Excerpt from Finding the Mind: Preface

Bringing Lonergan’s Discovery to a Larger Audience—Problems


Anyone who has read a text more than once knows that, with each new reading, the meaning changes, and often increases. Often we can approach a text for the second or third time from a different horizon--a horizon changed for us by the first reading.

However, those who have read both of Lonergan’s major works, Insight, A Study of Human Understanding (1958 & 2000) and Method in Theology (1972), will recognize my reference here to the difference in writing style and delivery between the two works. Whereas Insight is thick, intricate, and cavernous, Method In Theology feels like breathing fresh air, especially after having struggled through Insight with its “in the seventeenth place” esoterica. For example, in his chapter in Insight, “Metaphysics as Dialectic,” Lonergan relates:

. . . let us suppose that a writer proposes to communicate some insight (A) to a reader. Then by an insight (B) the writer will grasp the reader’s habitual accumulation of insights (C); by a further insight (D) he will grasp the deficiencies in insight (E) that must be made up before the reader can grasp the insight (A); finally, the writer must reach a practical set of insights (F) that will govern his verbal flow, the shaping of his sentences, their combination into paragraphs, the sequence of paragraphs in chapters and of chapters in books. Clearly, this practical insight (F) differs notably from the insight (A) to be communicated. It is determined by the insight (A) as its principal objective. But it is also determined by the insight (B) which settles both what the writer need not explain and, no less, the resources of language on which he can rely to secure effective communication. Further, it is determined by the insight (D) which fixes a subsidiary goal that has to be attained if the principal goal is to be reached. Finally, the expression will be a failure in the measure that insights (B) and (D) miscalculate the habitual development (C) and the relevant deficiencies (E) of the anticipated reader. . . .It follows, then, that properly speaking expression is not true or false. (1958, p. 556 & 2000, p. 579)

It is not always like this in Insight. However, Lonergan wrote Insight with the scientist in mind; for a “sufficiently cultured consciousness;” and for those already familiar with reading philosophical history and its texts. For the teacher looking for cognitional theory, or for the cultured renaissance reader who could benefit greatly from Lonergan’s contributions, alas and however, Insight is entirely too long, technical and esoteric [8] (1958, p. xxviii & 2000, p. 11).

Thus, in reading Insight, the reader is asked to understand B-C-D and E before getting to Lonergan’s A. Whereas Method In Theology offers a more literary style and makes much quicker correlations between the A-B-C’s developed there and the personal interior of the reader. As such, Insight has a more foundational “punch” for the scientist, but is difficult for those who are not scientists; whereas, Method in Theology is a happier read for the teacher, or the literary scholar, or the renaissance reader.

The further problem with Method in Theology, however, is that it was apparently written explicitly for theologians; or at least an unknowing reader must presume so by a cursory review of the book’s title and by its many references to theology and theologians.

Moreover, many college and university teachers presently teach from the point of view of having understood Lonergan’s contributions. For instance, “Lonerganian” teachers in undergraduate secular institutions may order Method in Theology for their students in variously-named philosophy of religion courses. After doing so, teachers may easily convey that, in this work, Lonergan’s more comprehensive philosophical insights are transformed and adapted to theology; but that any field will benefit from such transformation and adaptation. In this way, savvy teachers can mediate Lonergan’s contribution to philosophy-proper through the use of Method in Theology, and direct students to relate it to different concerns thereby gaining a larger audience for the work.

Even so, the question remains whether Method in Theology is accessible for college undergraduates; or for non-theology students involved in special or general studies; or for those new to any sort of philosophical study; or for the easy consideration of administrators in secular colleges and universities. My experience of using this text for such students: It is not.

Regardless of his present limited (albeit growing) audience, Lonergan’s contribution is to the larger philosophical project in the academic fields, to the cultural studies, and to the foundations of the education of persons. Lonergan clearly knew that his work has vast implications for the foundations of the academy; for the philosophy of education and its various subsets; for cultural studies; for philosophy; and for any variously named departments of study--not to mention for statisticians and scientists involved in studies of the natural-physical world, cognition, and the brain. Also, his work self-consciously reaches beneath and far beyond the sciences and theology, though not beyond the scientist, the theologian and the renaissance reader, as critical thinkers in an increasingly complex world.

