Going for it: Self Appropriating with Jesus

Friday, March 16, 2007

All critiques most welcome

If readers of Lonergan wish to take me to task for my views. This is most welcome. I am not perfect and the last thing I want is to leave something published that is not true or could bear some improvements. Let it all hang out. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion this is mine. And all criticisms will be placed on top.

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Preliminaries

Self appropriation is going to come to me in drips and drabs if at all. First, I should like to know the relation of intellectual conversion to self appropriation. Intellectual conversion strikes me as a best next development in the psychic evolution of man, a state of mind we can now ascend to for only brief moments. Unique tales of animals behaving with an intelligence that almost seems human, like walking long distances to return home, or saving its master, and even compassionately, can't think of any examples, are commensurate with or similar to our momentary ascents to and glimpses of this new concerted viewpoint. But alas the animals can't 'hold onto' their achievement of a higher order of knowing. They always seem to sink back into their baser ways. Anyway when it come to knowing what animals know or how they think, lower animals I mean, non-humans, all I know is what I have read in the papers.

I believe humans stand a much better chance of learning how to 'hold onto' a higher state of mind and a better one. I have a theory about that. It's called the notion of the reasonable affirmation and responsible implementation of the notion of unique probability. And it has to do with 'views', a proof of the necessity of the subjunctive mode in the various stages of meaning and its importance as a basis of finding the immanent intelligibility in the self as knower.

I had an experience of the uniquely probable event today. Yesterday while reading or rummaging through some digital manuscripts I came upon a reference to Jasper's concept of an 'axial age'. That seems to have been an age of a rather ancient past full of the early essences of ethics such as Confucious, I Ching, Aristotle, Plato, Tao, and everything that contributed and still contributes to our ethical and advisory heritage. I thought, how very clever to somehow stand outside of that and label it the 'axial age' as if we were now twenty four millenia into the distant future looking back on the ancient ambient heritage as if it were a distant star or galaxy. I had never heard about it before, this axial age. But today while looking through a junk mail ad for 'classics' there was a complete description of the 'axial age' from which I rapidly was informed of everything which I wrote about above. It was a book review about a book by a Dr. Meusse.
~
I didn't include Jesus in the axial age because I do not limit Jesus to a particular age.

Ah but this is about self appropriation. So I must ask myself, what am I doing when I am thinking about this? Did you ever trace back a thought? You are driving along and find yourself thinking about something, someone out of your own ancient past and you try to recall the sequence of thoughts that led up to that thought? You may ask, "why am I thinking about this?

I am a fool perhaps and yet my conscience possesses a super-human canny for imprinting my every mistake in life errily on the impress of my memory, and, oh, it will deliver them up at the most appropriate while seemingly unlikely times. Proof of a higher intelligence? A guardian angel perhaps? Or an indication of mere relevance of thought and thinking to a deeper and present significance?

The old impersonal question? I find before me a cell phone. Immediately and seemingly without much reflection I know it's mine. Now however I ask, how do I know, how did I know it's a cell phone and it is my cell phone?. It has certain features. I recall its leisurely blinking green service light that literally lights up a darkened room as I turn in at the end of a day. I recall turning the phone over so as not to broadcast the surprisingly bright green blink. The cell phone is near me and it doesn't seem to excite much interest from the neighbor nearby at this library desk. I even sense a fear that the phone might be at risk of being grabbed by the wrong person, namely someone other than myself. All these connectors link me to a knowing that it is my cell phone which brings me to a 'my' and hence a 'me'.

But these are mere suggestions but rather than traverse the terrain followed by Descartes, about whom I know little, I must authenticate, or concretize my knowing of the cell phone and me and 'my' in my own original way. And you know with all those minds running around thinking Cartesian thoughts that leaves very little elbow room for something original with me. But that's what is important, invariantly, what is original with me. And where would we look for that 'personal' element?

As I look at the cell phone, Mr. Responsibility comes to my door and knocks. Ok already, he says, so you presuppose you exist, and that presupposes an act of presupposition and hence a presupposer. Every presupposition must be a complicated set of considerations, affirmations and denials, and this complicated set presupposes some understandings to be considered...But now hop onto the 'Way, Truth and Life' scaffolding and hasten to the proper study of the moment. Study up for that shift you have tomorrow.

