In acknowledging our unconscious drives for destruction and cruelty, writers such as Dostoevsky and Nietzsche anticipate the insights of depth psychology, psychoanalysis, and Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) seminal idea of the ‘Id.’ In fact, Freud famously remarked that Dostoevsky “cannot be understood without psychoanalysis — i.e., he isn't in need of it because he illustrates it himself in every character and every sentence” (cited in Frank 1976, 381). And Nietzsche had “more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live” (cited in Jones 1955, 385). These existential insights informed the development of the modern novel, introducing primal and subversive anti-heroes such as Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1903), Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and, more recently, Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996). These depictions suggest that if authenticity is the affective recovery of the ‘real you,’ then we ought to be worried about what we might uncover. Indeed, it could be that the self-deceptive and conformist routines of ‘the they’ are actually protecting us from who we really are.
The existentialist protest against the ideal of human goodness reveals that being authentic has little to do with being morally ‘good’ because there is no pre-given core of goodness inside of us to begin with, and, with the ‘death of God,’ there is no moral absolute that can determine what is, in fact, good. Indeed, as we turn to different conceptions of authenticity in the existentialist tradition, we see that the commitment to being true to oneself may require us to suspend our duty to universal moral principles. And it is precisely because we have to choose between being ethical (‘doing what is right’) and being an individual (‘being true to oneself’) that the prospect of authenticity can be so terrifying. This tension is powerfully expressed in Kierkegaard's conception of authenticity.
Becoming an individual
As we saw earlier, Kierkegaard pioneered the existentialist critique of philosophical detachment and objectivity by arguing that it has no connection to ‘the highest truth attainable,’ that is, to the concrete and particular concerns of the individual. By taking the standpoint of a disinterested spectator, philosophers cut themselves off from their own subjective truths. And it is these kinds of truths that are most important because they alone can tell me ‘what I am to do.’ For Kierkegaard, it is only when we live our lives on the basis of these passionate inward commitments that we actually succeed in becoming a ‘self’ or ‘individual.’ This process usually involves moving through three stages or spheres of existence, which he identifies as the ‘aesthetic,’ the ‘ethical,’ and the ‘religious’ stages.
The aesthetic sphere is the one that most of us live in as children, adolescents, and young adults. In this stage, we are caught up in the sensual pleasures and intoxications of the present moment. Using the character of Don Juan as an archetype, Kierkegaard portrays the aesthete as one who is unconcerned with moral obligations; he or she is focused only on the satisfaction of immediate pleasures, whether it is sex, food and drink, travel, or shopping. The life of the aesthete is reduced to the consumption of transitory pleasures and flight from the threat of pain and boredom. Kierkegaard sees the aesthetic life as one that ultimately leads to despair, not merely because temporal pleasures are short-lived and pull us into an empty cycle of searching for the next thrill, but because the aesthete is not yet an ‘individual’ or a ‘self.’ To be a self, for Kierkegaard, requires difficult, life-defining choices that synthesize and bind together the temporal moments of one's life into a coherent and lasting whole. “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite,” writes Kierkegaard, “of the temporal and the eternal. … Looked at in this way, [the aesthete] is not yet a self” (1989, 43, my emphasis). To the extent that the aesthete is unable to make a unifying commitment, he or she is fundamentally inauthentic, dispersed, and pulled apart by the finite pleasures of the moment and suffers from the despair of “not wanting to be itself, [of] wanting to be rid of itself” (43).
It is possible, however, through a transformative emotional crisis to become aware of the underlying emptiness of the aesthetic life and realize existence is more than a hedonistic masquerade. It is at these times that we begin to grasp the seriousness of our own existence, that life requires difficult commitments, and that these commitments have the power to pull the fragmented and disjointed moments of our lives together and constitute us as selves. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard's character Judge Wilhelm warns the pleasure-seeking aesthete:
One … wishes that some day the circumstances of your life may tighten upon you the screws in its rack and compel you to come out with what really dwells in you. … Life is a masquerade, you explain, and for you this is inexhaustible material for amusement; and so far, no one has succeeded in knowing you. … In fact you are nothing. … Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? … I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself. … Or can you think of anything more frightful than that it might end with your nature being resolved into a multiplicity, that you really might become many, become, like those unhappy demoniacs, a legion and you thus would have lost the inmost and holiest of all in a man, the unifying power of personality? (1946a, 99)
In taking a deliberate and principled stand on one's life, one enters the ethical sphere by renouncing temporal pleasures and committing oneself to eternal moral principles. Here, Kierkegaard is drawing on Kant's ethics that regards the moral agent as duty-bound to a set of universal laws — such as the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule — that apply to everyone and take priority over one's own selfish interests and inclinations. “The ethical as such is the universal,” writes Kierkegaard, “and as the universal it applies to everyone, which can be put from another point of view by saying that it applies at every moment” (1985, 83). With this commitment, the individual is ‘willing to be oneself’ because he or she has made the difficult ‘either/or’ choice that provides the coherence and unity necessary in being a self. Judge Wilhelm illustrates this distinction by articulating the moral duties of marriage. The ethical individual renounces the fleeting pleasures of sensual love or lust and instead chooses to be a self by making a life-defining commitment to an eternal principle, to the universal ideal of marriage. Thus, “the true eternity in love, as in true morality, delivers it, first of all from the sensual. But in order to produce this true eternity, a determination of the will [a choice] is called for” (Kierkegaard 1946a, 83).
The ethical sphere remains problematic, however, precisely because it sets the universal above the subjective needs of the individual. In stoically committing oneself to universal principles and renouncing one's own particular needs, the ethical individual is detached from the concrete realities of existence itself. The husband, for instance, who devotes himself to the ideal of marriage runs the risk of being cut off from the subjective upheavals of actually being in love. Again, for Kierkegaard, the highest form of truth is not objective and universal but subjective and particular. This means that objective moral principles are not universally binding. There may be times in one's life when one must suspend his or her obligations to the ethical and be guided by higher-order values that arise from one's own subjective passions. It is at this stage that one enters the religious sphere, the sphere of faith.