). Even if the culture we live in harbors the distinction as systematic in fields and professions, (as most Western cultures do), personally we still may live out our lives without carving out that distinction for ourselves in any systematic way. Our development towards differentiation of mind must do just that--develop. Though we are potential to do so, potentiality brings with it no guarantee.


Development and Dialectic

In Insight: A Study of Human Understanding Lonergan isolates four basic methods that apply to the sciences: classical, statistical, genetic (development) and dialectic (1958 and 2000). The natural-physical sciences are commonly governed by classical principles, and statistical science governs numerical aspects of events. Further, though developmental patterns and principles are evident in any life form, they take on distinctive form in human intelligence and being in the world. Finally, dialectical method governs specifically human concerns (1972).

Human developmental (genetic method) and dialectical methods and their principles are our concern in this section.

Genetic and dialectical methods are a part of what it means to be a living human being. We can foster and learn about them, but they are not "received" from our cultural conditioning--they come with being human.

Furthermore, our desire-quests that ever-reach for the good provide the dynamism for our specifically-human development; and that method of development is governed by a range of patterns and principles. Again, genetic method and its general principles apply to any life form. In the case of human beings, general genetic principles are given and accompanied by dialectical principles; both are potent (they may be fostered or derailed); and both provide their own dynamism as they emerge from and are applied-back to human beings (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000). Though their manifestation is a part of what is means to be human, both developmental and dialectical principles in any human being are conditioned by familial and cultural environment, and they can be enhanced through self-reflection—through consciously taking up our own developmental processes and the dialectics of human living.

Further, a plethora of other principles that come to govern our lives are received-learned. As learned they are insight-based and come to be established through this long developmental and learning process. And they are underpinned by the substantial given methods of human development and dialectic. As we grow (develop), we take on more and more meaning. From within that movement of growth, dialectic is how we settle tensions and work out the good-bad in the ever-changing details of our lives as we live in them, in the small and large history of our human being. Dialectic is what we do when we parse out meaning, and when we separate the wheat from the chaff in our human living.

Furthermore, just as our undeveloped feeling-desire base is first-attached to our received-good, so our undeveloped feeling-rejection or abhorrence is first-attached to our received-bad. Unfortunately, if the content of that reception is poorly drawn, it still provides the basic flooring of our further experience as human. The worse it is, the more unraveling and reconstituting will be needed.

Also, pervasive to our set of desire-quests is our potential to self-reflect and, with it, the need to understand the why of both the good and the bad. This is so not only about what we first-felt and-or imagined (like avoiding pain or fostering comfort), but also as it was received from those around us.

An initial differentiation that we undergo as a part of our human development, then, is centered on the distinction between (a) our undeveloped and open-to-content feeling-imagination and (b) our more developed installment of received habits and principles that come to govern our notions of the good-bad.

Dialectical method comes into view as a very human method governing our developmental patterns. First, we find our constant calling to work though the details of life as we develop in and through it. So again we find a dialectical tension already installed in the metaphysics of our human reality where the variety and nuance of the concrete good is always with us.

Second, dialectic also comes into play with the tension between mutually developing human aspects. That is, we experience a tension between

(1) given (with infancy) and then received-flooring of infant-child good-bad feelings-and-images, and

(2) later content development--of (sometimes conflicting) familial-culturally received good-bad behaviors; then,

(3) (potentially) what we come to understand of that good-bad for ourselves through the active involvement of our desire-quests in self-reflection—the why as we inspect ourselves and our traditions.

Also, both the good and the bad are situated in the context of our (a) desire to know what is so (the true good-bad), as well as our (b) desire to say and do what is really worthwhile and, thus, to be intimately involved in the good (Piscitelli, 1977 & 1985). It bears recalling that, in its historical order, 1 and 2 above have their emphasis first as we are guided by our given desire-fear apparatus and then others’ expectations first, before we can come to be reflective and self-reflective (through 3), and before we can fully understand what we are expected to say-do-be, and why we are supposed to say-do-be it.

In brief, we are first constituted by our desire-quests, then we are other-motivated-directed, and only then are we potential to become self-motivated-directed where our executive functions are fully developed and in full-force.

Further, in our initial state, we start with the pervasive desire and quest for the good directly associated with our feeling and image base and, through our development, we proceed to define it in terms of, and to winnow it away from, the bad--so that we can know, be involved in, and bring about the good. We do so (a) within a movement of human development (and lack of it) across a whole range of specific cultural contexts and (b) in dialectical fashion. We employ dialectic to the degree that we can begin to understand nuance and call to thought that inhabits the given tension between our general governing principles and our learning from our past experiences, on the one hand and, on the other hand, the applications of those principles in the no-fixed-data, ultra-variable field of meaning we call life.

Lonergan explains dialectic in the context of the tension between what he refers to as positions and counter-positions:

Positions express the dynamic structure of the subject qua intelligent and qua reasonable. Counterpositions contradict that structure. Whenever a person is explicitly affirming—presenting or affirming—a counter-position, he is involved in a queer type of contradiction. The contradiction is not between statements that he makes; the contradiction is between the statements that he makes and the subject that he is. He is intelligent and reasonable, and purports to be intelligent and reasonable, and he would not admit any fall from intelligence or reasonableness. Yet the implications of the one, the real consequences, so to speak, of the one, and the implications of the other, which are in the field of conceptions or a field of judgments, are in conflict.

Such a conflict tends to work itself out in one way or another. It sets up a tension, and it is a principle of movement, and that … is a fundamental instance of what is meant by dialectic. It is the concrete, it involves tension and opposition, and it is a principle of change; and the change is not so much, not merely, in the statements, it will also be in the subject who comes to a fuller realization, a fuller appropriation, of what he himself really is. (my emphases) (1996, 74-75)

Our desire-quests as virtualities are immediate to our existence as human. As concrete, what is immediate to our questions (and thus, to us), then, is our notional awareness of more to understand, say, and be; and that notional awareness is manifest in the movement of desire-quests within us (1). That is, our desire-quests, including for the good-worthwhile, come with being human—we need not understand or do anything in order for them to operate and develop in our thinking.

On the other hand, habits and principles of the good are learned, received-derived, and erected in our thinking from the activities of those more basic desire-quests. It follows that, in part, what is naturally reactive in us, before we learn anything after being born, is anything that violates the ordered movements in our given internal structure. The basic structure as intelligent is notional (aware, desire-questing for, anticipating more to understand-know, say, and be).

Normative to that desire-quest is our reasonability. That is, again, we are "intelligent and reasonable, and (we purport) to be intelligent and reasonable, and (we) would not admit any fall from intelligence or reasonableness."

As such, humanity brings with it (as natural-normative) both development and dialectic around established habits and principle of the good, as both given (as a built-in and constantly manifest desire-quest) and learned. Thus, the tension of development and dialectic are central methods engraved into the choices we are called to make in the details of our living. If that is the case (and our experiment sets up the conditions to verify that it is), then living is, if nothing else, dynamic. That is, both momentary stasis and the interruption (or even violation) of that stasis in the working-through of human living are inherent to that living in history.

Thus, the basic structure is notional. As notional, it can be violated, not necessarily when what we have come to think or know has been interrupted and/or violated, but rather when that structure as fundamentally dynamic-tensional is violated. If so, then the fundamental notional-tension can be violated at either end of the spectrum:

(a) Calcification around doctrine/dogma, and unmoving ways of life (in essence, death of the soul). I am-know-say all, and/or

(b) a conscious attempt to abandon our notional desire-quests and their subsequent insights to empty and nihilistic carelessness. I am-know-say nothing. We become trees dead-at-the-root.

The working-out of the real-true-good in the data-specifics of concrete living is what we do in the tensional in-between of our lives (through our desire-quests-3-4). Here the tension is 3-dimensional. That is: first, we are in-between the two extremes--of embracing all-being or no-being as reflectively-established decision; and second, in that history, we are in-between that general embrace and the specific-concrete that, in fact, is our human living-in-act (Voegelin 1957).

As such, living in the in-between is dynamic (in the meaningful good that is thought-through in the now [like administering the right medicine to the right person in the right place in the right amount, etc.]) and it is transcendent (notional--reaching for/aiming at the highest good available to us and always looking past that finite worthwhile-good towards an infinite good [as Simone Weil suggests above]).


Receiving: Trust as Given and Early Identity

As Aristotle suggests, we begin with receptiveness (we are equipped to receive). Such receptiveness in intelligent beings suggests prior operative principles of trust—trust that we will be given all that we need to grow into healthy human beings. Beyond that initial trust, the earlier we receive or learn a set of principles governing what it means to be involved with what is really worthwhile (the good), the more formative those principles are as basic directives of our motivations, thought, speech, and act; the more we identify with them as the core of our existence and source of our spontaneity; the more we can become imprisoned by them, and the more difficult they are to expunge or to transform (2).

As principles we have identified-with (sometimes down to our cells), the principles of the good are embedded in our feelings and image-base as human. They can send their roots of meaning into the very physics of our material being. For instance, the more we are heavily indoctrinated in cultural habits and practices early on (where to question is to be shunned or even killed), the more difficult it will be for our deeper-set desire-quests to set up and foster principles of dialectical openness and critical choice (3).

On the other hand, without some solid received principles erected early on, before we can develop our reflective and self-reflective capacities to understand the why of them, and our concomitant development of a sense of self-direction, we are prone to trust uncritically, and to wander and attach ourselves to whatever attractive mentor or pied piper we can find who fits our transient needs at the time.


Internalized Principles as Received, Developed, and-or Transformed

The principles of the good that we establish in our thought (doctrine, policy, laws, etc.) come to govern that thought, as well as our speech and actions (or negation of same). Those principles are learned and developed—either mimicked (accepted from our parents, authority figures, texts, etc.) and-or insighted (having gone through the questioning process to challenge our inner developing selves—to understandwhy) for ourselves.

Principles as accepted doctrine are often covertly or overtly passed down to us as traditions in our familial and cultural milieu. We take them up as habits of thought that govern our activities with-or-without our thoughtful pursuit of their why-meaning. They need not but can imprison our thinking and the creative processes. They are what are expected of us in our familial-cultural milieu. Much of what we mean by dysfunctional is what we have received, and may have even worked at the time, but what does not meet with our deeper normative patterns of well-being (what Lonergan refers to above as our positions) as that tensional well-being attempts to emerge and find its place in our lives as we become adults.

Further, we learn and set up principles of self-governance from:

1. our outer influences, e.g., familiar-cultural expectations and directives (as adults we “mold” our children) and

2. our inner structure of positional well-being. That structure sets up its own principles and continually calls for a basic integrity of being despite outer influences.

This double-field of (inner-and-outer) learning creates the potential for further inner tension or even conflict born of “owning” and shuffling around in conflicting learned inner principles.

Unlike our desire-quests that are immediate to us, then, our governing principles can emerge from them and be fostered in learning. Thus, our principles can be mediated—built “up” from the activities and call of our basic desire-quests. This building-up includes principles that come to govern our initial openness to understanding that is so obvious in infants and young children--our notional state of affairs (Piscitelli 1985). That state of affairs has its momentary stasis or end in new insights--in learning. Then we may be called to change, especially where conflicting principles have become rooted in our being so that our semi-conscious or unconscious being itself suffers from being divided. As Aristotle suggests in his Ethics:

… the virtues are implanted in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature: We are by nature equipped with the ability to receive them, and habit brings this ability to completion and fulfillment. … Furthermore, of all the qualities with which we are endowed by nature, we are provided with the capacity first, and display the activity afterwards. (trans. 1962, 33)

Our study suggests that, indeed, we are equipped to receive the virtues; and by virtue we at least mean the reception (habit OR insighting the why of) and the erection of inner principles of the-good that come to govern our understanding, our speech, and our acts.

So again we have a two-fold source of received principles--the outer source, from our familial-cultural traditions, and the inner source, from the core of our being (positional) that, in turn, and depending on the state of our inner conflict, often provides the internal gauge for any new learning that we do.

That equipment for reception manifests in a set of learned and habituated principles that govern our motivations and activities. For instance, we can be habitually open to new meaning; whereas closure to all new meaning (dogmatism) violates the given positional situation (Piscitelli 1985). However, that equipment is not itself a set of principles, but is our given aiming. It consists of our basic set of notional desire-quests that we are exploring here and in our main text: Finding the Mind.

If so, then the basic desire-quests as open and notional themselves are potential to set up principles either in unison with, or as opposed to other learned principles (positions and counter-positions). Further, those principles, derived from our inner sources, can become working and consciously accepted principle of openness and, considering the actual nuances involved with human living, of a dialectical approach to understanding meaning, knowing truth, and developing, saying, and doing the good, best, most excellent.

In any case, our learned principles tend to frame our anticipations--what we pay attention to--and, to some extent, of what is, and of what is good-bad, of what it means to be human, and of what it will mean for us in our specific humanness in our constant-now.

If we question what to say-do always in terms of the true-real good and our learned principles about it (and we do), then that good as intrinsic to what we say-do in history is the synthesis of our inner and outer true-reality.

Again, considering our metaphysics, from the insider’s view, the subject, and the distinction between subject-object, are still within the universe of being (aside from which there is nothing {Lonergan 1958 and 2000})—a universe that we are presently involved in questioning, understanding, and living in, and the universe we are involved in discovering just how pervasive the good is in that universe.

And again, our desire-quests are underpinned by our fundamental set of desires and fears. This set is mutually informing with our basic structure and its activities, and with our learned principles. Thus, our desires and fears can be and often are influenced, tempered, and changed by what we experience and learn (again, even our physics can be so-tempered). In our case, we desire to know, to say, and to be involved in the good-worthwhile; and we fear being separated-from or abandoned-by the good (Piscitelli, 1977).

Though learned principles are comprehensively directive, only the principle of openness—the one that leaves our development and our dialectical dynamism in place between other learned principles and their application in the field of the concrete good—can match and direct us in the constantly changing this-ness of the data of our human existence. Through that applications-now which constantly issues in human history, our performance then become IS-reality in history. (See appendix 7.)

Our stated and-or unstated principles, then, are embedded in our traditions, received, desire-quested for, resonated-with and recognized, and learned and relearned—they first are formed and mimicked from received practices and habits, long before we are able to explore and know the why of them fully. They become a part of us. Then they are potential to be appropriated into our complex of understanding through our questioning why (insighted, understood, and interrelated-integrated). Or we may change what we find and who we are through our exploration in reflective thought. We cannot do so but from within our given cultural context. However, the built-in basic structure and its built-up principles provide for a potential critique of ourselves and that culture. We can do so through tapping into that deeper set of notional desire-quests and their also-learned positional principles.

In either case of sources, our learned-received principles become spontaneous and habitual frameworks for our self-directions in the details of our lives and as human beings. I am a person who…. We can transform, and then we issue in that (or another) who. On the other hand, we tend to assume our earlier-learned principles—to come to think not about them, but rather with and through them. This early-learning is why breaking through counter-positions is so difficult. Their conflicting roots can have transformed and be actually woven into our very desire-fear complex, as well as into the intimate connections between that complex and the physics of our being.

A further nuance: the principles received from outer sources--ones that come to govern our motivations and our speech-acts--also emerge from our desire-quests--what is expected of me from those I trust? is a what-is-it type question. As example, the reception of the rule: don't ask questions already sets up a conflict with natural wonder and the principles of openness to understanding, knowing, and saying-doing the worthwhile that would be established if left alone or fostered. Part of our education, then, is to understand that, though some principles are a part of everyone’s being (sourcing from or matching the positions to the extent that they are developed well), principles also may be quashed.

At the very least, we cannot begin any communication by assuming others’ set of principles are the same as my own.


Building New Governing Principles

As born-in, then, our desire-quests to know-say-be (involved with) the worthwhile-good are a part of the method, aim, and intent of the mind (Piscitelli 1977). We are on constant call, searching, recognizing the good as resonant to our internal order and anticipations, and its developmental state of affairs, and inviting new insights. We do so only to find we have come upon a new set of questions.

Our insights, however, can be contrary to our present internal order and, as such, are set to create internal tension and to potentially transform our internal meaning as they become integrated with it. New questions and their insights, then, are potential to inspire our new growth--breaking down and building up-and to guide us to speak and act in terms of it. Such growth (as growth) is creative and has the potential to foster the setting up of new and better principles that then will govern our thought, speech, and actions with a modicum of spontaneity. Breakdowns of internal meaning can be so severe, however, as to be transformative but not transcendent.

Also, those principles will vary with developmental patterns, but will influence our pre-conscious selective process as well. In that process we select and-or reject meaning that is potent to come into our more conscious purview. So in a very real sense, we can come to see what we could not see before, or block-out what we may clearly see under other circumstances. Here we mean by seeing, of course, taking notice of and bringing our present understanding to bear on what we notice and what we want to understand more about.

We choose what we see more or less consciously, depending on the state of our inner development. However, the world of meaning is diffuse, undefined, and even infinitely endless (not fixed). And so, not our more or less conscious choices, but our range of choices comes to us from what our preconscious selective process invites and-or allows through its preformed gates. That pre-formation, in part, is set by our inner-outer received principles drawn generally around our desire-quested-to-understood meaning-truth-good and ultimate good (Piscitelli 1985).

Further, again, our built-up principles may change through a migration of development and-or through conversion experiences (4). And some new learning may come into and live in conflict with other learning and, if not integrated well, can make hypocrites of us all. Nevertheless, learned principles can become core to our being. Once grown-up, grown-in, and habitualized, we are hard-pressed to stamp them out or transform them for our peace of mind. They are spontaneous to and directive of our being.

Even in the worst extremes of human living, then, we come to identify closely with our learned principles, especially those that are received in our early learning—so closely that sometimes even the threat of death cannot bring them into question or dislodge them (some would die rather than breach them—I cannot be the good who I am and breach these principles). And a break with what is principled and identified-with in us, and whether the principles, in fact, are good or bad for us, can also be equivalent to, or at least accompanied by, what in psychology is generally referred to as a mental breakdown.

Similarly, a recovery from such a breakdown at least includes the rebuilding of and making-habitual a set of comfortable inner directives (where we need not re-question everything that comes our way), or governing principles erected according to what we newly learn, what we identify with, and what we now consider as truly good for us.

Further, our desire-quest-3 (to be involved with what is really worthwhile), besides manifesting in our daily activities, issues in learned, and now-embedded, principles that come to operate “behind” those daily activities. We draw the general principle from what is impressed upon us early on, and from what we recognize as valuable in those specific activities and events. What is general about those events then can become a general rule for living in similar circumstances. Our minds can be literally peppered with more or less specific rules, and more or less general principles generated from our experience. The more general, of course, the more comprehensive is the principle.

The more comprehensive, the more we are called to mediate who we are into each specific situation. The less general rule, I always take good care of my dog, Rover, yet calls for its set of details in the daily-dynamic-concrete. The more general rule, I always take good care of my pets, calls for more working-out of the concrete-dynamic details of that rule. The even more general principle of life: I am a good person and always try to do what is good-best, is comprehensive, but much more remote from those dynamic details.

Further, these more remote principles give the frame for what is normative according to our history of learning. Within that relative normativity, the variability of our more proximate development occurs where that internal development may lead us to dissolve and replace, or sublate, or transform those same long-standing principles.

It is our desire-quests, and our twin principles of development and dialectic, that promote such breakthroughs in our ever-living aim at understanding and at attaining the good for ourselves (Lonergan,1958, 451-487 & 2000, 476-511).

Furthermore, as Aristotle relates, there are no fixed data where human actions are concerned. Life-history moves and changes; our past is intelligently connected to our present and our future; and our experience varies from moment-to-moment and from one set of details to another. (As the saying goes: We never put our feet in the same river twice [paraphrased.]) History can only repeat itself in general and-or analogous fashion. We are never in the same event in the same context, with the same people, at the same time and place, etc. In this way, Aristotle suggests that ethics is a living thing—always an expression of the tension between who we are fully as characters-in-relation, and the applications of that character in the ever-changing details of human affairs (trans. 1962, 35).

Throughout life and in any cultural milieu, human beings continue to desire-quest and grow through those detail-rich events—we continue to ask the questions for good-bad-worthwhile that call for subsequent insights, judgments, speech, and actions within a given horizon and context; and we continue to self-correct from that same basic set of desire-quests. Even with a small amount of self-reflection, those questions and insights, in turn, can foster our development from one horizon and set of principles, to another. Our insights find resting places in our habituated principles that, though changeable and sometimes conflicting, guide us in that life.

