Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: Conversation with the outer word: Its redemptive function; moral impotence (dem Sinn nach)

Kurzinhalt: we want to repent, to change; but we cannot change ourselves. And so the Risen Lord forgives us for our involvement in personal and structural sin; he thereby gives us the strength

Textausschnitt: 41 I want to underline Lonergan's statement:
Without the visible mission of the Word, the gift of the Spirit is a being-in-love without a proper object; it remains simply an orientation to mystery that awaits its interpretation. (1985, p. 32)
()
Perhaps for most of us, Christian conversion involves encountering the Christ, the Son of God, whose story is to be read in the Gospels and the significance of that story in the Old Testament and the New Testament, in the light of God's gift of love. As with the original disciples, it is the Risen Lord who first reveals to us our own very real implicatedness in personal and structural sin; who reveals us to be the co-causes of his suffering; he who shows us the extent of suffering our sin cost him, and who communicates to us the judgment of his Father on the sheer horribility of that personal and structural sin. Confronted by our responsibility for our part in sin, we want to repent, to change; but we cannot change ourselves. And so the Risen Lord forgives us for our involvement in personal and structural sin; he thereby gives us the strength at once to take responsibility for our sin and to claim a new identity by uniting us with his redemptive suffering. He enables us to accept consciously, knowingly, responsibly the de facto intelligibility of this concrete universe: the law of the cross as the movement through death to life eternal. (262f; Fs)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: Freiheit u Aristoteles: kein Unterschied zw. Ausübung und Spezifikation des Willens; keine moralische Impotenz

Kurzinhalt: But he did not distinguish clearly between the specification and exercise of free will; no theory of moral impotence

Textausschnitt: 34 Take, for example, the word "liberty" in the structure of the human good. Liberty was acknowledged by the Greeks, but it was not a theme for them. They had a common sense apprehension of the difference between slave or free. Theoretically, Aristotle was explicitly clear about the contingency of terrestrial events, which implies the contingency of all human agency. But he did not distinguish clearly between the specification and exercise of free will. And in spite of having a theory of habit, a notion that intellectual virtues liberate human beings more than even the moral virtues do, a recognition that most men know what is good yet choose what is to their own advantage, he had no theory of moral impotence. In short, we have no reason to suppose that the ancient Greek meaning of liberty coincides with Lonergan's in a more than partial way. (260; Fs) (notabene)

35 On the other hand, liberty has been a theme for the moderns. Indeed, some modern thinkers might agree with Lonergan that liberty is not just indeterminacy but self-determination and even perhaps that "we experience our liberty as the active thrust of the subject terminating the process of deliberation" (1972, p. 50). But none of the modern thinkers I have mentioned would agree with him either that "implicit in human choice of values is the absolute good that is God" (Lonergan, 1967/1988, p. 230); or, correlatively, that freedom of choice is grounded in our ability to criticize any finite course of group or individual action (1972, p. 50). And similarly, despite, their realization that the god must be a being beyond the intracosmic gods, the Greeks did not affirm an explanatory notion of divine transcendence, any more than the moderns do. (260; Fs)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: Ancient Political Philosophy; das partikuläre Gut ist dem Ordnungsgut untergeordnet

Kurzinhalt: mere life, good life; normative notion of culture

Textausschnitt: that of the good of order, brings with it a tendency to subordinate elements located on the third level of that structure to the second level. In St. Thomas Aquinas' Of Princely Government, for example, () Although almost all third level components are present and treated in the ancient accounts, they do tend to get subordinated to the second level. (251f; Fs) (notabene)
()
9 Second, the ancients conceive the practical and political question about the right way to live not merely empirically (that is, as an account of possible ways of life as verified), but ethically or morally.
()
the third level comprises the cultural domain in the light of which the social is (to be) judged and evaluated. By this distinction, both the "social" and the "cultural" have an utterly empirical meaning, but "culture" retains the connotation of a normative function without being classicist in Lonergan's pejorative sense. (252; Fs)
12 In the best of the ancients, culture and the political order are identical only in the ideal and highly improbable case where the philosopher becomes the ruler; otherwise and (we can suppose almost always) in fact, culture is only the forum before which the political order is judged, and within which justice is realized not in deed, but in speech alone. This sense of balance got lost as the "Greek mediation of meaning" was transformed into classical culture with its science of man. As Lonergan came to discover, classical culture performed the above-mentioned normative function of culture by means of "a somewhat arbitrary standardization of man" (1967/1988, p. 241). Classical or classicist culture transformed the Greek breakthrough - "a necessary stage in the development of the human mind" (p. 241) - into a timeless criterion in which the content of the classically oriented science of man "easily obscures man's nature, constricts his spontaneity, saps his vitality, limits his freedom" (p. 241), because it "concentrated on the essential to ignore the accidental, on the universal to ignore the particular, on the necessary to ignore the contingent" (p. 240). Since it omitted so much of the data on human being, its explanations could not help but be provisional in some respects, which is understandable. The overwhelming problem with classicist culture is its inability to acknowledge these limits and its apparent unwillingness to keep learning. (253; Fs)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: Modern Political Philosophy - 1. wave; Sorge um self-preservation wird dominierend; summum bonum, malum
Modern Political Philosophy; The first wave of modernity; Allan Bloom

Kurzinhalt: displacing the desire to know elevated to normative status by the ancients with the desire for self-preservation

