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Bernard Lonergan and the Catholic Teacher By Moira T. Carley
Bernard J. F. Lonergan was born December 17, 1904, in Buckingham, Quebec, the first child of Josephine Wood, the daughter -of a wheelwright at the local mill and Gerald Lonergan, a civil engineer. He attended the English-speaking section of the local boys school run by the Brothers of Christian Instruction until the age of fourteen when he left home to board at Loyola High School in Montreal. At 18, Lonergan entered the Jesuit novitiate at Guelph, Ontario. His studies of philosophy, classics, economics, and theology took him from Montreal to London to France to Rome, where he completed his doctoral work and returned to Canada in 1940 to teach at the Jesuit House of Studies in Montreal and at Regis College in Toronto. In 1953 he was assigned to teach theology to seminarians at the Gregorian University in Rome where he remained until illness forced his return to Canada in 1965. For the next 15 years he wrote and taught in Toronto, Boston, Montreal and other North American centers of learning He spent his last teaching days at Boston College, where he was in the process of rewriting a manuscript on economic theory when his final illness came. He returned to the Jesuit house at Pickering, Ontario, where he died November 26, 1984. In his working and living, Lonergan probably saw himself as both a theologian, seeking to understand his own religious faith which was deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition, and as a teacher, seeking to share that faith with others. He spent most of his adult life working on a method of doing and teaching theology that would move Catholic theologians out of the traditional method inherited from medieval scholasticism to one more suited to the 20th-century scientific worldview. In an interview, just two years before his death, Lonergan recalled that as a teacher with an assigned curriculum to teach at high school, college or graduate levels, he often found himself asking, "What on earth am I doing? and why?" Lonergan says the experience of teaching compelled him to engage in research on human knowing (Lambert et al, 1982, pp. 8-10). For 15 years he doggedly explored the question of how the mind operates as it follows its own dynamic process towards understanding. His research question during these years was simply: What do we do when we come to know? And his answer to the question was published as Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). In this book, Lonergan invites the reader, through a series of exercises, to recognize and appropriate what happens when we engage in ordinary mental activities such as asking questions, grasping insights, making judgments and forming concepts. His aim in writing the book was "to help people experience themselves understanding, advert to the experience, distinguish it from other experiences, name and identify it, and recognize it when it recurs" (1974, p. 269). Once Insight was completed, Lonergan spent the next 15 years with the question "What are we doing when we do theology?" The fruit of his labor was published in 1972 as Method in Theology. In this latter work Lonergan quietly suggests that his "transcendental method" of doing theology could supply a lacking "anthropological component" to the natural and human sciences as well (1972, pp. 23-25). The "lacking ... component," for Lonergan, was the conscious Presence of the human subject in the process of coming to understand anything. Responding to Lonergan's suggestion, I began to wonder whether what he had discovered about what we do when we know might have something to say to teachers about what we do when we teach. I read Insight one more time looking for an answer to a question I had been living with for more than 25 years: what do we do when we teach? and why? When I discovered a set of unpublished lectures which Lonergan had given to Catholic educators in 1959, 1 began to see that by following through on my own question about teaching, I would be personally responding to Lonergan's direct invitation to educators. He had said: "I am not a specialist in education. But I have suffered under educators for very many years and I have been teaching an equally large number.... Most of the concrete applications, the ironing out of things, will have to be done by you who are in the field of education and philosophy of education (1959, p. 27)." This paper will "iron out" some of Lonergan's thought on what we do when we come to know and make some "concrete applications" to what we teachers do when we teach. In a milieu in which the assessment of teachers' performance depends on students' performance on national tests, and in which teachers are expected to do everything from teaching the basics to surrogate parenting to social control, the simple question of what