Progressions


Givens

• Desire-fear complex

• Undifferentiated but structured set of desire-quests

• Potential for development/dialectic

Learned-Developed

Learning/development

• Is "received" from inner positions and from outer familial-social-cultural influences

• Results in influences/transformations of feeling-image and development of under-meaning base, and includes sets of principles that govern our thought and expression

• Is received overtly and-or covertly (children often learn what we don't know we are teaching them)

• Often is polymorphic and conflicting (received principles can conflict with one another)

• All are involved with more or less differentiated quali-meaning

• As inner-positional, learning is the transformation of self and the installation of principles of openness, development, and dialectic

• As outer influence, learning is a transformation of self and the installation of whatever comes "down" to us from our experiences of things, persons, events in the context of community.

And so we can say that, first, the good is difficult to define but always present to us as substantial to our desire-quests and, as satisfied, as an assumed-true-real object.

Second, the fullness of our present analysis and its concerns (Finding the Mind) reveals this: that the understanding and knowledge we achieve throughout our lives includes the bad with the good and the negative with the positive (as qualitative). For a very long time, such understanding and knowledge is on one plane of meaning--undifferentiated with regard to the intelligible-good.

Third, the learned principles that come to govern our lives emerge, in part, from our given and dynamic matrix of being and from the basic method of mind (positions). That method, in part, is a set of desire-quests that are fundamentally open to new meaning-truth-good and that, through them, we seek to find and give meaningful order to our lives. That method itself is governed by genetic (developmental) and dialectical (differentiation of meaning-to-truth) methods and their principles (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000). As S. Weil suggests above, our desire-quests for the concrete good are worked out in and through what we understand as worthwhile in the details of our lives; however, those desire-quests are never completely satisfied but remain constant to reach beyond the concrete-finite to take in for ourselves the infinite good that is always beyond us (5).

Fourth, we “receive” learned principles in an undifferentiated way from our inner dynamism and its structure and then from our familial-cultural environment as habitual training—where, at first, we are not capable of understanding why and what is becoming habitual to us. Then, we receive in a more differentiated way from our potential reflective considerations—learning why (mediated through our questioning and insighting activities) and either embraced, modified, transformed, or rejected.

Thus, as long as we are, the parameters of good are incremental to us, and development-dependent. Therefore, and coupled with the no-fixed-data details of history we live in, our relationship to the accessible good is highly complex and variable.

What we first receive from our familial-cultural environment (our habitual patterning of our speech and act) we follow, but do not yet fully understand if we understand at all. Through our normative development we can (but not necessarily) come to a moment where we question and reject, or embrace, or develop further nuance in the governing principles that we received in the first place (dialectic). Those principles come to people our foundations from which all speech and acts flow.


An Unexamined Life

The creative movement is foundational to all human beings, then, and is rooted in our given desire-quests. As positional, those desire-quests are flexible, but normative. They are potential for both developmental and dialectical activities that may emerge as general principles of government that may come into conflict with outer-received principles. Central to that development and dialectic as we unfold are our potential towards reflection and self-reflection. In turn, those forms of reflection and the meaning that transpires through them come to provide the grounding meaning for all that we say and do.

Further, reflection and self-reflection are embedded-as-potential with the methods of logic and dialectic, whether we have named them or not, and whether or not we have made them systematic. On the other hand, if we fail to develop habits of reflection and self-reflection, then we become adults in name only--chronological sleep-walkers--walking deep in the shadows of unquestioned tradition that we have received and accepted, but not understood for ourselves and, as such, embraced as our own to translate into the details of our lives. Or as Plato remarks in his dialogues, an unexamined life is not worth living.

That development is already potential--waiting in our given set of desire-quests and their aims--to unfold. Our development as humanly normative resides in the fact that our desire-quests are notional and questioning, and that we can learn, rather than receiving relatively prescribed instincts or once-given principles to follow in lock-step fashion. In fact, loosely speaking, what is immediately “instinctual” to us is that we ask questions about and can objectify-name that which is beyond us—even beyond the traditions that we are born into, that we receive in relatively unthinking fashion, and that hand down to us a set of principles, expectations, and habits to live by--good or bad.

In other words, human beings are essentially and always potentially self-transcendent beings. Our desire-quests and the twin dynamisms of human development and dialectic are fundamentally aimed at that self-transcendence.


Our Project and Human Development

Regardless of whatever distinctions and developments of mind we have undergone or fields of study we belong to, our good-worth-desire-quest and its emergence into specific questions has a long history and will remain, warped or weaved, as a central thrust in our lives. Their diffuse accumulation of meaning underpins, influences, and informs all of our daily and proximate concerns.

In other words, though proper and improper distinctions abound, the good is pervasive--a developmental window through which all human beings are able to see. (By see I mean explore for understanding and knowledge including knowledge of the good-worthwhile.) We do so via the structure and process of our minds, and each of us from within a varied and specific accumulation of meaning.

Also, we do so though we may deny it, though we may misunderstand it; though the good-worthwhile may be difficult to define; though the tints and hues of meaning differ considerably via human development and our variety of cultures in history; and though the window’s frame is expanded differently for each of us as we go through our history and climb to higher horizons of meaning.

We can define the evaluative (good-bad) complex, then, as originating in an anticipating desire-quest that is given to human consciousness; then as a set of insighted and developed (and developing), learned principles that govern our analysis, reflection, discernment, and choosing; and then as a diffuse bed of meaning accumulation that informs our seemingly-immediate sight. The desire-quests are generalized in the theory and thus all content, including the theory and its data, can fall under four venues expressed as a general and dynamic structure.

Further, and like the myriad content of our questions, our developed and developing principles that come to govern our thought, speech, and conduct, are not necessarily consistent, well-ordered, or well-integrated. Also, by the time we turn our objectifying attention to the mind that objectifies, that complex has undergone a long process of expansive and transformative change. Further, that change is itself the issue of and is inspired-by the set of desire-quests we are identifying, exploring and, in the end, verifying through a personally undertaken experiment.

Furthermore, the fact that our method of mind is a generalized questioning structure of type-desire-quests holds no guarantee that we must ask any set of specified questions in a deterministic sort of way. Those questions are emergent-to-circumstances and may be quashed, ignored, and-or misdirected by many means over the course of our lives.

We may be tortured by, but we cannot deny or quash our own intelligence without implicitly acknowledging its presence in us. The basis of transcendental method does not lie "in the content of the judgment but in the conditions for its possibility. ... Questioning itself is the beginning" (Lonergan 1967, 190). From the point of view of an undeveloped or inadequate philosophical and-or psychological foundation, however, we may quash or deny specific questions for ourselves. In this way, we can be “at odds with ourselves.” And that being at-odds can be the source of great inner turmoil.

However, when human development progresses normatively around the openness of the desire-quests for understanding, knowing and saying-doing-being the good, it takes us in a long progression--from our spontaneous and proximate desires and fears as children, to a constant transformation of those desires and fears, in reflection, into the depth and nuance of an adult world of human being in our sought-out maturity and wisdom. Here we actually can have developed and reflectively established a set of flexible but unifying principles that guide all that goes into our being, but that foster our remaining open to our own questioning as life goes on.

We may attempt to quash but we cannot deny given developmental and dialectical thrusts or even their learned principles to our own conflicting outer-acquired principles or to the relative stasis that we seek. And living in the tension between stasis and openness invites the dynamism of dialectical thought in concrete affairs that is what it means to be genuine (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).


Quali-Meaning, Parts and Wholes

And so, long before we operate in or clarify for ourselves any distinctions between (a) the intelligible and (b) the good-bad complex of meaning, notions of both good and bad are already operative in us, in both undifferentiated and differentiated form, and from within the context of our present state of cultural and personal development. Since we already have such distinctions in our common and technical language in the West and in Western-influenced cultures, let us recollect a less differentiated moment in both cultural and personal history and refer to that moment as quali-meant. Or we are involved with quali-meaning, quali-knowledge, and quali-truth-reality. Quali-meant, then, refers to moments in our thought and in our history of thought where we have not yet differentiated our thinking about (a) what-who is intelligible and (b) what-who is good-bad.

~~~

I raise the question here, then, of what intelligence-intelligent-intelligible has come to mean in theoretical discourse in all of the sciences and professions, and in all common communications. The question is whether distinctions of meaning include (a) intelligibility as systematically distinct and separated from qualitative meaning exploration, and (b) a deeper philosophical distinction between intelligibility and the good--namely, where the good is not and cannot be an aspect of the true-real.

First, in fact, we could not be involved in such a study of mind as this one, or any critical study of any data for that matter, had not this distinction between what-is and what-is-good-bad become part and parcel to our thinking:

But such a study would not be possible without the prior development of the sciences and the long clarification of more general issues by philosophical inquiries and debates. Nor would the scientific and philosophic developments themselves have been possible without a prior evolution of language and literature and without the security and leisure generated by technological, economic, and political advance. (Lonergan 1958, 535-36 and 2000, 558-59)

Second, however, our study reveals, qualitative meaning (quali-meaning and the good-bad complex) is already pervasive to both “sides” as it were, of the distinction. That is, considering human development, and looking through the eyes of undifferentiated quali-meaning is a child’s only venue—it is our first state-of-affairs as we approach life. Only later (if at all) does the child receive, learn, make habitual, and-or reflectively establish a systematic separation (and a concomitant differentiation of mind) of the good-bad complex from what we mean by meaningful-intelligible in our analysis of anything. That is, only later can the scientist or the person of clear and critical commonsense knowledge distinguish clearly and systematically what it is from what is good-bad about it where IT is any object whatsoever.

Historically, then, the distinction is learned and comes relatively late in both

(a) our writ-small individual histories, as developmental human beings bent on analysis and understanding, and in

(b) our writ-large history, as a paradigmatic movement towards systematic distinctions over many generations, i.e., through the scientific revolution and the enlightenment.

The distinction between the intelligible and the good-bad emerges-from and then returns-to, and thus in fact, is only a part-of or aspect-of, a larger movement in the whole of history. A view of ourselves as a-historical in this regard, then, is a false view.

This is so especially in the West where the said distinction is a tenet of the sciences--and with its influence from the sciences on commonsense consciousness with regard to what it means to be critical-minded. Children, even those who are destined to become scientists, in fact, do not start with our said distinction in place. Rather, we all start in an undifferentiated state and must (1) develop our bad-good horizons and (2) recover this and many other distinctions in our long individual educational journey.

In that education in the West at least, and now in Eastern cultures influenced by Western ideas (theory and system, etc.) , a child may relatively easily recover, as received habit, the distinctions that were so hard-won during the scientific revolution (6). The manifestation of the distinction, of course, will differ considerably from culture to culture.

In other words, and regardless of relevant and important topical distinctions with regard to meaning, the scientist does not begin with a blank slate but with a history of development and informal and informal education where the question for good-worthwhile is/was always operative. That history of accumulated under-meaning, that any critical thinker draws on for resonance and memory, is already saturated with quali-meaning. As such, there is no such thing as a science that is not already permeated by a complex of quali-meaning and its influences.


Positivism, the Good, and a Moment in the Differentiation of Mind

From our study, however, we can see that positivism (and the various movements of thought associated with it in our philosophical history) is a distortion of the spontaneous movement towards differentiation of mind how that movement influences what we think of the true-reality of the object. Understood from an appropriation of the scientist's/science's history and foundational development, positivism embraces the topical distinction. However, even in embracing that distinction, it further reduces the data field to the data of the natural-physical sciences. The historical influence of quali-meaning on the scientist/science is avoided and-or erased.

Positivism offers a view of science as an a-historical culmination of "scientific objectivity" where that objectivity may now disregard the historical field from whence science and the scientist emerged.

Of course, differentiation of mind is what happens, in part, when we learn. However, positivism takes the differentiated part manifest in the distinction (intelligibility distinguished-away from the good-bad) and proceeds to portray that reality as the whole.

In this way, and again, the positivist's constricting of what constitutes true-reality carries with it, hidden in the folds of its assumptions, the same philosophical separation we speak of above: The natural-physical sciences now have a hegemonic hold on what the scientist deems true-reality, and everything else, including the human sciences, is ruled out of court--merely subjective.

In fact, however, the positivist takes a self-contradictory stance, in fact standing on and in a history of thought and activities that are shot-through with quali-meaning, while discounting that meaning as not true-real, on principle. The factual aspect of the matter includes the scientist's valuation of the distinction itself as a tenet of critical science.

In terms of metaphysics, the positivist thinks of him-herself as a metaphysical outsider and, from that view, can dispense with quali-meaning and a wealth of other meaning--meaning that the positivist in fact lives in, but tries to ignore, obscure, or erase from their history.

Basically, in positivist thought, the factual part and all of its "hard" qualities come to be understood as the fantasy whole. Such thought has produced a history of misguided philosophical, technical, personal and cultural applications (Voegelin 1958 & 1987).

Further, a person who follows the trail of this extreme in their own lives can take this view as a way to avoid full human development. That is, we can become philosophically, morally, ethically, socially, politically, and spiritually defunct. Below, Lonergan refers to scientism which is derived from a more basic embrace of what we mean by positivism.

Another type of one-sidedness is scientism. It is highly developed on the theoretic side but it remains rather primitive in common sense, in human affairs, in philosophy, in religion. (Lonergan 1996, 197)

We can become primitive in the above sense from having absorbed the assumptions of a field and-or a culture and where we have never encountered the terms scientism or positivism before.

Furthermore, until the said distinction begins to occur in anyone, the underlying field of philosophical meaning will remain undeveloped and, in this case, undifferentiated (and latent), but also relatively unified. That is, before we give it any reflective thought, before the above distinctions have begun to take hold as spontaneous frameworks, and before half-thought-out philosophical questions have been raised and wrongly-settled, the true-reality status of quali-meaning commonly goes without saying, at least in our common living and its discourse.

From the point of view of a metaphysical outsider, then, this means that we think that quali-meaning potentially is, and sometimes really is, true-real. Whereas, from a metaphysical insider's point of view, the good-bad can be and often is, in fact, true-real.

I suggest then, and our study reveals, that a wealth of quali-meaning is already pervasive to the historical build-up of meaning that comes resonant in any scientist (positivist or not) who makes the said distinction in a critical way. In this way, any scientific, well-differentiated, arena of discourse and writing already stands in a vast field of resonant quali-meaning. Further, any new differentiations of mind and field, e.g., between what-is and what-is-good-bad, will already stand on and in that same history of quali-meaning accrual.

Also, a spiritually sensitive person, even a child or young adult, will resonate negatively with the presented undeveloped or primitive demeanor of persons involved in scientism. We may not know what, but we are sensitive resonantly that something indeed is wrong.

Further, in that philosophically latent state of mind, as unified with the intelligible, and in our common approach to living, quali-meaning is first and spontaneously assumed to be what is knowable as fact, and what is objectively true-real. Any suggestion otherwise is viewed as stupid if not insane. (If philosophy has a bad name in some commonsense circles, this conflict of philosophical analysis with the assumed knowing of commonsense is, in part, why.)

In philosophically latent consciousness, the true-reality of quali-meaning is not a matter up for questioning. If it does come up, and if the thinker concedes to enter the "too philosophical" discussion with any seriousness of mind, we de facto leave latent and enter problematic philosophy (problematic metaphysics for Lonergan: 1958 and 2000); and we commonly draw on any one of the counter-positions available to us in common and philosophical discourse and literature; for we have not yet developed reflective or self-reflective thought drawn from what Lonergan calls our fundamental position (1958 and 2000).


Right Distinctions, Wrong Philosophical Separations

Drawing from the tenets of our experiment, the suggestion will come clear that the distinction between intelligible-meaning and quali-meaning is needed; historically the distinction is here; and the distinction is appropriate. It is appropriate as a perfunctory moment in most if not all critical discourse, common and-or scientific. Regardless of what is good or bad about it, and no matter how pleasant or painful it may be, we want to know what it really is. Here, the distinction defines, in part, what it means to be critical.

Also, in common living, and philosophically speaking, most if not all of us (even the scientist) maintain our assumption: we spontaneously identify the good-bad with the true-real, and that assumption comes through regularly in our easy communications in common venues with others. In other words, in common living, we not only are critical in our distinction between

(a) what we want/desire/need to be good and
(b) the true-real,

we also are critical about

(c) what is and
(b) what is not truly and really good/worthwhile.

On the other hand, latent philosophy becomes problematic when, in common, scientific, and professional discourse, the philosophical assumption (of a separation between the intelligible and the good-bad in terms of what can be true-real) creeps into our also-assumed critical regard for the data.


Quali-Meaning as Pervasive

A critical distinction about our data may, but need not, pervade or invade its underlying philosophical space. That is, consciously-now (if you've been paying attention here and in Finding the Mind), we can either

(a) assign the good-bad to be potentially true-real. Here we go with our long-held habit of thought with most meanings and quali-meanings (see our examples above of spilt coffee and car accidents and add your own); or

(b) we can go with the invasion of our philosophical space with untoward distinctions. That is, we can create a disunity of thought, and consciously-now set the good-bad necessarily on the side of mere subjectivity and/or relativity alone. In this case, we leave what we mean by intelligibility in its critical demeanor to occupy the philosophical space of the true-real--alone and shorn of any qualifying meaning it may have; and by inference we empty most of human history of its metaphysical import (it's not really real).

In its worst-case scenario, this assignment of true-reality comes to apply to the natural-physical sciences alone, and where the human sciences (not to mention philosophy) are only wannabee copy-cats of those "hard" sciences, if they participate in true-reality at all. Also, and to add to our polymorphism, the assignment resonates well with the naive philosophical view that knowing is like looking, and that what we see is what is real, and that only (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).

Confusing the issue is the fact that, in many cases, we rightly can think of science as a-historical. And so we can easily ignore the quali-meaning assumptions that already pervade our history of thought and, thus, any critical discovery or argument we might make. And we may ignore our own polymorphism of mind that says, in one case, the good-bad can and often is true-real while, in another case, it cannot be so true-real (problematic philosophy).

In part, the quali-meanings that already pervade the issue and argument are such that: we want the best kind of knowledge and the best available. We could not arrive at a critical science without valuing what it means to be critical--we think it's worthwhile to be so. That we hold-off our questions for quality about a particular content only means that our expectations of making qualified judgments are already operative in that holding-off.

Our pervasive notions of what-is and can-be knowable-as-true-real live at that philosophical level of our thinking—which most (my guess is) commonly do not bring up for analysis. In that subterranean region of our minds, and again in a good amount of our past experience of our philosophical latency, we have regularly assumed all quali-meaning, new and old, is also knowable as true-real. That is, for most of our daily living, quali-meaning remains potentially and then actually real. (Even the person harboring the worst-case of scientism actually reverts back to and lives in and by the philosophical tenets of quali-meaning, even in the lab, though we are often loathe to admit it).

When involved in that living, however, quali-meaning has not been overtly relegated to the realm of the not knowable-true-real, or to the not true, the not objective, or to the merely subjective or sentimental, and-or identified necessarily with a manifestation of bias. Or, in a reversion to latency, quali-meaning leaves the field of problematic philosophical assumptions (1958 and 2000).

There is no irony in the fact that what we want as critical knowledge may be shorn of what we might want to be or fear is the case, and regardless of its past, present, or future implications. As our experiment will reveal, historically the distinction itself emerges from a desire-quest for quali-meaning and cannot help but do so considering the organic, developmental, dialectical, and complex nature of all human learning and the place of the substantial good-as-true-real in it.

So that it does not follow that the more topical distinction between the intelligible and quali-meaning must necessarily influence the division of our deeper quali-understanding of what constitutes and can be true-real or not. We want to be philosophically consistent; and the distinction need not put us and everything good-bad out of true-reality, as it were.

When the distinction does enter into our philosophical field of under-meaning, however, instead of completely reverting back to full latency (once the cat is out of the bag, there's no going back), we rather tend to become unsettled (discontent) in the half-conscious regions of our minds. We may begin to wonder about the meaning and import of our prior commitments and even of the passion of our living at all. The internal argument goes something like this: If the good is not potentially true-real in my science, then it’s not so in my life either. And then employing a supreme irony we ask: What good is living anyway?

Under the force of our internal logic, our moral life can begin to become separated-away from our being. Morality/ethics become sympathetic objects that, in fact, have no bearing or import on the true-real. Here we can begin to harbor a sense of fragmentation as our sense of wholeness, and the prior import of our moral life, unhinges from our foundations and fades from our living. Under such a sway (and coupled with other positivist influence in the fields), an otherwise critical thinker can find philosophical support for becoming involved with scientism. And again, in the worst-case scenario, a scientist of other person of power with little moral development in the first place can see the philosophical split as an opportune time to become god. Enter: Voegelin's notion of libido dominandi (2007, 25).

The foundational separation also can affect our set of learned principles (recalling our narrative above). Again, those principles are developed from our desire-quest to be involved with what is really worthwhile. Worth equates to good. I want to be honest with myself. The nagging semi-conscious logic of problematic philosophy is that, if I am to be true to myself, and if nothing is truely and really good (science says so and heavily influences common thought), then my developed principles of good—the ones that were taught to me and that have governed my life for so long--are, in fact, false and, again, worthless.
~
The set of desire-quests that govern our speech and action in the world (is it worthwhile?, etc.) emerges from within our established horizon of good that provides a framework and view of our range of common or scientific choices. A change in the foundational horizon marks a substantial change of the person.



Object-Oriented Questions

Proper Topical Distinctions:

(a) What is it? (intelligible)
(b) What is good-bad about it? (quali-meaning)

Improper Philosophical Distinctions:

(a) What is intelligible IS Knowable-True-Real
(b) What is intelligible-good-bad IS NOT Knowable-True-Real

Further assumption: The science and the scientist are a-historical. That is, quali-meaning and the good-bad complex do not already underpin, frame, resonate with, and direct all What is it?-type questions as developmental in all, including in the scientist.

Latent-to Problematic/Polymorphic

In half-reflection, we can think the good-bad complex is

(a) merely subjective, while

(b) actually ruling our lives with the clearly manifest assumption that quali-meaning, the good-bad complex, and our judgments about it are fully objective.

Common Appropriation of Scientific Distinctions

By science, I do not mean any particular science or its data, e.g., physics, or natural or human science. Rather, I mean by science the governance of any study of any data by critical empirical methods, and the concomitant development of theory and its technical language. That is, to be scientific is not reserved for or exclusive of any specific data, i.e., the natural and physical sciences. Rather, to be scientific is to be guided by a critical regard for whatever data is under review, by experimentation and theory development and, if philosophically explicit, accompanied by some sort of foundational review. This means some explication of the institution's, science's and scientist's foundations (King/unpublished manuscript: Finding the Mind: Foundational Review).

In terms of method, it took a scientific revolution to systematically separate our questions for understanding and knowledge of what-is and is-not from our questions about what-is and is-not good-bad.

Different arenas of common discourse have followed suit, albeit absorbing the distinction in haphazard fashion. At this writing, some cultures as a whole, and some within every culture, have yet to make and keep this critical distinction in place. Over time, however, and in many different venues of communications, we have attempted to absorb the distinction between the merely intelligible and the intelligible-valuable-good-bad in our common discourse making it more critical--though such appropriation is far from refined or systematic as it is in the sciences. And again, the philosophical division has often covertly followed along with the right-divisions in our analysis of data.

Again, and in the extreme, we have been known to divorce the moral life from what we mean by real life. In that extreme, the moral life is merely subjective and, though nice, has little or nothing to do with what we mean by real life. And then in our metaphysical hypocrisy, we proceed to live in a moral-ethical world because we cannot do otherwise. (Whether that’s good or bad is up to each of us to decide for ourselves.)

In either case, we find we can think both ways about quali-meaning and the good-bad complex and even be relatively comfortable living with the prima fascia philosophical contradiction. Or said another way, we can be involved in a movement between latent and problematic philosophy, or we can be philosophically polymorphic.

In following this now-timeworn, semi-conscious but unrefined distinction, however, our common motivation and aim are always well-meaning and even critical at times. We honestly attempt to avoid the influences of our own and others' biases and where bias means we bring our own unkempt and untested desires, fears, opinions, or our mere subjectivity about what-quality to the table of object-analysis, or to questions about what is so or what really happened?

However, in much of common discourse, in order to be unbiased we often overshoot the critical point. That is, in the polymorphic philosophical regions of our minds where the reality-split has covertly (and insidiously) entered our philosophical foundations, bias has come to be equated with any passion, feeling, quali-meaning, or personal judgments for quality we might make whatsoever. And so if we are to be honest, we must back away from bringing what is best about ourselves to the table of communications: speech and actions.

Further, unbiased has come to mean (pervasively and polymorphically) that we do not express passion about or raise our evaluative-qualitative questions or concerns about the data under review, at any time and for any reason—not if we are going to talk about that data as true-objective-factual-real, and not if we are going to be heard or taken seriously. In many venues, we seem to have lost (or never found) the median distinction or nuanced, but still critical, meaning-field between all or none: a thoughtful, tempered, and civil passion for and commitment to, for instance, the truth and for the true-good.

Furthermore and as problematic, if we do raise passionate or qualitative questions, or if we voice such concerns about the data, we allow the authentic topical distinction drawn from the sciences (between the intelligible and the intelligible-good-bad) to invade the philosophical space underpinning our quali-judgments about the data--as knowable-true-real or not. That is, we slip into assuming that the entrance of such quali-questions into the discourse, automatically and in every case, brings our own bias to the table—or our mere subjectivity, our mere opinion or sentiment, and equally dismissive feelings, passion-language, and horizons. Under that assumption, on principle, any introduction of quali-meaning into the dialogue colors or even poisons the objectivity and factualness of our interest and cannot do otherwise.

Thus, the assumed right distinction between (a) meaningful-intelligible data and (b) its meaningful-qualitative aspects wrongly slices through the object as objective, pushes through-to and cuts down into our philosophical underpinnings, creating a problematic-polymorphic arena of thought and rendering all quali-meaning as residing only on the subjective side of the real-objective/not-real-subjective distinction. With this incisive slicing, nothing we know can be really and truly good-bad; and nothing we say-do can be guided by the question for the good-bad where that good-bad becomes a further object for our question: Is-was-will-it-be good-bad, truly and really?

Under this assumption, a good or bad cannot also be an objective fact.

Here, in one side of our thought, questions of quality and their frames of reference (regarding quali-meaning or the good-bad) automatically sully what we mean by objective analysis of the facts, or of what we can know as true-real of the data under consideration. We so sully, even though such thought flies in the face of other deeply embedded assumptions (not to mention the substance of our basic structure that spontaneously desire-quests for the good) that commonly govern how we actually go about doing things, and have for all of our lives.

The philosophical relegation of quali-meaning as trapped in our in-here-subjectivity (and only that), however, continues to pervade in ghost-like fashion all that we come to understand and know. When such relegation occurs, it brings with it a half-conscious sense of doubt and skepticism to every reflective quali-judgment we make. Under our latent philosophical assumptions, we might think we are understanding, participating-in, and creating the true-real good-bad, but our problematic philosophical underpinnings also tell us naught.

The more we become conscious of it, the more we come to realize the bifurcation between (a) what we actually do philosophically, and (b) what-we-think we are involved in. Further, the more we are pressed to do one of three things:

(1) wring our hands and embrace our own polymorphism, trying not to think about it;

(2) overtly turn to moral relativism and, if we are honest with ourselves and follow its internal logic, to nihilism, or

(3) rethink our basic presuppositions that, in their own logical trail, have led us to this crisis and its impasse in the first place.

If you recognize the above as a part of our own internal landscape of thought, it might be helpful to know that the problem is not yours alone, but has its writ-large historical roots in western thought (see King, Finding the Mind: Foundational Review [unpublished at this writing]).

As polymorphic, then, what we half-think as not-really-real or factual does not relate-to or integrate-well-with what we actually do and have done all of our lives--according to our given, normative, philosophical structure and its dynamism.

As problematic, that split philosophical ground, that lack of inner coherence, leaves us with a pervasive sense of doubt about (and here’s the irony) the most important things we think, say, and do as human beings in community with others. The ghostly split rests on what has been called for years the problem of knowledge (epistemology).

The abiding philosophical situation as half-conscious leaves us with an inability to be wholly secure about our own meaning in life and to commit to the judgments that we make--without abandoning our hold on the coherence of our own intelligence. "Don't think about it, just do it."

We cannot wholly commit to the acts that we do which all involve, in some comprehensive way, quali-meaning and, thus, are a reflection of our desire for the good-worthwhile. From that split-ground, made systematic with the advent of science in the West—a science that has yet to work through its own misguided array of philosophical foundations--we can do nothing both entirely thoughtful and with a whole-heart.


Wisdom and Love: The Exceptions in Common Parlance

Nicholas Maxwell’s exploration, From Knowledge to Wisdom (2007), addresses more topically what we are developing as critical-philosophical underpinning. Here Maxwell applauds the successes of science and its knowledge. However, he also cautions that science without wisdom, or without civilization, becomes dangerous. In Lonergan's terms: the working out of the good of order and the order of the good, in civil culture (1972).

Such notions of danger are rooted in (at least) an attempt to appropriate the human desire-quest for the good-worthwhile, though not necessarily in that language. The problem, Maxwell argues, is that science as it is practiced presently does so without paying attention to its own assumptions. Without such self-knowledge or, in our language, without philosophical self-understanding (born of a consciously afforded foundational review, by whatever name), scientists and our sciences can continue to transform the world but, it seems, we cannot transform or rightly direct ourselves in self-reflective fashion.

Here we see the tension emerge between knowledge-as-such (sans the good-worth question) and the questions of value-worth (quali-meaning), or of what is worthwhile to say-do—what is essential to the underpinning philosophical dynamism and structure we are exploring here (Maxwell 2007).

In our time we often find that our thinking is multi-faceted and often compartmentalized—like a submarine with its various compartments that can be totally cut-off from one another or, by choice, open so that some airflow (the movement of ideas and questions) can occur. The closure between arenas of thought, however, can be enough for the above uncritically-established divisions to live almost comfortably in juxtaposed but conflicting thought-spaces and, similarly, the doors to those compartments can be in full view of our pervasive and more holistic and complete regard for what we mean by wisdom and love.

Said another way, philosophical polymorphism means we are not of one mind. Driven by outer circumstances and internal meaning venues, we often and subtly shift our thinking back and forth between one compartment and its philosophical notion (wholeness and objective truth regarding the good-bad) and another compartment where its ground conflicts with the first (the good-bad as subjective-relative-only or as components of mere sentiment). We can move from

(a) our notions of wisdom and love as having knowledge of true and speculatively-true quali-meaning or the true-real-good and bad as clearly objective to

(b) considering qualitative aspects of the intelligible as merely sentimental on principle, and-or as variously relative--to the merely personal (subjective) domain—and certainly not potentially objective in the same way that other kinds of objectivity are.

Oddly or fortunately, however, depending on how we look at it, our notions of wisdom and love commonly get a bit of a philosophical pass. That is, we commonly do not claim the same philosophical incision or foundational “split” for developing anything that goes by the names of wisdom or love , even when we are talking about a scientist who is waxing philosophical, ethical, lovingly, or spiritually.

In common communications, and even though such notions may conflict with other avenues of thought, e.g., the present problematic philosophical grounds of our sciences, wisdom and love still commonly mean to understand not only the intelligible but also include the wholeness of the good, or quali-meaning, as an integral part of that intelligibility--to know not only what is, but what is excellent or horrible, or creative or degenerate; to understand the larger view, and to foster and do what is best, regardless of what we or anyone else may wish.

Further, we can love ourselves and others as a part what it means to live a good life, and we can interpret everything, good or bad, from that more holistic view without every once challenging the truth-reality of the content of our judgments and our deliberations and decisions that inform our manifest execution of speech-acts.

So in the vastly imprecise fields of common discourse and in the mysterious over-meaning of qualified literary narratives and reflections, we find a strange philosophical disjunctive between what we deem

(1) wisdom and love in the common life-affairs of human beings and

(2) critical discourse in common and field-scientific venues—in both natural-physical and human sciences--and its relationship to qualification (the good-bad complex).

