Creativity has its phases and moods, its tempo and rhythm, variables of temperament and topic. In simpler problem solving we can identify times when, although the question we are interested in is clear to us, we are stuck and cannot work out an answer. In complex problem solving there are times when we don’t really understand the problem itself and have to labour to clarify it. In the summer of 1949 the time for Lonergan’s creative desire to compose the new vision ofInsighthad arrived.² The questions of his awakened desire having matured through the desert experience of thinking...

Understanding a world order would, for Lonergan, result from an integration of all of the different kinds of insights that can be identified in the empirical sciences. Earlier in 1943, in his ‘Forms of Inference,’ he articulated his dream of an empirical science of the mind itself. In the early draft of chapters 1, 2, and 8 ofInsightthat follow in the notes for ‘Intelligence and Reality,’ these two approaches are united. Involved was a first move in exploring the possibility of developing an experimental method for the study of insights as conscious with the eventual aim of integrating...

As early as 1926/7 the unsolved problem of cognition, of how we come to know something in the world, fatefully emerged as a central interest in Lonergan’s intellectual narrative. Initially he was frustrated by the naive realism and intuitionism of Suarez and others, but found inspiration in Newman. Later he was challenged by J.A. Stewart and Hoenen, but it was not until 1935 that he made a significant breakthrough on the relation between judgment and what exists. Despite this, in 1943 he was still asking whether everything in the world was subject to law other than the human mind.

Significant...

In his insight into cognitional structure, Lonergan has worked out his answer to one of the three related questions and disciplines he articulated in the notes taken by his student, William Stewart, in 1947: the gnoseological. At this point he now has to face the accusation that what he has articulated is a mental structure between which and the world of things there is no intelligible connection. Pages 15–17 and 18–19 of the course notes for ‘Intelligence and Reality’ that follow, addressing what he terms the epistemological question, take up that accusation. Entitled respectively ‘The Notion of Being’...

In the domains of mathematics, of the natural and human sciences, and, as we shall see later, of common sense, the intellectual desires of communities of individuals and their related mental powers engage with their worlds. In the mathematical community the desires of those individuals can engage with the problems of geometry or of numbers and number theory. In the scientific community they can embark on the cognitional process of coming to explain the great diversity of species of things that are to be found in our universe, seek an understanding of the laws of their emergence, behaviour, and survival....

Sometime after ‘The Role’ was written, Lonergan began to compose the autograph, the final text, ofInsight.² His assembly, as noted, of a proto-Insightmade it possible for him now to envisage sections of the finished work. The earliest known of the several outlines he would sketch of the book’s table of contents follows.³

The Notion of Judgment 7

Reflective Understanding 33 40

(nine headings as inInsight)

Self-affirmation 24 64

Notion of Being 23 87

Notion of Objectivity 8 95

Forms of Experience 11 106

Critical enlightenment 12 118 + 92 = 180

The texts of chapters 9–13,...

Early in 1952, having articulated his foundations, Lonergan began the third movement in the composition ofInsight. A creative movement running through the first eight chapters, it would involve new insights into emergent probability, the development of common sense, and the explanation of things. Written from within the perspective of his foundations, those chapters fill out and develop the meaning of the relation of the subject and object of knowledge within his theory of objectivity. The emerging world view develops his reworking of Kant’s Copernican revolution in a range of contexts.

For Lonergan mind, particularly as intellectual desire and as...

In chapter 9 of the final draft ofInsight,inspired by the challenge of exploring concrete judgments of facts, Lonergan first considered the question of common sense as a distinctive form of knowledge. Those judgments presupposed a common-sense culture that he began to differentiate from the scientific. In the final write-up of chapters 6 and 7 during the summer of 1952, he began to relate common sense to his earlier work on the dialectic of history. Initially a single chapter with the title ‘Common Sense,’² it was later divided into two concerned, respectively, with objectifying the subject and object of...

Towards the end of 1952, in the composition of chapter 8 on things, Lonergan completed the third act in his performance of authoringInsight. It addressed a topic that had for him a long history, going right back to his Heythrop days. It later featured in the Keeler ‘Essay on Newman’ and, largely inspired by Aristotle’s writings on substance, in the ‘Thought and Reality’ and ‘Intelligence and Reality’ lectures. For over a year after the latter lectures the topic was bracketed while he composed chapters 9–13 on his foundations, followed by the first seven chapters. Chapter 8 incorporates and...

As a sense of Lonergan’s work on the book became known, interest in what he was doing developed in the Jesuit community. In response he gave a series of sixteen evening lectures on Tuesdays between 11 November 1952 and 21 April, largely on the book. Notes taken by Thomas O’D. Hanley SJ at this series are extant and give us a window into the process of composition at this time. The first six lectures, up to the Christmas break on 16 December, dealt with material from the first three chapters, lectures on 20 and 27 January with emergent probability.²

Addressing...

The life, for Lonergan, of a presently existing human being is a concrete and intelligible unity that integrates intellectual, psychic, neural, chemical, and physical levels of activities and related laws. As the imagination conditions the intellect, so, more generally, events and their laws on the lower levels condition the possibilities on the higher. The higher escape the limitations of the lower. Clearly, the downward series of levels of activity does not go on for ever, and so there arises the question, what is prime potency or prime matter? It is Lonergan’s suggestion that the modern scientific concept of energy, framed...

Work on the final four chapters ofInsightbegan during the spring of 1953. The last episodes of the last movement in the drama of composition, they are in many ways the expression of an aspiration or dream. Written in haste, they were finished towards the end of July. In them the book ends with a flourish.

Behind their dense prose, creative and challenging questions are taking shape. How does the advance of scientific and philosophical consciousness relate to mythical or what Lonergan would later term ‘symbolic’ consciousness? Would a fully explanatory account of the universe eliminate all sense of...

Up to this point, Lonergan’s intellectual probings have disclosed a universe of species of things emerging in accordance with the principle of finality and continuing in accordance with emergent probability. They reveal a cognitional subject who develops organically, psychically, and intellectually but who also has to struggle with the burden and blindness of bias in the common-sense world as well as with the counterpositions in philosophy. Culturally, that subject lives in a world of symbols, art works and texts, and experiences a conflict of interpretations and reinterpretations.

In chapter 18, entitled ‘The Possibility of Ethics,’ Lonergan enlarges his interests into...

In hisI and ThouMartin Buber remarked that in every particular human encounter with a Thou there is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou.² If we extend the lines of human relations, it is Buber’s view that they meet in the eternal Thou. In his concluding chapters Lonergan attempts to explore a parallel possibility. It arises, not from the experience of friendship and love in the field of personal relations, in which he acknowledges his treatment is skimpy, but from the aspirations of modern science and a related metaphysics. These are particular expressions of the desire of the...

At the start of his doctoral studies in 1938 Lonergan was assigned, on their completion, to become a teacher of theology in the Gregorian. Because of the outbreak of the war, he returned to Montreal in 1940 on the assumption that, at a later date, he would be recalled to Rome. As things turned out, that recall was delayed until 1953, providing him with exactly the circumstances he needed in order to research and composeInsight. In September 1953 he returned to Rome and was appointed a professor in the theology faculty of the Gregorian University, where he would teach...

In order fully to know a road one must walk it in both directions. In the same way it is sometimes said that we live our lives forwards but understand them, to the limited extent that we do, backwards. The forwards experience can be like groping our way with difficulty down a dark and unpredictable passageway whose light switch is there to be discovered at the far end. Acknowledging our current familiarity with the biographical details of the life, what illumination, it might be asked, should we expect to discover through recollection in the backwards reading of the narrative? In...