Authenticity

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Hello, to thine own self be true is advice so apparently simple and compelling that when Polonia says it in Hamlet he needs no further examination. To philosophers though, from Aristotle to Sarge to today, it's been far from simple. Is your authentic self something you were born with and you need to fulfil, or is it something you create for yourself throughout your life?

Does your obligation to be yourself override your obligation to others? And if you really can be true to yourself, where does authenticity end and narcissism start? With me to discuss ideas about authenticity in philosophy are Dennis McManus, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton,

Sarah Richmond, Associate Professor in Philosophy at University College London, and Irene McMullin, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex. I mentioned Aristotle. Why was he so concerned with the question of authenticity?

Well, although the idea of authenticity is often thought of as a specifically modern... ideal, you can actually see that there are uh in a sense an older conception of of authenticity, which can be traced back to, for instance, to Aristotle or to Plato. Which takes the form of the the it starts from the thought that each and every one of us

is capable of judging their situation, forming their view about what should be done, and then acting on it, or failing to do so. So for instance, one of the ways in which you might fail to do so is you don't act on your own assessment of what should be done, you do what you think's gonna please others.

So you begin to get these some of these kinds of themes can be traced back perhaps because they're perennial in in human existence, can be traced back as far as, for instance, Aristotle. So what you what you see there is a question

A concern not just with whether someone does the right thing, but if you like, why they do it, what lies behind it, what's their relationship to that right thing. So for instance, Aristotle will say that the virtuous person is somebody who does virtuous things For their own sake.

So as it were then they're not doing it b for some ulterior motive, for instance, because they think it'll please the crowd, but because they themselves think that these acts need to be done, that these acts should be carried out. So you can see already, even when we go back to the to the to the Greeks, you can see what a recognizably concerns

How you yourself relate to the actions that you perform? Are you really yourself the author of your actions, if you like? Do you are you the origin of your actions as as Aristotle says. Or are you, for instance, you know, you're you're living because you want honour, so you want to be praised by others. Perhaps that's really what's driving your actions. It's the opinion of others rather than your own.

Well let's move on to Augustine now. Sure. What did he have to say? Well so one of the things that you seem to get with the emergence of of Christianity is An increasing sense of, if you like, human inwardness. A sense of of human beings as having uh inner depths. And sometimes inner depths that they don't themselves really understand very well. Why why did what you mean wh why should Christianity have that that kind of impact?

That's a a tricky question. Um and also you'd get a question about uh about causation as well. You know, is it is it that Christianity brings it about, or is it that other forces were in play which allowed cr the Christian understanding to be to be taken up? Okay, that was a digression. So how did Augustine take it on as it were, as it might have been from Aristotle? Sure. Well so one of the things that you you'll see

I mentioned already that that one of the one of the key images when people talk about authenticity is um if you're like are are you acting on your own behalf or are you acting just in the eyes of others? You're acting through are you are you judging your actions through the eyes of others? Um that's a very prominent topic for St. Augustine. But I think in a way one of the most interesting others d that he that he asks us to to think about in this connection, um, is God.

So as well as asking are you just acting are you are you doing what's uh what to deem to be right because other people think it's right, they'll praise you for doing it. He also asks are you doing what Are you doing what's right because you think it's right or because you think God will punish you if you don't? And he has this very interesting distinction between what he calls servile fear and and pure fear. Yeah. So basically the thought is that

When you do, as well, the right action, are you doing it because you yourself think that that action is right and therefore has to be done? Or are you doing it because you really don't want to be punished? You don't want to be punished by a God. And what Augustine says

Is that if like the the true Christian experiences pure fear, chaste fear is another translation of it. And what and they are the true Christian because if like they love what God loves. They actually love what God's love what what God loves. So they're not just doing it because they're scared of God.

And it's not just because they're they're scared of punishment. So he has this nice line about um if if you're only doing what's right because you're scared of punishment, then you're not scared of sinning, you're scared of burning.

There's quite a lot of fast forward in this programme, Sarah. We've gone from Arisol to Augustine over several centuries and now we're going whoop to the eighteenth century. What changed then, or what do you think changed then and made a difference to this argument? Well, probably the key figure from the eighteenth century who has got some influence on the idea of authenticity is Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was um tremendously important philosopher. A sort of proto romanticist?

ac wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i' But across many of his writings we get this same idea which is a strand that gets followed through by other thinkers, the idea that social existence to some extent corrupts human beings.

