Educational Foundations of Philosophy
By Professor Emil J. Piscitelli
Education and Dialectics
The most conspicuous and in practice the most often forgotten and least understood characteristic of human education is that it is something that happens between persons: between teachers and students. Other meanings of the term are derivatives of the basic acts of teaching and learning which are themselves conscious events that take place between persons. In our culture we emphasize the activity of the teacher and his relation to the student because we think of the teacher as originating and guiding the activities of learning. However a closer examination of teaching and learning shows them to be a continuous and unified activity. Teachers are not really teaching if no students are learning.
When I speak of education as an act of persons, by person I mean a conscious subject who is neither an unrelated individual nor merely a member of a society though human persons are always both. We could say that the person lives at the intersection of the individual and the society. The person is an individual by virtue of the fact that to be a person is to be some thing in the world (Lonergan’s definition of a “Thing” is a Unity, Identity, Whole). The person is a member of a society by virtue of the fact that to be a person is to be a human being who shares his or her life with other human beings. All living things are more or less societal. But by society I do not mean community, for to be a person is the same thing as being-in-community. The reason for this is that persons are communities: the two notions are correlative. Living things may be members of societies, but only human beings form communities. To speak of persons-in-community or to speak of a community of persons is to speak of the unique ability of the person to relate himself to himself (Please adjust the pronouns to your comfort levelJ in a conscious act of intending an object. The fundamental acts of persons are the intentional acts of knowing, speaking, hearing (in the sense of understanding This point is really important), loving, deciding, and acting. For in those conscious and intentional acts the person relates himself to himself. All of those acts presuppose that I can “other myself” in various more or less complex ways. To take a seemingly simple example I cannot speak unless at the same time I as other can hear (understand) what I am saying.
It is now recognized by psychologists that children cannot learn to think until they practice speaking to themselves. Similarly, as personal, teaching and learning are reflexive activities: I can be said to teach myself something or learn something for myself. When this happens teaching and learning become one and the same intentional act. So this is a distinctive quality of human persons: the power to relate one's self to one's self by intending an object. This is an essential mark of our humanness. The self-relating activities of the human person are the foundation for human interiority (inwardness) and human intentionality (consciously to mean an object). They also are the condition for the possibility of human speech.
The subject of our inquiry is the meaning and value of a liberal education, the education of human persons to freedom. However, before we can speak of a liberal education, we must be clear about what is involved in any kind of human education. This means an understanding of the relations between teachers and students and these are fundamentally interpersonal relations. In cognitional terms the teacher is a knower and the student is coming to know. In hermeneutic terms the teacher is the one who speaks from the vantage point of understanding or knowing while the student is the one who listens in order to understand or to know or to know how to act. A teacher cannot teach a student what he, the teacher, has not already learned. Thus, mastery of the subject to be taught is a necessary condition or an essential quality of a teacher. Teachers who have not mastered their fields of inquiry must pretend to have mastery or they will lose the respect of their students. Discipline is the fundamental characteristic of the student. Here discipline means submitting oneself to the teacher for the sake of the thing to be learned. This is what it means to be a disciple. What corresponds to the discipline of the student in the teacher is the training he gives the student. Similarly, what corresponds to mastery in the teacher is the achievement of a competence in the student. If the conditions for teaching and learning are mastery and discipline respectively, then the acts of teaching and learning are training and gaining a competence respectively. Mastery gives the teacher the knowledge necessary for the effective training of the student. In other words without mastery the teacher would not know either the proper prescriptions or the proper application of the prescriptions to be given to the student to meet the demands of a particular set of activities to be learned. So mastery is more than competence, it is a whole set of competencies that gives the teacher control over the whole range of the subject to be learned as well as the ability to train a student properly. Still training and discipline are for the sake of the competence to be acquired by the student. Learning in the student depends upon self-discipline and thus training from the teacher depends upon the teacher's own self-mastery.
Self-mastery and self-discipline are peculiar to human acts of teaching and learning. For unlike animals that are also capable of teaching and learning, human teaching and learning require an act of internalization if they are to be fully human. This act of internalization is, once again, a self- relating act. For example, it is for this reason that human beings are capable of competing with themselves while animals are not.
Human competition in any field is really founded upon our ability to internalize an ideal which we try to realize just as we recognize the reality of an ideal behind any excellent human activity. The consequences for human teaching and learning should be obvious: the teacher tries to get the student to internalize the ideal of the activities to be performed and to the extent that the student does, he can be said to be more than merely trained, he can be said to be educated.
All human knowledge is the result of learning, but it is equally true that human learning generally requires a teacher as well as the internalization of an ideal. So while we must learn things for ourselves, we are not doomed to learn things all by ourselves. Moreover discipline and training can be oppressive if they are not for the sake of and intrinsically required by the thing to be learned or if they do not result in the internalization of an ideal. Finally, even mastery and competence can become insignificant pastimes if they are not directed to something worthwhile for its own sake. Thus we raise the question of the self-authenticating objectives of human teaching and learning and the commitment that should guide both the teacher and the student in the learning process.
