20th WCP: Education for Cosmopolis

I. The Educative Mediation

Education (1) mediates between cultural matrices and the meaning and value they give to their personal and communal processes of self-appropriation and self-affirmation as genuine human beings in history. Lonergan means by "mediation":

. . . any factor, quality, property, feature, aspect, that has a source, origins, ground, basis, and consequences, effects, derivatives, a field of influence, radiation, expansion, an expression, manifestation, revelation, outcome may be said to be immediate in the source, origin, ground, basis, and mediated in its consequences, effects, derivatives, outcome, in its field of influence, radiation, expansion, in its expression, manifestation, revelation (1984, p. 2; p. 12). Such is the general or simple notion of mediation.

Education is immediate in the basis and mediated in its expansion. The basis of education lays in cultural matrices. They generate, transform, and share meanings and values by the product of several patterns of experience (inconscient, dramatic, biological, aesthetic, artistic, practical, intellectual, religious, etc.), and the spontaneous and self-correcting processes of learning, such as the human cooperation in labor, the human intersubjectivity in language and communication, and the cooperation with others as the basis of legitimate power in the community. The expansion of education is an historical self-consciousness that persons and communities would autonomously affirm.

Conceived as a mutual self-mediation process, education combines two types of mediation: mutual mediation and self-mediation. As a mutual mediation education is a reciprocal relation, where its elements configure an interchanging "functional whole: there are at least two principles and each mediates the other or others" (p. 12). Education is also a self-mediation process in so far as it constitutes "a whole that has consequences that change the whole" (p. 6); people develop their capacities, operations, plasticity and skills to reach their personal autonomy. In the same way, groups pursue their historic autonomy through processes of spontaneous intersubjective relationships, through several mechanisms in which a community organizes itself to make its own decisions, through genuine interpersonal relations mediated by common meanings and oriented by common values and actions. The individual mediates him/herself throughout life, where existential decisions are made to obtain autonomy within the community; this mediation occurs in the bossom of the family, in the social medium of relatives, friends, and proximate communities of everyday life-world. Communal self-mediation is done throgh its own history, the manifestation of the communicative and constitutive common sense of the community (p.12).

Now, the combination of mutual and self-mediation originates a mutual self-mediation. Education sets a new whole with consequences that change the whole. In so far as communication is the relevant case of this type of mediation (Sierra, 1993, pp. 269-276), education belongs to this field as an interpersonal encounter, as a kind of communicative action.

People and cultures involved in educative practices should eventually discover the oversights of education as an isolated entity, or both as a simple mediation (one dimensional and vertical expansion from a unique basis, criticized by Freire's notion of 'banking education'), and as a mere transactionist and reciprocal 'contract.' Briefly, through education, cultural matrices are moved towards a cultural dimension — Cosmopolis — that enables them to integrate themselves, to reflect and obtain answers for themselves; answers that at once satisfy their intelligence and speak to their hearts (Lonergan, 1992, p. 261).

II. An Integral Strategy for Education

How to overcome the old opposition in education between the way of achievement and the way of tradition? How to reconcile educating individuals and educating society itself? These false dilemmas are faced by complementary movements of human developing consciousness, through the simultaneous movement of two vectors (upward - downward). The 'upward vector' stresses the way of achievement, the decentering of the self to obtain his/her personal autonomy and socialization (Crowe 1985, pp. 89-108). The 'downward vector' is concerned on the way society, traditions, institutions, environment, and circumstances mould an individual and the society itself, through the self-correcting processes of learning mentioned. The goal of education as a mutual self-mediation is prior in intention to both components of human development. (2)

A. Education as a personal achievement: Even if the issue of education as an achievement is tackled in the first place, this does not mean that education as an heritage would come after; the ontological priority of the second vector could be argued. The process from below upwards "is the way of progress under the dynamism of human consciousness, of the drive to understand, to . . . respond to the deep interior exigences of our intelligent and rational and responsible nature. It is a drive we experience; if we do not experience it, there is no possibility of education" (Crowe, 1985, p. 1).

