DIALECTIC: towards the harmony among differences

INTRODUCTION
Dialectic derives from the Greek dialektikē which comes from dialegesthai, “to converse,” and was originally the “art of conversation.”(1) In philosophy, different philosophers apply the term differently. Back to the Ancient times sophists used dialectic as a mere instrument for winning a dispute. For example Protagoras claimed that he “could make the worse argument appear the better,”(2) such aim belongs rather to rhetoric than to philosophy, and this regress form of dialectic was called Eristic by Plato.(3) Eristic came to make deliberate use of invalid argumentation and sophistical tricks, like that of Zeno of Elea – regarded as the founder of dialectic and is known for his paradoxes. Socrates stands in contrast to sophists and professes to be seeking truth. His chief philosophical method for instance was that of elenchus,(4) eliciting and questioning of beliefs in order to establish truths and reveal inconsistencies. For Plato dialectic is a positive method, shaped to attain knowledge of the forms or ideas and the relations between them. To Aristotle on the other hand, reasoning becomes dialectical if the premises are opinions that are generally accepted by everyone or by the majority, but if the premises merely seem probable or if one has an incorrect reasoning, then it is “eristic.” Immanuel Kant gave the term Transcendental Dialectic(5) to his attempt to uncover the illusion of judgment that tries to transcend the limits of experience.(6) For G.W.F. Hegel, dialectic does not involve a dialogue either between two thinkers or between a thinker and his subject matter, as in that of Plato. Rather it is conceived as the autonomous self-criticism and self-development of the subject matter, of, e.g., a form of consciousness or a concept.(7)

Influenced by Kant and Hegel (also Heidegger, and Aquinas) Bernard Lonergan(8) offered his own insights on what dialectic is, and even devoted the whole Chapter 10 of his Method in Theology,(9) thoroughly discussing the issues, problems, structure, and method of Dialectic. Inspired by the man’s assiduous avarice of achieving unity of plurality, I intend to present us a thematic review of Lonergan’s fourth functional specialty - Dialectic, which primarily deals with conflicts. Although the process seem to be an illusory attempt to promote harmony among differences, lecture of the topic at hand is imperative because it presents the hopeful possibility of achieving unity despite differences, of coming into terms with each other without putting aside the individual’s uniqueness, precisely because the human person is attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. To Lonergan, the functional specialty dialectic manifests itself when investigators attend to and evaluate the basic elements in any human situation. They evaluate the data of research, the explanation of interpreters, and the accounts of historians. To ensure that all germane questions are met, they bring together different people with different evaluations with a vision to clarifying and resolving any differences that may appear. It attempt to balance different perspectives of people in history – to compare and evaluate conflicting views precisely because of our different experience of phenomena, to the unity of systematically organized concepts or ideas.

HORIZON
In its literal sense the word, horizon, denotes the bounding circle, the line at which earth and sky appear to meet. This line is the limit of one’s field of vision. As one moves about, it recedes in front and closes in behind so that, for different standpoints, there are different horizons. Moreover, for each different standpoint and horizon, there are different divisions of the totality of visible objects. Beyond the horizon lie the objects that, at least for the moment, cannot be seen. Within the horizon lie the objects that can now be seen.(10)

Horizons are the vantage points where we find ourselves in relation to reality. We live in a world. Our world-view, which blends in numerous opinions about this world, is to a colossal extent the thoughtful outcome of our interactions with the people and things that dwell in that world. In turn, our world-view affects our interactions with the world. Opinions grow out of differences of experiences, and opinions in turn influence - improve, diminish, or change in some way - the quality of experience. What or how we experience and the way we think may be different from each other but are still interdependent.What makes the differences in horizon, according to Lonergan, may be complementary, genetic, or dialectical. Horizon is complementary when there is the merging together of different horizon for the functioning of a communal world. Wherein horizon is seen as an individual’s field of interest, doctors, engineers, artists, educators come together for the improvement of everyone. Despite diversities and differences, there is a sense of peaceful co-existence. One can master his own world or field of interest, knowing that he can give or share it to others, and recognizing that in as much as he is good in his ‘own’ world and of little knowledge of that of others, or at least not as good as that of others, hence he also need the other.

Next, horizons may differ genetically. They are parts, not of a single communal world, but of a single biography or of a single history. As Ruth Benedict has aptly phrased it: “The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.” (11)

Walls built between thought and action can be due to self-imposed presuppositions or "inherited" cultural presuppositions - perspectives we did not arrive at by our own thinking, but have adopted without criticism from our cultural milieu. Each individual has been born into, then conditioned into, the roles provided by his culture. His roles were given and defined, and he had “to define” himself into the roles and plays out the definition. His culture’s world-view became his, including its customs, values, history, myths, traditions, and – deepest of all – the unexamined assumptions upon which his culture’s world-view is grounded.

Thirdly, horizons may be opposed dialectically. What I find to be intelligible may be unintelligible to you. What you consider as false may be true for the other. What for him is good may be for her is evil, vice-versa. Horizons, finally, are structured resultant of past achievement and, as well, both the condition and the limitation of further development. [M p.237] All learning is not a mere accession of previous learning, but rather an organic growth out of it. New knowledge is a necessary consequence of the previous ones. Our horizons speaks about what we know, where we belong to, what we can be good at; but they also show the limits of our vision, where we do not ‘belong,’ things that we are deficient, at least in the present. Nevertheless, as horizon talks of the scope and limitation of an individual, it is also there where we try to extend the limits of our humanity. They are “points of view” from which the sensible world is interpreted. They structure human questioning in its dynamic search for an understanding of this world.

CONVERSIONS and BREAKDOWNS
he possibility that the movement into a new horizon involves an about-face; it comes out of the old by repudiating characteristic features; it begins a new sequence that can keep revealing ever greater depth and breadth and wealth. Such an about-face and new beginning is what is meant by a conversion. [M p.238]

For Lonergan the most radical differences result from the presence or absence of conversion, wherein he identified three principal types. Conversion may be intellectual or moral or religious. Although the three are connected with each other, still each is a distinct category of event and has to be considered in itself before being related to the others. Formulated principles are the products of minds shaped by an ambivalent heritage and lay bared to dialectic of opinions. These minds are shaped by personal commitments within intellectual, moral, and affective horizons. These horizons may complement each other; they may develop from earlier stages; or they may be dialectically opposed, as when people who articulates the same world-view attach different meanings to them, or when people espouse the principle but acts otherwise.

Intellectual conversion is a radical clarification and, consequently, the elimination of an exceedingly stubborn and misleading myth concerning reality, objectivity, and human knowledge. [M p.238] It is a process of liberation and discovery in the sense that the person is becoming aware of one’s own conscious operations and processing. The intellectually converted subject recognizes that knowing is not like looking and that the real human world we live in is constituted by acts of meaning.

Lonergan distinguished the world of immediacy from that of the world mediated by meaning. The former is what he considers as myth in the sense that “knowing is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and that the real is what is out there now to be looked at,” like the world of an infant. The child responds only to objects present, to what is seen, heard, touched, and felt in the world of immediate experience. The world mediated by meaning on the other hand, is known “not by the sense experience of an individual but by the external and internal experience of a cultural community, and by the continuously checked and rechecked judgments of the community.” Accordingly, knowing is not just seeing but also experiencing, wherein these experiences are systematized and extrapolated by understanding and posited by judgment and belief. As such, intellectual conversion is a weapon against stupidity, obscurity, and silliness. It pulls out of “one’s own little world,” as the whole has consequences that transforms the whole itself, so that in a way, intellectual conversion is a process of self-transcendence. It plays a role similar to the center of Insight: the explicit self-affirmation of the knower, wherein “self-affirmation of the knower” means that the self as affirmed is characterized by such occurrences as sensing, perceiving, imagining, inquiring, understanding, formulating, reflecting, grasping the unconditioned, and affirming. (12)

As Plato once reiterated, “Philosophy begins in wonder,” intellectual conversion is also connected to the starting point of philosophy. "Because philosophy is a quest for rational understanding of the most fundamental kind it brings into the open important questions about the nature of understanding and hence of enquiry and knowledge. It was out of philosophy that science was born. It is the same world that philosophy, science, and art are all exploring. All three confront the mystery of the world’s existence and our existence as human beings, and try to achieve deeper understanding of it."(13)

The unrestricted desire to know all that there is to know about all that there is, introduces the infinity into human life, unleashing the vast human capabilities to become. The term intellectual conversion could be applied to the great cultural break-through in the world of theory, like the Greek achievement in philosophy, and the growing movements of liberation theology. There is an intellectual conversion by which a person has personally met the challenges of a cognitional theory, an epistemology, metaphysics, and a methodology. The desire to know is an alertness of mind, an inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, spirit of inquiry, or active intelligence. It powerfully engages people of action to search solutions to problems or act shrewdly in situations. It is what absorbs philosophers and scientists in their inquisitions. The intellectually converted person’s desire to know is what becomes known correctly by finally understanding whatever it was that was in question. As we pursue knowledge, more becomes known, yet further questions always remain.

Lonergan relates such philosophy rooted in radical intellectual conversion to the need for moral conversion. There is a moral conversion by which a person is committed to values above mere satisfactions. Albert Schweitzer once reiterated:“Ethical affirmation of life is the intellectual act by which man ceases simply to live at random and begins to concern himself reverently with his own life, so that he may realize its true value. And the first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.” (14)

According to Lonergan, to speak of a morally good man is someone who is capable of reflecting and hence, recognizes not only his strengths so he may improve it or make it better, but also his weaknesses that he may eliminate it or transform it into a strength – to transcend horizontally to oneself and vertically towards the other. In dialogue it is opening oneself to other’s protests and criticisms, and willingly accept his mistakes, ready to break down one’s towering ego. Each of us has something to say, whether agreeable or not, no matter how simple or complicated it is. Each has a voice that deserves to be heard. You speak, others listen. Others speak, so must you listen also. Recognizing that you don’t know everything, you learn from others also in as much as they learn from you. “One has to keep developing one’s knowledge of human reality and potentiality as they are in the existing situation. One has to keep distinct its elements of progress and its elements of decline. One has to keep scrutinizing one’s intentional responses to values and their implicit scales of preference. One has to listen to criticism and to protest. One has to remain ready to learn from others.” [M p.240]

As intellectual and moral conversion, so also religious conversion is a mode of self-transcendence. “Religious conversion is to a total being-in-love as the efficacious ground of all self-transcendence, whether in the pursuit of truth, or in the realization of human values, or in the orientation man adopts to the universe, its ground, and its goal.” [M p.141] It is being grasped by religious love. When religious love enters the horizon of a human being, the entire horizon is transformed, for transcendent being has become the context for consideration of contingent being in the awareness. It is God’s gift of grace wherein the self becomes a different self because the horizon within which all reality is considered has been radically altered.

