Stichwort: Authentizität

Autor, Quelle: Lawrence, The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: Nietzsche - Lonergan

Index: Objektivität als Frucht der Subjektivität; authentisches Subjekt im Maße -> reines Streben nach Wissen und Sein in affektiver Einheit mit dem transzendenten Sein

Kurzinhalt: In the Nietzschean ethos God is dead and the highest values repudiated, and so everything is permitted and 'authenticity' is a replacement for the good ...

Text: 18b In the Nietzschean ethos God is dead and the highest values repudiated, and so everything is permitted and 'authenticity' is a replacement for the good. As the antithesis of the hypocrisy of being other-directed, it entails no more than the honesty or sincerity of self-expression.1 For Lonergan, 'authenticity' involves fidelity to the transcendental precepts: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, and be loving.2 Lonergan's ideal of authenticity does not spurn traditional, objective standards for judging a person's words or deeds, but it does underline how objectivity itself is the fruit of subjectivity that is authentic precisely in the measure that it lives in the light of the pure, detached, disinterested, and unrestricted desire to know and to be in affective union with the universe of being beyond itself.3 (Fs) (notabene)

18c In the absence of any objective standard of evaluation, intensity of commitment becomes the Nietzschean criterion for authenticity.1 This makes feelings the ultimate criterion, but it also abolishes the distinction between premoral feelings as arising from any appetites whatsoever, and feelings as intentional responses to the integral scale of vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious values. In contrast, commitment for Lonergan is an enactment of conscious intentionality on the level of deliberation, evaluation, decision, and action. Conscious intentionality becomes conscience when the transcendental notion of value synthesizes feelings as intentional responses to values with knowing to reach value judgments that are right in the measure that the person asking What is worthwhile? What should I do? Should I do it? is virtuous or self-transcendent or authentic.2 Only then do we have the assurance that judgments of value are not arbitrary.

Stichwort: Authentizität

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, C2

Titel: Authentizität - Selbsttranszendenz

Index: Authentizität - Selbsttranszendenz

Kurzinhalt: ... human authenticity is a matter of following the built-in law of the human spirit ... in the measure we fulfil these conditions of being human persons, we also achieve self-transcendence both in the field of knowledge and in the field of action ...

Text: 1. Authenticity

165b First, then, authenticity. For I wish to begin from what is simply human and, indeed, from a contemporary apprehension of what it is to be human. There is the older, highly logical, and so abstract, static, and minimal apprehension of being human. It holds that being human is something independent of the merely accidental, and so one is pronounced human whether or not one is awake or asleep, a genius or a moron, a saint or a sinner, young or old, sober or drunk, well or ill, sane or crazy. In contrast with the static, minimal, logical approach, there is the contemporary, concrete, dynamic, maximal view that endeavors to envisage the range of human potentiality and to distinguish authentic from unauthentic realization of that potentiality. On this approach, being human is ambivalent: one can be human authentically, genuinely, and one can be human unauthentically. Moreover, besides ambivalence, there also is dialectic: authenticity never is some pure, serene, secure possession; it is always precarious, ever a withdrawal from unauthenticity, ever in danger of slipping back into unauthenticity. (Fs) (notabene)

166a On this view, then, the basic question is, What is authentic or genuine realization of human potentiality? In a word, my answer is that authentic realization is a self-transcending realization. So I must attempt to describe what I mean by self-transcending. I shall illustrate five different instances and conclude that the last four of the five form an ordered unity. (Fs)

166b In dreamless sleep, we are still alive. We are operating in accord with the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It may be said that we are ourselves but not that we are reaching beyond ourselves and, much less, that we are rising above ourselves. But when we begin to dream, consciousness emerges. However helpless, however lacking in initiative, the dreamer is an intending subject. What is intended, commonly is obscure, fragmentary, symbolic. In so-called dreams of the night the source of the dream is one's somatic state, say, the state of one's digestion. But in dreams of the morning the dreamer is anticipating his waking state; he is recollecting his world; he is beginning to adopt a stance within that world. In the dream of the morning, then, the dreamer has got beyond himself; he is concerned with what is distinct from himself; he is anticipating his self-transcendence. (Fs)

