Article From April 2006

Authenticity by Eric Dejardin

Few characteristics expose the condition of modern man as succinctly and as powerfully as does his obsession with his own identity. Modernity has atomized man with its loosening of religious, national and communal ties, so much so that the notion of “self-sufficiency” has achieved the status of a moral precept. The Scientific Revolution, premised upon the distinction between the subject and the object, has taken the process of atomization even further by isolating each person from the universe itself, whether it is understood as a whole or as a collection of distinct objects. Among those objects are other discrete subjects with which each of us must interact, and the nature of those interactions is largely determined by the political presuppositions people in any given society hold. For example, the assumptions of democratic politics, ascendant in the West (the area -- or is it a mindset? -- of focus in this article), reach deeper than their putative legal sphere to influence our every thought about ourselves in relation to other people: I am no different -- fundamentally -- from anyone else. Thus people (collectively) are conceived of as an undifferentiated mass of pure subjectivity, in essence indistinguishable from one another, while at the same time each person is (qua subject) forever sealed off from every other subject. But a sense of separation from other “things” is not the only factor at work here. Since the disenchanted universe (Weber’s term for what I have been describing) can have nothing to say about questions of value and meaning, it follows that the (individual!) subject has become the sole source of meaning in a detached, neutral universe of objects. While each subject is the ultimate arbiter of meaning, it is also the case that each subject’s sense of meaning is influenced by a number of external (predominantly cultural) factors. Modern mass culture in the West, which expresses itself through the democracy of the marketplace as well as through democratic politics, has trivialized modern man’s conception of his own life by reducing its ends to mere comfort and security (the Lockean and Hobbesean virtues that dominate modern Western political philosophy). The modern condition can thus be understood as the logical consequence of a weltanschauung permeated by an intense feeling of isolation that simultaneously separates each of us from one another, from the universe, and from any sense of meaning that transcends ourselves. Such a worldview cannot but foster a preoccupation with personal identity.

The search for identity, conceived as a dialectic between isolation (by which each of us is thought to be separate from everyone -- indeed, everything -- else and hence unique, i.e. inherently to possess identity) and sameness (by which each of us is understood to be no different, fundamentally, from anyone else, a condition which makes the notion of personal identity problematic), is a distinctly modern phenomenon. Its emergence could briefly be described as the transformation of the soul into the self. The soul sought God or some absolute good, both of which are in some sense objective and defined without reference to the individual, but the self looks only within: The subject is the object. The soul could be evaluated with respect to criteria determined by the soul’s relationship to absolute good; for the self, the search for those evaluative criteria is the only categorical imperative. Each soul was connected to every other soul insofar as each was an expression of, or a participant in, absolute goodness, but each self has no necessary connection to other selves. While every soul played a key part in an important drama -- the unfolding of the divine plan -- each self is viewed as a relatively unimportant and insignificant entity, especially when considered in the context of what Pascal called “the eternal silence of these [the universe’s] infinite spaces.” Moreover, each soul had a unique relationship with God, and was thus in a unique position with respect to absolute goodness, while each self -- with respect to meaning -- is in the same position, searching for identity without a Virgil to guide it.

It is, of course, not just any identity we seek: We strive to know our “true” identity, our “authentic” self. Authenticity, that Emersonian virtue, has become both the dominant value of modern man and the favorite remedy for many of his psychological ills. Thus it is both a moral obligation and a precondition for psychological health. If you would be good, or if you would be sound, the prescription is the same -- be true to yourself. What a sad state modern man is in! We have taken for our golden rule and for our salvation the trite words of a comic figure in Shakespeare’s greatest play: “To thine own self be true.” Beyond this reliance upon platitudes, however, we encounter deep problems with this summum bonum of modern man. If we are isolated from both others and the world -- hermetically sealed singularities with respect to subjectivity -- then where are we to look when we search for our authentic selves? At first it seems that we must begin by looking within, but this necessarily collapses the subject/object distinction, a fundamental source of the very problem of identity. It appears that the premises of modernity that give rise to the problem of identity also render it insoluble. I would argue that this is indeed the case (a conclusion I’ll elaborate upon at the end of this essay), but we cannot end our inquiry here. Whatever misgivings one may have about the search for authenticity, it nonetheless must be conceded that its general acceptance as a valid -- even necessary -- quest requires that we take it seriously, even if only to expose its shortcomings. So far, we have only considered the issue abstractly, but often the best way to elucidate an abstract concept is to provide a concrete example. With this in mind, I propose to assess the validity of one of the most popular routes people (in the West, at least) take on their quest for self knowledge: The immersion of oneself in the cultural practices and beliefs that are most clearly linked to one’s racial makeup. An analysis of this specific type of search for authenticity will illuminate the nature of the problems with the general search for authenticity itself.

