What does your conscience say? – ”You shall become who you are.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Moods and the problem of the real self

The word ‘authentic’ derives from the Greek authentikos, meaning ‘original’ or ‘genuine.’ To say that I am authentic, then, is to say that I do not simply imitate the socially prescribed roles and values of the public world. I am genuine or true to the concerns and commitments that matter to me as an individual. Authenticity, as Charles Taylor writes, “is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me” (1991, 28–29). Although Heidegger is the only one who liberally uses the word, employing the German Eigentlichkeit (from the stem eigen meaning ‘own’ or ‘proper’) that translates literally as ‘being one's own’ or ‘ownedness,’ existentialists are generally united in emphasizing the significance of authenticity, of being true to oneself. But, as we have seen, the commitment to one's own truth is difficult because our normal tendency is to drift along and conform to the average expectations and meanings of the public world. We are, for this reason, usually alienated from ourselves, living in a state of comfortable self-deception because we simply do what ‘they’ do. As a ‘they-self,’ we have no sense of who we really are or what really matters to us, and we are unable to see how exactly we are different from anyone else. Yet the existentialists make it clear that it is possible to be shaken out of self-deception, not by means of any kind of detached reasoning but through penetrating moods or emotional experiences that can shatter the routinized familiarity of everyday life, forcing us to confront ourselves as finite beings thrown into a world with no pre-given meaning that can justify our choices.

For Kierkegaard and Heidegger, this existential confrontation is disclosed to us primarily through ‘anxiety’ (Angst) or ‘dread.’ Unlike fear, which is always directed toward some external threat, anxiety is directed toward oneself as an unsettled existence penetrated by dizzying freedom and the possibility of death. “One may liken anxiety to dizziness,” writes Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread. “He whose eye chances to look down into a yawning abyss becomes dizzy. … Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom which [when] freedom gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself” (1944, 55). Anxiety puts me face-to-face with my own freedom, exposing me to the fact that I am not a stable and enduring thing but a possibility. In this way, anxiety reveals existence as fundamentally insecure, that the public meanings I rely on to make sense of things are precarious, and that any sense I have of rational control and mastery of the world is an illusion. Coming from within, this feeling has the power to shake me out of the false security of everydayness and open me up to my own structural nothingness. Although Angst can certainly arise in the face of a profound crisis such as the death of a loved one, a terminal illness, or a divorce, the mood is largely autochthonous; it is a fundamental part of the human situation and can, therefore, arise spontaneously on its own, without an identifiable cause or reason.

Jaspers refers to these moments as ‘limit’ or ‘boundary’ situations, a reference to the experience “when everything that is said to be valuable and true collapses before my eyes” (1956, 117; cited in Wallraff 1970, 137). Nietzsche describes this feeling in terms of “the terror” (2000, 36) that overwhelms us when language and reason fail and our understanding of the world as a place of order and reliability dissolves, shattering our sense of who we are as secure, self-subsisting individuals. Sartre famously refers to the “nausea” that suddenly overtakes us when the veneer of public meanings collapses and we are confronted with the superfluous and unintelligible ‘is-ness’ of things. Speaking through his character Roquentin in his novella Nausea, he writes:

For Sartre, nausea reveals the sheer contingency and “terrible freedom” (1956, 55–56) of existence, where we alone are responsible for deciding who we are and what our fate will be. Marcel develops this theme by describing the feeling of “mystery” that intrudes into our everyday lives and defies rational explanation. It is the uncanny sense that “there is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit – no security, no guarantee” (1956, 27), and I am left alone with the burden to accept and create myself. These feelings expose us to the fact that there is no ground that can secure our lives and that any project or identity we commit ourselves to is, in the end, futile.

Camus explores the possibility of suicide in the face of these feelings. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he refers to the feeling of “absurdity” that strikes out of the blue when our need for reasons confronts the “unreasonable silence of the world” (1955, 28), destroying the comforting rhythm of our everyday lives.

Absurdity prompts ‘the why’ because it discloses reality as it is, as contingent, meaningless, and irrational, revealing that I am “a stranger to myself and to the world” (20–21), and the only certainty is freedom and the ever-present possibility of my own death. Comparing the empty repetitiveness of modern life to the futile struggles of Sisyphus – who was condemned by the Greek gods to forever push a rock up a mountain only to watch it roll back down – Camus introduces suicide for those who are unable to bear the truth of ‘the absurd.’ The temptation to kill ourselves, then, is similar to our temptation to flee into the metaphysical comforts of religion or the tranquilizing routines of the public; they are all incarnations of flight from who we are. For Camus, suicide is a rejection or “repudiation” of one's own freedom, a freedom that defiantly and passionately affirms the absurdity of life and which alone can be “enough to fill a man's heart” (198).

Guilt is another mood that provides insight into our own existence. For existentialists like Kierkegaard and Heidegger, ‘guilt’ is not to be interpreted in the religious or moralistic sense as a feeling that we have done something wrong on the basis of some set of moral absolutes. This view creates the illusion that there are binding ethical norms that we can appeal to. Existential guilt dissolves this illusion, revealing that there is nothing – no God, no reason, no moral principle – that can legitimize or justify our choices and actions. Guilt reveals that we have been thrown into a world that we did not choose, and it is a world that has abandoned us to the extent that it lacks any objective measure that can tell us what we should or should not do. Understood this way, guilt does not represent a moral failing; it represents the structural unsettledness of being human. The fact that we are thrown into a world that offers no guidance for our lives means that guilt is invariably accompanied by anxiety. “The relation of freedom to guilt is anxiety,” says Kierkegaard, “because freedom and guilt are still a possibility” (1944, 97). The human situation is one where we are faced with an indefinite range of possibilities that the world opens up for us but are provided with nothing in terms of guidance. Guilt, then, not only reveals our structural unsettledness; it also reveals that we are answerable only to ourselves.