In the scope of Insight, this upward vector is described as "one's own rational self-consciousness clearly and distinctly taking possession of itself as rational self-consciousness" (Lonergan, 1992, p. 13). Education invites and fosters the personal crucial experiment of learning, identifying, and orientating (pp. 581-585) the inner dynamisms of our spirit towards truth. Even if self-appropriation and self-affirmation may occur in the several patterns of experience, these tasks are mainly formulated from the intellectual pattern, and a kind of intellectual conversion is required to break the duality in one's knowledge to assume a critical realistic viewpoint in common sense and sciences and philosophy. However, "the appropriation of one's own rational self-consciousness . . . is not an end in itself, but rather a beginning" (p. 22). Lonergan's long-range enterprise, his 'moving-viewpoint' (p.18-20) is not deductivist; self-consciousness is not a fixed possession, a permanent triumph; it is a slow and militant struggle where the critical point is never transcended (Lonergan, 1988, p. 224).

In the scope of Method in Theology, education emerges first, as an effort to overcome the systematic exigence of meaning through "the confrontation of the three basic questions: What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it? These three questions help men/women to shift from the outer realms of common sense and theory to the appropriation of one's own interiority, one's subjectivity, one's operations, their structures, norms, and potentialities" (p. 83). Education marks a breakthrough from conceptualism and traditional controls of meaning, from the moulding power of universal education (p. 99), from the repetition of theories by heart, from amounts of information towards a performative self-involvement of persons in what they do.

Second, this critical exigence marks a withdrawal into interiority which is not an end in itself (p. 83). From it one returns (p. 342) to the realms of common sense and theory with the ability to meet the methodical exigence, and a post-interiorly discourse-action reconstruction of other realms of meaning. For self-appropriation itself is a grasp of transcendental method (p. 305). Clearly, education aims the subject's differentiation of his/her polymorphic consciousness through the ongoing discovery of the nest of sources, acts, terms, functions, exigences and realms of human meanings and values. Education in this upward vector explodes the methodical expansions of human ortopraxis and a methodical pattern for creativity. Education fosters individual styles, respects differences in personal developments and achievements, promotes pluralism; but no less, it is a methodical attention to the fragility of our consciousness where we should learn other lessons. The violence of counterpositions is always present and the subject's self-mediation could easily be biased to become a lewd individual expressionism, a violent wrestling of narcisistic images and solitary pleasures spread through the many mirrors of the media (Sierra, 1993, p. 274). Human development is fragile, incomplete and conflicting when it is not oriented toward values, when it understands adequately but its judgements of fact are false; when it restricts understanding to compromise, when experience is reduced to a unique horizon (Lonergan, 1985, pp. 169-183).

Third, we can also characterize this upward vector of education as a self-discovery of 'the subject-as-subject'. Martin J. Matustik (1988, pp. 59-61) made evident that the Lonerganian deconstruction notably differs from other projects of deconstruction of subjectivity. The center of immediacy, the subject as conscious, cannot be served on a silver platter for a direct, unmediated grasp, and if one looked for such a 'presence in itself' there would be nothing to deal with in terms both of 'being' and the 'I.' Lonergan's notion of consciousness, rather than understanding the subject under the modern paradigm of presentation and representation, is experiential, operative, and leaves room for the deep life of the existential self.

The subject-as-subject is a dialectical unity of identity and non-identity of the subject-as-object and the object-as-object. It is not an absolute unity of identity as it is characteristic of hegelian idealism, for the immediate conscious experience never is completely sublated in knowing, in social sciences, in the pedagogies of the subject-as-object. This real distinction does not lead to an absolute non-identity (as it is characteristic of the diverse forms of subjects' dissolution), for subject's operations mediate both in the object-as-object and the subject-as-object; for objectivity is radically a self-transcendent subjectivity. Now, the subject's unity is not absolute but virtually unconditioned. Self-appropriation and self-affirmation have their own conditions and belong to the generalized emergent probability as well.

