Why I Am Interested in Maurice Blondel - Philosophical Development and Commitments

in this video I'm going to talk about one of my favorite philosophers of all time somebody who is not all that well-known but who I think deserves to be much better known this very systematic comprehensive and deeply incisive philosopher whose name is Maurice Blondell this is one of his major early works accion 1893 and it was actually his dissertation one of his two dissertations back at that time you know - right - for for the French philosophical establishment he and I actually wrote my dissertation on race blown now I can't rightly say that I've had a blown DeLeon phase the way I could talk about a start trim phase or an itching phase or Hegelian phase or things like that in part because blown Dowell is still absolutely central in my my thinking he's one of the interlocutors who I retain the engaged like Aristotle or Plato our Epictetus really also Hegel people who I'm going to be thinking through probably the rest of my my life and career is a philosopher and so I want to tell you a little bit about who this guy was and you know some of his story and his influence and importance and I'll tell you a little bit about his philosophy as well just very you know thumbnail sketch stuff because it's it's quite complex and and very you know difficult to try to encapsulate in a few moments but I won't start out talking about how I got into blown del in the first place because it was very fortuitous or you know depending on how you want to look at it you might say providential so when I was in graduate school I've done a video about the languages that I acquired and used for my research Greek Latin German and French and one of the ways that you could actually pass a language requirement at SIU was at least for philosophy was to translate a work from the original language and then you wouldn't have to take coursework or stuff like that I was actually taking graduate level courses in French just just for kicks just you know literature classes not in philosophy or anything like that so I thought well you know I've got a good facility with French I'll translate something and the guy who did French philosophy there was Garth Gillen who eventually became my mentor and dissertation adviser and a good friend of mine and I can tell you much more about about my interactions with him and in another video but this actually did have to do with some important interactions so Garth had taught a class on Adorno then I took my second semester at SIU and I really enjoyed it I enjoy it a toreador knows works they're very complex very difficult to read they're very demanding and he's critical of everything and anything but it's he's also a great stylist so it's very interesting to read him and Garth was also very much into Holocaust Studies as a matter of fact he has a book called after Auschwitz reason the true the good I think it's after Auschwitz the rising from the ruins that's what it is reason reason true and the good after after Auschwitz and so I knew that and I thought well I'll do something having to do with the Holocaust of d'Or know so I went to the library and I think I just dug around in the Revue de metaphase he hated morality or some other French journals and I found something recent some piece a Holocaust and Adorno in French and so I thought perfect I'll translate this you'll like that and then he'll sign off on it and and all that so he was passing outside the hallway and I was sitting in my office with my feet up on my desk and I saw him say hey hey I've got something for you I've got it I've got a piece I'm gonna translate from my French apartment he said well what is it so he handed it to him he's a tall no this their this stuff is a dime a dozen if you're going to translate something translate something that actually needs to be translated and so you know his idea was and this is quite true look there's a ton of material out there that really deserves to be translated into English and nobody's done it and nobody's probably going to do it unless somebody comes along and happens to find an interest in that and say yeah I'll do this so I said well who-who should I translate them and he thought for a minute they said Maurice blown down and I said well I've never heard of him so he's a French Catholic thinker early 20th century influenced merleau-ponty gars was a variant Merrill Ponte and phenomenology and the interesting thing about this was that garthe he spoke as if he thought about this real long time but actually he was speaking really spur the moment he had just happened to read a reference to Rome he hadn't actually read blown nel for years and years and years and the only book of blown bells that he had read at that point it was was accion 1893 blown doll had sort of a currency in certain Catholic circles up until right about maybe the 70s and then he sort of fell outta sight in large part anyway garthe was Darth had read a little bit about him and garthe adrenaline stew him that very day and so garthe yeah that most of blown down stuff hasn't been translated you should translate some of that so what should I translate I don't know find something and translated so I went to the library and thankfully at SIU in an amazing research library particularly when I compare it to other research libraries that I had been to you know some top-notch schools that don't have all the holdings in certain things and they had then all these works by blown down and at that time the they had begun republishing blown Del's really works so I said well I'll start with some of the earliest stuff and so I got the volume from the president of Air cetera to France and blown Nels early works and just started translating and the what ended up happening was I translated wow this happened to me twice it's like translated a good portion of what ends up being this word now this isn't my translation this is a translation that's been out for a long time by Drew and Trethowan and it's part of the resource of all series a great great series by by eerdmans and it's got two works and at the letter around apologetics and history and dogma I'll talk about those in just just a few minutes when I talk about balloon Dells thought so luckily before I had gone too far into it I found the that somebody had already translated it so and and I was just sort of I was working my way through Blondell