Paper given at West Coast Methods Institute: 2 0 1 6

For posting to EDU site w/MORE other appendixesScrutinizing Our Philosophical

AssumptionsPolymorphism: How is it that, “the subject’s reality lies beyond his

own horizon”?

CONTEXT: Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues1

Presenter: Catherine Blanche King

KEY WORDS: philosophy, intentions, assumptions, horizon, genuineness, polymorphism, existential gap, education,

bioethical, Lonergan

Abstract

At the center of our thesis is the empiricist’s assumption about knowing: “What is obvious in knowing is what knowing obviously is” (Lonergan 2000/441). Or: since knowing seems immediate and occurs simultaneously with looking or otherwise sensing, it must be or be LIKE sensing. From that erred epistemology flows a similarly erred ontology: Reality is visible or “already out there now;” images are vague replicas of it; and interiority is “already in here now,” but invisible; so it cannot be real or knowable. What, then, can ground invisible ethics as real?

We bring Lonergan’s notions of polymorphism, the existential gap, and philosophical genuineness2 to President Obama’s Gray Matters Commission where scholars refer to “silo-thinking” and “obstinate resistance” to ethics and field integration as common in students of science. Our goals, then, are (1) to explain how scientists’ silo-thinking and obstinate resistance begin in deeply buried but wholly influential developmental errors in what are otherwise highly creative and intelligent thinkers; and (2) to reveal the “from the get-go” reeducation that is needed for philosophical genuineness to occur. Several insights emerge from our exploration:

(a) Our knowing, with its self-corrective process and its assumed relationship with reality and being, continues on in us in its radiant way regardless of our thought-errors about it.

1 “Integrative Approaches for Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society.” Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (vol. 1), Gray Matters: Topics at the Intersection of Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society (vol. 2).

2 For polymorphism, see Insight, index. For the existential gap, see Collection 18 (280-, 302); for philosophical genuineness, see Insight (2000/500-04).

(b) Our erred epistemology and ontology are the result of a set of erred insights; couched in a set of oversights; and encrusted in too-quick judgments about that radiant process.

(c) Such judgments can occur quite early in a thinker’s learning life, often long before our critical capacities mature and before we begin our formal education. Too easily a young thinker can equate their speed of recall (an aspect of knowing) with “obvious” looking or otherwise sensing.

(d) As with all learning, early-made and erred philosophical judgments tend to stay. But philosophical learning tends to shift its affective memory content to underpin “from below” and so to inform our reality-existence horizon. The result can be silo-thinking. Uncorrected, it remains remotely qualitative and selective and tends to poison authentic discourse, for instance, regarding ethical considerations and field integration.

(e) Our study clarifies the distinction between (1) core philosophical intentions that already inform all spontaneous assumptions and concrete questions (latent metaphysics) and (2) reflectively established, insight-based philosophical assumptions which can be correctly drawn, or partly or wholly in error. Our core assumptions then come into conflict with our erred insight-based assumptions creating an existential gap and providing the ground for polymorphism (2000/500). Philosophical genuineness occurs when 1 and 2 become symmetrical, or when learning correlates with its object, and that learning as subject-constitutive.

(f) Polymorphism emerges from those early oversights and errors, then, but still includes an operating radiant center: the core knowing-reality relationship fueling common, scientific, artistic, & spiritual knowing.

(g) The errors’ effects are: (1) to reduce a thinker’s horizon re: the reality and, thus, the significance of human sciences, the arts and humanities, philosophy and ethics, and their professional fields through the presence of an existential gap; (2) to condition “resistance” to questions about our habits of erred thought and, thus, to philosophical study, self-reflection, and correction; and (3) to tacitly intrude on, confuse, distort and misguide otherwise insightful discourse via offering empiricist, subjectivist, or relativist red herrings; and overtly to use philosophical diversions to avoid unwanted truth.

(h) Despite but also because of resistance, the “obvious” need is for guided “questioning of one’s own unconscious initiatives” or a reeducation of students of science that includes introspection and self-correction towards philosophical genuineness (2000/504). Such genuineness would flow into affording ethics a warranted significance for students’ life endeavors including excursions into scientific fields of study and application.

“Silo-thinking,” then, is a way to express what flows from that deep conflict at the level of foundations where our (a) “core” assumptions, and (b) our insight-based but flawed assumptions are “at cross-purposes” (2000/500). One outgrowth of the early-learned philosophical set of errors is that persons “get lost” somewhere between themselves as whole persons and as objectified and self-separated (an aspect of the existential gap). The logic flows from there so that subjects and fields become and remain isolated from one another, at least until a personal breakthrough occurs. We find the root of the isolation in the early-made conflictive subject-to-reality relationship error buried deep in the philosophical comportment of otherwise creative, intelligent and incisive thinkers. Problems of reeducation occur “from the get-go” because, by the time we take up philosophical self-reflection, we are already thinking WITH those errors as we approach those same errors, resulting initially in resistance.

Further, polymorphism and the existential gap are more likely to occur than not precisely because our knowing process is so complex and works so well for us. The empiricist “blunder”

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is almost unavoidable. What keeps us going and sane is our common spontaneous identity with critical consciousness which, though we may not be conscious of it, is operating in us and continues to be fueled by the radiance of our core philosophical assumptions. Also, in our formal education, our erred and/or correct but incomplete philosophical thinking often meets with educators and field professionals whose insight-based assumptions are also incomplete and/or in error. And so students’ early-made and now hidden philosophical judgments (incomplete, erred, or not) can easily become compounded and further confused. Today in the academy, it’s Frankenstein of Polymorphism meets the Werewolf of that same Polymorphism--a philosophical pox is afoot in both their houses. Presently, without adequate theoretical and personal guidance, students are left with the untenable, and often only partly conscious, choice between (a) abandoning the authentic resonances of their own critical intelligence and accepting any one of, or a conflicted complex of, poorly wrought philosophical views. Those views, in fact, are bifurcated away from their own radiant and spontaneous knowing; or (b) rejecting out of hand most or all formal education (c) undertaking the unlikely task of recreating the wheel that Lonergan discovered, made conscious and theoretically clear, and started rolling. His is a finishing philosophical corrective of what started as the scientific revolution. TO WCMI CONFERENCE ATTENDEES: This paper is drawn from a book-in-progress. Also, that book’s is written for a non-philosophical specialist audience. With that in mind, I have replaced philosophical with comprehensive or meta-mindset to reflect the difference between the spontaneous emergence of latent but yet-unnamed philosophical questioning and more formal philosophical inquiry in our thinker (the subject). I welcome questions and.comments. TO ONLINE READERS: I have edited and corrected some text here from the original paper given on April 2, 2016. Also, I have added the text boxes and appendixes drawn from the book to give some background to more summarized text herein.

Table of Contents

Abstract 1A Buried Problem with Far-Reaching Significance 4Enter: The Existential Gap 9 A Brief Excursion into Authenticity (Genuineness) 10Enter: Polymorphism 11Intellectual Development and Informal and Formal Education 13Passing Down to Students (the Inheritance) 16Interim Summary 14Revisiting Education with Comprehensive Matters in Mind 16Santa Claus Thinking (as Analog) 17Two Sources of Comprehensive Assumptions 18Horizons and Their Expression, Genuine or Not 20Meeting Polymorphism: The Inheritance Track in the Academy 24Passing Down to Students (the Inheritance) or: Our Thinker in the Academy OR the Academy’s Oversights and Errors in Our Thinker 26The Pervasiveness of the Problem: the Broader Picture 27

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Bibliography 30Appendixes:

1. Cognitional Theory in a Philosophical Context2. Brief supportive quotes 3. Excerpt from book in progress re: Resistance and Philosophical Restructuring

Scrutinizing Our Philosophical Assumptions

Presenter: Catherine Blanche. King

A Buried Problem with Far-Reaching Significance

In President Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (vol. 1), the Gray Matters report,3 P. Sankar, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, reflects that science students are “siloed” in their thinking . . . . Silo-ThinkingSankar states: “Science education has to be fundamentallyrestructured from the get go.”4

Sankar’s focus on field isolation and “obstinate resistance” to ethics and field integration is prescient, along with her call to return to get-go origins. For administrators, scientists, teachers and students to rethink their present thinking, attitudes, and education from the bottom-up, however, suggests at least some personal self-reflection with related adjustments. In the context of the education of scientists, it further suggests a systematic application of that new thinking to programs and curricula.5

Our intention in the present work, then, is to expose the core of the problem by exploring how a person arrives at what Sankar calls silo-thinking and resistance in the first place; to

3 “Integrative Approaches for Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society.” President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (vol. 1), Gray Matters: Topics at the Intersection of Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society (vol. 2).

4 I am borrowing Professor Sankar’s term “siloed” as an applicable metaphor for a blindered (and blundered) view, or a narrowing of habitual horizons of meaning in scientific and educational circles. Sankar states: “I think that science education has to be fundamentally restructured from the get-go, and that that is what is ultimately going to address these issues, and I think that scientists think the way they think because their education leads them to think that way. They’re siloed because that’s how they’re trained. It should be no surprise that they exist within a particular world when that is how science education is organized, and I think that that is something that has to be dealt with.” Sankar, P., Associate Professor, Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy; and Senior Fellow, Leonard Dan’s Institute of Health Economics,  University of Pennsylvania. (2014). ELSI: Origins and Early History. Presentation to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (February 11. Retrieved April 4, 2014 [(see Index, Gov. node/337])

5 The need for self-reflection and correction is especially evident where scientists display attitudes of obstinate resistance in studies and fields where the scientist’s maintenance of an open mind to new data and ideas is a most revered tenet.