B. Education as a legacy. Individual's achievements compose the legacy of human beings. The second vector has its own independent justification although it complements the other. The "second way consists in handing on to later generations the accumulated patrimony of the community or nation or race. Although it is received as a gift, it is not to be conceived as a mere passive way, for it is not appropriated without struggle; . . . struggle . . . against the stupidity and lethargy which is as much a part of our nature as is its dynamism" (Crowe, 1985, p. 1). The below upward vector started from the accumulation of experiences, through understanding experiences, reflecting and affirming what was understood, and reaching the level of autonomous decisions; the second begins from values and actions handed down and aprehended, through judgements on values and beliefs received, through the hermeneutics of received beliefs in order to reach an experience made "mature and perceptive" (p. 14).

A first consideration deals with the processes through which a tradition conveys its meaning and values to new generations to perpetuate the community. The dynamic structure is ontologically and existentially developed in the context of discourses and actions of the everyday life-world; the legacy in some way precedes the gift. Conveying values, judgements, interpretations, and experiences in a loving and confident atmosphere suppose a developed community in order to generate a mature and perceptive experience in its members (Lonergan, 1985, p. 196; Crowe, 1985, pp. 63-88). Basically this process rests on trust and belief. The best, simplest, more universal and more experienced stage for trust is home, family. Through the way of arts and affects, judgements and moral ideals are shared. In so far as the validity of morality and art is man and artists themselves, the world of morality and the world of beauty are the most precious legacy a generation hands on to another (Lonergan, 1992, p. 207-9; 1972, esp. pp. 65-68). Sensibility, imagination, originality contribute if we are able to share them up to the point to recognize them as a human patrimony. But this trend towards universalisation is not a logic-deductivist imperative for human actions as the Enlightenment expected, but a communicative self-correcting process of learning through history.

The self-appropriation of social, cultural, and religious heritage is a process of belief as well. The tradition's heritage is not an individual possession but a common historical fund from which each may draw his variable share, measured by his capacity, his interests, his energies, his beliefs (Lonergan, 1992, p. 198; 1972, pp. 43-47); fund to which one may contribute if genuinely one follows the methodical imperatives of the below upward vector. Belief is something public, detachable and communicable. Now, on affectivity rests the aprehension of values and on apprehension of values rests belief (Lonergan, 1985, p. 181); through a general judgement of value on the reliability of man's collaboration, in its historical and social dimensions; through a particular judgement of value on the trustworthiness of the person whom he believes, and through the believer's personal decision and action to believe the way of learning between the extremes of credibility and skepticism is being built.

Again, affectivity, trust, and belief are sorts of a wider communicative action between past, present, and future generations. Communication, as an option, an effort, a process, and results of sharing human meanings and values (Sierra, 1991), is essentially a mutual self-mediation relationship (Sierra, 1993b, p. 269-293). The way one generation communicates to another through education is a concrete mutual self-mediation. (3) Teachers ( family, citizens, leaders, humanists, artists, in general) and students (a community, in general) conform a whole that has consequences that change the whole itself (Lonergan, 1984, pp. 12-13).

Secondly, the encounter between different and distant or proximate traditions passes through concrete and existential teachers and students. Both of them developing or ignoring the transcendent exigences of human spirit. Students, founding genuine teachers, studying the masters of the past, conforming their growth in understanding, making mature and perceptive their own experience; educators, fostering their students' self-generation element to do a free, safe and continuous transition to a new whole. (4) Still, this encounter (teacher-pupil) is also fragile, incomplete, and not always it co-produces the maximum of progress. Such a lack of transparency to conform a cultural identity, rather than eroding the possibility of a reasonable emancipation, it claims for a new cosmopolitan enlightenment. (5)

III. Cosmopolis: The Integrated Form

A militant integration between creativity and tradition constitutes the ideal human development. The two modes of development are distinct but interdependent. Only through the first is there any real appropriation of the second (Lonergan, 1984b, pp. 10-11). The conflict between two vectors is always possible and it is not always solved through cooperation. (6) The resultant unity should be found in the dynamic unit of human consciousness and in the variables of its development (Crowe, 1985, pp. 22-29; 89-108).

For education mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of human emancipation in that matrix, education involves appropriation, and appropriation sets the threefold problem of learning, identification, and orientation (Lonergan, 1992, pp. 581-585). Learning involves an accumulation of acts of insight that constitutes a viewpoint, a mentality, and eventually the transition to a higher viewpoint. Identification does not only rest on grasping a set of relations, also in the acquisition of a capacity to use what has been known in different situations. Orientation requires the recognition of a position or a counterposition in each step, in the face of its compatibility with the authentic dynamism of our conscious operations (Lonergan, 1992, pp. 410-26; 1972, pp. 235-266).