These moods are important for the existentialists not only because they disclose basic truths about what it means to be human but because they have the power to pull us out of inauthenticity, out of our various modes of self-deception. But it is important not to confuse the transformative power that existentialists attribute to these emotions with the popular ideas of ‘getting in touch with one's feelings,’ ‘being true to one's inner self,’ or ‘finding the child within.’ These notions are largely holdovers of Romanticism, the sprawling and disjointed cultural reaction to Enlightenment rationality and the dehumanizing aspects of modern society. On the Romantic account, it is by attending to one's deepest and innermost feelings – rather than to disinterested reason – that the ‘real self’ can emerge and reclaim a primitive unity or oneness with the natural world, a unity that we once had and is still present in the simple spontaneous goodness of children (see Guignon 2004a, 49–77). This sentiment is perhaps most famously expressed in Rousseau's Emile (1762) when he writes: “To exist is to feel, our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas. … Let us be simpler and less pretentious; let us be content with the first feelings we experience in ourselves, since science always brings us back to these, unless it has led us astray” (1999, 210). This view suggests that beneath the instrumental and deforming conventions of rational society is a human nature that consists of spontaneous feelings that are fundamentally good.

Existentialists challenge this notion of innate human goodness. They, of course, do not deny the crucial role that feelings play in our lives or that humans are capable of spontaneous acts of tenderness and love, but they also acknowledge our darker side, for instance, the pleasure derived from senseless acts of violence and cruelty. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov describes the voluptuous experience of a “well-educated and intelligent” father beating his young daughter with a rod:

Dostoevsky concludes that these kinds of behaviors are not reserved for the sick and demented. They are sensual capacities that we all share, and it is naïve to think that they are not part of what it means to be human. “There is, of course, a beast hidden in every man,” writes Dostoevsky, “a beast of rage, a beast of sensual inflammability at the cries of the tormented victim, an unrestrained beast let off the chain” (241–242). And if we were to suggest that this kind of interpretation is irrational and absurd, Dostoevsky replies, “I tell you that absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities and without them perhaps nothing would happen” (243).

Nietzsche makes a similar point in acknowledging the human instinct for cruelty and violence, an aspect of our animal nature expressed most explicitly in the pleasure we derive in hurting others. Consider this passage from his On the Genealogy of Morals:

This interpretation suggests that the confluence of feeling that lurks below rational thought can be tender and cruel, creative and destructive and, therefore, transcends the simple binary between good and evil. In order to be true to ourselves, we have to acknowledge and accept the drives of the whole person, including those that are darkest and most dangerous. This is why, for existentialists like Nietzsche, traditional moralists get it wrong. They are not trying to sublimate or control our sensual natures; they are cultivating weakness and impotence by trying to deny them altogether. “Instead of employing the great sources of strength, those impetuous torrents of the soul that are so often dangerous and overwhelming, and economizing them, this most short-sighted and pernicious mode of thought, the moral code of thought, wants to make them dry up” (1968, 383).

In acknowledging our unconscious drives for destruction and cruelty, writers such as Dostoevsky and Nietzsche anticipate the insights of depth psychology, psychoanalysis, and Sigmund Freud's (1856–1939) seminal idea of the ‘Id.’ In fact, Freud famously remarked that Dostoevsky “cannot be understood without psychoanalysis – i.e., he isn't in need of it because he illustrates it himself in every character and every sentence” (cited in Frank 1976, 381). And Nietzsche had “more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live” (cited in Jones 1955, 385). These existential insights informed the development of the modern novel, introducing primal and subversive anti-heroes such as Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1903), Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and, more recently, Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996). These depictions suggest that if authenticity is the affective recovery of the ‘real you,’ then we ought to be worried about what we might uncover. Indeed, it could be that the self-deceptive and conformist routines of ‘the they’ are actually protecting us from who we really are.

The existentialist protest against the ideal of human goodness reveals that being authentic has little to do with being morally ‘good’ because there is no pre-given core of goodness inside of us to begin with, and, with the ‘death of God,’ there is no moral absolute that can determine what is, in fact, good. Indeed, as we turn to different conceptions of authenticity in the existentialist tradition, we see that the commitment to being true to oneself may require us to suspend our duty to universal moral principles. And it is precisely because we have to choose between being ethical (‘doing what is right’) and being an individual (‘being true to oneself’) that the prospect of authenticity can be so terrifying. This tension is powerfully expressed in Kierkegaard's conception of authenticity.

