Insight is pivotal for epistemology

I get the sense that I have finally identified where my argument will start. Of course, I’ve written a prospectus, spent years reading and loosely organizing notes, but my recent discovery of Robert Henman’s work on the implications of Lonergan’s Generalized Empirical Method for neuroscience has provided me with a case study of sorts that will frame my dissertation.

With that identified, I realize how much of what will immediately follow my look at Henman comes directly from Lonergan and from Insight. Since that is the case, it seems appropriate to reread Insight again and explain certain elements of Lonergan’s project as I go. Therefore, I intend to work through a series of posts that function as an informal Lonergan 101.

Let’s see if I can follow through on my intention.

The paradigmatic case

Lonergan opens Chapter One with the fun and colorful example of Archimedes’s Eureka! moment in the baths of Syracuse, but I prefer Lonergan’s illustration from the Preface regarding the detective story:

In the ideal detective story the reader is given all the clues yet fails to spot the criminal. He may advert to each clue as it arises. He needs no further clues to solve the mystery. Yet he can remain in the dark for the simple reason that reaching the solution is not the mere apprehension of any clue, not the mere memory of all, but a quite distinct activity of organizing intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective. (1)

What makes the ideal detective successful is his ability to organize all the clues in the particular way that reveals what others have missed given those same clues. This example is paradigmatic of insight’s centrality to successful inquiry, which can be further generalized into a theory of human knowing, or epistemology.

To be more specific, the occurrence of an insight is the doorway to what Lonergan calls “a full circuit of human knowing.” By understanding the elements of any particular insight, we begin to understand what we are doing when we are knowing, upon which we can build an accurate epistemology.

Sketching the nature of insight

There are five things one must come to understand about the activity of insight in order to understand its centrality to inquiry and epistemology.

What we have to grasp is that insight 1) comes as a release to the tension of inquiry, 2) comes suddenly and unexpectedly, 3) is a function not of outer circumstances but of inner conditions, 4) pivots between the concrete and the abstract, and 5) passes into the habitual texture of one’s mind. (2)

Release to the tension of inquiry

The Aristotelian notion that all men desire to know is a crucial component of Lonergan’s philosophy. He will refer to it later as “the core of cognitive meaning”, which I have noted about here. That we inquire is a fact and the desire to know is constitutive of that fact.

Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain. Just what is wanted has many names. In what precisely it consists is a matter of dispute. But the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his laboratory. It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration. It can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other achievements. It can fill his waking thoughts, hide from him the world of ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of his dreams. It can demand endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope, never a certain promise, of success. (3)

It comes suddenly and unexpectedly

Insight is not a matter of rote repetition. It is not produced through mechanical calculation or deduced by means of rule-following. It is the aha! moment of organizing intelligence in which we recognize the intelligible pattern that was there all along. It is, in a word, discovery.

For it is reached, in the last analysis, not by learning rules, not by following precepts, not by studying any methodology. Discovery is a new beginning. It is the origin of new rules that supplement or even supplant the old. Genius is creative. It is genius precisely because it disregards established routines, because it originates the novelties that will be the routines of the future. Were there rules for discovery, then discoveries would be mere conclusions. Were there precepts for genius, then men of genius would be hacks. (4)

Inner conditions, not outer circumstance

Insight is not simply a matter of sensation. If it were, any specifically ordered set of sensations would lead every individual to the exact same ideas. But this is not the case, as anyone with a child, or students, knows. Different people do vastly different things with the same set of data.

The detective story bears this out. Both the reader and other characters are aware of all the same clues, the same information, but only the master detective can put them all together to resolve the operative mystery.

Therefore, successful insight is not wholly dependent upon the mere outer circumstances of the case, but also upon the inner conditions of minds involved. There are habitual orientations towards alertness, awareness, and inquisitiveness that render the organizing intelligence of some more fruitful than that of others.

The pivot between the concrete and the abstract

I just mentioned that insight is not merely a matter of what is sensed, but how what is sensed is organized. But saying this should not be interpreted as an attempt to draw an ontological distinction between Minds and Material a la Cartesian dualism. Rather, it is merely the distinction between cognitive operations performed upon sensible and imagined presentations and the cognitive operations that treat abstract presentations beyond the sensible or imagined.

For if insights arise from concrete problems, if they reveal their value in concrete applications, nonetheless they possess a significance greater than their origins and a relevance wider than their original applications. Because insights arise with reference to the concrete, geometers use diagrams, mathematicians need pen and paper, teachers need blackboards, pupils have to perform experiments for themselves, doctors have to see their patients, troubleshooters have to travel to the spot, people with mechanical bent take things apart to see how they work.

But because the significance and relevance of insight goes beyond any concrete problem or application, men formulate abstract sciences with their numbers and symbols, their technical terms and formulae, their definitions, postulates, and deductions. Thus by its very nature insight is the mediator, the hinge, the pivot. It is insight into the concrete world of sense and imagination. Yet what is known by insight, what insight added to sensible and imagined presentations, finds its adequate expression only in the abstract and recondite formulations of the sciences. (5)

The discovery becomes habitual

In academia, there is the dissatisfying phenomenon of discovering something that, for you, is new and revolutionary for a time, but which soon becomes, for you, “obvious” and, it is feared, insignificant. Or at least one regards the discovery as insignificant the degree to which one also indulges the creep of impostor syndrome.

Much of this phenomenon is explained by the fact that what is new for us cannot stay “new” for long. We have an insight, then another, then another, accumulating them as we go, coordinating them into related patterns as is required. In a word, we learn.

Once one has understood, one has crossed a divide. What a moment ago was an insoluble problem now becomes incredibly simple and obvious. Moreover, it tends to remain simple and obvious. However laborious the first occurrence of an insight may be, subsequent repetitions occur almost at will. This, too, is a universal characteristic of insight, and indeed it constitutes the possibility of learning. For we can learn inasmuch as we can add insight to insight, inasmuch as the new does not extrude the old but complements and combines with it. (6)

The basics

This is the basic nature of insight, the phenomenon which Lonergan takes 770 pages to analyze and explain. But in this basic activity is a seed that blossoms into a complete cognitional theory, epistemology and metaphysics, all of which our troubled, postmodern times require.

Next, Lonergan outlines the basic elements of an insight: clues, concepts, images, questions, nominal and explanatory definitions, primitive terms, and implicit definitions.

Notes:

1. Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, p. 3.
2. ibid, p. 28.
3. ibid., p. 28 – 9.
4. ibid., p. 29.
5. ibid., p. 30.
6. ibid., p. 30 – 1.