In Search of Authenticity

Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus

Jacob Golomb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134812738
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Great philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre have clearly been preoccupied by the possibility of authenticity. In this study, Jacob Golomb looks closely at the literature and writings of these philosophers in his analysis of their ethics. Golomb's writings shows his passionate commitment to the quest for the authenticity - particularly in our climate of post-modern scepticism. He argues that existentialism is all the more pertinent and relevant today when set against the general disillusionment which characterises the late twentieth century. This book is invaluable reading for those who have been fascinated by figures like Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu and Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

1

Authenticity, sincerity and honesty

The term ‘authenticity’ is used in so many different contexts that it may very well resist definition. Yet the most significant difficulty that arises in attempting to define it lies in the philosophical nature of its meaning. Even to speak of ‘the nature of its meaning’ is misleading, since it implies a kind of essentialism, a perspective of objectivity which is foreign to authenticity. As Sartre pointed out, authenticity does not denote ‘objective qualities’ such as those associated with the notions of sincerity and honesty, qualities one predicates of ‘the person’ in the same way one asserts, for instance, that ‘the table is round or square’.¹ The notion of authenticity, it seems, signifies something beyond the domain of objective language, while the notions of sincerity and honesty have to do with attributes to which language can refer directly.

This feeling is strengthened by reading Being and Nothingness, where Sartre describes ‘human reality’ as ‘being which is what it is not and which is not what it is’.² This idea, and his insistence that authenticity is something we are aware of when ‘we flee it’,³ suggest that authenticity is a negative term. Its presence is discerned in its absence, in the passionate search for it, in inauthenticity and in various acts of ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi). The latter are described far more extensively in Sartre’s writings than are the authentic modes.

The works of other existentialist writers manifest a similar disproportion between those that directly address authenticity itself and those that critique societal values and inauthentic modes of living. Nietzsche, for example, devotes relatively little space to describing his ideal Übermensch and never points to a concrete historical figure who exemplifies it. The same is true of Kierkegaard and Camus. All agree in principle that any positive definition of authenticity would be self-nullifying.

The existentialist writers hope to shatter our dogmatic beliefs and lure us into giving up blindly accepted ethical norms and ideologies. Only when we successfully shed these values that we have been conditioned to uphold by various institutions – our families, schools and universities – will we be able to reach beyond them to the genuine roots of our selves and ultimately attain authenticity. The unnecessary information we have collected during our lifetimes, the ‘facts’ postulated as an integral part of the ethos of objectivity fostered by society and its institutions, are inapplicable to the sphere of human existence in which one struggles for one’s self. There, in their stead, the notion of authenticity emerges.

The indirect approach to understanding the notion of authenticity, akin to the theological via negativa, is also reflected in the OED, where the term ‘authentic’ is defined largely by its antonyms. Given this elusive nature, we may be better off approaching the notion of authenticity by attempting to distinguish it from the kindred terms of sincerity and honesty.

I

In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling defines sincerity as ‘the state or quality of the self which refers primarily to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling’. He goes on to claim that one of the main criteria of sincerity is ‘the degree of correspondence between the principle avowed by a society and its actual conduct’.⁴ Thus for Trilling the term ‘sincerity’ is used for the self as manifested in the social domain. Sincerity can be objectively tested – for example, by checking whether outward behaviour is consistent with public declarations. ‘Sincere’ in this sense is synonymous with ‘true’ and ‘honest’. All three of these concepts are foreign to the idea of authentic life as understood by the existentialist writers. For them, the notion of authenticity expresses, among other things, revolt against the traditional conception of truth and the ideal of sincerity derived from it.⁵ Authenticity resides neither in the external correspondence of sentences to what they refer to, nor in the internal coherence of various statements. This, in fact, is the heart of the existentialist revolution: the eclipse of ‘truth’ by ‘truthfulness’, the transition from objective sincerity to personal authenticity.

The terms ‘sincerity’ and ‘honesty’ are applicable to an individual whose inner convictions and commitments are congruent with that individual’s behaviour. As such, they differ from ‘authenticity’, which cannot be said to apply to any such correspondence, since correspondence presumes a static subject, while authenticity requires an incessant movement of becoming, self-transcendence and self-creation. It calls for no particular contents or consequences but, rather, focuses on the origins and the intensity of one’s emotional-existential commitments, on what Kierkegaard calls ‘subjective inwardness’ and Sartre ‘engagement’.

However, the existentialists’ reservations about sincerity and honesty are in no way similar to Hegel’s⁶ and stem from different considerations. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel criticizes the ‘honest individual’. The notions of honesty and sincerity in a given historical period, he argues, exemplify submission to the prevailing morality and nullify the urge of the Spirit to escape the conditions which circumscribe it and to assume an existence of complete freedom determined by itself alone. Since the Spirit is always undergoing the dialectical movement of unfolding itself in history, there is an inherent tension between the agent, as the vehicle of this development, and ‘the honest individual’ who ‘takes each moment to be an abiding essentiality’⁷ and derives his or her identity from the prevailing Sittlichkeit – the ethos based on current social, legal and cultural institutions. The rational essence of any individual, according to Hegel, can be adequately actualized only within the framework of a state organized so that its citizens and its social and cultural institutions coexist harmoniously. Since such a state is as yet just an unactualized idea in the practical realm of Spirit, those who conform to society by internalizing the prevailing ethic are actually subjecting themselves to a framework devoid of comprehensive rationality. And since social conformity is inconsistent with disbelief in the rationality and moral validity of society, such ‘honest individuals’ suffer from self-alienation, a state characterized by double standards and conflicting norms.

