Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Jesuit Britain?

My review of the anthology Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics, Law, and Rights, edited by Leopoldo Prieto López and José Luis Cendejas Bueno, appears in the Winter 2023 issue of Religion and Liberty.

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9 comments:

  1. Tim FinlayJanuary 10, 2024 at 8:38 AM

    I notice that the lead article of that Winter 2024 issue is "The Philosophical Roots of Wokeism" by Bishop Robert Barron. Barron describes wokeism as a popularization of critical theory, and notes that the philosophical roots include the Frankfurt School of Marxism (he mentions Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse) and poststructuralism (he mentions Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault). He mentions five themes or strands that make up critical theory: the radicalization of the modern self (which began with Descartes and Kant) such that it self-defines its essence and its moral values (the existentialism of Sartre), the relativization of truth (Derrida and Foucault; which I would add goes back to Nietzsche and before that, the Sophists of ancient Greece), an antagonistic social theory (the dialectic of Hegel was retained by Marx), Marx's doctrine of substructure and superstructure, and power as the supreme category (Foucault, but with roots in Nietzsche the voluntarism of William of Ockham). All five strands are radically opposed to Christianity. Christianity teaches that there is a human essence underlying each existent human and that there is an objective moral imperative for all humans to will the good of other people. Christianity affirms that there are objective moral truths and that sentences/propositions are true if they correspond with reality. Christianity advocates a cooperative view in which "individuals, social classes, and owners and workers all cooperate with each other." Christianity regards the Marxist understanding of substructure and superstructure as "hopelessly simplistic and dangerous, reducing everything other than the substructure to be a problem to be unmasked or undone" and instead "sees society as a complex web of individuals and institutions subsisting in mutuality." Christianity does not analyze everything in quasi-voluntarist terms of power but see cardinal virtues such as justice (giving to each person his due) and theological virtues such as love (willing the good of the other) as supreme. This is a superb article and I would not have read it without your blog post linking to that Winter Issue of Religion and Liberty. I also notice that a recent issue had a superb article on my favorite poetess, the Anglican Christina Rossetti.

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    1. StardustyPsycheJanuary 10, 2024 at 10:34 PM

      Tim,
      "All five strands are radically opposed to Christianity."
      Ok, that sounds promising. But there are many ways to be wrong other than Christianity, so merely being opposed to Christianity does not make one right, but at least it eliminates a major source of wrong.

      "there is an objective moral imperative"
      Objective morality is logically impossible, being ruled out by arguments of the form found in Plato's Euthyphro dialog.

      God cannot be the source of any objectively true moral or ethical proposition or sentence or principle, since that would be logically impossible.

      "sentences/propositions are true if they correspond with reality."
      Yes, that is a typical materialist definition of truth, that which comports with reality.

      Delete
  2. bmillerJanuary 10, 2024 at 4:08 PM

    I accidentally read that article also. I agree with Tim.

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  3. Walter Van den AckerJanuary 11, 2024 at 1:01 AM

    bmiller

    Just to say that your reply in the thread about the Aristotelan proof was published three times.
    You have to select "load more" at the bottom of the page to view them.

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  4. DNWJanuary 11, 2024 at 10:50 AM

    So, I followed the link within the link to the Barron article. And though I never had much respect for him, considering him to be kind of mealy mouthed and chock full full of simpering pastoral bullsh#t, his sketch of the strands of wokeism was pretty damn good.

    It quickly became obvious that he had at least more than a passing familiarity with the concepts he was discussing, and had a handle on French post modernist philosophy and key concepts in Derrida's work, insofar as one can grasp or pin them down.

    "When I commenced my doctoral studies in Paris in 1989, just five years after Foucault’s death, the ..."

    Well, that 'splains it.

    It's also amusing, or bemusing, or interesting enough in itself to gain one's notice, that in handling the issues of radical subjectivity, voluntarism and the issue of the transcendentals and the Christian concept of God's "nature" relating to logical possibility, he incidentally disposed of some of the same shopworn objections to Christian moderate realism we see compulsively trotted out here.

    Well worth the read.

    I hereby forgive him for not previously shoving the polemical knife of contempt into the solar plexus of the woke and collectivist miscreants. I am now persuaded his restraint probably was truly part of his office, and not merely the result of some lack of force of character or intellectual capacity.

    He probably would be unhappy to see them fall into Hell. Go figure ....




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    1. AnonymousJanuary 13, 2024 at 9:08 AM

      "I hereby forgive him for not previously shoving the polemical knife of contempt into the solar plexus of the woke and collectivist miscreants."

      Now all is right with the world

      Delete
  5. bmillerJanuary 11, 2024 at 10:59 AM

    Thanks Walter.

    I was afraid it was going to be more like 3 dozen if thing got unblocked :-)

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  6. AnonymousJanuary 12, 2024 at 9:23 AM

    Barron describes wokeism as a popularization of critical theory, and notes that the philosophical roots include the Frankfurt School of Marxism (he mentions Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse) and poststructuralism (he mentions Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault).

    Just to refresh my grasp of "poststructuralism" and get a short-enough specification of its main thesis, I grabbed Wiki:

    Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism...

    Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure that is modeled on language. As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas about reality on the other hand, and a "third order" that mediates between the two.[6]

    A post-structuralist critique, then, might suggest that in order to build meaning out of such an interpretation, one must (falsely) assume that the definitions of these signs are both valid and fixed, and that the author employing structuralist theory is somehow above and apart from these structures they are describing so as to be able to wholly appreciate them.

    To be brief: post-structuralism critiques structuralism by arguing that to think is circular thinking.

    Even if that were a valid point, post-structuralism would not escape the same charge. To wit: post-structuralism uses concepts. The only thing that could avoid the charge would be NOT thinking. Which is what voluntarists do when they act according to their principles and stop arguing (which happens rarely, but pops up in sociopaths).

    In reality, post-structuralism was satirized in That Hideous Strength and N.I.C.E. before Foucault and Derrida.

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  7. Miguel CervantesJanuary 12, 2024 at 10:08 PM

    It's a very odd association. Belloc, who wished to recover the social science of early modern scholasticism, and Locke, who argued endlessly against the same scholasticism. Of course Locke and the early Enlightenment still had fresh in their minds the Baroque civilisation whose hegemony they had only recently displaced after long and bloody struggle. The conservatives, Burke, de Maistre and Scruton, merely continued the intra-Enlightenment squabbles of rationalist versus irrationalist romanticist. All of them agree on ignoring the social theory of Jesuit and Dominican scholasticism, and the early modern hegemony it described and inspired.

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