I must say first of all how grateful I am for this privilege of briefly addressing you on a subject which has been of some concern to me, particularly since I feel that theology has been in a rather loose relation to both science and philosophy. However, I would like to draw your attention to the view of Auguste Comte, who can in some ways be regarded as the father of positivism,that there are three stages through which every branch of knowledge passes. The first stage, as all of you probably know, is the eta theoloque, or fictive he calls, the theological stage or the fiction stage Comte calls it.The second stage is the l'eta metaphysique, or abstrait, the metaphysical or the abstract stage. And then finally, the l'eta scientifique or positiv. Now Comte is saying thatthat is the history of Western knowledge. It is a law that he has discovered by the study of the total corpus of Western knowledge, that knowledge passes through these three stages. The point is that asthe scientific stage of knowledge perfects itself, the other two forms of knowledge become obsolete, obscure, and gradually fade away. In a sense, I think he seems to be right because that's precisely what has happenedin Western thought. As scientific thought developed, both philosophical and theological thought have been seriously devalued. But I want to look at another approach to the same problem taken by Heidegger, the German philosopher who died only in 1976.Heidegger's view is that science does not think. He was really questioned about that. Then he altered his statement to say scientists do not think the way thinker think. Well,I can translate it to say, scientists do not think the way Heidegger thinks. Thinkers should think. Let that be. But what Heidegger says is, all the sciences have left from the womb of philosophy in a two-fold manner. They came outout of philosophy and they have parted with her. Now that they are apart, they can never again come together. There is no way for science to go back into its matrix of philosophy. Science, for example, cannot answer some fundamental questions aboutscience itself. For example, the nature of science, says Heidegger, cannot be discovered by the Scientific Method. But Heidegger goes deeper. Heidegger says the Western quest -- and Heidegger is very amusingly arrogant to me because he says that there are only two languages in which you can think; one is Greek and the other is German. There are no other languages in which you can think and there is no other philosophy except Greek and German philosophy, he says very clearly. And he says precisely Indian philosophy -- not philosophy, Chinese philosophy is not philosophy. Never mind. Butwhat Heidegger says, however, is a much radical critique of science. He focuses on what happens to the human psyche in the process of transition from theology to philosophy or metaphysics to science. We can take a concrete illustration provided by Heidegger himself but a little bit adaptedby me. Take a mountain, for example. We don't have any around, but the primitive pre-scientific man sees the mountain not as an object, but as a reality with which he lives, on which his life depends. He gives it a name, Himalaya, Kilimanjaro. Rockiesand Andes were not names given by primitive men so I won't talk about that. Well, he sees the mountain as a quasi subject, not as an object. He weaves it into his religious self-understanding through myth, ritual, thus entering into a relationship of reciprocitywith the mountain. The mountain impresses him and his total being responds in awe and wonder. It's majesty and grandeur speaks to his depths as an aspect of the reality in which he participates. His psyche responds not in the scientific quest to analyze and to understand,but in the deeper human response of poetry, art, myth, and ritual. It is a subject which stands with him, before him, not an object to be understood or overpowered. The mountain is a friend. In science, modern science, the perspective changeswith consequent changes in the human psyches. The search now is to understand in terms of how the mountain came to be by geological processes, to measure its altitude, to analyze its strati, its vegetation, its mineral content, its casual relation to other phenomenon like rainor flood. Now it becomes an object for the understanding, something to be explained and described independently of its relation to our subjectivity. Sometimes that relation is also studied, but not in a subjective sense. It is always the element of subjectivity is almost regarded as alien to theidea of understanding. Well, Heidegger thinks that this is already a basic alienation. Then, as the modern technology based on modern science develops, a new transition, a new change takes place. The human psyche shifts its perspective again. The mountain is no longer an object to be simply understood. The scientific understandingis now used to visualize it as a potential resource, as a source of timber for our paper mills and furniture factories, as a deposit of mineral ore to be mined and milled for industrial purposes. The technology is then developed to exploit the resource, to dominate it, to make it our slave, servingour will and our purpose. So