Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal

Somogy Varga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415895330
• eBook ISBN: 9781136508301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Authenticity has become a widespread ethical ideal that represents a way of dealing with normative gaps in contemporary life. This ideal suggests that one should be true to oneself and lead a life expressive of what one takes oneself to be. However, many contemporary thinkers have pointed out that the ideal of authenticity has increasingly turned into a kind of aestheticism and egoistic self-indulgence. In his book, Varga systematically constructs a critical concept of authenticity that takes into account the reciprocal shaping of capitalism and the ideal of authenticity. Drawing on different traditions in critical social theory, moral philosophy and phenomenology, Varga builds a concept of authenticity that can make intelligible various problematic and potentially exhausting practices of the self.

Part I

The Sources of Authenticity

1 The Sources of Authenticity

I have already mentioned the great impact of authenticity as an ideal and in this chapter I attempt to explore this in detail. At the same time I provide a historical overview of the idea, its critics, and where we stand today. The appeal of this ideal can be made intelligible if one understands that it grows out of a long tradition of Western thought and practices that have shaped the modern worldview. Due to its long philosophical pedigree and innumerable connotations, authenticity is a difficult concept to handle. I will, therefore, not attempt a comprehensive review of its history. At the same time, I do think that we can only properly assess this central feature of modern culture by gaining some insight into the historical scaffolding of ideas from which it has emerged. Consequently, this chapter is concerned with the history of authenticity in a more systematic way, attempting to review the different forms in which it has surfaced and the different justifications by which it has been defended throughout history. Additionally, to limit and systematize this undertaking, I shall draw the countours of authenticity as it is understood today by contrasting it to other related notions such as sincerity and autonomy.

One could argue that the idea of authenticity has always been a part of Western thought. Socrates must have had a distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic in mind when he invoked the dictum “Know thyself,” which is found on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Similarly, both Augustine’s and Seneca’s work presuppose this distinction between something inner, which is somehow more truthful and ‘higher,’ and something outer that is false. However, before concluding that authenticity as we understand it today has played a central role from the beginning of Western thought, we must pay attention to the conception of self in question. As Pierre Hadot (1992) has noted, in the Stoic conception of the self authenticity is far from being at one with something inner. Rather, the dimension of the self that is considered to be worthy of discovering and nourishing is exactly that dimension of the self that ultimately points towards something that transcends the self. So the good life is far from merely about being at one with oneself, but also involves transcending oneself towards cosmos. Similarly, Nussbaum (1994) points out that in Stoic spiritual exercises emphasis lies in the connection between the cultivation of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ reason. In the case of Socrates, authentic self-knowledge is not so much a matter of turning inward to detect unique personal traits, simply because Socrates does not operate with the conception of the self as an individual with a personal ‘interiority.’ Instead, human beings are regarded as parts of a cosmic web of interrelatedness, and individuality is understood as determined by the relation to this wider whole—it is this wider cosmos that determines how things ought to be. In this outlook, self-knowledge and authenticity are not about interiority, but about “excising what is particular and distinctive in yourself in order to be better able to match the ideal that determines your function” (Guignon 2004: 8). So not only are strong inner traits, personal desires, and feelings not considered constitutive of what one really is, but they can even be discarded as personal burdens that endanger authenticity, which is about living up to the place one has in the scheme of things, living up to the position that defines one as an instance of humankind.

