Authenticity
Authenticity
"This above all - to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
-William Shakespeare in Hamlet-
"You got to be who you are when you are."
The lines above speak of an authentic self – a real self, a true self, a genuine self. When people speak about authenticity, it is often this special kind of selfhood that they are speaking of. In the existentialist tradition, authenticity entails coming to terms with, then living in the presence of the blunt fact of our existence. An authentic self is one with no delusions about the kind of endeavor human being is.
Yet when people speak of authenticity, they may not always be speaking about the self. It is possible to speak of authentic experiences or moments; it is also possible to speak of authentic art or authentic literature. We may even like to speak about an authentic (or, more frequently, an inauthentic) culture. It is not just persons who lack or have the property of being authentic; it is a whole host of things.
Authenticity seeks not outside itself; it is its own end. It points at no other goals: the creation of a certain impression, the eliciting of a particular reaction, an influence on minds and behavior. Inauthenticity seems always to seek outside itself. It is practiced for the sake of some objective: wooing another, covering up an ugliness about oneself or one’s surroundings, abiding by external standards.
Is authenticity always better than its absence? How can we generate authenticity? Where is it likely to be found? How is it sustained? What is its worth?
posted by mjbrown at 7:14 PM
16 Comments:
I'm testing to see how authentic this new blogger format is
Interesting subject.
I think the hip hop reference is fitting since that's a culture concerned (obsessed perhaps) with authenticity.
Some philosophers have been too.
Kierkegaard painted a picture of the authentic individual as alienated from the group.
Heidegger developed on this theme, describing (a la Kierkegaard) how existence is uncanny and anxiety-provoking.
Heidegger describes how individuals take refuge in various forms of group-think, such as in vague ideas and idle talk.
Heidegger assured the reader that he meant nothing pejorative in the distinction between authentic and inauthentic. People experience the dread of their existence, the anxiety of being mortal, and then find a salvation (of sorts) in getting lost in the group.
However, many can't help but see a certain moral criticism in Heidegger's writings of people who run from being authentic.
Hannah Arendt, taking her point of departure from Heidegger, is often praised for emphasizing the more positive aspects of social behavior.
In Arendt's philosophy the idea of being socially connected and authentic is not contradictory.
Sartre has no problem with the connotations of morality in the terms authentic and inauthentic. Like Kierkegaard, Sarte associates inauthentic behavior with bad faith and thinks of it as something that is not inevitable.
For Sartre, the crowning pinnacle of inauthenticity is the rise to power of the bourgeois class. To be bourgeois is the same as being self-deceptive. Sartre would point to something like the destruction of the environment as an example of bourgeois self-deception. The contradiction of a group of people destroying the conditions for their existence is what being bourgeois is all about.
Sartre and many people in hip hop might agree that a person who is very poor, or very wealthy, can be "real," but not a person in a deeply indeterminate, dynamic condition with regard to wealth.
I'm not sure where I stand on all this, but a point that you made, Michael, about the individual being required to fragment the self for the purposes of success in certain areas is something worth thinking about. It is interesting the think of all the ways we have to be ever-re-defining ourselves and ever-adapting ourselves in order to keep the kind of perspective that allows us always to be able to respond appropriately to our ever-changing environment.
On some level, this is probably normal and a biological necessity. However, there is probably some social engineering that is going into it as well. There is a lot of pressure, in American society at least, to be the type of person who is skillful at always responding in an appropriate way to an ever-challenging landscape of choices and dangers.
This can be a bad thing if the choices and dangers we're presented with seem contrived.
There is a funny movie by Mike Judge called Office Space where a man leaves his tedius and bland job in an office to become a construction worker since he's so sick of the contrived, artificial "jungle" of middle-management America where human beings are always being measured by how well they respond to artificial challenges.
The challenges of being a construction worker, those of physical exertion and braving the elements, eventually comes to seem more authentic to him. At least in that environment no one will ever scold him for having "a case of the Mondays" or not properly ornamenting his attire with falsely cheerful slogans and advertising logos.
