Authenticity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry [1st ed.] 9783658296605, 9783658296612

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction (Godehard Brüntrup SJ, Michael Reder, Liselotte Gierstl)....Pages 1-6
Front Matter ....Pages 7-7
The Matrix-Analysis of Authenticity and the Relevance of Personal Projects (Godehard Brüntrup SJ, Ludwig Jaskolla)....Pages 9-27
Authenticity and the Significance of Self-Knowledge and Self-Ignorance (Nadja El Kassar)....Pages 29-49
Authenticity as a Benchmark of Human Selfhood? On Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Self (Karin Hutflötz)....Pages 51-71
Authenticity as Emerging Meaning—Dialectics, Pragmatism, and Psychotherapy (Donata Schoeller)....Pages 73-91
Front Matter ....Pages 93-93
What Is Good about Being Authentic? (Christine Bratu)....Pages 95-114
Authenticity as a Modern Myth. Remarks from Social Philosophy and Anthropology (Michael Reder)....Pages 115-131
Authentic Gestures: Modern Authenticity as Utopian Affirmation rather than Self-Articulation (Christian Strub)....Pages 133-152
Front Matter ....Pages 153-153
Authenticity: A Selfie Admired by Others? (Eckhard Frick SJ)....Pages 155-162
Being Oneself: The Functional Basis of Authenticity and Self-Development (Julius Kuhl)....Pages 163-183
Authenticity—Psychiatric Perspectives (Felix Tretter)....Pages 185-199

Citation preview

Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie

Godehard Brüntrup · Michael Reder Liselotte Gierstl Editors

Authenticity

Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry

Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie Series Editor Gerald Hartung, Philosophisches Seminar, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany

Unter dem Leitbegriff der Interdisziplinären Anthropologie formiert sich aktuell eine Forschungslandschaft, die dem Rätsel des Menschen angesichts seiner Riskiertheit und nicht-garantierten Überlebenschancen, aber auch seiner technologischen Gestaltungschancen nachgeht. Einerseits liefern die neueren Forschungen zur evolutionären Anthropologie in kurzen Fristen immer präzisere Daten zur Bestimmung der menschlichen Lebensform; andererseits stellen uns die neuen technologischen Möglichkeiten in den Lebenswissenschaften vor praktische Probleme der Folgenabschätzung unseres Handelns. Derzeit sind alle Wissensdisziplinen sowohl der Natur- als auch der Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften gefragt, ihren Beitrag zur Orientierung in dieser Situation zu liefern. Es geht dabei um theoretische Durchdringung komplexer Forschungsfragen und deren ethische Reflexion. Wir können daher mit Blick auf die Interdisziplinäre Anthropologie von einem Schlüsselthema aktueller Forschung sprechen. Die vorliegenden Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie stellen – neben dem Jahrbuch Interdisziplinäre Anthropologie – einen weiteren Versuch dar, diesem weiten Forschungsfeld ein Gesprächsforum zu bieten. Herausgegeben von: Prof. Dr. Gerald Hartung Bergische Universität Wuppertal Deutschland Editorial Board: Prof. Dr. Jörn Ahrens Universität Gießen, Deutschland Prof. Dr. Cornelia Brink Universität Freiburg, Deutschland Prof. Dr. Dirk Evers Universität Halle, Deutschland Prof. Dr. Thomas Fuchs Universität Heidelberg, Deutschland Dr. Matthias Herrgen Hochschule Darmstadt, Deutschland

Prof. Dr. Matthias Jung Universität Koblenz, Deutschland Prof. Dr. Katja Liebal Freie Universität Berlin, Deutschland Prof. Dr. Stephan Rixen Universität Bayreuth, Deutschland Prof. Dr. Hartmut Rosa Universität Jena, Deutschland

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13383

Godehard Brüntrup · Michael Reder · Liselotte Gierstl Editors

Authenticity Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry

Editors Godehard Brüntrup Munich School of Philosophy Munich, Germany

Michael Reder Munich School of Philosophy Munich, Germany

Liselotte Gierstl Neuried, Germany

ISSN 2567-661X ISSN 2567-6628  (electronic) Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie ISBN 978-3-658-29660-5 ISBN 978-3-658-29661-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Lektorat: Frank Schindler This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Acknowledgement & Editors’ Note

This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton Rlg. Trust (TRT 0119). We furthermore thank the Angela und Helmut Six Stiftung für Völkerverständigung for their valuable support. Finally, our thanks go to Tobias Sitter and Niklas Ernst for their dedicated assistance in realizing this volume, as well as to the Munich School of Philosophy as the host location of an interdisciplinary conference in 2015, which marked a first step towards the ­multi-perspectival concept analysis of authenticity by providing a stage for contributions from philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. With this multidisciplinary synopsis, we authentically hope to offer an essential foundation for the clarification of this notion by building an universal understanding for the basis of further engagement through dialogue and research.

Munich, June 2020

The editors

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Contents

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Godehard Brüntrup SJ, Michael Reder and Liselotte Gierstl Approaches from Metaphysics, Anthropology, and Phenomenology The Matrix-Analysis of Authenticity and the Relevance of Personal Projects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Godehard Brüntrup SJ and Ludwig Jaskolla Authenticity and the Significance of Self-Knowledge and Self-Ignorance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Nadja El Kassar Authenticity as a Benchmark of Human Selfhood? On Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Karin Hutflötz Authenticity as Emerging Meaning—Dialectics, Pragmatism, and Psychotherapy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Donata Schoeller Approaches from Ethics and Social Philosophy What Is Good about Being Authentic?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Christine Bratu Authenticity as a Modern Myth. Remarks from Social Philosophy and Anthropology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Michael Reder vii

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Authentic Gestures: Modern Authenticity as Utopian Affirmation rather than Self-Articulation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Christian Strub Approaches from Psychology and Psychiatry Authenticity: A Selfie Admired by Others? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Eckhard Frick SJ Being Oneself: The Functional Basis of Authenticity and Self-Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Julius Kuhl Authenticity—Psychiatric Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Felix Tretter

Contributors

Dr. Christine Bratu  Georg August University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany Prof. Dr. Godehard Brüntrup SJ Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany Prof. Dr. Eckhard Frick SJ  Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany Liselotte Gierstl  Neuried, Germany Dr. Karin Hutflötz  Catholic University of Eichstätt, Eichstätt, Germany Dr. Ludwig Jaskolla  Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany PD Dr. Nadja El Kassar  University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Prof. Dr. Julius Kuhl  University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany Prof. Dr. Michael Reder  Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany PD Dr. Donata Schoeller  University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany PD Dr. Christian Strub  Berlin, Germany Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Felix Tretter  Bertalanffy Center Vienna, Vienna, Austria

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Introduction From a Commonplace to an Intricate Concept Godehard Brüntrup SJ, Michael Reder and Liselotte Gierstl

In an ever more interconnected world, authenticity is considered an essential part of manifold interpersonal relationships, actions, and agreements. Authenticity’s association with sincerity, honesty, and reliability not only normatively charges the term in the context of social coexistence, but also makes it a demand which we impose on ourselves: The success of our lives is measured decisively by whether we live in harmony with our own convictions, wishes and needs. In philosophy, authenticity has also become the focus of interest, both in the context of the mechanisms of self-knowledge, as well as of personal development. Additionally, psychoanalytical, psychotherapeutic, and psychiatric theories sometimes address the lack of authenticity as a component, if not a cause, of mental and/or behavioral disorders. As early as 1991, Charles Taylor posed the question of the place, impact, and value of authenticity as it pertains to our relations with ourselves, others, and the world. In his programmatic The Malaise of Modernity, he acknowledges the potency of authenticity as moral ideal in modern societies, while at the same time urging further explication of its notion: In the light of the complex and murky challenges of the twentieth century, which persist in today’s multitude of spheres of work and life, a conceptual clarity as to what authenticity means remains essential for us in order to gain a better understanding of what it is to truly be oneself. G. Brüntrup SJ · M. Reder (*)  Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] G. Brüntrup SJ e-mail: [email protected] L. Gierstl  Neuried, Germany © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_1

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Irrespective of ontological disputes, authenticity has also gained an increasingly prominent position in terms of the social demand in societies resulting from reflexive modernity. Anthony Giddens provided a concise depiction of this reflexive character of modern societies by stating that today, people are called upon to reflexively recover their own biography. Implicitly, authenticity as requirement therefore became a social demand for everybody. It applies to our professional demeanor, as well as to our behavior within our families and among our friends: no authenticity, no success. For modern citizens, authentic living has gained significance in all different social, political and economic spheres. However, ­socio-theory and socio-philosophy are still far from an unequivocal rendering of the meaning of this social demand. Overall, the term “authenticity” has acquired meaning far beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines and areas of life. The enormous range, as well as the accompanying intra- and even inter-contextual inconsistencies in its application, have led to the current confusion and lack of clarity regarding the oft contradictory readings. In this context, post-Structuralist criticisms levied on claims of authenticity, as were paradigmatically presented by Michel Foucault (1988), signify this lack of clarity. Along with the critique of the uncertainness of the normative grounds of such claims, the opacity of fundamental issues gave rise in sociology and social psychology to a censorious debate questioning the appropriate scope for such a pretention. In a less theoretical context, authenticity has already come to play a key role in personalized psychotherapy: Therapists are supposed to adjust to their patients in the fashion of an “authentic chameleon” (Lazarus 1993, pp. 404–407) while simultaneously maintaining their human originality. Authenticity thus becomes a unifying mantra, regardless of whether it refers to the therapists’ attributes or the therapeutic objective (true self, self-management, identity), especially in the treatment of personality disorders. Pathologies related to authenticity are understood as being rooted in the early development of the self, viz. the search for stable attachment. These cases require therapists to provide a safe haven for patients to grow, as well as to have the capability of dealing with great insecurity. Yet in spite of these drastic demands, the notion of authenticity remains ambiguous and opaque, both within distinct fields of study as well as beyond the boundaries of individual scientific disciplines.

1 Historic Background One of the most important starting points for the philosophical debate on authenticity can be found in Enlightenment thought, namely in the works of Johann Gott­ fried Herder. His philosophy could be characterized as an anthropological turn

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of sorts, based on the reflection of the individual experiences of human beings. Because experiences differ in form and content, Herder interprets them as expressions of the individual person. Experiences and feelings form and constitute the individuality of the person (Herder 1994). Therefore, the individuality of human beings became the center of his philosophy. What does this mean for the concept of authenticity? Herder argues that every person has a sense of the coherence or harmony of her disparate feelings (Herder 1989). Authenticity means that persons should find harmony between different feelings and, by doing so, become an individual and genuine person. Moreover, all individuals also have the normative obligation to strive towards this harmony. Jean-Jacques Rousseau refers to this normative connotation of authenticity and argues that the self-fulfillment of a moral person is only possible through an authentic relationship, which the person attains with herself. Consequently, every human should be faithful to her inner nature (Sturma 2001, p. 83) in order to be an authentic person. Referring to Romantic ideas, Rousseau focuses on a deep inwardness through which a harmonic individuality is formed. Only on this basis is moral acting possible. Therefore, Rousseau might be interpreted as the first philosopher to develop an ethics of authenticity. Historically, Herder and Rousseau constitute the fundament of the modern concept of authenticity. During the 20th century, multiple intellectuals and philosophers referred to their concepts, reformulated them, and formed a socially pertinent discourse on authenticity. Firstly, Lionel Trilling, one of the most influential intellectuals working on authenticity in the 20th century, argued in comparison with Rousseau that the moral relation between the individual and other persons is no longer at the center of the concept of authenticity. Honesty is not the major focus of the concept, and a harmonic expression of the individual can no longer be presumed to be at its core (Trilling 1972). Thus, an authentic self is opaque to the individual (Strub 2009). In a similar vein, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that authenticity should be understood as openness for human reality, which requires the individual to decide for herself permanently. Secondly, in Trilling’s tradition, the self-relation is not a behavior towards other persons but rather an expression of what Friedrich Nietzsche called the ‘superman.’ During the 20th century, many philosophers refer to this as the ‘unsocial’ connotation of Nietzsche’s and Trilling’s interpretations of authenticity. Yet others try to return to the sources of the concept in Romanticism and Enlightenment. Finally, the two philosophers who seem to be most important for these two developments in the concept of authenticity are Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor. Foucault (1988) interprets authenticity as a liberal discursive mechanism by which all individuals are trained to perpetually improve themselves. He argues

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that authenticity is an illusion because self-relations only exist in plural. This variety cannot be harmonized into one authentic self-relation. From the perspective of bio-politics, the ideal of authenticity tries to convince human beings that they have to improve themselves in order to be ‘good citizens.’ In contrast, Taylor refers more to the reflections of Herder and Rousseau and argues that the authentic self is a precondition for human communities (Taylor 1992). Hence, authenticity aims for self-creation and self-determination. Today, western societies often face a challenge from the seeming loss of the ‘power’ of authenticity. The reason for this is an implication of liberal neutrality, which demands that all behaviors be accepted without question so long as they correlate with the biography and thus the self of the actor. Taylor argues (with Hegel) that the need for recognition is an essential part of the process of self-realization. Authenticity is a dimension of this interpersonal process and expresses a particular understanding of freedom, which is realized in relations of recognition.

2 Systematics for the Present Considerations on Authenticity The present volume aims to expand the cooperation across disciplines in order to develop a more comprehensive and profound understanding of authenticity, not by over-simplifying the highly complex subject, but by approaching the underlying concept from different scientific perspectives. The first part presents metaphysical, anthropological, and phenomenological approaches. They are complemented in the second part by ethical and socio-philosophical studies. Finally, part three considers authenticity from the standpoint of psychology and psychiatry. A first insight into these diverse discussions of authenticity is provided by a short overview of the contributions: The anthology opens with a concise elaboration on the systematics of the concept of authenticity by Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla. The authors propose a categorization matrix contrasting creation models and discovery models on the one hand, as well as individualistic versus social concepts on the other. Subsequently, they offer a rather liberal interpretation of authenticity based on observations regarding personal life-projects. Based on the often-invoked close link between authenticity and ­self-knowledge, Nadja El Kassar brings an additional component into play: She examines various forms of self-ignorance and argues for their relevance for a more accurate, relational understanding of authenticity.

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Karin Hutflötz engages in a critical analysis of the ideal of authenticity, which she sees as being demanded in contemporary society, by questioning a static understanding of the concept. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s phenomenological reflections in The Sickness unto Death, she works out a relational, processual notion and discusses respective implications regarding personal development. Donata Schoeller shifts the focus from a conceptual description of authenticity towards the analysis of meaning as it emerges through progressing interpretations which clients form when investigating their situational experiences in psychotherapy. Beginning from the empirical observation that authentic behavior is generally met with a certain form of respect, Christine Bratu investigates the ethical quality of authenticity and its dependence on the actual content of an agent’s ­self-expression. From a socio-philosophical point of view, Michael Reder employs a relational theory of self and society in order to show that the currently prevailing demand upon individuals for authenticity is untenable and, at least in some respects, a subtle manipulation of persons in favor of a capitalist meritocracy. Christian Strub views authenticity as an interpersonal attributive concept and views any self-reflexive claim to be authentic as a performative contradiction. For him, authenticity finds its expression in authentic gestures – involuntary reactions to situations which indicate an individual notion of a meaningful life including a social dimension. Drawing on the psychoanalytical differentiation between ego and self, Eckhard Frick promotes an integrative understanding of authenticity that entails both what is and what seems. Elaborating on the Jungian concept of shadows, he further suggests a broadened scope of authenticity entailing the inclusion of what one might want to consider as being not part of one’s true self. Julius Kuhl points to the close association between authenticity and a coherent self, offering a functional description of the simultaneously processing experiential network that enables authentic behavior. On this basis, he outlines considerations of the support of self-awareness, as well as pedagogical implications for the facilitation of self-development. In the closing article, Felix Tretter discusses authenticity as a relational concept against the backdrop of mental disorders. Based on a multi-level model of the mental system, he points out the indeterminate nature of a reference unit for the evaluation of a person’s behavior in terms of authenticity, which becomes particularly apparent in the psychopathological context. Munich, April 2019 The editors

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References Foucault, M. 1988. An Aesthetics of existence. In Michel Foucault: Politics, philosophy, culture, ed. L. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 47–53. Herder, J. G. 1989. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. In Werke in 10 Bänden, Bd. 6., ed. M. Bollacher. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Herder, J.G. 1994. Zum Sinn des Glücks. In Werke in 10 Bänden, vol. 4, ed. J. Brummack and M. Bollacher, 233–242. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lazarus, A. 1993. Tailoring the therapeutic relationship, or being an authentic Chameleon. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 30 (3): 404–407. Strub, C. 2009. Authentizität. Information Philosophie 37 (2): 39–45. Sturma, D. 2001. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. München: C.H. Beck. Taylor, C. 1991. The Malaise of modernity. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Taylor, C. 1992. The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Trilling, L. 1972. Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Prof. Dr. Godehard Brüntrup SJ  Professor for Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language at the Munich School of Philosophy. Studied Philosophy in Munich and Berlin, where he did his PhD on mental causation. Research interests: philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, philosophy of action, metaphysics, process ontology. Prof. Dr. Michael Reder Professor for Practical Philosophy and Chair of „Praktische Philosophie mit Schwerpunkt Völkerverständigung” at the Munich School of Philosophy. Studied Philosophy, Catholic Theology and Economics in Munich, Tübingen and Fribourg / CH. Research interests: pragmatism, social philosophy, theories of democracy, intergenerational justice, transnational practices of solidarity, environmental ethics. Liselotte Gierstl  Design Thinking Specialist and Customer Experience Manager at Versicherungskammer. Studied Philosophy, Psychology and Human Factors Engineering in Munich. Research interests: philosophical psychology, interdisciplinary studies on motivation, human-centered innovation.

Approaches from Metaphysics, Anthropology, and Phenomenology

The Matrix-Analysis of Authenticity and the Relevance of Personal Projects Godehard Brüntrup SJ and Ludwig Jaskolla

1 Introduction The philosophical concept of personal authenticity develops gradually from the very basis of modern philosophy. Where R. Descartes laid the groundworks for the discovery that self-consciousness is one of the cornerstones of philosophical inquiry, his successors further developed and detailed the philosophical consequences of the Cartesian discovery (Thiel 2014, pp. 97–120), e.g. J. Locke’s famous dictum that “consciousness makes the same person […]” (Locke Essay, 2.27.17). This development is intricately interrelated with various social changes leading to new liberties: Humans came to be seen more as individuals. Class systems were gradually abolished. Social norms were no longer considered as binding as they used to be (Taylor 1992, p. 28). Certainly, this is an oversimplification of the socio-historical changes that took place during the Enlightenment, but it nevertheless paints a truthful picture of this period (Dupré 2004, p. 9). For Ch. Taylor, arguably today’s most eminent philosophical scholar working on ‘authenticity,’ these two strands—the focus on consciousness and the development of new liberties—lead to an ‘age of authenticity’ within the Romantic period: “Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own ‘measure’ is his way of putting it. […] There is G. Brüntrup SJ · L. Jaskolla (*)  Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] G. Brüntrup SJ e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_2

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G. Brüntrup SJ and L. Jaskolla 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 what being human is for me” (Taylor 1992, pp. 28–29).

Taylor argues that this Herderian conceptualization foreshadows the multifarious ways in which the demand for authenticity has shaped our lives in the contemporary world (Taylor 1992, pp. 29–30). But this is not an essay about the history of authenticity. Rather, we propose an innovative systematic approach to classify these various notions that have been used in philosophy. For our purposes a minimal historical ‘definition’ suffices. Authenticity denotes a normative claim: Every individual person is called to find her inner “measure.” It seems as if ‘authenticity’ would be a clear-cut and reasonably well-defined philosophical concept. Unfortunately, this is clearly not the case. Apart from the rather general and unspecific characterization that authentic living consists in being true to one’s inner measure, there seems to be no deeper consensus what authenticity consists in. In this paper, we propose a Matrix analysis of the different ways in which the philosophical concept of ‘authenticity’ has been used: These dimensions rank different conceptualizations of authenticity along two axes, which understand authentic living as functions of the divide between the ‘discovery’ model and the ‘creation’ model on the one axis and between individualistic and social models on the other axis. After setting the logical landscape, we zoom in on a specific aspect of the social discovery model. Then, we argue that authentic living is dependent upon having, valuing, and realizing personal projects, as described and defined by M. Betzler. If this is the case, we posit that our arguments weigh in favor of the creation model of authenticity, because it can be read as an argument against the austere discovery model.

2 A Matrix-Analysis of ‘Authenticity’ 2.1 A Preliminary Definition The classification, which we propose in this paper, revolves around two conceptual contrasts, which seem to be essential to different strands of interpretation that shape the current debate in the concept of ‘authenticity.’ But first, we will provide a structural analysis of the concept of ‘authenticity’ as it has been introduced in these preliminary remarks. At its most basic

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structural level, authenticity describes the ability to cope with an inner tension within human existence. We find ourself in certain states, and we must ask ourself whether these states truly depict the way in which we want to lead our lives or how we truly are, or not. This inner tension provides at least two interesting dimensions for interpretation: First, this tension enfolds between factual ascriptions and ideal projections. There might be, for example, a harsh discrepancy between the way a person leads her life (factually) and the way in which she envisions leading her life (ideally). Habitual weakness of the will might lead to such a life. Second, this inner tension enfolds between factual ascriptions and normative evaluations. To further extend the previous example of weakness of the will, one might argue that the alleged discrepancy is in most cases combined with a normative evaluation. The person feels shame or guilt because of her weak-willed actions. She judges her ideals as normatively ‘better’ than her actual life. We would therefore posit that judgements about personal authenticity can be analyzed as comparative judgments, which compare factual self-ascriptions with ideal projections and normative evaluations. We can find this specific idea in Bernard Williams’s conviction that authentic statements about a person unveil what this person truly wants to be: “[Authenticity is] the idea that some things are in some sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t […]” (Williams cit. Guignon 2004, S. viii).

2.2 The ‘Discovery’ Model and the ‘Creation’ Model The first conceptual contrast originates from two different perspectives on what is actually achieved when a person lives according to her authentic self: It is the contrast between ‘discovery’ and ‘creation.’ ‘Authenticity’ construed along the lines of what we call the ‘discovery model’ might be defined as the ‘unveiling’ of the true self, the hidden, inner nature, or the essence of the person in question. Two layers of inquiry can be discerned within the discovery model: First, there is the reflective, conscious self-concept of the person; that which the person construes to be her identity. Secondly, there is the true self of the person; that which is possibly not consciously perceived as part of the person’s identity. Both psychologists as well as philosophers have made use of this model. Referring directly to S. Kierkegaard, psychotherapist and psychologist C. Rogers

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sums up the process of self-integration within his patients as their pivotal desire: “[…] to be that self which one truly is […]” (Rogers 1961, p. 163).

Kierkegaard even argues in an explicitly religious terminology that the self which is to be discovered is created by God. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the human person can overcome despair only if she accepts that she is created in a specific way and, therefore, discovers her true self: “This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it” (Kierkegaard Sickness, 44).

K. Vogt has pointed us to the question as to how this Kierkegaardian thought relates to Augustine’s ‘Confessions.’ We think that there is a difference between Augustine’s thought and the modern conceptualization in Kierkegaard’s ‘Sickness,’ which has to do with the focus of the respective work: In Augustine, the entire process of self-discovery is embedded in a Neo-Platonic metaphysics of participation. The discovery of one’s true self is the realization of one’s participation in the Divine: “Thou wast more inward to me than the most inward part of me” (Augustine Confessions, III.6.11). “For see, thou wast within and I was without, and I sought thee out there” (Augustine Confessions, X.27.38).

The person is ‘homo ad imaginem dei’ (see for this analysis Desch 1988, pp. 98–103). This relation has been characterized by A. Outler in the following way: “And since he [Augustine] was sure that it was God’s grace that had been his prime mover in that way, it was a spontaneous expression of his heart that cast his ­self-recollection into the form of a sustained prayer to God” (Outler 1955 p. 5).

One can easily identify further cases of the discovery model in recent philosophical research. Take for example H. Frankfurt’s volitional model of autonomy (1971). Frankfurt argues that autonomous action originates from a volition, a second-order stance towards our material, first-order desires, such that the

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s­ econd-order stance is conduct-guiding. In order to counter regress-arguments, he posits that volitions are grounded in such a way that they express those reasons for action, which the person in question truly cares about, those reasons, which the person pursues wholeheartedly. That which a person truly cares about seems to be something, which the person needs to discover in the sense discussed above: “Wholeheartedness, as I am using the term does not consist in a feeling of enthusiasm, or of certainty, concerning commitment. Nor is it likely to be readily apparent whether a decision which a person intends to be wholeheartedly is actually so. We do not know our hearts well enough to be confident whether our intention that nothing should interfere with a decision we make is one we ourself will want carried out when […]” (Frankfurt 1998, pp. 175–176).

In sum, whenever a person’s true or authentic self is not transparent to the person in question, whenever the person’s true goals are not set actively by the person in question, then the proposed concept of authenticity is indeed a version of the discovery model of authenticity. Alternatively, ‘authenticity’ could be construed along the lines of what might be called the ‘creation model.’ This second model can be understood against the backdrop of J.-P. Sartre’s critique of S. Freud (Sartre 1943, pp. 91, 658). Clearly, Freud’s notion of the unconscious fits the above definition of the discovery model: Psycho-analysis is exactly the process of making conscious the true nature of one’s desires and rationalizations. Philosophically speaking, there is a given essence of our true nature over which I have limited to no control. For Sartre, existence precedes essence (Sartre 1945, p. 22), i.e. my decisions make my essence. Sartre argued that a person who is fundamentally dependent upon her unconscious can never be fully authentic, as authenticity is directly connected to the self-reflective character of human consciousness, which in turn is inconsistent with the notion of the unconscious (Guignon and Varga 2014, n. p.): “Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate” (Sartre 1948, p. 65).

Accordingly, the notion of ‘authenticity’ is inextricably intertwined with the human capacity to relate to themselves and to make decisions, which shape the person. This is a process of self-creation or self-actualization. The creation model might thus be seen as the converse of the discovery model: Whereas the ultimate goal of authentic living for the discovery model is the unveiling of who the per-

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son truly is, for the creation model it is paramount what the person makes herself to be. Clearly, the radical or austere versions of the creation and the discovery model describe two extremes on a spectrum of positions. The now somewhat ­old-fashioned term of the 1960s and 1970s ‘self-realization’ carries both meanings: ­self-discovery and self-making. Nevertheless, it seems to be a helpful classification to rank conceptualizations of authenticity as to how they are located on this continuum.

2.3 Individualistic and Social Concepts of ‘Authenticity’ The second conceptual contrast originates from two perspectives on what it actually means to lead an authentic life. This second contrast is concerned with the question as to whether authenticity is an individualistic or a social concept. The first side of the contrast argues that authenticity is to be conceived of in merely individualistic terms: In authentic living it is paramount to be true to yourself. The above developed contrast between discovery and creation model was carried out entirely in an almost solipsistic manner. It seems that this first, individualistic perspective can be detailed along those classifications. The second side of the contrast argues that authenticity is to be conceived of as a certain kind of relation through which the person in question engages with others (Guignon and Varga 2014, n. p.). M. Oshana puts it thus: “Rather, inauthenticity of the sort of which Jaspers and May speak, the sort that enervates autonomy, occurs when the subject of deceit is what is most distinctive of and essential to a person’s life, to his relations with others, and to his legacy” (Oshana 2007, p. 15).

In consequence, this social concept of authenticity turns our attention to those inherently dialogical, second-personal relations which are essential to leading a good human life. If being authentic is connected to leading a good human life (eudaimonia) and leading a good human life is in turn dependent on meaningful relationships to others, then living an authentic life cannot be completely independent from having those meaningful relationships. This point was forcefully made by C. Taylor in the ‘Ethics of Authenticity’ (Taylor 1992, pp. 43–53): In a Hegelian tradition, it is for Taylor the relation of “recognition” (Anerkennung) that plays a pivotal role in developing one’s own identity both at the level of significant others and of the society as a whole.

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“The importance of recognition is now universally acknowledged in one form or another, on an intimate plane, we are all aware how identity can be formed or malformed in our contact with significant others. On the social plane, we have a continuing politics of equal recognition. Both have been shaped by the growing ideal of authenticity, and recognition plays an essential role in the culture that has been arisen around it” (Taylor 1992, p. 49).

2.4 A Matrix-Analysis of Authenticity Taking stock, we conclude that all concepts of authenticity can be classified along the lines of two contrasts: the contrast between the discovery and the creation model and the contrast between the individualistic and the social, cognitive model. Thus, we reach the matrix of quadrants, see Fig. 2.1: Each specific notion of ‘authenticity’ can be localized within these quadrants: The quadrant ‘DI’, for example, denotes notions of ‘authenticity’ which favor the

Fig. 2.1   The matrix-analysis of authenticity. (Source: own presentation)

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discovery model over the creation model and the individualistic model over the social model. Up to this point, we have mostly been talking about the creation and discovery models in the individualistic variants. Our matrix, nevertheless, leaves room for social interpretations of the creation and the discovery model. For example, a version of the creation model might be construed which emphasizes that the creation of self-identity is primarily a social process. This is a thesis that is prominent in current social psychology (Markus and Kitayama 2009, pp. 342–344). Social variants of both the creation and the discovery model have however seen less coverage in the philosophical literature. Major strands of modern philosophy have inherited up to this day a certain Cartesian solipsistic methodology. The matrix allows for both a coarse-grained and a fine-grained analysis. An analysis at the coarse-grained level uses solely the whole quadrants to specify ‘umbrella categories.’ Thus, we get only the four categories, each corresponding to one quadrant. A fine-grained analysis, however, will differentiate between locations even within a single quadrant allowing, for example, for a model that is placed relatively near to the center characterizing a theory that incorporates aspects of all four quadrants. Thus, instead of four categories, we get a vast array of possible vector-like locations within our matrix. The austere positions are to be defined as the negation of their respective counterparts: Thus, the austere discovery model should be understood as the position that authenticity consists solely in the unveiling of the true self regardless whether it is construed individualistically or socially. Any volitional shaping of our authentic self is, therefore, impossible. Do philosophers hold these austere positions? Kierkegaard moves in the direction of the austere discovery model, because he emphasizes that our true self is completely independent from what we do (Ringleben 1995, p. 94). Another example is the wide-spread view in motivational psychology since D. McLelland (Denzinger 2018; McLelland 1987) according to which each person has an individual configuration of innate, and mostly unconscious implicit motives—i.e. power, competence, relatedness, and others. Consciously opting for life-projects or life-goals that are not in line with the individualistic configuration of the basic needs will lead to a lack of intrinsic motivation, which is ultimately a lack of authenticity. It is not possible to discuss in this short paper all quadrants in detail, but we can add one prominent example to elucidate the power of this model. Probably the most detailed critique and defense of the concept of authenticity in recent philosophy can be found in the thought of Taylor (1992). Taylor starts out from a conceptual critique of authenticity as an ethical ideal for the modern world. He

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argues that in the modern era, authenticity has been mistaken for an individualistic concept of complete self-creation—Taylor criticizes in particular modern versions of individualism, a purely instrumental approach to reason, and a fragmentation of the societies we live in (Taylor 1992, pp. 1–24). Taylor himself articulates a counter-ideal: “If authenticity is being true to ourself, is recovering our own ‘sentiment de l’existence,’ then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole. It was perhaps not an accident that in the Romantic period the self-feeling and the feeling of belonging to nature were linked. Perhaps the loss of a sense of belonging through a publicly defined order needs to be compensated by a stronger, more inner sense of linkage. Perhaps this is what a great deal of modern poetry has been trying to articulate; and perhaps we need few things more today than such articulation” (Taylor 1992, p. 91).

So, Taylor agrees that being authentic is “being true to ourself” (discovery) and that this can only be achieved by connecting to a “wider whole” (social). Klaus Viertbauer seems to further strengthen this interpretation: „Der Authentizitätsgehalt liegt demnach in der Aneignung der jeweils prägenden Werteordnung“ (Viertbauer 2016, p. 174).

Against the background of our matrix, this would allow us to rank Taylor as given in Fig. 2.2: We think that this example demonstrates the conceptual strength of the Matrix model proposed above in supplying us with a reasonable tool for the evaluation and comparison of different approaches to the concept of authenticity. In the following considerations, we aim to explicate an argument in favor of creation models of authenticity. We think that personal projects are intrinsically socially construed, but we cannot develop this idea in the context of this paper.

3 Authentic Living—the Relevance of Personal Projects 3.1 The Relevance of Personal Projects In order to develop this argument, we have to introduce the idea of personal projects. That personal projects have a specific, important role to play has been first described by B. Williams, and has recently been championed by the German philosopher M. Betzler (2013, 2014).

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Fig. 2.2   Taylor’s model within the matrix-analysis. (Source: author’s own presentation)

Let us first start out from a sample case. Consider the 19th century American poet Emily Dickinson. She was a very productive author, but merely some dozens of her roughly 1800 poems were published during her lifetime. We think that it is not an overestimation to state that Emily Dickinson’s life was shaped by her project of writing poetry. The way she conducted her life and the way she entertained relations to others were deeply influenced by this long-term, personal life-project or life-goal. In an article for the ‘The Atlantic’ in (1913), M. Hale Shackford sums up this ideal of ‘life as a poet:’ “Poetry to her was the expression of vital meanings, the transfer of passionate feeling and of deep conviction. Her work is essentially lyric; […]” (Hale Shackford 1913, n. p.).

This project of ‘being a poet and writing poetry’ informed the way Dickinson led great parts of her life. It made her value certain things, it impacted her social life. One might think that leading the life of a poet is not truly what a personal project

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is about. We think that it is a perfectly fine case in point: Emily Dickinson had to make a conscious decision to pursue a life of poetry, she had to stay true to that decision, even in the extremely adverse circumstances of the surrounding society and historical epoch. Our example seems to fit Betzler’s characterization of personal projects (Betzler 2013, p. 101). But what is distinctive about personal projects? Betzler argues that personal projects create project-dependent reasons (Betzler 2013, 101–102). She defines those reasons the following way: “Pursuing a project in that way generates project-dependent reasons for the person in question. These project-dependent reasons have the following structural features: they are agent-relative, diachronic, modally stringent, and noninstrumental. That is, once a person values a project, she has reasons for valuing that particular project that other people who are not involved in that project do not share” (Betzler 2014, p. 687).

In the following, we focus on these three characteristics of project-dependent reasons and explicate them within our example-case of Emily Dickinson: 1. Diachronicity: Betzler argues that project-dependent reasons exemplify diachronicity in the following sense: “These reasons are diachronic, as they imply that the agent in question regards her project as guiding her actions over time” (Betzler 2014, 687).

Emily Dickinson, therefore, would have good reasons to get up early in the morning every day to work on her poetry and pursue her project of becoming a poet, she would have reason to repeatedly send her work to journals, etc. 2. Modal Stringency/Robustness: A second characteristic is closely related to diachronicity: Project-dependent reasons need to exemplify a certain modal stringency or robustness (Pettit’s term “robustness” (2015, 260–263) works similarly to Betzler’s term “stringency”): “The reasons for acting in a particular way that her project yields for her are modally stringent in that they continue to have normative force in a possible world in which her project might be less successful, or in which her caring engagement with it might be less articulate. It thus yields reasons for pursuing it by default. In this vein, having a personal project compels her, ceteris paribus, not to reconsider or revise her project, and to disregard other reasons that are not connected with the project she settled on” (Betzler 2014, p. 687).

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Consider for example, once again, the case of Emily Dickinson. Suppose for sake of argument that Dickinson came to the conclusion while studying at Amherst Academy that ‘being a poet’ should be her project. Emily Dickinson’s life-project is modally robust in the sense that she did not falter in her pursuit of it even in the face of strong opposition—for example the fact that it was nearly impossible for women to be published in her historical epoch. 3. Noninstrumentality: Betzler defines the noninstrumental nature of ­project-dependent reasons the following way: “Moreover, they are noninstrumental in that the point of pursuing a project is not about giving it up for some further end but about valuing it for its own sake. As a result, the more and the longer a person values a particular project, the more she gradually comes to conceptualize herself as someone pursuing a particular project” (Betzler 2014, p. 687).

Once again, let us take a look at Emily Dickinson’s career as a 19th century poet. It seems detrimental to Dickinson’s self-concept as well as to her project that she does not pursue the respective project just for reasons as for example fame or fortune. Psychologically speaking, Dickinson would then not be intrinsically motivated, but externally regulated, thus leading an alienated life (Ryan and Deci 2000, p. 68–78). In Dickinson’s case this is especially interesting because she received almost no social recognition for her work during her lifetime—recall that most her poetry remained unpublished until after her death and that she had to publish anonymously because of her gender. These circumstances clearly paint a picture of someone who intrinsically cares about what she does. Reasons originating from personal projects are therefore diachronically stable, modally stringent or robust, and noninstrumental in the sense that “they have to be valued—at least to some extent—for their own sakes” (Betzler 2014, p. 689). In the classification of ‘Self-Determination-Theory,’ pursuing something for its own sake is the only case for intrinsic motivation and full autonomy (Ryan and Deci 2000, pp. 68–78).

3.2 Personal Projects and the Matrix-Analysis of Authenticity To further elucidate our model, we wish now to zoom in on a specific aspect of authenticity which we exemplified through the case of Emily Dickinson. We claim that the generation and pursuit of long-term projects is characteristic of our

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existence as persons. Betzler thinks that projects contribute to “a person’s normative identity and self-understanding” (Betzler 2013, p. 110). We are quite aware that there are philosophers, like G. Strawson (2004, p. 430), who would dispute this claim vigorously. It is our hypothesis that long-term projects are constitutive of the process of developing an authentic sense of self. Clearly, if Emily Dickinson is pursuing her long-time goal, she thereby generates reasons in the way described above that either are related or not related to what Emily truly wants. The question then arises: Are the reasons originating from Emily’s project her authentic reasons? Earlier, we argued that there often is a tension between a given, mostly unconscious intrinsic mental nature of a person and her explicit propositional ­self-concept. It is this very tension which resurfaces in the question whether Emily’s ‘project-reasons’ are her ‘authentic reasons.’ In the following, we will suppose that there are authentic reasons. It would be of course possible to solve the above question by just submitting that there are no truly authentic reasons. Further, we will not argue here that the reasons generated by personal projects are automatically those reasons that we would describe as ‘authentic.’ Rather our goal is intellectually more humble: We want to present an argument for the claim that authentic reasons are at least not completely independent from those reasons generated by personal project. And if this holds, then it follows that personal projects generate at least some reasons related to our authentic selves. In his study ‘Person sein und Geschichten erzählen’ T. Henning develops an argument for the thesis that there is a connection between a person’s identification with certain reasons and those reasons being authentic. Anyone who identifies with a reason is guided by the belief that the reason is authentic (Henning 2009, p. 69). Henning argues that the identification with certain reasons is the avowal, the performative act, that those reasons are her own, authentic reasons. The form of self-knowledge that is needed for authenticity is not that of an inner spectator, who observes her own mental events like physical events in the outside-world. It is rather an agential form of knowledge. Coming to know what my reasons are requires an act of identification or appropriation with these reasons. Thus, we reject the austere discovery model of authenticity. My true reasons cannot simply be discovered, they have to be actively appropriated into my sense of self. This agential theory of self-knowledge has been best developed in R. Moran’s Authority and Estrangement (2001). Whoever identifies with certain reasons also thinks that these reasons say something about the question who she is (Henning 2009, p. 58). Betzler

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considers reasons generated by personal projects as those reasons “by which we come to identify ourself” (Betzler 2014, p. 689). This implies, in our view, that the appropriation of these reasons is not akin to a discovery. Self-knowledge of my reasons is always in part an act of avowal. Only if we are the author of our reasons, we can own them without a sense of estrangement. Authenticity requires the absence of alienation (Moran 2001). The somewhat Kantian idea of autonomous authorship of one’s own thought is eminently modern. Thus, we doubt that an adequate theory of authenticity can be generated within a predominantly pre-modern context. The proponent of the discovery model could interject at this point that the reasons with which we identify might possibly not be congruent with our true self. Imagine a person who identifies with the goal of going to law-school only to discover at the end of her studies that her real life-project is to become an artist. The previous goal was inauthentic insofar as it was, say, introjected by parental wishes. This is an interesting case, which speaks in favor of the discovery model and there is, indeed, some truth to the discovery model. We try to resolve this puzzle by referring to the ‘6-Stage-Model of Motivation’ in Self-Determination Theory, see Fig. 3.1. The problem case of the alienated law-student is located at either stage 3 or 4. The easiest case would be if the goal of going to law-school was simply an introjected parental goal which was pursued with self-control and ego involvement. This might still be called a personal project, but it obviously is an alienated project. The more interesting case is located in stage 4. Here the student has identified with the goal of going to law-school, considering it important and valuable, but still the synthesis with the self is deficient. Identification alone is not sufficient. Here the proponent of the discovery model has a real point: Autonomous valuing of a project is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making it authentic. A project is only authentically mine if it is congruent with my full self, including especially the unconscious basic needs and other aspects over which I have no conscious control. That is why R. Ryan and E. Deci distinguish between identified and integrated regulation. Interestingly, they argue that intrinsic regulation is yet another stage of motivation where the agent acts out of pure interest for the project and its inherent satisfaction. Thus, the ultimate regulatory process of motivation is not self-congruence, but interest in and enjoyment of the activity itself. We argue that personal projects in the sense of Betzler come in different degrees of autonomy: Only at the 5th level, the pursuit of the project is integrated with the whole self, which makes a full avowal of the project possible. At the 6th

Fig. 3.1   6-Stage-Model of motivation in self-determination theory (Ryan and Deci 2000, p. 72)

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level the project is intrinsically regulated, which entails that the project is pursued truly for its own sake. This is why the sample case of Emily Dickinson is so interesting to our argument: Her lack of external success and her ability to overcome adverse conditions are good indicators that Dickinson pursued her project of being a poet in synthesis with her full self (5th level), and the activity of writing poetry for its own sake (6th level). Inherent satisfaction and enjoyment of her project were most likely at the heart of her pursuit. Let us return to the case of the law-student and compare it with the case of Emily Dickinson. Based on what has been said, we introduce categorial distinctions with respect to the concept ‘personal project.’ 1. We distinguish alienated personal projects (level 3) from somewhat autonomous personal projects (level 4). If the law-student pursues her project only because of parental expectations, she would be alienated from her project. This would only qualify derivatively as personal project in the classic sense, because her pursuit would lack ‘authorship:’ If she consciously identifies with her project, the law student is at least partially authentic. 2. Further, we distinguish somewhat autonomous personal projects (level 4) from autonomous personal projects (level 5 and 6). The law student might value her project consciously, but it could still not be congruent with her full self; e.g. her unconscious, implicit motives differ from her explicitly identified goal. Somewhat autonomous personal projects of this kind are already personal project in the sense of Betzler. For autonomous personal projects full integration or intrinsic regulation are needed. Emily Dickinson’s pursuit of writing poetry exemplifies an autonomous personal project. Whereas the law-student is at best pursuing a somewhat autonomous personal project. This means that in all somewhat autonomous and autonomous personal projects, the project-generated reasons are at least partially authentic. In the case of alienated projects, the project-generated reasons are not authentic. Only in the case of autonomous personal projects, the reasons generated are fully authentic. Here the connection between authenticity and personal projects becomes obvious. Where does this discussion leave us concerning our matrix analysis of authenticity? As we have argued above, we think that the strong emphasis on avowed authorship, conscious identification, and autonomous valuing should count as an argument against the austere discovery model of authenticity. The austere discovery model is wrong, but the austere creation model is also wrong. Identification alone, as we have seen in the Ryan & Deci-model, is not

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sufficient. We need integration with those parts of the psyche, which are not under conscious control—like intrinsic needs and implicit motives. Only the 6th stage allows for complete intrinsicness of value or enjoyment, because it guarantees full non-instrumentality. Somewhat autonomous and autonomous personal projects can be located at stage 4, 5, and 6. Where should our model be located within the quadrants of the matrix model? Is it more individualistic (I) or social (S), is it more discovery (D) or ­creation-oriented (C)? We have been clearly arguing within a more individualistic framework, but since personal projects are almost always integrated into a greater social environment, we do not want to argue for too strong an individualistic emphasis. With our somewhat Kantian focus on authorship and agential avowal, we are also clearly located with the creation-quadrant, but again we have acknowledged that the discovery and integration of unconscious parts of the psyche is necessary for full integration. Thus, we would be located within the CI-quadrant, but close to the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical axis. Within our model, the social- and the discovery-aspect of authenticity are taken seriously. Independent of our own position, we think that the matrix model we developed is helpful in differentiating the interplay of four different aspects of authenticity. Even for philosophers who prefer a more social account of authenticity, our model should still be useful. Also, we hope to have successfully argued that there is an interesting connection between the concept of ‘authenticity’ and the idea of ‘personal projects.’ Authentic reasons for action are often generated within the context of fully autonomous personal projects. Note: This paper has been discussed at the Annual Munich-New-York Ethics Workshops: We are indebted to Monika Betzler, Katja Vogt, Monika Platz, and Alexander Edlich for extended feedback. Further, we would like to thank the following scholars: Isabel Kaeslin, André Grahle, Thimo Heisenberg, and Nadja El Kassar. This publication was made possible through the support of a grant (TRT0119) from Templeton Religion Trust. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton Religion Trust. The idea for this paper originates from research in the Cluster “Varieties of Normative Agency” of the Project “The Philosophy and Science of Self-Control” funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

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References Augustine. Confessions (trans: Albert C.). Outler. Web. August 10th 2018. http://faculty. georgetown.edu/jod/augustine/conf.pdf. [cit. Confessions]. Betzler, M. 2013. The normative significance of personal projects. In Autonomy and the self, ed. M. Kühler and N. Jelinek, 101–126. Dordrecht: Springer. Betzler, M. 2014. Personal projects and reasons for partiality. Social Theory and Practice 40 (4): 683–692. Desch, W. 1988. Augustins Confessiones. Beobachtungen zu Motivbestand und Gedankenbewegung. Frankfurt: Peter. Dupré, L. 2004. The enlightenment and the intellectual foundations of modern culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Denzinger, F. and V. Brandstätter. 2018. Stability of and changes in implicit motives. A narrative review of empirical studies. Frontiers in Psychology 8 (777): n. p. Frankfurt, H. 1971. Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1): 5–20. Frankfurt, H. 1988. Identification and wholeheartedness. In The importance of what we care about, ed. H. Frankfurt, 159–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guignon, C. 2004. On being authentic. New York: Routledge. Guignon, C and S. Varga. 2014. Authenticity. In Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, eds. E. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity. Hale Shackford, M. 1913. The poetry of Emily Dickinson. The Atlantic January 1913. Henning, T. 2009. Person sein und Geschichten erzählen. Berlin, New York. Kierkegaard, S. 1989. The sickness unto death: A christian psychological exposition of edification & awakening by anti-climacus (trans: Hannay, A.). London: Penguin [cit. Sickness]. Locke, J. 2008. An essay concerning human understanding, ed. P. Phemister. Oxford: Oxford University Press [cit. Essay]. Markus, H. and S. Kitayama. 2009. Culture and the self. Implications for cognition, emotion and motivation. In The self in social psychology, ed. R. Baumeister, 339–367. London: Psychology Press. McLelland, D. 1987. Human motivation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moran, R. 2001. Authority and estrangement. An essay on self-knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Oshana, M. 2007. Autonomy and the question of authenticity. Social Theory and Practice 33 (3): 1–19. Outler, A. 1955. Augustine: Confessions and enchiridion. (trans: Albert C.). Outler. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Pettit, P. 2015. The robust demands of the good. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ringleben, J. 1995. Die Krankheit zum Tode von Sören Kierkegaard. Erklärung und Kommentar. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Rogers, C. 1961. On becoming a person. A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Ryan, R., and E. Deci. 2000. Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist 55 (1): 68–78. Strawson, G. 2004. Against narrativity. Ratio. 17 (3): 428–452.

