Thomas McPartland on Modernity and Classicist Culture

[12] If we accept the penetrating analysis of Louis Dupré, as early as the fourteenth century we witness the beginnings of modernity. The medieval synthesis was dissolving, and neither the self-assertion of modernity, argued by Hans Blumberg, nor the second wave of modernity (the Enlightenment), nor the post-modern era has fundamentally changed the intellectual situation. According to Dupré, "Modernity is an event that has transformed the relation between the cosmos, its transcendent source, and its human interpreter. To explain this as an outcome of historical precedents is to ignore its most significant quality—namely, its success in rendering all rival views of the real obsolete."[1] In fact, what has taken place is a complicated process of decline and progress. The situation is irreversible in the sense that to reverse the decline is not to restore the prior intellectual situation because this would be to ignore the progress (which would be a form of decline). To be sure, it is quite correct to see the decline as beginning in the Late Medieval period with the nominalist critique of conceptualism (participating in what we have called the dialectic of dogmatism with skepticism). The hierarchical cosmos became an autonomous network of relations created by the arbitrary fiat of a [13] voluntarist deity separate from the world, and human beings began to take on the trappings of the voluntarist deity. The world was no longer a mirror of mind but the product of—perhaps blind—will. The deity was the distant voluntarist creator, or the removed Deist creator, or simply the hypothesis to be discarded. This epistemological confusion only continued with a repetition of the dialectic of dogmatism and skepticism in the antagonism of rationalism and empiricism, their canceling out in the Kantian critique and its retreat from metaphysics, the post-Kantian dialectic of positivism and romanticism as the dominant theme of nineteenth and twentieth century intellectual history, leading to the inexorable exhaustion of post-modernism with its denial of the self, an objective world, and perhaps transcendence. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, the climate of opinion was such, as Voegelin recounts, that a Wilhelm Dilthey, a man of philosophical bent, "refrained for a decade from publishing because he deemed the effort useless."[2] And to this decline in the cultural superstructure Voegelin would add the decline in the cultural infrastructure of symbol and sentiment with the neo-gnostic construction of modernity as the self-salvation of humanity. Lonergan would offer his more restrained recounting of the "longer cycle" of decline.[3]

Still, decline has been mated to progress. For along with the disintegration have come new differentiations of consciousness. Modern science has isolated the causes it investigates and developed an heuristic procedure to carry on those investigations. This specialization of intelligence has been complemented by the development of the hermeneutical and historical sciences in the past two centuries. The differentiations of consciousness associated with the Scientific Revolution and the "historical revolution" have led to the differentiation of nature from history. As the key to the Age [of] Theory, we might argue, was the "discovery of the mind," so the key to its emerging successor, the Age of Interiority, is the "discovery of the self" (or subject). The Age of Interiority, of course, is itself an ideal-type. If the contemporary situation is the product of decline and progress, then the fractures of modernity have been intensified by the new differentiations [14] of consciousness. At the same time, the earlier "discovery of the mind" has not disappeared and the problems and excesses and temptations of the Age of Theory have not disappeared, including the appeal of the "classicist culture."

Let us, by way of conclusion, expand on these comments.

We cannot return to an earlier view of nature as a static hierarchy permeated by mind nor to the modern romanticist intuition of the vitality of nature, which protests too much against the truncated rationalism of the modern idea of nature, thereby accepting its ground rules of what reason is. Unfortunately the autonomy of differentiated scientific inquiry has been purchased with the coin of faulty epistemological assumptions. The confrontation theory of truth was the framework for formulating the notion of nature as consonant with the heuristics of scientific method. Nature thus became a machine to be dominated by world alien human observers (Descartes), or a machine that could crush the independence of human objects (scientific materialism), or a merely phenomenal reality that could preserve human autonomy (Kant). To be sure, Leibniz sought to reintroduce teleology in natural process and a kind of historicity, taken up later by Whitehead, but his project was thwarted by his conceptualist metaphysics—decisively criticized by Kant for issuing mere analytic a prior [sic] judgments. [...] A contemporary effort to reintegrate nature, human being, and divinity, while respecting the differentiated field, cannot do so without resolute commitment to objectivity and a renewed focus on epistemology. Most varieties of existential phenomenology and Post Modern [sic] thought have failed to do this. Needless to say, classicist culture has nothing to offer here but utter obscurantism. We need to create, in Lonergan's words, [15] "a pure line of progress" retrospectively, separating modern insights from faulty epistemological assumptions and reconstructing the epistemological framework.

