Authenticity

1.  Bad faith (Sartre)

2.   Be true to oneself vs. self-deception

3.   Courage (to be) (Tillich) (Dare to be)

4.   Dare to act

5.   Death – the final coming to rest

6.   Folly and remorse

7.   Beyond redemption

8.   No Heidegger this time

9.   Not sure if psychoanalysis is helpful or relevant

10.  In Search of Authenticity: Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus (Problems of Modern European Thought), by Jacob Golomb, Routledge, 1995 (questia, scribd pdf)

11.  Now, a la Jacob Golomb, it is about ethics (not metaphysical at all, in other words)

12.  And, since it is about ethics, it is about dilemma and choice, both of which are so very personal, and quite inconsequential in terms of the progress of the HISTORY

13.  Therefore, this is about anti-hero

14. Now, our problem is, in search of authenticity, after camus

15. Interestingly, the two thinkers who adopted an ontological approach to authenticity both went through a kind of midlife Umkehr or ‘conversion’: Heidegger, from the phenomenological ontology of Dasein to the poetry and mysticism of Being, and Sartre, from phenomenological ontology to politics. (p. 92)

16. … like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, not a philosopher in the technical or academic sense, Camus expresses ideas and dilemmas that are intimately related to the ideal of authenticity (p. 119)

17. Unlike Kierkegaard, who entices us to take an absurd leap of faith, Camus rejects transcendence, adopts a position of strict immanence3 and invites us to live out a rebellious acceptance of our absurd fate. He encourages us to win authenticity by ‘an act of lucidity as one makes an act of faith’ (LACE, p. 81). This illuminates the dilemma that confronted all the thinkers we have considered: the singularity and the spontaneity of the ideal of authenticity imply a clash with the prevailing ethic; yet to resolve this impasse by granting authenticity a recognized social meaning in turn neutralizes this spontaneity by forcing it into a fixed ontological yoke. In any event, however, Camus rejects this solution since ontology is meaningless in an absurd world. (p. 119)

18. Sisyphian life in the face of the absurd is the only authentic attitude available to mortals who reject suicide and proudly affirm their lives. (p.120)

19. Camus’s two major philosophical essays, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, are philosophical commentaries on his understanding of authenticity as it is portrayed in his novels, short stories and plays. …By generating in us deep existential anguish, Camus’s fiction offers us a chance to overcome it by being true to ourselves for the sake of humanity. ‘This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future’ (MS, p. 169). (p. 120)

20. The answer…is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate…even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism…. The Myth of Sisyphus…sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert. (p. 122)

21. Hence Camus recommends acceptance and affirmation of life even if it lacks transcendent meaning. The solution to absurdity is not to escape to philosophy or suicide, but, rather, to accept it as a given. The sober and creative life is the authentic solution and indicates an authentic overcoming. To Camus’s generation the war had given little reason to be hopeful; Camus, like Nietzsche before him, offers hope without reason as the authentic reaction to the absurdity of immanence embodied in the myth of Sisyphus. Like the Nietzschean Übermensch, who adopts the existential formula of amor fati, ‘the absurd man says yes’ (ibid., p. 99).

22. Like Nietzsche, he demands that we liberate ourselves from the yearning for salvation by overcoming our nostalgia for it. Camus’s determination to withhold from us any ‘metaphysics of consolation’ (ibid., p. 42) makes authenticity all the more vital since in his eyes it is the only solution capable of withstanding the feeling of absurdity. (p. 124)

23. Even if suicide merely indicates resigned acceptance of the harsh implications of the relationship between the individual and the world and not the overcoming of this absurd—so what? It might be claimed that physical suicide is not the solution, since it creates a hierarchy of values within which there is one sort of action of ultimate value. In other words, to commit suicide can be seen as preferring one course of action over all others. But if our existence is sheer absurdity, why would suicide be any more valuable than Dr Rieux’s useless efforts to cure his patients in The Plague? (p. 125)

24. Camus knows that he has no valid argument against suicide. Suicide is an issue subject to the discretion of each individual who confronts the feeling of absurdity. Camus claims that we can ‘escape suicide’ to the extent that we are ‘simultaneously awareness and rejection of death’ (ibid., p. 60). The latter attitude is the ‘revolt’ that gives life its ‘value’ (ibid.)—its authenticity, the only possible value given the absurd. This ‘majestic’ revolt has ‘something exceptional’ about it, for, Camus feels, it displays ‘human pride’ (ibid., p. 48). It is not coincidental that at that point in his essay Camus begins to use first-person sentences such as ‘I must carry…the weight of my own life … alone’ (ibid.).