Lonergan has drawn a distinction between operative and cooperative grace. “Operative grace is the replacement of the heart of stone by a heart of flesh, a replacement beyond the horizon of the heart of stone.” It is being in touch and sensitive to ones feelings and that of others. Cooperative grace, on the other hand, is “the heart of flesh becoming effective in good works through human freedom. Operative grace is religious conversion.” From being ‘touched’ one is already moved to act. An action that promotes the fullness of humanity are thus necessary consequence of conversion, as there is the “gradual movement towards a full and complete transformation of the whole of ones living and feeling, ones thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions.”

Since intellectual, moral, and religious conversion all have to do with self-transcendence, it is possible, says Lonergan, when all three occur within a single consciousness, to conceive their relations in terms of sublation. What sublates goes beyond what is sublated; religious conversion sublates moral, and moral conversion sublates intellectual. Not that it destroys the other or the lower level but to improve it, to carry it or push it forward to a fuller realization with a richer context, transforming them in the process. In this context, “higher level” refers to fullness, a mounting from a fixation with the world of immediacy to the world constituted and known by acts of meaning and value. Each level establishes the conditions for the subject’s continuing conscious activities, wherein the process has to do with the endeavor toward the authentic human functioning identified with knowledge and choice. A sense of this kind of telos commands respect for whatever naturally comes to be even if no immediate uses come to mind. Conversion seen within the dynamism of reality toward fuller being, links to the notion of development, as it requires openness to the unknown, to ‘another’ sphere of reality. As a dynamic process, conversion covers our concrete being as a human in dynamic integration on the organic, psychic, intellectual, moral and affective levels.

Besides conversion there are breakdowns. What has been built up so slowly and so laboriously by the individual, the society, the culture, can collapse. [M p.243] The reality of development involves historical sequence of notions about better and worse. We inherit moral standards, subtract what we think is nonsensical and append what we think makes sense. What we have inherited is likewise a sum of our previous generation’s inheritance, of what they eliminated from it and added to it. Any tradition, or moral tradition for that matter is essentially a sequence of moral standards, each linked to the past by a tainted inheritance and to the future by the bits added and subtracted by a present generation. As it is, not every tradition is a progressing sequence. The subject’s failure to attend to the transcendental precepts: Be attentive,(15) Be intelligent,(16) Be reasonable,(17) Be responsible,(18) justifies itself by becoming an ideology; and ideologies so procured degenerate the social good to the point of the cumulative decline of a culture. Lonergan termed such basic human disregard of the transcendental precepts as Alienation, and self-justifying alienation from one’s true self is the most basic form of ideology. Sin, is for Lonergan the alienation from authentic humanness – disregarding his own self-transcendence. “As self-transcendence promotes progress, so the refusal of self-transcendence turns progress into cumulative decline.” [M p.55] If one is not attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible, he may experience a situation and have an impulse to improve it but he does not, or will not spot what’s missing. One may express his oversight to others, making it out to be an insight. If the person lacks a critical “eye,” he takes the other at their word rather than notice their oversight. He may plan and put it into effect, yet discover later on the inevitable worsening of the situation. Hence, the odds of spotting ways to improve things decreases, owing to the additional complexity and cross-purposes of the anomalies. With each turn of the circle, the more things don’t make sense. Such is the nature of situations that worsen.

DIALECTIC: the ISSUE and PROBLEM
Lonergan offered the tasks of dialectic. First, it “has to add to the interpretation that understands a further interpretation that appreciates.” [M 246] Dialectic has to bring us to the kind of intelligibility that accounts for concrete historical growth and decline. It has to help historians and planners understand how any situation gets better or worse. We come to the second task of dialectic when there is an inadequacy that is revealed when further data are uncovered and a better understanding is achieved, although there is the opposing views that arises from the individuality of historians that results from perspectivism. Finally, the gross differences owed to the fact of historians attempt to make intelligible to themselves the same sequence of events, is the concern of dialectic. To Lonergan, the only remedy for perspectivism, which is a product of differences of horizons, is through conversion. Without conversion hostility towards the other may arise because when one is converted, he does not only try to understand himself but also of the other already. “If he undergoes conversion, he will have a different self to understand, and the new understanding of himself can modify his understanding of the thing, the words, and the author.” [M p.245] The problem arises when there is the absence or lack of intellectual, of moral, or religious conversion because it gives rise to dialectically opposed horizons. In dialectic Lonergan emphasized the importance of encounter. Although interpretation rests on one’s self-understanding, and the history one writes rests on one’s horizon, encounter is the one way in which self-understanding and horizon can be put to the test. “Encounter is meeting people, appreciating the values they represent, criticizing their defects, and allowing one’s living to be challenged at its very roots by their words and by their deeds.” [M p.247]

DIALECTIC as METHODThe structure of dialectic has two planes. Operators are classified on the upper level, whereas on a lower level are assembled the materials to be operated. The operator has to advance positions and reverse counter-positions wherein positions are statements compatible with conversion, developed by being integrated with new data and further discovery. Counter-positions on the other hand are statements incompatible with conversion and reversed when the incompatible elements are removed. The materials have to be assembled, completed, compared, reduced, classified, and selected before being operated. “Positions and counter-positions are not just contradictory abstractions. They are to be understood concretely as opposed moments in ongoing process” and are to be apprehended in their proper dialectical character. In dialectic, people meet people. Person meets person. This way the subject secure gains a higher system as integrator, and within the emerged system that open the door to a better and higher system as operator.

Accordingly, Lonergan discussed the differences between the person who has undergone conversion to that who has not yet undergone conversion, when the dialectic is implemented. The converted investigator will know from personal experience just what intellectual, moral, and religious conversion, making it easier for him to distinguish positions from counter-positions. The person who has not yet undergone conversion on the other hand may have only a notional apprehension of conversion, and so he might be whining that dialectic is a very murky procedure. As people bring to light the dialectical oppositions by developing positions and reverse the counter-positions, they cater one another with the evidence for a judgment on their personal achievement of self-transcendence. They bring into light the self that did the research, proffered the interpretation, studied the history, and overhauled the judgments of value. Such objectification of subjectivity may be efficacious, but it will equip the open-minded, the serious, the sincere with moment to ask themselves essential questions, first, about others but eventually, even about themselves, making conversion a topic and thereby promote it.

“Conversion commonly is a slow process of maturation. It is finding out for oneself and in oneself what it is to be intelligent, to be reasonable, to be responsible, to love. Dialectic contributes to that end by pointing out ultimately differences, by offering the example of others that differ radically from oneself, by providing the occasion for a reflection, a self-scrutiny, that can lead to a new understanding of oneself and one’s destiny.” (19)

Lonergan emphasized the importance of questioning our human questioning. In the introduction to Insight, he articulated the process of self-appropriation taking place, not publicly, but privately. The transformation takes place in the hiddenness of one’s presence to oneself and one’s flourishing knowledge to oneself. Nonetheless as he goes on to say in the same introduction, though the act is private, both its antecedents and its consequents have their public manifestation. As the human consciousness interacts with reality it is not an enclosed, self-contained entity, but entity-in-relation.

Lonergan admits the difficulty of accepting the view he is proposing, as it demands a momentous personal change. But then many of us would agree that many times we think we cannot do, or will never be able to do something, only to find out that we actually can. Conversion is a breakthrough, an act of self-transcendence that goes beyond what one thinks as the limit.

The DIALECTIC of METHODLonergan tells us that in dialectic, the strategy of an individual is “not to prove his own position, not to refute counter-positions, but to exhibit diversity and to point to the evidence for its roots.” [M p.254] In this manner, the basic idea of the method Lonergan is trying to develop takes its stand on discovering what human authenticity is and showing how it appeal to it – a powerful method, for man’s deepest need and most prized achievement. As he clearly put it:

“Human authenticity is not some pure quality, some serene freedom from all oversights, all misunderstanding, all mistakes, all sins. Rather it consists in a withdrawal from unauthenticity, and the withdrawal is never a permanent achievement. It is ever precarious, ever to be achieved afresh, ever in great part a matter of uncovering still more oversights, acknowledging still further failures to understand, correcting still more mistakes, repenting more and more deeply hidden sins.(20) Human development, in brief, is largely through the resolution of conflicts and, within the realm of intentional consciousness…” (21)

To live authentically is to be in constant process of becoming a better person; to be open to the possibilities of goodness and build from it, and also of the possibilities of evil but learn from it, precisely because he is consistent in the struggle to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible. This dodgy and ever-developing state rests on long and sustained steadfast to the transcendental precepts.

Now Lonergan emphasized that the more differentiated the horizon, the fuller, more precise, and more illuminating will be the talk. In fully differentiated consciousness there are four realms of meaning: the realm of common sense,(22) the realm of theory,(23) the realm of interiority,(24) and the realm of transcendence.(25) These four realms of meaning take place in the fully differentiated consciousness, which is the fruit of prolonged development. Switching from one realm of meaning to another occurs to the degree one’s consciousness is differentiated. For the differentiated consciousness, the realms of meaning exist together yet have their own “identity.” Each has value.

