Understanding and Being Discussion 5:1

CD/mp3 157, first part of fifth discussion session at Halifax lectures on Insight. Corresponds to CWL 5: 370-80. Sponsored by Jeanne Belair, in the name of Fr. Jack Belair. Questions treated the relation of the pure desire to charity, Kant on the primacy of practical reason, archetypes, insight and ethics, suffering, and love and ethics. In general, one can have self-appropriation in the moral field and not in cognitional theory and metaphysics, as in Kant. Just as the structure of knowing is isomorphic with the structure of being, so self-appropriation contains a deontological element, what ought to be. There is a structure of doing that prolongs the structure of knowing. The three levels are relevant to ethics: the particular good, the good of order, and value. The good of order is the object of an insight. The level of value responds to the question of the value of the order we have. God thought it better to permit evil rather than to create a world in which no evil exists. Jesus chose suffering and death, the results of sin. The objective surd involved by sin is stopped, absorbed only insofar as there is suffering. Insofar as in humility and simplicity we accept things as they are, we can advance to a knowledge of God and intimacy with God that convince us that God's wisdom and goodness are surpassing wisdom and goodness.

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Audio restoration by Greg Lauzon