~~~

In a non-historical sense, then, a view that differentiates the intelligible from the good-bad (obscuring the fact that it is still wholly informed by quali-meaning), seems to enhance, or at least not to interfere with, some treatments within the fields and about their data. For instance, we continue to stand on several aspects of quali-meaning foundations, though we may be unaware of it. However, from that view, the said differentiation benefits our regard for how the basic physics of our universe work, or natural systems, or in considering mathematically-relevant and quantifiable issues in many aspects of the human sciences (e.g., statistics), or in our common activities and questions such as whether or not it will rain today, or in the law (in this case, in the USA) where the notion of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” still reigns supreme (8).

In such cases, we raise these questions as critical—which means we do so regardless of our history of quali-under-meaning (or at least, this is what we think we are doing), and regardless of what we desire or require of the weather based on what we think is good or bad about it for my today, or regardless of expected consequences (8).

Let us move beyond our point that, in fact, we regularly ask and answer good-bad questions about what-is-true-real in our lives; and let us move beyond our point that all human speech and act is driven, at its deepest places, by the substantially human desire-quest: is it really worthwhile? and therefore, all human speech-act is an expression of our horizon of the good. Beyond that, let us give credence to the question whether or not such statements of qualification (this is or is-not good, better, best …) can be knowable as true-real—on principle, or if we can be really and truly wise and that loving is more than mere sentiment or subjective-personal feeling but, like the canvas and frame of a great painting, gives form and context to all of our true-real being in the world.

Here, we must refer you “back” into your own latent but perhaps mixed metaphysical view of the world, and to your own sense of the question for truth-reality itself, (i.e., epistemology) (Lonergan 1958 & 2000). At the very least we can say here that our argument aligns with that self-corrective restructuring and self-appropriation-affirmation of what knowledge is and means. That is, the qualification of data that is or that, in speculation, may be is grounded in

(a) the constellation of judgments for the good-bad that antedates the current concern and

(b) in the specific current criteria brought under and afforded to our current judgment.

Of course, metaphysically-speaking, we are considering the above from an insider’s rather than from an outsider’s metaphysical position. From this view (and I want to be provocative but not outrageous here), we have and will have no access to a classicist notion of the good save from acknowledging, from a position of belief and-or faith, that we can hear the word of God as God speaks the good to us in history (and from whatever form our notion of God takes).

We can however still avoid the (recalcitrantly unfulfilled) classicist notion-and-need of the good-for-all-time by drawing general empirical criteria from

(a) how human beings are made in the first place, and how substantial the good is to everything we say and do (as our experiment affords for us) and

(b) how that making is played out in the history of human endeavors over time.

We cannot hold both positions (1) positivism/scientism where the good-bad and most or all human concerns are not and really cannot be true-real and (2) an embrace of what wisdom and love mean (really and truly) in any field of communications, and be (3) consistent.


Wisdom and Genuineness

In our common thought and conversations about concrete affairs, good-bad-evaluative meaning only differs from meaning-intelligibility in its further nuance and deeper development of what-who is under consideration. For instance, we consider the ballgame, ethnic cleansing, my teacher, the bank robber or clerk, the mother or father, the volunteer helper, the professional in any field, or the philanthropist, or global warming, etc. We may differentiate, and treat with incision, the general desire-quests (in our present study) and more specific questions in a variety of fields of study. However, we began from infancy with our desire-quest for the intelligible-good informing and directing us as we grew and developed from one horizon to another.

Whatever those discernments were, they have already accumulated as a spontaneous and resonant-dissonant resource for our present thinking—and we continue our present study with that history of under-meaning in place as an undifferentiated, resonating, and life-informative whole.

For another example, we can explore volcanoes under the guide of critical-scientific distinctions—What is a volcano (and all the science that goes into that question)? How do they act? What makes them occur? etc.; and we can attempt predictions for eruption using all sorts of technical methods and statistical data. However, such a study rests in and is surrounded by qualitative meaning accumulation.

First, our history of qualitative-worthwhile questions about being involved in such a study in the first place are already asked and answered for ourselves. Those questions are evident in the fact that we are engaged in that study—we value it; or the answers to our what-is-worthwhile questions have led us here.

Second, as critical scientists in a field with long-accepted methodological tenets, we value the clear distinction between knowledge and value. Further, those tenets are also an answer to the prior question: What's the best way to do this science in general, and this science in particular?

Third, our motives for study may include prediction—not for only clarity in our knowing, or for writing about what we find in some publication; but so that we may help protect other human beings when volcanic eruptions occur. Such motives are a manifestation of a desire for the good of others as they order their lives, of our own self-worth as an embraced part of bringing about that good, and similarly of warding off the bad.

As example, when we set up a system and inform or warn people living at the base of the volcano that may erupt soon, we move from mere knowledge accumulation as incised from good-bad evaluations, to operating under the guide of scientific wisdom in applications. (What is worthwhile to say-do or not with this knowledge?)

Here scientists shift their interests to bring forward and employ their qualitative judgments and concerns born of being wholly human and in a horizon that considers the well-being of others—the others who are now informed by their critically accumulated knowledge. These qualitative judgments and concerns have shifted from the background of knowledge accumulation to now overtly guiding the scientist’s thoughts, speech, and activities—a move from differentiated incisiveness to being motivated from a wholeness of spirit and a high horizon or love of self and others. (In can love myself because I can demonstrate in concrete terms that I also love others.)

Furthermore, such qualitative judgments and concerns may generate from a merely subjective arena of human thought. However, such generation is or is not an objective true-fact (in fact, we think this way about self and others, or we do not). And those real subjective concerns can issue in a new concrete objective reality or they can lie dormant. Thus, the scientist informs people so they may move out of the way of an erupting volcano in time to save lives, or they do not and people die.

Studying volcanoes can be for the sake of knowing alone—no other issue need occur, besides knowledge, for knowing to be good precisely because it fulfills the fundamental human desire to know real-being in its incisiveness and in its fullness. However, and though the applications of a science may be remote, applications always matter—in this case, whether or not people are warned and can choose to move away from an impending volcanic eruption.

And finally, under the more comprehensive (and pervasive) human-good-real principle, if there is bias operative in scientists (volcanologists, in our example), it is a bias of omission and would issue in the scientist’s lack of integration—in the scientist’s willingness to know, and to leave such knowledge on a shelf and then, through the bias (an aspect of scientism and-or perhaps other psychological-social issues), to abort the progression of well-being of other human beings in our history of being, even though we know how to avoid a disaster for them. Concretely, the omission would be a failure to warn affected people when they could, and not in their (a) valuing such a study as value-less knowledge and-or (b) issuing warnings to those concerned based merely on sentimental concerns for others. Mere sentiment hardly expresses what, in fact, is a scientist or group of scientists identifying him-herself as a good person in a loving community of others to whom we all belong.

In this way, dimensions and discernments of our good-bad-evaluations inform our self-interpretation and our history of thought; and they surround, infuse, or wait for, but never stand outside of, our more bifurcating-incisive, even authentic, scientific activities.

Further, we can regard that, along with the good, the bad is also always concrete and, as critical, is a part of our evaluative desire-quest and its accumulative window of meaning, both known and created.

Thus, all under-meaning, and consequently all current thought, incisive or not, is pervaded by evaluative meaning and judgments. As such, the accumulation of qualitative meaning remains affective of all objectivity--even though we may have taken the uncritical philosophical turn to relegate the is-good-bad to the merely subjective domain and deemed it a fictive imposition on the true-real in scientific as well as common discourse.

