“This one fact the world hates:
that the soul becomes.”
Ralph Waldo EMERSON. *
“The Babel of our day is the cumulative
product of a series of refusals to
understand...”
Bernard Lonergan. (insight,p.267)
INTRODUCTION: COSMOPOLIS AS AN X.
Why Cosmopolis in a world without utopias? Why cosmopolis in the Babel of our day? What is it? One more narration of the end of millenium? Another messianic theory? A new religion or sect? Is cosmopolis the magic solution or recipe against the world´s confusion?
“Still, what is cosmopolis? Like every
other object of human intelligence,
it is, in the first instance, an x...”
(Insight, p. 263)
There is no doubt that the end of the second millenium is an age of crisis in all the fields of human life. Economic crisis, characterized principally by increasing gaps between rich and poor countries and people, political crisis, manifested in multiple conflicts and social fragmentation, cultural crisis, present in a way of moral and religious confusion, relativism, subjectivism... ”The Babel of our day...”
Epoch of changes say most analists and politicians, “change of epoch” says Gorostiaga (1995) about this crisis, our crisis of the end of 20th century. Anyway, the fact is that humanity is in an age of transition and therefore , in a search for new meanings, for a new sense to personal life and human history. The crisis of this era is a crisis of sense, a crisis of what is really important, the real truth, the real good for the existence. This crisis is the result “of the cumulative...series of refusals to understand” as Lonergan affirmed, and, the cumulative series of refusals to choose the good, according to my beliefs. Fr. Arrupe was wright when he said: “Today it is evident that men could make the world more just, but they don´t want “.
How does the world reverse that “longer cycle of decline”? (Lonergan, 1992). In this paper I will explore the notion of Cosmopolis, through the heuristic meaning of the “x” mentioned above . As I intend to show, cosmopolis is not a place, a time, a model or recipe, or a final end; Cosmopolis is a permanent search for human intelligence and responsible freedom that can take the world out of the “longer cycle”, from the common sense in its authentic development to a “sense in common” for the re-orientation of the world as a human world.
This search implies a serie of challenges to education. Education is one of the most important ways to bring Cosmopolis into reality, if teachers may play a prominent role by orienting their work to self-appropriation of their students for community construction and social transformation, based on the authentic exigencies of their “unrestricted desire to know and choose the good” (Doorley, 1996). These challenges will only be acomplished if the mind and heart of teachers experiment an true transformation through authenticity. (Rugarcía, 1996).
1.-FROM COMMON SENSE: HUMAN COMPLEXITY.
“Not man but men inhabit this planet.
Plurality is the law of the Earth.”
Hannah Arendt.**
This “law of the Earth” is the basis for human history richness, but also, for its complexity. It is within this plurality that each human subject has to construct his or her own life; the product of this plurality is social progress or decline. These processes happen in the frame of plurality of human beings and as a result of an unpredictible series of personal, group and social dialectics. Such a construction can be thought of as a permanent, cumulative and contradictory search “from common sense to a sense in common” by the development of human intelligence throughout history.
“Plurality is the law of the Earth”, but it operates through the unity of a “normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results” (Lonergan, 1994 p.5). Such a set of operations of the human intentional consciousness constitutes the trascendental method, the method of human search. The trascendental method is the basic and common heuristic structure that allows the conception of cosmopolis: the human process from common sense to a sense in common lead by intelligence.
What is the common sense? What does the “sense in common” that defines Cosmopolis mean to me? What does the process of plurality in the unity imply?
1.1.-Common sense and its subject: internal dialectic.
“...one meets intelligence in every walk of life.
There are intelligent farmers and craftsmen...
intelligent doctors and lawyers...There is
intelligence in industry and commerce...There
is intelligence in the home and in friendship...in the
arts and in entertainment...” (Insight, p.196)
In fact, Lonergan stablishes that common sense is a type of intelligence, a very specialized type of intelligence, not less important but different from scientific and philosophic intelligence. Common sense intelligence is related to know the concrete and particular, never aspires to universality, has no use of technical language, and is a practical way to acquire knowledge.
The goal of common sense is to understand things related to our senses, while scientific knowledge is interested in the relation among things to one another. In other words, common sense makes descriptions and science makes explanations. However, Lonergan states that scientific knowledge and common sense are complementary in the process of human and social construction.
There is a subjective and an objective field of common sense (Lonergan, 1992 ;1993). According to Lonergan, within the subjective field, there are “four patterns of experience”, four “sets of intelligible relations that link together sequences of sensations, memories, images, conations, emotions and bodily movements...” (Insight,p.206), four modes of operation of the structure of human intentional consciousness. Each mode or pattern organizes and emphazises a particular level of operations and a particular search. The patterns of experience are: biological, aesthetic, intellectual and dramatic.
The biological pattern is related basically to the first level of consciousness and its operations are oriented to intussusception, reproduction and selfpreservation; extroversion is the main characteristic of this pattern. The aesthetic pattern emerges because there is nothing merely biological in human life, but rather a tendency for liberation of “self-justifying joy”, of spontaneous aesthetic enjoyment; this pattern is related to the levels of experience and intelligence. The intellectual pattern related to the levels of intelligence and reasoning and allows for the development of the “unrestricted desire to know” that inquiry and wondering open. Finally, the dramatic pattern of experience is related to the drama of construction of life. “The first work of art (of the human subject) is his own living” affirms Lonergan (Insight p.210).This dramatic pattern emphazise the levels of deliberation and decision, through practical reflection. (Braio, 1992).
The operation of the subject under the demands of those patterns that are functioning interdependently generates an internal dialectic because these demands are often contradictory. From this dialectic the subject grows up or refuse to live his own drama becoming a “drifter”, a person that thinks what others think, affirms what others affirm, decides and acts as others do. (Doorley, 1996)
The basic drama, the drama to the subject is a necessity at the same time motivating and paralyzing, in building his own life in this world of plurality and contradiction.
I the subject there can arise a dramatic bias, that is, aberrations of understanding that robe the development of common sense. Lonergan talks about “scotosis”, repression or inhibition. The dramatic bias consist basically in an overfunctioning of the censor that block the emergence of insights of the subject.
Thus, the internal dialectic process is the first problem to advance “from common sense to a sense in common”.
1.2.-Intersubjectivity and social order: the dialectic of community.
“Common sense is practical...It seeks knowledge,
not for...the pleasure of contemplation, but to use
knowledge in making and doing. Moreover, this
making and doing involve a transformation of man
and his enviroment.” (Insight, p. 232)
The advance of the practical intelligence of common sense is registered not merely in memory but in concrete products and practical instruments. Material progress is the product of the concrete realization of succesive practical ideas that develop common sense throughout the history of diverse cultures or geographic situations. However this realization of new practical ideas is imposible without human cooperation. Common sense demands the division of labor, organization of productive processes, economic order, political systems among other conditions. “Clearly, schemes of recurrence exist and function. No less clearly, their functioning is not inevitable...” (Insight, p.235)
The second dialectic process consists on the possibility of the functioning or not, of schemes of recurrence and human cooperation. This is the process that occurs between the spontaneous intersubjectivity and the necessity of an intelligent social order. It is the fight between personal or intersubjective group desires and the general desire of an intelligent, reasonable and responsible common good. The fight between “human as intelligent ...that is a legislator and as...an individual...subject of his own laws...” (insight p.240)
The dialectic of community coexists with, but differs from, the dialectic of the dramatic subject. Lonergan affirms the dominant position of the dialectic of community, but states that this dominant position is not absolute. In this dialectic we can find “... the individual bias of egoism, the group bias with its class conflicts, and a general bias that tends to set common sense against science and philosophy...”(Insight. p.244)
It is to attain a better understanding of the notion of Cosmopolis is necessary to discuss the general bias. The general bias is the mistake of considering common sense as the only way of knowing, and failing to recognize the significance of the scientific and philosophic knowledge as a general, mediated, and long term way of knowing. A general bias can also result from considering one field as the only one useful to make decisions about the social organization.