Becoming an individual

As we saw earlier, Kierkegaard pioneered the existentialist critique of philosophical detachment and objectivity by arguing that it has no connection to ‘the highest truth attainable,’ that is, to the concrete and particular concerns of the individual. By taking the standpoint of a disinterested spectator, philosophers cut themselves off from their own subjective truths. And it is these kinds of truths that are most important because they alone can tell me ‘what I am to do.’ For Kierkegaard, it is only when we live our lives on the basis of these passionate inward commitments that we actually succeed in becoming a ‘self’ or ‘individual.’ This process usually involves moving through three stages or spheres of existence, which he identifies as the ‘aesthetic,’ the ‘ethical,’ and the ‘religious’ stages.

The aesthetic sphere is the one that most of us live in as children, adolescents, and young adults. In this stage, we are caught up in the sensual pleasures and intoxications of the present moment. Using the character of Don Juan as an archetype, Kierkegaard portrays the aesthete as one who is unconcerned with moral obligations; he or she is focused only on the satisfaction of immediate pleasures, whether it is sex, food and drink, travel, or shopping. The life of the aesthete is reduced to the consumption of transitory pleasures and flight from the threat of pain and boredom. Kierkegaard sees the aesthetic life as one that ultimately leads to despair, not merely because temporal pleasures are short-lived and pull us into an empty cycle of searching for the next thrill, but because the aesthete is not yet an ‘individual’ or a ‘self.’ To be a self, for Kierkegaard, requires difficult, life-defining choices that synthesize and bind together the temporal moments of one's life into a coherent and lasting whole. “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite,” writes Kierkegaard, “of the temporal and the eternal. … Looked at in this way, [the aesthete] is not yet a self” (1989, 43, my emphasis). To the extent that the aesthete is unable to make a unifying commitment, he or she is fundamentally inauthentic, dispersed, and pulled apart by the finite pleasures of the moment and suffers from the despair of “not wanting to be itself, [of] wanting to be rid of itself” (43).

It is possible, however, through a transformative emotional crisis to become aware of the underlying emptiness of the aesthetic life and realize existence is more than a hedonistic masquerade. It is at these times that we begin to grasp the seriousness of our own existence, that life requires difficult commitments, and that these commitments have the power to pull the fragmented and disjointed moments of our lives together and constitute us as selves. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard's character Judge Wilhelm warns the pleasure-seeking aesthete:

In taking a deliberate and principled stand on one's life, one enters the ethical sphere by renouncing temporal pleasures and committing oneself to eternal moral principles. Here, Kierkegaard is drawing on Kant's ethics that regards the moral agent as duty-bound to a set of universal laws – such as the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule – that apply to everyone and take priority over one's own selfish interests and inclinations. “The ethical as such is the universal,” writes Kierkegaard, “and as the universal it applies to everyone, which can be put from another point of view by saying that it applies at every moment” (1985, 83). With this commitment, the individual is ‘willing to be oneself’ because he or she has made the difficult ‘either/or’ choice that provides the coherence and unity necessary in being a self. Judge Wilhelm illustrates this distinction by articulating the moral duties of marriage. The ethical individual renounces the fleeting pleasures of sensual love or lust and instead chooses to be a self by making a life-defining commitment to an eternal principle, to the universal ideal of marriage. Thus, “the true eternity in love, as in true morality, delivers it, first of all from the sensual. But in order to produce this true eternity, a determination of the will [a choice] is called for” (Kierkegaard 1946a, 83).

The ethical sphere remains problematic, however, precisely because it sets the universal above the subjective needs of the individual. In stoically committing oneself to universal principles and renouncing one's own particular needs, the ethical individual is detached from the concrete realities of existence itself. The husband, for instance, who devotes himself to the ideal of marriage runs the risk of being cut off from the subjective upheavals of actually being in love. Again, for Kierkegaard, the highest form of truth is not objective and universal but subjective and particular. This means that objective moral principles are not universally binding. There may be times in one's life when one must suspend his or her obligations to the ethical and be guided by higher-order values that arise from one's own subjective passions. It is at this stage that one enters the religious sphere, the sphere of faith.

For Kierkegaard, being true to oneself requires passing into the religious sphere and ‘becoming a Christian,’ but this has nothing to do with being a member of a church and blindly accepting ‘Articles of Faith.’ Such a view creates the kind of self-satisfied conformism that existentialists reject. On Kierkegaard's view, becoming a Christian requires a passionate inward commitment precisely because of the absurdity and irrationality of its doctrines. It is not difficult to accept a set of plausible moral principles, but it is terrifying to be a Christian because of its implausibility. Indeed, it is the absurdity that makes the religious life possible. It requires the highest form of individuation, a ‘leap’ into a paradox that cannot be rationally justified and a willingness to suspend one's obligations to the ethical sphere.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard uses the biblical figure of Abraham to illustrate the experience of individuation that occurs as one moves from the ethical to the religious sphere. The ethical reveals to Abraham a universal commandment, that under any and all circumstances a father must protect and love his child. But he is told by God to break this moral code and kill his son. He is caught in a horrifying conflict where he must either disobey the word of God or violate a universal moral imperative. In his willingness to sacrifice his son, Abraham becomes a ‘knight of faith.’ He breaks his commitment to ethical principles and chooses a higher truth: the truth embodied in the solitary individual who stands in anguished freedom before himself and an absurd and incomprehensible God. With a religious conscience, Abraham makes the ‘leap of faith,’ accepting the maddening paradox that his own individual needs are of infinite importance and, therefore, higher than the universal and ethical. “Faith is just this paradox,” writes Kierkegaard, “that the single individual is higher than the universal, though in such a way, be it noted, that the movement is repeated, that is, that, having been in the universal, the single individual now sets himself apart as the particular above the universal” (1985, 84). As a paradox, Abraham's choice is incomprehensible to others. In making the leap he has “discover[ed] something that thought cannot think” (1936, 29). There are no reasons to explain his actions. By all appearances, “he is insane and cannot make himself understood to anyone” (1985, 103). This is because one's own subjective truth cannot be expressed objectively; it can only be felt with the intensity and passion of the individual who makes the choice.