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proffer a way to break through the “obstinate resistance” that blocks the way to even considering the possibility of integrating ethics into our fields of study; and to promote insights born of the same thinkers who, presently, are resistant to such discourse. Commonly, scientists are intelligent, committed, and open-minded people, not known to shy away from complex problems that call for solution. This set of problems calls for a solution; and it begins with considering potential errors lodged in remote areas of our thinker’s mind.

Durkheimian sociology and behaviourist psychology may have excuses for barring the data of consciousness, for there exist notable difficulties in determining such data; but the business of the scientist is not to allege difficulties as excuses but to overcome them, and neither objectivity in the sense of verification nor the principle of empiricism can be advanced as reasons for ignoring the data of consciousness.   . . . (Lonergan/2000/260)

Our claim is that the problem can be understood and, given time, put right by scientists themselves. The solution will be difficult, long term, and programmatic; but is potential to unblock and reset the sciences’ open-ended aims. Further, that putting right of person and field can only be done with the admittance of a program of self-scrutiny attended to by a set of relevant and incisive questions, guided, but put to our thinker by our thinker. The invitation is to personal transformation through self-understanding. However, in the past and now, even philosophers are apt to think that objective argument is enough and that no qualified change in thinkers is needed to right a problem. Rather, many still think,

. . . if you put forth the right argument, everything will go fine. Though they have controversies that last over centuries, still at least some of them do not even advert to what the real trouble is . . . because one’s horizon is grounded in one’s concrete synthesis in conscious living, in one’s flow of consciousness, in the modes in which one’s consciousness can flow. Any tampering with such a successful solution causes anxiety phenomena. It makes one feel very uneasy, and it spontaneously gives rise to various defense mechanisms, whether emotional or otherwise, that tend to block off the possibility of this transformation. (2001/299)6 (my emphases)

6 The west had its “scientific revolution;” and it manifested well in the natural and physical sciences, and continues to do so. However, with that revolution the foundations of those sciences became exposed to question; and, most notably, the foundations of scientific method as applied not only to nature and physics but also to any data field. Understanding the foundations of the method, however, is different and much more difficult than understanding natural data and the applications of empirical method to that data. With that as background, we can say that the scientific revolution, as positive as it was and is, is still not finished. Lonergan’s work (and others’), and particularly his call for the scientist’s self-understanding (of their own comprehensive core, its presuppositions, and their possible past and present thought errors), is essential for that recovery and “finishing.” It’s not that brilliant philosophers over the years haven’t tried; they have. And yet the problems persist. Further, they can be said to persist in a good part of (notably) western-influenced thinking. If that’s the case (and I suggest that it is), then the “resistance” or block to systematic introspection in the academy must be broken through in order to go

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Empiricism: “What is obvious in knowing is what knowing obviously is”; or some version of: looking equals knowing (2000/441). (see appendix 2).

We begin, then, by understanding the above triangle of silo-thinking, obstinate resistance, and field isolation as wrong-headed but inter-supportive aspects of the same root problem located concretely in our thinker’s background of thought. The problem begins in the common occurrence of a thinker’s early-made misunderstandings and judgments, particularly about comprehensive matters. As comprehensive, those errors of thought easily have now shifted “down” to become deeply embedded assumptions underpinning and informing their present thought. Using B. Lonergan’s term, assumptions are remote modes of thought that inform our thinker’s more proximate interests from “behind-the-scenes.” Once learned and shifted-back, erred modes covertly limit the horizon thinkers bring to most or all thought content.

The problem is old, then, but unfortunately remains afoot in the sciences, fields and, indeed, in much of common thinking, though always mixed with other much more pervasive and powerful aspects of human intelligence. Succinctly, then, as comprehensive, the problem begins in past judgments that hold oversights and erred insights that are variably influential of all other content.

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. (Lonergan 2000/302)

Moreover, the problem becomes complex when we understand that as intelligent beings, we are born with a core foundation for thinking; and further that this core has a set of intentions that, in turn, issues in its own set of assumptions as we acquire knowledge. (appendix 1) When at the deeper levels of our thinking our core intentions and their assumptions differ from our comprehensive modes of learned judgments, conflict ensues, again, in the remote but influential regions of our thought.

Below is a summary graphic of our thinker’s range of thought showing the relationship between (a) their remote comprehensive mode and mindset, which can become conflictive with learned modes; (b) their general mindsets and memories “behind” each kind of proximate thought; and (c) their proximate thought content. Our term for having conflicting modes of thought about comprehensive matters is polymorphism.forward and to exploit the intelligence and creativity that most if not all scientists experience, identify with, and love.

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“I'm going to argue that we want transformational learning. . . . Transformational learning is not just about cognitive learning; it's not just about critical analytics skills . . . but also about habits of mind, attitudes and dispositions. Learning is transformational when it is not only about acquiring content, but it changes the learner in some kind of profound way” (Dr. M. Solomon, speaking at Presidential Commission: meeting 15 session. 1)

Furthermore, learned but erred mindsets can disturb, redirect, and displace, momentarily at least, our thinker’s intentions that continue to flow from their core. And so, erred and uncorrected modes are quite powerful in badly prescribing our thinker’s direction of thought. They do so by encroaching on the core’s spontaneous radiance with assumptions that conflict with its own. That said, erred assumptions cannot eliminate our thinker’s core intentions or all that flows from it. This is so precisely because the core contains, purveys, and spontaneously expresses itself in the principles that already inhabit all learning in the first place including erred learning (Lonergan/2000/ 333). The most the

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complex of oversights and errors can do is to limit and redirect from its unconscious or semiconscious domain.7

Again, that our thinker may have been in error about

comprehensive content early-on in their thinking career does not mean that core comprehensive matters have ceased to operate in their native fashion from behind-the-scenes. What is implied is that thinkers can do well in their fields up to a point. However, they are “not very good” at comprehensive matters. “They will not be able to give a very good account of themselves. Einstein relates to an audience of theorists and scientists: ‘Don’t pay any attention to what the scientists say to you, watch what they do’” (Lonergan 2001/263/Einstein 1934/12). In that same vein:

The perennial source of nonsense is that, after the scientist has verified his hypothesis, he is likely to go a little further and tell the layman what, apparently, scientific reality looks like! (Lonergan 2000/278)

7 Its position as an old, habitual, and unconscious or semi-conscious influence, in great part, is why it is so difficult to correct.

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Our thinker’s core intelligence is one thing, then; and what they think and then come to assume about it can be quite another, and even though erred thinking emerges from that core intelligence. As erred, the comprehensive complex of thought, then, becomes buried and conflictive, out of sight but quite literally not out of mind. Further, that complex may sleep sometimes leaving our thinker’s radiant core to operate in its normative fashion. And an erred complex can be transformed through introspection; but it doesn’t die. Rather, our thinker easily comes to think with the complex, at least at times.

Inasmuch as a development is conscious, there is some apprehension of the starting point, the term, the process. But such apprehensions may be correct or mistaken. If they are correct, the conscious and unconscious components of the development are operating from the same base along the same route to the same goal (genuine). If they are mistaken, the conscious and unconscious components, in greater or less extent, are operating at cross-purposes (a distorted complex of comprehensive apprehensions). Such a conflict is inimical to a development. (Lonergan/2000/500) (my parentheses)

We here refer to the spontaneous and thus natural “starting point, the term (and) the process” as the core of our comprehensive movements of mind.8 (appendix 1) Thus, our thinker (a) somewhat apprehends those movements by merely being humanly conscious and somewhat self-aware in the first place, and so self-present. But then (b) our thinker becomes more able to objectify their own thinking and to ask distinct questions about the process of their own knowing itself; whereupon their oversights and erred insights come to sully that apprehension. Again, such sullying is especially potent to occur when our thinker raises questions in reflection and therefore objectifies as other movements of their own mind and related matters.9

Further the error finds its company in the dark, behind the billowing curtain that separates our unconscious and semiconscious thought from our present object content. Its company includes our thinker’s sources of sanity where a complex of comprehensive oversights and errors plays at the roots of their comprehensive comportment, namely, their creative and critical capacities, their ethical, political, and spiritual seriousness, and their tacitly accepted range of reality-knowledge.

Enter: The Existential Gap

8 For a narrative on “the core of meaning” see chapter 12: “The Notion of Being” in Insight (2000/381).

9 Lonergan implies here two kinds of self-presence: one that is part and parcel to human consciousness and the other as emerging when we become self-reflective enough to objectify ourselves more fully as other. In our case, our thinker is called to objectify their own comprehensive matters and then their earlier thought about them, e.g., their starting point, term, and process for understanding and knowing anything. For a fuller treatment of two kinds of self-presence, see C. B. King, “Language and Self-Presence,” Appendix 1 for Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory (2011).

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As old, habitual, and uncorrected, that erred complex of judgments grows “down” into our thinker’s feeling and image base to affect what makes them comfortable, or not and to link that comfort to its “silo” horizon. As grown-in, the complex becomes existential; and as existential, it tends to resist being disturbed by thinking and discussions that bring conflict to it. Without recognizing the source of their discomfort, our thinker easily and half-consciously chooses to be put-off and diverted to other more comfortable content. In this way, their deflecting for comfort becomes their habit of mind or a “mindset” with a set of erred assumptions; and that mindset then reaches “up” to set our thinker’s horizon of interest: about all else.