It is the combination of general bias and group bias that produces the advantage of one social group or class over the disadvantage of the others, and provokes a distortion of the process of insight, proposal, action, new situation, and fresh insight, excluding some fruitful ideas as a result of compromises, group desires, or interests.
1.3.-Humanity as subject: the dialectic of history.
“...The refusal of insight is a fact that accounts
for individual and group egoism, for the psychoneuroses,
and for the ruin of nations and civilizations...”
(Insight, p.259)
The longer cycle is produced by the group and general biases, and the distortion of the process of development of new insights that can be applied to a concrete situation. Over long periods of time, distiortions may cause transmition of incomplete ideas, prejudices, passions, mutilated intelligence, between generations. Thus, the situation is progressively less intelligible and more absurd. This leads to the ruin of nations and civilizations because the appearence of higher viewpoints and the emergent probability of an intelligent change becomes progressively more difficult.
Lonergan proposes three elements for the reversal of this longer cycle: first, liberty as a principle of progress; second, a critical and normative human science, and third, culture as the capacity to ask, to reflect and reach answers. I understand Lonergan´s notion of cosmopolis, in part as the harmonious and progressive integration of these three elements to reverse the longer cycle, that is, the integration of culture with a critical and normative human science free to keep the intelligence operating and avoid the “...exaltation of the practical, the supremacy of the state, the cult of the class...” (Insght, p.263).
The third dialectic that constitutes the general frame of the internal dialectic of the subject and the dialectic of community is the dialectic of history, in which, humanity is the subject building its own drama throughout time. This general drama can be lead by the longer cycle produced by the general bias or addressed through the construction of the authentic human good of order. It depends on the prevalence of human intelligence and cooperation, as opposed to the group and general biases.
2.-THE LONGER CYCLE AND THE BABEL OF OUR DAY.
“Winning is not everything;
is the only thing.”
Vince Lombardi***
“Life for us has become an endless succession of contests” , says Kohn (1992) in his book on “cooperative learning”. Even in the author´s statement, “us” means the culture of the United States, but could be generalized in today’s world of economic globalization and “religion of competitiveness”. A world of contests has to have winners and losers and our world today is one with many more losers than winners. Rich and poor, famous and ignored, first and third world, north and south, are some of the names to indicate the division between winners and losers. But in a world of contest, there is no place for human cooperation: our world is organized in such a way that in its schemes of recurrence, cooperation is not supported.
The Babel of our day can be characterized through a series of paradoxes:
-In a world of mass media and information systems, human beings are isolated.
-In a world of economy and economists, poverty is the most important and increasingly problem.
-In a world of scientific development, the enviroment and nature are at great risk.
-In a world of “progress”, decline is evident.
-In a world of “liberty and plurality”, fragmentation is increasing.
-In a “futuristic world” , it seems there is no future.
-In a world of expansion of knowledge, the world has no truth.
The longer cycle is not only an idea of Lonergan, but it is present to us. The end of 20th century and its crisis are showing the validity of Lonergan’s thought about the group and general bias. The succesive “refusal of insight” seems to be present in our culture where we are living the “exaltation of practical (pragmatical) and the cult of the class”; the “kingdom of the Economy” has turned into a bias by neglecting the significance of all other fields.
Particular and group interests without a face are making the decisions, coopting the culture, manipulating the consciousness of millions of people around the world. “The law of the Earth...the plurality” that Arendt proclaims is dissapearing and becoming in an homogeneous way of life in which there are no human persons but only consumers.