The use of the link between race and culture in the quest for authenticity seems, prima facie, unproblematic. However, as we look more closely at the process by which one seeks authenticity through race and culture, we will discover that it is fraught with contradictions and irresolvable difficulties, and at the end of this article we will see that they follow directly from the problematic nature of the modern conception of the self. To clarify the nature of these problems, we will use for our example a person of mixed racial background: say, half Asian and half European (the specific racial makeup -- e.g., Korean, Chinese, French, Italian, etc. -- is not important for our purposes.) We shall further assume that this person lives in the West and that his physical features are predominantly Asian. First, however, we must look at some of the key terms we will be using.

The very use of race and culture in the pursuit of authenticity presupposes that they are distinct categories. For example, a racially Asian man who was raised by culturally European adoptive parents would be Asian by race and European by culture. By contrast, a racially European man raised by culturally Asian adoptive parents would be European with respect to race, Asian with respect to culture. (I’m exaggerating here for the sake of simplicity; in the real world, of course, the categories are never drawn so neatly). The approach to authenticity being examined here would suggest that each of these men is living inauthentically (knowledge of which may be revealed to each of them through both internal and external factors). If they wish to know themselves, the racially Asian man should adopt Asian culture, and the racially European man should adopt European culture. This assumes that race is the fundamental category with respect to identity (because we start with race, which then directs and guides the move to culture). Identity, therefore, is first and foremost biological. It is more about genes than memes, but it is also about the necessary link between certain genes and certain memes. This link must be “necessary” because the deep, true self we seek must be grounded in necessity; if the link were accidental, the self we discovered would be contingent, and since the self is, of course, a choosing self -- an entity with the capacity for choice -- the notion of a contingent authentic self strikes one as a contradiction. A hypothetical example, however, will demonstrate that this link is indeed accidental and contingent, and that therefore the self “discovered” by this approach cannot be authentic.

Imagine that the histories of Asia and Europe were switched with respect to the races that came to settle in these continents. That is, imagine that the people who we now (racially) classify as Asians had settled in Europe, and had developed what we now call European culture, while the people we now categorize as (racially) European had settled in Asia, and had developed what we now call Asian culture. If history had unfolded in this way, we’d notice nothing odd about the result. And since there’s no contradiction involved in supposing that history might have gone down this route, we can say that this hypothetical outcome is within the realm of logical possibility. What conclusions can we draw from this example?

First, it follows that race and culture are not necessarily linked. In the hypothetical above, we see that Europeans could have developed what we now call Asian culture, and that Asians could have developed what we now call European culture. Both cultures developed from historical processes that very easily could have gone the other (or any other) way. If the point seems difficult to grasp with respect to race and culture (because of the sentimental attachment many of us feel toward our culture), let’s look at a similar example from our use of language. There is no necessary connection between an actual tree and the word “tree”. Our use of the word is the result of a historical process, and one could easily imagine English (and its linguistic ancestors) having evolved another word to signify a "tree”. Therefore, since the race/culture link is consequent on the same type of contingent historical process, we must conclude that there is no necessary link between one’s race and the cultural structures that are socially bound to that race. Thus, the notion of an authentic self grounded on the link between race and culture is a contradiction (given this lack of necessity that, as I argued above, is entailed by the concept of authenticity).

