Progressive and Conservative by Herman H. Berger, and: The Idea of Dialogal Phenomenology by Stephan Strasse (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ~45 ethical system as something analogous to the " exception-making criterion " so brilliantly analyzed by Paul Ramsey. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. WILLIAM E. MAY Progressive and Conservative. By HERMAN H. BERGER. Translated from Dutch text by Henry J. Koren. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1971. Pp. 191. $7.95. The Idea of Dialogal Phenomenology. By STEPHAN STRASSE. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Pp. 136. $5.95. This book is a Progressive's attempt to analyze the intellectual polarization in the Catholic Church. The author makes no attempt to claim neutrality in the conflict. He states at the outset that his inquiry is written from the perspective of one who has already opted for Progressivism . The crisis that is occurring in Catholic Theology today is the result of a prior crisis in philosophy which Catholic Theology is finally catching up to. The Philosophical Crisis was marked by the Marxian overcoming of the Greek and Medieaval belief that there are eternal speculative truths to be discovered and contemplated, etc. The contemplative life, however, is the opiate of the philosopher which prevents the philosopher from coming into his " authentic " role as creator of truth. The authentic philosopher is one who recognizes that all of the achievements of the past are present in him because they play a role in his environment, and he proceeds to give them a new context and meaning that they could only have as a result of the individual philosopher's unique lived history. Thus, "Truth has as many forms as there are human beings and why uniform truth is just as objectionable as standardized humanity." (p. 32) Man, in a way resembling the thought of Merleau Ponty, must be understood as a self project and project of the world. In this way the individual displays a victory over the species because he recognizes that his " individual history" becomes a "place" where truth comes to pass that cannot be brought to light by anyone else. According to the author, the Conservative Man, who is reducible to the fundamentalist man, lives in a fictitious world where there are eternal truths and common natures to be discovered. The Conservative Man deludes himself into the belief that there are first principles that can be the basis for concluding that there is a " true " way for man to relate himself to 246 BOOK REVIEWS God and other men, a common basis for moral reasoning, etc. The myth here is the false belief that man can ever overcome the state of living in the realm of the problematic, that is, that man can attain to a resolution of a philosophical or religious question. The author hints that this false belief must be the result of some kind of psychological defect which he fails to identify. The Conservative position in opposition to the Progressive position results of necessity in the self-negation of the individual in his truthfulness in favor of the truth of the species which can never be authentic. The author proceeds in his own fashion to demonstrate the impossibility of maintaining the Conservative position by reducing it to the absurd. His argument rests on the model of "man as an original reader." The question is whether one can attain to a true understanding of a text. The author contends that there cannot be a true or universal understanding of a text because each man brings his own original historical situation to the reading of the text. The unavoidable intermingling of the text and the reader's situation always results in a unique interpretation and understanding of the text. Further, in this interpretative act, there is always more truth attained to than is contained in the text itself. Thus there are as many truthful interpretations as there are original readers, and there are as many original readers as there are Progressive men. Truth by its very nature is " pluriform." In this way ·the reader becomes a place where truth comes to be which cannot come to be anywhere else. Only in this way can the text of an ancient origin become contemporary. The Progressive Man is distinguished from the " rebel " in that the rebel will not admit the...