Thinking as to what to write up in the blog regarding the course Philosophy of Communication, I did read, reflect and reproduce in the previous article, ‘Objectivity is the Fruit of Authentic Subjectivity’ that I published after a detailed study. But giving a second thought to it and receiving practical comments, I decided to be more realistic in my thinking for myself and you (the reader). As a result, Down to Earth is the advertisement that I will be advertising for this product (course on Philosophy of Communication).
What is Philosophy? What is Communication? What is Philosophy of Communication? How should be a Philosophy of Communication? What is happening when we are communicating? How is this process of communication carried out in our daily life? How and when does one know that the one’s communication is true, meaningful and correct; that it represents the objective reality, and not a mere ‘subjective viewpoint’? When can we say that communication is tailored for the person, that is, when does it becomes real, and a personal interest of a person? This appears to be the primary concern of the philosophers (of me) while reflecting on the process of communication (experiences, understanding, and judging - Lonergan’s EUJ method).
In this context the works of Bernard Lonergan seems to have dealt directly and fairly systematically with communication. Three aspects of his writings readily illustrate his profound concern for communication: (1) his aim to seek a common ground on which people of intelligence might meet,[1] (2) his methodological proposal to obtain an equitable dialogue between past, present, and future,[2] (3) the participative and active reading his texts demand due to his insistence on personal and communal self-appropriation.[3] Hence, you and I will attempt to follow his philosophy of communication in constructing our method for communication in the contemporary world.
As Lonergan argues persuasively in chapter seven of Insight, wherever the possibility of independent and open communication has been stifled, the seeds of totalitarianism have already been sown.[4] The intensity of the crisis of meaning is affecting us today much more than ever. In this context, Lonergan’s search for a common ground can be clarified as a progressive and cumulative effort to articulate a normative source of meaning. It is in ‘insight’ that the common ground emerges, not as a set of contents of cognitive acts, but as a basic group of operations that constitute all human beings as knowers.[5] In many subjects, it is a common ground for communication and collaboration. The fact that we all understand and share the common dynamic of knowing is, when affirmed, the basic and radical move onto the common ground.[6]
You may say to yourself, after reading thus far as to, ‘why are you pakkauing (boring) us with your philosophical jargon’ or ‘abe saale philosophy kyu mar raha hai malum hai philosophy kar raha hai’ (hindi) We know you are doing philosophy no need of advertising or ‘ye be Lonergan ka baccha nikla’ (hindi) You also have become one of the adopted sons of Lonergan or whatever you are thinking right now with a smile on your face!!!
Lonergan defines the foundations of communication as sharing human meanings and values. He says, “A community …is an achievement of common meaning”[7] and “The genesis of common meaning is an ongoing process of communication, of people coming to share the same cognitive, constitutive, and effective meanings.”[8] Communication is then an ongoing process of sharing meanings and values.
Let us take for instance, the reel movie We Are Family[9] (2010) or as matter of fact the real movie of our family. We see that each of our family members are stretching themselves in different tangibles but yet we live in our sweet family, happy family. No matter what and how our day has been we live together and stay together (common ground). We share our lives, our values, our meanings and our whole being. I think it’s the same when you and I are doing our daily task and duties be it school, college, workplace in terms of institutions or be it friends in school or in locality or in colleges or anywhere you meet up and make, or be it the manager of a company or office.
In our daily lives, we communicate a lot of what we are simply by living our lives no matter where we are and what we are doing. But I think you and I are called to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible[10] (airr… that we breathe in our daily lives).
Reading McLuhan’s Understanding of communication we discover his insistence upon the way in which media affects individual, man and society. In this regard, when he says, ‘medium is the message,’[11] he clearly reveals that, in communication the way we communicate often determines what we communicate, and therein just about everything else in life and society.[12] In Understanding Media (1964), his study on media, he includes not only the major communication media, such as written and spoken words, television, radio, telephone, movie and comics but also includes money, cars, weapons, clothing and housing in the communication media category. It drives home the point that in his theory of communication everything is communication.
