on lonergans philosophy of knowing and historical insights

Crossing Oceans, Coleção CLE, v. 75, pp. 105-116, 2015.

On Lonergan’s philosophy of knowing and historical insights Fábio Maia Bertato Centro de Lógica, Epistemologia e História da Ciência, Universidade Estadual de Campinas Cidade Universitária “Zeferino Vaz”, Rua Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, 251, Barão Geraldo, Campinas, SP [email protected] Abstract: The main work of the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) is the book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). In this book, Lonergan presents his version of Aquinas’ philosophy of knowing from a contemporary perspective. His task is to understand ‘what is to understand’ and he focuses primarily in the knowing and secondly in the known. He begins the study on insight considering the ‘dramatic instance’ illustrated by Archimedes rushing naked from the Baths crying ‘Eureka!’. With this instance, Lonergan gives to the reader “an insight on insight” and introduces the characterization of this important concept. The aim of this paper is to make some considerations on Lonergan’s philosophy of knowing and to provide other examples of well-registered insights from history. Keywords: Lonergan; Insight; Philosophy of knowing; Historical insight; Epistemology.

Bernard Lonergan and his philosophy of knowing

Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) was a great scholar. He was a philosopher, a theologian, an economist and a student of methodology.1 He taught at Loyola College, Montreal (now part of Concordia University), Regis College (Toronto), the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Harvard University and Boston College. He had background in mathematics, classics and logic. 1 It seems more appropriate to call Lonergan a ‘student of methodology’ than a ‘methodologist’, because of his particular concept of method. While he accepted being called a methodologist, he added: “but what most people understand by method is a recipe”. This notion was strongly rejected by him (Morelli, 1997, p. 14; cf. http://www.bernardlonergan.com).

106 Fábio Maia Bertato


A few data about him: he has followers in the entire world. His works were translated into several languages. There are more than a dozen centers devoted to his work. Almost a dozen colloquia are held every year having him as core subject. The literature on his thought currently comprises more than one thousand articles and monographs. Those facts notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of people, including scholars, have never heard of Lonergan. Indeed, a story in the Boston College Magazine (Spring, 2003) explains: “To his followers, Bernard Lonergan, SJ, was the most important theologian, psychologist, economist, philosopher you never heard of”. On the occasion of a conference on Lonergan’s work, in 1970, Time magazine (April 20, 1970, p. 10) wrote he is “considered by many intellectuals to be the finest philosophic thinker of the 20th century”.

Lonergan’s main work is Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957). In this book, Lonergan presents his version of Thomas Aquinas’ (1225-1274) philosophy of knowing from a contemporary perspective. Although knowledge is the core of Lonergan’s philosophy, in Insight he also approaches philosophy, mathematics, physics and other natural sciences, ethics, economics, metaphysics, and so forth. In the present paper I discuss Lonergan’s concept of insight, namely, the main one in his philosophy, as an act of understanding and provide a few examples of historical insights.

The task Lonergan sought to accomplish in Insight was to understand ‘what to understand is’ by primarily focusing on the act of knowing and secondarily on that which is known. His philosophy unfolds in the answers to the following three questions: (1) What am I doing when I am knowing?; (2) Why is doing that knowing?; and (3) What do I know when I do it? The answers to those questions result in a cognitional theory, an epistemology and a metaphysics, respectively. In this way, Lonergan reverses the traditional order of dependence among these philosophical disciplines.

Lonergan began his reflection on insight by mathematics and mathematical physics, because, according to him, the mathematicians know exactly what they are doing when they have insights. His goal was to have an insight into insight. Thus he concluded: “Archimedes had his insight thinking about the crown; we shall have ours by thinking about Archimedes” (Lonergan 1992, p. 28). In his theory of cognition Lonergan considers three steps for the process of knowing: experience, understanding and judgment. Together with the decision

On Lonergan’s philosophy of knowing and historical insights 107


to act, these steps represent what Lonergan calls levels of self-transcendence, which might be conceived of as the set of operations by which one transcends oneself and deals with the external world. The objects of experience are data. Data are not mere deliverances of sense - of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting. Data are what human beings ask questions about. What humans experience but do not yet know or understand. Data are immediately present to consciousness. Data give rise to questions and questions can give rise to insights into the data. Through insights one fills the blanks in the answers to questions in a way that makes sense. Humans have a desire to know what they experience. According to Aristotle, ‘all men by nature desire to know’ (Arist. Met. I.1, 980a22, trans. Ross). Lonergan calls this desire to know the ‘primordial question’. Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins by assuming this fact, and Lonergan builds his philosophy on that primordial question, that thirst for knowledge, that seeking for the unknown: “By insight, […] is meant not any act of attention or advertence or memory but the supervening act of understanding” (Lonergan 1992, p. 3).