So for Rousseau we have um as well as a natural drive to look after ourselves and to preserve ourselves, we also have a natural capacity for compassion, which he calls piti. And his view is that in society we get corrupted in various ways so that our natural tendency towards um compassion is um stifled. and overlaid by other worse preoccupations, such as a preoccupation with what others think of us, which Ferrusso he calls amour part.

Another strand in Rousseau's thinking, which I think is central to some conceptions of authenticity, is a slight distrust of reason and rationality. So he felt that we were at our most authentic when we were in touch with the more passionate side of our nature. And that reason was very often used in a self deceptive way or in a rationalizing way, um, a way that would divert us from what is good in our originally good nature.

I see it's soon after that we have Kierkegaard, um uh who was the champion of the of the single individual. So can you use Kierkegaard to show how the idea of authenticity has been uh changed, altered by uh the idea of the individual? So Kierkegaard um was uh I think the most important fact about Kierkegaard is that he was a very, very devout Protestant Christian, nineteenth century Danish um philosopher.

And uh he also took the view that social existence was by and large a negative thing, and that, as it were, it encouraged conformity And it was for the individual to stand out against the crowd and in particular the relationship that Kierkegaard really cared about was the individual's relationship with God. Rydyn ni'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw.

such that ultimately the individual might find himself or herself damned, or on the contrary might win salvation through their mode of existence. So another very central idea which becomes important in existentialist thinking, and Kierkegaard's often thought of as the father of existentialism, is the idea of anguish. Or anxiety, actually, as it's usually translated. Angst. Yeah. Um so Kierkegaard has a distinction which Heidegger copies between um anxiety and fear.

Fear is an emotion that we may feel in relation to some particular worry or concern or danger. Whereas angst or anxiety is existential, it's about existence.

Yeah, I'd like to pull thank you. I'd like to pull it r back as far as we can to the idea of authenticity. Uh and we've talked about I'm sorry about this. You can tell us about Kant. He brings he did he bring a lot of ideas of course. But his idea of autonomy, how does that contrast with, support, negate, authenticity. What are we talking about there? Yes. Um so Kant talks about autonomy and um autonomy basically comes from the the autonomous, meaning giving oneself the law.

So the idea is that if you're autonomous, you are in a condition of self-governance. You are in charge of yourself. You're in control of yourself. And that he thinks is absolutely essential to understanding what genuine freedom is. So genuine freedom isn't just acting on whatever whim happens to grip you in the moment. So so there's a kind of

skepticism that whatever kind of inclinations um or desires uh that are gripping you of at the moment are genuinely what you want to act on. Instead what you want to be acting on is reasons, right? So so you should be essentially deliberating about what you what you do, who you want to be. Uh and autonomy is a condition where whatever incentives present themselves to you

are basically assessed and then decided if you uh decided if they're endorsable. Is this something that I want to actually do? Is it consistent with my vision of of who I am? Uh, or is it something um that I w I want to to reject and and and cast aside.

And that's um for Kant it it it is going to be basically the same in all people because he thought that we all share a kind of universal rationality and if we're assessing our our incentives in the same way um you know, submitting to this kind of submitting them to this kind of formal assessment procedure, then essentially we will all be bound by the same constraints.

And that differs from authenticity insofar as authenticity, especially as the existentialists understand it, is all about the individual and the uniqueness of the individual. Uh and so they're sort of pushing back on the idea that there is a kind of universal formal condition um that will mean that we're all autonomous in the same way. It occurs to me and it occurred to me while reading about this.

Is this subject, is this idea something which is uh pertinent and very, very important for a very small group of people? Or did it d did it permeate society? D was was individualism discovered in the eighteenth century by a great number of people? Uh uh did it see the the the earthlings as it were, or was it simply in the ivory towers? No, well I mean i i it depends on um the culture of course. But so for example in uh In Germany it really took took everyone by storm.

um, especially with uh Goethe on on the trials of young Verde. It was it was all about this sort of the individual wrestling with his own inner passions and and a tr attempting to be himself. Uh and there were young men who sort of dressed up like Verther and so i i i it it did permeate beyond the the the philosophers, so to speak.