“The actors of the drama of living become
stagehands; the setting is magnificent; the
lighting superb; the costumes gorgeous;
but there is no play...” (Insight, p.262)
The desperate yell today is for cooperation, for intelligence that reverses the longer cycle and illuminates the obscure tunnel of the future. The challenge is not to enable all people to live the “American way of life”, or every country to become “developed” as today’s economic development is conceived. The challenge is for a “civilization of cooperative simplicity” that implies, a complete change in the particular goods that are produced and consumed today, in the good of order that is stablished, and in the values that support our lives.(Sanchez, 1997)
Those changes will be possible only if the process of globalization that is taking place in the economic sphere is transposed into a “globalization of our consciousness”, making us aware that the world’s problems are our problems. Moreover the notion of “Sustainable Development” must be assumed thoroughly, not only in its ecological dimension, but as a heuristic notion for searching a new way of life, the “civilization of cooperative simplicity” that the world is needing today. This implies the progressive intellectual and moral conversion of people in influential levels in the fields of Economics, Politics and Culture.
It is the new “sense in common” that cosmopolis is discovering today.
3.-TO A SENSE IN COMMON: COSMOPOLIS IS NOT A PLACE OR A TIME.
“Cosmopolis is above all politics”.
(Insight. p.264)
“If social scientists take the actual data
of the social situation as the norm for
critically judging the reality of the situation
they are abandoning the normative guide
that is intrinsic to their own desire to know.”
(Flanagan, 1997, p.94)
Lonergan writes clearly what cosmopolis IS NOT. From Insight (Chapter 7, section 8.6), we can understand that cosmopolis is not a new utopia in the sense of a type of goverment, an economic model or a religious confession. Cosmopolis is “above all politics”, but also is beyond group or class conflicts, “police force” or a simplistic or superfluous solution of human problems.
Cosmopolis is not a place, but there is a map, not a well defined and structured map but an heuristic map, in our own dynamic intentional consciousness. If we are going to develop and appropriate the basic exigencies of “the method we are” (Ancona, 1990; 1996), if we are improving our capacity to be atemptive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible, we can participate in cosmopolis and “protect the future against the rationalization of abuses and the creation of myths” (Insight, p.265). Cosmopolis is “a dimension of consciousness” (Insight p. 266) and the only condition to be there is the genuine search of authenticity, the genuine assumption of the personal dialectic and the genuine compromise with the drama of human living in the history.
Cosmopolis is not a particular time, but there is a calendar; the calendar that registers the development of human consciousness along the history from undifferentiated, to differentiated common sense, from classical science to statistical science, and to historical consiousness. (Lonergan, 1993) Cosmopolis implies “...a grasp of historical origins and a discovery of historical responsibilities...” (Insight p. 266) It is a critical approach to human history, a compromise with the future, living authentically the present and being aware of the past. Cosmopolis is the work of living the drama in perspective, with a creative vision of the totality, trascending the inmediate vision.
Cosmopolis is not a model or recipe but there are some dummies and we have the ingredients. The ingredients are in the “normative guide of our desire to know”,the inmanent and spontaneous capacity of questioning, understanding, reflecting, jugding, valuing and choosing; the exigencies of authenticity are the ingredients for participating in cosmopolis. The dummies are all the human beings that were and are being authentics in the different cultures and historical periods, the people that have been “...supremely practical by ignoring what is thought to be really practical...” (Insight, p.264), the people that have turned operative the ideas that general bias of common sense considered inoperative.
Finally, Cosmopolis is not a final end but a permanent and progressive search. Cosmopolis is an heuristic notion, a helpful challenge, an invitation to compromise with the intelligence through the cooperation of practical common sense and scientific and philosophical understanding in the construction of a progressively human world for everyone. Cosmopolis today seems to me, is the compromise for searching in common sense and intelligent cooperation for a “new sense in common”, a new meaning for the re-orientation of human life and human history towards a more just and fraternal “civilization of cooperative simplicity” in the third millenium.