It's highly of interest to me that thoughts referent to the transcendental method elevated my thinking from a hum-drum process to a cognitional activity with cumulative results (and not of decline), hopefully, for I mounted to an ethical question, the question of what I should be doing now. So the higher viewpoint, the now viewpoint surrounds me like an outer quintessential sphere whose ever present light can burst in to my interior soul castle whenever I orient my reflective turrets toward the transcendental method. Is it so?

I think thereforethat my first insight about self-appropriation is that it is about me and my role in my present-my God-given duty.

Because as I manufactured an exercise of identifying a cell phone and embarking on abstract theories about 'me' and 'mine' I was suddenly shocked into a submission to a conscientious, personal decisive remonstrance. Something has to be done at this moment. Some chore. And so my insight into insight had a hidden and unexpected dimension. It was not an idle abstaction but I found myself invited persuasively into the concrete world of the particular present.

And, on a philosophical note, even as I report this I am no longer writing precisely about that particular and concrete 'primary substance' of that moment of persuasion. I doubt there is a word for it and so discourse always has the danger of diluting down the precise meaning if indeed specificity of a logical adequacy of discourse of the phrase 'affirmation of affirmation'.

2. Some related thoughts

The word understanding has a certain meaning. It is almost certainly always an understanding of something. This is offerred here as a mere observation or paradigmatic certainty. The word 'under' seems positional enough. In understanding something, one stands beneath it or in front of it in an earthen curvature that places is somewhat below it so to speak. So let us label this complex of an act of understanding with its almost necessary specific subject matter an 'adequacy'. It is only in terms of such 'adequacies' that we can discuss 'understanding'. At no time can we understand understanding, or what it is to understand, apart from the specific substance matter of the understanding in the first place. So for example if I want to understand understanding I must seek to understand the understanding of a math problem, or a proposition, or something.

What is the nature of an 'adequacy' then?

First an understanding of understanding would not be an 'adequacy' in the sense defined. To make sense of that sentence let me rephrase it thus:

An understanding (1) of understanding (2) would not be an adequacy.

An understanding in the second instance of understanding in the first instance is not an adequacy. Let's say understanding the math problem is the index or specimen understanding. Then an understanding of that understanding cannot take place if we have prescinded from the math problem in arbitrarily trying for an abstraction of understanding.

But without stressing the logic circuits too much it is possible that an understanding of that peculiar inadequacy of 'an understa ding of understanding' in such an abstraction is possible.

~ In this case I would venture to say 'an understanding (3) of an understanding (2) of understanding (1) is adequate because it turns out to be an understanding of an inadequacy.

Rendered thusly: an understanding in a third instance (of an act of understanding) of an understanding in a second instance of understanding in a third instance is adequate.

It doesn't go deeper than that. The variable of that specific item understood in the first instance such as 'the math problem' makes the problem interesting. To review briefly. There is an understanding of a math problem. There is an understanding. But it can't be understood except with a reference to the thing understood, i.e. the math problem. An understanding of that understanding the math problem is an 'adequacy'.

I think it is not an adequacy to try to determine what an understanding is unless there is a proviso that no discussion of something called understanding void of the thing understood take place.

Void of the thing understood, an understanding of understanding is not logically adequate. And an understanding of that inadequacy is in turn an adequacy. But it is an adequate understanding of something called an 'inadequacy'.

3.The virtually unconditioned

The above boarded on that which most readers would not like to venture. One ought to check the spaghetti on the stove before venturing further. But perhaps that consideration of a certain logical intricacy will prove of benefit in the ensuing discussion.

Lonergan's account of understanding is interesting. On the first level of intentional awareness there is an experiencing of data. On the second level, insights occur which cloak the data in recognizable, or intelligble forms.

I came up with that term 'adequacy' in the course of my discussion and I don't know if I had subliminal recollection of Lonergan's use of the term in Method in Theology. But in turning to this volume to look up 'virtually unconditioned' I came across the following remark by Lonergan:

(cit. 3.1) "Instrumental acts of meanings are expressions. They externalize and exhibit for interpretation by others the potential, formal, full, constitutive, or effective acts of meaning of the subject. As the expression and the interpretation may be adequate or faulty, instrumental acts of meaning provide the materials for a special chapter on hermeneutics." MIT pg 75.

