part0015

One thing that can be said with certainty about authenticity is that it is the opposite of bad faith. Bad faith is synonymous with inauthenticity. Authenticity is also distinct from sincerity which, as we have seen, is a form of bad faith. Previous chapters have hopefully made it clear that the most blatant feature of all forms of inauthenticity is the attempted evasion of responsibility. Certainly, all the characters in bad faith we’ve looked at are seeking to evade responsibility in one way or another.

Inauthentic people maintain particular projects of avoiding responsibility for their present situation or their past deeds by refusing, in bad faith, to acknowledge that they are responsible. More specifically, they refuse to acknowledge their inability to be a fixed entity, their unlimited freedom and the implications of their unlimited freedom. Recall that every consciousness, as nothing but the negation of being-in-itself, is founded upon what it is not. It cannot, therefore, become its own foundation or coincide with itself. There is nothing that a person can be without having to make herself be it. Unable to be what she is, a person must perpetually choose what she is by choosing her responses to situations. She cannot not choose to respond to situations, and because her responses are chosen she is responsible for them. Even if her response is to do nothing, that is still a choice for which she is responsible.

In the existentialists’ view, inauthenticity is the denial of the cardinal truth that we are free and responsible, whereas authenticity, as the antithesis of inauthenticity, is the acceptance or affirmation of this cardinal truth. Existentialists argue that authenticity involves a person confronting reality and facing up to the hard truth that she is a limitlessly free being who will never obtain coincidence with herself. Whereas the inauthentic person seeks to avoid recognising that this is the fundamental truth of her being, the authentic person not only recognises it, she strives to come to terms with it, affirm it and even to treat it as a source of values. The authentic person responds fully to the appeal to face up to reality that pervades existentialism.

As a radical conversion that involves a person affirming what in truth she has always been – a free and responsible being lacking coincidence with herself – adopting human reality as her own does not involve a radical change of being. Rather, it involves a radical shift in her attitude towards herself and her unavoidable situatedness . Instead of exercising her freedom in order to deny her freedom, instead of choosing not to choose, the authentic person assumes her freedom, acknowledges it, takes it on board, gets with it.

Assuming her freedom involves assuming full responsibility for herself in whatever situation she happens to find herself. It involves accepting that this and no other is her situation; that this situation is the facticity in terms of which she must now choose herself. If she is not imprisoned she can, of course, reject her situation by running away, but this still involves a choice. A choice that gives rise to new situations and to new demands to choose. Above all, assuming her freedom involves realising that because she is nothing in the mode of being it she is nothing but the choices she makes in her situation.

Imagine a guy called Steve who has lived as a civilian for many years. One day Steve gets his call-up papers and reluctantly joins the army. Steve is now a soldier. True, he is not a soldier in the manner of being a soldier-thing , but in so far as he wears a uniform and fights in an army ‘soldier’ is the meaning of his conduct. Remembering his years as a civilian, Steve inauthentically insists that he is not a soldier but a civilian disguised as a soldier. In saying this, Steve reveals that he is not taking responsibility for his choices. He makes himself something by acting in a certain way, while at the same time trying to run away from it and deny it.

Steve flees what he is making of himself – a soldier – towards the non-existent civilian-thing that he mistakenly fancies himself to be. He has not accepted what Sartre, who wrote about this kind of inauthenticity in his War Diaries , calls his being-in-situation . In denying that he is only ever his responses to his facticity, Steve pleads the excuse of his facticity. He chooses to see himself as a facticity, as a given, fixed entity swept along by circumstances.

It is in ceasing to be like Steve and accepting her being-in-situation that a person ceases to think of herself as swept along by circumstances and becomes authentic. An authentic person looks honestly and realistically at what the present situation requires, what constitutes a responsible attitude and responsible actions in that situation, then embraces that situation without regret. She throws herself wholeheartedly into it; into dealing with it and making the most of it.

If you’ve seen that great Vietnam war movie, Apocalypse Now , then you may be inclined to agree that this is the attitude of Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore – the guy who loves the smell of napalm in the morning. Is Kilgore crazy, evil, a murderer? Maybe he’s all three, but as is said in the film, ‘Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.’ Kilgore is no more crazy, evil and murderous than the war situation in which he finds himself, a situation into which he has utterly plunged himself, not just ‘making the most of it’ but positively relishing it.

Under the terms of conventional morality, Kilgore is a monster; under the terms of existentialism he is honest and authentic because his situation demands a monster . Would he be a better man if he did what he does indecisively, remorsefully, dishonestly? Would he be a better man if he pathetically appeased his guilt by blaming circumstances and other people, all the while striving for some dubious moral justification? Whatever he is, whatever he does, he authentically takes full responsibility for it by not regretting it.

Imagine a parallel universe in which soldier Steve is authentic. How does authentic Steve behave? Authentic Steve recognises that his present situation requires him to play to the full the role of a soldier. This does not mean that he pretends to be a soldier. Pretending to be a soldier is what inauthentic Steve does by considering himself to be a civilian disguised as a soldier. In playing at being a soldier to the full, authentic Steve aims at being a soldier to the best of his ability, absorbing himself in his military situation.

He does not believe he is a soldier in the mode of being one, but neither does he disbelieve he is a soldier in the sense of believing that he is really something other than a soldier; something other than his current role. Like Sartre’s waiter, he absorbs himself in his performance to the extent that he does not reflect upon the fact that he is performing. He has become his performance and his attitude towards himself involves a suspension of disbelief.

Authenticity is not simply a matter of a person recognising that there are no excuses for his or her actions, he or she must resist by an act of will any desire for excuses. Authentic Steve not only recognises that in his current situation there are no excuses not to play at being a soldier, he does not want there to be any excuses. To be truly authentic, Steve must fully realise his being-in-situation without regret. If authentic Steve does not want to be where he is he will leave without regret and face the consequences of desertion without regret. If he stays, he will assume responsibility for his staying and throw himself into the spirit of things.

Authenticity, as noted, involves a person coming to terms with the fact that she will never become a fixed, substantial entity at one with herself. Contrary to what might be supposed, however, authenticity does not involve abandoning the desire for substantiality and foundation. The desire to be its own foundation belongs to the very structure of human consciousness and so human consciousness cannot abandon this desire. Any attempt to abandon altogether the desire for foundation, for completeness, collapses into a project of nihilism. In seeking to escape the desire for a firm foundation the nihilist aims at being nothing at all, but nonetheless a nothingness that is what it is. The nihilist who aims to be nothing is as much in bad faith as the person who aims to be something.

The authentic person does not aim at substantiality by means of a futile flight from her freedom. Instead, she aims at substantiality by continually founding herself upon the affirmation of her freedom. The affirmation of her freedom is assumed as her basic principle or ultimate value. She seeks to identify herself with her inalienable freedom, rather than flee her inalienable freedom in the vain hope of identifying herself with the unfree objects that surround her.

The project of authenticity is actually more successful at achieving a kind of substantiality than the project of inauthenticity. This is because the project of authenticity reconciles a person to what she really is, an essentially free being, whereas the project of inauthenticity is only ever a flight from what a person really is towards an unachievable identity with objects. In fleeing freedom a person does not establish a foundation, but in assuming her freedom she establishes freedom itself as a foundation. In assuming her freedom she ‘becomes’ what she is – free – rather than failing to become what she can never be – unfree. The desire for constancy can only be satisfied by embracing freedom because freedom is the only thing about a person that is constant.

It is important to stress that the form of substantiality arrived at through authenticity is not a fixed state of being. It is logically impossible for consciousness to obtain a fixed state of being by any means and all attempts to do so function in bad faith. The substantiality obtained through authenticity is not achieved by consciousness once and for all, it is a substantiality that has to be continually self-perpetuated and re-assumed.

A person cannot simply be authentic, she has to be authentic. To declare that she is authentic in the manner of a thing, as a table is a table, is to slide once more into bad faith. Authentic being is not a permanent foundation that a person can choose to establish once and for all at a particular time, but rather a precarious foundation that she must continuously maintain by constantly choosing authentic responses to her situation.

Authenticity is not an essence, it is the way a person chooses to respond to her facticity and the way in which she chooses herself in response to her facticity. Authenticity is the continuous task of choosing responses that affirm freedom and responsibility rather than responses that signify a flight from freedom and responsibility. The authentic person takes on the task of continually resisting the slide into bad faith that threatens every human endeavour.

If authenticity involves living without regret, then the following objection regarding the very possibility of authenticity suggests itself. Arguably, authenticity is impossible because it is impossible to live without regret. Regret, it seems, is an unavoidable part of the human condition because anyone with the capacity to imagine alternatives cannot help wishing, at least occasionally, that they had made a different choice.

