Philosophy of Education 4:1

CD/mp3 197, first half of fourth Cincinnati lecture on philosophy of education. Corresponds to CWL 10: 79-90. Sponsored by Catherine MacNeil. Lonergan moves on to the human good as the developing subject. A first transition is from the logical essence of 'rational animal' to the ideal. What we have to be is not what we necessarily are, but something that develops from a use of our freedom. To decide we have to take risks, and the risks regard objects, other people, and ourselves. And once one makes the decision, one rises to the challenge just for that occasion. The challenge remains with us. At any time we can fail. The one who is challenged is I, and the use of the first person supposes consciousness. Consciousness is not thinking about oneself. 'Presence' helps us get hold of the notion of consciousness: consciousness is presence to myself. And there are different levels of consciousness: empirical, intelligent, rational, and responsible. The second transition is from substance to subject, and the third is from faculty psychology to flow of consciousness. The flow of consciousness has a fundamental autonomy. Normally consciousness is a directed organization of selected data. Governing the direction and selection is our concern, Sorge. The correlative of Sorge is one's world. One's world is a horizon of horizons, a horizon of the second degree, the totality of objects for which I have any concern. So there are four terms: subject, concern, horizon, world. The subject's concern determines his horizon, and his horizon selects his world. There are differentiations of this flow of consciousness, different patterns of experience, different ways of determining horizon and selecting a world. The concern of consciousness in the intellectual pattern is the wonder that Aristotle spoke of as the beginning of all science and philosophy. In its first instance, the pattern is spontaneous. In a second instance, we can organize our lives to favor the intellectual pattern. That organization is the fundamental meaning of logic and method. When this is one's concern, the correlative becomes the universe, everything. The horizon is the frontier between the known unknown and the unknown unknown. One knows about one's horizon only indirectly. At the horizon, one's interest ceases altogether. Going beyond one's horizon is not simple. There is an organized resistance against it. It means a reorganization of the subject and his operations. The deepest dread is the collapse of oneself and one's world.

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Audio restoration by Greg Lauzon