The threefold problem of appropriation is present not only in individuals but in cultures as well. Cultures, then, have a meta-educative function within and among themselves. So, a culture "can pause and with a smile or a forced grin ask what the drama . . . is about. [A] culture is [the] capacity to ask, to reflect, to reach an answer that at once satisfies [the] intelligence and speaks to . . . heart" (Lonergan, 1992, p. 261). Now, we hold that a community becomes a culture through an educative self-mediation and through politics. Through the former a community moves itself toward a culture; through the latter a community moves itself from its culture. Through education a community appropriates a tradition it hands on to itself. Through politics a community says what are the objects in which it believes, which is the horizon of its desire, for a community intelligently organizes the reality it affirms and conveys it to be performed (Barrera, 1989, pp. 13-19).

Accordingly, the integrated form consolides the shift from an empirical level of culture, (7) where a set of meanings and values conform a way of life, towards a critical or superstructural level, where culture exerts an historical control of meaning. "It is the function of culture to discover, express, validate, criticize, correct, develop, improve such meaning and value" (Lonergan, 1972, p. 32). The development and authenticity that are required if culture is to perform its appropriate role in society, the self-transcendence needed for the integrity of culture, is the responsibility of a cosmopolitan intellectual collaboration to promote. Cultures either have allowed themselves to be marginalized or have capitulated to the absurdity of irrationality, so they are needed of a profound criticism (Doran, 1990, p. 391).

Now, the role to be played by the higher viewpoint of culture meets the additional challenge of discerning the possibilities to work out a cross-cultural community with world-cultural values. An integral dialectics of human history involves the dialectic of the individual, the dialectic of the community, and the dialectic of culture. The integrated form of education is involved in the general tension between limitation and transcendence of this global challenge and in its creative and permanent resolution in terms of 'Cosmopolis.' (8)

The integrated form involves a fourthfold intellectual, moral, religious, and psychic conversion, (9) of persons and communities. The intellectual conversion is a momentous rejection of the myth of the ocular vision as objective knowledge. The moral and political conversion is a radical shift from satisfactions to a normative scale of values in the criteria of decisions, and the reversions of individual, groupal, and general bias through vertical exercises of freedom (Lonergan, 1992, pp. 242-257). Such a conversion is political, in so far as it fulfils the moral reflection and adverts that all education is political and all politics is educative. To perform a reasonable life in community is the reasonable good of human beings, in the former; the latter, in so far as politics should bring up the community among citizens and teach them to sustain it (Weil, 1971). The religious conversion is a total being-in-love as the eficacious ground of all self-transcendence differently expressed in several religious traditions; this conversion is still needed in facing up the loss of credibility in reason and the unmasking of gods and imposed metaphysics. Finally, the psychic/aesthetic conversion allows new and freer images, feelings, and affects to emerge in psyche and fit its appropriate symbols. In so far as cosmopolis is a non-conceptualist and non-rationalist notion, we can realize it as a 'valid sign' which transforms the human field of constitutive and communicative meaning (Lawrence, 1993a, p.14). New cultural matrices should embody these crucial shifts of meaning, through interiority, toward a methodical and transcendent exigence (Lonergan, 1972, pp. 237-244; Mathews, 1985, pp. 115-144). 'Cosmopolis' means this integral form of education (10) (Lonergan, 1992, pp. 263-267).

IV. Education for Cosmopolis

It is hard to see education out of such an historical task "that is too universal to be bribed, too impalpable to be forced, too effective to be ignored" called cosmopolis (p. 263). For cosmopolis " . . . is founded on the native detachement and desinterestedness of every intelligence, that commands man's first allegiance" (Ibid.); for education is the first implementation of that allegiance.

Strategies and tasks of an education for cosmopolis focus on four main related domains: first, they foster the personal and communal self-appropriation of the very dynamisms of human spirit; second, they teach us to think historically; third, they teach us to reach a world-cultural community; four, they teach us a withdrawal from practicality to save praticality.

First, as an invitation to discover and develop the personal and communal self-appropriation of the very dynamisms of human spirit, a cosmopolitan education undertakes the essential task of encouraging and supporting a new emancipative dimension of consciousness. (11) It is its business to foster "those that would speak the simple truth though simple truth has gone out of fashion" (p. 265). This task is performed through mentioned conversions; through the continuous effort to differentiate our polymorphic consciousness; through the passionatedness of being as the core of meaning and the derivative sources, acts, terms, functions, exigences and historical stages of meaning.

Lonergan's insistence on cosmopolis as an 'X' to be determided is a call for imagination, symbols and direct insights, and for inverse insights, critical, and practical questions as well. But a cosmopolitan education also has to ridicule and destroy rationalization of abuses, creation of myths, screening memories of the longer cycle of decline. (12) This task is to be methodically performed (Lonergan, 1972, 125-145) "to discover and expose both the past refusals and the tactics of contemporary resistance to enlightenment" (Lonergan, 1992, p. 264-7).

Finally, in so far as a cosmopolitan education "is not a compromise that will check and reverse the longer cycle of decline, [it is not an] unbiased intelligence that yields a welter of opinions. Cosmopolis is not a Babel" (p. 267). The higher viewpoint of culture is not to be monopolized by only one kind of education; it is an open and ongoing process where sane common sense has other strategies to reach the same end. A cosmopolitan education must be permanently purged of its own bias, otherwise the blind will be leading the blind and both will head for a ditch (p. 265). This is the best rebuttal against any positivistic and final design of "the pedagogy" for cosmopolis; "Cosmopolis is not an academy that endorses opinions" (p. 266).

In the second place, a cosmopolitan education teaches us how to think historically. Toward this end Lonergan's efforts have been devoted through his methodological proposal to obtain an equitable dialogue between past, present, and future. (13) Toward this end we have mentioned the notion of an integral dialectic of the historical process which includes individual, groupal and cultural tensions. The critique of our historicity is an ongoing and empirical task with the concourse of human studies and of our social and cultural arrangements. (14) On a third stage of meaning, Lonergan stresses a shift of attention beyond developments in doing and in speaking to developments themselves (p.177). On this plateau logic loses its key position to become a modest part of method. Science and history become ongoing processes, asserting not necessity but verifiable possibility, claiming not certitude but probability (p. 178).

For human development is incomplete it contributes with its ambiguity to the dialectic of history. People familiarized with action cannot easily understand people with a classical differentiation of their consciousness, and less people concerned on developments and methods (p. 181). History, in this context, is not an iron law, neither it requires to be an organization of the crowd of human events into a universal history of humanity toward an inevitable progress. (15) So, nor automatic progress (liberal/marxist), nor apocalyptic decline as necessary; rather, a free control of the general and plural emergent probability; a dimension of consciousness, a heightened grasp of historical origins, a discovery of historical responsibilities (Lonergan, 1988, p. 109).

In the third place, in order to teach us to reach a world-cultural community, a cosmopolitan education develops the normative function of a culture. "[T]here is cultural community. It transcends the frontiers of states and epochs of history. It is cosmopolis not as an unrealized political ideal, but as a long-standing, nonpolitical, cultural fact. It is the field of communication and influence of artists, scientists, and philosophers. It is the bar of enlightened public opinion to which naked power can be driven to submit" (Ibid.). But it is not a culture in itself, rather, the normativity and "compromise that results from taking the highest common factor of an aggregate of cultures" (Lonergan, 1992, pp. 266-267).

Education for cosmopolis seeks to a balanced development of several functions of meaning (Lonergan, 1972, pp. 76-79), and pluralistic and diversified expressions of them in cultures. An art, a literature, a theatre and multimedia, a journalism and a history, a school and a university, a personal depth and a public opinion (Lonergan, 1992, p. 266) are invited to create and share new possibilities. Education for cosmopolis teaches us not only communicative competences but dialogical procedures and strategies to make our own decisions. It forbids itself 'force' and 'violence' (Sierra, 1993, p. 283).