Although conflicting views, interpretations, beliefs arise between people engaged in dialectic precisely because of differences of horizon and sphere of being, Lonergan expressed his hope for humanity in achieving unity of plurality – that behind this multiplicity there is a unity that comes to light – if only one is willing to heighten his consciousness because such a heightening bring into light not the subject as object but the subject as subject. As Lonergan puts it:

“…this heightening of consciousness proceeds to an objectification of the subject, to an intelligent and reasonable affirmation of the subject, and so to a transition from the subject as subject to the subject as object. Such a transition yields objective knowledge of the subject just as much as does any valid transition from the data of sense through inquiry and understanding, reflections and judgment.” (26)

To understand this, Lonergan offered two quite disparate meaning of the term object. There is the object in the world mediated by meaning wherein answers refer to objects because they are answers to questions intended, understood, affirmed, and decided. There is also the world of immediacy wherein the meaning of the object is already, out, there, now, real.(27) As there are two meanings of the word object, so too there are two meanings of the word, objectivity. Lonergan tells us; in the world of immediacy the mandatory and adequate case of objectivity is to be a functioning animal. But in the world mediated by meaning, objectivity has three components: the experiential, normative and the absolute. Objectivity is absolute when it is the product of combining the givenness of the data of sense and the data of consciousness in the experiential objectivity, with the fulfillment of the needs of intelligent and reasonable operation in the normative objectivity. While it is in experiential objectivity that conditions are fulfilled, conditions are linked to what they condition in normative objectivity. Combined they yield a conditioned with its conditions fulfilled. In knowledge, this is a fact, and in reality, this is a contingent being or event. The idea of being in its totality is absolutely transcendent. To apprehend it, we would need to be capable of an unrestricted act of understanding, and its possibility of knowing it arises from an unrestricted intention that intends the transcendent. Knowing is recognized in the process of self-transcendence that reaches the transcendent, for the intention directs the process to being. As Lonergan beautifully relates:

“Objectivity is simply the consequence of authentic subjectivity, of genuine attention, genuine intelligence, genuine reasonableness, genuine responsibility. Mathematics, science, philosophy, ethics, theology differ in many manners; but they have the common feature that their objectivity is the fruit of attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility.”(28)

REFLECTIONS and CONCLUSION
Opinions, presuppositions, and perspectives comprises jumble of things and experiences. We have perspective about ourselves, of other people, of our surroundings, society, and culture, not disregarding the fact that we also have our own opinions about our "relationship" to these discrete parts of our world. We have views of how government and institutions ought to administer, how people should conduct, how children ought to be raised, what one is like and what s/he wish to become, whether a person is candidly loved or surreptitiously exploited, whether life is worth living at all, whether compassion matters, whether television, cell phones, or other technologies are beneficial or damaging, et cetera.

The multiple possibilities of interactions and relationships are infinite as there are various possible ways of interacting with each person or thing in our world, having peculiar manner of relating to people, artifacts, and nature. We are also selective as one has his or her own preferences and biases - liking some things and people more than others. The entirety of our relationships is an intricate web. To a great extent, our opinions are influenced by these likes and dislikes, positive and negative relations. Our presuppositions reflect the attitude we have worked out in interaction and interdependence with a real world.

Despite multifarious diversities basically because of our different experiences, horizons or sphere of being, Lonergran expresses his hope of achieving the unity of plurality through dialectic. That behind this multiplicity there is a basic unity that comes to light fundamentally because we are an insight-full being. “We can inquire into the possibility of fruitful inquiry. We can reflect on the nature of reflection. We can deliberate whether our deliberation is worth while.” [M p.111]

The key towards understanding Lonergan’s vision of unity and harmony among diversity is to take into account the human person’s capacity of self-transcendence, wherein to Love is considered to be its authentic manifestation, and conversion is the necessary condition, the ladder, the bridge as it were for one to be able transcend him/herself by loving. Lonergan offered an analysis of love to show how it functions to reverse the dynamics of decline brought about by people’s failure to engage in an authentic dialogue.

Lonergan’s perspective on dialectic aims to help people; the historian, planner, researchers, politicians, and et cetera, to understand how any situation gets better or worse, to have a comprehensive viewpoints, to seek some single or set of related bases from which it can proceed to an understanding of the character, the oppositions, and the relations of the many exhibited conflicting viewpoints since not every viewpoint is coherent, and “not every reason is a sound reason.” Dialectic aims ultimately at a comprehensive viewpoint, and proceeds toward that goal by acknowledging the differences, seeking their grounds, and eliminating superfluous oppositions.

if only we don’t limit ourselves with our individual identity, like isolating ourselves from other races, then everything becomes One (black), wherein boundaries between people are abolished. We are like the different colors having a beauty of its own, identity of its own, and unique from that of others but if we are willing to transcend ‘this’ individual identity to a collective identity then we can all work together toward the harmony among difference. Now this doesn't necessarily mean abandoning it, as I don't know if that is possible, but to incorporate a new layer, not on the surface but as a foundation. That foundation is the willingness to go an extra mile, to respond to the call of transcendental precepts to be intelligent, reasonable, responsible, to love. Yes we are a product of our background as much as our heredity, and as much as the thoughts we have cultured in ourselves. Ones awareness is how one exists, so it is wherever one is. But the point is that if we honor the idea that the whole is our self, this provides us an opportunity to improve the community where we belong to, because in so doing we are also improving, transcending ourselves. When we are sick we look for medicines or does things to eliminate the pain that we are feeling, which holds the same with our society.

“We belong to a world, a world that we share together,” yet in studying beings we must pay attention to context, to situation, to environment, i.e., to horizon of being. What we are is not an isolated datum. We are a combination of individual temperament, environmental influence, and our cultural backgrounds. We are the result of an active interaction with the world. Briefly, we are not outsiders with relation to the world; we are organically attached to it. The world and the individual are "dancing partners," as it were. The danger however is when we limit ourselves only to what we believe “is” and disregarding what may be there or the other. A community’s heritage is a mixed bag of sense and nonsense and so one has to have a thorough assessment of the concrete situation, hoping that it will bring us an intuition of what seems best. Dialectic attempts to mediate the differences, to bridge the gap between people. In a way, we are a collection of people as diverse as the cells in the human body. When my cells work well, I’m hardly conscious of their individual presence. What I feel is the composite of their activity known as Anabelle Luya Abordo. My body, composed of many parts, is one. When seen in the microscope or in books, individually the cells seem puny and oddly designed, yet these invisible parts cooperated to lavish me (us) with the phenomenon of life. Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey explored the same analogy in their beautifully reflective book, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made.(30) Every second our smooth muscle cells modulate the width of our blood vessels, gently push matter through intestines, open the close the plumbing in our kidneys. When things are going well-ones heart contracting rhythmically, the brain humming with knowledge, the lymph laving tired cells – and we rarely give these cells a passing thought. But these cells in our body, I believe, teach us about larger organisms: families, organizations, communities, nations. Imagine what would happen if our sense of sight fails for instance? Or what if our sense of touch, or sense of taste, or our speaking or hearing capacity fails? If one part of our body refuses to “cooperate” for the good of all, devastating things eventually comes out.

Again, a color on a canvas for instance, can be beautiful in itself yet the artist stands out not by using one color across the canvass but by positioning it between complementary or contrasting hues. The original color in a painting then derives richness and depth from it being combined to different colors. A rainbow composes different colors yet they are pleasingly beautiful in our sight because they are harmoniously contrasted to other colors. Just like in dialectic, we compare and evaluate conflicting views and in the process one keeps developing one’s knowledge of human reality and potentiality in an existing situation as s/he keep distinct its elements of progress and decline, keep scrutinizing one’s intentional responses to values and their implicit scales of preference, listening to criticisms and to protests, and always ready to learn from others. To Lonergan, what guarantees the truthfulness of ones arguments/beliefs/perspectives is the way things are able to bring transformation to the individual. That is, on how they are becoming a better human person in relation to others.
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NOTES
1 The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries: A Hegel Dictionary, (UK: Blackwell Reference, 1992, p.8)
2 The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. & The Free Press, vol. II, 1967, p.386)
3 Ibid.
4 Diané Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers: A Reference Guide, (London: Croom Helm, 1987)
5 Kant entitled the second division of his transcendental logic “Transcendental Dialectic” in his Critic of Pure Reason.
6 See for instance The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries: A Kant Dictionary, (UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1995)
7 See The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries: A Hegel Dictionary, a helpful reference about the subject.
8 Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan (1904-84) is a Canadian philosopher and theologian who approached the problems of philosophy by inviting us to attend to the mental act in which we engage when we come to know anything.
See also Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (London and New York: Routledge, vol. 5, 1998), and the ‘Introduction’ in Elizabeth and Mark Morelli’s The Lonergan Reader, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
9 London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973.
10 Method, p.235-236.
11 James L. Christian, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, (New York: CBS College Publishing, Third Edition, 1981, p303)
12 In this entire analysis I am paraphrasing and abbreviating a massive amount of material in Lonergan’s thought. For Lonergan’s own compendious treatment of these materials, see Insight: A study of Human Understanding, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1965) for further exhaustion of the topic.
13 Byan Magee, The Story of Philosophy, (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1998, p.9)
14 Philosophy: Introduction to the Art of Wondering, p.337.
15 Attentiveness leads the subject to discern data from that of sense and that of consciousness. The first grounds the subject in the world of immediate experience while the latter directs the subject to heed to the world of interiority, to discern what is happening as one processes sense data or the data of consciousness.
16 Intelligence brings in the subject into investigation or inquiry, and if not blocked by bias, the questioning goes on unrestricted.
17 Reasonableness calls for conclusions; it is the questioning of whether something is so as one understand it.
18 Responsibility posits the question of merit, of value. It urges for prioritizing in lieu of choice, of decision and action.
19 Method, p. 253.
20 To Lonergan, sinfulness is distinct from moral evil, as it is the privation of total loving, or a radical dimension of lovelessness. It is a state wherein “the absence of fulfillment reveals itself in unrest, the absence of joy in the pursuit of fun, the absence of peace in disgust – a depressive disgust with oneself or a manic, hostile, even violent disgust with mankind.” More than what you do to other people, sin is a violation to oneself as there is now an element of self-denial, closing down oneself, and it’s like saying “no to tomorrow” or “no to the good that I can do” already.
21 Method, p. 252.
22 It is the realm of persons and things in their relations to us. It is always concerned with the particular and the concrete, where meaning is expressed in everyday or ordinary language. Thus it fails to see a need to discern the intelligible from the absurd in human situations and so will naively crank out insights that leave the absurdities untouched and thereby add even more absurdity to an already absurd situation. In short, common sense is not enough common.
See also Tad Dunne, Lonergan and Spirituality: Towards a Spiritual Integration, (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985, p. 97-100).
23 The realm of theory is where meaning is expressed in technical language, as in science. Common sense does not step beyond our relation to things in the manner that science does. When a person functions from the realm of theory, insights are accumulated and self-corrected with tools of precision associated with science.
24 It is where meaning rests upon self-appropriation, attending not merely to objects but also to the attending subject in his acts.
25 The realm of transcendence is where meaning transpire through the language of prayer and relation to divinity.
26 Method, p. 262.
27 It is already as it is given prior to any questions about it. It is out for it is the object of extraverted consciousness. It is there as sense organs, so too sensed objects are spatial. It is now for the time of sensing runs along with the time of what is sensed. It is real for it is bound up with one’s living and acting and so must be just as real as they are.
28 Method, p. 265.
29 Philosophy Professor, Saint Louis University, Baguio City Philippines.
30 Michigan: OMF Literature Inc., 1980

Woman Is a Woman as a Result of Certain Lack of Characteristics

Introduction
Luce Irigaray is one of the important, but not easy, writers to read. Understanding her requires a familiarity not just with philosophy but also with linguistics and psychoanalysis. And readers must be prepared to decode dense texts that are jungles of double meaning and eccentric syntax. Yet her difficult texts are in fact examples of the kind of feminine writing as a way of deconstructing the “traditional” ways of men, which is part of the mechanism of the oppression of women. At the core of Irigaray’s writings, language, which is the cause of oppression, is the very thing, or the very instrument that would also in turn revive and liberate us.

