When we talk about the spirit of the times, it is wise to specify where we are calling from. I live in Minnesota on a block where people plan vacations, expect their kids to go to college, attend yoga classes and/or church. It is called “Minnesota Nice.” Stop by to give someone a birthday gift and you’re likely to receive a thank-you card before you get home. Even North Star residents suspect that Minnesota Nice can conceal Minnesota Ice, that deep down we suspect our good behavior and better manners are often less than authentic.
But what does authenticity even mean? And what does it mean to live authentically?
In the fifties and early sixties, television shows idealizing traditional families and suburban life were wildly popular. At the same time, literary characters such as Holden Caulfield and Willy Loman, like Ivan Ilych long before them, hinted at an undercurrent of fear about becoming a cookie cutter of a human being, a crowd person, the kind of individual who was defined by externals.
Among my suburban cohort and students, the once-urgent issue of authenticity seems to have been lost to selfies, social media branding, and managing your profile on LinkedIn and Facebook, as though everyone has become their own unabashed publicist. It is not who you are but who you seem to be! A well-known Generation X author, Chuck Klosterman, remarked, “I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they’re all so envious of it.”
Today, the piety is “Follow your passions. Do what you love.” Everyone is enjoined 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. Accordingly, Paul Gauguin may have been a creep for leaving his family to paint in Tahiti, but he was acting authentically. In his measured defense of an “ethic of authenticity,” renowned philosopher Charles Taylor quotes Gail Sheehy’s bestseller Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life as an example of the authenticity/individual self-fulfillment equation. Sheehy homilizes:
You can’t take everything with you when you leave on the midlife journey. You are moving away. Away from institutional claims and other people’s agenda. Away from external valuations and accreditations. You are moving out of roles and into the self. If I could give everyone a gift for the send-off on this journey, it would be a tent. A tent for tentativeness. The gift of portable roots. . . . For each of us there is an opportunity to emerge reborn, authentically unique. . . . The delights of self-discovery are always available.1
There are many philosophical theories about authenticity; however, I don’t need a theory to recognize that I have spent much of my life sparring with the fear of being inauthentic. Motored by profound insecurities and by sheer dint of the enormous effort that insecurities can mobilize, I made it into precincts both in sports and academia in which I felt like I didn’t belong, and sometimes rightly so. One late autumn afternoon in the early 1980s, my authenticity hang-ups burst out of the closet and nearly uprooted my future.
Everyone is enjoined 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.
When Philip Rieff took me under his wing, it felt like a benediction, one that I surely let all my fellow graduate students know about. A figure cast from Downton Abbey, Rieff was extremely formal in both dress and manner, sometimes sporting a top hat and monocle. Though he was an intellectual renegade of sorts—not unlike Kierkegaard—Rieff was devout in his belief that decorum was the last wall of defense between the barbarians in- and outside of us. No “ums” or stumblings in his diction; Rieff was hypnotic. He spoke as though he were reading from a book, a very good book. Decades later, he would write a lengthy volume on charisma, a quality he possessed in great measure, and those of us who studied with him felt the full weight of it in his presence.
One afternoon, Rieff instructed me to meet him to discuss a paper I was writing on Freud and Kierkegaard. Nervously, I ambled into his office clad in jeans, a dashiki, and a single gold earring. Rieff took one glance at me and pulled a face as though he had just bitten into a lemon. “Why do you carry yourself and dress like a thug?” Sniggering, he continued, “And why are you wearing that silly earring?” Interestingly enough, he had seen me dressed like this before but was mum. Either he thought my sartorial tendencies were an aberration or more likely he calculated that I was now attached enough to him that he could criticize me without my doing something self-destructive. Jumped by anxiety, I bumbled an inanity along the lines that the earring was a symbol. “A symbol!” Rieff chortled. “Ten years from now everyone in the business school will be wearing one. A symbol of what?” he asked acerbically. “If you think it is a symbol, then you must know something about its history.” He quizzed, “What do you know about these earrings?” Flummoxed, I shrugged. After a few moments of screaming silence, Rieff delivered a short history of the earring, explaining that it was common among the peasants where my ancestors had come from in southern Italy.
