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