[Lonergan_l] introduction
tollfor...@gmail.com
I'd like to introduce myself as Josh. I've been reading and rereading Insight and some other matters from Lonergan from time to time over roughly the past 15 years.
What I come away with is that reality is identical with understanding. To me, this would imply that something different from understanding is itself identical with understanding that. So in understanding the unknown unknown as such that unknown is fully understood.
Yet, when I read him, he seems not to state this in any brief form and sometimes seems to want to affirm a real that is not understanding.
I'm curious what views might bw circulating here as to whether Lonergan affirms that reality is truly identical with understanding.
Josh
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Joe F
I think I get some idea of what you are saying. Let's say there is an
understanding that is identical with reality. And someone possesses a
comprehensive overview or explanation of this. But I don't understand
it as yet and so there is a portion of the real which is not real to
me.
Then also it seems you are saying that my understanding of someone
else's comprehensive understanding takes a kind of understanding which
is different from that which is identical with reality in the first
place. So are you suggesting a paradox?
My first thought was that Lonergan may mean 'real' in a sense that is
special. It reminded me of William James' 'live options'. In his
lecture The Will to Believe:
"James distinguishes between live and dead hypotheses. A live
hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him whom it
is proposed. Some hypotheses refuse to scintillate with any
credibility at all. Liveness is not an intrinsic property of an
hypothesis, but is relational. The decision between two hypotheses is
an option. There are different kinds of options: 1, living or dead; 2,
forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial." clipped from
http://alien.dowling.edu/~cperring/williamjames.html
Only if I understand something with my heart, so that it moves me,
with real understanding will I experience it as a live option, or a
real possibility or will it lead to live hypotheses. Maybe Lonergan
actually thinks of the real in terms of 'live'.
My second thought is that don't forget to distinguish an explanation
from an understanding. Someone may have a comprehensive understanding
of 'the real' and yet what their utterance consists of is an
explanation. The explanation has a content. Lonergan writes:
"Now a change of understanding involves a change in explanatory
conception, for the explanatory concept may be defined as an
expression of the content of the understanding.” INSIGHT '57 p.737
When we confront the understanding offered by another we are not
coming face to face with the understanding that is identical with the
reality. We are coming face to face with something twice removed from
that. An understanding has a content. And what we are confronting is
expression of the content, or the explanation.
Joe
Joe F
of Species' for a lack of an explicit statement of methodology. And in
the following:
“There is ample evidence, therefore, to support the view that
Lonergan's primary concerns were questions and issues normally
associated with philosophy, theology and methodology” Morelli and
Morelli, The Lonergan Reader, University of Toronto Press Inc 1997 p.
13
I was hoping to get a better idea of what is meant by methodology as
it applied to the statement about Origin of Species.
Thank you,
Joe
Joe F
“In fact, though the work does not contain any systematic statement of
methodological foundations...” INSIGHT p. 132
Phil McShane
You have asked a fundamental and brilliant question
that, strangely, is not attended to seriously and adequately by even the
leading lights among his followers. Not many - perhaps less than 10% of the
school called Lonerganism - come to grips personally with the large-scale
strategy of the book. So why not just quote my comment on that for my
article of 1962 in Philosophical Studies (Maynooth, 1961), "The Contemporary
Thomism of Bernard Lonergan": see does it help.
"In Insight there is a large scale strategic shift of the critical
problem from' that we know' to 'what we know', from the quest
for certitude to the..question of what exactly occurs when we are
knowing. For this reason it is only at the end of a prolonged
effort at understanding his own activity of understanding that the
reader is engaged in a judgment.· This judgment does not commit
the reader to any position on the nature of reality. Whether reality
is one or many, material etc., there is the undeniable and intelligently
formulated factual judgment, 'I am a knower': With the
identification of ' being' ~nd the objective of the pure desire to
know there is, strangely enough, still no commitment on reality.
By the conscientious objector the definition can be taken as nominal:
whatever I can know or want to know I will call ... Umpa? Odo?
what's in a name? ...:'Being?
One is led further to an appreciation of the complex notion of
objectivity. Yet it is only in the clear statement of the' position'
and the 'counterpositions' that the key element in the strategy falls
into place. "
Some lead perhaps?
But it is altogether too compact a statement.
I'll add a few further pointers, but we really need some to and fro to get
there [Augustine took ten years to get half-way there!]. You might find
useful the fifth chapter of my little book *Wealth of Self*, "The Inside-out
of Critical Realism". The book is available free of charge on
www.philipmcshane.ca The most up-to-date stuff on the issue is Mark Morelli
,"Lonergan's Debt to Hegel and the Appropriation of Critical Realism", in
*Meaning and History in Systematic Theology. Essays in Honor of Robert
Doran*, edited by John Dadosky, Univeristy of Toronto Press, 2009, $39, just
out. Mark has been working on Stewart, Hegel, and Liddy for a good few
years, and is in the front line of this work, very much brilliantly alone.
Let me go back to the 1961 quotation. The position that I talked about at
the end of that 1`961 quoation was on page 388 of the first edition, nicely
placed [top of the page] and nicely layed-out as Lonergan wanted it. The
editors messed it up by compacting the printing, which is on page 413 of the
new U. of T. edition. A sad editing over-reach which does not get the reader
to pause, as the reader must. It is a challenge to take a stand, it is a
decision, the reader's option. It is a leap, a commitment to a "startling
strangeness" [see the Introduction, xxvii in the old, 25 in the new ed].
This is the leap that you point to, circle around, in your question. The
real is what you reach in correct understanding .... this takes you way
beyond naive realism [I would guess that most Lonergan students are in fact
naive realists], way beyond Kant and Hegel, to discover yourself as a very
strange being.
NOW: dont forget that Insight is an introductory book. Lonergan did not wish
to introduce the word "intentional" or any of its variants. The presentation
on that key page 388[413] is very simple and shocking. A full axiomatics of
the position would involve a set of axioms that would include an axiom of
intentionality [other axioms would be an axiom of infinity, an axiom of
incompleteness ....] which would point to finite mind being ALL, IN
DESIRE., a desire for intentional identity. That desire is the exigence
talked of in Phenomenology and Logic [see the index] .... but that
introduces larger twists on the problem of the desire and its actuation and
leads to a very intrigueing eschatology within a theology of the
supernatural. so best halt there .... see does it help you towards further
precise insights and questions.
Phil
Toll Booth
Thanks for your message. I can read you in a way that would have you reading
my question in the way I mean it, but need to spend some more time with what
you wrote. :)
Josh
mou...@uw.edu
I would use the description from MiT which concludes with the idea that everyone agrees on the basic structure, but which includes BL's transitional contribution with the idea that many outrageously disagree on the meaning.
Joe F
to interrupt it as I have sometimes been accused. It is this GMAIL
that keeps the threads together. I assure you I tried to change the
subject heading and it just happened. Many many apologies. ALso sorry
if I didn't get Josh's question quite right. I tried.
On 12/15/09, Joe F <172...@gmail.com> wrote:
Toll Booth
line can be an annoyance. Your take on my question is welcome, rupture or
no.
mou...@uw.edu
(PS - my girls' teachers are effectively ending their interest in chemistry and math, ``I just have to memorize this for the test, then I won't have to think about it again.'' one said.)
Science 27 November 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5957, p. 1189
Letters
Teaching Strategies Based on Research
The Letter "Teaching and learning strategies that work" (R. Hoffman and S. Y. McGuire, 4 September, p. 1203) highlights how scientists—or, at least, these chemists—are isolated from "education." In the Letter, two chemistry professors described educational strategies they have "developed" over the course of their 40 years of combined teaching experience. We were struck by the fact that they made no obvious reference to the discipline of education. In the past 40 years, there have been thousands of research studies documented in the education literature. These research studies detail and inform us of the successes and failures of teaching strategies and their impact on the learner at all stages of development.
Colleges of Education within universities are grounded in research and a body of literature on teaching and learning. All professors wishing to teach should be informed by past research in education, just as we expect chemists to be informed by past research in chemistry. Why is it that professors who earn doctoral degrees in other disciplines automatically presume to be teachers?
Unfortunately, this approach is rampant in academia and even in this journal's sister publication, Science Signaling. Upon review of the 57 abstracts (going back to 2003) that Science Signaling lists as "Teaching Resources," not one was written by an educator. We will see improvements in teaching sooner if we are informed by research on teaching strategies proven to maximize learning across all developmental levels.
P. Dee Boersma1,* and Lin Zurfluh2
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: boe...@u.washington.edu
1 Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
2 Seattle, WA 98102, USA.
Toll Booth
Have any leading questions?
Ok, I revisited p.388 and, yes, that incorporates into my interpretation.
Here's a beginning filled with brevity. Consider page 381 where he is
affirming that "the given is constituted apart from questioning"
There are a couple of ways to read that. Let's say that I interpret
this affirmation of his as a *deed* - he is affirming that the given is
constituted apart from questioning; a chosen act. It's an act of affirmation
that occurs within the active horizon of critical realism. The given is
consituted along with questioning, known as the condition of questioning,
intrinsically related to questioning, meaning that such affirmation occurs
in context of reflectively understanding that the given is that. *The given,
then, is what it is reasonably affirmed to be; no more, no less. The reality
of that is rooted in understanding*.
Let's say that I interpret this affirmation as being not a deed but as some
flinging out of the metaphysical latency of the naive realist. (I must say I
right now understand a new way to appreciate his use of that term "latent").
