Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Werte, Stufen: partikulär, sozial, kulturell, religiös, personal

Kurzinhalt: For Lonergan the levels of value as vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious are governed by relations of mutual presupposition and complementarity so that ...

Textausschnitt: 10c The fruit of the gradual evolution of Lonergan's analysis of the horizon of human beings is the articulation of a universal viewpoint or total and basic horizon which is not only completely general but completely concrete.1 This total and basic horizon is grounded in the universally immanent, operative, and normative questioning-structure proper to the human consciousness of any race, class, or gender. In light of this horizon2 it becomes evident that in order to be fully comprehensive, reflection on the human condition must take seriously but go beyond the merely vital values of the overall health, strength, and graceful comportment of our bodies, to the social values required by cooperation in bringing about the human good with its particular goods and its institutional recurrence schemes or goods of order. Even more concretely, reflection on the human condition has to move beyond social to cultural values in which traditional aims and aspirations are embodied in stories and customs and rituals that furnish the wellsprings from which human beings may engage in the reflective evaluation of their concrete way of life.3

11a A still further step in concreteness then has to go beyond values as cultural to values as personal. By reason of the intrinsically conversational nature of each one's human mind and heart, persons are originators of values.4 This conversational structure of personhood is realized by living up to the conversation's inbuilt demands for free self-transcendence. This in turn occurs most frequently when people belong to communities where regularly or normally cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart).

11b But the most comprehensive concreteness is attained on the level of religious values5 In any culture human beings elaborate an overarching symbolic order: the ma'at of ancient Egypt, or the Tao of China, or the nomos of Greece, or the Torah of Judaism, or the law of the cross in Christianity. Modern secularists may be suspicious of or debunk such overarching orders, yet they too work out surrogates which play the role that since Vico has been called civil religion.

12a For Lonergan the levels of value as vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious are governed by relations of mutual presupposition and complementarity so that lower levels condition but do not determine higher levels. Most societies and cultures handle these complex relationships in differing ways. We speak of contemporary Western Europe, for example, as a highly secular culture, while we regard most Latin American cultures as rather highly religious. Whatever the specific configuration of values in any given culture, the culture may be regarded as more advanced the more the different levels of culture are distinguished, even if not necessarily separated, from each other. The more primitive a society, the more global and compact are its basic self-understandings and self-expressions in rituals and celebrations, dramas, lyrics and music, songs, paintings, architecture and monuments; the more advanced the society, the more differentiated these things are.