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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Reading Fergus Kerr’s article “Lonergan’s Wake’ (New Blackfriars, July 1975) as well as the book which inspired it leaves one with a whole new insight into the plight of Jairus. Containing as it does many misleading comments about Lonergan’s thought (for instance on p. 308 Kerr identifies the very common and ordinary occurrence of having an insight with the quite distinct and extremely rare event of self-appropriation) as well as totally destructive criticism it requires a reply. The criticisms given in Looking at Lonergan’s Method are held to be irreparably damaging, mark a watershed, and make Lonergan’s work seem ramshackle. Method, Kerr concludes, is a gross error. However, Kerr’s own uncritical acceptance of the accuracy of the interpretations of Lonergan by the contributors, of the soundness and significance of their arguments and comments, as well as the severity of his own conclusions are not themselves beyond criticism.
It is claimed (p. 307) that firstly Lonergan has never engaged in even the most elementary analysis of the central concepts of his method, understanding and knowing; secondly, that he systematically misunderstands these concepts and makes all the mistakes that Wittgenstein warned us to avoid in his Philosophical Investigations. The first of these claims is preposterous. Lonergan has both written and lectured on Aristotelian, Medieval, Rationalist, Empiricist, and Idealist theories of concepts of knowledge and has worked out a highly sophisticated dialectical technique for choosing between conflicting theories. Granted that his starting point is not the analysis of concepts of understanding but of the more basic human performance of understanding itself. To simply study concepts of understanding without relating them to the experience of understanding, theological or otherwise, is to build castles in the air.
1 Looking at Lonergan's Method, edited by Patrick Corcoran SM, The Talbot Press, Dublin, 1975. It is my intention to deal only with points raised by Kerr in his article. In one or two instances a particular point has been filled out, by drawing on its source in the book. Unqualified page references refer to the article.
2 To mention but two of a vast number, Shrady, Maria, Moments of Insight, The emergence of great ideas in the lives of creative men, N.Y., Harper, 1972Google Scholar, and Taylor, and Barron, , Scientific Creativity, Its Recognition and Development, N.Y., Wiley, 1963Google Scholar.
3 Geach, Peter, Mental Acts, London, 1957, p. 9Google Scholar.
4 Norman Malcolm in his Problems of Mind, Descartes to Wittgenstein, London, 1972, 10fGoogle Scholar, outlines the sources in Descartes, Locke and Hume of the closed‐box notion of mind. In it the mind's internal ideas are its immediate objects. For Lonergan all mental operations are intentional, they have a world orientation.
5 See Vass and Mathews, ‘Lonergan's Method: Two Views’, Heythrop Journal, XIII, No. 4, 1972, p. 428.
6 On the genesis, history, and transmission of common meanings see Lonergan, , Collection, London, 1967, p. 245Google Scholar, Method, 356f. On the innovative role of creative individuals in the field of meaning see Method, 255f.
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