To the naive realism that "the given is constituted apart from questioning"
means something entirely different, that the matter is what is already out
there now before our minds begin to form questions about it. It must have
been the reality of the shower that Mr. Liddy was wrestling with in the
shower, if I remember right. (He was the author of that "Transforming Light"
book, right?)
Another realm where this difference is made explicit is in the differing
interpretations of the meaning of desiring to know. Which comes first,
vital anticipation or heuristics?
To circle back to my original question (which originates in relation to the
understanding that it is the original question) Is the desire to know
identical with correctly understanding the desire to know?
Onwards in deed. Now, it is a strange enough matter to decide whether
oneself is being critically realistic. A stranger yet matter to decide if
another is being decisively critically realistic about the reality
of entertaining such decision.
:)
Regards,
Josh
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 6:52 AM, Phil McShane <pmcs...@shaw.ca> wrote:
Toll Booth
bust up naively realistic interpretations of his expression of critical
realism? I'm thinking of that densely variable-laden section on reflective
interpretation in Insight and the fact that he is reflectively communicating
the meaning of such interpretation to readers who might not be reflectively
interpretating his expression. How do you present naive realism to itself as
it's own problem? :)
Catherine B. King
Let me add my welcome to the list. And a quick couple of responses to your
inspiring notes:
First, I think you understand more than you let on, or that Phil has given
you credit for.
But to take your questions at face value, it's not that there are no physics
of "out there" and "in here," but rather that naive realism misunderstands
what KNOWING is--or the naive-realistic understanding of knowing is that we
KNOW by looking out there and by some sort of "intuition" (or whatever) in
here. Hence, the oh-so-famous bifurcation: Real reality is "out there"
because we can see it, as well as human brains, etc., as "in here." But
human minds "in here" cannot be seen; hence, they cannot be real. (The
implications of that "fact" on human living go much further than any naive
realist I know would care to be a part of.)
Also, the latent activities that you speak of are so-latent-to-problematic
precisely because we can think of how they work, and the implications of
that working, differently than how they actually work. Hence, Lonergan's
emphasis on the philosophical polymorphism of mind leading to problematic
metaphysics.
Also, and not unrelated to the above, cognitional activities (and
questioning as a part of those activities) operate by having a "given" set
of materials to operate on. So the given, like the operations of the human
mind, keeps responding to our questions--hence, we can speak of the known
unknown.
But I'm always interested in what Phil has to say about such things.
Regards,
Catherine
Catherine B. King
I do believe that's why Lonergan wrote Insight in the style of a moving
viewpoint. I guess you could call the use of a moving viewpoint a
"technique." However, the "break up" of naive realism is not only knowing
about something, but constitutes a kind of conversion--both a corrective and
a new development of one's basic point of view that then is comprehensive as
it reaches into all of our other meaning accumulation--past, present,
future.
The moving viewpoint provides an incremental education towards the
occurrence of the break-up, and then the break-through, that Lonergan speaks
of as "breaking the duality" of one's knowing in the Introduction of Insight
(p. 22).
For myself, I am in education; and so this difference--between (1) the
self-reflective philosophical enterprise and (2) the more object-oriented
(by a bad interpretation of what "objective" means) that is the focus that
the field generally takes today--is a sword that we keep trying not to fall
on.
Regards,
Catherine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Toll Booth" <tollfor...@gmail.com>
To: "Phil McShane" <pmcs...@shaw.ca>
Cc: <loner...@skipperweb.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 9:13 PM
Subject: Re: [Lonergan_l] introduction
Phil McShane
you are, again, raising the 64-dollar questions that need to be raised by
the entire Lonergan community. How am I to help your thinking and mine - and
those reading with us - forward? It seems best to take your last
communication first, one I quote immediately here after my comment on "The
Given", the central topic of your earlier communication. That comment brings
out something of the difficulty we, the Lonergan community, are facing ....
or I would claim, not facing!! When we get to that: in my next
communication, you will find that I quote to you a section of the Field
Nocturnes entitled "The Given": it is section 3 of FN 21, which curiously is
the central section of the entire 41 Field Nocturnes, a 300 page commentary
on the paragraph "Study of the organism begins ..." (Insight 464[489]). [I
presume that you can track down those Field Nocturnes? You will find them on
my webstie www.philipmcshane.ca ] Insight, of course, could have begun that
way, since it is a study of the organism that is you or I, gorillas in the
myst. But the book, sadly, remains to be taken seriously as an empirical
study, an empirical self-study.
O.K.: now let us move to the 64-dollar question of your communication, which
I now quote for reference.
"So, here's a question - what techniques does Lonergan create and employ to
bust up naively realistic interpretations of his expression of critical
realism? I'm thinking of that densely variable-laden section on reflective
interpretation in Insight and the fact that he is reflectively communicating
the meaning of such interpretation to readers who might not be reflectively
interpretating his expression . How do you present naive realism to itself
as
it's own problem?"
