Notes to the Third Gallery of Images
Descriptions of images from left to right, top to bottom:
A. McShane regularly quoted Insight from memory at conferences and workshops. It is a book he studied diligently, as is evident in the essay series Field Nocturnes, an extended commentary on a paragraph on the study of organic development (CWL 3, 489). In the Cantowers series, Mcshane connected the first twenty Cantowers with the twenty chapters in Insight and added Cantower XXI as parallel to the Epilogue. Throughout his writings, he highlighted the importance of genetic method (CWL 3, 484 ff), methodical hermeneutics (CWL 3, 608–615), and repentant good will “willing the joy and zeal of the universe” (CWL 3, 722). He also found humor in Insight, for example, the line “The answer is easily reached” (CWL 3, 195) at the end of chapter 5 “Space and Time.” See FuSe 11, “Lonerganism’s Crippling Difficulties with Interpretation,” at pages 6-7.
B. McShane wrote about Gandhi’s 10,000 villages on pages 7–8 of “Arriving in Cosmopolis,” an essay he wrote for the First Latin-American Lonergan Workshop in Puebla Mexico, June 2011. (The original quote: “India is not to be found in its few cities, but in the 700,000 villages.”) The numbers 10 through 10,000 in the first column of the image indicate an approximate number of functional specialists for each of the 10,000 villages, i.e., one researcher and one communicator in each village, one interpreter and one systematics specialist in every 10 villages, and so on. The middle column contains numbers based on an estimation of a world population of 10 billion people in the year 9011: approximately a quarter of a billion “people caring, in Cosmopolis fashion, for the [100,000,000] villages,” or “what comes to one functional researcher per 100 people.” “Arriving in Cosmopolis,” 8.
C. This is a mock-up for the front cover of Futurology Express, an introductory book that has no footnotes in the first fifteen chapters. Chapter One, “The Turn-Around,” is about a family planning a vacation at a cottage on a lake north of Toronto. As luck would have it, they come up with a plan about planning, an efficient way to divide up the tasks. Similar versions of the story are told in A Brief History of Tongue (pp. 100-104) and Economics for Everyone (3rd ed. [2017], pp. 111-113.) McShane insisted on using red as the primary color for the book cover. On the back cover he wrote: “This Little Red Book points to the road forward from the present crippled and crippling structures of economics and education. It reaches way beyond Mao Zedong’s little red efforts and present big blue muddlings in finance.”
D. This “Mibox” image appears on page 1 of The Future: Core Precepts in Supramolecular Method and Nanochemistry. On page 2 McShane identifies the “W”: “Walking in and into slowly, Wondering slowly, Wanting slowly, Wising-up slowly, Willing so.” The diagram, which first appeared in Towards Self-Meaning (Garrett Barden and Philip McShane, Gill and Macmillan, 1969, p. 44) and was reproduced in Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations: Self-Axis of the Great Ascent (New York: Exposition Press, 1975, p. 41; 2nd ed. 2021, p. 36), also appears in various Disputing Quests and Interpretation essays.
F. This “What is to be done?” image appears on page 48 of the first edition of Wealth of Self and Wealth of Nations: Self-Axis of the Great Ascent (p. 43 of the 2nd edition). In Appendix A of Phenomenology and Logic, McShane underscored the important modal distinction between the questions “What?” and “What-to-do?” (CWL 18, 319–323). Time and again he stressed the importance of adding “be adventurous” to the list of four precepts “be attentive,” “be intelligent,” “be reasonable,” and “be responsible.” In the essay “‘What-to-do?’: The Heart of Lonergan’s Ethics,” he asked: “Is it not wonderful to identify the transcendental ‘be adventurous’ as the dominant transcendental of Lonergan’s life?” “‘What-to-do?’: The Heart of Lonergan’s Ethics,” 78.
G. A search of the term “Cosmopolis” yields over 200 results from various essays, articles, and books. In the classroom, McShane presented to young students the problem of meeting “Cosmo Polis” (see, for example, Field Nocturne 13, “Solving the Mind-Body Problem” at pp. 12–13). In Joistings 22, “Reviewing Mathew’s Lonergan’s Quest, and Ours,” he identified functional specialization—he preferred the name functional collaboration—as the answer to Lonergan’s quest for a global group of scholars that would satisfy the requirements of the five-point sketch of Cosmopolis in chapter 7 of Insight (CWL 3, 263–267). He expressed his preference for the name “functional collaboration” in the first paragraph of the essay “Ways to Get Into Functional Collaboration.”
H. This series of diagrams appears in many of McShane’s writings on economics (see, for example, Economics for Everyone, 3rd ed., pp. iii-v; Profit: The Stupid View of President Donald Trump, pp. 7–9; and Piketty’s Plight and the Global Future, pp. 11–14). In 1968, Lonergan sent McShane two postcards, one simply mentioning his 1944 typescript and requesting that McShane “find an economist,” the second giving the reason for the request. In the essay “Finding an Effective Economist: A Central Theological Challenge,” McShane wrote that his search had been in vain but invited the reader to search, to find an economist willing to embrace the position: “There are two types of firms.”
I. This image appears on page 4 of Æcornomics 1, “That the Word Be Made Fresh.” On page 4, after presenting two “baseball diagrams” that Lonergan used in his economics, McShane suggested thinking of the two diagrams “as just two big words parallel to the words in Chinese for ‘international trade’” (3–4) and thinking about the Chinese image as representing the English expression “Chinese trade.” He went on to ask: “Does the Chinese parallel better the meaning of ‘international trade’?”