we do when we teach and why is often lost to consciousness. In the next part of the paper, I will propose a model for teaching grounded on Lonergan's answer to the question of what we do when we come to know anything. The model develops out of the invitation of Insight, to recognize and appropriate what happens when we ourselves engage in the process of coming to know. In the last part of the paper, I suggest that Lonergan's life and work as a Catholic teacher provides some answers to the question of what faith contributes to understanding what Catholic teachers do when we teach, especially at this time in history, when we ask ourselves once again, "What are we doing? and why?" In the next part of the paper, I will propose a model for teaching grounded on Lonergan's answer to the question of what we do when we come to know anything. The model develops out of the invitation of Insight, to recognize and appropriate what happens when we ourselves engage in the process of coming to know. In the last part of the paper, I suggest that Lonergan's life and work as a Catholic teacher provides some answers to the question of what faith contributes to understanding what Catholic teachers do when we teach, especially at this time in history, when we ask ourselves once again, "What are we doing? and why?" A Model for Teaching Midway through his book Midway through his book Insight, under the heading "Scientific Method and Philosophy," Lonergan writes something which seems like a typical Lonerganian quip. "As there is nothing to prevent a scientist from being a man of common sense, so there is nothing to prevent him from being a philosopher" (1957, p. 423). 1 think if Lonergan had written this for teachers he would have said instead: "As there is nothing to prevent teachers from being persons of common sense, so there is nothing to prevent them from being philosophers." Yes, for Lonergan, teachers must also become philosophers. What would happen if teachers became philosophers? First of all we would pay attention to the operation of our own minds when we want to know something, to what we do when we move from desire expressed in a question to knowing expressed in an answer. Lonergan says: "It is (our) own grasp of the dialectical unfolding of (our) own desire to know ... that provides the key to (our) own philosophic development" (1957, p. 429). "Dialectical" here means the process or movement of desire from question to answer. The aim of philosophy, for Lonergan, and the foreground of his cognitional theory, is a process, "the integrated unfolding of the detached, disinterested, and unrestricted desire to know" (1957, p.418). Philosophical development begins when humans experience concretely the desire to know, express it in a question and follow through on that desire to the conscious possession of knowledge. Teachers who "know their job," says Lonergan, are those skilled in recognizing that innate "orientation of inquiring intelligence" which is already operative in students. If we are to move students out of a reception line attitude towards learning, we must first recognize and bring to consciousness in them this innate desire to know. Only then can we engage them in their own selfcorrecting process of learning. We must first engage them as potentially "conscious knowers," not information processors. We must recognize in them this "pure, detached, disinterested desire simply to know" without which, says Lonergan, "there would arise no questioning, no inquiry, no wonder" (1957, p. 74). 1 suggest that if as teachers we have "grasped ... the dialectical unfolding" of our own "desire to know" then we have also acquired the skill to recognize the same unfolding in our students. This kind of knowledge provides an effective method of teaching based on the in-built self-correcting process of learning natural to every human being. Because this teaching method is grounded on the "dialectical unfolding" of our own and our students' "unrestricted desire to know," it also provides the key to ever-expanding horizons of knowledge. Let me recount an incident which serves to illustrate what I want to say about the relationship between the innate "orientation of inquiring intelligence" and the achievement of learning. In this case, it was a learning experience cut off in mid-flight. One day, while shopping for groceries, I heard a child call out to his mother, "What's that?" Looking up I saw the child, who was seated in a grocery cart, pointing to the live lobster aquarium, and I heard the mother answer: "It's a lobster." Then, as if he knew that from this exchange I was hoping to learn something about knowing, the child asked the question which philosophers love and parents dread: "Why?" "Because that's its name," said the mother, pushing the cart over to the cheese counter. I stood there wondering what was going on within the child. Was the word "lobster" the object of his desire or need or whatever was catapulting from his space in the world to that of his mother's with the question "Why?" The imperative quality of this child's "Why?" made me wonder if what I was hearing was what Lonergan refers to as "the immanent source of transcendence" in humanity which he names the "detached, disinterested, unrestricted desire to know" and which he claims to be "the origin of all (our) questions" (1957, p. 636). 