Stichwort: Impotenz (moralische)

Autor, Quelle: Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Moralische Impotenz - Rationalisierung, Konversion

Index: Konversion; Rationalisierung der morlaischen Impotenz; religiöse Konversion

Kurzinhalt: What almost inevitably happens is that people do not admit their own moral impotence, but rationalize their lack of effective freedom through various symbolic languages

Text: 18/E A moral metaphysics must clarify the way in which the culture provides the mediating structure through which choosers seek their proximate objectives in the various career choices available within their cultural community. Such career choices form cooperative roles within a set of ongoing institutional cycles, and these cycles constitute the performers' participation in seeking an organized objective designed to provide a common good that will benefit each cooperating member. Various cultural symbols mediate the motivating meanings that predispose individuals to choose to cooperate with the other role-players in seeking their common destiny. Since these cultural symbols motivate community members to perform a range of different cooperational schemes — economic, political, social, religious - the crucial question about these institutional schemes is how they scale the ordering of human values and thereby predispose and encourage the members of the society to scale their values in the same way. (266; Fs)

19/E In other words, since 'the order of the soul is the state writ small,' the crucial dialectic is between the proximate scale of values that is operative within any ongoing set of cultural schemes and the remote transcultural objective that orients every cultural chooser in every social order in successive historical periods. To interpret and critically evaluate in an authentic manner, we must mediate the long-term motivational meanings that operate to advance or block the members' development to become more or less morally authentic insofar as they choose personal and collective meanings that will make them more friendly to themselves and to one another. They are thus able to make themselves more responsible to the ultimate goodness that motivates each and every member of their historical community. (266; Fs)

20/E Ironically, what the genetic-dialectical mediation of our past historical community reveals is that to be an authentic knower we must commit ourselves to an ever-expanding, practical understanding of better ways to organize and orient cultural communities. For a people to choose to commit themselves to develop and execute more valuable ways of cooperative living requires a willingness that people do not yet have. They are essentially free to live in more reasonable and worthwhile ways, but they are not effectively free to do so, and thus must develop the motivational meanings or willingness in order to develop and execute more choiceworthy ways of seeking their common destiny. (266f; Fs)

21/E What almost inevitably happens is that people do not admit their own moral impotence, but rationalize their lack of effective freedom through various symbolic languages; then they pass on these cultural cover-ups to the next generation, thereby setting up future cycles of disorder. The potential solution to this problem of moral impotence is a religious conversion that grounds a new type of religious authenticity that commits a person or community to transcend every form of human loving and to seek an ever-expanding religious loving. (267; Fs)

22/E Such religious conversion involves a response on the part of a person or community to a 'totally other.' While completely transcending the human universe, this ' totally other' is also immanent and effectively present in the personal awareness of every chooser, drawing that person into a more perfect, mysterious communion. This experience of being in the presence of a 'fearful other' who is also mysteriously attractive can take many different forms in different cultures and historical periods, but such historical and cultural variations are not so different that they exclude certain common characteristics which historians of religion have identified. This implies that the notion of an authentic religious conversion can transcend different belief traditions and form a basic challenge for the members of different religious traditions, whether Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or Christian, etc. (267; Fs)

23/E 'Religious conversion,' as I am using the term, refers to an experience that is immediately conscious to a person. How individuals or a community come to mediate such experiences will vary with historical periods and different cultural traditions. But there is among these different historical traditions of beliefs seven common characteristics which reveal a transcultural orientation that can summon the culturally different believers to seek, within their own moral and cognitive horizons, a fuller and more perfect response both to knowing and to loving the transcendent source of their experiences, and to develop more morally perfect ways of cooperating with their own and other human communities. (267; Fs)

24/E Such an authentic conversion is, therefore, primarily a call to practice more morally and reasonably ordered ways of human living. This implies a basic tension, between the present limited personal and communal response of moral and religious practices and the always more perfect response, which lies within the range of any person or community, to an unlimited knowing, valuing, and loving. This same religious conversion also speaks to non-believers since the appeal is not to any religious truths or practices but to conscious experiences that are operative, or may be operative, in the horizon of any knower and chooser. (267; Fs)

