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Life Arts    H3'ed 8/18/24

David Brooks on Emotions and Decision Making (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Thomas Farrell
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David Brooks at the Miller Center Forum
David Brooks at the Miller Center Forum
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 17, 2024: In my recent OEN article "Barton T. Geger, S.J., and 'Jesuitmania'" (dated August 13, 2024), I discussed the work of the American Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong (1912-2003), the work of the Spanish Renaissance mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), and the American Jesuit theologian Barton T. Geger's new 2024 critical edition of The Constitution of the Society of Jesus (Institute of Jesuit Sources):

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In it, I call attention to three of Ong's publications about St. Ignatius Loyola. One of them was Ong's article titled "'A.M.D.G.': Dedication or Directive?" in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Review of Religious, volume 11, number 5 (September 15, 1952): pp. 34-51.

The acronym A.M.D.G. stands for the Latin Ad majorem Dei gloriam ("For the greater glory of God"). Ong answers the question that he posed in the article's title by arguing that St. Ignatius Loyola meant for Jesuits to use the standard "For the greater glory of God" as a touchstone for their decision making, not as a motto to be inscribed on papers and elsewhere as a dedication.

Ong's 1952 article is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1995, pp. 1-8).

Ong revisited Ad majorem Dei gloriam in his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, pp. 78-81 and 87), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.

In the "Index of Topics" in Geger's new 2024 critical edition of The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (pp. 577-621), there is no entry on decision making - nor one of dedication. However, there are entries on Greater Glory of God (p. 596), Discernment (p. 589), Discretion (p. 589), Judgment (p. 599), and Prudence (p. 610).

Now, the self-styled conservative columnist David Brook recently published a column titled "You're Only as Smart as Your Emotions" (dated August 15, 2024) in the New York Times:

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In it, Brooks celebrates what he refers to as "the revolution in our understanding of emotion" in modern neuroscience in the last half century. According to Brooks, "For thousands of years, it was common in Western thought to imagine that there was an eternal war between reason and our emotions."

Even though Brooks does not happen to refer specifically to Plato, Plato did bestow on our Western philosophical tradition of thought the famous imagery of reason as the charioteer directing the chariot/body being drawn by two strong and unruly and competing horses - representing the two components in the human psyche known as the desiring part of the human psyche, on the one hand, and, on the other, as the thumos or thymos part of the human psyche. The Greek term that we transliterate as thumos/ thymos is usually translated as the spirited part of the human psyche.

The psychodynamic of the spirited part of the human psyche is the topic of Ong's 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Contest (Cornell University Press), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.

Over the years, I have collected books that are related, to one degree or another, to Ong's thesis about agonistic structures in his 1981 book - far too many to list all of them here. Suffice it to say that both Barbara Koziak's book Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos , Aristotle, and Gender (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) and John Coates' book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust (Penguin Press, 2012) are related to Ong's thesis about agonistic structures in his 1981 book.

As for the rational part of the human psyche, represented by the charioteer in Plato's famous imagery, the formal study of logic in the history of Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle in ancient times down to the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and beyond is the subject of Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press).

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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