[Lonergan_l] Webb and Streeter on Authenticity: follow ups
Jaray...@aol.com
Hi,
I thank Mike Albertson for giving us a reference to Eugene Webb's book on
the Philosophers of Consciousness.
In reviewing this book Carla Mae Streeter (SPIRITUALITY TODAY
Summer 1992, Vol.44 No.2, pp. 132-142) makes two points (among others):
1) As the new millennium opens before us, an ecclesial person must be
characterized
by integrity and authenticity that rest on Transcendent Mystery and 2)
"Choice belongs to authentic humanness. With human authenticity as a
central focus, I suggest that ecclesiology will need to be attentive to what
Eugene Webb in a recent book calls the Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi,
Lonergan, Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard. In proposing that the
ecclesial person of the future be genuinely human we are seeking someone with
a differentiation of consciousness leading toward a new, more reflective
integration of the human agent as a rational and responsible performer of
the intentional operations that constitute specifically human existence. (284)
The future belongs to those who not only image a distinctly authentic
human presence in the world, but who can explain just what this means and
intentionally move to constitute this human presence in the flesh. Assumptions
regarding authentic human operation do underlie cultural phenomena. Such
assumptions underpin economics, politics, the arts, and religion. An analysis
of human authentic operation, possibly valid across cultures, enables such
assumptions to be called into question. It is from our stance, often not
declared, of what we think being human is, that decisions are made, opinions
are formed, systems are created, and infrastructures are allowed to stand.
The result can be massive oppression."END quote
BL, Levinas, Marion, Phil and others have tried in various ways to move us
beyond a mere secular dimension such as is manifested in Heidegger or in
the phenomenologists (for these two latter incarnations we can "thank"
Kant).
BL writes in Phenomenolgy and Logic (CWL, 18) about the "fundamental
limitation to phenomenology":
"While phenomemology has got hold of something that is of great
importance...since it is dealing with the manifest as structured by insight, and
since it provides the evidence for judgment, still it has no reflective account
of judgment, and until it gets it, it is not on the level of verum, ens,
bonum (the true, the existing, the good as "interconnected if not
interchangeable notions).
The above is relevant to the present discussion on "heuristic concepts".
Part of what the GEM world has to pursue more diligently and in a more
unified manner are some of the implications that can be drawn from the above.
One can ask whether the "GEM world" is up to the challenges facing the world.
A theme of a possible Conference evaluating the present "crisis" facing
GEM students (here quoting Meynell) is that the GEM world may be
organizationally out of sync. The GEM world must be credibly organized if it is to go
beyond phenomenology and mere heuristic concepts a la Kant, a la Heidegger,
a la phenomenology. SSI and SGEME seem to be wrestling with such
problematics facing the GEM world. Until such problems are addressed in an effective
way we'll have a hard time helping the world live authentically and
ethically. SSI and SGEME, as I see it, want to encourage a SYNERGETIC functional
specialization and a GEM "(ethical) renewal" that Kantian presuppositions
have effectively derailed,
John
Mike Albertson
Reading the Times this morning on the passage of Health care reform in
the House
I found the following article of interest:
Making Health Care Better
By DAVID LEONHARDT
The evidence-based medicine practiced at Intermountain hospital could
be the cure for American health care.
The history of advances in medical treatment is an illustration of the
struggle between common sense and theory.
But, is it more than that? Perhaps.
> From: Mike Albertson <mikealb...@mac.com>
> Date: November 6, 2009 7:55:35 AM EST
> To: Lonergan <loner...@skipperweb.org>
> Subject: Re: [Lonergan_l] Ricoeur, Marion and "skillful means"
>
>
> John, the published works of Eugene Webb can be found at this web
> site
> http://faculty.washington.edu/ewebb/bibliog.html
>
> These three in particular may be relevant to the current
> discussion---I haven't read the recent book, but look forward to
> doing so. His "Self Between," and also the translation that he did
> "Puppets of Desire" are illuminating on Freud as well as Girard's
> interdividual psychology.
>
> Book: Worldview and Mind: Religious Thought and Psychological
> Development Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009.
>
> Article: "Eros and The Psychology of World Views." Anthropoetics,
> XII, 1 (Spring / Summer 2006). URL: http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1201/webb06rev.htm
> .
