Return to Philosophy and The Recovery of Belief

The titles of two books by British philosopher C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953) comprise the title of this post. They resonate with me in ways I will try to describe.

Joad’s life and writings are a recent discovery of mine, too recent for me to have dedicated a portal to his essays on my dormant philosophy site as I had done for many other thinkers. I can’t now recall what occasioned Joad’s coming to my attention. Perhaps he wandered onto the stage of his times about which I’ve been reading lately.

It was his prose style, however, that caught and held my attention, which was then drawn to his biography. I get almost as much pleasure from reading Joad as I do Brand Blanshard, Joad’s contemporary, which is to say, a great deal.Image result for c e m joad

The way Joad wrote has reawakened within me the kind of feelings that led me to philosophy almost fifty years ago. A few years ago I found myself unable to write about it anymore after having proposed a metaphilosophy that drew the criticism of William F. Vallicella,  a philosopher I respect. I wrote many pages of notes toward a reply, but found myself unable to articulate to my satisfaction my critique of philosophy’s presuppositions, which critique also serves as an apologetic for orthodox Christian theism.

Perhaps I’ve retreated into metaphilosophy because I despair of reaching philosophical conclusions. Really, what end has my site served other than that of displaying my philosophical interests at the expense of committing to definite answers to philosophical questions?

The charge of conflating defense and critique might occur even to sympathetic readers. Such a charge, however, overlooks a key thesis of the critique, namely, that dependence on God, whether acknowledged, unacknowledged, or even denied, underpins every theoretical enterprise. (Even the enterprise of demonstrating the dependence of all theorizing on God.) An implication of the critique is that denial of such dependence is self-stultifying. Even the failure to acknowledge it is an unstable intellectual position.

As it happened, a little book entitled Return to Philosophy (1935) came into my life, and reading it has encouraged me to give the whole thing another try. Maybe. I’m keenly aware that I had begun to pursue worldview-apologetics and metaphilosophy at the expense of actual philosophizing. Whether I have it in me to philosophize any more is an open question.

Image result for c e m joadFor most of his life Joad was not only a socialist, but also a professed atheist who became dissatisfied with the worldview that underpinned that profession. He returned to the Church of England of his youth a few years before his death. (He never repented of his socialism, although he increasingly acknowledged, and feared, that the means to that end was a bloated and rights-violating state.) In The Recovery of Belief (1953) the many arguments he had relied on in support of his atheism pass in review. Some of them are arguments that have occurred to me, as have Joad’s criticisms thereof.

An ex-Communist myself, I experienced my own recovery of belief about forty years ago. The work of relating my return to my recovery, however, is a work in progress. This blog may provide a platform for it.

joad

Bernard Lonergan’s “Insight”: on becoming an intellectually fulfilled theist

“Well, they’re deductivists. And you know what I think of deductivists.”

That’s how Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J. (1904-1984) answered when I asked him about the Austrian school of economics.

Yes, I did know what he thought of them. More on that presently.

On June 22, 1983 I was on the campus of Boston College, engrossed in an afternoon session on Lonergan’s then-unpublished “Essay in Circulation Analysis, the economics section of that year’s Lonergan Workshop. (An unofficial edition circulated among Lonerganians.) My aunt, the late Anne T. Flood, Sister of Charity, Ph.D. (Catholic University of America; dissertation on Bishop Christopher Butler and Lonergan) beckoned me from the hallway.

Would I like to meet the great man?

I didn’t return to the classroom.

Patricia “Pat” Coonan, who had known Lonergan since 1945, drove us from Chestnut Hill to Weston, where he was convalescing at the Campion Center. When we arrived, it wasn’t certain that Lonergan was up to a visit. We might have to turn around.

But soon he was ready [my diary shows] and greeted us [from his hospital bed] with a smile. Pat introduced me to the master, and I managed to comport myself properly. I did not interview him, but I did tell him about myself, what his work has meant to me, and even raised the question [of] macroeconomics with him when Pat brought up her difficulties with the “Circulation Analysis.” Lonergan stressed his own macroeconomic approach, not seeming to be aware that [Ludwig von] Mises’ and [Murray N.] Rothbard’s “microeconomic” approach has addressed the “Depression” argument against the free market.

Image result for bernard lonerganIn the aftermath of the Great Depression, immersed in theological studies and spiritual formation between his profession of vows in 1924 and ordination in 1936, Lonergan produced that manuscript. In the ‘70s, after his methodological work was done, he returned to it.

Continue reading “Bernard Lonergan’s “Insight”: on becoming an intellectually fulfilled theist”

Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order

“What ‘banged’?”

That was the derisive reaction of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) to someone’s mentioning the prevailing cosmology, the Big Bang theory (not to be confused with the television comedy whose theme song’s lyrics encapsulate the disordered cosmology Voegelin analyzed*).

He asked that rhetorical question on March 26, 1983 in Newton, Massachusetts during a Friday night-Saturday afternoon conference arranged by organizers of the annual Lonergan Workshops. (During that year’s meeting in June I’d meet Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, whose mind I revered as much as Voegelin’s.)voegelin

Being a Rothbardian libertarian, I could hardly resist asking Voegelin about the seminars that Ludwig von Mises led in Vienna in the twenties. Smiling, Voegelin said he appreciated learning from Mises that inflation is not an increase in prices but rather the central bank’s increase in the money supply not commensurate with an increase in production of commodities. (A government may politically “freeze” prices, but then the economic effect of the inflation, that is, of the physical increase, is a shortage of the goods whose prices were frozen.) 

At the cocktail hour I asked Voegelin (I paraphrase from memory) how he could communicate with scholars whose grasp of the historical material was far below his (among whom he did not number Father Lonergan, but I certainly include myself). “With a kind of controlled irony,” he deadpanned. 

Continue reading “Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order”