What did Nietzsche bring to the table? So Nietzsche was very interested in the idea of of the individual. So he he w sort of rails against the the conformism and this emphasis on the idea that um the rules governing how we ought to be will be the same for everyone. Uh instead he says, you know, each one of us has to sort of get in touch with our own inner genius uh and engage in the process of self becoming.

which he he views as a process, um, it's a it's a task, it's an ongoing labor of self creation, which which he compares to, um, basically the making of art. So you you y the ideal is that you sort of get in touch with your your most basic uh loves and passions, but then you submit those to a kind of discipline, um, aimed at becoming an ideal version of yourself. So there's this emphasis on on allowing the the

the inner sort of bud uh to to blossom. Uh and so there you can really see the kind of romantic uh influence uh on on Nietzsche. But he he resisted the idea that, you know, we were fully formed in utero, so to speak, and we just needed to to stand back and watch and watch the unfolding occur.

Uh Dennis McMahon, we're coming to Heidegger, but before we do, can you tell us can you give the listener some idea of why the idea of authenticity, if it was, was something that they were they they expected people to be very interested in? Well I think in in in Heidegger's case. So you often get this question of as w why sh why should I be authentic? Why why is it why does it matter that I be myself in the way described?

I think sometimes people feel well we can't really give you a reason if if it doesn't appeal r from the very Certainly I think with with with Heidegger himself I think in some respects he takes us back to that that older conception of of authenticity where you know the question is, you know, y you are capable of judging your situation, you're capable of acting on your own judgment. Do you do it?

So I I should say Heidegger is absolute murder. He's an incredibly difficult philosopher. There are so many different opinions about what he's up to, including in this room I I think. But just to to give you kind of flavour of of of what I think he he brings. I I think one of the things that he brings in is the notion that one of the reasons why we are inauthentic is because we can't tolerate the thought of our finitude, of our mortality.

The the kind of picture he he paints is one in which um you know you always find yourself confronted with a range of different demands that are made on you. You know, you as a as a a son, a father, a whatever it might be. Um so but you d you don't choose that, you find yourself in that condition. So that that's one form of finitude. Another one is that you are then gonna have to decide between those different demands which are gonna be met and which ones aren't.

But how do you think that generally speaking we don't make that decision? Instead what we do is we we live a kind of dream of indeterminacy where where we think, yes, okay, I'm not gonna be m be able to meet these demands now, but I'll meet them later. I'll get round to it eventually. And this ties into to what a big theme in Heidegger's work, which is the idea of being towards death.

So he thinks that that the inauthentic have a very specific relationship towards death. So th they'll say, for instance, they they'll say, Death's definitely coming, but not yet. There's still time. And in a way they have to say that because they're not willing to judge the situation that they're in right now. They have to believe that there's still time for them to change, to become different, to be other than what they are now.

So it's only really the authentic who at least on on this understanding are those who are as it were ready and and willing to to to make decisions about the conflicting demands they see. Only they are actually in a position to tolerate the thought that death might come now because it's only them who are actually setting to work their assessment of how they should live.

Well you've made that you've made very clear something which is murderously difficult to to work up yourself. So we're all in your debt for that. Sir Sir Richmond. Um so still on Heidegger, he has the idea of of owning one's own life. Now what does he mean by that?

Um well the Germ this is actually quite interesting in terms of um some translation history, because the German term that Heidegger used for authenticity was Eigentlichkeit. And if you try and look that word up in a German English dictionary, you probably won't even find it as an entry. It's not a normal, ordinary word in German at all. And um Heidegger was very fond of doing this. This is one of the ways um in which he can be uh murdered.

He was very fond of sort of packing all kinds of meanings into a term or a little So what did you mean by this? Well, that is a big discussion. Let's have a little one. But we'll have a we'll have a little one. Uh what he seems to have wanted to do was exploit the component parts of that word, Eigentlichkeit. Mae'r ymwneudol yn ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. So authenticity is very connected for Heidegger with the idea of making something our own.

And I think actually if we're thinking about authenticity in the existentialist tradition, it's probably closer to an idea of responsibility than to an idea of sincerity or something like that. So he's moving towards the idea that that the only authentic thing to do is to take control of your own life. To take control over the way you live your life. Yes. It's not necessarily the case for the existentialists that we can take control over what happens to us. Yes I t I I accept your amendment.

I Irene McMull now Uh he w we've talked a little about Heidegger, uh his authenticity and so on. He was also a member of the Nazi Party. What does that say about his authenticity? Does it say that that uh authenticity his authenticity is is trumping morality or or what? Uh yes. So this is uh obviously a a a very contested uh dimension of of Heidegger studies, uh or controversial and difficult to to deal with.

So some people think that his entire philosophy is essentially um corrupted by or um yeah, saturated with this kind of of Nazi disposition Um, other people think, well, he was a a bad person but it is fundamentally unrelated to to his uh philosophical views. Um Uh uh the the thing about the idea of authenticity in Heidegger is that it is very much related to this idea of of responsibility, of taking responsibility for your own life, refusing to just sort of

lapse into the anonymity and passivity of conforming to whatever dominant social n norms uh happen to be governing you at the time. So there is this idea of of, you know, sort of seizing yourself uh and becoming yourself without um yeah the comfort of of of these um m these conventions. And he says that when it comes to the actual content of what you're going to sort of resolutely commit to once you are authentic

He says, Well, we can't make any determinations about that. Each person's situation will will determine what it is that that you resolutely and authentically take ownership of. Uh and so in response to that some people have said, Okay, well what if, you know, I resolutely and and authentically feel that my my best or most true self is somebody who likes torturing people or like

Sending people to the gas chamber. Uh and so there's this real problem with whether there's room for any moral constraints in in the Heidegerian idea. What's his What is his solution to that?

Well, um, he doesn't really uh provide a solution to that. But that's because he wasn't really interested in that question so much. I mean, fundamentally for him the question of authenticity takes place within the context of his question about how it's possible for us to ask the question what does it mean to be?

So he's interested in these broader questions about the nature of being, the nature of of existence as such, uh and his his discussion of human existence takes place against that context because he says, Well look Human beings are the only ones who ask the question, What does it mean to be? And normally they ask that question not in a kind of abstract philosophical way, but in a highly personal, individualistic, what does it mean for me to be? Who am I?

Uh and so if the discussion of authenticity takes place in terms of that, it doesn't really take place in terms of of the question about what is it be what is it to be a moral person?

Thank you very much. Increasingly, Dennis McManus, it seems that more and more thinkers and philosophers are giving us many more reasons to be inauthentic than to be authentic. Can you develop that? Certainly it's it's it's often said that you get a clearer picture of uh of inauthenticity from these authors or from these authors than you get of authenticity so there's quite often the um

Th there apparently was students of Heidegger's who were complaining that uh you know he's he's telling us that we have to be we have to be resolute. This is this is another another expression he uses in terms of authenticity. So we know we've got to be resolute, but we just don't know what we've got to be resolute about.

Social norms, conventional behaviour, moving as the rest of people move, is something to be opposed and from which you seek to disassociate yourself and set up an independent state of warn against this. Is that right? Uh it can do, but if that's what authenticity is, then it's problematic. Yeah. All right, let's talk about inauthenticity then.

Um it's certainly th there's there's no denying that a crucial theme in all of these discussions is this notion of conformity, of of conformism, the way in which we end up just falling into line with with what other people haven't. A bad thing. Well, th th this is a good question. What's what's so wrong what's so bad about doing what other people How are they inauthentic?

Well it will have to depend on how they take up these these shared common activities. Because what we certainly don't want, we don't want to end up in a situation where the authentic are people who, for instance, have have some kind of cookie eccentric lifestyle. You know, so the authentic person is the you know, the the the guy on the on the unicycle. Um you know He came in from LaFell, didn't he?

So there's there's also a nice expression, um this guy um Charles Guignon talks about how you know, we mustn't end up with a picture of of the authentic as odd ducks. You know, so it looks like the authentic are gonna have to essentially live in the same kind of world as all the rest of us, engage in in s in in one sense in the same kind of activities as we do.

But those of us who are as we're fans of authenticity are gonna have to make out some distinction between the ways in which we authentic people do it, um which which is different from the way that that the the inauthentic. But more and more ideas keep teeming in as the centuries go past from the eighteenth century. Uh actually on the side of inau i i of the inauthentic, don't they? And we come to the uh sorry which we come to the

The man himself, Sartre, who seems to represent a great deal about this and talk a great deal about this. Can you can you can you discuss uh how how he upset the apple card if you did? I think he did. Do you think you did? Um I don't know if he upset it. He definitely uh took the centre of action somewhere slightly different.

