That is, we can talk and write about your having questions and insights, but questions and insights have to actually occur in you to be yours. In other words, and using Lonergan's crucial distinction, questions and insights are conceptual (talked about), and then they are your performance.
Neither the dialogue nor the performance of self-appropriation-affirmation can be forced, however, on principle:
No one can understand for another or judge for another. Such acts are one’s own and only one’s own. (Lonergan 1958, 396 and 2000, 421)
Like any learning that has potential long-lasting meaning for you, these activities and developments ultimately depend on your own serious engagement with the material, on your initial preparation, and on your open attitude and dialogue with your teacher, and with other student-experimenters.
Further, the project of self-appropriation-affirmation (the longer journey) is not a competition; nor does having the appropriate insights warrant some sort of prized position with regard to others. Nor need such insights be proven to anyone but to your own self as a self-developmental and self-corrective learner. Thus, the project calls for an honesty of the first and best order—to your own self and to no other.
Also, the raising of questions and the having of insights often have their own mysterious timetable; and as with all learning, many insights most probably will occur outside of the classroom climate in the quietness of a reflective moment, in the bath or shower, when walking or when riding in the car. As example, the poet Robert Frost knew how insights work—he wrote his poems on napkins if they came to him while eating at restaurants. Frost knew how insights can get away from us if we fail to write them down when they occur--apparently “out of nowhere.”
Furthermore, tests and assessments can readily be developed for the more proximate experiment as object-verification(the shorter journey). However, for the broader project (the longer journey), I offer no test for such insights; and self-governance and, again, self-honesty is assumed throughout.
Since the appeal to disorientated knowledge would only extend and confirm the disorientation, the appeal must be to the desire that is prior to knowledge, that generates knowledge, that can effect the correction of miscarriages in the cognitional process. Still, it cannot be taken for granted that the subject knows his own desire and its implications; were there such knowledge, the disorientation would be remedied already; and so the initial appeal is to the desire, not as known, but as existing and operative. The first directive, then, is to begin from interest, to excite it, to use its momentum to carry things along. In other words, the method of metaphysics primarily is pedagogical: it is headed towards an end that is unknown and as yet cannot be disclosed; from the viewpoint of the pupil, it proceeds by cajoling or forcing attention and not by explaining the intended goal and by inviting an intelligent and reasonable cooperation. (1958, 397-98 and 2000, 422-23)
So in a formal setting you may be tested and do well with the experiment; and the tests and assessments can guide you in your initial discoveries. However, as you go through either the short or long journey, you must make your own judgments about whether you have truly understood and identified with your own processes. Also, for the fuller project, you must think in terms of the experiment being only a beginning. I suggest, however, that if we translate seeing into the fuller experiencing, “you will know it when you see it.” Further, a bad or too-quick judgment is often followed by a kind of internal haunting where your own questions become bothersome and fly around in your mind like ghosts around a castle.
The process, then, to explicit metaphysics is primarily a process to self-knowledge. It has to begin from the polymorphic subject in his native disorientation and bewilderment. It cannot appeal to what he knows, for as yet he has not learnt to distinguish sharply and effectively between the knowing men share with animals, the knowing that men possess, and the manifold blends and mixtures of the two that are the disorientation and ground the bewilderment of people as they are. (1958, 397 and 2000, 422)
Such internal discomfort suggests that, as polymorphic, our internal resources have not settled all of our pertinent wonder with insights, and they demand more insighted meaning for true judgments to occur without such discomfort following up on them.
Your attention to the distinction between desire-questing, insighting, and understanding, on the one hand, and knowing on the other and, again, what each including knowing means, is also essential for this self-knowledge to occur in any critical way (Lonergan 1958 and 2000).
If you cannot explain the difference between believing and knowing, for instance, or the out-there real as looked at and the real as known, then your knowing as a critical venture will suffer on account of it. And again, seeing in our common use of this term refers to more than merely an ocular occurrence. For us, again, the term seeing is a metaphor for your having experienced your desire-quests; that is, for your having gone through a flow of meaning and a series of internal activities—wondering, having an insight, understanding, and reflective understanding, followed by a judgment, etc. To recognize is to understand something, and not only to see it.
Students may also want to read the appendix: For the Teacher. Here, we draw on E. Piscitelli's work to develop what having a polymorphic beginning-point means. And here you might find and self-identify your own attitudinal approach to the material and begin to take steps to remedy or self-correct your own fundamental attitudes on you own (Piscitelli 1985). But that sets you clearly on the longer journey. Also, I do not expect you to confirm anything that you have not first thoroughly understood on your own terms. In this way, the theory and method are consistent with actual conscious procedures (method) when those procedures are operating at their best.
Moreover, this experiment is not merely an “academic exercise” but rather requires a serious and personal regard—or what Voegelin means by an existential movement in your own experience and to what Lonergan refers to as performance. It requires the employment of your serious discernment and a turning of your mind towards your own experience of the flow of consciousness.
