In Deference to the Other

Trenchju

Description

In Deference to the Other brings contemporary continental thought into conversation with that of Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), the Jesuit philosopher and theologian. This is an opportune moment to open such a dialogue: philosophers and theologians indebted to Lonergan have increasingly found themselves challenged by the insights of thinkers typically dubbed "postmodern," while postmodernists, most notably Jacques Derrida, have begun to ask the "God question." While Lonergan was not a continental philosopher, neither was he an analytic philosopher. Concerned with both epistemology and cognition, his systematic and hermeneutic-like proposals resonate with the concerns of philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, and Kristeva. Contributors to this volume find insight and affiliation between Lonergan's thought and contemporary continental thought in a wide-ranging work that engages the philosophical problems of authenticity, self-appropriation, ethics, and the human subject.

Foreword
John D. Caputo

Introduction
Jim Kanaris and Mark J. Doorley

1. Decentering Inwardness
Nicholas Plants

2. To Whom Do We Return in the Turn to the Subject? Lonergan, Derrida, and Foucault Revisited
Jim Kanaris

3. Self-Appropriation: Lonergan's Pearl of Great Price
James L. Marsh

4. Subject for the Other: Lonergan and Levinas on Being Human in Postmodernity
Michele Saracino

5. Kristeva's Horror and Lonergan's Insight: The Psychic Structure of the Human Person and the Move to a Higher Viewpoint
Christine E. Jamieson

6. Lonergan's Postmodern Subject: Neither Neoscholastic Substance nor Cartesian Ego
Frederick Lawrence

7. In Response to the Other: Postmodernity and Critical Realism
Mark J. Doorley

8. Lonergan and the Ambiguity of Postmodern Laughter
Ronald H. McKinney, SJ

Works Cited

Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christianity
• Philosophy of religion
• Theology
• Catholic Church

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791484319
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Lonergan

and C ontemporary

C ontinental Thoug ht

Edited by Jim Kanaris & Mark J. Doorley

Foreword by John D. Caputo

In Deference to the Other

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In Deference to the Other

Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought

Edited by Jim Kanaris and Mark J. Doorley

Foreword by John D. Caputo

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2004 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

In deference to the other : Lonergan and contemporary continental thought / edited by Jim Kanaris and Mark J. Doorley ; foreword by John D. Caputo. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6243-9 (alk. paper) 1. Lonergan, Bernard J. F. I. Kanaris, Jim 1964– II. Doorley, Mark J.

BX4705.L7133I5 2004 191—dc22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

2003070440

Foreword J OHN D. C APUTO

Contents

Introduction J IM K ANARIS AND M ARK J. D OORLEY

1. Decentering Inwardness N ICHOLAS P LANTS

2. To Whom Do We Return in the Turn to the Subject? Lonergan, Derrida, and Foucault Revisited J IM K ANARIS

3. Self-Appropriation: Lonergan’s Pearl of Great Price J AMES L. M ARSH

4. Subject for the Other: Lonergan and Levinas on Being Human in Postmodernity M ICHELE S ARACINO

5. Kristeva’s Horror and Lonergan’s Insight: The Psychic Structure of the Human Person and the Move to a Higher Viewpoint C HRISTINE E. J AMIESON

6. Lonergan’s Postmodern Subject: Neither Neoscholastic Substance nor Cartesian Ego F REDERICK L AWRENCE

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Contents

7. In Response to the Other: Postmodernity and Critical Realism M ARK J. D OORLEY

8. Lonergan and the Ambiguity of Postmodern Laughter R ONALD H. M C K INNEY , S.J.

Works Cited

Contributors

Index

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Foreword

J OHN D. C APUTO

n the current revival of interest in religion among recent Continental I philosophers, the name of Bernard Lonergan is an unlikely partner. But if the studies that are collected in the present volume succeed, that is likely to change and Lonergan will assume a growing importance in this discussion, if not as an “integral postmodern,” as Fred Lawrence puts it (since, if I may say so, a certain measure of disintegration is integral to the postmodern scene), at least as integral to the discussion. That assessment is also based upon a sea change that has taken place among Continental philosophers in the last two decades. A constructive confrontation of Lon- ergan and postmodernism thus involves a twofold movement: first, a movement beyond entrenched doctrinaire polemics against postmod- ernism by Lonerganians of the strict observance, and second, a movement on the part of postmodernists beyond their cultured—and modernist to the core—disdain of religion. As the present volume speaks to the first movement, allow me to say something about the second and the possibil- ities that these two movements create. 1 What Mark Taylor once said in his landmark workErring, nearly twenty years ago now—that deconstruction is the hermeneutics of the death of God—has suffered the fate of all such pronouncements about God’s death: it has been stood on its head. Instead of Taylor’s reductionist atheology, nowadays one is more likely to hear arguments that postmod- ern thought is the hermeneutics of the desire for God, where desire has the deeply Augustinian tone of thecor inquietum, the restless heart that cannot rest until it rests in God. A seemingly secular philosopher like Jacques Derrida finds himself asking, along with Augustine, “Quid ergo

