Theological Journal – June 2 Gunton Tuesday: The One, the Three, and the Many

Ch.1 From Heraclitus to Havel. The problem of the one and the many in modern life and thought

                1 The idea of modernity

There is both continuity and diversity between ancients and moderns (contra the claims of some postmoderns that humanity today is something new and different than other eras.

Task: “I shall look at the world which we all share, believer and unbeliever alike, through a focus provided by the doctrine of the God made known in Christ and the Spirit, and in a process of identification and elucidation shall hope to illumine where we stand now, so laying the basis for an approach to a Christian theology appropriate to the time.”

-In other words, Gunton proposes to use a trinitarian view of God to forge a contextually relevant view of today’s world.

the complexity of the modern world is obscured by the ideology of modernity. For us to truly see our world is therefore “doubly” complex.

-“modernity promised us a culture of unintimidated, curious, rational, self-reliant individuals, and it produced ... a herd society, a race of anxious, timid, conformist 'sheep’, and a culture of utter banality.” Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),

Ch.2 MODERNITY AS DISENGAGEMENT

Thesis presented in its themes:

First thesis: displacement treating the other as external, as objects, key word: instrumental/technocratic attitude: world is there to do with what we want.

                -this attitude not new

-issue: is there a larger order in which our world and lives are rooted; if not, we shall not understand ourselves. Plato’s great contribution is to understand this; otherwise we end up with “scientism” (that is, we can fully understand ourselves with the closed world of quantitative scientific reasoning)

-Plato is concerned for “salvation,” a right human life, human living in an order given by cosmology (a world bigger than ourselves from we derive identity, meaning, and purpose)

-displacement or disengagement happens against the god of Christendom

Second main theme

                -recurrent, universal theme in Western civilization (Heraclitus v. Parmenides)

-“Heraclitus is the philosopher of plurality and motion: the many are prior to the one, and in such a way that there is to be found in nature no stability.

-Parmenides represents the opposite pole of thought. For him, the real is the totally unchanging, for so reason teaches, contradicting the appearances presented to the senses. Reality is timelessly and uniformly what it is, so that Parmenides is the philosopher of the One par excellence. The many do not really exist, except it be as functions of the One.”

Why is this important?

-Two reasons: (1) the question of unity and plurality of the cosmos; and (2) should human society be a unity or plurality

-the relation (or lack thereof) of these two questions is key: ancients agreed there was such a relation (society ought to be ordered on the pattern of the cosmos); moderns do not think so as much