What is hermeneutics? Hermeneutics From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Hermeneutics may be described as the development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts. In contemporary usage in religious studies, hermeneutics often refers to study of the interpretation of Biblical texts. It is more broadly used in contemporary philosophy to denote the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning.

The idea of instrumental acts of meaning which are expressions is relevant to the question of adequacy as I defined it. Because an expression 'understanding of understanding' may not be 'adequate' also as an intrumental act of meaning in Lonergan's terms. An 'understanding of understanding qua that particular math problem' may be an adequate expression.

It's a fine point, nary a whisker of meaning, but I venture to say all important in the history of western thought.

It seems that from the standpoint of MIT the discussion of 'virtually unconditioned' involves level three, the level of reflection wherein considerations, affirmations, and denials are said to take place. In speaking of affirmations in different spheres, such as the concretely real, the imaginary, the mathematical, etc. Lonergan tells us what is meant by the 'virtually unconditioned' in terms of affirmations.

(cit.3.2) "The affirmation is rational because it proceeds from an act of reflective understanding in which is grasped the virtually unconditioned, that is, the conditioned whose conditions are fulfilled" MIT pg 75

Following him in his footsteps: his footnote to this is to consult INSIGHT Chapt 10.:

(cit.3.3) "To grasp evidence as sufficient for a prospective judgment is to grasp the prospective judgment as virtually unconditioned.Distinguish then between the formally and the virtually unconditioned. The formally unconditioned has no conditions whatever. The virtually unconditioned has conditions indeed but they are fulfilled.Accordingly, a virtually unconditioned involves three elements, namely:(1) a conditioned,(2) a link between the conditioned and its conditions, and(3) the fulfilment of the conditions.Hence, a prospective judgment will be virtually unconditioned if(1) it is the conditioned,(2) its conditions are known, and(3) the conditions are fulfilled." INSIGHT'78 Chap 10.1 The General Form of Reflective Insight. pg.280

4. Can I afford to depersonalize insight and judgment?

My aim has been simply to investigate by means of reading up. In INSIGHT Lonergan writes:

(cit.1.1) "In the third place, then, more than all else, the aim of the book is to issue an invitation to a personal, decisive act." INSIGHT Intro pg xix

The general discussion has been around Jesus Christ and how that Divine Person has supplied the spiritual meaning of a Personal Touch to knowing by means of his Way, Truth and Life idea. So any reference to 'personal' I take as in some way connected to Jesus.

Lonergan invites to the adventure of self-appropriation prescribing ways to experience for ourselves the transcendental method operating in our knowing:

(cit.1.2) "Though I cannot recall to each reader his personal experiences, he can do so for himself and thereby pluck my general phrases from the dim world of thought to set them in the pulsing flow of life." INSIGHT Intro. pg xix

Now notice he said to recall our 'personal experiences'. For that is the general phrase I am plucking from the dim world of thought to set in the pulsing flow of life. Haven't I an obligation to maintain that this general phrase 'personal experiences' means what it says and says what it means, and that it may signify and specify a certain type of experience having an important qualification?

The power of the word 'personal' ought to be the same in cit.1.1 and cit.1.2. If so then we must always choose from our personal cognitional events relevant to our own self-appropriation, those which were powerfully personal and decisive, and hence concrete, particular and specific. Is it remiss or inauthentic of me to take the word 'personal' seriously enough to try to find out what Lonergan may have meant by the kind of experience of knowing relevant to the task of self-appropriation? What did Lonergan have in mind in calling for 'personal experiences'? Do I have a right to limit the meaning to my chaotic level of common sense understanding of terms?

Yes I am sure he could have had a very common-sensical meaning that these experiences occurred only to me, not to him or not to anyone else. But then, even even because these experiences are seen as my own they must be specific, concrete, located in a particular mind at a place and time that is particular and specific. It's obvious then that such an experience cannot just be of an 'affirmation' per se. Because 'affirmation' per se is an abstraction, same whenever or wherever it occurs, and hence non-specific. Suppose Lonergan recognized the paper cup on his desk and I also recognized the paper cup on my desk. These are not the same generic insights. They would no longer be personal operations.

