The Cognitive Spectrum of Transformative Learning

Argument Summary

Impetus for current transformative learning theory came initially from two directions. The first was from explicitly political critique and consciousness–raising in response to entrenched forms of oppression—such as in feminist critique of patriarchy and in grassroots movements associated with Paolo Freire’s (1972) liberatory Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The second was from Jack Mezirow’s empirical and theoretical studies of transformative learning (particularly, Mezirow, 1978, 1991). I begin by examining Mezirow’s view of transformative learning, endorsing its broad outline but arguing that Mezirow unduly restricts the scope of his definition and model of transformative learning by bringing to them unrealistically narrow conceptions of intelligence, rationality, thought, and reflective judgment. However, by considering transformative learning in the creative arts, we may gain a more comprehensive understanding of those aspects of cognition and thereby see the applicability of Mezirow’s model to a considerably wider range of cases, including particularly those in which transformation is accomplished through embodied activity involving nondiscursive modes of cognition, metacognition, and rationality. I then turn to transformative learning of a type that outwardly might seem least reliant on cognition—depth transformation of the psyche (Boyd, 1989; Dirkx, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2006; Illeris, 2014a, 2014b; Imel, 1998; Tennant, 2012)—showing how it essentially involves a refiguring (at depth) of metaphoric cognition deriving from our embodied experience in the world and thereby a refiguring of subjectivity.

This broadened and deepened view of cognition is important for understanding a type of transformative learning overlooked by the current theoretical literature and overdue for rediscovery and reexamination: transformation of understanding from bloodless “notions” to “real assent” (active, “fleshed out” commitment), as identified nearly 150 years ago in J. H. Newman’s (1979, pp. 76–86) An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. While notional-to-real transformation is close kin to liberatory (consciousness–raising) transformation, the relevance of Newman’s insights for all transformative learning is shown by reference to neurological studies of a peculiar syndrome of cognitive dissociation in which understanding appears intact but remains merely notional and without personal significance or motivational import. Further consideration of Newman’s insights illuminates the essential metacognitive roles in transformative learning of feeling and sociality, as manifested in the authentic commitment needed to overcome the “problematic meaning perspective” whose recognition initiates and motivates the transformative process.

Finally, I consider Kegan’s (1994, 2000) subject–object model, in which transformation occurs when an underlying cognitive formation to which one previously had been merely “subject” or in thrall—that is, a meaning perspective which previously had functioned habitually and invisibly, beneath consciousness—becomes available as an “object” of active conscious reflection to be considered, evaluated, and overcome. I argue that Kegan’s model is applicable to all forms of transformative learning and characterizes the entire spectrum of the transformative cognitive and metacognitive dynamic which makes them possible. Thus, metacognitively active transformation of cognition of this subject–object type is, in Kegan’s (2000) phrase, “the form that transforms”—the essence of transformative learning.

A Critical Reinterpretation of Mezirow’s Theoretical Model

Among the extensive literature prompted by Mezirow’s model of transformative learning, a considerable portion has been critical but appreciative. I count my own response in this category and certainly do not share the “mutinous” doubts of commentators such as M. Newman (2012, 2014). However, along with Collard and Law (1989), Taylor (1993, 1994), Clark and Wilson (1991), and some of the more recent writing on critical reflection, I do see Mezirow’s Socratic assumptions as being unduly restrictive. For it is not the case that motivation and critique in the transformative process must be self-regarding (Stage 2 of Mezirow’s model), nor is it necessary that critical rationality be discursive. Here, I examine those assumptions and suggest how a broadened understanding of cognition, metacognition, and rationality makes Mezirow’s model applicable to a wider range of cases.

Motivation in Transformative Learning: Is Critical Self-Reflection Necessary?

While Mezirow in his earlier studies of transformative learning made critical self-awareness a requirement for transformation of meaning perspective, his later focus is on metacognitive reasoning which “emphasizes insight into the source, structure, and history of a frame of reference, as well as judging its relevance, appropriateness, and consequences” (Mezirow, 2003, p. 61). This may prompt us to ask whether transformation may occur even if involves little self-awareness but is instead wholly or mostly problem focused—that is, in the absence of Stage 2 of his model. In such a case, even though one is not engaged in “self-examination with feelings of fear, anger, guilt or shame” (Mezirow, 1991, p. 50), focus on the problematic situation might be just as emotionally intense, disorienting, critically exploratory, and metacognitively critical of previous ways of thinking, and just as strongly motivating, as would a Stage 2 challenge to one’s self-conception and self-evaluation. While Mezirow does acknowledge that there may be variations from his 10-stage model (for a survey of critical studies, see Taylor, 1998, pp. 39–43; see also K. P. King, 1998), here we need to bear in mind that involvement in things “bigger than oneself” can be life changing even when those things are not “about” one’s life or self or their transformation. For example, one’s motivating distress might be for others, rather than for oneself: self-regarding fear, anger, guilt, or shame may be absent or irrelevant. Nor are life-changing challenges always distressful: Some are exhilarating, even though disorienting and problematic. In these cases, one is engaged in critical metacognitive activity—critical “thinking about thinking”—but focused on the problematic of the task, rather than on oneself (as problematically so tasked). Indeed, I am certain that transformative learning sometimes does occur (and has occurred in my own case and in that of colleagues I’ve consulted) in the absence of Socratic self-critique.

Extending Mezirow’s Account to Nondiscursive Transformative Learning

Mezirow’s essentially discursive type of transformative learning is very important, but his Socratic/Habermasian view of rationality prevents him from recognizing that some transformative learning is entirely nonverbal, yet nonetheless may fully conform to his 10-stage model. In these cases, as I will show, the place of discursive reasoning is taken by enactively embodied cognition inherent in transformative perceptual, imaginal, affective, or performative activity, and rationality takes nondiscursive form. While Mezirow does allow that factors other than discursively self-aware reflection may be among the preconditions and consequences of transformative learning, he appears to instrumentalize the nondiscursive and the not wholly cognitive as merely facilitative, as when, for example, he says that for critical-dialectical discourse, empathy is “relevant” and “qualities of emotional intelligence … are obvious assets,” and that “conditions fostering social justice are essential” because “[h]ungry, desperate, homeless, sick, destitute, and intimidated people obviously cannot participate fully and freely in discourse” (Mezirow, 2003, p. 60). What he says is of course true, but sometimes the nondiscursive and the not wholly cognitive are intrinsic to transformation of meaning perspective and are not mere enabling conditions. This is because learning intrinsically may be perceptual, emotional, imaginal, performative, aesthetic, moral, or social and not merely be (intellectually) about these aspects of experience and activity. And in any of these modes, learning may be transformative, whether or not it involves discursive critical reasoning. Mezirow does recognize that problematic frames of reference—problematic meaning perspectives—need not be declarative or verbal (Mezirow, 2000, pp. 5–6) but fails to recognize that when they are not, there is no good reason, either theoretical or phenomenological, for supposing that their dynamics must be discursively mediated or their problematic character be verbally conceived.

The problematic for a dancer, for example, might be spatio-kinetic, perceptual, aesthetic, and performative; it might be felt rather than thought or it might be thought in experience as experience, perceptually, enactively, rather than as reflection or reasoning. It might be dealt with through nondiscursive modes of intelligence (see, e.g., Gardner, 1983) in creative exploratory performance. Nonetheless (and conforming to Mezirow’s 10-stage model) the dancer’s situation might be first experienced as an uncomfortably disorienting dilemma; there might be relevant self-examination and critique, but enactively in creative experimentation, rather than ratiocinatively; there could be exploration of options, planning, development of new skills, provisional trying out of new approaches, practice and development of competence, and integration of a transformed perspective into the dancer’s frame of values and understandings. This might be as personally significant, and as transforming of the dancer’s meaning perspective, as any more Socratic, discursively mediated transformation would have been. It might even have involved considerable self-reflective critique, but critique exercised through nondiscursive modes of intelligence.