The philosopher Bernard Williams offers a secularized version of Kierkegaard's ‘suspension of the ethical’ with an account based loosely on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. On Williams's reading, Gauguin, in pursuing the life-defining commitment to be an artist, abandons his wife and children to a desperate financial situation and moves to Tahiti, where he believes the tropical setting will allow him to develop more fully as a painter. Although he feels a strong sense of moral duty to his family, he is drawn by deeper values that conflict with universal principles and rational justifications. Williams describes the tension between the values of morality and the values of the individual, writing that “while we are sometimes guided by the notion that it would be the best of worlds in which morality were universally respected and all men were of a disposition to affirm it, we have, in fact, deep and persistent reasons that that is not the world we have” (1981, 23). Like Kierkegaard, Williams sees traditional conceptions of morality as generally following the Kantian formula that moral values are rational and universal. Yet in Gauguin's case we see that there are values – grounded in the idiosyncratic passions of the individual – that fall outside the purview of reason and morality, and this means that morality cannot be the sole source of value. Williams's underlying point is not to claim that moral considerations are unimportant, but that “each person has a life to lead” (1985, 186), and this means that, in being true to myself, I may have to make the painful choice of breaking these binding commitments because they do not adequately reflect the values that matter to me as an individual.

Similarly, when Kierkegaard claims that the ‘individual is higher than the universal,’ he is not suggesting that religious faith requires getting rid of the ethical. This is impossible. The point is that, in some cases, faith may supersede any moral obligation. But the ethical is still present in the anguished struggle that the individual endures in breaking this obligation. If the content of the ethical sphere were completely absent, then Abraham would not be overcome with ‘fear and trembling.’ The paradox that Kierkegaard is expressing is that the passionate, life-defining commitment required in being true to oneself cannot be expressed or made intelligible in ethical terms of right and wrong; it is a commitment that is beyond rational comprehension. Becoming a self, then, “remains in all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought” (1985, 85). This idea, that in order to be authentic we must be willing to go beyond universal moral principles, is developed further by Nietzsche, who claims that these principles breed conformism and weakness, preventing individuals from wholly accepting themselves and diminishing their ability to create their own lives.

Living with style

There is no way to access Nietzsche's conception of authenticity without placing it within the context of nihilism. For Nietzsche, nihilism means that the very idea of “truth is an error” (1968, 454, 540), and there is no objective or universal justification for our choices and actions. This, however, is not a cause for despair, but for celebration. It frees us from the bourgeois values of the Western tradition so we can create new values and meanings that reflect our own temperaments and styles of living. In this sense, Nietzsche's account of being true to oneself is unique in the canon of existentialism because it is not so preoccupied with gloomy themes of death and anxiety. For Nietzsche, the confrontation with nihilism is a cause for rejoicing, cheerfulness, and laughter because it opens up new and exciting possibilities for self-creation. In The Gay Science, he writes:

Initially, it may seem strange to talk about the possibility of being true to oneself in Nietzsche's philosophy because he rejects the notion of an independent and unified self. The self, as we saw in , is nothing more than the dynamic “totality of drives that constitute our being” (1997, 119). This is why Nietzsche claims that “to become what one is, presupposes that one not have the faintest notion what one is” (1967, 9). But if there is no self, no way one ‘really is,’ then how can we ever be authentic? To answer this question, we have to first get clear about the underlying principle of Nietzsche's philosophy, the ‘will to power’ (Wille zur Macht).

When Nietzsche says, “The world is the will to power and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides!” (1968, 550), he is not referring to the traditional notion of the ‘will’ as a causal agent. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche rejects the idea of an immaterial substance or will that commands our bodies to act in certain ways. “Is ‘will to power’ a kind of ‘will’ or identical with the concept ‘will’?” he asks. “Is it the same thing as desiring? Or commanding? … My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all. … [It is] a mere empty word” (692). For Nietzsche, will to power refers to the plurality of drives and forces behind all forms of life, revealing that every living thing is striving to grow, flourish, and dominate. Everything, he says, “want[s] to grow, to reach out around itself, pull towards itself, gain the upper hand – not out of some morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life simply is the will to power” (1998, IX, 259). It is important here not to confuse this notion with Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) evolutionary theory of ‘survival of the fittest.’ Nietzsche makes it clear that living things are not simply trying to preserve themselves in order to survive. If this were the case, then when a species evolved to a state where it could comfortably exist, the species would stop striving, growing, and developing. But this is not the case. “Every living thing,” says Nietzsche, “does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more” (1968, 688). He repeatedly attacks the ‘English Darwinists’ because he believes the struggle for self-preservation is an exception in the natural world, not a rule, and he believes Darwinists miss this point. “Wanting to preserve oneself expresses a situation of emergency,” writes Nietzsche, “a constriction of the real, fundamental drive of life, which aims at extending its power, and in this willing, often enough puts self-preservation into question and sacrifices it” (1995, 349).

