New book by McShane: physics, economics, history

Just went through - went through is the right word, I went through it without really pausing, slowing down, attempting to digest - McShane's proposal for a new book, with the title Bernard Lonergan's View of Physics, Economics and History: A Heuristic Gauging Structure for Human Ecological Survival. McShane received a rather encouraging reply from his prospective publishers just as he was setting out for the airport to come to India, and so forwarded the mail to me, with a request for a printout, and an invitation to read on if I could. I did. Impressive.

Impressive first of all because, while there is much Philtalk, there is much less of it than is usual. On the whole the proposal reads beautifully, and does communicate without too much unexpected (Joycean) jargon.

What is Phil trying to do? "To break through to a heuristic of history" by drawing on and then expanding Lonergan's writings. The expanding will involve creative integration from the two sciences that were Lonergan's greatest interest: physics and economics, the one a natural science and the other a human science.

More specifically, the project intends to follow Lonergan's advice to select "the conspicuously successful science of our time" - which is physics, and to use it to lift up the conspicuously unsuccessful science - which Phil identifies with economics. And all this, in the service of working out "an integral heuristic of history." Thus: "The writings of O'Raifeartaigh are key here: can I lift O'Raifeartaigh's work, both in physics and in the heuristics of dialectic, to a level where I can identify, heuristically and effectively, a future dynamics of both physics and economics that I discern in the history of macro-hydrodynamics[,] a history which powerfully nudges us to conceive of a beginning of ecologically-responsible economic dynamics?"

Economics as a non-science is, I think, one of the claims made by Lonergan and pushed by McShane in many of his works, including the recent issue of Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education 21/2: Do You Want a Sane Economy? edited by him.

He wants to do for economics (and for history), I think, what Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh did for gauge theory in physics, with his The Dawing of Gauge Theory and other works.

What is impressive are Phil's credentials: his original training was in theoretical physics; he went on to take a D.Phil. in Oxford; his interest in economics began in 1968 when Lonergan requested him to "find [him] an economist"; and his publication record is "excellent" in the words of the two editors of the current proposal.

But, but: what on earth is a heuristic of history? This is related to Lonergan's search for an integral heuristic structure, "a symbolic indication of the total range of possible experience". The sought after heuristic of history is "a key sub-structure of that search". In Lonergan's words, the problem of general history "is the real catch". The problem is fundamentally solved "by a functional specialist theoretic of the merging - through sloping up from isolated research - horizons of disciplines." "The core of the present project is the tackling empirically of that issue of sloping, in both history as lived and as written, in the disciplines of physics and economics and their ecological technologies."

And: why search for a heuristic of history? Hints: liberation from "contemporary myths of maturity of humanity or of science or industrialization"; reaching "a coherent and humble heuristic that is remote from contemporary disorientations regarding physics, economics and ecology"; a meshing of economic and ecological concerns in Lonergan's writings on history and economics that "anticipate elements of the openness of present leading ecologists, reaching out to a post-industrial culture of leisure, self-attention, and creative post-industrial and nano-innovation of such dimensions as would warrant the global implementation of Lonergan's pragmatics of long-term cyclic economic innovations"; "a beginning of ecologically-responsible economic dynamics".

History and interpretation

Crowe clearly explains FS history as following the series of interpretations: you try to trace their sequence and find out what was going on. See his "Theology and the Future: Responsible Innovation," Frederick E. Crowe, Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 269.

Halbfass on philosophy, darsana, dharma, history, etc.

Inspired by Paul Hacker, W. Halbfass (Europa und Indien) has chapters on darśana and anviksiki as distinct from the Western concept of philosophy; on the Indian appropriation of the conception of philosophy in modern Hinduism, on the metamorphosis of the concept of dharma from traditional to modern Hinduism, and on the so-called lack of historical sense of the Hindus, correcting on the way many facile generalizations. [R. De Smet, Review of Halbfass, 1982 188.]

Very useful for the ACPI Encyclopedia, for the entries on PHILOSOPHY, DARSANA, DHARMA, HISTORY. But I am almost sure that neither Hacker nor Halbfass have been used or cited in the bibliographies.

Poetry, history and philosophy

In contrast to Plato, who spoke of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, Aristotle makes poetry closer to philosophy than to history. Where history deals with the particular and contingent, poetry deals with the probable or necessary - and so it approaches philosophy which, according to Aristotle, deals with the necessary.