You should not implicitly trust memoirs, mine included. Try as we might, conversations from years past are always part fiction. In this case, I cannot recall my exact words, but I vaguely remember uttering something to the effect that, even though I was in a doctoral program at an elite university, I intended to stay true to my background. Even today, I occasionally hear sports celebrities take this tack, pledging that just because they signed a seven-figure contract and live in mansions in the exurbs, they have not forgotten their roots. Without blinking, Rieff peered at me through his thick glasses, placed his long, slender fingers on his desk, and said—and this is verbatim—“Mr. Marino, it’s time you started identifying up.” Much as I stood in awe of the man, I was now an impulse away from leaping up and telling him where he could stick his identification sermon.
In my addled mind, I was trying to remain authentic, trying to stay true to who I thought I was—maybe some mildly erudite version of a working-class hero. Rieff must have been right that the attachment was secure because something stopped me from the kind of outburst I was given to, one that would have exploded a relationship that molded my life in positive, otherwise-unimaginable directions.
Is the litmus test of authenticity the gap between who we feel we are and who we present ourselves to be? Camus meditated long and hard on authenticity. Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger—arguably Camus’s most famous character—commits a senseless murder but, in the end, is sentenced to death largely because he refuses to tell the magistrate and others what they want to hear, namely, that he is sorry. Meursault will murder but he won’t divulge feelings he does not have. “Above all,” Camus wrote in his Notebooks, “in order to be, never try to seem.” That advice is easier written than followed.
Is the litmus test of authenticity the gap between who we feel we are and who we present ourselves to be? “Above all,” Camus wrote in his Notebooks, “in order to be, never try to seem.”
When I commenced my career as a boxing writer, I would sometimes carry myself as though my modicum of ring experience as a professional heavyweight sparring partner entitled me to think that I was not just a writer but a member of the elite fistic brotherhood. One afternoon, after a long talk, I was walking with Mike Tyson, who addressed me, saying, “Guys like you and me . . .” I suppose I had pulled the charade off, or Iron Mike let me think I had pulled it off, but I immediately felt that body blow of inauthenticity. I had managed to wrap myself in borrowed clothes, and though I did not correct Tyson, I felt like the not-so-great imposter. Camus again: if you want to be authentic, “don’t try to seem.” But some of us who might not be so at home in our skin will have to try “to try not to seem.”
Is there, however, more to authenticity than being devoid of pretenses? Is a con artist authentic because she acknowledges her con artist activities? Or is a kind and generous soul who thinks of herself as selfish inauthentic because of the dissonance between her public and perceived selves?
The theme of authenticity is a red thread that runs through existential texts, all the way back to the Romantics and Rousseau. And yet it is not as though there is an “essence” of authenticity; that is, some property that uniquely defines it, as we define a square as a figure with four equal sides. A physicist and philosopher, Dr. Ben Yacobi sincerely states it:
The concept of “authenticity” is a human construct, and as such it has no reality independent of minds. But is authenticity possible, or even desirable? . . . This steers us toward an interpretation of the concept of authenticity as an absolute, but in general the search for absolutes is fruitless.2
Though Sartre tries, there is no precisely distinguishing 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. This lack of exactitude applies to all our attempts to parse the ingredients of the inner life.
In Works of Love, Kierkegaard wrote, “all human speech . . . about the spiritual is essentially metaphorical speech.”3 You can talk about the movement of the wind in the trees literally but not the “movement” of the spirit. With a delicious metaphor, Nietzsche announces, “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors.” And we need rich metaphors to daub authenticity.
The philosopher and critic Theodore Adorno groused in his Jargon of Authenticity that much of the gauzy language generated by such figures as Kierkegaard and Heidegger is enticing but ultimately empty chatter. It is the kind of talk that gulls a reader into believing there are real issues being discussed when, in fact, the only reality is an illusion conjured by fancy words. Atheists moan about religious mumbo jumbo but Adorno contends that philosophy has its own storehouse of the same in what he derisively terms “the liturgy of intimacy.” For Adorno, all the sophisticated chatter about authenticity, about becoming yourself, is grounded in the fallacious assumption that each of us possesses an individual soul-like essence discernible by introspection. Nietzsche might have retorted that originality is the ability “to see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face.”4 Such might be the case with authenticity.
To reiterate a common theme, we are relational entities. We exist in relation to ourselves, in relation to others and to our surroundings, and for some of us, we believe or try to trust that we exist in relation to God. Given our relational nature, it is reasonable to think that there are true (authentic) and false (inauthentic) ways of connecting to ourselves and others, where true would imply open and honest and false would imply dissembling relationships.