I was kind of learning as I was translating and I was fascinated by his thought because it was just it was just amazing stuff but it was very complex his writing is rather turgid and and you know it's this vast systematic discussion of things so it is rather difficult to render well I mean it's not even great French quite honestly there was a critic and I forgot who it was that said that Blondell actually needed to be translated into French and the guy wrote French in the first place so you know that that's you know that's a sign so then I settled on on translating another piece called the idealist illusion and I worked up a translation of that and I was going to you know I had a first draft and I was gonna see if there was anything about it and then fiak were long brought out the idealist illusion and other essays and luckily I happened to find out about it because I would have really embarrassed myself trying to send this off to a publisher would have said well you know there's already a translation up there so it was a good way to get to know blown-down them I loved translating in part because you have to give voice to another author instead of trying to say your own thing or articulate your own thoughts you've already got somebody who's pretty brilliant and at least what you're doing you know philosophical translation and they're saying something that's worth talking about and you've got to you've got to work your way into it and figure out how to express this not just to students that's what teaching is about but to speakers of another language and so it really makes you learn their works anyway long story short I became more and more interested in blown-down at that time I was considering by the time that I was doing all of this work I was considering writing my dissertation first under edad I was talked out of that by Stephen Timon thank God who said you should write on somebody a perennial philosophical Court so now I'll do some talk about my Didion phase that I went through another time and then I shifted to Hegel and I thought yeah I'm gonna write on Hegel I'm gonna work on him he's he's certainly somebody who's doing me something that that's going to stand the test of time thoughts worth worth definitely worth thinking out making your own and figuring out how they apply to your own life and practice and all that now long Dell was called the French Hegel or the Catholic Hegel for good reason his work is it has two things in common well three though three things in common with with Hegel action for the fourth is that he started to read and you almost need a concordance sometimes to make your way through some of the stuff until you've learned that the past Blondell is a systematic thinker so this book you know accion 1883 it's you know it's a it's called an essay on a critique of life and a science of practice and it's it's organized into all these chapters and he analyzes action the concept the phenomenon the reality of action its constituents what it requires what it points us towards moving from the simplest things all the way up to politics religion culture history all those sorts of things so that sounds an awful lot like Hegel - doesn't Blondell was also a dialectical philosopher similar to Hegel in fact I would say is actually more dialectical than than than Hegel he's taken the dialectic further than than Hegel did Hegel wasn't dialectic enough that's a common complaint made about Hegel by his his ears like you know somebody like Marx you know materialist blown Dallas tearing it in a very different way and so those are two main ways in which he's like Hegel there's also the the difficulty of reading his writing the other the other thing is that blown nel ultimately is steering you towards some sort of final place in which philosophy is going to fully realize itself and he understood this as something that is gonna draw on the resources of philosophy develop you know from antiquity on but which came to a particularly crisis moment in this period that we call modernity so blown dealt thought that modern thought modern ways of living modern culture presents us with radically new challenges and this is very similar to Hegel it's also similar to somebody like like Nietzsche or Heidegger and by the way Heidegger actually thought very highly of blown down and sent Ernesto Grassi one of his students actually one time to convey those those sentiments to him so I was very attracted to just the breadth and the scope of blow and Ellis thought he was a philosopher for philosophers who analyzed everybody else's philosophy and tried to try to show you tried to push it as far as it could go and show where it revealed itself to be inadequate and requiring something beyond it and he did the all of this through what we could call the metaphysics of charity and I don't mean charity in the sense of like doling out you know money to people I mean charity in the Christian conception of love I got paid which is with Caritas is a translation of you have to if you're going to be a good philosopher in one Dells view you have to be able to love even the people that you disagree with and the comportment that's required for a thinker is to treat everybody with you know utmost fairness and see whether there really is anything to their their point of view their doctrine their their system there are criticisms of other people and push them as far as they can go even push them beyond where they are comfortable with being it's kind of Augustinian love in that case and then see what else has to be added to picture to fill it in blown del understood philosophy and religion as necessarily coming into crisis and conflict in modernity because both of them and this is where his understanding of philosophy is very different than that of contemporary continental or contemporary analytic philosophy because philosophy is and has been and ought to be something that tries to describe everything it tries to bring everything within its purview it tries to describe integral reality so does religion philosophy makes absolute claims religion makes absolute claims are they necessarily going to conflict or can they interviews with each other in fact do they need to interviews with each other in order for the philosophy to be realized in order for and in this case Christianity be due to be realized that's the argument that that Blondell makes in Locke's show and