The hypothetical reveals another contradiction. If the link between race and culture is a result of a contingent historical process, then it follows that the link is conventional. But if the link is conventional, it is a matter of consensus. It thus requires us to understand authenticity -- who you truly are -- to be no different from whom society tells you that you should be. Authenticity is reduced to democracy: The majority opinion rules. This formulation -- given the acceptation of the term “authenticity” -- is a direct contradiction. Authenticity cannot be grounded on mere opinion, and it especially cannot be grounded on the opinions of others, however many there are (or have been).

Even if one rejects the theoretical argument above, there are further, practical difficulties with this particular type of search for authenticity. Now we are ready to return to our racially mixed individual. Let’s assume that our mixed Asian has decided that life in the West, and, in particular, Western culture, has gotten in the way of his own quest for self knowledge. He looks Asian, and others, in many ways, treat him (at least when they first meet him) as if he were Asian. It seems natural to him to conclude that Asian culture will be a better “fit,” so he begins to research it, even to immerse himself in it (the specific culture, again, is not important for the general lines of the argument I’m developing). But it is here that the practical problems with this approach become evident.

All cultures are the (intentional and unintentional) products of human beings that have evolved to meet human needs (spiritual, material, etc.). As such, they are not stable constructions, but change as the conditions of those who are living with -- and through --them change. Therefore, the first question anyone looking to adopt the practices and beliefs of any particular culture would have to answer is, “From what period of time shall I adopt my chosen culture?” For example, what would it have meant to adopt Roman culture in the year 400: to be a Roman in the mold of Cato, who advocated and lived the old Roman virtues, or in the mold of Cicero, a Hellenized Roman who adopted Greek culture, or in the mold of St. Augustine, a Roman who committed himself to Christianity? All were Roman, yet each had a different (historically developed) understanding about what it meant to be a Roman; which one(s) was authentically Roman? What standard could guide us in making such a determination? We could call this the vertical (historical) dimension of culture, a dimension used to reflect the fact that cultures change (some more, some less) with the times.

But cultures do not only change with the times; they also represent different responses to the same period of time. For example, we could look at culture in the United States during the Antebellum period. The Northern and the Southern states, while part of the same union, living in the same times, developed distinct cultures. This could be called the horizontal dimension of culture, used to reflect the fact that a dominant culture at any time often comprises numerous subcultures

Whatever the period of time we choose to focus upon, we can see that the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of culture demonstrate that any particular culture is amenable to a range of interpretations, and thus to a range of consequences. It is instructive to reflect upon the fact that the same culture, over a 200 year period, was able to produce both a Mozart and a Hitler.

The dimensions of culture prove the futility of looking to the race/culture link in the quest for authenticity because there is no standard to guide one who is attempting to select from the sundry cultural practices and beliefs that have been used by a particular society both over the long run and during any specific point in time. We have thus seen that not only is this method internally contradictory, from a theoretical standpoint, but that it is impossible from a practical standpoint. But how are these critiques a consequence of the modern notion of the self?

The key to this critique is in the history of the self’s emergence from its antecedent, the soul. Ideas rarely change completely; rather, we find that so-called new ideas contain traces -- sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly -- of the old ideas they have replaced. Such is the case with the modern understanding of the self. The search for authenticity is largely driven by a vestige of the soul insofar as we treat the self as a soul-like entity. Modernity has jettisoned the soul and the conceptual framework that supported it but has kept its shell, which we now seek to “fill” with our personal identity. When we “look into” this shell (a process I‘ll elucidate below), however, we find nothing there that is distinctly “ours” as opposed to what has been “put” there by any number of “others,” -- the environment, our experiences, our genes, or, most fundamentally, the “stuff” of the universe out of which each of us is made. The self-entity, it appears, is nothing more than a composite of “others”. This is what we find when we look within: we discover particular experiences or predilections, or particular “things,” but no substrate, i.e. no “self” (this inability to discover a “self” introspectively was recognized by Hume. And, incidentally, this fact allows us to understand what would truly be guiding the hypothetical mixed Asian we spoke about earlier as he pursued authenticity through the race/culture link: his predilections and his experientially evolved worldview.). From this fact we can draw out a deep contradiction buried in the modern notion of authenticity. The quest for authenticity (as we undertake it) presupposes a number of artificial constructs: language, society, culture, and so on. As such, it is a quest grounded in the artificial, but the authentic cannot be derived from the artificial.