Again, this experiment has the potential of beginning of a life-changing process that is often “long and painstaking.” Nor will a mere adequate recounting of the theory from memory yield a full understanding or the personal process of verification, though theoretical verification is an authentic moment in the process. Nor do we expect to make a short trip out of what may be a wonderful life-long journey of self-discovery, knowledge, valuation and movements of the spirit.
Nor is reading Finding the Mind or this appendix a replacement for a sustained engagement with Lonergan’s Insight, A study of Human Understanding (1958 and 2000), or Method In Theology (1972), or other relevant literature and-or philosophical works and dialogue.
This work and the experiment offered herein, however, can serve as a repositioning of spirit, as a new foundation for dialogue, as a verified beginning-point/ introduction-to any philosophical study, and as a helpful introduction to the central issues in these other noted works.
Though relatively brief (in terms of philosophical literature), such an experiment can give you a verified basis for all other inquiry; and it can inspire in you a new interest in your own developmental patterns, in the distinguishable activities of your own interior life, and in your vision for a developing future. For a scientist or researcher in any field, an engagement with the experiment can afford you a new philosophical, ethical, and perhaps even spiritual foundation for your field.
Answering whether merely reading a narrative that includes an experiment, rather than attending a class regularly, can help readers make the personal connection of the theory to your conscious process--in the way that face-to-face communication often does--will have to wait for you to go through the experiment, understand, verify and say for yourself.
A beginning personal recognition of your interior infrastructure and your correlative heightening of your own consciousness or even your conversion experiences are, of course, a hopeful outcome of having engaged this workbook, and the fundamental motivating factor for my having written it. And when teachers learn about ourselves in this philosophical way, that learning rightly tends to inform all other kinds of teaching and content. (See Note 1 below)
Luminosity in Self-Discovery and Knowledge
The process of self-appropriation-affirmation is not a game or an abstract test or even a merely-academic exercise. Rather, the process is the conscious, directed and self-directed, and critical recovery of the basic structure and activities of your own mind, operating on itself--self-reflection at its most basic and comprehensive level--and as the real Me-I in a newly translucent self-awareness.
With some focused intellectual work as experiment, we can expect a new beginning made of a given potential for a heightened self-awareness. Such unfolding awareness is followed by a dynamic fruition of that potential as (1) what-we-are as immediately given (immediately, we are mediators), (2) our potential to be consistent and in unison with what we think we are (to know ourselves truly), and (3) what we think we can be--all come together in one cohesive whole.
In the experiment in Finding the Mind, first, we recount our personal crisis in a narrative. Second, we learn the broad outlines of the theory. Third, we go behind the crisis narrative of your specific event to develop our embedded and generalized shadow-questions/desire-quests learned in the theory. Here, we relate the general theory to our own specific questions to discover (1) the theory as shadow-questions and then (2) the structure within as our desire-quests.
Further, we hope to have our insights about the actual occurrence of questions and insights in us and further recognize the spontaneous, generative, normative pattern not only in our own questions associated with our crisis, but also as a recurrent dynamic structure within. We recognize how we already become aware of and know about anything at all; but also, and more importantly, about that process as it continues to operate in and about ourselves.
The discovery is of a very old human activity; but yet it is also entirely new because we have only recently in time (relatively speaking) come to a time when we can know ourselves so well, and with such critical acumen—and yet the mystery still surrounds us. Though we may research and verify the dynamic structure of human interiority by critical analysis of historical texts and other persons’ dialogue (i.e., through our examples) the further personal accomplishment of self-appropriation-affirmation.
1. provides the luminous personal moment of heightening of consciousness, or self-recognition and critical verification (subject-object-subject) in the immediate mediation that constitutes our being;
2. is the grounding inductive verification that connects the theoretician with the universal claim in the generalized theory (object-verification);
3. is the discovery of a trans-cultural base, providing a ground for universal dialogue.
Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding. (1958, xxviii and 2000, 22)
To that experiment we now should turn.
For a more thorough exploration of your own metaphysics that may underpin your view of this experiment, et al, see also appendix 5: The Pervasiveness of the Good.
Note 1: Lonergan speaks of the difference between experiencing conscious activities (that we all do if we are alive) and knowing those conscious activities (that most of us do not do, but that we can):
I say that all of us are conscious of these activities, for our sensing and feeling, our inquiring and understanding, our formulating and checking, our deliberating and deciding, are not unconscious but conscious.
I say that so few have any exact knowledge of these operations, for while they are conscious, still that consciousness is not knowledge but only the infrastructure in a potential knowledge that few get around to actuating by adding its appropriate superstructure. (1985, 57-58)
Thus, the infrastructure is the mind in operation, as given, as immediate, and the superstructure is the theory about that infrastructure.
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