SLIDE 1

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Lonergan uses the term existential gap to refer to the distinction between (a) our thinker’s core, or their deeper internal reality with its open horizon, that has become covered over and steered by (b) the lesser horizon and its erred idea plane rooted now in our thinker’s feelings and image base: “the existential gap consists in the fact that the reality of the subject lies beyond his own horizon” (2001/281-284). We refer to our thinker as the subject; to the reality of the subject as the core (with its horizon) (appendix 1); and to our thinker’s horizon as what they initially thought and now presume about the core, erred or not, and about comprehensive matters that flow from it; for instance, how ethics relates to reality. In turn, that horizon frames or eliminates, deems significant or not, in preliminary fashion, all further proximate content. It should come as no surprise, then, that such assumption-influenced content as erred can include those same comprehensive matters.

Authenticity (Genuineness): A Brief Excursion

Briefly genuineness is the admission into consciousness of the tension between limitation and transcendence (2000/502).10 Speaking of its relevance in our context, Lonergan states:

The law of genuineness . . . becomes relevant insofar as development is conscious; and what it demands will be spontaneous in some cases and in others obtained only through more or less extensive self-scrutiny. (Lonergan/2000/501)

10 For our purposes we equate the term authenticity with what it means to be genuine, and both understood in the quasi-limited context of comprehensive thought and matters.

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What is spontaneous is our thinker’s radiant structure of mind as consciousness and as already their passive and active awareness; that is, their thinking, learning, and living. That radiance is not yet what our thinker thinks about (though they can think about it). Rather, that radiance is what spontaneously conditions any thinking at all as intelligent in the first place. That spontaneity in part is (a) our thinker’s desire to know;11 (b) their functioning set of generalized questions (appendix 1); (c) their orientation towards language-expression; and (d) their self-presence and reflexivity: our thinker’s thinking is constituted by a vague but correlate apprehension of one’s own self as conscious. Such self-presence is a part of consciousness as thinking. However, it is not yet our thinker thinking about him/herself fully as other-object. Rather our thinker’s initial self-presence is primary condition for their ability to self-objectify and self-reflect in the first place. That is, our thinker objectifies anything/one from a base of self-to-self communication.12

SLIDE 2

11 For a theoretically incisive development of the desire to know, see those many references to it in Lonergan’s Insight.

12 For this author’s reflections on two kinds of self-presence, see online paper and appendix 1 to my Finding the Mind: “Language and Self-Presence.” (See bibliography for link)

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In the graphic above, as authentic, our thinker’s given (spontaneous) core and its intentions and horizon are correlated with what they have learned about them. The above paragraph and graphic give a brief and general description of the dynamic constitution of the human mind (based on our cognitional theory/appendix 1). The description is of the spontaneous performance and general functions, intentions, and normative anticipations of common human intelligence.13

Further, in common discourse, the term genuineness (and authenticity) can refer to many aspects of being human. However, in our context, genuineness is limited to what we refer to as comprehensive matters (or meta-concerns), and though those comprehensive matters influence all else.14 Also, our notion of genuineness is grounded in and flows from the mind’s actual core with its natural and normative functioning and that functioning as concretely evident in its ongoing performance in our thinker (or any human being/thinker). We refer to that general structure, its functioning and performance as natural because it is spontaneous to (it’s the general nature of) the intelligence of human beings. For instance, we need not ask children, our thinker, or ourselves to wonder with the intention of understanding. Further, we refer to the core as normative because in its general outline and dynamism, and even in its fault-lines, it remains constant, past and present. Thus, it provides a general heuristic for a grounded cognitional theory set in a comprehensive (philosophical) context. Finally, by grounded, we mean such functions 13 Behind-the-scene tensions, then, are associated with both genuineness and with the addition of erred thought.

14 The formal field of comprehensive matters is the general field and science of philosophy.

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and their activities can be identified and verified as operating in our thinker by our thinker; and as that thinker directs their intelligent functioning to discover the reality of that functioning in themselves for themselves. (appendix 1)

Enter: Polymorphism

First, erred learning about comprehensive matters sets the conditions for an existential gap to occur (slide 1 above). However, that erred learning can result in multiple assumptions, horizons, and views that vary in several ways and where one set is in conflict with another at different times and in different contexts. Second, our thinker’s core with its own assumptions, horizon, and view remains present and active regardless of other conflicting learning. From this mixture of conflicting influences, however, we can recognize a polymorphism of mind 15 emerging in our thinker that, as comprehensive, affects “from below” (as assumptions) as well as “from above” (as horizons) their more proximate thinking; and that, in turn, flows into their writings and other expressions. One aspect of that polymorphism we can refer to as Professor Sankar’s silo-thinking, or thinking, in the main, with a false reality horizon.

As our thinker enters the academy, then, they already can be thinking with such polymorphism in place; and they can be suffering internally from their buried, conflicting, and now hard-to-get-at mixture of assumptions hovering around and sickening their comprehensive core.

Further, introspection is anathema to the gap and to polymorphism, both of which, again, can have become existential. Without its hard-won and guided self-correction, at best, our thinker can be obsessively resistant to new questions that press against old, deeply buried, and now existential assumptions and horizons. On the other hand, today, a person who already has genuine leanings where comprehensive matters are concerned will be in luck to have that genuineness fostered and enhanced by being introduced to qualified theory and method in the academy.

Also, thinkers commonly are only vaguely aware of their comprehensive comportment or of the tension that flows from inordinate conflict embedded in their interior life. Then it easily gets worse when they enter the academy where it’s a case of “pot luck” where direct and qualified explanation of comprehensive matters is concerned. To solidify the problem, then, when entering an academic setting that also harbors such polymorphism

15 Polymorphism: Lonergan 2000 (see Insight/Index); and 1973/268.

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“ . . . perhaps no more than a minority of students and professors, of critics and historians ever wander very far from a set of assumptions that are neither formulated nor scrutinized. (Lonergan 2000/ 241)

and its resistance, our thinker will remain misguided in significant aspects of their development and, thus, the directions of their thinkings and doings for a very long time.

Intellectual Development in Informal and Formal Education

When Professor Sankar refers to problems in the formal education of scientists she is partly but not wholly correct in locating there the causes of silo-thinking and of obstinate resistance to such issues as field integration. The aforesaid problems, indeed, are rooted in a thinker’s education; and the problems do manifest in and presently are exacerbated remotely in curricula and sometimes even directly in teaching in formal education. It is in that sense that such problems are “inherited.”

Also, regardless of our thinker’s present internal state where comprehensive matters are concerned, they are easily influenced by misunderstandings as they flow tacitly in and through their curricula and their proximate communications with teachers and other students in their educational groups. Indeed, the social pressure surrounding group-thinking easily fosters dogmatic attitudes, presently, about the hegemony of some data and fields over other data and fields, as well as about persons in those fields.16

Such problems can occur, then, from poor formal training, institution-wide endorsement of biased curricula, and/or socially-accepted dogmatism. And all three can tacitly lead students to embrace limiting horizons and views as their own. Whether by fiat, by “inheritance,” by professors’ unconscious omission or conscious intent, students’ formal education easily perpetuates comprehensive problems.

However, those problems as easily can have begun much earlier: in our thinker’s development as they undergo their many and diverse informal educational experiences.

Though highly variable from case to case, in the normative threads of our thinker’s early and informal education we find great potential for the occurrence of a set of comprehensive oversights, misunderstandings, and downright errors, capped off by the too quickly-made judgments of verity. If left uncorrected such judgments and their content shift to become buried “below” our thinker’s conscious thought. Again, though buried, comprehensive contents do not die or fade into oblivion. Undisturbed by further inquiry, the complex becomes set, crusty and self-protective while remaining at-the-ready to influence, direct, inform, frame, and confuse, the more conscious thought that constitutes our thinker’s present and ongoing interests. Sankar is correct, then, to locate

16 Let us again regard thinker resistance to introspection where it and it alone can initiate self-correction and qualified change in that thinker’s interior life. Correction of the problem will not occur when, by whatever impetus, a dogmatic disregard for introspection rules the day.

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the problem in our thinker’s education; but the problem goes much deeper than her comment suggests.

Interim Summary

We have considered that past insights and judgments remain with us. Further, such insights and judgments (a) can concern comprehensive matters; (b) can be correct or partially correct, or contain massive oversights and errors; and (c) can be made quite early in a thinker’s life: during their informal education. When about comprehensive matters, oversights and errors of thought become buried but remain “alive” in their spontaneous pre-selective functioning: they direct and give form to our thinker’s habitual orientation. Judgments about comprehensive matters then remain “present and operative, but only from behind the scenes.” Whether correct or in error, those early now-buried assumptions, in turn, generate horizons and views where all

. . . 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. Hence, when a new judgment is made, there is within us a habitual context of insights and other judgments and it stands ready to elucidate the judgment just made, to complement it, to balance it, to draw distinctions, to add qualifications, to provide defence, to offer evidence of proof, to attempt persuasion. (2000/302)

As comprehensive, the facilitation of fresh insights that Lonergan talks about, at the very least, concerns the potentially limiting horizons of significance afforded any new data or field. Also, our thinker’s present and potentially erred world and its horizon are charged with the potential for resistance. That horizon

. . . corresponds to the concrete synthesis that is my conscious living, and that concrete synthesis does not admit change without experience of anxiety, dread; . . . . it is not the reality of my world that is the anchor, the conservative principle; it is the dread I experience and spontaneously I ward off whenever my world is menaced. (2001/204-5)

. In other words, again, Sankar’s “get-go” goes much deeper, and is more recalcitrant and harder to get at than presently she might think. This is so even if our thinker is open to the idea of facing and working through deeply personal anxiety, even dread; and even when it is they or we who harbor such oversights and errors close to or even wrapped around the generative core of our own thought, knowledge, and being.

Revisiting Education with Comprehensive Matters in Mind

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Let us revisit and increase our definitions of informal and formal education by placing them in relation to the staying power of oversights, insights, and judgments about comprehensive matters.