Beyond the proximate objective of learning skills to produce goods or services for society there is the remote and more comprehensive objective of educating the human person. The real educator treats the person as always more than a natural, socio-economic, political, or even cultural resource. For to come to be a person requires more than discipline and competence or training and mastery because it fundamentally requires self-understanding, self-knowledge, self-possession, self-control, and self-respect; in a word it requires moral excellence.(Worthy goals for parents, teachers and children) In a really human education the relation between teacher and student which would tend to become that of master and slave would be sublated by the mutual commitment of both to the objectives of self-understanding, self-knowing, and moral excellence. Through the intention of these objectives self-discipline and self-mastery are one and the same thing. Human education requires the mutual recognition of persons as persons and this begins when a teacher invites a student to understand himself, to know himself, and to be himself by being morally excellent and when a student recognizes that a teacher listens to what he, the student, has to say.
Self-understanding, self-knowledge, and moral excellence are, then, the self-authenticating objectives of a human education. Each objective has its own specifying object. Thus the specifying object of understanding is meaning, of knowing is the truth, and of moral excellence is the good. To say the same thing in a more appropriate way, we could say that understanding intends meaning, knowing intends the truth, and moral excellence intends the good and by so doing makes real hope possible. It follows that the self-authenticating objectives of human education make the question of the fundamental attitudes and basic orientation of the person unavoidable.
Thus I wish to argue that a good human education aims to achieve in oneself and in others the fundamental attitudes of openness to understanding, openness to knowing, and a real hope for the meaningful and true human good. But to understand these attitudes and objectives, to appropriate them for one- self, and to aid others in self-understanding and self-appropriation involves us in a self-conscious, dialectical process. This is another way of saying that these attitudes are the result of overcoming fundamental, inner human conflicts, for dialectic implies tensions or conflicts. Still I am using the notion of dialectic as strictly applicable only to the realm of persons and interpersonal relations or what might be called the realms of psyche, mind, or spirit.
Through the notion of dialectic we recognize that the person is a community of selves in conflict or tension. To be a human person in history is to be this community of selves as well as to be in a community of persons who themselves are caught up in the same tensions. Dialectic, dialogue, and conversation are three dimensions of the same human reality that we are as persons. Dialectic refers to the structural dimension of the human reality; dialogue refers to the interpersonal dimension of the same reality; while the conversation that we are refers to the reality itself. Just as the notion of dialogue implies that there are characters speaking and the notion of conversation implies that some thing is being spoken about, so also then, dialectic is the structure of the conversation that we are as persons.
In other words openness to understanding, openness to knowing, and hope for the meaningful and true human good as the fundamental attitudes and basic orientation of the authentic human person are part of the dialectical structure that we are in tension with our selves. These attitudes and orientations are the authentic selves that we are and are to become.
As dialogue dialectic is the structure of a conversation: the conversation that we are. Since dialogue reveals the interpersonal dimension of the conversation that we are, corresponding to the fourfold structure there are four characters or selves in the conversation that is the human person or the human person in community. Corresponding to the initial position there is the "Unthinker" that we are; corresponding to the counter-position there is the "Half-Baked Thinker" that we are; corresponding to the false compromise there is the "Common Sense Thinker" that we are or "The Great Compromiser" that we are; and finally corresponding to the higher viewpoint there is the "Authentic Self" we are and can become. (These are best understood under Lonergan’s explanation of the four human biases)
As the conversation that we are, dialectic is the reality-in-tension that the lower viewpoints represent in relation to the higher viewpoint. In other words the content of the conversation that we are is defined in relation to the objectives of meaning, truth, and worth and the lower viewpoints have their meaning, truth, and worth in relation to the higher viewpoint. To be a human person is to live within the horizon in tension of meaning, truth, and worth.
To appropriate the attitudes of openness to understanding, openness to knowing, and hope along with the fundamental orientations to the meaningful, the true, and the good requires a foundational decision and commitment that can best be described as a conversion or a series of conversions because the higher viewpoint or the authentic human self is always the result of a withdrawal from inauthenticity rather than a complete identification with the meaningful, the true, or the good. The reason for this is twofold: first human beings will never be able to understand or know everything about everything or be involved with everything that is really worthwhile and secondly human persons are de facto a conscious reality in tension with their own radical inauthenticity. In a word we are finite and alienated from ourselves, from others, from nature, and from God.
We will argue that the attitudes of openness and hope and the corresponding fundamental orientations to meaning, truth, and worth as uncovered in a dialectical analysis as described above constitute the real aims of a truly human education and that such a dialectical analysis will allow, to the extent that it is possible, a reflective appropriation of those attitudes and fundamental orientations. Philosophy has always been a dialectical enterprise in this sense. Thus dialectical philosophy is at the service of self-appropriation. This is the hermeneutic side of philosophy.
Openness To Understanding
The first kind of openness at which a truly human education would aim is openness to understanding that intends meaning. However, it is easier to talk about the attitude of openness than it is to achieve it. Long ago for example the philosopher, Heraclitus, complained about a recalcitrant common sense that refused to open itself to what he called a universal LOGOS that consistently overcomes the chaos of the world process. Or in a similar vein Plato became so enthralled by the power of ideas that he came to think of them as more real than the things of immediate experience. Or again Aristotle at the end of the Posterior Analytics, when discussing how induction is possible, described the discovery of meaningful patterns in experience in terms of a single soldier in a routed army taking up the standard and rallying his fellow comrades so that the army could slowly regroup and take a stand. In each instance these philosophers were referring to insight and openness to understanding. In each case what is at stake is a performance, a way of life, not simply another piece of information to be stored.
