Miller, p. 1 of 21

Lonergan and Hegel on Dialectic

Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

Preliminary Notions ......................................................................................................................... 3

Lonergan and Scholasticism ............................................................................................................ 9

Lonergan and Empiricism .............................................................................................................. 12

Lonergan and Critique ................................................................................................................... 15

Lonergan and Intuition .................................................................................................................. 19

Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 20

Introduction In his epilogue to Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Fr. Bernard J.F.

Lonergan, S.J. submits that his insight into insight has made:

a contribution to theology, or as more commonly it is named, to apologetics. The Catholic admits neither the exclusive rationalism of the Enlightenment nor, on the other hand, the various irrationalist tendencies that can be traced from the medieval period through the Reformation to their sharp manifestation in Kierkegaard’s reaction to Hegelianism and in contemporary dialectical and existential trends. But this twofold negation involves a positive commitment…For if we have begun with a complete deference to the positive element in rationalism, we have had no difficulty in ending with a reversal of its opposition between the exigencies of intelligence and the claims of religion.1

The positive commitment Lonergan makes for Christian apologetics thus moves beyond

this dual negation, but it nonetheless relies on the truth of those negations for the

possibility of its continuance. In turn, Lonergan’s insights must transcend Hegel’s

1 Lonergan, Bernard JF, SJ. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 3. Ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. 1992. p754 and 755. Hereafter referred to simply as “CWL 3.”

Miller, p. 2 of 21

System and obviate the need for an individual rebuttal for each of his followers and

irrationalist critics who so pervade the modern philosophical scene.

Lonergan himself sets the criterion for this transcendence when he observes

that: “Hegel’s system is not afraid of facts…is not afraid of contradictions…The only

thing the System has to fear is that it itself should be no more than some incomplete

viewpoint, and in fact that is what it is.”2 In the first work of the Encyclopaedia of the

Philosophical Sciences, the Logic, Hegel attempts to insulate himself from this sort of

claim by categorizing the alternative possibilities for philosophical systems and

demonstrating a fundamental difficulty with each. Thus while Lonergan’s conceptual

claims against Hegelianism in Insight are strong, claims of equivalent force must be

made that Lonergan’s generalized empirical method does not fall within one of the

categories which Hegel so forcefully critiques. If these claims are successful than the

case that Lonergan’s insights into insight transcend Hegelianism are made stronger,

while if they fail then Lonergan’s position is cast into doubt as merely another

conceptual variation explainable with recourse to the System. It is my contention that

the claim for Lonergan’s transcendence of Hegelianism succeeds, and I will demonstrate

this claim by explicating Hegel’s objections against each method he identifies in the

Logic and indicating why Lonergan’s thought cannot be fully critiqued by that

categorization.

2 CWL 3. p397.

Miller, p. 3 of 21

Preliminary Notions Before Hegel undertakes his critique of previous philosophical methods, he

explicates his preliminary notions regarding the structure of human consciousness,

giving his definitions and method of proceeding. Hegel begins by stating that “thought

must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-

developing totality of its laws and particular forms. These laws are the work of

thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.”3 Insofar as this rejects

an overly rationalistic, mechanistic, and pre-determined view of thought, Lonergan

would be tempted to agree, yet Lonergan understands thought self-developing its

totality according to a method and this method being a fact. This fact of the

operations of consciousness is not external or a priori, but it is nonetheless a real

method and a real fact.4

After surveying the concomitant difficulty and ease of attending to logic as a

study of the proper operations of the human mind, Hegel identifies thought as “one of

many activities or faculties of the mind, co-ordinate with such others as sensation,

perception, imagination, desire, volition, and the like.”5 If we take Hegel’s meaning of

“thought” here to be the activity of the mind while engaged in what Lonergan considers

as the intellectual pattern of experience, then this account seems commensurate with

3 Hegel, G.W.F. The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Part I: Logic. Trans. William Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press. 1975. p24. (§19).