Irigaray claims that “women cannot be women and speak in a sensible coherent manner” given the condition of an order that entails one part of humanity “having a hold over the other.” Sexual difference is perpetuated by the culture, culture in turn is perpetuated by language, and hence, language perpetuates sexual difference. What accounts then for the fact that women find it so difficult to speak and to be heard as women is that sexual or gender difference is not so clear. If people, especially the feminists, are fighting for equality, Irigaray tells us that recognizing sexual difference is itself equality because “the demand to be equal presupposes a point of comparison. To whom or to what do women want to be equalized?” “Women’s exploitation is based upon sexual difference; its solution will come only through sexual difference.” To fight or demand for equality is not to try to remove or hide the differences between men and women but rather to bring it into the open. Women could not have an authentic “women’s discourse” without acknowledging the presence of men. The same holds true to men; they could not have an authentic male discourse if they disregard the existence of women.

In most of the societies throughout history, men have been having hold over the women and so women as subjects are not recognized (or often not recognized) as such, and language played a vital role in here. Irigaray suggests that there should be a kind of development which is collective, that is, there has to be a language transformation, or the changing of the laws of language in order for cultural transformation to occur that may lead to the recognition of women as subjects and not mere objects – someone who is always been “the Other.” To perpetuate and recognize sexual difference is to affirm one’s identity, so in order for women to be able to affirm themselves as an “I” is to recognize that there is the “You” or the male. The same holds true with the male; they do not actually have a truly authentic identity as subjects unless they don’t recognize the presence of the other – not as an object, but also a subject. There can be no “ako” without “ikaw.”

In this essay then, I will be presenting the common characteristics attributed to women by the famous theorist in the field of psychology, Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition(s), which is accepted and perpetuated by the society whether consciously or not, that has long been alienating women but have lurked only as a shadowy presence. I shall also endeavor to present Irigaray’s responses to Freud and/or that of the psychoanalytic traditions’ claims in juxtaposition with my own stance.

Unless women tries to embrace the other half of humanity and consider the other’s own horizon also, they cannot be recognized as such and be able to speak in a coherent manner and vice versa. Male’s social experiences are better understood by including female social experiences, and female’s social experiences are also better understood by acknowledging that of males. I shall therefore treat the subject matter as objective as possible to the best I can, hoping that this essay will itself serve as an example of an authentic women's discourse. Nonetheless, all the quotes in the discussion proper in this essay are taken from Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, unless otherwise another source is indicated.

An Ex-orbitant Narcissism
Freud (and/or the society to a greater extent) “attribute a larger amount of narcissism to femininity which also affects women’s choice of object, so that to be loved is stronger need for them than to love.”[p.113] But Irigaray asks, does woman really have the option of “loving” or “being loved” in the first place? In the psychoanalytic tradition, the sexual development of women is purely about repression as they used patriarchal terms only in defining women that goes on to denigrates women. Right from the start, particularly in the phallic stage, Freud already poisoned or tried to poison for that matter, the little girl’s identity wherein the little girl has always already been a little boy by claiming that her clitoris is but a penis-equivalent because all the terms used and accorded to her comes from the phallocentric currency. So that in the discussion of the castration complex, the potency of the penis is itself at stake because it has always been the point of reference of identity, essence, and sexuality, as if the potency of what is there is everything that is seen. Women’s narcissism can be traced back to Freud’s discussion of women as a “castrated male.”

Why does women then tend to submit so readily to the idea of her castration when in the first place she has nothing, that is, she don’t have a penis to be castrated? Irigaray tells us that it is because of the power and activity attached to the penis. The women/girl cannot gaze at her genitals because unlike the penis, it is not protruding; it is hidden. The gaze itself shows the potency of something, which is the penis, which would lead the difference itself on the part of the girl/woman. This realization now leads to the envy of penis because it is easily seen by the eye whereas hers is not, hence it goes on to imply that somehow the woman doesn’t have an identity or an “I” to affirm to. The woman doesn’t have the penis and that means, according to Freud and/or the Psychoanalytic tradition, that the woman doesn’t have that power and acknowledgement given to the males who are “blessed” to have it. The girl’s or women’s awareness of castration through the gaze tells her that she is nothing, a no-thing; that she has no being nor truth at all so that in order for her to develop her sexuality or affirm her identity, she has to maintain her penis-envy or at least to have a “neutral libido.” According to Freud there is no such thing as female libido or female desire because her genitals cannot be represented. This then goes on to imply that female sexuality can only be made visible through the male sexuality - to continuously envy the penis.

Moreover, women’s submission so easily to the idea of her castration has something, or shall I say, a lot to do with the conditioning of her of the society who has given much importance to penis, which is always said to be the point of reference of identity, essence, and sexuality. Since women don’t have a penis, this means she has no identity, no essence, no sexuality, so that in order for her to have all these, she has to maintain her envy of the males’ genital. In order to affirm herself then, she has to desire her father who has the penis. But then since her father could not seduce her, she has to desire or look for another man that could impregnate her and bear her a son who could give, provide, and satisfy her longings - the son then somehow soothes the mother’s penis-envy.

Irigaray goes on to respond; “femininity is actually instigated by a wave of passivity, by transformations of the little girl’s early instincts into instincts ‘with a passive aim’ and by perpetuating the ‘object’ pole. When it really comes down to it, then, woman will not choose, or desire, an ‘object’ of love but will arrange matters so that a ‘subject’ takes her as his ‘object.’’’[p.113] Right from the very start Freud has always already been implying, or directly been saying for that matter, that the ‘only’ desirable ‘object’ is always the penis, the phallus, by keep on repeating that a little girl will become woman only in terms of lack, absence, default, and every ‘negative’ terms that his system could attach to women. Thus, women tend to be narcissistic only in a phallic currency; a one-sided approach as a repercussion of women. Women now just tend to follow the phallic standards for what they impose of what woman should be. “She is mutilated, amputated, humiliated…because of being a woman.”[p.113]

The Vanity of a Commodity
Freud claims, “the effect of penis-envy has a share, furthermore, in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority.”[p.112] But, here again, Irigaray asks if in the first place women have a choice or any choice for that matter, of being or not being in vain about her body if they have to correspond to the “femininity” expected of her. Does not women’s sexual “usefulness” depend on her concern of the quality or “property” of her body? As I have always observed, it is true that there are more women, as compared to men, who devout more time attending to their physical attractiveness. Now, can we blame them? The psychoanalytic tradition or Freud for that matter imposed that it is only the penis that is desirable. Now since women does not have it, they then come to conclude that women has to continuously envy the penis. “Thus, ‘femininity’ is caught in a vicious circle; because she doesn’t have ‘it,’ she must wish to have ‘it’ since ‘it’ is the guarantor of sexual exchange…”[p.114] and women have to have that penis, if they have to satisfy their longings, then they have to be conscious and concern themselves to their physical attributes – if she is to be a desirable “object” and if man is to want to possess her. Many women then cherishes physical beauty so much and disguises themselves of all those make-ups and lipsticks and cosmetics, etcetera, if she is to be desirable to men, if she is to have “her penis.” “Her body transformed into gold to satisfy his auto-erotic, scoptophiliac, and possessive instincts….”[p.115]

Now what about those women who do not concern themselves so much on physical attractiveness? Taking Freud’s assessment, perhaps these women have not yet realized their “true sexuality” or that they are to be considered perverts because according to him, women’s sexuality is made realized only through men’s sexuality so that women must and should and will have to continuously desire the penis – to continuously desire man – to desire “to be loved” rather than to love. And for her to compensate her inferiority she has, as it were to be in vain of beauty, of her physical attractiveness. However, if we get away from the psychoanalytic traditions, we can say that women who do not augment herself must actually be “superior” or at least someone who must have been able to discover or affirm her identity and sexuality as a woman by acknowledging her own essence as a human person, and not only and only through male sexuality. I have nothing against women who are in vain of physical attractiveness but I would appreciate them more, even if they still want to wear those cosmetics and the like provided that they do it as a matter of self-expression and not only because of wanting to be attractive in the eyes of men, to flirt, to seduce him; that is, to “transform” her body into gold to satisfy men’s auto-erotic and possessive instinct. Every woman must recognize herself as a sexual being and must be liberated from all sexual repressions.

The Shame that Demands Vicious Conformity
Freud goes on to say that “shame which is considered to be a feminine characteristic par excellence but is far more a matter of convention than might be supposed has as its purpose, we believe, concealment of genital deficiency.”[p.112] It is but alright and normal for women to be shameful, ashamed, and shy because it is a form of concealment of her genital deficiency, that she doesn’t have a penis that is regarded as nature’s masterpiece – a fine work of art – where everything considered good and beautiful and excellent are pointed to, whereas that of woman’s is deficient because she only have a penis-equivalent, clitoris. So that according to Irigaray, as her justification for women, “though her body is beautiful and she is decked out in gold for him and by him, woman will still be reserved, modest, shameful, as far as her sex organs are concerned. She will discreetly assist in hiding them…For woman’s ‘body’ has some ‘usefulness,’ represents some ‘value’ only on condition that her sex organs are hidden.”[p.115] She has to cover herself because the more she is covered the more she is desired. So she disguises herself through cosmetics, flash jewels, etc, because she, in the first place is expected to be good looking if she is to be desired. Hence, women are themselves just finding ways to sell themselves in the sexual market.

