Abstract

The language of self-fulfillment and self-realization are common currency in contemporary culture. They are subsumed under the term authenticity. The question of what constitutes authentic human existence is a question about a moral ideal that needs to be taken seriously, because the meaning of authenticity shapes our understanding of what it means to be human. Charles Taylor, in taking from Heidegger key insights into the nature of human agency, has written persuasively about the need to retrieve a proper understanding of the idea authenticity. Bernard Lonergan, another Canadian thinker, has also contributed much in articulating what it means to be an authentic person. For Lonergan, authentic human existence is a three-fold conversion that is intellectual, moral and religious. ;Intellectual conversion is the move out of a world of immediacy and into a world mediated by meaning and motivated by value. The subject is then able to move beyond the mistaken position that knowing is some form of looking, and that the known is what is to be seen or not seen. ;Moral conversion, "changes the criterion of one's decisions and choices from satisfactions to values." Moral conversion is that moment when one opts for what is truly worthwhile, valuable, and good as opposed to what is merely satisfying or ego-regarding. ;Finally, religious conversion is the experience of being grasped by what Lonergan calls ultimate concern. It is "otherworldly falling in love." In short, religious conversion goes beyond moral conversion by transforming the existential subject into "a subject held, grasped, possessed, owned through a total and so an other-worldly love." There is then a new basis for all valuing, choosing, and doing good. ;While the emphasis of this dissertation will be on Lonergan's notion of authenticity, I will offer an overview of both Heidegger and Taylor's idea of authenticity and then place the three thinkers together in the last chapter in hopes of showing how Lonergan's account best addresses the question of what it means to be authentic?