Philip McShane: SURF2

SURF 2: Ivo Coelho’s Challenge, with a preliminary Context.

My interest is in replying to Ivo Coelho’s challenging effort to relate functional specialization to interpretations of Sankara. But I have a larger project in mind that I wish to mention. It is listed in the December 2008 Lonergan Newletter in the final section on Projects:
Project: Global Functional Collaboration, and the project is connected with the up-coming conference on functional collaboration (St.Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia), also mentioned in that Newsletter. It seems useful, before venturing on my comments on Ivo Coelho’s work, to give the description of the Project that is in the Newsletter.

Project: Global Functional Collaboration

The term Global indicates both omnidisciplinary and geohistorical intent. The collaboration is that discovered by Lonergan in 1966, and published first in 1969: Gregorianum 50, 485-505. The fortieth anniversary of its appearance seems an appropriate time to take seriously the task of implementing that discovery of Cosmopolis, an effective move against decline. It is to be a cyclic global antifoundational collaboration that lifts both Richard Branston’s popular Elders and Wikinomics‘ aspirations into a effective operative context. The effectiveness will take several generations to emerge but a beginning has to be made on developing the new differentiations of consciousness and language involved. A first meeting of interested parties was held at Concordia University in November 2009, and a first Conference was arranged for July 6th - 10th at St.Mary’s University, Halifax (on this, see elsewhere in the Newsletter). Further gatherings round the globe are contemplated, but attendance at such gatherings is peripheral: what is essential is a community committed to this massive shift of Lonergan studies. The first Project director is Russell Baker of Concordia University,(e-mail: rssllbkr@citenet.net ) with secretary Philip McShane. Expressions of interest should be sent to McShane at pmcshane@shaw.ca . Website Collaborations will emerge gradually and be identified.

My part in that challenge, as noted, is secretarial at present. But I have a unique position in being the senior failure in the business of global collaboration. I have known about the functional possibility since 1966, and indeed spelled out its significance in Musicology in 1969, (see The Shaping of the Foundations, chapter 2, a website book: www.philipmcshane.ca ) but have actually done almost nothing about it yet. Almost? Well, I had a stab at interpreting Lonergan functionally on the meaning of Completeness in the Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis, volume 4, but it really was not sufficiently orientated towards function. So, as Joan Robinson wrote about economics in her brilliant little half-way house text, “it is time to go back to the beginning and start again”(Joan Robinson and John Eatwell, An Introduction to Modern Economics, McGraw Hill, London and New York, 1973, 52).

I hope to contribute to such beginnings by conversations and what might be called “secretarial linkings”. Linkages, in that I have tuned into the problem in various ways over the past fifty years, and may be able to bridge some gaps, open some doors.

So this is a beginning of a writing contribution to the new beginning, and it begins, as it were, in the middle of our searchings, with Ivo Coelho’s effort “Applying Lonergan’s Method”, particularly page 250 of Method, to interpretations of Sankara. I don’t think one needs to know the area to benefit from our exchanges: I certainly don’t know it!!! I recall my old slogan that Fred Crowe enjoyed in the late 1970s: “I f a thing is worth doing, then it is worth doing badly”.I note that I hope to contribute now to contribute in some serial fashion, and for this reason I would identify the present effort as Surf 2. Surf 1, to be made available on my own and other websites, will enlarge on the nature of the serial contributions, and on the various meanings of the title Surf.

My reflections on Ivo’s efforts are not ordered systematically. I leave them as they emerged. We are in conversation, rambling within a scientific problem of huge proportions. I parallel it with the smaller emergence of properly grounded physics in the 20th century brilliantly described by Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh in his The Dawning of Gauge Theory, and that reference allows me to make a final introductory point. The story O’Raifeartaigh tells is one of blunt and somethimes silly criticism. For example, Herman Weil is a key initiator of the needed lift of physics, but colleagues wrote to him in such terms as “go learn a little physics”. The same is true of other areas: I might talk of the blunt exchanges in the story of the Fermat’s Last Theorem. The point and pointing is that the core of Method - the working of page 250 - is a self-exposure, a bluntness, a genuine heated meeting. Lonergan writes “ .... the more the historian has been at pains not to conceal his tracks, but to lay his cards on the table ....” (Method, 193) We cannot afford to conceal our tracks when Method-ology is precisely an effort to reach a cosmopolis of self-luminosity in a luminous community of global care.

