The importance of insight to the methodical investigations of mathematicians and natural scientist have been previous been discussed. But insight is important in ordinary life.
Lonergan states how the wonder or desire to know comes like a flood for children once they become language beings. The child wants to know everything immediately, not realizing acquiring knowledge is a gradual process. Lonergan states there exists in all men "the very spirit of inquiry that constitutes the scientific attitude" (98).
There is both "spontaneous" inquiry and "spontaneous accumulation of related" insights.
Lonergan describes our historicity: "Not only are men born with a native drive to inquire and understand; they are born into a community that possesses a common fund of tested answers, and from that fund each may draw his variable share, measured by his capacity, his interests, and his energy" (99).
There exists a self-correcting process of learning in common sense. Common sense is a "specialization of intelligence in the particular and the concrete" (100).
Ways that common sense differ from science or theory: "But common sense, because it does not have to be articulate, can operate directly from its accumulated insights. In correspondence with the similarities of the situation, it can appeal to an incomplete set of insights. In correspondence with the significant difference of situations, it can add the different insights relevant to each" (100).
It also differs in its generalization from science. Common sense differs logic and science "in the meaning it attaches to analogies and generalizations. In all its utterances it operates from a distinctive viewpoint and pursue an ideal of its own" (101). The heuristic structure of science "anticipate the determination of nature always act in the same fashion under similar circumstances" (101).
Common sense does not attempt for "universally valid knowledge," and it does not seek to communicate its findings "exhaustively".
Common sense does not use technical language. Common sense knowledge is both "subtle and fluid" (102). Common sense says what it means to someone. The only "interpreter of common sense is common sense" (102).
Scientific observation is a detached interest; whereas common sense is an involved interest. Common sense is always "is ever on its guard against all theory" (103). Common sense is always asking what difference will the knowledge make. Common sense is practically oriented. Common sense relates to thing as they relate to us; science relates to things as they relate to each other. Lonergan states that there are two kinds of knowledge: "Rational choice is not between science and common sense; it is a choice of both, of science to master the universal, and of common sense to deal with the particular" (104).
For every place of location, for every different job, for different types of common sense, exists an appropriate common sense for it. Common sense is knowledge on how to act in many types of situations.
In the next section, Lonergan discusses the notion of patterns of experience: "biological, aesthetic, intellectual, and dramatic patterns" (106). Lonergan thinks it is abstract to talk about the experience of the senses. The senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, never occur in isolation. They are related to the movement of the body. Without eyes, there is no seeing; without noses, there is no smelling; without ears, there is no hearing. Lonergan asserts, "Sensation has a bodily basis, and functionly it is linked to the bodily movements" (106). In addition, "the bodily movements are subject to an organizing control. Besides the systematic links between senses and sense organs, there is, immanent in experience, a factor variously named conation, interest, attention, purpose" (106).
Lonergan summarizes before describing the different patterns of experiences: "There are, then, different dynamic patterns of experience ... As conceived, it is the formulation of an insight; but all insight arises from sensitive or imaginative presentations, and in the present case the relevant presentations are simply the various elements that is organized by the pattern" (107).
The Biological Pattern of Experience
Lonergan compares the biological experiences of plants and animals: "A plant draws its sustenance from its environment by remaining in a single place and by performing a slowly varying set of routines in interaction with a slowly varying set of things. In contrast, the effective environment of a carnivorous animal is a floating population of other animals that move over a range of places and are more or less well equipped to deceive or elude their pursuers" (107). Both plants and animals are alive, "for in both aggregates of events insight discerns an intelligible unity that is commonly is formulated in terms of biological drive or purpose" (107). Both provides information about our own biological experience. They both adapt to their environments. Lonergan writes, "Outer senses are the heralds of biological opportunities and dangers. Memory is the file of supplementary information. Imagination is the projection of courses of action. Conation and emotion are the pent-up pressure of elemental purposiveness" (107). The pattern "is a set of intelligible relations that link together sequences of sensations, memories, images, conations, emotions, and bodily movements; and to name the pattern biological is simply to affirm that the sequences converge upon terminal activities of intussusception or reproduction, or, when negative in scope, self-preservation" (108). Consciousness is only "a part of the animal's total living" (108). Like the plant, in the animal operates "immanent vital processes without the benefit of any conscious control" (108). "extroversion" is a prominent part of the biological pattern of experience. The body and its functions speak of the elementary experience that is concerned with "external conditions and opportunities" (108).