>
>
> Book: The Self Between: From Freud to the New Social Psychology of
> France (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993)
>
> On Nov 6, 2009, at 2:59 AM, Jaray...@aol.com wrote:
>
>> Joe,
>>
>> good point. It is part of the GEM task to dialectically and
>> foundationally evaluate great thinkers and separate the wheat from
>> the chaff. Levinas
>> and Ricoeur were good at that, as is Marion and his "team".
>>
>> Much progress is being made along this line in the present
>> attempts of
>> Christian theologians to lay a deeper basis for interfaith
>> encounters. For
>> example, the famous Buddhist doctrine of "skillful
>> means" (teaching deep
>> truths using simple images that the ordinary person can
>> understand) is being
>> adapted by "interfaith" Christian theologians to mediate between
>> the tenets
>> of other religions and the fundamental message of Christianity--
>> with all
>> the give and take that might involve. It does get complex. I
>> repeat the
>> following to illustrate what "skillful means" may be when teaching
>> on the
>> "juvenile level":
>>
>> "As I talk with my confirmation class, I see their eyes open big
>> when
>> new non-threatening horizons open up. I think they realize that
>> there ARE
>> many threats out there and that the liturgy opens up "strange",
>> attractive
>> horizons which people like BL, Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Marion clarify
>> for us
>> in our secular age,"
>>
>> You, as an MD, a scientist and a declared "non-philosopher" do
>> have the
>> tenacity to TRY to adapt your own "skillful means" to reach your
>> kids as
>> well as those who seem to be hopelessly secularized and closed to the
>> dimension, to the horizon an Aquinas, a Lonergan, a Levinas, a
>> Marion assure us IS
>> there--one that genuine Christians or other religious people have
>> experienced in the depth of their being--but remains, in the last
>> analysis
>> ineffable.
>>
>> I think Darwin was open to the ineffable while Freud eventually got
>> lost--was cut off from the ineffable--due to ideology. It takes a
>> Ricoeur (an
>> archeology "that necessaroly implies a forward-moving teleology"--
>> MiT,68) to
>> show how Freud got lost--thus obscuring his original insights.
>> Darwinism
>> also got lost provoking an equally uncritical "creatiionist
>> "counter-ideology",
>>
>> John
>>
>> From: Joe F <172...@gmail.com>
>> Date: November 5, 2009 3:43:26 PM EST
>> To: Jaray...@aol.com
>> Cc: loner...@skipperweb.org
>> Subject: Re: [Lonergan_l] education fragments, Levinas, Marion etc
>>
>>
>> John,
>>
>> I am sure you are right that Freud obscured something by error
>> subsequent to his 'discovery of the genuine category of the
>> psychogenic'. But I am trying to understand Lonergan's positive
>> remark
>> about this discovery. Lonergan does say that Freud's sacrifice was a
>> sacrifice of mechanist determinism but that Freud remained
>> professedly
>> deterministic. All the remarks about Marcuse may be true but
>> nevertheless according to Lonergan Freud was part of a movement of
>> the
>> liberation of sciences despite his determinism and made a significant
>> discovery. That's the whole point, that Lonergan is enabling a
>> sifting
>> of wheat from chaff regarding these minds. As youths they seem
>> exemplary to me and well worth holding out. Especially Darwin who
>> gained the respect and friendship of his two main mentors, Lyell and
>> Humboldt by, I recently learned, refuting them well. It is the
>> admixture of positions and counterpositions that we study.
>>
>> Joe
>>
>> On 11/5/09, Jaray...@aol.com <Jaray...@aol.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Joe,
>>>
>>> nice to know that both you and Doug are fathers of twins. I
>>> guess these
>>> four young ones are at the "problematic", questioning stage of
>>> life. I'm
>>> now teaching a confirmation class, so I thought I'd join this mix of
>>> scholarly and practical discussion.
>>>
>>> In MiT, 13 (5th line), BL speaks of a "single thrust, the eros
>>> of the
>>> human spirit". But then he qualifies this, reminding us for
>>> example that
>>> "insights are a dime a dozen".