That may just be another way of saying that people often associate the inauthentic condition with being in the middle and wanting to move up.
authenticity is difficult. its residence is not easily pinpointed, even with a carefully drawn map. one's authenticity changes as well; strong are human experiences indeed.
in any story that i have read, inauthenticity often breeds contempt. contempt for the authentic. inauthenticity also seems apparently popular, for there are more characters with that trait then the authentic ones.
i believe that the worth of authenticity depends on the worth of the person. it has been my experience that those who are most content and solid are the authentic people. those who care what others think about them are insecure- and are typically willing to change to receive recognition, and therefore might not be authentic.
those who are grounded emotionally are typically quite authentic. in a postmodern culture, that pervasive one found in america, it is easy to find the inauthentic. and it gives rise to those wanting to join the inauthentic. in my experience anyways.
is the absence of authenticity better than than its existence? i should say it would be if one wanted to be a crowd pleaser. but all throughout history the authentic drew large numbers, sort of a leading people to the light. i am thinking of Christ, Muhammad, Ghandi, King and such. however, it is not tied to the religious community solely. therefore- i see authenticity better than its absence.
authenticity is sustained, in my opinion, by consistency. men like Kuyper and Lincoln come to mind.
authenticity is generated by the will, like most things. one would will to be honest until it became second nature. i do believe that the more virtuous the person- the more authentic.
we typically assimilate traits in others that we wish were a part of ourselves. and this is where inauthenticity can breed.
an interesting subject indeed.
I have one comment for Luke. Your entire blog had no orginal thought. You summarized different philosophies from individuals and used Office Space to illustrate that job movement is not authentic. Perhaps if you would use your own thoughts instead of repeating what others said, you would have been more authentic yourself. Just a authentic analysis for you to ponder.
You shouldn't criticize someone for being unoriginal unless you yourself have something original to say.
In addition, it's a bit strange that I should be criticized for failing to do something I had no intention of doing.
That's a bit like a dude I once know (who, interestingly enough, was also named Greg) who criticized a certain drama I like for being "humorless." When I pointed out that the story was not intended to be funny, he said, "That's not my problem."
When I pointed out it was a well-respected movie, he said, "I'm not afraid to criticize anyone."
That's interesting, Billiam, that you should mention the postmodern in your thoughts about inauthenticity.
Many philosophers have for a long time been talking about (or heralding in) the death of the Enlightenment Age, the death of Cartesian rationalism (and for that reason the death of the German Idealism of Kant, Hegel and Shopenhauer) and the death of God in the sense not of faith in God but of the Christian metaphysic as central in the West.
Philosophers such as Foucault and more especially Derrida see the event of Heidegger's philosophy as a post-Cartesian (i.e. postmodern) revolution and a re-awakening (Heidegger spoke of a "clearing") of the primordial questions of philosophy such as those first asked at the origin of philosophy in the West by Permenides and Heraclitus.
Derrida thought that the poet Mallarme served a similiar role in France of clearing a revolutionary path for thought in a post-Englightenment age. Derrida spoke of Heidegger's "Ereignis" and Mallarme's "Avoir Lieu" as a "happening" in philosophy in a way similiar to that of Hegel in speaking of "Negation" as a force in history.
With the word "Postmodern" is also linking the term "New Age" which is not surprising as the Postermodern Age is supposed to be a new historical epoch. Interestingly enough, the phrase "New Age" was coined by Aleister Crowley, who believed that our civilization was entering the age of Horus (a reference to ancient Egypt) and that Thelema (will in Greek) was to be the new law.
Like the term "Postmodern," "New Age" has entered into ordinary English as a way of describing the sense of disruption and the possible clearing of new way of thinking in present times.
On the subject of Postmodernism and the hold that Heidegger has had on Continental philosophy for the last 80 or so years, one thing that interests me about Sartre's philosophy is that he runs contrary to this current of Continental thought while still remaining true to its vocabulary and many of its fundamental prejudices.
Sartre embraced some of the basic premises of Husserl's phenomenology and some of Heidegger, but he could not have been further in attitude or spirit from a post-modernist. However, Sartre is often read poorly or not at all.
Speaking of inauthenticity, I was reading a blog not long ago in which many of the contributers were taking what seemed to me to be a smug attitude to Sartre. A few bloggers seemed particularly mean-spirited. It was said, for example, that reading Sartre's phenomenology is like reading badly rehashed Heidegger, that his artistic work is "unreadable," and that his political philosophy is nothing but an apology for totalitarianism.
These blogs were inauthentic to me, and I felt as if I'd slipped into a sort of viscous sink-hole, what Sartre called a "negatite," (i.e. a little pool of nothingness that makes reality or Being discontiguous, like Swiss cheese).
I thought, for example, of the fact that, after Being and Nothingness was published, Sartre received a warm letter from Heidegger saying that, although he (Heidegger) did not agree with many of the points in Being and Nothingness, he thought that Sartre had understood him better than any of his peers in Germany.
In addition, Heidegger was impressed with the fact that Sartre had taken the trouble to learn German in order to study Hegel, Husserl and himself.
