Insight by Bernard J. F. Lonergan

First published: 1957

Edition(s) used:Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. 3d ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1970

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Critical analysis; didactic treatise; hermeneutics; philosophy

Core issue(s): Ethics; faith; good vs. evil; knowledge; problem of evil; self-knowledge; truth

Overview

Bernard Lonergan, S.J., has been called one of the most profound philosophers and theologians of the twentieth century, and his major work, Insight, has been favorably compared to David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of Pure Reason, 1838). With his grasp of modern science and philosophy, Lonergan was able to go well beyond these earlier philosophers in Insight, whose pivotal claim is that a general structure of inquiry exists in all thinking individuals, a structure that is operative in every endeavor from the simplest commonsense decisions to the most revolutionary ideas of scientific, artistic, and theological geniuses. The number of insights generated by humans is ungraspably immense and growing at an accelerated pace, but Lonergan is primarily concerned not with the known but the knowing. He has discovered that knowing has a recurrent structure of experiencing, pondering, judging, and deciding. He challenges readers to understand what it means when they themselves understand, and if they do this, then they not only will generally understand whatever needs to be comprehended but also will have an insight into the insight-making process itself. This understanding will promote intellectual progress in a variety of fields and also help humans to avoid false ideas (“oversights”) that lead to intellectual and social decline, unenlightened policies, and dangerous courses of action.

Insight has two parts, “Insight as Activity” and “Insight as Knowledge,” and these parts have ten chapters each. Lonergan’s purpose in the first five chapters is to elucidate the nature of insight by examining examples from mathematics and science. He wants to clarify how scientists gather data, formulate hypotheses, and verify their ideas. He then uses a generalized version of this empirical method to convince readers of their own process of knowing. He carefully distinguishes this objectification of conscious experience from the mistaken view of introspection as mental picturing. The goal of his theory of understanding is not pictures but an insight into the pattern of a person’s cognitional activities.

The first example of insight Lonergan analyzes is Archimedes’ famous “Aha experience” when, while taking a bath, he apprehended the principle of buoyancy. By using this and other examples from science and mathematics, Lonergan illustrates how specific individuals intelligently generated, critically evaluated, and progressively revised new ideas. In chapters 3 through 5, he consolidates these points by showing that the examples reveal not only a heuristic structure (how insights are generated) but also a set of rules governing their unfolding (how insights must be part of a quest for relevance).

Chapters 6 and 7, on “common sense,” were the first ones Lonergan wrote, because they concerned what he most wanted to communicate. Intelligent activity is an important part of everyday life, but whereas scientific understanding deals with the relations of things to each other, common sense centers on how things relate to us. Lonergan had earlier introduced his idea of “emergent probability” in his analysis of scientific insights, since chance variation plays a role in the physical and natural sciences. Chance variations of certain human activities can be made intelligible through statistical laws, but the challenge of history is for humans to restrict the realm of chance and enlarge the influence of enlightened understanding and informed choice.

Scientists and ordinary individuals are concerned with things, and in his eighth chapter, Lonergan wrestles with a perennial philosophical question: What is a thing? While admitting that, for most people, what he calls the “already out there now real” is unquestioned, he sees things as intelligible unities that are grasped through patterned knowing. He is thus neither a naïve nor an uncritical realist but someone whose analysis of insight leads him to a nuanced view of both intellectual activity and the real world.

In the final two chapters of the first part, Lonergan studies the problem of critical judgment, which he defines as answering “Yes” or “No” to a question derived from one’s experience and understanding. Judgments made in mathematics, science, and ordinary life are propositions that are the result of an individual’s experiencing, considering, and thinking. Furthermore, forming judgments is often a collaborative undertaking among individuals, a self-correcting process in which genuine insights are separated from inapt oversights.

In part 2, “Insight as Knowledge,” Lonergan turns from theory to practice and investigates the crucial question of whether human beings can make correct judgments. He was deeply concerned that many modern thinkers had cast doubt on human beings’ ability to arrive at truths about the world and themselves. He affirmed that what exists for knowers to grasp by insight is not only the reality of themselves as knowers but also the reality of anything that is to be understood. The objective of the human being’s “pure desire to know” is being, a notion that undergirds all cognitional contents and constitutes them as cognitional. In contrast to the radical subjectivity and relativism characteristic of many modern philosophers, Lonergan believes in an ideal goal of objectivity, which he understands as a correlation between the subject’s intentionality and the realities intended.

