[Lonergan_l] Rethinking Self-appropriation
nichola...@utoronto.ca
Doug's posting I found to be very, very helpful, especially since he
took thought and time to address the question of anagogy. Heidegger
and Gadamer's main point is that on this earth we must learn to dwell
poetically. Like both of these philosophers, Ricoeur states, symbol
gives rise of thought, and uses Frye liberally in his three volumes
TIME AND NARRATIVE. Voegelin remarked to me in Toronto, 1978, how
envious he was of students of English being able to go from Chaucer to
Wallace Stevens. There is no such stretch of development of poetry in
German literature. Emile Piscetelli's was one of first theses to
arrive at the Lonergan Centre, Toronto, (1974) and I've been reading
it ever since; it's main point being for a shift in Lonergan Studies
to a focus on language. Hugo Meynell's review of THE GREAT CODE, call
it a work of genius.
INSIGHT (1958) p.233 mentions Vico, the father of language studies.
"With Giambattista Vico, then,we hold for the priority of poetry."
(MIT 73). Lonergan knew Vico's classic, Scienza nuova, and since
Lonergan is dealing here with alternatives to the longer cycle of
decline he could hardly have missed the same in Vico: "Men first feel
necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later
amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and
finally go mad and waste their substance" [The New Science, 78 (par.
241)} Lonergan had a double major: classics and mathematics, just as
Frye had a double major in english lit and philosophy. Frye mentions
preparing simultaneously for examinations in Milton and Descartes and
having the feeling of having the 17th century down cold. Likewise,
with Lonergan : he could write fine Ciceronian prose and at the same
time play around with example of thermodynamic equations.
Self-appropriation must be expanded when we move from a methematical,
an Aristotelian physical universe, with its physical first cause, and
its science defined as "CERTAIN knowledge of things through their
causes." to a verbal universe at the centre of which is myth and
metaphor, which in another key or philosophical language, are
expressed as question and answer. Philosophical language is preceed by
rhetorical and poetic language and followed by scientific language.
Lonergan four levels of consciousness must be rethrough and
self-appropriated in these four stages of language first noticed by
Vico. Any book on language that lacks a serious study of myth and
metaphor,which is Frye's focus, is not worth its salt.
INSIGHT is a five-finger exercise in preparation for the vision of
METHOD. Implementation without vision is what Satre, very precisely,
call bad faith.
HOPE provides the vision. FAITH is a dialectical process of
implementation. And neither of these is worth a bean without CHARITY.
See, Lonergan's brief statement: "Why I am a Christian."
"Everyone with any social function has some model community in his
mind in the light of which he does his job, such as a community of
better health for the doctor, of clearer judgment for the teacher, of
fewer wrecked and wasted lives for the social worker. The model so
contructed is a myth or fiction, and in normal minds it is known to
be a fiction. That does not make it unreal; what happens is rather an
interchange of reality and illusion in the mind. Most of what we call
objective reality is a human construct [even cosmologies are fictions]
left over from yesterday; much of it could do with imrovement, and the
model that hope affords shows up a good deal of this contruct as both
undesireable and removable, and to that extent unreal. The touchstone
of reality is the fictional model vision. The Epistle of James talks
about "works"
[implementation] as the complement of faith [2:14-26], but it seems to
me a better metaphor to regard faith and hope, the dialectic of belief
and vision, as the parents of which works [implementation] are the
offspring." Frye, CW. vol. 4, p.350
Anyone who call Northrop Frye a trunctated subject is only pointing a
finger at themselves. Let us remember that Lonergan was at home in
mathematics and the classics. To remain stuck in mathematical and
scientific models, to grey-hair footnotes to a tired world view, is
very offputting for anyone with an educated imagination, what Lonergan
calls,"a sufficiently cultured consciousnss." INSIGHT
Doug mentions Joseph Campbell, who like Voegelin, had the courage to
radically rethink what was fundamental in their work. Campbell started
off thinking that what was fundamental was the search for the meaning
of life. What he discovered to be fundamental was the EXPERIENCE and
not the meaning of life. He asks: What's the meaning of a flower? [in
a verbal universe]!! Similarly, Voegelin shifted from the history of
ideas to a search for order in history, the metaxy, the tension of
existence. Frye deals with this tension in terms of soma psychikon and
soma pneumatikon, the natural and the spiritual man that St Paul
speaks of. Or as Yeats puts it, the man who sits down to breakfast is
not the same man who sat up writing poems all night. So, lets start
rethinking!
To paraphrase GBS, sorry I didn't have time to write a short letter!!
