A Catholic Critic of Modernity

[djeter]

http://payingattentiontothesky.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/spaemann22.jpg

Robert Spaemann is a critic of modernity who comments on modernity both from a philosophical and from a Catholic point of view. He does so by way of what he calls ‘recollection’ (Erinnerung). (By this, he means a recollection of what modern reason is otherwise liable either to overlook and to forget or explicitly to dismiss.) In so doing, Spaemann belongs among the outstanding interpreters and critics of modernity and late modernity and their political, religious, and ethical implications in contemporary German philosophy.

I came to him by way of a reading on Benedict XVI’s interpretation of Modernity and found a doctoral thesis by Holger Zaborowski that introduces his philosophy of the person: Robert Spaemann’s Philosophy of the Human Person. Slow reading but learning a lot and what I have absorbed I strongly agree with.

I have a couple of reading selections up here:

payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/10/04/robert-spaemann%e2%80%99s-catholic-informed-criticism-of-modernity/

Hope you enjoy

dj

 

[Leela]

I wonder with such “critics of modernity” when exactly they think the “good old days” were. When was this pre-modern Golden Age that we need to try to get back to?

 

[manygift1spirit]

I wonder with such “critics of modernity” when exactly they think the “good old days” were. When was this pre-modern Golden Age that we need to try to get back to?

It is a mistake to read “good old days” with the emphasis on ‘days’, that is, purely chronologically. Rather with emphasis on ‘good’, where it characterizes the topic, i.e., philosophy.

A Golden Age in a particular topic (e.g., philosophy) might be quite the Leaden Age in another topic. But that would be a thread on the other topic. To overlook this distinction is to risk saying “but this was bad at the particular time that you are praising that, ergo that cannot be as good as you say”, which is an egregious but not uncommon mistake.

That said, it looks like this gentleman is not nighttime reading…

 

[djeter]

That said, it looks like this gentleman is not nighttime reading…

Not unless your nighttime reading echoes something of Wallace Stevens:

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens
The long rhythmic lines arranged in couplets and the frequent repetition create songlike quality that draws us into the poem. We settle into a moment of tranquility, a sense of perfect fulfillment. The work of a master.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

But back to Robert Spaemann… I came across a reference to him in a reading on Modernity and Pope Benedict XVI, saw that they were friends and had my curiosity tweaked. Part of my blog (which is an echo of my conversion) deals with the concept of personalism (which I am trying to absorb) and this is a topic to which Spaemann’s philosophy speaks – in fact is centered on.

It’s a fascinating topic for me because I think so much of the Church’s stands on abortion and gay marriage flow from an appreciation of the concept of person. I really think you have to understand the one to get to the others.

I’ve posted on the topic today, if you are interested in following up in a Stevens’ state of mind of course…

dj