On Nietzsche's account, living things are not just trying to survive but to flourish and thrive and to realize greater possibilities of power and abundances of strength. The roots of the oak tree, for instance, do not just reach into the soil in order to keep the tree upright; the tree is always striving to become more than it is by expanding, overcoming, and dominating its surroundings until it reaches some resistance (Guignon and Pereboom 2001, 113). In­deed, the struggle entailed in overcoming resistances is crucial to the dynamic structure of power because without some resistance or counterforce power cannot be expressed. “Will to power,” as Nietzsche writes, “can manifest itself only against resistances therefore it seeks that which resists it” (1968, 656; see Hatab 2012). The result of such of view, for Nietzsche, is that life simply is “that which must always overcome itself” (2006, 11, 12).

As a manifestation of will to power, human beings, like all other forms of life, are driven by an instinct to overcome resistances and overflow with abundances of power. “What man wants,” says Nietzsche, “what every smallest part of the living organism wants, is an increase in power” (1968, 702). Yet critics have argued that this appears to be a justification for violence, domination, and cruelty, and there is ample textual evidence to support this (e.g., Schütte 1985). In On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, Nietzsche writes,

But this literal or ‘hard’ interpretation fails to acknowledge the crucial distinction between ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ expressions of power. Will to power is healthy, for Nietzsche, when it is active and creative, when it is spontaneously discharged from within in a way that goes beyond one's own limitations for the sake of greater strength and expanded possibilities for living. By contrast, a manifestation of power is unhealthy when it is reactive. In these cases, the discharge of power is dependent on others, always coming from something external or outside itself. Nietzsche explains these two manifestations in terms of two different moralities, that of the ‘master’ and the ‘slave.’ “In order to exist at all,” writes Nietzsche, “slave morality … always needs an opposing, outer world; in physiological terms, it needs external stimuli in order to act; its action is fundamentally reaction” (I, 10). But the opposite is the case for the master morality. The master actively creates and affirms his or her own life based on the idiosyncratic needs and projects that matter to them as individuals. For Nietzsche, then, the highest form of power is not reactive and other-directed and has little to do with one's ability to dominate and brutalize others. The strongest and healthiest individuals are self-directed; they are the artists, poets, musicians, and philosophers who have power over themselves to create their own values and meanings. The power to ‘overcome oneself,’ then, is the highest value, and it is actualized by those who have the strength to control their base drives, and to sublimate or re-channel them in acts of – artistic and philosophical – creation. This is why, as commentators like Robert Solomon have suggested, the clearest incarnation of this kind of individual is not necessarily the great warriors that Nietzsche often praises, such as Napoleon or Caesar, but figures like “Socrates, Mozart, and even Christ” (1972, 135).

For Nietzsche, the pre-Platonic Greeks were the embodiment of this kind of active self-creation. Here was a culture that wholly accepted the cruel and tragic dimensions of the human situation but sublimated and released these dimensions in artistic and creative ways, balancing the conflicting elements of Dionysian passion with Apollonian self-discipline. “Oh, those Greeks!” says Nietzsche. “They knew how to live. … Adorers of forms, of tomes, of words! And therefore – artists” (1954a, 683). But with the spread of Christianity and the conversion of the Romans under Constantine, the master morality degenerated through what Nietzsche calls a “transvaluation of values” (1996, I, 10), a historical reversal or inversion of Greek and Roman values. With inborn feelings of repressed envy or ‘ressentiment,’ the early Christians expressed their power by determining that creative, self-assertive, and independent values were ‘evil’ and that the meek, obedient, and selfless values of Christianity were ‘good.’ For Nietzsche, it is this reversal that has created the tame bourgeois society that we inhabit today, one that is standardized and weak, incapable of exhibiting any style or originality. But Nietzsche is hopeful about the future. He understands that slave morality requires subservience to an absolute moral authority, and it for this reason that ‘God's death’ is a cause for celebration. It provides an opening for what Nietzsche calls the ‘overman’ (Übermensch).

The Übermensch is a reference to a human ideal in a post-Christian, post-nihilistic future. Nietzsche describes him as one

The Übermensch is a “Yes-sayer,” one who embodies the principle of “amor fati” by loving and affirming his life as a whole (1995, 276). He is true to himself because he accepts the world as it is without the support of moral absolutes and owns up to all of the unique and idiosyncratic qualities that make him the person that he is, all of his strengths and weaknesses, everything that has been and will be in his life. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes the kind of courage that is required for the total embrace of one's life with a powerful thought experiment that he calls the ‘doctrine of eternal recurrence’:

On Nietzsche's account, most of us would be ‘shattered’ by this doctrine. The thought of living through the fears, disappointments, and monotony of our lives over and over for eternity is too much to bear. This is why we don't overcome ourselves. We are unwilling to accept and carry the weight of our own lives. We conform to the bourgeois norms of the crowd, doing what ‘they’ do. But the Übermensch does not recoil from the demon; he responds, “You are a god and I have never heard anything more godlike” (341).