Although I agree to Irigaray’s claim, we also have to acknowledge the fact that many men now tend to be more attracted to women who are thick-faced or “makapal” enough to bare themselves naked, that is, to flaunt their flesh and body proudly with little coverings, or even without coverings for that matter like that of pornography. But then again, whether women are shameful or not, whether they bare their soul naked or not, women are still caught under the snare of phallocentric currency because they still have to be “in” for the sake of sexual economy. Yes, in earlier times the more a woman’s dress is thicker and longer the more she is prized and desired. But with the changing of society especially with the more “liberated” men and women alike in a more liberated country or places, the more a woman flaunt her navel by wearing hanging shirts, or show her arms by wearing spaghetti straps, or bare a part of her legs by wearing short pants or skirts or, to show her body’s shape by wearing fitted clothes, the more she becomes beautiful and desirable to men. That, I conclude that women’s sense of shame in Irigaray’s opposition to the psychoanalytic tradition is true only in a more traditional and conservative types of people as there are now many women who are “liberated,” at least in manner of dressing themselves, in showing the “beauty” of their body. But then again, in some way or another women are still victims of the phallocentrism because many still tend to show themselves just because it is what is considered “in” in the phallic standards.

Woman Have Never Invented Anything but Weaving
In connection to women’s sense of shame Freud goes on to claim that “women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they have invented – that of plaiting and weaving…. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, whole on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together…we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive to the achievement.”[p.112] Here, weaving is not only to be understood literally, as it is also symbolically equated, or at least has something to do with the pubic hair. Pubic hair could not function as concealment of penis for men because no matter how thick it would be, the penis would still be readily seen, hence recognition, hence identity as a subject, hence power. Whereas aside from being considered as protection to women’s vagina/hymen, the pubic hair also functions as concealment of their deficiency. Therefore women weaves as it were, in order to veil herself, to wrap herself, to mask herself, as if it is a necessity to do for her to restore her wholeness.

According to Irigaray however, “the contradiction is already implicit in the veil Freud talks about, in the duplicity of that veil’s function. Used to cover a lesser ‘value’ and to overvalue the fetish, it will equally serve to conceal the interest afforded by what it claims to protect from devaluation…”[p.116] There is the tendency on women’s part to fetishist the male organ by stressing the disavowal of the mother’s castration. By stressing that the mother has no penis, she (or women) is already denied of her sexual potency. Thus weaving, like the pubic hair, that is supposed to be a protection of themselves (of the vagina) still turns against women as it is still a way of adhering to the phallocentric standards for veiling (of the vagina), to wait in passivity (in weaving), to stay in the shadow (for tolerating of not being recognized in the re-production of the child).

The Very Envious Nature
“The fact that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt related to the predominance of envy in their mental life”[p.116] as if throughout women’s life they have been envious with that of men for having a penis since it is considered as the signifier of omnipotence. Freud believed that personality is shaped by early experiences as children pass through a set sequence of psychosexual stages, one of which is the phallic stage. In this stage, the little boy’s love-object is his mother and so is the little girl, not until she is in Oedipus situation where her father will become her love-object. Irigaray claims that in the course of time, a girl has to change her object of love, from the mother to father, while her male counterpart retains his.

A little girl will become woman only in terms of lack, absence, default, etc. Upon reaching the oedipal stage, according to Freud, the girl has to recognize that her clitoris is not a “real penis” but only a penis equivalent thus she could not possibly continue her desire for her mother, whereas her boy counterpart retains his love, or rather sex object, which is the mother. She lacked the so-called “treasured” possession of males, which is the very “instrument” for her to be able to come back to her place of origin. She realizes that her vagina serves as a receptacle, a hole to be filled. Her desire to “penetrate” her mother proves impossible so that all she can do now is to hate her mother and divert her desire to her father or to a person who possesses a penis. Since the mother (or her vagina) is considered as a “home,” the daughter develops hostility towards her mother because it is as though it is her mother’s fault why the child is born a girl and not a boy because recognizing that you are a “female” means recognizing that you are lacking something. The son could fulfill his sexual desires towards his mother by having intercourse with other woman, hence, in a way he is able to come “back home” whereas the daughter will never be able to satisfy her early desires to her mother; all the daughter has is clitoris that doesn’t grow like the son’s penis. Moreover, the daughter becomes aware, and accepts the fact that her desire to impregnate her mother (or other woman) will never be fulfilled because instead of impregnating, she is the one supposed to be impregnated. She doesn’t have the penis that thrust in sexual intercourse but only a passive vagina that waits for the warrior to ravage, animate her lonely and dark world. The girl’s discovery, the realization of the absence of penis in her follows that all she could do now is to become like an empty vase waiting for a flower to be placed in her. Here now also comes into play the passivity or activity in sexual intercourse wherein the woman just waits or receives the sperms accorded or given to her by man’s penis. Like a hole, the vagina is just there waiting for that ‘thing’ to fill it. Like a bottle without water, it is the penis that fills it through his sperm.

Freud then tell us that women’s little sense of justice is related to the predominance of envy in their entire life; that they do not know what is fair or what is good or what is just because of their nature, that is, women are clouded by their lack (having no penis) and of their deficiency (for having a penis-equivalent – clitoris only), hence, disrupts their tendency of seeing the better part of herself and of the society at large. But then Irigaray says, “…if woman does nor religiously, blindly, support the attributes of power of the king, judge, or warrior, that power may well decline, or prove useless, since the real issue is always men’s competition for power.” [p.118] Women has no choice but to follow the phallocratic standards of justice because in the first place the society or men for that matter, considered only men’s capabilities and power. How could women be recognized as having a fair sense of justice if men only considered their point of views? If women speak what they think is justice, they are always been presupposed by Freud to have arisen only from the envy of men’s power for being assertive anyway. And how could they even begin to speak or to assert themselves when they are only regarded as objects? She is included in the exchange market only as a commodity. If commodities could speak, Irigaray says, “they might possibly given an opinion about their price, about whether they consider their status just, or about the dealings of their owners” [p.118] – men, who are recognized as subjects, as persons, in contrast to women as objects, as mere commodities in the sexual market. “The problem is that women often find it hard not to claim access to the procedures of equivalence that are still limited by right to men alone, or at any rate to ‘masculinity’ and whose practice is prescribed and re-marked by phallic hegemony.” [p.118-119]

Irigaray acknowledges Freud to a certain extent in his opposition to the feminists, “except that the reason he cites are questionable and testify to his failure to grasp the importance of the question.” [p.119] Feminists, or women who demand power’s equal, or “equivalent” to those of men may well be considered only as an envy. But can we blame them when for a long time they have been representing themselves only as the alienated and oppressed…the victim of penile narcissism, just so that she get possession of those privileges? This reminded me of my favorite women personality in the field of politics, Meriam Defensor-Santiago, who was supposed to be the president of the Philippines but was betrayed, cheated by Fidel Valdez-Ramos during the 1992 election. Meriam is known to be outspoken and assertive. Now since outspokenness and assertiveness are generally regarded as strength, people tend to say that Meriam is masculine, hence unnatural, since femininity is generally equated to passivity. Considering our country’s current president, which is also a woman, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s whimsical behavior, particularly in decision-making, and for being considered as one of President Bush’s “pet,” people now tend to conclude that women could not really be counted in political matters, in justice talks. Being whimsical and passive are considered weaknesses hence, attached to femininity, hence a woman’s nature.

Society Holds No Interest for Women
Irigaray, quoting Freud, claimed “we also regard women as weaker in their social interest, no doubt because of the dissocial quality which unquestionably characterizes all sexual relations.” [p.113] Women’s weak social interest is obvious but, “the ambiguity, the double meaning, of that expression makes further comment unnecessary” [p.19] because it has been determined, initiated, and perpetuated by the society of men itself wherein women’s inferiority is doubled by their sexual inferiority. For how can you take part in the social life and participate in it when you are considered an outcast and ostracized? How can you speak when the categories used are not neutral, that is, very phallic; very masculine that even the language offered to women belong to the phallic currency? “And why, after all, should women be interested in a society in which they have no stake, which earns them interest only through compulsory intervention of a third person who des hold a legal?…In fact, how can one take part in social life when one has no available currency, when one possesses nothing of one’s own to put in relation to the properties of the other, or others?” [p.119] How can one take part then of the social life when aside form the very dominant masculine categories they don’t even listen to you...just because you are a women?

Perhaps these contradictions might possibly be explained by the lack of attention or interest to women, that Freud devote in his passage to the social dimension of sexual relation, for at the core of it, women’s weaker social interest is itself useful to them, to the phallic currency.

Freud reproaches women for her lack of abilities – sexual, psychological, cultural, political, etc. but such misogyny can be understood as an ideological bond that bails out the current regimes of property because right from the start, women is not recognized as subject with dignity, and it has been perpetuated, implanted, reinforced by the society.

In the discussion of marriage, Irigaray took Friedrich Engel’s study on The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State to show the forbidden truths, as it were inherent in marriage contracts: “The succession of different property regimes – slave, feudal, capitalist – has not altered the fact that woman is possessed by the head of the family as a ‘mere instrument of production’ and reproduction. The marriage contract will often implicitly a work contract, but one that is not ratified as such by law, thereby depriving woman of her right to perfectly legitimate social demands: salary, work hours, vacations, etc. She is accepted on a ‘equal footing’ in a home in which she takes care of the domestic chores in exchange for food, lodging, and clothes… ‘The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife…. In the great majority of cases today, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy without any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. As well as being undeclared work contract, the marriage contract will also have disguised a purchase agreement for the body and sex for a wife, ‘who only differs from the ordinary courtesan in that she does not let out her body on piecework as a wage worker, but sells it once and for all into slavery.”[p.121] How’s that for a shock? Finally the “forbidden truth” is revealed!