Furthermore, making qualitative judgments is just another term for how wisdom and love develop--when we love others, we want what is truly best for them; and when we say-do what is truly best for them, we are involved in loving ourselves from a horizon that is wholly self-identified with that kind of activity. From that horizon, the question is not whether I will do what is best, but rather what exactly that best is.

~~~

In his reflections on development and its relationship to genuineness in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan remarks on the correlation of unconscious with conscious aims and the inherent tension between limitation and transcendence:

…

acquired habits. … The whole tendency of present perceptiveness, of present affectivity and aggressivity, of present ways of understanding and judging, deliberating and choosing, speaking and doing is for them to remain as they are. Against this solid and salutary conservatism, however, there operate the same principles that gave rise to the acquired habits and now persist in attempting to transform them. Unconsciously operative is the finality that consists in the upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism of all proportionate being. Consciously operative is the detached and disinterested desire raising even further questions. Among the topics for questioning are one’s own unconscious initiatives, their subsumption under the general order intelligence discovers in the universe of being, their integration in the fabric of one’s habitual living. So there emerges into consciousness a concrete apprehension of an obviously practicable and proximate ideal self; but along with it there also emerges the tension between limitation and transcendence, and it is no vague tension … but an unwelcome invasion of consciousness by opposed apprehensions of oneself as one concretely is and as one concretely is to be. (1958, 476-77; & 2000, 501-02)

Genuineness, Lonergan states, “is the admission of that tension into consciousness, …” Though itself ideal, this admission is a required condition for there to be harmony and cooperation between our conscious and unconsciousness movements of development (1958, 477; & 2000, 502). In this sense, having peace of mind is a living and dynamic thing where tension is an essential part of that peace.

Also, Lonergan relates such genuineness to our fuller meaning of wisdom:

… genuineness … goes far beyond the native endowment of detachment and disinterestedness that we possess in the pure desire to know. For it presupposes the accumulation of direct, introspective, and reflective insights that are needed to discriminate between issues. Some are momentous, some important, some secondary, some minor, some merely silly. Without due perspective and discrimination, the exercise of genuineness, as described, above, results only in the earnest person with a remarkable flair for concentrating on the wrong questions. Nor can perspective and discrimination be acquired without asking the significant questions.(1958, 477 and 2000, 502)

Lonergan speaks of a kind of vicious circle, then, that calls constantly to be broken, “for we cannot become wise and discriminating without concentrating on the right questions, and we cannot select those questions unless we already are wise and discriminating” (477; & 502).

Our already-given potential to self-transcend is the only avenue to break that vicious circle.

Further, just as we know nothing concretely that is not already informed by qualitative meaning in some way--even by the very formation of our interest--so there is nothing wondered-about or distinguished that we cannot bring the good-bad question to reflectively for (a) our understanding and reflective understanding (what is its value/is it really so valuable?) and-or (b) our discernment towards speech and act (what is worthwhile?/is it so worthwhile to say-do? etc.). The internal tension, then, is derived from the relationship between our past accumulation of meaning and our present circumstances, or our considerations of the future—and who we decide to be in those circumstances (self-making and self-interpretation). The vicious circle can be broken only when, spontaneously and then consciously invited, our new questions for worthwhile-ness emerge from that relationship from the core of our desire-quest, or from what Lonergan relates above as is the dynamism of the principle of finality.

In his narrative on the "Elements of Metaphysics" in Insight, Lonergan explores the tension between openness and closure in terms of his meaning of finality: (my parentheses)

… there is a law of limitation and transcendence. It is a law of tension. On the one hand, development is in the subject and of the subject; on the other hand, it is from the subject as he is and towards the subject as he is to be. Finality has been conceived as the upwardly but not determinately directed dynamism of proportionate being (what of being is known). Its realization may be regular, but its regularity is not according to law, according to settled spontaneity, according to acquired habit, according to existing schemes of recurrence; on the contrary, it is a change in the law, the spontaneity, the habit, the scheme; it is the process if introducing and establishing a new law, spontaneity, habit, scheme. Its point of departure necessarily is the subject as he happens to be; but its direction is against his remaining as he is; and though its term will involve him in a fresh temptation to inertial repetition and recurrence, that term is to be approached only by breaking away from the inertia of his prior stage. ….Now the tension that is inherent in the finality of all proportionate being becomes in man a conscious tension. (1958, 482; & 2000, 497)

The structure as a dynamism of desire-quests is given as tensional, and that tension moves us through the process of ever-questing to knowing more and better, and of ever-becoming more and better than we are at present.

However, within the specifics of our own development and emergence we have a range of choices regarding the issue and content of such questions, or we can avoid questions we do not like or would not like the answers to. Again, to avoid some meaning or issue is already to have considered that issue in some way, at some level of our understanding, or in some interior region that has meaning and function, but which is not yet a part of our conscious awareness and self-awareness. Enter: an implied region of self-selecting; a kind of person-specific gate-keeping that operates on presented meaning and that apparently protects the consistency of our present conscious awareness, only letting that meaning emerge that does not threaten our sense of order.

This apparent depth of meaning in our minds, that is not our awareness but that keeps guard over the meaning that passes through our internal gates into our awareness, raises the question of the operative relationship between it and our developing executive functions. That is, what happens when, through our executive functions, we call to that meaning to come "up" into our awareness and self-awareness, even if we do not know what the content of that meaning may be or not be. We can infer, perhaps, that mystical consciousness, in part at least, is involved with that calling.

Our self-mediation (and with others as a mutual self-mediation) is our sense of worthwhile-ness always reaching for its highest horizon through our questioning. Such questions can be diverted or distorted from a consciousness that is less collaborative with what is unconscious and also spontaneous in us and that, in its sensitivity, may "know" enough to fear what may come clear. Or: those questions can be invited and accepted in the genuineness that is the acceptance of such tensions into consciousness and that is the basis of human wisdom as well as our ability to love—in part, the tension emerges from our knowing that we do not know. Wanted or not, our questions provide the impetus for our potential development out and away from our vicious circle of ignorance and carelessness, not only from one set of insights to another, but from one horizon of being to another.


The Questions to Unearth Philosophical Hypocrisy

I am putting our classicism-grounded question aside, however, and going further here to press the issue that you may be interested, at least, in unearthing a philosophical hypocrisy that may be hidden in the folds of your semi-conscious fabric of thought and that may affect all that you and I think, do, and say. The fundamental questions that will unearth our philosophical hypocrisy then are: Are we built the way the experiment affords that we are, and then, can quali-meaning or the good-bad be knowable-true-real?

And beneath that set of questions, we can ask this one having to do with metaphysics: Are your foundations rooted in an insider’s or outsider’s view? You might guess that beginning from an embrace of the outsider’s view only continues our unsatisfying journey, ad infinitum, into the far-reaches of the impasses we find ourselves in now.

~~~

To recoup, philosophical polymorphism and its problematics manifest in our thinking at times (and not at other times when we revert to latency). That is, our philosophically split foundations show up as an assumption: that what is intelligible sans quality, and our judgments about it, remain true-objective-real; while in other discourse we assume that quali-meaning, what is good-bad, and our judgments about it become not-real and necessarily an expression of bias, or merely subjective.

Thus, our critical and right distinction about data analysis wrongly forges a distinction in our philosophical presuppositions that underpin whatever data are under question—about the potential true-reality of the data. Again, can the good be factual?

In our right penchant to be critical-objective, we wrongly separate-divorce the good-bad intelligible from the knowable-true-real (the factual) and relegate it to the realm of the unknowable, merely subjective, non-factual, biased, and not real. Thus, we tend to divide the intelligible data into:

(

1) the meaningful-intelligible, or what we can know as real objective facts, and

(2) the good-bad, or what we can know in some other way, or not know, or what is not-factual, merely sentimental, subjective, relative, and unreal.

From Wisdom to the Personal

Under the cloudy influence of philosophical polymorphism, the idea and domains of the personal also are diminished. That is, in that fuzzy shifting of semi-conscious philosophical thought, we can subtly deem that the personal also is merely subjective, etc., and, thus (and as odd as it might sound), we cannot know or participate in the objective-true-real-factual as personal. Pervasive to such polymorphism of thought is the assumption that the best science is one that somehow rises above, and does not need to deal with scientists as persons and their biases, or, from our view, with the pervasiveness of the good in the relationship between science and the scientist.


Unwanted Philosophical Discourse

For the human sciences and philosophy, what actually happens to us--the overall experience of all persons as actual knowers and speakers-doers of the true-real in any venue (not to mention the quali-true-real)--seems to have gone missing as a substantial touchstone of data-reference. It’s as if we are afraid to include ourselves and the personal because we know, on some level, how much real work that self-corrective philosophical project implies—and those who think this are right in that assumption. Or we just assume it cannot be done, or a least done critically; and so we continue to avoid the issue hiding our arguments for the truth, along with our operative relativism, in our claim to nuance and to various forms of constructivism, or in whatever epistemological hidey-hole we can find to avoid the issues of truth and the true-good.

The same applies for odd but less defined moments in common discourse.

Also, philosophical discourse is fundamentally reflective and hopefully self-reflective; and reflection is a poor relation when in the midst of a crisis situation. This is so even though the philosopher may be like the volcanologist who can closely predict what will happen should things keep going as they are.

In crises, however, or even in many common and relatively peaceful conversations, we commonly cannot raise distinctly philosophical questions without also opening a Pandora’s Box of seemingly endless discussion and-or bad feeling. Presently-established philosophical meaning (foundations, whatever they are at present) supplies the background, or the wallpaper, flooring, wood and brick, of common conversations or crisis situations. And we cannot play football, as it were, if our attention is continually directed to the size of the field, the quality of the grass, or the straightness of the chalk lines.

As philosophical, such background is received early, often in polymorphic form, or in reflection in times and places that we have set aside specifically for that reflection, e.g., in formal higher education. A philosophical education is one that occurs gradually but, when done well, is grounded in our taking up the reflective life. As such, philosophical meaning, whatever its form, is commonly latent and already established, however polymorphically, as a set of working assumptions in all of our crisis situations and-or common conversations.

Bringing philosophical discourse into such moments tends to sound off-point and all-too-odd, or is treated as an aggravating and unneeded diversion (a red herring) or even a deadly poison to the ongoing narrative. Indeed, philosophical discourse can be used quite consciously specifically as a diversion by those who want to sidebar the present issue.

Philosophical exploration is often unwelcome, however, precisely because it demands reflection and self-reflection—and it demands that we back up, and stop playing for awhile, and think about the size of the field, the quality of the grass, or the chalk lines, as it were. We commonly do not want to do that while going forward in the midst of play—it does not work, especially if persons are unaccustomed to addressing philosophical issues and especially for those who deny outright that foundations even exist.

Philosophical meaning is a different, often unseen aspect of any ongoing conversation. To focus on it is to change the object of our conversation, from playing the game to the state of the grass, the proper size of the field, etc., all of which are needed as background, but are hardly the point of play. The metaphor can continue on, however, and the game will change course considerably if we erase the lines or find gaping holes in the field. Philosophical meaning is a given--necessary but not sufficient--aspect of human living. The question whether it's necessary to be self-reflective and to know about our own philosophical comportment is another question that you must answer for yourself. (This self-reflection is what I refer to in Finding the Mind as the longer journey.)

To find philosophical meaning is to objectify what is already operating as a backdrop to the other more proximate object of our conversation. It is to make an object of one's conversation the conditions for that or any conversation taking place.

Even if the crisis would dissipate or disappear with a new understanding of philosophical meaning, commonly only the philosopher understands that most cogent point—a point that, again, cannot be properly conveyed in the midst of a crisis--even one that, in the moment, would dissipate if all understood what the philosopher understood.

A focus on philosophical meaning (including the meaning of the good) may also be a focus on what is already polymorphic and problematic in the persons in any specific conversation; and our polymorphism has teeth rooted in commonly un-tempered feeling—and it bites hard if our hypocrisy is exposed to the light of philosophical critique. Correcting or developing our philosophical foundations takes time and does not fare well where our social or political standing is at stake--we do not change our philosophical meaning in the midst of a crisis.

The change in conversation from topical to philosophical can be experienced as an intrusion and as all-too frustrating; we just don’t want to go there; we want to go forward, not backward or, worse, I feel threatened by it, so let’s kill it and whoever embodies it. In such cases, the philosophical confusion that we harbor underneath our seeming sense of unity becomes a systematic and persistent hypocrisy underlying all common and professional discourse.
~
Quali-meaning, wisdom and the personal and their potential truth-reality are long-suffering victims of our underlying philosophical divisions and conflicts. That is, if such internal conflicts actually occur in common discourse, we should notice what happens philosophically and pragmatically, to our excursions into notions of wisdom, to the domain of the personal, and to what we deem as good-bad-qualitative or to quali-meaning and, perhaps, even to love. If so, then we should notice the subtle disappearance of the good-bad and the personal, etc., from the realm of the knowable as factual, objective, and real in common and scientific discourse. (“Oh, not really” kinds of statements come from our latent philosophical foundations that are waking up to becoming problematic.)

Here, the closed-door submarine-type of compartmentalization and its harbored inconsistency that defines our polymorphism can help us avoid such issues. That is, our latency comes forward when we need it to confirm an “obvious” good-bad fact; and our problematics come forward when we are involved in conflict that makes us uncomfortable about what we mean by facts, or that we want to avoid. And so from this confused compartmentalized cul-de-sac of philosophical thought we reduce all that is conflicting to us to mere opinion, to the merely subjective, or to out-and-out relativism.

However, if we were to be consistent, we would either avoid the question, or follow a course of thought that deems wisdom, the personal, and the good as not able to be true or real, on principle. The internal logic that moves us towards a sense of carelessness and even nihilism goes: Why think, say, and do the good if it’s fiction anyway—or if it’s not really real? But when things are amenable to us, we do not want to deem the good as not-really real and so we slip back into that resonantly-comfortable mode. If we are in any-way courageous, our responsibility for actively arguing and acting against the bad, and for bringing the good into that true-reality, follow suit.

Here again, in our polymorphic thinking, we harbor conflicts. On the one hand, we understand implicitly that wisdom includes knowing the good-bad, avoiding the bad, and doing the good. As such, the notion of wisdom resonates with the substance of our basic structure. However, and on the other hand, we also entertain the notion that being scientific and critical (a highly regarded way of being) is about our knowing real objective facts--so far, so good. However, with the underlying philosophical split in place, those facts (presumably) exclude our passions, our qualitative meaning and our judgments about it, our subjective concerns, or the personal overall in the world, on principle—and there’s the rub.

In such a polymorphic state of mind, we can think that the-personal and the-good and even the loving, are not really connected with the true-real, on principle; while at the same time we continue to act under the assumption that all are true-real--especially when we are thinking, speaking, and acting wisely. If we give it any thought at all, we say we are acting as if what we say-do were really real.

Further, when it’s not us, we continue spontaneously to admire those who are wise, who do good things, and who obviously are loving persons, from an unwavering sense of commitment—and who do not doubt the truth and reality of their personal goodness and good acts in the process.

On the other hand, if we meet with disagreement, it’s all relative anyway. In fact, we are reverting back to hearing only what we want to hear, and using our inherited (and bad) philosophical foundations to support our avoidance of what may be true, and to embrace what serves us in this argument about our problematic foundations, even though our internal life is bifurcated with such endeavors. Again, in the midst of such thought, and though we may not overtly entertain carelessness, irresponsibility, and-or nihilism, this many-headed hydra definitely throw its shadow on our life-in-being.


Blowback

Also, in our everyday discourse, we commonly do not take up directly the philosophical “blowback” or implications of such split-apart thinking--of the subtle fluctuating separation of the personal, and of the good-bad, from what we might consider true-real-objective-fact. Rather, we just waffle back and forth, depending for the implementation of the good on our own established habits, on our immediate needs, on the relative peacefulness that living in a lawful community brings, and on the (not so secure) culturally developed moral conscience of The Other Fellow.

However, the more complex and multi-cultural we become, the more common assumptions become less common, and the more what we consider to be moral and ethical practice becomes diversified; the more likely misunderstandings will occur; and the weaker is the link that connects (a) accepted general notions of what the good-bad mean, and a generally accepted idea of what a person of good conscience will do and not do (and, again, our notions of wisdom and love of others) to (b) their specific manifestation in the real world of complex and multi-cultural human beings.

We are carried along on the seemingly consistent veneer of life by our more comprehensive notions of wisdom and love that reside in our thinking alongside our separatist notions of the good-bad and the scientific and factual-real. And we commonly fail to note the automatic assignment of bias or mere anecdote to quali-meaning or to the personal; but then: The Other Fellow doesn’t share my thoughts on the good-bad.

There is the naïve approach, unaware of the issue. People have their own minds, and that’s good common sense; when the other fellow’s assumptions begin to appear and reveal differences of interpretation, well, he’s wrong. But they have not too much consciousness that they are doing the same sort of thing themselves. (Lonergan 1988, 60)

One manifestation of polymorphism is that the naïve person can take the scientific “out.” That is, we can interpret about other person’s argument that the good and the personal are merely subjective and/or relative thereby diminishing the force of it on our internal coherence. In our own minds, we take the potential truth-reality away from their critique of our statements. While, on the other hand, we can remain dogmatic about our own argument's truth-reality.

Again, our philosophical history, especially in the West, goes far in providing the internal logic for purveying such philosophical self-foolery and sleight-of-hand. On the omission side, the philosophical tradition has been unable to provide a way out for so long that most have (a) appropriated one or many of what Lonergan refers to philosophical counter-positions (over a lifetime) and thus remain in problematic philosophy and (b) cannot recognize the way out when it appears on the philosophical scene.


Developing the Implications of the Philosophical-Foundational Split

Let us briefly consider the implications of such a shift of meaning (from the good-bad as real, to the good as merely subjective, or as not real on principle).

First, the good-bad are two sides of the same coin. That is, we cannot leave the good out of our notions of true-reality unless we also leave the bad out of it. Need I list horrible events in history, and what such a view of the good-bad might mean to human history?

Second, as suggested above, the shift tends to throw us into often-covert and only-felt conflict between (a) our latent philosophical assumptions that inform how we actually go about our lives--or how we actually assign import in life events, and (b) what, in reflection, we think about the good-bad when we enter a state of problematic philosophy and when we are being infringed on by our covertly learned philosophical separations and our waffling polymorphism.

In the above example of polymorphism’s manifestation, the arguer might come to the insight that the subjectivism and relativism that I apply to the other’s critique also must apply to my own—if I am to be consistent. Why argue, then? Just hope you have all of the “hard” power in your own camp. (More politically astute readers will recognize the seeds of fascism in this thought process supported by foul philosophical foundations.)

Fortunately for all, how we actually are in the world with regard to knowing the good as true-real (via the operations of our interior structure and dynamism) is commonly more-aligned with our notions of wisdom and loving than it is with a relegation of the personal and the good to some internal landscape of the merely subjective and non-factual.

Third, in our latency we might foster and already have wisdom, and are loving, in some circumstances—where the good-bad is known as objective, personal, and as true-real.

However, a philosophically problematic shift to the assumptions of metaphysical separation (from the good-personal as true-real to not true-real) brings with it a pervasive sense of felt-doubt and, again, residual carelessness that invades our sense of developing wisdom about life circumstances and our sense of love for others when brought to reflective practice--we act out the good only as-if it were true-real. Under the influence of those split circumstances, our conflicted consciousness spontaneously tries to integrate itself—the submarine doors are not as closed-tight as we thought--but we are often left to waffle from real-to-unreal taking refuge in our ability to be “of two minds” and more philosophically, without being completely conscious of it.

As a product of a semi-conscious split, below the surface, as it were, of our more topical thought-content, the sense of doubt will pervade as a constant low-dose of feeling-disturbance, but will not become clearly conscious to us; and that low-dose anxiety tends to at least color, in one hue or another, all of our dreams, images, internal dialogue, symbols, speech, and actions. Doubt emerges if we cannot reconcile; and we cannot reconcile at that deeper plane of our existence without philosophical inspection, self-inspection, and self-correction undertaken apart from specific circumstances, conversations, or crises.

Fourth, the selection and migration of internal assignments of philosophical import (i.e., it can/cannot be known as true-real) tend to diminish our respect for the human sciences. Those sciences apparently do not share the certainty that the natural and physical sciences do precisely because the data are human.

Further, the human sciences must consider the good-bad and the personal as a part of what it means to be so-human; so that along with being human ourselves as thinking researchers and, thus involved intimately and historically with the good-bad (a point that is often overlooked, obscured, or erased), the human scientist is also studying humans who, as data, are again involved intimately and historically with the good-bad. To study humans without considering our quali-meaning aspects is to disregard a good portion of the available data--which goes against a long-held scientific tenet: Pay attention to the data.

On the other hand (though the field is in flux and, of course, I haven’t read or heard everything), at this writing, when the human sciences try to include notions of the good-bad, they do so from a place of philosophical half-light. Human scientists (as human) will resonate with the good as true-real, but commonly are stuck in an inadequately conceived or completely dysfunctional epistemology with regards to their study and, again, to the personal both as (a) a part of themselves and (b) the data under consideration.

At this writing, some qualified movement has occurred in the fields and continues to do so, despite the hold of problematic metaphysics on those fields. Nevertheless, the human sciences have a history of trying to live under the false ideals that positivist science brought along with its embrace (Voegelin 1987). On oft-accepted principle, most cannot get to the good-bad or the personal as objective, or critically-philosophically, for their science.