4 CWL 3. p346.

5 Hegel. p29. (§20).

Miller, p. 4 of 21

that offered by Lonergan. Hegel continues, however, adding that “The product of this

activity, the form or character peculiar to thought, is the UNIVERSAL (sic), or, in general,

the abstract.”6 Here Lonergan would be forced to disagree, believing that insight, the

characteristic operation of the intellectual pattern of experience, “pivots between the

concrete and the abstract.”7

The distinction is clarified by Hegel’s insistence that “The real distinction

between sense and thought [is] that the essential feature of the sensible is individuality,

and as the individual…is also a member of a group, sensible existence presents a

number of mutually exclusive units…which exist side by side with, and after, one

another.”8 This contrasts sharply with Lonergan’s attentiveness to the nature of

perception as a dynamic stream which is only grasped as unities, identities, wholes by

an appropriate insight into the data of experience.9 Thus thought is not primarily a

mechanism of generalization but rather one of understanding which might later be

verified as either particular (as the insights pertaining to common sense) or general (as

the formulations of physics which are invariant under inertial transforms). Lonergan

himself clarifies the difference between his method and Hegel’s structure by noting

that:

6 Ibid.

7 CWL 3. p30.

8 Hegel. p29-30. (§20).

9 CWL 3. p271.

Miller, p. 5 of 21

The foregoing differences have a common source. Hegel endeavors to pour everything into the concept; we regard concepts as byproducts of the development of understanding, and place understanding itself in an intermediate role between experience and critical reflection. It follows that what Hegel is bound to regard as conceptual we can interpret quite differently.10

This difference in the status and meaning accorded to “concept” thus creates a

fundamental rift between Lonergan’s method and Hegel’s preliminary notion.

Despite this rift, however, many methodological similarities remain. Hegel

informs his reader that:

The propositions giving an account of thought in this and the following sections are not offered as assertions or opinions of mine on the matter. But in these preliminary chapters, any deduction or proof would be impossible, and the statements may be taken as matters in evidence. In other words, every man, when he thinks and considers his thoughts, will discover by the experience of his consciousness that they possess the character of universality as well as the other aspects of thought to be afterwards enumerated. We assume of course that his powers of attention and abstraction have undergone a previous training, enabling him to observe correctly the evidence of his consciousness and his conceptions.11

I understand him to mean that he believes his account to be objectively and universally

true (not mere assertion or opinion), and yet admits that the epistemic foundation that

he can offer for his claims is not deductive but a fact claimed about the data of

consciousness. As with the discovery of any fact, correct observation depends upon

attentiveness and training. Compare this account to the one that Lonergan offers in

the introduction to Insight:

10 Ibid. p447.

11 Hegel. p29. (§20).

Miller, p. 6 of 21

the aim is not to set forth a list of the abstract properties of human knowledge but to assist the reader in effecting a personal appropriation of the concrete dynamic structure immanent and recurrently operative in his own cognitional activities…such an appropriation can occur only gradually, and so there will be offered, not a sudden account of the whole of the structure, but a slow assembly of its elements, relations, alternatives, and implications…the order of the assembly is governed, not by abstract considerations of logical or metaphysical priority, but by concrete motives of pedagogical efficacy.12

Hegel and Lonergan clearly differ on the method used to judge a fact to be true (taking

an appropriately astute look vs. verifying an insight), and this gives rise to a different

understanding of the training necessary to properly verify the facts of consciousness.

Nonetheless a reading of the two passages indicates that both men admit the data of

consciousness as foundational in the development of philosophical system, and both

recognize that the implications of this data are not self-evident to all but require training

to understand. This is a deep similarity which accounts for the ability of Lonergan’s

method to resist the critiques Hegel makes of systems alternative to his own.