In this sense, Cosmopolis is not a paradigm (Kuhn, 1970) but is the cause for paradigm changes in history, Cosmopolis is beyond the notion of “research program” (Lakathos, 1970) , because it is not a particular group of scientists that are sharing their assumptions in a precise moment or age. It is a concrete -in the Lonergan´s sense of comprehensive- totality of human beings that were, are and will be developing authentically their “unrestricted desire to know and choose the good” to cooperate in the construction of human world.
4.-TO A SENSE IN COMMON: EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGES TO A NEW EPOCH.
“The need for a heart that is open and
in tune with being demands a pedagogy
which is interested in more than an
intellectual grasp of what it is, but is
also interested in a formation of the
heart such that a knowledge of what
is, will be greeted, as well, by an
affective response to what is known...”
(Doorley, 1997 p. 52)
Since many years ago, education has been trapped in conceptualism and the cult of memorizing and information. As a product of this longer cycle and of this society in crisis, education is living its own crisis trying to escape its old rituals today meaningless for students.(Rugarcía, 1996; López Calva, 1997) Teachers have aimed for students´ memorization of concepts, formulas, functions and operations, blocking their “unrestricted desire to know “.
Not only our education has forgotten to estimulate students´ questioning, inquiry, understanding and judging, but it has not taken into account the heart of the students, their emotional dimension and their own “unrestricted desire to choose the good” (Doorley, 1996). The students´ own drama of living is out of the classrooms today and the historical consciousness that Cosmopolis is demanding is not dealt within the curricula where history is the mere repetition of facts, names and dates, and philosophy is out of the question because of the technical and pragmatic demands of the “job market”.
The social crisis of the end of the millenium and the longer cycle of decline in which humanity is inmerse are claiming to an urgent and complete educational change. This change is not an issue of methods, technics or subjects; this change implies the teachers´ TRANS-formation in the intellectual and moral dimensions. Only if teachers´ minds and hearts change, something can change in education, as Stenhouse affirmed (Rugarcía, 1995).
The world is needing an education that:
-Takes into account the whole person ( the biological-sensitive, ludic-aesthetic, intellectual and deliberative dimensions).
-Works with the student searching the discovery and appropriation of his or her own intentional consciousness in its four levels.
-Develops the historical consciousness of the students so they can discover their historical responsibilities.
-Changes the focus from competition to cooperation.
-Changes the individualistic viewpoint into a global and social viewpoint.
-Reflects on the notion of sustainable development as a challenge for a new world wide civilization, based on a simplistic life style.
A “personalizing education” (Leland & Howe, 1975; López Calva, 1997 (2)) assumes its compromise to work with the subjet-student in his or her physical, aesthetic, intellectual and deliberative dimensions, this will allow the student to develop his or her own capacity to establish constructive relations with particular goods and deliberate and cooperate towards the construction of the authentic good of order. (Lonergan, 1993) A “personalizing education” will make the student aware of his or her personal dialectics, the dialectic of community, and the dialectic of history in order of the discovery and appropriation of his or her own “unrestricted desire to know and choose the good” and the concrete humanization of his or her “effective freedom”.(Lonergan, 1992)
This implies the transformation of teaching from a mechanic and routine practice into a creative and critical praxis.
“With regard to the philosophy of education
itself, the fundamental problem is the
horizon of the educationalist -of the person
or group that has the power and the money,
that runs the bureaucracy, that makes the
decisions- and the horizon of the teacher...”
(Lonergan, 1993. p. 106)
Only if education modifies its conceptions and organization beyond that of the educationalists and teachers, will Cosmopolis be able to have a social and cultural influence and cooperate in the transformation of the world in crisis into a more human world. Cosmopolis is today, a set of challenges to educational systems and to all people working in the field of education, that believe in human intelligence, reasonability and responsibility as the media by which the soul is always becoming and improving the world, and on human consciousness as the only unifying criteria in a world where diversity is the law, and love, the only possibility of authentic human life.
* In Savater Fernando (1988). p.91
**In Savater, Fernando (1988). p.181.
***In Kohn, Alfie (1992) p.3
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