This movement of thought, where philosophy as a field of study has been marginalized even more, has a long history which we cannot develop here. Nevertheless, the problem of metaphysical marginalization or even erasure is fundamentally philosophical and, as such, pervasive to our history of thought in any of the fields and sciences (Lonergan, 1958, 527 & 2000, 551; and King, Finding the Mind: Foundational Review [unpublished at this writing]).

Under these subtle and waffling reassignments of import (the good is true-real, to untrue and unreal, and back again to true-real), and as absurd as it might sound, under the positivist principle, the whole project of the human sciences cannot be involved with real-objective-fact—at least not in the same way that the natural and physical sciences are. So go human beings as subjects who are investigating all things, not to mention all-things-human and personal.

...as in the natural sciences, so also in metaphysics, an understanding of method, its accurate formulation, its acceptance, and its proper use are neither automatically achieved nor automatically efficacious. They are operations of intelligence and reasonableness. They result only from sustained inquiry and sustained reflection. Their power is no more than the power of intelligence and reasonableness, and while that power is great indeed, it is not exercised after the fashion of the steamroller that crushes opposition but through a mounting dialectical tension that makes absurdity ever more evidently absurd until man either rejects it or destroys himself by clinging to it. (1958, 226 and 2000, 550)

Sheer relativism of the truth is followed by sheer relativism of the good-bad complex and both have manifest in our time as distinctly post-modern problems, expressed nicely in the first few pages of Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987).

We have moved past Bloom’s analysis in our time. However, that movement is more in terms of nuance and brilliant methods of philosophical avoidance born of courageous pragmatics than of our substantial understanding of the philosophical issues that lay at the heart of the matter. We have yet to gain a universally conscious and affirmed epistemology to pass on to our commonsense--one that can support latent assumptions and our still-operative notions of personal wisdom and its relationship to true-reality, and all that goes into it. A deeply corrosive negation of meaning, truth, and good in common discourse(subjectivism and relativism), however, only reinforces, and is only reinforced by, the philosophical migration of the personal-good-bad to the domain of the merely subjective or not-real in our thinking.

A discussion of the good, or ethics, that is anything more than topical and or "merely academic," then, or as assumed to be marginalized or absent from potential true-reality, cannot be accomplished well without exploring the relationship of the good to its underlying metaphysics and epistemology. Such that, if there is no knowledge of the truth, then there can be no knowledge of the true good. Our fundamental question emerges again: It is not whether everything must be good or bad, but rather whether, on principle, we can even entertain the question of the good-bad-personal as objective-factual-true-real. Or, must we say that it follows from the fact that the good-bad is (a) developmental, (b) nuanced and (c) called into dialectical treatment, we also mean that true-good cannot be concrete and, as such, known as true-real. “What is good always is concrete” (Lonergan 1972, 27).


Quali-Meaning as Personal History

By quali-meaning, I refer to the meaning of thought, speech, and historical instances that emerged from the good-bad desire-quest and its complex. Or with regard to our past, quali-meaning is meaning already substantial as qualitative questions, insights, concerns, and outcomes.

In our historical moment, then (circa post-scientific revolution), we find it easy to bring hard-won already-defined distinctions of meaning to our inquiry (as William James does in our example of his work in note 8). This is so regardless of whether, at a deeper and more comprehensive level in our own thought, we deem such meaning as true-real on the one hand, and-or subjective-relative, on the other. (When we think in terms of and-or, then, we are involved in problematic philosophy or polymorphism of mind at the philosophical level of our thinking. The logical principle of excluded middle is operative here [Lonergan 1958, 581-82 and 2000, 599]. However, that principle is more than merely logical because it is rooted deep in our desire-quest for correctly ordered thought about meaning and the true-good.)

The process of incising meaning, or of carving out distinctions between the intelligible and good-bad are, for example, performing (in the topical sense) value-free research. Or we can develop statistical data, for instance, that presumably do not (at least overtly) carry value-good-bad in them. Such incising is either right- or wrong-headed; but as right-headed it has its legitimate place in our common and scientific venues of our interest and research, even though all of that research rests on a resonant base of quali-meaning.

In the human sciences, first, any aspect of studied data in human history already overtly includes all sorts of quali-meaning as object--in such a way that makes it nigh-impossible to tease quali-meaning from the intelligible without losing most or all that is substantial to the data. If so and if we are to be truly critical, then such meaning cannot be ignored or dispensed with precisely because it already is constitutive of the human data we want to understand clearly. Avoiding the good-bad complex of meaning would be like trying to tease-out the original acorn from of the oak tree that grew from it--we cannot find the acorn; however, we know that what was the acorn is and always will be an essential part of the tree.

That humans regularly assign good-bad meaning to historical circumstances is an objective fact. The historians selective and interpretive process is itself woven in with (a) qualified judgments of (b) quali-meaning. Also, statistical reviews cannot (and should not) pretend otherwise or dismiss quali-meaning that already saturates any data that is then rightly or wrongly quantified. If so, then in any study where humans are concerned, we can either account for quali-meaning well, or not account for it well. And we can give that research a good philosophical basis--one that correlates with long-accepted scientific tenets--or we can continue to sneak issues of the true and the good past the epistemological dead elephant in the room, again, under the cover of nuance.

However, and even though such covert philosophical moves seem to work sometimes, from that implied view, we will not find a way to coherently unify the sciences and fields. And in that sense, philosophy has failed and, in some sense, deserves its present marginalization.

Second, all scientist and sciences have a long background of remotely developed quali-meaning accumulation, as well as growth and development of horizons around issues of the good-bad, and questions about who the scientist chooses to be. Such meaning accrual occurs long before any scientist is able to methodologically distinguish intelligibility from the good-bad complex of meaning; and certainly long before the scientist was able to assign knowable-true-real to one aspect of the data while dismissing it from the other. That is, all scientists in any data field, first, are human and, second, have a developmental potential and history as human that took us to the point of being able to make the above distinction.

Humanity and our development are already shot-through with judgments of quali-meaning manifest of latent philosophical assumptions rendering those judgments unquestionably true-real. Thus, there is no scientist who does not depend on that background of thought for their present array of quali-knowledge and even wisdom with regard to scientific wonder, insights, developments, and exploits. And again, science is a human thing--there is no science without its scientists.

Third, beyond but also including the individual, the history of science is dynamic. It emerged from, rests in, and moves forward in a larger cultural history that consists of a wealth of quali-meaning. In fact, there is no science or scientist that is not a part of that history and that whole.

Long before anyone became a scientist, we were raised in a cultural environment--with all of its undifferentiated, less differentiated, shallow, deep, and-or nuanced quali-meaning surrounding and saturating our fields of communications. That environment may or may not have included the incisions of and distinctions between the intelligible and quali-meaning in its common discourse. In a wealth of cases today, and because of the technological revolution we are involved in, we most probably can say that most cultures include a mixture of both kinds of discourse: (a) undifferentiated quali-meaningful (issuing in unison with a latent philosophy) and (b) intelligible-intelligence differentiated from the good-bad (issuing in problematic and polymorphic philosophy/consciousness, or in explicit philosophy) (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000). We can also assume that the said variability of meaning is not often a direct object of conversation among scientists or persons of good commonsense.

Our focus here is on the underlying philosophical complex and its import on our thought, speech and actions especially with regard to the pervasiveness of the good-bad. Thus, our focus is on the distinction between the intelligible and the good-bad complex of meaning, and then again on its unified composition in our lives before the distinction was made clear. If we don't acknowledge the good as a metaphysical reality then, with our present study, we at least cannot ignore the fact (as fact) that all of human history is said-done under the rubric of these questions: What is really good?, and what is really worthwhile? and: is it so?

And again, in studying any human data for any reason, we can account for the development and those horizons in the scientist well (through some sort of foundational review); or we can ignore them and-or not account for them well. The question then is not whether a person’s state of horizon development with regard to quali-meaning (in any venue) affects his-her view of common meaning or of the reality of the data, especially of human data. Rather, the question is whether one view is more or less authentic than another—and can be shown to be so in any methodological or systematic way.

If the above is true then, in the light of a common resort to and embrace of subjectivism and-or relativism (or either hiding under the name of epistemological nuance), we can ask about our un-objectified philosophical underpinnings—underpinnings that (we can admit) affect all inquiry and our view of all data, human or otherwise.

In bringing the philosophical underpinning to the surface, however, and if we are honest with ourselves, we may find the implications of relegating the good-bad to the realm of mere subjectivity/relativity problematic, even though we may have already accepted that notions of the personal necessarily bring bias to the table, especially where science is concerned. It may sound problematic because, again, the overt assignment of the good-bad to mere subjectivity or to relativism would include our entire set of evaluative questions, insights, principles, and all of the details of their meaning-content, both bad and good, not to mention their application to any object or person, or in any event whatsoever.

Though we may not like or be able to live with how that sounds, however, that’s the implication of such a split view.

For instance, and taking extreme cases as our examples, under the assumptions of mere subjectivity (and only that) and-or relativism as applied to any and all questions of quali-meaning, we cannot deem child-abuse, rape, robbery, assault, and murder as truly or really or truly bad things. Following that logic, these things are merely feeling-oriented, or anti-sentimental, or they must happen in some quasi- or secondhand existence—as-if they were potentially true-real--certainly not the truly real one.

Again, if the above sounds absurd to you, I would agree that it does and is. However, again, that’s where the logic of the underlying philosophical split must take us.

With our notions of critical science (which we are opening to question and critique here), to relegate all quali-meaning to the not-knowable, the untrue, and the subsequent not-real would be to assume that such insights, etc., had no import on either the data under consideration as true-real, or the field of human development, not to mention history or, internally, on our moral-ethical comportment. For in fact, it would not matter--if all that we say and do can have no true-real quali-meaning associated with it, on principle. Here and in fact, we move beyond mere polymorphism of mind and its operative hypocrisy and enter a world of philosophical socio-pathology.

On the other hand, we can observe what we have appropriated in our common language from a half-thought-out scientific ideal of value-good-less objectivity. In fact, history itself is wholly constituted by its qualitative components that we then can approach in reflection with a differentiated set of intelligibility-qualitative questions.

Similarly, so go all science and scientific inquiry. Human history, including the history of science, is the dynamic and abiding response-answer to the developmental and incremental questions for quali-meaning: What is best? What should we-I do? Should we-I do it? Will we-I do it? Instantiation is equivalent to human execution as historical act.

Further, we may find it massively problematic to get to the true-real-good-bad philosophically through the maze of philosophical problems we are presented with. That fact, however, does not render as not-true-real the horrific or wonderful events that have occurred in human history--as horrific or wonderful and really so. We objectify acts and events in history in order to understand; but also to objectify and evaluate ourselves in terms of it and its movements. To understand is a human good; and to understand our history in order to understand ourselves is both given and good (with its own criteria to distinguish good from bad).

Such distinctions (between what is intelligible and what is quali-intelligible), then, need to be rethought, especially where they have been influenced by the otherwise-proper distinctions between physical and human-historical data, between the physical-natural sciences, and between the human sciences and their respective professions.

Again, harboring the attitudes of subjectivism and-or relativism tends to foster the relegation of the merely physical-natural to the real, and the human-historical (quali-meaning and the personal) to the not-real. However, obstructing the way of such relegation in our common discourse we find not only the comprehensive and conflicting meanings of wisdom and love, but also the fact that—fortunately or not--we can have no science without a scientist who is structured to bring (a) (at some point) the question of the good to what-is findings as scientifically sound judgments about the data and (b) the question of worthwhile-ness to what science and the scientist do with and about those findings.

Further, our pretending that our human sciences deal with real data only as that data are physical, and can be data unimpinged-on by the foundational situation of the scientist, will not do—at least for a truly critical scientist who is operating under the tenet:

Pay attention to the data--all of the data.

We have come to expect that the scientist, at least, has a leg-up on such tenets and their habituation, on our notions of "hard" facts and their objectivity, and on the critical exercise of empirical method (as we are using in our experiment in our main text for Finding the Mind).

In our self-reflections, let us at least aim at philosophical honesty: If we assign the entire field of the personal-good-bad to a non-objective, non-real merely subjective-relativity, to be consistent we have to consciously accept that we must also dismiss our entire field of study here (and in the experiment of Finding the Mind) as having any stake in the true-real—not to mention all personal human living you or I might do in terms of the worthwhile-desire-quest that we uncover in that experiment. It’s all moot—at best, an exercise in vanity. We need to admit openly to ourselves that, under the influence of our un-inspected philosophical split, and otherwise polymorphic philosophical notions, all human thought is and must be fundamentally flawed and can have nothing to do with objective fact.

We must ask ourselves: Do we really want to say that we live in a self-fooling fantasyland, pretending that the good is real when really, it isn’t? And do we want to live in an "act as if" universe; or in a world where the good is substantial to all-things-human, but where we are in constant denial of that fact, especially because our received and confused philosophical foundations, in its frayed logic, lead us to that impasse and denial.


The Pragmatics of the Good, or The Insider’s View

Let us first distinguish the physical from the material. That is:

First, what I mean by physical is what we can sense, or the sensible aspect of our data, and what are governed by physical laws; and what we sense and those laws we can also come to know as true-real.

Second, the sensible is also material. That is, the sensible is also intelligible. And again, the intelligible is what we are potential to understand and to come to know through our raising questions and having insights about it.

Third, what is material may or may not be physical. In our case, we are studying the basic structure of our minds, which is material--where material means intelligible and knowable as true-real. However, the mind is (a) not sensible, but is (b) manifest in the sensible. That is, the basic structure of the mind is evident in what we say and write and otherwise communicate to one another. Further, the mind's basic structure and dynamism is repeatedly evident in all human language.

Further, the good-bad is not physical, even though the presence of either can have profound effects on our physical being. As concrete, however, the good-bad is also material and, thus, is manifest in the physical universe--in the speaking and acting that we do--though it's not itself physical.

Finally, in the above sense, the good is material and, again, it manifests in the physical, i.e., in the sound of the spoken word and in the sight/touch of the written word; however, the good also may be more than material--it also may be spiritual (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).

That being said, if we are to be philosophically honest, then we can acknowledge that we have not worked out the relationship between quali-meaning (the good-bad complex) and the know-able-true-real. However, at the very least, we can let merely pragmatic principles guide us towards the true-reality of the good-bad in the beginning. We can let the latent philosophical foundations of our regard for wisdom reign, for the moment, at least. Here we continue to revel and suffer in the consequences of events, again, as good and bad and, in many cases, as both.

On the other hand, we want to recognize the legitimacy of incision (in some cases, of maintaining the difference between the meaningful-intelligible and quali-meaning) as a moment-in-context in the study of most if not all data and in nuances of it. Such incision, though it emerges from and always stands on a vastly varied foundation of quali-meaning, is needed in our methodical approach to different kinds of data--even in our understanding of the good-bad complex itself as potentially true-real.

However, we can do so without negating the field of resonant quali-meaning that underpins the development of the scientist and the history of the science and its contributions to critical thought. Indeed, we can do so without ignoring that such meaning is responsible for defining what critical consciousness means in the first place. If we cannot yet give an explicit reasonable and philosophical explanation of the good that will satisfy a classical mindset, at least we want to lay open to question:

Whether a focus on qualitative aspects of any data must draw with it a foundational philosophical split (the good is knowable-true-real or not), or whether we can become integrated and whole--and critical--in our thinking about quali-meaning, namely, as potentially explainable as true-real--as with all other what-type meaning and as conditional of all human execution in historical act.

Again, we want to move away from the split foundation that we harbor in our sciences. We want to move from the question of whether the good-bad can be true-real, to how the good-bad also can be knowable-objective-factual-true-real and, concomitantly, how the good-bad can be thought rightly of as intimate with what we mean by, at once, objectively true-real and personal. We want to bring the personal and its thought about and execution of the good back into what we think of as true-real existence; and we want to do so without losing the critical edge that we have become so accustomed to since the advent of the scientific revolution. This is a tall order, but this is what is needed at our present time in history.

Thus, we can consider that what is true-real is (more than merely sensing) what is intelligible, understood, and known (1958 & 2000; & 1972). However, in human concerns, we can consider that the qualified dimensions of anything we ask about also has all of the metaphysical trappings of the potential for being the intelligible-true-factual-real as any other what-data--any event or any person whatsoever, and in a plethora of degrees and nuances.

The legitimate issues of the personal real-good-bad may include the scientist’s accessibility to physical data and our use of logic and critical methods. In general terms, the personal real-good-bad is about what is meaningful, explainable, understood, defined, marshaled, and judged to be so (true-real).

However, such true-real-good-bad is also subject to (a) human developmental patterns with regard to horizons of the good in both the questioner and (if the data are human) in the questioned and (b) the dialectical powers of thoughtful discussion in community about specific issues. Here, the spirit of compromise is brought together with the spirit of transcendence by the differentiation and restructuring of meaning that dialectic affords.

In other words, the criteria for judging the true-real of the merely intelligible (e.g., in physics or nature or human situations, or in identifying the good as true-real in human history) share some similarity with, but are also quite different from, the criteria for judging the true-real of the good bad. However, the basic method--developing the criteria and tenets of making sound and critical judgments--remains the same.

Personal quali-meaning, then, in Lonergan's language, is potential to be, can be, and often is the content of the known-true-real, or of the fulfilled contingencies of the virtually unconditioned (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000).

Developing the criteria for the good will have to wait for discourse in the broader community. However, if we suffer from a philosophical split as we have been so intent on explaining above, the good falls dead at the door of reality and we can go no further to find some sense of unity. We can never even get to the development of such criteria if the good cannot be true-real, and pervasive to our true-real lives, on principle, or if we think of the good only as-if it were true-real.

As our analysis and experiment will show, human living is not only about knowing about what is intelligible and good-bad as truly and really so, but also (with Aristotle) about personally saying and doing (embodying) quali-meaning in our real-life activities—it’s about good-bad as manifest in our concrete history. Or, quali-meaning is about our being-in-act—how we actually are and choose to be in our history of living-being.

The good-bad, then, is discursive, but also circular (or in Langer’s term: presentational) —it is already present to us in its state of desire-quest-development (1942). And it wraps around from our desire-quest, to our insights-to-understanding and knowing (what is good-bad), and on into our being as concrete—our desire for and inquiry about quali-meaning can be understood, but then it can come back around to be appropriated. We can reach for a new and better interpretation of ourselves, and then become that interpretation. We can instantiate that quali-meaning in our history of being human. We do so as also knowable and as truly real. This is the pragmatic aspect of quali-meaning. Or again, “What is good always is concrete” (1972, p. 27); and it is we who are that concrete embodied good.

The suggestion then is that, philosophically, our latent assumptions about the wholeness and true-reality of the personal and (more often) of our applied wisdom is more appropriate to human living than is dividing-up true-reality and assigning the personal and quali-meaning to the domain of the merely subjective or relativistic. I make this suggestion regardless of the supposed hegemony of the natural and physical sciences and of many scientists who may still hold an outsider's metaphysical view. The wholesale application of our incisions and migrations of meaning in our notions of science (as true-real) and the personal and quali-meaningful (as untrue-unreal) does not meet with our individual experience of what constitutes wisdom or with the constant manifestation of human being in history--as a constant manifestation of our inborn good-worth desire-quest.