As I said, a giant question.
First, I would say that Lonergan only expressed clearly a central "telling"
technique late in his work, when he wrote of 'linguistic feedback' [note 34
of MIT 88, and in a piece missing in the published book from page 92]. The
point is that the TELLING has to be a telling talk to the reader to attended
to the reader who is, for example, HERENOW, NOW-HERE, NOWHERE, looking with
curiosity at lower-case after odd upper-case print. The looked-at print is
behind the eyeballs, but oh-so-easily seen out there on the screen.
Secondly, that is just a small illustration of a particular interpersonal
technique, one that was not native to Lonergan's writing style, one that I
have as yet to push in any serious sense. { It would, for example twist
Insight towards begin more like a Finnegans Wake than a Ulysses } The larger
technique is the technique he leaped to in February 1965, the techniques of
recycling called functional collaboration: chapter 5 of Method in Theology.
That technique has been consistently dodged for forty years by the entire
school in its pretend-following of him. But then the school manages also to
dodge Insight ... the paragraph I mentioned from Insight 464[489], the
section you mention in your next sentence. [We had a conference in Concordia
in the late 1970s: papers published in Ben Meyer and Sean McEvenue,
Interpreting Lonergan ..... we managed not to speak either of functional
collaboration or of chapter 17 of Insight .... wow!].
So you are right on here in thinking of that dense section. It is, indeed,
the topic of my last Cantower, Field Nocturnes CanTower 117: but I continue
reflection on it in Fusions 11-13 and 18.
The difficulty of our discussion, and of the entire Lonergan tradition, is
that that tradition emerged in what might be called a literary tradition of
non-scientific comparative studies which still dominates. You can talk or
write about X and Y and Z and never get round to thinking about oneself.
Lonergan invented a complex of paradigm shifts that the culture was
unprepared for. But we'll get back to that when we turn to the given, a
sel-turning turn to the given behind the eyeballs.
But you mind-glimpse the long-term solution, the solving of the problem of
cosmopolis, the shortening of the long axial period between the first and
the second phyletic times of the human organism? It took Lonergan 12 years
after finishing Insight to glimpse it, so don't be in a hurry!
Just a final word then. Within the new cyclic solution, there is that
brilliant page 250 of Method, where Lonergan invites people to meet
themselves and others with brutal honesty. My commentary on it is in the two
series of 8 SOFDAWARE essays and 20+ Quodlibets. It is, should we wonder
about this, a page that is solidly avoided by the Lonergan school. But
anyway, the second half of that page is the fundamental public answer to
your concluding question:
"How do you present naive realism to itself as it's own problem?"
Perhaps I should halt there, see what I can say in a communication to follow
about your previous good nudges.
Sally McShane
just ended my previous effort and found Catherine's good comments AND
anotther approach to the naive realist, one I didn't mention. It can work
with a group or an individual IF the group or individual can be lifted out
of "talking away from themselves" ..... that's where the feedback stuff
helps.
AND, Catherine, you are right .... Josh's 15 years shows in his right-on
questions!!!!
Phil
P.S. perhaps, Catherine, we can get back to that good conversation we were
having a couple of weeks ago? We were sadly derailed!!
Catherine B. King
I was just thinking the same thing. Also, in that vein, and in the broader
context of emergent probability in-the-flesh in history, I'd like to take
another stab at bringing forward the remarkable relationship between two
different threads of thought (1) our own philosophical movements of thought
in the various threads of "Lonergan studies," e.g., among many is
collaboration (by whatever name), and (2) the thread of action research that
(from what I can tell) began as a corrective movement back in the 80's in
formal research methods, and as a democratization of the field at the same
time.
>From how I understand it at present, and if we are talking about functional
collaboration, we need to at least recognize what is already going
forward--what is actually emerging--in the various fields that is truly
creative in the sense of what is becoming acceptable at the level of "world
thought," or world views as they go through the self-corrective process.
These two threads have come together in David Coghlan's work at the
University of Dublin, Trinity College (Lecturer in Organisational
Development, School of Business there in Ireland). He has a good grasp of
the import of Lonergan's philosophical contributions and is intersecting it
nicely with action research studies, bringing the moral component in as an
essential part of the picture--and not as an "oh, yes ... that" add-on to
the dead and dying left-overs from the positivist world view.
As a not unnotable aside, the movie "Deception" (on cable now) states
oh-so-clearly the view of method sans self-transcendence (Doran's problem in
a recent essay). The reference is to middle-class values. I paraphrase:
The only walls that keep you from doing what you want are the ones you build
in your head yourself.
Need I add the supposed un-reality of the "in here" world.
