Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Lonergan über sein Werk Einsicht (Insight Revisited)

Kurzinhalt: The first eight chapters of Insight are a series of five-finger exercises inviting the reader to discover in himself and for himself just what happens when he understands. My aim is ...

Textausschnitt: 268b I worked at Insight from 1949 to 1953. During the first three years my intention was an exploration of methods generally in preparation for a study of the method of theology. But in 1952 it became clear that I was due to start teaching at the Gregorian University in Rome in 1953, so I changed my plan and decided to round off what I had done and publish it under the title, Insight, A Study of Human Understanding. (Fs)

268c The problem tackled in the book was complex indeed. At its root was a question of psychological fact. Human intellect does not intuit essences. It grasps in simplifying images intelligible possibilities that may prove relevant to an understanding of the data. However, naive realists cannot remain naive realists and at the same time acknowledge the psychological facts. For them knowing is a matter of taking a good look; objectivity is a matter of seeing just what is there to be seen. For them my account of human understanding would appear to present intelligence as merely subjective and so imply an empiricism and, if they managed to get beyond empiricism, they would find themselves mere idealists. Accordingly, besides convincing people of the precise manner in which human understanding operates and develops, I also had to persuade them to drop intuitionist assumptions and come to understand the discursive character of human knowledge. Besides the world of immediacy alone known to the infant, there is also the world mediated by meaning into which the infant gradually moves. The former is Kant's world in which our only intuitions are sensitive. The latter is the world of a critical realism in which the objects are intended when we ask questions and are known when the questions are answered correctly. (Fs)

269a The first eight chapters of Insight are a series of five-finger exercises inviting the reader to discover in himself and for himself just what happens when he understands. My aim is to help people experience themselves understanding, advert to the experience, distinguish it from other experiences, name and identify it, and recognize it when it recurs. My aim, I surmise, is parallel to Carl Rogers' aim of inducing his clients to advert to the feelings that they experience but do not advert to, distinguish, name, identify, recognize. (Fs) (notabene)

269b The first chapter draws on instances of insight in mathematics. I began there because it is in mathematics that the content and context of an insight are more clearly and precisely defined. Again, it is in mathematics that one has the clearest proof of the existence of preconceptual operations on the intellectual level. Apart from its mistaken assumption of uniqueness, Euclidean geometry is not mistaken. But this does not mean that it is rigorous. Euclidean proofs frequently rest on valid but unacknowledged insights.1 Contemporary mathematicians employ highly formalized methods to avoid the use of insights that are not explicitly formulated, for what is not explicitly formulated is not subject to control. (Fs)

270a Chapters two to five draw on physics for their illustrations. Here insights are well enough defined, but they are much more in a context of ongoing process. Again, while mathematical formulations rest on insights, and while the insights rest on diagrams and other symbols, still this process can remain implicit, with explicit attention concentrated on rigorously logical formulation and proof. In contrast, in the natural sciences, besides the logical operations of description, the formulation of hypotheses, the deduction of assumptions and implications, there also occur such nonlogical operations as observation, discovery, the planning and execution of experiments, the presence or absence of verification and, in the latter case, the modification of the hypothesis or the substitution of another hypothesis. So the second chapter is devoted to ongoing structures of discovery, the third to the canons of empirical method, the fourth to the complementarity of classical and statistical heuristic structures, and the fifth to a clarification of the meaning of special relativity. (Fs)

270b Chapters six and seven are concerned with the operations of common-sense intelligence. While this is the universal manifestation of intelligence, it also is the most difficult to objectify clearly and distinctly. Common sense is more at home in doing than in speaking, and its speaking is apt to be terse and elliptical, or else metaphorical if not fanciful. It is a development of intelligence that is prior to that achieved in system, science, logic, and so it is prior to the systematic mode of differentiated consciousness. Common sense does not argue from principles but attends to proverbs, i.e., to brief bits of advice that are worth attending to when the occasion arises. It does not define terms but, along with the analysts, knows when terms are used appropriately. It is a specialization of intelligence in the realm of the particular and the concrete and, while it always remains a necessary specialization, still it is open to as many revisions and qualifications as there develop other specializations which take over areas that common sense once assigned to its own omnicompetence. (Fs)