The contract is usually drawn up between the father who serves, or is likened to a pimp, and the “future” husband as the customer, in which the value of the daughter/woman’s virginity is exchanged for the man’s dowry, plus certain capacity to work, plus a certain guarantee of potency, as if a woman is useless or without value if she loses her virginity earlier before entering into the contract. We must also be reminded that as it were, little girls are deemed to have no value before puberty, or if they have not yet reached the onset of puberty because this stage is the preparation to become a woman wherein she is already capable of giving birth; to receive the penis, to “drink” his sperm, and to breastfeed the child.

Moreover, if the marriage contract is not done between the woman’s father and the supposedly husband – the customer, the whole deal will be arranged between the heads of two families; the fathers of both sides will come to an agreement. The woman’s father had to protect her virginity since this was a value necessary for her “exchange,” and the husband will have to confine his wife at “home” to ensure the accumulation of his wealth, of private property in a single place, and its transmission to his own children through inheritance. “Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual – a man – and from that need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of man” [p.122] In “imprisoning” women in the house, this keeps her in a state of economic dependence that justifies every kind of oppression. In confining her at “home” doing all the domestic chores, nursing the children, serving the king of the house, etc., how else could she be active in her social life if she is stultified to be active, only, at “home?” Nevertheless, as Irigaray reconsidered, if the family is considered to the basic political and societal unit, the woman therefore is actually an active participant of the society….

A Fault in Sublimation
Freud once again has seen female sexuality as a lesser version of masculine sexuality by claiming, “women have less capacity for sublimating their instincts than men.” [p.113]. He sees the mother as a castrated male and therefore devalued. The identity of the child’s super-ego is always considered masculine because in the (re)production, the child is always identified with the “paternal prototype.” Besides the fact that the definition of “ego” in women is vague, Freud considers the mother’s ego as an expression of their masochistic fantasies and activities. Since she is lesser than her male counterpart, she will therefore always remain in “a state of childish dependence upon a phallic super-ego that looks sternly and disdainfully on her castrated sex/organ(s).” [p.124] Everything that is good and sublime to women is ascribed as masculinity, wherein women only identify, represent, and play man’s identity/ego/super-ego. Whereas all of women’s weakness or deformities are considered to be natural to them so that in order for them to really sublimate themselves, they should always maintain a sense of shame, or to be in isolation from the social world, that is to say to live in the “private” houses and live a life of decency – of passivity. Thus, in Freudian system, a woman has to denounce her identity (if ever there is) and her sexuality (if ever there is) just so she will be accepted in the society. She will always be a sexual object without being, without truth.

Furthermore, women is said to have lesser capacity of sublimation because all her desires cannot be expressed in reality but only in dreams – that they can never take a conscious state, they will and will always remain in the unconscious. So that to express themselves, women has to undergo a change of character and neurosis or sexual inhibitions – to “mimic” a work of art. Therefore she becomes an aesthetic object but as some-thing that doesn’t have a value because it (she) is forged, an artifice, lie, deception. Like the pirated CD’s that could be bought just anywhere in this city that is of low quality hence of cheap value, women are seen to just defying the natural, who flaunts appearances, a criminal. “The society has the duty to ban forgeries.” [p.125] Yes. But this is also the same way of saying that men have the right to reject and not recognize the excellence or goodness of women just because they don’t have the so-called nature’s masterpiece – penis! By mimicking a work of art, they (women) could be “legally sanctioned.” But what or who determines what is legal anyway? Isn’t it men? Therefore socially, even personally, a woman is a woman because of her lack, of her deficiency.

Irigaray further included the concept of “Red blood” in this topic wherein it signifies woman but at the same time also signify her loss. The red blood is valued and exalted in “prehistory” but was denied and censored in the onset of patriarchy wherein the blood’s value is replaced by the penis’ sperm. “Blood rights are so completely neglected that ‘consanguineous’ is now defined as ‘sired by the same father” [p.125] so that the “sperm has capitalized the authority, the attributes, the product of labor, once associated with blood.”[p.125] In the privacy of the bedroom, in the fantasy productions that are rarely discussed in public, Irigaray likened man, the master of the house as “a vampire who needs to stay in disguise and do his work at night.” [p.126] As it were he has to re-insure his potency, enjoined to reappropriate the right to exploit blood and then, as a result, to go on to more sublime pursuits.

Although I agree to Irigaray, to some extent I think she has quite exaggerated her analogy of man as to that of a vampire, as if woman is “always” exploited, alienated, degraded in the sexual acts. She failed to put into consideration that many women also enjoy doing it with their partners. Of course the idea of masochism on the part of women will again come into play in here but the point is, women may not always have to be regarded as the victim of the vampire as she, herself derives pleasure in it. Irigaray presupposed that women “will never manage to satisfy the sexual need which gave rise to them.” [p.127]

Nonetheless I still agree with her that many women are still under the pretext that she is anatomically inferior, castrated, as if “anything she produces will find a market only when it gains legitimacy under mans’ name or auspices.” [p.126] To liberate women then, from oppression, Irigaray says, “perhaps blood will have the freedom of the city, and the right to circulated, only if it takes the form of ink. The pen will always already have been dipped into the murdered bodies of the mother and the woman and will write in black, in the black blood (like) ink, the clotting of its (his?) desires and pleasures.” [p.126]

“La Femme de Trente Ans”
According to Freud, “a man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual…. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her physical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence – as though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned….” [p.113] It is said and believed that women of 30’s has already exhausted her sexual productivity; all her possibilities of (re)production. Accordingly she loses her sexual appetite because it is the stage where her hormones are fast changing and shifting. However, Irigaray argues that “perhaps what libido she has been so curbed, censored and finally inhibited that it can never function; perhaps women does not have enough energy to change her condition. Especially since that condition is a result of social, economic, and cultural conditions and conditioning.” [p.127] As a girl or a lady, she is assigned difficult tasks and lots of household works that she may be confined only at home, forgetting her social life. Even if she has free time to associate with men in the society and join their conversations, it is seen as inappropriate - she’s unfit for it, she doesn’t have a place in their discussions. Sooner or later she just marry, only to be confined at “home” and bear, nurse children and her husband. If the child is a male, lucky for him. But if it is a female, well, she just have to repeat and undergo the cycle that her mother has encountered, again. “And once again woman will support that economy, without even really being a party to it, without her sexuality ever being accounted for. She is reduced to a function and a functioning whose historic causes must be reconsidered: property systems, philosophical, mythological, or religious systems – the theory and practice of psychoanalysis itself – all continually, even today, prescribe and define that destiny laid down for woman’s sexuality.”[p. 129]

SUMMARY and CONCLUSION
Psychoanalysis is one of the fields in psychology that tries to explain the human psyche or the person’s behavior by way of going back to the past experiences, most specifically of childhood experiences. I believe that a person’s behavior in the present moment is so much affected by her/his encounter with the world in the past regardless if they are joyous or resentful moments. By traveling back to the past, one will have a more or less better, clearer, and more profound understanding of who and what s/he is right now.

However, if we take Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretation of femininity, or womanity for that matter, although there may be some “truths” to his claims, I assess that he seemed to have complicated the matter more because his assertions are predominantly clouded by his bias for men, and against women. Putting into the pedestal the penis (men), women have already ceased to “exist,” wherein Freud explained women’s sexuality only in terms of phallocentric currency, sees “reality” only in a patriarchal model. Had he not fetishist and put into the clouds so high the value of penis and seen and recognized the vagina also, particularly the clitoris in its own right and not as a “penis-equivalent,” he could have given us a clearer understanding of what/who women are for objectively seeing reality. If one is going to apply his own system, one has the right to interpret that Freud’s “over-love” for the penis and disdain for the vagina, is that he must be actually a gay or a bisexual and, he may actually be envious of women because he, himself doesn’t have the vagina, which explains his hatred of women. Instead of women having a penis-envy, using Freud one could say that he is actually suffering from “vagina-envy.” Freud is “only” considered as the “Father of psychoanalysis” just because he is the first one to introduce it but it doesn’t mean that we should follow all his steps and ways of interpreting human behavior. Like what Luce Irigaray did, who is herself a psychoanalyst; trained in psychoanalytic traditions of Freud, using psychoanalysis itself could give us possible reasons why Freud has always been very negative towards women. Like all sciences, they could give us explanations about things but they are never final. Even the most prestigious scientists would give at least .01 to .05 rooms for doubts, room for improvements, for further discoveries and developments. Transcending the psychoanalytic tradition, by going beyond the tradition, one could have a more genuine understanding of what womanity is. The failure of most men to recognize the presence and essence of female organ is symptomatic of “ontological homelessness” as Irigaray tells us. The female genital organ is likened to a HOME where we all came from, where we came out, where we originally grew up, that even prior our birth, it has always been out home.

In her book, Je, Tu, Nuous, Irigaray indicated that our culture, or the society at large is suffering from “cultural amnesia” and tried to put it forward in relation to the discussion of the placental economy. Placenta is said to be the one that supports the fetus (baby) inside the mother’s womb. It separates the fetus from the mother, that is, it has a “life” of its own yet at the same time it is that which connects the two together. “All” human beings had their own placenta when they were born but many of us have already forgotten or, are not even aware of this that our very first breath or the first stages of our life’s development happened and supported by the placenta. And placenta is something that is very feminine; it exists only in a woman’s body/system and without it, emergence of “new” life would be impossible to occur.

Although fetus has a life of its own and is supported by the placenta, we cannot deny the fact that its life is still very dependent to the mother. Fetuses are considered parasites in the sense that it takes part or share to whatever food the other is taking in and so pregnant woman are supposed to eat more food as compared when they were still not pregnant because this time, she is not only feeding herself but also the “child” inside her. Fetuses are parasites that they even get ample amount of calcium of the mother, which causes weakening of bones of the mother. We were once fetuses; we were parasites! Well, many of us are still parasites though, but the point is that, just because we are already born in this world and grew up adults, we now tend to forget that we owe our lives to our mothers who had the courage and had taken the risk and responsibilities of the hardships and difficulties of bearing us, of bringing us forth in this world. We were, and many still are parasites that most of us (in a patriarchal society most especially) cannot, or don’t even “give back” the care and love and respect to the woman whose been there for us from the very beginning of our lives. The “love,” nourishment and care that the placenta has “given” – that our mother has given us, cannot be paid or exchanged by any amount of money but at least, there has to be an appreciation accorded to our mother – to women.