Textausschnitt: ... the moderns contended that the concentration on virtue contradicts the concern for well-being. Aristotle admitted that "equipment" as well as virtue is needed for happiness, but said nothing about how that equipment is acquired. A careful examination of the acquisition of equipment reveals that virtue impedes that acquisition. [...] Equipment is surely necessary, so why not experiment with doing without virtue. (1990, pp. 282-283) (notabene)
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14 In other words, thinkers like Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke judged that in the light of humanity's "disequilibrium of high aspiration and poor performance" (Lonergan,1967/ 1988, p. 39), taking care of equipment not only means doing without virtue if need be, but displacing the desire to know elevated to normative status by the ancients with the desire for self-preservation. (253f; Fs) (notabene)
()
15 In tandem with modern science's myth of productivity, modern political philosophy undertook the vast "humanitarian" project of taking care of equipment by parleying private vices into public welfare. But this was to subordinate the second and third levels of the structure of the human good to that of needs, desires, and particular goods. It follows that the common good no longer refers to the good of order as normative, but to particular goods as satisfying needs and desires as correlative with life in contradistinction to the good life. As a mere collectivity of private goods, the common good is "common" only in the sense of an accidental genus or species instead of as the objective of rational choice correlative with the human capacity for intellectual development. Furthermore, in relation to the normative order of vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious values, the preference for mere life over the good life means the supremacy of vital values. The dominant practical question becomes not merely, "What's in it for me or my group?" but "What's the value of being good if you're not well off?" (254; Fs) (notabene)
()
17 Concerns for the third level are acknowledged by the early moderns under the rubric of natural right. Friendships are relevant as long as they are based on utility or pleasure. Liberty means either the freedom to design institutions that will provide mutual security and rules that guarantee the public good by enabling each individual to pursue private goods without obstruction from others, or at least the freedom to consent to such a design. It is clear, then, that the notion of natural right, inalienable, underivable from any authority, is an eminently selfish idea. As the product of an attempt to define human equality independently of any religion or metaphysics, it also meant to leave open the answer to the question of the right way to live, at least in principle; but in fact, that openness was a void the early moderns were content to see filled by commerce. Taking care of equipment is realized as taking care of business. (254f; Fs)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: Politische Philosophie: 2 Wellen; Rousseau: Nature - Kultur; "der allgemeine Wille"

Kurzinhalt: ... nature (satisfaction of needs on the level of organistic spontaneity) and culture; freedom for him was coordinate with the perfectibility of the amiable but brutish human being

Textausschnitt: 2.22 The second wave of modern political philosophy.

18 In his First and Second Discourses, Rousseau laid bare the opposition between nature - now identified with the satisfaction of needs on the level of organistic spontaneity - and culture or civilization. He thus set the stage for the modern use of the term culture. As Bloom has written:

according to Kant, Rousseau in his later works, Emile, Social Contract, Nouvelle Heloise, proposed a possible unity that harmonized the low natural demands with the high responsibilities of morality and art. This unity Kant called "culture." (1990, p. 278)
Rousseau, therefore, unleashed the first cultural critique of the mercenary morality of liberalism. (255; Fs) (notabene)

19 From the point of view of the structure of the human good, we can say that Rousseau's scathing attack was actually an ambiguous breakthrough to the second (social) and third (cultural) levels in reaction to the early modern reduction of all elements to the first level. Both the breakthrough and its ambiguity are signaled by the notorious modern dichotomies between nature and freedom, nature and history, and nature and art, which were exploited till our own day by the movements of idealism, historicism, and Romanticism. No less than Hobbes and Locke, however, Rousseau conceived of liberty without any reference to divine transcendence. Though he did not confine freedom to the limits of scientific calculation and technical control and debunked early liberalism's utilitarianism and instrumentalism, freedom for him was coordinate with the perfectibility of the amiable but brutish human being he uncovered in the state of nature, and its matrix was that animal's "simple feeling of existence," its "conscience" as "the science of simple souls." (255; Fs) (notabene)

20 Out of the framework built with these ideas, Rousseau eventually developed the idea of the "general will." On the one hand, the general will was to be understood in terms of national custom, national "philosophy," or the "mystique of the nation." We have become familiar with these ideas under the guise of such terms as Hegel's Zeitgeist or Whitehead's "climate of opinion." On the other hand, Kant drew out the more idealist implications of the general will, for example, in his moralistic grounding of human rights. Earlier liberalism's "natural" rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were founded not so much in the state of nature theory as on factual evidence on the dominance within human beings of the natural inclinations toward security and comfort. But Kant uses the ability (shown by Rousseau to be human and rational, but not natural) humans possess of universalizing their desire in order to subordinate the older liberalism's self-interest in safety and prosperity to rights conceived of as universal principles that serve to define human beings as free and independent. (255; Fs)

21 One can appreciate the high moral tone of this transformation of so-called natural rights into human rights. It does seem to give primacy to the moral demands proper to the second and third levels. However, the apriorism, abstractness, and formalism of Kant's thought not only divorce his grounding from any concrete practical relevance; but his intelligible ego with its good will is so isolated from the empirically verifiable process of communication within which subjects grow to maturity that we are forced to concede that it is quite utopian (not to say unreal) as well. Kant had no way of tethering his "normative" realm of freedom to empirically verifiable fact; and so he buttressed it with postulates about God, freedom, and immortality, on the one hand; and with a speculative philosophy of history, on the other. Even on Kantian grounds, the former threesome may be argued not to exist; and Kant's philosophy of history finally settles for a distinction between morality and mere legality that represents a compromise of rational faith with Realpolitik. (256; Fs)