For Nietzsche, by embracing the world and owning up to our fate in this way we are able to impart a unique aesthetic style to everything we do, creating our own identity and life story as if it were a work of art (e.g., Nehamas 1985). It is ‘giving style’ to life that is, for Nietzsche, the one thing that is needed in order to be true to oneself:

Unlike members of the herd, those who live with style and embody the ideals of the Übermensch do not mourn the death of God and do not invent and cling to new idols. They see the truths that have been handed down from history as simply “a mobile army of metaphors” (1954b, 46) that are, in no way, universal or morally binding. And they overcome these truths by reinterpreting them in creative and original ways as a means of poetically expressing their own unique style of living. This ability to playfully and spontaneously reinterpret their own tradition is a sign of health emerging from “overflowing fullness and power” (1995, 382). Being true to oneself, then, entails a commitment to be open and expansive by embracing a plurality of different ways of seeing things, and to be ceaselessly driven to transform and revise the apparent truths of tradition. “Such spirits,” says Nietzsche, “are always out to fashion or explain themselves and their surroundings as free nature – wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disordered, and surprising. And this is good for them to do, for only thus can they do themselves good” (290).

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche offer versions of the authentic self as a solitary figure who transcends moral absolutes and the leveled-down conformity of the crowd by means of a passionate commitment to one's own values and styles of living. Against this individualistic version, existentialists like Heidegger suggest that any account of authenticity has to begin with the recognition of our fundamental intersubjectivity or being-with-others. The central idea is that in order to be true to oneself we have to first realize that we can be a self only in relation to others. To put it another way, our sense of who we are and of what matters to us as individuals is constituted by our involvement in a world that recognizes us as the kinds of individuals that we are.

Anxiety and resoluteness

Heidegger's account of authenticity in the second half of Being and Time is arguably the most influential in existentialist thought, but it is distinctive in rejecting the image of the isolated hero who rises above the shallow norms of the public. For Heidegger, as we saw in , human existence is invariably structured by ‘falling’ (Verfallen). This means that we are never solitary subjects but are always embedded in social contexts that open up possible ways that we can interpret and understand ourselves. In falling, our choices, actions, and self-interpretations are limited by the regulative norms and expectations of ‘the they.’ In our everyday lives, then, we are essentially a ‘they-self.’ We drift along with the crowd, enacting the socially approved roles and identities that are prescribed for us. In this mode, we are inauthentic because the question ‘Who am I?’ is not a pressing issue for us. Absorbed in the social world we simply do what anyone else does, assuming that we are living well and that our choices and actions are justified. But, as we have seen, this complacency can be shattered by anxiety, a mood that brings us face-to-face with the human situation and that is usually so disturbing that we spend most of our lives running away from it.

In anxiety, the familiar social context that grounds my sense of who I am “collapses into itself” (Heidegger 1962, 231), and I can no longer understand my own being or identity. Without this context to orient me with a set of publicly interpreted roles and values, the world loses its significance. I am paralyzed and bewildered, unable to press forward into the future, because there is nothing that stands out as significant or meaningful anymore. This paralysis is characterized by what Heidegger calls ‘uncanniness’ (Unheimlichkeit), a word that captures the feeling of being abandoned, lost, or ‘not-at-home.’ In this sense, anxiety “individualizes” me, severing the familiar bond that I have with the world and leaving me exposed to confront my own “naked Dasein” (345). This exposure reveals my temporal constitution as a ‘thrown project.’ I find myself contingently thrown into a historical situation that I did not choose, as I project forward into future possibilities that terminate in my own death. This means that as long as I exist I am not a stable or secure thing but a ‘being possible’ because my identity remains fundamentally unfinished or incomplete. I can only be something when there are no more possibilities, when my life comes to an end. This is why anxiety is so crucial for the prospect of self-realization. By bringing me face-to-face with the fact that my existence comes to an end, anxiety “snatches [me] back” (435) from the tranquilized drift of everydayness, reminding me that my choices and actions are not to be taken lightly because they alone give my life the meaning and coherence that it has.

When Heidegger refers to our existence in terms of ‘being- toward-the-end’ or ‘being-toward-death,’ this has nothing to do with our physical demise, a heart attack, or dying of old age but to the idea that our existence gains its meaning from death as our temporal limit. Without an end, our lives have no shape or direction, and there would be no worldly episode or project that stands out as significant in any way. As Charles Guignon suggests, in the same way that events in a story are meaningful only insofar as they contribute to the outcome of the story, so the events in my own life are meaningful only in relation to the overarching goals and projects that define my “life story as a totality, right up to the end” (Guignon and Pereboom 2001, 201). With the anxious awareness of my own death, my decisions and commitments are made with a renewed sense of urgency and focus, with the recognition that the stand I take on my situation contributes to the realization of the kind of person that I am, and that I alone am responsible for the coherence, integrity, and direction of my life. The inauthentic response to anxiety is a flight back into the security of our public routines, becoming lost once again in ‘the they.’ The authentic response is what Heidegger calls ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit).

Resoluteness, for Heidegger, “means letting oneself be summoned out of one's lostness in ‘the they’ ” (1962, 345). It refers to the steady, clear-sighted, and focused stance toward life that can emerge only in confronting my own death. Such a confrontation shakes me out of the drift of everydayness and opens up the possibility to “pull [myself] together” (441, my emphasis) by taking a stand on an identity and values that matter to me. But resoluteness does not detach me from the world, turning me into an “isolated subject” (233) or “free-floating ‘I’ ” (344). It is true that I am individualized with anxiety, but individualized “as being-in-the-world” (233). This means that when I commit myself to a particular identity as a dutiful soldier, for instance, or a responsible father, it is not one that I create ex nihilo. These identities are already meaningful because they have been publicly interpreted by the world that I have been thrown into. It is true that I take them over, appropriate them in particular ways, and, in this sense, make them mine, but the cultural meaning and significance of these identities have already been established by my sociohistorical context.

