by Gary Borjesson
Become who you are, having learned what that is. -Pindar
Become who you are. —Nietzsche
I want to be authentic and so probably do you. It’s a virtue fostered by philosophic and therapeutic inquiries. In popular culture, “authenticity” is broadly used to mean being true to oneself—often with an emphasis on not caring what others think. Thus its critics see authenticity as encouraging a culture of narcissism, since it appears to focus on self-actualization at the expense of other ideals, including healthy relationships and communities, and the social values such as honesty, fairness, and justice that support these. Here I offer a philosophically informed definition of authenticity, drawing attention to why, despite popular usage, it is a prosocial, ethical ideal.
Authenticity may indeed be the virtue of being true to oneself, but what does that mean? To some it means being the creator of one’s own truth and value, and living solely according to these. Imagine a bright, rebellious teenager who’s read a little Nietzsche. They decide that the first step to becoming authentic is to take up their philosophic hammer and use it to smash all external claims and constraints —those truths, values, and beliefs that come from family, religion, community, customs, traditions, even from nature herself. This apparently asocial or even antisocial tendency is partly how authenticity gets associated with nihilism and moral decline, rather than being the virtue I suggest it is.
As many have pointed out, including Allan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind, this narcissistic-fantasy version of authenticity stems from a philosophy of “cheerful nihilism,” a memorable phrase borrowed from Donald Barthelme. It’s cheerful because it’s about freedom from responsibility, rather than being freedom with responsibility. The roots of this nihilism can be traced to reductive materialism in the sciences and postmodernism in the humanities—ideologies that find fertile ground in individualistic capitalist societies, where everyone competes to get the most they can. These days one can see this “ethic” prominently displayed among politicians and tech billionaires, but this is not authenticity. (Philosopher Charles Taylor’s short book The Ethics of Authenticity offers a good account of the history and future of authenticity.)
The ethical definition of authenticity includes the observable fact that we own our lives and truth in the world. Specifically, becoming authentic concerns taking our place in the world—even if it’s the place of a rebel. For where else but in a world do we learn who we are, and actualize ourselves? Our very power of living, thinking, and speaking owes its development to others. Thus, a free spirit or rebel or Libertarian may imagine they are powered by their truth alone. But without a world, there’s nothing to rebel against, and nothing from which to liberate the spirit.
Of course, most who choose more interior lives are far from denying that living authentically includes taking their place in the world. They offer the rest of us the fruits of what they gather in solitude, perhaps in the form of art or wisdom. They also remind us that to live authentically involves going inward and getting to know who are we are, apart from others. Who are we when we strip away being a parent or child? When we quit our professional roles and relationships? When we step back from our political and social affiliations? These are questions that Socrates and philosophy press on us. They must be pressed because our tendency is thoughtlessly to accept (or reject) at face value the values and stories we’re given, including the ones we’ve been told about who we are.
To learn who we are, and become our true selves, we go beyond the false dichotomy between identifying with external values and therefore being prosocial; or making our own values, and therefore being nihilists, cheerful or otherwise. The historical notion of authenticity (if not the word) recognizes that there is a natural dialectical tension between our group identities and our individual identity. The group identities come naturally, some of them internalized before we’re old enough to know what we’ve taken in! (The language we speak, for example, or family attitudes.) The integrity of the rebellious teen’s philosophy is that growing up does include challenging the authority of the group identities foisted on us.
Authenticity is associated with this inward, questioning moment in the dialectic between self and other because this is always the harder task. To get to know who we are and where we fit in the world requires conscious effort in a way that achieving physical maturity or acting from instinct does not. Moreover, many external forces are arrayed against us becoming authentic. In fact, the modern notion of authenticity originated in late 18th century in response to the dehumanizing and leveling effects of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution.
The leveling effects have only intensified in the age of the internet, social media, and large corporations competing (very skillfully!) for control of our attention and behavior. Mechanization, urbanization, mass production, mass media, and mass culture have created what Heidegger called “das Man”—inauthentic, mass human beings who have no true identity of their own and are easily led by others. Living by clock and calendar and timetables; socializing via tech devices and corporate algorithms; measuring productivity in work, fitness, sleep; subjected to advertising and propaganda; in these and countless other ways we’re easily made over by capitalism from persons into consumers whose happiness is, conveniently, measured in personal wealth and GDP.
Against these leveling forces, thinkers such as Rousseau and later the Romantics emphasized the importance of one’s own private experience and feeling, and of cultivating one’s particular “genius” rather than conforming to social norms and expectations. Later, Nietzsche and Heidegger, among others, take up the theme, arguing that we must “become what we are, having learned what that is.” Nietzsche loved this motto of the ancient Greek poet, Pindar, and made it his own. And in fact, this process of making-things-our-own goes to the true heart of authenticity.
As an ideal, authenticity underscores our right, and indeed our responsibility, to go inward and learn what our own truth and genius are. It reminds us that unless we make a conscious effort, we don’t become authentic, but instead remain the unexamined sum of external influences that influence our identity and fate. In short, the ideal of authenticity reminds us that there is in fact an ontological difference between identifying, say, as a Christian or Muslim or Jew or Atheist because our parents do; and identifying as one because we’ve wrestled with faith for ourselves.
At the same time, we see now that going inward does not mean going it alone. Nor that external influences can or should be rejected out of hand in the name of cultivating our own truth. But we do need to be able to question them; indeed, we need to be encouraged to question them because, after all, we start our lives as prisoners in a cave of ignorance. From here, as Socrates illustrates, we come to know ourselves and the world by questioning laws, values, customs, beliefs, and opinions—not in a dismissive way, but hospitably, as I described in an earlier column. Socrates exemplifies how to hold space for a hearing by refraining from calling anything true or false before it has been examined. Thus the ethics of authenticity, ancient and modern, suggest that we become authentic by going back and forth, into ourselves and out into the world—not for the sake of reaching agreement, but for the sake of discovering ourselves, the world, and where we fit.
Nietzsche wrote about philosophizing with a hammer. This is often misunderstood in just the way that authenticity is. It’s not a sledgehammer for smashing what exists and making whatever we please instead. Rather, it’s a sounding hammer, used to find out what beliefs and values ring true and what sound hollow or fall to pieces when examined. The problem, as Nietzsche wrote, is that
There are more idols than realities in the world…For once, then, to pose the questions here with a hammer and…[to pose them in such a way that] just that which would remain silent must become outspoken…not just the idols of the age, but the eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork.
No one can do this work for us, just as no one can do our dying for us. That’s because it’s who we are—our unique history and ensemble of gifts, passions, and curses—that we must discover and develop and locate in the world. This philosophic story, as I’m telling it, is also the likely story from an evolutionary perspective, inasmuch as novelty is an engine of adaption. Then, by coming into our own inimitable selves, we bring that novelty to our collaborations, offering the best of ourselves, and helping, we hope, to bring out the best in others. After all, we live not in a world of atoms in a void, but in an interdependent world constituted through the ongoing play of dynamic forces.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.