22 As a result of the two waves of modernity, there are two chief forms or languages of Western liberalism. They both depart from the modern assumption that the chief concern or issue of modern politics is power. First, commercial democracy is based on consent to governmental power as guarantor of public safety and comfort and on the doctrine of classical political economy that if there are no restrictions to free economic activity other than enlightened self-interest, social harmony and well-being will necessarily prevail. Second, socialist politics of compassion grounds the legitimacy of governmental power upon the extent to which it bolsters equality not merely of opportunity (that is, the political right to endeavor to acquire and dispose of one's property within the limits of the law and the civil right to freedom of expression and to self-government), but of the satisfaction of aggregate societal needs (under the heading of economic, social, and cultural rights to such things as health, housing, education, employment, sanitation, etc.) by attempting to reconcile older liberalism's means with socialist or collectivist ends in what has been since called welfare economics. Both versions of liberalism are staunchly convinced of the efficacy of scientific prediction and control and of institutionally contrived solutions to political problems. In general, and by way of oversimplification, advocates of commercial democracy believe that enlightened self-interest in private good is the operator of common weal, and they preach the ideal of as much freedom as possible for the individual and the equality of opportunity. In the United States we tend to label this stance conservative. Secularist proponents of the socialist politics of compassion depend upon "culture" to supply the link between the self-regarding individual and disinterested respect of the law or the rights of others by generating a secular kind of compassion that educes gentle and beneficent concern for others from natural selfishness. They advocate a greater equality of conditions or results in life and preach equality of influence and power for all. In the United States we tend to reserve the name liberal for people who are considered politically progressive in this sense. (256f; Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: result of the two waves of modernity; two chief forms or languages of Western liberalism; Karl Marx

Kurzinhalt: both depart from the modern assumption that the chief concern or issue of modern politics is power. First; conservative, liberal; socialist politics

Textausschnitt: 22 As a result of the two waves of modernity, there are two chief forms or languages of Western liberalism. They both depart from the modern assumption that the chief concern or issue of modern politics is power. First, commercial democracy is based on consent to governmental power as guarantor of public safety and comfort and on the doctrine of classical political economy that if there are no restrictions to free economic activity other than enlightened self-interest, social harmony and well-being will necessarily prevail. Second, socialist politics of compassion grounds the legitimacy of governmental power upon the extent to which it bolsters equality not merely of opportunity (that is, the political right to endeavor to acquire and dispose of one's property within the limits of the law and the civil right to freedom of expression and to self-government), but of the satisfaction of aggregate societal needs (under the heading of economic, social, and cultural rights to such things as health, housing, education, employment, sanitation, etc.) by attempting to reconcile older liberalism's means with socialist or collectivist ends in what has been since called welfare economics. Both versions of liberalism are staunchly convinced of the efficacy of scientific prediction and control and of institutionally contrived solutions to political problems. In general, and by way of oversimplification, advocates of commercial democracy believe that enlightened self-interest in private good is the operator of common weal, and they preach the ideal of as much freedom as possible for the individual and the equality of opportunity. In the United States we tend to label this stance conservative. Secularist proponents of the socialist politics of compassion depend upon "culture" to supply the link between the self-regarding individual and disinterested respect of the law or the rights of others by generating a secular kind of compassion that educes gentle and beneficent concern for others from natural selfishness. They advocate a greater equality of conditions or results in life and preach equality of influence and power for all. In the United States we tend to reserve the name liberal for people who are considered politically progressive in this sense. (256f; Fs) (notabene)
()
23 The most noteworthy proponent of the socialist politics of compassion is Karl Marx. ... Marx tried to analyze that struggle by re-introducing social (second level) and, at least in his youthful writings, ethical (third level) concerns into political economy in opposition to the "possessive individualism" of liberal capitalism. However, this important attempt to redress the biases of liberal democratic political economy unfortunately got derailed by Marx's uneasy blend of idealism and materialism. That idealism trivialized the underlying problem of evil just as Rousseau and Kant had done. The materialism kept him from breaking cleanly from the utilitarianism and instrumentalism of his early liberal predecessors. He failed altogether to appreciate Rousseau's insight that to achieve freedom in equality requires small communities with religious foundations. And however much the Romantic model of artistic creation was his privileged model for the making of history by human subjects, his revolutionary idea was ultimately just a project of technical mastery, which not even a classless and stateless society would be capable of redeeming. (257; Fs)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: The third wave of modern political philosophy: (a) Nietzsche

Kurzinhalt: abolition of all ideals and aspirations;

Textausschnitt: 24 As the inaugurator of the third wave of modernity, Nietzsche realized that the outcome of both liberal democracy's dedication to preservation and comfort and social democracy's well-fed, well-clothed, well-sheltered human beings with their up-to-date educations, entertainment, and psychiatry would be the abolition of all ideals and aspirations. To the degree that liberalisms of both left and right choose mere life over the good life, they produce the "last man" - healthy, but without heart or convictions. (257; Fs) (notabene)
()
25 Nietzsche, therefore, has the overwhelming importance of trying to reestablish the importance of the level of liberty and terminal values. He stands just at the threshold of the religiously mediated insight so neatly formulated in the title of the book by Dorothee Sölle: Death by Bread Alone. He sets the stage for the rescuing consciousness of the unorthodox Jew, Walter Benjamin, and for the Christian theologian, Johann Baptist Metz. The latter's short definition for religion is interruption - interruption of the modern project of subjugating human and subhuman nature. But for Nietzsche, Christianity is just Platonism for the masses and all the supports for ultimate values in nature, God, or reason are gone. The only option left open in the face of the abyss is a creative transvaluation of all previous values on the part of solitary individuals creative enough to respond to the implications of the will-to-power, especially, that human beings are originating values in the absolute sense of being able to posit values arbitrarily. In Nietzsche, the most radical breakthrough to the third level of terminal values also presents us with the epitome of human disorientation, rebellion, and disorder. (257f; Fs) (notabene)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: (b) Weber: Between Kant and Nietzsche; scial science (Sozialwissenschaft);

Kurzinhalt: realm of nature investigated by science -> the value-free domain of fact; Weber's "iron cage";