The modern discovery of self has been accompanied by numerous versions of an "ersatz self," catalogued [sic] in abundant historical detail by Charles Taylor. It is instructive to note that there is a current version of the "self" dominant in Western popular culture and in political discourse. The self, so conceived, is the self-creation of a voluntaristic agent, and the very activity of self-creation, or self-making, is its own end, for the process bestows meaning on human existence. [4] This goes beyond even the earlier romantic journey of finding one's unique, true self. The self is not found—but must be created. And this self-creation is the goal to which all culture and politics must be subordinate. In the modern secular utopia the purpose of the polity is to ensure the conditions of self-creation. By definition, minority life styles are to be protected; by definition, the majority culture is tyrannical. All issues from the most complex constitutional disputes to concerns over the status of marriage must be analyzed solely from the perspective of the view of the self. Such is the dominant temperament and sentiment of the times. There is a clear and present danger lurking here. For, the immanentization of a liberal Christian moralism notwithstanding (which confers a kind of dignity on the project), the status of this self is not altogether different from that of Plato's "democratic soul" in the Republic, and the "logic" of the situation heads toward a devolution of selfhood [sic] into the "tyrannical self," as the contemporary drug and techno culture would intimate. This view of the self, in fact, is a product of a crude voluntaristic subjective idealism. It is a massive counterposition, which must be exposed and rejected without compromise, for its smothering intensity prohibits rational debate. The classicist mentality may be nurtured in this soil as a reaction, but it is not equal to the task of critique, and indeed it would simply be co-opted as just another viewpoint created as a project of self-making! By contrast, sufficient reflection on the normative process of cognitive, moral, and spiritual self-transcendence would establish the validity of a basic [16] horizon beyond solipsism and narcissism and enter the world of authentic selfhood–and indeed the universe of being.

Also prevalent in popular culture today is neo-atheism, a movement nourished by positivism and certain post-modern efforts. To be sure, the movement is singularly lacking in originality; it regurgitates stock arguments from Victorian anthropology, Feuerbach's projection theory (rooted in naive realism!), Marx's one paragraph critique of religion, Freud's own version of projection theory, based on his so-called "reality principle," and, in general, simplistic materialist and reductionist philosophies, culminating in claims of neuroscience; while it dogmatically denies the validity of philosophy in the age of science. But its massive impact cannot be reversed by thinkers—including many contemporary theologians—who contain religious discourse within language games, or subtexts, or opinions. God is absent from modern culture. Philosophical discourse—and arguments—about God are not arcane if they are purged of antiquated science and conceptualist metaphysics, that is, if they are completed [sic] divorced from classicist culture. In our post metaphysical age, metaphysics still matters! It must, of course, be a metaphysics at home with a universe of emergent probability and the discovery of the self.

In summation, classicist culture is the result of certain tendencies within the Age of Theory. But as long as the dynamics of basic horizon are overlooked and a premium is placed on the products of thinking, as long as the defects of materialism, reductionism, relativism, nihilism, hedonism, and atheism are apparent, and as long as philosophical skepticism is rampant, then classicist culture will have a perennial appeal. We do not live in a positivist universe where the putative third stage of history has supplanted the earlier stages. The Age of Interiority has not superseded the Age of Theory any more than the Age of Theory has superseded the Age of Myth. The discovery of the self has not abrogated the discovery of the mind any more than the discovery of the mind has abrogated the efficacy of myth as a representation of mystery. What is imperative in the Age of Interiority is the integration of selfhood, objectivity, and myth. And classicist culture cannot even adequately conceive of this enterprise, let alone execute it.

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Footnotes:

1.Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 249; see Hans Blumberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983).

2. Eric Voeglin, Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 57.

3. Insight, 5th ed., Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 251-253.

4. See Emil Fackenheim, "Metaphysics and Historicity," in The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity, ed. John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), chap. 8.

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Source:Thomas J. McPartland, "'Classicist Culture': The Utility and Limits of an Ideal-Type," Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies N.S. 1, no. 1 (2010): 12–16.

Mastery Requires Awareness

It seems that higher levels of mastery require deeper levels of awareness, fine tuned to details that are otherwise completely unnoticed by lay folk. What is simply a wood chair to one is a Nakashima masterpiece by another who has the eyes to see. What is simply the same wall of choral sound to one is a vastly different sound "palette" to an experienced choir director. What is simply a nice book to one is a sign of profound dedication to the craft of typesetting to another. It could be said, then, that the refinement and growth of awareness forms one of the most necessary foundations for mastery.

Appreciation is a form of awareness—awareness of goodness in another or in a deed done. Gratitude is awareness. Joy is awareness of the presence of goodness and its possession. Humility is awareness of truth.

George Nakashima Interview from George Nakashima Woodworker on Vimeo.