the subject/subject relationship moved to a subject/objective relationship in science and then in technology, it becomes owner/property relationship. So to the scientist, the mountain is nothing but the result of geologicalprocesses. To the industrial technologist, it is nothing but a resource to serve him, to be controlled and exploited by him. Here in this transition from understanding to overpowering, there is the second transition in the human psyche. Now of course in recent thinking, this hasbeen justified in terms of the dominium terrae doctrine where Adam and Eve were asked to dominate the earth by their Creator, if dominate is the Hebrew word. But the dominium terrae doctrine is very much under question and we are having new alternatives because the dominium terrae is accusedfor the troubles of pollution, resource depletion, disruption of the delicate eco balance, or the balance which sustains the life world of the biosphere. The attempt has been made also to justify the process in terms of the category of de-divinization, that it was the Judeo-Christianheritage that allowed human beings to de-divinize nature and thereby make science and later technology based on it possible. So it was a necessary task of econoclasis by which we broke the spell of the divine in the mountain. Well, I don't want to speak too much aboutthat kind of approach. I don't think our forefathers, however, saw the mountain as divine. They may have seen it as embodying divine energy, but that is how I see it, [those poor?] primitive. Because for me, all matter is energyand whose energy? For me as a theologian, no other choice except to say it's the energia theo, the energy of God, which is the foundation of matter itself and therefore for me, there is no question of de-divinizing nature. I don't identify God with nature; I don't even talk in termsof a word nature if I can help it. But for me, the mountain is still God's energy and I think the primitive had a vision, which we need to recapture. But let's get back to Heidegger. Heidegger says this whole process of the Western intellectual enterprise, colossal enterprise,is a colossal failure. That's Heidegger's point. Because, the problem with the Greek philosophers as well as modern man is the attempt to stand outside the reality of nature and to understand it. Even Greek philosophy, except Socrates, beginning with Thales and next [Emender?]and so on, have been this effort to stand outside of the reality and then to understand it and to question being. From that position, he says, is a totally disruptive and dehumanizing process. That's what Heidegger says. NowHeidegger says philosophy cannot help us of this point because philosophy also takes a stance outside the totality and seeks to understand it through synthetic inductive judgments. For example, Heidegger is very unhappy with those who want to find a kind of planetary culture and a planetary philosophyputting together all the philosophies of the world, Indian, Chinese, African, Middle Eastern, European, Maya, Inca. All these philosophies, if you put them together, you won't get, he says, a universal philosophy which helps you to understand the being which manifests itself to us through the beings.He says, we have to take a different stance from that of the Greek initiated Western intellectual effort. And whether theology can do it, well, Heidegger dismisses theology by saying, oh, they've got all kinds of answers. Don't listen to them. That's all he says, mostly. Nowphilosophy's task today is perhaps to question the stance, but let's go on to another rather interesting German thinking, Jurgen Habermas. I don't know how well Habermas is known in these parts. He has probably the most ambitious project, to find a universal pragmatics,a universal philosophy in which all things can be put into their place and provides the basis for a universal pragmatics, or a universal praxis, which includes theory. Jurgen Habermas was formally of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, then went to the Max Planck Instituteand I think he is retired now. I'll draw your attention to four of his books; they're all available in English now, all published by the Beacon Press in Boston, very interesting books if you can understand the involved arguments. First is "The Knowledge and Human Interest," a very seminal essay, small, but very interesting.Second is "Theory and Practice." Third is "Legitimization Crisis," and fourth is "The Communication and the Evolution of Society." These books were published here since '71, in Germany since '68. So these are almost the latest form in which European thoughttries to cope with this problem. A good summary of Habermas you can get in Thomas McCarthy, who is Professor of Philosophy at Boston University who has written a very good book, which is "The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas," which we have in our library. It's 1978. I find a more interesting little summary publisheda man whom I don't know, Garbis Kortian, who has published a book called "Metacritique, The Philosophical Argument of Jurgen Habermas." That's 1980. I would recommend Kortian because that has got a lucidity. Now, Habermas takes a different