That is, “behind” concrete history of human speech, acts, and events is our constant and concrete desire for knowing and for being involved in what is truly-and really worthwhile—quali-meaning. Though we develop in vastly different ways around this desire-quest in history, we do not choose to have that desire-quest. Rather it comes with being human; and we cannot think without already being within that desire-quest framework, and without employing all of the assumptions that go along with it. Though topical incisions and distinctions may have their legitimate moment in our critical thinking about any data, including whether, in fact, the good is potential to be true-real, the philosophical migrations and split-meanings we are exposing here do not.

~~~

A person standing in an outsider’s view of history will have the problem of a metaphysics that cannot connect the good-bad with a "proof" of All-Ultimate-Meaning and, therefore, subjectivism and relativism are their only outs. From that view, a search for evidence to support those incisions and migrations as applied to quali-meaning is already underpinned by the assumptions that negate it. From an insider's view, that journey as defined is moot.

From the outsider's view, and without a clarifying-verifying piece of evidence, we presumably must wait for death to discover whether there is such a thing as truth or whether the good-bad that we say-do can be truly real. However, a person standing in an insider’s view of history understands the good-bad as concrete; the metaphysical All-Ultimate as, in fact, the yet-unsatisfied object of our desire-quests; those quests as open towards a great mystery; and the good that we do in the world as real-definitive of who we are in its incremental constant now that is our experience. The concrete, whatever else it is, is what is potentially true-real via our qualified and qualifying judgments of it, and that becomes so through our speech-act in the history of our being.

Further, we live our lives—get up and go to bed—surrounded by the constant application of our notions of quali-meaning, and we always have. As such, those applications bear a substantial relationship to the factual true-real that actually constitutes human living to the full and, again, to human wisdom.

For beyond the question for intelligence that is met by insight, there is always the question for reflection. However, while the speculative or factual insight is followed by the question whether the unity exists or whether the correlation governs events, the practical insight is followed by the question whether the unity is going to be made to exist or whether the correlation is going to be made to govern events. In other words, while speculative and factual insights are concerned to lead to knowledge of being, practical insights are concerned to lead to the making of being. Their objective is not what is but what is to be done. They reveal, not the unities and relations of things as they are, but the unities and relations of possible courses of action. (Lonergan, 1958, 610; & 2000, 633).

The making of being that Lonergan talks about above is underpinned by our constant desire-quest for the good, or for being involved with what is truly worthwhile, and by our history of development within a cultural setting that is manifest of it. Enter, if not faith, our speculative expectations of the True Good. Under such a view, it may become reasonable to have faith as one's guide.

We can speculate with some security that waiting for the Ultimate and Absolute True Good to be found after death only gets us unqualified regrets on our deathbed (for passively waiting most of our lives for it). Pragmatically speaking, because we live in a history of human understanding and judgments about quali-meaning, and in our latent philosophical assumptions about its true-reality, the personal-good-bad (not to mention the truth) can be defined as much more than mere subjectivity, relativity, sentimentality, or a product of mere bias and only that.

If we are to be privy to the good in any respect, and if we are to be involved in it in any way through our speech and acts, then we must understand it as at least regularly available to us in some way--if not the Ultimate and Absolute True Good that can only come from knowing and living Everything for All Time, at least a bonafide shadow of it merging in our lives as the ultimate, absolute, true good.

Again, with an affirmation of the theory in the data of our own experience of ourselves as questioners(coming clear to us in the experiment in Finding the Mind), we find that human history is an expression of the variably stated desire-quests: What is good-bad? What is/Is it worthwhile? Should I say-do it or bring it about? If so, we can also infer that the personal-quali-meaningful dimension of human living is already substantive of all of human history, including any science we undertake. And as discursive, any human situation in history that we ask about from the point of view of afterwards is already a product of what someone asked about, insighted, and brought about as the actuation of their desire-quest for the good. We might or might not agree that, indeed, it was or is wholly and concretely good. However, regardless of our specific judgments about it from our later view of it in its historical context, that act still was a product of that same desire-quest and its underpinning of philosophical assumptions.


The Practical Results of Giving Up or Waiting, from the Outsider’s View

The subtle omission of the question of quality-as-true-real has quite practical results if applied to the real of our regular human living. That is, when we harbor philosophical doubt that the good-bad is real on principle (not this or that good-bad, but all thises and thats), we are less likely to bring good about, or to bring it about well. In such cases, a sense of carelessness can become pervasive to our being.

If so, similarly, so goes our assumed inclusion of that desire-quest in the domain of the real—it has quite practical results. For, at first glance, from a philosophically incisive view, relegating quali-meaning to the merely-subjective domain, for instance, assault or murder have no moral value one way or the other. We leave ourselves to either break the principle in each and every detail in our lives, or with no way to recognize or to judge any form of cultural breakdown or depravity. And of course we quite regularly do recognize such breakdowns and depravity, again, with a pervasive (latent) assumption of the true-real of many forms of quali-meaning.

Further, under the press to cohere with our incisive philosophical assumption, nor can we develop, critique, improve, or recognize the good, or make more excellent, (make good-better-best) ourselves or any other human creation or situation in the world—we can do so only as an abstract exercise, but not really and truly. Of course these are aspects of our lives that already are rooted in our assumptions about the presence of the good in the true-real, and we continue to do those things--to break the principle of incision--with our assumptions about the true-real of the good firmly in place, regardless of the incision and of what some scientists (speaking from an outsider’s view) tell us about the subjectivity and-or relativism of the good.


Incision Applied to Our Analysis of the Mind
In a legitimately incisive moment, then, we can distinguish our analysis and affirmation of the mind from the good or bad of it. However, through our experiment in Finding the Mind, we also can locate and affirm for ourselves the existing structure and operations of our desire-quests that are foundational to our intelligence (the mind) With that critical affirmation at our backs, as it were, we cannot be consistent in our thinking and also divorce the good, in principle, from our experimental findings along with our legitimate incisions, distinctions, analysis and affirmations.

The incisive clarity--of the distinction between the intelligible and quali-meaning--is crucial to all critical thinking and to science. However, a regard for the data that includes a postponement of the personal-good-bad does not mean a necessary and all-consuming divorce (a metaphysical separation) of either from the whole knowable-true-real.

That is, first, what we found in our experiment was identical with the structure and operations of all personal selves. Second, that structure and its operations (our desire-quests) constitute the condition that must occur for any and all that is humanly known, said, and done.

After incision, our further questions are (1) is the basic structure good-bad and (2) is it worthwhile?

First, as the basic structure and operations are constitutive of the human mind, we can consciously direct, but do not choose to employ that structure and operations. And so the question: is it worthwhile? applied to the structure and operations is like asking: do we need to show up, or a field of grass, chalk lines, ball, etc., to play our game of football--the answer is: only if you want to play football. That is, the theory has been critically affirmed; and so we find that we need to employ the structure and its operations to ask this question of it. It forms the fundamental basis for our asking this worthwhile question of anything else we know-say-do.

Second, beyond the questions what is it and is it so about the human mind that we have asked and answered in our experiment, we can ask: Is the basic structure and its operations that we have affirmed good or bad? If the basic structure and its operations are indeed so fundamental to what it means to be human (and they are) then an equivalent question would be: Is human living as such basically good or bad? Again, we need to employ the structure and its operations to ask this question of ourselves as we go about our living.
~~~

To recoup our exploration in view of the above, first, everything we have thought before, about which we were able to distinguish quali-meaning from the intelligible, is already infused with albeit-developmental resonant quali-meaning. This means that all of our new questions cannot but spring from a field that is good-bad substantiated.

And second, any form of applications of our thought are governed by the question of worthwhile-ness of our speech and actions—or quali-meaning by another name. Such applications include those derived from any and all science.

Further, the field of applications is where our very comportment with regard to the good of life is worked out. As waiting for a "proof" of the Ultimate Really True Good, and if we want to be consistent in our thought, we are potential to become not only amoral passive sleepwalkers through life, but immoral. We may remain unaware of our underlying philosophical divisions. However, considering that we are supported by several centuries of wayward (if not haphazard) philosophical thought, those divisions tend to migrate uncritically along with our correctly divided object-oriented thought. In so doing, the divisions infect everything we think, say, and do.


Distinct Data

Natural-Physical Sciences

Philosophical Rendering:
Objective-Fact-Knowable Reality

Distinct Data

Human Sciences

Philosophical Rendering:
Subjective-Biased-Sentiment-Relative
AND-OR
Objective-Fact-Knowable Reality

Distinct Data

Human Beings

Philosophical Rendering:

Subjective-Biased-Sentiment-Relative
AND-OR
Objective-Fact-Knowing-Knowable Reality(beyond our mere physicality)

Distinct Data

Quali-meaning/Personal

Philosophical Rendering:

Subjective-Biased-Sentiment-Relative
AND-OR
Objective-Fact-Knowing-Knowable Reality

Distinct Data

Wisdom

Philosophical Rendering:

Objective-Fact-Knowable Reality
As Both Personal and Qualified

Commenting on the differences between methods and results in the sciences and in metaphysics as science, Lonergan states:

Because the results obtained in the empirical sciences commonly are far less general than the methods they employ, scientists are not troubled to any notable extent by a predetermination of their results by their choice of method. In metaphysics, however, methods and results are of equal generality and tend to be coincident. It follows that differences in metaphysical positions can be studied expeditiously and compendiously by examining differences in method. Moreover, such a study is not confined to tabulating the correlations that hold between different methods and different metaphysical systems. For there is only one method that is not arbitrary, and it grounds its explicit anticipations on the anticipations that, though latent, are present and operative in consciousness. (Lonergan, 1958, 402; & 2000, 427)

Of course in any science we seek and expect to find a dynamic correlation between the data and the theory—we expect a mutually informing conversation, as it were. So it is in metaphysics. However, here (as human beings) we are both the data and the student of it. And so, in order for the theory to be adequate, we can expect to understand the data, but also we can expect nothing less than to be able to identify with the general framework and dynamism of the theory, if we have the theory right.

This potential and overtly called-for verification-of and then identification-with is what makes the theory, general empirical method, unique. In this special case, then, the data is my and your own method and pattern of mind. However, and though our study is of the subject's mind, our method and theory still seek an objective moment—to know what is objective-true-factual-real about that mind, regardless of whether it is me or another human subject, thing, or event.

Our results, then, will not necessarily be biased or merely sentimental, subjective or relativistic, on principle. Our philosophical assumptions (of the search for and expectation of the reality of the data under concern) need not migrate with a philosophical incision about the intelligibility and the good of that data as true-real merely because it is a human subject we are concerned with. Nor do we need to dismiss the knowable-true-real of the data merely because it is me-you-subjects who are our objects of concern and, again, the good as pervasive to that concern.

Further, as latent or explicit, the method we are exploring (general empirical method) as factual includes our set of desire-quests; and our set of desire-quests includes quality (the quest for knowledge of good-bad and doing-saying-participation in the worthwhile) as informative of both un-incised intelligibility and of wisdom. Those desire-quests, then, point to and include our anticipations as similarly qualified in all forthcoming speech and act. (See our reflections on the good in appendix 2.)

In concrete examples, if the (assumed) omission of quality from human intelligibility-true-real were even possible, we could not tell the difference between a real thief and a real shopper in a store, a real rapist and a real doctor or lover, or the real police and real terrorists. Nor would we care about the effects of genocide (people die, so sorry, but so what?). We could not know the difference between qualified over poor building materials, the good-bad effects of global warming, or the good-bad of “polluting” our oceans and fresh waters. Not only is the good concrete, it is defined that way as a condition for its full intelligibility in human affairs.

At the philosophical level of our thought, if we leave in place the distinction between what is and what is so (as objective) and the good-bad (as merely subjective bias), then we can say, Yes, that’s definitely ethnic cleansing; or polluting (as mere change). However, we can add nothing really intelligent or reasonable or passionate about whether such activities are really good or bad. We must wait for the Metaphysical Fact to be "proven" in Absolute terms to make that judgment.


Development and the Good

Philosophically, our internal moral development and erection of our moral principles in our thought potentially follow the same pattern as our other notions of the good-bad. That is, in our thinking our moral principles can “fall” on the subjective side of the incision, i.e., they are nice to have but really are mere subjectivity, sentimentality, a form of bias, , etc., in the backrooms of our thought. In effect, we de-claw our moral principles, taking away their power over us by an over-shadow of doubt (about their connection to reality) as we work out our daily lives and our moral dilemmas.

Our polymorphism does not necessarily call for a philosophical split or migration of meaning (of our moral identities and principles) from (a) our thought of them as objective-factual-reality to (b) our thought of them as merely subjective, sentimental, or biased, but it can.

However, in our time such a potential differentiation of mind calls for a general explication (a coming to consciousness) of our intellectual and moral horizons as it applies to any science, especially in its applications, or in any human situation. (Such an explication may be named foundational review and be a general rendering or be applied to a particular human being or institution.) In individual persons, institutions, or entire states, however, the meaning of culture itself holds within it an implication of excellence—as a pearl is not only grown, but cultured, meaning it has gone through a process to make it more excellent.

Further, such excellence does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, we identify criteria for that excellence in every situation some of which becomes quite systematic, for instance, to set up general standards and protocols for action in any field of applications.

Our aim here is not to argue for this or that good or bad (Following James’ lead in note 8). Such an argument will take us, first, into an exploration of readers’ developmental concerns, culture, and several content-horizons within both. (See our next two sections.) Second, it would take us into the highly variable contingencies associated with coming to know the particular good-bad, e.g., what has come to be called situation ethics. And, third, arguing for the good or bad would take us into an exploration of the freedom of spirit and its basic intent that grounds qualified contingency in all human concerns, not to mention political frameworks (Lonergan, 1958 and 2000).

Rather, our aim is to forge a clear distinction between the intelligence-intelligible and the good-bad complexes of meaning that you hold in your mind and spirit; to show the migration of philosophical assumptions that can accompany such distinctions and the implications of such a migration; to show that making the distinction itself carries with it an assumption that the science or the discourse will be better for having made it; then to reveal the integral relationship between what we have distinguished, and to foster (in my hypothetical readers--you), the maintenance of a philosophically consistent ground at the core of our scientific fields, our common life activities, and our creative movements of mind and their expressions in history. Our focus is that the same specific questions for quality and our now-developed principles of selection--all are derived from our prior desire-quests and the subsequent insights that flow into our notions of the intelligible-good-bad-worthwhile of speech-act in the world.

A now-conscious affirmation or denial of the good-bad desire-quest and its developmental complex as a reality in each of us carries with it an implied affirmation or denial of our responsibility for intelligent-or defunct human living. Such recognition brings the good out of the air and into the ground of human living. Such affirmation or denial lays open our personal history of being, scientist or not, to its own positive-negative forces, e.g., to the avoidance or embrace of qualified self-consciousness; to rationalization or the more difficult road towards reasonability, and potentially to the question of faith (our fourth desire-quest); to moral renunciation or to self-conscious identity with one’s socially inherited and/or consciously chosen moral principles; and to a denial-of or fidelity-to an inborn but violable sense of human integrity (1958, 599; and 2000, 622-23).

Our spontaneously operating set of desire-quests fuels our penchant for developing moral principles in the first place, and for coming to evaluative insights, and for making evaluative judgments about the real—the judgments which (under the influence of the semi-conscious split) supposedly only can come from our subjective bias. Where in fact those desire-quests also fuel (a) our prior (resonant) selective interest and (b) the implications of excellence, of making-better (culturing), of progressing, or of improving anything whatsoever—all of which actually manifest regularly in the history of the human beings in our real world, and cannot do otherwise.

Fundamentally, we desire to be involved with the good, and so if not quashed or misdirected, we are set in our development towards it.


The Good in Concrete Events and Language Expressions

Concretely in our common thought and conversations, we ask and make direct evaluative statements--about quality-excellence, good-bad, right-wrong, good-evil, etc. For instance, we ask: was it a good ballgame? Or we say: it was an excellent concert (prior question: How good-bad was the concert?), or is this a qualified (good) theory? Also, as example, lurking under our questions for fact, e.g., did the concert really take place? is a set of already-directed qualitative questions and already-formed assumptions made up of a plethora of under-meaning.

Further, in common discourse, evaluative language is often undifferentiated—crowded in with many other kinds of meaning. In common discourse we assume, for instance, that fraud is unethical (bad) by its very definition, and that the practice of ethnic cleansing is evil (on a cosmic scale, or worse than bad—not for the good of others or of the selves who perpetrate it). Or, not only did two planes fly into the World Trade Center buildings in New York City, collapsing them (meaning-real-fact), it was a horrible event (bad/qualitative judgment/reality) and the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center was nothing less than evil. Because such expressions and terms go unexplained in-the-moment does not mean that they occur in a quali-meaning vacuum.

Furthermore, we use euphemisms like ethnic cleansing instead of tribal murder or senseless killing to “goodify” language that is difficult to hear precisely because of its negative clarity. In this way, we even try to make the bad sound better.

Again, especially in common discourse, we infuse and surround factual inquiry with qualitative meaning. That discourse also can include implicit or explicit religious and-or spiritual meaning (is it really ultimately worthwhile?), for instance, our use of the term evil above.

Further, in our latency, we commonly do not raise the philosophical question of whether, in such discourse, we assume that everything said refers to the true-real or if it remains merely subjective. Indeed, it might seem bizarre to raise such a question, but even more bizarre to think that nothing we have spoken about is true-real.

And yet, when poised against what we mean by the critical objectivity of sciences, where the content-data of the science is physical and-or natural, all things human take a backseat to that sense of critical objectivity. To point to the philosophical hypocrisy of such thinking, for example, we can explore the physics of burning flesh in the ovens at Auschwitz or the crushing and burning of bodies in the World Trade Center. However, under the principle of incision, our commitment to such objectivity waffles--when considering the true-reality of the humanity, ethics, or spirituality of those concerned.

As example, in ethnic cleansing and the events of 9-11 in New York City, we can counter the judgments of these events as bad or evil with the obvious judgment about what was worthwhile to do for the terrorists and murderers, or with the Nazis in World War II Germany as they dealt with “the Jewish question,” or “the final solution,” or with those who fly airplanes into buildings on a clear day and are gladly willing to die along with those they force to die with them. Some refer to such events as evil while, from another view, others are convinced of their good and danced in the streets upon hearing of it. In the details of living, sorting out the true-real-good is nothing if not complex.

However, our theory is drawn as a general structure, and is just that--general. Thus, in both situations above, we and terrorists and murderers are making a commitment around a set of criteria, and around our meaningful responses to our questions for the good. Our theory states that we and the terrorists take an ethical-political-spiritual stand on the quality of the acts in question, and of the meaning-real-fact, once it occurs. And so, though you and I take our stands on such issues, our question for the good is manifest in both diverse judgments and in all things that we say and do. Our exploration here is to locate the desire-quest as fundamental and trans-cultural, and to find evidence for it in its issue in concrete reality. There is some good in that as a precursor to an educated discussion in a politics of openness to mutual self-mediation.

Also, we argue for the expression of the true good as fact, and as worthwhile act. For human beings can be genuine or not; and what we consider worthwhile, we say, do, and must live or die with.

However, we are not yet arguing its case in any one particular set of events, for such an argument would take us far from our present concern and task. For the present, and with a critical inspection of human consciousness, we can say that the desire-quest for the good is trans-cultural, whatever form it takes in its specific history, and that we can look to a person’s learned foundations, born of culture, for the source of our differences, rather than to more topical concerns or to what is trans-cultural about us.

From an empirical view, however, we can start by acknowledging the basic structure and that it belongs to all. The political protection of the basic openness and potential development that goes with it is fundamental to the good of order and of development towards the good of all culture. Further, self-destruction can be argued on an individual level and with individual data; whereas, destruction of others, or quashing of human potential, are quite another--where the good is located at the beginning in the openness to meaning-truth-good in each and every case.

Thus, in the midst of our study and experiment, we can now ground for ourselves the desire-quest for the true-good as intimately personal, as objectively true-real, and as trans-cultural. We can do so because not only its basic structure but its developmental thrusts and windows are given to all human beings. Whether fostered, suppressed, distorted, or quashed, the set of desire-quests, its basic structure, and its dynamism, are manifest in all.

That you want to distinguish and probably already judge, for instance, whether the events in New York on 9-11 were good or bad, or even had some good outcomes in time, points not only to a difficult argument to put forth to terrorists and murderers who have a long history of other learned foundations and intentions, but also to the trans-cultural nature of our desire-quests. We can and do regularly choose one good over another based on some complex set of criteria of the good and our erected principles--even to kill ourselves and others in "the name of God."

That criteria differ and are vast does not mean that the true-real-good (small trg) is not sought by all and found by some.


Meaning (And Good as Meaningful) as Potent for Knowable-True Reality

Difficult or not to distinguish and define, the questions of the good-worthwhile permeates our historical-human context through-and-through, including the underpinning of all science. First, meaning is constitutive of human living:

If we eliminate meaning from human life, would there be any family? There would not. Family is something that we mean and that we realize. Would there be any society if there were not any meaning? Not in any normal sense. There might be a herd or a drove; there could hardly be a society. There could be no education, nor morals. Morals lie in the field of meaning; they are impossible without meaning. There would be neither state nor law, neither economics nor technics. To eliminate meaning is to eliminate all human institutions. Again, to eliminate meaning would be to eliminate interpersonal relations, symbols, art, language, literature, religion, science, history, philosophy, theology. There still would be human beings in the sense of the definition ‘rational animal’; but it would always be the rational animal that had not yet reached the point where it had learned any language or been able to signify anything. Human living, then, is something to which meaning is essential; it is incomplete without meaning; it has a constituent in the realm of meaning. Not only is human living constituted by meaning—it isn’t constituted solely by meaning, we have bodies, we have physiological processes, and they are all real – but human living would not be what we mean by human living if meaning were eliminated. (Lonergan 1996, 104).