Who seeks insights and in which domains? Mathematicians seek insights into sets of elements, scientists into ranges of phenomena and men of common sense (i.e., all human beings in their daily activities) into concrete situations and practical affairs. Insight is universal: “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” (Lonergan 1992, p. 4). Insights can be direct or inverse. Through direct insight humans get a glimpse of the intelligibility of data (for instance, we can easily identify the pattern underlying the following sequence of numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, …). Through inverse insight we recognize absence of intelligibility (we understand the randomness of a sequence like: 3, -2, 10, 40.023, 22, π, -3,278, …). In the stage of experience insights provide provisional understanding. In the step of understanding one deals with the accumulation, integration, systematization of insights. One grasps relations, connections among the content of previous insights. Understanding develops. However, inquiries derived from the primordial question are not satisfied by just a plausible understanding of experience. One further needs to check whether such understanding is true or correct. Every ‘question for intelligence’ (what is it?, Why? and How often?) leads to a ‘question for reflection’



(Is it so?). 2 Therefore, one next moves onto the stage of judgment of the cognitional process, in which the ‘questions for reflection’ arise, aiming at establishing whether evidences are sufficient to affirm a judgment (‘It is so’) and thus whether one’s judgment is correct or not.

Dramatic situations: the experience of insight

In his study of insight as an activity Lonergan considers each singular insight as an event that occurs ‘within various patterns of other related events’ (Lonergan 1992, p. 16). Here he is not interested in what is understood, but in the process by which something comes to be understood. In the first part of Insight, Lonergan seeks answer to the question, ‘What is happening when we are knowing?’:

But in fact our primary concern is not the known but the knowing. The known is extensive, but the knowing is a recurrent structure that can be investigated sufficiently in a series of strategically chosen instances. The known is difficult to master, but in our day competent specialists have labored to select for serious readers and to present to them in an adequate fashion the basic components of the various departments of knowledge. Finally, the known is incomplete and subject to revision, but our concern is the knower that will be the source of the future additions and revisions. (Lonergan 1992, p. 12).

An insight is simply an act of understanding, an act that occurs easily and frequently in intelligent people, but seldom among the ones lacking in intelligence (Lonergan 1992, p. 29). The experience of insight marks the transition from non-understanding to understanding. The occurrence of an insight is related with the passage from one problem to its solution. What insight is not? Insight is not an act of memory. It is not an intuition. It is not a vision of sensible objects. Insight is not an act of picturing.

Insight is commonplace. We all perform acts of understanding all the time. People know in two possible manners, by acquiring commonsense or 2 On the notion of judgment and the different kinds of ‘grasps’ and ‘formulations’ obtained from the ‘questions for intelligence’, see Lonergan (1992, pp. 296-303).



theoretical knowledge, and insights are present in both. Through commonsense insights one can understand things related to oneself. Theoretical insights allow understanding how things are related one to another.

History provides many examples of extraordinary insights. As a dramatic

instance of commonsense insight (if one might say adjective ‘common’ applies to this case), let us consider the well-known story of the American author Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968). She was deaf, blind and mute in consequence of a disease she had at age 18 months old. Everything changed for her when her teacher and lifelong companion, Anne Mansfield Sullivan (1866-1936), herself visually impaired, went to Keller’s home in March 1887. In the latter’s words:

The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. [...] Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. [...] Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. [...] But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name. [...] We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. [...] I learned a great many new words that day. [...] It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day [...]” (Keller 1905, cap. IV – emphasis added).



A little seven-year-old girl practically isolated from the exterior world by her blindness and deafness discovered that ‘everything had a name’ and each such name allowed her acquire new thoughts. The blind girl could now see by means of that ‘strange new sight’ that enabled her to learn about and understand the world. Probably Lonergan would have considered such new sight as insight.