As Aristotle and many after him recognized, the attitude of openness to understanding and the basic orientation to meaning and intelligibility lies at the foundation of all philosophy and science and it is rooted in what he called wonder. This wonder, however, is always more than mere curiosity because it goes beyond the immediacy of interest through the reflective mediation of questions that seek meaningful answers.
Openness to understanding and our fundamental orientation to meaning has its roots in human spontaneity: spontaneously we wonder and ask questions, we are open to other persons and things in the world. This is openness as a fact of human existence; it is not openness as an achievement, but is its basis.
The roots of openness are to be found, then, in the human condition itself. Human infants are different from the young of every other animal species in that to accommodate the size of the brain they must literally be "born too soon". This means that the human infant is very vulnerable and, hence, requires tremendous care. Thus we are born too soon "for the sake of" intelligence and the result of this is that we do not survive, grow, and mature except as a result of someone caring. So even human biology witnesses to the two essential constituents of our humanness: intelligence (understanding) and love.
Because of our initial vulnerability we need to rely on and trust others, especially those who care for us. This trust is a "natural" trust or belief and, therefore, it is neutral. Nevertheless this natural trust or belief is for the sake of the development of our own intelligence and responsible autonomy. As we become capable of understanding more and taking more responsibility for ourselves, natural trust or belief must give way to intelligent trust or belief. Thus those who are responsible for us must yield to this new situation and reciprocally we must identify with our own developing intelligence and capacity for autonomy. When this fails to happen, when we continue to rely upon others for the answers to questions we ourselves can have and/or when those who are responsible for us refuse to yield to the new situation of our developing intelligence and autonomy, we tend to fall into the initial position of the first dialectic: the attitude of naivete, an unthinking and irresponsible trust or belief. This paragraph is essential for effective parenting practices. Children ought to participate in planning behavior, activities, and goals, at age appropriate levels, of course. Then natural and logical consequences are implemented as needed for the child to stay on task and accomplish goals. Again, age appropriate consequences alwaysJ
Human beings tend to become naive because we need answers before we can understand the questions or because we speak before we can understand the meaning of what we are saying. "Natural belief" need not become naivete' but it is very likely to. Naiveté is the indiscriminate belief of someone who can intelligently discriminate for themselves but will not. Still the naive attitude is not taken without a pseudo-reason ( I call it "pseudo" because it is a "reason" that contradicts reason.): This pseudo-reason is the quest for security. The naive person "thinks" he can gain security by depending upon another for answers he himself can discover. The paradox is the more he depends upon another in this way, the more insecure he becomes. Security is for the sake of understanding and not vice-versa and the more we understand, the more likely it will be that we will be secure. Security is never an authentic terminal value, understanding always is. Questions make the naive uncomfortable so that what they do understand tends to become a set of fixed answers rather than a motive for further understanding. The naive bury their heads in the sands of a security that has forgotten the purpose of real security: understanding.
Very few persons have the luxury of being able to retreat from all real issues in the world and from other human beings in a crazy Howard Hughes style just as the logic of the naive attitude would suggest. In the long run, if not always in the short run, reality demands an intelligent response and people need understanding. Reality tends to catch up with most of us. The naive can discover that they cannot live in a world of their own making in which everyone agrees with their own view of things. An inevitable crisis can make the naive person reflective. It soon becomes clear that their unthought-out answers no longer work. They can become as uncomfortable about the answers they accepted from others as they were initially uncomfortable about real questions. They may come to think there are "no easy answers" and there are many contradictory ones, none of which seem to provide them with the kind of security they longed for initially. They come less and less to trust the answers of others for security and more and more to "trust only themselves" realizing, of course, that this gives them very little security. When this happens, the indiscriminate belief of the naive becomes the indiscriminate doubt of the skeptic. Skepticism is a reaction to the failure of the naive attitude. Every skeptic was first naive: Skepticism is born of the failure of naivete'.
Thus the counter-position in the dialectic of openness to understanding is skepticism. First the skeptic defines himself in opposition to the naive by refusing to believe anyone or anything. In its positive moment the attitude of skepticism is the power of questioning, for behind every doubt is a possibly fruitful question; but the skeptic makes every question into a doubt and every doubt into a weapon of "self-defense". The skeptic finds an odd kind of security in the "idea" that there is no security, for he thinks there is no security in depending upon others so he must depend upon himself; but he also knows he cannot guarantee his own security because no one can. He finds "meaning-intelligibility" in the "idea" that there is no meaning in human experience or intelligibility in the world except the "meaning-intelligibility" he "projects" from his own vacuous self. So he thinks human experience and the intelligibility of the world collapses under the weight of all his doubts. He likes to claim that there is only one thing to be understood: that there is nothing to be understood. (Of course if that can be understood, then there is no reason to believe that nothing else can.) If naivete leads to an impractical practicality, then skepticism leads to an anti-intellectual intellectualism. On reflection naivete turned out to be impossible from a practical standpoint, skepticism, on the other hand, which is possible only in reflection, seems to be "theoretically" possible. It seems more viable in thought because the illusion is a "self-fabrication". However the NO of skepticism requires the prior YES of naivete': the skeptic does not realize that without belief there is nothing to doubt; and without the possibility of real meaning in human experience and real intelligibility in the world, there is nothing to question.