McLuhan completely affirms that dialogue is the fundamental mode of communication. In today’s context, the word ‘communication’ is used in a narrow sense. However, he says that ‘communication’ is a much broader concept and it is multi-relational and not a linear type.[13]
McLuhan shared in a dialogue with G. E. Stearn about his concept of communication thus:
Communication, in the conventional sense, is difficult under any conditions. People prefer rapport through smoking or drinking together. There is more communication than there ever is by verbal means. We can share environments, we can share weather, we can share all sorts of cultural factors together but communication takes place only inadequately and is very seldom understood… There is a kind of illusion in the world we live in that communication is something that happens all the time that it’s normal… Actually, communication is an exceedingly difficult activity. In the sense of a mere point-to-point correspondence between what is said, done, and thought and felt between people-this is the rarest thing in the world. If there is the slightest tangential area of touch, agreement, and so on among people, that is communication in a big way. The idea of complete identity is unthinkable. Most people have the idea of communication as something matching between what is said and what is understood. In actual fact, communication is making. The person who sees or heeds or hears is engaged in making a response to a situation which is mostly of his own fictional invention.[14]
It throws light on McLuhan’s interpretation that in communication there is no transportation of information from a source to a target, but a transformation of the source and target mutually.[15] Thus, in broad sense, he acknowledges that we are all senders and receivers, encoders and decoders, producers and consumers in communication. Ultimately, it is the focus now on prosumer.
According to Lonergan, our communication depends upon our mode of being. To be is to be real and contextual. It is the realistic existence of ever being in the totality of being. It is realized in the way we express, interpret and live out this reality. For, our knowing is knowing being, our communication is communicating being. The object of all our knowing and meaning is being and it is the core of all meaning. It obviously has different meanings, in the sense that it anticipates everything and it will be the task of insight and judgment to render its meaning explicit in the world of daily life. It is this being, the reality, which constitutes the remote context in communication.
We can agree with Lonergan’s claim that, to analyze the world of daily life philosophically is to begin to differentiate one’s consciousness. That is to say, it is to begin to be aware of and to recognize different forms or modes of human knowing and, consequently, of human communication that endeavors to share different modes of meaning, different aspects or realms of reality, different worlds; all of which are desirable and necessary aspects of the real world, none of which must be confused with any of the others.
The term ‘common sense’ refers to a down-to-earth, practical, sensible attitude. It is the mode of knowing practiced by everyone in the business of daily living. Lonergan refers to this as the ‘self-correcting process of learning’, which is constantly taking place in human beings. The act of communication is always concrete, particular, here and now. Communicating intelligence then must be employed in the way proper to common sense if the act is to be effectively performed. Common sense cannot analyze or criticize itself because it is concerned only with practical thinking, saying and doing, with what is concrete and particular, here and now.
The movement of the subject from the immediate infant world to the adult mediated world of meaning symbolizes growth in one’s world. Along with the expansion of one’s world, there is also simultaneous development in one’s communicative process. For, communication at the meditated world of meaning involves not only the experiential reality but also the habits, beliefs and values that one acquires, learns and develops along with the growth path of one’s world. It is not only the sensory or immediate environmental communication but also the meaningful communication of knowing, truth and objectivity of one’s reality. One achieves this expansion and development in and through communication and further continues to grow in it. The search for meaning, the discovery of the real, expanded adult world, is a life-long task. Beginning with the data supplied to us by the world of immediacy, we move slowly towards its understanding, apprehension and communication in order to construct a world mediated by meaning.
Human living, holds Lonergan, is something to which meaning is essential. All our cultural achievements such as symbols, art, language, literature, religion, science, history, philosophy, theology and interpersonal relations are intricately involved in acts of meaning. Communication is sharing of meaning, for it is the meaning itself that one has to share for the communication to take place. Meaning then is something that is constitutive of human community and communication. It forms the inseparable element of human life and in the transformation of human environment as well as that of the human person.
Each one’s apprehension and interpretation of the world is his or her meaning of the world. What one person means is communicated to another intersubjectively, artistically, symbolically, linguistically, incarnately through verbal and non-verbal languages. So individual meaning becomes ‘common’ meaning. Lonergan describes communication as involving a re-expression of the appropriated meaning, as being guided by a practical insight.
The renewed commitment for communication calls for the practice of mediation that could lead to overcoming the conflict and resume meaningful communication. We are living in a world today which witnesses accelerating growth in the problems of terrorism and violence that are directly related to the breakdown of communication (a current event that is racing in my mind is that of Hosni Mubarak, hitting the headlines of the world news – a step down). It has become of vital importance to resume dialogue and revitalize communication channels. Communication conceived as a mutual self-mediation of human beings, their meanings, and values becomes dynamic and transformative. It is a space where a co-production, a co-reference, a co-creation of new-shared meanings, a co-transformation of wholes constituted by common meanings and values is performed.
