Unfortuntately, due to my limited knowledge of Spanish, I couldn't get too far. I had never read anything by Ignacio Ellacuría mostly, perhaps, because very little of what he's written has been translated into English and I don't generally try to read complex texts in a second language. It's a shame that there aren't a lot of good translations of his work in English, readily available as there are for such writers as Hans Kung and Karl Rahner because the little I've seen in the past day, his work is very much worth reading.
I do have to wonder what the role of him coming from a small, impoverished country plays in the wider obscurity of Ellacuría, clearly a major intellectual that the richest English speaking country could find the trouble to help kill but who is not translated into the language. I have to wonder what other thinkers from small, often poor countries have said that is generally unknown due to them never being translated into English. English speakers don't deserve the power that they're given to determine such things.**
That deficiency in translation also effects the wider knowledge of Xavier Zubrini, of whom I was totally unaware but who looks to me, on one day of looking at this beginner's introduction to his thinking, to be an extremely important philosopher whose work is little known to English speakers. The introduction, alone, shows why it is a shame his thinking isn't available in English.* Here are two excerpts to show why it makes me wish I knew more about it and Ellacuría's theology that was so influenced by his thinking.
Zubiri long pondered the great philosophical questions, and as befits serious philosopher, he did not adopt a "motto"; but had he done so, it would undoubtedly have been his friend Einstein's keen observation: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them". Zubiri believes that previous philosophers have gone astray because they started to construct elaborate theories about human understanding, things of the world, and so forth, without first looking very hard at and trying to describe and understand the most basic aspects of human experience. This has led to bizarre theories which even their creators admit they do not believe. Start at the beginning, Zubiri says, and you will see that human understanding is divided into three modes or phases. These three modes or phases unfold logically if not chronologically as follows:
- Primordial apprehension of reality (or basic, direct installation in reality, giving us pure and simple reality). This is what one gets first, and is the basis on which all subsequent understanding is based. Perhaps it can be most easily understood if one thinks of a baby, which has only this apprehension: the baby perceives the real world around it, but as a congeries of sounds, colors, etc., which are real, but as yet undifferentiated into chairs, walls, spoken words, etc.
- Logos (explanation of what something is vis à vis other things, or as Zubiri expresses it, what the real of primordial apprehension is in reality). This is the second step: differentiate things, give them names, and understand them in relation to each other. As a baby gets older, this is what he does: he learns to make out things in his environment, and he learns what their names are, eventually learning to speak and communicate with others verbally.
- Reason (or ratio, methodological explanation of what things are and why they are, as is done in science, for example). This is the highest level of understanding; it encompasses all of our ways of understanding our environment. One naturally thinks of science, of course; but long before science as we know it existed, people sought explanations of things. And they found them in myths, legends, plays, poetry, art, and music-which are indeed examples of reason in the most general sense: they all seek to tell us something about reality. Later, of course, came philosophy and science; but no single way of access to reality, in this sense, is exhaustive; all have a role.
The third level of intellection, ratio or reason-with the broad acceptation of explanation-encompasses far more than what is usually associated with this word in English-speaking countries, viz. discursive knowledge. In particular, knowledge is not just science and mathematics (important though they are); there are other modes of knowledge, for example poetic knowledge and religious knowledge, which fall under the scope of reason as Zubiri understands it. Correlatively, there are realities which are not things in the sense of objects of science; for example, there is the reality of the person. In Zubiri's words, reason is "measurant intellection of the real in depth", which means that reason seeks to know the real in a very probing, insightful way. There are three moments of reason to be distinguished: (1) intellection in depth, e.g., electromagnetic theory is intellection in depth of color; a poem or song may be intellection in depth of someone's emotions; and a great painting can be intellection in depth of a religious doctrine or of the beauty of nature. (2) Its character as measuring, in the most general sense, akin to the notion of measure in advanced mathematics. This may be, but is not necessarily quantitative; certainly a play can "take the measure of" a person or experience. (3) Reason as intellectus quaerens-which means that reason, with its dynamic, directional, and provisional structure, is only able to conquer things in a provisional manner. But provisional in the sense that our intellection cannot conquer all of reality, or all of any given thing; reality is too rich for our finite minds. 'Provisional' does not imply skepticism; it only means that we go on seeking the fullness of truth about reality which we shall never obtain, but of which pieces are delivered to us by science, art, music, literature, architecture, and all of the "higher" forms of knowledge.
