The notion of "the subject" is central methodologically to the heuristics of Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957; 5th ed., 1992) is Lonergan's most significant work in which he attempts to unveil the ever-elusive dynamics of conscious being as it functions in diverse realms of human thought. Essential to this endeavor is the identification of conscious operations (acts) and their objectifications (contents). This constitutes the "semantic" burden of Insight which, consequently, ought not to be separated from Lonergan's pragmatical mode of investigation. Failure to note this dipolar structure of Insight results in misinformed analyses which are quick to make faulty ideational correlations, thereby excusing out of hand any ingenuity on the part of Lonergan. This study attempts to reverse such trends by examining certain basic relations of the thinking subject in Insight (i.e. "experience" and "understanding"), and by developing the dynamics of such a relation in the larger context of the differentiations of consciousness (i.e. "intellectual" and "religious"), a concept that is brought to full fruition in Lonergan's widely read Method in Theology (1972).

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