Contemplative Phenomenology – implications
JB on June 10, 2010 in Axiological, Cosmological, Methods & Approaches, Uncategorized, the descriptive - Science, the evaluative - Culture, the interpretive - Religion, the normative - Philosophy No Comments »
and the over against a sterile hierarchicalism http://www.innerexplorations.com/philtext/ph7.htm
Indeed, as you point out regarding our various faculties and values, our cosmology (Everybody’s Story) can account for all of these scientific (descriptive), philosophic (normative) and cultural (evaluative) causes and effects apart from God (theologically) and without any reference to a soul (metaphysically). I would say, then, that our cosmology accounts for our normal experience of truth, beauty, goodness and unity.
Our interpretive axis, we believe – after leaping, relates us to a religious dimension of experience in which we enjoy a heightened sense of truth, beauty, goodness and unity, which we attribute to the divine presence and activity in the world. And we experience the divine presence and activity in the world in varying degrees. We may also experience, in varying degrees, the lack thereof.
This interpretive stance thus primarily entails an amplification of epistemic risk that is ordered toward an augmentation of human value-realizations (truth, beauty, goodness, unity). It is not primarily adopted as an explanatory strategy with an aim to close various gaps in our cosmological knowledge, as if what we can explain is physical and what we cannot must be metaphysical, as if what we can explain is natural and what we cannot must be supernatural, divine or otherwise. Any such categorical scheme based on explanatory adequacy or a lack thereof falls prey to the “god of the gaps” charge. The religious dimension of our experience, then, invites an interpretive stance that is primarily an axiological strategy and is not, for the most part, aimed at cosmological and ontological explanations. It is more theosis than theoria, more practical than speculative, though not without propositional aspects, to be sure.
Thus the invocation of divine agency, essentially, is an interpretive stance, primarily an axiological strategy; it’s neither a cosmological nor ontological explanation. However, you left a similar question begging. Why invoke the metaphysical concept of the soul, the faculties of which are otherwise explained scientifically?
________________________________________________________
From the NPR Forum 13.7 on Cosmos & Culture
In the context of this thread and also “Nature, And Something Else Beside Nature,” it seems to me that values like truth, beauty, goodness & unity can be realized in abundance (and I’m not denying that one can also be frustrated to no end in their pursuit) and that what we know from Everybody’s Story (our shared cosmology) is necessary & sufficient for such value-realizations. As I conceive it, this cosmology integrally relates the otherwise autonomous methods of science, philosophy & culture, methods that are, respectively, descriptive, normative & evaluative. By abundance, I mean “good enough” & not anything in an absolute sense. By “everybody’s story,” I mean we shouldn’t imagine that we can go around willy nilly making all this stuff up.
Ursula described friends who inhabit “something else” beside the cosmology that I described. In addition to our descriptive, normative & evaluative methods, what each inhabits is an interpretive stance. If w/Wm.James we describe this “move” as a vital, forced & live option, then it is only by going beyond but not without our cosmology that would make the option live. Interpretive stances are tautological & thus add no new information to our systems. Many report that their inhabitation of same relates them to a dimension of experience in which they somehow enjoy a heightened sense of value-realization (e.g. truth, beauty, goodness, unity) over & above any normal experience. An interpretive axis is primarily an axiological strategy and will more so engage our participatory imagination (hometown knowledge) than our propositional cognition (conceptual map-making). As tautologies, they do not provide ontological & cosmological explanations & are thus more practical than speculative. This practical significance might be aesthetic, affective or existential. Any reasoning from is to ought should take place in our cosmology b/c the propositional aspects of interpretive stances are too highly speculative to be given normative impetus.
+++
__________________________________________________________
My chief critique of thomism, even with the extrinsicism corrected and the epistemology being a critical realism, would generally involve a protest of its essentialistic categories. And a buy-into a nominalistic process approach is no cure. But I am sure you recall Jim’s fascination with the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics, Jungian synchronicity, Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields and such? This was Jim’s attempt to infuse thomism’s formal causation with deeply dynamic characteristics. This strategy, in my view, made for a very coherent via media between essentialism and nominalism in metaphysics. Mind you, if someone put a gun to my head, I’d go with the Copenhagen interpretation and wouldn’t give Sheldrake’s work the time of day. But substantively (no pun intended), I could see what Jim was doing and it was not unlike Jack Haught’s discussion of mutually interpenetrating fields, for example. To be very clear, I applaud these metaphysical projects and recognize them as hypotheses. I just do not do metaphysics having been preoccupied as I have over the years with epistemology and, let’s say, meta-metaphysics. And to be even more clear, what Arraj did and his manner of appropriating Maritain’s existential thomism makes it laregly immune from the critiques of thomism that I launched in that article. In a phrase, it’s good stuff.