So here goes with Ivo. I label sections alphabetically for convenience, and I add a final preliminary comment. I mentioned linkage etc. Elementary leads are needed, and I think - from teaching young ladies about themselves for twenty years - that I can supply some. But my first effort here, I realize on re-reading, is obscure, “fantastic” in the meaning related to fantasy. But we need that to get out of present conventional ruts .... that is the issue, after all, of Lonergan grim reflections on the need for cosmopolis. Anyway, I leave this obscure reflection as is: but I am easily reached regarding any part of it, at the end of the e-mail pmcshane@shaw,ca

Ivo Coelho’s Challenge
A. Fantasy-Context from Foundational Persons

Suppose that by 2400 A.D. the Cyclic System is up and running in larger Europe, so that there is respectable geohistorical content to the meaning of UV + GS + Fi . {useful to check back [website: www.philipmcshane.ca] to chapter five of The Redress of Poise, “Systematics: a Language of the Heart”, where I included a dictionary entry on Systematics of A.D.3000, translated from Hindi! This involves a larger imagining of a global community with pressure-influence on World Bank, UNO, Corporations, etc)
UV : O.K. from Insight, but clearly seen on the analogy of science, like zoology but with a touch of physics: but there is a sublated inclusion of merging, overlapping, etc contexts. The universal viewpoint needs to weave in global dates [s,t] and key holders of views [Lonergan makes this point in unpublished notes] E.g.Alexandria and Antioch, Luther and Lainnez, in “leaky tunnels” within a global dynamic etc etc.
GS: not in Insight, but got from UV at each stage by reversal of counterpositional stuff.
[related to contra-factual perspective]
FSi : it weaves within UV + GS, but best keep it explicit for analytic clarity. FSi is the heuristics of procedures within each specialty, and we could also break off a section for each i, since the procedures are more developed within each i.
Needless to say, functionality is adequately conceived and operational in the control of e.g. sentence formats and contents: the baton-exchange metaphor becomes an existential reality, a control of meaning as obvious as the theory of invariants in particle physics.

Up and Running? A Standard Model operating and theoretically grasped, e.g. the sloping of disciplines towards common dialectic and foundational components. Including a full genetic heuristic of ontogenetics of orientations [conversions etc, but a full set of genera, species, and genetics.... I would suggest - I suggested it already in Process chapter 4 - that there is need for a neutral terminology ....e.g. displacements for conversions]. Furthermore, dominated by explanatory heuristics of the Metagrams: Wi . So, for example, “seeing hearing etc “ of page 6 of Method in Theology in is conceived then properly within contemporary neuropsychology. [the push of the Field Nocturnes]

Further the community is “decently” positional and poisitional [see Cantower 9] .... and dialogue is well established by the norms of personal relating [Method, 48] the central pressure towards which is the creative pressure from the end of MIT 250, + that of “Fantasy and Forwarding” [the two key functions of foundations, these norms being an existential reality of the 64 types of conversations, Ci j .( i, j going from 1 to 8, but there are sets of extra-tower conversations [see W3 metagram]. I add that the perspective of foundational prayer is dominant, ‘resting and question in the real”, {see Prehumous 4-8, five essays on foundational prayer, including the problem of the mystical] and the real is heuristically appreciated as in W3.

