JDMA Vol. 1 (2001) Download Entire Issue

I thought I saw the fallen flower Returning to its branch Only to find it was a butterfly 1 3 The Problem of Insight So I turn to the astonishing naïve detachment of Lonergan's great work.It is a naïve doctrinal work, and in the intervening forty-five years it has generated a large body of post-systematic literature.The systematic meaning, of course, was private to the forty-year old Lonergan, clear about the Butterfield shift of perspective, 6 rich in remote possibilities.7 There is, I think, work to be done towards understanding Lonergan as being primarily of the temperament of oratio obliqua.8 But his concern was nonetheless practical, as he would say himself, interested in making all things new in Christ, interested in sublating Marx.9 So, he adds our troublesome word to the definition of metaphysics, "… and 5 In Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism (Halifax: Axial Press, 2002), I bring out a parallel lack in contemporary economic theories and texts.The two lacks merge to guarantee the irrelevance of Christian economic morality in global politics.In later notes I shall simply refer to this book as Pastkeynes.6 Section 8 fills out this remark.7 This golden hoard remains to be exploited, implemented.A key to its eventual implementation is the lifting, in later generations, of the work Insight into the spiral of functional specialization.See also note 13.8 This is a large and important topic.For instance, in Lonergan's case, one can detect a poise towards retrieval in his life's work, even though his major achievements (see section 6) were forward-looking.His final years of teaching his forward-looking economics were very much focused on retrieval through Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis.See Lonergan, CWL 21, xxviii-ix.In the case of his disciples, and of theology in general, precisions of futurology are sparse: a poise of such sophisticated direct speech needs slow incarnation.This relates also to the problem raised in note 2 above regarding differentiations of interest in ethics.There is a related neglected transcendental grounded in the modally distinct what-todo question which might be proverbialized as "be adventurous," meshing with a category of fantasy.9 See Michael Shute, The Origin of Lonergan's Notion of a Dialectic of History (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1993); The Making of a Catholic Marx: Lonergan's Early Writings on Economics (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2004).26 Lonergan, in De Deo Trino I : Pars Dogmatica (Rome: Gregorian Press, 1964), 10, n.10, translates this as displacement towards system.He had not yet envisaged the functional system but he was, in that text, struggling to build in the perspective of a genetic systematics that would be a full and just retrieval of history.See note 23 above.27 This work was done in connection with my editing of CWL 18, springing from an analysis of Husserl's essay "On the Origin of Geometry," which is given as an Appendix to his last work on The Crisis of European Science.It forms part of chapter three of Pastkeynes.There is a fuller consideration of Husserl on geometry and Science in chapters 3 and 4 of my Lack in the Beingstalk: A Giants Causeway.(This is the sequel to Phenomenology and Logic, promised there under the title Lonergan: Phenomenology, Logic, Grammatology.)It adds a balance to Lonergan's reflections on the late Husserl by considering Husserl's neglected 1882 doctorate thesis (under the brilliant Weirstrass) on the Calculus of Variation.28 On physics, see Method, 126; on human studies, ibid, 364-5.See also William Mathews, "A Biographic Perspective on Conversion and the Functional Specialties in Lonergan," MJLS 16 (1998), 147, on Lonergan's interest in Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature in late 1965.29 My broadest treatment of the topic is the third chapter of Pastkeynes.For law there is Bruce Anderson, Discovery in Legal Decision-Making (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996).For musicology see chapter two of McShane, The Shaping of the Foundations (Washington: UP of America, 1976).For literature see McShane, Lonergan's Challenge to the University and the Economy, chapter 5.The work cited in note 13 above deals with the need for functional specialization in physics.hidden resource.The notes should be available in all Lonergan centres, and eventually edited for publication. CommunicationsBy communications I mean both the eighth functional speciality and the communications that I conceive as the ninth genus of implementation.The chapter on this topic is subtle but altogether too slight.56 It was never presented in his Summer method courses: even after finishing Method, he left me with the unenviable task of saying something about it in the Dublin Institute of 1971.Early scholarly struggles with the topic tended to shrink the meaning 57 : I tried to restore the balance in "Systematics, Communications, Actual Contexts."A massive global genetic systematics is to be linked with interdisciplinary, transpositional, and media reachings 58 in order "to speak effectively to undifferentiated consciousness" 59 and to scientific and aesthetic consciousness, however reductive.Because of general bias' effect within Lonerganism, the speciality of Communications requires massive dedication if it is to develop into the seriously remote global-local speciality that it should be.It brings to mind my favourite parable, The Unjust Steward, when I pursue the complexity and sophistication of secularity's commitment to communication, the energy devoted to selling soap as compared to selling salvation.The children of this world seem, indeed, wiser. Special CategoriesSome few remarks.Lonergan's sketchy treatment of these 56 The first brief section, linked to the other brief section of the book, chapter three, section 6, is powerfully suggestive of the mature categorial character of post-axial times, mediating foundationally both the character of all hodiks (Method, 292) and eventually the character of culture, the topic of the second section.Character is full of deep resonances and also recalls the breadth of the beginning of the Aristotelian Magna Moralia.57 On this, see the concluding sections of Sinead Breathnach, Communications in Lonergan, a doctorate thesis in the Department of Higher Education, Trinity College, Dublin, 1986.A copy is available in the Toronto Lonergan Centre.

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