Now, Gelpi’s transmuted experience hypothesis also corrects the essentialism, the naive realism and the extrinsicism under consideration. Even then, his model remains encumbered by dualistic conceptions like natural and supernatural grace, created and uncreated grace, and addresses Christian conversion without giving much of an account of how the grace might work in other traditions. I offer no serious, much less fatal, critique of his project, other than to point out that, it too, is a fallible hypothesis, which he’d be the first to suggest. Further, I only want to point out that there is more space open for theological discussion than one might first imagine when considering Gelpi’s account. Specifically, we would all want to address religious conversion in nonChristian traditions. In that regard, what Gelpi sees going on in Christian conversion, I would say is also taking place in other traditions wherever people are opening themselves to spiritual transcendence, experiencing creation’s pneumatic features, engaging their pneumatological imagination, lovingly participating in co-creativity and articulating such experiences with some type of pneumatological theory, however inchoate, however symbolized, however celebrated and realized. None of this is to deny that a Christological account might/should have a universal normative impetus with profound practical implications, fostering a journey where one moves much more swiftly and with much less hindrance. It is to say that that shouldn’t be one’s starting point in interreligious dialogue and needn’t be one’s starting point in theological anthropology, even if one buys into the Fall and classical substitutionary atonement theory, which I do not.
As regards epistemology in general, nowadays, most folks are critical realists, whether foundational, nonfoundational or postfoundational. Most have responded to the postmodern critique. So, even the foundationalists acknowledge weakened foundations. The important thing is that one has moved from a naive to some form of critical realism. After that, one reaches the point of diminishing returns vis a vis epistemic virtue by picking a nit with one school or another. This is to say, if you like existential thomism and Maritain, especially as interpreted and expanded by our late pal, Jim, I think that will serve you very well, indeed. I know it is never far away from my epistemological machinations, whether as my system dujour or foil! That is not the type of approach that falls victim to my critique and is not what I had in mind, which was mostly the old extrinsicism, essentialism and a priorism. As for the dualisms, like natural and supernatural grace, created and uncreated grace, it is my intent to open up the theological space for such hypotheses to blossom and thrive, should they be consistent in fostering human conversions and authenticity a la Lonergan/Gelpi. Those dualisms may not articulate MY preferred account of grace but I do not mean to dismiss them, only to suggest that it mustn’t be thought that things are necessarily so vis a vis an essential Christianity, in particular, or pneumatology, in general. In fact, like metaphysics, I do not think I really have a theological position on grace, only a meta-theological stance that suggests we needn’t rush to closure and have no warrant to get too very dogmatic regarding one account versus another, as long as such an account meets other criteria of epistemic and theological virtue.
Finally, not all postmodern approaches are created equal. I am not advocating a radically deconstructive postmodernism or relativism, which is the prevailing caricature of the postmodern bogeyman. There are those who do, but they do so rhetorically and not systematically; nihilism doesn’t do systems. Not all pragmatism is created equal. Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism is not related to Peirce’s realism. Finally, even regarding Peirce, I only appropriate the rudiments of his approach and am not sure I’d buy into anyplace where he gets overly metaphysical, which doesn’t really interest me. In conclusion, while many have adopted a so-called critical realism, their rather dogmatic insistence on approaching reality one way over all others betrays a practical naive realism, which leads to fundamentalisms. That’s why I adopted the mantra that our deontologies should be considered as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. And until someone comes up with a metaphysic that reconciles gravity and quantum mechanics, in my view, they all remain highly speculative. My biggest appeals are for epistemic holism and humility.
_________________________________________________________
To explain the relationship between nature and grace, there is an open space theologically to consider alternatives other than
1) an extrinsicism, where the supernatural acts as a superstructure alongside or above human nature and with such distinctions as between an immanent and an economic trinity
2) thematic grace, where grace penetrates, perfects and transforms nature within human nature as discovered by a priori, rationalistic transcendental methods and interpreted using essentialistic categories
3) transmuted experience, where grace penetrates, perfects and transforms nature within human nature as discovered by consulting experience a posteriori and interpreted per the various dynamic structures of human development as they are transformed in a distinctly Christian conversion employing distinctions like created and uncreated grace, natural and supernatural grace.