25/E Thus, the foundation for the method we have been following can be understood as an empirical foundation. The natural sciences in the Renaissance turned away from the deductive method of scholastic reasoning, with its appeal to first principles, and shifted to considering only propositions or theories that could be tested in sensible data. So to the method we have pursued in this study is also empirical, but it is a generalized empirical method because, in addition to appealing to immediate sensible data as scientists do, we have also appealed to the immediate data of our own conscious experiences. This appeal has been directed not primarily to subjects or objects, but to the operations through which subjects and objects are mediated cognitively, morally, and religiously. (267f; Fs)

26/E Furthermore, these operations are dynamically and normatively directed to two quite distinct objects: proximate, limited objects and the remote, unlimited object. The tension between these two objectives has provided empirical norms for testing the authenticity of a person as knower operating through cognitive structures, as chooser operating through evaluative and choosing structures, and as religious lover operating through the whole person." (268; E00; 30.05.00)

Stichwort: Impotenz (moralische)

Autor, Quelle: Walsh, William J. S.J., Workshop Rome 2001

Titel: Moralische Impotenz - Entwicklung

Index: ... moral impotence which 'follows from incomplete intellectual and volitional development.' It is incomplete, because ... one does not take the time to persuade oneself to be willing to act

Kurzinhalt: ... moral impotence which 'follows from incomplete intellectual and volitional development.' It is incomplete, because ... one does not take the time to persuade oneself to be willing to act

Text: 76 Man's effective freedom, says Lonergan, is restricted by moral impotence which 'follows from incomplete intellectual and volitional development.' It is incomplete, because one fails to take the time to acquire the practical insights one needs for action; and incomplete because one does not take the time to persuade oneself to be willing to act. There is a gap between what ideally one can do and what one actually does. The gap, says Ben Meyer, is between one's merely 'given self (the self I am) and the 'summoning self' (the self 'as pattern, project, vocation, [...] a fuller and freer self,' the self I could become). That gap, says Lonergan, is the measure of one's moral impotence.1 (24f; Fs)

77 And so, Lonergan invites the general reader to examine his consciousness and become aware of the transcendental imperatives which fidelity to this active thrust of the spirit for meaning and value demands: be attentive, be intelligent, be rational, be responsible. Use these imperatives, says Lonergan, as diagnostic tools to determine the degree to which one is an authentic human being. He writes: (25; Fs) (notabene)

Human authenticity is a matter of following the built-in law of the human spirit. Because we can experience, we should attend. Because we can understand, we should inquire. Because we can reach the truth, we should reflect and check. Because we can realize values in ourselves and promote them in others, we should deliberate. In the measure that we follow these precepts, in the measure we fulfil these conditions of being human persons, we also achieve self-transcendence both in the field of knowledge and in the field of action.2 (notabene)
78 Lonergan spells out how one's activity at the fourth level of consciousness is both practical and existential when he writes: (25; Fs)

On the topmost level of human consciousness the subject deliberates, evaluates, decides, controls, acts. At once he is practical and existential: practical inasmuch as he is concerned with concrete courses of action; existential inasmuch as control includes self-control, and the possibility of self-control involves responsibility for the effects of his actions on others and, more basically, on himself. The topmost level of human consciousness is conscience.3

79 This is the level, says Lonergan, where 'each of us is engaged in publishing the one and only edition of ourselves.'4 (25; Fs)

Stichwort: Impotenz (moralische)

Autor, Quelle: Lawrence, Fred, THE ETHICS OF AUTHENTICITY AND THE HUMAN GOOD: BEYOND LEFT AND RIGHT IN POLITICS

Titel: Moralische Impotenz - Kultur

Index: Moralische Impotenz - Kultur; das soziale Irrationale

Kurzinhalt: 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 ...

Text: 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