Another well-known story is that of Archimedes rushing naked from the baths shouting ‘Eureka!’. According to Vitruvius (c.80-70 BC-15 BC):

Though Archimedes discovered many curious matters which evince great intelligence, that which I am about to mention is the most extraordinary. Hiero, when he obtained the regal power in Syracuse, having, on the fortunate turn of his affairs, decreed a votive crown of gold to be placed in a certain temple to the immortal gods, commanded it to be made of great value, and assigned an appropriate weight of gold to the manufacturer. He, in due time, presented the work to the king, beautifully wrought, and the weight appeared to correspond with that of the gold which had been assigned for it. But a report having been circulated, that some of the gold had been abstracted, and that the deficiency thus caused had been supplied with silver, Hiero was indignant at the fraud, and, unacquainted with the method by which the theft might be detected, requested Archimedes would undertake to give it his attention. Charged with this commission, he by chance went to a bath, and being in the vessel, perceived that, as his body became immersed, the water ran out of the vessel. Whence, catching at the method to be adopted for the solution of the proposition, he immediately followed it up, leapt out of the vessel in joy, and, returning home naked, cried out with a loud voice that he had found that of which he was in search, for he continued exclaiming, in Greek, εὑρηκα, (I have found it out). After this, he is said to have taken two masses, each of a weight equal to that of the crown, one of them of gold and the other of silver. Having prepared them, he filled a large vase with water up to the brim, wherein he placed the mass of silver, which caused as much water to run out as was equal to the bulk thereof. The mass being then taken out, he poured in by measure as much water as was required to fill the vase once more to the brim. By these means he found out what quantity of water was equal to a certain weight of silver. He then placed the mass of gold in the vessel, and, on taking it out, found that the water which ran over was lessened, because, as the magnitude of



the gold mass was smaller than that containing the same weight of silver. After again filling the vase by measure, he put the crown itself in, and discovered that more water ran over then than with the mass of gold that was equal to it in weight; and thus, from the superfluous quantity of water carried over the brim by the immersion of the crown, more than that displaced by the mass, he found, by calculation, the quantity of silver mixed with the gold, and made manifest the fraud of the manufacturer.” (Vitruvius 1826, Book IX, pp. 264-265 – emphasis added).

Lonergan choose this story as his first illustration of insight. Probably it is a legend, as there is evidence against the possibility of reproducing accurately the procedure indicated by Vitruvius. Still, if this story is true Archimedes might have worked out the principles of displacement and specific weight or gravity. In any case Lonergan was not interested in the principles of hydrostatics. His goal was to have an insight into insight. Thus he concluded: “Archimedes had his insight thinking about the crown; we shall have ours by thinking about Archimedes” (Lonergan 1992, p. 28).

Following this dramatic instance Lonergan describes five characteristics of insight that can be grasped by analyzing Archimedes’ Eureka moment and reflecting on what is going on in our own minds while we are understanding.

Five characteristics of insight 1. Insight comes as a release to the tension of inquiry:

[…] 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.” (Lonergan 1992, p. 28)

It suffices to think of Helen Keller’s joy. Or of Andrew Wiles (b. 1953) absorbed in his research on Fermat’s Last Theorem for over six years in near-total secrecy. Certainly, Archimedes running naked is an excellent example of this kind of release.



2. Insight comes suddenly and unexpectedly: One cannot force an insight. When people have a problem, they are active in the sense they are looking for answers and solutions. They are passive in the sense they are waiting for an insight. Insights do not follow automatically from the formulation of a problem.

This fact is seen in the following quotes by Wiles and Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), leaving the beauty of the mathematical construction aside. About his insight into the solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles said, “I was casually glancing at a paper of Barry Mazur’s [...] and I just instantly realized that there was a trick that I could use [...]” (apud Mozzochi 2000, p. 16). And Poincaré, on his sudden flash of illumination during a sleepless night that led him to formulate the class of Fuchsian functions,

The incidents of the travel made me forget my mathematical work [...] At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it [...] I did not verify the idea [...] I felt a perfect certainty.” (apud van der Waerden 2009, p. 69)

3. Insights depend on inner conditions rather than on outer circumstances: Propitious conditions for insights to occur might be created by asking questions continually, handling data, considering different perspectives and reasoning by analogies. Yet, according to Lonergan (1992, p. 29), “insight depends upon native endowment”; after all, “many frequented the baths of Syracuse without coming to grasp the principles of hydrostatics”.

