Reclaiming Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal

3 Quarks Daily essay

This essay was originally published at 3 Quarks Daily. My follow-up essays, Becoming What You Are, and The Feeling of Authenticity, are now also available here on Substack.

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Reclaiming Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal

Become who you are, having learned what that is. -Pindar
Become who you are. —Nietzsche

I want to be authentic and so probably do you. It’s a virtue fostered by philosophic and therapeutic inquiries. In popular culture, “authenticity” is broadly used to mean being true to oneself—often with an emphasis on not caring what others think. This is why critics of authenticity see it as encouraging a culture of narcissism, since it appears to focus on self-actualization at the expense of other ideals, including healthy relationships and communities, and the prosocial values such as honesty, fairness, and justice that support these. Here I offer a philosophically informed definition of authenticity, drawing attention to why it is a prosocial ethical ideal.

Authenticity may indeed be the virtue of being true to oneself, but what does that mean? To some it means being the creator of one’s own truth and value, and living solely according to these. Imagine a bright, rebellious teenager who’s read some Nietzsche. They decide that the first step to becoming authentic is to take up their philosophic hammer and use it to smash all external claims and constraints —those truths, values, and beliefs that come from family, religion, community, customs, traditions, even from nature herself. This gesture of rejection the imposition of values so that we can discover our own is appropriate to youth, but can easily become an obstacle to growing up.

In Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom suggests this narcissistic-fantasy version of authenticity includes a philosophy of “cheerful nihilism,” a memorable phrase borrowed from Donald Barthelme. It’s cheerful because it’s about freedom from responsibility, rather than being freedom with responsibility. This nihilism has roots in reductive materialism in the sciences and postmodernism in the humanities—ideologies that find fertile ground in individualistic capitalist societies, where we’re encouraged to view life as a zero-sum game where everyone competes to get the most they can. One can see this “ethic” prominently displayed among politicians and tech billionaires. But this is a corrupted view of authenticity. (Philosopher Charles Taylor’s short book The Ethics of Authenticity offers a good account of the history of authenticity.)

A more ethical prosocial definition of authenticity includes the observable fact that we own our lives and truth in a world. Specifically, becoming authentic concerns taking our place in the world—even if it’s the place of a rebel. For where else but in a world do we learn who we are, and actualize ourselves? Our very power of living, thinking, and speaking owes its development to others. Thus, a free spirit or rebel or Libertarian may imagine they are powered by their truth alone. But without a world, there’s nothing to rebel against, and nothing from which to liberate their spirit.

This is not to say that authenticity demands we lead our lives in the public square, but it is to correct the impression that we can be authentic without discovering where we fit in the world. Even most of those who choose to live more private interior lives are far from denying that living authentically includes taking their place in the world. They offer the rest of us the fruits of what they gather in solitude, in the form of their art or learning or wisdom.

They do, however, remind us that living authentically involves going inward and getting to know who are we are, apart from others. Who are we when we strip away being a parent or child or partner? When we’re not identified with our professional roles? When we step back from our political and social affiliations? These are questions that Socrates and philosophy press on us. They must be pressed because our tendency is thoughtlessly to accept (or reject) at face value the values and stories we’re given, including the ones we’ve been told about who we are.

To learn who we are, and become our true selves, we go beyond the false dichotomy between identifying with external values and therefore being prosocial; or making our own values, and therefore being nihilists, cheerful or otherwise. The historical notion of authenticity (if not the word) recognizes that there is a natural dialectical tension between our group identities and our individual identity. The group identities come naturally, some of them internalized before we’re old enough to know what we’ve taken in. (The language we speak, for example, or family values around religion and politics.) To come back to our rebellious teen: their integrity lies in the felt sense that growing up and owning their lives does include questioning the authority of the group identities foisted on them.

The reason authenticity is associated with this inward, questioning moment in the dialectic between self and other is because this is always the harder task. To get to know who we are and where we fit in the world requires conscious effort in a way that achieving physical maturity or acting from instinct or identifying with our family’s values does not.

Moreover, many external forces are arrayed against us becoming authentic. In fact, the modern notion of authenticity originated in late 18th century in response to the dehumanizing and leveling effects of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, which critics saw as reducing the human spirit to complicated machines that can be organized for work on the factory floor. The leveling effects have only intensified in the age of the internet, social media, and large corporations competing (very skillfully!) for control of our attention and behavior. Mechanization, urbanization, mass production, mass media, and mass culture have created what Heidegger called “das Man”—inauthentic, mass human beings who have no true identity of their own and are easily led by others. Living by clock and calendar and timetables; socializing via tech devices and corporate algorithms; measuring productivity in work, fitness, sleep; subjected to advertising and propaganda; in these and countless other ways we’re easily made over by capitalism from persons into workers and consumers whose happiness is, conveniently, measured in personal wealth and GDP.

Against these leveling forces, thinkers such as Rousseau and later the Romantics emphasized the importance of one’s own private experience and feeling, and of cultivating one’s particular “genius” rather than conforming to social norms and expectations. Later, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, among others, take up the ancient Greek poet Pindar’s motto that we must “become what we are, having learned what that is.” Nietzsche loved this idea and ran with it.

This process of making-things-our-own goes to the heart of true authenticity. As an ideal, authenticity underscores our right, and indeed our responsibility, to go inward and learn what our own truth and genius are. It reminds us that unless we make a conscious effort, we don’t become authentic, but instead remain the unexamined sum of  external influences that influence our identity and fate. In another way of putting it, the ideal of authenticity reminds us that there is in fact an ontological difference between identifying, say, as a Christian or Muslim or Jew or Atheist because our parents do; and identifying as one because we’ve wrestled with faith for ourselves and reached our own conclusions.

At the same time, we see now that going inward does not mean going it alone. Nor that external influences can or should be rejected out of hand in the name of cultivating our own truth. Yet we do need to be able to question them; indeed, we need to be encouraged to question them because, after all, we start our lives as prisoners in a cave of ignorance. We free ourselves through coming to know ourselves and the world by questioning laws, values, customs, beliefs, and opinions—not in a dismissive way, but philosophically, as I described in an earlier essay, Hospitality as a Way of Being. Socrates exemplifies how to hold space for a hearing, by refraining from calling anything true or false before it has been examined.

Thus the ethics of authenticity, ancient and modern, suggest that we become authentic by going back and forth, into ourselves and out into the world—for the sake of discovering ourselves, the world, and where we fit.

Nietzsche’s provocative claim that he philosophizes with a hammer is often misunderstood in just the way that authenticity is. Contrary to the rebellious teen’s idea, it is not a sledgehammer for smashing what exists and making whatever we please instead. Rather, it’s a sounding hammer, used to find out what beliefs and values ring true, and what sound hollow or fall to pieces when examined. The problem, as Nietzsche wrote, is that

There are more idols than realities in the world…For once, then, to pose the questions here with a hammer and…[to pose them in such a way that] just that which would remain silent must become outspoken…not just the idols of the age, but the eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork.

No one can do this work for us, just as no one can do our dying for us. That’s because it’s who we are—our unique history and ensemble of gifts, passions, and curses—that we must discover and develop and locate in the world.

This philosophic story, as I’m telling it, is also the likeliest story from an evolutionary perspective, when you stop to think how novelty is an engine of adaption. At our best, we bring what is truest and most uniquely ours to our collaborations, offering the best of ourselves, and helping, we hope, to bring out the best in others. After all, we live not in a world of atoms in a void, but in an interdependent world constituted through the ongoing play of dynamic forces.