The aim of Heidegger's account of authenticity is to show that when I make a commitment in the face of death, I not only inject my life with a dimension of intensity and seriousness that was missing; I am also providing a sense of cohesion and unity to my life as a whole. But there is always the temptation of being pulled back into the scattered shallows of ‘the they.’ This is why Heidegger, following Kierkegaard, argues that I need to continually ‘anticipate death’ and ‘repeat’ the commitment to who I am. But this does not mean I stubbornly cling to a particular identity. By anticipating death I realize there is no guarantee that this commitment will matter to me for the rest of my life. Thus, my commitment is always penetrated by a ‘not’ because I remain flexible and open to the possibility of “taking it back” (355) if it is no longer significant or meaningful to my own situation. This recognition, that whatever identity I commit myself to I am also not that person, is radicalized in Sartre's conception of authenticity.

Bad faith and nothingness

In a similar way that self-deceptive ‘falling’ is a structure of being human for Heidegger, so is ‘bad faith’ a structure for Sartre. Again, Sartre develops the existentialist configuration of the self as a relational tension or struggle between two distinct aspects, ‘facticity’ and ‘transcendence.’ Facticity refers to the facts about my situation that limit and constrain me such as my physical traits, my social circumstances, and my past patterns of conduct. Transcendence refers to the self-conscious way that I relate to these facts, how I choose to interpret them, make them meaningful, and transform them through my actions. Inauthenticity or bad faith emerges when I deny one of these two aspects of myself. I am in bad faith, for instance, when I deny the freedom I have to take a stand on my situation and see myself as not responsible because I am wholly determined by it. And I am also in bad faith when I deny that I am limited by my situation and see myself as wholly free, and my life as completely open-ended.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre offers a number of vivid examples that capture various incarnations of bad faith. His description of the French waiter, for instance, reveals a man who denies his transcendence:

The waiter sees himself as the public sees him. He is constrained by an occupational stereotype and is restricted to certain behaviors because of it. On Sartre's account, he gives in to ‘the look’ of the customers that reduces him to an object, to a ‘being-in-itself.’ By disappearing into this persona, the waiter appears to be deceiving himself by refusing to take responsibility for it and denying the fact that there are other choices and self-interpretations that are available to him. But the waiter is, at the same time, transcending his facticity by breaking the rules of being a waiter. He does this by performing his tasks in an exaggerated way. He overdoes things; his mannerisms are too mechanical; he moves too quickly; he is too much of a French waiter. He is playing the role of the waiter in such an exaggerated and overdone way that he actually escapes the role (Bernasconi 2007, 38). This is why Sartre says, “I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not” (1956, 103). The waiter is also ‘not’ a waiter because his thing-like identity is always open to being negated.

In the case of denying one's facticity, Sartre offers an example of a woman on a first date with a man. As the man reaches out and takes her hand at the end of the evening, the woman pretends not to notice and denies the intimacy and sexually charged implications of the act. In “neither consenting nor resisting” (97), she acts in bad faith because she refuses to see that she has committed herself to a pattern of conduct, denying that the act of touching is bound up with the facticity of her body as an object of desire. She looks down on the event from a standpoint of intellectual detachment as if it were not her own body, as if she were simply a passive object. “She has disarmed the actions of her companion,” says Sartre, “by reducing them to being only what they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself” (98).

But neither the waiter nor the woman can become authentic by simply being ‘sincere’ with themselves and taking responsibility for their respective transcendence or facticity. This is because the self is fundamentally unstable; it is a “double property … that is at once a facticity and a transcendence” (98). Whatever role or identity I happen to commit myself to, I am also ‘not’ that person because I am constantly reversing back and forth, regarding myself solely in terms of facticity or solely in terms of transcendence. Sartre explains this instability with an example of the homosexual who refuses to be sincere and accept who he is. “The homosexual recognizes his faults,” writes Sartre, “but he struggles with all his strength against the crushing view that his mistakes constitute for him a destiny. He does not wish to let himself be considered as a thing. He has an obscure but strong feeling that a homosexual is not a homosexual as this table is a table or as this red-haired man is red-haired” (107). In his reluctance to accept that his desires and past patterns of conduct suggest ‘a destiny’ that constitutes him as certain kind of ‘being-in-itself,’ the homosexual is in bad faith by denying his facticity. But what if, asks Sartre, “in the name of sincerity [and] of freedom … the homosexual reflected on his situation and acknowledged himself as a homosexual” (108)? In this case, the homosexual would still be in bad faith because he would see himself as a thing, as a homosexual, in the way that ‘this table is a table.’ Being sincere, then, has nothing to do with authenticity because, in committing ourselves to a particular identity, we strip away the possibility of transcendence by reducing ourselves to a thing.