Textausschnitt: The realm of nature investigated by science and exploited by technology becomes the value-free domain of fact; whereas both the realm of freedom and responsibility and that of art and religion become the domain of value. As a result of this fateful distinction, the normative moment of culture intended by Lonergan's notion of terminal value gets sunk into the quagmire of the arbitrariness and caprice of values as the creation of the Nietzschean will-to-power. (258; Fs) (notabene)
()
... Social science is confined to facts: It describes, and its descriptions are expected to yield information on the basis of which social policy can predict and control. Any normative judgment - either as classical intelligibility or as true judgments of fact and value - gets systematically excluded. The individual, group, or general bias of those in power leads them to repudiate true terminal values (beyond the desires and needs of organistic spontaneity) and to reject any intelligibility yielded by science that does not afford means of prediction and control. The point is to increase managerial efficiency even at the cost of human liberty or social, cultural, personal, or religious values. (258; Fs) (notabene)
()
32 The ongoing mutual impenetrability of second and third levels becomes all the more disastrous when it comes to Weber's reconstruction of the reasons why people historically have obeyed authority. On the one hand, his construct of the charismatic form of legitimation is one of the few 19th century instances of evaluating religiously based existence positively, since for Weber charismatic authority is the privileged force or agency for social change. On the other hand, his hypothesis about modernity as a process of rationalization, combined with his analysis of bureaucratic control, spells out in a way that is verifiable the meaning of Nietzsche's critique of liberal democracy and socialism on the level of the good of order. Because, for all the preoccupation of liberal and socialist democracy with being emancipated from religious, feudal, monarchical, or aristocratic control; for all their preoccupation with the use of scientific prediction and manipulation "for the relief of man's estate," and of either consent and bargaining (liberal reformism) or violence (socialist revolution) to bring about an order of freedom in equality - it all seems only to have paved the way for bureaucracy and centralization: Weber's "iron cage." (259; Fs)

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Werte, intentionale Gefühle; Dietrich von Hildebrand; Erfassung von Werten ("aprehension of values"); moralische Konversion; Werturteil (judgment of value)

Kurzinhalt: What allows feelings to reveal values? In agreement with Max Scheler and Dietrich von Hildebrand, Lonergan ascribes the ability of feelings to "see" values to whether or not ...

Textausschnitt: 15a Lonergan's account of value reached its most mature stage when he developed his theory of feelings and made explicit the transcendental notion of value by which he was able to expand his account of knowing to synthesize feelings. He distinguished feelings like tiredness and hunger as correlative to non-intentional states and trends from feelings that are intentional responses to objects, whether of pleasure and pain or of our highest aspirations. Among such intentional feelings he distinguished between those that do discriminate between what is truly good and what is apparently good, and those feelings that do not. In discriminating true from merely apparent goods, feelings as intentional responses "put themselves in a hierarchy" of the vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious values spoken of above.1 On what basis are these feelings as intentional responses capable of discriminating and discerning among values? What allows feelings to reveal values? In agreement with Max Scheler and Dietrich von Hildebrand, Lonergan ascribes the ability of feelings to "see" values to whether or not, and how, we are in love.2 (Fs) (notabene)

15b Situations demanding action or appreciative response are feeling-laden. In them there spontaneously arises within us the transcendental notion of value marked by the questions, Is this worthwhile? or What am I to do?1 These are questions for deliberation. They call for insights into the intentional feelings usually already being felt and evoked by the situation. Lonergan sometimes names such acts of understanding or insight in response to questions for deliberation 'apprehensions of value';2 and sometimes he suggests that the feelings themselves as intentional responses to values are already 'apprehensions of value.'3 At any rate, when deliberation occurs, intelligence and feeling come together in formulating possible courses of action, or in discerning just what the feelings and values at stake might happen to be. Deliberation needs an understanding and formulation of a possible course of action in order to ask the further question, Should I do it?, to arrive at a judgment of value, and to come to a decision. (Fs) (notabene)

16a What is of overwhelming significance in the full discernment of value is the existential orientation1 of the person doing the evaluating and deciding. For Lonergan this orientation is determined by whether or not one is morally converted.2 Prior to moral conversion, one's feelings as intentional responses do not care about the possible difference between satisfactions and values, or between what is truly or only apparently good. Once a person is morally converted, his feelings are under the sway of the transcendental notion of value, so that the questions, Is it worthwhile? and What should I do? do not reduce in egocentric fashion into, What's in it for me? or What's in it for our in-group? Instead they spur us on to self-transcendence. Beyond selfishness the calculus of pleasure and pain is broken wide open and feelings as intentional responses

become concerned with values: with the vital values of health and strength; with the social values enshrined in family and custom, society and education, the state and the law, the economy and technology, the church or sect; with the cultural values of religion and art, language and literature, science, philosophy, history, theology; with the achieved personal values of one dedicated to realizing values in himself and promoting their realization in others;3 and with the religious value of the transcendent mystery of love and awe.4

16b The morally converted person places feelings as intentional responses to value in the context of the notion of value where they become part of the process of deliberation, evaluation, decision, and action. This awareness marks the emergence of ourselves as personal, as existential subjects who freely and responsibly make ourselves who we are to be whenever we consciously intend the good in asking about values, about what is worthwhile.5 (Fs) (notabene)

17a Whenever we ask, What should we do? we deliberate. In the context of feelings as intentional responses to values we get insights that permit us to formulate alternative courses of action. Deliberation continues as we ponder whether we should do this or that. By means of feelings as intentional responses to values our reflective act of understanding discerns what course of action is good or better, and a judgment of value responsibly proceeds. For Lonergan value "is known in judgments of value made by a virtuous or authentic person with a good conscience."1 These judgments arise from a deliberative process which "sublates and thereby unifies knowing and feeling."2 The criterion of value is the happy or easy conscience of the good or virtuous or authentic person: "It is only by reaching the sustained self-transcendence of the virtuous man that one becomes a good judge, not of this or that human act, but on the whole range of human goodness."3