Sorry if I dropped the ball on our other correspondence. But I haven't read
Finnegan's Wake.
Warm Regards,
Catherine
Sally McShane
It is not at all easy to move along here, but I'll ramble round.
First then you clear question:
"To circle back to my original question (which originates in relation to the
understanding that it is the original question) Is the desire to know
identical with correctly understanding the desire to know?"
This is a powerful question, a simple answer to which is NO. Not a helpful
NO, that! The desire to know is each of us in our incarnate what-being. Best
illustrated by sports: the poised Serena Williams waiting to receive a
serve, desiring to know "what is coming". Correctly understanding the
desire? That is the long 7-million-year human trek of moving towards the
second time of human history, the being luminous as a group about "what is
coming", and having a toe into the making of the coming ..... the problem
raised in section 8 of Chapter 7 of Insight. It is the problem we moved
round in the last communication; it is the problem of an explicit
metaphysics; being "at the level of the times" in conceiving and affirming
AND IMPLEMENTING the up-to-date dynamic stumblings of the group's lean into
the future, a group now over 100 billion.
Now you notice that as you read the previous paragraph you had insights
about your question .... the desire to know is a reality that occurred so
far about 100 billion times. You had, possibly, not thought of that? So, you
have advanced to a suggested understanding of your own desire to know - and
of all other gorillas in the myst. Now you can ponder: Is this right-on,
correct? Then you can move to your own answer to your good question. O.K?
I started at the end of your communication. But what might I say about the
beginning? In the previous communication I mentioned the 300 pages of the 41
Field Nocturnes. That would seem a helpful way to go, but we need something
as an immediate "starter". So, perhaps the suggestion of your statement
about Lonergan on THE GIVEN:
"There are a couple of ways to read that. Let's say that I interpret
this affirmation of his as a *deed* - he is affirming that the given is
constituted apart from questioning; a chosen act."
Yes, many way to read ..... but let me twist it towards the topic we are on,
towards you. Yes, he chose to affirm and chose to type back there in the
early 1950s, hoping the reader would stay with him in chapter 13,
self-discovering but not asking the epistemological question in a mature
way. A wonderful interpersonal poise ..... like the dying Merleau-Ponty
asking you to poise with him over your sense of touch [The Visible and the
Invisible, posthumous work]. So you are asked to interpret you, the reader.
He wants you to come to appreciate something very elusive ..... what
Catherine was talking about .... not at all easy to get a naive realist to
"get into", because it is a discomforting invitation to get into one's
psychic skin, a skin of patterned macromolecules.
Oddly, it seems best for me to pause here and poise you in some more
neuroprint ... a bit of that Field Nocturne 21 that I already mentioned ....
obviously you can find the whole text, with its footnotes, on the website.
But it seems one way of providing a context for your "couple of ways"
question and the question of in-ter-pret-poise, the re-guarding of the
given.
Here then, a bit of a quote with which I'll pause for the moment, poise you
with, within. Section 3 was on Phenomenology, the I move to muse about The
GIVEN.
Phil
Pause, then, with me. Our concern here is with the pre-predictive, with the
woman and "with the man who is the source of the concept, the man who is the
source of the judgment". Did Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, really share our
concern, or share it successfully? Later Lonergan remarks, more bluntly,
"Phenomenology is concerned with the evident. The thematic treatment of what
is evident is considered secondary: the phenomenologists merely report."20
Is this true? And - to come to the core of our present problem - did they
report correctly on the "significant"21 given, or on the given? What do I
mean by given here? You find, I think, that I am ambiguous, in that my focus
is on what is here. The three Field Nocturnes, of which this is the second,
aim at enlightening you about that ambiguity. Obviously I am interested in
the what that is you being startlingly and startingly present. But let us
return enlighteningly to Lonergan's brief talk about the given that is here.
4. The Given
At the beginning of section 2 I mentioned fashions that have developed, have
been developed in us. A very elementary fashion that is included in Lonergan's
broad sweep of what is given in the given, "not only the veridical
deliverances of outer sense but also images, dreams, illusions,
hallucinations, personal equations, subjective bias", there is a fashion of
reading that is a deeply fixed illusion in our culture, perhaps in you. If
it were not some way a given in you then this essay, largely a pointing to
the reading of Lonergan's comments on the given, would be old news. But did
you not find our reading of the end words of the section new news: "the pure
desire regarding the flow of empirical consciousness"?
