How To Be Yourself

Who are we? How do we find out? What is it to find our authentic selves? What can we learn from the history and philosophy of authenticity?

Today, supposedly, we’re free. Free, to do what makes us happy, to be anything we strive to be, to choose our own paths. We even feel free from parts of ourselves – that our emotions are something separate from us, that there’s a real us beneath them, a supra-inner rational core that transcends everything outside of it, that is somehow higher than fleeting emotions that make us do things that aren’t really us.

The history of the search for authenticity has sought to understand this true core of human experience. It has been approached in many ways. Sometimes as a revolt against the outer layer, against standards given to us by society. Other times as taking off a mask. Or rejecting reading a script someone else has written for us, whether god or the bible or society and its rules

Philosopher Jacob Golomb writes that ‘the concept of authenticity is a protest against the blind, mechanical acceptance of an externally imposed code of values.’

The history of authenticity tells us much about the modern world. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, discovering our authentic self meant removing the masks society encourages us to wear, about confessing why we really say or do certain things.

Kierkegaard encouraged us to take passionate leaps of faith, to find subjective truths that were meaningful for us, to take action, to make difficult either/or choices.

Nietzsche knew that the death of god meant that humans were free to create their own values, to pursue the will to power creatively, to break free from the chains others imposed on us. We should love our fates - amor fati - but give style to our characters.

Heidegger thought authenticity meant facing our own deaths, as beings-towards-death, overcoming our own anxiety, and stepping away from the 'They' to create something unique and lasting in the world

And finally, Jean-Paul Sartre argued that we are, above all us, free to choose who we are, what we do, and what meaning we attach to the world and its objects. We have a piercing, lucid, and powerful consciousness that can explore the world and our own characters, and not using that reflective power, not interogating our own traits, beliefs, and actions meant we'd be living in 'bad faith', inauthentically ignoring our true human potential.

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Sources:

W. R. Newell, Heidegger on Freedom and Community: Some Political Implications of His Early Thought

M. Heidegger, Being and Time

Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax

Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic

Maiken Umbach & Mathew Humphrey, Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept

Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus

Steven Churchill & Jack Reynolds, Jean-Paul Sartre, Key Concepts

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity

Rousseau, Confessions

F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra