Rescuing Reason from Error
In Pursuit of Self-Knowledge: Part 2
If we are honest, most of us take our own intelligence for granted. We draw conclusions, form opinions, and drift through our days with a certain confidence that we know what we know, though we rarely pause to ask how we came to know it. And yet, in that unexamined space is where the stakes of our humanity are highest.
For it is there, in the interior workshop of the mind, that we either learn to discern truth or leave ourselves open to being carried off by whatever happens to be loudest, angriest, or newest.
Bernard Lonergan, Jesuit priest, philosopher, and one of the clearest minds of the twentieth century, believed that the modern world’s great crises were not simply political or economic.
They were cognitional
Lonergan came to this conviction firsthand. As a young Jesuit studying in Rome in the 1930s and later teaching through the 1940s, he watched Europe succumb to ideological fever.
Mussolini’s parades rattled the windows of the very classrooms where he pored over Aquinas.
The Spanish Civil War led to Franco’s dictatorship.
And Germany—cultured, philosophical, musically gifted Germany—marched itself into the abyss behind Adolf Hitler.
Across the continent, socialists and fascists hurled accusations at one another, each convinced that only their brand of ideology could save society. Ordinary people, people who might have been our neighbors, opted for slogans over reason, loudness over truth, and expediency over wisdom.
What Lonergan saw was not merely political collapse, but the collapse of intelligence into ideology.
He set out to understand how this could happen to millions of ordinary, responsible people and to search for a remedy strong enough to prevent it from happening again.
That search led him to notice something many others had overlooked in the scientific revolution. Advances, from Galileo’s falling bodies to Einstein’s curved space-time, were driven more by method than by individual genius.
The scientific community, beginning in the mid-16th century, was developing and adopting what later came to be known as the empirical method :
Attend carefully to the data,
Search for a unifying insight that made sense of it,
Examine and test that insight with rigor,
And judge honestly whether it was true.
There was nothing mystical about it. It was simply fidelity to the interior movements by which all genuine knowing occurs—movements every human being, scientist or not, possesses.
So Lonergan asked the question that would change everything:
If such progress came from a method applied only to nature, what might happen if we applied the same interior rigor to the whole of human life?
This question gave rise to one of the most valuable cognitive developments of our age: the Generalized Empirical Method, or GEM.
Classical empiricism dealt only with what could be touched, measured, and seen—the data of sense. But human beings navigate life through another equally real realm: the data of consciousness, which includes our thoughts, memories, and emotions.
GEM widens the empirical lens to examine both the external and the internal worlds of the knower.
And in doing so, it reveals that our conscious life unfolds through four levels:
It begins with experience. Our consciousness becomes attentive to sights, sounds, thoughts, and emotions.
Understanding and insight follow experience. The mind reaches for meaning: What is going on here? Why? How does this fit together? Insight is that aha moment, when light breaks through the mental fog.
We then make a judgment because insight may be mistaken. The mind pauses and asks: Is this really so? If the answer is, maybe or I’m not sure, then there’s either more data to gather, more deliberation needed, or both.
And finally, there’s decision and act. When knowing involves choosing a particular course of action, the will acts on what the mind has affirmed through judgment.
These four steps, Lonergan recognized, are the native virtues of every human mind.
Lonergan believed the tragedies of the twentieth century, the tyrannies, the genocides, the mass hysterias, began long before the tanks rolled. They started in the betrayals of reason:
Refusal to attend to inconvenient facts,
Laziness in reflective inquiry,
Rashness in judgment,
Willingness to act without conscience.
A mind that skips one step soon stumbles over all of them.
And when enough minds stumble, nations do too.
This was true in the 1930s. It remains true now.
Lonergan’s work was forged in a century that lost its bearings. And though our circumstances differ, the parallels are close enough to give any thoughtful person pause.
Today we are surrounded not by a shortage of information but by an excess of it—oceans of data, waves of opinion, and machines that speak with confidence but without understanding.
In such a moment, Lonergan’s voice returns with unexpected urgency.
He reminds us that the future must belong not to those who shout the loudest or compute the fastest, but to those who remain committed to the hard discipline of conforming reason to reality.