1 had a hunch that this experience would help me to understand the connection Lonergan makes between the "antecedent desire" of inquiring intelligence and the achievement of understanding or insight on the way to knowledge. Lonergan says, "Unless one inquires, one does not give insight a chance to arise" (1980, p. 186). Standing within the image provided by this experience in the grocery store, and with my own inquiring intelligence now prodding me on, I began to wonder about the child's question, "Why?" Where does this "Why?" come from and where does it hope to go? And when teachers hear this kind of imperious "Why?" in the classroom, what do we do with it? What happens to the primordial "Why?" which Lonergan claims is "the pure question ... the desire to understand ... active. intelligence, the drive to know"? (1957, p. 9). To ask "Why?" or to wonder is not merely an exercise in abstraction; rather, it is to ask a question of some concrete experience in life with the hope of understanding what it means, how it fits into an intelligible pattern or whole. To question is to stand pointing at something within experience (the moon or a lobster in a tank) and to ask why? with the implicit hope of coming to "stand under" the experience and to grasp the point of experience, to catch on, "to see things in a new light, to grasp how they hang together, to come to know why, the reason, the cause" (1957, p. 324). Lonergan says there are questions which are natural expressions of human intelligence, natural in the sense that they emerge not because a person has been trained in a certain way, but because they emerge directly from human desire itself. These questions are "What is it? why is it? and is it so?" (1980, p. 81). These questions, the spontaneous expressions of inquiring intelligence in act, form the basis of Lonergan's cognitional theory articulated in Insight which was his answer to the question: what do we do when we know? It is to this question that I will now attend, sharing what I learned about the process of knowing when I accepted Lonergan's invitation to reflect on my own learning process. Later I will interpret this process in the light of my further question on what we do when we teach and why?
What We Do When We Know I will begin as I believe teachers must, in the realm of the concrete data of experience. I will first describe, then reflect on the data of experience, asking what am I doing? and why? Then, I will be the philosopher-teacher who explains to others what she has understood about how learning happens. I will tell the story of what happened to me one morning when the sound of a bell caused a spontaneous chain reaction which moved me from a state of biological semi -somnambulence to one of questioner responding to a desire to know and puzzling over causes, to one of knower possessing what I wanted, to one of relaxation in newly acquired knowledge so that I could enjoy a cup of coffee. One morning, early, while making the coffee, I heard a bell ringing, from a distance, not in the kitchen. My sense of hearing was activated by the experience. Instinctively, the exigence of my inquiring mind went into operation and I asked the question: "What is it?" "Why is it?" My imagination and memory went to work immediately to help me answer the questions. An image came to consciousness: a few days before, as I arrived home, I saw the police inspecting my neighbor's house because the alarm system had signaled an intruder. I now have an intelligible image: I am onto a possible "cause." I have a sense that some of the elements of the image fit with what I am experiencing -the sound of the bell and the tension of inquiry - so I offer a possible answer to my question. This is what Lonergan calls "insight." I now experience a release of the tension of inquiry. I have a possible "because" to my "why?" Then I experience a need to articulate in words what I have grasped. I say to myself: "It's the alarm system again." Now I have an idea, an hypothesis, a concept. But this doesn't stop the dynamism of the process. Spontaneously, I move towards the front door to marshal evidence which will verify or falsify my possible answer to the question that is bugging me, "What is this bell and why is it ringing?" Something compels me to know correctly. Now I want to know, "Is it so?" Do I have enough evidence to say, "Yes, it's the alarm system"? I want to know if