The Art & Science of Improvisation – as seen by two boys from Happy Jack
In my lifetime’s study of formative spirituality, I’ve found that
– integral to the transformative dynamics, as well as to their fulfillments & frustrations,
– consistent with most everything I’ve embraced, anthropologically, from Peirce, Lonergan & Bracken vis a vis spontaneity, emergent probabilities & creativity, and
– central to what I believe it’s all about (nod to Alfie) is that dynamic we call “improvisation.”
I will touch upon improvisation, proper (or is that improper?), after first laying the groundwork for how the dynamism of improvisation can be enhanced or hindered & its goals fulfilled or frustrated, within a Lonerganian model of human transformation. If his model, in places, evokes resonances with Maslow, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Jung & others whose thoughts we boomers imbibed, that’s no accident. Lonergan engaged them all.
Lonergan & his protégés systematically related the
1) levels of operations of consciousness: experience, understanding, judgment & decision;
2) transformations of consciousness: intellectual, psychic (affective), moral (personal & sociopolitical) & religious, including even imaginative & aesthetic conversions;
3) transcendental precepts: be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible & in love;
4) notions of Rahner’s (not Hegel’s) sublation, “Aufhebung,” where, per Lonergan, “what sublates goes beyond what is sublated, introduces something new and distinct, puts everything on a new basis, yet so far from interfering with the sublated or destroying it, on the contrary needs it, includes it, preserves all its proper features and properties, and carries them forward to a fuller realization within a richer context.”
5) a directionality to sublation dynamics, which brings to mind normative accounts of Peirce & Kierkegaard, where aesthetics precede ethics which precede logic, or as I’ve translated them, most often, it is the gift of right belonging that precedes (gifts) the right desiring that instills our right behaving as expressed in right believing, all as ordered to right becoming in love.
These transformative dynamics best inform the way we qualify the deliberative in contemplative & personal or “trust relational” terms.
Specifically, I find it helpful to distinguish between deliberative aspects in terms of whether or not they can be reduced to rational discourse. In our intellect’s semeiotic activities, if – as per Peirce – aesthetics precede ethics which precede logic, then,
as an epistemic complement to and evidential ground for all that’s reducible to rational discourse, and
for all that’s gnoseological, propositional, reflective, discursive & meditative and
for all that’s logically inferred,
there can be knowledges that are non-linguistic, that are operative, participatory, relatively immediate & intuitional vis a vis reality’s meanings, that are nondiscursive & contemplative, knowledges that access aspects of reality that we experience in terms of both the aesthetically qualitative & the ethically felt.
Those knowledges that are relatively immediate would include such as the upper blade of Lonergan’s epistemic scissors & his accounts of meaning, understanding & unrestricted desire; Maritain’s connaturality & intuition of being; Polanyi’s tacit dimension; Newman’s illative sense; Hegel’s self-positing & intellectual intuition; Fries’ nonintuitive immediate knowledge; Peirce’s abduction & such. Modal distinctions regarding our experience & knowledge of reality include descriptors such as mediated & immediate, gnoseological & operative, and effable & ineffable. They involve dynamics such as emergent probabilities, transformations of consciousness (conversions) & sublations, etc
We constitutively participate, to some degree, however inchoate, in all of these modes & dynamics.
I apply sublation to our immediate & mediate knowledge of reality, to the ineffable & effable, to our tacit, illative & intuitive knowing & to our deliberative reason, will & trust, none of which are destroyed by various epistemic closures, conversions, transformations or transcended horizons. Rather, they only ever become more perfect in terms of the manner we employ them as we grow in authenticity.
Lonergan & his protégés have also systematically related how the operations of consciousness can go awry, precisely in terms of stifled operations. In Augustinian terms, one might think in terms of privation or parasitization. In Jungian terms – the shadow; Maslovian – failed self-transcendence.
Per Steven Cone, what sublating dynamics will purify are “errors, the greatest of which is one’s putative status as the last word, whereas one’s genuine insights will be strengthened.”
Cone oberves that “faith begins in the immediate apprehension of value conveyed by feelings. But it does not stay there. It transforms one’s whole living. It is capable of transforming one’s community, indeed, of turning the world upside down … fulfilling instead of abrogating human freedom.”
There’s a taxonomy of failed self-transcendence as described by Cone. It includes unauthenticity (not following the transcendental precepts); alienation (who we are as conscious subjects becomes different from who we judge ourselves to be); absurdity (our existence becomes more and more characterized by the absurd as a cumulative irrationality of decisions and actions brings about an ever more distorted, unintelligible, irrational social situation); and Lonergan’s four biases: individual, group, general and dramatic (distinct ways in which we embrace alienation).
Individual bias is personal egoism that interferes with pursuing the transcendental precepts. Lonergan states, “Egoism, then, is an incomplete development of intelligence.” Per Cone, the desires and fears we have as individuals concerning our individual satisfactions motivate us to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible in situations where to do so is to our advantage. However, in situations that look beyond our interests, that benefit others, or that call for self-sacrifice, the free exercise of our intellectual and moral being is stifled.”
Group bias, per Cone, is “individual bias writ large,” where “the whole creative potential of a society may be devoted to the justification of its own interests and ends & ideologies develop as self-justifying discourse.”
