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"Great problems are solved by being broken down into little problems. The strokes of genius are but the outcome of a continuous habit of inquiry that grasps clearly and distinctly all that is involved in the simple things that anyone can understand."

Bernard Lonergan

Insight is our recognition of meaning and the possible relationships of that meaning to other concepts. In his introduction, Bernard Lonergan, author of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, compares the intellectual abilities of a boy to those of an animal: "As every schoolboy knows, a circle is a locus of co-planar points equidistant from a centre. What every schoolboy does not know is the difference between repeating that definition, as a parrot might, and uttering it intelligently." Clearly, the key to insight is the comprehended definition of a concept.

Much different from perception, a different function than reasoning, but nevertheless, the essential component of both, insight is a distinctive mental phenomenon. Lonergan identifies its essential characteristics:

1) Insight comes as a clear release to the tension of inquiry. 
2) Insight comes suddenly and unexpectedly. 
3) Insight is a function not of outer circumstances but of inner conditions.
4) Insight pivots between the concrete and the abstract. 
5) Insight enters into the habitual texture of one's mind.

The critical questions--who? what? where? when? why? and how?--trigger the quest for understanding, and when that quest is complete, the insight literally erupts into consciousness without reference to who we are or what we're doing. The processing has been unconscious. Little is known about the nature of that activity, but as an answer, insight evolves at the correct level of generality and as the truth. As a "truth statement," the insight forces a realignment of our whole world view or "metaphysic," and with all its authority as a revelation, the only way to reject one insight is to engage another. The trigger that initiates insight is asking the critical questions. The response to such questioning is the process through which an insight evolves. 

In Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970), Becker, Pike, and Young have outlined the four stages of that evolution: 

1) Stage 1: Preparation 
a) initial awareness of a problem 
b) formulation of the difficulty as a problem 
c) exploration of the problem

The key to the preparation stage is the application of formula(e); it is a formula through which a difficulty is delineated as a problem, and it is through formula(e) that the problem is explored.

2) Stage 2: Incubation The subconscious conceptualization/settling/orientation

3) Stage 3: Illumination The "imaginative leap to . . . a hypothesis"

4) Stage 4: Verification "Some sort of answer to the hypothesis"

Brain physiology and neurology have revealed much more in the past twenty-five years about the "incubation" activity. The physiology of learning and the theory of a "rule-governed" mind reflects an incredibly complex process extending from prenatal development through an entire lifetime. The transformational "ah-HA!" of the revelation of insight that verifies the realization as true, appropriate, and acceptable is the product end of a process that involves chemical-neurological interactions involving perhaps as many as several million brain cells at any one time.

What is even more remarkable is our ability to step outside that process within ourselves, to examine ourselves at right angles in order to analyze the hierarchy of insight that we experience, an overlapping, overarching series that ranges from simple insight to symbolism and inverse insight.

Simple Insight 
Knowledge and the comprehension of both "percepts" (concepts whose features are derived through the senses) and abstractions (like "justice," "peace," etc.) reflect the lowest order of insight.

Complex Insight
Knowledge of the possible relationships that can exist between elements of simple insights constitute complex insight. For example, think of two people you know and name them. Your comprehension of these two people as individuals illustrates simple insight. Now, list possible relationships that might exist between these two people (ex. friends, colleagues, siblings, etc.). Note that the possible relationships represent knowledge quite distinct from your knowledge of the two people. Simple insights combined with selected relationships, however, constitute complex insights.

Higher Viewpoints
The innate rules of the mind common to all people constitute the higher viewpoints. Referenced first in the field of transformational-generative linguistics by Noam Chomsky (1957) at MIT, these "phrase structure rules" include a finite number of rules that govern, not only how the mind creates language, but how the mind organizes and combines all data into concepts. Examples of such rules include "+" (addition), "-" (subtraction), "÷" (division), "<" (less than), ">" (greater than), ". . ." (continue), "(( ))" (embedding), "=" (equal to), etc. It is the application of these rules to strings of lower order insights that create complex meaning.

Still Higher Viewpoints
Analogous reasoning (or "symbolism") and inverse insight constitute the highest order of insight. Ultimately, the highest, most abstract concept reflects the fundamental physiological relationship at the level of neurons (cells) in the brain: "on" or "off." Literally, information is being transmitted or it's not: That is, either the axons (ends of the neurons) are receiving neuro-chemical bombardments or they aren't. Applied to the operations of the mind, the rules either apply in a given context or they don't; and within a given string of evolving concepts, either they are applied obligatorily or optionally. As exemplified at a conceptual level, they are reflected in the concept of opposites such as "right/left," "front/back," "good/bad," "creator/created," "few/many," "singular/plural." Because knowledge of one presupposes knowledge of the other, rationalists tend to emphasize the innate nature of opposites. Others argue that specific meanings can be/are learned and applied--like a veneer--over the poles of inverse insight. 

This page was last modified on September 13, 2011,
and is maintained by Dr. Geoffrey Grimes.