Better living through a stronger vocabulary; Freedom in the Gap

Once a month, I get together with about four other people at the local Catholic book store for a Communio circle. The purpose is to read an discuss an article in Communio: International Catholic Review. Communio's mission statement is as follows:

Communio was founded in 1972 by a group of theologians that includes Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and Joseph Ratzinger. It stands for the renewal of theology in continuity with the living Christian tradition, and continuing dialogue of all believers, past, and present.
Communio regularly carries articles on philosophy, the arts, and the relation between Catholicism and American culture. In a regular feature which we call "Retrieving the Tradition" we reprint Catholic classics of our time by Bernanos, Blondel, Chesterton, Claudel, Dawson, Day, Gilson, Guardini, Pieper, and many others.

Communio is just chock-a-block full of incomprehensible theological/philosphical articles that elude understanding. Often the article seem to be extended inside argument between theologians that lesser mortals aren't privy to. The trick is to wade your way to the end of the article to find out the real point of the article, and then to go back and see how the meandering skein of thought got you to the conclusion.

And, of course, there is the thick, impenetrable writing style of which this is an example from Roger Duncan's "Emmanuel Levinas in the Light of Fides et Ratio"

Husserl had explored consciousness as the intentional constituting correlate of an objective and invariable structure of meanings, only to keep coming up against a surd of non-intentional consciousness prior to and controlling intentionality, relativizing its clarity.

Put aside the fact that "intentionality" has an undefined technical meaning which is not the same as "intentional." What the heck is a "surd?" The speculation last night was that it shared a cognate root with "absurd." Of course, since we were meeting in a Catholic bookstore, there were no dictionaries available.

The answer from a quick google search is:

"surd:"
A quantity that cannot be expressed as a rational number. It consists of the root of an arithmetic member (e.g. [sqroot]3), which cannot be exactly determined, or the sum or difference of such roots.

"Surd" - use it in conversation today.

[Parenthetically, Duncan's point is identical to the passage I read this morning in John R. Searles "Rationality in Action:" Rationality in Action is concerned with the issue of choice. Searles' argument is that there is always a "gap" between human actions and the causes or reasons for the actions, which gap is a function of "free will." Searles makes the point on page 74 that "The intelligibility of our operation in the gap requires an irreducible notion of the self." Now, if you have read Fides et Ratio, you will recall that John Paul II's principle concern was restoring a philosphy of "being." Wander over to Joshua Claybourn's Domain and you will see an interesting series of comments on the issue of atheism and ethics. Several posts by atheists claim that all human action is determined mechanistically, which is the issue that both Fides et Ratio and Searles contradict. Interesting, it may all go back to a "surd" of "non-intentional consciousness prior to and controlling intentionality" if you get my meaning.]