I wondered how many of those bloggers who were trashing Sartre, and calling some of his works "unreadable," had taken the trouble to learn French in order not to judge him by translation.
Moreover, it occurred to me that anyone who thinks that Sartre is just a re-hash of other Continental philosophy did not understand what Heidegger himself did, that Sartre had studied Heidegger's masterpiece, Being and Time, in a very deep way for the purpose of opposing it more than to follow it.
For example, Heidegger's philosophy holds forth the promise of breaking down the subject-object distinction for a primordial experience (a melting perhaps) of the human being into Being proper, opening up new possibilities for defining what is human while blurring the human/object distinction in both directions. A sort of radical anthropomorphism.
Sartre agrees that the subject-object distinction is false in that that the primacy of knowledge in the modern tradition (i.e. since Descartes) needs to be abandoned.
However, he clearly and strongly rejects Heidegger's concept of the human being as Dasein and defines what is human (what is "Pour-soi" in Sartre's vocabulary) as being absolutely linked with consciousness and freedom.
Nothing could be less Heideggerian than Sartre's refusal to accept the human as defined in any terms except those involving consciousness. Moreover, Sartre is only philosopher in the Western tradition to argue that there is no such thing as something that is "human" but not existentially free. Even a radical anti-Hegelian like Kierkegaard didn't go that far.
It struck me as particularly sad in this respect that Sartre was being called an apologist for totalitarianism when his refusual to define the human being in any terms other than those of freedom is one of the most extreme theories found among philosophers. He could not be more in disagreement with the political tradition of Hegel with regard to human self-definition, despite being sympathetic with Marxism. He thought Marxism was insufficient on this point, and that human beings could never just be cogs in some machine.
It's true that, in reading Sartre, I had often felt that Sartre wasn't really at his best when writing about his utter and complete loathing for the bourgeois and his attempt (which he later abandoned) to justify Soviet-style Communism.
But what struck me as especially inauthentic about the criticisms of Sartre was that they were offerred under the semi-anonymous protection of the web by people making conclusory statements that didn't appear to based in any reading or even any respect for a philosopher who has carved a place for himself in the history of western philosophy as someone particuarly concerned with freedom and justice.
I think it gives people a feeling of pleasure in their egos to attack things that are widely respected, and, paradoxically, no justification is required, as this sort of criticism is a merely a question of style, of adopting an edgy position, of feeling a shiver of hipness. The respect and sympathy that is required for careful, thoughtful reading is not required.
But at the same time I think Sartre would not have taken it too seriously to find that people were excoriating him in blogs, denouncing his phenomenology without having understood it and denouncing his political theory probably without having read many of the thousands of pages he wrote on the current politics of his time and on political theory.
Once, when he was asked how he felt about having made so many enemies by denouncing the bourgeois class, he said, "I've had to dance a bit."
He hadn't entered the debate with a grave attitude or any expectation of authenticity from anyone who would presume to judge him without putting any real effort into it.
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Those are some good points, Bron.
There does seem to be a capital "n" Negation going on, although philosophers will argue about its locus.
Hegal: negation as a historical force.
Sartre: the human is the sole locus of negation.
Although Sartre's theory of existential freedom does not accord with ordinary language (consider the term "existential slave," which is coherent) his theory of a dualism between negative and positive (Being and Nothingness) is much more in accord with ordinary language (even the logics of analytic philosohers retain the tilde).
Authenticity as a form of honesty?
This also accords with ordinary language.
... authentic ... sincere ... open ... exact ... frank ... veridical ... real ... candid ... transparent ... upstanding ...
I would say that authenticity is a higher level of honesty that is moving from mere openness toward transparency. (Think of Kant, whose walks were more accurate than any clock).
Authenticity also has the connotation of something old and grand. Imagine what it must be like to hold in your hand a relic, a cup or a sword, from ancient Rome, Greece, China or Egypt.
I suppose someone in Physics would say that everything is just as old as everything else. The energy in every object (or fact) can be traced back to the same original source (the Big Bang).
However, in the human or existential dimension, there are ancient artifacts that retain a certain meaning-giving power.
It is precisely these things that are denied us in a culture where everything is thrown away and reshaped into the next new thing.
There is no doubt that newness has a freshness and a power on its own. Think of the feeling of wearing a new shirt, or cracking open a new book you're eager to read, or even the feeling of gratitude at eating fresh food (especially if you'd been forced to eat from cans and bags for any length of time).
