authenticity

In the fifties and early sixties, American TV shows idealized traditional families and suburban life so much people had an undercurrent fear that they might become a cookie cutter human being defined by the externals.

Today, with selfies, social media branding, and managing your profile on LinkedIn and Facebook, everyone seems to have become their own unabashed promoter. The new social mantra "Follow your passions. Do what you love" enjoins everyone to have some dream about their life and you are authentic to the extent that you doggedly pursue that vision as though it were your essence.

What does authenticity mean, and what does it mean to live authentically?  

  

In Camus' novel "The Stranger", the protagonist commits a senseless murder but, in the end, is sentenced to death largely because he refuses to tell the officials and others what they want to hear, namely that he is sorry, which he isn't. 

"In order to be, never try to seem," that seems to be one stern advise Camus wants to tell us through the story. 

Is there, however, more to authenticity than just "don't pretend"? Though Sartre tries, he can find no precise distinction between sincerity and authenticity as one might differentiate between tables and chairs, nor is it possible to generate an unambiguous criterion for deciding whether or not we are leading authentic lives. Perhaps like all ingredients of inner life, authenticity is something you just can't put on a scale and tell how much it weighs.

Etymologically speaking, both in Latin and in German, the idea of authenticity comes from the notion of making something your own. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, many 19- and 20-year-olds, many of them first-generation college students whose parents had to dig deeply to send them to college, boarded buses southbound to help register voters and fight racism, knowing full well the maelstrom of violence they were driving into. That was authenticity on two counts. They were not taking marching orders from their parents or society in general, and they were acting on their own conviction.

"Be true to yourself", then, sounds like one great simple way to be authentic. The trick, and the trap to avoid, though, is how not to become a narcissist or self-righteous bigot following such easily turned self-serving moral guideline. After all, it could be argued that there were millions of Nazis who did just that, and hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their last breath defending slavery.

"If authenticity is being true to ourselves ... then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole," says contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor in his book "The Ethics of Authenticity".

Relational creatures as we humans are, it could be that becoming our own person is only possible via strong bonds to something outside of ourselves. For Kierkegaard it is God, while Taylor submits this connection can take the form of binding yourself to a "political cause or tending to the earth."

Maybe we have taken this all wrong. Authenticity is not something we can work at, all we can do is to make efforts to avoid inauthenticity. So, for example, being vulnerable makes you closer to authenticity, while "faking it until you make it" makes you less so. 

Or maybe authenticity is something we were born with, that got lost/buried under layers of layers of pseudo knowledge as we got "educated" by culture, society and lots of our own "self-help" efforts. The task then is to shake off the chaff and shackles and get back to the original, "返璞歸真," as the Taoists would say. 

Or follow a plan that is there from the start, to become who you truly are in God, as Kierkegaard would say.

* This writing is based on Chapter "Authenticity" of the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide".