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: Nietzsche (Seele - Selbst); Lonergan: Missverständnis - Klärung durch Kontrastierung; subjektiv; Authentizität im Maße von -> reines Streben nach Wissen und Sein ...

Kurzinhalt: 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 ...

Textausschnitt: 17b Key terms used in Lonergan's formulation of the ethics of authenticity-self, authenticity or sincerity, commitment, and values-are liable to be misunderstood in terms of Nietzsche's meanings that have become common currency today. As Allan Bloom put it, for Nietzsche the 'self

is the modern substitute of the soul, which is a rationally ordered structure and is dependent on and subordinate to the order of the cosmos. The self has no order and is dependent on nothing; it makes a cosmos out of the chaos that is really outside by imposing an order of values on it.1

18a Not so for Lonergan. For him the term 'self not only refers to the conscious subject as he or she exists concretely, but represents a transposition of Aquinas's conception of the order of the human soul into a framework of conscious intentionality in which a formally dynamic structure is experienced as immanent, operative, and normative.1 Human living is a matter not of positing values but of asking and answering questions and freely living by the answers. The pattern of inquiry, reflection, and deliberation is an exigence not for self­aggrandisement but for self-transcendence.

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.2 For Lonergan, 'authenticity' involves fidelity to the transcendental precepts: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, and be loving.3 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.4 (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.

19a This is just the opposite of the very meaning of 'value' in Nietzschean parlance. For Nietzsche 'values' cannot be rationally evaluated. They are original creations produced by arbitrary positings of the willful self as a primordial chaos3 Values come from merely arbitrary choices instead of from responsible judgments of value. Disgusted by the utilitarian and technocratic individualism that reduces values to market prices, the Nietzschean version of expressive individualism turns whatever arises unpredictably from the self as an oracle into a value.