Mezirow seems equivocal about such cases. On the one hand, clearly he recognizes that transformative learning for a dancer might involve such nonverbal (or “presentational”) forms of construal (Mezirow, 2000, pp. 5–6). So, could the whole process of transformative learning sometimes be nonverbal? Mezirow does not make his view on this clear when he says, for example, that “[w]e use language here only when we experience a problem in understanding or want to share the experience” (Mezirow, 2000, p. 5). The dancer of my example does experience a problem, inter alia a problem in understanding, but perhaps says nothing (even subvocally). Are there clues in Mezirow’s (2000, p. 10) view of the distinction between instrumental and communicative transformative learning and of the criteria of rationality appropriate to each?

[R]ationality refers to assessing reasons supporting one’s options as objectively as possible and choosing the most effective means available to achieve one’s objectives. In instrumental learning, rationality is judged by whether we are able to achieve technical success in meeting our objectives (for example, use methods that result in improved performance). In communicative learning, rationality is judged by our success in coming to an understanding concerning the issues at hand.

Some though may still wonder how these cases could legitimately be termed self-reflective exercises of critical rationality, when little or no explicit reasoning was involved. Here, I would draw attention to characteristics of expert activity and expert judgment (see Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). Relevantly to their fields of expertise, experts—including the expert dancer—perceive and experience a situation differently from the nonexpert. What for the novice and the newly competent may require a long and laborious process of reasoning, the expert may immediately see or insightfully grasp in critical detail—or in the case of the dancer, feel spatio-kinetically and aesthetically. Expert judgment may be holistic, intuitive, and quite unlike the laborious, linear, step-by-step plodding of inexpert judgment. But to say that expert judgment for this reason cannot be deemed rational would be utterly absurd. In the case of experts and insightful nonexperts, transformative learning may employ forms of holistic rational judgment quite unlike the linear logic thought to be typical of discursive reasoning. Mezirow’s account needs to be based in a better theory of rationality: a theory able to accommodate the rationality of holistic judgment (see, e.g., H. I. Brown, 1990, on judgment in rationality; and Gadamer, 2004, on “fusion of [interpretive] horizons”) and cognizant of nonverbal forms of intelligence, communication, and learning (e.g., Gardner, 1983).

I shall make one further point. Mezirow (2000, p. 10) says that “the only alternatives to discourse for justifying a belief are to appeal to tradition, authority, or force”. However, Wittgenstein (1967, p. 461) speaks of an Indian geometer’s proof of a geometric theorem, where that proof is given by the geometer showing a geometric drawing and simply saying, “Look at this.” The point here is that showing, illustrating, and pointing are modes of communication and, as in Wittgenstein’s example, can be modes of rational discourse (the geometer’s words were superfluous). Thus, discourse too is a broader category than Mezirow, in his interpretation of Habermas (e.g., Habermas, 1984), seems to acknowledge.

Mezirow’s analysis, while largely correct, needs to incorporate a broadened understanding of discourse, rationality, and critical cognition. Thus amended, its applicability is broadened also.

Transformative Learning and Depth Psychology

I will now consider what may seem the least cognitively dependant of all types of transformative learning: Transformation whose primary dynamic is at depth, where consciousness and subjectivity—indeed, one’s psyche or self—are transformed by a largely unconscious resolution of a personal dilemma. This is sometimes characterized as “transformation as individuation” (Dirkx, 1998) or as formation of self or identity (Illeris, 2014a, 2014b; Tennant, 2012) or as (typically, Jungian) psychoanalytic transformation (Dirkx, 2006; Taylor, 2008), although, as I shall argue, one need not subscribe to psychoanalytic theory in order to identify a powerful transformative dynamic. Robert Boyd (1989, p. 459) sees this form as a “fundamental change in one’s personality involving the resolution of a personal dilemma and the expansion of consciousness resulting in greater personality integration.” This view “is grounded in the field of depth psychology, which is based on a fundamental belief in the powerful role that the dynamic unconscious plays in shaping our thoughts, feelings, and actions on a day-to-day basis” (Dirkx, 2000, p. 2). Summarising the views of Boyd (1989) and Boyd and Myers (1988), Imel (1998, p. 3) explains that they hold such transformation to be accomplished through a

“process of discernment … composed of the three activities of receptivity, recognition, and grieving,” which “calls upon such extrarational sources as symbols, images, and archetypes to assist in creating a personal vision or meaning of what it means to be human.”