Informal education, then, is the learning and development of mind that occurs spontaneously in any and all thinkers’ life experiences from birth to death. Informal education about comprehensive matters, when it occurs, then, can also be spontaneous and varied. Fur the young and unguided mind, it is often incomplete and sometimes full of oversights and errors; and it occurs in variable but normative developmental patterns in the family, group, and socio-cultural environments.

Briefly, our thinker spontaneously performs thinking and processes knowledge from birth, employing their self-corrective process for a very long time before they are even capable of overtly questioning their own thinking and its implications on comprehensive matters, for instance, what constitutes the real. And so they can start thinking about thinking after that thinking has been occurring for all of their life up to that point. Because of the complexity of comprehensive matters, and because our thinker is young and unguided, they are easy to overlook what had to occur for them to even start asking questions about that thinking or anything else for that matter.

Our thinker’s early-made oversights, erred insights, and too-quick judgments might go like this: Wondering about thinking and the real: I look and hear and I understand immediately what I am looking at and hearing, and can vaguely imagine it later. Therefore, what I am seeing and hearing is the real out there, and my thinking that accompanies my seeing and hearing is in here, separated from what I am sensing. We observe-to-understand reality then, and that reality is the sensed world that we see and hear. Also, I cannot see my thoughts; so they, and lots of things I cannot see but still think about, must not be the “hard” reality that I see when I look. The above or something similar easily can become the comprehensive complex of thought that becomes buried but remains assumptive and influential of all further direction and content of our thinker’s interests and thought. At its core, and coupled with several kinds of error, is an oversight that consists of a devaluation of the intelligibility and meaning of the universe and the self as a part of it. Moreover, our thinker’s thoughts will occur in a moving tandem with their core. However, if their buried complex of oversights and errors is left uncorrected, from that buried thought our thinker can solidify and make habitual a set of assumptions and horizons that, again, start with the devaluation of the order of existence as intelligible and meaningful. Instead, for our thinker reality is not an order of comprehensive existence of which they inquire from being intimate with it, but rather “the sensed world” that they inspect from without. Instead of engaging in intimate pillow-talk with their lover, they rather voyeur “it” from

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somewhere, a “place” they haven’t bothered to explain yet as apparently it’s hidden even from themselves.

Furthermore, our thinker easily can rest in the assumptive understanding that their own knowing process is equated to their ability to sense that world. From there, study fields and their data easily gain or lose their significance in the estimation of our thinker according to that early-made now-habitual complex of oversights and thought errors.

I see reality out there; my mind is in here “where” I cannot see it; and so somehow I stand outside of reality looking at it. Though I treat the unseen as if it were real, it really is not.

SLIDE 3

Further, such thought easily can go uncorrected over time. Spontaneous also, however, is that, correct or not, such learning stays and, again, easily becomes incorporated into the behind-the-scenes field of feelings, images, and assumptions from whence our mindsets spring, aka our attitudes, horizons (reality frames), and viewpoints. And so our young thinker can grow to adulthood with early-made comprehensive oversights and errors present and operative as background for and set as habit for their more proximate thinking, long before they enter the academy and begin their higher education.17

17 As a counter-example to the above oversights and errors of thought, in a paper given at the same conference as our own, William Matthews refers to and quotes Albert Einstein: “The first arousal of Einstein’s curiosity did not come from a book

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On the other hand, formal education is commonly focused, systematic, content-oriented, and specialist directed; if not in a content-field, at least in the methods of educating the young. Comprehensive personal development is always demonstrated as embodied in our thinker’s teachers; and it is at least covertly attached to content as thinkers vaguely apprehend and sometimes appropriate pervasive mindsets and their assumptions from literature and social experiences. Comprehensive assumptions are always present in any literature or conversation. Just what form they take is a different question altogether. Presently,18 formal education occurs in academic and/or professional environments. If any direct learning concerning comprehensive matters occurs (we can presently assume), it is sometimes wayward, sometimes not.

When adequate direct learning is absent, our question becomes whether our thinker has the wherewithal and/or opportunity to self-correct in their familial and cultural setting, aka: in their informal educational environment or then later in their formal education.19 And in a formal setting we can ask:

Are expanding student-thinkers’ self-knowledge and potential self-correction concerning comprehensive matters presently considered essential aspects of the curriculum?

Santa Claus Thinking (as Analog for our Thinker’s Comprehensive Comportment)

Though of course a highly variable affair from culture to culture, children often consider spiritual questions quite early in their development. As examples, Santa Claus is

but from a compass when he was 4 or 5. It awakened in him a wonder about nature: ‘Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.’” Here is an example of an early comprehensive insight that pointed Einstein towards the “hidden,” might I say the intelligible, rather than to the merely sensible. Then in his note, Matthews states: “The quotes are from his Autobiographical Notes, page 9. On page 15 he remarks that between the ages of 11-16 he had the good fortune of discovering the right books and subsequently teachers to advance his curiosity” In that same paper, Matthews writes: “In their afterword to the 2015 The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists, Christof Koch and Gary Marcus wrote: ‘The final challenge, indubitably, will be how subjective feelings, how consciousness itself, emerges from the physical brain. Even today, there remains an explanatory gap between neural activity and subjective feelings, between the brain and the conscious mind. One belongs to the realm of physics, to space and time, energy and mass. The other belongs to a still poorly understood magisterium of experience’” (Matthews 2016). Again, the “magisterium of experience” can be interpreted, rightly I suggest,as a recovery of the intelligibility and meaning of the universe and ourselves as intelligent in it.

18 That is, “presently” at least in western-influenced formal education circa the beginning of the 21st century.. 19 To have the “wherewithal to self-correct” is not grounded first in theoretical expertise but rather in having a well developed imagination. And to have a well-developed imagination, our thinker needs to have a background in language, literature, and the arts (not necessarily all formal). “Otherwise they lack imagination, and without imagination they do not have a sensitive tool of sufficient suppleness and range to provide a basis for intellectual activity. This is the theoretical ground of classical or humanistic education” (2001/264). For the academy presently, however, theoretical understanding is the securing factor.

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purveyed and children’s Bible stories are written with a child’s developmental moment in mind and questions they may be considering. These stories at least are comforting to children at a time when they need to “know” about what is much bigger than they are; but yet what they are incapable of questioning or understanding in a mature way.

As a thinker grows, however, so grows their ability to raise questions about and to understand nuance and complexity about such matters. With continued development, children are able to return to Santa Claus and their religious and spiritual questions better able to understand such complex matters or at least to sort out their questions for knowledge from their questions for belief and faith without inciting too much existential fear and grief. They can dispense with the child-comforts of Santa Claus and Bible stories; but also perhaps draw from them, for instance, the spirit of good and giving in the midst of implied good in and of the universe. With a deepening of mind, however, revisiting spiritual stories and religious meaning is common in most if not all cultures.

Santa Claus and Bible stories, insofar as they give treatment to spiritual and religious concerns of children, are certainly about comprehensive matters. And so, in that sense, Santa Claus thinking is similar to our focus, namely, our thinker’s questions, oversights, and insights about the what-how-and-why of our comprehensive matters, or what we can now name as philosophical; e.g., the good/bad, knowing/knowledge, existence, objectivity and reality. Also as children do with comprehensive religious concerns, our young thinker makes early and quick judgments about what seems so clearly to be the case at the time: I open my eyes and see reality (cognitional), thus, looking is how I understand and know with my judgments (epistemological): I know with my senses and the real world is “out there” to be sensed (ontological); end of story (closure). If those judgments are based on a vast set of oversights and errors, it sets the assumptions and horizons, in our thinker’s mind, of everything else in the world, real or not.

What commonly differs, however, between our thinker’s (a) religious and spiritual questions and (b) their philosophical concerns in their present formal and informal education is their return to and development of their thought about those two different kinds of comprehensive matters: philosophical and spiritual/religious.

For many reasons, and in the cultural context of their growing maturity and experience of life, a thinker easily will revisit their questions and early judgments about spiritual and religious matters with their critical eyes (for instance, Santa Claus and Bible stories). And commonly, they do so with the help of family and groups within religious institutions with their doctrines and practices, and many times throughout their lives. With the advent of further more critical questions, our maturing thinker replaces Santa Claus thinking, if not with answers, at least with more mature experiences, questions, and movements of mind, and often within a community of faith.

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On the other hand, our thinker’s return to philosophical matters is not so common, if not rare; and we certainly can ask in our present situation, again, whether these matters are so commonly appreciated, even in an intellectual environment as is the academy. Nor is such revisiting presently a cultural habit: far from it; and certainly if such study does occur in our academies, its import and methodology are far from settled.

In fact, though variety rules—and don’t miss the metaphysical irony here--the higher the intelligence, the earlier the oversights and errors probably occurred, the less likely such problems will be revisited, scrutinized, and corrected; the deeper the roots of error went in our thinker’s interior psychic earth to become grown-in and habitual to their thinking and, thus, the harder the complex is to approach, uproot, scrutinize, and self-correct. Our thinker was born with an developmental but incisive self-corrective process; however, they cannot self-correct such a long-held habit of thought easily, especially when they are already thinking with that habit of mind; and especially when that habit tends to include overlooking the vast comprehensive implications of the very self-corrective process they themselves so often employ.

And so with little or no cultural or educational support regarding the revisiting of their philosophical-comprehensive assumptions and horizons, our thinker easily can be left with some very, shall we say: immature Santa Claus-type presuppositions and mindsets to think with; to tacitly direct their thought; and to continue to be in conflict with their core mindset.

