Lonergan's Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of "Insight"

Review Article by Brendan Staunton, SJ

Issue 379, vol.95, Autumn 2006

Whether you have heard of Kant or not, your thinking and our world has been influenced by him. He woke up one day and decided to settle an age-old question once and for all: the head versus the heart; empiricism versus idealism, the imagination versus the intellect, the inner and the outer. He banged these two philosophical heads together and got beyond a dualism that came up with a synthesis of the subjective and the objective, firmly coming down on the side of the mind’s primacy in the construction of reality. Just as in the history of painting the eternal dilemma of line versus colour was resolved in our time by Matisse, the ancient conflict between the world of Plato’s ideas and Aristotle’s matter, Hegel’s idealism and Hume’s empiricism, was settled by Kant. But how satisfactorily did he settle it?

William Mathews, associate Professor of Philosophy in the Milltown Institute, in this (a first), biography of Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), pits this Jesuit Canadian philosopher, theologian and priest against Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”, and claims Lonergan has added a new insight to an oversight in Kant. On many points “the cognitional theories of Kant and Lonergan diverge irreconcilably”. (p.166)

If this difference is an existential and personal question for you, if this is the level of your question, this book is for you. It will bring out the intellectual detective in you, and raise questions like the way the mind works, the origin of thinking and effective as distinct from essential freedom. Also the God question, that of Christian revelation and the heart of Ignatian spirituality, although this book deals with Lonergan up to Insight (1957).

Insight brought him to a pinnacle that led to the mountain view of Method in Theology (1972). The mountain metaphor is apt, since Lonergan is difficult, not only at the level of ideas but more so because of the personal challenge implied in all his work. Insight is not an argument but a programme, a way to self-possession, through the step of an “appropriation of rational self-consciousness”.

Frederic Crowe S.J. in The Lonergan Enterprise, compares reading Lonergan to reading Euclid and the scriptures, and Crowe “inclines to the view that Lonergan represents a third possibility”. Crowe believes Lonergan makes the most sense to those “haunted by the ghost of Kierkegaard.” That is the stress on individual authenticity.

Mathews’s book makes sense of this in bringing out Lonergan’s version of Kant’s questions, adding up to the challenge of self-appropriation. Lonergan may have had his eye on the stars, but his feel, (oops, feet!), never left the ground of personal questions, and his contemporary culture. This narrative teases out the gradual thread of Lonergan’s quest, especially from his time at Heythrop College (then in Oxfordshire) to the finishing of Insight,and the ups and downs of finding a publisher. Insight is presented as the “artistry of desire”, that is in the way it was composed: all the rewriting and predecessors that went into it are mapped out with not only scholarly precision, but an infectious enthusiasm from the author, who has obviously pondered long on the philosophical and theological issues involved. He is particularly good on the ordering of the chapters, which written first and so on, and their eventual placing in the finished work; finished in a hurry, as Lonergan knew he had to go to Rome the following academic year, where the printing presses were not good. The correspondence between the Superior General of the Jesuits and the Canadian Jesuit Provincial make interesting reading, and Mathews ponders the probability of Insight never seeing the light of day, had these letters not been written.

While the focus of this work is the philosophical quest Lonergan pursued, you will also find answers to such questions as ‘what does it mean to say that Christ lives in you?’ (p.283)

Lonergan’s quest means a journey, a journey to an intellectual conversion that here is insightfully mapped out. Mathews makes a link between Lonergan’s father, whose work involved much travel to the Canadian outposts mapping territory, and his son’s mapping of the cultural climate of his time. Biography and philosophy mingle and merge marvellously, underlying Lonergan’s critique of Kant.

Knowledge includes imagination, images and concrete particulars as well as abstract concepts and logical propositions. The “release” Lonergan experienced, when going beyond nominalism, was a crucial step that is highlighted here. This movement is a key theme, tackled with tact and a sympathetic identification on the part of the author, whose background as a scientist grasps Lonergan’s mathematical mind wonderfully well. The thorny issue of “insight into insight”, is spelled out well: how to square this with the fact that insight is “is insight into a phantasm”? Or if the relation between a knower and a known is an identity, does the knower become the known?

There are ample examples for those of us non-scientists from the legal world, (the judgement of a jury), the everyday world of common sense, (the mind of a man returning home to see his house destroyed by a fire?); some abstract notions are illustrated from modern classics of the theatre, such as Miller and Ibsen.

Mathews is no hagiographer. Lonergan comes across as very human. His shortcomings and dark times are not denied, (his lung cancer was not diagnosed until after Insight, so, not mentioned), which brings the graced experiences of his life to life. Mathews puts flesh and blood on this visionary thinker. He was at times gruff and secretive; endured one major row with a rector; took a criticism of his Verbum (1967) as personal rejection; suffered from loneliness and depression after his move from Montreal to Toronto. 

Lonergan was certainly ahead of his time, but when will his time come? He has fallen out of fashion, and is not a major player on the world’s stage of philosophy. Most of the most influential painters in the history of art were not recognised until long after their deaths, and Crowe has argued that Lonergan took the long view, and was not a “theologian of the now”.

Lonergan’s “pure desire to know” can sound overly optimistic in the light of Freud’s discovery of unconscious thinking as a form of knowledge. In his work on Negation for example, the origin of thinking is rooted in a refusal to know, a repudiation that contrasts sharply with Lonergan’s “pure desire to know”. Consciousness for Freud can only emerge on condition that it is negated, that is, a lifting of repression without an acceptance of what is repressed. A cognitional structure pre-dates the use of reason.

A fascinating biographical sketch is found on page 36. Lonergan was asked to preach to his fellow students in Heythrop. He took as his text “you may hear and hear but you will never understand. You may look and look, but you will never see.” This verse, from Acts 28, was too much for his Superior, who thought the ‘doctrine might be true, but it would be better not to preach it’! There was a latent Freud in Lonergan.  

For Lonergan, developments in modern culture were precisely that: developments. The glass of historicism, phenomenology, personalism and existentialism was half full for him, in contrast to a papal encyclical that saw the glass of modernism as half empty. Lonergan welcomed change, and Mathews is to be congratulated in contextualising the 1950’s, when Insight appeared, as meeting a need created by the termination of scholasticism, a school of philosophy that Lonergan compared to “Aegean stables” that needed a cleansing. Lonergan’s goal was to infuse the old with the new, to do for our time what Aquinas did with Aristotle. This biography could resurrect this goal, a task all the more urgent now that the issue facing the Catholic Church, is the place of humanism and the other sciences in Christianity.

Mathews uses the metaphor of a mountain view finally coming into view. His book is a climb rather than a contemplation of colourful lily ponds. The mental energy becomes easily exhausted, but an experienced walker knows the pace to go at. So this is not a book for the beach, but certainly one for a long reflection on the abstract philosophy that has so many concrete consequences in everyday experiencing, understanding and judging.

Is there insight in this biography? Yes, but what is insight? Lonergan deserves much praise for drawing our attention to this question, as the implications for all our known forms of knowledge are implied in this question. And getting the insight into insight is the key to reaching a judgement on relativist, pragmatic, materialist and idealist thinking.

Lonergan and Mathews build admirable bridges between the world of science and the world of common sense that should reverberate beyond the narrow confines of philosophy and theology. Mathews is also to be congratulated for a most helpful bibliography and index, which he compiled himself. This is a wonderful piece of work and I am glad it has seen the light of day, as the gestation was long, but like a good wine, the wait was worth it.

Brendan Staunton, S.J. is a counsellor and psychotherapist.