Just as the naive person is left with the false security of an immediate outward experience of the world and an immediate, unthinking belief in others, so also is the skeptical person left with the false security of an immediate inner, empty self and world. The skeptic defines himself as the "Unbeliever"; and as such, without realizing it, he depends upon the proposals (beliefs) of others for his doubt. Hence the doubts of the skeptic are as indiscriminate and exclusive of human understanding as the naive persons beliefs are. Because both agree, as it were, to give up the quest for understanding that is the foundation of all art and theory; skepticism is no less aesthetically and theoretically self-contradictory than is naivete' its polar opposite. They only differ on how and why the project of human understanding is impossible. Both seek security instead of understanding: naivete' the security of unexamined beliefs, skepticism the "security" of empty self-reliance.
The opposition between naivete' and skepticism are clearly dialectical in the manner we have already described. For naivete' is the initial position (unthought-out) and skepticism is the counter-position (half-baked); neither can be maintained without self-contradiction; both are impossible for authentic human selfhood. Nevertheless the common sense temptation is to find a compromise between the two. However, since neither is viable because they both exclude the attitude of openness to understanding and contradict the fundamental human orientation to meaning, no really workable compromise is possible. In fact the common sense, "middle ground" is even more insidious to authentic practice than the initial and counter-positions because biased common sense weaves a tangle of half-truths that resist every intelligent analysis. Common sense likes to call attention to the so-called complexities of life and thought, not to understand and resolve them intelligently, but to hide behind them and avoid the real issues of thoughtful reflection and the meaningful life. Thus real openness to understanding does not lie anywhere between naivete' and skepticism in some common sense compromise, for it lies on an entirely different level, the level of a reflective commitment to understanding and meaning that transcends both naivete' and skepticism as well as the false common sense compromise. Finally, such a level is not reached without a person undergoing a conversion or protrepsis.
By transcending both naivete' and skepticism the really open person is able to preserve the truth of both as well as the truth of the inauthentic common sense compromise while eliminating the falsities in all three lower viewpoints. The term lower viewpoint is helpful in understanding sublation, differentiated consciousness, and higher viewpoint By showing how this is done, the elements of the higher viewpoint of openness to understanding can be understood. Nevertheless, since such openness involves an intellectual and/or an aesthetic conversion, no analysis can substitute for the performance of a commitment to understanding in ones life. These conversions represent a withdrawal from inauthenticity, that is by virtue of a commitment to understanding as a terminal value with which the subject identifies himself, the intellectually and/or aesthetically converted subject commits himself to the unlimited project of understanding in the realms of human meanings (art) or the realms of object-intelligibilities (science). Such a commitment or conversion never implies that a person has ever fully achieved the higher viewpoint, for to do so would mean that a human being could understand everything about everything. When the partial human achievement of such openness comes, it comes only with a lifetime struggle of trying to be true to the human intention of understanding and meaning, revealed in wonder and worked out in the concrete questions and answers in philosophy and the sciences or in the concrete attempts to express the meaning of the human self in its symbolic forms in art and literature.
We can understand what real openness to understanding is, then, by analyzing how it transcends the lower viewpoints. In other words we shall be answering the question: What does it mean to be intellectually and aesthetically converted? (Which is not the same thing as being intellectually and aesthetically converted.) A person who is truly open to understanding and self-attuned to the fundamental orientation to meaning and intelligibility is one who recognizes that all human understanding begins both from one's own experience and beliefs from others.
The problem, then, with the naive attitude is that it begins and ends with experience and belief: the immediacy of its own experience and the comfort of its own beliefs. Thus to be open to understanding and attuned to meaning and intelligibility is to act on the principle that all human understanding begins from experience and belief, but such a beginning is for the sake of understanding, not for the sake of security. So the truth of the naive attitude is its recognition of the only real starting point for human understanding; its falsity lies in its suppression of wonder and the intention of understanding that spontaneously and intelligently expresses itself in questions and diligently articulates itself in symbols and concepts in the arts, the sciences, religion, theology, and philosophy.
The person who is really open to understanding and attuned to meaning and intelligibility recognizes the truth of skepticism: behind every doubt is a possibly fruitful question. Besides the "no" of skepticism, there is the "no" to skepticism that the open person must give. (So there is in openness a negative moment similar to the negativity of the skeptic, but it is a negation of all lower viewpoints for the sake of affirming what is only partially meaningful and true in each.) Thus the indiscriminate doubt of the skeptic is as unintelligent and stupid as the indiscriminate belief of the naive person though it often hides its stupidity behind a pseudo-intellectualist, smoke screen of "scientific," "philosophical," or "methodological" jargon. By turning every question into a destructive weapon of doubt for whatever supposedly constructive purpose (self-defense?), the skeptic turns his own orientation to intelligibility and meaning (intellectual intentionality) into an ultimately self-destructive weapon. I think this is what Plato was talking about when he called the misologist, a misanthropist. (He was speaking of the skeptical side of sophism.) The truth of skepticism is, then, that there are no answers without questions. (Recall the naive person wanted answers without questions.) The skeptic says there are none and he is right. However, he also says there are no answers and there he is, not only wrong, but also contradicting himself because he cannot claim that it is meaningful to claim that there is no meaning in human experience and belief without at the same time presupposing that there is. Unlike the skeptic, the person open to understanding questions his experience and beliefs in order to understand them (doubt only when there is reason to doubt). So doubts are for him always discriminating and limited because they are raised to eliminate barriers to understanding.