The placental economy is said to be a peaceful economy that encourages the growth of an “other” – the fetus – us - inside it because it recognizes the existence of the “other” and respects it. Our lives are all nourished in it, lived peacefully inside the other – the mother. We are an “other” to our mothers yet we “belong” to them - different identities yet one. However in our culture and society now, we tend to disregard the importance of the “Other” – the mothers, women, females, girls. Looking at the reality of our country, it is so sad in our culture that men are pampered so much while women are expected to dream for the family, to be responsible for the parents and siblings, to go abroad for any jobs just to feed the needs of the family and even their luxury. I hate this subculture... Asian or Filipino women are bracketed with that role...While men, have the privilege and the luxury of time because they are the ones who will continue the name of the father and besides, they dream for their ego and personal quest for career, family, material comfort, etc. Without curing ourselves from this cultural amnesia, we would all be living inauthentically; we would still be living in a world of deceptions and lies.

The limitation of this essay is that it is more directed to more “close-minded,” traditional beliefs of a patriarchal society wherein male genitals are fetishised, hence power over those who doesn’t have it. I am aware that with the help of education, more and more man and woman alike already accept each other without having hold over the other, respecting each other’s integrity and seeing the other as a dignified person.

It is a fact that it is the economic dominance of men over women that give them as sense of power and superiority over men, but nowadays some women are now more successful than men in career, handling the family & children, in business, etc. The problem is, women may have been “liberated” from their economic dependence to men, but many of them are the more stifled because after all those tiresome works in the “outside world,” when she gets home she is still the ‘only’ one expected to take care and attend to all the needs of her family; to cook and prepare the husband and the children’s food, to wash dishes, wash clothes, fixes the house, etc, whereas we just often find the husband relaxing himself in front of the television, reading newspapers, etc. Aside from her shift from her job in the society outside to her family/home inside, there is still another shift – it’s her “job” to attend to the sexual needs of her husband, to give him all the sexual pleasures he need. In the morning in is the woman who often has to wake up very early in the morning while the husband and the children are still sound asleep, to prepare their things needed by the children in school and of the husband in his work. So that when they wake up everything is ready, they just attend to themselves. Or, if the child is a female, aside from being the mother’s “right hand” in terms of “serving the family,” she is expected to be the one to “replace” the mother’s “job” to serve them just in case the mother is not around, whereas the boys could just play and play or attend to themselves alone.

Nevertheless the truth still stand out, many of us are still suffering from a cultural amnesia. This is a sad reality…the reality of living in a world full of deceptions and lies…really sad… But the “fight” must go on… For although believing and adhering to our customs and traditions are great guide to human life, as David Hume once reiterated, sometimes it is also necessary to challenge them to bring about progress and development. Philosophy’s role as master discourse needed to question and to be questioned, to disturb and be disturbed precisely because of its claims to the pursuit of Truth.

ENDING RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE (an attempt)

introduction
I was born Christian, baptized in a catholic church and grew up in a Christian community. I was taught of the goodness and wonderful promises of God and to “love thy neighbor as you love thyself.” Yet everyday I hear of the evilness of man around; radios broadcasting about husbands beating their wives, televisions showing massacres, movies depicting wars, newspapers and magazines telling about the recent robbery in town, etc. People who claim to be religious are not excluded in these chaotic scenes either. We hear news about priests molesting a little girl, suicide bombings between Jews and Arabs, and the fact that we are all Filipinos cannot stop the prejudices we have with each other to Moslem and Christian brothers and sisters here in the Philippines. It is no wonder why more and more people are now becoming more and more apathetic that they turn out agnostics or rather choose to become atheists.

In this essay I will try to present some instances of violence brought about by religion and the different reasons and justifications of these violence, resulting to the secular lost of the transcendence of God and try to restore, as it were the devastated world by bridging the gap between people by traveling us back to the real essence of religion in light of the Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan, on his view of what religion is and how it should be able to transform an individual into a better human person and not the other way around, by pointing us out that the recurrent structure of human understanding proceeds generally from experience to insight or understanding of experience; from insight to judgment of the truth or falsity of claims; and from judgment to decisions that lead us back to experience. Thus at the end of the day, religion is not about imposing to the other what we “believe” but rather about respecting the other’s belief and that the evilness in this world is not for God to be blamed but to the person herself who is the doer of the action.

religious violence and its justifications
The term religion comes from Latin root religare, which means, “to bind together,”[1] suggests a communal orientation and common purpose about whose behavior reasonable generation can be made. However beneath the histories of religious traditions from the great acts of martyrdom to crusading ventures back to biblical wars, oppression and violence has lurked as a shadowy presence. Precisely the reason why Karl Marx propounded that religion is the opium of the people because if it is that which “binds” things together, why are there many alienated and oppressed people and are willing to do violence in the name of religion?

One of the ever-famous personalities in the darkest chapters in history of religion or of the human history in general is Adolf Hitler, known for being the one responsible for the Jewish Holocaust. He said, “…as for the Jews…I don’t put race above religion, but I do see the danger in the representations of this race for church and state, and perhaps I am doing Christianity a great service.[2]Certainly, this one does not understand his faith enough that instead of making him a better person, his crooked belief led him to the lower level of beasts instead of becoming the best person he could possibly become. The oppressive and violent acts of priests and political leaders or any person are not to be justified just because they belong to a certain religion. If religions have legitimated certain acts of violence, they have also attempted to limit the frequency and scope of those acts.

William Ernest Hocking once wrote:
“Religion is often described as the healing of an alienation which has spread between man and his world: this is true; but we may forget that it is religion which has brought about that alienation religion is healing of a breach which religion itself is made.”[3]

The concept and experience, then, of alienation are part of the religious attitude itself. Back to the history of Christianity, the feudal system of government has used religion to control and oppress people. In ancient times, the intellectualism and rationality of Greeks are all about the pervading idea of “fate,” that order is designed by gods for the pleasure of gods so that the person cannot do anything for his improvement anymore. However at Medieval period, Christianity became the most prevailing practice and the “pagan” thing was evil. According to them, fate is a pagan belief. Yet they just changed this concept of “fate” into “faith in Divine Providence” wherein there should be a resignation to the will of God, i.e., whatever the Divine Providence wills, people cannot do anything about it anymore hence feudalism is impressed in the Christian mind. Thus any revolutionary ideas, which are aimed at eliminating inequality, were an act against the will of God. Looking at the feudal system closely, Christianity actually practiced paganism under the guise of “faith in Divine Providence.” Hence, the breeding ground of Marx’s idea is that he saw religion as a form of alienation through which humankind had attributed all the goodness and wisdom which it was capable to a remote God instead of recognizing them as essentially human capacities. For how can we uncover God’s face in a context where people are reduced to insignificance? What does it mean to speak about the God of life of people whose daily experience is being despised because they are poor people in oppressed races?

In the case of Israelites and Palestinians, suicide bombings have been rampant because of conflicting religious beliefs and ideas. Mark Juergensmeyer, in his book, Terror in the Mind of God,[4] shares, that Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish Israelite, saw the situation of Jewish people of Israel as that of victims oppressed in their own land. Encroaching presence of Arabs on the West Bank was not just a distant threat. Goldstein lived there and saw on the daily basis what he perceives to be the Arabs arrogance in thinking that they had the right to the land on which they lived. He had watched with mourning wrath as Palestinian Arabs increased their attacks on his fellow resident and complained that automobiles driven by Jewish settlers had been stoned on the major road leading to Jerusalem and several settlers had been killed. At night he could hear noises and occasionally hear some shouting the terrible words, it bah al-yahud, meaning, “slaughter the Jews.” He has had enough and so one day he went to the shrine of the Mosque on the Muslim side of the building and pulled out a Gail assault rifle firing and killing more than 30 worshippers, and injuring scores more. Goldstein was overwhelmed by the crowd and pummeled to death.

For the Jews the idea that the creation of a Palestinian government on the West Bank poses a danger not only to Israel as a nation but to Jews in general and to Judaism as a religion was explained by Rabbi Meir Kahane – founder of Israel’s Right-wing Kach (Thus) Party. At the heart of Kahane’s thinking was “catastrophic messianism,” the idea that the messiah will come in a great conflict in which Jews triumph and praise God through their success. This was their understanding of the term Kiddush ha Shem, “the sanctification of God.” Anything that humiliates the Jews was not only an embarrassment but also a retrograde motion in the world’s progress towards salvation.

On the other hand, like other religions, Islam occasionally allows for force while stressing that the main spiritual goal is one of nonviolence and peace. According to Sheik Mar Abdul Rahman in an interview shortly after the bombing of the World Trade Center, a Muslim can “never call for violence,” only for “love, forgiveness and tolerance.” But he added that if they are aggressed against it, they must call for hitting the attacker and the aggressor to put an end to the aggression. Iran’s ayatollah Khomeini said he knew of no command ‘more binding’ to the Muslim than the command to sacrifice life and property to defend the bolster Islam. Violence is required for purposes of punishment, for example, and it is sometimes deemed necessary for defending faith. In the “world of conflict” outside the Muslim world, force is a means of cultural survival. In such a context, maintaining the purity of religious existence is thought to be a matter of jihad, a word literally means, “striving” and is often translated as “holy war.” It is as a political one, stemming from religious commitment. It was also part of a tradition of Islamic protest against injustice.

With these justifications for violence in mind, they have been able to go about their business killing with certainty that they were following the logic of God. It is really an irony that religious leaders claim that their principal aim is to promote peace and order yet are using violence, abusing and oppressing people to achieve these “wonderful” goals of their own religion. Nevertheless, this narrow usage of “religion” confuses people even more. It binds us to the fact that we live today in the midst of competing religious value systems and that we are being pressed by this warfare of the gods into making choices we would rather avoid.

religion is cultural
Other people contend that all religions are one. Many have said this because they wanted it to be so, but some of these claims are results of personal experience with many religious faiths. It is not much important proving that “all religions are one” but we just have to accept the fact that different people of different culture attributes different characteristics to their God, hence behave and respond differently from those who have a different God. It is of no objection to me if someone will tell me that to Black Africans, Christ must be seen as black. It is not a matter of having many and different gods either. As Simone Weil once said, “All religions pronounce the name of God in their particular language. As a rule it is better for a man to name God in his native tongue rather than in one that is foreign to him,” hence the name Jesus, Brahma, Allah, Kabunyan, etc. In one of the Vedic texts it says, Ekam sat, vipra bahudha vadanti, meaning, “Truth is One; sages call it by various names.”