B. Existential Context of Reader
The above context is not at present shared. It needs to be communicated by analogies of science, analogies that are intussuscepted slowly , within the efforts to get the cycling moving. Illustrations of such efforts come from the beginning both of Insight and of Method. The Archimedean thing has to be intussuscepted in the style dictated [doctrinized] by the first paragraph of the first chapter of Insight. The analogy of successful science prescribed at the beginning of Method has to be faced existentially. The Helen Keller insight, made luminous, has to be a group reality eventually of the reading of both books..

C. Further Fantasy
One must then envisage a massive transposition of talk and writing within the Tower community.... lines of this in the boldfaced stuff of Field Nocturnes. The community lives in the metatheoretic existentialism of HOW expression. [HOW: expression becomes increasingly the “Home Of Wonder” ].This adds, by fantasy, to a further remoteness from present global care. But its later addition will be neuromolecular fact.
The climb is not impractical. Insight 17 has to be studied in the pointing towards the transition to Method, as mentioned in note 1 of page 153 of Method. Further, Method has to be existentially lifted, chapter by chapter, into the context that Lonergan had in mind when he thought, in 1952, of a second volume, Faith and Insight. But now both Insight and that second volume have to be conceived and existentially appreciated as dominated by the heuristics of UV + GS + FSi , supported by the metagrams, Wi . How, HOW, we are to get there, that is a matter for later sections and the fantasy-driven labour of later generations.

D. Next, we envisage a good colonization process, in Ivo’s case to the Indian subcontinent. A context for this is the solution to the problem of general history, “the real catch” (Topics in Education, 236 ) by the emergence of the region (topologically complex) called the Tower of Able. This revision of chapter 10 of Topics in Education has to be worked out in detail: a take-off pointing is Field Nocturnes CanTower 50: “Insight Within a New Global Culture”
. In energetic fantasy, it seems useful to imagine, with Lonergan, every village having its own professional Tower Pair, one in research and one in communications, each “as familiar a professional figure as the doctor”(For A New Political Economy, 37) and then think of the commercial enterprize “Ten Thousand Villages”. Then the Tower community is imagined as a community of 22,220 members [10,000 reseachers, 1,000 interpreters, 100 historians, 10 dialecticians, etc .....10, 100, 1000, 10,000 ]

But now we think of the extending of the Tower influence [analogy of empires and colonizations - including the empires of Christianity and Muslimism, but ‘cleaned up’ to be better than they were - ] .... we can think realistically but fantastically of the preparation of the community by training at various levels.

Fantastically? Let us imagine that researchers are tuned into the analogy of science so that they know what they are at and after. Stay first within the larger Europe of our imagined 2400 A.D. But now let us enlarge on the pointers regarding the Standard Model. Perhaps this is best done by thinking of the component that is a training in meta-economics. That economic “science” ... a new pragmatics ... has the characteristics sketched e.g. in Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism, supplemented by the perspective in implementation of Prehumous 1 and of FNC 46, both essays attentive to the shift required in school economics. The training, whatever the specialty, is in a Praxisweltanschauung that is omnidisciplinary and with an eye on the effectiveness of implementation that belongs to it as beautifully efficient (Topics in Education, 160, line 16). Useful here, too, to think, fantasize forward, in a sublation of both Richard Branson Elders project (2007) and the book on Wikinomics such that the Tower is an effective pressure on World Bank, UNO, etc etc. By 2400 the two-layer economic analysis should have replace the present phlogiston economics with its gambling casino and its false notions both of money and of credit (the key here is the notion of Concomitance: see the index to For A New Political Economy, under Concomitance). One also has here new strategies of meso-economics and microeconomics, and these are relevant to the education e.g. of Tower exportable-researchers. Think of researchers in the new cyclic 27 kilometer set-up under the Swiss-French border: searching for positive and negative anomalies. But now our researchers are in the cultural cyclic set-up overground and over the border of India ( symbolic of Indian culture, a more complex topology).