Augustine deepens the gap between interiority and exteriority, creating a more profound notion of interiority that according to Richard Sennett has shaped Western culture ever since. Augustine creates a divide between subjectivity and world, self and city (Sennett 1993: xii) and embraces inwardness and spirituality over a worldly oriented life that supposedly turns individuals away from themselves (Ibid.: 6–10). In De vera Religione, Augustine’s advice on how to live an authentic life reads: “Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth” (quoted in Taylor 1989: 129). In Book 10 of his Confessions, he uses the symbol of the heart to denote the inner self. At first the symbol of the heart suggests not only a journey towards interiority, but also a privatized spirituality. But instead, for Augustine, interiority is where God dwells, and it is in this interior space that one is truly united with humanity (Augustine 1955; Sheldrake 2003). Therefore, Augustine’s pledge to “Return to your heart!” in the Tractates on the Gospel of John (18.10) should not be understood as merely an inward journey but one that eventually transcends this interiority towards God and humanity. In all, Augustine clears the path towards the modern duality of outer ‘false’ self and inner ‘true’ self, but the inward orientation turns out to be an orientation that exactly transcends interiority. This shows how different Augustine’s conception of the self is, when compared to modern and contemporary conceptions of authenticity. The self is not seen as a unified source of agency, but as depending on God as the source of one’s being. In the distinction between true and false self, the latter refers to the worldly self. This self only appears to be the source of our actions, since for Augustine God is the real source of our actions. Thus, while introspection gets us closer to the hidden force, introspection will always remain unreliable and incomplete, since “there is something of man that the spirit of man that is in him does not know” (Augustine 1955: section 5).

Consequently, we can maintain that authenticity has been a part of Western thought since antiquity, but only if we keep in mind how much the Greek, Roman, and early Christian views on the authentic self differ from our modern and contemporary conception of authenticity which posits the self as a unified source of agency. What we find in authors like Augustine is really not so much about a pure turn inward. Rather, it is a turn “inward and upward” (Taylor 1989: 134). What is on the inside gains its importance only as a manifestation of something ‘higher’ that is to be realized. While this ‘agent-transcendent’ aspect weakens in the course of secularization, the aspect that the realization of something (agent) immanent is at the same time also a realization of something ‘higher’ remains a feature of authenticity.

Much later, the idea behind the ancient dictums “Know Thyself” and “Return to your heart” is transformed and secularized together with the underlying conception of the self. The emergence of the moral ideal of sincerity, under the dictum of “Be true to yourself,” marks a crucial step towards the contemporary idea of authenticity.

1 SINCERITY

In his book Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling traces the appearance of a new moral idea, putting forward “that at a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity” (Trilling 1972: 2). While the moral ideal of sincerity is an important step towards the contemporary shape of authenticity, let me point out some defining characteristics and central differences between sincerity and authenticity. First, let us look at sincerity. Trilling (Ibid.: 3) here points to a moment in Hamlet, where Polonius sends Laertes to Paris with paternal advice:

This above all: to thine own self be true

And it doth follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Polonius thus conceived sincerity as being true to one’s own self, which at first sounds a lot like the contemporary ideal of authenticity. However, a careful look reveals that sincerity is here depicted in a manner that actually corresponds with the ‘inward and upward’ model that we have seen in the work of Augustine. As with the Greek and Roman thinkers, being true to the self is not an end in itself, but first and foremost an essential condition of virtue. Inward orientation is therefore not valuable in its own right. Instead, it is valuable because it serves the higher moral goal of being true to others. This should make clear that the underlying idea of the true self is very different from the contemporary notion. Sincerity is not essentially a personal but rather a social virtue. Its aim is to avoid being false to others by virtue of being true to oneself. If we look at the defining characteristics of sincerity, we see a particular pattern emerging. Sincerity is defined as the state of the self in which there is equivalence between the statement and the actual feeling that informs behavior. Hence, sincerity refers to the self in its outward manifestation in the social domain, and it can therefore be put to the test by examining whether one‘s actions actually match one’s public declarations. Sincere in this sense means something close to ‘honest.’ The basic wrongdoing of insincerity is about violating the expectations that follow with the position one holds in society, whenever attempting to appear otherwise than one ought to.