4. An insight pivots between the abstract and the concrete: Insights deal

with data and images which are concrete. An insight grasps an idea, a concept, an abstract element. According to Lonergan (1992, p. 30),

[…] 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.”

One might evoke Socrates and the slave (Plato, Meno 80d-86c): one particular square gives a general result on areas of squares.



5. An insight passes into the habitual texture of one’s mind. Before Archimedes could solve his problem he needed inspiration, but he no longer needed it once the solution was found. A difficult problem becomes simple. And tends to remain simple. This characteristic makes learning possible.

What one really understands somehow becomes part of one’s own being. It is like riding a bike... After this characterization of insight, Lonergan discusses the genesis of the definition of circle and the insight-involving cognitive process that allows one go from a cartwheel to the concept of circle. He also considers the different kinds of definition (nominal, explanatory and implicit definitions) and the emergence of higher viewpoints, as the development from arithmetic to algebra (Lonergan 1992, pp. 31-37).3

Final remarks

Allow me a brief comment on the possibility of developing a systemic approach to Lonergan’s philosophy of knowing: considering his characterization of insight and that “for every basic insight there is a circle of terms and relations, such that the terms fix the relations, the relations fix the terms and the insight fixes both” (Lonergan 1992, p. 36), a systemic theory of knowing, a general theory of knowing using the apparatus of mathematical logic is plausible. The reason is that systems can be mathematically considered as relational structures, that is, ordered pairs composed of a set of objects and a set of relations on the set of objects. I intend to develop this formal approach in the future (Bertato 2014).

From the aforementioned considerations I may highlight the following points: historical examples allow identifying some characteristics of insight;

3 According to Lonergan, insights on questions lead to further questions. Further questions lead to further insights only to raise still further questions. In this way insights accumulate as ‘viewpoints’; ‘lower viewpoints’ lead to ‘higher viewpoints’. The example of the emergence of algebra from arithmetic or the sequence of construction of number systems (naturals, integers, rational, irrational, real, complex, etc.) can help understand the idea of higher viewpoints as a result of the limitations of the lower ones (e.g., complex numbers allow performing operations which are impossible with real numbers).



understanding insight might help stimulate its occurrence; based on the notion of insight one can build a philosophy and a metaphysics; the notion of self-appropriation proposed by Lonergan (in the sense of self-awareness and obtainment of insights from the history of science) seems interesting; and Lonergan’s theory has great potential for formal systems. References ARISTOTLE. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York:

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BERTATO, F.M. “Sobre a definição matemática de aistema: alguns aspectos Históricos, Novas Propostas e Lógicas Sistêmicas Associadas”. In: E. Bresciani Filho, I.M.L. D’Ottaviano, M.E.Q. Gonzalez, A.M. Pellegrini and R.S.C. de Andrade (orgs.) (2014), vol. 66, pp. 55-100.

BRESCIANI FILHO, E., D’OTTAVIANO, I.M.L., GONZALEZ, M.E.Q., PELLEGRINI, A.M., ANDRADE, R.S.C. de. Auto-Organização: Estudos Interdisciplinares. Campinas: CLE, 2014.

GRONER, R.; GRONER, M.; BISCHOF, W.F. Methods of Heuristics. New York: Routledge, 2009.

KELLER, H. The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905.

LONERGAN, B. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London: Drodlet, 1957.

______. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. In: Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, 5th ed., ed. F.E. Crowe and R. M. Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, vol. 3, pp. 27-770.

MORELLI, Mark D.; MORELLI, Elizabeth A. The Lonergan Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

MOZZOCHI, C.J. The Fermat Diary. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 2000.

PLATO. Meno. In: Plato in Twelve Volumes, transl. W.R.M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, vol. 3, pp. 265-468.



VITRUVIUS, Marcus. The Architecture of M. Vitruvius Pollio in Ten Books, trans. J. Gwilt. London: Priestley and Weale, 1826.

VAN DER WAERDEN, B.L. “Inspiration and Thinking in Mathematics”. In: R. Groner, M. Groner and W.F. Bischof (eds.) (2009), pp. 69-77.

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