--NWG
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Joe F
writer of poems:
A NIGHT SCENE.
A night-sky over head :
One solitary star
Shining amid
A little track of blue—for dark clouds hid
Its sister sunlets ; on its azure bed
It seemed a sun, for there
No jealous planet shone with which it to compare.
The dark clouds rolled away,
And all heaven's shining train
Of suns and stars,
With the great moon, beamed forth their gorgeous light.
Where then was that fair star that shone so bright ?
Where was it ? none could say,
Yet there it doubtless was although it seemed away.
So lustrous shall we find
On earth each soul
When seen alone;
And though when brighter spirits round it press,
We lose its form and doubt its loveliness,
Still should we bear in mind
That it is not less bright although it be outshined.
Liverpool, March 1840.
nichola...@utoronto.ca
Lonergan was very trusting and "guileless",as Fred Lawrence describes
him. Bruno Snell's THE GREEK DECOVERY OF MIND is a book Lonergan
trusted, but unfortunately its fatal flaw lies in its understanding of
"myth". The word "myth" is rooted in the Greek "mythos", which, means
"story" or "narrative", not a description and especialy not an attempt
at an account of the "out there" [INSIGHT 385/410; FRYE CW. vol 18,
The Secular Scripture, 154] Lonergan was also duped by another book,
S.K.Langer, FEELING AND FORM, [INSIGHT,'57: 184,544], but that's
something for another day.
The study of myth, story, narrative, and metaphor, followed quickly on
the heels of Einsteine's discoveries. Sir James Frazer's work on myth
in THE GOLDEN BOUGH, third edition, published 1906 - 15, comprised
twelve volumes. It's influence on the emerging discipline of
anthropology was pervasive and undeniable. For example, Bronislaw
Malinowski, stricken with tuberculosis shortly after receiving his
Ph.D in physics and mathematics, read Frazer's work in the original
English to distract himself from his illness. "No sooner had I read
this great work than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I
realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is
a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and
more exact studies and I became bound to the service of Frazerian
anthropology." ["From Ape to Angel...", cited in L.L. Langness, THE
STUDY OF CULTURE,1974,p.75] Malinowski, we might say, is a perfect
example of what Lonergan calls "a sufficiently cultured consciousness"
INSIGHT XXVIII/20.
Snell's meaning of "displacement" is suspect and gives the impression
of "surpassing", "elimination", as rooted in the fallacy of progress.
Displacement is a technical term in Frye [ch. 1 of ANATOMY] rooted in
Aristotle's account of character in the POETICS. Frye's favorite
exercise for his students is to rewrite and displace the story of the
FLOOD in the mythical context of the Bible to a romantic or realistic
context,e.g., Margaret Atwood's, (a student if Frye's), current best
seller novel, THE FLOOD.
Scientific description is the last phase in the cycle of language
recounted in Vico: Poetry, Rhetorich, Philosoophy, Science. This
series of contractions or displacements have unfortunately given way
to either/or [separation] instead of both/and [interpenetration].
Scientific description is the bottom level, unless we want to fall
into the "out there" [ibid.]. With a rethinking of and a return to
myth as we now find in art and literature we might hopefully recover
something of the vision or fiction or myth of Joachim of Floris (1145
- 1202):
an organic development in which the age of the Father, or the reign of
law, before Christianity, advanced to the age of the Son, or reign of
the Gospel, to be finally fused in the age of the Spirit, a sort of
Kantian kingdom of ends in which all hierarchical distinctions were
abolished.
Cheers,
--NWG
Quoting Joe F <172...@gmail.com>:
> NWG,
>
> Lonergan gives us two levels of 'writing fiction': pre-scientific and
> scientific description.
>
> ?...to effect a transformation of pre-scientific anticipations and
> descriptions, there has to be formulated an ideal of scientific
> explanation.? INSIGHT pg. 63
>
> "Fifthly, from the formulation of the precise scientific objective
> there follows the displacement of pre-scientific by scientific
> description." INSIGHT p.64
>
> Can the term 'myth' be applied with equal accuracy or conveniently to
> both levels of description?
>
> Joe
Maxim Faust
I'm responding to your Nov. 25-26/09 posts which I would compare
to newspaper writing. Trying to get past the nominal, I have found a
reference for your interest in contrasting what Frye's work means and silly
ol' Lonergan:
CWL 12, Question 21, up too "... seen by the thoughtless to be empirical
evidence that proves the ineptitude of those who wish to follow reason."
(p.499)
Good reading!
Maxim