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.