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Hermeneutischer Zirkel: Glaube - Vernunft; Befangenheit (bias), Sünde

Kurzinhalt: Bias, combined with basic sin, distorts the hermeneutic circle of understanding and believing

Textausschnitt: 9a In Insight Lonergan had transposed Thomas Aquinas's metaphysical analysis of the structure of human knowing into the contemporary framework of phenomenologically ostensible intentionality analysis. In coming to terms with the genetic and dialectical dimensions of human cognitional development this intentionality analysis took shape as a horizon-analysis of the dynamics of the hermeneutic circle: understanding in order to believe, and believing in order to understand. These dynamics feature the priority of the dramatic pattern in human living over other-biological, aesthetic, and intellectual patternings of consciousness that function as parts within the dramatic pattern's whole.1

9b However, our dramatic pattern of human experience is beset by bias and basic sin.1 This means that the dynamism of conscious intentionality as headed spontaneously toward intelligibility, truth, and goodness is subject to dramatic, individual, group, and commonsense biases. Moreover, basic sin is our failure to choose what the spontaneous dynamism of our spirits knows to be intelligent, reasonable, and responsible courses of action. Bias, combined with basic sin, distorts the hermeneutic circle of understanding and believing. The impersonal forces of a cultural and social surd begin to prevail to such an extent that the gap between our natural and our effective freedom becomes a radical moral impotence that cannot be overcome by human resources alone.2 The inevitable time-lag between living and knowing how to live leads to the short-circuiting of human genuineness by the 'reign of sin.'3

10a For Lonergan philosophic horizon-analysis inevitably yields to theological horizon­analysis as a matter of integrity. For in concrete human living the social and cultural surd of sin can only be countered adequately by a transformation due to a gift of God's love that is disproportionate to human nature.4 After Insight, in essays before Method in Theology, in Method itself, and in the writings that followed, Lonergan's horizon-analysis gradually transposed Thomas Aquinas's theology of grace and freedom that he had originally retrieved on its own terms in his doctoral dissertation in the late 1930s into contemporary terms.5

10b According to Lonergan's dialectical analysis of horizon, human development is shown to be a mixture of progress and decline.6 However, as he came to acknowledge, concrete human becoming occurs in the context or tension of two vectors of human development: a vector of healing that moves from above downwards and that in the highest instance is empowered by the God's self-gift (according to the Christian interpretation of redemption); and a vector of creativity that moves from below upwards starting with attentiveness to data, through intelligent inquiry and reasonable discernment, to responsible deliberation, evaluation, decision, arid action.7

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Werte, Stufen: partikulär, sozial, kulturell, religiös, personal

Kurzinhalt: For Lonergan the levels of value as vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious are governed by relations of mutual presupposition and complementarity so that ...

Textausschnitt: 10c The fruit of the gradual evolution of Lonergan's analysis of the horizon of human beings is the articulation of a universal viewpoint or total and basic horizon which is not only completely general but completely concrete.1 This total and basic horizon is grounded in the universally immanent, operative, and normative questioning-structure proper to the human consciousness of any race, class, or gender. In light of this horizon2 it becomes evident that in order to be fully comprehensive, reflection on the human condition must take seriously but go beyond the merely vital values of the overall health, strength, and graceful comportment of our bodies, to the social values required by cooperation in bringing about the human good with its particular goods and its institutional recurrence schemes or goods of order. Even more concretely, reflection on the human condition has to move beyond social to cultural values in which traditional aims and aspirations are embodied in stories and customs and rituals that furnish the wellsprings from which human beings may engage in the reflective evaluation of their concrete way of life.3

11a A still further step in concreteness then has to go beyond values as cultural to values as personal. By reason of the intrinsically conversational nature of each one's human mind and heart, persons are originators of values.4 This conversational structure of personhood is realized by living up to the conversation's inbuilt demands for free self-transcendence. This in turn occurs most frequently when people belong to communities where regularly or normally cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart).

11b But the most comprehensive concreteness is attained on the level of religious values5 In any culture human beings elaborate an overarching symbolic order: the ma'at of ancient Egypt, or the Tao of China, or the nomos of Greece, or the Torah of Judaism, or the law of the cross in Christianity. Modern secularists may be suspicious of or debunk such overarching orders, yet they too work out surrogates which play the role that since Vico has been called civil religion.

12a For Lonergan the levels of value as vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious are governed by relations of mutual presupposition and complementarity so that lower levels condition but do not determine higher levels. Most societies and cultures handle these complex relationships in differing ways. We speak of contemporary Western Europe, for example, as a highly secular culture, while we regard most Latin American cultures as rather highly religious. Whatever the specific configuration of values in any given culture, the culture may be regarded as more advanced the more the different levels of culture are distinguished, even if not necessarily separated, from each other. The more primitive a society, the more global and compact are its basic self-understandings and self-expressions in rituals and celebrations, dramas, lyrics and music, songs, paintings, architecture and monuments; the more advanced the society, the more differentiated these things are.

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Moderne; Dichotomie: Natur - Vernunft, Glaube - Vernunft, Tatsache - Wert; Notwendigkeit einer differentierten Wertanalyse

Kurzinhalt: Hence, the notorious modern dichotomies between nature and reason, between reason and faith, and between fact and value. These dichotomies wreak havoc on the complex, concrete relations among vital ...

