Field Nocturnes

This series of forty-one essays was undertaken as the 300-page project of reading the single paragraph in Insight that begins “Study of the organism begins from the thing-for-us, from the organism as exhibited to our senses.” Insight, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, 489. Field refers to Lonergan’s use of the word in Phenomenology and Logic (CWL 18), while Nocturnes, a reference to both Chopin and John Field, points to a community of functional collaborators, each member of the community in his or her luminous darkness.

(Please note that in some of the essays there are hyperlinks to works hosted on an earlier version of this website. All of those essays are now available on this website and can be easily found using the search bar.)

Field Nocturne 1: Lonergan’s Clearest Challenge to his Followers

Field Nocturne 2: Lonergan’s Obscurest Challenge to his Followers

Field Nocturne 3: Gently Putting Lonergan’s Two Challenges Together

Field Nocturne 4: Lonergan’s 1954 View of Theology in the New Context

Field Nocturne 5: First Exercises in Visual Self-Appropriation

Field Nocturne 6: A First Reading of Insight464 [489]

Field Nocturne 7: Recycling Insight 464 [489]

Field Nocturne 8: Self-appropriating Hearing

Field Nocturne 9: The Hearing Organism

Field Nocturne 10: Noise-Infolding

Field Nocturne 11: Horse Sense

Field Nocturne 12: Self-Appropriating the Inner Parts

Field Nocturne 13: Solving the Mind-Body Problem

Field Nocturne 14: The Central Human Meta-Insight

Field Nocturne 15: A Context for Cell-searching Soul-searching

Field Nocturne 16: Saving Grace in Biology Class

Field Nocturne 17: More Than Admiring Aristotle

Field Nocturne 18: Re-Cycling Effectively Forward

Field Nocturne 19: Molecules of Willows and Women, of Mice and Men

Field Nocturne 20: The Bendings of Beings, of Cilias

Field Nocturne 21: Observing Brains

Field Nocturne 22: Aggreformism

Field Nocturne 23: Here Hear

Field Nocturne 24: Merleau-Ponty and Other Mudflesh

Field Nocturne 25: Proust and the Squid

Field Nocturne 26: Hellen Keller and I

Field Nocturne 27: Helen. Troy Again. Fail Better.

Field Nocturne 28: A Touching of Touching: Getting on Your Nerves.

Field Nocturne 29: Beginagain Awake

Field Nocturne 30: Onwords

Field Nocturne 31: And Opwords

Field Nocturne 32: Seeing is Deceiving

Field Nocturne 33: Seeing Neuroscience chapters 9,10.

Field Nocturne 34: A Bard’s High View

Field Nocturne 35: Helen’s Halting Hand

Field Nocturne 36: Desire and Distance

Field Nocturne 37: Desire Undistanced : Light

Field Nocturne 38: At the Threshold of the Halfway House

Field Nocturne 39: FN 1-38: Faulty Communications or Stumbling Research?

Field Nocturne 40: Doctrines of the Studying Organism

Field Nocturne 41: What are we up to?