Two Sources of Comprehensive Assumptions

Our thinker’s intellectual development stands-on and draws-from the fulfillment of their early infant patterns based in needs; however, that development also has its own patterns (2000/ chap. 15). Those patterns include movements towards (a) reflection as a general activity of mind where we expand on and revisit meaning for clarity and verity in new and broader contexts of meaning, and (b) raising questions and reflecting specifically on comprehensive matters. Both tend to emerge at some point in our thinker’s life; though our thinker’s movements towards (a) reflective thinking need not include (b) the consideration of comprehensive matters as their objects. (appendix 1)

Thus, the emergence, broadening-out, and sharpening of our thinker’s reflective capacity is just their manifesting their human potential to become thoughtful and critical in their thinking habits. Such movements are common and normative, but variable, on a variable schedule, and heavily dependent on cultural context and so: not absolutely necessary. The general pattern emerges from childhood, however, and reveals our thinker’s potential maturation towards a normative thoughtful adulthood (Coles 1990). 20

20 See also J. Piaget’s foundational work on child development.

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On the other hand, neither (a) the development of our thinker’s reflective powers nor (b) their wonder about foundational matters precedes our thinker’s already-functioning core intelligence and its anticipatory patterns. On the contrary, the core with its intentions, accompanying assumptions, and open horizon provides the condition for any human development to occur at all.

Two Sources of Comprehensive (Foundational) Assumptions

1. Given with our thinker’s being humanly intelligent:

Original/organic/core/generative: Core intentions underpin our questioning and interact with insight content to become the core assumptions of those insights about particular thought; and both are present and grow with the fundamental functioning of human intelligence, beginning in the infant’s expectations-to-life (appendix 1). Original assumptions underpin our thinker’s first thought content, then, and accompany all developmentally-ordered ventures in extroverted thinking/ knowing/expressing/doing from birth to death. Such assumptions remain as intentionally correlated with their core intentions. They ground all aesthetic, commonsense, and scientific judgments along with the actual wisdom we find in all kinds of thought, knowledge, and expression.

In his book Insight (2000), Lonergan speaks of both objectivity and being as first notional to the basic functioning of human intelligence.21 The connection between (a) the notion of being as an aspect of metaphysical meaning and (b) the core of our thinker’s human intelligence, its development, and patterning is the given aspect of their core’s intentionality towards their understanding and knowing real being and towards their being involved with what is really worthwhile about that reality (Piscitelli 1977). Long before our thinker names such patterning, they are involved in it.

The notion of being does not result from an understanding of being; it does not rest on the grasp of what from some viewpoint is essential; and so the notion of being is not the notion of some essence. Further, the notion of being remains

21 In his Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Collection 3 (2002), ,Lonergan’s chapters on “The Notion of Being” and “The Notion of Objectivity” precede his chapters explicating his metaphysical theory. Understanding the difference between the “notion” of being and a full-fledged theoretical metaphysics is essential to understanding both Lonergan’s work and the potential for our thinker’s own recovery of self in the fullness of the intentionality that came with their being human in the first place. That is, as notional, our thinker’s being-in-being is “latent” but tending towards their conscious understanding of that being through their given intentionality of it. His chapter on the notion of being, then, is his attempt to move the reader from being involved latently in their own metaphysics, to their becoming explicitly aware of it. Our thinker, then, is already intelligent and already aimed at All Real-Being as intelligible, though at first unaware of their own operations or the implications of their own thoughts and actions. Lonergan’s theoretical metaphysics, then, is fully empirical in drawing from a critically established (self-appropriated/ affirmed) cognitional theory a basic heuristic towards understanding the universe of being, again as intelligible and, thus as not merely sensed or looked at, but as understood, known, and lived in. In this way, Lonergan’s work lends a moment of theoretical finishing to the problematics of philosophical movements of minds and their writings since the scientific revolution came on the scene.

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incomplete on the level of intelligence; it moves conception forward to questions for reflection; it moves beyond single judgments to the totality of correct judgments; and so it does not prescind from existence and actuality. (Lonergan 2000/384)

2. Learned:

Vaguely “apprehended” as an aspect of self-presence; then reflectively established, learned assumptions (and their horizons/views) result from wondering/questioning; and correct or potentially-incomplete and/or erred insights and judgments about comprehensive-foundational matters. Learned assumptions can develop any time and, notably, long before our thinker’s critical reflective capacities mature.

Reflections of (2) above not only emerge from, but are of (1) the core as aspects of the given developmental potential of human intelligence. Again, we refer to the core as the source of authenticity where comprehensive matters are concerned. Thus, a learned meta-mindset can be authentic insofar as it either correlates with, or at least does not conflict with, the core and its flow; or it can be inauthentic in being in conflict with it.

Our question here, then, is not yet WHY we ARE or what is history about? Rather, they are about how our thinker can regain the self-identity that came with that first self-present apprehension in the first place. How can our thinker regain their given intentions that they easily can have drifted away from somewhere in the backrooms of their development? We want our thinker to recover those intentions that came with their being intelligent in an intelligible universe, again, in the first place. It’s a recovery that concretely regards three universal facts: (1) that human beings do not know everything about everything; (2) that we come to know the reality of some things about some things; and (3) that we continue to desire to do so.

Horizons and Their Expression, Genuine or Not

A comprehensive horizon can be artificially diminished where, for instance, our thinker glazes over and yawns at the introduction of new material that falls outside of that horizon or, worse, is fearful of it. The point is not that our thinker is not interested where their lack of interest may be legitimate. The question is rather: why. A horizon’s tacit illegitimate selective influence serves to either include “automatically,” or diminish (or completely omit) other data, things, events, and persons that our thinker might think significant and interesting were they identified with their core’s intentions and their openness to intelligibility and meaning as potential to their knowing of the real. On the other hand, with a limited (inauthentic) horizon in place, for many reasons, unwanted material still can enter our thinker’s field of awareness or concern; and that entrance with its conflict is still potential to release the dialectical process in those concerned. However, the question is: at what point does difficulty turn into indulgence and, again, why.

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Our thinker also can think of “unseen material” as if it were real; knowing no other way to “view” it. And again, our thinker may indulge the unseen (employing their core with its assumptions and horizon) while at the same time, employing aspects of their erred complex to lend to it little or no reality significance at all. Further, as a result of an erred comportment our thinker can harbor a false imaginary “view” of themselves as somehow, again, an observer standing outside of existence. They look in at its (merely sensed) reality where their accompanying instant self-other image, or its obscurity, secures that further questions about their own view are avoided. Vaguely for our thinker, what they intend of themselves as persons and as thinkers thinking about thinking, include their psychological, social, moral, political, and spiritual life. We are involved in it, but it’s not really real. With an entrenched “outsider-observer” view such issues easily lose their reality status in our thinker’s estimation. So go the human fields and their data.

SLIDE 4

On the other hand, learned horizons can be rightly-drawn and are intimately personal, quite literally: to the core (authentic). Our thinker can discover and come to know their own core and its intentions as their personally being intelligence involved in self-discovery and as already in being, and both as intelligible. This kind of knowing can include objectification, but also extends itself further to self-recognition experienced as a heightening of consciousness.

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Since sensations can be produced or removed at will, it is a fairly simple matter to advert to them and become familiar with them. On the other hand, not a little forethought and ingenuity are needed when one is out to heighten one’s consciousness of inquiry, insight, formulation, critical reflection, weighing the evidence, judging, deliberating, deciding. One has to know the precise meaning of each of these words. One has to produce in oneself the corresponding operation. One has to keep producing it until one gets beyond the object intended to the consciously operating subject. One has to do all this within the appropriate context, which is a matter not of inward inspection but of inquiry, enlarged interest, discernment, comparison, distinction, identification, naming. (Lonergan/1972/15).

Further, heightening experiences can include a repositioning of thought about ourselves: as intelligent beings in intelligible being the reality of which we are only incrementally aware through our inquiry and understanding. Further, that intelligibility as WHAT we look at, but also understand and verify, needs no “bridge” to be intimate with the intelligibility of the good and of what we think and do in terms of it (ethics). Our thinker can become open and consciously identified-with the activities and functions of their core, or as being-in-question already in the universe of being with others as we work out our understanding of that universe and what we do together in it. We can come to harbor this “insider’s view” of ourselves and the world as intelligible as not only reflectively understood and self-appropriated, but also as a spontaneous habit of thought. That discovery and transformation can be spectacular:

When a person has one’s living organized on a lower level, the movement to a higher level involves something like the apparent eruption of a latent power, the possibility of a radical discovery, where the discovered has been present all along but where there has been a hiding of what has been discovered. (Lonergan 2001/244-45)

The already-given core then is so personal as to condition our thinker’s intelligence-in-being in the first place. Further, and far from being tautological or merely logical, our thinker’s critical reflections about their own intelligence-in-being penetrate to become one with their concrete living in the constant and regular here-and-now of their particular existence.

On the other hand, as erred, our thinker harbors a kind of multiply-split consciousness with their self-image hovering somewhere in between themselves and their objectifications as other. As genuine, then, our thinker can discover their core and experience a recovery and synthesis of their authentic being human. The internal tension shifts spectacularly from the inauthentic split (in the existential gap) to the authentic dynamism of our existing, questioning, knowing, and living in relation to all that we ARE and are involved in.