166c An enormously richer self-transcendence emerges when one awakes. There is the endless variety of things to be seen, sounds to be heard, odors to be sniffed, tastes to be palated, shapes and textures to be touched. We feel pleasure and pain, desire and fear, joy and sorrow, and in such feelings there seem to reside the mass and momentum of our lives. We move about in various manners, assume now this and now that posture and position, and by the fleeting movements of our facial muscles, communicate to others the quiet pulse or sudden surge of our feelings. (Fs)

166d Still, sensations, feelings, movements are confined to the narrow strip of space-time occupied by immediate experience. But beyond that there is a vastly larger world. Nor is anyone content with immediate experience. Imagination wants to fill out and round off the picture. Language makes questions possible, and intelligence makes them fascinating. So we ask why and what and what for and how. Our answers construct, serialize, extrapolate, generalize. Memory and tradition and belief put at our disposal the tales of travellers, the stories of clans or nations, the exploits of heroes, the treasures of literature, the discoveries of science, the reflections of philosophers, and the meditations of holy men. Each of us has his own little world of immediacy, but all such worlds are just minute strips within a far larger world, a world constructed by imagination and intelligence, mediated by words and meaning, and based largely upon belief. (Fs)

167a If the larger world is one and the same, still there are as many different constructions of it as there are stages in human development and differences in human cultures. But such diversity only serves to bring to light a still further dimension of self-transcendence. Beyond questions for intelligence-such as what and why and how and what for-there are the questions for reflection that ask, Is that so or is it not so? Is that certain or is it only probable? Unlike questions for intelligence, these can be answered by a simple "Yes" or "No." How we can give such answers, is beside my present purpose; but what such answers mean, is very much to it. For when we say that this or that really and truly is so, we do not mean that this is what appears, or what we imagine, or what we would like, or what we think, or what seems to be so, or what we would be inclined to say. No doubt, we frequently have to be content with such lesser statements. But the point I would make is that the greater statement is not reducible to the lesser. When we seriously affirm that something really and truly is so, we are making the claim that we have got beyond ourselves in some absolute fashion, somehow have got hold of something that is independent of ourselves, somehow have reached beyond, transcended ourselves. (Fs)
168a I have been endeavoring to clarify the notion of self-transcendence by contrasting, first, dreamless sleep with the beginnings of consciousness in the dream, secondly, the dreaming with the waking subject, thirdly, the world of immediate experience and the enormously vaster real world in which we live our lives, fourthly that larger world as constructed by intelligence with the same larger world as known to have been constructed as it really is. (Fs)

168b There remains a still further dimension of self-transcendence. Our illustrations, so far, have mainly regarded knowledge. There remains action. Beyond questions for intelligence-what? why? how? what for?-there are questions for reflection-is that so? But beyond both there are questions for deliberation. Beyond the pleasures we enjoy and the pains we dread, there are the values to which we may respond with the whole of our being. On the topmost level of human consciousness the subject deliberates, evaluates, decides, controls, acts. At once he is practical and existential: practical inasmuch as he is concerned with concrete courses of action; existential inasmuch as control includes self-control, and the possibility of self-control involves responsibility for the effects of his actions on others and, more basically, on himself. The topmost level of human consciousness is conscience. (Fs)

168c However, man's self-control can proceed from quite different grounds. It can tend to be mere selfishness. Then the process of deliberation, evaluation, decision, is limited to determining what is most to one's advantage, what best serves one's interests, what on the whole yields a maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. At the opposite pole it can tend to be concerned solely with values: with the vital values of health and strength; with the social values enshrined in family and custom, society and education, the state and the law, the economy and technology, the church or sect; with the cultural values of religion and art, language and literature, science, philosophy, history, theology; with the achieved personal value of one dedicated to realizing values in himself and promoting their realization in others. (Fs)

