The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

Dante Alighieri (c.1265-1321) was a major figure in medieval Italian literature, a writer whose work anticipated and made way for the cultural flowering of the Renaissance. He is the author of several works of poetry, the most important being his Divine Comedy, a trilogy that relates an allegorical journey he undertakes through hell (Inferno), purgatory (Purgatorio), and heaven (Paradiso). He was the first major poet to write serious works of literature in the Italian vernacular instead of Latin, and continues to be revered as the highest name in the tradition of Italian literature.

Dante’s Divine Comedy represents an imaginative depiction of Roman Catholic doctrine on the afterlife and of the Christian view of the spiritual journey, but scholars have often noted that it also includes a prominent undercurrent of social and political commentary. This commentary—often somewhat subversive in Dante’s own historical context—was rooted in his experience of living as a political exile from his hometown of Florence. Like most prominent Florentines, he had been forced into taking certain positions regarding the partisan politics of his day, and while on assignment to Rome by his party (the White Guelphs), an opposing party (the Black Guelphs) seized power and eventually condemned him to perpetual exile.

Much of the Divine Comedy’s narrative—particularly the Inferno—displays a polemical cynicism concerning the politics of his day. Its main feature, however, is its identity as a journey narrative, moving from the darkness of doubts and errors to the luminous brightness of joy and love, and it is that progression that Beck uses to build out the framework of The Way of Integrity.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher and a leading intellectual of the European Enlightenment. He is known for his influential positions on questions of metaphysics and ethics, but particularly on the field of epistemology, which is concerned with the processes of human knowledge.

Kant staked out a position on metaphysics (the question of what really exists) that was distinct from the dominant theories of his time—namely, that the existence of all things was grounded either in their ultimate reality as concepts held in the mind of God, or in their actual reality as objects in the physical universe of time and space. Kant argued that such objects (and time and space themselves) are empirically real in a certain sense, but that our perception of them is only grasped through the processes of human ideation.

Kant’s main point, then, as laid out in his treatise A Critique of Pure Reason, was an epistemological one: We cannot know for certain the truth about anything, because our perceptions of that thing are mediated through a subjective internal process. This position, which formed part of his larger philosophy of transcendental idealism, became a foundational philosophical consideration in post-Enlightenment thought.

In The Way of Integrity, Beck relates her first exposure to Kant’s philosophy and the transformational effect it had on her life. She found the idea that we cannot actually know for certain if anything is true a liberating one, as it provided a marked contrast to the rigorous certainties expressed by the familial and religious culture in which she had been raised. In a few instances, she extends Kant’s epistemological claim into a claim about metaphysics—that nothing is universally true—in a way that Kant himself never did.

Beck takes Kant’s epistemological insight and applies it to the journey of personal transformation, developing exercises by which people can take some of the thoughts that have defined their enculturated lifestyles and subject them to epistemological questioning (such as, “Can I be absolutely certain that this thought is true?”) in order to gain that same sense of liberation that Beck experienced.