direction from that of Heidegger. Hewants to pursue a critical theory following the Western enterprise. He sees nothing wrong with the Western enterprise. As such, he thinks it can be redeemed and proceeds to do so. He sees the beginning of the more modern problem when Comte separated pure reason and practical reason.This has led to the problem of the cleavage between the ease and the ought. There is no way or proceeding from statements of perception to statements of morality. Now, Habermas wants us to go back to theComtian schema of three departments of knowledge, pure reason, practical reason, and the critique of judgment. Now I want to say that these three divisions are perennial in human thought because we have three ways of getting at truth. One is through the mind; the other is through the will, or morality; and the thirdis through feeling, aesthetics, the approach to beauty. These are basically three approaches, which humanity has always used to come to terms of reality and the Comtian critique is an attempt to put those in clear and neat separation with separate categories for their work. But what has happened is that, of course, Hegelquestioned Comte's method of pure reason in a very interesting way. Hegel asked the question, now if Comte says that the categories of the mind that he lists are the way in which all knowledge takes place, where did he get these categories? Did heget them also by using the same method which he recommends in the critique? Obviously no. These categories are presupposed before the analysis and that's a pretty bad critique. The second critique, which is a little more serious, of Comte, is that Comte took the adult German mindas the model for the universal mind. He took it as a given, the grownup mind of German thinker, and tried to analyze its categories. He had, well, little acquaintance with the way other cultures and other people saw it, but more important, he did not analyze the way by which that particularsubjectivity of the German adult came to be formed. And that is the contribute of Gadamer. Gadamer Says, you have to know also the antecedents of the knowing mind, how it came to be shaped that way, what he calls the wirkus geschichte, of the personwho is knowing. He has had a large number of experiences, which have determined the limit of his seeing. He has a certain fixed horizon, beyond which he cannot see because the things which have happened to him, not only as an individual but in his culture, in his language, which he has not created,but has been created by history, by the cultural antecedents, all these have determined his subjectivity, and therefore, Gadamer says, we have to see, understanding not simply in terms of a static process, but as a process in which the human mind itself changeshorizon. And according to your horizon, you will see things differently. Because certain things you may not be equipped to see -- for example, certain things in physics, for example, I cannot see because I have not been trained. My mind has not had the wirkus geschichte of a physicist. Therefore, my mind will not see some of the things that are happeningin physics. So my horizon is limited; the physics man's horizon is another kind of horizon. He may not have the same experiences I had, therefore his horizon would be also limited. Well, Gadamer has also given us this very interesting, fresh insight about the Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment,which came to flower in the nineteenth century, was a revolt against tradition and authority. Actually, the word "modern" means that, that which rejects tradition and authority and makes reason the arbiter.Reason can be tested; reason can be checked with reference to external reality as well as with reference to its so inconsistency, but the Enlightenment put reason as the way, as the most important factor in knowing, and was heavily prejudiced against tradition because it was trying to emancipateitself from a Church tradition which had proved to be oppressive. Now what Gadamer tells us is that we cannot see anything without prejudice, that prejudice are foreknowledge, which in French would be prejudice, [Vorautiel?] in German,would be the necessary thing for me to know something. If I did not know what a chair was, I wouldn't know that this is a chair. Already I have a knowledge; if I don't know what an oak tree is, I wouldn't know that this is an oak tree. And some other trees, which I see in America, I don't know because I don't know -- I've never seen them before.And I don't know them; unless I have already previous experience of such trees, it is almost impossible for me to know them. So what I do in the process of knowing is I am putting forward one of the prejudgments that are already in my mind. This could be a maple or this could be an oak tree. Those are two possible prejudices, and certainly I see some thingswhich make me think could be an oak, and I project the image and what I think are the requirements of an oak tree to that which I see, and I see that it confirms it. And then I know that it is an oak tree. That means this prejudgment about what an oak tree should be is already in me and all knowledge is of this character and science itself is