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Sartre, J.-P. 1948/1976. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schocken Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1991. Das Sein und das Nichts. Versuch einer phänomenologischen Ontologie, ed. Traugott König. Hamburg: Rowohlt. [Citations follow the French original from 1943]. Sartre, J.-P. 2007. Existentialism Is a Humanism. New Haven: Yale University Press (First Publication 1945). Taylor, C. 1992. The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Thiel, U. 2014. The early modern subject. Self-consciousness and personal identity from descartes to hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Viertbauer, K. 2016. Authentizität und Selbst-Bestimmung. Die Aporetik des “ethischen Selbst” bei Habermas mit einem Seitenblick auf Taylor. In Authentizität—Modewort, Leitbild, Konzept. Theologische und humanwissenschaftliche Erkundungen zu einer schillernden Kategorie, Eds. A. Kreutzer and C. Niemand, 161–177. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet.

Prof. Dr. Godehard Brüntrup SJ Professor for Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language at the Munich School of Philosophy. Studied Philosophy in Munich and Berlin, where he did his PhD on mental causation. Research interests: philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, philosophy of action, metaphysics, process ontology. Dr. Ludwig Jaskolla  Head of Communications and Media at the Munich School of Philosophy. Studied Philosophy in Munich. Research interests: philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of action, philosophy of psychology, process philosophy.

Authenticity and the Significance of Self-Knowledge and Self-Ignorance Nadja El Kassar

1 Setting the Scene To philosophers and non-philosophers alike, there is an intuitive appeal to the claim that authenticity and self-knowledge are intimately connected. But once we start looking beyond this intuitive appeal and examine the claim, we see that it is not warranted. In particular, it fails to consider self-ignorance and thus does not elicit an adequate theory of the epistemological nature of authenticity. This article extends the dyad authenticity and self-knowledge into the triad authenticity, ­self-knowledge and self-ignorance, thereby leading to a modified self-conception of human beings as well as a modified conception of authenticity. A relational conception of authenticity will present itself as more appropriate than an individualistic conception. The main term, authenticity, is notoriously opaque. One of the express aims of this article is to contribute to the current attempts at illuminating authenticity. The convenient go-to definition of authenticity for most authors is “being true to oneself” (e.g., Cassam 2015, p. 216). This go-to definition provides a general idea of authenticity and it is convenient because it fits with different, more detailed conceptions of authenticity. For example, the four conceptions of authenticity that Feldman and Hazlett distinguish in their study of the relation between authenticity and self-knowledge—“avoiding pretense […], Frankfurtian wholeheartedness […], existential self-knowledge […], spontaneity” (Feldman and Hazlett 2013, p. 158)—all fit with “being true to oneself”. Authenticity understood as avoiding pretense is fairly self-explaining: the authentic subject is not a “poseur” N. El Kassar (*)  University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_3

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(Feldman and Hazlett 2013, p. 161). Authenticity as Frankfurtian wholeheartedness conceives of authenticity as identifying with those desires that motivate you to action. In this case you are acting wholeheartedly and are authentic (Lynch 2004, p. 125). Authenticity as existential self-knowledge refers to authenticity as acknowledging the human condition of objective activity and subjective transcendence (cf. Sartre 1956). Finally, authenticity as spontaneity refers to “authenticity […] characterized by spontaneity, unselfconsciousness, and by the unreflective expression of what one loves or cares about” (Feldman and Hazlett 2013, p. 175). There is abundant literature on self-knowledge—i.e. knowledge of one’s beliefs, attitudes, emotions and values—but significantly less literature on the relation between authenticity and self-knowledge. Michael Lynch is the central proponent of the claim that self-knowledge is constitutive of authenticity (2004) and Simon Feldman and Alan Hazlett (2013) and Quassim Cassam (2015) provide one of the few critical discussions of the idea that authenticity and selfknowledge are intimately connected.1 This paper takes a step towards filling this gap in the literature on authenticity. I develop the existing discussion by introducing self-ignorance into the debate about authenticity and self-knowledge. The dyad ‘self-knowledge and authenticity’ is insufficient for capturing the epistemological characteristics of authenticity and needs to be replaced by a triad— ‘authenticity, self-knowledge and self-ignorance’. It is trivially known that human cognitive capacities are finite and fallible. Ignorance and self-ignorance abound, e.g. one may believe that one is friendly when, in fact, one is rather grumpy, and similarly for other false beliefs about our own attitudes, beliefs, values etc. And in the face of this evidence we are led to ask: Is authenticity even possible if there is systematic and pervasive self-ignorance? And: how should we conceive of authenticity in the face of systematic and pervasive self-ignorance? The paper addresses these questions.2

1Garcia

(2015) argues that self-understanding is constitutive of authenticity but since he does not address self-knowledge explicitly, I do not include his theory in this paper. He also presents an interesting alternative overview of conceptions of authenticity (2015, 274). 2I won’t be engaging with the question of the value or disvalue of authenticity. For an extensive case against authenticity, see Feldman (2015). I also won’t be discussing arguments in favor of the value of (self-)ignorance (e.g. Taylor and Brown 1988; McKay and Dennett 2009). There is evidence on the practical value of positive illusions: self-evaluation bias is found in non-depressed agents but not in depressed agents. Having false beliefs about oneself may improve one’s well-being and one’s performances (e.g. Taylor and Brown 1988). On the other hand, self-ignorance may also be harmful because it may keep the agent from meeting her goals, from recognizing reality as it is (cf. Tugendhat 2010,

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Section 2 details the way from the dyad ‘authenticity and self-knowledge’ to the triad ‘authenticity, self-knowledge and self-ignorance’. By spelling out the significance of self-ignorance for the human self-conception (Sect. 3), I develop an answer to the following question: how is authenticity possible in the face of self-ignorance (Sect. 4)? I submit that self-ignorance is a feature of the human self-conception and so being authentic involves being self-ignorant and admitting to the potential for self-ignorance. Once we have this modified self-conception that assigns a central place to self-ignorance in view, we see that the individualistic go-to conception of authenticity—being true to oneself—is inadequate and may need to be replaced, e.g. by a relational conception.

2 From the Dyad ‘Authenticity and ­SelfKnowledge’ to the Triad ‘Authenticity, S ­ elfKnowledge and Self-Ignorance’ The vague statement ‘Authenticity and self-knowledge are intimately connected’ obviously translates into different accounts of the relation between ­self-knowledge and authenticity. Feldman and Hazlett in their study distinguish a constitutive account that argues that “self-knowledge is (at least) a part of authenticity” (Feldman and Hazlett 2013, p. 160) from a causal account that argues that ­“self-knowledge (generally, typically, normally) causes authenticity” (Feldman and Hazlett 2013, p. 160). And Cassam, in addition, introduces the weaker claim of self-knowledge “promot[ing] or facilitat[ing] authenticity” (Cassam 2015, p. 219).

p. 99), and, of course: from understanding herself and, possibly, from being authentic. I also bracket any discussions of authentic critical reflection within debates about autonomy. Christman (2009) in his procedural theory of autonomy introduces authenticity as a condition of autonomy; authenticity is “non-alienation upon historically sensitive, adequate self-reflection, given one’s diachronic practical identity and one’s position in the world” (Christman 2009, p. 155). Authenticity in this context amounts to ownership of beliefs and values. I will instead be addressing what one may describe as authenticity as a way of being—a way of believing, hoping, wanting, acting and so on. This second interpretation encompasses authenticity as ownership of beliefs and values as used in the literature on autonomy, but it is broader inter alia because it refers to concrete acts, including speech acts (cf. e.g. Oshana 2007, p. 424).

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Few authors explicitly spell out how and why self-knowledge and authenticity are intimately connected, Lynch’s plea for the value of truth for life is a crucial exception (Lynch 2004). He argues that self-knowledge is constitutive of authenticity, understood as wholeheartedness. He reasons that “[i]f you don’t know which of your possibly conflicting desires you identify with, you cannot be acting authentically” (Lynch 2004, p. 126). “You identify with a desire when it reflects the kind of person you wish to be, what you care about” (Lynch 2004, p. 125). And acting authentically is constitutive of happiness. Feldman and Hazlett argue that Lynch does not manage to establish that ­self-knowledge and authenticity are constitutively or causally related. Neither do the other conceptions—avoiding pretense, existential self-knowledge, and spontaneity. On the ‘authenticity as existential self-knowledge’ view, authenticity is identical with self-knowledge, and on the ‘authenticity as spontaneity’ view, self-knowledge is even harmful to authenticity. Contrary to the initial intuitive assumption, it is not clear why self-knowledge should be required for authenticity. As Cassam puts it, “Why would you have to know you are generous in order to be generous, or to behave generously because you are generous?” (Cassam 2015, p. 217). This very simple question serves as an intuitively convincing obser­ vation against any claims about close ties between self-knowledge and authenticity. The self-knowledge in question is what Cassam calls “substantive ­self-knowledge” including “knowledge of such things as one’s character, values, emotions, and abilities” (Cassam 2015, p. 171). Substantive self-knowledge contrasts with “trivial self-knowledge”, e.g. knowing that I’m sitting at this desk with my legs crossed under the desk without looking at my legs, or knowing what ice cream flavor I like most. Both Cassam (2015) and Schwitzgebel (2012) observe that trivial self-knowledge is not interesting for the self, it is “boring” self-knowledge (Cassam 2015, p. 28).3 The same applies for any considerations about selfknowledge that is supposed to be intimately connected to authenticity. In addition to Cassam’s and Feldman and Hazlett’s criticism of the relevance of self-knowledge for authenticity, there is substantial doubt about the general quality of self-knowledge. It is a fact that human beings have essentially finite and fallible cognitive capacities. This fallibility also extends to human self-knowledge. Psychological research undergirds this observation by

3Cassam

introduces ten conditions that distinguish substantial ­self-knowledge from trivial self-knowledge (2015, p. 31 f.).

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revealing systematic flaws in human self-directed reasoning, e.g. the b­ etter-thanaverage-effect—people generally assess their own abilities as being better than average. As Schwitzgebel, one of very few philosophers to have written about self-ignorance, observes, “[w]e live in cocoons of ignorance, especially where our ­self-conception is at stake” (Schwitzgebel 2012, p. 197). How can self-knowledge be of high epistemic quality if the s­elf-reporting mechanisms are not reliably correct? The evidence on cognitive fallibility further erodes the intuitive assumption of the intimate connection between ­self-knowledge and authenticity. Ultimately, once we have recognized the prevalence of ignorance and self-ignorance, we are led to ask how self-knowledge can be a safe foundation for authenticity. And more precisely: how is authenticity even possible if there is pervasive self-ignorance? The dyad ‘authenticity and self-knowledge’ has to be reconceived as and replaced by the triad ‘authenticity, self-knowledge and self-ignorance’. Let’s look at self-ignorance, this additional member that complements ­self-knowledge and authenticity. Cassam provides one of the few philosophical taxonomies of self-ignorance and I will use a slightly adapted version of his taxonomy to explicate the notion of self-ignorance that is significant for authenticity. With respect to the content of self-ignorance Cassam distinguishes (i) not knowing what one wants, believes, hopes, etc., (ii) not knowing what one’s character, value and emotions are, (iii) not knowing why one wants, believes, hopes, etc. what one wants (Cassam 2015, p. 191). Structurally, self-ignorance can take at least two different shapes. It can consist in lack of a reflective second-order belief or in false second-order belief. This disjunctive definition of self-ignorance, importantly, does not restrict ignorance to the absence of knowledge or true belief, but also includes false belief. If I don’t know that I believe that Japan doesn’t have sand beaches, or if I don’t know that I don’t want to go on vacation to Japan, I am “merely self-ignorant”, as Cassam calls it. These cases contrast with self-ignorance that includes a false second-order belief: I believe that I want to go to a party on Friday but, really, I’d rather stay home. I believe that I am a very friendly person, but, really, I’m treating my colleagues rather arrogantly (“positive self-deception”, Cassam 2015, p. 193). Or I believe that I’m not timid but, really, I am rather timid (“negative ­self-deception”, Shoemaker 2009, in Cassam 2015, p. 193). Cassam groups all kinds of false second-order belief about oneself as self-deception. On his conception, in s­elf-deception cases the subject has evidence but draws the wrong

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conclusion either because she “reason[s] poorly”, because she “misinterpret[s] the evidence”, or because she has “a defective theory about the relationship between [her] evidence and [her] attitude” (Cassam 2015, p. 195). I submit that we need to add another explanation for false second-order belief to Cassam’s list. Adding this condition leads me to take issue with Cassam labeling all cases of false reflective second-order beliefs “self-deception”. Cassam doesn’t consider cases in which a subject possesses false or misleading evidence—he only discusses lack of evidence and having evidence and drawing the wrong conclusion. My addition is important because it weakens the link between false second-order belief and self-deception. A subject may have a false second-order belief because of misleading evidence, and it would be confusing to call this self-deception. Self-deception comes with an inherent negative evaluation that does not apply to false second-order belief based on misleading evidence. In reply, Cassam might point out that he admits that self-deception may be motivated or un-motivated, thus avoiding any inherent negative evaluation of the term self-deception. However, Cassam’s good intentions are not sufficient since the case of misleading/false evidence has a different structure than the cases of self-deception that he discusses. The subject might draw the right conclusion but still end up with a false second-order belief because the evidence is faulty. This is a case of a false second-order belief that is not a case of self-deception. Accordingly, we should distinguish what one may call ‘mere false second-order belief about one’s attitudes and so on’ and self-deception. Psychological research provides additional evidence for instances of ­self-ignorance. The so-called Dunning-Kruger effect presents a particular form of mere self-ignorance: “those who are incompetent […] should have little insight into their incompetence” (Dunning 2011, p. 260). Such forms of self-ignorance consist in not knowing what one doesn’t know. Psychologists have been tracing this effect in different studies, e.g. one in which participants took a test and after the test were asked to assess their own performance. The bottom 25% of performers massively overestimated their performance (Dunning 2011, p. 264). This finding replicates for different tasks, e.g. “readers indicating how well they comprehend a narrative passage […], clinicians making mental illness diagnoses x […], physics experts knowing which problems will be more difficult” (Dunning 2011, p. 261, references deleted, N.E.). For the purposes of this article I will translate this claim about incompetence into a claim about ignorance; this is in line with Dunning’s description of the Dunning-Kruger effect: “being ignorant of one’s own ignorance” (Dunning 2011, p. 247). Dunning and Kruger’s explanation for this general result is that ignorant participants qua being ignorant lack the

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knowledge required for assessing their own performance and recognizing their own ignorance. Research on various biases evinces that people have false beliefs about their abilities, traits etc. and they lack the relevant true self-reflexive beliefs (e.g. Brown and Taylor 1988, 1994). The biases explain how this particular category of self-ignorance—false belief about one’s abilities, character traits, and so on— comes about; e.g. by reference to the better-than-average effect—people generally assess their abilities as being better than average (e.g. Alicke and Govorun 2005)—self-evaluation bias—people generally rate their abilities and character traits more favorably than they are (e.g. Krueger 1998)—and other biases. The biases explain how this particular category of self-ignorance—false belief about one’s abilities, character traits, and so on—comes about. In addition to this ­self-ignorance on the level of content, there is also psychological evidence that our access to our own beliefs, motivation, reasons, etc. is deficient. Research by Nisbett and Wilson suggests that “people may have little ability to report accurately on their cognitive processes” (Nisbett and Wilson 1977, p. 247). Over the last decade psychological research has been under particular scrutiny because the results of several classic studies could not be reproduced. The so-called replicability crisis (cf. e.g. Open Science Collaboration 2015) also concerns the Dunning-Kruger-effect, the better-than-average effect and ­self-evaluation bias. But this discussion does not affect my observations about pervasive self-ignorance since the evidence for self-ignorance—in the present paper and in general—is not limited to the evidence from psychological research. Self-ignorance as false second-order belief or as lack of second-order belief about one’s beliefs, attitudes, values etc. is widely acknowledged in human everyday life. Socrates already acknowledges self-ignorance in Philebus. He distinguishes three ways of not knowing oneself: “Are there not necessarily three ways in which it is possible not to know oneself? […] The first way concerns money, if someone thinks himself richer than in fact he is. […] Even more consider themselves taller and handsomer than in fact they are, and believe that they have other such physical advantages. […] But an overwhelming number are mistaken about the third kind, which belongs to the soul, namely virtue, and believe that they are superior in virtue, although they are not. […] And again, among virtues, is it not especially to wisdom that the largest number of people lay claim, puffing themselves up with quarrels and pretensions to would-be knowledge?” (Plato 1993, 48d–49a).

Socrates’s distinctions clearly align with the previous examples. In fact, the third variety of not knowing oneself, “self-aggrandizing thoughts” (Vogt 2012, p. 50),

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seems to be closely related to beliefs that are influenced by self-evaluation bias and motivated reasoning. That there is a phenomenon called self-ignorance and that human beings are beset by self-ignorance thus may count as undisputed. Moreover, there is a fundamental structure of self-ignorance that we can agree upon. We may say that self-ignorance can concern one’s beliefs, attitudes, hopes, desires, values, abilities, character traits, and it can consist in lack of reflective second-order belief or, alternatively, false second-order belief about one’s beliefs, attitudes, values, etc. Self-ignorance is in a complicated relation to one’s evidence for one’s beliefs. The details of this relation depend on one’s preferred model of self-knowledge, e.g. Cassam’s inferentialist theory (Cassam 2015) comes with a different model than a non-inferentialist theory (e.g. Burge 1996; Moran 2001). The simple explanation for self-ignorance is the fact that cognitive capacities of human beings are limited and that reasoning may be influenced by non-epistemic factors. There are further detailed suggestions for explanations from psychology, yet these are subject to objections.

3 The Significance of Self-Ignorance The fact of self-ignorance invites conclusions of vastly differing degrees concerning the self-conception of human beings and the possibility of authenticity. One can draw what one may call a ‘sweeping conclusion’ or ‘restricted conclusions’. According to the sweeping conclusion, self-ignorance puts all beliefs about oneself into question and leaves them unwarranted. The conclusion certainly applies to substantial self-knowledge and may or may not apply to trivial self-knowledge. Yet, it is doubtful whether this conclusion is at all warranted, it seems like an unnecessary overreaction. The evidence attests to the possibility of self-ignorance and to its pervasiveness, but it does not entail that self-knowledge is impossible, therefore I will disregard the sweeping conclusion. A restricted conclusion propounds that all beliefs about oneself are subject to the possibility of error. Beliefs about oneself may be false and inaccurate.4

4There

are different interpretations of the restricted conclusion depending on one’s views on trivial self-knowledge and substantive self-knowledge, e.g. one may hold that only substantive ­self-knowledge is in jeopardy and trivial self-knowledge is safe. I won’t enter into these details, because the distinction is not relevant here. Instead we need to distinguish, very generally, potential and actualized self-ignorance.