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SLIDE 5

The Insider’s View (reasonable facsimile)

However, just reading and understanding of the above constitutes an objectivist take on our issue for any reader. The actuality is not so fast or easy. Early and then later thought errors tend to be recalcitrant and habitual, throwing us out of our own being with their false images, feelings, and narrow horizons of thought; if not root, at least branch, so to speak. And those thought errors have organized our spontaneous thinking and living for some time. They don’t like to be bothered. Speaking of such errors in the context of a reflection on genuineness, Lonergan states:

Besides being correct or mistaken, the apprehensions that make a development conscious may be minimal or more or less extensive. They are minimal when they involve little more than the succession of fragmentary and separate acts needed to carry out the successive steps of the development with advertence, intelligence, and reasonableness. They are more or less extensive when one begins to delve into the background, the context, the premises, the interrelations, of the minimal series of conscious acts, and to subsume this understanding of oneself under empirical laws and philosophic theories of development. Now, other things being equal, there is less likelihood of error in the minimal series alone (informed by our core assumptions sans the influence of learned but erred insights and judgments) than in the minimal series fitted out with its concrete background and its theoretical explanation; and for this reason we expect genuineness to be more common in the simple and honest soul innocent of introspection and depth psychology. But it very well may be that other things are not equal, that errors have become lodged in the habitual background whence spring our direct and reflective insights, that if we relied upon our virtual and implicit self-knowledge (“self-knowledge” is our learned complex of

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comprehensive matters) to provide us with concrete guidance through a conscious development, then the minimal series, so far from being probably correct, would be certainly mistaken. (2000/500-501) (my parenthetical content)

Our thinker’s core lies behind or “below” that already behind-the-scenes learned but erred thought, that thought’s recalcitrance and accompanying feelings of resistance and even dread, and that thought’s objectifying self-image. Again, it’s not merely a tautology or even merely a logical conceptual argument for objectivity we are talking about here.22

Meeting Polymorphism: The Inheritance Track in the Academy

Regardless of the comprehensive comportment they bring to the academy, students can meet with a polymorphic intellectual-inheritance track upon entering the academy. As polymorphic, that track can vary, differing from professor to professor and from course to course; and it can be taught tacitly or explicit, or both, well or not. In any case, as polymorphic, that track probably goes back much further in history and is deeper-set than, at first, we might expect.23

Further, upon entering higher education, students can be developing well with matters of comprehensive concern; or they can already harbor an erred complex. Situations vary of course; however, in either case, our thinker easily can experience anxiety from meeting conflicting comprehensive notions that are “lodged” in various curricula. Also, in the rush of their new and already confusing academic experience, students also can easily overlook the subtleties and source of their own felt anxiety. If their development is going well, upon meeting conflict, student-thinkers probably still lack the critical self-awareness and an understanding of tacit polymorphic assumptions that are dissonant or resonant for them upon hearing or reading explicit arguments.

A lack of critical astuteness, however, leaves thinkers impressionable to implicit or explicit comprehensive matters, distorted or not. When challenged, that lacking leaves thinkers unable to defend in any critical way what can be their own correct and authentic but not yet critically established comportment. That comportment, regardless of its state, is existential and emerges as the yet-unsaid and sometimes-quiet presence of dissonance and/or resonance coming from below as they experience comprehensive undercurrents in readings and lectures, interludes and conversations.

Moreover, if our thinker harbors an erred complex, it has been fermenting, sending its conflicted but habituating roots down into their psychic under-field, and building more 22 This reflection also responds to the question governing the WCMI conference in 2009, generally: why does Lonergan’s work remain unappreciated in the academy today?

23 I suggest that waiting for professors to retire won’t do. Rather, some sort of interference is needed to break the overlapping pattern of inheritance.

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and more influence from behind the scenes of their proximate and fully conscious thought. And if the causes of resultant anxiety are misunderstood, or go without direct address in the academy, our thinker may think it easier just to turn away from their felt confusion and accept what each course portrays, polymorphic as they may be overall. Such acceptance cannot help but invite a general sense of malaise.

For our thinker, then, an unhinging of self from authentic self can occur; and the academy can easily become a kind of supermarket with a brand like any other brand; as well as a game to play like any other game. Further, and because this polymorphism is about comprehensive matters, those supermarket and game notions and ideas, with their accompanying moral, political, and spiritual self-interpretive influence, can easily extend not only to all other knowledge, but also to our thinker’s interpersonal relationships and to their life as lived. “Comprehensive” means just that: comprehensive.

Furthermore, instead of recognizing error outright, thinkers already harboring an erred complex can actually resonate, at first and at least, with tacitly expressed but erred assumptions that happen to be buried in the underpinnings of their curricula or taught directly. The experience of comprehensive errors, then, can feel right, at least at first. Add to that the anxiety or even dread that comes with raising questions about a thinker’s interior situation, namely: about their own core and all that flows from it, and we can see why resistance is so common to thinkers entering higher education and the fields, or teaching there. Our student-thinker is just now transforming their old, and building their new forms of psycho-social-intellectual-spiritual existence. In that context, their raising questions about what everyone else seems so settled about can invite self and social marginalization and even existential breakdown. Educators want students to break with naiveté and dogmatism; but not with reality and their intimate place in it.

Curricula harboring a background of “lodged” polymorphic oversights and errors, all of which constantly flow out from behind the scenes of its content, did not occur in a vacuum. Rather someone planned and wrote the material; and someone now executes it for the student to experience. Further, it can occur in the context of otherwise excellent and excellently delivered curricula. Indeed, in the broader sense, professors are also a part of the curricula. Presumably whoever wrote the content was writing with a similarly lodged complex of thought providing a pre-fabricated mindset in an existential cul-de-sac (silo) complete with assumed foundations to resonate with. Also commonly, such curricula can sport perfectly coherent logic. Why question, then, when it is so logical and feels so right, and when questioning makes me feel extremely uncomfortable, not to mention: socially outcast?

To be fair, questioning an otherwise intelligent and creative (and published) thinker about their unconscious or semi-conscious thought, indeed, is off-putting for most anyone. Socrates’ admonition to welcome critique and thank the critic notwithstanding, such

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questioning can feel insulting and, again, inspire resistance born of a sense of dread (2001/206-08). In turn, such dread can degenerate into a kill-the-messenger contempt or even hatred. Thus, and especially in today’s environment, such questioning is rarely if ever welcome. Many are accustomed (a) to their own spontaneous knowing process and its self-correcting to arrive at the real (their core and its intentions/assumptions); while at the same time claiming that (b) on principle, no one can really know anything at all, especially about our interior lives (they are, after all, merely psychological); or some other version of that odd state of comprehensive affairs. So that to question the conflict between (a) and (b) is to open a Pandora’s Box, never to be closed again; or at least that’s what our thinker is left to think.

Further, and though affective in a highly variable way, an erred complex can presently underpin and accompany all information, explorations, and arguments put forth in writings, lectures, and conversations. When thinkers are long habituated to think with a specific comprehensive mindset and set of presuppositions, the requirement (for understanding and potential correction) is nothing less than sustained introspection aimed at self-discovery, beginning with an initial engagement with one’s own anxiety, dread, and resistance. Such existential responses can flow initially from revisiting in systematic fashion one’s own comprehensive presuppositions. But then the further difficulty is this: the above resistance and its dogmatism can also be about: engaging in introspection.

Moreover, an assumed hegemony of data and fields is a clue to, or an indication of, among many others, a horizon that may provide false limits to our thinker’s thinking often before they begin thinking of anything. Again, Lonergan writes in his lecture notes about the dread that comes with breaking through a horizon in conscious living:

A world: what lies within a horizon; a totality of potential objects. Not some particular object, but a possibility of some types of objects and not of others. . . . World, horizon, corresponds to the concrete synthesis that is my conscious living, and that concrete synthesis does not admit change without experience of anxiety, dread; . . . . it is not the reality of my world that is the anchor, the conservative principle; it is the dread I experience and spontaneously I ward off whenever my world is menaced. . . . My concrete synthesis in conscious living is (a) integration of underlying neural manifold (b) set of modes of dealing with Mitwelt of persons and Unwelt of tools; or any other combination . . . to change it, to be converted to a new world, to let my horizon recede is to invite experience of dread and to release a spontaneous, resourceful, manifold, plausible resistance . . . . .this dread and release is not a function of objective evidence for my world; it is a function of my mode of life, my solution to total range of problems arising in my concrete living. (Lonergan 2001/204-5)

In the light of the above, and whether or not such oversights and errors are present in particular thinkers in the academy and professions, all present still can benefit from a

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formal and systematic engagement with critical self-understanding: of our comprehensive comportment and outlook.

Passing Down to Students (the Inheritance) or: Our Thinker in the Academy OR the Academy’s Oversights and Errors in Our Thinker

Left unquestioned, set-in comprehensive oversights and errors easily are passed down to students. This is “accomplished” tacitly, for instance, through a too-easy acceptance of the long-assumed hegemony of specific data and fields over others. What student would have the wherewithal to question the comprehensive matters that come from the university and its highly esteemed professors? And again: “. . . perhaps no more than a minority of students and professors, of critics and historians ever wander very far from a set of assumptions that are neither formulated nor scrutinized” (Lonergan/2000/ 241).

More boldly, such errors can be rife and, in the academy, are the cause, as example, of the “automatic” acceptance of field hegemony; the “automatic” rejection of movements towards field integration or engaging seriously in ethical discourse; and the “automatic” rejection of introspection and of fields that refer to it.24 What will need more or less extensive self-scrutiny, then, is our thinker’s moments and plateaus of development in terms of their capacity to understand and to be correct or in error about those comprehensive matters (for instance, knowledge of their own knowing process and their given intentions towards the intelligibility and meaning of the real), not merely as objects, but in how our thinker has incorporated those matters into their assumptive base. This is so even in terms of their pervasive self-image and their relationship to existence and the real. Moreover, the error is systemic and so must be the cure. It’s constitutive thinking we are talking about which, by definition, is rather intimate to the thinker as person.25 (appendix 3)

So too our thinker must guard against the attitude of dogmatism that keeps in place their erred assumptions, their unwieldy horizons and views, and their wall of internal resistance. All too often a dogmatic attitude prevails about questioning a thinker’s own presuppositions not to mention the many matters of comprehensive issue that flow from their own comportment. Dogmatism sits in its turret, so to speak, machine-gun ready, overlooking to defend its old, erred, and habitual complex of thought.26

24 What is needed, of course, is for our thinker to learn to “red flag” such automatic assumptions when they occur, rather than merely resisting questioning their meaning and their potential influence on their thinking.

