More on experienced authenticity, how inherited habits of habitats become inherent (yes, it does sound Lamarckian). Eric Berne in his book, What do you say after you say Hello, suggested that children ‘inherit’ the attitudes to life of their families, and that any child born into a particular household with a particular attitude to life’s vicissitudes would have acquired the characteristic attitudes and habits of that family, although most likely assuming that their habits and attitudes were entirely their own. They will experience those attitudes to particular situations, and the beliefs and behaviours that perpetuate them, as both unexceptionable and authentic. The discovery that alternative attitudes exist and that they can enable alternative actions is an insight or epiphany, produced by revelation or by examination.
This is somewhat similar to C Wright Mills‘ thesis of the proper understanding of relations between private troubles and public issues, in his book The Sociological Imagination, that while one man’s personal history may seem to reflect his own personality and psychopathology, where a hundred or a thousand men in a city of a hundred thousand share aspects of that history (particularly unemployment), the cause is likely to be found in social conditions as much as or more than individual constraints.
How then would examination reconcile experienced authenticity with inherent integrity? Put another way, if everyone always does what authentically seems to them most important so imperative at any moment, their wont and/as want (want as in wanting to do whatever they believe is most important so imperative, whether or not they ‘feel like’ doing it) how does change in attitude and behaviour occur? How can it be possible to reserve and preserve the recognition of inherent integrity, as the sense of having done doing whatever seemed best at a particular moment, while recognising that whatever one did at some particular moment may no longer seem either to be best now or to have been best then? How can recognition that momentary impulsions or compulsions, or reverberations to rhetoric, can sweep across us and sweep away some of our sense of the authenticity of our inherited attitudes (of which we may be already in doubt) and our sense of the integrity of our examined principles, be reconciled with recognition of the principle of recognising on principle that constant inherent integrity on principle? Can there be a framework for constancy of wont and want that enables a focus on change as itself also expressing consistency, not inconsistency? Will have a go at a framework. Tomorrow.
