Dr Philip McShane, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Mount St Vincent Univeristy, recently delivered a lecture at the Washington Lonergan Center, titled Economics & Contemplation. His presentation was an intricate patterning of novel and interesting ideas, problems, blunt criticisms, bold assertions, fantasies, pithy caricatures, suggestions, pointings, and jokes. One member of the audience compared Professor McShane’s performance to a concert master conducting a symphony the way he skillfully assembled and weaved his arguments and drew on various fields of inquiry. While it is impossible for me to come anywhere close to capturing the essence of his presentation and his very considerable rhetorical gifts I can, perhaps, identify a few of the themes he explored.

Professor McShane began by arguing that we currently live in a handicapped period of history called the Axial Period, a period spanning perhaps from 4000 BC to 2500 AD. Our problem is that we are molecularly and psychically tuned out to meaning and we suffer from an absence of tribal mystery with its cultivation of, and respect for, elders. In fact, things have gotten so bad that he questioned whether we even notice that the social situation has deteriorated cumulatively. (The reference here is to Insight, Chapter 7, section 8.2 The Christian church, he pointed out, has not yet become a community committed to asking seriously "What are we doing?" He bluntly identified the crux of the problem: the Christian community, a group committed to divine understanding, dodges understanding. More broadly, he said the problem of Christians in the Axial Period is a problem of Christian psychology concerning retrieval and defence. He explained that to cope with the Axial Period it is crucial that we cultivate a scientific and futuristic attitude in ourselves and that we implement Bernard Lonergan’s explanation of functional specialization. He stressed that it is persons of feelings and facts who move forward.

In spite of his obvious respect for Lonergan’s deepest concern - how we are to move from history to the future - and Lonergan’s achievement – functional specialization – he submitted Insight and Method in Theology to careful scrutiny. He argued Insight is not a foundational work in the sense of the fifth functional specialty. Rather, Insight is a doctrinal work, a dense manual of hill-climbing instructions rather than the sort of help that would be useful to get you up a particular hill. He also judged that Method in Theology, a tired work, is deficient in providing directions. The chapters on Systematics and Communications are ‘thin’ in that they do not call for each of us to become a character of fantasy and adventure.

But he did see a way forward by building on the work of Bernard Lonergan. In fact, he claimed that Lonergan solved Plato’s problem of implementation with his discovery of functional specialization. The question "How do you get a practical view of history?’ can be answered by engaging in functional specialization. McShane addressed the limitations of Lonergan’s chapter on Systematics by answering the questions ‘What is the system that will be adequate to the future?’ ‘What is the seventh functional specialty to be?’ His answer is that the functional specialty called systematics should be a genetic retrieval of all systems. He illustrated what he meant by explaining what a good tennis coach does. The coach discovers what the player, say Martina Hingis, did best in her games over the years. The coach also identifies mistakes and the coach and the player work at reversing those mistakes and even improving upon what Martina Hingis does best so that Martina Hingis is an incarnate genetic system capable of pulling out the right piece of the system on the baseline.

Playing tennis, then, involves a genetic minding retrieval of past efforts and reversal of bad performances of the past. Explanation in tennis is understanding what it is to play tennis and embodying it. McShane recalled here Lonergan’s discussions of the adequate historian of mathematics in De Intellectu et Methodo. The mathematician must be an incarnate system in the sense that the mathematician understands the history of mathematics, has that development of mathematical understanding in his or her own mind, and understands the development within a luminous heuristic.

Turning to economics, McShane explored the nature of, and the need for mediating, a scientific attitude in that field of inquiry. He argued that Keynes and post-Keynesian economists are not scientific. They have elaborately complex mathematical models of non-existent economies. Moreover, the NASDAQ has little relevance and the stock market is a mythic zone. In the light of this deficient context, Lonergan’s writings on economics do not simply represent a paradigm shift. Rather, they establish the science of economics. He compared this feat to radical heuristic discoveries in chemistry and biology. He forcefully stated the failure of establishment economics in light of Lonergan’s work: ‘Unless you know there are two distinct monetary circuits – a flow of payments concerned with consumer goods & services and a distinct flow of payments concerned with capital goods & services then you cannot have an intelligent tax policy, investment policy, or trade policy.’

He developed his statements about mediating a scientific attitude by turning to Lonergan’s invention of generalized empirical method. He captured the procedure of generalized empirical method with the slogan ‘When you are teaching children geometry you are teaching children children!’ In general terms, you are engaged in GEM when you study some subject and you are also studying yourself studying that subject.

He called our attention to diagrams of the cognitional process that he believes Lonergan created and which will be published in Volume 18 of Lonergan’s Collected Works. (The diagrams are included at the end of this summary.) In particular, he criticized Lonergan students for ignoring the modal difference between the questions ‘What is it?’ and ‘What is to be done?’ The point he convincingly made was that people writing about cognitional theory jumped from judgments of fact to judgments of value without noticing the need for inventing and formulating plans. In fact, he proposed that the transcendental precepts that have become the slogan of the Lonergan school should be revised to read: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be adventuresome, be responsible.

Not straying from his diagram theme, he quoted Insight that ‘the role of the metaphysician is to create images’ and applied it to the field of economics. The metaphysical perspective in economics would be trying ‘to hold’ the economies of the world together with diagrams. He insisted on the importance of diagrams by pointing out the importance of musical scores to musicians. He called one of Chopin’s ballads a forty page diagram and compared Heidegger’s search for an answer to the question ‘What is metaphysics?’ to a group of musicians asking ‘What is music?’ and failing to mention scores. You see, Heidegger didn’t create images.

He then lifted line 28 on page 520 (1957 edition; line 14 on page 544 of the 1992 edition) out of its moving viewpoint in Insight. The line is ‘The universe can bring forth its own unity in the concentrated form of a simple intelligent view.’ McShane put this statement in the fuller concrete perspective that the universe has brought forth its own unity in the unity of a single intelligent view – the mind of Christ. This view, however, is not an implementable vision. Rather, 1 Cor 216 and Phil 25 call for a kataphatic contemplation that has not yet emerged in the Christian group. He commented, from this perspective, on these texts of St Paul and the theological search relating to them and expressed trinitarian theology in the form of four contemplative questions: (1) When did you last have a real conversation? (2) When were you last understanding and understood? (3) When did you last speak? (4) When did you last listen? He put it bluntly, the cosmic word is not some simple topic like meditating on colours. He claimed our quest was understanding, the struggle to understand simple things like electrons and money, and that to understand was to become like God. That invitation, to discover what understanding is, is emerging especially from the last 400 years of mathematics and physics. The role of the metaphysician in understanding that development is crucial.

McShane ended with a hopeful note by gathering together the lines of his arguments. With Lonergan’s work on economics and functional specialization, we are in a position to move toward democracy. But the crucial question is ‘Where do we begin?’ His answer it that we begin by thinking, by contemplating. He recalled Lonergan’s remarks that if you want to help the poor you should start by studying economics. The Christians, Lonergan noted, did not have a counter to Karl Marx working in the British Library. McShane wondered if this situation was due to a false complacency of faith. He closed his lecture by inviting us to fantasize with the aim of bringing forth possibilities that would be sequential, possible, probable.

Bruce Anderson