The essential difference [between history and poetry] is that one tells us what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen. That is why poetry is at once more like philosophy and more worth while than history. (Poetics ch. 9, 1451a - 1451b)

What is interesting is that Gadamer thought it fit to look to art as a way of conceptualizing the approach to truth in the human sciences - including, I suppose, history.

But keep in mind also Lonergan's distinction between human studies and human sciences. History would be part of the former, while sociology part of the latter.

Tommaso Demaria, Salesian philosopher

From Mauro Mantovani, I have just heard the name of Tommaso Demaria, a Salesian philosopher-theologian who undertook to integrate history, culture and meaning into metaphysics. Several conferences have been held on Demaria's work in the last 10 years or so, but none of his works have been translated into any other language. The article that Mantovani has contributed to Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education might well be the first in the English language - but that has to be checked out.

It would be interesting to compare Demaria's effort with that of Lonergan. Demaria explicitly appeals to the Pauline theology of the Body of Christ, our incorporation as baptized members into the Church; and he notes that this incorporation and our action within the Church is historical. History, in other words, is the theorem relevant to ecclesiology, as Lonergan used to say.

Hegel and Aquinas on history and totality

The first whiff of a possible divergence: Caputo faults Hegel for clinging on to a central idea of the Enlightenment, that reason forms a 'system,' a comprehensive whole, that it seeks an ultimate goal or end (telos) that governs all particular elements in the system.

That kind of thinking became part of the problem, not part of the solution, for it only served to perpetuate pretty much the same 'totalizing,' all-encompassing grip of 'reason,' now in the form of a historical reason that the Enlightenment had first proposed. (Caputo, Philosophy and Theology 39)

I am thinking: Caputo is right in what he is criticizing here. He has great respect for the achievement of Thomas Aquinas. But perhaps he does not really grasp the way Thomas brought together the Biblical and the Aristotelian worldviews, how he integrated the contingent and the particular and the event and so history into the universal, something that Lonergan has so brilliantly recovered in his Grace and Freedom, and that Pat Bryne has so well brought together in a long article in volume 6 of the Lonergan Workshop...

There, in that achievement of Aquinas, lies I think a 'permanently enduring achievement' that needs to be recovered, one that is of great significance in the movement out of modernity into post-modernity...

Hegel's Sittlichkeit vs Kant's abstract morality

Sittlichkeit: it would seem that it was Hegel who gave coin to this word, by placing it against the pure abstract 'morality' of Kant, what Caputo calls "the formal universality of doing yourself only what can be universalized into a rule for everyone." Caputo translates Sittlichkeit as 'ethical life,' talks about it in terms of concrete universality, and describes it as "the real rules and rich customs and concrete practices of cultural and social life in which rational morals are actually embodied.

So that just might be the context against which to understand Droysen's Sittlichkeit, translated by Grondin and others as the 'moral life'. Caputo's description brings out the meaning better, also by its contrast to the abstract and universal morality of Kant. (Caputo, Philosophy and Theology 39)

Note that Caputo upholds Hegel as the first great philosopher of history, the philosopher who put history on philosophy's map:

Hegel insisted against the Enlightenment that the ideas and ideals of 'pure reason' have a coefficient in time and history where they are embodied in the flesh and blood, the sweat and tears, of concrete peoples. So Hegel introduced a distinction beetween what he called Verstand, abstract understanding, and Vernunft, the more concrete embrace of a robustly historical reason. Abstract understanding is one-sided, purely formal and ahistorical, and how right he was. (Ibid. 38-39)

Heidegger and Lonergan

I find it extremely interesting that both Heidegger and Lonergan seem to have been set on the path of thinking by a similar, if not the same, problem: the relationship between faith, scripture and doctrine.

Heidegger was searching for a new and adequate language for the christian faith. He did not find it, and thought intellectual honesty demanded that he depart from the faith. Ever the enigma, of course, he asked for a Catholic funeral service.

Lonergan put it this way: "All my work has been introducing history into Catholic theology." Crowe has an article on this topic, and just today I read Lonergan talking about "the as yet unfinished task" of effecting the synthesis of historical and theological aims "so that we have neither history without theology nor theology without history, but both." ("Theology and Man's Future," A Second Collection, 1974, 136.)

One of the factors in this divergence needing further exploration is the role of Scotus: Heidegger did his second thesis on Scotus.