E. We get closer to Ivo’s effort. Ivo’s village - now we are back to 2000 A.D. - in viewing the training college in the old tradition: even taken at its best it is bent towards the flawed Lonerganism that has no creative glimpse of the global collaboration for which mother history groans with the help of foster-father Lonergan. Ivo’s grip on the Standard Model enables him to detect vaguely [here one would need a long ramble about such detection in particle physics.... e.g. the emergence of the neutrino in the twentieth century, or the reach for a Higgs particle in the present scene) anomalies, good and bad; So, he notices interpretations of Sankara that are operative, or potentially operative (this would include the C 9 of W3) in the “larger village”. Note here that interpretation is taken in the sense of Insight chapter 17, passing on to another audience: but now the passing on, or round, is within the Round [Recall the hidden title of the Cantower Series: Roun Doll, Home James] of cyclic withdrawal. Here we have to point to effective considerations of the next four centuries regarding disorientations of scholarship, so that we turn around in the Academy rather than in the “merely academic”. So, one has to ask whether the list of chaps mentioned by Ivo are effective interpretations, operative in the smaller or larger Indian village. An issue of functional history , as we shall see.

We could get lost in details here , e.g. we might suppose that there are sub-groups in the village - large or small - that are allied in practice with one or other of the interpreters. What, then, is the Tower task? I would note here, that we are doing something that goes beyond Ivo’s venture .... we are asking a general question about the village duo, researcher and communicator, representative of FS1 and FS8, in dialogue [always luminously within the Matrix Ci j ], C1 8 and C8 1 . In so far as the Standard Model is effectively in place, these conversations can include certain sub-structures that bypass the full cycle. But anomalies are sometimes discovered [like the neutrino data or Higgs data] that are novel, complexifications of previous simpler patterns, whatever.

F. Getting still closer. Let us suppose that there is a sort-of fresh advertence here. A venture of colonization yields data on other life-styles ... of Hindu contempation, of Zen comestation, whatever. Then, in such a case as praxis of Sankara, there may be seen and seized the need to get to the roots of the traditions so as to get a grip on progressive anomalies. More realistically, the researcher sees at least the need to pass on the anomaly to an interpreter, who has a richer context of genetic systematics. Suppose, for example, that the group of interpretations is relatively isomorphic to a group around Tertullian, an earlier slice of genetic dynamics. Then one can envisage communication structures of the type C2 7 , which feed forward through C7 8. It would be too complicated to envisage such substructures here, since there is a general lack of a common meaning for Standard Model operations, indeed even of a meaning of the Matrix conversations Ci j . So, it would mean even less to talk of the substructure that would in a judgment of the worth of “going further round and up” to the functional historical context. Recall that effective meaning is an ongoing historical thing.

Judgments about whether to move my interpretation on to the historical community depend on the luminousness of individuals in the cycling process regarding their own and others levels of competence. At all events, one could have relevant conversations of the type C3 6 , sufficient to handle the anomalies. I would go on re this but perhaps a single noting of the place of lines 12 and 14 of Method 250. Some anomalies are culture-linked ,,,, affinities that are not foundational..... “dismissed” (line 14) but only temporarily: such affinities are carried across e.g. to doctrines or system .... but enough re that for the moment.

G. Can we home in now on Ivo’s venture? He wished to lift the set of interpretations into the context of dialectic. Would his judgment be modified by what was said above? In the long-term the full cycling seems appropriate, but then it would have to be a denser cycling, in a cultural and linguist mesh that might show forth elements “dismissed” (line 14, 250) but to be cultivated within, or even beyond, the Indian culture [borderline of tentative patterns of global progress .e.g think of the beneficial variation of neuropatterns of language forms]. That denser cycling, however, does not seem on the cards at present, when there is no explanatory heuristic in place in any of the relevant groups. But what then of the “slimer” positional analysis that is attempted by Ivo? It is slimmer in a variety of ways, contextualized by a lack of an explanatory thematic of position such as is to emerge in these next centuries, perhaps in this century: the needed spectrum of position-complexes, with e.g. basic axioms of intentionality and infinity and incompleteness added to an explanatory account of the described position of Insight 388[413].