In order to attain such a world-cultural community, a cosmopolitan education teaches that:

Classical culture cannot be jettisoned without being replaced; and what replaces it cannot but run counter to classical expectations. There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that development . . . But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait" (Lonergan, 1988, p. 245).

In an age marked by fragmentation, the human claim for unity, balance and good judgement persists. We should have shed the illusions of historical innocence. Change does not invariably mean progress, the promoting of rancor and rage is not the way to justice. The new cultural strategy should respect and promote both pluralism and unity. This new critical center must be empirical and historically minded as classicist culture was not. It must be critical, normative, and foundational as contemporary relativism is not. It must be more open to the full range of human self-transcendence than the hermeneutics of radical suspicion (McCarthy, 1992, p. 22).

Finally, a cosmopolitan education teaches us a withdrawal from practicality to save practicality. The shortsightedness of a culture could think of a group, or a state, or a world-court that enrolls 'cosmopolitan' members to proselitisize. But cosmopolis is not such a busybody and is above all politics. Inasmuch as it is a dimension of consciousness, its emancipative power — man's first allegiance — is too universal to be bribed, too impalpable to be forced, too effective to be ignored (Lonergan, 1992, p. 263-66; Tucker, 1991). Emancipative power is self-transcendence of persons and communities.

Emancipation is essential to Lonergan's notion of cosmopolis. (16) Emancipation is the global name for the forthfold conversion mentioned. The Kantian query of "What is the Enlightenment?" should be transposed and translated from a "classicist" control of meaning, conceived as a "universal fixed for all times" to a "modern/or postmodern" control as itself involved in an ongoing process. It is not the "calculating transition from unlightened to enlightened self-interest," (17) but "a conversion of concern for satisfactions to concern for the terminal values that may coincide with the realization of the kingdom of God" (Lawrence, 1981, p. 276).

Finally, Lonergan's method (1972, pp. 364-367), provides a pertinent place to bring scientists and scholars into close contact with experts in very many different fields. New institutional communications will be related to policy-making concerned with attitudes and ends, to the planning to work out the optimal use of existing resources for attaining the ends under given conditions, to the execution of the plans in order to generate feedback and ongoing processes that are revised in the light of their consequences. These actions constitute a genuine institutional pragmatics in communities. In that sense, the longer cycle of decadence may find, for instance, in a distorted university, the best context for a massive institutional surrender of intelligence. Cultural matrices are the base of the intellectual mediations; teachers, students, research workers, should integrate their experiences without putting strit-jackets on them. Its academic presence should be explicit in the dynamic of cultures, in their spontaneous processes. (18) University cannot be sacrificed on the altar of professional-marketing. The integrality of functions of meaning (cognitive, efficient, communicative, constitutive) should be balanced in the educative mediation of a university (Barrera, 1980, pp. 217-224).

V. Conclusion

The educative dimension of cosmopolis, rather than minimizing the powers of human spirit, or declaring the subject's and history's death, as some post-modernist do, stresses on the very root of genuine historical transformations: personal and communal self-appropriation of intentional consciousness in cultural matrices. Education is completely focused on this task through the integrated balance between promoting pedagogies of the self and self-correcting processes of learning of cultural matrices, communication particularly. Education for cosmopolis is radically emancipative; sooner or later, through probable dialectical turns, the eros of human mind and heart shall claim for its own liberty.

Cosmopolis is the integrative and operative answer to that claim, both as an "X" that would challenge human intelligence and as a type of symbol to develop the dramatic artistry of our lives throughout history.

Notes

(1) In this paper, 'education' is a general term; it includes both institutional and non-institutional educative practices. A Lonerganian perspective on education is maily treated in his Lectures on Education given at Xavier College, Cincinatti, in 1959, now published as Topics in Education. CWL 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1993. Also see R. M. Doran (1983) and F. E. Crowe (1985).

(2) The metaphor of the vectors of human development in Lonergan: 1984b, p. 10, and 1985. pp. 180-181. Now, the complementarity is not only between the two vertical directions of vectors, there is also an horizontal parallelism between experience, understanding, judgement, and decision of the two movements, i. e. values are a personal achievement as well as handed down and apprehended (Crowe, 1985, p.14).