General bias, per Cone, is a “malfunction of common sense with respect to its competence to judge the whole world. Sadly, “when a problem emerges that is beyond the situations known to our common sense or whose solution does not lie in our common reservoir of practical insights, theoretical In its imperialistic devaluing of forms of knowledge different from it, the general bias of common sense stunts the free exercise of the spirit of inquiry.”
Dramatic bias, per Cone, differs from the individual, group and general bias, which are defects in our relation to the world of being and value or malfunctions based in common sense with respect to the objects of our cognition. Cone offers that “dramatic bias, on the other hand, is a defect in us, as the subjects who do the relating. Dramatic bias is a flight from unwanted insights concerning ourselves.” It involves a malfunctioning of our censorship, where the function of the censor, which is normally constructive in admitting and arranging the images and impulses most appropriate for the functioning of our consciousness, becomes distorted.
Cone elaborates that “within us there is not only light but darkness, and we often wish to stay in the darkness. When the functioning of the censor becomes distorted, we repress images and impulses that lead toward uncomfortable truths concerning ourselves. Albeit in an unconscious way, we lie to ourselves about ourselves because we cannot stand the reality of what is in us.”
Lonergan goes beyond psychoanalytic theory, Cone observes, to speak of different aspects of consciousness moreso than to distinguish consciousness, preconsciousness and unconsciousness.
What some call the unconscious, Lonergan considered to be the “twilight of what is conscious but not objectified.”
I cannot more highly commend Steven Douglas Cone’s Transforming Desire: The Relation of Religious Conversion and Moral Conversion in the Later Writings of Bernard Lonergan.
Integral to these transformative dynamics, as well as to their fulfillments & frustrations, consistent with most everything I’ve embraced, anthropologically, from Peirce, Lonergan & Bracken vis a vis spontaneity, emergent probabilities & creativity, and central to what I believe it’s all about (nod to Alfie) is that dynamic we call “improvisation.”
I set forth the transformational dynamics above to provide some specificity to my primary interest, herein, which is to explore the promises & perils of the dynamics of improvisation, which, per my own theoanthropological vision, constitutes our very raison d’être, which is ad majorem Dei gloriam, as the Jesuit motto puts it, or our very theosis as ordered toward theophany.
My earliest influences regarding improvisation were those of my birthplace, New Orleans, mostly Al Hirt, Louis Armstrong & a holy host of Jazz musicians. My primary influences in exploring improvisation have been my friend, Tom Belt, theologically, and Cynthia Nielsen, philosophically. Improvisation just always seemed to me to lie at the very heart of my most perduring interest – formative spirituality.
Tom Belt’s
God wills our improvisation
Creation at the Improv
Cynthia Nielsen’s books, chapters & articles
especially
“Gadamer on the Event of Art, the Other, and a Gesture Toward a Gadamerian Approach to Free Jazz,” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, March 2016, ISSN 1927-4416
I once lamented that, in order to more fully flesh out the abstractions of my theoanthropology in a more accessible & rhetorically persuasive way, it would take certain gifts that I lack. This is especially true in situations that occupy my conceptual map-making more than my participatory imagination. What it would take, specifically, is a combination of some storytelling & concrete example-giving. I just resolved to keep writing what I do in the way that I do, while leaving it to Providence to guide me to the stories & story-tellers, who might best complement my ouvré.
As Providence would have it, in searching the internet for the lost email address of a friend, whose dear Mom had grown up across the lane from my own childhood home (on the banks of the Mississippi River in a hamlet called Happy Jack, 43 miles south of New Orleans), I discovered that Randy Fertel had published two more books after his 2011 The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak , which had caputured my imagination & endeared me for manifold reasons.
The focus of Randy’s latest books?
Improvisation!
Is there not an obvious confluence with:
Cynthia Nielsen’s observation that –
Gadamer’s philosophical project upholds difference, since it requires a dialogical interplay between self and other that creates the possibility for a transformative experience.
Tom Belt’s credo that –
“What the world gives to God is what it gives back to God in improvisation upon and within the grace of being.“
and Randy’s:
“Musical improvisation is, like chaos science as we will see below, apparently carefree and random and yet it is both deterministic and free.”
All of this, above, has been part of my stage-setting for – not reviewing, but – reading Randy’s books! Obviously, I’ve skimmed them, scanned the indexes & chapter titles, read others’ reviews and did select keyword searches. I’ve already gleaned our resonances & aspire to bolster his claims. Randy’s accounts of improvisation are a veritable cornucopia of all the concrete examples & story-telling I ever could’ve hoped to have found as a complement to my otherwise sterile prose. I knew it from the moment I saw him quote
Oscar Wilde: “Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.”
Below are urls I commend to those further interested:
https://www.fertel.com/a-taste-for-chaos/
https://chimeraobscura.com/vm/episode-588-randy-fertel
https://shepherdexpress.com/culture/books/winging-it-improvs-power-peril-in-the-time-of-trump/
https://commonedge.org/randy-fertel-on-the-power-and-peril-of-creative-improvisation/
https://www.assayjournal.com/randy-fertel-a-taste-for-chaos-creative-nonfiction-as-improvisation65279-12.html
https://jungstudies.net/2015/03/new-book-by-randy-fertel-a-taste-for-chaos-the-art-of-literary-improvisation/
Enough of all that.
I’ve read the menu.
I’m ready to feast!