Edith Stein, and Gift

Edith Stein has a meditation on gift that is equal to and perhaps surpasses that of Jean-Luc Marion. Pier Luigi Fornari reporting about a convention on Stein held in the Lateran University in March 2014:

Ad aprire e concludere il convegno sarà Angela Ales Bello, iniziatrice e guida in Italia degli studi sulla santa filosofa, e ora direttrice dell’Area internazionale di Ricerca Edith Stein nella filosofia contemporanea, attivata da un anno dalla Lateranense. Proprio in tema di rapporti con Heidegger, la relazione di Hanna Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, illustrerà come la filosofia della Stein non abbia nulla da invidiare alla suggestiva meditazione di Jean Luc Marion sul "dono". 

"Heidegger-Stein, la gioia contro l’angoscia"

Pier Luigi Fornari. 5 March 2014. http://www.avvenire.it/Cultura/Pagine/heideggere-stein-la-giogia-contro-angoscia.aspx

Jesus, humanity, the cultures and the religions

Given our faith that Christ is not only the historical Jesus, but also at the same time the Lord who will come again, the process of the Christian Fact is not finished with the original event, even if it received from this event its definitive and permanent norms. If we were to move closer to the conceptions developed by the Greek Fathers, in their attempt to reach a global understanding of the Christian Fact, we could say that the process of the Incarnation, of the assimilation of the human on the part of the divine manifested in Christ, began in him, but did not end with him. Yet again, in other words, borrowing modern categories, we could express the same thing by saying that the encounter of humanity, starting with Jesus of Nazareth, continues as long as there are human beings; it is only in the course of this encounter that it can develop itself in all its possibilities. (J. Ratzinger, Il problema della storia dei dogmi nella teologia cattolica, Natura e compito della teologia: Il teologo nella disputa contemporanea Storia e dogma [Milano: Jaca Book, 1993] 118-119)

Earlier versions:
Das Problem des Dogmengeschichte in der Sicht der katholischen Theologie (Koln-Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966).
"Il problema della storia dei dogma nella teologia cattolica," Storia e Dogma (Milano: Jaca Book, 1971) 11-34.

The highlighted text is extremely interesting for its world-ecumenical implications. If the assertion is true, then the encounter of humanity with Jesus continues in every religion, in every age, in every culture. And only in the course of this encounter can it develop and unfold in all its possibilities. 

Hermeneutics

From Sathish Thiagarajan, 8 July 2015:

Dear Fr.,

I know you are busy! I got your hermeneutics notes… 

I am choosing to treat you as my professor and so willingly disturb you, as a student. 

I am reading on hermeneutics these days. 

I got an article by Jean Grondin. I am attaching it with this mail. 

I get the development of the hermeneutical concern from Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger (hermeneutics of existence), Gadamer (hermeneutics (original problem with Heideggerian insights) language and tradition)! 

What is the problem of Habermas against Gadamer? Is Habermas unable to accept the necessity of language and tradition as the path to understanding? Is Gadamer losing hope in the possibility of systematically moving towards a fusion overcoming prejudice etc.. (Lonergan’s method of interpretation)

What does Habermas mean when he speaks of the possibility of ’self-transcendence’ of language? (does he mean to say that there is a way out… and is critical of the pessimism of Gadamer?) So does Habermas agree with Lonergan’s project? (I am sure they might not have seen each other or agree to each other in person. But I am asking conceptually.)

Grondin seems ignorant of Lonergan’s project in Insight and MIT. He switches to postmodernists and then projects Ricoeur as sorting out the problem between Gadamer and Habermas! 

What is ‘hermeneutics of trust’ and 'hermeneutics of suspicion’? I get something… but it is ambiguous. 

Gianni Vattimo (nihilism) and Rorty (pragmatism) make a renewed commitment to relativism as the choiceless option given the impossibility of reaching Truth of a given text or reality (combination Gadamer-Heidegger-Nietzsche-Postmodern concerns)! Finally, Grondin concludes with the Derridian suspicion of every hermeneutic project (good will of the reader to understand the other) as also stripping the other of its otherness? 

All along i see all these french, Italian, american, and german philosophers, suspicious of any attempts towards resolving the problem? I understand the depth of the hermeneutical problem raised by them… but don’t we have a way out? In our daily life, their problematisation has helped us to be cautious, sensitive in our judgements, humble about our opinions, etc. Is that only the fruit of this pursuit? 

These are some of my questions. 

Thank you!

Love,

Sathish.

Tuesday, 14 July 2015:

Dear Sathish,

What a lot of questions! 