The higher viewpoint of openness to understanding can be understood in relation to naivete', skepticism, and the common sense compromise in terms of the meaning of aesthetic and intellectual conversion. For the naive person the real world is "the already out there now": the real is the object of biological extroversion. The reality of the universe is unrelated to intelligibility. For the skeptic the real self is "the already in here now": the real is the object of psychological introversion: the reality of the self is unrelated to meaning. For common sense, reality is a combination of both: the real world is "the already out there now" and the real self is "the already in here now": neither is intrinsically related to intelligibility or meaning. In contrast, for the aesthetically converted subject the reality of the self is intrinsically related to meaning: the self is constituted and constitutes itself by meaning. Similarly for the intellectually converted subject the reality of the world is intrinsically related to intelligibility: the real world is what can be understood and is to be understood, not merely what is out in front of your face. For both aesthetic and intellectual conversion the real is intrinsically related to meaning or intelligibility.
In the higher viewpoint of openness to understanding, then, the truth of naivete' and skepticism is preserved while the falsity of both is eliminated. All understanding begins in experience and belief, but we must question, not necessarily doubt, both for the sake of understanding. There is then a kind of circle of belief and understanding that has two distinct sides to it that constitute the two different ways of understanding: The Way of Discovery and the Way of Recovery (the methodic side and the hermeneutic side of the first dialectic respectively.) The pivot point in the circle of understanding and belief in the way of discovery (science) is the question because the question mediates between experience and belief on the one hand and understanding for yourself and formulating your understanding (concept) on the other. Complementarily, the pivot point in the circle of understanding and belief in the way of recovery (humanities) is the act of understanding (interpreting) a text-history because that act mediates between the questions and expressions of an interpreter and the questions and expressions of an author. In real life, of course, there is no understanding without both ways, one is subordinated to another for different purposes. Nevertheless the two ways are distinct and have different structures: The way of discovery has a Subject-Object-Object structure while the way of recovery has a Subject-Object-Subject (interpersonal) structure. The first we shall call the structure of the concept (explanation) and the second the structure of the symbol (meaning exploration).
The dialectic of the attitude of openness to understanding has two distinct "sides". So it can be called a theoretical (science) or aesthetic (art) dialectic. As theoretical the dialectic reveals the foundation of scientific inquiry, theory formation, and conceptual articulation. As aesthetic the dialectic reveals the foundation of artistic self-understanding, artistic self-expression, and symbolic explorations of meaning. The paradox is that science "subjectifies" the world by creating worlds of theory yielding the possibility of explanatory, objective knowledge, while art "objectifies" the self yielding the possibility of objective self-knowledge through symbolic, self understanding. By transcending both art and science, philosophy is able to bring to both symbolic and conceptual expression a knowledge of both self and the world in their fundamental (transcendental) relations. At the same time philosophy depends on the performance of both symbolic-artistic and conceptual-theoretical understanding. This complementarity between art and theory may help to explain why it was that philosophy arose historically among the Greeks who, as an ancient people, had a highly developed sense of theory formation and aesthetic imagination.
Theoretical-Aesthetic Dialectic: Question: What Is It? The Dual Structure of Openness To Understanding
Way of Discovery Way of Recovery
The foundation of art and science lies in the fact that we ask questions of the general type characterized by the universal form of the question: What Is It? By this I mean questions of the type: How does it work? What does it mean? Why is this such and such? etc.. These questions are really all What-Type questions because they anticipate understanding and meaning as satisfying. Questions of this general type: What is it? anticipate meaning or intelligibility as their objective and understanding as the corresponding act of the subject. We could describe the fact that we spontaneously and intelligently ask such questions as the factual foundation for human openness to understanding.
The aim of the education of human persons, then, is to establish the attitude of openness to understanding and the corresponding attunement to meaning (Art) and intelligibility (science). Though it is true that such openness can not be brought about independently of all content (Philosophy presupposes the acts of understanding in the realms of common sense, art, and science.), and though it is true that it can hardly be brought about by a teacher who is himself not open to understanding (Conversion is always a precondition), still it remains true such openness is never naivete' or skepticism or the common sense compromise. Without a recognition of the unrestricted intention of human wonder, the act of appropriating such openness to understanding becomes a difficult if not even an impossible project. In addition common sense is no solution because every position along the line between naivete' and skepticism contains not only truth but falsity, no common sense compromise will be able to resolve the problem of appropriating real openness to understanding short of the commitment to the project of understanding as a terminal human value. This is the commitment common sense refuses to give. For the person to become an authentic self the person must identify himself with the desire to understand or the intentionality of meaning and commit himself to it. This is an infinite or unrestricted project, one that intends the Infinite itself ultimately. Such a commitment to understanding and meaning is usually experienced as more of a passion (something I undergo) rather than an action (something I do). So we can like Plato speak of an EROS of the mind and with him we would argue that such a passion for ideas (meaning-intelligibility) does not diminish human passion, but heightens it when human beings become aware that the fullest intention of their love is the intention of meaning-intelligibility through understanding: the human meanings expressed aesthetically and the intelligibility of the world expressed in theory.