Undoubtedly, transformative learning is sometimes of this type. However, its theorists’ characterization of the role of symbols, images, and archetypes as “extrarational” is misconceived. And this has obscured the significance and dynamics of cognitive transformation at depth.

Involvement of Symbolic Processes in Depth Transformation Is Not Extrarational

Boyd deems the crucial involvement of symbolic processes at depth extrarational: He conceives transformative learning as occurring in a “realm of interior experience, one constituent being the rational expressed through insights, judgments, and decision; the other being the extrarational expressed through symbols, images, and feelings” (Boyd & Myers, 1988, p. 275). This leads Dirkx (2000) to describe such transformation as “mytho-poetic.” While the latter description is apt, Boyd’s and Dirkx’s distinction here between the rational and the extrarational is misconceived. In fact, the realm of “symbols, images, and feelings” is intimately linked with reasoning through what Lakoff and Johnson (2003) have termed Metaphors We Live By. As they argue in their book of that title, the discourses of rationality and even our everyday experiences are irreducibly pervaded by metaphors of embodied activity that are constitutive of our worldviews, our subjectivity, and our shared understandings of life. These form a deep and coherently extensible system that largely constitutes the rational order of experience, thought, and life. That is, these metaphors rationally license expectations, assumptions, inferences, and questions and make possible systematic and holistic understanding of ourselves and the world. For example, the metaphoric understanding that life is a journey allows me to consider whether my life “is going anywhere” or may lead me to feel I have “lost my way.” The point here is not that we all must or do see our lives as journeys, but that we may and that this metaphor opens up perspectives on our lives and self-conceptions that would be otherwise unavailable. Pursuing the example (a further metaphor!) if life is a journey, then what sort of journey is mine: a quest? ramble? pilgrimage? escape? random walk? exploration? reconnoitre? And what am I, that I make such a journey: traveller? tourist? fugitive? pilgrim? quester? idler? outcast? refugee? Have I a destination? Have I a home? Is it the journeying or the destination that matters most? Is there something I seek or should seek? May I return? Have I companions, or must I go alone? Am I following an established path, or must I “blaze a trail”? So familiar are such metaphors, not only is it commonly overlooked that they are metaphors, but their deep relationship to embodied human experience too becomes invisible. Take the metaphor of a life path or even a career path. Only terrestrial creatures literally use or (metaphorically) “follow” paths—creatures with legs and feet or other means of terrestrial locomotion—were we no less intelligent aquatic beings, we would likely use aquatic metaphors for life’s “journey,” and these, having different metaphoric implications and resonances, would make possible different understandings of life as a journey. However, it is the depth (yet another metaphor!) of involvement of such metaphors in our understanding, as well as their pervasiveness in everyday life, that implicates them in transformative learning at depth. Metaphors are part of the essence of human understanding.

But suppose the metaphor life is a journey has little resonance for me, then to the extent that I do understand my life, it will be in terms of some other metaphoric perspective(s): perhaps life is a trial or test (of what courage? perseverance? sincerity? cunning? and to what purpose a test?) or life is a game (of chance? of skill? Are there stakes?) or life is a gift (of what sort? from whom? and for what reason?) or life is a work of art, or life is a dramatic stage, or life is a school, or life is a punishment. Nor are we restricted to a single metaphoric perspective, for (to continue the example) understanding and experience of life as a journey might be shaped additionally by other metaphors brought into relation with it. A journey might be a trial, a puzzle, a gift, an education, a reward, a punishment, an ordeal; in sum, it might even be all of these. (See also Turner, 1996, 2014 and Fauconnier & Turner, 2002, on “conceptual blending.”)