A student of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Tolstoy, Heidegger abstains from referring to people in the traditional terms of subjects and objects. Instead, he refers to humans using the neologism Dasein, which translates to “being there.” Make of this what you will, but for Heidegger a human being is essentially an opening in being itself—an opening in which being questions the meaning of being. Other than humans, there do not seem to be any other creatures entranced by problems such as “What is the meaning of life?” Or Heidegger’s “Why is there something rather than nothing?” As Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, Dasein brings nothingness into being, vis-à-vis the interrogation of our own being.
The phenomenological story in something smaller than a nutshell is this: Dasein is cast into existence with distinct abilities and in a nexus of culture and history. Using religious terms, Heidegger maintains that Dasein is naturally in a state of “fallenness,” a state in which “it” is absorbed in the forgetfulness and triviality of everyday life. In its fallenness, Dasein garners its identity and sense of being from “the crowd.” I use quotation marks around the “it” because, as mentioned, Heidegger was trying to fashion a vocabulary that eschewed the subject-object dichotomy. Our “fallenness” is like falling into a recliner and binge watching a TV series. Popcorn in hand, we are not haunted with questions about the meaning of life, but are in a state of forgetfulness. Then something shakes the crossbeams of our existence. Kierkegaard calls it “the jolt.” For Heidegger, it was an existential awareness of death, our “outermost possibility.” This bracing awareness, coupled with the angst that it brings, grabs us by the wrist and pulls us out of the crowd. The anxiety engulfs us and we fall out of our fallenness, perhaps like someone in a waiting room, waiting to discover whether or not her child will survive an open-heart surgery. Strictly speaking, she is not alone but is surrounded by people thumbing through magazines and saying rosaries, but feels isolated in her terror, alone and without recourse. Through a small window, she glimpses the surgeon walk by and thinks that even though he has just been touching her little girl’s heart, the doctor is probably thinking of something like calling his wife to see how junior did at his basketball game. Again, anxiety—and death anxiety in particular—individuates us, makes us homesick for that recliner and forgetfulness. Yet, according to Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Tolstoy, and other existentialists, the anxiety, the homesickness, affords an opportunity for us to enter into an authentic relation with others and ourselves. In a gloss on Heidegger and Tolstoy, philosopher Mike Martin writes:
This bracing awareness of death, coupled with the angst that it brings, grabs us by the wrist and pulls us out of the crowd.
Unconfronted, death is dreadful. It generates vague fears and anxieties that drive us away from authenticity and toward immersion in conventionality and everyday pleasures. . . . In fully acknowledging death we are pressured to unify our lives.5
And perhaps unifying our lives has something to do with being authentic.
While there is no unequivocal definition of authenticity, there is more to authenticity than refraining from putting on airs. I am acquainted with many individuals whom I would not describe as authentic even though they are devoid of pretenses solely on account of a cold indifference to the opinions of others. To become authentic is to become yourself. When Nietzsche implores, “Become who you are,” like Heidegger he is prodding us to create ourselves. For Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger, we are a witch’s brew of culture, feelings, experiences, and evaluations, and we create ourselves out of this mélange, as though our lives were an artwork.
To become authentic is to become yourself.
Kierkegaard was emphatic that somewhere beneath our historically and culturally influenced vision of ourselves, there is a true self. As Dylan tells it, “You may be an ambassador to England or France . . . / But you’re gonna have to serve somebody,” and, for Kierkegaard, that servant is the real you. Authenticity is not to be confused with bucket lists or self-fulfillment. You might be a Picasso who realized every grain of your potential, but from a Kierkegaardian perspective, that doesn’t mean you have become authentic, that you have become your true self, the self God meant you to be. But who is Kierkegaard to say? Why should I believe that the Creator of the universe created little old me with a plan that I must choose between trying to realize or ignoring? Maybe that plan is the same for us all: to love and look after our neighbor as we would ourselves, to be a good Samaritan. Am I to take this on a leap of faith? Take him or leave him, Kierkegaard held that a person’s primary relationship is to God and from that, all other relationships properly follow.
