The conception of freedom as the struggle to create oneself in the face of factical limitations and constraints leads to another core idea in existentialism, authenticity. The existentialists recognize that everyday life is usually characterized by being inauthentic, that is, we deceive ourselves by conforming to the ready-made roles, meanings, and values of the public world and, therefore, refuse to take responsibility for our own being. Existentialists offer an alternative to this kind of self-deception by addressing what it means to ‘be true’ to oneself. Consistent with the existentialist conceptions of freedom and selfhood, authenticity is not given to us by some pre-given essence; it is something we earn or realize through our actions and choices. In the following chapter, we will examine the ways in which existentialists offer different views of self-realization and articulate how these views can lead to the criticism that, in privileging authenticity, existentialism may be undermining the possibility for ethics.
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Solomon, R. (2002). Nietzsche on fatalism and “free will.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 23: 63–87.
6: Authenticity
Moods and the problem of the real self
The word ‘authentic’ derives from the Greek authentikos, meaning ‘original’ or ‘genuine.’ To say that I am authentic, then, is to say that I do not simply imitate the socially prescribed roles and values of the public world. I am genuine or true to the concerns and commitments that matter to me as an individual. Authenticity, as Charles Taylor writes, “is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me” (1991, 28–29). Although Heidegger is the only one who liberally uses the word, employing the German Eigentlichkeit (from the stem eigen meaning ‘own’ or ‘proper’) that translates literally as ‘being one's own’ or ‘ownedness,’ existentialists are generally united in emphasizing the significance of authenticity, of being true to oneself. But, as we have seen, the commitment to one's own truth is difficult because our normal tendency is to drift along and conform to the average expectations and meanings of the public world. We are, for this reason, usually alienated from ourselves, living in a state of comfortable self-deception because we simply do what ‘they’ do. As a ‘they-self,’ we have no sense of who we really are or what really matters to us, and we are unable to see how exactly we are different from anyone else. Yet the existentialists make it clear that it is possible to be shaken out of self-deception, not by means of any kind of detached reasoning but through penetrating moods or emotional experiences that can shatter the routinized familiarity of everyday life, forcing us to confront ourselves as finite beings thrown into a world with no pre-given meaning that can justify our choices.
For Kierkegaard and Heidegger, this existential confrontation is disclosed to us primarily through ‘anxiety’ (Angst) or ‘dread.’ Unlike fear, which is always directed toward some external threat, anxiety is directed toward oneself as an unsettled existence penetrated by dizzying freedom and the possibility of death. “One may liken anxiety to dizziness,” writes Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread. “He whose eye chances to look down into a yawning abyss becomes dizzy. … Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom which [when] freedom gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself” (1944, 55). Anxiety puts me face-to-face with my own freedom, exposing me to the fact that I am not a stable and enduring thing but a possibility. In this way, anxiety reveals existence as fundamentally insecure, that the public meanings I rely on to make sense of things are precarious, and that any sense I have of rational control and mastery of the world is an illusion. Coming from within, this feeling has the power to shake me out of the false security of everydayness and open me up to my own structural nothingness. Although Angst can certainly arise in the face of a profound crisis such as the death of a loved one, a terminal illness, or a divorce, the mood is largely autochthonous; it is a fundamental part of the human situation and can, therefore, arise spontaneously on its own, without an identifiable cause or reason.
Jaspers refers to these moments as ‘limit’ or ‘boundary’ situations, a reference to the experience “when everything that is said to be valuable and true collapses before my eyes” (1956, 117; cited in Wallraff 1970, 137). Nietzsche describes this feeling in terms of “the terror” (2000, 36) that overwhelms us when language and reason fail and our understanding of the world as a place of order and reliability dissolves, shattering our sense of who we are as secure, self-subsisting individuals. Sartre famously refers to the “nausea” that suddenly overtakes us when the veneer of public meanings collapses and we are confronted with the superfluous and unintelligible ‘is-ness’ of things. Speaking through his character Roquentin in his novella Nausea, he writes:
And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. … This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in a horrible ecstasy; I understood the Nausea, I possessed it. (127)
For Sartre, nausea reveals the sheer contingency and “terrible freedom” (1956, 55–56) of existence, where we alone are responsible for deciding who we are and what our fate will be. Marcel develops this theme by describing the feeling of “mystery” that intrudes into our everyday lives and defies rational explanation. It is the uncanny sense that “there is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit — no security, no guarantee” (1956, 27), and I am left alone with the burden to accept and create myself. These feelings expose us to the fact that there is no ground that can secure our lives and that any project or identity we commit ourselves to is, in the end, futile.