also in history of dogma and the letter on apologetics and a number of his his other works so I found this this point of view very compelling and then you know I started studying more and more about people writing about blown-down and more and more of glendale's works themselves and the more that I studied you know reading this stuff in the French and you know some of the secondary literature in German and some of it I can puzzle out and Italian at least the sections I needed to I just got drawn in more and more and more people talk about blown Dells work as being cycloidal as you know working around these center points and drawing you in further further further and that that really isn't and blone del talks about the will he talks about desire he talks about community he talks about all these themes that I was particularly interested in at the time you know the relation between faith and reason and he staked out a position that was that was radically new and yet in continuity with with past thinkers it's interesting this is a side note I'll come back to my main discussion in a moment it's interesting that in Catholic circles blown devil is almost unknown outside of Catholic circles that wasn't the case prior to World War two he was a major force in French philosophy he influenced along with their song phenomenology mock Schaller invited him to to be part of the constant he in at blundell you know turned him down Heidegger like I pointed out knew who the guy was that one of his his students to you know talk to him William James you know interacted with blown-down he was one of the big heavy hitters of early of late 19th century and early 20th century French philosophy at least as important as on Revere's own or or any of the other people that you could compare him to at the time in Catholic circles Blondell became embroiled in what was called the modernist controversy and this was something that really got its per from a document called the path Shandy and then the lament ability from Pope Pius the tenth which to find this this heresy of modernism which was you know connected with with contemporary philosophy and theological studies and biblical studies and all these sorts of things and there actually were modernists at the time because blown-down interacted with them and told them how they were wrong and in you know the letter on apologetics of history of dogma he's keen to sort of say well look the old way you can't just say we're going to regurgitate Thomas Aquinas and that'll solve everything we have to think things out in radically new ways at the same time this has to be in continuity with with the past and you can't just throw it away and say well it's it sort of all up for grabs or you know there were a lot of different things to I'm going to sort of skip through the story through it fairly quickly in any case there were a certain Thomas like Gary gula garage for example who admitted that he did not understand blown Dells work at all he said I've read it and I can't understand it who consistently attacked blown down as a modernist and so within Catholic circles and very you know conservative Catholic circles he's if you say you're a blown down person they think you're your heterodox the irony is is that those of us who are still around as blown down scholars tend to be on the more traditional you know even cancer fix side of things blown Nels thought led to Vatican two and through several different paths he influenced all of the nouvelle tlg people I got ready to luboc you know John Donoghue he also influenced the transcendental Thomas from from Irish all all the way to Ron ER and then later on Lonnegan he Simone called him the philosopher of Vatican two for good reason or maybe it was King Savior right and maybe mixing those two up in any case I had come back to the the church because of the intellectual tradition that I found there and this was at the same time that you know John Paul the second is coming out with fetus a trot CEO and talking about all these these great things a lot of powerful movement of thought going on at the time and so blown doll had been you know thinking about these issues a hundred years before that and so I I you know I latched onto this and I saw this as being really really central I would like to also make one other digression point out a book that I think is particularly worth getting your hands on if you want to know anything about Maurice blown-down it's by the guy who actually translated this he was the second translator of Axio 1993 the first translation was not very good all of a blast shot at BA at Boston College has taught blown down for decades I almost said centuries and decades and he's actually still still doing quite well I met him at a conference recently and I was a little star-struck because this is a guy who I corresponded with you know back when I first started studying blowing down he is sort of like he's the grandfather of blown doll studies here in the United States in any case he recently came out with a book that I actually reviewed in a journal Maurice bloom della philosophical life if you want to know about the guy and you want to see the context of loaned Allen his time this is this is a book that's you you just have to have there's a few other great blown delve books that I could bring up as well but I'm gonna I'm gonna skip over that for the time being so I wrote my dissertation on blown down and that ended up taking me about three years to research and write and I really enjoyed it I think I overreached quite a bit I tried to analyze three major conceptions in blown Dells thoughts and each one of them probably would have would reach one of them probably merits its own book and then I tried to tie it in also with this you know massive discussion of Catholic intellectual life and thought in in the 20th century beginning with the Posche nd ending with fetus Iran Co and it was very ambitious totally unpublishable but a great great exercise great time for me to work on on this and not only to read Blondell and meditate on his thought and try to work it through but also to see what other people were writing and talking about when it came to blown-down and I had a few conference papers some of which became Articles that came out of that period later on I would actually do something different with blown-down and that's that's where most of my work on him is bad in the last