Textausschnitt: 12b Modernity has tended to push legitimate distinctions between levels of value to the point of destructive separation. For example, continental liberalism's reaction to the abusive alliance between altar and throne under absolutist regimes led to a separation of church and state that in its anti-clerical thrust tried to secularize and privatize the public sphere. In contrast, the institutional separation of church and state in the United States's disestablishment of every church or sect has been less apt to imply the complete banishment of religious values from the public sphere. Nonetheless, the individualism and materialism presupposed by procedural liberalism favor the repression of religious values and all the forces running counter to the "unencumbered self." The ethos that stresses the 'punctual self' with its disengaged reason and its disembodied ego generates a climate which both publicly and privately threatens the flourishing of all but vital values. (notabene)

12a Hence, the notorious modern dichotomies between nature and reason, between reason and faith, and between fact and value. These dichotomies wreak havoc on the complex, concrete relations among vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious values. Max Weber noted that the process of modernity's rationalization and disenchantment of society and its movement from substantive (charismatic and traditional) legitimation to formal (bureaucratic-legal) legitimation creates an "iron cage" that either eliminates the higher levels of value from public influence, or subordinates the higher to the lower. Karl Marx diagnosed these phenomena in terms of commodity fetishism. The Frankfurterschule's Kulturkritik criticizes instrumental rationality. Even more radically, Nietzschean or postmodernist genealogy exposes dominant orientations towards power.

13a All these criticisms of advanced industrial societies point to the need for a sufficiently differentiated account of values that can at once do justice to all the levels of value, ranging from vital to religious; and help solve questions that arise from social and cultural differentiation. For instance, an intelligent and legitimate desacralization of certain spheres or institutions of public life does not have to mean the wholesale secularization of society and culture of the kind built into modernization's drift towards separating what needs chiefly to be distinguished. We need a normative heuristic structure of values and of the human good such as is worked out by Lonergan in Insight and Method in Theology.

13b Lonergan's approach is so helpful, to begin with, because it does not initially require a return to premodern ontologies, cosmologies, or social hierarchies on the part of anyone appropriating and applying it, especially if such a return would entail a dedifferentiation and a disregard of modern science and modern historical consciousness. Now any adequate contemporary approach has to go to the roots of what Charles Taylor calls "radical reflexivity." As we have seen, most modern versions of the 'turn to the subject' have miscarried in one way or another.1 Early moderns such as Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, and Bacon have succeeded in revealing only a truncated subject. Rousseau and Kant in the 18th century and the German Idealists in the 19th reacted to this truncation and oversimplification by unconvering an immanentist subject. Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, and today's deconstructionist and genealogical Nietzscheans have called into question and debunked both the truncated and immanentist versions of the subject to disclose the alienated subject. Lonergan has shown how "radical reflexivity" is not a dead-end.

14a Lonergan begins with the polymorphous existential (not 'existentialist') subject. By generalized empirical method he lays bare the immanent and operative dynamisms of conscious intentionality. By doing a thorough and empirically verifiable phenomenology of the subject, he goes beyond the horizons of the truncated, immanentist, and alienated subjects to disclose a total viewpoint that is basic yet not 'foundationalist' precisely because it gets beyond those other foreshortened or distorted horizons. Such a viewpoint exposes the total and basic horizon of the incarnate inquirer, "liable to mythic consciousness, in need of a critique that reveals where ... counterpositions come from," but also an incarnate inquirer who "develops in a development that is social and historical, that stamps the stages of scientific and philosophic progress with dates, that is open to a theology that Karl Rahner has described as an Aufhebung der Philosophie."2

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Nietzsche (Seele - Selbst); Lonergan: Missverständnis - Klärung durch Kontrastierung; subjektiv; Authentizität im Maße von -> reines Streben nach Wissen und Sein ...

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan's ideal of authenticity does not spurn traditional, objective standards for judging a person's words or deeds, but it does underline how objectivity itself is the fruit of subjectivity that ...

Textausschnitt: 17b Key terms used in Lonergan's formulation of the ethics of authenticity-self, authenticity or sincerity, commitment, and values-are liable to be misunderstood in terms of Nietzsche's meanings that have become common currency today. As Allan Bloom put it, for Nietzsche the 'self

is the modern substitute of the soul, which is a rationally ordered structure and is dependent on and subordinate to the order of the cosmos. The self has no order and is dependent on nothing; it makes a cosmos out of the chaos that is really outside by imposing an order of values on it.1

18a Not so for Lonergan. For him the term 'self not only refers to the conscious subject as he or she exists concretely, but represents a transposition of Aquinas's conception of the order of the human soul into a framework of conscious intentionality in which a formally dynamic structure is experienced as immanent, operative, and normative.1 Human living is a matter not of positing values but of asking and answering questions and freely living by the answers. The pattern of inquiry, reflection, and deliberation is an exigence not for self­aggrandisement but for self-transcendence.

18b In the Nietzschean ethos God is dead and the highest values repudiated, and so everything is permitted and 'authenticity' is a replacement for the good. As the antithesis of the hypocrisy of being other-directed, it entails no more than the honesty or sincerity of self-expression.2 For Lonergan, 'authenticity' involves fidelity to the transcendental precepts: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, and be loving.3 Lonergan's ideal of authenticity does not spurn traditional, objective standards for judging a person's words or deeds, but it does underline how objectivity itself is the fruit of subjectivity that is authentic precisely in the measure that it lives in the light of the pure, detached, disinterested, and unrestricted desire to know and to be in affective union with the universe of being beyond itself.4 (Fs) (notabene)

18c In the absence of any objective standard of evaluation, intensity of commitment becomes the Nietzschean criterion for authenticity.1 This makes feelings the ultimate criterion, but it also abolishes the distinction between premoral feelings as arising from any appetites whatsoever, and feelings as intentional responses to the integral scale of vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious values. In contrast, commitment for Lonergan is an enactment of conscious intentionality on the level of deliberation, evaluation, decision, and action. Conscious intentionality becomes conscience when the transcendental notion of value synthesizes feelings as intentional responses to values with knowing to reach value judgments that are right in the measure that the person asking What is worthwhile? What should I do? Should I do it? is virtuous or self-transcendent or authentic.2 Only then do we have the assurance that judgments of value are not arbitrary.