there is a correlation between what I am thinking and what is really so. I know what caused the bell to ring a few days ago, but now I want to know what caused the bell to ring at 6:00 a.m. on this particular winter morning. I go back over the experience which supplied the original image of the burglar alarm ringing and recall that it included the police car at my neighbor's door. I look out the window one more time. The evidence brings up more questions: Why are the police not there? Are the neighbors at home? Is the bell I am hearing really caused by the alarm system as the image in my imagination suggests? I am using my reasoning powers now to check the evidence of my senses against the image to verify my original insight. I recognize that certain conditions have to be fulfilled before I say, "Yes ... it is really the alarm system that is causing the bell to ring." As I walk away from the front door, puzzling over the lack of evidence to back up my original understanding, a new image intrudes upon my mental space - a surprise! Suddenly, I have an image of myself waking up earlier than usual before the alarm had gone off. Ahh ... that's it ... what I heard was my alarm clock! Of course! What I heard was in fact my own alarm clock ringing, not the neighbor's burglar alarm system in operation. No more questions spring up. I have a different intelligible image than the one I started with. This new image helps me to grasp what is going on and why it is that I am hearing a bell. Finally, I make the rational judgment which the spontaneous dynamism of my mind wanted to make from the first impact of the sound of the bell. "Yes, it is!" My mind is now at re st I enjoy the coffee and the new day. When I reflect on the process I have just described I discover that there is a dynamic and recurrent pattern operating in my own consciousness when I make the effort to understand something. The dynamic pattern of the operation is the movement from experience to understanding to judgement. What sets this process going is my attending to a specific experience which evokes a question; and this question, like a gadfly, becomes the engine which activates my capacity to find a correct answer, one that satisfies my desire to know and includes the word "is." The diagram on page 82 describes Lonergan's cognitional theory as it applies not just to knowing but also to my intention: the movement of life and the search for direction and meaning. The process is cyclic because experience can always be recalled. It is cumulative in that memory stores and supplies images, the content of previous insights and ever higher viewpoints. The process is whole in that each part is what it is in virtue
of its functional relations to other parts. Though the process is spontaneous, it is not automatic. Lonergan's theory holds that conscious effort and specific personal qualities or characteristics are required if knowledge is to be achieved. Above all, the prevailing attitude in the potential knower must be the "detached, disinterested, unrestricted desire to know" (1957, p. 636). Following through the process of conscious intentionality to the possession of the is of reality demands authenticity in the person asking questions of experience, as well as attentiveness to "instances of one's own understanding and, equally, one's failing to understand," and a willingness to conduct personal experiments in moving from puzzlement to "catching., on" (1988, p. 209). Anyone who has ever taken golf lessons knows that professional instructors stress an habitual disposition of "following through." A golfer who has what is needed for a perfect swing in his or her spontaneous neural impulses, and who consciously intends to follow through, can still meet interference on many different levels o n the way actually to hitting the ball. The point I am laboring here is that the integrity of Lonergan's theory is based on the twofold assumption of the subject's absolute desire to understand correctly and the subject's freedom to commit what Lonergan calls the basic sin against life, the "root of the irrational in human rational self-consciousness." This happens when the subject refuses to ask the obvious next question which results in the "contraction of consciousness" and the intentional flight from understanding (1957, p. 666). Lonergan explores the refusal to follow through on the desire to know, or the blocking out of the next question, and names this tendency "bias." By this he means the unconscious motivation operative in the person or some blind egoism which energizes either an individual or a community. He also explains what he names the "general bias of common sense," as the intelligence which refuses to go beyond the concrete experience or the particular situation because one makes the false assumption that one knows all one needs to know (1957, P. 191-206, pp. 218244).