So Sartre was very influenced by Heidegger, and Sartre's uh what's regarded as his philosophical masterpiece being a nothingness The title was chosen deliberately to echo Heidegger's philosophical um masterpiece which was Being in Time. So Sartre is in dialogue with Heidegger, but he in a very typical Sartrean way devotes a lot of effort to showing how his ideas are better as he sees them than Heidegger.

So one of the things he does in Being a Nothingness is he picks up Heidegger's idea which Dennis has talked about, the idea of being towards death. and possibly caricaturing that some that idea to some extent. He rubbishes it, Sartre says there is no way in which the key to authenticity can have anything to do with the way in which I relate to my own death or my own mortality. Why?

Well, for a start, he says, it's an absurd idea given that I don't know when my death's going to occur. It's not exactly an event that I can anticipate, he says, using language borrowed from Heidegger, this idea of relating to death. So as Sartre sees it, death was a bit of a blind alley. Yes. Ha. Thank you for that. Can I say a bit more about what he did think or say? Yeah, that would be good. Okay. So he thinks Heidegger was wrong. Uh what he thinks the central concept has to be is freedom.

So for Sartre to be inauthentic is to not want to acknowledge the freedom that all human beings possess simply by virtue of being the kind of thing that human beings are. So most of the time for Sartre, most of us live in a state of bad faith or inauthenticity, where we choose to believe that we're not actually free, that various ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud.

I mean, can you develop the idea of bad faith, which is which is a strong idea there? Yes, yeah. So so exactly as Sarah was saying, the idea of bad faith, um it it generally involves a kind of tendency to get the ontology wrong. So ontology is the study of of being, the way things are, the way they exist. And the existentialists were very interested in the way of existing that is specific to human beings, which is different than how numbers exist and ideas exist and rocks exist and so on.

Um and one of the the the primary features of inauthenticity or bad faith is the tendency for human beings to treat themselves as if they were just sort of causally determined things. that they aren't responsible for the task of self making, that they aren't responsible for their own freedom. And so bad faith is uh you know, the way that we avoid this recognition of what we are by thinking of ourselves in these kind of deterministic terms.

So Sart has this very ex uh famous example of the waiter uh in the cafe who's just sort of performing his role as a waiter uh as if he were were just sort of determined by the role, that he's not the one who is constantly responsible for committing himself to the role and endorsing his choice. uh to to take up this role uh and and play it out in his life. But there's also the t the this sort of other tendency in bad faith Which is...

The real waiter is the one who's enjoying it and determined to do it. What's the differen you we've had the bad faith one. What about the the unauthentic one? Is there an authentic waiter? Are all waiters a bit like the one you've described? Well, I mean uh so this is getting back to what Dennis was saying about how it it's not that the authentic person or the person in good faith is is doing radically different things. It's that th the person is doing it

out of an awareness or in light of an understanding of the kind of things that human beings are. So rather than sort of i you know, avoiding or evading the recognition that we're gonna die, that we're free, that we're not caused by uh, you know, some kind of internal essence or soul that we're born with, but rather we're constantly responsible for the task of deciding who we're gonna be.

Um, people in bad faith just sort of try and avoid that. And there's a huge emphasis on the the various avoidance techniques that we're all constantly engaged in.

And before I come to you, Dennis, can I uh can I quote something that Satra says which I I think is central to what we're talking about in the uh in the Roads to Freedom where he's talking about uh character called Matya He says, Quote, He could do what he liked. No one had the right to advise him. There would be for him no good nor evil unless he brought them into being. He was alone and developed by this monstrous silence. He was free and alone, without assistance and without excuse.

condemned to decide without support from any quarter, condemned forever to be free. Now that's quite an agenda, isn't it? It certainly is. And that um in a way that passage sums up a certain picture of the classic existentialist hero. Now I think there are reasons to wonder about whether that's really what Sartre is fully signed up. I I think it's worth having that that sort of that image on on the table because um certainly

That image of of what the existentialist hero is has been hugely influential. So it's that it's that image of the person who is purely free. They don't take any given value as having authority over them. They they have to they choose restraints. And certainly that image I think was To some extent it was made popular through peop through those who criticised Saras, so people like Iris Murdo.

who uh who's fascinating in all sorts of ways in her own in her own right. But in her early work she had a famous criticism of of the existentialists where she argued that The kind of freedom that they insisted on was only really possible in, if you like, a sort of moral desert.

the world would have to have all value sucked out of it in order for that kind of freedom to be ho to be possible. She has this kind of she she has this allusion to uh Lucifer in in Paradise Lost. So the thought would be, yes, you can you can just as he can reign in heaven, To rule in hell and to reign in hell. To reign in hell and to be served in heaven.