Trilling traces how the moral ideal of sincerity transformed into the ideal of authenticity with the evolution of modernity. While the two concepts in the beginning shared common features, they quickly grew apart. In fact, there is today a clash between sincerity and authenticity. The sincere person who seeks to match the requirements of his position in social life is now almost automatically considered inauthentic (Ferrara 1993: 87). For instance, Sartre (1943/1991) discusses the inauthentic waiter who disappears as an individual while trying to fit his professional role. When turning to the question of how authenticity is justified, we see an analogous reversal. Being true to own self is no longer a mere means to a higher moral end, but an end in itself. As Ferrara notes, authenticity is sincerity for its own sake (Ferrara 1993: 86).

In addition, while sincerity does not imply criticism of a given social order, authenticity becomes an implicitly critical concept, which calls into question social order and public opinion. Hegel is among the first to call attention to the fading ideal of sincerity, which he polemically refers to as “the heroism of dumb service” (Hegel 2002: 515). Hegel launches an attack on the sincerity of the bourgeois “honest man,” who passively interiorizes a particular conventional social ethos. In the condition of sincerity, the individual is uncritically obedient to the external power of society—a conformity that for Hegel leads to subjugation and a deterioration of the individual (Trilling 1972; Golomb 1995: 9). In the progress of spirit, the individual consciousness moves from this condition to a condition of baseness, in which the individual becomes antagonistic to external power and achieves a measure of autonomy. The loss of transparency that is connected to this process also means that the individual becomes self-alienated, but this is for Hegel a necessary step in progress. As Bernard Williams (2002: 190) has noted, the self-alienated individual “can no longer feel unreflectively at home in its social environment.”

Hegel shows this clearly in a comment on Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, a story in which the narrator (supposedly Diderot himself) is portrayed as the reasonable, sincere man who respects the prevailing order, and who has achieved bourgeois respectability. In contrast, the nephew is full of contempt for the society in which he figures as a worthless person. Nevertheless, he is in opposition to himself, because he still aspires to a better standing in a society, which he believes has nothing but emptiness to offer (Despland 1975: 360; Golomb 1995: 13–15). For Hegel, Rameau is an example of the sincere, honest soul, while the nephew figures as the “disintegrated,” alienated consciousness. The nephew is described as alienated, because he is unable to appropriate and to identify with the social norms of the society he lives in.

But for Hegel this alienation is a step in the progression towards autonomous existence. With Hegel, we see an intellectual atmosphere emerging, in which sincerity becomes suspicious and in which it will later be replaced by the stronger notion of authenticity. Trilling clarifies this development by maintaining that individuals in Hegel’s time become aware that society “requires that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we really are what we want our community to know we are.” And Trilling continues:

In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgment may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic (Trilling 1972: 10–11).

The corrosion of the ideal of sincerity is an important factor that has made it possible for authenticity to emerge. Another decisive factor was the emergence of a distinctively modern conception of the self that builds on a starker contrast between interiority and exteriority compared to earlier thinkers. One of the intertwining processes that led to such a radicalization of inwardness was the emergence of religious individualism, which centers religious life on the individual and stresses the importance of inwardness and of introspectively examining one’s inner motives, intentions, and conscience. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault calls attention to the origins of the modern subject of inwardness, suggesting that

Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth … The obligation to confess now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface (Foucault 1980: 58. 60).

For Foucault, confession and the look inward to monitor one’s interior life and to tell certain ‘truths’ about oneself has become a part of cultural life, reaching from religious contexts to psychological therapy. The radicalization of the distinction between true interiority and exteriority has led to new possibilities. Inner states, motivations, and feelings can now be objectified and worked upon in different contexts. Also, the focus on the inner paves the way for assessing one’s undertakings against the measure of who one essentially is.

2 AUTONOMY

As I have mentioned earlier, understanding the emergence of the ethical ideal of authenticity can be best achieved by describing the context in which it evolves as a contrast to sincerity and autonomy. While the normative grip of authenticity partly stems from its replacing sincerity, the connection of authenticity and autonomy is more sophisticated yet, and even today we find numerous accounts that do not distinguish between the two adequately.