In fact, however, it is not so easy to leave the subject outside one's calculations .... (1958, p. 408; & 2000, p. 433)

Thus, I appreciate greatly Lonergan’s genius, his efforts at creating a dialogue with scientists, his forays into the philosophy of education, and his great contribution to method in theology. However, I also recognize the implied limitation in readership that Insight’s esoterica and Method’s theological references present. Precisely because of the creative import of his work, it needs to “get out there” in ways that transcend both problems in appealing to a more general reader-access.

Further, Lonergan was a Jesuit and spent his major intellectual work from within the venue of theological and religious studies. His long-term study of St. Thomas Aquinas is well-known throughout the circles of Lonergan scholars. Moreover, because Lonergan was a major thinker who made major contributions, many from his intellectual milieu have developed their own work around what was basic to his.

However, the writing emerging from these works is often published in relatively arcane publications in the fields of academic philosophy, theology, and religion. Also, many writers use the still-unknown “Lonergan” in their book titles; or maintain their religious references there and in their subject matter; or they maintain an esoteric language and presentation equal to or surpassing Lonergan’s own. In any of these cases, and well-written or not, the movement of Lonergan’s contribution through these writers towards a larger audience of educators and persons of good commonsense is slow.

Also, many who would benefit from Lonergan’s work mistakenly regard Lonergan as “only” a Catholic or Christian theologian. Some might argue that, though remarkably intelligent, after all, Lonergan is speaking only from a belief, faith, doctrinal, ideological or classicist set of views. If the critique is true, and by secular and critical-methodological standards, such arguments would rightly render Lonergan’s work irrelevant to all but the most devoted of religious followers. Indeed, such a critique reveals a tension that rightly exists between secular and religious domains. However, this critique of Lonergan’s work is fundamentally wrongheaded, and those who understand Lonergan’s meaning will recognize a moment of high irony in such a dismissal. As such, a brief description of the sweep of Lonergan’s contribution is appropriate to this section of the present work:

Though Lonergan was indeed a Jesuit, he was also a philosopher of the first order. As such, we can read his work from a philosophical point of view without taking into consideration his religious foundations, one way or the other. That is, his work is fully critical.

Further, as a philosopher, Lonergan was a critical generalist who gathers in the insights from a long history of philosophical thought and brings them into view under a creative and critical venue. Thus, transcendental method fully embraces science and its empirical method—by defining knowledge in its most critical-empirical way and by methodologically clarifying, and setting up the conditions for us to verify, the empirical ground of all knowledge fields. That ground can be found in the actual structure and dynamism of human cognition—in everyone’s, and especially yours, which is the fundamental focus of this work. Further, it can be found in the actual historical unfolding and development of human knowledge (1958, p. 387; & 2000, p. 412).

Thus, if we begin from the point of view of Catholic scholarship and Christian education, Lonergan’s contribution is to theology and to the foundations of religion. This contribution includes a critical view of classicist thought, ideology, doctrine, logic, and the philosophical dimension of theological studies. Here, the philosophical assumptions of the theologian are called into question and laid open for self-critical review (or what we will refer to as foundational review).

Therefore, Lonergan’s work explicitly requires of the theologian a critical openness towards, and active critique of, the theologian’s own philosophical inheritance (their intentionality analysis and foundational review), their own minds and methods, their own biases, and the underpinnings of all specific church doctrine. For Lonergan, then, philosophy provides the critical, edifying, negative-dialectic for theological and for religious studies. Far from portraying philosophy as the “handmaiden of religion,” this work portrays philosophy as the empirically verifiable source of critique for the theologian and for theology. Also, Lonergan did not place himself or his work outside of such a critique.