Lakoff and Johnson (2003) analyse several “metaphors we live by” in detail, exploring cognitive principles of structuration, coherence, and systematic rationale of complexes of metaphors (especially Chapters 15–22 and “Afterword, 2003”). They stress that these are principles not of lexical definition, but rather of cognition, experience, and understanding. In effect, there is a cognitive “logic” of metaphor—less strict than the logic of literal entailment, but that indeed is its strength, not its weakness, for it is the dynamic of interpretation, conjecture, expectation, analogy, insight, illumination, and creativity and thus an essential part of the rational order of cognition (see also Turner, 1996, 2014; Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). Indeed, the cognitive logic of metaphor is at the heart of what the philosopher C. S. Peirce (2014) termed “abductive inference” and held to be a domain of the logic of inquiry (see also Mezirow, 2000, p. 9, on the importance of metaphoric-abductive inference in “communicative learning”). Metaphors, images, and archetypes active in the unconscious and in its “dialogue” with the conscious ego, given their power to shape and orient our metaphorically structured meaning perspectives and self-understanding, and whether or not they be part of a “collective unconscious,” similarly accord with principles of systematic metaphoric structuration, coherence, and blending: For their power would be inexplicable were their operation devoid of systematic rationale. Thus, although functioning at depth in the “dialogue between ego-consciousness and the powerful contents of the unconscious,” they are not to be deemed extrarational.

Metaphors we live by—and thus metaphoric cognition—permeate not only everyday thought, reason, and experience but also processes of identity formation and depth transformation of self-understanding (e.g., in the case of Charles Darwin discussed below). So while it is appropriate that theorists of depth transformation such as Illeris (2014a, 2014b) criticize Mezirow’s narrowly cognitivist account of transformative learning, they are mistaken in assuming that transformation at depth does not itself have an essentially cognitive dimension, this being metaphoric cognition. The “spectrum” of cognitive activity is broader than they seem to have recognized.

Involvement of Imagination in Depth Transformation Is Not Extrarational

Nor does the involvement of imagination in this “mytho-poetic” form of transformative learning warrant the designation extrarational either; for those same principles of metaphoric structuration, elaboration and blending guide imagination. Similar principles shape the structuration, elaboration, and blending of images and archetypes. It is indeed imagination that creatively explores and realizes the conceptual possibilities that are made possible by the logic of metaphoric and imagistic structuration. Moreover, as Ricoeur (1994) argues, imagination—conceived as poetic, imagistic, metaphoric and narrative activity—is not only essentially involved in the meaning-making constitutive of the emergent realms of culture, society, and action but is essential also to their reasoned critique—as in the dialectical interplay between the imaginaries of “utopia” and “ideology.”

Theorists of transformative learning at depth are right to distinguish it as largely a realm of imagination and feeling (Dirkx, 2001, 2006) and to stress the importance of these components even in Mezirow’s type of transformation (see also Taylor, 1998, pp. 33–35, 2001). But they are wrong to divorce the symbolic, affective, and imaginal dynamics of unconscious processes from reason, for the systematic rationale of metaphoric implication and blending is intrinsic to those processes. However, this is no more than half of the explanation for the power of imagination and feeling in transformative learning. The other half of the explanation is revealed by a type of transformative learning not yet adequately recognized or theorized in the literature.

Newman’s Distinction Between Notional and Real Assent

A mode of transformative learning was identified nearly a century and a half ago by Cardinal John Henry Newman in a philosophical work originally published in 1870, entitled An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (J. H. Newman, 1979). In this work, J. H. Newman (1979, pp. 76–86) introduced a distinction between what he termed “notional assent” and “real assent”: between assent as a merely intellectual phenomenon—that is, where one has only bloodless “notions” of that to which one assents, one’s way of understanding being through abstractions only—and assent in which the way of knowing is at least partly through acquaintance with the particularity of real or imagined instances—a mode of understanding which, unlike mere notions and abstractions, has rich connection with one’s values, feelings, and motives. Substituting the term “understanding” for Newman’s “assent,” we might gloss transformation from notional to real understanding as the “fleshing out” of mere notions with perceptual, remembered, or imagined detail—with all of the conscious and unconscious mnemic, affective, and conative resonances that such detail may have. Newman’s key insight was that mere notions or abstractions have few such resonances and hence have much lesser connection with and potency for one’s system of motives and values, whereas whatever is present to the mind not in the abstract but in rich particularity, offers itself as real, and it is this which moves us to feeling and action. For example,