Openness To Knowing
In addition to openness to understanding and our attunement to meaning, there is the demand for openness to knowing and our attunement with the truth. Besides the aesthetic-speculative dialectic, there is the critical-rhetorical dialectic of openness to the truth. For beyond our desire to understand that intends meaning and intelligibility, there is our desire to know that intends the truth and ultimately the real. The desire to know, rooted in wonder, expresses itself rationally and reasonably in the universal form of the question: Is it so? Notice that the answer to this question must take the form: Yes or No. "Maybes" and "I don't know's" simply postpone the question for a later date. Admissions of ignorance are never satisfactory as an answer to the questions in the form: Is it so? All human knowledge is expressed in the form of a judgment in which someone asserts or denies the truth or falsity of some proposition. Of course, no one can reasonably answer the question: Is it so?, until they have answered the question: What is it? intelligently and satisfactorily first. Hence the dialectic of openness to the truth depends for its proper functioning upon the prior dialectic of openness to understanding and meaning. In other words the IT in the question: What is IT? refers back to our immediate experience and/or beliefs, but the IT in the question: Is IT so? refers back no only to our immediate experience and beliefs but also to the mediation of our experience in questions through understanding and its expression either in concepts (science) or in symbols (art).
The reason this dialectic is called critical is that it concerns the foundation of the act of knowing itself. There are two semantic correlations connected with the act of knowing: Knowing makes no semantic sense unless it is the truth that is known and knowing the truth makes no semantic sense unless it implies we have reached the real. In other words we know the real by making true judgments and a true judgment is one that says of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not. Moreover the intentional demand for the truth expressed by the question, Is it so?, is a demand for an unconditioned, a kind of absolute. An indication of this demand for an unconditioned is to be found in the form of the answer that is required to satisfy the question: there is an absolute distinction between the yes and the no. In other words between yes and no there is no third possibility in terms of what the question is asking for. Isomorphically between existence and non-existence there is no third possibility, the distinction is absolute. To complicate matters a bit more, although the question, Is it so?, demands an absolute or unconditioned, still no judgment we make is ever absolutely necessary or unconditioned in an unqualified sense nor is there anything we experience that is completely unconditioned or absolute. In other words David Hume was partially at least correct to claim that all our knowledge rests on matters of fact, in other words on things that could have been otherwise or might not have been at all. Nevertheless Hume was mistaken because he overlooked the other fact of human knowing: that matters of fact themselves could not be recognized as true without the reasonable demand for the unconditioned intended in the question, Is it so? We cannot claim that something is a matter of fact without also claiming it is true. There is no such a thing as an untrue fact, only mistakes about what the true (real) facts are. Thus to deny the human intention of the truth (as Hume did) is at the same time to deny the truth of any matter of fact and to suppress the critical question for reflection, Is it so?
Thus a distinction must be made between a formally unconditioned and a virtually unconditioned if we are going to avoid the two fallacies of claiming either that human knowing grasps an unqualified absolute (Leibnitz) or that human knowing does not intend an absolute (Hume). Thus a formally unconditioned is a reality that has no conditions whatsoever (Absolute, Necessary Being); while a virtually unconditioned is a reality that has conditions, but those conditions happen to be fulfilled as a matter of fact. When we pay attention to our acts of knowing, we can understand what it entails.
This second dialectic is rhetorical as well as critical because it is not enough to know the truth through true judgments; as persons we must tell the truth. Plato was the first to warn of the dangers inherent in a rhetoric that cuts itself off from the demand to tell the truth. Truth-telling is ontologically prior to all ethical demands because it lies at the foundation of those demands. Thus the desire to speak the truth is complementary to the desire to know the truth. Even though human speech as discourse is not identical with the truth because it is not identical with reality, still there is no truth that cannot come through human speech as discourse.
The recognition that truth can come through human speech as discourse is implicit in every performance of speech or language to the extent that no one can speak/write without the hope of having something to say or without the hope that the listener will be able to understand what the speaker has to say as meaningful or true. The same is true in reverse for the listener vis a vis the speaker. We shall call this presupposition of the performance of speech "Hermeneutic Faith". Nor do things deceive us but rather show us what they are provided we pay attention, understand, and respond to them. In one sense, then, truth is a response to things. Another indicator of our truth-reality orientation is the fact that children tend to say what is on their minds spontaneously and even adults must reflect self-consciously if they are going to perpetrate a lie; telling the truth usually takes no such effort. Hence the rhetorical dimension of openness to the truth demands that we listen to what the other person has to say before we speak to them and in a similar way it requires that we listen for the truth of things before we speak.
To enter an analysis of the second dialectic (openness to the truth) required this preliminary discussion because the second dialectic is reflective unlike the first which is not. In other words we are going to reflect on human reflectiveness in its performance. We are going to try to understand what it means to know and tell the truth and then to know ourselves as knowers and speakers of the truth just as we tried to understand what it meant to understand and express ourselves meaningfully and then to understand ourselves as understanders and speakers-hearers in the first dialectic. First, then, we will have to understand how the second dialectic emerges.
Just as the spontaneous human openness to meaning/intelligibility tends to become the naivete' of common sense that is common nonsense, so the spontaneous human openness to the truth (of things and persons) tends to become a pseudo-practical common sense dogmatism. Because wonder leads to wonder about wonder, human beings spontaneously at some point in their lives begin to reflect. Still prior to the emergence of spontaneous reflection there was the need for the results of such reflection: In a word human beings need to know the truth before they are capable of knowing it for themselves, just as they need to tell the truth before they are able to know the difference between telling the truth and expressing a wish. Once again "natural belief or trust" allows us access to the results of the reflection of others, but it is for the sake of the time when we will be able to reflect for ourselves: when we are able to meet the reflective question: Is it so? for ourselves. There is a kind of extension of natural belief into a natural "Doctrinalism," but this is not yet dogmatism because it does not cut off the possibility of criticism.