The hypothesis being supported in our contemplative phenomenology employs the concept of grace as transmuted experience, where grace penetrates, perfects and transforms nature within human nature as discovered by consulting experience a posteriori and as interpreted per the various dynamic structures of human development as they experience creation’s basic and pneumatic features. Such experiences inform a pneumatological imagination out of which emerges a theology of Spirit (pneumatology), which in Eastern theology treats grace as the fruits of the Spirit without needing to develop such a concept as created grace.
In this anthropology, human nature is biosemiotically distinct as the symbolic species. In this theology, the creature-Creator distinction and deification are both affirmed as our union with God is via the uncreated divine energies, hence neither hypostatic nor substantial as in the Incarnation and Trinity, respectively. What the West refers to as supernatural is signified in the East by these energies. Creation’s primal ground, primal origin, primal cause, primal destiny, primal being, primal support, primal context or primal matrix would be the act of creation, apart from which God is otherwise indeterminate. This hypothesis thus implicitly employs a vague panentheism that aspires to a successful reference of the Creator, Whom we cannot hope to otherwise successfully describe, whether in terms of substance, process, experience or other ontologies.
The implicit theological anthropology of this hypothesis does recognize our participatory role in this dynamic creative process and the distinctly symbolic nature of our co-creative activity does lead us to further specify it as a pan-semio-entheism. The Spirit thereby acts in a manner that is ineluctably unobtrusive but utterly efficacious, not unlike other semiotic realities with their formal, final and quasi causations and rather tacit dimensions.
Relying on observations and experiences and describing them with vague categories that can be affirmed phenomenologically, this hypothesis does take into account different types of continuity and discontinuity but does not try to prove too much metaphysically. That is to say that it does not try to determine too much epistemically, to specify too much ontologically or aspire to say more than we can possibly know about the precise nature of various continuities and discontinuities.
This theology, we suggest, is informed by the best of Western philosophy, a pragmatic and semiotic realism, which well articulates the logical import of our categories, but also the best insights of our Eastern traditions, which well emphasize the aesthetical and practical, hence axiological, import of our pneumatological vision, which blurs any sharp distinctions between the exoteric-mythical and esoteric-mystical, between dogma and experience, between conceptual map-making and participatory imagining, between a philosophic parsing and a contemplative being-with (Indian anubhava).
Our consideration is not just systematic but historical. We want to exploit the creative tension between aggiornamento and ressourcement, bringing our theology up to date by returning to our sources. The dualistic accretions of a neoscholastic extrinsicism take many forms, most of them insidious. Outside the faith, with their explicit sacred-secular divide, they fostered modernist excesses, naturalism and atheism. Within the faith, they fed an hierarchicalism that infantilized the laity.
See http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=3069
Also, see http://www.spiritualitytoday.org/spir2day/833545gelpi.html
It is this extrinsicism that the transcendental thomists tried to overcome. Our critique of Rahner, Lonergan and deLubac is thus sympathetic. That grace perfects nature and gratuitously so, we can all agree. How this happens and what methods we employ in the discovery and defense of our accounts of how this happens has a great practical significance for our anthropology, formative spirituality, soteriology, ecclesiology and practical life of faith.
2.1.2.3 Trinitarian and Spirit-Centered
The whole framework of Eastern Theology is Trinitarian. This is very much reflected in the liturgy, as well as in the theology centered on the economy of salvation. At the same time, due importance is given to the theology of co-penetration/mutual indwelling (perichoresis). In expounding the doctrine of the Trinity the Eastern Church Fathers took the three persons as the starting point, and thence passed to the one nature; while the Western thought most frequently followed the opposite coursefrom the one nature to the three persons. The Eastern way, in conformity to the Holy Scripture and to the baptismal formula that names the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, starts from the concrete. For the Eastern Church, if one speaks of God, it is always in the concrete: the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; the God of Jesus Christ; it is always the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Eastern Theology gives special importance to the Holy Spirit. In the Eastern theological understanding, much emphasis is given to the sending of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost) as the fruit of the Christ event. Christ returns to the Father so that the Spirit may be sent. According to St. Basil there is no gift conferred on the creature in which the Holy Spirit is not present. Whereas the work of Christ is seen as concerning human nature which he recapitulates in his hypostasis, the work of the Holy Spirit concerns persons, being applied to each one singly. The Holy Spirit is acclaimed as the source of sanctification. According to Eastern thinking Christ is the sole image appropriate to the common nature of humanity, and the Holy Spirit grants to each person the possibility of fulfilling the likeness in the common nature.