I need to refresh myself by reading at least my own notes, but just now I cannot do that. 

from what i remember: 

Habermas feels that Gadamer allows tradition to overwhelm him. Gadamer feels this is an unjustified criticism. In fact, I am not sure that Habermas has any way out of this impasse. Gadamer has some way, which is perhaps the way discovered by Heidegger (the question is not jumping out of the hermeneutical circle, but entering properly into it = becoming aware, to the extent possible, of our situatedness). But Gadamer is more open than Heidegger to the dynamic / dialectic of questioning, and that is his salvation. It is the dialectic of questioning that is one of the ways out. Ricoeur also admits this, affirms this. But I find Lonergan to have given me most clarity on this matter: how questioning is an approach to truth (remember the absence of further relevant questions); the limitations of this approach (and hence the need for a remote criterion, which is authenticity in all its dimensions); how, therefore, our attainment of truth remains fragile in so many cases (except in the most ‘stupid’ ones - not really stupid, but the banal ones, the ones in fact without which we would not be able to live, catch trains, do anything at all…). 

Grondin’s book Introduction to Phil Hermeneutics I found good because of the way it made Heidegger and Gadamer intelligible. surely he has no idea of Lonergan. no one is God, no one can read everything - though people like Heidegger were amazing in what all they read. but then even Heidegger has his limitations, coming from his own background. “Everyone fights with his own demons.” 

Rorty realises our situatedness, and feels there is no way out of it, so he opts for what he calls ethnocentrism. within this kind of option, he still has many brilliant and useful things to say. he also does know the dynamic of questioning, as I try to show in my article on him. the dynamic of questioning is the dynamic of conversation or dialogue, and anyone who appeals to conversation is admitting the dynamic of questioning, and therefore has an approach to truth. you will find Rorty talking about a pragmatic approach, in which everything is conventional. and that to an extent, in the area of ordinary, everyday, commonsense life, is true! it works! that is how in fact we work! His problem is that he then universalises this fact which is valid in the area of common sense. 

About Vattimo I do not know enough. but he also, i am sure, has something from which we can learn. as far as I remember, he is not an out an out relativist. 

about Derrida i know even less, but the remarks i gathered in my notes might be indicative. even the most postmodern thinker is upset when he feels misrepresented. that is interesting for me. and then, I have discovered that there are many varieties of postmodernism. naturally. it is not a dogma, it is not a school. but it looks like everyone has an inbuilt tendency to absolutize what is no doubt true in some limited area of experience. 

so dear Sathish, i do not think there is no way out. I think hermeneutical philosophy and its postmodern daughters have done us a great service by bringing to the centre of our attention our situatedness, our “being already engaged”, the fact that there is no God’s eye view, there is no Hook from which we can Hang, there is no jumping out of our minds. Also that the subject is by no means an isolated cartesian individual something. the deep interconnectedness of subjects, of persons; the priority of the We, of community. the fragility of the community and of subjects and persons within it. but of course it is still groping its way. 

i am sure if I read Derrida i will find much that is fascinating. these are all great men! they have taken the trouble to think.

as for myself, I am happy with the little I have learnt from them. like in the case of faith: not that we have to think our way into it. it is that we have been already Loved, and that we need to take the time out to discover what it is that has happened / is happening to us… and so on. (see the paper I gave in Yercaud for the jubilee). (and also what Pope Francis is saying. worth reading, calmly, Evangelii Gaudium, and even the last chapter of Laudato Si’.)

thanks for that! I think I find philosophy easeir than formation!

Relations, real and logical and so on

Banzelao Teixeira asked a question about relations: "Would you be explain to me the difference between relatio secundum esse and relatio secundum dici????" 

My reply:

not sure of the Latin.

literally, it seems to translate: "relation according to being", and "relation according to saying."

perhaps it is a way of talking about "real relation" and "notional relation" or perhaps "logical relation."  

i think you should try asking JD...

Here's Lonergan, Insight, p. 514 of the CWL 3 edition:

in any pair of correlatives, we can distinguish between a relation, its base, its term, and the converse relation, base, and term.

E.g. the relation 'father' has Abraham as its base, and Isaac as its term.

the converse relation 'son' has Isaac as converse base, and Abraham as converse term. 

relations may be notional, problematic, real or mixed.

they are notional if they are merely supposed, merely objects of thought.

they are problematic if their affirmation occurs in a description or in a provisional explanation.

they are real if their affirmation would survive in a definitive explanatory account of the universe.

they are mixed if one correlative is real, and the other is notional. 

The correlatives Ivo and Amish.

relation uncle has Ivo as base and Amish as term

converse relation nephew has Amish as converse base and Ivo as converse term.

Is the father-son relation the same as the uncle-nephew relation?

Or better: is uncle-nephew notional, problematic, real or mixed?

Going by the above, it would appear that uncle-nephew is real, as real as father-son; since the reality or lack of it depends not on causality but on the reality of the terms. In other words, it is not only efficient causal relations (father-son) that are real. There are many other types of real relations. Father-son would be a relationship of efficient causality (efficient cause – effect). Uncle-nephew would not be a relationship of efficient causality, or at least not directly so.

Internal and external relations. (517)

Internal: when the concept of the relation is intrinsic to the concept of its base.

External: when the base remains essentially the same whether or not the relation accrues to it.