>>>
>>> It is nice but problematic to reach into history to interpret
>>> giants
>>> such as Darwin and Freud. Freud discovered the psychogenic but
>>> obscured
>>> this
>>> with his questionable philosophical prejudices which Ricoeur and
>>> Marcuse,
>>> for example, have uncovered from their perspectives. In MiT, BL
>>> outlines
>>> his
>>> debt to Ricoeur on this matter
>>>
>>> Let me instance this googled blurb on Marcuse's reading of Freud:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> "Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization" lays the foundations for a major
>>> critique of the fundamental tenets of Freud's theory of the mind.
>>> The German
>>>
>>> philosopher demonstrates how Freud transformed what was
>>> essentially a
>>> psychology
>>> of society into a sociology of the mind. ('Freud's "biologism" is
>>> social
>>> theory in a depth dimension"'). For Marcuse, Freud's mistake was
>>> to see the
>>> repression of instincts not as a historically situated pheomenon
>>> due to
>>> particular (and therefore mutable) social conditions, but as an
>>> absolute
>>> given
>>> indispensable to the growth of civilization. Perhaps for reasons of
>>> expediency (Freud's ideas might have been still too influential
>>> in 1956 for
>>> an
>>> overt attack), Marcuse elaborates his counterargument that a non-
>>> repressive
>>> society IS possible within a Freudian framework. But the damage
>>> is done:
>>> once you read this book. Freud's idea that repression is salutary
>>> and
>>> necessary for psychic development will look a lot more like what it
>>> was(late
>>> Victorian moralism) and much less like what it wasn't (science).
>>> For more
>>> along
>>> these lines try Rieff, Freud: the Mind and the Moralist." END blurb
>>>
>>> We can get into a vast territory--a huge background for Doug's
>>> orgininal problematic.
>>>
>>> I, too, am learning, in trying to address the vast problematics
>>> here
>>> opened up. (Maybe it's best to stick with Catherine's K-12
>>> observations).
>>> But
>>> I'll instance two more googled blurbs that give a Christian
>>> background to
>>> counter the radical claims of a Freud or a Marcuse:
>>>
>>> 1) Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn" brings together in a
>>> single
>>> volume the debate over Dominique Janicaud's critique of the
>>> "theological
>>> turn" of French phenomenology as represented by the works of
>>> Emmanuel
>>> Levinas,
>>> Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Lue Marion, Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Louis
>>> Chretien,
>>> and Michel Henry. According to Janicaud, these theologically
>>> oriented
>>> philosophers have subverted the classical orientation of
>>> phenomenology
>>> toward
>>> the "things themselves" in favor of a giving beyond all measure,
>>> and
>>> certainly beyond the measure of the phenomenological method.
>>> Marion and his
>>> colleagues seek to give phenomenological credentials to an absolute
>>> experience,
>>> an experience of the absolute, that is strictly religious and
>>> hence,
>>> Janicaud contends, outside the bounds of phenomenology's
>>> methodological
>>> strictures. In the second part, Courtine, Marion, Chretien,
>>> Henry, and
>>> Ricoeur
>>> address the possibility of a phenomenology of religion as a
>>> philosophical,
>>> not a
>>> theological, project. Their approach is premised on the idea that
>>> philoso
>>> phical discourse can describe religious phenomena through a
>>> phenomenology
>>> of
>>> donation (givenness) that is able to describe religious phenomena
>>> without
>>> sacrificing their claim to absoluteness and irreducibility.
>>>
>>> 2) Christian phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel
>>> Henry,
>>> and Jean-Louis Chrétien have all pressed an incisive and provocative
>>> question
>>> to modern secular philosophy: do our lived human experiences of
>>> self,
>>> other and world finally make sense only when we see them as
>>> founded on God’s
>>>
>>> creative act? By answering this question affirmatively, these
>>> thinkers have
>>> asserted that a rigorous philosophical account of human experience
>>> must also
>>>
>>> involve a philosophy of God. Human experience, precisely in order
>>> to be
>>> true to itself, must include practices of religious gratitude and
>>> praise.
>>> As a
>>> corollary, philosophy must include theological analysis.
>>>
>>> As I talk with my confirmation class, I see their eyes open big
>>> when
>>> new non-threatening horizons open up. I think they realize that
>>> there ARE
>>> many threats out there and that the liturgy opens up "strange",
>>> attractive
>>> horizons which people like BL, Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Marion
>>> clarify for us
>>> in
>>> our secular age,
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>>
>>
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