Day 5 – AUTHENTICITY
Day 5:
Authenticity
Live Like an Existentialist
Background
We have said that it would be contradictory deliberately to will oneself not free. But one can choose not to will himself free.In laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, one contests the meaning of the project at the very moment that one defines it. The spontaneity of the subject is then merely a vain living palpitation, its movement toward the object is a flight, and itself is an absence.To convert the absence into presence, to convert my flight into will, I must assume my project positively. It is not a matter of retiring into the completely inner and, moreover, abstract movement of a given spontaneity, but of adhering to the concrete and particular movement by which this spontaneity defines itself by thrusting itself toward an end…But this justification requires a constant tension. My project is never founded; it founds itself.
– Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.8
Because values, for existentialism, do not exist beyond particular experiences of valuing, it is not clear how the existentialist can critique or challenge someone’s values. So long as someone values Y, Y is valuable. So does the desire in 1942 Germany for a racially pure state have as much of a right to exist as the desire to dismantle the Nazi regime? The existentialists certainly don’t think so. Beauvoir introduces a meta-value into the equation: a value that all other values can have or not have. This is authenticity. A value is worth cultivating and pursuing inasmuch as that cultivation and pursuit is or can be authentic; an inauthentic pursuit of value is not, for the existentialists, good living. Beauvoir only defines authenticity (or genuineness) obliquely. But the class readings do make it clear that this meta-value is not achieved once and for all, but is a constant (or absent) element of a project over time. Beauvoir describes this as an element of acknowledgement and adherence: one is living authentically if one is a) refusing to evade, suppress, or ignore elements of existence [like freedom, or ambiguity] and b) adhering to the project one is currently undertaking, across and through time––or, “to will is to engage myself to persevere in my will.”
Today's Exercise
Today you’ll experiment with acknowledgement and adherence. Isolate two distinct experiences that occur today: not after the fact, but during the experience. Then try to live each experience authentically. Afterwards, spend ten minutes journaling about each experience. For one, focus your journaling on the role acknowledgement played in the experience. Were you ever engaged in the sort of evasive activities Beauvoir describes as “seriousness,” “nihilism,” “philosophy,” etc., in which certain ambiguous aspects of a situation, or the role one’s freedom played in it, or the non-absolute nature of the values at stake, are not acknowledged? If not, how did that acknowledgement actually occur? For the second experience, focus your journaling on the role played by adherence. How did you “adhere” to the project over time? What did you have to do to keep that happening? Did it feel like an active choice, or something that just happened?
Once you’ve completed the assigned exercises for today, click here to access the prompt for tonight’s reflection and to submit your 1-2 paragraph journal entry.