(3) Even if education is mainly a communicative mutual self-mediation, we should not forget E. Weil's insistence (1971) on 'work,' and 'labor,' as the first educator of humanity. Education is also decisive in the community's cooperation as the source of authentic power (Lonergan, 1985, pp.5-12).

(4) Now, even if we recognize the postmodern insitence on the tradition-constituted nature of human reason we can not accept MacIntyre's contradiction inasmuch as he holds, on the one hand, that " . . . the Thomistic understanding of rationality: (1) makes sense of the basic capacity of human beings to move in a tradition of enquiry toward rational justification of the sciences; (2) is the only adequate account of the nature of rational enquiry in all three traditions (Agustinian, Aristotelian); and (3) is adequate for the dialectical engagement among the three traditions" . . . and, on the other hand, he argues that, "because these claims are themselves made from within the Thomistic tradition of enquiry, they may undergo dialectical revision in accordance with that tradition's understanding of rationality as tradition-constituted enquiry." (Maxwell, 1993, p. 399). It is possible to say something true and normative for all traditions of enquiry and yet at the same time maintain that the truth of what is said is constituted from within the Thomistic tradition of enquiry.

(5) Lawrence (1993, pp. 194-211) exposes the problem of Lonergan and contingency in the face of postmodern thought. See also his treatment of Enlightenment in (1981, pp. 273-276).

(6) Doran (1988, pp. 38-40; 1990) distinguishes a dialectic of contraries from a dialectic of contradictories. In the first one, the constitutive principles work harmoniously in the unfolding of the changes that emerge from their interaction. In the second one, the changes are a function of the dominance of one principle over the other.

(7) Cl. Geertz (1988) holds that our nervous system was developed interacting with culture; our brain would be incapable to govern our behavior with no symbolic mediations. Culture then, is not something that is added to a virtually complete animal. There is no human nature independent of a culture; neither, a completely established intercultural consensus. These facts do not close the possibility to grasp a superior common factor among an aggregate of cultures (Lonergan's cosmopolis) or a recurrent operative structure of human activities where a transcendental but empiric normativity could be discerned (Lonergan's method). Lonergan means by culture: (1) the complex web of meanings and values which make a way of life worth living, and a society worth belonging to. As such, 'culture' is distinguished from 'the social,' that is, the ways groups of people get things done (1974, pp.90-91; 101-102); and (2) a higher level of culture (1974, p. 102-3) that criticizes, evaluates, and ultimately accepts or rejects meanings and values implicit in expressions and deeds of the first level. "If men are to meet the challenge set by major decline and its longer cycle, it will be through their culture that they do so" (Lonergan, 1992, p. 261).

(8) R. Polin (1993) argues against the possibility of universal values, and against the generous ideal of a world-political order, and against a world-cultural humanity. It would be an interesting instance for a lonerganian critique in terms of the exigences and stages of meaning. Briefly, Polin still lives in an universe where abstract universal validity rules everything.

(9) The notion of a 'psychic conversion' was added to the Lonergan's threefold by R. M. Doran (1981). Lonergan himself speaks of 'affective conversion' by 1977 (1985, p. 180).

(10) For an historical comment on what the word 'Cosmopolis' means, see Toulmin (1990, pp. 67-68; 180-201). For him, 'Cosmopolis' is the 'hidden agenda of modernity.' The care to model the order of the city (polis ) under the order of nature (cosmos ) was latent in the middle 16th century and advanced and made explicited in early 20th century. This modern ideal fused physics, mathematics and logic in the notion of cosmos; and ethics, politics, philosophy, and theology sacrificed their spirit of tolerance and their renacentist ideals in the mode of logic and theory and the explanation by principles. B. Lonergan, thirty years before Toulmin, criticized this type of bias and proposed an explicit agenda to counteract 'The Romantic Agony,' (M. Praz) of a succesion of lower viewpoints. Now, while Toulmin (1990) calls for a profound and explicit reconsideration of cosmopolis as the key step toward a third phase of modernity (or the transition to a post-modern phase), and proposes a renewal of the humanism of the 16th century humanizing modernity, and gives a place for an ideal ecology of institutions and adaptations to trap The Leviathan, Lonergan has already hastened to affirm that cosmopolis is not a world-state, neither a particular social class (1992, pp. 263-264). Finally, the relation Toulmin-Lonergan is not antagonistic. His historical and rhetorical reconstruction of modernity is suggestive (see: Th. J. Farrel & P. A. Soukup, eds., 1993, p. 357 J. A. Campbell's bibliographical commentary).