H. What emerges in Ivo’s sketching is an effort to do interpretations of interpretations without an explicit context of UV. GS is not in sight, nor would one expect it to be. So, we have a descriptive beginning of some aspects of the six tasks italicized on page 250 of Method, based on descriptive interpretations, and on selections of limited data.

I. A context could emerge in this generation for what I called a colonization attempt that would do a better functional job: the emergence of a Western-based UV + GS + FSi that would make possible analogies of dialectic and genetic development e.g. a fuller UV treatment of The Way to Nicea would give a core component of such a context. Think of the various struggling shabby realisms around the Tertullian period, but also up through and beyond Augustine.

J. Perhaps at this stage a more detailed working through Ivo’s venture is appropriate. So we have to consider some of pp. 1-12, with the notes added on the later pages. Ivo is meeting Paul Allen’s request, and providing great stuff for lifting us forward : the effort above is witness to that. So: he stumbles for us all.

P.1 “the topics of dialectic comparison are theology, metaphysics, and cognitional theory” but what is meant by this?. By 2400 A.D. there will be e.g. a genetic account of these emergences, at least in the tradition of the West. The “topics” then will be Standard Model contexts, that are rich geohistorical structures and the question will be Where do what has been a data-identified and interpreted and historically structured [and we are to be dealing with history dominated by explanatory heuristics, at present quite unknown] core component of the Indian tradition. This is an important piece of the recognition of the two first canons of hermeneutics. Further, question of conversions has to be placed in the same full context, fleshing out implicit, problematic and explicit perspectives.
So, we are to tackle the “well-know conflict of interpretation” of Sankara’ Advaita, focusing on the relation of Brahman and the world.