So the thought again would be yes, the existential hero can be utterly free, but only as long as they're willing to live in this this this hellish world where nothing matters. Which which she also thought is not only is it rebarbative, but also it's not clear that it really makes sense. So so what kind of choices could you make? On what basis could you make a choice? Now what I think that almost certainly says is that

If we're gonna have a coherent philosophy, authenticity cannot be the only value in town. It has to be just one value alongside other. Well Sarah's nodding, so we're gonna find out what she uh whether she accepts what you say. Yes, well I not entirely. Um Iris Murdoch did make various criticisms of Sartre. I think there may have been a little bit of rivalry between the two of them insofar as

There aren't that many novelist philosophers, and both Sartre and Iris Murdoch were novelist philosophers. But they did have quite a different temperament. But I would say that the idea that Mr in Sartre authenticity is an attitude which um encourages us to sort of create moral values in a vacuum. I would definitely say that That is a caricature of what Sartre has in mind. What he tries to do from being a nothingness onwards

is to show that authenticity does have moral implications. And basically what he tries to do is to say it's not that we can choose any value we like. The only value that makes philosophical sense for us to choose is freedom, because we are free. to freedom.

His partner and lover and uh uh superior in in in in the exams, wasn't she? Simone de Beauvoir, um, took up issues of his Yes, she did, definitely. Um, and partly in in terms of what Sarah was saying about um freedom and having to be committed both to your own freedom and the freedom of others. So uh she she makes an argument for the necessity of of trying to enhance the freedom of others as being part of of your own process of of becoming free.

But I think um one of the most interesting things about what Beauvoir brings to the table when she's talking about this is she she does a little bit of a a of a developmental account of the person because she says part of the problem for us and and part of the sort of root of our attempts to evade responsibility is um, is to be found in the fact that we were first children. And when we're children, the world is sort of an established, settled place where values and rules

are givens in the world in the same way that the the law of gravity or rocks and so on. These things are are real, they're in the world. And that is a a source of tremendous comfort because we know what one must do.

And then as we get older, uh and she talks about you know, adolescence as being a kind of time of crisis where you begin to recognize that these values, that these norms are ultimately human constructions and that the adults who have been holding them up and and propagating them and so on are just confused failed uh persons uh like like everyone else. And so there's this tremendous sense of loss, um and confusion and an attempt to get back the sense of stability that one had as a child.

Yes, I I think Simon de Beauvoir was a much more practically minded philosopher than Sartre. We don't get Sartre really. talking about development, he doesn't talk about children. There's all kinds of parts of ordinary life which, surprisingly perhaps, Sartre never gets round to discussing. And um I think the other thing about de Beauvoir is that she saw possibly sooner than Sartre did, although of course there's always a debate about

who pinched whose ideas or who was more indebted to whom. But certainly if one looks at the texts, I think she saw faster than Sartre did. that one had to take social position into account when one was talking about freedom and that there were degrees of freedom depending on the kinds of social relations in which we find ourselves. And that women, for instance, had been put in a social position which they had to accept and that defined the way they thought about things.

Absolutely as she says in the second section. Second sex, yeah. Yeah.

Um Dennis, um how can we be authentic ourselves, um, or even know what that means without being influenced by others? Well in a way I think this takes us back to some of the the earlier issues that we've we've touched on on a couple of a couple of points because um I it can look as if the only way in which you're going to be authentic is by separating yourself off from the rest of society and living your your isolated little existence.

Um if that's what authenticity is, then it doesn't look like it's viable for ninety-nine point nine percent. So it looks like there's gonna have to be some notion of how we can live an authentic life amongst uh w you know with with each other, amongst um one another. Um now I think

You know, there are various different ways in which people have tried to to to accommodate these these different needs. And it and it's especially important for people like Heidegger, Sartre de Beauvoir because you know, they all stress this idea that you that we are

to use Hadiger's expression, we all are in the world. Our our mode of existence is being in the world. So it's a social, historical, cultural existence. There's no getting away from that. You're apt we are thrown into this kind of condition. Yeah. In a way all all of all the the people who who work on these on these figures trying to make sense of these ideas are in the business of trying to figure out how you can do this.

