[Lonergan_l] Ricoeur, Marion and "skillful means"
Jaray...@aol.com
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
Mike Albertson
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)
> 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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