In the final sections of his preliminary notion, Hegel attempts to account for the

possibility of thought to reach objectivity. He begins by relating that

the reality in object, circumstance, or event, the intrinsic worth or essence, the thing on which everything depends, is not a self-evident datum of consciousness, or coincident with the first appearance and impression of the object; that on the contrary, Reflection is required in order to discover the real constitution of the object—and that by such reflection it will be ascertained.13

This succinct rebuttal of empiricism is strongly consonant with Lonergan’s project, which

claims that a “thing,” an essential “unity, identity, whole” is not identical with a body,

12 CWL 3. p11.

13 Hegel. p33. (§21).

Miller, p. 7 of 21

the already out there now real of biological experience.14 Being, in Lonergan’s

estimation, is not something experienced but the “object of the pure desire to know,”15

and thus it can only be known objectively by acts of reflective understanding which

verify the answers to the questions for intelligence as correct.16 In both methods, the

subject is affirmed as a knower who objectively knows the being of the thing after a

process of reflection and judgment.

Where Hegel and Lonergan begin to differ is in Hegel’s further claim that “by the

act of reflection something is altered (sic) in the way in which the fact was originally

presented in sensation, perception, or conception.”17 In Lonergan’s view this goes to

the heart of the misconception that sensations demonstrate facts (rather than correct

judgments); for Lonergan reflection occurs with respect to the insight, which is a

formulation of the intelligibility of the data but not itself found in the data. The error is

subtly compounded when Hegel extrapolates that “the real nature is a product of my

mind (sic), in its character of thinking subject—generated by me in my simple

universality, self-collected and removed from extraneous influences—in one word, in

my Freedom.”18 While the nature is certainly a discovery of the mind, and the mind is

free to formulate oversights rather than insights and affirm incorrect judgments to the

14 CWL 3. p271.

15 Ibid. p372.

16 Ibid. p402.

17 Hegel. p34. (§22).

18 Ibid. p35. (§23).

Miller, p. 8 of 21

detriment of correct ones, the true act of reflective understanding is governed by the

pertinent questions.19 Thus while both thinkers reject a simple empiricism, Lonergan’s

method remains empirical due to the relevant questions while bring to light the

intelligibility immanent in the data, while Hegel’s system finds the real in the reflective

altering of perception and thus finally divorces it from the data of sense.

Hegel concludes his preliminary notion by claiming that “Logic therefore

coincides with Metaphysics, the science of things set and held in thoughts (sic)—

thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things…If thought tries to

form a notion of things, this notion…cannot be composed of articles and relations which

are alien and irrelevant to the things.”20 With the caveat that dynamic method and

not the static method of logic is the proper understanding of the operations of human

consciousness, Lonergan would heartily assent. Lonergan, after all, makes the bold

claim in the preface to Insight that:

just as insight into insight yields a clear and distinct idea of clear and distinct ideas, just as it includes an apprehension of the meaning of meaning, just as it exhibits the range of the a priori synthetic components in our knowledge, just as it involves a philosophic unification of mathematics, the sciences, and common sense…it implies a metaphysical account of what is to be known through the various departments of human inquiry.21

Thus the broad outlines of Hegel’s System and Lonergan’s method find much in

common: both reject empiricism and critical philosophy as overly simplistic, both

19 CWL 3. p305.

20 Hegel. p36-37. (§24).

21 CWL 3. p6.

Miller, p. 9 of 21

embrace the power of reflection for the understanding of reality, and both believe that

the data of consciousness have important consequences for metaphysics.

Lonergan and Scholasticism Given his affinity for St. Thomas Aquinas, penchant for metaphysics, and self-

described occupation as “professor of dogmatic theology,”22 it is unsurprising that

many consider Lonergan to be merely a modern day scholastic. Despite his criticism of

deductive methods in metaphysics as empty, he nonetheless affirms the method of

Thomistic analysis even as he admits that its interpretation has been problematic. The

question thus naturally arises as to whether Lonergan’s methods are merely a revived

scholasticism fully subject to Hegel’s critique in Chapter III of the Logic.