On Hegel’s analysis, the ‘honest individual’ is actually a hypocrite lacking real freedom. For Hegel, the absolute rationality which will be fully realized with the end of history will bring with it total freedom, but this freedom is far removed from that aspired to by the thinkers on authenticity. For them, freedom consists in negating the current ethic, in overcoming the demands of one’s personal history by not defining oneself according to present or future historical predicaments. Rejection of the ethos of ‘the honest individual’ makes way for the pathos of authenticity.

Authenticity and sincerity are thus fundamentally opposed and should not be regarded as equivalent or synonymous.⁸ Trilling maintains that authenticity is ‘a more strenuous moral experience than “sincerity”, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life’. The distinction, however, is not merely a quantitative one. As Trilling notes, ‘much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, e.g., disorder, violence, unreason’.⁹ But authenticity is not a ‘moral authority’, for it is contrary to the nature of authenticity to tell others what to do. Though the term is indeed derived from auctoritas, the authority in question is self-directed – it is the mastery of one who freely creates the pathos of authenticity and strives to express and live it in the everyday.

II

David Hume is one of those who use the term ‘authenticity’ in the sense of genuineness, of things being what they profess in origin or authorship.¹⁰ But Hume did not apply this notion to the concept of the self, arguing that the term ‘self’ is a meaningless metaphysical obfuscation denoting an allegedly permanent entity that is in fact no more than a bundle of impressions and ideas to which we mistakenly ascribe an identity.

In reaction to Hume, certain German philosophers sought to restore the metaphysical validity of the self. Kant introduces the ‘transcendental Ego’ to shift the focus away from the individual or ‘empirical Ego’. He transfers God’s creative functions to human beings, who, as transcendental Egos, create the whole knowable world, including their empirical Egos, around themselves. This move cleared the way for the self-creation of one’s selfhood – for authenticity. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus soon follow with their claims of the death of God and their demands that all individuals adopt for themselves the God-like role of being the originator of their own selves. As the theory of the ‘pre-established harmony’ between our thoughts and reality, guaranteed by God, fell into disfavour, that of the self-creation of the self gained popularity. The proponents of authenticity took the opportunity to have us become God.

Like Kant’s transcendental Ego, the notion of authenticity is formal: it too focuses on the origin of creativity and spontaneity, on ‘how’ rather than ‘what’. It is also formal in the sense of the categorical imperative. No less than the Kantian conception of the morally autonomous human agent, the concept of authenticity is a protest against the blind, mechanical acceptance of an externally imposed code of values. The existentialist thinkers’ preoccupation with origin and genealogy, then, is largely a product of the Kantian outlook. Yet the Kantian perspective evokes a kind of ‘transcendental pretence’.¹¹ The transcendental Ego, construed as supra-personal, leads ultimately to a destructive collapse of all individual selves into an abstract universal Self.¹² The existentialist revolt should thus be seen as an attempt to counteract this tendency, to call us back to our all-too-human but none the less authentic sense of self.

The concept of ‘self’ denotes that which one intrinsically is. However, this being, according to thinkers on authenticity, is not a fixed entity or abstract essence, but an existence that precedes any essence and determination. Thus, existentialism rejects the traditional ontological notion of the subject, the grandiose metaphysical idea of the Absolute or Universal Self. Hume himself encouraged this rejection by fostering a profound confidence in human emotions. In contradistinction to Kant’s rational ethics and unqualified faith in reason, Hume argued: ‘Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions’,¹³ thereby strengthening the claim of pathos to be a legitimate constitutive element of the self.

Further, Hume’s notion of the self as a ‘bundle of impressions’ conceived of the individual as chaotic raw material which one’s creativity could organize and mould without any ontological constraints. The Humean individual lacks the ontological rigidity and fixedness of an a priori essence and is therefore more amenable to self-creation, providing one is in control of these impressions. Once ordered, they become a set of expressions which transform the self into an aggregate of sentiments and life-pathos, of ‘true pathos of every period of our life’.¹⁴ This conception of pathos as an experience, feeling or sentiment of a particular individual, as a sensual feeling of one’s own authentic self in its emotional richness, requires no definite ontological status or metaphysical aggrandizement.

The Continental existentialists’ revolt against Western metaphysics, however, does not deny its history. To invert values, to revise, one must have a good command of the original versions and dogmas against which one is reacting. The thinkers of authenticity, though seeking to replace conventional concepts of truth, retain certain traditional motifs. Thus, for example, when Sartre succumbs to the temptation to define authenticity despite the essential impossibility of such a definition, he is simply regressing to the traditional concept of truth as correspondence:

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, sometimes in horror and hate.¹⁵

Another example is the ideal of coherence, which reappears as a whole, congruent and harmonious personality in the existentialist quest for individuum, which rejects any symptom of dividuum within one’s authentic self. They thus oppose those components of the prevailing social ethos that, when internalized, prevent one from attaining this ideal inner harmony and simplicity.

III

The notions of honesty and sincerity can be defined as congruence between one’s inclinations and the prevailing ethos, or as congruence between one’s behaviour and one’s innermost essence.¹⁶ Authenticity, however, is not in keeping with such a definition. Not only does it deny any rigid a priori essence, but it also rejects any intrinsic value in compliance with a given set of standards. It regards any such compliance as flight from one’s responsibility for freely forming one’s selfhood. Authenticity defines itself as lacking any...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• In Search of Authenticity
• PROBLEMS OF MODERN EUROPEAN THOUGHT
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editorsnotes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Authenticity, sincerity and honesty
• 2 Authenticity, literature and irony
• 3 Kierkegaard’s ironic ladder to authentic faith
• 4 Nietzsche’s pathos of authenticity
• 5 Heidegger’s ontology of authenticity
• 6 Sartre: from phenomenological ontology to psychoanalysis and politics
• 7 Camus’s return to authentic human morality
• Conclusion: Authenticity and ethics
• Bibliography
• Index