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amo cum deum meum amo?” (What do I love when I love my God?), where it is not a question of whether one loves God but of what that love 2 means and where it is directed. Without simply repudiating pyschoanaly- sis, the theme of desire has twisted free of its psychoanalytic imprisonment and become the basis of an affirmative relationship to what we have been calling thetout autre,the “wholly other,” ever since Levinas installed this word from negative theology at the heart of contemporary Continental thought. Far from representing a form of skepticism, or relativism, or a reductionist rejection of religion and theology, the various postmodern critiques of the “metaphysics of presence” or “ontotheology” are now seen to have an affirmative and even positively religious quality in clearing away the idols of presence or of the ontotheological manipulation of the idea of God in order to make room for a more religious God, what Meister Eckhart called the truly godly God,der göttliche Gott. For desire cannot be satisfied with the idols of metaphysics, desire being a kind of self-tran- scending desire beyond desire, a desire beyond anything that eye has seen or ear heard. In Derrida—to me the most interesting example in the pres- ent scene—a critique that seemed like a merciless exposure of the “unde- cidability” in things at the cost of being able to hold or think anything decisive, that seemed to issue in nothing but nihilism, is now widely regarded as the affirmation of the gift or of a justice to come that exceeds every thing that presently calls itself justice or the gift, an affirmation that has a deeply religious, prophetic, and even messianic tonality. This is a philosophical scene with which Lonergan’s conception of intelligence as dynamism toward God, of the mind’s relentless work of questioning, and of God as the totality of answers to the totality of ques- tions, the complete intelligibility of being, while hardly congruent, can 3 undertake a serious dialogue. That this is not a wild conjecture is con- firmed by the work of the late Charles Winquist, for whom Lonergan was an explicit formative influence and a powerful provocation, along with 4 Tillich and Whitehead. One of the luminaries in postmodern theology, Winquist’s work, once associated primarily with Mark Taylor and the death of God movement, evolved in the direction of what he called a “desiring theology.” In my view, that evolution followed a firm rule. The death of God in any simple and straightforward sense would be the death of desire, for the name of God is the name of what we desire. The death of God in any straightforward sense would be the death of questioning, for the name of God is the name of what we are always already inquiring into.

Foreword

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In Winquist the momentum of Lonergan’s conception of the dynamism of questioning desiring intelligence was brought together with Tillich’s notion of “ultimate concern,” which exerts a certain pressure on the every- day things of common concern, forcing them to give way to the theologi- cal force of radical questioning and thus open up the radical and religious depth in things. Without the force of this desiring questioning and ques- tioning desire, our desire would be abandoned to wander the shopping malls in search of what we desire (a result that perhaps would be impor- tant for James L. Marsh’s study in this volume). To be sure, the theologi- cal glow given by things under the pressure of radical questioning is confined entirely to what Winquist calls, following Deleuze, the “plane of immanence.” Incidentally, Winquist would fault Lonergan for attaching an ontological reference to the word “God,” inasmuch as for Winquist this word gives expression to a subjective concern and transcendental desire; but it does so in the manner of what Jaspers would call a “cipher” for something I know not what. Winquist would in effect fault Lonergan for his theism. At this point his desiring theology and Lonergan part ways; but the idea is not to stress obvious differences but to see the range of views in postmodern theory with which Lonergan’s views intersect and can be articulated or “integrated,” to use Nicholas Plants’s vocabulary. The point is that while postmodern thinkers do not share the critical realism that underlies Lonergan’s theory of judgment and insight, or his metaphysics of the intelligibility of being, with its Aristotelian and Thomistic roots, that is not because they advocate a sceptical antirealism but because the notion of thetout autre, the wholly other, commits them to a radical theory of alterity which I would describe not as antirealism but as hyperrealism, that is, as advocating a reality beyond reality corresponding 5 to a desire beyond desire. Postmodern thought, or at least the brand of it that is proving congenial to a renewal of religious discourse, is driven not by a logic of the “anti” or the oppositional, but by a logic of the beyond, of the “hyper” or “au-delà”, let us say a hyperbolic logic not of “anything goes” but of what goes beyond, not incidentally or by accident, but in principle. For example, postmodernists emphasize interpretation over pure facts not out of scepticism, but out of a respect for the irreducible complexity of the real, and a recognition that—and Lonergan would agree—the world is not blocked off from us by mediating interpretations but delivered over to us, mediated, through them, but this mediation also delivers us over to a play of interpretations with which we must learn to cope.