What We Do When We Teach Teachers can actually terminate the development of students' inquiring intelligence and can effectively limit or cut off the transcendent dimension of learning and of living. This thought came to me when reading Derek Edwards and Neil Mercer's 1987 research study, Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the Classroom, which explored how knowledge is shared in the classroom. The authors studied the behaviors of teachers and concluded that they were working unconsciously out of the "pedagogical ideology of progressive education." These teachers, convinced that children need to discover things for themselves, refused to explain the "why" or the reasons for certain expected behaviors (educational experience). Edwards and Mercer report that the teachers they had observed had adopted progressive teaching methods without really understanding the underlying theory or the why?" and thus failed to see that the children needed explanations if they were to come to a shared understanding of anything (1987, pp. 24-30). It occurred to me that since the "Why?" question was not operative in the teachers, the fact that they failed to recognize it as operative or, as Edwards and Mercer suggest, as an unspoken need in the children they were teaching, is not surprising. The authors also observed that teachers spend a great deal of teaching time controlling both the content of common knowledge and the manner in which it is shared in the classroom. Learning in the classrooms they had observed became a guessing game which was won or lost, depending on whether students figured out the signals that led to the right answers or whatever behaviors the teacher expected. They concluded that students spent too much classroom time learning procedural or ritual knowledge. Rather than learning what the teachers intend, for example something about math or science or language, the students who make the effort to learn spent their time looking for clues dropped by teachers. The objective of learning then becomes solving the mystery of the classroom game, or what the teacher wants (1987, p. 30). Finally, Edwards and Mercer conclude that prepackaged knowledge transmitted from teacher to student does not achieve shared understanding; rather this will come by means of "discursive communication" between students and teachers which they claim creates "a shared conceptual sense of the meaning and significance of experience and activity" (1987, p. 169). The authors advocate what they call a cultural-conimunicative model of education in which children can participate in their own learning and come to a shared understanding of the culture into which they are being educated. What this says to me is that the uncritical appropriation of teaching methods as described in this study is the result of the teachers' own failure to see the value of what Lonergan describes as the "Perpetual alertness, ever asking the little 'why' question." The teachers have learned a method without understanding the why of it, so it is not at all surprising that the why of their students cannot be recognized as a need (1987, p. 40). "Why?" is simply a non-question for them. Not surprisingly, the world these teachers open up to their students is as limited as their own unreflected experience. Because they do not understand that students desire intelligibility (what is it? why is it?) and work toward correct judgment (is it so?), their teaching stops at the level of unreflected experience.What strikes me about this research report by Edwards and Mercer is the deftness with which the authors manage to ignore the philosophical issues underlying the teaching-learning process under investigation. There are references to the work of psychologists, linguists, educationalists, anthropologists and others (1987, pp. 8-31). However, the study's implicit ideological assumption (to use their own term) about how common understanding is achieved in classroom discourse is that teachers have nothing to learn from what philosophers have learned so far about human understanding and how people learn anything. I suggest that Lonergan's study of human understanding, along with his invitation for teachers and scientists to become philosophers who understand their own cognitional process because they have asked the "why?" question, could contribute significantly to the work of Edwards and Mercer and other educational researchers seeking to understand what teachers do when we teach. However, for teachers to accept this invitation to appropriate our own cognitional process and to encourage our students as well to recognize themselves as "conscious knowers" is to join Lonergan's campaign against the flight from understanding which he names "the tumor of our age. This philosophical dis-ease according to Lonergan, is the result of the biases operative in individuals, in communities and in cultures which limit or mutate the unrestricted desire to know. For instance, when we close out certain realities such as those which make us feel guilty or otherwise uncomfortable, we set unnatural limits to what he names the "eros of the human spirit." Because, says Lonergan, "besides the love of light, there can be a love of darkness.... To exclude an insight is also to exclude the further questions that would arise from it" (1957, p. 191). Teachers who accept Lonergan's invitation to follow through on our own desire to know and to live out the appropriation of one's identity as conscious knowers, and to teach from this knowledge, run the risk of achieving something which he names "genuineness," or "authenticity" (1957, pp. 475-478, 623-626). Personal genuineness, for Lonergan, is a high and costly achievement which consists "not in the mere recognition of an ideal norm but in the adoption of an attitude towards the universe of being ... in which performance matches aspiration" (1957, p. 624).
