#11 - Critique of Authenticity

Maybe your feelings aren't truth

*A series of works written in one sitting — inspired by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry on Authenticity

Building off my last article defining authenticity, I have two main critiques of the popular usage of authenticity. First, it inspires a self-indulgent focus on inner feelings as truth. Second, through its self-focus, authenticity devalues anything beyond the self, including moral standards, duty, family, community, love, compassion, etc. My final minor critique is the modern usage of authenticity as an end is conspicuously performative, but for the sake of time, I'll leave that to Bo Burnham.

In my personal quest for salvation, I turned inward as the ethic of authenticity instructed me to do. The goal was not some salvation or golden age, but simple psychic wellbeing. The prescription was a self-reflexive sabbatical to uncover the layers of social conditioning and self-coercion from childhood. With some time away from prying eyes, I could reveal my authentic self and finally find a fulfilling direction.

But when some semblance of personal resonance and whims of feeling becomes your compass, it becomes arbitrary. Perhaps I took the doctrine too seriously. If a relationship or job didn't particularly inspire joy, then maybe it was wrong for me and I did an inner search for why that might be. For 2 years, I nomadically bounced around searching for something to strike me. But perhaps I over-indexed on authentic, self-focused feelings and under-indexed on discipline and serving others in a larger project.

This brings me to my bigger problem of authenticity, its over-focus on the self disconnects it from larger systems of connection and meaning. There's an absurd assumption underlying authenticity that the individual is somehow clearly distinct from the environment. But obviously your environment deeply influences everything from your grander values to the lower impulses of feeling I mistook as truth. There is not one unchanging true self to uncover, but a dynamic self that evolved and changed in response to and expecting a broader environment. The ideal of the authentic self ignores the natural mimetic and cultural influences on an individual. And it's within this larger context that I think one should ask what is worth doing? Some thinkers believed human nature meant authenticity would naturally turn to these more prosocial aims, but popular culture increasingly focuses on your own internal feelings as the end. It's all about you, when a richer perspective would be a broader perspective.

While my gripes are primarily about authenticity in practice, Satre and Beauvoir offer a version of authenticity I actually resonate with. Satre, the great existentialism, believed "we constitute ourselves through our own choices: though the facticity of my situation creates some constraints on my possible self-interpretations, it is always up to me to decide the meaning of those constraints, and this means that what I take to be limitations are in fact produced by my own interpretations or meaning-giving activities." Humans can uniquely define what sort of person they are, but there is an inherent instability in making a revokable self declaration. Authenticity would be “the awareness and acceptance of—this basic ambiguity”. Beauvoir built off this view believing "the authentic individual will be the one who takes up the terrifying freedom of being the ultimate source of values, embraces it, and acts with a clarity and firmness suitable to his or her best understanding of what is right in this context."

It's a very different kind of authenticity, but there's beauty in the realness of ambiguity.