19a This is just the opposite of the very meaning of 'value' in Nietzschean parlance. For Nietzsche 'values' cannot be rationally evaluated. They are original creations produced by arbitrary positings of the willful self as a primordial chaos3 Values come from merely arbitrary choices instead of from responsible judgments of value. Disgusted by the utilitarian and technocratic individualism that reduces values to market prices, the Nietzschean version of expressive individualism turns whatever arises unpredictably from the self as an oracle into a value.

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Wert, Person: authentische, Wert schaffend, selbsttranszendent; Freiheit; Zielwerte, dreifache Struktur des Guten -> Stufen der Gemeinschaft

Kurzinhalt: When a person is not motivated in a calculus of pleasure and pain but by values ... then "the self... is achieving moral self-transcendence[,] ... is existing authentically[,] ... is constituting himself as an originative value

Textausschnitt: 20b Whenever human beings deliberate, evaluate, decide, and act, for Lonergan they emerge as existential subjects whose very person is at stake.1 Whenever people as individuals are self-transcendent enough in their deliberating, evaluating, deciding, and acting, they realize personal values. As mentioned above, they are originators of values in themselves and in their milieus, and they inspire and invite others to be originators too.2 As originating values, persons are authentic, choosing self-transcendence by their good choices.3 Then, to be persons means to be "principles of benevolence and beneficence, capable of genuine collaboration and of true love."4 Particular goods are whatever satisfy needs and fulfill capacities. Goods of order are the institutions, and "all the skill and know-how, all the industry and resourcefulness, all the ambition and fellow-feeling of a whole people, adapting to each change of circumstance, meeting each new emergency, struggling against any tendency to disorder."5 Terminal values as the comprehensive objective correlative of persons as originating values are the values that people actually choose: "true instances of the particular good, a true good of order, a true scale of preferences regarding values and satisfactions."6

21a It is clear that for Lonergan, maturity entails a real apprehension, judgment, and decision regarding personal values and an appreciation of liberty as an active thrust of the self towards self-determination. When a person is not motivated in a calculus of pleasure and pain but by values, he or she is free and "regularly opts, not for the merely apparent good, but for the truly good"; then "the self... is achieving moral self-transcendence[,] ... is existing authentically[,] ... is constituting himself as an originative value, and is bringing about terminal values, namely a good of order that is truly good and instances of the particular good that are truly good."7 Then, too, personal values govern cultural, social, and vital values. Because when we exist as persons, we "meet one another in a common concern for values, (and) seek to abolish the organization of human living on the basis of competing egoisms and to replace it by an organization on the basis of man's perceptiveness and intelligence, his reasonableness, and his responsible exercise of freedom." (Fs) (notabene)

21b The orientation of people is shown in the personal relations implicit in their cooperating for particular goods, and in playing roles and fulfilling tasks in the different institutional contexts of the familial, educational, technological, economic, legal, political, artistic, and religious orders of society. People carry on recreational and pragmatic communication in these relationships. But orientation is most central when personal relationships are of focal concern in friendships that go beyond motives of mutual utility or pleasure, and simply exist for their own sake. Communication on this level is constitutive in the sense that it is the kind of communication in which people's personal identity and orientation are at stake.1 For Lonergan freedom is a matter not of indeterminacy but of self-determination, and what most determines a person's free self-constitution are the commitments they undertake and "the expectations aroused in others by the commitments."2 These commitments and the expectations that go with them regard not just performance, competence, or skill but "qualitative values and scales of preference." Each person's qualitative values and scales of preference are determined most crucially by their free commitments.

22a The three-tiered structure of the human good, comprised by particular goods, goods of order, and terminal values, corresponds to diverse levels of community.3 Particular goods correspond to the intersubjective community that integrates people as subjects of experience and desire, with their spontaneous tendencies and elemental feelings of belonging together. Goods of order arise from the developments of human intelligence that enable people to "grasp and formulate technological devices, economic arrangements, political structures," and they correspond to the civil community, "a complex product embracing and harmonizing material techniques, economic arrangements, and political structures."4 Terminal values arise from personal judgments of value and they correspond to the cultural community, which is "the field of communication and influence of artists, scientists, and philosophers[,] ...the bar of enlightened public opinion to which naked power can be driven to submit [,]...the tribunal of history that may expose successful charlatans and may restore to honor the prophets stoned by their contemporaries."5

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Enstsprechung: Struktur des Guten - Zivilisation; Jane Jacobs: Ethik des Jägers, Geschäftsmanns

Kurzinhalt: We can use Lonergan's structure of the human good to interpret civilizational and cultural development in history ... Raider ethics ... Trader ethics ...: shun force, come to voluntary agreements, be honest ...

