Background

Explicit Metaphysics and Critical Realism

For Lonergan explicit metaphysics is personal philosophical knowledge. It is the integration of philosophical, scientific and common sense knowledge. The philosophical contribution is the understanding of the structure of knowledge which is isomorphic to that of knowing where potency corresponds to experience, form to understanding and act to judgment. The attainment of explicit metaphysics is a personal achievement that rounds out the “startling strange” realization that there are two different kinds of realism: “an incoherent realism, half animal and half human” and an “intelligent and reasonable realism”. (Insight, 22) It is a movement from an extroverted view of the real to an explanatory and reasonable one. The insinuation of the extroverted view into philosophical understanding yields the counter positions that are reversed via dialectic. Effective dialectic requires explicit metaphysics. The attainment of explicit metaphysics confers “…a basic yet startling unity on the whole field of human inquiry and human opinion.” The field is understood via explanation. This is a fundamental difference from theories that claim that knowledge is descriptive, a claim rooted in an extroverted view of knowing where the thing in itself is modeled on the thing for us. Lonergan admonishes us to cut the umbilical cord to the imagination. Imagination and description have roles to play, but they are transcended in explanatory understanding and knowledge. Intelligibility explicitly comes to the fore. The emergence of explicit metaphysics presents the challenge to the sciences of the mind to be consistent with it and ultimately to take it into account. The same challenge is presented by the self-appropriation of cognitional structure which is instrumental to explicit metaphysics. This challenge is both daunting and generally unrecognized.

Cognitional Structure and Self Appropriation

Self-appropriation is a process of coming to know and choose yourself as you are. Its core is disinterested self-discovery. Disinterested inquiry requires the overcoming of biases which skew inquiry (and, in a way, distort consciousness) through personal (egoistic) or group interests (i.e. ideology or social class values) which interfere with the pursuit of the truth and factual knowledge. This requires the understanding and ownership of our feelings and concomitant motivations and values and may include therapeutic insights and choices. Self-appropriation of ourselves as knowers requires experiencing the conscious cognitional structure of experiencing, understanding and judging, understanding that structure and arriving at the appropriate judgments to affirm the reality or factualness of that structure. We experience the structure by virtue of being conscious, but to understand and know it we, as conscious, need to become attentive to our own operations. This is a form of mindfulness, but goes beyond the popular understand of mindfulness by our trying to understand our mind, so that we, at the end of this process, become mind-full. This yields not only a reorientation of consciousness but a knowledge of the process of getting to reality that can become methodical.