Repost: Lonergan and the Desire to Know

According to Lonergan, Aristotle expressed something fundamental in the opening lines of the Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.” When the animal has its physiological needs met, it sleeps, but when the human has met its needs, we do math or theology or go exploring, for our intelligence is essentially dynamic love; so long as we want to know, so long as we care and direct our intelligence towards knowing, our consciousness continues to operate in a cumulative, self-correcting, and indefinite process of accumulating data and acquiring new insights. This dynamism is for some unknown, and we seek this unknown spontaneously, by some innate tendency, although it “is a conscious tendency . . . we do so intelligently.” Children ask incessant questions, without prompting, according to some inner impetus, although the dull child, the one who does not care to know, can rarely be coaxed or coerced into knowing if he lacks the desire, for knowledge does not just happen because the external data is present but because of the interior condition of inquiry and the interior operations by which we arrive at knowing. The interior condition manifests itself in questions, for we would not ask unless there was an unknown, and we could not ask unless we sought something. Something: what we seek exists as an ideal, but not clearly or explicitly or we would already have what we were seeking.

The transcendental condition of our questions is the dynamic desire to know, and to know what is unknown, an x, and this unknown x functions as a heuristic, as an intended ideal that as yet is not appropriated or known. It is whatever is intended by the question. But what is intended by questions is not empty or abstract. The condition of questioning is transcendental—the “pure question”—but “no one just wonders. We wonder about something.” Of course, we can wonder about many things, in many different ways, and there are different heuristics at different times, in different communities, and so on. The pursuit is intelligent and conscious, but it is not conceptually explicit, and it differs and develops as questions differ and develop, so “how do you proceed methodically . . . to the attainment of something that you do not know, something which, if known, would not have to be pursued?” According to Lonergan, the solution is precisely that metatheory by which we try to catch ourselves in the act of knowing which Budziszewski judged distracting:

The solution . . . to this problem is self-appropriation. . . . The ideal we seek in seeking the unknown, in trying to know, is conceptually implicit. There does not exist naturally, spontaneously, through the whole of history, a set of propositions, conceptions, and definitions that define the ideal of knowledge. But to say that conceptually it is implicit . . . that these statements differ in different places and at different times—they are historically conditioned—is not to say that it is nonexistent. While the conception of the ideal is not by nature, still there is something by nature. The ideal of knowledge is myself as intelligent, as asking questions, as requiring intelligible answers . . . and if we can turn in upon these fundamental tendencies, then we are on the way to getting hold. . . .

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Source: R.J. Snell, "The Meaning(s) of Natural Law," Intercollegiate Review, June 16, 2014, accessed July 1, 2014, http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2014/06/16/the-meanings-of-natural-law/.

Becoming an "Elite"—Prudence

In May 2010, Seth Godin wrote,

In the developing world, there's often a sharp dividing line between the elites and everyone else. The elites have money and/or an advanced education. It's not unusual to go to the poorest places on earth and find a small cadre of people who aren't poor at all. Sometimes, this is an unearned position, one that's inherited or acquired in ways that take advantage of others. Regardless, you can't just announce you're an elite and become one. 

In more and more societies, though (including my country and probably yours [and I'm including virtually the entire planet here, except perhaps North Korea] ), I'd argue that there's a different dividing line. This is the line between people who are actively engaged in new ideas, actively seeking out change, actively engaging--and people who accept what's given and slog along. It starts in school, of course, and then the difference accelerates as we get older. Some people make the effort to encounter new challenges or to grapple with things they disagree with. They seek out new people and new opportunities and relish the discomfort that comes from being challenged to grow (and challenging others to do the same). [...] 

[Becoming an elite is] because of a choice, the decision to be aware and engaged, to challenge a status quo of your choice.

Source: Seth Godin, "Are You an Elite?," Seth's Blog, May 11, 2010, accessed February 16, 2014, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/05/are-you-an-elite.html.

In more general terms, Godin indicates the option that is available to all regardless of their financial or living circumstances, the option to take responsibility for their actions, their lives, their orientation—and ultimately it will be either towards God or away from God. What Godin is actually talking about, when translated into the language of the Catholic heritage of moral philosophy and theology, is the difference between those with prudence (combined with a certain magnanimity) and those without it.

The Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan called this reflective self-appropriation, a series of actions by which we examine our experience, form an insight regarding it, make a judgment, and then decide to act on our insights and judgments. This process is, really, a contemporary version of what St. Thomas called the steps for acquiring prudence: reflection, judgment, action. It is a necessary step in order to be both a good human as human (for those who are legitimately ignorant of Christian revelation, wherever they may be) and a good Christian. Prudence shows us our proper goals and the right means to attain them. Magnanimity encourages us on to endeavor towards great things, those things worthy of honor, those things which give glory to God.