p. 2
I skip to the paragraph re “my effort”. The effort, and that of the “3 or 4" {I prefer to think of ten or so) has to be lifted into at least a nominal acknowledgment of the canons of hermeneutics as they structure the Standard Model. Otherwise we are really only disguising old methods of descriptive comparison [comparison is a zone of entry into functional specialization that needs to be exploited and cultivated ... a great deal of present Lonerganesque work is old-style comparison .... but this is another topic, perhaps for our next Guideline effort together]. Yes, there are two levels of dialectic, but it seems to me that if the second is done properly, there is no need to add dialogue.... the second level of dialectic is very discomforting dialogue of colleagues who share the Standard Model. This latter point is very important to absorb: the cycling is not done with adversaries, but with colleagues within the Standard Model. And do I have to insist that the work and its results are to be quite beyond common sense? This emerges most clearly when one considers doctrines as they are thematized in the sixth specialty, which carry forward in meaning through the standard model control round the circuit, to doctrines as they are promoted to common sense [see C9 in W3]. This “leap of meaning” is a critical zone of method, a question raised at the end of chapter 3 of Lack in the Beingstalk. It is the question of ex-plane- ing. One has to avoid the imaging that would have meaning thinning out as one “descends” through the specialties to communication. A better, more helpful image of the specialties for this, perhaps, is the image of eight stairs up: then the problem is clear: How, HOW, does one get from the metagrasp of doctrinal meaning to a meaning that meshes with the common sense of the particular culture, such as, in our case, the village culture both of ordinary common sense and of the undergraduate level of such common sense that is the normal state of the beginning-students in a college-village?
But I would note here that the common sense of the 25th century will have reached sophistications of luminosity that give it an edge on appreciating the “distance’ between commonsense grasp and metatheoretic grasp: there will be in place the shifts indicated by Insight chapter seventeen, section 1. But I have digressed.
Back to page 2. Moving into assembly and completion. It is important, even when beginning such efforts as this,. to hang on even nominally to the full heuristic, such as is expressed in Method in Theology: Revisions and Implementations. Otherwise one is pulled back to the equivalent of pre-Newtonian physics when in fact Einstein reigns. Lonergan does not reign of course, but scientific belief [see chapter 20 of Insight] brings him into the picturing of up-to-date process. So, the dialectician is an omnidisciplinary person, taking in the most recent results of “the usual” process of sloping of disciplines. It is important to think out this ‘usual” in a developed science. One may think of Kuhn’s point. There has been, in the previous centuries of this science, cumulative and progressive results. But some of these are named in Insight and much more briefly named {see e.g. pp.286ff in Method) in Lonergan’s later works: key pointers are A Third Collection, 141 top lines, on the mature operation of generalized empirical method and Topics in Education, p. 160, line 16, on the effective [and beautiful] maturity of functional cycling.
So, there is a pre-assembled context and achievement into which the assembly of Sankara work has to go. This, at least, has to be explicitly acknowledged in some heuristic intimations such as are suggested by developments in the metawords, Wi: I think of the Markov Matrix of meanings suggested in Randomness , Statistics and Emergence. We are back here at points I made in the Method Journal article of 2005 {published in 2008] ,”Obstacles to the Control of Meaning.” The combining of assembly and completion is a messy thing. Assembly is the last non-dialogue stage of the 250 process. Completion puts the bones and nerves of the dialectician into “play”, pushing what Lonergan talked about at the end of Phenomenology and Logic, the subject-as-subject. Again we must hold to the idea that the subject is sophisticated, with fully differentiated consciousness - including the differentiations that have to emerge by specializations, but that is a wider topic. What is one doing, if one is doing this in 2400 A.D.? .... one is sifting more recent cycling effort to detect gut-wise, existentially, what .... “Yes, Yes, this adds to our progress!!!” What Ivo goes on to detect is absences of the elementary positional sophistications presupposed by and in Insight chapter 16 in these interpreters and their source. But at that later date, or in anticipating it through a good heuristic diagraming, this is not the issue: the issue would be more refined cultural elements that might be relevant to progress: stuff I talked of earlier as borderline, borderline global invariants: think of Indian aesthetics and prayer stances.
Our consideration get more complicated here as we move, in imagination, down page 250
of Method. I would note, e.g. that the quotation, given by Ivo, about legitimate development is from MT 302, but the other one from page 312 [given in the note] is closer to our mood here: the grip on the concrete historical process within a full geohistorial heuristic. [This heuristic is to sublate and integrate all that Lonergan says of merging, overlapping, etc etc contexts].