Lonergan might have meant that just as I am saying, the kinds of experiences relevant to one's own self-appropriation must be those particular experiences of a personal kind and that these must then be particular insights, affirmations of particular and specific matters at particular times and places.

Of course the frightening implication from this is that if I just think about my affirmations per se, by prescinding from the actual concrete instances of insights or affirmations and making soup of all my insights or affirmations casting them into sets, and trying to distill out what they all resemble each other as; haven't I then begun to veer off, in a method of cumulative decline, from the particular and concrete, and hence from the personal and relevant, and hence from Lonergan's intent and meaning?

Haven't I then in so doing subverted the very intent of Lonergan which may have been to bring into the authentic present and not into another round robin of dissimulative abstraction.

Haven't I, in abstracting away from the concrete, particular and hence personal instance, begun to talk about insights and affirmations in a very impersonal way, lost the way, truth and life of 'instrumental meaning, fallen into the very anti-teleologic vein of our current western science in the matter of a performance which is at least inherently teleological and purposeful always?

When all along I should have been pedagogically directed toward the relevant decisively personal, concretely particular, cognitional events, rooted in place and time and derived from that the insightful purposiveness of transcendental method and that it advents on the procedures of Jesus Christ who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

5. Intellectual Conversion and Self Appropriation

(cit.5.1) "But it is this consciousness as brought to a fulfilment, as having undergone a conversion, as possessing a basis that may be broadened and deepened and heightened and enriched but not superseded, as ready to deliberate and judge aFourthly. such an appropriation can occur only gradually, and so there will he offered, not a sudden account of the whole of the structure, but a slow assembly of its elements, relations, alternatives, and implications. Fifthly, the order of the assembly is governed, not by abstract considerations of logical or metaphysical priority, but by concrete motives of pedagogical efficacy. nd decide and act with the easy freedom of those that do all good because they are in love. So the gift of God's love occupies the ground and root of the fourth and highest level of man's intentional consciousness. It takes over the peak of the soul, the apex animae." Method in Theology p.106

One of the most beautiful remarks in INSIGHT about self appropriation is to my mind:

(cit.5.2) "Fourthly. such an appropriation can occur only gradually, and so there will he offered, not a sudden account of the whole of the structure, but a slow assembly of its elements, relations, alternatives, and implications. Fifthly, the order of the assembly is governed, not by abstract considerations of logical or metaphysical priority, but by concrete motives of pedagogical efficacy." INSIGHT Intro pg xvii

What is pedagogical efficacy? What for Lonergan is pedagogy. In INSIGHT it seems to have something to do with what a teacher does that pupil does not. It's difficult to figure out why Lonergan felt the resultant assembly that is a resultant of self appropriation is governed by 'concrete motives of pedagogical efficacy'

However two conclusions may be drawn. The first is that there is a resultant assembly. And we must assign a value to it and ask what it might mean. The second is that something called 'concrete motives of pedagogical efficacy' is a limitation on the resultant. Perhaps this supports the theory that Lonergan had a certain qualification of the 'personal, decisive, concrete, particular, specific' for any and all cognitive operations deemed relevant to self appropriation.

So now I ask myself...

So now I consider what I am doing when I am knowing something? Notice I add 'something'. Another question is whether I can ask 'what am I doing when I am knowing?' without specifying what I am knowing?

Suppose I take a look over there at the paper coffee cup with the plastic lid on my desk. Obviously I know what it is. I just wrote about it. If I inquire what I just went through I can't say I recall conditioning the cup, and then finding that the conditions were fulfilled...at least not as an 'intelligent' insight, that is, a second level insight. But now as I reflect I can 'confirm' or rather affirm that it is a cup, the paper cup with the plastic lid from the local donut shop. And it's a large size and I recall how that came about. I had one a coffee because of a marking hidden in the rolled up top edge. And my daughter said 'ask for a large one, because you are allowed to get any size.' And so I did. All these memories help me affirm the identity of this particular cup. I won't go as far as Descartes who asked if he was dreaming the whole thing up. I could but I won't.