[G]reat truths, practical or ethical, float on the surface of society, admitted by all, valued by few … until changed circumstances, accident, or continual pressure of their advocates, force them upon its attention. The iniquity, for instance, of the slave-trade ought to have been acknowledged by all men from the first; it was acknowledged by many, but it needed an organized agitation, with tracts and speeches innumerable, so as to affect the imaginations of men as to make their acknowledgment of that iniquitousness operative. (J. H. Newman, 1979, p. 78)

Notional-to-Real Transformation

One’s notional assents may be sincere, but (to borrow a distinction from Geertz’, 1973, cultural anthropology) notional understandings embody “thin” rather than “thick” content. However, transformation of understanding from notional to real is not merely a “filling out” of detail. It is also—and this is what makes it genuinely transformative—a new way of conceiving and understanding that which formerly was only notionally apprehended—a new way of knowing it. And this new meaning, through its transformed connection with one’s valuational and motivational system, is thereby the basis of a transformed meaning perspective—even in the case of Newman’s example above, in which one’s assent both before and after the transformation might be expressed in the very same words—when, in one sense, one’s view has not changed, while in another sense, it is utterly transformed. Summarizing what he saw as the importance of such transformation, J. H. Newman (1979, pp. 85–86) says:

Real Assents … as given to moral objects … are perhaps as rare as they are powerful. Till we have them, in spite of a full apprehension and assent in the field of notions, we have no intellectual moorings, and are at the mercy of impulses, fancies, and wandering lights, whether as regards personal conduct, social and political action, or religion. These beliefs, be they true or false in the particular case, form the mind out of which they grow, and impart to it a seriousness ….

Notional-to-Real Transformation Has Implications for Learning Transfer

Newman’s examples and discussion make it very clear that real understanding embodies richly contextual understanding. Notions, however, are decontextualized abstractions, and as J. S. Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989a, p. 12, cited in Laurillard, 1993, p. 19) note, “to the degree that abstractions are not grounded in multiple contexts, they will not transfer well” (see also J. S. Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989b). By grounding notions in experientially realized context, real understanding facilitates learning transfer, thus enabling us to recognize, appreciate, and respond to the actual relevance of those notions in our lives.

The Distinction Between Notional and Real Understanding Does Not Reduce to the Distinction Between Shallow and Deep Learning

The distinction between shallow and deep learning (Biggs, 1987) has two related aspects. First, it contrasts two broad learning “styles”: the shallow approach which aims at rote retention and the deep approach which aims at understanding the matter to be learned. Second, it contrasts the respective learning outcomes. In neither aspect though does it correspond to the distinction between notional and real understanding. To take an example, a student’s theoretical understanding of an abstract domain such as mathematics may be notional—couched entirely in abstractions—yet deep both in its approach and in the mathematical understanding achieved. Another student though might have gained an understanding of mathematics largely through experiential engagement with the world and have thus acquired a real understanding of the mathematics learned. Nonetheless, the notional understanding of the first student might be both deeper and more extensive than the real understanding of the second. A third student, however, might have taken a shallow approach, merely memorizing equations and techniques without endeavouring to understand when or why they were applicable, thus guaranteeing a shallow notional learning outcome. Notional understanding, then, may be deep or it may be shallow. As regards outcome, real understanding too may be either deep or shallow. But as regards approach to learning, real understanding is never achieved by rote, for rote retention lacks the richly detailed particularity and motivational resonances that typify real understanding.

Notional-to-Real Transformation and Consciousness–Raising

Transformation from notional to real understanding—particularly in the examples Newman discusses—is closely related to consciousness–raising or liberatory transformative learning. The latter arose in response to systemic political oppression, as was the case for Paolo Freire’s (1972, p. 31) socially transformative, avowedly political “pedagogy of the oppressed” with its central process of “conscientization”:

first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and … commit themselves to its transformation … [so that] this pedagogy becomes a pedagogy of all men in the process of permanent liberation.

The Roles of Imagery, Feeling, and Imagination in Notional-to-Real Transformation

J. H. Newman (1979, p. 81) notes that “the natural and rightful effect of acts of the imagination upon us … is, not to create assent, but to intensify it.” He means two things: That real understanding should not substitute for notional or abstract thought but should rather complement it (see also Laurillard, 1993, Chapters 2 & 3); and that it does not usurp the roles of reason and understanding, but rather animates reasoning and understanding.

