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Near the beginning of *The Fourth Stage of Meaning* :
[[ CWL = Collected Works of Lonergan [ Bernard ] ]
... i don’t recall reading Vignette 10 nor any of the Interior Lighthouse essays after reading Bill’s
draft, though I may have. What I recall was revisiting Prehumous 4-8, emailing Mike Shute to ask
him what he was working on, and – thanks to Prehumous 8 – sharing some of CWL 8 The
Incarnate Word (2016) with Bill as possibly relevant to his work-in-progress. I was delighted to
talk to these two about what they were working on because they seemed to be focusing on
what got me seriously interested in Phil in the first place: the fifth chapter of Wealth of Self
(1975), “The Inside-Out of Radical Existentialism.” It was around my twenty-first birthday. I was
a senior philosophy major in Bill’s Theory of Knowing course in the fall of 2010.
By the time we got to that chapter, I had already come to think of “radical existentialism” as
Phil’s name for a habitual focus on the roots of one’s intentionality that would help one in the
revision, maintenance, and formation of one’s habits. The idea came to me in the context of his
clues about the axial period, which ends with an endnote referring the reader to Quaestio 21 of
De Deo Trino II (1964):
Here one may move to the positive aspects of the fruit of methodology: for
self-attentive methodology offers man the possibility of getting to grips with his meaning
at its focus. Existentialism and historical consciousness have succeeded in underlining
man’s creativity of his own essence. That emergent essence is centrally on the level of
mind, and the more man appreciates the nature of the emergence of meaning, the more
adequately will he contribute creatively to that emergence. That appreciation will enable
him to move from a state of spontaneous use of his intelligence in his doing to a level of
intelligent guidance of that use.2
2
Ibid., p. 8.
1
Ibid., p. 8.
1
Before figuring that much out, I recall vividly, with the music of Rage Against the Machine in the
background, reading the words “my interest is in the abolition of slavery of minds at its roots.”
3
It was important to me that Phil talked about me getting a grip on myself in the context of
history getting a grip on themselves. But it wasn’t until reading “The Inside-Out of Radical
Existentialism” that I realized what I was doing with Phil, in spite of his claim in the
introduction’s endnotes that he would be restricting our “considerations to historical reality in
its nonreligious dimensions,”
4 was deeply religious.
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