Responding to this objection existentialists would argue that it does not show authenticity is impossible, simply that it is very difficult to achieve. If a person can come to regret less, as undoubtedly she can by employing various strategies from yoga to the study of existentialism, then she has the potential to master herself completely and regret nothing.

If pressed, existentialists might concede that the task of complete self-mastery and self-overcoming is too difficult to achieve in one lifetime, particularly for people raised in a culture of regret and recrimination. Yet they will still insist that it is an heroic ideal worth striving for because it is always better for a person to try to get real, get a grip and stand firm than it is for her to give up and tell herself she is a victim of circumstance.

It is better, not least, because a person who constantly strives to confront her situation and overcome it, a person who thereby constantly strives to confront and overcome herself, enjoys dignity and self-respect. A cowardly person, on the other hand, who dwells on regret, refusing to confront her situation and her being in that situation, knows only her own weakness, lack of dignity and sense of defeat.

Arguably, authentic existence as a sustained project can be striven for and is worth striving for but it cannot be achieved. It is the holy grail of existentialism; its unobtainable ideal. Sustained authenticity is conceivable as a logical possibility, but no one can actually achieve it. It is like living without making errors of judgement. We know what it would be to live without making errors of judgement, but there will never be a person who makes no errors of judgement. Bad faith threatens every human endeavour. A person would have to be superhuman to always avoid sliding into bad faith. A person slides into bad faith the moment she ceases consciously resisting the world’s endless temptations to slide. Bad faith is too convenient and too seductive to be avoided at all times.

To summarise: authentic existence is a project that has to be continually reassumed. A person is only as authentic as her present act. Even if she has been consistently authentic for a week, if she is not authentic right now then she is not authentic. Given the world’s endless temptations to bad faith, the difficulties of resisting regret, the fact that habit and other people’s expectations shape a person’s being as much as her capacity to choose, it is unrealistic to suppose that anyone can sustain authenticity for a significant period of time. At best, it appears a person can be authentic occasionally, which does not amount to achieving authentic existence as a sustained project. Authentic existence – the sustained project – is an unobtainable existentialist ideal. Nevertheless, it is an ideal worth aiming at.

Before ending this chapter it is worth taking a look at Nietzsche’s view of authenticity which focuses on the affirmation of life through the refusal to regret a single moment of it. Nietzsche was a nineteenth-century German philosopher who can be accurately described as an existentialist and whose ideas certainly had a huge influence on the existentialist movement as it gathered pace in the twentieth century.

Bad faith, as we’ve seen, is a choice not to choose. It is negative freedom , freedom that denies, checks and represses itself. To exercise freedom negatively is to adopt what Nietzsche calls the ascetic ideal . The ascetic ideal values self-repression and self-denial above all else and for their own sake. A person who adopts the ascetic ideal does not, for example, value celibacy for the sexual health and peace of mind it brings, but only for the self-denial it involves.

Opposite to the ascetic ideal is Nietzsche’s notion of the noble ideal . The noble ideal involves the positive affirmation of freedom. A noble person positively affirms herself as a free being. She does not deny and repress her freedom but enjoys it and is constantly aware of it. She does this by acting decisively, overcoming difficulties, taking responsibility, choosing her own values and refusing to regret. For Nietzsche, positive freedom is expansive, sometimes even reckless and violent. It triumphs in its own strength as a positive will to power .

Will to power, a key idea in Nietzsche’s philosophy, can be either positive or negative. Positive will to power is power as it is commonly understood: power that is expansive, even explosive. It’s opposite, however, is still will to power. A being that refuses to expand still has will to power. Soldiers making an orderly retreat refuse expansion but this does not mean they have lost their will to power. Likewise, a person who conserves her strength behind a barricade exercises will to power in inviting her enemy to spend her strength attacking that barricade.

For Nietzsche, a person cannot not be a will to power, just as, according to Sartre and de Beauvoir, a person cannot not be free. Whereas Nietzsche has the concepts of positive and negative will to power, Sartre and de Beauvoir have the concepts of the positive freedom of the responsible, authentic person and the negative freedom of the inauthentic person who acts in bad faith choosing not to choose.

For Sartre and de Beauvoir, freedom can come to value itself as the source of all values. This positive freedom involves the same principles as Nietzsche’s noble ideal. It is a positive will to power. A person does not achieve a radical conversion to authenticity by rejecting and divorcing her former self through the exercise of bad faith, but by overcoming her former self, her former values, to become the creator of her own values. As the creator of her own values she creates herself; she is the artist or author of her own life.

