Autor: Ormerod, Neil

Buch: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Titel: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Stichwort: Dialektik: Transzendenz - Begrenzung; Ordnung d. Werte; soziale Werte - Dialektik: Gemeinschaftssinn - praktische Intelligenz

Kurzinhalt: To break the tension in favor of communal sense is to opt for economic, technological, and political stagnation, while to break it in favor of practical intelligence is to undermine social cohesion, ...

Textausschnitt: THE DIALECTIC OF TRANSCENDENCE AND LIMITATION

60b The preceding analysis of the nature of environmental destruction is suggestive of the fact that, just as we have a dialectic of transcendence and limitation operating within the individual person, so too there are other dialectics operating in an analogous fashion. Broadly speaking we might then conceive of evil in terms of the breakdown and distortion of these dialectics. This suggestion has been given substance in the writings of Lonergan scholar Robert Doran. The starting point of Doran's analysis is what Lonergan refers to as a hierarchical scale of values:

we may distinguish vital, social, cultural, personal and religious values in an ascending order. Vital values, such as health and strength, grace and vigour, normally are preferred to avoiding the work, privations, pains involved in acquiring, maintaining, restoring them. Social values, such as the good of order which conditions the vital values of the whole community, have to be preferred to the vital values of individual members of the community. Cultural values do not exist without the underpinning of vital and social values, but none the less they rank higher. Not by bread alone doth man live. Over and above mere living and operating, men have to find meaning and value in their living and operating. It is the function of culture to discover, express, validate, criticize, correct, develop, improve such meaning and value. Personal value is the person in his self-transcendence, as loving and being loved, as originator of value in himself and in his milieu, as an inspiration and invitation to others to do likewise. Religious values, finally, are at the heart of the meaning and value of man's living and man's world.1

61a Doran builds on Lonergan's work by analyzing three interacting dialectics that are present in the personal, cultural, and social levels of value. Since we have already considered personal sin in terms of the dialectic of transcendence and limitation, of spirit and bodiliness, I shall now turn our attention to the social and cultural levels, to shed further light on the concerns of liberation and feminist theologies. (Fs)

Social Values

61b Social values are concerned with the good of order, the distribution of political and economic power, the sense of community belonging, and communal identity. Following Lonergan, Doran sees the social level as a dialectic between spontaneous intersubjectivity, that is, our communal sense of belonging, of sharing, which Lonergan understands as the primordial ground of all human community, and practical intelligence, which consists of the economy, our technological development, and the sphere of political activity. While the dialectic tension between intersubjectivity and practical intelligence is maintained, there is a true progress, which allows for increasing economic, technological, and political complexity while respecting the intersubjective needs of human community. To break the tension in favor of communal sense is to opt for economic, technological, and political stagnation, while to break it in favor of practical intelligence is to undermine social cohesion, leading to the formation of dominant groups and what Lonergan calls "group bias" and the "shorter cycle of decline."2

62a Perhaps the recent history of Eastern Europe is illustrative of this process. Marxism stressed practical intelligence, social and economic planning, to the detriment of a communal sense of belonging. With the marked failures of an overstretched practical intelligence, evidenced in the collapse of the economy and the disintegration of political power, people are reverting to their "tribal groupings," their more basic communal identity. In this way they are seeking both to reclaim what they had lost and at the same time to dominate other competing groups, a process most evident in the Balkans. (Fs)

At a more local level, in Western societies we see the competing social values of "progress" and "community" in the battles over the construction of freeways, airports, prisons, and other products of "practical intelligence" that threaten local communities, dividing them geographically or in other ways destroying their local community lifestyle. The cry "not in my back-yard" is often not just individual self-interest. It may also be a protest against the destruction of our local communities, which are threatened by economic, technological, and political decisions made in the name of practical intelligence. (Fs)

62b From the perspective of liberation theology, the existence of a large number of poor in any society is a clear sign of the breakdown of the dialectic between practical intelligence and communal sense. That we can tolerate an economic underclass signifies that we no longer feel a sense of identity or community with them; we no longer feel connected with them, and so we no longer feel that their fate is of any concern to us. In fact their pleas for justice are now heard as a threat to the status quo, from which we benefit, and so we seek to objectify them and even demonize them, blaming them for their own poverty. The poor represent the limitation pole of the social dialectic, and our neglect of the poor implies a breakdown in the social dialectic. (Fs)