Hegel’s criticism of scholastic thought begins with the polemic that such thought

has “no sense of the contradiction in thought,” sees knowing as mere picturing, and

assumes that ways of thinking are identical with ways of being.23 He then narrows this

broad criticism to three specific aspects:

(1) These terms of thought [philosophical predicates] were cut off from their connection (sic), their solidarity; each was believed valid by itself and capable of serving as a predicate of the truth24…(2) In the second place, the metaphysical systems adopted a wrong criterion. Their objects were no doubt totalities which in their own proper selves belong to reason, that is, to the organized and systematically developed universe of thought. But these totalities—God, the Soul, the World—were taken by the metaphysicians as subjects made and ready,

22 Ibid. p754.

23 Hegel. p47-48. (§26-28).

24 Ibid. p48. (§28).

Miller, p. 10 of 21

to form the basis for an application of the categories of the understanding. They were assumed from popular conception25…(3) In the third place, this system of metaphysic turned into Dogmatism (sic). When our thought never ranges beyond narrow and rigid terms, we are forced to assume that of two opposite assertions…the one must be true and the other false.26

The invulnerability of Lonergan’s method to each of these criticisms stems from

the nature of insight itself. The first and second criticisms may be grouped as concerns

about the origin of the terms used to denote both the predicates and objects of inquiry

and whether these are sufficiently rigorous for speculative metaphysics. The third is of

a different nature, and inquires at the procedure for dealing with judgment on insights

which seem to be contradictory. Lonergan notes that “any metaphysical system

eventually assumes the form of a set of propositions,”27 and Lonergan agrees with

Hegel that “the abstract metaphysics of all possible worlds is empty.”28 Lonergan,

however, is not engaged in such a procedure, but rather argues that “insamuch as

metaphysical inquiry aims at making latent metaphysics explicit, it proceeds not from

arbitrary assumptions about the goal of knowledge, which would involve it in the fallacy

of begging the question, but from matters of fact that any inquirer can verify in his own

empirical, intelligent, and rational consciousness.”29 Since for Lonergan matters of fact

are discovered by insights, the terms of the metaphysical system must be as sound as

25 Ibid. p50-51. (§29).

26 Ibid. p52. (§32).

27 CWL 3. p427.

28 Ibid. p428.

29 Ibid. p427.

Miller, p. 11 of 21

those to which insight gives rise in other situations. Avoiding Hegel’s first and second

criticisms at a stroke, Lonergan explains that:

Definitions do not occur in a private vacuum of their own. They emerge in solidarity with experiences, images, questions, and insights. It is true enough that every definition involves several terms, but it is also true that no insight can be expressed by a single term, and it is not true that every insight presupposes previous insights. Let us say, then, 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.30

Coupled with his distinction between nominal and explanatory definition, and his insight

that science satisfactory to logicians makes use of explanatory definitions rather than

the nominal sort,31 Lonergan’s metaphysics is immune to the charge of inappropriate

definition.

In answer to the final possible charge of dogmatism, Lonergan illustrates how

metaphysical dialectic well accounts for the existence of alternative views. Lonergan

makes this account by appealing “not only to the isomorphism between the structure of

cognitional activity and the structure of proportionate being but also to the

polymorphism of human consciousness.”32 Lonergan illustrates this concept during his

discussion of the notion of “thing,” suggesting that “As is apparent, we are back at the

notion of dialectic. There are two types of knowing. Each is modified by its own

development. They are opposed, for one arises through intelligent and reasonable

30 Ibid. p36.

31 Ibid. p37.

32 Ibid. p553.

Miller, p. 12 of 21

question and answers, and the other does not. They are linked together in man, who

at once is an animal, intelligent, and reasonable.”33 This passage clearly illustrates

Lonergan’s embrace of dialectical method and consequent flight from dogmatism.

Thus, although Lonergan has a high opinion of scholastic thought and emulates it in

some respects, he successfully avoids falling prey to Hegel’s attacks on this first attitude

of thought to objectivity.

Lonergan and Empiricism The method for human understanding that Lonergan elucidates in Insight will

later be identified by him as “generalized empirical method;” and he makes repeated

references to the “empirical” in his account of human knowing. He explains the

content of direct insight as “positive intelligibility” affirming empirical elements,34 and

as noted above denies the meaningfulness of the metaphysics of all possible worlds.