In the Eastern tradition grace is treated in the theology of the Spirit (Pneumatology), as the fruits of the Holy Spirit. The theology of grace is the same as a developed treatise within the theology of the Spirit. Consequently, Easterners have not developed the concept of created grace, a term that appeared in the Western theological tradition.
We must remain mindful of an important distinction re: so-called common views, does one mean a view commonly held by academics & theologians or that held by the majority of persons no matter their education. That will be in play, below. Another critical distinction is that between the Catholic hierarchy or magisterial teaching office (a/k/a Rome) versus mainstream theologians versus even what the faithful (sensus fidelium) actually believe and practice.
A question that begs, then, is what could one possibly mean by the qualifier REALLY core or peripheral. While it is true that, in addition to Scripture & Tradition, Faith & Reason, Mysticism & Experience, Catholics have another leg to our stool called the Magisterium or hierarchical teaching office, in THEORY the Magisterium is NOT structured as a TOP-DOWN reality, although IN PRACTICE, that dynamic does seem to be in effect, at least in part, because their’s is a “temporal” power of the purse and of juridical authority that very much controls the destiny of many people’s lives vis a vis their expression of and experience of church. Being less abstract: 1) women cannot be ordained 2) some priests must remain celibate 3) some politicians get visibly interdicted at the communion rail 4) some ex-priests cannot teach in a parochial school because they weren’t laicized via a formal dispensation 5) some divorced and remarried teachers, similarly, are turned away from church employment because they did not obtain a marriage annulment.
Catholic progressives, both Roman and Anglican, are more closely related hermeneutically to each other than they are to their coreligionists in their respective denominations. Same thing with our traditionalist brothers and sisters. Increasingly, I have found that progressive Roman and Anglican catholics have a GREAT deal in common with much of liberal Protestantism and the emerging church conversation(s). This is to say that we are in large agreement regarding essentials vs accidentals, core vs peripheral beliefs. I am in much more agreement with the Anglican approach to moral doctrine, church disciplines and church polity than I am with my own Roman tradition, but these are not essentials in my view, while our creeds, our sacraments, our liturgical traditions and incarnational outlooks are. Otherwise, out of personal integrity, I’d have to offer myself up in the recent prisoner swap (yes, that’s a euphemism for a recent impolitic event).
It’s not Greek metaphysics. Even the hierarchy is clear in that science and philosophy are autonomous from faith. While theological discourse will employ inculturated language in articulating beliefs, it is no more tied to this or that metaphysical concept than it is tied to a particular language. It simply translates the essentials of the faith into this or that idiom. I am heavily invested in the American pragmatist tradition (Peirce, less so James, much less so Dewey) and the best parts of our Transcendentalist tradition (Josiah Royce) and don’t do substance metaphysics or Thomism, so my (meta)metaphysical constructs are going to be nondual vis a vis a triadic semiotic. Rome doesn’t publish catechisms in this idiom, only a group of folks who belong to the John Courtney Murray Society at Berkeley find it engaging (best I can tell, anyway; I’m not an academic and I do not get around much).
Do people articulate anthropologies, epistemologies, metaphysics and philosophies that would be incompatible with faith? Of course, but that’s because they are doing bad anthropology, bad epistemology, bad metaphysics and bad philosophy, in ways that don’t employ philosophical rigor and can’t withstand philosophical scrutiny. Do believers articulate scientific and philosophical perspectives derived from their religious stances? Sure, but that’s because they’re doing bad science and bad philosophy. In other words, category errors are not uncommon.
As did Kurt Vonnegut, Thom enjoys his life in this incredible chronosynclastic infundibulum, where all is at once both true and false (this recognizing that Thom has also suspended his disbelief in the silly notion that such concepts as true and false successfully refer). While so-called First Principles, like noncontradiction and excluded middle, certainly entertain Thom, he sees that they only work within formal symbol systems, the axioms of which remain otherwise unprovable within that system, which, itself, remains either incomplete or inconsistent. Incompleteness and inconsistency are concepts which, paradoxically, do appear to make successful references to reality insofar as they add no new information to Thom’s otherwise unintelligible tautological accounts.
