Philosophical categories often structure interpretation under the table- so to speak, without the awareness of interpreters/readers. These categories are embedded in the very language used in order to make clear or elucidate meaning.
Making philosophical horizons explicit will often show the true root of disagreement between groups that come to a debate with implicit assumptions that are incompatible. Dialectic, for Lonergan, is the process of laying bare those assumptions.
As a late-modern (or late western- i.e. neither modern nor post-modern) interpreter I've inherited certain categories that structure interpretation:
1. The individual as the primary category of human existence.
2. Newtonian causality (one object bumps another setting off a chain of events) - even though no longer dominant in physics, the underlying notion is tacitly held by many of us in our approach to everyday events of causality, including textual ones.
3. Spirit/body dualism (this is a classic Platonic distinction which held sway in various ways and times throughout interpretive history)
4. A parallel theological/material distinction which leaves things like economics and social reality out of interpretation in theological texts.
All of these things I would call tendencies- categorizations that I have inherited but which I can subvert as long as I make them explicit. It is not that all of these categorizations are wrong, bad or untrue- though at times I feel that they can be misleading (especially when interpreting biblical texts). The point is that if I am not at least aware of these tendencies in interpreting I will be far more likely to allow these assumptions to dominate.
Critical realism is about a posture of humility towards the world and an honest assessment of one's capability to know along with a commitment to the drive to knowledge.
More to come.
4 comments:
i own up to all those assumptions as well--though reading Bhaskar, i've been contemplating a non-dual conception of reality. i've even considered something like a stratified version of monism.
I definitely think that they need to be acknowledged and then thought through again (and then rejected or critically appropriated).
I'd be interested to hear more about Bhaskar. I haven't read much of his stuff (I looked into it briefly awhile ago).
What would you suggest as a good starting place for Bhaskar?
Thomas,
I strongly recommend the book _Transcendence: Critical Realism and God_, which is by Andrew Collier, Margaret Archer, and Douglas Porpora. Those three are close to Bhaskar. Bhaskar himself is notoriously difficult to read. His later stuff (like the _meta-Reality_ book I'm blogging through) is significantly easier to read, though he claims meta-Reality is a different philosophy which subsumes Critical Realism.
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