Now, just to very briefly go back to the kind of picture that I gave from from Heidegger, I think there you can see that um the kind of different obligations between which you have to adjudicate um, are if you like, could well be social obligations. So, you know, being a father is a social position, being a son is a social position, being a neighbour is a social position. Um, I think on that picture of authenticity

If you like, my contribution is not that I will into existence a new way of life, but instead I pull all those different obligations together and I adjudicate between them. I take responsibility for deciding how I'm going to take up those different kinds of roles.

The idea was uh f even further elaborated by Freud and others saying What is this self? And the post structural is saying, There isn't a core self. We invent s different selves at different times. Now can you take that on briefly towards the end of the programme, Sarah? Yes, so I suppose if we're thinking about a body of theory that's perhaps more recent even than the existentialists, we could think about some of the ways in which Freudian ideas have been developed.

Um, in particular I'm thinking of a quite a well known paper by a post Freudian psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, who belonged to the British School of Psychoanalysis. And he mentions in the title to one of his papers the difference betw between the true and the false self. Now I think it's very important not to parody what the idea is here. So the difference between the true and the false self isn't, as one might think, the difference, say, between the public. the show and the private self.

Rather the difference um depends on a developmental story, basically about the way in which one has been parented. and um an infant whose mother has or parent or caretaker it's not necessarily the biological mother, although Winnicott tends to use that term, but an infant whose caretaker has responded to it But a mother who, for whatever reasons, is um not responsive in the right way to an infant is going to be imposing her own agenda.

as it were, on the child. She's not going to be focused so much on what the child might be thinking and on trying to make sense of that. She's going to be imposing her own needs and wishes, and what that will lead to is what Winnicott calls a false self.

Finally then I do you think the the the idea of a true self is a myth and uh is that what is that what the debate about authenticity is about at the moment?

Uh certainly there are people who are are very interested in that idea whether or not this this whole conversation is is fundamentally misguided. Um so some people also emphasize that you know, maybe this kind of fixation on on talk of authenticity is is just a kind of feature of modern Western capitalist uh individualism and that it's a kind of fetishizing of uniqueness and individual freedom and that

uh that in fact it's a distortion of of um of what we actually are, which is, as uh Dennis uh was saying, you know, socially embedded creatures who are fundamentally defined by our relationships to others. So so now authenticity, discussions in authenticity are really trying to accommodate this intuition we have that there are unique selves that we should try and be instead of just sort of you know, coasting along in this mode of of irresponsible anonymity.

Um but that doesn't mean that it's a just a kind of narcissistic self assertion uh but is instead going to have to be responsive to the kinds of things that we are, that we're social beings who who who love and are are are responsible to others. I think some people say we're happy casting along in responsible anonymity, but that's another program. Thank you very much. I'm Mullen.

Sir Richmond and Dennis McManus. Next week Gerald Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest who's been called the greatest Victorian poet. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Sarah. Well I'd like to make a point about um something Irene said uh about narcissism. which is that that is indeed the case, that people sometimes criticise the idea of authenticity on the basis that it involves some kind of excessive you know, self-importance or self-indulgence. You know, I shouldn't really be thinking about myself, I should be much more outward focused.

I think that criticism absolutely can't apply to Sartre and Beauvoir. Because one of the things that their conception of authenticity... was that we shouldn't actually think of ourselves in terms of being at all, and that even the concept that we have some kind of self, even if it's a self for which we take ownership can actually be another instance of bad faith. So the cells. Sorry, can you take me from one of those Is it? The two s the penultimate sentence to the last sentence.

Well, so narcissism I think is dependent on the idea of a self. Authenticity, as the French existentialists construe it, is probably opposed to the idea of a self, precisely because. We're tempted always to reify the idea of a self and to use it to restrict our freedom rather than to expand it. So in a way, I would argue that, as Sartre and de Beauvoir conceive it, authenticity is the opposite of narcissism.

Uh yeah, can I j just jump in on that? Because um It seems to me that that a lot of what many of these thinkers is wrestl are wrestling with is the fact that we are both defined by certain factors that over which we have no control.

Um but we also have this freedom to to interpret and take up uh and understand you know, our situation in various ways. And so w we have freedom but it's a constrained or confined freedom and so it puts us in a difficult position because we want to make ourselves but we don't have total control over over that self making.

um and that the different kinds of bad faith that that Sartre talks about involves both trying to to sort of understand oneself fully in terms of one's sort of factic given I have no control domain, dimension of ourselves, or going the other way and just saying, Well, I'm pure freedom, anything I may have done in the past, any relationships in which I find myself, those don't really define me because, hey, I can always just you know, create myself anew, you know, f out of nothing.

