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Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Volume 3 (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan)

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Rev. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.(1904-1984), though still not commonly known, was, talent-wise, certainly one of the top thinkers of the 20th century. It takes time for his thoughts to be appreciated, developed and applied. There are already numerous web-sites and hundreds of books, articles and theses written on his ideas. He might be publicly acknowledged as one of the 100 most influential thinkers by the end of this century. For more than forty years, his works continue to nourish and challenge people, initially in seminary circles, and gradually in different universities. Boston College has been a key base for over 20 years in fostering studies of Lonergan's thought and stimulating dialogue with people in diverse fields. Insight remains one of the basic books that one needs to master if we want to reach up to Lonergan's mind, just as he reached up to the mind of Aquinas. One of the perennial issues underlying human differences is our assumptions about knowing and reality. What is it to know? Is it taking a look out there? Or do we presume that we cannot know reality? Lonergan proposed an arduous journey for all of us to become aware of what we are doing when experiencing, understanding, judging and choosing. The focus is on appropriating or gaining self-knowledge of our recurrent cognitional processes and structures in knowing. "¡Kit is essential that the notion of insight, of the accumulation of insights, of higher viewpoints, and of their heuristic significance and implications, not only should be grasped clearly and distinctly but also, in so far as possible, should be identified in one's own personal intellectual experience." (p.xx) "Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding." (p.xxviii) This is a difficult, painstaking and challenging task, not achieved just by reading from cover to cover (785 pages plus 30). Lonergan's examples from mathematics, physics, classical and statistical investigations might be a hurdle to those who don't have background in such disciplines. Insight is like the Zen master's finger pointing towards the moon. One must be careful not to get lost in the sweeping and erudite visions and constantly come back to appropriating one's own knowing processes. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. One easier introduction is Terry J. Tekippe's "What is Lonergan Up to in Insight? A Primer". Then one can go on to Flanagan's Quest for Self-Knowledge, and The Lonergan Reader, edited by the Morellis, and finally come to grapple with the full original and Lonergan's later works on Method in Theology and Macroeconomic Dynamics.

This book is focused about three levels of study on human understanding: First Level. Cognitional Activity: What do I do when I meet knowledge? Second Level. Epystemology: Why that, what I do, when I say I know, is knowledge? Third Level. Metaphysics: What do I know when knowing? This is an oustanding book and analysis. I've read it for 5 times and still I am enjoiyng it. This book opens your mind in order to understand yourself and keep learning.

This is the definitive text of Bernard Lonergan's most important work, Insight, with over 130 revisions, based on the meticulous labor of comparing three texts, line by line, word by word! All students of Lonergan's thought owe a great debt to Frs. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran for having executed their task with such thoughtfulness, perfection and devotion. Corresponding pages to the second edition of Insight, which has been the standard one, are given in brackets. My previous review was based on the second edition.

How to review a whole philosophy? This book is a masterpiece, but with many flaws. Lonergan was a Thomist who sought to bring Aquinas into the 20th Century. He added to conventional Thomism a phenomenological method and an acceptance of the reality of the world as known by science. In this one work he offers a general account of human knowing in natural science, common sense, human science, and philosophy. He presents a philosophy of science, a Transcendental Deduction with a Kantian flavor, a position on objectivity, the outline of a metaphysics that will absorb and unify the findings of science, an ethics, a proof for the existence of God, and a preamble to religious faith.

Lonergan developed his conception of insight by extending the Thomist account of abstraction to all areas of knowledge. Knowing always starts with sensed or imagined data into which one has an insight, an act of understanding. After this, one considers the sufficiency of evidence and makes a judgment about the validity of the insight. Experiencing, understanding and judging are the three cognitional acts; they have for their respective contents the three Thomist metaphysical elements of potency, form, and act. Data play a special role. Lonergan assumes that there is a separate act of being aware of data, which seems unlikely, but his conception of data is equivocal. He takes over the sense data of empiricist philosophy and conflates them with the data of science and also with the concrete properties of the physical world.

On the basis of his understanding of classical and statistical science, Lonergan developed his own conception of world process, emergent probability, as an alternative to Darwinian evolution. Every event is wholly determined by laws, but any prospective event also has its own numerical probability of occurring. Events can fall into cycles, "schemes of recurrence", and then their probabilities of occurrence are increased. If a new cycle is stabilized, a new entity at a higher level may emerge. Eventually, distinct physical, chemical, biological, psychic, and intellectual levels of reality appear. There are corresponding sciences for each level, each science distinct and autonomous and related to the others as higher and lower viewpoints. An upward dynamism carries nature through these levels; it appears in a special way in the pure desire to know, which is the upward dynamism in human knowing and human life.

