The Shape of Lonergan’s Argument in Insight

THE SHAPE OF LONERGAN'S ARGUMENT IN INSIGHT LNERGAN'S INSIGHT, one can say without fear of contradiction, has puzzled many. The difficulty, however , is not simply one of coming to terms with the immense background, notably mathematics and physics, of the book. Nor is the problem limited to the intrinsic one posed by any major philosophical work. Even once beyond these hurdles, Lonergan's argument seems extremely difficult to pin down exactly.1 This article, then, is an attempt to outline in simple language the essential shape of the logical procedure of Insight. A number of reasons might be given for approaching such a complicated argument with simple terms and from a commonsense starting point. The first point is rather obvious, if honored sometimes more in the breach than the observance. There should be something like a principle of subsidiarity in philosophical writing; the vocabulary should be no more convoluted than the task demands. Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently, the problem of communication between varied traditions comes today more and more to the fore. Anyone who has been present at a congress bringing together exponents of varied viewpoints will likely have had the painful experience of seeing a thinker, accustomed to dealing in fluent and incredibly nuanced terms with his students aud colleagues, suddenly reduced to childish babble and inane remarks directed to superficial questions when confronted with a similarly sophisticated thinker from another 1 Edward M. Mackinnon makes clear what a complex and protracted process the assimilation of Insight may be. "Understanding According to Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S. J.," The Thomist, !28 (1964), pp. 97, 478. 671 672 TERRY J. TEKIPPE tradition. Short of agreeing on one philosophy to use as a lingua franca, which seems a rather hopeless project, what would seem most advantageous in promoting such dialogue is a somewhat disciplined but basically common sense vocabulary in which communication might at least begin. Each philosophical tradition, then, should be willing to attempt to express its basic approach in some more-or-less common sense terms. After all, no one is simply born a philosopher; he comes to inhabit that thought world only from a previous existence in a commonsense world; and there should be some intelligent way of retracing his steps. This is not to suggest that every philosophy, or even any one, can reduced without remainder into a popular presentation. Presumably the technical jargon exists for more than gnostic mystification. Nor is it to suggest that real dialogue can ultimately evade the task of appropriating another's vocabulary and thought forms. But it is to affirm that dialogue has to start somewhere; and if vulgarization is painful for the specialist, it is perhaps less painful in the long run than the specter of profound thinkers glibly and endlessly talking past one another. A third point is that such simplification may have a critical function. Lonergan speaks somewhere of Peter Lombard who, by simply juxtaposing two streams of thought in his Sentences, innocently laid bare the incoherence of previous theological thought. The present essay may have the effect of more-or-less innocently laying bare either the coherence or incoherence of Lonergan's thought. The may, of course, is stressed: this will be so only if the presentation manages to capture representatively , even if in a simplified way, the essential movement of the author's presentation. These reasons for adopting a rather simple mode of exposition imply two qualifications. One is that the simplified explanation does not pretend to substitute adequately for the more rigorous and, in fact, incredibly nuanced train of thought in Insight. The second is that the attempt is no more than a hypothetical interpretation of what Lonergan is doing; it stands in need of verification by the reader or critic. THE SHAPE OF LONGERGAN's ARGUMENT IN "INSIGHT" 678 THE INVESTIGATION An obvious premise of the search for the structure of Lonergan 's argument is that Insight does present an argument of some kind. That seems clear enough from the long chains of syllogisms introduced, and from Lonergan's observation that in ". . . constructing a ship or a philosophy one has to go the whole way...." 2 For the literary genre of...