For Sartre, the ‘double property’ of selfhood means that we can never be anything. Being a homosexual, for example, is a matter of accepting a particular identity and maintaining this identity by means of certain choices and actions. A homosexual, then, is not something ‘I am’; it is something I create and constitute through my ongoing, moment-to-moment decisions. In this sense, it is an identity that is never stable and complete; it is something I can freely modify or reject at some point down the line. Again, this is why “[I am] what I am not” (103). Whatever I am as a complete and determined ‘being-in-itself’ is penetrated by the ‘not’ of choice and consciousness, of ‘being-for-itself.’ And there is no way to achieve a unity or synthesis between these two aspects, to become ‘in-and-for-itself.’ It is because of this structural instability that self-deception and bad faith are impossible to avoid. It is, as Sartre says, an “immediate [and] permanent threat to every project of the human being” (116). But where does that leave us with respect to authenticity? Being and Nothingness isn't very helpful. In this work, Sartre refers to ‘authenticity’ (authenticité) as a kind of “self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted” (116), but he does not explain what this self-recovery consists of. Yet from our previous discussion of bad faith and looking at his reflections on authenticity in other works, we can get a sense of what he has in mind.

In his War Diaries, Sartre describes the possibility of being shaken out of bad faith with an example of a young man being called up to war:

In this transformation, the socially prescribed identities that create the illusion that the young man is a secure and complete thing, a being ‘in-itself,’ collapses. He is now “no longer a ‘family man,’ he's no longer practicing his profession, etc.” (280). These public personas cannot provide a ground or support for his being anymore. He now sees that any identity that he takes over can be called into question. But authenticity (or ‘good faith’) is not just a matter of questioning; it is acting in a new way, changing one's life in the face of the question. “The desire to call [oneself] into question, if it is sincere, can appear only against a background of authenticity. And it's not enough to call into question: it's necessary to change” (280, my emphasis). Sartre is suggesting that authenticity, as ‘self-recovery,’ is a twofold process. First, it requires a lucid awareness and acceptance of the structural instability or ambiguity at the core of the self. And second, it requires a willingness to act and “adapt one's life” (280) to this ambiguity. In good faith, the young man acknowledges his factical situation, that his past actions added up to being a particular kind of person, but he simultaneously acknowledges his transcendence, seeing that this pattern of conduct does not determine who he will be in the future, because he can freely choose to act from a range of possibilities that are open to him and that he alone is responsible for these choices. This is why Hazel Barnes writes that “the existentialist in good faith will recognize that at any moment, simultaneously, he is and is not his situation” (1967, 55). Sartre explains this position in Anti-Semite and Jew when he writes, “Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it … sometimes in horror and hate” (1948a, 90). But authenticity is never secure; the man will always be tempted to flip back into self-deception. When the war ends, his wife and friends will call on him to take over his old identity and be the man that he used to be. This is the test. “Perhaps he'll yield,” says Sartre, “but he can't revert to this old error vis-à-vis [his wife] without, at a stroke, tumbling headlong into inauthenticity” (1996, 281).

Sartre's account seems especially bleak because whatever identity or project I happen to commit myself to in the attempt to be true to myself is ultimately arbitrary and futile because of the structural instability of the self. In her Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir describes Sartre's position as one that

But Beauvoir goes on to point out that simply because our projects are ambiguous and futile does not mean they are meaningless. “The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity,” she writes. “To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (129). What Beauvoir is suggesting is that when we accept our structural ambiguity rather than fleeing from it, we can begin to focus on what we actually do in the world rather than trying to be something, because we now realize we can't be anything. This is why, in Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre writes, “Authenticity reveals that the only meaningful project is that of doing (not that of being). … So, originally, authenticity consists in refusing any quest for being, because I am always nothing” (Sartre 1992, 475; see Carman 2009, 239).

But in emphasizing how meanings are constituted through our actions in the world, existentialists now have to confront the ethical question: ‘How are we supposed to act?’ Without moral absolutes to guide us, can we do whatever we like as long as we are passionate, resolute, and clear-sighted about our ambiguity? Is it true, as Sartre asks, that “if God does not exist, [then] everything would be possible?” (2001, 296). From the preceding discussion, there appear to be no intimations of an ethics in existentialism. Kierkegaard calls for a ‘suspension of the ethical’; Nietzsche is committed to going ‘beyond good and evil’; Heidegger's account of ‘being-toward-death’ tells us nothing about what it means to be a good person; and Sartre makes it clear that there are “no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. … We are alone with no excuses” (2001, 296). Indeed, by privileging authenticity (‘being true to oneself’) over ethics (‘doing what is right’), it appears that the authentic individual could be a murderer just as easily as he or she could be a saint. And given Heidegger's own commitment to Nazism and Sartre's interests in Maoism, the question of whether or not existentialism has an ethics is a serious one for critics. The question of ethics also gives us an opportunity to explore heterodox conceptions of authenticity offered by some religious existentialists. For figures like Buber and Levinas, authenticity has little to do with being true to oneself because this puts too much emphasis on the individual. The aim, rather, is to see how we are morally responsible for and mutually dependent on others and bound up with something ‘higher’ than ourselves. We can now turn our attention to the relationship between existentialism and ethics as it framed by both secular and religious existentialists.

Suggested reading

Carman, T. (2009). The concept of authenticity. In H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), A companion to existentialism and phenomenology (pp. 229–239). Oxford: Blackwell.

Guignon, C. B. (2004a). On being authentic. London: Routledge.

Nehemas, A. (1985). Nietzsche: Life as literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.