271a Chapter six touches on the bias of the dynamic unconscious; here I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to draw attention to two works that I found very enlightening and, in some measure, to confirm the surmises I expressed in Insight. Herbert Fingarette in The Self in Transformation2 conceived neurosis as cumulatively misinterpreted experience. Both the experience and the misinterpretation are conscious though not adverted to, identified, named, distinguished from other experience and interpretations. What is properly unconscious and, as well, the goal of the psyche's profound striving is the correct interpretation of the misinterpreted experience. Eugene Gendlin in "A Theory of Personality Change"3 set himself the task of saying just what was meant by personality change and just how psychotherapy brings it about. I found it a most helpful study. (Fs) (notabene)

271b It was about 1937-38 that I became interested in a theoretical analysis of history. I worked out an analysis on the model of a threefold approximation. Newton's planetary theory had a first approximation in the first law of motion: bodies move in a straight line with constant velocity unless some force intervenes. There was a second approximation when the addition of the law of gravity between the sun and the planet yielded an elliptical orbit for the planet. A third approximation was reached when the influence of the gravity of the planets on one another is taken into account to reveal the perturbed ellipses in which the planets actually move. The point to this model is, of course, that in the intellectual construction of reality it is not any of the earlier stages of the construction but only the final product that actually exists. Planets do not move in straight lines nor in properly elliptical orbits; but these conceptions are needed to arrive at the perturbed ellipses in which they actually do move. (Fs)

272a In my rather theological analysis of human history, my first approximation was the assumption that men always do what is intelligent and reasonable, and its implication was an ever increasing progress. The second approximation was the radical inverse insight that men can be biased, and so unintelligent and unreasonable in their choices and decisions. The third approximation was the redemptive process resulting from God's gift of his grace to individuals and from the manifestation of his love in Christ Jesus. The whole idea was presented in chapter twenty of Insight. The sundry forms of bias were presented in chapters six and seven on common sense. The notion of moral impotence, which I had studied in some detail when working on Aquinas' notion of gratia operans in my dissertation, was worked out in chapter eighteen on the possibility of ethics. (Fs)

272b The first seven chapters of Insight deal with human intelligence insofar as it unifies data by setting up intelligible correlations. The eighth chapter moves on to a quite different type of insight, in which one grasps a concrete unity-identity-whole. This I referred to as a "thing," and I contrasted it with the already-out-there-now-real of extroverted animality, which I referred to as "body." Both of these, of course, are to be contrasted with Aristotle's substance, which is the first of a series of predicaments and arises, not from a study of human intelligence, but from an analysis that basically is grammatical. It arises, I mean, not in an account of the genesis of the mediation of a world through meaning, but in a study of the meanings so generated. Finally, when Aristotle's notion of substance is taken over by a naive realist, it acquires the meaning of what is underneath the already-out-there-now-real.1 (Fs)

273a Chapters nine, ten, and eleven have to do with judgment. Chapter nine endeavors to say what we mean by judgment. Chapter ten investigates the immediate ground of judgment and finds it in a grasp of the virtually unconditioned, a view that was preceded in my thinking by some acquaintance with Newman's illative sense. It differs from the naive realist and empiricist opinion, which thinks of verification simply as a matter of attending to data and not as a matter of finding data that fit in with a hypothesis. It further differs, of course, from the old notion that judging can be a matter of comparing concepts and discovering that one entails another. Such entailment we considered to yield no more than analytic propositions. To reach analytic principles the compared concepts in their defined sense have to be verified in experience. (Fs)

273b Chapter eleven asks whether any true judgments occur and it attempts to meet the issue by asking whether I am a knower. The "I" is the unity-identity-whole given in consciousness; a "knower" is one who performs the operations investigated in the previous ten chapters; the reader is asked to find out for himself and in himself whether it is virtually unconditioned that he is a knower. The alternative to an affirmative answer, as presented in Method in Theology, is the admission that one is a nonresponsible, nonreasonable, nonintelligent somnambulist.2 (Fs)

