Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: Ancient Political Philosophy; das partikuläre Gut ist dem Ordnungsgut untergeordnet

Kurzinhalt: mere life, good life; normative notion of culture

Textausschnitt: that of the good of order, brings with it a tendency to subordinate elements located on the third level of that structure to the second level. In St. Thomas Aquinas' Of Princely Government, for example, () Although almost all third level components are present and treated in the ancient accounts, they do tend to get subordinated to the second level. (251f; Fs) (notabene)
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9 Second, the ancients conceive the practical and political question about the right way to live not merely empirically (that is, as an account of possible ways of life as verified), but ethically or morally.
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the third level comprises the cultural domain in the light of which the social is (to be) judged and evaluated. By this distinction, both the "social" and the "cultural" have an utterly empirical meaning, but "culture" retains the connotation of a normative function without being classicist in Lonergan's pejorative sense. (252; Fs)
12 In the best of the ancients, culture and the political order are identical only in the ideal and highly improbable case where the philosopher becomes the ruler; otherwise and (we can suppose almost always) in fact, culture is only the forum before which the political order is judged, and within which justice is realized not in deed, but in speech alone. This sense of balance got lost as the "Greek mediation of meaning" was transformed into classical culture with its science of man. As Lonergan came to discover, classical culture performed the above-mentioned normative function of culture by means of "a somewhat arbitrary standardization of man" (1967/1988, p. 241). Classical or classicist culture transformed the Greek breakthrough - "a necessary stage in the development of the human mind" (p. 241) - into a timeless criterion in which the content of the classically oriented science of man "easily obscures man's nature, constricts his spontaneity, saps his vitality, limits his freedom" (p. 241), because it "concentrated on the essential to ignore the accidental, on the universal to ignore the particular, on the necessary to ignore the contingent" (p. 240). Since it omitted so much of the data on human being, its explanations could not help but be provisional in some respects, which is understandable. The overwhelming problem with classicist culture is its inability to acknowledge these limits and its apparent unwillingness to keep learning. (253; Fs)