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Against this background, self-ignorance is significant for authenticity in three ways. First, it is a challenge for theories that claim that self-knowledge is causally connected to or constitutive of authenticity. Second, it presents an epistemic impediment for authenticity. Is authenticity even possible for human beings if they are potentially and frequently mistaken about their beliefs, emotions, values, and so on? On the go-to conception of authenticity as being true to oneself, self-ignorance matters because due to self-ignorance one might be systematically mistaken about the characteristics and the constituents of one’s self, making it impossible to be authentic. Upon closer inspection this pertinent question morphs into the following conceptual question about authenticity: How should we conceive of authenticity if human beings are potentially and frequently mistaken about their beliefs, emotions, values, and so on? The second challenge thus is connected to a third challenge that has self-ignorance as an issue for conceptions of authenticity: Does it even make sense to conceive of authenticity as being true to oneself if one acknowledges the existence of self-ignorance? This issue is related to a ­well-known problem for discussions of authenticity: What is the “true self” that one is supposed to be representing when one is authentic? (cf. e.g. Frankfurt 1988, p. 63 f.). But the present issue presents a different problem: how is authenticity possible in the face of these epistemic limitations and restrictions? The old problem concerns the object of authenticity, we might say, and the new problem, our present problem, on the other hand, concerns the conditions, steps and processes involved in being authentic. With respect to the first challenge we quickly see that self-ignorance is but an indirect challenge to theories that argue for a causal/constitutive connection between self-knowledge and authenticity. It doesn’t defeat the claims about ­self-knowledge and authenticity but instead induces us to re-evaluate self-knowledge. Once one is aware of the pervasive existence and the ever-present possibility of self-ignorance, self-knowledge acquires a different status. It remains distinctive, unique and valuable—epistemically and practically—but it becomes one of (at least) two self-reflective states for human beings. Think of an onlychild that gets a sibling. She is still distinctive, unique and valuable to her parents, but there is another child that is also distinctive, unique and valuable to her parents. Yet, I don’t want to overstretch this analogy. And since self-ignorance independently matters to authenticity, I won’t be engaging further with the effects of acknowledging self-ignorance on the relation between self-knowledge and authenticity. Instead, I focus on the relation between self-ignorance and authenticity. As I have suggested above, self-ignorance is part of the human condition since human

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beings are finite and fallible creatures. Thus, since it looks like self-ignorance is an impediment to authenticity, authenticity appears to be more difficult to attain for human beings than one might suppose initially. Once we acknowledge the significance of self-ignorance for human beings, we can phrase the second and third challenge in terms of two questions: (1) Is authenticity even possible for human beings if they are potentially and frequently mistaken about their beliefs, emotions, values, and so on? (2) How should we conceive of authenticity if human beings are potentially and frequently mistaken about their beliefs, emotions, values, and so on? I’ll devote the rest of the article to addressing these questions.

4 The Impact of Self-Ignorance on Human ­­SelfConceptions In examining the possibility of authenticity in the face of self-ignorance, I expound on the restricted conclusions regarding the reality and pervasiveness of self-ignorance. There are different kinds of self-ignorance: mere self-ignorance (lack of a second-order belief), mere false second-order belief, ­self-deception. And these different kinds of self-ignorance have different implications for authenticity. More importantly, self-ignorance can be potential or actualized. The general observation that human beings are finite and fallible beings in the first instance refers to an ever-present potential for self-ignorance. This potential partly constitutes being a human being. Human beings are inter alia such beings that are beset by self-ignorance and are subject to the possibility of ­self-ignorance. In addition, there is self-ignorance as the actualized potential for self-ignorance, namely when a subject has a false second-order belief or lacks a second-order belief about her attitudes or values. For example, we need to distinguish potentially deceiving oneself about one’s motives for not calling a close friend—a phenomenon that is possible and conceivable for all human beings— and actually deceiving oneself about one’s motives for not calling a close friend. The term self-ignorance applies to both cases. Identifying and addressing self-ignorance is doubly complicated because it involves reflection about intricate, opaque, conscious and unconscious contents, and because self-ignorance can be a mere potential or an actualized potential. Moreover, self-reflection about one’s attitudes or emotions may change or constitute one’s attitude (cf. Hampshire 1971, p. 244). This malleability makes identifying self-ignorance

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and positioning oneself towards self-ignorance a demanding undertaking. And these intricacies also extend to being authentic in the face of self-ignorance. Discussing the impact of self-ignorance on our self-conception by way of the following illustrative scenario is an indirect way of approaching the intricacies surrounding authenticity. Having recognized the pervasiveness of self-ignorance and then factoring in this awareness into one’s self-conception is like walking through a forest after having read the sign ‘There are poisonous snakes in this forest. If you’ve been bitten by a snake, call: 073 76253.’ When you are in this forest, you are alerted to the potential of being bitten by a snake. And there are four kinds of snake-related scenarios for you: (i) You don’t meet any snakes. (ii) You see a snake, but aren’t bitten by it. (iii) You see a snake, but you don’t recognize it, e.g. because you mistake it for a stick. (iv) You see a snake and are bitten by it. (i) leaves the potential unactualized, and (ii)–(iv) are possible actualizations of the potential for being bitten by a snake. This parallel helps illustrate the impact of recognizing self-ignorance on human beings, of living a life with self-ignorance recognized and what having recognized the potential for self-ignorance means. In other words: we can assess the relevance of self-ignorance for the human self-conception. The four potential scenarios translate as follows for self-ignorance—with ‘being bitten by a snake’ translating into ‘entertaining a merely false second-order belief about a particular mental attitude M’. We could also translate the list into ‘lacking a second-order belief about a particular mental attitude M’ and for abilities, character traits etc., but for the sake of briefness I focus on merely false ­second-order belief and on the generic mental attitude M. (i) You do not entertain a false second-order belief about M. (ii) You hold a false second-order belief about M, but you correct it. (iii) You consider a false second-order belief about M, but don’t endorse it. (iv) You hold a false second-order belief about M and have a false belief/engage in self-deception. These possible scenarios differ in their consequences on the subject that entertains a false second-order belief about M. But once we have distinguished these different instances and their effects on one’s self-conception, we see that

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s­elf-ignorance is not necessarily an epistemic impediment or even a general impediment to authenticity, in the sense of being true to oneself. The evidence on self-ignorance may be included in one’s self-conception and nevertheless per se not obstruct authenticity. Harmful self-ignorance is an impediment to authenticity, but that is not because of self-ignorance itself but because of the harmful content and effects of the particular self-ignorance. Self-ignorance itself is not harmful nor an impediment to authenticity. Even more, if we really take seriously the observation that self-ignorance is part of the human condition, we are led to a conception of the human life that recognizes the presence of self-knowledge as well as self-ignorance and that suggests an alternative approach to authenticity. Being ignorant, manifesting ­self-ignorance, is a feature of being human, and thus in being authentic, on the go-to definition, one must be true to oneself as a human being with a particular cognitive set-up, one must recognize that one is a human being with all characteristics that come with that status.5 Katja Vogt suggests that recognizing one’s human limitations is also at the center of Socrates’ interpretation of the Delphic “Know thyself”—which certainly is the most interesting invitation to acquiring self-knowledge. She argues that to Socrates, “‘know thyself’ means ‘Mortals you are, think mortal thoughts.’” Vogt explains: “Qua human thinker, one should and in some sense must concern oneself with matters as they figure in human life, and from a human perspective” (Vogt 2012, p. 36). Self-ignorance—potential and actual—is a characteristic of human beings, mortal beings. Knowing that self-ignorance belongs with being human is a central piece of self-knowledge. This conjecture is an elaboration of one of two possible reactions to recognizing that human beings are self-ignorant, or, in the parallel example, to learning that there are poisonous snakes in the forest one is entering. Snakes in the forest are just the way things are, and my walk in the forest is simply a walk in a forest with snakes. Similarly, my being human just means that I may be ignorant about my beliefs, attitudes, values and so on (lacking second-order beliefs or having false second-order beliefs). In “Mortals you are, think mortal thoughts” these

5This

insight is similar to the existentialist remarks about the human condition as “objective facticity” and “subjective transcendence” (Sartre 1956), and “good faith”, viz. authenticity, as “honest acceptance of your human condition” (Feldman and Hazlett 2013, p. 173). But the present insights about self-ignorance are more specialized because they concern cognitive capacities of human beings. They don’t require the existentialist framework and thus I develop them independently from it.

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limitations are acknowledged and applied to one’s beliefs about oneself and beliefs about the external world. If I choose to include self-ignorance in my self-conception, or snakes into the entities that constitute the forest that I’m walking in, I can either walk just as I had planned, not actively looking out for snakes, or I can be careful, looking out for snakes on my way through the forest. More particularly, I can try to avoid snakes and I can try to avoid being bitten by any snakes. There are different ways for reaching this aim: I can look out for snakes to avoid them or I can refrain from even walking through the forest. Ignoring the information on snakes in the forest and walking through the forest as if the existence of snakes hasn’t been pointed out to you is like ignoring the evidence on self-ignorance in your self-conception and in your everyday life. The effect of self-ignorance on the (or: on one’s) human self-conception are crucial for authenticity because they entail a changed self-conception and thus extend to authenticity as being true to oneself. We have returned to the first question: Is authenticity even possible for human beings if they are potentially and frequently mistaken about their beliefs, emotions, values, and so on? The worry is that under these circumstances human beings cannot be authentic. But this worry is unwarranted. Instead, as I argue in the next section, manifesting (some) ­self-ignorance is being authentic for human beings since self-ignorance is natural to human beings.

5 Is Authenticity Even Possible for Human Beings if They are Potentially and Frequently Mistaken About Their Beliefs, Emotions, Values, and so on? So let’s turn to authenticity. I have noted that the fact of self-ignorance changes the human self-conception and that this changed self-conception is relevant to the possibility of authenticity. Self-ignorance appears to be a challenge to authenticity. “Mortals you are, think mortal thoughts” provides one simple path to being authentic despite the fact of self-ignorance: admitting the reality and pervasiveness of self-ignorance—including it in one’s self-conception—is being authentic. But this reaction does not account sufficiently for self-ignorance as an epistemic challenge to authenticity. How is authenticity possible if you are systematically mistaken about your beliefs about yourself (or also: your self)? Being authentic by admitting self-ignorance does not address this issue. Before I turn to discussing self-ignorance as a challenge to the possibility of authenticity, I need to address a possible objection. This objection is based on one

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of Feldman and Hazlett’s four interpretations of authenticity, namely authenticity as spontaneity. On this interpretation, self-ignorance is conducive to authenticity because authenticity is a natural, untouched state that would be changed, maybe even skewed by self-reflection and self-knowledge. Hampshire’s observations about reflection “forming, or bringing into existence, [a] state of mind” (Hampshire 1971, p. 244) and the French saying “Il ne faut pas se regarder vivre” (Hampshire 1971, p. 233) complement this objection.6 The objection, in effect, notes that ­self-ignorance is not a challenge to authenticity but instead a necessary condition for authenticity. Yet, this objection only concerns one facet of self-ignorance and only one interpretation of authenticity. Self-reflection may indeed impede one’s natural way of expression but that does not entail that self-ignorance is required for all kinds of authenticity, nor for any general conception of authenticity. In particular, the objection would only be able to rehabilitate self-ignorance as lack of ­second-order belief about one’s beliefs, attitudes, values, and so on. Self-ignorance in the shape of false self-reflective belief or self-deception still presents a problem for authenticity. So, even though one form of self-ignorance may be conducive to one form of authenticity, this does not affect the evidence on selfignorance as an impediment to authenticity in general. Let’s turn to self-ignorance as a challenge and the first question: Is authenticity even possible for human beings if they are potentially and frequently mistaken about their beliefs, emotions, values, and so on? We need to adapt the ‘snake warning sign in forest’-scenario to address the particular issues of self-ignorance and authenticity in more detail. Instead of a warning sign for poisonous snakes, there is now a sign warning of possibly misleading signposts in the forest and giving a number you may call if you are lost. Again, one is taking a walk through a forest, let’s say one is taking the Hohensteinweg to Uto Kulm. The image of a walk is particularly fitting because being authentic is not a singular one-off undertaking, but rather a long-term project. The warning sign does not just warn the hiker of particular impeding entities as in the snake-case but alerts her to a fundamental problem that may be misleading her on her way to Uto Kulm and threatens the success of the project at large. After having read the sign on misleading signposts, there are different possible reactions—analogously to the above reactions to the warning sign about poisonous snakes. One may walk through the forest, conscious of the presence of

6Thanks

to Naomi Scheman for mentioning this article to me.

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misleading signposts, but not taking into account that one may be misdirected on one’s way to the top of Uetliberg that one wanted to walk up to. Or, one may follow the route without taking into consideration the possibility of misleading signposts, assuming that the signposts will just turn out to be correct. After all, it is just a possibility that the signposts are misleading. Or, one may follow the signposts but try to verify their directions, ask other hikers, call the number on the warning sign etc. Acknowledging self-ignorance is like accepting that the signposts may be misleading. The observation that admitting self-ignorance is being authentic amounts to following the path, without any impact of the information about misleading signpost on one’s hike. You know that the signposts may be misleading, but that is just how this path is. If you wanted to properly include the evidence in your hike, you would try to find out whether a particular signpost on the way is misleading or not. You would acquire further evidence, e.g. by looking at a map, asking other hikers, calling the number on the sign. Similarly, for self-ignorance: you need to check with fellow beings, with the world, with theories, with texts etc. whether your beliefs about yourself are correct or not. It would be unwise, maybe even irrational to ignore the evidence on the misleading signposts and on ­self-ignorance and not try to address it. To be sure, one may be acquiring faulty evidence that further substantiates the false belief. Or one may grow up and live in an environment that does not encourage self-reflection and so one lacks important second-order beliefs about one’s attitudes and so on. And some beliefs about one’s own attitudes, character traits etc. might forever remain false. But that does not mean that ­self-ignorance is always a detrimental problem nor that one cannot be authentic. These very pessimistic conclusions are the equivalent of not taking the path at all upon hearing that there are misleading signpost. Of course, you may decide to stop wanting to be authentic, but this would clearly be an overreaction and not practical. A moderately pessimistic attitude would be more appropriate.7 Self-ignorance is an impediment to authenticity but it does not make authenticity impossible. It is a challenge on the way to Uto Kulm, but it is not a rockfall that makes the very project impossible. So is authenticity even possible for human beings if they are potentially and frequently mistaken about their beliefs, emotions, values, and so on? Moderate pessimism about our intellect looks like the appropriate attitude in response to

7Cf.

Cassam (2015, p. 204) on moderate pessimism about self-knowledge.

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this question. But we can say more than this since moderate pessimism is not the full story: there is room for a meta-attitude towards one’s limitations. Adam Elga (2005) provides a vivid insight into the difficulties of reacting to the evidence on self-evaluation bias, one form of self-ignorance, and points to a solution for dealing with one’s limitation. “I was convinced that most people overrate themselves, and had no reason to think I was an exception. I mouthed the words ‘I’m not as good as I thought I was.’ But they didn’t sink in. As soon as it was time to make dinner, write a paper, or see a friend—indeed, as soon as it was time to do anything but sit in my office brooding about the positive illusion literature—the impact of that literature on my ­self-evaluations completely evaporated. Try it yourself. If you were at all convinced by the above summary of the positive illusion literature, see if it lowered your estimate of how good a writer you are. […] It is tough to make a sustained change in one’s self-evaluations. Just learning that people overrate themselves does not automatically effect such a change” (Elga 2005, p. 118).

In not changing one’s beliefs about oneself, one goes against the following rationality norm: “One ought not have beliefs that go against what one reasonably thinks one’s evidence supports” (Elga 2005, p. 116). Elga’s solution to this problem is distinguishing between a “reflective belief state” and a “non-reflective belief state”. The “reflective belief state takes into account the positive illusion literature, and [the] non-reflective one does not” (Elga 2005, p. 121). This solution is instructive for the issue of self-ignorance and authenticity even though it does look fairly ad hoc. It points in the direction of a more principled attitude. Quite generally, the most fruitful attitude in the area of self-ignorance would have to meet the following conditions: awareness of one’s fallibility, taking one’s beliefs (first-order and second-order) seriously, accepting challenges. A promising candidate is intellectual honesty; this disposition “to avoid falsehoods in one’s (individual and collective) belief set” (Tugendhat 2010, p. 101, translation by the author8) and to engage “in a dynamic of explicating and justifying” (Tugendhat 2010, p. 109, translation by the author9) would allow the subject to address her self-ignorance.

8Original:

“[…] die Vermeidung von Unwahrheit im bereits bestehenden eigenen (individuellen und kollektiven) Meinungssystem” (Tugendhat 2010, p. 101). 9Original: “eine Dynamik des Klärens und Begründens” (Tugendhat 2010, p. 109).

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Intellectual honesty is a formal attitude, it is a stance towards one’s beliefs and attitudes, not a particular set of beliefs and attitudes. Moreover, it is not identical to virtues like integrity that are more substantive (cf. Lynch 2004, p. 134). Instead, it contains openness towards one’s fallibility that may be manifest whenever one is engaging with the world and oneself. And such self-reflective openness is most probably a crucial component of being authentic despite the reality of ­self-ignorance. An attitude like intellectual honesty takes an important step towards explaining how authenticity is possible even though one may be (and is) frequently and systematically mistaken about one’s beliefs, emotions, values and so on.

6 How Should We Conceive of Authenticity in the Face of Self-Ignorance? For the final section of this paper I want to draw out the consequences of these insights for the conception of authenticity. I submit that acknowledging ­self-ignorance encourages an alternative conception of authenticity, a relational conception rather than the go-to individualistic ‘being true to oneself’-conception. In the misleading-signposts analogy I have suggested some options for following the path as planned despite the possibility of misleading signposts. Crucially, all options involved reaching out to fellow beings, including the world or texts or theories in one following the signposts on the path. The same holds true for dealing with self-ignorance. There is an undeniable social and relational component in addressing self-ignorance. I suggest that this social-relational character is also found in the conception of authenticity itself and points into the direction of a relational conception of authenticity. As I have stated in the beginning, authenticity is standardly understood as being true to oneself; the major participants in this relation are the subject and whatever it is that constitutes her self (herself). The above considerations concerning self-ignorance have certainly weakened the viability of this conception. Authenticity as a way of being is embedded in a social context that the standard conception does not capture adequately. Authenticity is not merely directed at oneself, it is also a public stance. Marina Oshana’s conception of authenticity goes towards a conception of authenticity that takes the social and public embeddedness of authenticity seriously. Oshana endorses Karl Jasper’s notion of authenticity as “truthfulness toward oneself and about oneself in word and in deed” (Oshana 2007, p. 424). On this basis and on the basis of Larry May’s

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elaboration of Jasper’s notion she gives the following description of being authentic and being inauthentic: “[O]ne who is authentic ‘meets head on his or her faults […] and regards oneself as at least partially responsible for them,’ not so much in the sense of having been the causal origin of these but in the sense of owning up to them, even perhaps of ‘standing behind one’s choices’ but of doing so even while not endorsing them and even if one feels alienated from them. […] By contrast, one is inauthentic or lives inauthentically when one is not honest with oneself and, perhaps, others about one’s position in the world and about one’s ability to transform or even take a stance with respect to that position” (Oshana 2007, p. 424 f., quotations from May 1991, p. 243).

Being authentic on this conception is fundamentally relational. You are authentic in your life as a human being in a community; you can only be authentic in circumstances that allow for authenticity. Following Oshana’s model, I suggest that being authentic thus may be more appropriately be understood as being truthful about oneself toward oneself and others. The main advantage of this conception is that it captures the social embeddedness of authenticity. The workings of self-deception also point towards a relational model of authenticity and inauthenticity. In her study of self-deception and lying Simone Dietz emphasizes that different kinds of self-deception are distinguished by the different roles of one’s social environment for self-deception: self-protection, weakness, and habitualized self-deception (Dietz 2017, p. 232, translation by the author10). The role of the social is also reflected in measures for avoiding selfdeception, as noted by Dietz: “the attitudes of one’s social environment, […] institutions of self-enlightenment, […] long-term strategies of committing oneself” (Dietz 2017, p. 230, translation by the author11) may support one’s attempts of avoiding self-deception. Therefore, authenticity, too, is also socially embedded and dependent on the state of one’s environment. A relational conception seems to avoid some of the problems of the ‘true to oneself’ conception since being truthful about oneself does not appeal to an ideal self that serves as an original or as a standard in the way that being true to oneself does. Being truthful about oneself puts emphasis on the subject’s attitude rather than the picture of matching up with oneself that being true to oneself transports.

10Original:

“Selbstschutz, Schwachheit, habitualisierte Selbsttäuschung” (Dietz 2017, p. 232). 11Original: “die Einstellung des sozialen Umfelds, […] Institutionen der Selbstaufklärung, […] langfristige Strategien der Selbstbindung” (Dietz 2017, p. 230).

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These considerations clearly do not suffice to substantiate this alternative conception of authenticity, but they point in a new direction for conceptualizing authenticity, and open up new fields of discussion. For example, one may look at work on honesty to explicate the nature of authenticity. Epistemological work on truthfulness would also promise new paths of studying authenticity—its nature and its (dis-)value. Once we have acknowledged that self-ignorance is a fact of human existence, we cannot but integrate it into our theory of authenticity and into any project of being authentic. Being authentic is a possible characteristic of creatures that have the capacity for self-knowledge and for self-ignorance. Thus, self-ignorance cannot outright prevent being authentic—otherwise, we would lose the very notion of authenticity since only infallible beings would be capable of being authentic. Authenticity and fallibility must not be incompatible. Instead, as Vogt demonstrates by spelling out Socrates’ interpretation of Know thyself for mortal beings, we have to aim for authenticity for mortal beings. A relational conception of authenticity may be exactly what authenticity for mortal beings consists in. Of course, particular instances of self-ignorance and self-knowledge may and do on occasion impede an agent’s authenticity, but human beings can acquire ­meta-attitudes to deal with their effects. Attitudes like intellectual honesty as well as interaction with fellow human beings are means for enabling authenticity despite any issues with self-ignorance. They won’t rule out self-ignorance indefinitely, but beings that are not subject to self-ignorance at all would have taken a crucial step towards infallibility and would certainly not be human. I doubt that authenticity would even matter to such beings.12

References Alicke, M.D., and O. Govorun. 2005. The Better-than-average effect. In The self in social judgment, ed. M.D. Alicke, D.A. Dunning, and J.I. Krueger, 85–106. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. Burge, T. 1996. Our entitlement to self-knowledge. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96: 91–116.

12Thanks

to Christine Bratu, Martin Hurni, Andrea Lailach-Hennrich, Vanessa Rampton, Naomi Scheman and Annett Wienmeister for helpful discussions of the claims in this paper.