Lonergan's Notion of Faith In this last part of the paper, with the help of some of Lonergan's writings, I will reflect on the unique contribution faith makes to what we do when we teach. Faith helps Catholic teachers to love our students, to hear and guide their questions respectfully and to answer our own question: what are we doing when we teach and why? Lonergan says that religious faith is "knowledge born of religious love" (1972, p. 115). As teachers, we can attempt to communicate God's love to our students and hope they can come to faith. However, if as teachers we are ever tempted to think that we can or even should "teach" students to believe in God, these words from Lonergan's later years will make us pause: "Ordinarily the experience of the mystery of love and awe is not objectified. It remains within subjectivity as a vector, an undertow, a fateful call to a dreaded holiness" (1972, p. 113). And he insists that the experience of what is grasped in faith differs radically from the understanding and eventual articulation of it. Time and time again after 1965, what appears to have been Lonergan's favorite scriptural passage, "The love of God has been poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Romans 5:5), shows up in his writing. Earlier, he had written very simply of what he had observed about the transforming power of love and how "being in love" effects a radical change in one's way of being in the world (1988, p. 17-27). His later writing shimmers with the personal experience of this love. In his early work the emphasis of Lonergan's search was on the cognitional aspects of reaching for what he called "the known unknown" (1957, p. 53 1). In his later years, especially after a bout with lung cancer in 1964, the emphasis shifts to the experience of "the mystery by which we are held" (1972, p. 113). An all-pervasive sense of mystery within which all human knowing and living moves is a constant presence throughout Lonergan's writings. For him, the very act of human questioning and reflection on human existence opens the transcendent dimension of what it means for humans to search for and relate to that which is called "God."
Central to Lonergan's understanding of human knowing was the human ability to ask questions and the sense of reverence and awe in the presence of that power recognized as a gift from God. The intention of self-transcendence implied in the very act of asking a question includes an act of faith both in the intelligibility of human experience and in the source of that intelligibility.
This fundamental faith is the power and freedom of human intelligence moving toward God even as it moves toward understanding all there is to know, is the heart of what Lonergan says teaching is all about. "Teaching ... puts the further questions that reveal the need of further insights .... it has grasped the strategy of developing intelligence . . ." (1957, p. 174). Finally, by providing teachers with a sense of meaning and direction, faith helps us to understand what we are doing when we teach and why. In a paper first written under the title "On Being Oneself' in 1964, Lonergan says that "our separate, unrevealed, hidden cores have a common circle of reference, the human community, and an ultimate point of reference which is God who is all in all" (1988, p222). As teachers whose " common circle of reference" is a specific "human community" named "Catholic" in which the "ultimate point of reference ... is God" revealed in Jesus Christ, in one way, our task is no different from that of all teachers: to recognize and develop the "inquiring intelligence" of our students. But our reason, our "Why?" is indeed different. Because we share the common understanding that human intelligence is a "participation in the eternal light" we believe that by developing the "inquiring intelligence" of our students we can also usher them into the active presence of the source and fulfillment of all human desire for knowledge and for love. Lonergan says, "At any time in any place what a given self can make of himself is some function of the heritage or sediment of common meanings that comes to him from the authentic or unauthentic living of his predecessors and his contemporaries" (1988, p. 227). As Catholic teachers we can be privileged models of faith for our students because, says Lonergan, "our authenticity consists of being like God, in self-transcending, in being origins of value, in true love" (1972, p. 117). If we understand that teaching is a sacred trust which incarnates this kind of authenticity for our students, it is because, with Lonergan, we have experienced "the love of God . . . poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). Lonergan assures us that faith "recognizes that God grants (us) freedom, that God wills us to be persons and not just . . .automata, that God calls us to the higher authenticity that overcomes evil with good" (1972, p. 117). Faith gives us confidence to love our students. Faith empowers us to awaken and trust the spirit of inquiry which students bring to their own learning process. Faith inspires us to create with them the history of our time by critically appropriating our own Catholic tradition and transforming it and our world by the truth of our own lives. Says Lonergan: "Faith and progress have a common root in man's cognitional and moral self-transcendence. .... Faith places human efforts in a friendly universe" (1972, p. 117).[From Caroline DiGiovanni (ed) The Philosophy of Education (Ottawa: Novlis,1992)] I |