that.Science itself is a form of developing hypotheses, or theories, which you then project on to an experiment and see if the experiment confirms it, because in your hypothesis, you have so conceived it, that if the hypothesis is true, it must have that result in the experiment. So already, you have to have a prejudice before you can do any science.And then Gadamer asked this very interesting question: Why don't you like that? Because, well, we are just ridden with prejudices and the only way to get rid of prejudices is to discern between bad prejudice and good prejudice. Now if I see an oak tree,if I had a bad prejudice, is it a coconut tree, and I go to it, it just won't work. It's just a bad prejudice. I have to find another prejudice to correct my bad prejudice. So all you can do is to examine your prejudices. How do you examine your prejudice? Well, he says, there are three movements in examining your prejudice. First of all, recognize that youhave a prejudice; otherwise you'll never be able to examine it. If it doesn't exist, then why do you examine it? Second, objectify it. What is the nature of your prejudice? Then try to find another prejudice which might tell you what is wrong with that prejudice. That is, you correct prejudice by prejudice. This is even more infuriating. You are putting us more deep intoprejudice and then finally Gadamer comes with his clashing final blow when he says, "Why are you so angry? Because you have a prejudice against prejudice as such." That is the reason why you are so unhappy. Where did you get that? From the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was the attempt to start thinking reason's activity withoutpresuppositions and prejudices, and therefore Enlightenment created in Western culture a negative animus against prejudices. And that is why you are prejudiced against prejudice. Well, all that is very good. Now Habermas likes all that but says, something wrong there. Gadamer doesn't go sufficientlydeeply... Gadamer says, in the first place -- no, Habermas says that Gadamer is too individualistic in his understanding. He does not understand all the formation processes that have gone into your effective history.And when you take the formation processes also into account, you have to have a universal pragmatics, because part of your formation is the fact of biological evolution. You have come out of the animals and some of things you may be experiencing because of your animal past. And even the evolutionof the earth may be part of your own past. Anyway, so what Habermas suggests is that the problem of positivism, which tried to stop reflection, is what is still our problem. And we have nowto reflect on reflection. That's a peculiar activity of the human person, when he can reflect on the reflective process. Now, we cannot simply stop with any of the solutions that have been given so far. Hegeltried to do this reflection on reflection and ended up in the metaphysical idea of the absolute idea, which is not anything which can be confirmed, whereas Marx, who also tried to deal with this problem came to the view thatthe contradiction is not in the mind, not in the psyche, but the contradiction is an external reality. Both in nature and in society, there are contradictions. And the contradictions in your psychic cannot be resolved without resolving the contradictions in nature and in society. And nature's contradictions are resolvedby the process of humanization of nature. And this is a very interesting way in which the humanization came to be used. It is a word which begins with Hegel, and I think it's very important for theology because we have begun to misuse that word very badly. The question was this: how does a human person become a human person?This is the question. The word in German, I understand, is menschwerden. How does a mensch become a mensch? How does a human being become a human being? Well, for Marx, the process of becoming human is through stoffwechsel, that is material exchange with nature. Without that,a human person does not become a human person. It is in a learning to handle things that the understanding begins. Questions about the way things react with you begin in your mind and theory arises in answer to problems of practice, which you have in handling, exchangingwith reality. And the distinctive thing about a human person, a human being, is not that he is homo sapiens, the man who knows, a distinct from the animals, but homo faber, man who fabricates, the man who makes tools. That is the most important thing about the human person according to Marx,because animals adapt to the environment, whereas human beings adapt the environment to themselves through the use of tools. And this material exchange is the situation in which all thinking arises. And it is in that stoffwechsel, this materialexchange, that human formation itself takes place. But Marx would say, the material exchange does not take place between the individual and matter; it takes place as social labor. For Marx, the most important epistemological category is social labor. By working in an organized way,to adapt nature to our ends, all theoretical reflection begins. And so, we have to deal with that element. Now