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Cassam, Q. 2015. Self-knowledge for humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christman, J. 2009. The politics of persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dietz, S. 2017. Selbsttäuschung als sozialer Prozess. In Selbsttäuschung. Eine Herausforderung für Philosophie und Psychoanalyse, eds. E. Angehrn and J. Küchenhof, 223– 239. Weilerswist: Velbrück. Dunning, D. 2011. The Dunning-Kruger effect. Advances in experimental social psychology 44: 247–296. Elga, A. 2005. On overrating oneself… and knowing it. Philosophical Studies 123 (1–2): 115–124. Feldman, S. 2015. Against authenticity: Why you shouldn’t be yourself. Lanham: Lexington Books. Feldman, S., and A. Hazlett. 2013. Authenticity and self-knowledge. Dialectica 67 (2): 157–181. Frankfurt, H. 1988. Identification and externality. In The Importance of what we care about, ed. Harry G., 58–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garcia, E.V. 2015. The virtue of authenticity. In Oxford studies in normative ethics, vol. 5, ed. M. Timmons, 272–295. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hampshire, S. 1971. Freedom of Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Krueger, J. 1998. Enhancement bias in descriptions of self and others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 24 (5): 505–516. Lynch, M. 2004. True to life: Why truth matters. Cambridge.: MIT Press. May, L. 1991. Metaphysical guilt and moral taint. In Collective responsibility: Five decades of debate in theoretical and applied ethics, eds. L. May and S. Hoffman, 239–254. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. McKay, R., and D. Dennett. 2009. The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 493–510. Moran, R. 2001. Authority and estrangement: An essay on self-knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nisbett, R., and T. Wilson. 1977. Telling more than we know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review 84 (3): 231–259. Open Science Collaboration. 2015. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 349 (6251). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716. Oshana, M. 2007. Autonomy and the question of authenticity. Social Theory and Practice 33 (3): 411–429. Plato. 1993. Philebus (trans: Frede, D.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Sartre, J. 1956. Being and nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press. Schwitzgebel, E. 2012. Self-Ignorance. In Consciousness and the self: New essays, ed. J. Liu and J. Perry, 184–197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shoemaker, Sydney. 2009. Self-Intimation and second order belief. Erkenntnis 71: 35–51. Taylor, S.E., and J.D. Brown. 1988. Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin 103 (2): 193–210. Taylor, S.E., and J.D. Brown. 1994. Positive illusions and well-being revisited: Separating fact from fiction. Psychological Bulletin 116 (1): 21–27.

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Tugendhat, E. 2010. Anthropologie statt Metaphysik, 2. edn. München: Beck. Vogt, K. 2012. Belief and Truth: A skeptic reading of plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press. PD Dr. Nadja El Kassar  Postdoc Researcher at the Chair for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Zurich. Habilitation at ETH Zurich and PhD at the University of Potsdam. Research interests: epistemology of ignorance, social epistemology, philosophy of perception.

Authenticity as a Benchmark of Human Selfhood? On Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Self Karin Hutflötz 1 Introduction According to current usage, being ‘authentic’ is used as a high value word today, but what social or ethical claims are associated with it? It should be asked to what extent a person can and should meet this requirement to be authentic—both in terms of their current performance or self-representation and in terms of their development over time. In what context does this claim make sense, what legitimizes it, or does it only prove to be a fake or “delusion of authenticity” (Bauer 2018, p. 64), just used as “a pathos formula of postmodernism” (Strub 2009, p. 39) which depends on the myth that beyond social roles there is ‘a true self’ or ‘genuine ego’, and that it is desirable to live out this self as unfiltered as possible. Criticism of this is usually limited to the objection that it disregards the social conditionality and development of the self, and that people are thus overtaxed on the one hand and instrumentalized in market politics on the other (Honneth 2010; Illouz 2017; Hall 2015).

K. Hutflötz (*)  Catholic University of Eichstätt, Eichstätt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_4

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2 On the Distinction Between the Concept and Phenomenon of Authenticity 2.1 What Does It Mean to be ‘Authentic’? 2.1.1 The Concept of Authenticity and its Underlying Idea of the Human Self First, the term is to be examined with regard to its categorically diverse use, and it should be asked why ‘authenticity’ is considered desirable in such different areas, above all as the measure of all things in the ranking of self and human competencies. Whereas adaptation and behavioral inconspicuousness used to be regarded as social norms and criteria for mental health or social recognition, today it is not least the attribution of being or living ‘authentically’. In the double sense of originality and autonomy (cf. Oshana 2007, p. 23 f.), it advanced to become a primarily admired virtue in the global mainstream, as evidenced by the fact that there is hardly anything today that would actually have more weight in individual self-assessment than in social coexistence. Classical virtues and normative attributes, such as being fair, respectful, polite or appreciative of others, are certainly still regarded as good and important, but do not have the current status and cult status of being ‘authentic’. The social respect that goes along with this attribution even seems to be independent of how ethically questionably, derogatorily or “asocially” a person behaves. Thus, Bauer (2018) refers to the use of words of authenticity in the mass media, according to which this attribute unquestionably positively connotated is ascribed precisely to persons who apparently have no consideration for the social and know no other measure than their advantage and their moods.1 One is obviously only authentic if one turns one’s inner being or supposedly unadulterated nature unfiltered outwards.2 Behind the claim to be or live one’s 1Bauer

refers to the examples of Dieter Bohlen or Donald Trump. In fact, the main reason Trump's voters cited in polls was his “authenticity” (Bauer 2018, p. 83). Both style icons of public life show blatant egocentrism and ruthlessness as their hallmarks, leaving no doubt that they always have only their own advantage in mind and no problem with pushing themselves forward in the figurative and literal sense or imposing themselves on others, and accept only their own needs as justified. But precisely this seems to be regarded as “authentic” and admirable in form, when one never hesitates and says without scruples what he thinks and feels, means and wants in the situation to the other person. 2“Authentisch ist der Mensch offenbar nur dann, wenn er sein Inneres, seine vermeintlich unverfälschte Natur, ungefiltert nach außen stülpt” (Bauer 2018, p. 67).

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‘real’ or ‘true’ self is the assumption of a substantial core self or “a person’s essential character” (Frankfurt 1998, p. 132) as a determinable and already existing potentiality: as if there were an already to be realized ‘self’ as an inner form template and final cause at the same time. This is also the aim of the critique of the discourse on authenticity from a sociological perspective, since it presupposes that our unadulterated self finds itself in ourselves and does not develop in our interaction with culture and society. The authenticity discourse refrains from the fact that people in society always act in different roles that change depending on the situation, in which people by no means always give the same answers to the same questions and react to similar stimuli with the same emotions. The claims associated with the demand for authenticity, even more the underlying self-concepts, are thus not only paradoxical, but often semantically ambiguous. It is precisely the contradictions in the inflationarily used claim to authenticity that shed light on this mythically charged and simultaneously empty concept. On the one hand, the concept of authenticity is opposed to that of staging; on the other hand, there is hardly another place where there is more struggle for authenticity than in (self-)staging, as can be observed in the art of acting and in pop culture. On the one hand, there is an almost ethical demand on the individual to be as authentic as possible; on the other hand, realization seems virtually impossible, especially under the conditions of capitalist mass society, which thus post-authentically dictates behavior and individuation on the market.3 Nevertheless, authenticity in relation to a person has an exclusively positive connotation in everyday language and knows no gradual gradation. That means, one cannot be ‘too authentic’ or ‘a bit authentic’. The attribute stands for an either-or, which is not used in a negative sense either (quite different in comparison to e.g. being perfect or perfectionist). Also in the specialist discourse of Psychology or in Pedagogy, it is explicitly or implicitly regarded as a qualitative measure of selfhood and personality formation. This is reflected, as stated above, also in popular codes and contexts, as in fashion, in pop music, in art, where it is meant as a cult value. At least the consistently positive evaluation is common to the semantically diverse uses, despite or because of the excessive use of this attribution, which is common in various language games. The question posed by the title about a qualitative measure of selfhood requires clarification of what it means to be ‘authentic’ in relation to persons

3Honneth

examines this under the buzzword “organized self-realization” and concisely points out the market-dictated “paradoxes of individualization” (Honneth 2010, p. 202 f.).

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with regard to current philosophical positions. Here the criterion of coherence is usually4 mentioned, in the sense of a claim and the urge to be “truthful”, “real”, “original”, which is generally imputed to men (Jaspers 1971, p. 35). Or one speaks of honesty or “being true to oneself” (Taylor 1992, p. 29),5 usually without asking what it means to be true, real or genuine oneself, if a person should and how one could be and remain true to oneself. Taylor has made significant contributions to the anthropological premises and ethical requirements associated with the notion and contemporary understanding of ‘authenticity’, which the present time also calls ‘age of authenticity’ and which continues to shape the discourse on the notion and meaning of personal authenticity to this day. Based on this, we will examine which concept of the self is assumed both in Taylor and in the discourse of authenticity in general, and which ideals and implicit demands on individuation and socialization underlie it. He himself clarifies his concept and the guiding idea of (post-)modern selfhood and becoming self as follows: “Being true to oneself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity, and to the goals of self-fulfilment or ­self-realization in which it is usually couched” (Taylor 1992, p. 29).

4As

little precise as the aforementioned criterion of coherence in literature can be, psychology, for example, focuses very much on the negative phenomenon, the diversely-known and well-studied forms of “incoherence” of the ­self-relationship (Jaspers 1973, p. 107), which describes all possible variants and degrees of personal disintegration, forms of dissociation or fragmentation of the self as an umbrella term. The positive concept of the integrative self and the unity execution of the ego, which is associated with the coherence criterion as a claim to authenticity, is derived from this, but not exactly defined or described from a psychological-psychiatric point of view. Although this is hardly justified, it is formulated in general terms as a fundamental claim: “Der Mensch will wahrhaftig sein, will wirklich, will echt sein” (Jaspers 1971, p. 35). 5In defining authenticity as “being true to oneself”, Taylor thus falls back on an early interpretation of Herder, who thus coined the ideal of self-determination: a person is authentic when he is honest or faithful to himself, and that is when he develops his life on the basis of his own values. Herder was the first to speak of authenticity as one’s own measure of selfhood: „Jeder Mensch hat ein eignes Maß, gleichsam eine eigne Stimmung aller sinnlichen Gefühle zueinander” (Herder 1887, p. 291).

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As can be inferred from this exemplary definition, in the context of the attribution of authenticity the self is usually spoken of as if it were a timelessly guaranteed, already existing entity, “an own measure” of authenticity (Herder 1887, p. 291: see Note 5). Selfhood is understood as an individually given potentiality that can only be unfolded, similar to a voice that has not yet been developed but is present, which requires expression and unfolding and thus realization. Although Taylor refuses elsewhere to introduce the ‘self’ as a particular object that would be substantially present and could be located or found objectified, he does not believe that the ‘self’ is a specific object. And yet, according to his dictum, there is a certain way in which every human being is original and can implement universal values and ideals (cf. Taylor 2007, p. 475), achieve his goals and shape his life, “against the demands of external conformity” (Taylor 1992, p. 67). Authenticity proves to be an existential as well as normatively understood measure of selfhood, at the same time a categorically unclear concept that semantically oscillates between originality, self-determination and inwardness.

2.1.2 On the Relevance of a Phenomenological View of Authenticity In the following, the term and its usage will be related to the question of the phenomenological content of personal authenticity. To what extent can a person, ‘whole’, ‘real’ or ‘true’, be himself? All three attributes are used synonymously in this context, whereby the content of meaning is different depending on the context. The claim to be ‘whole’ suggests that one is otherwise only partly there, and refers to a plural self-understanding, as if the self is manifold or at least polyphonic, and only at times unanimous or whole. To be ‘real’ or ‘true’ oneself as synonymous with ‘authentic’, on the other hand, suggests that one can also be unreal or false, be it because somebody’s pretending to be somebody else or other, be it because one is only pretending with one voice or partly stands for something. What kind, therefore, is the human self that such is possible? How is it that one can put oneself in relation to oneself and others in several voices or in a variety of ways, that one can ever behave differently—and that one can always evaluate as coherent or inconsistent to the extent of a (by what?) set self? How does a harmonious relationship between self and world take its measure (to what extent is it individual or can it be formulated in general terms?), and to what extent is authenticity a legitimate description of it? As legitimate as the critique of the concept of authenticity and its anthropologically questionable preconditions may be, so little does it contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenal content of being ‘authentic’, which expresses itself at least as a human striving for individuation and integrity, for really or

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completely being oneself. Even if one questions the hype about this ideal as a construct or chimera of (post-)modernity, the fact that inner conflicts, situational dissatisfaction with oneself, dissension and sometimes despair are inevitable experiences of individual development and human self-relations in the course of a lifetime, all this refers via negationis to the ideal of being coherent or one with oneself.6 With a focus on the phenomenal content of personal authenticity, the following will therefore examine what it means and presupposes to be completely “in the self” (Schwartz 1997, p. 36). To what extent can or should a person be or remain true to himself, and satisfy the claim to be ‘real’ or ‘true’ to himself? And in what sense can one speak of authenticity as a qualitative measure of human selfhood? In the following, answers to these questions will be sought, particularly in the analysis of Sören Kierkegaard’s (1941) groundbreaking analyses of the structure and dynamics of human self-development. Especially with regard to the question posed here about the phenomenal content of authenticity, the topicality of his concept is measured by the fact that he explains both the formal coherence of self- or ego-consciousness that persists throughout one’s life (i.e. that people can basically refer to themselves as one and the same self or ego for the rest of their lives, despite all possible crises, breaks, transformations) as well as the fact that the determination of who or what one is is in fact permanently subject to relational change. For both physically and mentally, no human being is ever the same, and this is due to his constantly changing relationship to himself, by at the same time behaving towards others. Recent publications in particular have identified Kierkegaard as the main exponent of an individuation theory according to which selfhood and personality formation can only take place intersubjectively and relationally, in a mutually reflexive interaction with others (Rudd 2012) and in principle only challenged by others (Liebsch 2006). In this sense, according to Kierkegaard, the self is both “a

6Due

to the experience of a strong or weak selfhood, psychologists even talk about the real or “false self” in psychology (Winnicott 1965; Kohut 2015). During the last decades they have gained a lot of new insights into the structure and dynamics of human selfhood by successful therapies (see R. Schwartz 1997), all based on “the self as a dynamic multiplicity of I-positions [or parts] between which dialogical or monological relationships may emerge” (Hermans 2012). And Hermans argues that “multiplicity and unity are not mutually exclusive but inclusive” because of “a core sense of self” (Zahavi 2008). Schwartz’s ­forward-thinking analysis also defines the Self as a manifold system and “the core of a person”, but he describes it as a quality state of the inner system, not as a substantial and timeless given entity (Schwartz 1997, p. 232).

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dynamic process” and “always a historical self, so that history is then a product of ‘becoming a self’” (Patios 2013, p. 104). Above all, however, the self is not a thing or something that can be examined from the 3rd person’s perspective and thus empirically objectified, but rather a specific dynamic and qualitative process that demands the primacy of the first person’s perspective in order to be examined, as Zahavi, in the tradition of Kierkegaard, explains in relevant publications (Zahavi 2008).

2.2 What Does It Mean to Be an Individual? 2.2.1 Sören Kierkegaard’s Normative Turn in Questioning Human Selfhood Kierkegaard’s philosophy makes a decisive contribution to the question of how personal selfhood develops qualitatively, above all with its concept of a relational structure of the self and a recursive dynamic as a double movement of self and world reference. In his late work The Sickness to Death the Danish philosopher clarified the structure of selfhood: “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 9).

From an analytical point of view, he asked for the main conditions and principles of becoming an individual self due to its dialogical rather than its reflective structure. He figured out that the inner and outer conflicts and despair every human is facing sometimes are results of not being able to relate “to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 10), his “formula” for becoming a real or authentic self. And vice versa, not to be conscious of having a self, and not to be willing to be its own self, is “despair” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 14). What it means to be or to have a self is a current object of research not only in today’s neurobiology, psychology and philosophical anthropology. Kierkegaard’s contribution to this is his decisive break with the idealistic thinking of being an ‘I’ and a subject towards an exploration of the structure and dynamics of becoming a self. What Hegel and Kierkegaard have brought out is a change in the perspective of the question: No longer ‘What is a subject?’ (insofar as it exists in the epistemological perspective, i.e. the question is no longer asked here about the conditions of the possibility of knowing oneself), but with the dawn of modernity,

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the question is asked: How does individuation concretely proceed and what does self-education qualitatively mean? How does subjectivation, which proves to be a historical interplay and dialogical interplay with the world and the opposite, succeed or fail? “For Kierkegaard the self is not a static entity but a dynamic and unfolding reality, something I must strive to become. One is not a self but becomes a self as an ethical-religious task to be actualized” (Sousa 2012, p. 37).

This philosophy of self uncovers the dynamic form and intersubjective structure of individuation and thus refers to the unbreakable relativity of subject and society. But where does self-education, which takes place in the constant interplay between claim and correspondence to situation and encounter, take its measure for real or true selfhood, for coherence and integrity, and thus for authenticity? Literally, the word does not occur in Kierkegaard’s writing, because the term is used as a personal attribute only much later. But in the matter and question mentioned it is central to Kierkegaard’s concept of a qualitative-normative analysis of existence—with regard to its unjustifiable individuality and permanent relativity. Stokes speaks in this context of the “normative turn” initiated with Kierkegaard in the debate on personal identity (Stokes 2015, p. 24). Valco regards this as “a resource in our search for personal authenticity”, because “Kierkegaard here grounds authentic subjectivity in a double relatedness of a human individual’s self—as self relates to itself and as this relatedness relates to Other in faith” (Valco 2016, p. 103). Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death develops a concept of selfhood that has been increasingly received to this day and that results from the dynamic interplay in the practices of world and life play, namely through the nature and quality of the self-reference.7 In this respect, human selfhood is not based on a substantial core of an unchangeable ego, but on a recursive relationship whose specific dynamics result from a double form of reference. “Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 10). This succeeds above all in the explicitly questioning behavior towards oneself, in the claim of encounter and reference

7“A

synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.” If “the relation relates itself to its own self, the relation is then the positive third term, and this is the self” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 9).

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to other things. From this arises the challenge to position oneself, as it happens in judging, deciding and any correspondence to the demands of the situation.8 In this way, one measures the scope of possibilities opened up in each case (which is why we can each act anew and never the same), but at the same time also the necessities of situation, context and counterpart (which is why we can act adequately and potentially be ‘authentic’, which can only be said in interaction and reflection). By placing himself in relation to both determinations, he behaves positively towards them, takes the step of synthesis and acts as ‘himself’. Precisely because of this, possibility and necessity come into a human measure and the individual as a person takes shape as a counterpart in terms of time and fact. Therefore, the assessment of possible authenticity can also only be made from the outside or in the 1st person’s perspective in retrospect, in self-reflection. According to Kierkegaard’s understanding, what the synthesis step achieves and from which the self emerges as “the positive third” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 13) is the transition from mere contradiction to the factual interplay of opposites. This also corresponds to the fact that one can never ‘have’ the successful synthesis permanently and as a state, but at best it is only instantaneous. For as Hegel, who coined this dialectical figure of thought, accentuated in Die Wissenschaft der Logik II, “something, then, is alive only in so far as it contains the contradiction in itself, and that is the power to grasp and endure the contradiction in itself” (Hegel 1969, p. 76, translation by the author9). Self-becoming is therefore not a process with an objectifiable result, does not produce a self that can be statically fixed and thus realized, but rather finds its goal in this relational-recursive becoming in a measure of equilibrium (cf. Kierkegaard 1941, p. 10) that gives the self a name in Kierkegaard. Although ‘authenticity’ is used as a static concept and as a personal trait that one has or does not have, that has no clue in the matter as can be shown with Kierkegaard. Because no human being is authentic, whole or true, at any time and everywhere, in the required double movement of self- and world reference. In this respect, authenticity categorically does not stand for a state, but for a quality of the execu-

8By

presenting itself not only as itself, but also as testified to by the other (Liebsch 2006, Chapter VIII), the self is initially not an object of knowledge or narration. Rather, it exists as testified or as dependent on testimony and proves to be challenged by the other to be ‘someone’—for itself and for others. 9Original: “Etwas ist also lebendig, nur insofern es den Widerspruch in sich enthält, und zwar diese Kraft ist, den Widerspruch in sich zu fassen und auszuhalten” (Hegel 1969, p. 76).

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tion of existence and its coherence with regard to a ‘self’ of whatever kind in the context of its references. The “how”, the way of setting oneself in relation is in the best case of the “self” being a successful middle between the limiting and the unlimited, between freedom and necessity, insofar as it is the adequate measure to the absolute and to the fact of uniqueness. This concept, however, speaks against an interpretation of autonomy or ­self-education as a one-sided self-choice in the notion of active feasibility or in the existentialist-postmodern misunderstanding of free design and self-constitution, which have as popular a tradition as they are empirically uncovered and shape Western self-understanding. On the contrary, Kierkegaard shows how important it is to understand the dynamics of this interplay as the form of becoming one’s self: on the one hand to be given to oneself and on the other hand to shape oneself and one’s life.10 In this context, the essential human urge for autonomy can also be understood as self-determination, understood here as the ability and unavoidable task of self-reference and self-determination. This carries from the beginning all efforts of self-education: the basic need to be self-determined, but understood in its dialectic and double sense to let oneself be determined (by what meets) and to define oneself anew (in recursive form).11 Only if both steps are carried out sufficiently often will it be possible from an early age to develop a ‘healthy’ identity in the sense of a community-capable consciousness on the basis of realistic self-awareness—instead of forming a false ­self-confidence and narcissistic world relationship by adopting self-images dictated by the mere imagination and desires. The reference to ‘identity’ here does not mean the concept of a static-solid or once achieved, constant ‘identity’, as the confusion of self-image with selfhood often suggests. What is meant is the telos of becoming one’s own in the sense of Kierkegaard: as the dynamics of the double movement, as a developed ability or sense, which expresses itself in a mobility of the mind to self and world refer-

10Rudd

(2012) also refers to this: “to understand the tension between the sense that we are responsible for shaping or authoring our own lives, and the sense that there is something… definite about ourselves that has to be accepted as simply given” (p. 3). In this context, he also criticizes Sartre, Frankfurt and Korsgaard insofar as they overestimate and overemphasize the meaning of “self-choice”; however, he also rejects fatalism for reasons of reason (cf. p. 42 f.). 11For this reason, it is rightly pointed out in the literature that the self in Kierkegaard “as a complex activity” (Woolever 2013, p. 21) is both individual and relational: “the self is both individual and constitutive relational” (ibid., p. 3), and in this respect it is a selfhood that categorically means an “essential relationship” (Boomgaarden 2016, p. 36).

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ence, as the ability, depending on the situation, context and person, to relate to oneself by behaving as appropriately as possible and thus ‘authentically’ to what one encounters. The blurriness or the latitude that is undoubtedly inherent in the criterion of ‘appropriateness’ here does not detract from the substance. Just as, for example, learning the language from an early age and increasingly enabling the assessment of semantic and syntactic ‘appropriateness’, one is also enabled to become a self by practicing self-reference according to Kierkegaard’s concept. Hühn therefore speaks of Kierkegaard’s “concretely maieutic ethics” (Hühn 2009, p. 205, translation by the author12).

