idols

[Doug Mounce]

I had this insight about the "four idols" categories that I would typically describe in an essay format but I can't seem to allocate the time!  This short note may be interesting to some and, of course, any feedback is welcome.

Attributed to Thomas, the false idols are power, money, adoration and pleasure.  I had the insight that there is an opposite ideal like those developed in the four temperaments theory. Power has a positive possibility, for example, in leadership.  Money, likewise, can provide stability and security.  Adoration might inspire community in shared appreciation, and, my idol, pleasure, can also be joy.

Lonergan, in the Aristorelian tradition, was a great classifier and I'm fond of saying that some of our most profound mistakes are made in classification schemes, but these are fun games to play in any case.  What are your favorite proto-psychological theories?

-Doug

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[Hugh Williams]

Doug my good friend in ‘letters’,

 I’ve not thought about Thomas Aquinas (and his totalizing project of the summa for the ‘catholic faith’) for some time as I’ve been mixing with those at one time considered heretics.

 Be that as it may, we both recognized Thomas’ work hovering in the background for our extensive and good exchanges with a few others on Lonergan and then on Rahner.

 Generally speaking, idolatry, as I understand it, is the most serious of sins for Thomas since it sets up another god in the world, diminishing the true God’s primacy.

 So, this post will be somewhat self-serving in that I’d like to use your invitation to draw attention to at least a short excerpt from my extensive review of John and Pierre’s AIRR(2023) text that I shared in a much earlier attachment with this list. This excerpt can be read as a constructively critical review of a very serious Christian effort to expose the idolatry of ‘power and money’ in the real-world capitalist system of our times.

 My strange argument is that this effort from the Christian side will require, especially if we hope to understand and overcome what I consider to be this real and present idolatry, that we revisit the thinking of the Marxist tradition which often has been regarded as a type of ‘heresy’.

 Ah … but heresy and idolatry do come in many forms and its clarification and effective overcoming necessarily requires honest dialectic. 

Lonergan himself has said as much … so in this spirit, for those interested, see attached.

 Hugh

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[Doug Mounce]

Thanks Hugh,

Always appreciate a good Phil McShane quote.  I don't have a passionate interest in economics but I have changed my opinion about Marx since listening to some of Paul North's Yale lectures on commodity and capital. Of course, I've always appreciated Thurman Arnold's Symbols of Government where law and economics have the same contradiction in, "the necessity of pretending to do one thing, while actually doing another".  There's also the early public relations and propaganda promoted by Edward Bernays that seems to dominate our modern individual psychology. To recall Adrial's interest in this direction - I don't know how you get people to differently think without some kind of conversion first.  If Catherine still participated then she might add that Lonergan says we are in the cycles that will generate this advance in the longue dure'e in any case.

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[Hugh Williams]

Doug et al,

Given the nature of the complex challenges presented by their text and the so-called polycrisis of our times which they too are recurrently recounting at various places in their text, this appeal for education in John’s and Pierre’s important work can at first seem like a facile liberal appeal, especially to those of us with Marxist-socialist inclinations.  But for Lonergan and his adherents, like John and Pierre in their AIRR(2023) text, I've come to realize that education means something quite specific for an overall ‘theory and practice’. It is definitely not an academic conceptualism seeking some continuity and interrelationship in and among concepts, but instead it is much more like the Marxist understanding of praxis, in that it is an education that seeks an authenticity and continuity in the common cognitional operations possessed by people of different times and places as they are engaged in their own struggle of thinking and acting with others on the challenges and opportunities presented by their actual circumstances. What is being sought and focused upon in the education called for, as I’ve come to appreciate, is a fundamental methodological concern for all human attempts to obtain real knowledge, with scientific knowledge in economics being of central concern for a significant part of the Lonergan tradition. However, in Lonergan, this is not just another resource for solving particular problems or addressing particular content, such as that of Christian theology which was Lonergan’s initial concern which then shifted in some ways and to some degree to economics and political-economy. It is a method most concerned with one’s consciously subjective yet invariable intentional operations. This method, arguably, is supposed to achieve some grasp of a common open universal dynamic structure for any and all intelligent human inquiry that is said to transcend cultural and class differences. (AIRR, P44)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Without being drawn into the depths of this notion or of its extensive literature … I would say the notion of praxis is key for moving towards the higher viewpoint that also would constitute the desired higher synthesis for any liberal-marxist dialectic. Praxis in the Marxist tradition, as I understand it, is the free activity through which we create and change our historical world and ourselves. It is an activity in Marxism believed to be unique to us as self-mediating beings and it is given primacy over theory because theoretical contradictions can only be resolved through practical activity and through revolutionary activity with others in particular. There is this coincidence of changing historical circumstances and human activity as personal change that in Marxism is conceived and understood as revolutionary practice. Even the mysteries of religion that might lead theory towards mysticism, are said to find their rational resolution in this human praxis and in the comprehension of this praxis. Liberal philosophers, in the Marxist view, are seen in general and for the most part, as tending to interpret the world; the crucial point is to change it. However, society cannot be changed by reformers who understand and elucidate its needs but only by the revolutionary praxis of the people (and their leaders) whose interests coincide with that of the good of society as a whole (i.e. the proletariat). This (or any of these acts) will be an act of society understanding itself, in which this 'social subject' changes the 'social object' (in this case society or the social relational matrix) by the very activity of this understanding and practice.

 So the crucial question of 'what is to be done?' can only be addressed by careful attention to what struggles - challenges and opportunities, presented by the circumstances of our different times and places, that we in and with our thinking and acting, are actually engaged or involved. What I find important and perhaps unique in John's and Pierre's text is their insistent expansion of the traditional Lonerganian focus on the individual-personal 'conversions' of our intellectual, moral, and religious realms, to this much more collective-communal conversion involved with this fundamental transformation of our common 'economic-ecological' reality ...

Hugh 

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