say six years and this ties in with the the Christian philosophy debates stuff that is the subject of my first book Blondell got involved in this debate in the 1930s about the Christian philosophy about the possibility the reality the nature of Christian philosophy people were using the term and some people said look that doesn't mean anything there's no such thing as Christian philosophy if it's Christian can't be philosophy if it's philosophy can't be Christian other people said you know whole variety of other positions some of Thomas's Christian philosophy but you know providing you just rigidly distinguish the theology from the philosophy of course nobody could agree on where the dividing lines were and I got very very complex drew in about about 50 or 60 different French intellectuals some of them secular what we would now call secularists many of them Catholic quite a few of them actually reformed Protestant and then it spurred a later French reformed Protestant debate in the 1940s and 50s and it's it spilled over in other areas and it comes up now and again in different spots in any case this this colleague of mine Adrian paps sent me some documents that blonde Ellen written in the debates and said why don't why don't you translate this stuff and I thought well you know I wanted to translate blown-down for quite a while and I actually have a draft of his his 1927 work path through a team on EJ just sitting there that I haven't done anything with for years I should polish it up and send it out and I began trying to translate one of his one of the books of his later metaphysical trilogy that is at being and beings which is the third the second book in that the third volume it's five volume three three book set and this was more manageable this was like smaller articles and I thought yeah okay I could I could do that and so I started researching it and as it turned out in in English language literature the debates had been you know the debates are like this big and they saw like this little bit event not when they were going on and when they were going out and they saw this much but over time they got shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and so after a while the people that are you know in the Catholic circles talking about this well it's just a debate between Jocelyn Mara Tom Brady maybe none Steenburgen no I included blown-down was another another major thing Gabrielle Marcel continents their tianj and all these other thinkers in French Catholic Catholic and Protestant intellectual life writing back and forth it even spilled into Germany into some Italian stuff some some Spanish stuff started you know spurred some discussion here in the States and in Canada and Bloedel was one of the central figures this was one of the major documents from the work still untranslated unfortunately maybe not maybe I'll translate it in the future if I if I get around to it find the time there was talk a while back of starting a blowing dial translation project I much rather be part of a blown Bell translation project then try to translate this stuff just all by myself because there's a whole bunch of reasons one is it's better to translate with other people because you know you go back and forth it's a lot more fun translating with other people it's a lot easier to get things done and it's easier to stand on point and not get lost in the forest when you're doing that well anyway he not only wrote this book he wrote a number of important articles and I translated four of those along with another eight other articles or pieces as the main body of my my first my first book which came out with Catholic University of America Press a few years back 2011 called the reason fulfilled by revelation the 1930s Christian philosophy debates in France and so I was trying to give blown Dells voice back I was trying to bring him back into the spotlight and show that he was just as central to the debate as people whose works have been translated like a schedule saw or Jacque more attend or a meal per year right here stuff has been translated mainly his history of philosophy and so I I got drawn into that aspect of Glendale in the last several years since that book has been published I had been spending more time going back to other other things in blown-down going back to the metaphysical trilogy going back to accion 1893 you know this first early work also going back to another thing that I really enjoyed this is called the Carnot and team these are his notebooks that he he journaled in as he was working out his dissertation as he was thinking about it and it was part of a spiritual practice for him it's it's really interesting to see his thought developing so I don't I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do with blowing down other than to think along with him I can tell you this that within the next year or two and there's a few other projects I want to get out of the way I am going to do a youtube series specifically on boxing on 1893 going through the entire book I think I will probably wait until I've done Hegel's phenomenology of spirit before I do that because I promise to do that but but blown delta's definitely deserves to be well known he's been extremely fruitful for my thought he's been somebody I've learned a lot from oftentimes things that changed me in the process for the better because I was able to recognize my own failings as a philosopher as a thinker and as a friend as a father as a boyfriend fiance husband blown doll has been somebody very good for for helping me think about what I want to do and and again his thought is so rich so complex it's it's easy to sort of get lost in it and just you know be struck with wha the way one often does with with Hegel as well so I could I could talk for hours about this but but I think I should draw this to a close at this point I'm sure that some of you will have questions or comments about this and welcome them and I'll try to respond to all of them

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 5,013

Rating: 4.8709679 out of 5

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Student, College, University, Sadler, Maurice Blondel, Blondelian, Action (1893), Christian Philosophy, Catholic Philosophy, Ethics, Moral, Morality, Religion, Christianity, Catholicism, Modernism, Debates

Id: A89jjds-24k

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2013