2.2.2 Awareness and Acceptance as Conditional Moments of Authenticity According to Kierkegaard, all forms of non-authentic selfhood are at the core “despair”, which corresponds to the lack of not being able to relate neither to oneself nor to others, therefore not to experience oneself as one and to be able to act coherently—as the person in the situation and context in which one shows oneself in all diversity and refers to one’s opposing destinies. In this respect it is a lack of consciousness, of “transparency” (Kierkegaard 1941, pp. 11, 154) with regard to the respective situatively set selfhood or the refusal to accept oneself in the here and now. As man’s attempt to get rid of his self, it is at the same time despair about the failure of this attempt and thus bears witness to the fact that man cannot get rid of his self as claim and task in mutual relation to himself and the world.13 According to Kierkegaard, the fact that “despair is precisely the ordinary thing” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 18) and not the rare thing is shown by the fact that “not a single person lives without a restlessness dwelling within, a discord, a disharmony, a fear of something unknown […] of a possibility of existence or a fear of oneself” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 17 f.). The impetus of self-movement and at the same time its problem is that opposing moments of movement have an effect and contain an ambivalent temptation to let the other be. The condition of the possibility, however, that we are at all able to refer to both moments or poles at the same time, is the fact that we are equipped with ‘key senses’, both with a sense for the temporal and for the eternal; for necessity, as for freedom; for the finite

12Original:

Kierkegaard’s “konkret-maieutischer Ethik” (Hühn 2009, p. 205). “All immediacy, despite its illusory security and tranquility, is fear and therefore, quite logically, most fear of nothingness” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 25). And this is because immediately no last reason and stable ground of existence is visible or observable, but instead remains in the dark and can only be caught up in the light of reflection.

13Cf.

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and the eternal in its inexhaustible forms of encounter and appropriation of the world. These constitutive moments determine selfhood with regard to its form, and thus formally indicate that which is set in it in an unavailable way and is principally given to the execution of existence. However, they say nothing about the extent and quality of its realization or concretization in detail. Kierkegaard summarizes this in the counter-formula to “despair” and as a definition for what deserves the name ‘Self’, namely the successful execution of human existence in the conscious synthesis step and in the self-becoming through affirmation: “By relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it” (Kierkegaard 1941, pp. 11, 43). This means that human self-formation stands and falls with the two conditions of becoming aware of oneself and accepting it both in recognition and in will.14 Kierkegaard “reminds us precisely of the importance of an intentional cultivation of the individual human self, reflecting and relating to itself and the (human) other, while consciously receiving its being, dignity, and direction from the (divine) Other. A valuable lesson for us rests in learning to live with a creative tension between immanence and transcendence, caring unreservedly about the temporal and hoping ferociously for the eternal” (Valco 2016, p. 96). Or, as George McLean argues, shifting our reflection from being a work of deduction working in abstraction from the process of human life, to deep engagement under the pressure of life’s challenges at the center of human concerns. In summary, “Kierkegaard’s ‘authentic individual’” (Valco 2016, p. 99) expresses himself in the living presence of selfhood—instead of in the representation of roles, expectations and self-images; in responsible, since radically responsive action—the measure of person, situation and context, instead of following the socially sanctioned primacy of self-assertion and egocentricity; and last but not least in personal and moral integrity which should not be confused with coherence in action and judgement. However, this being oneself, whole or true, must not be properly understood as a given, already existing “true self” (Lesmeister 2009, p. 85), as should become clear through Kierkegaard’s relational dynamics of being and becoming a self. With a specifically relational instead of substantial concept of the self, Kierkegaard links the ethical basic question of the good life to the quality and

14“By relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the Power which constituted it.” This is not only the way he defines the process of becoming a self, but also the definition of faith (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 154).

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task of an ‘authentic’ becoming self and thus to a dynamic form of development. A development, the formal challenge of which lies in the fact that, in the respective situation and context, one must as far as possible ‘completely’ or ‘truthfully’ enter into a dialogical relationship with oneself and relate oneself again to the diverse, often contradictory dispositions, determinations or voices of one’s own person. As Kierkegaard can point out, the fact that this is possible in principle and necessary for any form of coherence experience is due to the “dialogi­ cal feature of our condition“ (Taylor 1992, p. 35) and structure of the self, which is given as a formal definition with the possibility of reflecting first and second order. Accordingly, it is not always possible, let alone automatic, to be one’s self true or ‘authentic’ (in “identification and satisfaction”, as Frankfurt says, 1987, p. 159 ff.), but requires self-development and education to an adequate and integral self-relationship. This is due to the recursive-relational dynamics of the self, as Kierkegaard explains in detailed analysis. To truly become oneself therefore means to become more and more aware of oneself in the dialogue of one’s opposing motives and concerns, regarding one’s possibilities and limits, freedoms and necessities. That is to say, to be able to relate oneself in the contrasts of one’s own provisions to the situation and context in order to acknowledge that “each of our voices has something of its own to say” (Taylor 1992, p. 29). Self-development as a qualitative form of development therefore demands the ability to accept oneself in one’s polyphony, which can succeed insofar as, according to Kierkegaard, we are endowed with our own individual sense or measure of coherence for ourselves. The aforementioned double movement of reflection and affirmation thus enables the synthesis step to a respective situational ‘authentic’ ego, which at least from the first person’s perspective allows the experience of being wholly, really or truly oneself in the situation. Thus, in the end, both the human struggle for true or ‘authentic’ selfhood and the failure to meet an external requirement of authenticity and its ethical implications can be understood. Ultimately, Kierkegaard aims to show that being ‘authentic’ is not a characteristic of persons, but a quality characteristic of situations or a measure of situational action and successful selfhood in execution.

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2.3 What Does It Mean to be Faithful to Oneself? 2.3.1 Criteria of Authentic Selfhood and Behavior: Phenomenological Insights The perspective that makes Kierkegaard strong is the 1st person’s perspective under the central question of when I am whole or true and thus ‘authentic’ myself. Both formulations, however, emphasize different facts: one suggests that there is half or all of selfhood. What is meant is not a numerical identity, but integrity in the sense of a qualitatively experienced selfhood, whether stated from the 2nd or 3rd person’s perspective or experienced from the 1st person’s perspective. To be ‘whole’ in the self does not mean to be indistinguishable, but to be participative and unanimous, as Kierkegaard’s concept of authenticity suggests.15 To be truly oneself is in contrast to being ‘unfeigned’, and corresponds to the idea of being as sincere as possible, not only to keep oneself in roles and not to stage oneself. It means, of course, not just representing something. The attribution of ‘authentic’ in this sense is mainly used from a 2nd or 3rd person’s perspective, either in the pejorative sense of “You are not authentic!” (in the sense of inconsistent, false or disguised) or in the recognizing sense of “he or she is authentic”. The qualitative criteria of the attribution of authenticity, which justify the judgement above all in the positive use of terms, are often vague and little explicit. But with what right can one deny the other to be true or authentic? The negative attribution of being ‘not authentic’ occurs preferentially and, in a certain sense, justifiably when one always behaves in the same way, unmoved by context, situation and counterpart, or holds oneself linguistically and gesturally in stereotypes. The negative attribution is also largely independent of the quality of the respective behavior, language or habitus. For it is also the case when the person appears in the same habitus of apparent perfection, but at the same time remains conspicuously untouched by context, situation and person(s) he encoun-

15The

dialogic structure and diversity of the Self presented, manifests itself in different voices, opposing motifs and inclinations that make up a person depending on context and situation. Thus, the Self structurally encompasses this plurality of selfhood, but at best brings it to unity in an ephemeral synthesis step. Kierkegaard’s insights gained in phenomenological investigations and deductive structural analysis are now empirically confirmed in various forms of therapy, especially in those who work with the “Inner Team” or “EgoState Therapy” or “Schema therapy”, for example. But the theory of authentic selfhood according to Kierkegaard, presented here, finds most correspondence in the concept of the IFS (Internal Family System), a highly effective form of therapy developed by R. Schwartz (1997).

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ters or interacts with—as if the world were only an audience, faceless mass and thus reified as the occasion and recipient of self-portrayal. It is different when people come into tangible contact with what they encounter and thus engage in transformative self-determination, which enables self-determination (understood here as genitivus subectivus, not objectivus!) through the respective context, the situation and the person encountering it. Then one is or acts not necessarily coherently, but with integrity. With Kierkegaard, it is not a matter of referring to oneself as an object, that is, to one’s self-image and the self-concepts of oneself once conceptualized, by relating to what I mean to be or how I think to be seen, or what I have thought and said before. Rather, it is a matter of daring the “leap” (Kierkegaard 1941, p. 33) into the openness of the respective situation and each new self-encounter by being prepared to ask oneself anew and to question oneself in the face of the respective encounter in a Socratic-radical way: to ask oneself in the inner “conversation of the soul with itself” (Plato, Sophist 264a),16 what I see and think here and now, what moves me right now, what appeals to me. As if everything were new every time, including the encounter, the gaze and the way of behaving towards oneself and others. Inasmuch as one succeeds in being able to respond from this attitude of presence and devotion to the situation, which is at least always possible, the person appears particularly harmonious or ‘authentic’. The fact that we are in a position to respond in a new and specific way to the individual demands of the situation, although no one can know in advance how he answers and what arises, proves us to be permanently in transformation and open for it (see Hutflötz 2017, p. 70 f.). This means that it is not the person who changes his identities in a particularly ‘authentic’ way like others change their shirts, who stages himself stylistically or outwardly in a particularly changeable way, but the person who can think and feel self-reflexively in the encounter, depending as far as possible on the situation and context, who can interact appropriately with the body and language. The in-between and the engagement with the (ultimately never controllable nor predictable) interplay in the encounter are decisive. If one wants to identify a positive content of authenticity, understood as an inherent claim to be entirely within the self or truly there, in phenomenological analysis, then the use and attribution of the attribute has its hold in the capacity for reference and transforma-

16Plato,

Sophist 264a: “that thought is conversation of the soul with itself” (translated by F.N. Fowler).

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tion of the self. As a result, authenticity should not be understood as a description of personal character or condition over time or life span, but as a situational and ephemeral category of the present that is always open to success from moment to moment.

2.3.2 Lessons from Acting and the Performing Arts One does not seem authentic then, because one does not play a role or does not stage oneself in any way and present oneself on the respective stage or on the set of life. But one appears ‘authentic’ when one presents the role required and assumed in the situation, not only represents it, and thus conveys it. Even with actors this is the measure of their authenticity and credibility. Even if they play the same role every day, it seems to be true and real if they succeed in relating themselves lively to context, situation and counterpart every time. With Kierkegaard, it is necessary to relate and behave towards oneself, even in one’s contradictions, conflicts, opposing traits and motives, in a perceptive and appreciative way. This would find expression in a harmonious interplay of claim and correspondence to context, situation and respective counterpart. Roles and staging can only be identified in the repetition,17 if the comparison is possible between the once so and then once again recognizable given. So you say, ‘he was playing Hamlet’. You can only say that if you know ‘Hamlet’ once you have seen the representation of the figure. Then each performance of the same is a representation of this role, once fixed or sketched in writing, which comes to personal presence in the act of representation, in the animation of a fictitious or real person.18 But if an actor on stage only acts as if he answers to his counterpart, and is in fact primarily in relation to his text, for example, because he has to concentrate so much on it that his counterpart hardly gets attention and space, does not gain any presence in his consciousness, then one notices that he is acting. All the more fake, i.e. situatively incongruous, he seems. Good actors are always intense in relation to their counterparts and to the subject, thus finding

17See

on role and concept of “repetition” of Kierkegaard in the same named book, 1843. even actors can distinguish between good (‘authentic’) and bad play, only in the second case it is actually noticeable that one of them plays a role, that he stages himself as a character, which he is not in the movie or on stage. The criterion for good acting today is indeed (and that was not always the case) how real or authentic the character appears, how much she really brings the person to be portrayed to presence (and by no means only represents a role), how real and thus experienced the acting itself appears in the context and situation of the play or the film.

18Now

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authentic gesture and play, even if they ‘only’ say the same text per performance and do not find their own language in the situation. The figure and role in the situation portrayed and in the respective context gains physical presence. Therefore, the text must ideally be learned so well, i.e. ‘by heart’, that it no longer requires the attention and perception of the actor during the scene, which then focuses entirely on the situational correspondence to the subject and to the counterpart. If this succeeds, the actor appears—paradoxically enough—as a maximally authentic, credible character, so that “one takes it from him”. It is as if he himself is and experiences what the role prescribes here and now. But those who behave in a situation and a certain context only according to known or assumed roles, only express themselves in empty phrases, platitudes or clichés, do not go into a specific or real relationship to the subject and the counterpart. They do not perceive them in the situation and its context, but rather draw their attention to the recognition and reenactment of what has already been said, seen or heard. Great acting art or performance thrives on the fact that the presenting person in the situation and in any context19 goes into an instinctive ­self-reference. Then what is shown does not appear in the as-if mode, but as real, really experienced and truly experienced, and thus credible. What comes to light and is believed, is not the person who presents it, but what is happening comes into focus. It is not just that the actor represents it; that is why he steps back at most from what he is doing in the situation and he makes himself a medium to that extent. In the case of authentic playing, however, the truthfulness of the event, i.e. the coherence of the references, is believed to come truly into view, becoming a ‘true’, albeit ephemeral image of what is really happening. The other or the thing it is about does not even become the content of the consciousness in this respect, because this intentionally unerringly (or fear-dictated) reaches beyond it, inasmuch as it only considers and perceives its own ideas, which the other or the encountering person evokes, considers and perceives, not the thing itself or the person as counterpart in the encounter. Narcissistic adventures in the reference universe of self-staged virtuality and the prevention of communicative action are de facto the

19‘Anyone’

is not right either, because the professionalism of a performance is measured by the fact that it can perform in almost any context and environment, i.e. with almost any counterpart and in front of any audience, and can keep the quality of devotion in the selfreference of authenticity, but in fact it varies, it always succeeds more or less, because the audience and the counterpart also play along and relate. Therefore, certain fluctuations in tension and attention are also noticeable.

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result; the lack of reference both in social togetherness and in self-relations, i.e. “despair” according to Kierkegaard, is the price for itself. But, where the momentary correspondence in thinking and acting, however, succeeds to the claim of a person, according to his inner and outer situation and context, he can perceive himself in his respective present voices, moods and parts and become aware of himself. Then he can accept them as belonging to himself, perceive them as a self-part and accept them as self-determination (in the sense of the genitivus subjectivus). In this respect, a person gains presence and in the result for herself form and boundary, acts in the consequence self-determined (in the sense of the genitivus objectivus) and noticeably credible, inasmuch ‘authentic’ (because the person testifies to their own statements at the same time). The fact that this impression of increased credibility and presence is now rightly linked to a measure of selfhood can be explained by Kierkegaard, who shows how self-awareness and consciousness, as well as acceptance of oneself, lead to authentic self-becoming and thus to a way of being and remaining true to oneself.

3 Summary The attempt that has been made here to question what authenticity means in and of itself in terms of the concept has its origin in a decided and, as should be shown, necessary distinction between the concept and the phenomenon of being and acting ‘authentic(ally)’. This requires a methodological distinction on the one hand between a conceptual and discourse analysis to examine the categorical use of the term—be it in everyday language or in specialist discourses—and a phenomenological analysis on the other, which focuses on the intentional content of authenticity. This double consideration becomes necessary if a term is used contradictorily, vaguely and under-determinedly, but the attribution made with it nevertheless makes a distinction that is justified on the merits. This suggests the suspicion that the word is used unilaterally and categorically incorrectly, but one cannot conclude from this that the thing meant by the term does not exist, that there is no reference object for this attribution. As shown here in the case of authenticity, there are indeed criteria of coherence in one’s behavior towards oneself and others, as well as qualitative degrees of selfhood that can be experienced and described. No matter how one conceptualizes, interprets and evaluates them, the fact and phenomenon is undeniable that self-education takes place in the constant struggle for coherence and ­self-determination, under the individual condition of doing justice to oneself or ‘being true to oneself’ and remaining true to oneself.

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Although this measure is available in advance for being ‘authentic’, in retrospect there is the possibility of a reflexive-recursive comparison between claim and reality. This allows on the one hand qualitative orientation with regard to ­self-education in the future, and on the other hand refers to the individual’s claim to be his ‘self’. However, this must not be reified and misunderstood as a substantial core or form template for being and becoming oneself, but is to be understood categorically as one’s own ‘core sense’ for world reference and individuation, preferably in analogy to conscience. Even conscience ‘speaks’ only in retrospect and then not as regards content, proves to be a sense of balance with regard to mutual giving and taking in the genesis of sociality. It works, as pictorially often compared—like a compass on the road or like a spirit level of action, to testify to imbalances in terms of what belongs to me, and what does not. Here, too, we each have our own measure, ultimately individual and marked by self-awareness—but aligned and calibrated to the general good and the formal (not content-wise defined) idea of justice. Analogously, authenticity is traced back on a sense for itself that is given in principle. In addition, it is based on the possibility of developing one’s own measure of coherence for how one can do justice to oneself and to others through self-perception and joint reflection. Basically, all efforts in educational processes in the service of personal development would have to be made to strengthen these criteria of being ‘authentic’ in thinking and acting from an early age, as well as to enable being and becoming a self as a lifelong exercise of becoming aware and accepting oneself depending on the situation and context. However, this aims—as Kierkegaard was supposed to show—at the concept of authenticity as a measure of a relational-recursive ­self-reference20 that can lead situatively and intersubjectively to a harmonious relationship between self and world. However, this is not compatible with a static ideal of personal coherence nor with identitarian self-concepts. Last but not least, it speaks against the contemporary ideal of an ‘authenticity’ as inflationary as it is misleadingly demanded as market-dictated self-realization in mass society, which is currently increasingly expressed in supposed originality or asocial self-assertion.

20“The

humans self is thus being conceived of as an ‘emerging‘ reality which is being constituted in the very act of relating to itself” (Valco 2016, p. 99).

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References Bauer, T. 2018. Die Vereindeutigung der Welt. Über den Verlust an Mehrdeutigkeit und Vielfalt. Stuttgart: Reclam. Boomgaarden, J. 2016. Das verlorene Selbst: eine Interpretation zu Søren Kierkegaards Schrift “Die Krankheit zum Tode”. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Frankfurt, H. 1987. Identification and wholeheartedness. In Responsiblity, character, and the emotions: New essays in moral psychology, ed. F. Schoeman, 159–176. Cambrigde: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. 1998. Autonomy, necessity, and love. In Necessity, volition, and love, ed. H. Frankfurt, 129–141. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, E.E. 2015. The paradox of authenticity. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hegel, G. W. F. 1969. Wissenschaft der Logik II. Werkausgabe vol. 6. Hrsg. M. Moldenhauer. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Herder, J. 1785/1887. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Zweiter Theil. In Herders sämtliche Werke, vol. 13, ed. W. Suphan. Berlin: Weidmann. Hermans, H.J.M., et al. (eds.). 2012. Handbook of dialogical self theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. 2010. Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung. Paradoxien der Individualisierung. In Das Ich im Wir. Studien zur Anerkennungstheorie, ed. A. Honneth, 202–220. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Hühn, L. 2009. Kierkegaard und der Deutsche Idealismus. Konstellationen des Übergangs. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Hutflötz, K. 2017. Der Mensch – das offene Wesen. In Der Blick ins Freie. Im Diskurs mir Janusz Korczak, ed. S. von Steiger et al., 70–85. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt. Illouz, E. 2017. Emotions as commodities: Capitalism, consumption and authenticity. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd. Jaspers, K. 1971. Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. Berlin: Springer. Jaspers, K. 1973. Allgemeine Psychopathologie, 9th ed. Berlin: Springer. Kierkegaard, S. 1941. The sickness unto death. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lesmeister, R. 2009. Selbst und Individuation: Facetten von Subjektivität und Intersubjektivität in der Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes und Apsel. Liebsch, B. 2006. Das bezeugte Selbst. Kierkegaard nach Hegel – und danach. Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 53: 681–716. Oshana, M. 2007. Autonomy and the question of authenticity. Social Theory and Practice 33 (3): 411–429. Patios, G. 2013. Kierkegaard’s construction of the human self. International Journal for Philosophy 18 (1): 37–47. Rudd, A. 2012. Self, value, and narrative: A kierkegaardian approach. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Schwartz, R. 1997. Internal family systems therapy. New York: Guilford Publications. Sousa, D. 2012. Kierkegaard’s anthropology of the self. Heythrop Journal 53 (1): 37–50. Stokes, P. 2015. The naked self: Kierkegaard and personal identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strub, C. 2009. Authentizität. Information Philosophie 37 (2): 39–45. Taylor, C. 1992. The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Taylor, C. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Valco, M. 2016. Kierkegaard’s ‘Sickness unto death’ as a resource in our search for personal authenticity. European Journal of Science and Theology 12 (1): 97–105. Winnicott, D.W. 1965. Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. Studies in the theory of emotional development, 140–157. New York: International Universities Press. Woolever, S. 2013. The process of self-becoming in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Rogers. University of Iowa. Zahavi, D. 2008. Subjectivity and selfhood. Investigating the first-person perspective. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Dr. Karin Hutflötz Research Fellow at the KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. Studied Chemistry, Mathematics and Philosophy in Munich. Research interests: philosophy of education, philo­ sophical anthropology, phenomenology of personal development, values formation in an intercultural context, human education in the dispositive of the digital.

Authenticity as Emerging Meaning—Dialectics, Pragmatism, and Psychotherapy Donata Schoeller 1 Experience vs. Experiencing “The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity, things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel labeled ‘lazy Existence.’ Philosophy’s theme would consist of the qualities it downgrades as contingent, as quantité négligeable. A matter of urgency to the concept would be what it fails to cover, what its abstractionist mechanism eliminates, what is not already a case of the concept” (Adorno 2000, p. 8). “Could we succeed in shaping a language that is not only parallel to the living world but is itself living and participates in cultivating life?” (Irigaray, in Irigaray and Marder 2016, p. 80)

Adorno’s and Irigaray’s encouraging appeal to turn to those matters which are not yet a case of being a concept expresses at the same time the vast area of conflict such an interest holds for us.1 The above-mentioned philosophical disinterest in

1This

chapter is based on a translation and modification of a chapter in my forthcoming book: Close Talking. Erleben zur Sprache bringen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. [Humanprojekt]. I am thankful to Neil Dunaetz for his help in making this article more readable in English and for the eye-opening discussions during this process. His deep understanding of Gendlin’s philosophy was ‘maieutic’ for my own beginnings.