169a In the measure that one's living, one's aims, one's achievements are a response to values, in that measure self-transcendence is effected in the field of action. One has got beyond mere selfishness. One has become a principle of benevolence and beneficence. One has become capable of genuine collaboration and of true love. In the measure that self-transcendence in the field of action characterizes the members of a society, in that measure their world not only is constructed by imagination and intelligence, mediated by words and meaning, based by and large on belief; it also is a world motivated and regulated not by self-seeking but by values, not by what is only apparently good but by what truly is good. (Fs) (notabene)

169b Now if we compare the last four of our modes of self-transcendence, we find that they form an interlocking unity. Experiencing is presupposed and complemented by inquiry and understanding. Experiencing and understanding are presupposed and complemented by reflecting and judging. Experiencing, understanding, and judging, are presupposed and complemented by deliberating and deciding. The four modes are interdependent, and each later level sublates those that precede in the sense that it goes beyond them, introduces something entirely new, makes that new element a new basis of operation; but so far from crowding or interfering with its predecessors, it preserves them, perfects them, and extends their relevance and significance. Inquiry sharpens our powers of observation, understanding enormously extends the field of data one can master, reflection and judgment force inquiry to attend to ever further data and force understanding to revise its previous achievements, deliberation turns attention from what is to what can be, to what probably would be and above all, to what really is worthwhile. (Fs)

169c To conclude, human authenticity is a matter of following the built-in law of the human spirit. Because we can experience, we should attend. Because we can understand, we should inquire. Because we can reach the truth, we should reflect and check. Because we can realize values in ourselves and promote them in others, we should deliberate. In the measure that we follow these precepts, in the measure we fulfil these conditions of being human persons, we also achieve self-transcendence both in the field of knowledge and in the field of action. (Fs)

170a Now you may have been wondering why I have spent so much time on so remote a topic as authenticity. I have had three reasons for doing so. First, I wished to get out of the abstract and static context dictated by logical clarity, coherence, and rigor and into the concrete, open, and ongoing context dictated by attention, inquiry, reflection, and deliberation. Secondly, I wished to get out of the context of a faculty psychology with its consequent alternatives of voluntarism, intellectualism, sentimentalism, and sensism, none of which has any serious, viable meaning, and into the context of intentionality analysis that distinguishes and relates the manifold of human conscious operations and reveals that together they head man towards self-trauscendence. Thirdly, I wished to have a base, a starting-point, a springboard, in people as they are and as they can discover themselves to be; for without such a base, talk about the Spirit, the Word, the apostolate, the Jesuit priesthood is all in the air; it sounds abstract, irrelevant, without substance. (Fs)

Stichwort: Authentizität

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, A Third Collection

Titel:

Index: Authentizität (kleine u. große); sekulare Welt; Sünde (Todsünde, lässliche Sünde, habituelle Sünde); operative Gnade

Kurzinhalt: authenticity is twofold; this-worldly secularists - other-worldly believers; barriers to enlightenment, barriers to loving God above all; sin: mortal, occasional; grace: operative (Aquinas), sanctifying, actual

Text: 4. AUTHENTICITY

27/14 The question of authenticity is twofold: there is the minor authenticity of the subject with respect to the tradition that has nourished him; there is the major authenticity that justifies or condemns the tradition itself. The first passes a human judgment on persons; the second is the judgment of history and ultimately the judgment of divine providence upon traditions. (233; Fs)

28/14 As Kierkegaard asked himself whether he was a Christian, so divers men can ask themselves whether or not they are genuine Catholics or Protestants, Muslims or Buddhists, Platonists or Aristotelians, and so on. They may answer that they are, and be correct in their answers. But they also may answer affirmatively and still be mistaken. In this case there will exist a series of points in which what they are coincides with what the ideals of the tradition demand, but there will be another series in which there is a greater or less divergence. These points of difference are overlooked, whether from a selective inattention, or a failure to understand, or an undetected rationalization. What I am is one thing, what a genuine Christian or Buddhist is, is another, and I am unaware of the difference. My unawareness is unexpressed; I have no language to express what I really am, so I use the language of the tradition I unauthentically appropriate, and thereby I devaluate, distort, water down, corrupt that language. (233; Fs)