Lonergan proposed a scientific method called genetic method for studying emergent probability, especially in biological systems. This was in addition to his so-called classical and statistical methods for studying the deterministic and probabilistic aspects of physical processes and his general "canons of empirical method". Unfortunately, Lonergan's understanding of science and mathematics was limited. His methods have little to do with what actually goes on in science and his treatment of the probability of events is unconvincing.

The phenomenology and Transcendental Deduction come in when Lonergan asks the reader to identify the three interconnected cognitional acts in his or her own experience. This "cognitional structure" provides a framework for all that inquiry can discover, and will ground his treatment of reality and objectivity. Lonergan's account of "self-appropriation" depends on the so-called "data of consciousness", our cognitional acts experienced as contents accessible to introspection. (He assumes there are such things without argument.) Data of consciousness are foundational for philosophy and the human sciences.

Much of the concern of this book is to overcome Kant's position, under the 'two-world' interpretation, and thereby to show that our knowledge actually reaches reality as it is in itself. For this purpose Lonergan develops a conception of judgment as absolute. We can make a judgment when we know that no further pertinent questions remain unanswered and therefore the conditions for the truth of the judgment have been completely met. Absolutely warranted judgment (the "virtually unconditioned") enables our thought to reach being. As a rule for conducting inquiry, this is weak. There can't be an explicit standard for identifying pertinent questions. Hence all this gives us is an admonition to address the ones that seem pertinent to us. Such a procedure doesn't justify anything absolutely, and indeed Lonergan recognizes that many judgments are "merely probable", including those reached in science.

The deeper question is what this has to do with the Kantian problem. What keeps us from making fully grounded judgments and still reaching only a world of appearances? The best answer I can find is in Lonergan's conception of the dialectic of philosophy. In concrete human life, the pure desire to know is in conflict with our other, lower desires. In philosophy, this shows up as an attachment to picture thinking. Science has shown that reality as explained is not perceptible or imaginable and that only the impalpable act of judgment brings us to genuine knowledge. But many people are not converted to this standard, and consequently they overvalue the experiential part of the knowing process at the expense of the intellectual or rational part. This orientation is behind the position of Kant and of anyone else who shares his qualms about the objectivity of our knowledge. In this way, Lonergan acquires an answer to any philosophy that differs substantially from his own. It has misconstrued the knowing process and hankers for a direct presentation of reality that it cannot have. Lonergan proposes a fourth, dialectical, method that is supposed to be the method of philosophy and the human sciences. This method would sort out disagreements in those fields on the basis of their true or false conceptions of the cognitional process and would work toward a universal viewpoint.

Lonergan's writing is impressive in scope and magisterial in style. At the same time, he produced some weak arguments and even fallacies of reasoning at critical points, including in his argument for the existence of God. He made rationalistic proposals for projects in hermeneutics and metaphysics that will never occur. His work was exclusively within the Catholic philosophical context and that is where most of his significance lies. Outside that context, he often was inadequately aware of the alternatives to his position. His effort to address them once and for all is doomed to failure. Within the religious context, he has helped many to build up their faith. For them the problems I have raised here may be of little importance. A few have taken him as virtually infallible and have built an enclave around him, but that was probably not his intention. Philosophy has no Messiah, but it has great thinkers who can contribute to the common effort.

Lonergan, a Thomistic philosopher,tries to explain the procedures of human mind,discerning a transcendental method capable to establish a fundamental pattern of every operation present in cognitional action."What am I doing when I am knowing?",that's the previous question Lonergan attempts to answer.This is possible integrating the operations "experiencing","understanding" and "judging",an INSIGTH which brings a startling unity to knowledge and to the pursuit of understanding in every field.

If somebody loves you authentically so much so that you become better person than before, you can't help loving him dearly. It happens. And it can happen even through a book! In this incredable book called "insight", you are invited to a wonderland of a higly diffentiated intelligence, only to find that it is no other than your real self. At first you wonder, you ask, you think hard, and you get it! For the first time you come to know what is understanding. You begin to doubt, you reflect, and finally you judge that you are a knower! Now you are changed. Now you know you are consciously operating in your experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. Now you know what knowledge is, what it means to you, and how it means to you. You become a living, knowing, acting subject. And you come to love Lonergan, since he introduced you to yourself. To "read" Insight may take a long time, years or decades. However when you finish it, you will begin to take another long trip to yourself, where no one had gone before...