Communication is a vital value in as much as it is an inseparable element of human life. Communication is a concrete form of human good, and its process “is not merely the service of man; it is above all the making of man, his advance in authenticity, the fulfilment of his affectivity, and the direction of his work to the particular goods and a good of order that are worthwhile”.[16] Lonergan thus emphasizes the fact that communication is fundamentally a communication of values that are mutually mediated in the context of the human good of the individual and the community.
Lonergan’s search for the common ground calls for a methodical inquiry into the nature of insight. In short, his method is an open, ongoing, progressive and cumulative process which we apply to the field of communication for deriving an adequate philosophy of communication. To this effect, Lonergan suggests the experiential communication method of mutual self-mediation in context to actually create Cosmopolis, a biased free community. We will employ this mutually mediated communicative process to show how it is applicable to any tradition or situation across all the culture in the world and the reader is enjoined to embrace the work of personal growth that is necessary for mutually self-mediated communication.
We need a bridge that can help us to communicate with the love of the community and for the community by dialogical attitude. This presupposes a presence of openness and readiness. It brings out the aspect of communion. Here the Theory of Communicative Action of Habermas comes into action. Thus according Habermas, if one wants to be understood, one inevitably claims to be doing the following:
Uttering something understandably (speech)
Imparting something to be understood (content)
Making oneself thereby understandable (subjectivity)
Coming to an understanding with another person (rightness - objectivity)[17]
We can conclude with future prospects of Lonerganian process of communication to contemporary field of communication that aims at communication as ‘communion’, at the establishment and promotion of human community, as opposed to communication as ‘information-sharing’.
Lonergan suggests an overall plan for communication, by conscientizing the public opinion through media literacy and critical media education, towards consensus in the construction of a new, creative world. It is a movement of the elemental ‘we’ to expand beyond the minimal nuclear centre towards the ‘good of order’ as such by overcoming the inherent dialectical tensions of the community. An intellectual conversion of this sort will result in a cosmopolis, an overall attitude of mind and heart guided by the liberated detached desire to know. It is a personal, internalized, philosophical attitude that would become a philosophical public opinion and transcend all sorts of powers, groups and biases. The cosmopolis thus fosters and works through communication conceived as mutual self-mediation.
Meaning is something constitutive of human community and communication as common meaning is achieved and shared in communities where cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart). We could thus conclude in the words of Lonergan affirming that “through communication there is constituted community and, conversely, community constitutes and perfects itself through communication.”[18]
Cor Ad Cor Loquitur (C2C)
[1] Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Insight: A study of Human Understanding (London: Toronto Press, 1957) 7.
[2] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Toronto Press, 1971), chapters 5-14. Explaining the connection between present, past and future communication Lonergan writes: “The thinking of people generally, at the present time, has been the result of communication in the past, communication through education and through the media of communication. Their thought comes from that source. They may change their ideas to a certain extent, but by and large their ideas correspond to the communication. As people’s minds as they are at present are the result of communication in the past, so what they ought to be in the future can be a result of further communication”. PL, 309.
[3] Francisco Sierra-Gutierrez, “Communication: Mutual Self-Mediation in Context”, Commu-nication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age, eds. Thomas Farrel and Paul Soukup (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1993) 269.
[4] Robert M. Doran, “Foreword: Common Ground”, Thomas Farrel and Paul Soukup, eds. Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1993). Here Doran refers to Bernard Lonergan, Insight, chapter 7, 232-269.
[5] Lonergan, Insight, 7.
[9] We Are Family movie is the remake of the 1998 film Stepmom. Maya (Kajol) is the perfect mother . Her life revolves around her three children , Aleya (Aanchal Munjal) , Ankush (Nominath Ginsburg) , and Anjali (Diya Sonecha) , who think nothing less than the world of her . Despite being divorced from her husband , Aman (Arjun Rampal) Maya has ensured that everything runs smoothly in her house , under her watch , and that they continue to remain a happy family unit . However , when Aman introduces his girlfriend , Shreya (Kareena Kapoor) a career oriented woman , who has a lot to learn about children , to the family , the situation imediately takes an unexpected turn . When an incident changes their lives drastically , bringing the two women under the same roof , they find themselves putting to test an unusual situation ; can two mothers make a home ? Accessed from http://popcorn.oneindia.in/movie-synopsis/4844/we-are-family.html, accessed on 12th February 2011, accessed at 10: 25 pm.
[11] McLuhan, Understanding Media: An Extension of Man ed. McGraw Hill (New York: Gingko Press, 2003) 16.
[12] Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (London: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 5.
[13] Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 5.
[14] Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 5.
[15] Cavell, McLuhan in Space, 5.