Thus it is unsurprising that some might wrongly conceive Lonergan’s emphasis on the

concrete and factual dynamics of cognitive operations as a form of empiricism, and thus

subject to Hegel’s critique of that brand of philosophy. Against empiricism Hegel levels

a singular but damning rebuke: “it employs the metaphysical categories of matter,

force, those of one, many, generality, infinity, etc,”35 yet it denies the concepts of

33 Ibid. p278.

34 Ibid. p44.

35 Hegel. p62. (§38).

Miller, p. 13 of 21

universality, necessity, causality and identity which make these possible, and avoids

consideration of ethics and religion.36

It is unclear that Lonergan makes any use of the notion of force or matter per se

except insofar as they “survive in a fully explanatory science,”37 and he clearly does not

deny the notions of universality (identified via conjugate form) or identity (identified via

central form) so his work is clearly exempt from at least part of Hegel's rebuke.

Furthermore, Lonergan obviously takes his philosophy as having important implications

for ethics and religion, which he introduces in Insight and develops at length elsewhere.

Lonergan does however use the concepts of “one, many, [and] generality” without

supporting them via causality and necessity, preferring the language of “conditional

necessity.”38

Conditional necessity, in Lonergan's account, arises via the virtual unconditioning

of judgment, in which the conditions for the truth of an insight are in fact fulfilled.

Thus the ground of necessity in philosophy is not that of absolute metaphysical

necessity, whereby things could not have been otherwise, but that of epistemic

necessity, whereby insofar as one is a knower, one's judgments are necessary if one is to

be reasonable. Insofar as pertinent questions for reflection really do come to an end,

these judgments really do occur, and their result is understandings which are necessarily

36 Hegel. p64. (§39).

37 CWL 3. p462.

38 Ibid. p355.

Miller, p. 14 of 21

knowledge. Since Lonergan's account of one, many, and generality is equally

grounded in epistemology rather than an a priori metaphysics of all possible worlds, this

account presents no contradiction.

In order for a concept to be presented for judgment, however, it must be the

content of an act of understanding; if we do not understand, then we are in no position

to judge. It is in the act of understanding that one (central form), many (conjugate

form), and generality (abstraction from the empirical residue) are achieved. Insight,

however, demands no notion of causality but only an understanding of conditions.

When conditions and ideal frequencies of occurrence are understood, a theory of

emergent probability develops, and the processes (when understood in their concrete

totality, things) which develop are known individually and in their relations to one

another.39 Causality is only achievable when the conditions involved are systematic,

but this case is not necessary for generality, because “if the intelligibility of abstract

system is not to be had, still generality is not to be renounced; for there is the generality

of the ideal frequency of events, and from such an ideal frequency the nonsystematic

cannot diverge in any systematic fashion.”40

Thus one, many, and generality are contingent notions, the results of verified

insights into real experience, and as such the principles of causality and necessity upon

which Hegel claims they rest can be equally contingent. The truths Lonergan espouses

39 Ibid. p487.

40 Ibid. p125.

Miller, p. 15 of 21

are not reductions of reality, the result of an analytic destructiveness, but rather the

result of the spontaneous questioning of the human person discovering form in the

ground of the empirical residue (the particular as particular). Experience, rather than

bare matter, is the ground of the dynamic functioning of human consciousness, and

rather than being an unverifiable abstraction, secondary cognition allows experience of

experience, thereby verifying its consistency with the overall cognitional system.

Lonergan and Critique Another careless reading of Insight might claim Lonergan to be a Kantian dualist,

noting that in his view knowing is the result of verified insights rather than an

apprehension of the already-out-there-now-real, which he dismisses as a biological

pattern not proper to human knowing. Even if this misunderstanding is avoided,

further correlation might be assumed from Hegel's frequent comment that Kant's

categories are derived from “the spontaneity of thought,” a phrase Lonergan uses freely

to describe the motivation of human cognition.41 Hegel's three real criticisms of Kant's

system, however, are all avoided by Lonergan's position.

