Last month I published an old (1978) paper of mine on the problem (scandal?) of philosophical diversity, “Philosophic Diversity and Skeptical Possibility: A Confrontation with Hegel”[1]—why is it that brilliant minds committed to discovering truth cannot agree?—but I forgot to mention that when I wrote it, my discovery of Bernard Lonergan and his proposed outline of a solution to the problem was still a few months in the future.
The first step in cornering it, he said, lies in grasping “the polymorphism of human consciousness.” Consciousness operates differently in different contexts, for example, commonsense understanding, theoretical reasoning, artistic expression, or moral deliberation, and so forth.
In his magnum opus, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding, Lonergan makes this bold pronouncement:
. . . the polymorphism of human consciousness is the one and only key to philosophy.[2]
I learned only today of the publication, in 2008, of a (prohibitively expensive) book that elaborates upon this proposition.[3]