Both internal and external relations survive in a definitive explanatory account of the universe. (518)

Euphuia, discernment, and Aquinas' Plato-Aristotle option regarding knowing as identity

This has to do with the question, how did Aquinas know he had to choose Aristotle's theorem of knowing as identity over Plato's theorem of knowing as confrontation. (See also my Wisdom Epistemology article somewhere...). Pat Bryne, in his International Lonergan Workshop Jerusalem contribution, has something very useful on the point, in fact, he sheds great light on the matter, when he notes that for Aristotle, dialectic alone was not enough; something called EUPHUIA was needed, which can perhaps be translated as discernment. 

Question to Pat Byrne:

when Thomas makes a choice between Plato and Aristotle, between knowledge as confrontation and knowledge as identity, is he exercising euphuia? if he is, then your paper is casting wonderful light on what has been a little question for me for several years...

Pat Byrne's reply, 4 april 2015:

     As for Thomas’s choice between Plato and Aristotle, between knowledge as confrontation and knowledge as identity, that is a question beyond my expertise, but it sounds right. Strictly speaking, what Aristotle means by euphoria should be preceded by a meticulous dialectical analysis. That would mean that Aquinas himself should have done something like the questions and answers put to both Plato and Aristotle as sources of great acumen, come to the options of what confrontation vs. identity imply, and then chosen knowing by identity on the basis of the inner light (of both the unrestricted desire and faith). I don’t know how much Plato he actually read. In Verbum Lonergan is contrasting Aristotle’s knowing by identity with a Platonic knowing by confrontation, but he does not actually offer texts to show that Aquinas himself actually did that. Aquinas seems to have gotten the great insight from his careful reading of Aristotle’s De Anima. Whether Aquinas also saw that this posed a dialectical choice against Plato, I am not sure.
        Be that as it may, at some point Aquinas himself no doubt realized he had to abandon knowing as confrontation, because of the options it leads to, and that itself certainly would have been an exercise of euphuia.
        This was a great question. I never thought of applying it in this way. When I heard C.D.C. Reeve explain this, the lights went on for me also — a problem in Aristotle’s dialectics that has been also bothering me for years, and something I never found explained satisfactorily by any other Aristotle scholar.

Self-Knowledge, and Understanding

I am continuing here the point I was pushing in the previous chapter: the remoteness of serious understanding, and the problem, raised in the chapter on dialectic, of taking an honest stand about your stand regarding it. The honesty relates to the struggle towards genuineness, and it is sadly amusing to bring together two statements of Lonergan, one about the historian “at pains not to conceal his tracks,” the other talking about the self who “keeps matters some entirely to oneself, and refuses even to face others.”135 The “outer rind of the persona” 136 may well be eager to take a stand on the importance of understanding’s “bloody entrance,”137 but some hidden layer rejects this and, oddly, that hidden rejection can be quite manifest in that self’s attitude towards the effort to seriously understand, even going to the extreme of a certain stand about the inevitability of C.P.Snow’s two culture, a stand that fits nicely with “the substitution of pseudometaphysical myth-making for scientific inquiry.”138 So, one talks of feelings with disdain for chemistry.  

Such an exclusion of serious understanding is presently supported by the dominant traditions of contemplation, which are anaphatic. The new systematics, on the other hand, is to be increasingly kataphatic. Systematic searchings, in a later maturity, will, as a “Language of the Heart”, “as central feature of the world of sense, intimate its finality, its yearning for God.”139 (Philip McShane, http://www.philipmcshane.ca/method-02.pdf p. 77) 

The Salesian titanothore?

“But we are not there yet. And for society to progress towards that or any other goal it 78 140For a New Political Economy, 20. must fulfil one condition. It cannot be a titanothore, a beast with a three-ton body and a ten-ounce brain. It must direct its attention .... to the overhead product of cultural implements. It must glory in its deepening, in the pure deepening that adds to aggregate leisure, to liberate many entirely and all increasingly to the field of cultural activities .... It must lift its eyes more and more to the more general and more difficult fields of speculation, for it is from them that it has to derive the delicate compound of unity and freedom in which alone progress can be born, struggle, and win through.” [n.140: Lonergan, For a New Political Economy, 20.] [P. McShane,http://www.philipmcshane.ca/method-02.pdf, "Systematics."]

I am jotting this down, this fantastic comment from Lonergan, because it has all to do with my / our being Salesian at this moment in history. Is there or is there not place for the 'intellectual,' the theoretical, the mind? True, I have been emphasizing the Way of the Heart, which is what we miss. I have been saying that we have shored up enough the Way of the Mind. And that is true, but only in a sense: we have the structures, and by now the average provincial does not think twice about having to set aside persons for 2 or 3 years for a master's degree or a doctoral degree in philosophy or theology and sometimes salesianity and spirituality. But: as a congregation, do we really think, reflect, and allow intelligence under faith to guide us? Is there a place for the graced mind in our being and acting? Are we running the risk of being a beast with a three-ton body and a ten-ounce brain?