25. Camus, following Nietzsche, declares: I embrace a lucid and sober attitude, since I want to attain authenticity, to live intensely but without ‘stage-sets’ that distort my selfhood; hence I turn away from suicide which will prevent me from engaging in revolt, the practical embodiment of authenticity. (p. 125)

26. Thus the feeling and notion of absurdity and the constant struggle against their nihilistic implications are necessary conditions of authenticity. ‘I am authentic ergo it is absurd’ is Camus’s existential version of the Cartesian Cogito. ‘Only from chaos is a star born’, Nietzsche claims; and Camus develops this idea, maintaining that only from the feeling of absurdity and from the complex sensations that constitute its pathos is the aspiration to authenticity born. This happens when the ‘stage-sets’ of normative ethics ‘collapse’ and the question of where to go—‘suicide or recovery’ (ibid., p. 18)—becomes inescapable. (pp. 125-126)

27. According to Camus, no ethical rule can be sustained in an absurd world. ‘What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order?’ (ibid., p. 58) asks Camus, and answers: ‘There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules’ (ibid., p. 57). Here Camus alludes to the many self-proclaimed moralists who preach at the city’s gates while themselves eschewing morality. He describes them as having ‘clean’ consciences, because they never use them. For Camus, the ideal of integrity, or, in Nietzschean language, truthfulness in life, stands above the objective ethical norms of honesty and sincerity. Authenticity reigns ‘beyond good and evil’; it does not require, nor can it have, ethical rules for the rational justification of actions. Authenticity is a personal, intuitive morality that springs from freedom and spontaneity without any external a priori dictates of Reason, God or History. The authority of authenticity lies in itself. (p. 127)

28. To conclude is to reach an end together, but the authentic posture, as understood by the philosophers of authenticity, forbids me from presuming to conclude for you or for us. Each individual has to come to her own conclusions about authenticity. In fact, encouraging you to ponder this existential issue and to entice you into drawing your own conclusions is a central objective of this book. As Nietzsche advises us through Zarathustra, ‘if you would go high, use your own legs’. (p. 143)

29. From the historical perspective, however, the intuitive and individual routes to authenticity seem to be more viable and productive than the ontological-phenomenological approaches. (p. 143)

30. Authenticity calls for an ongoing life of significant actions. It is actions that shape our authenticity. The thinkers we have looked at preferred action, or Heideggerian ‘care’, to reflection (which, Kierkegaard claims, ‘freezes action’) and knowledge (which ‘kills action’ according to Nietzsche). But meaningful activity is only possible in the context of intersubjective interaction, namely, within society. (pp. 143-144)

31. Authenticity, we saw, is best forged and revealed in ‘boundary’ or extreme existential situations. Yet such circumstances presuppose a social context. (p. 144)

32. The literature on authenticity abounds in descriptions of conflicts between individuals acting on different ethical maxims. These conflicts highlight the need for resolute and authentic decisions and spontaneous actions. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard argue that one knows what one is only after realizing what one is not. (p. 144)

33. But can authenticity, thus understood, ever be implemented? Here too we have looked at some convincing arguments to the effect that authenticity is highly problematic at best. (p. 144)

34. In his study of authenticity, Charles Taylor warns against an unrestrained, egocentric individualism. His sympathetic attitude to the ideal of authenticity as countering the ‘malaises of modernity’1 is remarkable evidence that the issue is far from having been closed by Camus, or, for that matter, by the present study, which stresses the aesthetic model of authenticity.2 (p. 145)

35. There is today a grave danger that we are facing the death of authenticity. Poststructuralist thought and the other currently fashionable streams of what is vaguely called ‘postmodernism’ attempt to dissolve the subjective pathos of authenticity which lies at the heart of existentialist concern. This study should be seen as an attempt to redress the postmodernistic devaluation of the authentic self by embarking on historical reconstruction. (pp. 145-146)

36. Let me end with a personal vision expressed in terms of a musical analogy. I envisage a society of authentic individuals as analogous to an orchestra without a conductor, where each individual plays her own composition. Sometimes one member of the ensemble will be in tune with the others, but not always. There is only one proviso: no one composition can overcome the others, and no player can suppress another’s self-expression. From the outside, the music produced by these individuals sounds like sheer cacophony, but for the participants each of their pieces has meaning, while the music played by the others functions as the inevitable background against which they struggle to perfect their original melodies. (p. 146)

37. Finally, let us recall Kierkegaard’s historical description of the emergence of the authentic ideal: ‘With every turning point in history there are two movements to be observed. On the one hand, the new shall come forth; on the other, the old must be displaced.’4 At these turningpoints we will encounter the authentic individual. Just as the decline of the ethic of objectivity set in motion the appeal for authenticity, so the decline of the ethic of subjectivity in the postmodern era, and the suppression of individuality encouraged by the mass media and multinational markets, will invigorate the quest for authenticity as a personal, corrective ideal if not an objectively viable norm. Only the return to our authentic pathos can prevent the betrayal of what is dearest to each of us: our own selfhood. (pp. 146-147)