Yet, however joyous such feelings can be, they are not exactly those of authenticity, that sense of realness that things take on when they toughen with time and gather more and more meaning.
There is something that is negating everything we do and everything there is. People speak of time and movement and change with a feeling that these things themselves are constant (i.e. "change is the only permanent thing" and so forth).
There is something beautiful but menancing about what is inhuman. Sartre: "there is nothing more inconceivable and contradictory than the idea of 'passive existence.'"
So, we tend to wonder what can contintue to stand in time. Nothing? Then will time eventuall consume itself? In physics one can talk of things like maximum entropy in thermodynamics when the universe has "expanded" (i.e. energy has become more and more simple) until it is the case, as Bertrand Russell once put it, "There is simply nothing interesting occurring any longer."
This is a leveling of authenticity and quality to maximum blandness: the least common denominator, as if the universe were being run by a advertising agency and goes from being a series of great films to a series of absolutely uncontroversial advertisements.
What will happen then? When we think of things going from bad to worse, we begin to realize that maybe it is not into anything that we can imagine that we should send our hopes.
Thus, the need to throw our symbols forward in front of us: for symbolism.
We don't necessarily need to cry out in the wilderness that, "Only a God (or an Ubermensch, if you prefer) can save us now!" But I think we do need to feel we could capture unexpected meanings in the nets we throw out.
I hate to say it, it has come to be somewhat needed, too many commments or words does not prove a point it only enhances the fact that readers get bored of listening. maybe keep that in mind.
"Authenticity consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometim es in horror or hate." Sartre
Too be honest I dont believe in authenticity anymore, because it used to be connected with originality in the arts and music and so on. But now nothing can really be authentic with the over amounted people and ideas in the world. To be authentic to one self is different. hOWEVER THIS WHOLE CASE DEPNDS ON WHAT DO YOU DEFINE AS AUTHENTIC, COMING UP WITH IT FIRST OR COMING UP WITH AN IDEA YOURSELF... OR...
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To go a little deeper into the issue of Philosophy and Symbolism...
What is Symbolism and why is it necessary or useful to philosophy?
By Symbolism I intend to suggest the capacity to take the Dialectic (both that of Socrates and that of Hegel)seriously.
What is not meant is a division of labor a la the pin makers in Adam Smith.
It is misleading to think of Socrates in an individual conversation (or Hegel in dividing up historical epochs) as making a division of labor for philosophy (or for history).
This interpretation leads to all sorts of absurdities, such as the various teleologies that have been ascribed to Hegel.
In fact, Hegel's pantheism and anthropomorphism is not teleological in any technological sense.
I would make the opposite argument. Hegel would, I think, claim that technology is dialectical.
This is to say that it is divided in the sense that the conversations in Athens with Socrates were divided. There is an in-culteration occurring but not a product being produced.
Moreover, and this to me is an important point, there is no role changing, which is one of the attributes of a corporation (Adam Smith and capitalism again).
Symbolism does fit in here. There is the possibility of a new (in fact old) authenticity in philosophy.
This is to say that Heidegger asks the question "What is Being?" with no expectation whatsoever that his philosophy or his epoch can provide that answer. Again, he's not intending to move up any corporate ladder.
We see this current deepened with Derrida. Derrida abolishes the author (and for that matter, the litarary critic) from any divine chair in the house of philosophy.
And all symbolists laugh, "That's long overdue!"
Philosophy becomes a form of Poetry, or a form of Art in general.
In other words, philosophy becomes a collaborative project, but, again, not in the sense of a division of labor. And also not in the sense of producing a product technologically. This is all pre-technological and founds technology.
Symbolism can be called a craft that "produces" a sort of "in-culturation" (I'm calling it). By that I intend to suggest a sort of ancient robotics, and I will say that all technology is robotics, whether in the sense of craft or in the sense of modern day corporate technology (division of labor technology).
And by "robotics" I intend to suggest anthropomorphism again.
What does this have to do with authenticity?
I think the story of Pinocchio illustrates the point. The subsequent interpretations of this story could also be thought about.
For example, dramatist Karel Capek coined the term "robot" in 1917 to describe the mechanical people in his science-fiction drama R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).
There is also Edward Scissorhands, and Stephen Spielburg's A.I. and "I Robot" with Will Smith.
These are all re-tellings of the Pinocchio story.
What happens with Pinocchio? Everyone knows that he starts out as a puppet and eventually becomes a real boy. In the original story, the piece of wood from which Pinocchio was carved had the ability to talk, but it is never explained where the piece of wood came from.
