Study of Human Understanding

* Book: Bernard Lonergan. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. 1957.

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Context

Charles McKelvey:

"Bernard Lonergan was a Catholic philosopher who formulated an understanding of the process through which the “subject,” that is, a person seeking truth, can arrive to knowledge and correct understanding, even though understanding is shaped and limited by the social position of the subject. In Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (originally published in 1957) and Method in Theology (originally published in 1972), Lonergan formulates the common cognitional structure of understanding in the various fields of human intellectual activity, an understanding of understanding itself. Lonergan’s cognitional theory challenges the post-modern assumptions of today’s radical Left."

(https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/maga-and-common-sense-intelligence)

Discussion

The objectivity of knowledge and its real possibility through Cross-Horizon Encounter

Charles McKelvey:

"Lonergan’s cognitional theory proceeds on the premise that the attainment of knowledge by the subject is rooted in the desire to know. Lonergan recognizes, of course, that there are other desires, such as desires for power, privilege, status, or material comfort; and that such other desires can subvert the course of the desire to know. However, he maintains, based on empirical observation, that there are persons who at times succeed in stilling other desires, allowing the desire to know to become the dominant force. He writes:

[The desire to know] is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man, it can keep him for hours, day by 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 him from the world of ordinary affairs, invade the 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.

The desire to know is the source of knowing, driving the subject through the three levels of consciousness that pertain to the general cognitional structure of human understanding. First, the subject experiences data that are present to consciousness. Secondly, the subject seeks to understand the data and to formulate an understanding. Thirdly, the subject seeks to determine if the understanding is correct by raising relevant questions and gathering evidence in response.

As the subject strives to understand, he or she critically reflects on questions that are relevant to the issue at hand by discovering further relevant questions and continually reformulating understanding as the process unfolds. There arrives a critical moment when the answers to relevant questions begin to reinforce one another, which compels the subject to make the judgment that the reformulated insight is correct.

Such judgments do not have certainty. Even though the answers to relevant questions reinforce one another, there remains some probability that there are further relevant questions, not known to consciousness, which would modify the insight.

Such judgements, however, are objective, in that they are independent of the subject who makes the judgment, if the subject has been adhering to the rules of knowledge. Such judgments are mandated by the results of a process that involves the continuous addressing of relevant questions.

There is, however, the problem of horizon. The scope of knowledge and the range of interests of the subject are bounded by his or her historical period, social background, educational formation, and personal development. Knowledge and insights that are beyond the horizon of the subject are beyond consciousness, and they therefore cannot stimulate awareness of further relevant questions.

Lonergan, therefore, stressed in Method in Theology the importance of personal encounter with persons of different horizons, enabling the subject to discover relevant questions previously blocked from consciousness by horizon. Personal encounter involves “meeting persons, appreciating the values they represent, criticizing their defects, and allowing one’s living to be challenged at its roots by their words and their deeds.”

Personal encounter is the opposite of dismissal. Personal encounter involves taking seriously the words of the other, critically reflecting on them, even when they challenge one’s own interests and cherished beliefs, and even to the point of allowing for the possibility of their provoking one’s own intellectual and moral conversion.

Cross-horizon encounter takes the subject beyond the judgment that pertains to a particular social context. Through personal encounter with persons of other horizons, the subject is able to arrive to a formulation that transcends his or her horizon.

Cross-horizon encounter is the key to the attainment of objective knowledge. That is to say, the attainment of universal understandings which transcend cultural differences, developed by subjects who seek understanding with fidelity to the rules of knowledge.

Cross-horizon encounter unleashes enormous possibilities for human understanding. Through the collective and sustained pursuit of cross-horizon encounter, subjects cooperatively develop an objective fund of knowledge, consisting of universal truths that constitute the foundation for understanding for all of humanity in a given stage of human development. I will maintain below that this process has been unfolding in recent decades in the form of a dialogue among civilizations in the context of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist political praxis.

For Lonergan, the objectivity of knowledge pertains to the realms of both fact and value. He maintains that the drive of the subject through levels of consciousness expresses itself not only with respect to questions concerning what is, but also with respect to questions concerning what ought to be done. However, distinct from the drive of the subject with respect to questions of fact, when the subject arrives to insight and judgment with respect to what ought to be done, he or she then proceeds to a fourth level of consciousness, the level of decision, in which the subject decides to act or not act on the correct course of action. If driven by the desire to know through the three levels of consciousness, the subject at the fourth level of consciousness can be driven by a desire for consistency between knowing and doing.

Universal objective knowledge, therefore, pertains to what is and what ought to be done. It consists of those understandings that are developed through the unfolding of the desire to know and the discovery of relevant questions through cross-horizon encounter. Although objective knowledge begins with personal experiences of looking and seeing in a particular social context, it ultimately transcends the personal experiences and the horizons of subjects.

We are speaking here of human possibilities, not widespread patterns. However, it is a real possibility, which has given rise to a general pattern in which, in the quest for a more just world, exceptional leaders have emerged in all regions of the world who have been able to draw upon the insights of intellectuals to formulate a coherent vision and to disseminate the vision in society through a political process. They have created a part of the cultural legacy of and for humanity. This is a fundamental fact of the modern human condition, clearly visible to all who look beyond the realities of their particular horizons."

(https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/maga-and-common-sense-intelligence)