Habermas criticizes Marx at that point and says, "I think Marx was too simplistic in his understanding ofthis stoffwechsel." Habermas says, there are two interests in the human person's dealing with the material reality or with nature. The first interest is the instrumental interest. That is, to shape tools and to mold the external worldto suit your needs. But that's only one of the interests of knowledge, the instrumental interests. And the problem with Marxist understanding, according to Habermas, is that it's understanding of reason itself is too close linked with this instrumental aspect of the mind. And then Habermas goes back to the old German discussionbeginning with Dobach, Fichte, and Hegel, and says, "My problem is that in knowing something, I see that the known object retains its autonomy. It doesn't become part of me, however much I humanize. It retains its character of anobject and it doesn't become one with me. The subject and the object remain dual; the consciousness in itself and the object for consciousness do not coincide." This is the problem which Fichte tried to resolve by saying practical reason and pure reasoncannot be separate; that they should be together, held together. And that is the line which Marx has basically followed, but that's not enough, says Habermas. You see the external world and the external object as something which limits you and conditions you.It is the other, alternative. It remains in its otherness and in spite of all my efforts to overpower it, it retains its otherness. And I want to be delivered from this conditioning by the other. This is what Habermas calls the emancipatory interest in knowledge. All knowledgehas these twin elements. One interest is the instrumental; the other is the emancipatory or freedom from being externally conditioned. That interest of knowledge is what Marx had ignored, says Habermas. So he goes on to develop that aspect,and this is probably the biggest contribution of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, an interesting contribution, which we can examine, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, all of this come from this Frankfurt School; they were all dealing with this basic issue of the distinction between instrumental reason and ontological reason, or the reason that seeks reason, which is different frominstrumental reason. And the temptation of modern culture is to take reason purely as an instrumental thing. In any case, the emancipatory interest has to be taken seriously. How do you get this emancipation? Well, it is always a movement fromdependency to autonomy. That is the basic thrust of emancipation, from dependency to autonomy. All human becoming is in a situation of dependency. You are dependent on the external reality; you are dependent on your parents, on siblings, on various other things, and we live in a world in which this dependence has become oppressive and sothe emancipatory interest becomes a central problem. So what Habermas does in his universal pragmatics is to take three realms of knowledge and say that you can't apply the same method in all three realms of knowledge. There is the lowest level ofscience and the technology based on it. There you have certain validation criteria, the empirical experimental method is the basic way by which you say that something is certified knowledge, acceptable knowledge. But you can't use that in the next realm, which is political economy, or the relations of production,how people should organize themselves. If you use the Scientific Method, you will not get normative criteria for political economy. For political economy, you have to look elsewhere for the normative criteria. And then, you come up against another problem, namely, where are these normative criteria themselvesderived from? Supposing you say, in political economy, the basic criteria are autonomy, freedom, justice, and so on, where do you get those criteria? The source of these criteria themselves have to be analyzed, and that is what is called metacritique. You have to beyond to analyze the categories themselveswhich you have used. And when you come to metacritique, there is a lot of obscuration by ideology. What is ideology? Ideology is a set of values which have been put together quite often to serve the interest of a particular group. That's what ideology is. SoMarx himself, early Marx, already saw ideology and later Marx also, post-1848 also saw ideology as false consciousness, for example, the bourgeois ideology. That is what he was fighting all the time, which is a false consciousness which sees values differently in order to justify its own position of power. And so you have to criticize ideology, but where do you get the values by whichyou can criticize ideology? That forms the third level of knowledge. At that third level of knowledge, what are your criteria? For Habermas, there is only one basic criteria. That is, unconstrained communication, communication without constraint. Habermaswould say that if you want to speak about something specific that distinguishes a human person from an animal, don't go to this homo faber. The important thing is communication competence, the capacity to communicate with each