Freedom From Authenticity

My thinking about authenticity is sporadic and owes more to serendipity than to any conscientious scholarly endeavor. For example, most recently, from no particular quarter, the following question formulated itself in my head: “What is the problem to which authenticity is the answer?” There is nothing particularly insightful about this question, but it did get me thinking about authenticity from a different angle. The meandering mental path that subsequently unfolded led me to identify this problem as some sort of psychic rupture or dissonance. We don’t think of authenticity at all unless we think of it as a problem, and it presents itself as a problem at the very time it enters our conscious awareness. It is a problem tied to our awareness of ourselves as selves.

As William Deresiewicz put it, “the search for authenticity is futile. If you have to look for it, you’re not going to find it.” Authenticity, like happiness and love and probably everything else that is truly significant in life, partakes of this dynamic whereby the sought after thing can be attained only by not consciously seeking it. Think of it, and now it is a problem; seek it, and you will not find it; focus on it, and it becomes elusive.

So authenticity is the sort of thing that vanishes the moment you become aware of it. It’s what you have only when you’re not thinking of it. And what you’re not thinking of when you have it is yourself. Authenticity is a crisis of self invoked by a hypertrophied self-awareness that makes it impossible not think of oneself. I don’t think this is a matter of being a horribly selfish or arrogant person. No, in fact, I think this kind of self-awareness is more often than not burdened with insecurity and fear and anxiety. It’s a voice most people want to silence and, hence, the Sisyphean quest for authenticity.

Few people have written as incisively about the discontents of the modern self as Walker Percy. Percy, a medical doctor turned philosophical novelist, went from being a diagnostician of physical maladies to one of existential maladies. With his acute Pascalian eye, Percy made a literary career of diagnosing the modern self’s inability to understand itself. This was the theme of his send-off of the self-help genre, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.

Percy chose the following passage from Nietzsche as an epigraph for Lost in the Cosmos:

A little further on, in his inventory of possible “selfs” (or should that be “sevles”), Percy offered this description of the lost self:

Percy was writing in 1983. Centuries earlier, St. Augustine wrote, “I have been made a question to myself.” The problem of authenticity is much older than we sometimes realize. Perhaps we might say that it is a perpetually possible problem that is more or less actualized given certain historical or psychological conditions. There may be a few reasons, then, why this perpetually possible problem has been actualized more frequently in recent history.

Modernity is one long identity crisis. In traditional societies, identity was given. It was grounded in the relative solidity of pre-modern life. Individuals inhabited an identity that was given by time, place, the structures and institutions of daily life. In modernity, all that is solid melts … and choice is the solvent. A multiplicity of choices arise where once there were few or none – choices regarding vocation, home, spouse, religion, and more. Consumer society is simply the apotheosis of a very long trajectory and Luther was her prophet.

Crisis of identity used to be the province of exiles and their children. Modernity generalizes the condition of exile. Where there is choice there is freedom. There is also uncertainty, anxiety, regret, and self-consciousness. Choice foregrounds the choosing self. Choices, because they could have been otherwise, become signals to be read. They disclose and they reveal. When this dynamic is embraced, happily or despondently, identity becomes performance and a performed identity – relative to an inhabited, given identity – feels inauthentic. Performance is knowing, cool, detached, ironic. Performance feels inauthentic because it is rehearsed action.

Media is also implicated in this story. Until recently the power to produce media – whether textual, photographic, or audio-visual – has been in the hands of a relative few. Under these circumstances individuals were the medium and culture was the message. When the power to produce media is democratized the relationship is reversed. Culture becomes the medium and the self is the message.

In the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin wrote, “Any person today can lay claim to being filmed.” Any person today can lay claim to being a filmmaker. In the same essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin added, “The distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character … At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer.” Digital media has democratized the production of media even further. We are not only actors, but also directors of our own lives as we perform them for an audience, imagined or real. Authenticity, if it is taken to mean either non-performative action or immediate action that is not self-reflexive, is no longer an option. In the world created by the expansion of choices, we have no choice in the matter.

The poet W. H. Auden, although not addressing the question of authenticity directly, arrived at a corollary conclusion:

We might likewise say that the given self for whom authenticity was not a problem cannot now be brought back. Whatever virtues we attributed to it, if they can be had still, must be had by “a deliberate effort of the will and the intelligence.”

In his 2005 Kenyon College Commencement address, David Foster Wallace offers a few helpful considerations toward this end. First, there’s this: “Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive.”

This is what he calls our default setting. Our default setting is to think about the world as if we were its center, to process every situation through the grid of our own experience, to assume “that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.” This is our default setting in part because from the perspective of our own experience, the only perspective to which we have immediate access, we are literally the center of the universe.

Wallace also issued this warning: “Worship power you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

So then, worship authenticity and … 

But, Wallace also tells us, it doesn’t have to be this way. The point of a liberal arts education — this is a commencement address after all — is to teach us how to exercise choice over what we think and what we pay attention to. And Wallace urges us to pay attention to something other than the monologue inside our head. Getting out of our own heads, what Wallace called our “skull-sized kingdoms” — this is the only solution to the problem of authenticity.

Serendipitously, around the same time I read Wallace’s speech, I stumbled on a video about glass-blowing in which a glass-blower is talking about his craft when he says this: “When you’re blowing glass, there really isn’t time to have your mind elsewhere – you have to be 100% engaged.” This suggests that certain kinds of practices can so focus our attention on themselves, that we stop, for a time, paying attention to ourselves.

Now, I know, we can’t all run off and take up glass blowing. That would be silly and potentially dangerous. The point is that this practice (and many others) has the magical side effect of taking a person out of their own head by acutely focusing our attention. The leap I want to make now is to suggest that this skill is transferable. Learn the mental discipline of focusing your attention in one particular context and you will be better able to deploy it in other circumstances.

It’s like the ascetic practice of fasting. The point is not that food is bad or that denying yourself food is somehow itself virtuous or meritorious. It’s about training the will and learning how to temper desire so as to direct and deploy it toward more noble ends. You train your will with food so that you can exercise it meaningfully in other, more serious contexts.

In any case, Wallace is right. It’s hard work not yielding to our default self-centeredness. “The really important kind of freedom,” Wallace explained, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” That is a crucial, challenging truth.

Freedom is not about being able to do whatever we want, when we want. It has nothing to do with listening to our heart or following our dreams or whatever else we put on greeting cards and bumper stickers. Real freedom comes from learning to get out of our “skull-sized kingdoms” long enough to pay attention to the human being next us so that we might treat them with decency and kindness and respect. Then perhaps we’ll have our authenticity, but we’ll have it because we’ve stopped caring about it.

October 10, 2012