Uh and so it seems that really the task at hand is to face up to the kinds of things that we are, which is both factic and free. Right? We're thrown into a situation, uh, but we have to take it up and take responsibility for how we take it up. Uh and so that's the the the difficult task of sort of negotiating that tension. Yeah. I mean I I think j just to to carry on with this this the theme of narcissism, I think in a way

Uh through throughout the the people we've been discussing you see a distinction between different kinds of self self love or self uh self concern. So um just to take the case I I know best, I think with with Heidegger I think he thinks that the authentic They exhibit a s a self concern in that they judge for themselves. They look for themselves to see what's happening. To to judge what what needs to be needs to be to be done.

But that need not be a concern with as it were y their own personal welfare. They might realise that actually my personal welfare needs to be sacrificed here because something else matters more. And I think y in a way you can see something similar, you you go right back to someone like Saint Augustine where you know in a sense it's a it's a battle between two kinds of self concern.

Um, are you doing what you yourself think is right or are you just worried about not being p punished or are you are you are you being Uh is your life being controlled by what you might think of as th the parts of yourself that you don't really want to to to to allow to take over your existence? Or do you just want to be seen to be doing why?

Well that's an that's another question, yeah. Yeah. So certainly I think that that notion of of narcissism, um I certainly think in the Heideggerian case I think it kinda misses the misses the target. You can understand why people think it because there seems to be this concern with um with the self.

But I think certainly in his case, you know, the the the thought is that you need to take responsibility for your existence. And one of the things that that might involve um is a very self self sacrificial um existence. If you like the element of self assertion is that you look for yourself. So you don't take another person's word for what needs doing or you don't look through another person's eyes. You you as a were turn your attention to your own existence and you look yourself.

So I think it might be helpful to point out that for all these people authenticity is difficult. It's not the default. It's difficult. As Sartre puts it, we have to win it. And the temptation is constantly to fall back into this kind of anonymous mode of of m irresponsibly coasting along. So it's a it's not like you achieve a state of authenticity and then you're authentic from there on out. It's a it's a constant temptation to to slide back.

Um yeah. The other the other thing that we didn't really talk much about, although you mentioned it Sarah, was the idea uh of anxiety uh and and this sense that what interrupts the the conformist, anonymous mode of inauthenticity is is a kind of of especially in Heidegger, anxiety, this existential uh terror and um sense that the way that you ordinarily give me ordinarily give meaning and structure to your life has fallen away.

uh and you come sort of face to face with the kind of thing that you are. Um and that anxiety is not something that you can sort of call up on your own. So there's sort of a lot of of of discourse about the lack of control over even the process of becoming authentic or moving away from inauthenticity. When you teach it to your uh your students these days, I mean are they taken with the idea, is it something that they think applies to them?

I think so. Yeah. That's my my impression. I think that it's that it does it grabs people because, you know, in a way it's talking about this question of are you living your own life? Are you are you or are you just Um so I think Yeah, w when these w with all of these authors you get these very vivid pictures of of of inauthenticity and these these elusive characterizations of authenticity. But I think they are magnetic. Um and I think I think

I th I think in some respects um maybe th th there are difficulties in in knowing w w what what are the red herrings in the idea of of authenticity. So sometimes you wonder about whether s a certain concern with individualism might be a red herring. you know, that that insistence that you be different from other people. Does that really matter? But I think often when when when we talk about individualism, really what we're concerned about are other things.

Like you are are you allowing other people to tell you what to do? Are you developing your own your own talents? So I think one of the the the difficulties that we that we face when we teach uh authenticity now is helping people think about which elements in this big cluster of concepts might be bogus and which ones might be Well, thank you very much. Simon's going to come in and make you a BBC, but you can't refuse it. Please, yeah. Or tease? Or tease, authenticity?

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, I'm Greg Foote and I am hosting a new Radio 4 podcast called things since sliced bread. Have you ever wondered what's fact and what's fad when it comes to wonder products, face creams, activated charcoal, kombucha, turmeric shot? That's what I'm trying to find out with the help of leading scientists and special guests. If you want to see Best thing since sliced bread on BBC Sounds. スペースペースペースペース Tråkig!

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