First, Hegel critiques the method by which Kant claims knowledge of the

categories of understanding as:

not being derived from the empirical facts as such, must belong to the spontaneity of thought; in other words, it is a priori...Even Hume's scepticism does not deny that the characteristics of universality and necessity are found in cognition. And even in Kant this fact remains a presupposition after all; it may be

41 Hegel. §40.

Miller, p. 16 of 21

said, to use the ordinary phraseology of the sciences, that Kant did no more than offer another explanation of the fact.42

Second, Hegel criticizes that Kant's method of obtaining this explanation is impossible,

noting that Kant:

demanded a criticism of the faculty of cognition as preliminary to its exercise. That is a fair demand, if it mean that even the forms of thought must be made an object of investigation. Unfortunately there soon creeps in the misconception of already knowing before you know - the error of refusing to enter the water until you have learnt to swim. True, indeed, the forms of thought should be subjected to a scrutiny before they are used: yet what is this scrutiny but ipso facto a cognition? So that what we want is to combine in our process of inquiry the action of the forms of thought with a criticism of them. The forms of thought must be studied in their essential nature and complete development: they are at once the object of research and the action of that object.43

Third, this inadequate method of dealing with the antinomies of thought creates a

fundamental dualism and concommittant skepticism:

According to Kant, the things that we know about are to us appearances only, and we can never know their essential nature, which belongs to another world we cannot approach. Plain minds have not unreasonably taken exception to this subjective idealism, with its reduction of the facts of consciousness to a purely personal world, created by ourselves alone.44

Finally, the real ground of these difficulties, claimed Hegel, was an insufficient grasp of

Dialectic, insofar as “Kant, as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid. §40n1.

44 Ibid. §46.

Miller, p. 17 of 21

the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the

antinomies really and positively mean.”45

An analysis of Lonergan's position as expressed in Insight reveals how he avoids

these difficulties. The first is sidestepped by Lonergan's reliance on “insight into

insight” rather than intuition to reveal the categories of human understanding.

“Rather than an original synthetic unity of apperception as the a priori condition of the 'I

think' accompanying all cognitional acts,” Lonergan makes use of “empirical

consciousness, namely, the awareness that is immanent in acts of sensing, perceiving,

imagining, desiring, fearing, and the like.”46 Thus, insight into experience of the self,

just like insight into the experience of the other, occurs by inquiry and is validated by

reflection. Lonergan's answers are thus not a priori intuitions but facts about human

cognition based on our experience of its occurrence.

This basis in insight also allows Lonergan's cognitional theory to meet Hegel's

second challenge. Insight is the climax of the conscious operation of inquiry which

results in understanding. Insight into insight, then, rather than claiming to investigate

human cognition prior to its exercise, makes its investigation precisely by the exercise of

human cognitive faculties. Self-affirmation of oneself as a knower is true, in

Lonergan's account, not because of some intuition made prior to the exercise of the

45 Ibid. §48n1.

46 CWL3. p365.

Miller, p. 18 of 21

mechanisms of human knowing but because it is the only result compatible with the

continued exercise of those mechanisms.47

Furthermore, absent any intuition into oneself and being that is prior to and

separate from the methods of one's self-affirmation as a knower, questions about how

we reach out to some essence which is beyond us are nonsensical. What is this

essence, independent of its ability to be conceived and affirmed by a human knower,

and how does the purported objectivist know about it? Lonergan's defense of his

description of objectivity as a pattern of judgments thereby rests not on some attempt

to get beyond oneself but rather in that the same cognitional process which resulted in

self-affirmation as a knower, when applied to the experience of the other, will behave in

the same way.48 Among these judgments is the judgment that there are other

knowers, so charges of solipsism may safely be avoided. All knowledge, whether of

oneself or the world, is thus personal knowledge (for how else would the knower know

it?) but this does not impugn the objectivity of the knowledge thereby affirmed.

