Re: [Lonergan_l] Lonergan_l Digest, Vol 20, Issue 8

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Maxim Faust

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Mar 9, 2009, 2:18:32 PM3/9/09

to loner...@skipperweb.org

John,

There will never be any need for anyone to reply privately to a posted
address from me. If I commit a faux pas, correction, public or private, is
an experience which at my age will easily fall through all traumatic cracks.

Re. “attache”. Add “d” for “attached”

Re Robert Jackel’s book dealt with by Liddy: my post expressed selective
attention to what Liddy’s essay evoked in me. If I was in a classroom, I
imagine being asked to attend to other aspects. But this is not a classroom.

Re “greatest of saints: I am charry of any kind of superlative, period. Take
a glance around the cultural mess we’re in and note the role of
superlative-ese. See how it plays havoc in the minds of our kids. In
lonergandom it simply does not compute. But perhaps you took me to refer to
the category “saint”?

No, I do not agree that the conversions have to do with striving to be holy.
Lonergan did not submit a programme for sanctity. Rather, in numerous ways,
sanctity is not our doing. When you find BL setting out the parameters of
authenticity, he is *not* discussing integrity. When the latter is on the
table, he takes pains to account for its severe limitations, for the
existential gap, for the huge problem that we cannot solve. Again,
Conversion is easy to understand. It is the prior side of being conscious-of
any undifferentiated x, as in the myriad of insights that press us from
infancy into young adulthood. On the other hand, conversion is difficult to
in-state as a habit, a new practice of adult development, the startling
strangeness of reality mediated by one’s interiority – imagination,
intelligence, will.

Okay, now, Dan: I affirm the argument for the radical continuity in
developing one’s reality. I also assert the radical discontinuity of heaven.
The Founder gave us to accept the negative: “Eye has not seen, nor ear
heard…” etc. The same may be stated in terms of Philip the Chancellor’s
hypothesis of the supernatural… another term badly abused in our day. But
that's theology, and,well, we should be limiting ourselves to philosophy.

Max
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Mar 9, 2009, 5:18:07 PM3/9/09

to Maxim Faust, loner...@skipperweb.org

Maxim,

Thanks for your response, I appreciate the conversation. Responses below.

You said:

I say:

In regard to the discontinuity - in discussion of the one who is developing
one's reality - if that one's reality contains a radical discontinuity that
involves a basic shift in the one who is developing one's reality (a
reflection upon a basic and *radically, inversely, unexpected* shift in the
basis of development) - the death and rebirth or transformation of self that
The Founder seems to associate with foundational living, wouldn't that be
essential (axial, one might say) to the self-understanding that articulates
the whole narrative? In other words, heaven as existential reality.

In regard to the superlative and theology/philosophy --> fair enough. I'm
with you on the illusion of the superlative and apologize if I misread your
words. Even if the work required to delimit this work site to the
philosophic is not (in itself) a philosophic collaboration, that's not to
say a work site cannot or should not be brought into better *approximation*
to that ideal.