P.3
So, I jump to the top of page 3, and home in on the fifth word “explains”, recalling the Appendix of The Triune God: Systematics, where Lonergan talks of the inappropriateness of descriptive categories, even at the beginning of a science. Sankara simply does not “explain”.THAT is the big challenge of the meaning of the second canon of hermeneutics in Insight 17.3.8. Getting a grip on this canon is a tough job: hints about it are in Cantower 14.
But now we are in deepening trouble as we move on. What is needed is the movements of sophisticated interpretation ( the second specialty, operating within the full standard model) that would pin down - in the genetic sequencing and dialectic optioning of inner and outer words suggested by the canon - “ an explanatory interpretation of non-explanatory meaning” (Insight, 587[610]) . So, e.g. we need an explanatory account of appearance and illusion such as is to emerge from contemporary neuropsychology (on this, various essays in the 41 Field Nocturnes, stuff which I hinted about applying to the present phenomenological analyses of Renaud Barbaras in his two-book effort to rescue Merleau-Ponty, especially M-P’s last 1964 work, The Visible and the Invisible: Barbaras’s books are The Phenomenology of Perception (around 200)and Desire and Distance(2006). Nor is this pointer a distraction: Phenomenology is revamping the problems being dealt with by the interpreters that Ivo is considering. In the mature global metascience this would be noted and exploited. Even the book title, Desire and Distance, tells the Vedantic tale ).
I hold myself to just two further comments on this page:
(a) Radhakrishnan clearly admits, therefore, the relative and dependent reality of the world”. This statement needs complex re-consideration. How clear is he? He certainly is has not the perspective on relations that Lonergan has [Insight 16 or appendix to The Triune God: Systematics] .... Lonergan’s disciples, even, don’t have that. Are we trapped here in description? .... yes, the controlling factor is his understanding and expression - and implicit metaphysics - of what is true I would note that we are here, psychologically, and perhaps communally, at the beginning of section 2 of Insight chapter 17, “the real issue, then, is truth”, and I would suggest that Barbaras and Radhakrishnan are probably in the same boat. The Lonergan people? Mark Morelli’s work on Hegel would suggest that we are mostly messing with Kant around the half-way house. [His Hegel thing is to appear in the Lonergan workshop volume for 2008]
The second sentence for comment is the last of the page: “The distinction between the illusory and the empirical can, in my opinion, be sustained.” Again, this sentence warrants lengthy consideration. There is needed a heuristic context of “my opinion” .... is the community, to which Ivo is talking, with him in his digested acceptance of e.g. Lonergan’s analysis of the given in chapter 13 of Insight? The “my opinion” is what is to emerge further down the page, the stand taken within the context of the “further objectification of horizon” (line 24). The context then has to be appreciated as including a position on “distinction” such as emerges from chapter 16 of Insight. The illusory and the empirical have to have meanings that emerge from the effort describe in the middle of page 287 of Method, “from such a broadened basis”. This is not being attempted by the Lonergan school... so they are trapped in the descriptive stuff that Lonergan was forced to use in the first half of Method.
Now it would seem worthwhile to pause over my interest in particular sentences. In a developed tradition of functional specialization - in all disciplines - there is to be a control of meaning that reaches to each sentence. One is running a leg of the 8-person relay, one runs in a defined way toward passing the baton. These notions are descriptive of refinements quite beyond the compactness of present discourse. Again, a huge distraction here.

P. 4
We carry on from the last sentence, and the same problem of non-explanatory meaning prevails, “very damaging, even at the beginning of science” (I quote the The Triune God: Systeamtics appendix). As I move through these pages the gap between performance and the norms that Lonergan set up gets larger (see Phenomenology and Logic , index, Existential Gap), there is the sad fact that none of us took up his challenge of Insight chapter 17 in any serious way (See the dismal failure of the Concordia Conference published as Lonergan’s Hermeneutics, edited by Ben Meyer and Sean McEvenue :we never got near the canons, or indeed chapter 17). Add to that the challenge of transposition to functionality expressed in Method, 153, note 1.
But the reach needed is a massive foundational reach of fantasy (foundation’s task is two-fold: fantasy, and circulation). Here the difficulty is the needed dominance of the standard model, a genetic and dialectic sequencing of meanings. This sequencing takes up the story of any meaning when we move to history. What is the meaning of an interpretation? One ask in history (and again I note the absence in our minds of an explanatory pragmatic heuristic) about the on-going meaning .... and that just is not the mood or the topic on page 4 or later pages. There is a sort of isolated discriptiveness that has its parallel in a descriptive physics that gives and account of red without taking up the explanatory relating that is spectrum analysis. Thinking with the functional specialty history is a thinking which is quite explicit about being “in” the standard, and it is worthwhile to note that the history of ideas is central to the second component of that model, the GS of the UV + GS + FSi
The ahistorical perspective is prevalent right on through the effort, and it seems as well to halt my rambles at this stage. I will take up the question of history in the next Guidelines, where I find a handy parallel with Ivo’s work in taking, instead of Radhakrisnan (1952) and Mahadevan (1968) etc, Lonergan (1952)(1968) etc. In !952 Lonergan was heading towards those final chapters of Insight; in 1968 he was writing the article for Gregorianum (1969) etc. We can ask the short-term history question, what is/was the ongoing meaning of Lonergan’s meaning? What we find, I think, is another way into the functional specialties, by focusing on Lonergan instead of - but also as well as - on Shankara.