Men have always had experiences that they venture with great importance and often such circumstances, from the acts of audacity and fortitude and moments of love to visions and aesthetic ‘highs’ brings about drastic changes in our lives. We uphold the essence of an experience by trying to understand it by conceptualizing and reflecting on it. To Bernard Lonergan, Insight is the act of understanding understanding. Understanding shapes the being of the human person hence, to understand understanding is to commit oneself to being, i.e., to commit oneself to the unfolding of reality. And to unfold reality is to know ourselves by situating us within a particular realm or sphere of being. As we experience something, the mind interprets it hence what experience “means” is therefore culturally relative. Every culture has a particular world-view at its foundation. People have their own particular mode of experience so we have to understand them according to their experiences or tradition. In an interview, Lonergan tell us that his “concern is with a state of culture. Theology mediates between a religion and a culture.” Furthermore, a system (or any religious system) he says,
“presupposes a horizon, a world-view, a differentiation of consciousness that has unfolded under the conditions and circumstances of a particular culture and a particular historical development.”[5]

Lonergan’s approach is historicist. He recognizes that culture is on the move hence it changes over time, because cultures are man-made. The development (or decline) of a culture reflects the mythological concepts in an attempt to make sense of the experience of the people of the awe and supposed certainties they have on the minds which in turn will reflect the underlying belief system of the culture. Faith thus is rooted in people’s experiences hence an account of human person’s self-consciousness. Religion is a lifetime journey of knowing oneself, hence self-transcendence. Each human culture is an ongoing process of human self-creation. Humans make cultures and each culture makes the humans of that culture. In an analysis of cultural progress and decline, Lonergan maintains that: “insight into insight brings to light the cumulative process of progress. For concrete situations give rise to insights which issue into policies and courses of action. Action transforms the existing situation to give rise to further insights, better policies, and more effective courses of action. It follows that if insight occurs, it keeps occurring; and at each recurrence knowledge develops, action increases its scope, and situations improve.”

restoring the distorted essence of religion
Lonergan developed a religious epistemology that is rooted in the dynamism of human understanding: insight. In the subject’s pursuit of truth, which is the demand of her rationality is the call to authentic existence. The truth of what one is, is revealed more fully in the light of the telos of religion. Religion is a mode of the divine-human encounter, which is consummated in love. Love is the perfection of religion; the love of creation for the love of God is what defines the nature of religion. Religion is the unique condition of integral human transformation. Being religious, then, in the strictest sense of the word, means being human in the most special way.[6]

Religion must permeates every level of existence and not prevent the people from realizing their potentials. The sad thing in the history of religion is that people of “power” used the name of God and religion to degrade the lowly more into their doom and destruction. That is why religion, to be properly human is supposed to be critical, it should help people realize their own uniqueness and importance, not just as human but also as Person. The key towards understanding Lonergan’s vision of religion is to take into account the human persons capacity of self-transcendence. And an authentic self-transcendence is Love, that is, the love of God and love of neighbor. As Lonergan eloquently puts it:
“I have conceived being in love with God as an ultimate fulfillment of man’s capacity for self-transcendence; as the supreme fulfillment of the transcendental notions, as supreme intelligence, truth, reality, righteousness, goodness…unless religion is totally directed to what is good, to genuine love of one’s neighbor and to a self-denial that is subordinated to a fuller goodness in oneself, then the cult of a God that is terrifying can slip over into the demonic, into an exultant destructiveness of oneself and of others.”[7]

Religion therefore is the opportunity accorded for people to transcend themselves by loving God and neighbors. It must not be seen as a body of doctrine but rather as a way of life that articulates the challenge of co-existence, that is, to be open minded to different perspectives of different people belonging to different culture and religion and be able to compare and evaluate the conflicting views in history by willing to engage ourselves in a dialogue. Religion is pedagogical because it allows us to learn the truth of who we really are, and the truth of who we are is very much affected by our experiences and of the kind of culture where we grew up. But as we interact with other cultures we form some view of the world. Like all unfamiliar insights, this propositions requires a horizon shift. Of course these may present a communication problem because of different perspectives but Lonergan is hopeful of achieving the unity of plurality. He says,
“But behind this multiplicity there is a basic unity that comes to light in the exercise of transcendental method.[8] We can inquire into the possibility of fruitful inquiry. We can reflect on the nature of reflection. We can deliberate whether our deliberation is worth while.”[9]

Religion is not about imposing or forcing the other to accept your convictions that often result to catastrophic killing but rather, it should make people broad minded enough to be able to listen to the side of the other. We have to be critical and at the same time understanding of our own and of other people’s experiences.

conclusion
Religion is human’s involvement in the search of the meaning of her existence, and the depth of the person’s involvement is the depth of her religion. It is a participation in solving the riddle of life in a special way for a special purpose. Religion is our attempt to make sense of the universe and find a meaningful relatedness to all the pregnant event of human experiences. It is “our ultimate concern for the ultimate,” as Paul Tillich once said.

However, everyday we hear news of violence committed by people in the name of religion. People spitting people, people cursing people, people killing people just because of conflicting religious beliefs brought about by cultural differences. Because of these many people now consider religion as a world system used to mislead or deceive people. According to Marx,
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sign of the oppressed, the heart of the heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation.”[10]

The religious and moral risk of tragic consciousness is to encounter reality or truth in its radical plurality, unmooring the mood from any metaphysical anchor, so that it becomes entirely human, entirely fragile relationship. It is our ignorance of the connection we have with others that causes this to happen. It wouldn't happen if we didn't do it to ourselves. People can reflect anything they need to, to not do what they are compelled to do by a healthy heart, and that is to love unconditionally, which means to forgive unconditionally.

Many of us becomes dependent on others, to our “religious leaders” who pretend to have in them the “love of God” in which they usually use the natural needs and instincts to another person for their own selfish ends. What stops a person from knowing it is themselves. So now we have man struggling with his own mind, but most of the time he does not appear to struggle because he is comfortable with what he is told by other people on what to know. I am not telling us to go against our pastors or priests or any religious leaders in our community but if we are to understand our faith, we have to understand it thoroughly and reflect within and ask ourselves where does our religion or belief or faith is bringing us. Because for one to be truly religious in strictest sense of the word, a self-transformation should be seen in the person. Religion must be humanity and not doctrines; religion unites and not divides.

According to Lonergan, the gift of God’s love is that “it leads to a transformation in life, but more on the order of practice than on the order of intellectual knowledge”[11] so that at the end of the day, all knowing must lead into acting. That is to love God, and to love God is to love the other as you love yourself.

The human person is an insight-full being; a being capable of knowing herself, of understanding herself, that is to say she knows and understands her actions hence she takes responsibility of her actions and it is in being responsible that she is able to commit herself to the unfolding of reality which is done by loving. Our ignorance or failure to take a look into the depths of ourselves is that which creates disharmony, destruction, non-oneness. God is eternal will, eternal consciousness and awareness, hence it is in wisdom or in the human person’s capacity to understand her understanding, in reflecting, in in-sighting that God creates the harmony, order, and oneness. God lives through us; in a family or friends or community of being or even to the ones we consider as our enemies. A collective consciousness is much like our own body; one person is a hand, another is a foot, an eye, an ear, and so on. One mind controls them all (which is God), maneuvering them in a graceful harmony. The collective tie is love, which is to say each individual mind sees their oneness with the whole. If each mind or if each of us acts from the same perspective, the same place, even though we are separate, we are still the same. Each human mind acts from the same place, truth. Truth is God and if one has insight of the truth she has an insight of love and it is the bond of love that will encompass all the seeming differences we have. This is oneness, this is harmony.The world is what it is today because we are not all acting from the same place. We are still very much consumed by our prejudices and biases of other people just because they grew up in a different place and time, in a different culture and call their God a different name, etc., making each one act differently. Religion is not about imposing our belief to the other saying, “this is truth, this is what is.” Not that it is what is, just that we will take it for what is. We all must be highly present, gentle, and flexible in order to perceive reality for what it is and construct the proper beliefs/codes/directives that will act as hand me downs for our children to come. Our beliefs will be theirs, so our beliefs now will create their world when it is happening in the now.

In an era like ours, where peaceful dialogue is lacking, religion can either worsen the disease or help contribute to a recovery. This situation will become less baffling however, if we stop trying to understand it as a battle between faith and reason, emotion and intelligence, religion and culture.
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endnotes

[1] Scott, Appleby R. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
[2] Rivera, Alberto. Alberto. CA USA: Jack T. Chick, Chick Publications, 1985. vol. 16, p.26-27.
[3] Dupre, Louis. The Other Dimensions: A search for the Meaning of Religions. New York: Doubleday, 1972.
[4] Published by The Regents of the University of CA, 2000.
[5] Lonergan, Bernard J.F., S.J. Philosophy of God and Theology. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1973, p.12.
[6] Assistant philosophy professor - Mr. Jeffrey Centeno’s introductory lecture of Bernard Lonergan’s thought, first semester 2004, Saint Louis University, Baguio City, Philippines.
[7] Lonergan, Bernard J.F., S.J. Method in Theology. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1973, p.111.
[8] Transcendental Method is the epistemological pattern of cognitive operations or the response to the demands of the mind, that is, the dynamism of rational self-consciousness. It is about the willingness to walk an extra mile, to reach further, to know further until we arrive to the question of God. And religion, according to Lonergan tells us of the possibility of the knowledge of God because the possibility of knowledge lies in the unity of the structures of the mind.
[9] Method in Theology, p.101.
[10] Palmer,Donald. Looking at Philosophy, Mayfield Publishing Company, 2001. p. 259.
[11] Philosophy of God and Theology, p. 41.