Pinocchio's journey is, of course, interpreted as the classic coming-of-age story, the story of a child's transformation from something fake to something more real or authentic.
It is also an example of how we tend to see inculturation process as turning objects into human things. Our first robots were ourselves.
But lights, guns, mirrors, all sorts of equipment in all sorts of forms are "robots" in the sense that they perform human functions. They support us, protect us, befriend us, light our ways, etc.
Or, turning from Pinocchio, we can look at Kafka. Why is Kakfa a novelist of Symbolism? Camus asked this question.
The reason, again, has to do with the artist stepping down from the seat of God. Kafka's works are symbolic and therefore collaborative. They are left deliberately empty so that future generations can take them up. For example, because I have gathered historical material about totalitarianism and paranoia that Kafka was not in a historical position to see (he died before the Holocaust) I am able to understand the Trial in a way that he himself could not.
This, of course, requires me to read the Trial and interpret it. But, more importantly, it required Kafka to leave the Trial "empty" or open in the way that Symbolists do so that this sort of stepping-in-place-of-the-author interpratation can take place. We can do things with the Trial and with the works of other Symbolists (Rimbaud, Mallarme, etc.) that we cannot do with other novelists and poets.
Again, I intend to suggest Heidegger's non-rhetorically asking the question, "What does it mean to be?" or Derrida's entire philosophical project, which is philosophy reaching a very pure level of Symbolism.
Philosophy has gone back to the Dialectic, not just in the sense of asking future generations to make a classless society, or to fulfill the Geist in history so that all energy becomes consciousness.
It is philosophers asking others not to fulfill this or that philosophic project but to fulfill philosophy itself, in the same way that Socrates went around Athens asking the people he encountered to join him in philosophy, to become philosophers.
The vision is all of the human race collaborating in an enormous Symbolic project. Why Symbolic? Because, like Kafka, we need the openness, the emptiness, of Symbolism as absolutely necessary for all collaborative efforts that are not eventually just going to be reduced to corporate structures.
But does the Dialectic also apply to objects, to "matter" as it was called by Descartes? We are in the process of saying it does with technology, which is to say with our current versions of Pinocchio.
This ancient artifact that I hold in my hand, this cup dug from the ground, vibrates with more humanity than many of the people I know. The Pinocchio story often becomes a Frankenstein story, where the "monster" turns out to be more human than the human beings (because more cultured).
We use technology to try to make the "matter," that is, the unconscious energy of the universe, become human, to anthroporphize the world, to make it join us in our symbolic, collaborative project.
It's true that, a la Hegel, we can interpret this as a Geist in history, as a prophecy that eventually the entire universe will become human and aware. In other words, that the universe is our robot, that the universe is our Pinocchio and we're attempting to refashion it, to inculturate it.
But it can also be interpreted as saying that we are simply trying to make the world (the universe) real to ourselves. We are simply seeking authenticity. Someone will say, "I can look up in the sky and feel nothing but alone and die without a God, as long as I know that I'm being real, that I'm being authentic in doing so." Any degree of hopelessness seems bearable as long as there is a sense of reality to it, and a sense that to have things any other way would be cowardly and fake, a false and insipid consolation.
So, we see two currents going in opposite directions and in tension with each other. The first, to re-shape the universe into something human. The second, to re-shape the human into something more true to the cold desolation of reality.
Symbolism serves as the method for doing this as it radically de-centers all authors and voices of authority.
Symbolism leaves the necessary degree of emptiness in the work so that it's not just a process of authors writing and critics interpreting.
Symbolism allows for a radical de-centering, a collaboration, in other words, a dialectic, a dialect that we can take over and become responsible for an pass down.
are we way off topic? and, surely i would hate to bring it up- but it does seem that the more i read these posts, the more i read summarizations, and the coupling of different philosophers. whereas i do enjoy reading summarizations- where are the thoughts that are to be impressed by them?
it just seems that a discussion should show our thoughts, which might be comprised from what we know about what certain philosophers have written.
That's three responses the length and lack of personal thoughts in my blogs!
I'm going from the perspective that history of philosophy is, in fact, philosophy, and that there's no need for anything personal or even very original in these blogs.
It seems worth mentioning that talk of the history of philosophy is not welcome is most of the blogs out there, and so it's a bit discouraging that it's also not welcome in a blog devoted to philosophy!
But not to worry; I don't have to post any more in these blogs. The sense of discomfort goes both ways, to be sure.
I'll, therefore, stop posting in these blogs and say farewell.
...but still wishing you all the best in seeking philosophy...
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