Textausschnitt: 22b We can use Lonergan's structure of the human good to interpret civilizational and cultural development in history. In the most primitive stage of civilizational development--hunters and gatherers in a nomadic state--intersubjective community predominates over civil community, and technology, economy, and polity exist in the most rudimentary state. Here what Jane Jacobs calls the ethics of raiding dominates the modes of making a living. Raider ethics inculcates a guardian moral syndrome with its corresponding catalogue of virtues: shun trading, exert prowess, be obedient and disciplined, adhere to tradition, respect hierarchy, be loyal, take vengeance, deceive for the sake of the task, make rich use of leisure, be ostentatious, dispense largess, be exclusive, show fortitude, be fatalistic, treasure honor.1 (Fs) (notabene)

23a With the agrarian revolution goods of order required for the cultivation of land supplant the skills, roles, and tasks of hunting and gathering nomads. Technology gets more sophisticated with the development of tools, the domestication and training of animals, and the development of newly specialized skills, roles, and tasks; economy tries to attain a steady standard of living, so that although surpluses bring about great population growth, they are used chiefly for barter and for making the next round of harvesting and planting possible. Far less frequently are surpluses used for capital formation in the sense of "things produced and arranged not because they themselves are desired but because they expedite and accelerate the process of supplying the goods and services that are wanted by consumers."2 At this stage of civilizational development polity is organized as centralized government dominated by upper classes.

23b With the commercial revolution, however, the technology of commerce shifts to money as ameans of exchange, thus making possible new uses of economic surplus in relation to capital formation, along with a new and legitimately productive purpose for lending at interest. Besides inevitably disrupting agrarian autarky, the newly emergent commerce promotes the proliferation of artisans, professions, guilds, and other services--in short, urban life in Aristotle's sense of 'city.' Under the auspices of mercantilism the good of order as political shifts. Civil community begins to hold more sway over intersubjective communities of pre-urban villages. According to Jane Jacobs, the ethics of trading starts to become the prevalent mode of making a living. Trader ethics inculcates the commercial moral syndrome with its set of typical virtues: shun force, come to voluntary agreements, be honest, collaborate easily with strangers and aliens, compete, respect contracts, use initiative and enterprise, be open to inventiveness and novelty, be efficient, promote comfort and convenience, dissent for the sake of the task, invest for productive purposes, be industrious, be thrifty, be opfmistic.3 Thus, the building of the cathedrals and universities signals the presence of a cultural surplus and the prospering of a cultural community in which it is also legitimate for the commercial guilds of artisans, professionals, and university personnel to influence the freedom of markets in the name of the common good, which goes beyond mere public order (in the sense of technology and economy) to include cultural, personal, and religious values.

Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Enstsprechung: Struktur des Guten - Zivilisation; industrielle Revolution; Herrschaft des partikulären Gutes; Versklavung; Krise der Zeit = Krise der Authetizität; Globalisierung; Folgen

Kurzinhalt: The world-wide trends prevailing today have taught us that technological efficiency in multiplying particular goods can tend toward the elimination of cultural, personal, and religious values. Then two distortions follow: ...

Textausschnitt: 24a Finally, with the discovery of technologies for controlling the motor power of fire, the industrial revolution transforms cities and the planet itself. Production and monetary exchange, in their two interacting cycles of capital formation (that is, the production of goods for producers) and consumer goods production are differentiated more dramatically and expressed in the booms and slumps of business cycles. There are massive increases in productivity, heightened urbanization, and concentrations of power and economic inequalities never before dreamed of in history.

24b In this historic unfolding, the great promise for cultural community based on such tremendous potential for cultural surplus has remained fulfilled only ambiguously. Although an unheard of leisure from the necessities of non-liberal labor is made possible by higher standards of living, the new distinction between labor and capital has favored the overwhelming growth of technocracy, and the degeneration of true leisure. Politically, the same contrast between promise and achievement is suggested in Ferdinand Braudel's distinction (in his economic history of the 16th and 17th centuries) between 'market' economies exemplified by the subterranean exchange economies that are coeval with commerce in a context of small-scale agriculture, small businesses, and small industries in cities of typically no more than 10,000 people; and 'capitalist' economies based on the fateful alliance between economic and political power at the summit of the social classes for the sake of a kind of gigantic 'success,' in which guardian moral syndromes are mixed up with commercial moral syndromes in disastrous ways.1 In Braudel's sense of 'capitalist' (in which the term is not specified functionally in terms of capital formation although it includes this function), this kind of top-heavy, power-driven economy becomes dominant in countries that are capitalist, socialist, or under so-called mixed economies; it reigns supreme over both public and private sectors, nationally and transnationally; and it currently parades under the heading of 'globalization.' At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, it gravitates against genuine entrepreneurial freedom in the name of vertical managerial control exercised in bureaucratic modes at the same time as it spawns the world-wide duality of high-paying, skilled jobs for the relatively few highly educated and the unskilled, low-wage jobs for the masses.2 (Fs) (notabene)

25a Now according to the normative intelligibility of the human good, particular goods are to be subordinated to goods of order, and goods of order are to be subordinated to terminal values. For this to happen coherently, though, the integral scale of values (ranging from vital to religious) needs to be preserved intact by a sufficient number of authentic people. The world-wide trends prevailing today have taught us that technological efficiency in multiplying particular goods can tend toward the elimination of cultural, personal, and religious values. Then two distortions follow: first, values come to be equated with needs and desires on the level of appetite; and second, social goods of order come to be conceived as efficient means to the satisfaction of self-interested covetousness. (Fs) (notabene)

26a It follows that the end of human living is conceived as an unlimited and disoriented satisfaction of needs and capacities disguised as freedom. This results in the reversal of the normative ordering of civil society: economy is subordinated to technology, and polity to economy. The triumph of technocracy means the organization of human living in terms of the competing egoisms of individuals and groups. Paradoxically, the great potential for freedom made possible by technical innovations and the enormous formation of capital in the second half of the 20th century can enslave liberty inasmuch as the chances for unauthenticity are heightened. Why? Because in the measure that "one's decisions have their principal motives, not in the values at stake but in a calculus of pleasures and pains, one is failing in self-transcendence, in authentic human existence, in the origination of value in oneself and one's society."3 This is why the modern crisis of the common good is ultimately a crisis of authenticity. (E08; 03.02.2008)