So there is the "apparently trifling problem" of misreading: could that
problem have been a given from Insight's first paragraph on? There is the
"illustrative instance of insight" of page one of chapter one: how did you
read those four words?22
Now you may well say that I go too far, and I suppose I do. What I go to is
an envisaging of a far later stage of meaning when the operation and
significance of the task of reading is a luminous possession of - in both
senses - culture. It can be a private achievement, an evolutionary sport,
but its establishment as a culture is to be the achievement of cyclic tower
collaboration. So, my few comments, here to your what about the here to your
what that is these couple of pages of Insight needs enormous luck to achieve
even a little shift. No doubt I am on to an embarrassing topic such as
Lonergan mentioned in Method: "Doctrines that are embarrassing will not be
mentioned in polite company."23
Phil McShane
and no, you did not drop the ball ....someone snatched it out of
the game!!!
So, yes, things to follow up... I'll go back and find what we were on to.
But yes, we have to be open and global. Bob Henman has, I think, been in
conversation with David Coghlan in Trinity, and finds him open and
out-reaching. This brings up that vexing question of implementation and the
eighth functional specialty .... In either guise we are just terrible in
"Lonergan Studies" in that regard.
Finnegans Wake? Ho ho .... dont go near it, unless for fun!
My own present efforts are towards bringing the Lonergan group
towards larger dialogue [thinking of Hugo Meynell's great comment re
ghetto!!] especially in noticing that Lonergan's suggestion is one of global
collaboration ...
one of my difficulties is to get people to talk about these problems, these
failures in Lonergan studies. But the main problem is the non-reading of
Lonergan in the sense of self-discovery in this century, with all its
genuine people battered by false reachers.
So yes, let us stumble forward, short-term, long term,
Phil
Maxim Faust
The subject here is: A Primary meaning of the Given.
A few days ago you refered to your WoS&WoN, chapter 4, "The Inside-Out of
Radical Exitentialism". Writing to those who will read the text, I would
like to draw attention to the paragraph on p.40:
"Now, if the reader will indulge in the experiment suggested in the
quotation from Osgood, he or she will find that the environment rocks. I ask
you to attend to that experience and to overcome the tendency to claim that,
obviously, the real room isn't rocking but the appearances are disturbed.
That, of course, is one of my twisted suggestions! What I am trying to
counteract is the tendency to deny that the rocking is 'out there'. The
rocking is, I hope you agree, very definitely 'out there'."
You doubled Osgood's experiment with a pair of spectacles. (I like that!
That's an excellent way of letting Osgood know that you have completed the
experiment and happen to concur with the observations.) But do I appreciate
what you are trying to short circuit? I think I do. The senses are
sensitive, not intelligent. They are perfectly, and merely, actuated (in
whatever state of health they may be) by the seamless inflow of dumb
energy-as-sensible. The actuation of the passive potency of the senses is
ever in the *form* of the sensible, of the "out there"! It is helpful
to note that the sensible environment of animality includes the dynamics of
both the animal's body and the animal's non-body surrounds, of both thirst
and water. So, perhaps this to include both: sensing is ever in thrall to
the sensible. This domain of conjugates, the data of sense, is the first to
be named as given.
Any corrections will be well received.
Max
Toll Booth
some time to reply to you (as well as John, whose response I just caught)
this evening.
Phil McShane
no problem, no correction. But notice the value of
the direct address - a sort of reach-for linguistic feedback ... it all
works better in the classroom, but it is really a heavy thing and I believe
that there are serious scholars who dont "get into" the personal experiment
and the personal shock. My very first conversation with Lonergan - Easter
1961 - was about this... he paced around talking of the shock he felt. It
is quite a leap and still further to leap to the position and then to the
poise [cantower 9 is about this] Liddy is a help, but Morelli really
clinches it, IF we read ourselves, "with him", with his print in our
eye-bald psyche !!! ..... we are, so to speak, bloody-well alone in being
: ) !!!
and you see the value of identifying chapter 13 as a piece of the climb to
the position?
thanks Maxim,
Phil
Maxim Faust
haven't met yet. ...time). And you write:
".... IF we read ourselves, "with him", with his print in our eye-bald
psyche !!! ..... we are, so to speak, bloody-well alone in being : ) !!! "
I've been told that there's a living spanish poet who dares to propose that
we are islands!
Oddly, because I have always had only patches of time to study, I learned to
turn away from the page first toward unmasking the oh so sweet illusions of
accomplishment in understanding sentences!
Well, at least they are "given" :0)), those logically stitched, neatly
Pressed nominal declaratives.
But, Now, what shall I do with the gift. How shall I make it my own? Maybe I
should not!
To decide, I learned that I must somehow turn toward, and find and then
grapple with the About of those sentences.
But Lo! there were always two about's, one of which was the writer!! To pick
a old example, besides the about of Principles of Psychology - "streams of
consciousness" and its cluster of other symbols - there was the about
named William James. How do I deal with that?! The example is lifted from
my early 20's and I recall the craziness of not knowing how to cope
with what I could not deny was the fact of the matter. Oh, I could have
snuggled into "language (or logic or symbols or power or daddy) makes us do
it!" and took up exploring the evidence for the theory.