Second, then, for humans, good and bad are constituents of meaning because we seek the good and avoid the bad; we develop (and cultures develop) around that seeking; and our very complex of questions for living (What should-ought I say-do?, etc.) is about the good.

So far, we have suggested that, from the beginning, we identify the good-bad complex with basic human intelligence and the intelligible, and that what is immediate to us is that we mediate meaning. This mediation as dynamic and concrete is, as it were, our spirit-in-act. Thus, the intelligible in all human concerns is rooted in the fact of our having such desire-quests and of our raising such questions in the first place in their undifferentiated form. That undifferentiated desire-quest comes first, whether in a context where the human spirit is systematically fostered or quashed. The quashing is of that mediation and its development as spontaneous to being human.

Further, we raise specific questions from a more or less developed and differentiated frame of mind. That development conditions the meaning of our specific insights for the good and bad when they occur in each situation.

Furthermore, though such a fact makes for great nuance and complexity with regard to the objective good, that nuance and complexity does not provide the ground for a philosophical migration of meaning from potentially real to not potentially real on principle—a split consciousness with regard to the good--that we are exploring here, or for a subsequent arbitrariness of character and its development, or for moral or ethical relativity, or for our disregard of the constant call emanating from our own internal structure for being personally responsible.

The historical outsider, then, in order to argue overt nihilism or covert passivity where we wait for the end-time to become truly involved, must first explain why it is best to put our intimate participation in reality on hold. Then we must explain the thought that constantly manifests in the good-worthwhile-ness of human history; and then return to his-her living in a way that is consistent with either view. This is so since (a) we are exploring human being in history here and (b) the scientist, etc., is a human being in that history.

States are not just instances of what ought to be; they are concrete embodiments of what peoples have de facto chosen them to be. (Lonergan 1996, 203)

We have enough history behind us to recognize the desire-quest for the good as an intrinsic aspect of the intelligible in all true-real human affairs, and its common and general thread of moral being in that history—one that, in each generation, finds its resonance, recurrence, and self-transcendence in that generation. And it is enough despite “intelligent, creative, and critical” attempts to quash the good-worthwhile or to deem it not true-real via uncritical and wrong-headed philosophical incision-migration.

Without reflecting on these issues, then, as potentially-received products of our common culture in our time, we may begin our study and experiment by assuming that our personal and qualitative concerns are necessarily biased, on principle, or that they are merely subjective or sentimental, etc., and further, we may assume that meaning itself is not real:

One is apt to say that on the one hand there are things that are real and on the other there is ‘mere meaning’ – as though meaning were not a reality. The proper division is that esse reale, the real, divides into the ‘natural’ and the ‘intentional’; the intentional order is the order of meaning. (1996, 105)

Also, meaning is not only about human affairs. We also understand what we sense not by sensing alone, but from questioning what we sense--of the concrete materiality of the universe we live in. From our beginning as infants, we want to understand what we are sensing. Sensing is not equal to understanding. When infants explore the natural world that surrounds them, they begin by sensing. However, developing any knowledge, including knowledge of the natural and physical world, its mathematics, etc., is dependent on our questioning and having insights—and not merely on our sensing what is “out there.”

Certainly, we begin by looking with our eyes or by otherwise sensing. However, knowing is a process that follows sensing with our set of desire-quests, our resonance with images and past meaning, with our questioning and, through insighting, with our new meaning accrual. In the process of coming to know, we ask about what it is, or what it means, and then, using various methods, we move towards critical confirmation of that meaning—knowing the true real. Knowing is a confirmation of that what-meaning through our now-reflective consideration of it.

Generally speaking, knowledge is the end-run of that movement of meaning exploration—experience and understanding, its accrual, and then its confirmation. Then that same knowledge becomes a resonant resource—a means towards our understanding what is worthwhile to do and to say in our history (Lonergan 1958 & 2000, 1996, 214-243).

At this writing, many who write about the assumptions underpinning our scientific fields are also grappling with these same issues. For instance, the historian Steven Shapin, with Ian Hacking, exposes the claims of constructivism to critique. In his works, A Social History of Truth and Science is Culture, Shapin argues that science is, indeed, social, but that being social does not undermine the truth claims that science makes. Truth, Shapin says, is also social by its very nature.

Here we have the implications of a partial recovery of the complexity of culture, of history as dynamic, and of the sciences that emerged from that dynamism, but also a grappling with what truth itself really is. Shapin does not diminish truth, but rather finds the scientist within, rather than without, culture and the history of truth’s dynamism.

Many other authors from several fields, including the sciences, are raising similar questions (Shapin 1998). We are in a long, slow recovery from the forces of positivism generated from the scientific revolution and its affect on philosophy in the past centuries. In terms of Lonergan’s work on knowing and being (epistemology, ontology, and metaphysics), Shapin and others, however haphazardly, are rethinking the philosophical foundations of their fields. Such rethinking will have a profound effect on the outcomes of our fields and sciences. Shapin himself seems to have found the empirical principle as applied to the sciences, history, and culture. He has also hinted at reality and a solid truth at the middle ground between Absolute Knowledge and a vacuous relativity.

In Lonergan’s terms, Shapin is reflecting the (unnamed by Shapin) activities of the virtually unconditioned—the empirical-absolute as dynamic and historical--and the movement of proportionate being, rather than some sort of assumed and all-consuming Classical Absolute Truth that only the scientist has access to (Lonergan, 1958 & 2000) in the way that religious potentates thought they had access before the scientific revolution emerged in Western history—what I am now referring to as the outsider’s view.


Knowledge of True-Reality as Underpinning the Good

At least we are raising some preliminary questions here and, at the very least, we are being critical in distinguishing knowing the true-real (and knowing the true-real-good) from mere belief or opinion. So that we are finding the knowing of the true-real-good-bad within that same structure and as virtually unconditioned, as conditioned-speculative, and as practical (see Finding the Mind and Lonergan 1958 & 2000).

The accrual of meaningful evidence (not merely as seen or otherwise sensed) for making a sound judgment about what is objective and real marks the vast difference between mere subjectivity, seeing, believing, or having opinions, on the one hand, and knowing the true-real in any critical way, on the other. I am suggesting that we can only take our own and all other human activities, creations, and concerns seriously (even with regard to our knowing of the natural-physical world) if we also regard them as both meaningful and-or qualitative, and both as potentially having not only a subjective component, but also an objectively true-real component. The suggestion is that the merely subjective good-bad (or opinion or belief) is potential to become known (objectively) from within the general structure of knowing as critically established (Lonergan 1997, 214-243).

In other words, our suggestion is that you already may be fostering a philosophical view that we are trying to explore here and that affects your view about our data—in our case, the mind—that we cannot see or otherwise sense. We cannot sense the mind, thus (you may assume), the mind is not, and cannot be known as, real. Further, you may assume our study of the good and its pervasiveness follows suit for the same reasons. And despite all of our good intentions, despite our experiment and your success in it, and despite how we actually speak and act in the world every day with regard to the good, the good-bad-worth complex of meaning cannot really be a part of the material universe—of what you assume is only what we can sense.

The philosophical incision-bifurcation-migration leaves the mind and the good-bad complex of meaning as clearly in the domain of the subject alone, of ungrounded conjecture, of bias, of sentiment—but not as potentially known-true-real, on principle. In effect, we lose all of our critical capacities to say this is true-real about the mind or the good-bad complex of meaning before we even start our exploration.

On the other hand, we can foster a view that we and our minds are a part of a diffuse arena of meaning--including what is authentically subjective to us, and that what is meaningful, good, and true are not and need not be a direct product of sensing. Rather, these are products of our movement of mind: experiencing, understanding, and reflective understanding ending in a judgment. As a metaphysical issue, however, what is really subjective is subjective only within an objective context. That is, to be consistent, if we know what-is subjective, then we know that it IS subjective (Lonergan 1996).

This metaphysical view includes that any meaning whatsoever, whether a product of direct sensing or not, is potent to be evidenced and judged—or known to be and-or to become real. Again, as thought-fantasy, that meaning IS thought-fantastic in the subjective plane of our existence and is so really and truly. Further, once judged to be so, and when our judgments are correct, that true-reality is so independent of ourselves and our thought about it.

In responding to a critique by Fr Coreth of Insight: A Study of Understanding, Lonergan explains the relationship between content and performance in developing a metaphysics. Here he juxtaposes (what we call) an insider's view to an outsider's view:

The operative moment in Fr Coreth's use of transcendental method cannot occur in a Kantian context. For that operative moment lies in a contradiction not between content and content but between content and performance; but a Kantian context is a context of contents that does not envisage performances. Thus there is no explicit contradiction in the content of the statement, We are under an illusion when we claim to know what really is. On the other hand, there is an explicit contradiction in the reflective statement, I am stating what really and truly is so when I state that we are under an illusion whenever we claim to know what really and truly is so. However, the content of the explicitly contradictory statement adds to the content of the first what is found implicitly in the first, not as content, but as performance. Now to bring to light such contradictions is the operative moment in Fr Coreth's use of transcendental method. But such an operative moment cannot occur in a Kantian context for, while Kant envisages an Ich denke as a formal condition of the possibility of objective contents being thought, still he cannot find room for a concrete reality intelligently asking and rationally answering questions. In brief, phenomena appear, but they do not perform; and transcendental conditions of possibility within a transcendental logic do not transcend transcendental logic. (1967, 192-93)

We are, then, speaking of vastly different metaphysical horizons:

The fact of horizon explains why realism and, generally, a philosophy cannot be proved deductively. The reason is that horizon is prior to the meaning of statements: every statement made by a realist denotes an object in a realist's world; every statement made by an idealist denotes an object in an idealist world; the two sets of objects are disparate; and neither of the two sets of statements can prove the horizon within which each set has its meaning, simply because the statements can have their meaning only by presupposing their proper horizon.

(Lonergan, 1967, 199)

From this brief excursion into metaphysics perhaps we can see why the outsider's (deductive) view--one that has come "down" to us via Kant and others--has become so ingrained in our thought. It also suggests why we can, and need to, provide a foundational review (by any name) to all forms of empirical study. Such a view follows from an understanding of the effect of one's philosophical horizons on all object-content.

The relationship between conceptual contents and our performance is also where our creative abilities are grounded. From the insider's view, thinking and thought are real. The content or what we think then holds the possibility and potential of becoming so and always in a context of further questions. From an outsider's view purveyed by Kant et al, we are separated away from our own performance and our conceptual development becomes the source of our performed-as-unperformed dogmatism. And again, so goes our understanding of how the good (as concrete) is actually worked out in our lives--as true-real.

We can foster a view that we can explore our universe and ourselves, self-consciously, from within, and with our incisions about the good in place at their proper time. It is no small point that such a view coincides with how we all go about living in the first place. Again, from the insider’s view, all thought is real thought as such; however, everything we think is not necessarily real by virtue of our thinking it.

Also, from an insider's view we will think of sensing as one aspect of our experience and, thus, of the fuller knowing process; however, we will be methodical in maintaining access to the real--through a reflective understanding of and judgment about meaning, and regardless of the form or qualifications our data take.

For instance, if tables are sensible and if minds are not, but both are meaningful-intelligible and, as such, respondent to the question what, and if knowledge is a process of desire-questing-exploring meaning and reflecting on it for the reasonability of the evidence, then tables and minds are intelligible and can be explored, understood, and known as true-real, functioning and independent of my thoughts about either.

Further, we can explore the question of the good-bad of anything and, as complex-developmental and horizon-dependent as it is, we can accumulate meaningful evidence for its truth-reality as good-bad. There is, of course, internal-external unification at hand--of what was the case, before we erased performance from our metaphysical view and before we acquired a split-away view the universe, its qualifications, and our knowing of and place in it.

From our more comprehensive, empirical, but unified base, we must maintain such what-good distinctions for exploration of data, for some intentions, and in some venues. Here our understanding alone depends on its qualified underpinnings, but maintains a clear division of meaning, in special contexts, without further questions of quality. We can and do postpone our qualitative questions in some times and in some venues. However, we also maintain that both desire-quests (what is it? and what is its worth-good?) are constitutive of the human mind and that, though knowledge is key, speech-and-act in history (informed by desire-quest-3) is the greater context in which all knowledge is and must be played out.

From our view, then, the desire-quests, including the desire-quest for the good-worthwhile, can be accessed as an aspect of the mind (a) as data and as evidence for a general theorem of mind and (b) as a potentially and personally understood and affirmed true-real aspect of my mind. We can analyze ourselves and our minds as objects, then; but also we can identify consciously with what we have come to know about ourselves as objectively real--in performance.

Thus, we maintain that the desire-quests are functional, operative, and dynamic and, further, that they can be evidenced as such. Thus, they can be established as true and as objective reality. (For a fuller discussion of this argument, see indexes for Lonergan’s works, and our chapter on history in the fuller version of Finding the Mind: Foundational Review [unpublished at this writing].)


Passions, Philosophy, and the Pervasiveness of the Good

As performance, then, a transformation of self and culture can bring us to identify-with, and to grow our desires and fears into, aspects and movements of that transformation. In this way, we need not divorce ourselves from our passions in order to be philosophically integrated or to aspire to wisdom. Rather our transformed passions can inform, and we can have learned and reflectively-established principles of living that guide wise and passionate ways of speaking and acting in the world—or not so speaking and acting. Such principles and ways may change considerably over time—we are weak and we may dissemble--but they also can become our habitual lenses or windows of thought that tend to temper passions that were once unruly--beginning points through which we question, understand, analyze, judge, qualify, discern, choose, and frame our speech and acts.

So that a human baby spontaneously desires what is pleasant, and fears what is painful, in the here-and-now of her life. Then she comes to be learned-responsive to those desires and fears as a small step away from mere sensitive consciousness, and in her rudimentary but pragmatic and performed existence.

However, a well-developed adult desires, with full but tutored and transformed feeling, what meets with a unity of spirit around our developed habits of being, and around our now-developed principles of what it means to be a good and valuable human being. And we fear what does not meet that unity (Aristotle, trans. 1962).

Further, when that unity is breached, our transformed fear-desire complex rises up spontaneously as our sense of having a bad conscience, and in our discomfort or anxiety at having manifested a lack of character in a specific situation. Under the influence of such development, we “automatically” experience such discomfort and bad feelings when we witness or consider saying bad things and doing bad acts. Such activities and thoughts go against our now-developed sense of well-being, as well as our developed conscience, and the character of who we are and want to be.

Though in one sense, such a conscience is a developed thing within a culture, with all of its inherited details, in another sense (and one that Aristotle only hinted at) our conscience is connected with a deeper sense of integrity that manifests around the tenets and principles that come with our basic dynamic structure. We see this at its very basic manifestation in a child who wants to be held or let go and who may want either from their own needs and their given sense of autonomous freedom to fulfill them.

Furthermore, we experience peace, comfort and good feelings--even resonant joy--when we witness good-speech-acts and-or contemplate saying-doing good things. As children, we already have a rudimentary sense of spiritual integrity from which our wonder emerges, and which is responsive in kind to our surroundings and to normative calls for our development. But as mature adults, through that development, we have transformed and attuned our desire-fear complex to meet with the ongoing demands of intelligence, reasonability, responsibility, and of loving—in the events in our lives in a more consciously self-directed way. (See appendix 3 for Resonance and Rejection of Meaning.)

In either case, and depending on our self-honesty and habits of self-reflection, our conscience may or may not be developed enough to give a series of good explanations and reasons (not rationalizations) for the expression and follow-through of such feelings and comforts of our being.

Furthermore, we are defining the good (and the substance of our evaluative desire-quests and discernments) in terms of the concrete--the real life-in-meaning that we live every day (Lonergan 1972, p. 27) and that responds to our questions for knowledge of it. In this way, the evaluative complex is operative in us as a constantly-performing set of desire-quests that emerge in the context of a vast field of developed under-meaning. Such under-meaning is built up over time and is constituted by the full range of our individual-human and collaborative-cultural experiences and developments in history. The evaluative complex in all its dynamism is the source of order or disorder in all real-concrete personal and cultural living.

And it is here, where the good is understood as performance and as always concrete (1972), that human beings cannot step-away from our responsibility for our history—regardless of what we think of ourselves, stepping-away also is a performed response--of no-response--to our place in that history.(9) Also, qualitative content, as manifest in the specifics of our understanding, choices, speech, and actions, concretely is grounded in the fact that, however tinted, quashed, or expanded, we have a good-bad window that calls for, informs, frames, and directs that content. Evaluation (discernment of the good-bad) is grounded in the spontaneous emergence and development of our prior desire-quest for the good-bad (is it good-bad? and, is it worthwhile?) As our experiment will convey that, though developmental and highly variable from person-to-person, our evaluative desire-quest is given—built-in to the human mind. It constitute how we feel and think. That how in its general form is expressed here as general empirical or transcendental method.

As we will see, our desire-quest for knowing the real good-bad, as well as for saying and doing the real good, is a fundamental (and fundamentally human) framework for choice. The good-worthwhile-desire-quest is part of the centerpiece of our experiment and its verification procedures in our present course of study.


Applying the Structure to our Study

Because our exploration is of the structure and dynamism of the human mind, we should be able to apply our descriptions, and the theory of mind (general empirical method), in our experiment and to our exploration itself and, specifically, in terms of our good-bad set of questions that the theory sets out. Thus, in our present study in Finding the Mind we are exploring this theory, general empirical method, and its referent--the structure of human consciousness--for our own understanding and knowledge (What is it? and Is it so?).

Further, we can put off or we can ask the evaluative question of our study: is it good-bad? In fact, you may already be harboring that question (about going through the experiment) as you read through the text anyway. Such questions can act like a computer program running at the back of your present focus: Is this a good and worthwhile study and-or experiment? One criterion for judgment of the study’s true good, for instance, will be whether you will learn something from it about yourself, not to mention about everyone else.

Furthermore, we begin our study by already assuming and trusting that it is worthwhile to forge such a study. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be involved in such a study. However, at present we are not asking qualitative questions overtly. We are only exploring whether or not, independent of what we already think about it, we actually do have such desire-quests and ask such questions regardless of whether you want or do-not-want the theory to be correct and the experiment to be well drawn. And to put it in blunt metaphysical terms, if the structure and its dynamism are not real, neither are you.

In this study, then, what you learn about the meaning of your own human consciousness will become a part of your under-meaning that may, and probably will, go on to inform your thought, speech and act, as time goes on. Thus, though we can set aside the good-bad desire-quest for our analysis, at a deeper level, that desire-quest, and its accumulated meaning and principles, have already underpinned, informed, and will inform, your study and what you do and say in terms of it.


Blank Slate or Meaning Accrual

The more we develop, deepen, open ourselves, and mature, the more our accumulation of qualitative under-meaning accrues, and the more meaning we can bring to new events for our understanding of those events as spontaneous resonance and-or as conscious memory-raising. Our further questions that lead to our own speech and acts also are underpinned by that accruing meaning-quality and our discernments of its truth. That same meaning informs what we are considering to be worthwhile doing and saying as speculative and as practical.

By contrast, we might consider that what we see is what we know; and following that notion, that we begin with a "blank slate" in each event. This we do, rather than think with accrued under-meaning that comes forward to inform what we see in spontaneous fashion. In that case, we will have nothing to go on—no wisdom, no images, insights, or memory of other similar events, no identities to connect with or refer to (except ignorance and perhaps a basic good will) in any concrete affair we are involved in (Hughes 2006).

Thus, the evidence for meaning-real-fact is intrinsically related to, but can also be clearly distinguished from, evidence for qualitative-real-fact. Together, as undifferentiated, and-or as incisively and methodologically distinct from one another, both can be and commonly are forthcoming in human thought and speech.

In our examples, we are studying here the what of human consciousness, and not whether it is good or not. And nine-eleven happened--planes hit buildings and the buildings fell with people in them--and we have accumulated evidence to claim knowledge about who died and who is really responsible for it, etc.