The doctrinal wisdom of common sense teaches us that we must make judgments in order to live and that we must accept as true certain propositions if we are going to participate in human life. To act requires judgment. However this common sense "doctrinal" wisdom can and does easily become dogmatic when reflective self-understanding becomes excluded from our judgments. Like the naive person, then, the dogmatist is looking for answers, but the dogmatic person recognizes that the answers must not only be meaningful or intelligible, they must also be true. Like the naive person the dogmatist seeks a kind of security, but now it is a cognitional and/or a propositional security; the dogmatist identifies knowing what is true with certainty. Hence dogmatism is the classical case of closed mindedness. The dogmatist tends to listen to only what he wants to hear. Thus he suppresses all objections to the positions he takes because they are not established by a prior commitment to a reasonable discussion or by meeting the demands of the reflective question: Is it so? Because the dogmatist "thinks he knows" his positions are true he cannot give a reasonable account of them. He is often good at offering objections to other positions but he is unwilling and unable to defend his own. So there is a false mysticism that results from dogmatism, a pseudo-mysticism that is identical to obscurantism (the suppression of authentic questions for reflection). This is not the true mysticism that recognizes the Presence of Transcendent Mystery that can be overheard in the truth that comes through authentic human speech and heightens our intelligence and reflectiveness and promotes questions for understanding and reflection. Dogmatism is obviously an uncritical attitude, a non-self-transcending attitude closed in on itself. (All “Isms” are uncritical)
From the standpoint of criticism (knowing) dogmatism is the refusal to make judgments based upon sufficient evidence: it is a refusal to take responsibility for one's own judgments. Since sufficient evidence can be achieved only by one who has made a prior commitment to reasonable discussion which would aim at the truth of judgments in human speech, the dogmatist can also be defined as one who refuses to make that prior commitment to reasonable discussion. Thus dogmatism has a rhetorical as well as a critical dimension.
The dogmatist identifies the human intention of (orientation to) truth with his own apprehension of what he thinks is the truth; he falsely identifies the requirement that true human judgments must express an unconditioned with a grasp of the Formally Unconditioned itself. (Human judgment grasps a virtually unconditioned that intends a Formally Unconditioned.) He identifies the absolute expressed in true human discourse with the Absolute Truth intended by human discourse.
The more the dogmatist comes to understand, the more he enters into intelligent discussion with other intelligent persons, the less he will be able to maintain his dogmatic attitude and positions. In the face of an onslaught of intelligent objections from others, slowly he can come to realize that he cannot maintain his unthought-out, unevidenced dogmatic positions. As it becomes more and more impossible for him to maintain his dogmatism in intelligent discussion, so he will come to realize that he cannot preserve the absolute certainty his dogmatism was meant to defend. He comes to recognize that absolute certainty is a false ideal for human knowledge. The dogmatist's quest for certainty, however, was originally a self-defense mechanism: the dogmatist feared being "wrong" just as the naive person feared being "mistaken". As he gives up the false ideal of certainty without giving up the fear of being wrong he begins to use a new defensive strategy: If he cannot preserve his certainty with his unthought-out, unevidenced judgments because one by one they are struck down by intelligent criticism, then the way he thinks he can protect himself from being wrong will be to suspend all judgments. If he refuses to make judgments, then he cannot be criticized for making false judgments. This "half-baked thinker" thinks he can avoid being wrong by claiming that the only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain. What he does not realize is that he might be able to protect himself from making false judgments by refusing to make any judgment, but by doing that he will also make it impossible to make any true judgments: he will make it impossible to be right. One by one, then, the dogmatist rejects his unreasonable judgments and begins to suspend all judgment on principle. When that happens, the dogmatist becomes a relativist, an Unthinker becomes a half-baked thinker.
The counter-position to the attitude of dogmatism in the dialectic of openness to the truth, then, is relativism (The basic anti-philosophical attitude of our culture). In opposition to the dogmatist the relativist refuses to make any judgment until all the evidence is in. Until the relativist knows everything about everything, he denies that anyone can know anything about anything. Just as his counter-part, the dogmatist, is uncritical because he makes judgments without sufficient evidence, so also the relativist is uncritical because he refuses to make any judgment since he unreasonably refuses to recognize any evidence short of absolute knowledge. Absolute knowledge would require an understanding of everything about everything which no finite human being could ever acquire.
The relativist attitude is regressive in the sense that it tends to reduce the question about the truth (Is it so?) to the question of understanding (What is it?). These questions obviously cannot be reduced to each other. Though it is true that all human understanding involves some relativity (Direct understanding involves a grasp either of things in relation to us (description) or of things in relation to one another (explanation). Reflective understanding involves a grasp of the relation between evidence and the fulfillment of the conditions in the virtually unconditioned--a relative absolute.), still knowing always goes beyond the relativity of understanding and the conditions of the unconditioned when we say that something is in fact the case. The truth of judgment includes but goes beyond meaning in verified meanings or theories If the dogmatist suppressed the question for reflection (Is it so?), then the relativist ignores the reflective act of human understanding by demanding too much: that human reflection achieve an infinite act of understanding which is, of course, impossible. Paradoxically, on a deeper level, the relativist agrees with the dogmatist because he also confuses a quest for the truth, that is genuinely self-transcending, with the quest for certainty that is self-defensive and lacks all transcendence. The only difference between the dogmatist and the relativist is that the latter postpones his certainty into an indefinable future.