Lonergan talked about reaching up to the mind of Aquinas, about
intentionality analysis, about mutually mediating sources of meaning, about
the heuristic of the development of said meaning - the true, the good, the
right.
... enough. It's late.
Max
Phil McShane
the "shock" business: worth pausing over, but not just
as an anecdote re Lonergan, rather as a present reality in you now-here,
nowhere, here-now, reading. So I write such attention-stoppers-catchers as
the one Max quotes:
".... IF we read ourselves, "with him", with his print in our eye-bald
psyche !!! ..... we are, so to speak, bloody-well alone in being : ) !!! "
significant pause now-here is the pause that is self-attentive in the
reading of, say, the words EYE-BALD PSYCHE.
EYE-BALD PSYCHE.
Where are these seen words now, capitalized, capitan eyes? You are the
captain of your soul, you are the captain of your eyes. The shock happens
when you are lifted, lift, to be luminously captain, know where EYE-BALD
PSYCHE is. We are back in the interpersonal effort of a class reading and
doing chapter 5 of Wealth of Self. But you, reading, have to here-savour
the shock of EYE-BALD PSYCHE being "inner print", bald of meaning [bring
your dog up to look, to get an eye-full] unless there be an about-what.
I wont go on here .... it is very much a matter of interpersonal exchanging.
But think of the shocking reality of having the book Insight in your hand(s)
when you find that the EYE-BALD BOOK is not the real book, nor is it like
the real book. The real book vanishes in the shocking realism of our
aloneness.
I would say that for most Lonergan students the real book looks like the
seen book in a strange hairy - non-bald - way. What do you think, hold,
cherish?
Toll Booth
Thanks for your kind welcome. This has been in queue for a common
sense while, time to dequeue it.
Let me rebegin with a portion of what you wrote which will hopefully
represent the whole of what you have written:
"cognitional activities (and questioning as a part of those
activities) operate by having a "given" set of materials to operate
on. So the given, like the operations of the human mind, keeps
responding to our questions--hence, we can speak of the known unknown"
There was a first reading I made of this. Then, I made an effort to
read more deeply into your expression to consider how your
understanding might be operating on, preparing, the materials of my
interpretation. My guess is that you are saying that there are limited
questions and that any limited question has conditions that are (1)
outside the specific scope of the question yet (2) required for the
question to be asked.
To state it otherwise, the limited question, any event that is asking
a limited question, is a virtually unconditioned. Any limited question
is an occurrence and that occurrence is a virtually unconditioned. The
condition or set of conditions are "the given" and this identification
of the limited question as a virtually unconditioned brings another
level of consciousness to the question. There seems to me a
distinction to be made here that every limited question introduces an
"in-scope" conditioned circumscribed by the question and an
"out-of-scope" virtually unconditioned that pertains to the occurrence
of the question itself. For instance, I can ask whether my keyboard is
a qwerty keyboard and the conditions of affirming that are different
from the conditions of asking. The conditions of asking are the
conditions relevant to the latter and called "the given"
My original question pertains to the limiting case where the question
is unrestricted and therefore has no "out-of-scope" conditions. This
is the context in which I am asking the limited question of whether
Lonergan made an unrestricted identification of reality with
understanding.
I find that what I'm going to write comes about mid-flight, let me
know if this flew like a bottlerocket without the tail drag required
to keep it on course. ;)
Josh
Loner...@box297.bluehost.com
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Toll Booth
You said:
"Not many - perhaps less than 10% of the school called Lonerganism - come to
grips personally with the large-scale strategy of the book"
I can form a memory of myself coming to grips with the sentence about the
"startling strangeness" (which I notice you have mentioned in various
contexts) That sentence was the pivot of weeks of reflection for me where
there was an emergent trend towards understanding the difference between my
reflective understanding of reflective understanding and the image of visual
interface between judgement and event that I was trying to stop confusing
with reflective understanding. The release of the unproductive cycle was
effected by a choice to let go of the images. A decisive separation of
imaginative synthesis from synthetic understanding. To say it differently, I
had not yet formed the ability to form the memory of that startling
strangeness and, strangely, the memory later formed was to be placed in my
then past. So, anyhow, the question of what he was doing to accelerate my
recognition of my recognition, I had not recognized.
To recollect and summarize, I make a connection of what you say here about
the strategy of Insight with p. 208 of Insight where Lonergan is speaking of
human ingenuity and the acceleration of good production. Emergent
trending...
Josh
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 6:52 AM, Phil McShane <pmcs...@shaw.ca> wrote:
Loner...@box297.bluehost.com
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Phil McShane
Thank you Josh for your reflections on "startling strangeness" and on "the
position" (page 413 in the new Insight) . What might I helpfully add?
