Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Titel: Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964

Stichwort: Dialektik - Subjekt, Geschichte; Plato - Eristik; Dialektik - Bewegung - Gegenposition - Umkehr

Kurzinhalt: The contradiction is not between statements that he makes; the contradiction is between the statements that he makes and the subject that he is

Textausschnitt: 74b I will now go on to another notion that emerges on the level of philosophic reflection on history. The notion is dialectic. About the beginning of the last decade, Joseph Moreau wrote a very small book on idealism and realism in Plato,1 and its final paragraph ended up with a statement from Blondel, L 'Action (1893), in which Blondel said that a fully coherent idealism ends by eliminating all the differences that separate it from realism.2 It is the statement that one type of philosophy, if fully coherent, if worked out to the end, becomes another; and there you have a fundamental opposition between what I call positions and counterpositions. Positions express the dynamic structure of the subject qua intelligent and qua reasonable. Counterpositions contradict that structure. Whenever a person is explicitly affirming - presenting or affirming - a counterposition, he is involved in a queer type of contradiction. The contradiction is not between statements that he makes; the contradiction is between the statements that he makes and the subject that he is. He is intelligent and reasonable, and purports to be intelligent and reasonable, and he would not admit any fall from intelligence or reasonableness. Yet the implications of the one, the real consequences, so to speak, of the one, and the implications of the other, which are in a field of conceptions or a field of judgments, are in conflict. (Fs) (notabene)

75a Such a conflict tends to work itself out in one way or another. It sets up a tension, and it is a principle of movement; and that, to my mind, is a fundamental instance of what is meant by dialectic. It is in the concrete, it involves tension and opposition, and it is a principle of change; and the change is not so much, not merely, in the statements; it will also be in the subject who comes to a fuller realization, a fuller appropriation, of what he himself really is. The effect of the dialectic is not simply a matter of straightening out the sentences, and affirming the ones that are true and denying the ones that are false. A person can be affirming propositions that are true, but misinterpreting them; and you cannot correct what is wrong with him by telling him the right ones, because he is always going to bring in the misinterpretation. There is a more fundamental step: the development in the subject himself through dialectic. (Fs) (notabene)

75b Now that dialectic goes on not merely within the individual. Platonic dialectic was dialogue. There was ruled out eristic dialectic, that is, argument for argument's sake: the man in Goldsmith's deserted village, though vanquished, could argue still.3 But let the argument have its run, let it have its free course, and things will come to light that we had not thought of before. The Platonic dialogue is a concrete, group use of dialectic in that individual sense. The individual will make his statements, and another individual will state what this subject really is, in an implicit manner no doubt, but there is another example of dialectic. A third example, what Aristotle called dialectic, was reviewing the opinions of all the people that discussed the question before him; and there you have the dialogue put out into time. But what goes on in the subject, what goes on in the dialogue, what goes on in the development of opinions on a single question, that also has relevance to the total field of human development; and that is history. (Fs)

75c Now that notion of development has come to notice today. It is a little hard to describe it; there has been both Hegelian and Marxist dialectic. Think of Hegel's account, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, of the master-slave relations.4 It is a beautiful piece of work. It describes the initial situation, where you have a master who is really master and the slave who is really slave. But time goes on, and the master becomes more and more dependent upon the slave, and the roles become reversed. That is an illustration of the notion of development of situations working themselves out to their consequences. But that notion of dialectic has been plunged into the problem of the interpretation, the grand-scale interpretation, of history on the philosophic level, and that is very much a problem of our time. The liberals - the Enlightenment and then the liberals - had a doctrine, an interpretation, of history in terms of progress. Things were getting better and better. The Marxists had an interpretation in terms of what they call the materialistic dialectic of history, which has become the interpretation of human reality in Russia and in China; and it seems to be accepted there in all seriousness as the correct view of this world and what its meaning is, what it is about. (We had a sample today with Mr Khrushchev's speech at the United Nations.5)

76a We have had others of these grand-scale interpretations of history. Another example is Rosenberg's myth of the twentieth century,6 which is the interpretation of history behind the Nazi movement. There is very definitely a problem here. Christopher Dawson, in a recent book, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture,7 speaks of these movements going on and of Christians having very little influence because of largely passive attitudes. Eric Voegelin, in his New Science of Politics8 suggests - perhaps does more than suggest - that the Christian view of this world, as waiting for the second coming of Christ, left a vacuum of meaning in that merely day-to-day aspect of human living which these modern philosophies of history are attempting to fill. When they fill it, they obtain stupendous results, stupendous influence over human life in all its aspects, as is illustrated by nineteenth-century progressivism - it goes on well into this century - and the influence of Marx at the present time. (Fs)