(11) Eighteenth century's notion of emancipation was conceived in terms of a project of replacing traditional backwardness by the rule of pure reason, not as an operative critique of traditions. Always enlightenment is a matter of the ancient precept "Know thyself," and nowadays it is a matter of cognitional, affective, moral, and religious self-transcendence of the person and the community (Lonergan, 1985, 176-182).

(12) If we transpose Lonergan's distinction between 'imaginative synthesis' and 'systematic unification' (1992, pp. 114-117) to this context, we could differentiate between the reccurrent representative utopias of human history and the critical realist tasks of cosmopolis. Dynamic symbols, images, designs for utopias are welcome in the pursue of the known-unknown, but concrete human history does not consist in the necessary adjustment to these images as images. Lonergan's cosmopolis shows the revolutionary and subversive power of the detachment and desinterestedness of human intelligence while at once prevents one of the ludic imperatives of myth-makers.

(13) "All my work has been introducing history in Catholic theology" (Lonergan, March 28, 1980). Quoted by F. E. Crowe in his lecture for the 20th Lonergan Workshop, Boston College, 1993, p. 1.

(14) We follow Lonergan's metaphor of plateaus (1985, pp. 177-182). See also (Sierra, 1990).

(15) Lyotard (1985) questions the supposed 'we' of the kantian idea of emancipation (The Idea of History from a Cosmopolitan Viewpoint ) and the metaphysical attempts to find a 'true self' for man. We are historical contingent selves, with untranslatable discourses and cultures, he says; "nothing in a savage community disposes it to argue itself into a society of citizens" (p.566). In renouncing unanimity, Lyotard holds we shall fall back on terror, on a kind of terror "whose rationale is not in principle accesible to everybody and whose benefits are not sharable by everybody "(p.562). Such an ethnocentrism, close to a nazism, according to Rorty (1991, p. 212), should be reverted from a Lonerganian aprehension of the dialectic of history (1985, pp. 169-183). We must "learn to remove the tumor of the flight from understanding without destroying the organs of intelligence' (1992, p.8). Lonergan proposes different and pluralistic routes toward a new type of universality. Lyotard unfolds an aesthetic tactic of resistance to a new enlightenment while Lonergan advices us that cosmopolis "is not a dissemination of sweetness and light, where sweetnes means sweet to me, and light means light to me" (1992, p. 266).

(16) Rorty (1991) develops a contrary thesis. He substitutes emancipation for a tolerant reciprocity, which belongs provincially to Western culture, for there is no a supercultural observation platform to which we might repair. "There is no human nature, he says, which was once, or still is, in chains. Rather, our species has -ever since it developed language- been making up a nature for itself. This nature has been developed through ever larger, richer, more muddled, and more painful synthesis of opposing values" (p. 213). Now, as Lonergan says: "Never has the need to speak effectively to undifferentiated consciousness been greater" (1972, p.99). The highest common factor of an aggregate of cultures is not a new human nature, neither a cross-cultural consensus already established. It consists in the norms inmanent in human attention and affectivity, in human intelligence, human judgement, human evaluation, which are operative or ignored in different cultures.

(17) L. Strauss, quoted by Lawrence (1981, p. 276). Rorty's pragmaticism (1991) distrust of conversions and self-appropriation as key steps toward emancipation.

(18) Certainly, there is an important task in reformulating a university curriculum: R. M. Doran proposes a liberal curriculum (1983, pp.152-156); M. J. Matustik brings a program of education for liberation (1988, pp.189-199); F. E. Crowe, proposes a school without graduates, (1985, pp. 157-173). Also, Ph. McShane (1980, pp. 1-28) speaks of a reconstruction of the psychological academic present.

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