Understanding and Being Discussion 1:2

CD/mp3 134, second part of first discussion session at Halifax lectures on Insight. Corresponds to CWL 5: 266-79. Sponsored by Mel and Therese Mason in memory of Marjorie Bassett. The birth of philosophic reflection and of individualism occurred during a period of breakdown of the previous civilizations. So too today, the effort to express the idea of insight is difficult, because expression is in words, concepts, judgments, and the insight is behind those. Is Lonergan not making insight some kind of a mystical thing, a transcendental self behind the judgment? There is a sense in which you cannot get to such a self, and a sense in which you can. The answer to the question is in chapter 11 of Insight, where we ask, Am I a knower? You advert to insight as an occurrence and then relate it to other elements in knowing: inquiry, data, conceptions, further questions, judgment, further questions, invariant patterns in the knowing and the known. Philosophy is a matter of personal responsibility, and Lonergan's concern is with the individual coming to find intelligence and rationality in oneself. The question of objectivity comes in with the question of truth and true judgments. If the decisive element is judgment, idealism is a halfway house between realism and materialism, and the Kantian Copernican revolution was not revolutionary enough.

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