But this introspective search for the self gives rise to further problems. As we “look” within, we collapse the subject/object distinction. We become both subject and object (or subject as object). But the premises of modernity have not provided us with a cognitive model capable of dealing with this collapse. The self, it appears, possesses a subject/object duality (just as in quantum physics they speak of the wave/particle duality of light): in certain contexts, it has the characteristics of a subject, while in others it has the characteristics of an object. I would argue that this is not the case. Rather, this result suggests that the quest for authenticity -- given the premises of modernity -- is misguided, misunderstood, or misstated. I would argue that the error lies in the conception of the self as a self-entity. But if the self is not an entity that we can look within and discover, what is it?

The self is fundamentally a process. Alternatively, we could say that we have no self but that we are always “selfing,” which is to say, we are always in the process of defining ourselves. This distinction could be clarified by making use of a similar distinction in political philosophy. Political philosophers distinguish “procedural justice,” whereby justice is said to be done whenever the proper procedures are followed -- regardless of the outcome of those procedures -- from “substantive justice,” which is solely concerned with just outcomes. Similarly, we could distinguish the “substantive self,” conceived as a self- entity, from the “procedural self,” understood as an unending process of self definition (selfing). The procedural conception of the self makes clear the futility of looking within to discover some pre-existing self: first, it is not there to be found -- the Cartesian theatre is not only empty: it doesn‘t exist; second, by looking within, we alter the properties of the very “thing” we are looking for (we could call this the “psychological uncertainty principle,” again borrowing an idea from quantum physics). But what does it mean to say that the self is “procedural”?

In essence, the self is a sum of processes, none of which could by itself be labeled “the self.” Science has much to say about this view, and about the particular physical processes involved. (An outstanding book that clarifies the science behind this view is Daniel Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained”.) In this article, however, the focus is more philosophical. From this perspective, the elusive substrate of selfhood-as-process is “choice.” Ultimately, selfhood is agenthood. Choice is a more fundamental category than even thought is when it comes to defining the self (as a process) because one must choose to think. We can therefore reformulate Descartes: a person is not essentially a “thinking thing” (res cogitans) but a “choosing thing” (res eligens). This conception elevates “will” over “reason” (broadly defined).

Choice presupposes freedom. With respect to identity, paradoxically, choice provides one with the freedom to limit oneself (the essence of identity is to limit). But the limitations we set are new limits; they are our limits, and they are subject to revision, if we so decide. By setting these limitations upon ourselves, we are actively engaging in a process of creating an identity. Identity is therefore created, or rather, being created; it is not “discovered” (the expected outcome of the view that the self is an entity). It’s chosen, not given, and the result is authentic to the extent that the choices that at any time compose our identity are genuinely ours. Our new conception of the self has thus necessarily redefined our understanding of “authenticity,” which is now identified with choosing honestly rather than with being honest about what we have “found” ourselves to be. (This illuminates another problem with the race/ culture approach to authenticity: If we actively engage in a process of self creation, and if self creation is necessarily self limitation, why let others -- to wit, those who developed and lived the culture you’ve adopted -- set those limits? This would be inauthentic. Why not set the limits yourself?)

We are thus forced to conclude that the search for authenticity is an acid that dissolves the old dualism between subject and object to make way for a new, dynamic, syncretistic understanding of the self. Some may find that Heidegger’s notion of “Being-in-the-world” is sufficient; others may turn to different -- perhaps postmodern -- conceptions. But wherever we look, we must be willing to acknowledge the fact that identity is a tool, not an ontological entity; that it is created, not discovered; that identity is always in a state of “becoming,” and never in a state of “being.” We can close by rewording Marx’s famous proclamation from his “Theses on Feuerbach”: The point is not to discover (interpret, understand) the self, but to change it.