There is an interaction between the stimulus and the response. "The stimulating elements are the elementary object; the responding elements are the elementary subject" (109). The biological experience is the pattern of experience human share with plants and animal. It is an elementary level of experience.
The Aesthetic Pattern of Experience
There is experience in man that goes beyond the biological. It is conscious living as illustrated by the play of children. Another is the example of sports in which health and exercise is not the dominant motivation. One seeks the experience just for the experience itself.
"The artist exercises his intelligence in discovering ever novel forms that unify and relate the contents and acts of aesthetic experience" (109). Art is freedom in two ways: it "liberates experience from the drag of biological purposiveness, [and] it liberates intelligence from the wearying constraints of mathematical proofs, scientific verifications, and commonsense factualness" (109). There is both the joy of conscious living and creating. "The aesthetic and artistic also are symbolic" (110). What is created in art is unclear or vague or "obscure". It is the "expression of the human subject outside the limits of adequate intellectual formulation or appraisal" (110). It communicates, not through science or philosophy, "but through a participation, and in some fashion a reenactment of the artist's inspiration and intention" (110).
The obscurity of art "is in a sense its most generic meaning. Prior to the neatly formulated questions of systematizing intelligence, there is the deep-set wonder in which all questions have their source and ground" (110).
The Intellectual Pattern of Experience
"The aesthetic liberation and the free artistic control of the flow of sensations and images, of emotions and bodily movements, not merely break the bonds of biological drive but also generate in experience a flexibility that makes it a ready tool for the spirit of inquiry" (110).
Study is hard for the youth. In the experienced observer, outer sense forgets its primitive biological functions to take on selective alertness that keeps pace with the refinements of elaborate and subtle classifications. In the theorist intent upon a problem, even the subconscious goes to work to yield at unexpected moments the suggestive images of clues and missing links, of patterns and perspectives, that evoke the desiderated insight and the delighted cry 'Eureka!' (110-111). Intellectual pattern of experience depends "upon native aptitude, upon training, upon age and development, upon external circumstances, upon the chance that confronts one with problems and that supplies at least the intermittent opportunity to work towards their solution" (111). To the skillful, opportunities for intellectual experience come often. Even with ability, knowledge comes gradually. Lonergan describes the effort needed: "To learn thoroughly is a vast undertaking that calls for relentless perseverance. To strike out on a new line and become more than a weekend celebrity calls for years in which one's living is more or less constantly absorbed in the effort to understand, in which one's understanding gradually works round and up a spiral of viewpoints with each complementing its predecessor and only the last embracing the whole field to be mastered" (111).
The Dramatic Pattern of Experience
Ordinary human living is not the biological, artistic, nor the intellectual pattern of experience. Human living "involves not only succession but also direction" (112). Behind human living can be discern an artistic, "dramatic component."
Human desires are more than the "biological impulses of hunger for eating and sex for mating" (112). Man is an animal. Eating and drinking are "biological performances." But eating for man comes with a multiplicity of activities. Wearing clothes is more than keeping warm. Sex is more than mating.
Man's living is an art form: "Not only, then, is man capable of aesthetic liberation and artistic creativity, but his first work of art is his own living" (112). The biological pattern cannot be denied, but in man they are transformed. Men works not only to make a living, but it must dignify their life. Man desires their aesthetic values be affirmed by others because man is a social animal.
Loner thinks that the "characters of this drama of living are molded by the drama itself" (113). Human develop the roles he might perform. Humans display a plasticity. Man is also historically conditioned. His role is influenced by what preceded him.
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