On its rhetorical side relativism is no more capable of speaking or telling the truth than is dogmatism. For the relativist must suspend every judgment for fear of being wrong at the cost of ever being right. However, all human knowledge of the truth comes through and is expressed in a judgment or series of judgments. Thus relativism subscribes to a kind of false cognitional "End-Time". Just as the dogmatist falsely believes that his own human mind is already in possession of an Absolute Divine Truth, so the relativist falsely thinks that a human mind cannot know anything that is true until it becomes an Absolute Divine Mind which unfortunately it can never become.
Between the position of dogmatism and the counter-position of relativism neither compromise nor oscillation is really a possible resolution of the dialectic of our attunement to the truth. For anywhere between the attitudes of dogmatism and relativism there is not only something that is true but also something that is false because the question for reflection (Is it so?) requires both reflective understanding (against dogmatism) and the judgment based upon sufficient, not exhaustive, evidence (against relativism): the question demands an unconditioned (against relativism) but one that is a possible achievement of finite minds (against dogmatism). Once again the common sense compromise is really a self-delusion.
Unlike the common sense compromise, real openness to the truth requires not only the preservation of what is true in the lower viewpoints but also the elimination of what is false. Hence the higher viewpoint is neither dogmatism, nor relativism, nor the common sense compromise. It requires that we make judgments, expressing a virtually unconditioned, which judgments are based upon sufficient evidence known to be sufficient only after all relevant questions have been raised and answered satisfactorily. But how can we know whether all relevant questions have been raised yet alone answered satisfactorily? The answer to this question can be decided only in concrete cases, but the general rule is that we are to be governed by the "Law of Decreasing Returns". This means that as long as our truth proposals continue to generate significant objections which demand intelligent, reasonable, and responsible revisions in order to maintain them, then all relevant questions have not yet been raised and answered satisfactorily. While questions recur, the question is still an open question. But that does not mean that a time will never come when they no longer recur (relativism) after significant revisions have been made to meet the real issues. When this happens, of course, new questions arise that demand further truth proposals. And so it goes.
Openness to the truth demands that we submit our proposals to all intelligent, reasonable, and responsible men and women in the human community. This we do when we make our proposals public expressed in a reasonable account and make such revisions of our proposals as are necessary to meet all intelligent, reasonable, and responsible objections. As rhetorical, the dialectic of openness to the truth requires a prior commitment to the truth as it comes through human speech (language). For all human speech that is guided by the intention of the truth is in the form of a dialogue-conversation insofar as the speaker or writer recognizes that there is no final expression of the truth in human speech. Still at the same time there is no truth that is unrelated to human speech because there is no truth without understanding. The dialectic of openness to the truth reveals that the aim of a liberal education is to create the conditions necessary for the human person to participate in the ongoing discussion and dialogue that applies the methods through which men and women come to know the truth that can be expressed in human speech and action so that they will know how to live and act accordingly.
The critical-rhetorical dialectic of openness to the truth presupposes, complements, and goes beyond the aesthetic-theoretical dialectic of openness to understanding. Since we cannot know what is true without first understanding, we cannot be open to the truth without first being open to understanding. There is no knowing without a reflective act of understanding that grasps the sufficiency of evidence expressed by a virtually unconditioned. So the requirements for real openness to the truth are cumulative. Although we are usually involved in either naivete' or skepticism, dogmatism or relativism, or the common sense compromises; we cannot be open to understanding/intelligibility/meaning without also moving in the direction of being open to knowing/truth. Nor can we be open to the truth without first being open to understanding.
Though it is possible to be performatively open to understanding as a result of an intellectual and/or aesthetic conversion short of philosophical and rhetorical conversion, it is not possible to achieve an openness to the truth without the rhetorical conversion by which persons commit themselves to the project of the humanities and/or without a philosophical conversion by which persons intelligently and reasonably appropriate their own intelligence and reasonableness. In other words a person can overcome naivete' and skepticism, if not in principle, at least in fact by entering into the project of theory-formation in the sciences or the project of the symbolic expression of the human possibilities of meaning in the world in the arts and humanities. However, a person cannot get beyond dogmatism, relativism, and the common sense compromise of the dialectic of truth without a commitment to the truth of human existence as pursued in the humanities (rhetorical conversion) and without a reflective philosophical self-appropriation (philosophical conversion). In other words rhetorical and philosophical conversion alone allow human persons to identify themselves as human insofar as they are speakers and hearers (origins of meaning, truth, and worth) and intelligent, reasonable, and responsible knowers. Thus art and science are not enough for a truly human education.
Moreover neither intellectual (science) nor aesthetic (art) conversion can be consolidated and made principles for the whole of human life without both rhetorical (project of the humanities) and philosophical conversion (the critical project of philosophy). Without the humanities' commitment to the truth of our humanness and philosophy's commitment to the human project of knowing the truth, the best that can be hoped for is that the intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility of the person of common sense, the artist, or scientist will have an indirect influence on the whole of one's life. For this reason the humanities and philosophy really comprehend and support the intention of both art and science by the self-appropriation of the more comprehensive commitment of the human intention of the truth that comes through human speech as conversation, dialogue, and discourse. An education that does not aim explicitly at philosophical and rhetorical conversion simply will not and cannot liberate human persons.