D. Schoeller (*)  University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_5

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the non-conceptual is also due to well established reasons dating back centuries. What empirical knowledge can be gained from something that has not, or will not, become a concept? Whether it is the skeptical tradition, which, in order to gain certain knowledge, has learned to mistrust the changeable and the phenomenological since the ancient Greeks; or the epistemological tradition, according to which experience can only ever be constituted by concepts; or the idealistic tradition, which demonstrates the workability and vividness of concepts as opposed to void immediacy; or the linguistic turn, which in order not to become entangled in the realms of pseudo-problems, accounts for language as the only unambiguous source of material; or discourse theory, relating to the ­long-established uncircumventable union between power and concept: nothing seems to be more difficult for the philosopher than dwelling in the vicinity of a theme like “the pre-conceptual” without digressing into mystification, esotericism, or simply vagueness. What seems impossible to the philosophers is ‘daily business’ for the psychotherapists: to deal with something that appears perfectly unclear but too meaningful to be ignored, too particular to be easily classified, so intricately woven that we are lost for words when trying to describe it. Clients who attend to the experiencing going on while they tell or analyze their situations, begin to pause, grope and struggle with explicating something which seems to matter but cannot be put to words easily. Therapy research findings show that shifting attention to an experiencing process happening now, staying with it and speaking from it, is highly significant for therapeutic progress (Gendlin 1961, 1963; Petitmengin 2007). In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant speaks of experience as a way of conceiving “whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree” (B, XVIII). But is there not a similar kind of predetermined conformity between objects of experience and concepts a priori corresponding to the idea of experience in psychotherapeutic theory? While speaking of their experiences, psychotherapy clients are referred back to a basic pattern which appears to be the essence of the experience they try to describe, also determining the object of the experience. The real issue seems to be the structure the therapist can detect, thereby identifying the kind of experience the client is talking about. As in the transcendental theory of knowledge, various schools of psychotherapy assume that experiences seem to match a priori a corresponding basic pattern (like Adler’s “effeminate”, or Jung’s “archetypical”, or Freud’s “compulsive” pattern), which can be recognized through analysis and diagnosis. Thus it seems inevitable

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that some kind of pattern is necessary for access to our experience. What alternative could there be? By focusing on pre-reflexive and pre-conceptual functions of experiencing, hermeneutic, pragmatistic and phenomenological thinkers like Dilthey, Dewey, or Merleau-Ponty consider alternative approaches. A process of understanding, as well as creative work in progress (scientific, artistic etc.), depend on processes that are not controlled by concepts alone, as they are capable of generating new ones. Gendlin, as a Classical Pragmatist in the third generation, focally develops these impulses by analyzing progressions in psychotherapeutic transcripts. Mr. X, for instance, has a problem with authority which according to a Freudian psychological diagnosis goes back to an unsolved Oedipal conflict, on account of which he transfers certain emotions related to his father onto other people. Mr. X suffers from castration anxiety. “‘Yes, from what I’ve read I agree that I have an Œdipal conflict, but I’m not aware of that. I guess I must have repressed it. What I am aware of is that I get so mad I can’t eat or sleep and I argue with myself constantly. I know how I ought to behave, how I wish I behaved, but when some little thing happens, then I blow up’” (Gendlin 1963, p. 249).

Up to this point one could still think that the Oedipal structure underlies his experience but he doesn’t know it, as he has “repressed” it. But then Mr. X continues: “‘I’m mad. Let’s see, why do I get so mad? I understand a lot about the dynamics of it, but that gets me no place. I mean, I know it’s true and all that, but I’m still just as mad. It hasn’t gotten any better. It just doesn’t ‘give.’ Let’s see.’ (Silence . . . he focuses his attention directly on the felt meanings of his experiencing.) Sigh. ‘Well, uh, it’s funny but it seems to me now that I’m not really angry. Resentful is more like it. My feelings are hurt, really. Hurt, I think really I’m hurt. I feel so bad that people don’t think more of me, that I’m such a mere hireling, I mean that’s nobody’s fault, of course, but I can’t be talked to like that, like they talk to me. I won’t stand for it, I mean it hurts my feelings’” (Gendlin 1963, p. 249).

This new conceptualization by Mr. X not only changes the picture he has, but “his concrete inward experiencing is momentarily changed”. He shifted from being so angry that he can’t eat or sleep to something different: feeling hurt and humiliated, Mr. X is again certain that he is now speaking truly, for he can feel the “concrete continuity between his felt meanings and the words he uses” (Gendlin 1963, p. 249).

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Yet, after a few moments he will say how very much he is afraid to have to look for another job. He gets so desperate, because his colleagues show him everyday that he can’t stay and respect himself. And later again, he says that he has always been afraid among people, which is why he can’t quite “get around in the world or face life” (Gendlin 1963, p. 249). While Mr. X’s various movements to understand himself may be interpreted as castration anxiety, we want to direct our attention to the movements of the assertions themselves. The flexibility of this movement could indicate certain forms of anxiety, but it could also indicate other basic patterns expressible in terms of “life styles or power drives or life avoidances or interpersonal patterns” (Gendlin 1963, p. 250). Depending on the school of therapy, different basic conceptions can be used for interpretation. It seems impossible to agree on the conceptual structures which psychology hopes to find at the root of individual experiences. So one could philosophically conclude that the innumerable possibilities of interpretation seem to account for a confusing arbitrariness or for a radical constructivism in the sense of Heinz von Foerster, who assumes “the invention of a world” (von Foerster 2001, p. 233) taking place in such expressive processes. The constructivist conclusion may become even more obvious when Gendlin, in the same article, describes a client going through a successful therapy by deriving the meaning of his experience with the help of a pattern for which a game of tennis stood as model. Although different schools of therapy attribute utmost importance to their mode of interpreting, none of them takes the lead regarding the rate of success in treatment (Gendlin 1996, p. 172). Does all this amount to an “anything goes” notion regarding the basic nature of our experiences, as it seems to make no difference whether the interpretation derives from widely supported research in depth psychology or any common wisdom such as the reference to sports rules? Or does it speak for the passivity of our experiences, depending like wax on the kind of mold imposed on it?

2 Responsive vs. Dialectical Movement According to Dewey’s essay on Qualitative Thought and Gendlin’s thinking continuing from here, the provocation of cases like Mr. X or of the client who cures himself with tennis rules might point a different way. The unpredictability of the movement in Mr. X’s statements indicate the exact opposite of “anything goes”, both in terms of arbitrariness of interpretation as well as passivity of experience. The flexibility of both the statements and of their interpretation show something which does not show up if our attention is only directed towards

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interpreting and classifying experience according to predetermined patterns. It has to do with a forming and regulating effect that does not stem from concepts, but from something Dewey names the felt quality of a situation: “By the term situation in this connection is signified the fact that the subject-matter ultimately referred to in existential propositions is a complex existence that is held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by the fact that it is dominated and characterized by a single quality [which we can feel]” (Dewey 1984, p. 246).

Dewey refuses to classify this feeling as something merely internal and distinguishes it from emotion. In his article on Qualitative Thought, as well as in Art as Experience and Logic of Inquiry, he develops a wider notion of feeling: as a point of reference that holds situational complexity which needs further development to transform into clear propositions and states of affairs. (This developmental aspect distinguishes qualitative feeling from Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit.) Having this in mind, one can say that in the changes from one statement to the next, Mr. X does not just arbitrarily choose different interpretations of his experiences. Rather, the movement created in this attentive way of speaking seems to result from an interplay between interpretation and what is interpreted—as something felt. In fact, what is interpreted seems to regulate the interpretation, thereby causing its constant modifications. What seems to be a provocative arbitrariness of possible interpretations is an indication of a provocation of a very different sort: the interpreted itself seems capable of reinterpreting the interpretation. Thus, many different ways of getting to the point can be rightly applied to Mr. X’s case as well as to others. Dewey’s impulse is further elaborated in Gendlin’s work on A Responsive Order (1997). “This is no accident of this one example. Because felt meanings are […] capable of being conceptualized by modifying any vocabulary and using it in reference to this experiential process of felt meanings and differentiated aspects” (Gendlin 1963, p. 251).

In a dialectic way of speaking, one could say, it is this “counter-thrust” of the ‘felt meaning’s’ capacity of modifying vocabulary which undermines a linear determination of experienced meaning, rendering the articulation of Mr. X’s curvy. Or to put it differently: experience can be conceptualized in very different ways, not because it is relative, but because as experiencing it is capable of modifying the vocabulary referring to it in a very precise way. Regarding the speaker’s capacities of making a point with different notions in different sets of arguments, systems and expectational backgrounds, the felt point “has this odd ‘order’ of responding

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to different formulations differently—but very exactingly, just so to each. And not only to different systems—‘the’ point would respond just so to different purposes, backgrounds, even loyalties to certain groups” (Gendlin 1989, p. 404). Analogous to Hegel’s speculative movement, we find a kind of movement in the above propositions of Mr. X which disturbs the identity of the subject and predicate, the subject in this case being the anxiety and the predicate its interpretation. The motion here, however, is not initiated through the notions alone, but— to continue in Hegelian terms—through the contact of a concept and its ‘other’. Hegel helps even a bit further by explaining the speculative movement as going against the idea of a subject to which predicates are linked, whereas “here, that subject is replaced by the knowing ‘I’ itself, which links the predicates with the subjects holding them” (Hegel 1977, p. 37). Instead of the knowing “I”, which according to Hegel links subject and predicate in a way that their meaning dialectically expands, hermeneutical and pragmatist thinkers point to an experiencing “I”, functioning creatively and precisely to form a meaning which is not determined by one basic pattern (e.g. dialectics), but from which many (basic) patterns emerge in an undeterminable way. This experiencing function—and at this point, Hegel’s help comes to an end—does not constitute the starting point of a conceptual dynamics as its “poorest truth” (Hegel 1977, p. 58). A Hermeneutic and Pragmatist turn is characterized by a different beginning. We are always already in the midst of our experiencing process, in “Erleben”, “inder-Welt”, in “situations”, which is so rich that its expression becomes a challenge needing the precise felt functions of something “more” than propositional forms. In order to demonstrate this reversal of a traditional philosophical starting point, it seems promising to continue with Hegel as a background. Hegel very transparently shows a kind of beginning that is linked by the kinds of moves conceptuality alone makes possible and impossible. Hegel’s Phenomenology starts and proceeds by way of abstracting from the wealth of individual experiencing, which in the famous beginning of this book is called “sense-certainty”. As his description indicates, he does not mean sensory perception (like a sensation such as red). Sense-certainty is characterized as “the richest kind of knowledge”, “infinite wealth” being attributed to it. According to Hegel, it is something that could be “entered” and to which “no bounds” are found etc (Hegel 1977, p. 58). It is well known that Hegel does not even need pages, only a few lines, to dismantle this certainty and to present it as the ‘poorest truth’. It is poor because the thing of which this certainty is certain is not yet a host of distinct qualities, has not yet entered into various relationships with other objects, and is still lacking any knowing I moving in this certainty. Hegel demonstrates a first

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dialectic movement by showing how much is involved in what seems given in an immediate way: the thing that conveys certainty to me, while also being certain through me. Thus, immediacy is already a kind of product, a form of certainty that is produced through a twofold relation of the thing with myself. The first transition from immediacy to mediacy is carried out by Hegel in detail. At first, the essence of certainty appears to be nothing else than the thing itself: “this”. The essence of “this” is what is here and now. Obviously, therefore, this essence cannot be preserved—it changes constantly with every new here and now. What stays constant is nothing but the concepts of ‘now’ and ‘here’, preserving themselves negatively in relation to the passing moments to which they refer. Staying constant only in contrast to the transient moments is what makes them universal, at the same time being the only form in which we can have transience. Hegel states this basic dialectic as follows: “A simple thing of this kind which is through negation, which is neither This nor That, a not-This, and is with equal indifference This as well as That—such a thing we call universal. So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty” (Hegel 1977, p. 60). The infinite wealth of sense-certainty, into which, according to Hegel, one could ‘enter’, virtually dissipates into something entirely ephemeral, of which only the opposite can be kept: the constant form of language, deriving its constancy through negation of the fleeting wealth it indicates. Therefore, Hegel concludes that language, “as we see, is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say, and since the universal is the true [content] of ­sense-certainty and language expresses this true [content] alone, it is not possible for us ever to say, or express just in words, a sensuous being that we mean” (Hegel 1977, p. 60). As the infinite and boundless wealth of sense-certainty seems to be too changeable to be held and kept, it melts down to what Adorno called a philosophical quantité negligeable. Equating truth to a form of predictable stability is obviously not unique to Hegel; it can be found, as pragmatist critique of philosophy has shown before Adorno, throughout the history of philosophy (Dewey in Logic of Inquiry, Chapter V, and James throughout the Pluralistic Universe). Hegel therefore is a powerful representative of an utmost traditional intellectual strategy, freeing itself from a “particular texture [of things D.S.] in favor of universal structures, as well as from phenomenalism in favor of intelligible form of being.” (Angehrn 2000, p. 145, translated by D.S.). Nothing partakes in this thinking that does not fit into the concept, even if it is engaged in speculative movement. Other ways of having this house, this tree ‘stay’ with us (as memories, forms of attachment, love or hate, ‘felt meanings’) do not fit into this concept of permanence which Hegel assumes. Keeping a ‘this’ and ‘now’ in a biographically engraved

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way, as a wealth of personal meaning eventually making us the persons we are and imprinting the meaning of the notions we have, has already been noticed by Leibniz (1996). Hegel, however, is not interested in this kind of individual experiential permanence. What matters here is the linguistic and conceptual constancy that carries the speculative movement in a clear dialectical pattern over the vastness of an immediate kind of experienced meaning, which drop out of the only formal understanding of the ‘here’ and the ‘now’. The conceptual understanding of Now, This and Here, as the only possible way to conserve the ever-changing sequence of Nows and Heres, which Hegel draws over the boundlessness of sense-certainty, at the same time prevents Hegel’s entry into it. The pursuit of the dialectical implications of the used concepts and their resulting movements turns upside-down what people mean to say and their point of expressing this being exactly what Hegel intends to do: turning around common sense approaches. Pragmatism can be viewed as the counter-movement: Common-sense thinking in its concern with actual experience, its complex daily and situational interactivity, becomes a role-model of the challenge going along with experience and its philosophical reflection. This inspires Pragmatist thinkers to include an experiential happening, which not only Hegel excludes but which also seems to have become the blind spot of philosophy after the linguistic turn. Philosophical ‘therapy’ in an Analytical sense of curing philosophy from its tendency to get caught up in pseudo-problems by wrong use of language paradoxically makes it hard to conceive what people do in actual therapy dealing with ordinary experience. From a dialectical as well as from an analytical standpoint, it becomes impossible to understand how different forms of having meaning seem to make the expression even of simple experiential aspects a compelling challenge. To go further into this, let us first return to Hegel’s struggle with the inconceivability of sense-certainty. Let us take up from where we stopped: After realizing that sense-certainty can neither be located in the thing itself nor in the I, neither in the Here nor in the Now, Hegel starts anew by conceiving the essence of ­ sense-certainty as a whole, to which he refers as “immediacy”. Immediacy is a kind of relation which “no distinction whatever can penetrate” (Hegel 1977, p. 62). It is not yet separable as a certainty of the thing and of the I, as it is only given in the sequence of Now and Here. As this certainty cannot yet be approached analytically, it can only be pointed to: “We must let ourselves point to it; for the truth of this immediate relation is the truth of this ‘I’ which confines itself to one ‘Now’ or one ‘Here’. Were we to examine this truth afterwards, or stand at a distance from it, it would lose its significance entirely; for that would do away with the immediacy which is essential to it” (Hegel 1977, p. 63).

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What kind of truth is at stake, which confines itself to Here and Now, and whose meaning results from our not ‘stand[ing] at a distance to it’? It is a truth, according to Hegel, that is constituted by the story of its movement, or, what seems to be the same for him, by experience. This movement, says Hegel, is constituted by the sequence of “Thises” which change into other “Thises”, of “Nows” which disappear, “Heres” which again vanish to other “Heres” to become a “simple complex of many Heres” (Hegel 1977, p. 64). The truth confining itself to a Here and Now, this very particular truth, is carried by a movement which can be traced (or is traced in this way by Hegel) only through transitions from One (Now) into Many, from Being (This) into Nothingness, from Particular (Here) into Universal. The complex of many Heres seem to add up to a (hi)story whose course unfolds through the dynamic logic of dominant patterns. Obviously Hegel did not succeed in achieving what he intended: not to stand “at a distance” from this truth. By only stating the disappearance of This into another This as well as of Here into another Here, he renders himself distant in such a fundamental way that the truth that confines itself to a Here and Now can hardly show up. What story would emerge if it could unfold itself with regard to its content, which has not been abstracted to a bare series of notions such as This, Here and Now? ‘What is it like’ to actually experience ‘a complex of Heres’? The point of immediate experience is already lost by Hegel’s pressing it to move towards seemingly only one alternative of either-or: either something abides or vanishes. The thickness of immediate experiencing does not, as Hegel assumes, culminate in only one kind of doubt and eventually to “despair” about the nothingness of its own certainty (Hegel 1977, p. 65). What happens if we do what Hegel describes as an option without trying it out himself: enter into the wealth of this kind of certainty, even at the risk of finding no boundary? Will this not amount to very different stories with very different kinds of points, challenging philosophy to consider very different kinds of movements, even more, the continuous necessity of making sense of ordinary experiencing.

3 Meaning that Calls for Closeness: What Does Philosophy Have to Do with It? An extract from a conversation with Ms. Y: “‘Oh . . .,it isn’t that I like him. I thought I liked him. Really, I try so hard to please him because I want him to like me, that’s it.’

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According to Hegel’s characteristics of sense-certainty, this passage from a therapy record could be viewed as predications that expose a constantly changing form of certainty of a truth which confines itself to a Now or a Here. The meaning of the statements derives exclusively from the proximity to a kind of truth, which cannot be uttered from the distance of a third person. The truth seems to change from “this” to “this” with every new now, but not in an arbitrary way. By stating a first “this” (“I like him”), one “now” changes to a next “now”, in which a different kind of certainty becomes expressible (“I thought I liked him”), which again changes to a next now, which modifies “this” again (“I try so hard to please him”), which then changes anew (“I don’t care whether he likes me or not. But to realize that I’m really all alone, I can’t stand that”), and once more (“being alone is fine with me. But, that good kind of alone comes only when I feel there is someone out there who knows me. Otherwise I feel like I could disappear”). As regards content, one could say that these examples demonstrate very well what Hegel analyzes: A kind of continuing exchange between the I and the thing the immediate certainty involves (I like him, I don’t like him, I don’t care whether he likes me). The shifting certainties move as whole, thereby unfolding a content contained in them. By letting speak the truth of this kind of certainty explicitly and without distance, Gendlin, as mentioned above, again notices the distinctive curves the sense-making takes. The sequence thereby forming, however, is not adequately conceivable only through a pattern of negation or contradiction, or through any kind of predeterminable set of logical patterns. The ‘complex of different Nows’, to use Hegel’s inviting expression, unfolds in a thickness of a content that is carried out by every new statement, not as a movement of negations, but as a kind of qualified sequence. The certainty of feelings towards “him” modify to a certainty about herself, located within that first certainty, about her own way of being able to be alone under exactly which circumstances. The sequence unfolds only as she really “enters into” the wealth of the first certainty (as Hegel suggests, but does not seem to consider as a serious option). The above

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example of a truth of an I which confines itself to a Now or a Here (how she is presently doing in her relationship) is not only the poor content of some few universal structures which remain, but it tells something both particular and important about herself, herself in relations to others and the world, and how she is going to tackle the next phase of her life. So what kind of statements are we talking about here? They are obviously not statements of a sense-certainty like ‘there is a tree’ or ‘it is raining’. Here, a different form of certainty is at stake. If the statements uttered by Mr. X and Ms. Y are regarded in relation to Searle’s classification of speech acts, where would they fit? They are performative in the sense that these sentences have an effect, but not in a declarative, commissive, or directive sense, according to which the statement performs or causes an action (like Austin’s famous order: ‘shoot her’). They are not representative by articulating states of affairs (like the famous cat which is on the mat), because the states they are articulating cannot be observed by a detached spectator. They can best be classified as expressive statements, although Searle does not grant this class of predication any kind of direction of fit from word to world or vice versa. The expression of statements like the above have, according to this classification, nothing to do with the world, and neither does it have an effect on it, whether we express it or not. With this classification Searle partly corresponds to a paradigm which he alludes to as the “model for all knowledge” (Searle 2008, p. 50). This model declares all concepts either to consist of things which are physical, or, from a dualistic point of view, of things which are either physical or mental. Searle admits that “large tracts of apparently fact-stating language do not consist of concepts which are part of this picture”. He gives as examples aesthetic and ethical statements, which have actually not been classified as such by philosophers as “mere expressions of emotions”, or “simply autobiographical statements of a psychological kind, recording […] sentiments” (Searle 2008, p. 50). Before the type of predication of Mr. X or Ms. Y becomes classifiable, it seems necessary to explore what kind of reference, what kind of order, becomes apparent through it, and also what functions in those statements to make them accurate. Both speakers do not get lost in boundless, arbitrary immediacy. They choose their words exactly and they modify what they are saying while speaking about what they are certain of in a specific way. Exploring the above questions causes one to doubt whether such types of statements have no universal value as being “mere” expressions of emotions, “simply” autobiographical statements of a psychological kind. The words “mere” and “simply” insinuate that they cannot be types of statements relevant to philosophy. Also, Ratcliffe’s (2008) considerations on ‘existential feeling’ make it questionable if the statements of

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Mr. X and Ms. Y are about emotions at all. It seems more adequate to view them as expressions of the complexly felt situatedness of one’s being-in-the-world, so that a classification like Searle’s seems too narrow to be helpful here. Before following this perspective further, we want to take a rather general philosophical stance towards the possibility of a closer look that Mr. X and Ms. Y take at themselves in therapy sessions, which could also take place while talking to friends. The way Mr. X and Ms. Y are engaged in a process trying to make sense of themselves and their specific ways of experiencing situations could be regarded as an elementary form of occupation, which has been part of the definition of philosophy since the times of ancient Greece. From the oracle at Delphi’s “Gnothi se auton” to the three, or four, questions by Kant to their reformulation and extension by Hermann Schmitz in this century, self-exploration and gaining of self-insight has been of crucial philosophical concern. Despite its neglect in modern academic philosophy (Cavell being the big exception), it has been cultivated by erudite philosophers for centuries, who have been taught in academia. Schmitz outlines the scope of this philosophical concern for today as follows: “Philosophical questions which cannot be answered adequately by any positive science, although their objects overlap with the possibility of finding an answer, are questions like: What concerns me? Which of the things offered by my surroundings should I, will I, or do I have to take seriously and accept as my thing? […] What am I capable of? […] What can I believe? Where shall I doubt […]? To what extent do I have reasons to participate in or to withdraw from the devouring bustle of life around me? […] What experiences will I be deprived of if I let myself guide? What do I ignore, what do I treat with inconsideration without being aware of doing so? Where do I take my courage from to carry on with my life in spite of there being death, misery and guilt? Is this all real? Who am I myself beyond all that has been carried into me and taken over by me? What is real of me, and what is merely façade? What remains and continues to exist in my life? What does this all amount to?” (Schmitz 2007, p. 9, translated by D.S.).