So what am I doing when I am knowing? At first I am attending or being attentive and specifying something I am attending to. The knowing of it is the act of specifying it to some steady state of completion. But in the end what makes it the cup that it is, is still an act of philosophical speculation.

We have a cat named Mystic, a friendly one that appeared at our doorstep, and the children derive a lot of peace out of this little animal. I see a stray mutt and am asked 'what is it?'. I know it is a dog, but if I am asked 'what is that?' of Mystic the cat, I am affronted. That is not a that, that is Mystic. So you see there is something in the knowing that is not part of the generic conditioning. I think Aristotle referred to it as the primary substance.

Taking it a step further, when a seagull flies overhead, and I know it. I can spend hours asking how I knew it. After considering color, plumage, shape etc. I am forced to consider that the only condition it has that had to be fulfilled that it looks like a seagull. If I am asked if 2 and 2 make 4 perhaps I can check up on other angles, well, 3 + 1 = (2+1) + (3-1) or say I am practicing the inverse by subtracting 2 from 4 and getting the other 2. But when it comes to seagulls, hey it just looks like a seagull.

Fund of Knowledge

To resume the above consideration of 'instances' of understanding. Enlarging slightly to include 'affirmations' because Lonergan does speak of the reflective insight in the section of his work INSIGHT entitled The General Form of the Reflective Insight. The Reflective Insight is presumably an operation of the third or reflective level and so must be part of Affirmations or Denials. Right? So enlarging the argument of 'instances' to affirmations it goes in this fashion.

Let's say the specific being affirmed 'that is my cell phone' us termed 'a'. Then the affirmation that it is my cell phone indeed is an affirmation in the first instance. Let's call it A1a. Now let's say I sit back and notice my cognition. Yes, I affirmed that it is my cell phone. I affirm that I made an affirmation of the cell phone. Let's call that A2A1a. An affirmation in a second instance of affirmation of the affirmation in the first instance of my cell phone.

But now I take the untoward step of saying I affirm an affirmation. Yes I affirmed an affirmation and 'prescind' or abstract in such a way that we let loose the specific 'cell phone'. Now we call that A2A1. An affirmation in the second instance of an affirmation in the first instance, but notice we drop the specific (a).

I am saying that is a logical inadequacy. There is no adequacy in an expression of an affirmation of something called 'affirmation'.

That is my problem with the 'incontrovertibility theorem'. It will be said the skeptic should take note that if they affirm that they do not know then they have affirmed that, and so indirectly must admit they affirm the denial, so that they do indeed affirm. But to affirm affirmation per se is a logical inadequacy.

I agree that if I affirm that I deny I am affirming 'cell phone' (let's call that A2non-A1a) then I am making an affirmation in which case I affirm or deny the existence of cell phone. In that case I am brought 'incontrovertibly' to 'specifics' in any and every affirmation or denial or affirmation or denial of affirmation or denial that I make.

And that constant incontrovertible flow of 'specific' (a's) constitute fund of knowledge. Rather than say that if I deny my affirmation I have affirmed my denial and so must admit that I affirm, I would as soon say that if I deny my affirmation it is a cell phone, I have affirmed that I know what a cell phone is and so have affirmed a conceptual knowledge of my cell phone.

Affirmation of affirmation presupposes an affirmation, and 'an' affirmation is an affirmation of an affirmed specific. An affirmation of affirmation in an abstract sense is a logical inadequacy because an affirmation entails a specific. Affirmation per se is generic not specific. This logical inconclusiveness on the part of many of Lonergan's proponents, and I will attempt to show, not Lonergan himself, causes an incipient attentuation of the purpose of knowing, the knowing of specific instances of knowable items and their intricate web of relations in a veritable fund of knowledge, and hence an attentuation of the full formal meaning of the the unfolding of the 'drive to know' which is an unfolding of an intelligible purpose.

Again to revisit cit.3.1:

In hermeneutics texts are being evaluated and interpreted. Starting with Aristotle's attempt to tell what he meant by 'primary substance' and through our present attempt to understand 'the virtually unconditioned' there is an ever-present incipient de-conditioning that takes place as soon as individual specifics take to text. It would indeed take a chapter to argue against this deconditioning.