Mendo Henriques

The History of Political Ideas by the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin is a monumental work of around 2,600 pages. It remained unpublished during his lifetime, and it came to light through the American edition and the now completed Portuguese edition. Being the author of the first world edition of an abridged version of the History of Political Ideas ; the translator of the first three volumes of the 2012-2018 Portuguese edition; and the author of The civil philosophy of Eric Voegelin I consider that the History of Political Ideas challenges the present climate of opinion: it subverts the dominant corrosive forces of moral relativism, intolerant neo-positivism, end-of-history obsessions, postmodernist deconstructions, agnosticism, nihilism, new age religions, and the all-pervasive ideology of money. Eric Voegelin achieves all this leading his readers from Antiquity to Modern Age. His monumental work begins with the “spiritual disintegration” of the Greek world, after the peak of Plato and Aristotle, a disintegration that ushered a long process of transition in the self-understanding of man in the Mediterranean world. The series goes through Middle Ages, R enaissance and Reformation as Voegelin analyzes the collapse of imperial Christianity, which led to the rise of autonomous reason and sectarian revolts that reached full development in later centuries. A new form of modern human consciousness replaced the Christian understanding of a divinely created closed cosmos. The collection ends - in a suspensive way - with “The Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man” focused on thinkers such as Comte, Bakunine and Marx; although they experienced true epiphanies, they become self-obsessed to the detriment of the world to which they refer. Such “Apocalypse of Man” must now be challenged, albeit with methodologies and hermeneutic principles other than those that Voegelin himself abandoned some decades ago.

In Insight, an essay on human understanding, Lonergan presents a heuristic model of emerging probability in order to define, explain and extract norms from the dynamism common to all nature, including human nature, a dynamism that mirrors the reality of intellection. Continuity between different levels of nature discloses a directed, upward, but indeterminate dynamism of the emerging generalized probability. In addition to the ethical consequences that he elaborates, Lonergan remains in an open hermeneutic framework, beyond being proportionate to discursive reason; he opens the way for a surprising final manifestation of this universal dynamism through what he calls transcendent conjugated forms of generalized probability emerging – faith, hope and charity – that are proposed to human freedom.

Rosenzweig’s outstanding work culminates in the issue of recognition of God. God is a being who we vainly try to reduce to an object, and whose manifestation goes along a hidden face. The divine being calls the human being, among the nothings of nature and the culture of nihilism, overcoming the totalities of power and history. This will be an important path for Rosenzweig’s new dialogical philosophy, opening the way for the voices of Lévinas, Buber, Fromm, Strauss, Benjamin and Scholem, and developing the hermeneutic categories of relation, narrative, temporality and redemption.

A obra principal de Bernard Lonergan Inteligência: Um ensaio sobre o conhecimento humano, é um tratado que leva a cabo uma integração segundo o método transcendental dos conhecimentos heterogéneos da ciência, da filosofia, do senso comum e da teologia. A obra visa a auto-apropriação da nossa auto-consciência intelectual e racional com base na experiência consciente dos actos de intelecção. Começa como teoria cognitiva, expande-se para uma metafísica e uma ética, e avança para uma concepção e uma afirmação de Deus, para ser finalmente confrontada com o problema do mal que exige a transformação da inteligência auto-confiante no intellectus quaerens fidem. Ao cumprir estes objectivos, Inteligência tornou-se uma das mais importantes obras de filosofia do século XX, aqui sucintamente elucidada em cinco das suas principais vertentes: a relação entre conhecimento e realidade, conhecimento científico e cosmologia, a acção humana e a ética, as questões de interpretação, a relação entre natureza de Deus e filosofia. O artigo conclui com uma avaliação da cosmopolis lonerganiana, ou seja, o poder da comunidade de espírito na sociedade. /// Bernard Lonergan s opus magnum, Insight: A Study of human understanding, handles the heterogeneous fields of knowledge as given in science, philosophy, common sense and theology according to a transcendental method. The work aims at the self-appropriation of human intellectual and rational self-conscience as based in the conscious experience of insight. Lonergan s work starts as a cognitive theory, and advances, through metaphysics and ethics, to a conception and affirmation of God, one that is confronted with the problem of evil and therefore requires a transformation of self-confident intelligence into the intellectus quaerens fidem. Handling these goals, Insight became one of the most important works of philosophy in the 20 th century. The present article deals with five of the main issues in Lonergan s work: the relation between knowledge and reality, scientific knowledge and cosmology, human action and ethics, the problem of interpretation, as well as the problem of the relation between the nature of God and philosophy. The article ends with an assessment of the lonerganian notion of cosmopolis, a notion that represents the power of the community of the spirit in society.