I have been studying and teaching philosophy for over thirty years; indeed philosophical wisdom has been a lifelong quest for me. For much of this journey, I was haunted by the prospect of discovering a thinker who would do for our time what St. Thomas Aquinas accomplished for his--namely, reconcile and synthesize the best aspects of philosophy, theology and natural science. Then about a decade ago I read Lonergan's *Insight* and found that not only was such a synthesis possible--it had actually been realized by this remarkable (but still underappreciated) thinker. Though Lonergan was a prolific writer whose later works (including *Method in THeology*) are justly admired for their mature wisdom, *Insight* represents his initial breakthrough and remains his masterpiece. Indeed, it is a unique and in many ways revolutionary book about the dynamics and dimensions of human consciousness as it develops from experience through questioning, to understanding, critical reflection, judgment, responsible deliberation and action. Along the way, Lonergan presents a full-orbed, wholistic, and astonishingly insightful account of the human subject as situated in a non-reductionistic but scientifically-informed cosmology. He also gives a plausible rationale for an intelligent, reasonable and responsible theism that accords fully with evolutionary science and the best traditions of Christian theology. His presentation, over the long haul of 800+ pages, is intellectually challenging, but also enormously satisfying, as the reader assembles the author's clues (or perhaps, better said, cues for achieving self-understanding), and ascends through ever-widening contexts of explanation from the simple question of what makes a cartwheel round to an anticipation of the kind of solution to the human predicament a God of the classical theistic type would engender through the processes of human history.

Of course, a book of this length and complexity is impossible to summarize in a brief "Amazon" review. Suffice it to say that *Insight* is a truly extraordinary work, unique in the history of modern philosophy. Though, as indicated above, the author is a Christian theist, *Insight* will surely appeal to any open-minded reader, regardless of religious background or conviction (or the absence thereof). In my opinion, it sets forth an account of human cognition that far surpasses even the best work currently being done in cognitive science and epistemology, and for that reason alone deserves to be regarded as a philosophical classic, indeed one commensurate in scope and depth with Kant's First Critique (to cite just one example).

Not to be missed by any thoughtful inquirer with a decent background in philosophy and the natural sciences. If you require a good commentary (and you may, since this is formidable work), I suggest Joseph Flanagan's *Quest for Self-Knowledge* as a great "study guide" to the full range of Lonergan's thought.

This is a huge book. Why would Lonergan have written such a huge book?

To understand why, we need to consider the philosophical and existential context from which the book arose. Lonergan thought all serious thought begins w/ the practical/political question: How do we best live in society? Acc. Lonergan, it began in Western society w/ Socrates asking what the good life is. Then Lonergan thought that before we could answer that question, we had to backtrack to ask, What is real? What is the truth? This is the metaphysical question -- asked and answered by Aristotle (though not perfectly). Aristotle's answers more or less reigned through the 1200's w/ Thomas Aquinas being a peak. But around then, people like Ockham, Scotus, Descartes, Hume, and Kant shifted the emphasis of philosophy to an even more fundamental question, that of epistemology: How do we know what's real or true?

Lonergan thought that question was still the man question of our times: reason or revelation? heart or mind? experience or belief? etc. Lon. thought all those things were important, and he tried to understand how they were all interdependent, no matter which field one pursued. Insight is his main effort to do this. It is very good and very comprehensive. It seeks to combine the best of traditional philosophy/theology and add to it modern discoveries in math, science, history, and psychology. But it has one primary flaw in that it neglects largely the way our commitments or loves can shape our knowing (for better and worse). Method in Theology seeks to redress that (particularly ch 4).

Interestingly enough, Lon's own life traced the steps he outlined above. Growing up during the two world wars and the Great Depression, he wondered how we could best live. So he worked at economics. But by obedience to his Jesuit superiors, he went to philosophy and then theology. Toward the end of his life, moved by Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of liberation theology, he devoted the rest of his years to economics again. It was a kind of return after long years of withdrawal -- from the practical/political question, to the metaphysical, to the epistemological, and back to the practical/political.

One thing is missing here, namely that ultimately, Lonergan though, one needed to answer ultimate questions. And these were questions for theology.

This classic book in epistemology by a leading scholastic examines the process of forming concepts from a subjective point of view in the long tradition of philosophy descending from Aristotle and others and continued by Catholic thought. This school does not utilize experimental data and does not offer neuron models. Accepting inner experience as prime scientific data, Lonergan examines the process of forming an understanding through its perceived specific instances. You will be led to an understanding of understanding, if you will, and only if you will.

This may be the most comprehensive book ever written to answer a simple question: What is the basis of understanding? At 875 pages it may seem daunting. Yet it is worth the effort if you are doing serious work in the field. If you are not familiar with philosophical terminology, you will have to spend some time figuring out what phrases like "empirical residue" mean. And there is the detail: Every thought is elaborated and elaborated and so forth. This is not a criticism. It is just an explanation of the rigour that Lonergan brought to the effot. The last 200 pages or so approach understanding from a theological point of view. If you are not interested in that aspect, you will learn plenty from the rest of the book. So yes I recommend this book for the serious scholar.