The text goes on from there,
Zubiri's insight is that while human intelligence is not fundamentally flawed, and therefore is capable of truth, it is fundamentally limited, in ways not realized prior to this century because the pretensions of what he terms 'rational knowledge' were not recognized. In general, 'rational knowledge' was identified with some combination of philosophy and science, often combined with some form of reductionism (e.g., all experience and all of reality can be explained by science). Always there was the belief that somehow everything is capable of rational explanation. In no case was this ambitious program ever carried out, and in general it was only sketched as a project; but the belief was propagated with religious ferver. Alas, the bottom fell out in the 20th century, when even science was forced to come to grips with fundamental uncertainties. In Zubiri's view, far from this being a catastrophe, it was most liberating to the human mind, because it freed us from slavish adherence to excessively rational explanations that are inadequate to capture all of human experience, and at the same time opened other areas of knowledge as capable of delivering reality to us as well: history, literature, theology, art, and so forth. Correlatively, there are realities which are not things in the sense of objects of science; for example, there is the reality of the person. These multiple ways of understanding reality reflect its ultimate "openness", as opposed to the view held in previous philosophies which implied that reality is "closed" and hence fully capturable, usually by science.
That would indicate that he, more than many English language philosophers was keenly aware of the problems physicists were running up against, the limits of what is knowable through the powerful but limited practices of human reason. The consequences of that general ignorance and denial of the consequences of those limits have infected more than just philosophy and the philosophy of physical science, they've had catastrophic consequences in history as allegedly "scientific" political ideologies have made it perfectly acceptable to people to accept the murders of scores of millions of people as essential to the progress towards a more scientific future.***
I think there is a temptation to think that the triumph of science, as in scientistic, materialistic modernism is due to the intellectual and philosophical success of scientific method when I think it is based on its ability to produce things that magnify human power which is generally, then, unwisely and disastrously implemented and gets the environment destroyed and lots of people killed. Science was adopted largely for what it could get us, not out of some great devotion to reason and evidence and all of those other things claimed for it. That Einstein quote might be worth considering because we are doing it now just as certainly as it did in Einstein's time and all others.
"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them".
* It is worth considering how much better it would be to have a democratic, easily learned and mastered lingua franca, to play for modern democratic culture the same role that Latin played in medieval and late medieval times. The texts could be competently translated or even written into the language and so accessible to anyone who had bothered to learn to read it - which would require a fraction of the time it takes to learn to read even a relatively easy second language. I studied Spanish for years and can read it with some ease but no where near the level I'd need to read these kinds of texts. I studied Esperanto for six months before I reached the same level of reading fluency and a far better ability to speak it. Just thought I'd mention that since "Esperanto" was so recently in the news due to Trump's bizarre tweet. As a samideano, just thought I'd get that in.
** In the National Catholic Reporter article, above, it notes that the major theologian Jon Sobrino was at a conference in Thailand at the time of the murders - he would certainly have been a seventh theologian murdered by the El Salvador army if he hadn't been there IN THAILAND BECAUSE HE COULD SPEAK ENGLISH, instead of Leo Boff who couldn't.
*** Consider this paragraph from this recent New Yorker review of a new translation of Koestler's Darkness At Noon.
By the late nineteen-thirties, Western intellectuals who sympathized with Communism had already proved themselves capable of accepting a great deal of killing in the name of the cause. Such “fellow-travellers” usually justified Stalinism’s crimes as the necessary price of building a socialist future, and of defending it against a hostile capitalist world. Walter Duranty, the Times’ correspondent in Moscow, excused the three million famine deaths that were caused by the push to collectivize Soviet agriculture, writing that, “to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Just think about the concept behind that breezy high-journalistic dismissal of the murders of millions of people BY STARVATION, how totally fucked up it is considering the only purpose of agriculture IS TO FEED PEOPLE, TO KEEP THEM FROM DYING OF STARVATION but in the "scientific" modernistic thinking of people, making agriculture fit into their scheme of the real, right way to be all sciency, it was perfectly OK to do things that lead to the starvation deaths of millions because agriculture refused to be corseted into their science. And it was so AOK with the right-thinking of modern culture, which deifies science, that journalists, academics, "public intellectuals" could spout their approval from the writing chairs and other venues of thought dispersal over and over again. THE ASSHOLE WAS GIVEN A PULITZER PRIZE EXACTLY FOR THE REPORTING HE DID THAT INCLUDED THAT! The same kind of approval was given by good, right, thinking intellectuals and writers to Mao during the "great leap forward" and it is continually given by the right to fascist systems which regularly starve people and deprive them of subsistance through the similar logics of would-be scientific economics of completing sects.
I don't think it's likely to be a mere coincidence that Ignacio Ellacuría was murdered for being a theologian opposed to the instrumental thinking of both sides of such scientific thking and suspect his reading of Zubrini had a major part in being able to break out of a vicious dialectic that virtually every English speaking writer on politics and economics has been stuck in my entire life.
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