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4>Useful texts: Bernard J F Lonergan: Insight: Excerpt from author's Preface
[Lonergan 1992,3-4]
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 organising intelligence that places the full set of clues in a unique explanatory perspective.
By insight, then, is meant not any act of attention or advertence or memory, but the supervening act of understanding. It is not any recondite intuition but the familiar event that occures easily and frequently in the moderately intelligent, rarely and with diffuculty only in the very stupid. In itself it is so simple and obvious that it seems to merit the little attention that commonly it receives. At the same time, its function in cognitional activity is so central that to grasp it in its conditions, its working, and its results, is to confer a basic yet startling unity on the whole field of human inquiry and human opinion. Indeed, this very wealth of implications is disconcerting, and I find it difficult to state in any brief and easy manner what the present book is about, how a single author can expect to treat the variety of topics listed in the table of contents, why he should attempt to do so in a single work, and what good he could hope to accomplish even if he were to succeed in his odd undertaking.
Still, a preface should provide at least a jejune and simplified answer to such questions and, perhaps, I can make a beginning by saying that the aim of the work is to convey an insight into insight. Mathematicians seek insight into sets of elements. Scientists seek insight into ranges of phenomena. Men of common sense seek insight into concrete situations and practical affairs. But our concern is to reach the act of organising intelligence that brings within a single perspective the insights of mathematicians, scientists and men of common sense.
It follows at once that the topics listed in the table of contents are not so disparate as they appear on a superficial reading. If anyone wishes to become a mathematician or a scientist or a man of common sense, he will derive no direct help from the present work. As physicsts study the shape of waves and leave to chemists the analysis of air and water, so we are concerned not with the objects understood in mathematics but with mathematicians' acts of understanding, not with objects understood in the various sciences but with scientists' acts of understanding, not with the concrete situations mastered by common sense but with the acts of understanding of men of common sense.
Further, while all acts of understanding have a certain family likeness, a full and balanced view is to be reached only by combining in a single account the evidence obtained from different fields of intelligent activity. Thus, the precise nature of the act of understanding is to be seen most clearly in mathematical examples. The dynamic context in which understanding occures can be studied to best advantage in an investigation of scientific methods. The disturbance of that dynamic context by alien concerns is thrust upon one's attention by the manner in which various measures of common nonsense blend in with common sense.
However, insight is not only a mental activity but also a constituent factor in human knowledge. It follows that insight into insight is in some sense knowledge of knowledge. Indeed, it is a knowledge of knowledge that seems extremely relevant to a whole series of basic problmes in philosophy. This I must now endeavour to indicate even though I can do so only in the abrupt and summary fashion that leaves terms undefined and offers arguments that fall far short of proof.
First, then, it is insight that makes the difference between the tantalising problem and the evident solution. Accordingly, insights seem to be the source of what Descartes named clear and distinct ideas and, on that showing, insight into insight would be the source of clear and distinct ideas about clear and distinct ideas.
Books
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' Amazon back |
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