25 We mean by constitutive, again, what our thinker comes to think with, rather than about as merely referential knowledge.

26 For a theoretical treatment of the “fundamental attitudes,” including dogmatism, see E. Piscitelli (1985 & 2010).

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If our professional thinkers consider the high potential for, and difficulty of cure of, an inter-generational transfer of some very basic oversights and errors then they are on the right track. Again, it is in that transfer sense that short-sightedness about comprehensive matters, not to mention resistance to talk about field integration, are “inherited.” We can hope that Lonergan was speaking out of a moment of frustration or perhaps irony when he remarked that current professors just need to retire.

The Pervasiveness of the Problem: the Broader Picture

The root problem, then, consists of some old and entirely common oversights, coupled with an array of similarly common thought errors, capped by a set of judgments. If left uncorrected (in the academy?), that set of errors is now un- or semiconscious, but selective and so profoundly affective living at the base of our thinkers’ knowing process.

Concretely, the problem influences a thinker’s views of physical and other data, and their sciences and fields, bringing a hegemonic bias “automatically” to favor physical data in a way that isolates and deems less significant the data of the human sciences, humanities, and the arts. Also, the problem occurs in individuals; but then is shared and mutually fostered by groups of researchers and scientists, and in departments, who share some form of the bias, but more systemic, and so worse, a pervasive contempt for comprehensive introspection. And so the problem comes to infect the foundations of those sciences and fields to be passed down to and thus “inherited” by their students. Here is Bernard Lonergan on the scientist’s limited horizon:

That horizon has a significance in the natural sciences, but also and much more profoundly in anything that involves man, such as the human sciences, philosophy, and theology. . . . in the case where man is involved the subject is one of the objects . . . . (Lonergan 2001/283) (see also appendix 2)

Moreover, the assumption that affords field hegemony is not restricted only to scientists involved in the natural or neurosciences. Rather, even when those involved in the human sciences and fields argue against the hegemonic bias of the natural and neurosciences, they often do so from having tacitly accepted the same complex of judgments and the limited horizon that flows from it, and that is present in those who assume and argue for that hegemony. From that horizon follows an acceptance of the tenets and methods of the natural sciences that, when applied slavishly to human

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“These insights must occur, not (merely) in the detached and disinterested intellectual pattern of experience, but in the dramatic pattern in which images are tinged with affects. Otherwise the insights will occur but they will not undo (the problem) . . . . . There will result a development of theoretical intelligence without a change in the sensitive spontaneity.” (2000/224/25)(see appendix 3)

data, fail to fully account for either (a) the highly relevant differences between natural and human data or (b) that human scientists are also instances of their data. Overlooked is that both points have major consequences for the development of critical methods and tenets in human professions and fields of study:

Human studies have to cope with the complexity that recognizes both (1) that the data may be a mixed product of authenticity and of unauthenticity and (2) that the very investigation of the data may be affected by the personal or inherited unauthenticity of the investigators. (Lonergan 1973/ 157) 27

The question of personal or inherited authenticity is still significant to the natural scientist on many levels, for instance, ethics in the lab and especially in applications. However, in human studies, not only do the data differ from natural science data, but also the ranges of authenticity of scientists and professionals in human fields, on many levels, come into bright methodological relation with the same ranges of authenticity of the humans we study as a data field. Further, openly recognizing such differences in the human fields presently may seem to secure the loss of what is critical about applications of scientific method to human data. However, first, we can ask how critical is any science that disregards crucial differences in both the data (human) and its context of study (humans studying humans)? I would argue: not very. Further, recognizing such differences methodologically, at the very least, invites a dialogue among intelligent, well-trained, and committed thinker-professionals about (a) maintaining critical tenets while (b) accounting for those crucial differences even if that accounting includes (c) personal introspection and personally breaking down some recalcitrant thought-barriers, including stating foundational assumptions of moral and political views that influence both the data and the researcher/theoretician.

But what in the world can comprehensive or other authenticity of the data and the scientist, or its absence, refer to? And how can we possibly claim objectivity in such a context? Scandalous as it may seem at present, and though the question certainly demands an answer of some sort, we can only raise that question at this point in our discussion and suggest—no, we claim—the question’s legitimacy to any study (including those of the natural and neurosciences); and follow with some explanation and evidence for that claim. We can make such a claim while in full awareness of its profound implications: for making huge and substantial changes in our understanding of and in the way we presently go about things, for instance, in our scientific and educational institutions. Our initial claim is that, if it’s needed, it is worth doing; and if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, or even badly. Of course, as with any study, we have to

27 This paper is too brief to introduce genetic and dialectical methods to fill out the four methods that relate directly to human data and the researcher/theoretician. For an incisive exploration of genetic (developmental) and dialectical methods as well as their relationship to classical and statistical methods, see Lonergan (2000); and his other works. From my present understanding, the fields await a systematic exploration and recovery of the significance of those methods and of Lonergan’s contributions to the foundation of those fields.

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understand the depth and breadth of the problem; but further, we must be open to correct any hidden errors of thought and attitude in ourselves that, presently, may be lodged in our thinking, and that we can already be thinking with and laboring under.

Most importantly, the process of recovery must be systematic but also hold an element of self-direction because, pedagogically, it will mean nothing if merely believed or imposed on students from external sources.28 Certainly, the exercise cannot hurt anyone, especially those who have experienced, and who understand and love the power of their own thinking. (appendix 3)

Our claim is that, as bold as it may seem, such self-scrutiny can set the stage for a kind of personal breakthrough that includes psychological import, but that is much more “comprehensive” than that. For the fields, the stage is set for our increased understanding and then for moving to a new and integrative plateau in human thinking. Specifically, and where obscurity and/or error are already present in an otherwise-intelligent thinker, such self-knowledge will change the field from whence their questions rise, the content and direction of those questions, and then the insights that flow from them. From such a fundamental change in our thinker, what seemed like a huge block, a high wall, or gulf in need of a bridge, can become a logical flow of intelligence towards new knowledge. Further, I might add that the application of a corrected self-understanding to one’s own comprehensive comportment is both general-theoretical and completely concrete.

Though such reflections can be anxiety producing at first, such re-visiting also can issue in a welcome clarity of thought born from rethinking in critical fashion some presently fuzzy, conflicting, and profoundly affective assumptions, again, about what we are referring to as comprehensive matters. Such matters and the need for rethinking them, I suggest, are already present in our academies and in professional thinkers along with what remains undiscovered but “has been present all along.”

Bibliography

Coles, Robert. The Spiritual Life of Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

Einstein, Albert. Essays in Science, trans. Alan Harris (New York: Philosophical Library, 1934) 12. As cited in Lonergan, Collection 18, p. 263.

King, Catherine. Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory. Lanham MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2011. Appendix 1: “Language and Self-Presence” online:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ZsPZLGgOsih1JyvAxGFl6XSoc-h- Qt7E9CX_lznXus/edit

28 The hinted-at but associated problem here is one of assessments which can be anathema to such a program of comprehensive education. The problem also applies to what is knows as “transformational learning” referred to by M. Solomon in an inset earlier in this paper.

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“Integrative Approaches for Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society.” President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues (vol. 1); Gray Matters: Topics at the Intersection of

Neuroscience, Ethics, and Society (vol. 2). http://bioethics.gov/sites/default/files/GrayMatter_V2_508.pdf

http://www.bioethics.gov/sites/default/files/Gray%20Matters%20Vol%201.pdf

Lonergan, Bernard J. F. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 3: Insight. Ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

_______. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Eexistentialism. Vol. 18, ed. Phillip J. McShane, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

_______. A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.

_______. Method in Theology. Minneapolis: Winston Press, Inc., 1972.

Matthews, William. Paper: Challenging the Paradigms of Conscious Studies.” Paper given at West Coast Methods Institute, March 31, 2016; the 31st Annual Fallon Memorial Lonergan Symposium. Sponsored by The Los Angeles Lonergan Center & Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University: www2.LMU/Lonergan

Piscitelli, Emile J. 1977. Language and method in the philosophy of religion: A critical study of the development of the philosophy of Bernard Lonergan. PhD. Diss., Georgetown University, Washington DC.

———. “The Fundamental Attitudes of the Liberally Educated Person: Foundational Dialectics.” The Lonergan Workshop 5. (1985): 289-342.

______. Philosophy: A Passion for Wisdom. Frederick MD: PublishAmerica LLLP, 2010.

Solomon, Mildred. Transcript of Meeting 15, Session 1, December 18, 2013. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, Gray Matters: www.bioethics.gov/node/3238. From moderator’s introductory comments: “Dr. Solomon is President of the Hastings Center and Clinical Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. She directs the school's fellowship in medical ethics. Prior to assuming leadership of the Hastings Center, Dr. Solomon was senior director of implementation science at the Association of American Medical Colleges, and before that she was Vice President of the Education Development Center. Dr. Solomon has founded or led many educational programs in bioethics, including a project funded by the National Institutes of Health that developed and pilot tested a high school bioethics curriculum. She has served on committees of the National Academies of Science, was a member of the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on organ transplantation, consults to numerous foundations and government agencies. “

Appendixes: Cognitional Theory in a Philosophical Context Brief supportive quote

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Excerpt from book in progress re: Resistance and Philosophical Restructuring

Appendix1 Cognitional Theory in a Comprehensive (Philosophical) Context

The theory is of the method of mind (the mind’s intelligent functioning): general empirical method. The method is drawn from B. Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collection 3/2000) (and other works); and from E. Piscitelli’s “Fundamental Attitudes” (1985) and A Passion for Wisdom (2010). The terms desire-quests, shadow-questions, and questions as related below are my own from: Finding the Mind: Pedagogy for Verifying Cognitional Theory (2011).