Chapters 14 through 17 deal with metaphysics, which centers on the question: What do I know when I am occupied with understanding? By analyzing how understanding develops in the dynamic consciousness of self-affirming subjects, Lonergan elucidates the relationship between the structure that informs our wondering and the realities we wonder about. Furthermore, a correspondence exists between the “material intelligibility that is understood and the spiritual intelligibility that is understanding.” For Lonergan, the human being is both material and spiritual and is capable of arriving at the truth, which he defines as “the absence of any difference whatever between the knowing and the known being.”

Hierarchical structures characterize not only human consciousness but also Lonergan’s book itself, which ascends from the “lower knowledge” of empirical experience in the earlier chapters to the “higher knowledge” of ethics and natural theology in the final three chapters. His ethical method parallels his metaphysical method, for just as the dynamic structure of human knowing grounds a metaphysics, so the extension of that structure into human action grounds an ethics. This inner dynamic does not immediately lead to ethical codes governing human behavior, but it does provide the theoretical framework within which reflective humans will subsequently carry out this mission. Transcendent being, which is the subject of the final two chapters, expands and deepens Lonergan’s ethical analysis, since God perfects human ethical explorations. Lonergan approaches God from the perspective of his analysis of insight, concluding that God is understanding par excellence, and hence he somehow undergirds every human act of insight. In fact, Lonergan argues for the existence of God from the intelligibility of the real world. This world, however, also contains evil. Ultimately, the problem of evil requires a supernatural solution, and in the epilogue he sketches how the Christian mysteries of the Incarnation and redemption provide this solution.

Christian Themes

Originally, Lonergan intended Insight to contain a substantial analysis of theological method, but circumstances in his life led him to postpone this application of his new ideas until he could write Method in Theology (1972). Nevertheless, themes relevant to Christianity exist through Insight, especially in the later chapters. In fact, he eventually reveals that the desire to know, which is at the heart of most of the book, is rooted in God and points to God.

Some readers have seen Insight as a philosophical search for faith. Lonergan does admit, in the epilogue, that he is a Roman Catholic believer and a professor of theology who believes in the harmony of faith and reason. He shares the traditional belief that reason can foster a fruitful understanding of the Christian mysteries, even though the human mind is incapable of plumbing the depths of God’s reality. For example, reason can help us to analyze the problem of evil, which exists because God respects human freedom. Lonergan understands sin as a failure of free will to choose a morally obligatory course of action. He believes that secular humanists are unable to deal insightfully with human evil, because to do so requires a transcendence of humanism and an acceptance of basic Christian values, especially self-sacrificial love.

These Christian values are the subjects of theology, and Insight is more a preparatory study to theology than a theological work itself. However, Lonergan believed that his cognitional theory had important implications not only for physical scientists but also for theologians and scripture scholars. Divine revelation, a treasure preserved and protected by the Church, is something that thinking people in every historical period have to come to terms with and from which they have gained profound insights.

Sources for Further Study

Crowe, Frederick E. Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical, and Existential Themes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. This compendium of studies and essays on Lonergan by one of the scholars who understood him best contains a helpful article on the genesis and continuing influence of Insight. List of Crowe’s writings and an index.

Flanagan, Joseph. Quest for Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Lonergan’s Philosophy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. A good introduction to Lonergan as a philosopher and in particular to Insight, his major philosophical work.

Gregson, Vernon, ed. The Desires of the Human Heart: An Introduction to the Theology of Bernard Lonergan. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. Although many of the essays in this volume emphasize Lonergan’s analyses of theological issues, some deal with his philosophical theory of understanding. Selected readings and an index of subjects and authors.

Tekippe, Terry J. What Is Lonergan Up to in “Insight?” A Primer. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996. This brief (164-page) manual makes Lonergan’s study of understanding accessible to general readers.