A comment from my own struggles on your statement:
"That sentence was the pivot of weeks of reflection for me where
there was an emergent trend towards understanding the difference between my
reflective understanding of reflective understanding and the image of visual
interface between judgement and event that I was trying to stop confusing
with reflective understanding."
For me the struggle is on-going .... reaching for an existential grip on the
solitude of molecular spirit and reaching for a fuller expression of the
statement on page 413 of Insight: I regularly note that there are missing
axioms of intentionality, of infinity, of incompleteness .... these emerge
meaningfully only from the slow growth over the years in a stretching POISE
in the position.
So there is the need to return regularly to that strange zone of psychic
skin to find the strange type of being that is a be-all without being other
than self.
It is another wonderland if you find someone else to talk to, Jack and Jill
in the darkness of sound objectivity surrounded by the mystery that willl
strangely survive the circumincessional reality of beatific life.
Most of this is unchartered territory.... I made a beginning in Cantower 9,
"Position, Poisition, Protopossession" and have been struggling forward
since, e.g. in Field Nocturne CanTower 116 "Desire and Distance".
Catherine B. King
You will probably find a better answer to your question in the beginning
part of Chapter 19 in Insight.
But the given is (in some camps) an objectionable term because it implies a
giver--perhaps we can refer to Lonergan's notion of things or data--all of
which we ask about with an anticipation of understanding-knowing.
Also, forgive me if I have misunderstood your meaning; however, in your note
you seem to be equating questioning with the virtually unconditioned?
Whereas the virtually unconditioned is the marshalling of meaning
(virtually) that leads up to a judgment (unconditioned) and that follows
from questioning--in this case, is it so? From my understanding of it, and
to relate it to the notion of the given, questions arise out of a matrix of
prior understanding-knowing, beliefs, images, feelings, etc., whereas at
their center are our more basic desires to understand-know/be/say (drawing
from both Lonergan and Piscitelli here) and as meeting the "call" of new
things and events in our lives and interests.
I'm not sure if I have addressed your meaning here, but then it won't be the
first time, ...
Catherine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Toll Booth" <tollfor...@gmail.com>
To: "Catherine B. King" <cb....@verizon.net>
Cc: <loner...@skipperweb.org>
Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 12:15 AM
Subject: Re: [Lonergan_l] introduction
Joe F
I would like to chime in on this realizing that my views are sometimes
out left field in some respects. So I am advancing this if only to see
what the response might be. I find that when I fill conditions to
affirm something I am really doing several affirmations or denials at
one time. This may be obvious to some but i state it anyway. Let's say
I am looking at a map as I idle on the side of the road. I am
gathering information from the map and finally affirm, 'ok that's the
way to go' and start to drive. I have affirmed the 'knowing' of the
route but also a host of other knowings such as that the map is
acceptable and accurate, that I have enough information even if I do
not have an exhaustive supply of information. I must add that many of
these other affirmations are not made explicitly. I exploit the fact
that there are some non-explicit affirmations to make the following
point. There is an agency in the act of knowing. It is I. I must be
making all those choices even some 'non-explicitly'.
So my insight into insight if you will is that there is an agency. It
is I who am making those choices. I alone and if I don't make them,
probably no one else will. So my problem is this- that there is not
enough headlines given to the agency of the person in the account of
knowing. Why is this important-to me, at any rate? It seems to be one
of the central theme of modern day intellection. We find Waddington
comparing field natural selection to the evolution of factories and
products in England. We find Wm James complaining that Spencer's
evolution neglects the personal achievements of men and women. In
other words, the factories can't be explained unless one accounts for
the contributions of living thinking persons. Similarly the theory of
knowing can't be thoroughly explained unless one achieves an
understanding of the agency of the acting person.
That's my quandary and, again, I offer it because I think it needs to
be expressed but also to invite criticiques.
Let's anthropomorphize man, is there a person in the machine and how?
Joe
On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 11:40 PM, <tollfor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to introduce myself as Josh. I've been reading and rereading Insight and some other matters from Lonergan from time to time over roughly the past 15 years.
>
> What I come away with is that reality is identical with understanding. To me, this would imply that something different from understanding is itself identical with understanding that. So in understanding the unknown unknown as such that unknown is fully understood.
>
> Yet, when I read him, he seems not to state this in any brief form and sometimes seems to want to affirm a real that is not understanding.
>
> I'm curious what views might bw circulating here as to whether Lonergan affirms that reality is truly identical with understanding.
>
> Josh
>
>
Toll Booth
I hadn't logged into the list for some time. I just did and noticed your
reply, which I regret missing. Since you have retired from the list, as it
seems, I'll send the reply to you privately. (For the life of me, I couldn't
figure out what imperative you had violated...at any rate...keep a lookout
for my erudite response. :)
Cheers,
Josh