Newman’s insightful discussion of the distinction between notional and real assent, and of transformation from notional to real understanding, was never brought to a viable stage as theory. Subsequent attempts to reconstrue it in other epistemological terms (e.g., Price, 1969; or, more recently, in some of the work on the distinction between de dicto and de re propositional attitudes) ignored the transformative dimension and so missed its cognitive–motivational point. What was chiefly lacking in Newman’s own perspective, I think, was an empirically based theoretical understanding of the relations between thinking, feeling, and motivation. However, this deficiency has since been addressed by studies in neurology and neuropsychology (see, e.g., Taylor, 2001; A. R. Damasio, 1994, 1999, 2003; H. Damasio, Grabowski, Frank, Galaburda, & Damasio, 1994). I shall briefly discuss just one of these studies—but one which illuminates the importance of the distinction between merely notional and real understanding and the latter’s role in all transformative learning.

The neurologist Antonio Damasio (A. R. Damasio, 1994; see also H. Damasio et al., 1994) discusses a peculiar syndrome of cognitive dissociation in which understanding appears intact but remains merely notional and without personal significance or motivational import. Such cases may result from a particular type of acquired brain injury (that of the 19th-century railway worker Phineas Gage being a well-known example) in which intellectual function appears to remain almost wholly intact, yet has become dissociated from what we might term “humanity” (A. R. Damasio, 1994). Not only is there loss of emotional intelligence and normal human feeling in these cases, there is loss also of anything that we might call “wisdom” (as happened with Phineas Gage, although there is evidence of his partial recovery later in life: see Macmillan, 2008). People so afflicted may retain capacity for abstract thought and for what may appear to be “critical reasoning”—but this is conducted entirely in notions, which sufferers are unable to flesh out with real understanding (in Newman’s sense) and whose seriousness eludes them. Such cases bear out not only the strength of Newman’s distinction but also the importance to transformative learning of contextualized rationality (Clark & Wilson, 1991), rich experiential engagement and emotional connection (see, e.g., Mezirow, 2000, 2003; Taylor, 1998, 2001; and, particularly, Mälkki, 2010, who draws extensively on Damasio’s theory of the biological relationship between emotion, cognition, and motivation).

This, then, is the second half of the explanation for why affective and imaginal dynamics are so important in transformative learning, as was recognized by Mezirow, by theorists of depth transformation, and by liberatory transformative educators. It is these affective and imaginal dynamics which cognitively link insight to commitment (including metacognitive commitment), action, wisdom, and humane connection with others.

Transformation of Problematic Meaning Perspectives

As we saw, Kegan holds that transformation occurs when an underlying cognitive formation—a “way of knowing” that one previously had been subject to—is brought to awareness as a systemic bias or constriction of understanding and thus becomes available as an object of conscious reflection to be considered, evaluated, and overcome. This is not to say that one must have been previously unaware of the principles or perspective that had shaped one’s ways of knowing and conceiving, but rather that one was previously unaware of, or unconcerned by, their problematic limitations. This recognition, however, is merely a beginning and does not of itself constitute a transformation, for transformative learning never occurs passively but is achieved through active confrontation with a difficulty. For although every science has its known anomalies, every worldview its mysteries, and every frame of reference its limitations, some scientific anomalies are “shelved” (Kuhn, 1970), some mysteries of worldview become familiar and even sacred symbols, and many problematic limitations of frames of reference simply get dismissed as “someone else’s problem.” For a transformative process to occur, the problematic must become my problem or our problem, must be experienced as a constriction or obstacle to be overcome, and thereby as motivation for the cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and practical work of values-based commitment that transformative learning requires. Thus, we may gloss Kegan’s insight in terms of Newman’s distinction between notional and real understanding: for transformative learning to be possible, the problematic for the learner must be real and not merely notional. This understanding is inherent in Kegan’s epistemological characterization of transformative learning as a transformed way of understanding, for epistemology is (inter alia) a normative system of cognitive evaluation, and evaluation is fully authentic only when it betokens real (and not merely notional) commitment. However, other modes of evaluation may enter with the epistemological, for all fields have their (often distinctive) ways of understanding, learning, creating, discovering, comparing, evaluating, and appreciating. The dancer of my earlier example had been educated in an aesthetic and in techniques and forms which had shaped her practice and dancer’s sensibility. When confronted with a disorienting challenge to her taken-for-granted frame of reference, she became aware of its limitations; but to see these did not require her to abandon the values in which she had been trained, for it was through those modes of appreciation and evaluation that she was able to see the present inadequacy. Recognizing the problem was an insight but not yet a transformation. It was only through accepting this problematic as hers that it became the motivation for active exploration of alternatives and eventual discovery of a transformative solution.