Of course, as ethical concepts there are several parallels between authenticity and autonomy. Most importantly, they both oppose the pre-modern notion of the right, which is justified by recourse to some higher authority like God, the King, or to some good, which can be known a priori (Ferrara 1993: 89). Historically, while autonomy and authenticity to a large extent shape distinct ethical theories, they both come from a common origin. Ethical views, oriented towards autonomy and authenticity, hold that the normativity of ethical norms derives from the capacity of the subject to follow a self-imposed principle. Having said this, it is also quite clear that they are distinct. For Kant, norms formed by principles constitute the goodness of moral will. In opposition to this, in an ethic of authenticity, importance is attributed to recognizing (and not denying) the impulses that draw us away us from universal principles. Christoph Menke has convincingly shown that Hegel’s discussion of tragedy in fact encircles this particular problem of modernity. The modern ideal of authenticity, where the individual pursues a good life that expresses his identity, clashes with the idea of normatively construed autonomy (Menke 1995: 93). In this sense modernity is divided with regard to these orientations and this division constitutes the “Tragödie der Sittlichkeit.” Menke interprets modern social reality in light of this tragic opposition between autonomy and authenticity, between a normative order (that is constructed in prohibitive terms) and individuality.

The idea of autonomy is a legacy of Enlightenment humanism; it emphasizes the individual’s self-governing abilities, which are employed independently of position in political and social structures. Autonomy is understood as holding a basic moral and political value, and central to this claim is that moral principles and the legitimacy of political authority should be grounded in the self-governing individual who is set free from various cultural and social constraints. In this sense, the concept of autonomy has these core components: the independence of one’s freedom of deliberation and choice from manipulation and paternalistic interventions, and the capacity to decide for oneself (Dworkin 1988: 121–129). Thus, ethical orientations based on the ideas of autonomy or authenticity do not refer to some higher authority, but to the actor’s capacity to reliably follow a self-imposed principle. Autonomy was given a key role in philosophical accounts of a person’s moral responsibility and in the justification of social political authority. At the core of Kant’s moral theory is the idea that rational human wills are autonomous. Like Rousseau, Kant goes beyond the idea of merely ‘negative’ freedom, the idea of being free from outer constraints. Autonomy does refer to being bound by laws, but by those that are to a certain extent laid down by oneself. Individual autonomy refers to a life led according to one’s own reasons and motives, rather than to one that is largely the product of manipulative external forces. In a broad sense, autonomy is about the ability to put one’s own behavior under reflexive scrutiny and make it dependent on self-determined goals (Honneth 1994: 59).

In this general picture, ‘personal autonomy’ is understood as a feature that actors can display when dealing with very diverse aspects of their lives (Dworkin 1988). On the other hand, Kantian ‘moral autonomy’ is limited to issues of moral obligation and means the capacity to impose the moral law on oneself. In Kantian moral discourse, autonomy is the ideal of self-legislation guided by general principles. But another central issue is that autonomy always entails being responsive to reasons. Thus, for a will to be autonomous it must be unconstrained by external factors, it must emerge from the actor and it must be responsive to reasons—a criterion that excludes, for instance, rigid obsessions.

What authenticity adds to this picture is that it not only refers to leading an autonomous life, guided by one’s own non-constrained reasons and motives. Beyond this, authenticity also refers to the idea that these motives and reasons are expressive of a subject’s core personality. This points to the conceptual gap between (Kantian) autonomy and authenticity. One can lead an autonomous life, even if this way of living fails to express a person’s self-understanding. In this sense, the notion of authenticity accounts for something that lies beyond the scope of autonomy, bringing into play the actor’s sense of self-identity. I might act in self-determined in a case where my concrete action fails to be authentic, and thus to fit with who I take myself to be. In an earlier book, Ferrara discusses the relation between autonomy and authenticity, saying that authenticity

introduces a distinc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I. The Sources of Authenticity
• PART II. Towards a ‘Formal’ Concept of Authenticity
• PART III. The Paradox of Authenticity
• Notes
• References
• Index