However, to overlook the pervasiveness of the qualitative judgments associated with and underpinning such events and questions, and with our knowledge, its true-reality, is to know what is incised but also to distort the spirit of wholeness that inspires our horrified focus on such events in the first place. We can include our regard for finding who, indeed, is responsible for it—and why. For what we do is evidence for how and what we value or do not value--as worthwhile to say and do. Our notions of justice, then, from both opposing views, are rooted in our one prior desire-quest for the good-worthwhile.

Though we are charged with "unpacking" and separating-out different aspects of such events in many different ways and terms, such unpacking, and a focus on only one aspect of it, cannot mandate forgetting the whole that we are unpacking from, or how grand differentiations of meaning are still rooted there.

In discussing his own project of exploring time and meaning, Lonergan treats the issues dialectically, speaking of a broader view of intelligence:

…as it is opposed to a classicism, so also it is opposed to a romanticism which knows the concrete, the singular, the individual, the personal, the historical, but does so at the expense of any overall view and results in a sort of fragmentation, compensated by enthusiasm, that is lost in detail. Finally, it is opposed to an abstraction, to a cult of the universal, the ideal, the norm, the exemplar, with the result that one never really apprehends things that exist in their particularity. (1996, 95)

Merely calling attention to any particular issue (for instance, the events of September 11 in New York) draws on long-held assumptions about good-bad meaning in any venue--from physics, to engineering, to economics, to the environment, up to and including its psychological, social, ethical, political, spiritual, and religious meaning for a community of persons.

Thus, the good is pervasive even in the selection process—of our very interest in such events. From the un-thinker to the most critically astute scientist, to the wise philosopher or sage, to the prayerful theologian--we are all already influenced by our past good-bad meaning accrual and judgments—and the more so-influenced, the more astute the scientist, the more wise the philosopher or sage, the more thoughtful and prayerful the theologian.

Such an analysis runs completely counter to the notion that known reality is a matter of merely looking, or that it is some sort of unconnected and unverifiable concept or ideal, or that the scientist’s evaluative judgments necessarily bring bias to the table, or that those judgments concern only the scientist’s or philosopher's or theologian's subjective views, or that our notions of the good-bad are mere sentimentality.

The real mystery is that, while scientists are regarded universally as men (and women) of intelligence, nonetheless it is thought outrageous to suggest that they know anything by understanding or that they know better and more adequately when they understand better or more adequately. (Lonergan, 1958, 480; & 2000, 504) (my parentheses)

Indeed, our evaluative judgments begin in the subject and, thus, have a subjective component. And our value judgments, indeed, may include sentiment, or biases of every stripe. However, such facts only mean that the question of genuineness and critical consciousness, and of what constitutes an authentic subject, must be raised, rather than (a) leaving the subject in obscurity, as if we could have a science without scientists, and-or (b) denying the fact that subjectivity and our views of it are intimate-to and import-on what it means to be authentically objective in the sciences or in any other venue.

In fact, the scientist’s lifetime accrual of good-bad meaning also resides with the fundamental assumption that our judgments about that meaning can be true-real. It is only when we explicitly raise the question of the true-real of our good-bad judgments that our problematic philosophical inheritance comes forward to muddy the waters of the scientist’s, etc., adequate or inadequate, authentic or inauthentic, incisive methodological procedures. In other words, not only is the idea of a blank slate incorrect, if it were true it would render us ignorant rather than intelligent, wise and thoughtful.

Further, the good-bad-real assumption is pervasive, comprehensive of all remote and proximate meaning, and essential to our judgments in any venue and about any particular issue—in scientific or any other kind of knowledge development. This is no less true of the scientist whose objective judgments are guided by the very tenets of a field that systematically includes critical empirical observations, considerations, and collaborative vetting as a part of the process of arriving at the objective truth of the matters under consideration.

Furthermore, concrete means not only to give sufficient evidence for making a range of qualitative judgments in thoughtful argument about some real thing, person, or event. Such judgments also carry the double entente of leading to our actually taking a stand in speech and act when we become present to such events and are called to do so by our being involved with them, for instance, in your crisis situations in the experiment in Finding the Mind.

In this way, without (and sometimes with) methodological incision, everything we evaluate and judge to be good or bad, better or worse, is also an intimate part of that same What intelligibility that we wonder about and insight-to-understand. That understanding with its embedded qualitative comportment—we refer to it here also as our under-meaning—accumulates as a huge wealth and variety of images, feelings, beliefs, ideas and knowledge, and as our remote source of further selection and thought.

Thus, the slate is not blank but variably active, flowing, full, and organically growing. All new judgments, critically incisive or not, scientific or not, spontaneously draw from that "packed" and resonant-ready slate of under-meaning that consists of our shared, but also individual and unique, history.

There is the relation of the present to the past. Thus, past judgments remain with us. They form a habitual orientation, present and operative, but only from behind the scenes. They govern the direction of attention, evaluate insights, guide formulations, and influence the acceptance or rejection of new judgments. Previous insights remain with us. They facilitate the occurrence of fresh insights, exert their influence on new formulations, provide presuppositions that underlie new judgments whether in the same or in connected or in merely analogous fields of inquiry. … (Lonergan 1958, 276; and 2000, 302)

As our above volcano example suggests, a methodologically institutionalized, but wrong-headed purging of “bias” in scientific analysis can automatically (and naively) transform into a gross oversight, a pervasive blind-spot, or (ironically) a rather obvious set of biases. This can occur when we understand the influence of the subjective component of under-meaning on objectivity and the suggestion of the need for excursions into self-knowledge from the field of philosophy for a critical foundational review of such meaning. Those “biases” extend to a study of the foundations of the sciences and fields, and to fields of application of scientific knowledge in the natural and human domains.

Thus our probing, discerning, and judging depend on our history of meaning development and its value-laden content as it meets life-events, regardless of any methodological distinctions we make between what and good-bad-what in any situation. Our intelligence, then, is fully comprehensive of the good.

On the other hand, from a philosophically problematic view (a blank slate), intelligence is seeing what is “objectively out there.” And as objective, the out-there is wholly unrelated to what is subjective or “in here” or our prior intellectual development, or our vast pattern of past value judgments.

Further, from such a view, our judgments of quality are “in-here.” Hence, quality is not real or objective because it cannot be seen “out there.” Furthermore, this view serves to separate our ethical desires, fears, and judgments from the “out-there” seen reality. Thus, again, those views also have no real-objective status in the scheme of things, and certainly not in science.

Also, from an insider's philosophical view—one that corresponds with our actual method of knowing and its common outcomes in human living--what may indicate bias in one situation may indicate transcendent wisdom in another. To complicate the issue, the laws of logic commonly hold from within any biased view and, therefore, if un-criticized can seem to support that view as comprehensive:

… there is the contextual aspect of judgment. Though single judgments bring single steps in inquiries to their conclusion, still single steps are related to one another in a highly complex fashion.

The most general aspects of cognitional context are represented by logic and dialectic. Logic is the effort of knowledge to attain the coherence and organization proper to any stage of its development. Dialectic, on the other hand, rests on the breakdown of efforts to attain coherence and organization at any given stage, and consists in bringing to birth a new stage in which logic again will endeavor to attain coherence and organization. … Now the pursuit of the logical ideal, far from favoring a static immobility, serves to reveal the inadequacy of any intermediate stage in the development of knowledge. (1958, 276; & 2000, 301-02)

Logic and dialectic, then, together provide the source of dynamism--of moving from stasis, to breakdown of stasis, to a new stasis, and onward. Rather than necessarily tainting any study with bias, then, good-bad meaning provides nuance; and its influence has already directed and enhanced it. Without that qualified influence, we would not be where we are in our incisive methodological distinctions in the first place—for the scientist judges, in true evaluative fashion, that making such incisive distinctions is good for the fields of science; and we set about to ensconce such judgments into the systems, tenets, and protocols of our fields. For setting up systems, tenets, and protocols are just what a group of intelligent and reasonable persons have decided is the best way to go about the project of knowing and applying that knowledge in objective fashion.

The operative word here is best. In this way, judgments about aspects of a game, a concert, a player, laboratory work, or any event whatsoever, constitute a grand confluence of a vast array of our prior, remote or proximate developments and accumulated under-meaning. And such meaning includes interwoven and pervasive insights of value-quality that we have already accrued and that have informed-through-resonance our directions over our lifetime.


Conclusion

The critical source of our conclusion here is the discovery and verification of the set of desire-quests as given of human consciousness—a deeply personal, but also an objective, universal, and trans-cultural, discovery. To regard our prior history of good-bad influences and meanings as necessarily biased, on principle, or as merely psychological-subjective—with no import on the objectively true-real--is to grossly distort the very reality we seek through our development of critical incisiveness itself.

From an adequate philosophical view, distinguishing and probing directly for the good-bad dimensions of something or someone assumes no distortion or lack of intelligibility of that nuance (nor a merely-subjective diversion, or even blight), on its true-real objective meaning. Rather like the natural-physical sciences, the view calls for an explication of meaning-evidence criteria. Unlike those sciences, the view assumes a fullness that maintaining such incisiveness (such that we include a philosophical-division between what can be real or not) cannot supply—on principle.

Indeed, we are subjects who are equipped with a desire-quest to be involved in what is really worthwhile, and to know the real-good-intelligible--beyond and despite what we may want or fear on some lesser or limited level of our existence. We desire so even though we also can go to great lengths to bend the real-good to our own lesser desires and fears; and even though, in a particular domain, what is really worthwhile is as diverse as are people, and as is history itself. We do so for our understanding and knowledge (what is it? and is it really so?); for the worthwhile-ness of something that we may do or say (is it worthwhile?--for our subjectivity and our concrete worth to be equivalent to real-objectivity of the concrete good); and for the further question of whether or not we will do or say it.

Thus, we are subjects who not only think and understand, but who also speak and act in history with regard to a set of derived principles--where those principles are learned guides to our basic and given set of desire-quests.

Further, our lives are relatively small--we cannot think, do, or say everything; neither is our behavior and being-in-the-world wholly prescribed. Thus, qualitative questions (is it good-bad? and is it worthwhile or not?), in their vast openness, signal aspects of and moments in our development, our call and ability to consciously choose, and our albeit-limited human freedom (1958 and 2000). They signal an inquiry into deeper and fuller dimensions of a windowed concrete order of what we mean and what is meant as human being--to, for, and with us.

Further, as personal commitment, our evaluative questions signal a discerning moment towards the intelligent and qualitative making of our being—of who we are--or towards what we are to do and say, as to-be committed to history and, thus, as to-be objectively true-real--we are metaphysical insiders. Earlier meaning development in its qualitative dimension then provides the basis for our later aim--of what we intend to actually occur through our own concrete speech and actions.

The intelligible-qualitative what-is reference, then, is the regular precursor to the question for worthwhile-ness as well as for the intelligible-qualitative should-ought that is not yet but that aims at issuing in our personal speech and act. Far from being superfluous to the objective questions of what is it? and is it so?, our worthwhile question is creative of the historical data of persons through our speech and acts. In spiral-like fashion, and in our reflections and self-reflections, our questions for meaningful-good then can be and commonly are applied-back to that history.

Said another way, and from kings and queens, to paupers, to democrats and republicans, to CEO's, to clergy, to philosophers and sages, to neighbors, friends, and family members, all humans and our events, and thus all of human history, are informed-by qualitative meaning and, thus, driven-from-within by our questioning complex: is it good-worthwhile? Without this fuller dimension of intelligible nuance that our questions for quality-value-excellence afford our awareness, we could not distinguish between the defunct, the defective, the mediocre, the merely adequate, the superb or the self-transcendent in anything we see, say, do, or come to understand.

When we study history, we study what others valued most--what they really and truly valued. However difficult to define, without our notions of the good-bad in the history of human concerns, we would have no such history. We would know of no past or future having rendered it inaccessible via the absence of self-presence and self-objectifying questions. We would be rendered less than non-reflective animals, and ignorant and naïve of self and other, with only born-with instincts to guide our way, and assuming that (from what we can know now of reality) existence is good. Nor could we develop in the fullness of a mature and reflectively appropriated commitment to a vision of well-being—that vision is of what we mean by the human good.

Hence, our ballgame could be defunct or excellent, and we could not qualify it in any case. Under such a good-bad-less view, ethnic cleansing (if it should occur) leaves us only with questions about what to do with the rotting bodies.

Even in such basic questions, however, our question for worthwhile-ness is operative in discerning: what is the best thing to do with them? where we use some qualitative criteria for judging even this real in the context of the concrete circumstances.

In this way, all schematic contents (under-meaning) are already saturated with intelligible meaning that is virtually indistinguishable from its qualitative dimensions—again, evident in the many condensed meanings in our language, its words, and its patterns. Rather then emerge from a perpetually blank slate, our questions emerge from a schematic filled with under-meaning and shot-through with assigned importances, discernments, beliefs, and known qualitative aspects of that meaning--all developed long before the scientific revolution and its methodological distinction between the intelligible and the value-qualified-good-bad has reached our consciousness.

Our questions for incised, critical, and distinguished (from valued) intelligence emerge in some of us precisely because our prior qualitative understanding has already informed those critically distinguished what-type and so-type questions as they were commonly applied to natural and physical data. In brief, we only ask about what is already in some way important-to and-or qualified-for us; and we ignore or avoid what is not important and qualified. In our self-understanding in our experiment, we will find that we ask critical what- and so-type questions about nothing else.

The notion of the good-bad, then, and all of its derivatives, is pervasive to all of our questions and to all of our affairs in our human being in history. It is the whole-cloth out of which all of our incision about meaning and the good-bad occur. Further, the content of our good-worth questions is transformative of all issued contents, as the contents of an acorn are pervasive to and transformative towards a mature oak.


Summary

1. The quest for knowing the real good-bad (is it good-bad? or evaluation), and for doing the real good (is it really worthwhile?, etc.), is structured-in to conscious order and, thus, is a trans-cultural aspect of all human beings.

2. Both the questioning structure and its content are complex, dynamic, developmental—such complexity and the wide range of developmental patterns and their potential derailments account for the complexity-in-difference of human beings in history.

3. Our first two desire-quests aim at knowledge of true-reality; and our assumptions are that our good-bad understanding participates wholly in this movement of meaning towards the true-real. In other words, good-bad under-meaning is already embedded in this question as it emerges.

4. We develop into and through several kinds of and "levels" of horizons. Our feelings (passions, desires, and fears) transform according to that development from infancy to adulthood. Passions, etc., are not separate from our intelligence, but rather are guided, tutored, and potentially transformed by our directive intelligence (and by others in our lives) and then come to inform that intelligence in circular and-or self-transcendent fashion.

5. Manifestation of our understanding of the desire-quests is conceptual and-or symbolic, diverse and variable according to individual development and cultural situations and influences in history.

6. We can define the whole of being diffusely and indirectly as what we seek to understand and the good we seek to be involved in, and clearly and directly as what is known to us proportionately (1958 & 2000).

7. Our epistemology (what is knowing?) and our metaphysics (what is real being?) is variable and comprehensively influences how we view the good, its history, and our personal place in it. We can divide metaphysical horizons into two basic views: insider's and outsider's. Appropriating the insider's view brings with it a call for foundational review in the sciences, including an ethical analysis, which, in turn, will provide a vehicle for a unification of the sciences. Our history of thought, however, reveals philosophical attachments to both views and a migration of meaning from philosophy (and science as philosophy) to commonsense thought. Problematic metaphysics/ philosophy does not correlate with latent metaphysics/philosophy leaving the philosopher to develop explicit metaphysics/philosophy which (1) accounts for problematics and (2) shows how the insider's view (empirical, inductive) corresponds with latent philosophy/metaphysics and always has (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).

END

NOTE 1: My reference to understanding/knowing, saying, and being are drawn from E. Piscitelli’s work (1977) and his Creating and Healing paper (1986). Further, I draw my reference to notional awareness and its relationship to the question (in our language, our desire-quests), from B. Lonergan’s essay on Metaphysics as Horizon (1967).

What is the condition of the possibility of questioning? In other words, what is the essence of questioning; what is found in every question to constitute it, not as question about this rather than about that, but simply as questioning? It is claimed that the condition of the possibility of any and all questions is an awareness that goes beyond the already known to an unknown to be known.

(1967, 190)


Considering Lonergan’s frequent use and stated definition of notion and notional, we can see that the notional and the raising of the question are intimately related if not meaningfully identical.


NOTE 2: Though in other contexts the term conversion has much broader meaning than we use it here, such transformation can call for and be described as nothing less than a conversion experience. In this sense, we are speaking of a moral conversion—where we actually change internally from identifying with one set of principles, governing our frame and view of the good, to another set of principles govern our frame and view of the good. As feeling-image based, such conversion is experienced as turning upside down as that entire base also becomes transformed and newly interrelated.

We should mention here the moral value of the arts and literature. Instead of beginning in the discursive aspects of language, the arts and literature strike us at the deep-well depths of our soul where our feelings-images live. Such conversion, then, affects us in a presentational, rather than discursive way (Langer, 1942 & 1992).


Note 3: It can take nothing less than a conversion experience to break through old and received, identified-with, but unthought-out principles that govern our speech and act This is especially so if those principles are attached or received as coming from religious authority.


Note 4: With Lonergan from Method we define conversion as below:

By conversion is understood a transformation of the subject and his world. Normally it is a prolonged process though its explicit acknowledgment may be concentrated in a few momentous judgments and decisions. Still it is not just a development or even a series of developments. Rather it is a resultant change of course and direction. It is as if one’s eyes were opened and one’s former world faded and fell away. There emerges something new that fructifies in inter-locking, cumulative sequences of developments on all levels and in all departments of human living.
Conversion is existential, intensely personal, utterly intimate. But it is not so private as to be solitary. It can happen to many, and they can form a community to sustain one another in their self-transformation and to help one another in working out the implications and fulfilling the promise of their new life. Finally, what can become communal, can become historical. It can pass from generation to generation. It can spread from one cultural milieu to another. It can adapt to changing circumstances, confront new situations, survive into a different age, flourish in another period or epoch.
Conversion, as lived, affects all of man’s conscious and intentional operations. It directs his gaze, pervades his imagination, releases the symbols that penetrate to the depths of his psyche. It enriches his understanding, guides his judgments, reinforces his decisions. (1972, pp. 130-31)

5 From an insider's view, we can recognize the relationship of the finite to the infinite good as basically a religious question informed by a religious insight, but implied in history. As human beings, if we could "prove" the Infinite Good inductively, in the way that we can prove other issues, or if we could reach the same kind of results as we do when we prove our basic structure in our experiment in Finding the Mind, by definition the Good would not be infinite and beyond the human. Again, human beings know and do the good as concrete.

6 Unfortunately, we also receive the philosophical hypocrisy, as well as the problem of knowledge (epistemology) that was never worked out well in post-revolutionary times and are still with us today.

7 The philosophical foundations of the law are rooted in what it means to create, maintain, foster and have a good life. Political order, then, is grounded in our view of the good.

8 In one example of turn-of-the-century thought (19th to 20th), we find William James writing in his The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Please observe, however, that I do not yet say that it is better that the subconscious and non-rational should thus hold primacy in the religious realm. I confine myself to simply pointing out that they do so hold it as a matter of fact. (1982, 74)

In his classic work, James repeats similar phrases that mark as methodical our distinction between a subject and an objective good-bad.

Of course, we can ask about qualitative aspects of either common or theoretical data or situations, as we can of James’ analysis. In the above case, we can question and judge for ourselves whether, indeed, it is better to …, and then proceed to develop criteria and to give our concrete evidence for that judgment, and so can James.

My guess is that James had his reasonable opinions on the matter, but that he had good reasons (ahem) also for maintaining his distinction and his privacy of thought on the matter with regard to overly-influencing his general readership. Of course, in doing so, he does not necessarily abandon the reader to subjectivist or relativist notions but rather leaves us to our own evaluative considerations and judgments about quali-meaning, quali-knowledge, quali-truth, and quali-reality.

I refer you again to our initial opening paragraphs for this appendix where Simone Weil states: “… all the goods of this world, past, present, and future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good.”

James is affirming (as knowable-true-real-factual) that many actually do give primacy to religious meaning. But he is not going the full route to affirming that, indeed, they are right in so giving where right and good are considered objective-true-real. The inference is that if they are right, then it is better to do so.

(9) So we can also see the insidious affect of Kantian, et al, philosophy on human living--bad enough for its affect in our thinking; but then, subsequently, for its affect on our concrete performance.


(Return to Part III in the text: Finding the Mind)