273c Not only are the "I" and its cognitional operations to be affirmed, but also the pattern in which they occur is acknowledged as invariant, not of course in the sense that further methodical developments are impossible, nor in the sense that fuller and more adequate knowledge of the pattern is unattainable, but in the sense that any attempt to revise the patterns as now known would involve the very operations that the pattern prescribes. (Fs)
273d Chapter twelve attempts an account of the notion of being. It distinguishes notion, idea, concept, and knowledge of being. Knowledge of being occurs in true judgments. Concepts of being are objectifications of the notion of being. The idea of being is the content of the act of understanding that understands everything about everything. The notion of being is our ability and drive to ask questions for intelligence (What? Why? How? What for? How often?) and for reflection (Is that so? Are you certain?). That ability and drive is prior to all acts of understanding and also to all concepts and judgments. As there is no limit to the questions we can ask, the notion of being is unrestricted. Accordingly, it is not categorial but transcendental. (Fs)

274a A point not made in Insight I have since learnt from Fr. Coreth. It regards spheres of being. Real being is known when the fulfilling conditions are data of sense or of consciousness. Restricted spheres of being are known when the fulfilling conditions are not data but some lesser requirement: the merely logical is what satisfies criteria of clarity, coherence, and rigor; the mathematical is any freely chosen set of suitable postulates with their conclusions rigorously drawn; the hypothetical is an instance of the logical that has some likelihood of being relevant to an understanding of the data of sense or of consciousness. Finally, there is transcendent being, and to this topic we return in chapter nineteen. (Fs) (notabene)

274b Chapter thirteen raises the key question of objectivity. It is a key question because insights are not intuitions. They are not of themselves knowledge of what really is so. Of themselves they merely grasp what may be relevant to what one is imagining and, if one's imagining is sufficiently accurate, to an understanding of what is so. Now if the intuitionist view of insight is mistaken, some other meaning has to be found for object, objective, objectivity. Hence, I distinguished a principal notion and three partial notions. The principal notion is that A and B are objects if it is true that (1) A is, (2) B is, and (3) A is not B. Further, if it is true that A is the subject and that B is not the subject, then there occurs an instance of the subject-object relation. The three partial notions of objectivity were referred to as the experiential, the normative, and the absolute. Absolute objectivity is reached with the grasp of a virtually unconditioned. Experiential objectivity is provided by the data as given. Normative objectivity arises when the exigences of one's intelligence and of one's reasonableness are met. If the virtually unconditioned is represented by the syllogism, If X, then Y; but X; therefore Y, then the major becomes known through normative objectivity, the minor becomes known through experiential objectivity, and the virtually unconditioned becomes known when the conclusion is drawn. (Fs)

275a With chapter thirteen the book could end. The first eight chapters explore human understanding. The next five reveal how correct understanding can be discerned and incorrect rejected. However, I felt that if I went no further, my work would be regarded as just psychological theory incapable of grounding a metaphysics. Unfortunately that type of argument could be repeated. A metaphysics could be possible and yet an ethics impossible. An ethics could be possible and yet arguments for God's existence impossible. In that fashion seven more chapters and an epilogue came to be written. Some of the points made then I still like; others have been superseded in the light of further reading, conversing, reflecting. (Fs)

275b I have not been moved to change my mind about the first three chapters on metaphysics, i.e., on chapters fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. But in chapter seventeen my usage of the word "myth" is out of line with current usage. My contrast of mystery and myth was between symbolic expressions of positions and of counter-positions. It was perhaps justifiable in the context of Insight, but it is not going to be understood outside of it, so another mode of expression is desirable. Further, the account of mystery has to be filled out with what chapter four of Method in Theology says about religious experience. (Fs)

275c Similarly, the third section of chapter seventeen on truth of interpretation has been given a more concrete expression in chapters seven to eleven of Method. A systematic account of the problems of interpretation there yield place in the later work to an orderly set of directions on what is to be done towards moving to the attainment of universal viewpoint. In this connection I might mention a doctoral dissertation presented at Fordham by Terry J. Tekippe on The Universal Viewpoint and the Relationship of Philosophy and Theology in the Works of Bernard Lonergan. It illustrates very well an intermediate position between what I had worked out in Insight and, on the other hand, the views presented in Method in Theology. (Fs)