Monday, August 4, 2014

Insight


During my time doing my Masters at Boston College, I had the honor of being a Lonergan Fellow and studying the work of Bernard Lonergan, S. J. Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest whose philosophy and theology centered around what it means to have an insight (which can also be called an "intellectual conversion"). I'm convinced that Lonergan will likely be known as one of the most comprehensive and original philosophers in modern history, if only because I have seen the kind of community that has grown from the study of his work. There are few communities as joyous, intellectually acute, or collaborative as Lonerganians, who are some of the most attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, and loving people you're likely to meet.

There are two recent developments in my post-grad Lonergan community. In the first place, this fall I will present my paper "FaƧadebook: The Internet, Cognition, and Grace" at Marquette University's Lonergan on the Edge conference (Sept 19-20). Look forward to snippets of my research appearing on here as I stumble upon things and sketch them into a presentable form. Secondly, my Thinking About Thinking (with a Little Bit of Drinking) reading group starts up next week, and our first book is Lonergan's masterwork Insight. We are an Inklings-style group interested in reading about cognition, epistemology, and creativity (over beer). Sketches from our readings and meetings will appear on here as well.

The reason Lonergan appeals to me as a creative human being is that creativity is contingent upon and constituted by insights. An insight is what gets us out of writer's block and what lets us lay down the first lines of a drawing—so one could say to be creative is to have insights. But one must not only have insights; one must also know what an insight actually is. Thus, one must have insight into insight (and, for that matter, insight into oversight) if one is to be truly creative, and not merely a hack who regurgitates old solutions or someone ever waiting on the capricious muses of inspiration to show up. Without insight into insight, people will try and force things that have worked in the past on the present or they will stare blankly and wait for things to fall into some ideal order. However, a truly insightful and creative person can look at the present and look at themselves and know that the answers are emerging from the questions, the solution is in the problem, and what is to be is already coming into being.

Lonergan begins Insight with the anecdote of Archimedes. Even if the average person doesn't recall the story of the Greek thinker rushing out of the baths after discovering the displacement of water and solving the problem of the king's crown, still the shouting of Eureka! is the archetypal image for most people about what it means to have an insight.

For the time being, here's an excerpt from the introduction where Lonergan unpacks the gravity of inquiry and the joy of insight nascent in this story:

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. What better symbol could one find for this obscure, exigent, imperious drive, than a man, naked, running, excitedly crying, 'I've got it'?