For the spiritually squeamish, however, Kierkegaard opens another vista on authenticity. Traditionally, knowledge is defined as true justified belief. Kierkegaard was more about belief than he was about the issue of truth and justification. For Kierkegaard, the “how” was equally as important as the “what.” Etymologically speaking, both in the Latin and German, the idea of authenticity is intrinsically bound up with the notion of making something your own. Kierkegaard believed that we make our views our own not by hitting “like” on Facebook but by passionately relating ourselves to those ideas and expressing them in the medium of action. Carry on about universal love and you had better be ready to make sacrifices to help the homeless woman sleeping on the grate in front of your apartment.
During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there were many who spoke against the injustice of racism. The Freedom Riders not only spoke but acted. They rambled on buses down South to register voters. They knew the maelstrom of violence that they were driving into. Buses were bombed. They were often beaten within an inch of their lives and sometimes beyond that inch. All the while, the police in places like Jackson, Mississippi, either participated or stood arms akimbo, and let the frothing mob have at it with fists and clubs. Many of the protesters who boarded those southbound Greyhounds were first-generation college students. Their parents had to dig deeply to send them to college, but in order to participate in the freedom rides, these nineteen- and twenty-year-olds had to skip their exams and drop out or take a leave of absence from college. That was authenticity on two counts. They were not taking their marching orders from their parents or society in general, and they were acting on their convictions.
The view of the virtues embedded in existentialism often returns to the requirement to be honest with oneself. And authenticity requires that we be candid with ourselves as to whether or not we have truly appropriated the opinions that we might be slapped on the back for espousing.
Some days I whisper to myself, “Gordon, you always talk as though you are a devotee of kindness. Okay then, have you denied yourself anything for anyone today?” I want to be as kind to myself as I would be to a friend, but honestly there are times when I can’t come up with a single thing that I have done to go out of my way for anyone. I am no Freedom Rider. Perhaps that indicates that I ought to consider the possibility that my convictions about kindness are a story I tell myself about myself that may not be as close to my heart as I would like to imagine. The view of the virtues embedded in existentialism often returns to the requirement to be honest with oneself. And authenticity requires that we be candid with ourselves as to whether or not we have truly appropriated the opinions that we might be slapped on the back for espousing.
And yet, to return to an earlier point, 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. Is authenticity qua “being true to ourselves” a selfish and narcissistic ideal? Taylor writes:
If authenticity is being true to ourselves, is recovering our own “sentiment de l’existence,” then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole. It was perhaps not an accident that in the Romantic period the self-feeling and the feeling of belonging to nature were linked.6
Authenticity does not ensure moral rectitude, but Taylor suggests “perhaps the loss of a sense of belonging through a publicly defined order needs to be compensated by a stronger more inner sense of linkage.” Kierkegaard would tab Taylor’s stronger sense of “inner linkage” “inwardness,” an ideal that Kierkegaard charged had been forgotten in his own age, and maybe all the more so in our age. With the emphasis on owning actions and choices, authenticity can seem selfishly self-referential. However, relational creatures that we are, it could be that becoming our own person is only possible vis-à-vis strong bonds to something outside of ourselves. For Kierkegaard it is God, but Taylor submits this connection can take the form of binding yourself to a “political cause or tending to the earth.” In the early 1990s Taylor was more than hinting that we are living in an increasingly fragmented world. He submits, “Perhaps this is what a great deal of modern poetry has been trying to articulate.”
Of his chosen disciple from Cana, Nathanael, Jesus said, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit” or guile. A person with nothing up his sleeves, a person who is just what he seems to be; perhaps, even, an “authentic” individual. However we define it, authenticity does not seem to be something we can work at, save in the sense that we can make strides to avoid inauthenticity. Rather than trying to seem like a fellow tough guy during my conversation with Mike Tyson, I could have tapped him on the shoulder and confessed that even though I answered the bell a few times, he and I did not inhabit similar worlds. Such an admission would have involved stripping myself of my armor and accepting a degree of vulnerability.
However we define it, authenticity does not seem to be something we can work at, save in the sense that we can make strides to avoid inauthenticity.
And yet, over and above refraining from “trying to seem,” we have visited the notion that authenticity is a matter of becoming your true self. Even “The Poet” Shakespeare wrote, “To thine own self be true.” The either-or, however, is this: Is that self a self we create or, à la Kierkegaard, a plan of a self that is there from the start, one that you can fail to realize even as you conquer territories, move mountains, or practice your own version of Minnesota Nice?