29/14 Such devaluation, distortion, corruption may occur only in scattered individuals. But it may occur on a more massive scale, and then the words are repeated but the meaning is gone. The chair is still the chair of Moses, but it is occupied by scribes and Pharisees. Traditional doctrine is still taught, but it is no longer convincing. The religious order still reads out the rules, but one may doubt that the home fires are still burning. The sacred name of science is still invoked, but when each field is divided into more and more specialties and these specialties cultivated by ever smaller groups, one may be led to ask with Edmund Husserl to what extent any significant ideal of science actually functions, indeed to what extent the ideals of science are being replaced by the conventions of a clique. If, in such eventualities, anyone were to accept a tradition as it stands, he could hardly do more than authentically realize unauthenticity. (233; Fs)

30/14 Truly enough, the modern world is in advance of its predecessors in its mathematics, its natural science, its human science, and the wealth and variety of its literary potentialities. But it was on the basis of his trust in God that modern man had erected his states and cultures, yet more and more he has opted to sustain them by an appeal to man's complete autonomy. He would acknowledge man's intelligence, his rationality, his responsibility, but he would not acknowledge more. For the consistent secularist to speak of God is, at best, irrelevant; to turn to God-except by way of a political gesture or an emotional outlet-is to sacrifice the good that man both knows and, by his own resources, can attain. (234; Fs) (notabene)

31/14 Such has been the mounting challenge to religion and, since it provides a paradigm for its many parallels, it seems worthwhile to analyze its elements. I shall first indicate ambiguities that arise when a people, sharing a common language, divides into this-worldly secularists and other-worldly believers. For the two groups will differ both in the realities and in the values they acknowledge. The otherworldly believers hold that God exists and is operative in religious living; the this-worldly secularists do not. Again, the other-worldly believers acknowledge other-worldly values, and this acknowledgment influences in varying degrees their this-worldly valuations; but the this-worldly secularists avoid such a complication for they acknowledge no other-worldly values and so are free to concentrate on the values of this world. (234; Fs) (notabene)

32/14 Next, a person's horizon is the boundary of what he knows and values. There follows a notable difference in the horizons of this-worldly secularists and other-worldly believers. For what we know and how we arrange our scale of values determines our horizons, and our horizons determine the range of our attention, our consideration, our valuations, our conduct. (234; Fs)

33/14 Further, there are two main components in a person's horizon. There is the main stem: what we know and what we value. There are extensions through the persons we know and care for, since knowing them and caring for them involve us in what they know and care for. (234; Fs)

34/14 Moreover, such extensions may be mutual, and then the horizon of each is an extension of the horizon of the other. They may interrelate all the members of a group, and as such a cohesive group increases in size, there is a need for organizing-for distinguishing, within the whole, smaller groups comparable to the organs of a living body. (234f; Fs)

35/14 Horizons develop both in their main stem of knowing and caring and in their extensions through involvement in the knowing and caring of others. Development in the main stem increases the depth and range of the consequent horizon; and this increase leads to a development in the extensions, since our knowing others and our concern for them involve some sharing in the objects they know and care for. Moreover, inasmuch as among such objects there will be persons that know and care for their own circle, there will result a mediation of involvement at a second remove. Finally, developing horizons open the way to reciprocity on the part of those with whom one has become involved. (235; Fs)

36/14 There are many ways, familiar and perhaps unfamiliar, in which people come to know and care for others. But I think it best to omit the familiar and to avoid the obscurity of the unfamiliar. What seems more pressing is to turn to three things: barriers, breakthroughs, and breakdowns. Barriers block development. Breakthroughs overcome barriers. Breakdowns undo past achievement.1

37/14 We have already illustrated the notion of a barrier in contrasting this-worldly secularists and other-worldly believers. The realities they acknowledge and the values they esteem diverge, and for St. Paul that divergence is extremely grave: (235; Fs)
[...] only the Spirit of God knows what God is. This is the Spirit that we have received from God, and not the spirit of the world, so that we may know all that God of his own grace gives us. [...] A man who is unspiritual refuses what belongs to the Spirit of God; it is folly to him; he cannot grasp it, because it needs to be judged in the light of the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:11-14).