On the other hand, and from the point of view of secular education and the history of thought, Lonergan’s contribution is to the critical philosophy underpinning all domains of thought, both personal and scientific, and both writ-small and writ-large. Here, Lonergan is in communication with the philosophical tradition as a whole, and with the various schools of thought that have emerged from the one cultural root, including those in the philosophy of history.

Considering again Lonergan’s writings, Method in Theology holds philosophical insights that are highly relevant to all thinkers in all knowledge fields. However, again, those insights remain obscured by the book’s title, its intended audience of theologians, and its example of and adaptation to theology. Thus, many highly intelligent thinkers, who may have neither “formulated nor scrutinized” their own sets of assumptions, can fail to be introduced to a body of work that provides a systematic and critical avenue for such scrutiny and formulation.

On the other hand, though Insight is written for the scientifically minded person, it is not exactly a weekend read. That being said, throughout Insight we find a continued formulation and reference to the personal scrutinizing experiment of self-reference for any thinker in any knowledge field:

To affirm knowing it is useless to peer inside, for the dynamic pattern is to be found not in this or that act but in the unfolding of mathematics, empirical science, common sense, and philosophy; in that unfolding must be grasped the pattern of knowing and, if one feels inclined to doubt that the pattern really exists, then one can try the experiment of attempting to escape experience, to renounce intelligence in inquiry, to desert reasonableness in critical reflection. (Lonergan, 1958, p. 416 & 2000, p. 441)

In all of his writings Lonergan rejects an arbitrary dismissal of, or an arbitrary acceptance of, transcendental or general empirical method. Further, Lonergan invokes the present disunity in-and-between all knowledge fields; and he relates a misunderstanding of the experience-of-inquiry as cause for the present disarray in our foundations of thought. As a critical approach to that disarray, a thorough engagement with Method in Theology finds, first, transcendental method and self-appropriation identified as not only in and for theologians but also in and for all persons (writ-small).

Second, we find that Lonergan developed the functional specialties as an expression of an heuristic structure of being--as an explicit metaphysics--drawn from an analysis of transcendental method and from its match with the unfolding of human knowledge in history. As such, he presents a clear view of the philosophical underpinnings of all knowledge fields, institutions, and cultures (writ-large) (1972, Chaps. 5-14). Moreover, again, such functional specialties are far from arbitrarily formed. Rather, they emerge from the data available for review of conscious structure:

For self-appropriation is of itself a grasp of transcendental method, and that grasp provides one with the tools not only for an analysis of common sense procedures, but also for the differentiation of the sciences and the construction of their methods. (1972, p. 83)

The work is bold, but bold is what we need.

Further, included in the knowledge fields, of course, is the integrative field of the philosophy of education, as well as curriculum development and classroom teaching where we come into communication with the political, social, ethical and spiritual dimensions of consciousness and culture.

Third, beyond the import of self-appropriation on individual persons, and beyond the import of the functional specialties on the unity of all knowledge fields and institutions, transcendental method is a general theory that points to conscious structure as a trans-cultural base. Such a base is universal, verifiable in everyone and every culture, and imports on all persons, culture, and history (1972, pp. 282-3). Thus, again, Lonergan draws into theory the underlying base and ground of all knowledge fields and cultures. He develops that ground from the broad outlines of all human understanding; and that understanding is rooted in the dynamism of our own cognitional structure. From that theoretical understanding, we can call up our own conscious structure for its analysis and verification; and indeed, that calling-up is what the present work is fundamentally about. As such, we finally can include ourselves in our notions of objectivity without sinking into a quagmire of "mere subjectivity" from which there is "no exit."

Further, those who spend any time with Lonergan’s work, as a rule, come away with the right notion that this person was, indeed, a first-rate philosopher; that he addresses the long-arch of human history and the place of science in it in post-modern life; and that his work is yet to be felt in the world in ways that it should be, and most probably will be.

The above is only a brief description of the sweep of an otherwise thorough-going, creative, and critical development in 20th century philosophical thought--thought that I hope will have great developmental and corrective influence in the 21st century.