Human Authenticity

Human Authenticity

Our philosophical assumptions are feeling-rooted, intellectually generational, and deeply habitual. Though they form a good part of our thought and outlook, for many reasons, many of us avoid making them an object of thought or of our critical attention (as we are doing here). Qualitative personal change on this ground, then, will take more than one reading and a few exercises by a few albeit well-meaning and committed people. And yet, such critique and attunement is continually called for by the divisions and seemingly un-surmountable problems we face in our daily dialogue in all but a few venues. What we are naming attunement between our fundaments and our foundations Lonergan refers to as authenticity —of person (minor, or writ-small) and of culture and its institutions (major, or writ-large):


What is fundamental is human authenticity, and it is twofold. There is the minor authenticity of the human subject with respect to the tradition that nourishes him. There is the major authenticity that justifies or condemns the tradition itself. The former leads to a human judgment on subjects. The latter invites the judgment of history upon traditions. . . . the unauthenticity of individuals generates the unauthenticity of traditions. Then if one takes the tradition as it currently exists for one’s standard, one can do no more than authentically realize unauthenticity. Such is unauthenticity in its tragic form, for then the best of intentions combine with a hidden decay. . . . So it is that commonly men have to pay a double price for their personal attainment of authenticity. Not only have they to undo their own lapses . . . but more grievously they have to discover what is wrong in the tradition they have inherited and they have to struggle against the massive undertow it sets up. (1985k)


Insights that resonate with our tendency towards such authenticity send their roots down-deep, tend to occur on their own schedule, and often come when we least expect them. They also can bypass or conflict with other, less authentic, desires and fears--pools of thought we may be harboring. Thus, qualified change in you or me will necessarily emerge slowly; and it will often follow roller-coaster confusion, moments of clarity, of disturbance and of joy, and in fits and starts. Moreover, though momentary weakness and confusion is essential for growth, the present work draws on this moment, fosters your conscious awareness of this point, and makes exact, direct, and concrete connections for you and to you, hopefully with only a modicum of such weakness and confusion.

However, in the writ-small arena, and if the exercises ring true for you as they should, foundation-to-fundament self-correction will begin to occur in the resonant, spontaneous way that such deeply-set correction commonly does; and the results of the initial process will remain as a fount for your further qualified questions, insights, thought and dialogue—to expect and to find a higher plane where your confusion dissipates and you are noticeably stronger, but where you might even search for more of both in order to reach for another even higher plane.

The process will not connect you forever to a logical necessity, or to a specific theoretical formulation that explains all once-and-for-all, or to some hidden super-knowledge that no one else can know, on principle. Rather, the process will connect you to a continually accessible, self-verifiable, and concrete beginning point for all other study, and for all other writ-small and writ-large analysis, critique, and knowledge.

In the writ-large arena, I and other culture-watchers--who consciously draw on an awareness of transcendental method and its operations in history as a critical resource--have witnessed the rumblings of great change, and the spread of good thinking about fundament-to-foundation self-understanding. Though rarely named, such change is already manifest in many students, readers, and others, and feels to some like a slow but exponentially increasing flow towards conditioning a major corrective and creative emergence. However, any paradigmatic change at the writ-large level, if it occurs, will begin slowly in a few and then many writ-small arenas where individual insights occur, and incrementally, especially in curriculum development in education, and especially where the foundations of the natural and human sciences are concerned.

However, if foundational attunement indeed occurs on a large scale, it will indeed constitute a paradigm shift--both corrective and creative. The results will be that what we are referring to as attunement will enter the professions and culture through education, and the present experienced fragmentation in individuals, theoretical fields, and cultures (especially in Western-influenced arenas of thought), over time, will become less and less formative. That is, currently disparate arenas of thought and dialogue will continue to internally differentiate, specialize, and explore the mysteries of the unknown in their areas of interest. However, we will also have within our grasp the recovery of a dynamically interrelated, empirically established unity for our disparate fields of discourse and for our varied cultures that are now becoming “cultures of communication.”

The common ground is the basic outline of culture itself writ-large, and the developmental structure and dynamic unity of human consciousness writ-small. We can at once discover and verify the basic structure for ourselves, while at the same time knowing ourselves to be open in our continuing commonsense, theoretical, artistic, dialogical, diacritical, ethical, political, and spiritual concerns--culture. It is not the data or the methodical differences, but the full gamut of untoward philosophical differences that are keeping us apart.

The sciences and professional fields are one thing, however, cultures are another. As the substance of a shift in philosophical paradigms, a full understanding of transcendental method as a writ-large trans-cultural base will provide access to a much-needed attunement of the philosophical underpinnings of all things cultural. In terms of cultural analysis in many arenas, it will engender more recognition of differentiation, and lack of it, and of non-philosophical attunement in others than it will engender a further need for philosophical self-correction. Whether recognition-of or self-correction-towards attunement, however, knowledge-of the trans-cultural base is knowledge of the legitimating empirical reference and centerpiece of all human knowledge and its communication--it reveals to us the broad outline of human authenticity.

I hope you will understand your place in such authentic, creative, and self-transcendent movements in history, especially if you are a teacher.