other through language and symbols as well as other forms of communicating, through utterances,through silence, all these, this crisscrossing pattern of intercommunication. But in this communication, there is deception, false consciousness, which can mislead you and therefore you have to psychoanalyze; you have to use Freud to see where the communication is already motivated by the hidden drive to conserve your own interests. And therefore, we have to haveunconstrained communication, which means a technique, a methodical technique of psychoanalyzing your motives in communicating the way you are doing, and ultimately, only through unconstrained communication, which means dialogue, continuous dialogue in which you expose the fallacies in your neighbor's thinking,you begin to come to some criteria of consensus. So what Habermas proposes as his huge, ambitious keep is to keep the three levels like that, lower level, physical sciences mainly, the second level, political economy, the third level, ideology critic, or, if you want to, domesticate it for yourself the domain of culture and valuesand meaning and even, I would say, religion, though Habermas himself does not do very much about this. Now, if you have the human formation itself is taking place in these three realms, menschewurde, becoming a human person, is the consequence not only of the material exchange, but also of the political economy, by alsoof the cultural phenomenon, the meaning phenomenon, the communication phenomenon. All three are formative processes by which the human person is shaped. Now, I think I will have to stop my analysis at that point and come very quickly to the conclusion. The conclusion is that theology must somehow take account of this.And one of the failures of theology is that we are not really doing this adequately. The positivist quest has come to grief. Scientism has come to grief. No use thrashing those babies; they are weeping. Don't thrash them. I think even in Marxism,scientism, the idea that positivist knowledge is possible, is being questioned from inside, not from outside. But the moment they bring that critique outside, you people will use it as a propaganda weapon against them, so they don't tell you what they are thinking. But they are really aware that their positivism is already highly doubtful becausejust take two simple questions in Marxism: what is the fundamental reality? What is there? It's only one thing, as they would say, matter and energy -- now it's no longer matter; it's matter-energy hyphenated -- in processes of dialectical development. That is the single reality that exists. And what is matter, matter-energy? Well, they'll tell you, it's self-existent, eternal, omnicompetent,all the things we say about God, they say about matter. And once I pointed out to a Marxist that and he said to me, "Well, if all you say about God is only what we say about matter, it's all right; you can use the word God for it, so long as it's the same thing that we are talking about." Well, [that's sadly?]. But the second thing is, Marxists have not sorted out the question of epistemology.What is the relation between the external reality and that which is in consciousness. Lenin started with the copy theory; that has been abandoned now by Marxist ideologists. They are now talking in terms of the reflection in consciousness of an objective reality, objectively existence. Well that objective existence part, philosophically you cannot demonstrate that. It's a dogma. And this other one is also a dogma. So the ethological and epistemological foundationsof Marxism have been demonstrated to be absolutely problematic, and I don't like beating the Marxists with those because they're crying. And you treat them very gently at those two points. So Habermas suggests a kind of metacritical self-reflection as the answer by which he wants to reinstate the European Enlightenment, whereas Heidegger says,nothing doing. The whole enterprise is condemned. It's an interesting dichotomy between Habermas and Heidegger, which I think theologians should look at a little bit. There must be some truth in both. On the one hand, the Habermassian attempt to continue the Western intellectual enterprise, and on the other hand, Heidegger saying, no, no, stop that; move out of it; changeyour stance; go to the clearing, the lichtung, and wait there to listen, to heed the call of being. That's what Heidegger is saying. Now our question is, can we do that? Can we get away from all our science and technology and political economy and find a spirituality which stands in the clearing and simply listens in meditation? Well,Zen Buddhism would suggest that, but I think at the moment, my own conviction is that I'm hit by Heidegger's critique, but I can't follow the way he wants me to follow. I want to follow the way Habermas follows, but I see umpteen problems in that too. But theology must deal with this; theology must try to takethese discussions into account and not simply say, philosophy has nothing to do with theology; reflection has nothing to do with theology, that theology is simply revealed truth. That is mostly what I have to say. I would have said something more if I had more time, but I'll stop --