38/14 Such was the message of St. Paul to the Corinthians almost two millennia ago. While I think it relevant to an account of the barrier between secularists and believers, I must recall what I have already said tonight, that people may accept in good faith mistaken views that have become traditional, and that even the original mistake would hardly have occurred without the scandal given by otherworldly believers. (235; Fs)

39/14 In this campaign one does well to turn to John Henry Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent and, specifically, to the passages in which he distinguishes notional apprehension from real apprehension, and notional assent from real assent. For the barriers to enlightenment are merely notional apprehension and merely notional assent, when we are content with understanding the general idea and give no more than an esthetic response that it is indeed a fine idea. On the other hand, the attainment of enlightenment is the attainment of real apprehension, real assent, and the motivation to live out what we have learnt. It is brought about through regular and sustained meditation on what it really means to be a Christian, a real meaning to be grasped not through definitions and systems but through the living words and deeds of our Lord, our Lady, and the saints, a meaning to be brought home to me in the measure that I come to realize how much of such meaning I have overlooked, how much I have greeted with selective inattention, how much I have been unwilling to recognize as a genuine element in Christian living. So gradually we replace shallowness and superficiality, weakness and self-indulgence, with the imagination and the feelings, with the solid knowledge and heartfelt willingness of a true follower of Christ. (236; Fs)

40/14 Both in the process of purification and in the process of enlightenment there are times when we resemble the two disciples on the Pope John's road to Emmaus before the stranger joined them on their journey, when they recalled with dismay how high had been their hopes before Jesus was scourged, condemned, and crucified; and there are other times when we resemble the disciples as they listened to the stranger's account of all that the scriptures had foretold and, as they later remarked, "Did we not feel our hearts on fire as he talked with us on the road [...]?" (Luke 24:32). Such times of spiritual dismay and spiritual elation have been interpreted as the language used by the inner teacher in his converse with our hearts. And if the elation is accompanied by a willingness to do good that hitherto we were unwilling to do, then it is the sign of a grace that Aquinas named operative, a grace foretold by Ezekiel with the words: "I will.[...] put a new spirit into them; I will take the heart of stone out of their bodies and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will conform to my statutes and keep my laws. They will become my people, and I will become their God" (Ezek. 11:19-20). (236f; Fs)

41/14 Both in the Old Testament and in the New there are given the two commandments. (237; Fs)

Then one of the lawyers [...] asked him, 'Which commandment is first of all?' Jesus answered, 'The first is, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God is the only Lord; love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength." The second is this: "Love your neighbour as yourself.'' There is no other commandment greater than these' (Mark 12:28-31; cf. Deut.6:4-5, Lev. 19:18).

42/14 A real apprehension of these commandments and a real assent to their binding force for each of us are given us by sanctifying grace, for then "God's love has flooded our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit he has given us" (Rom.5:5). But even then we must watch and pray that we enter not into temptation, for beyond sanctifying grace we also need actual graces, even operative actual graces, that take us through the processes of purification and enlightenment towards the state of union with God. (237; Fs)

43/14 I began by recalling how Pope John XXIII desired the church to leap forward in its apostolic mission by preaching to mankind the living Christ. I spoke in turn of the meaning, the function, and the relevance of a pastoral council. I ended by speaking of authenticity, of the genuine fruit of religious education and of pastoral ministry. Since that fruit fundamentally comes through God's grace, since that grace is given in answer to prayer, I would conclude by begging you one and all to pray that this Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, and all similar undertakings, prove to be instruments that bountifully promote the realization of Pope John's intentions. It is a prayer that the members of Christ's body on earth bring forth fruit thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. (237f; Fs)

A lecture given twice at Boston College, 1981, first in June, during the eighth annual Lonergan Workshop, then in July, during the tenth-anniversary celebration of The Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry. To be published in the proceedings of that celebration and in a future volume of Lonergan Workshop.