The question about the knowability of the thing-in-itself is restructured by

Lonergan as a distinction between descriptive and fully explanatory insights. The

descriptive insight yields understanding of the thing as it appears, while the fully

explanatory insight relates the thing solely to other things.49 The insight becomes fully

47 Ibid. p353.

48 Ibid. p401.

49 Ibid. p368.

Miller, p. 19 of 21

explanatory as it prescinds from the sense-impressions and focuses the process of

inquiry on understanding the relations of the things considered. Antinomies of

thought are then for Lonergan then fall into one of the following categories: they may

be confusions of descriptive and explanatory insights, confusions between what is called

biological knowing and the knowing proper to human consciousness, or they may be

mistaken affirmations of counter-positions. The first possibility is dealt with by

distinguishing the thing as related to the knower from the thing as related to other

things. The second possibility is clarified by understanding that biological knowing

does not provide access to things-in-themselves but only to bodies, and is thereby

irrelevant to the discussion.50 The affirmation of counter-positions, meanwhile, is at

odds with the nature of insight and the self-affirmation of the knower, and thus can be

understood as the result of bias rather than knowledge.51 Thus the Lonerganian

understanding of cognition, while responding to many of the same problems as Kant,

uses a different methodology and thus both achieves different results and frees itself

from the repeated criticisms.

Lonergan and Intuition Finally, a reader who did not understand the dynamic functioning of human

consciousness as data which may be examined by that consciousness might assume that

50 Ibid. p276.

51 Ibid. p413.

Miller, p. 20 of 21

Lonergan’s insights into insight were really just intuitions about the categories of human

knowing. Hegel is quite dismissive of such intuitive knowing, remarking that:

The facility we attain in any sort of knowledge, art, or technical expertness, consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of action present to our mind in any case that occurs, even, we may say, immediate in our very limbs, in an outgoing activity. In all these instances, immediacy of knowledge is so far from excluding mediation, that the two things are linked together - immediate knowledge being actually the product and result of mediated knowledge.52

Lonergan, however, makes nearly the same objection against intuition, and relies on the

method of insight rather than intuition to defend his claims. Kantian intuitions are

rejected as in contrast with the real method of understanding.53 Husserl's intuitions

into essences are shown to be products of the false view of knowledge as 'taking a look'

and therefore dismissed.54 If anything, Lonergan's rejection of intuition in Insight is

too aggressive, rather than being merely a cover for its powers.

Conclusion Hegel rejects scholasticism, empiricism, and Kantian Critique in turn as

insufficiently immune to skepticism, offering only his own method of Dialectic as a

sufficient antidote. The freedom of idealism provides his only ground:

... Scepticism, besides, could only get hold of the finite forms as they were suggested by experience, taking them as given, instead of deducing them scientifically. To require such a scepticism accomplished is the same as to insist on science being preceded by universal doubt, or a total absence of

52 Hegel. §66.

53 CWL3. p364.

54 CWL3. p440.

Miller, p. 21 of 21

presupposition. Strictly speaking, in the resolve that wills pure thought, this requirement is accomplished by freedom which, abstracting from everything, grasps its pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought.55

Lonergan manages to preserve human freedom and the grasp of abstraction without

committing himself to Dialectic, and he avoids Hegel's criticisms of other methods by

pioneering a new view of epistemology rooted in an understanding of human cognition

unrealized by the scholastics, empiricists, Kant, and intuitionists.

Since Lonergan's position is immune to all of Hegel's critiques in the Logic and, as

shown in his disagreement's with Hegel's preliminary notion, not a Hegelian himself, the

insights into insight Lonergan makes are immune to criticism from those assuming a

Hegelian framework. Those who step back to Humeanism or forward to an

irrationalism as reaction to Hegel must consider Lonergan's radically different

cognitional theory on its own merits. Similarly, modern-day descendants of Hegel

cannot merely repeat their arguments against prior systems without reworking them in

some substantial way, and taking the time to understand what Lonergan has actually

written. Thus I hope that persons who formerly dismissed Lonergan's positions might

consider and respond to them on their merits, furthering the dialog which plays a crucial

role in the advancement of knowledge by suggesting further questions for intelligent

inquiry.

55 Hegel. §78.