The case is even clearer with regard to discursive-Socratic transformative learning. To take a much studied historical example: Charles Darwin’s notebooks (Darwin, 2002) show he was well aware of the assumptions and principles of 19th-century creationist science—indeed, he was himself a creationist during the voyage of the Beagle, albeit a critically curious one as his notebooks attest (Darwin, 2002, 2009). However, it was only subsequently to the voyage, in an intense 2-year confrontation with what he now saw to be scientifically unacceptable limitations of the 19th-century creationist perspective and the inadequacies also of pre-Darwinian evolutionary perspectives, that he first conceived his theory of evolution shaped by natural selection and chance variation of heritable characteristics (Desmond & Moore, 1991, Chapters 15–19; Darwin, 2002), thereby transforming not only his understanding of biology but his entire worldview.

Transformation at Depth

Actively confronting perceived limitations or inadequacies of one’s frame of reference is the crucial metacognitive motivation and cognitive dynamic of transformative learning. However, as theorists of depth transformation have recognized, even that confrontation might occur below conscious awareness to emerge consciously only in the “mytho-poetic” dialogue between the conscious self and the unconscious. To continue the earlier example, Darwin’s biographers document not only the intense intellectual ferment of his secret notebooks as he was reinventing biological science but also the deeper psychic turmoil of his many years of secret theorizing (Desmond & Moore, 1991, chapters 15–19 and 21–32; Darwin, 2002). This deeper crisis concerned nothing less than his questioning of life’s significance. It manifested itself in his secrecy and descent into illness and reclusiveness, while he fashioned and refined a new worldview for science and for modernity. The transformation at depth of Darwin’s psyche was wrought through confrontation with the challenges his transformed scientific worldview presented for his self-understanding; it was a conflict between the deep and defining images of Darwin’s social, religious, and scientific enculturation versus those of the worldview now revealed to him through his theorizing: chance instead of design, mechanism instead of purpose, an uncaring cosmos instead of a beneficent creation, nature “red in tooth and claw” (in Tennyson’s later phrase) overturning enlightenment assumptions of nature’s harmony, and the seeming inconsequentiality of the human world, its span no longer the measure of time but dwarfed in time’s vastness. For Darwin, this deeper, troubling, and often painful psychic labour of transformative self-understanding underlay all of his more public transformative achievements. Writ large, Darwin’s struggle would become a transformative confrontation for modernity itself, from which would emerge a culture embodying the integrated secular, materialist, scientific–humanist worldview and human self-conception that Darwin found he had invented—in Kegan’s terms, modernity’s transformed way of understanding itself and its relationship to nature.

Notional-to-Real Transformation

In notional-to-real transformation too, we find an essential confrontation with the inadequacies of a former way of understanding. Here, one’s previous, merely notional understanding had failed to reveal the reality—the real importance and relevance to one’s life—of what was notionally entertained. Thus, in undergoing the process of consciousness–raising, for example, one recognizes the real implications of something for one’s self-conception, responsibilities, and behavior (which, as notions, perhaps one had already entertained but was not motivated to act upon); and on the basis of this transformed way of understanding, one acknowledges the need to reintegrate one’s life through commitment to what one now vividly sees and feels must be done. Moreover, as Newman clearly understood and as theorists of consciousness–raising make explicit, such transformation involves commitment to one’s now reconceptualized relationships with others, and real acknowledgement of one’s having learned from and with others.