The dialectical theorem in "Insight"

 Needed: a correction of my understanding of the dialectical theorem in Insight.

Dialectic is not the concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change, but rather it is APPLICABLE to such.

Dialectic distinguishes between the purely intellectual element and the interference of human sensibility and nerves (see INCW 269). This distinction is applied to the concrete unfolding...

The correction arose in the process of actually trying to understand how the theorem yields dramatic, individual, group and general bias. 

Dramatic bias: the linked but opposed principles of change are consciousness and its neural basis. Dialectic identifies the intellectual element and distinguishes it from human sensibility and nerves. it asks what happens when an insight is unwanted: how the pertinent images are suppressed, not consciously but preconsciously...

and so on.

"Despoiling the Egyptians"

The first great inculturation of Christianity was into the Graeco-Roman world.
The basic transculturality of Christianity. A translation of the Koran, for example, is not the Koran. The Koran is the Koran only in the original language.
The call to a second great inculturation (by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio) - which is not to say that this begins with this call!
The caveats: the second inculturation will not and should not take place by abandoning the first great inculturation. The permanently valid achievements of the latter should be transposed into the new inculturation.
The great question is, how?
We find a model in Aquinas: wisdom and discernment, not without controversy (the Franciscan bishop wanted to condemn him posthumously).
Lonergan: objectivity as fruit of authentic subjectivity, where authentic subjectivity involves intellectual, moral and religious conversion.
The core problem here: judgment and truth. Is everything fine? will all things be okay? Can just any interpretation do? Or is there a limit, a boundary?
Gadamer has a spontaneous criterion of truth.
Perhaps also others like Ricoeur.
Lonergan offers an explicit, methodical criterion of truth, which, in Method in Theology, is found in the functional specialty dialectic.
In our Indian context: we cannot reject in principle the Brahminic contribution. See Newman's advice to Despoil the Egyptians. It is time to retrieve the great contributions of the past. (De Smet says somewhere that it is time. Search for the bibliography of Indian Christian Theology in an early issue of Indian Theological Studies, I think.)
Study the Calcutta School of Indology. It is the before of De Smet. Study also the after of De Smet.
See also my blog ICW.

The relationality of humans, world and language

In his chapter on Heidegger Arthos has the following rather dense sentence:

The relationality of humans, world, and language is saturated with the frailty and possibility of human finitude, and so constructed out of a generative-destructive dynamic the continual loop [the Moebius strip] does not have, simultaneously withdrawing into abysms and accreting by revelation. (Arthos, The Inner Word 208)

When I alight from the bus and face the fields and the hills of home in the green distance, the 'relationality of humans, world, and language' comes alive to me. Those green hills are not just green hills. They are the interpenetration of humans, world and language. They mean something to me. To this I who is part of a We, a family, a people, a culture, a history.

And this relationality is penetrated by human finitude: "the frailty and possibility of human finitude." It is constructed out of a generative-destructive dynamic that the simple eternity or endlessness of the Moebius loop cannot represent.

Heidegger here has in mind the withdrawal and manifestation of Being. But I am thinking not so much of this dialectic, but of the other, the dialectic of joy and sorrow, much of which cannot be Said when the Time is not Ripe.  

Making things better than they were

Fred Lawrence mentioned something yesterday in his comment on my paper, about making Sankara better than he is. And yes, I thought, that is how De Smet has proceeded, not only w.r.t. Sankara, but w.r.t. to the whole Indian tradition that he studied: his eye of love enabled him to see things as perhaps better than they were. And, if that sounds terribly triumphalistic, perhaps it was that his eye of love saw and highlighted and promoted the good.

So interpretation and history might concentrate on What did he mean, and What really was going forward, but dialectic tries to develop the positions while reversing the counterpositions. Developing the positions: making things better than they were. Taking the good things forward in directions that perhaps were not actually taken by the protagonists.

So De Smet's interpretation of Sankara, even if proved 'wrong,' would certainly be in the line of such dialectic. And that is a legitimate thing!