Whatever a negative person or a person in bad faith identifies as a lamentable experience to be forgotten or denied, the artist or author of her own life, whose aim is to positively affirm her entire life, will identify as a learning experience that helped to make her stronger and wiser. She regrets nothing because every experience has contributed to making her what she is. In Nietzsche’s view, she will not even regret her evil qualities, or what other people label her evil qualities. As the source of her own values she re-evaluates her evil qualities as her best qualities. Her ability to do this is a true mark of her authenticity. ‘The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptise our evil qualities as our best qualities’ (Beyond Good and Evil , 116, p. 97).

In Crime and Punishment , a brilliant, existential novel by the Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the central character Raskolnikov, in an attempt to escape his poverty, kills a mean old pawnbroker and her sister with an axe. After committing double-murder, Raskolnikov tells himself he must strive to be like Napoleon, a man who has the strength of character to justify his crimes to himself. Unfortunately, unlike Napoleon, Raskolnikov lacks the audacity to shoulder his dirty deed and genuinely not care about it. In Nietzsche’s words, he lacks the courage, ‘To redeem the past and to transform every “It was” into an “I wanted it thus!”’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra , p. 161).

As Raskolnikov’s ego is not sufficient to swallow the enormity of his crime, his only means of escaping his guilt is to lapse into an attitude of bad faith whereby he disowns himself by disowning his past. This is not to say that to be authentic a person must commit murder without giving a damn about it, but rather that to be authentic a person must take responsibility for all her actions whatever they are rather than try to disown them through bad faith and confession and the belief that she has been ‘born again’.

To disown the past in bad faith and to redefine the past by assuming responsibility for it are radically different responses. If the aspiring convert to authenticity is to overcome bad faith she must take responsibility for the whole of her past without regret. A person who regrets wishes her past were different, she wishes she were not the free being she is and has been. A person who regrets fails to affirm the whole of her freedom and hence the whole of her life as the creation of her freedom. Nietzsche holds that the highest affirmation of life is the desire for eternal recurrence . For a person to truly affirm her freedom and her life as the creation of her freedom she must embrace the possibility of living it all over again in every detail an infinite number of times. Nietzsche writes:

The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? (The Gay Science , 341, p. 274)

Nietzsche’s uncompromising thought is that if you don’t want to live your life over again then you’re not living it right! Almost nobody wants to die. Most of us love life, or at least crave the opportunity to go on perfecting it in whatever future remains to us. But how many of us would actually want to relive a significant proportion of what we’ve had of our life so far – all that boredom, disappointment, insult, pain and fear? Realistically, could anyone ever become so well disposed towards her life as to crave every detail of it innumerable times?

In professing to love life is it that we love only our future and what we dream of becoming in our future? Does anyone actually love all or even most of their past, rather than just the good times they care to remember? And do you ever meet anyone who is honestly entirely happy with their present situation? And if everyone is unhappy with their present situation continually then …? If nothing else, the idea of eternal recurrence is rich food for thought that raises a lot of important personal and moral questions.

From a metaphysical point of view eternal recurrence is problematic. If eternal recurrence is true, this life must be identical to the infinity of lives you have lived and will live. You can’t change anything. And if you can’t change anything, you can’t be free. That Nietzsche actually believes we live our lives over again an infinite number of times is debatable. Arguably, what matters to him is not whether or not eternal recurrence is the case, but the moral acid test that the very idea of it provides.

So, Nietzsche’s answer to the perennial moral question, ‘How should I live?’, is: aspire to live in such a way that you want each and every moment of your life to recur eternally. Nietzsche calls this his formula for greatness . ‘My formula for greatness for a human being is amor fati [love fate]: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity’ (Ecce Homo : How one Becomes What One Is, p. 68). In rejecting and discarding his past like an old overcoat, Raskolnikov fails to adopt Nietzsche’s formula for greatness. It almost goes without saying that to become a true existentialist, to achieve authentic existence, you have to embrace Nietzsche’s formula for greatness.

Another German existentialist philosopher who was born only a few decades after Nietzsche is Martin Heidegger. Heidegger also has a lot to say about authenticity, but as he focuses on what he calls, authentic-being-towards-death , we will postpone exploring his views on authenticity until the final chapter; until the death.