Desire-Quests (Four) operative in you (for instance, your experience of wondering)

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Shadow-Questions Those four desire-quests expressed in the theory and emergent in all human thought and language. Questions Those questions and expressions with content.

Below is the basic cognitional theory, rooted in our thinker’s intellectual activities. See below each question for the comprehensive presuppositions that attend them.

1. What is it? Root desire-quest: to insight-to-understand meaning-intelligibility, includes the good-bad

Intends/presupposes: meaning/intelligibility of content (and its good/bad)

2. Is it really so? Root desire-quest: to know truth-reality-being

Intends/presupposes: Truth and the thinking and telling of it

3. What is/Is it really worthwhile? (What/should-ought I say-do?) Root desire-quest: to be involved with what is really worthwhile; refers to all three others as an interrelated complex.

Intends/presupposes: Worth; the good as principle of concrete choice.

4. What is/Is it ultimately/really worthwhile? (my All-meaning) Root- desire-quest: to be involved with what is ultimately and really worthwhile

Intends/presupposes: Being as having ultimate meaning/value/worth.

Appendix 2

Supporting quotes:

“In contrast, we reject outright the belief that ultimate reality is known by a set of unverifiable images, and if we affirm forms, we affirm them not only in organisms but also in electrons, protons, atoms, and chemical compounds. Nor is such an affirmation to be terms mystery mongering. For a mystery is what is not understood, but a form is what is to be known inasmuch as one understands correctly. The real mystery is that, while scientists are regarded universally as men 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 2000/505) .

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On Empiricism:

Lonergan’s labor in Insight is “. . . a sustained effort both to clarify the nature of insight and judgment and to account for the confusion, so national to man, between extroversion and objectivity. . . . an extremely paradoxical truth . . . . For man observes, understands, and judges, but he fancies that what he knows in judgment is not known in judgment and does not suppose an exercise of understanding but simply is attained by taking a good look at the ‘real’ that is ‘already out there now.’ Empiricism, then, is a bundle of blunders and its history is their successive clarification” (2000 437).

“The conflict between objectivity as extroversion and intelligence as knowledge has provided a fundamental theme in the unfolding of modern philosophy” (2000/438).

Appendix 3

Excerpt from a book-in-progress. The chapter is about:

Resistance and Philosophical Restructuring

. . . .In fact, and a thinker’s obstinate resistance aside, we can retrospectively think our way into our philosophical complex and, thus, into our old thinking and its erred judgments; to recover the core functioning of our philosophical experience. In doing so, we can initiate the occurrence of such restructuring towards integration and a changed spontaneity of thought.

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Talk is cheap, however; and like anything really worthwhile doing, this movement of mind will take effort and, for some, even if change is wanted, probably a very long time.

Psychological and/or Philosophical

Further, philosophical and psychological elements of our experience can be identical, but have different functions according to our focus. Thus, we can have a cognitional theory that we can understand purely in terms of its psychological and/or learning-theory import; and/or we can focus on the philosophical aspects and import of that same theory. For instance, we can ask how our learning results in knowing; how our knowledge complex relates to objectivity and the real; and for that matter, what is reality anyway? Also, elements can be different but tightly knit together and mutually influential at various moments in our development.

We can refer to an existential gap, then, as a psychological disorder at the base of scientists’ thinking, or of their mentality. What makes the gap philosophical, however, is that its original emergence concerned our thinker’s early reflections and first questions concerning philosophical matters. Distortions in such thought are far from guaranteed; however, distortions and blunted horizons (e.g., silo-thinking) are the result of too-easy-to-occur oversights and errors about those most-basic matters. As philosophical, the contents of such reflections do not go away but settle-in as basic thought-patterns to influence, in spontaneous fashion, the existential arena of our being of which our intelligence is a unified part.

Because its content is philosophical, then, that pattern is not only affective of our psychological field, but of our aforesaid core philosophical functioning that was already operating in us in the first place (from the get-go). Those early-philosophical reflections, then, in some sense, become “forgotten,” but are far from erased from our philosophical patterning. Correct or not, they get packed in the closet, so to speak, of our semi-conscious domain, the door of judgment having closed on them. That door, however, has a window where those judgments can remain quite present and influential, again, as now-habitual starting points for philosophical reference. Once set, however, the door is closed to our new questions about the complex’s content, but remains available to our philosophical referencing. Again, the contents of such early reflections begin to influence our approach to everything else; including, for instance, the reality-status of our fields, e.g., physics, psychology and philosophy and ultimately, of ourselves.

The gap, then, is not only about a thinker’s personal psychological history and state of mental affairs. Rather it also comes to underpin all new thought, even about the significance of those very elements; and it extends from there, in interactive fashion, to form our present philosophical horizons and views, e.g., silo-thinking. Again, the oversights and insight-content of such reflections were about sensing, understanding, the

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good-bad, objectivity, knowledge, reality, being, and how we and all are related. Though these have great psychological import, they are more fundamentally philosophical concerns and, thus move into our more comprehensive foundational understanding; foundational because they give the assumptive frame, limited or not, to our views and expressions about reality, life, and ultimately love. Far beyond its psychological import, talking about the assignment of reality-status to different kinds of data and their fields of study is another way to talk about correct and/or distorted philosophical world views.

Furthermore, just as, in the psychologist’s office, the patient’s problem can be “linked with a refusal to understand” and “its cure . . . an insight, a lightning flash of illumination,” so is the case for students and scientists and their philosophical disorder; and for their need for philosophical restructuring through sustained, critical, and qualitative self-reflection. We are, indeed, in a “get-go” situation if ever there was one. Referring again to psychological healing, Lonergan writes:

Just as the refusal excluded not some single insight but an expanding series, so the cure consists in the occurrence of at least the principal insights that were blocked. It is the re-formation of the patient’s mentality. (2000/224-25)

We are also talking about the psychology of resistance here. In our case, and probably in the case of many other kinds of insight-refusals, these “blocks” are fueled by the psychics of feeling and related images; built of old, erred, and unexamined judgments that are wrapped-tight and calcified around a complex of internalized doctrines. In our case, the block is of the thinker’s potential reality-horizon which, like a child’s Santa Claus, was overlooked and erred-about in that earlier time of our development; all the harder to get at for being early-made and, so, ingrained in our being, aka: existential. At the time of our early philosophical thinking, however, our oversights may have been relatively appropriate, and our erred insights may have been all we were ready to comprehend. Like early Santa-thinking, we made and accepted those judgments; we regularly start our thinking with some aspect of their content; and we even identify with them, at least tacitly. And that thinking was hard to give up.

Unlike our early thought about Santa Clause, however, we have neither the capacity nor the cultural context to re-think those early oversights and insights. And so they remain buried but influential.

Resistance

Also, as our philosophical comportment (and the gap) is existential, we find immediate discomfort when such judgments, and their logical but toxic tentacles, are disturbed. Such disturbance signals a presumed and felt loss of existence. Indeed it would be a kind of

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temporary loss of self; and so we fly away from the very insights that would break apart the judgments (our now-internalized doctrine and its mindset) and connect our field of understanding with our own philosophical reality. Indeed, we are psychologically invested in both inviting and avoiding those insights. Our initial response, then, is to feel confusion and to resist “intrusions” that fly-in-the-face of our now well-accepted and feeling-rooted judgments.

To be clear about the import of our present project, it is one thing to block and resist insights, for instance, about a personal event, and to subsequently miss the insights that might have come to us otherwise, or even to experience some sort of psychological healing. It is quite another thing when those insights, judgment-blocks, and spontaneous resistances are philosophical in kind. In the later situation, we are involved in setting up and securing our basic thinking, or the horizon of the subject about our own and others’ reality, right or wrong; or about what is and can be real, or not; and further how our knowing is related to that reality. As philosophical the situation is comprehensive of all other events and situations including what we might deem the merely psychological.

A Dramatic Retrospective Philosophical Education

As Sankar suggests, then, the common presence of silo-thinking calls for reeducation of our own selves, our students, our scientists, and those who teach our future scientists, “from the get-go.” And again, that get-go begins in the psychological, but its import is fundamentally philosophical.

Lonergan further suggests that, for full gap-healing to occur, a thinker’s series of philosophical insights cannot occur merely on the intellectual level, but must also go to the heart of scientists as persons:

These insights must occur, not (merely) in the detached and disinterested intellectual pattern of experience, but in the dramatic pattern in which images are tinged with affects. Otherwise the insights will occur but they will not undo (the problem) . . . there will result a development of theoretical intelligence without a change in the sensitive spontaneity. (2000/224/25) (my parentheses and omissions)

We here relate Sankar’s description of silo-thinking, then, and her call for restructuring, to Lonergan’s theoretical-philosophical work. In doing so, we can understand how deep the problem goes, both for the history of philosophy and for our specific thinker’s entire academic, professional, and fully personal life. Further, we can get a glimpse of how pervasive errant philosophical views have become in our scientists and in our field literature. Though difficult, I suggest the restructuring that Sankar calls for is highly relevant, especially if the existential gap-problem also lies at the root of the field isolation and obstinate resistance that Sankar also speaks of. . . .

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End of Excerpt

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