Functional Research: Introduction

On Functional Research: IntroductionThis is, I would claim, a massively important fresh attempt to initiate Lonergans' dream of functional collaboration, of "eliminating totalitarian ambitions." 1 One of my problems is that it is an attempt which is underway in another mode with some success: this volume emerges from a seminar, an e-seminar, on functional research, that occurred in the first months of 2011.We are now at present writing, in February of the next year, in the beginning of the fifth seminar, on functional foundations.2 Is the series, heading for 25 seminars of three months each, a success?For the active sub-group of the group of 50 involved I would say yes.We are making stumbling progress towards glimpsing what Lonergan was hoping for.But it is surprisingly slow work.My problem is that the success of that slow work could fade in this 'volume version' of the attempt.It could float dead in the waters of what I could call normal reading like those two floating volumes of Lonergan, Insight and Method in Theology.Normal reading -are you with me here?-may already object that the two volumes of Lonergan mentioned are not dead in the water but on the high sea of a movement.I won't attempt an answer to that objection for the moment beyond noting that there is little sign of the functional collaboration sketched in the second half of Method.And that is our interest in the seminars, an interest that slowly reveals that, yes, Insight is dead in the water.The problem in the case of any of these volumes is the slowness of serious reading, the slowness of the exercises involved.Do you recall Lonergan's comment on such slow exercising in the Epilogue of Verbum?But let me illustrate this from the beginning of the seminar on functional 1 I quote from the Florida (1970) "Interview with Lonergan edited by McShane," A Second Collection (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974), 213 recently republished as CWL 13.The paragraph there is worth slow contemplation.2 I place an almost final footnote here to Preface and Introduction as I settle for a partial solution to my problem of presentation.I am keeping the FuSes written for the seminar, in the heat of battle, as it were, the way they emerged at that time.There is the mood of messing, of a stumbling search of months.I can only hope that somehow this mood would trespass into the consciousnesses of the readers of the volume, even if it does not come to haunt them, thus fermenting them in the coming years towards a functional poise.

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