These questions, making the scope of the ancient claim for self-knowledge as well as of the Kantian questions explicit in modern language, turn all genuine self-experiencing and its striving for expression into a philosophical project. As long as the possible insights are self-explored, and not according to an external scheme, the explorations practiced by Mr. X and Ms. Y can be considered as a kind of rudimentary form of philosophical practice, insofar as it accomplishes what Gert Achenbach (1984) asserts as the definition of philosophical practice: the dismantling of our own questions. Different from learning a theory, these ­self-investigations involve the challenge of deriving sense by facing the complex subtleties of our own experience.

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This individual process points to something further that is of basic philosophical interest. Individual paths of self-assurance, providing us with the certainty of what is really experienced and how it is experienced, bring to light an emerging kind of meaning which cannot come about from greater distance or through abstraction. What emerges has to do exactly with this individual path or process. The turns which immediate experiencing takes in the light of investigative attention are contrary to the static of observable states of affairs. Analogous to Socratic dialogues, they seem to transform something which at first glance seems known (this “state”, this “feeling”, this well-known experience) into something intricately unfolding. Like Socrates’ attention on well-known concepts like bravery, justice, beauty dispersing premature certainty by demonstrating the complexity involved in them, thereby cultivating and initiating a different kind of reflexivity, similarly, a careful and attentive reference to immediate experiencing makes it apparent in its thickly layered and intricate conveyance. The usual concepts which at first may seem applicable soon show their limits, so that a new way of expressing becomes necessary. Hegel’s critical comment regarding ‘sensuous certainty’, according to which it seems impossible to ‘ever be able to express the thing we mean’ can thus become illustrative for a difficulty, which as such is an opportunity enabling entry into the complexity of our immediate experiencing; People find that their inward experience does not fit common categories and shared phrases. It is vastly a specific complexity, gradually opening up. This insight however depends on a kind of self-reference, which must be actively practiced and cannot be dedicated to the ideal of the passive observer (Gendlin 1992; Petitmengin and Bitbol 2009).

4 Tentative Speech Acts Extract from the therapy protocol of Ms. Z: “‘And there’s also something vague. I can’t get what it is. ... I feel a lot of tension. ... It is as if I want to run. ... someone will be mad at me if I let this part live, and that’s very uncomfortable. ... I want to run and never look back and just be free. ... Then that’s sad. ... Yes. Running from the vague thing is sad. ... Some of me wants to find out what this vague thing is. Some of me doesn’t. ... I don’t feel friendly. I want to...jump on it. ... I’m very angry. ... It’s a big loss, something missing. That’s what the vague thing was. ... And my energy is right here too. ... Yes, I don’t know what that is yet that’s missing, but even thought I don’t know what it is, I feel lighter’” (Gendlin 1996, pp. 115–118).

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This extract is from the beginning of a process. During the ongoing process the client notices her experiencing and struggles to explicate it by directly referring to ‘it’. This already raises a number of questions: How can one refer to something without knowing what it is one refers to? How is it possible to speak sensibly from there? In other words, how can such speaking “know” what it is talking about? What changes through the process of speaking? Why does something change at all? What does this suggest about the relation of speaking and experiencing? What does it have to say about the relation between present and past? And what does this tell us about the relation of experiential and conceptual order? These kinds of questions lead to profoundly different inquiries than theories of meaning whose main interest seems to lie in the process of the exchange of information. Already the starting point of the quoted examples seem to oppose the analytical verdict formulated by the early Wittgenstein, namely that we should remain silent about things we cannot speak about. Ms. Z for example does not know what it is she is speaking about, it is too vague. And it’s not a case of not knowing the language sufficiently. Speech acts like the above challenge Searle’s principle of expressibility in a certain way. Difficulties of expression in the mentioned cases don’t result from troubles of overcoming boundaries by not knowing a language sufficiently or from a lack of certain concepts. On the other hand, the processes of Mr. X as well as of Ms. Y and Ms. Z confirm this principle, though in a way which differs completely from Searle’s thinking and from the way his examples allow reflecting upon (e.g. Searle 2008, p. 19 f.). Searle’s principle of expressibility exemplifies a framework which in different variants seems to determine the function of language in the transmission of (finished) meaning from one person to the other. Even limits to the principle keep hold of this framework (compare Searle 2008, p. 20), which seems to form a basic premise within classical and current debates of language philosophy, namely the successful outcome of the exchange of meaning between speaker and hearer. Linguistic performances, as we find in the above quoted extracts, but also in personal conversations, or when talking to oneself, in diary entries and sometimes even in professional talks, would philosophically not count as speech acts worthy of philosophical inquiry. All are case in which the understanding of what one is talking about develops in the course of talking or writing about it. Such a conclusion seems obvious with regard to Searle’s inference from the principle of expressibility, which matches precisely Grice’s Logic of Conversation: “It has the consequence that cases where the speaker does not say exactly what he means – the principal kinds of cases of which are nonliteralness, vagueness, ambiguity, and incompleteness – are not theoretically essential to linguistic communication” (Searle 2008, p. 20).

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A pragmatist-hermeneutically motivated approach can thus go beyond theories of language which start from the principle that one always has to know for certain the intention of an utterance and the effect it should produce on the other. Paradigmatic thinkers of Philosophy of Language, e.g. Grice (1957), start from a situation in which a speaker S utters X with the intention to create a certain effect on a hearer H, and this effect is caused by H’s knowing of S’s intention. Hence, the speaker must always be conscious of the exact intention he seeks to call for as effect on the hearer. There seems to be no other way of generating meaning. Searle’s addition that meaning also always depends on linguistic convention does not lead to any fundamental change. Even references to internal states of consciousness are always examined in relation to an “Other” (Tugendhat 2003, p. 24): how can another conceive and examine those expressions? Accordingly, Tugendhat stresses the lack of symmetry in utterances about internal states as one of the main problems of the issue. Evidently, linguistic processes as described in the examples of Mr. X, Ms. Y and Ms. Z require an extended theoretical framework to become a research item of Philosophy of Language, which until now seems preoccupied with the transfer of formed meaning with known effects from a speaker to a hearer. Examples of experiential intricacy brought up by Gendlin (1961, 1962, 1997, 2004), Ratcliffe (2008), Petitmengin (2007) can no longer move within such a narrow conceptual framework of linguistic meaning. It is therefore of great interest to describe in detail the possibility of reference to something vague but intricate, which happens during the process of speaking. “Clients frequently speak of feeling something without knowing what it is they feel. Both client and counselor call such a feeling ‘this feeling’ and continue to communicate about it although neither person knows just what that feeling is. At such times, both persons directly refer to the client’s ongoing experiencing. They do so without a conceptualization of what the client refers to. The symbols used (such as the term ‘this’) do not conceptualize. They do not formulate anything. They only point” (Gendlin 1961, p. 23).

Even though there is no transfer of finished meaning from speaker to hearer, it seems sensible to the speaker to point to something in the process of speaking as well as to the hearer to continue listening despite this vagueness and ambiguity. That this does not only apply to therapy, but to many different sorts of creative processes, is also exemplified by the physicist Heisenberg. He avoided mathematical expression in creative sessions, where a new approach to a problem was at stake.

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D. Schoeller “He spoke slowly and concentratedly, often with closed eyes, prefering normal language for allowing greater amount of tentativeness.” In these exchanges, his former assistant Hans Peter Duerr recalls, “one could stammer, one could be vague and speak uncomprehensible. The listener would only repeat in his own words, until one could say: ‘Yes exactly like this!’ During this kind of intensive and lengthy exchanges, notions and conceptions became clearer and contours of the problem became visible” (Duerr 1981, translated by D.S.).

What might be the conditions as well as the criterion for the success of such tentative speech acts? The conditions seem to be exactly those of trying to pursue what one is talking of, and ideally of somebody listening who does not interrupt this process. The criterion for success lies in nothing else than the vague becoming clearer, somehow opening up in the process of pursuing and speaking. Why should it thus become clearer or open up? How can the act of speaking have an influence on an unclear starting point? And how should one know that ‘it’ becomes clearer? At first sight, there seems to be nothing which the gradually discovered meaning can be tested against. How does the process of becoming clearer happen? Does one have to assume that in these cases something is ‘represented’ unclearly although it manifests itself as something clear, so that one should simply practice conceptual representation more intensely, like someone wishing to improve their drawing skills? In which case one would be confronted with an “inner act”, which Austin rejects, as reducing words “as (merely) the outward, visible sign […] of an inward and spiritual act” (Austin 1962, p. 9), and at the same time creating a double world leading to infinite regressions and duplications, whose absurdity Ryle (1949) showed thoroughly enough. Along the lines of pragmatist and hermeneutic approaches one does not need to think of an ‘inner act’ in that way; an inner act and the notion of the ­‘double-life legend’ do not necessarily have to go together. The act performed by Ms. Z or by Heisenberg while speaking does not fit the description of words being external, visible signs of an internal process, which they would only have to represent. The words in these cases do not represent the inner act but help constitute its meaning by carrying it forward. By developing the concept of ‘carrying forward’, Gendlin (2004) emphasizes how words in these kinds of speech-acts gain a decisively different function then to represent or to perform in the usually described senses. The explication itself can carry the experiencing process forward, which becomes—not only conceptually, but also experientially—more specific and differentiated in the course of articulation. To go deeper into this would need another article. All this article intended to do was to hint at the ways in which a philosophical interest in ‘non-conceptuality’ and ‘particularity’, as Adorno put it, demands

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basic work on a practical as well as on a conceptual level. The practical dimension may consist in a very subtle sense of practice: as a kind of attentive-tentative speaking and thinking that “begins with looking for, letting come, waiting for… what is not yet ‘there’” (Gendlin 2018, p. 203). It is this kind of practice, which is the necessary condition for an intricate yet unclear ‘object’ of experiencing and thought to become articulable and clear. This is what Irigaray might mean with a use of language that is able to ‘cultivate life’. The ‘objects’ of a cultivating language are not just there, waiting to be found and copied in words, parallel to the living, as she formulates. Rather, these ‘objects’ of experience are in need of being cultivated through a sequence of attentive pursuing and tentative thinking and speaking from the living, embodied and experiential process. What emerges are meanings which do not represent the individual living process, but in which this experiencing goes on. What is lived, felt and experienced is intractably interwoven with the meanings that come-from and ‘grow’-from a careful practice to stay in touch with the actual experience while formulating. The conceptually unpredictable specificity of what is said thus carries forward and cultivates lived experiences, which continue to unfold in what is said. Maybe this is what we mean by authenticity. And maybe this is why at times it is more challenging to be authentic than to be honest, because in speaking authentically from experience one has more to deal with than facts and states of affairs. Authenticity requires the cultivation of a use of language that formulates experience in such careful precision that it is not interrupted, yet able to unfold according to its own intricate and responsive order.

References Achenbach, G. 1984. Zur Einführung der philosophischen Praxis: Vorträge, Aufsätze, Gespräche und Essays, mit denen sich die philosophische Praxis in den Jahren 1981 bis 2009 vorstellte; eine Dokumentation. Köln: Dinter. Adorno, T. 2000. Negative dialectics. London: Routledge. Angehrn, E. 2000. Der Weg zur Metaphysik: Vorsokratiker – Platon – Aristoteles. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wiss. Austin, J. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dewey, J. 1984. “Qualitative Thought.” In The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 5. 1929–1930, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 243–262. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Duerr, Hans Peter. 1981. Werner Heisenberg, Mensch und Forscher. Speech held to Heisenbergs 80ies birthday at the University of Leipzig. Unpublished Manuscript. Foerster, H. 2001. Rück- und Vorschauen: Heinz von Foerster im Gespräch mit Albert Müller und Karl H. Müller. In Konstruktivismus und Kognitionswissenschaft: Kulturelle

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Wurzeln und Ergebnisse. H. v. Foerster gewidmet, 2nd ed, ed. A. Müller, K.H. Müller, and F. Stadler. New York: Springer. (Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis; Sonderbd). Gendlin, E. 1961. Experiencing: A variable in the process of therapeutic change. American Journal of Psychotherapy 15: 233–245. Gendlin, E. 1962. Experiencing and the creation of meaning. Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press. Gendlin, E. 1963. Experiencing and the nature of concepts. The Christian Scholar 46 (3): 245–255. Gendlin, E. 1989. Phenomenology as non-logical steps. In Analecta Husserliana: Vol. 26. American phenomenology: Origins and developments, ed. E.F. Kaelin and C.O. Schrag, 404–410. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. http://previous.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/ gol_2165.html. Accessed: 4. Apr. 2018. Gendlin, E. 1992. Celebrations and problems of humanistic psychology. Humanistic Psychologist 20  (2–3): 447–460. http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2163.html. Accessed: 4. Apr. 2018. Gendlin, E. 1996. Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press. Gendlin, E. 1997. The responsive order: A new empiricism. Man and World 30 (3): 383– 411. Gendlin, E. 1998. Focusing-orientierte Psychotherapie: Ein Handbuch der erlebensbezogenen Methode. München: Pfeiffer. (Leben lernen; 119). Gendlin, E. 2004. The new phenomenology of carrying forward. Continental Philosophy Review 37(1): 127–151. Gendlin, E. 2017. A process model. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Hegel, G. 1977. Phenomenology of spirit. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Irigaray, L., and M. Marder. 2016. Through vegetal being. New York: Columbia University Press. Leibniz, G. 1996. Neue Abhandlungen über den Menschlichen Verstand. In Philosophische Werke in vier Bänden, vol. 3. Transl. E. Cassirer. Hamburg: Meiner. (Philosophische Bibliothek; 498). Petitmengin, C. 2007. Towards the source of thoughts: The gestural and transmodal dimension of lived experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (3): 54–82. http://clairepetitmengin.fr/AArticles%20versions%20finales/JCS%20-%20Source.pdf. Accessed: 4. Apr. 2018. Petitmengin, C., and M. Bitbol. 2009. The validity of first-person descriptions as authenticity and coherence. Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (10–12): 363–404. http://clairepetitmengin.fr/AArticles%20versions%20finales/JCS%20-%20First%20person%20 validity.pdf. Accessed: 4. Apr. 2018. Ratcliffe, M. 2008. Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryle, G. 1949. Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.

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Schmitz, H. 2007. Der unerschöpfliche Gegenstand: Grundzüge der Philosophie. Bonn: Bouvier. Searle, J. 2008. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Tugendhat, E. 2003. Egozentrizität und Mystik: Eine anthropologische Studie. München: Beck.

PD Dr. Donata Schoeller  Interim Professorship at the University of Koblenz and Guest Professor at the University of Iceland. Studied Philosophy and Religious Studies in Vienna, Oxford, Zurich and Chicago. Research interests: philosophy of embodiment, classical pragmatism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, idealism, German mysticism (focus on Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme).

Approaches from Ethics and Social Philosophy

What Is Good about Being Authentic? Christine Bratu

1 Introduction In Martin Scorsese’s movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the crooked broker Jordan Belfort. By luring regular people into investing in very risky stocks, getting them to gamble away what little savings they have so that he can receive a fat commission, Jordan amasses a steadily increasing amount of money and the dubious reputation of being able to sell anything to anybody. Once the FBI starts looking into his fraudulent activities, Jordan decides to accept the advice of his lawyers and to give up his business. With a heavy heart, he convenes his staff, intending to tell them about his imminent retirement. But as he speaks to them, reminiscing about the many outrageous deals they pulled off together, Jordan changes his mind: If he were to quit now, if he were to walk away from a good opportunity to make money to become an upstanding citizen, he would turn himself into a sell-out, he would not stay true to himself. So he decides to go on ripping people off, staying the moneygrubbing crook that he is—and his staff loves him for it. Morally speaking, Jordan is not an admirable person. He is a scammer who unashamedly prays on those he suspects to be vulnerable. Also, he is shallow and superficial, a materialist who cares for nothing and nobody but money and the social status that comes with it. Nevertheless, in the scene I described above, it is hard not to feel a certain admiration for him: The fact that he decides to stay true to himself induces a sort of respect for him, even though the self Jordan decides

C. Bratu (*)  Georg August University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_6

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to stay true to is anything but respectable. So apparently, we consider authenticity as such to be good or valuable. That we do so might be a sign of the pervasiveness of what Charles Taylor has called the “culture of self-fulfillment” (Taylor 1991, p. 15) as well as the “culture of authenticity” (Taylor 1991, p. 17). According to Taylor, it is one of the most prominent properties of modern (presumably Western) societies that their members strive to realize their true selves. Other authors such as Charles Guignon follow Taylor in this assessment, arguing that the “core assumptions underlying the ideal of authenticity are deeply engrained in our inherited common sense” (Guignon 2004, p. 9). So it might be that in admiring Jordan for staying true to himself, we simply express an evaluative stance common in modern societies. But should we really do so? Is authenticity as such valuable or is it only valuable if the self the authentic person stays true to has other valuable characteristics which she instantiates by being authentic? This is the question I want to address in this paper. To do so, I first have to clarify what I mean by authenticity and by acting authentically. In Sect. 2, I distinguish between two different understandings of authenticity—the expressive and the origin understanding—and settle for a version of the former. In Sect. 3, I spell out the notion of the self my conception of authenticity will rely on. More precisely, I argue that the self of a person crystallizes in her self-conception, i.e. in those of her normative commitments she has to live up to in order to recognize herself as the person she takes herself to be. In Sect. 4, I draw on these elements to present my conception of authenticity according to which a person A acts authentically in her action x insofar x expresses at least one of the normative commitments that make up A’s self-conception. After having established this understanding of authentic action, I investigate whether acting authentically is valuable in Sect. 5. I show that acting authentically is good insofar it is pleasurable and constitutive of being self-respecting. I also discuss whether acting authentically is conducive to acting courageously and autonomously. Here it will transpire that while the connection between authenticity and subjective well-being as well as self-respect holds independently of the self-conception the authentic agent stays true to, the connection between authenticity and courage as well as autonomy is much weaker and only holds for specific self-conceptions. I conclude that even though authentic action is valuable in some respect, it can also be problematic depending on the self-conception the authentic agent stays true to.

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2 Two Different Understandings of Authenticity In the introduction I presupposed a specific understanding of authenticity, according to which a person A is authentic insofar A stays true to herself. For the purposes of this paper, I will continue to rely on this understanding, which I am going to spell out in more detail in this and the following two sections. But this is not the only understanding of authenticity currently in use (for an overview cf. Feldman and Hazlett 2013 as well as Newman and Smith 2016). Therefore, in this section, I want to present a second notion and briefly sketch why I am not going to draw on it. According to my understanding of authenticity, a person A is authentic insofar A stays true to herself. This is the understanding of authenticity we use intuitively when we talk about people being authentic. Nevertheless, it needs further elaboration as it is far from obvious what “being true to oneself” means. As a starting point (about which I will say more in Sect. 4), let’s assume that an action x of some person A is authentic insofar x expresses A’s self-conception. In turn, A is an authentic person insofar an adequate amount of her actions are authentic.1 Let’s call this the expressive understanding of authenticity. Note that while the expressive understanding of authenticity is paradigmatically used in relation to people and their actions, these are not its only area of application. For instance, when we praise a restaurant for serving authentic Thai food, we mean to say something similar, namely that the dishes served there express the taste and flavors that are central to our conception of Thai cuisine. Contrast this understanding with the one we assume when we talk of the authenticity of works of art. If we say of a painting that it is an authentic O’Keeffe we do not intend to say that this painting expresses Georgia O’Keeffe’s self-conception, but that it has a specific spatiotemporal property (cf. Newman and Smith 2016, p. 610), namely that of having been painted by Georgia O’Keeffe. So a work of art is authentic insofar it has been produced by the person it is attributed to. Call this the origin understanding of authenticity (Dutton refers to this as nominal authenticity, cf. Dutton 2003).

1By

assuming that a person is authentic if enough of her actions are, I am subscribing to what could be called an additive understanding of authenticity. Several authors have taken a similar stance regarding personal autonomy, but phrased the idea in terms of local autonomy (i.e. the autonomy of particular actions) vs. global autonomy (i.e. the autonomy of an agent which depends on the autonomy of her actions). Cf. Oshana (1998, p. 92).

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At first glance it may seem that the expressive understanding is more fundamental, with the origin understanding simply spelling out the same idea in a different way. For it is tempting to assume that insofar a work of art has been produced by the person it is attributed to it also expresses her self-conception. But this assumption collapses on closer inspection, as a painting produced by O’Keeffe would still count as authentic in terms of the origin understanding even if O’Keeffe had not succeeded in making it reflect her self-conception, thus rendering it inauthentic in terms of the expressive understanding. Examples like this show that both understandings are better thought of as independent of each other. So “authentic” is an ambiguous term and means different things when applied to works of art on the one hand and people and their actions as well as their cuisines on the other (for a similar assessment, cf. Newman and Smith 2016, p. 609). My aim in this paper is not to clarify whether the expressive and the origin understanding of authenticity have a common core after all or which precise relation they stand in (for this cf. Newman and Smith 2016). I am happy to accept that the meaning of “authentic” varies according to its areas of application. All I want to stress is that when we discuss authenticity with regard to people and their actions, the pertinent understanding is the expressive one. For as long as we do not have to worry about being mentally controlled by other people on a large scale, there is not much to be gained by applying the origin understanding of authenticity to actions (and subsequently to people), i.e. by asking whether an action was really produced by the person it is attributed to.

3 Notions of the Self With this clarification in place, let’s take a closer look at the expressive understanding of authenticity, i.e. the idea that an authentic person stays true to herself. In the preceding section, I have already stated that the notion of “staying true to oneself” needs to be spelled out in more detail as it is just a metaphor (albeit a very suggestive one). I have also made clear that my preferred way of spelling out this metaphor relies on the notion of self-conception and that I subscribe to an additive view of authenticity. Before I explain my view in more detail, I want to take a quick look at alternative positions and explain how they differ from mine. To start, I want to point out that “staying true to oneself” is best thought of as the concept of the expressive understanding of authenticity, which can then be broken down into different conceptions, depending on the notion of the self we rely on. Put differently, what we have to do in order to stay true to our self varies in relation to the notion of the self we presuppose. Obviously, philosophers

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have argued for many different notions of the self and it is beyond the scope of this paper to present all of them and to assess their respective merits and faults. Rather than attempting to do this, in what follows I list some questions that help distinguish between different models of the self and, subsequently, different conceptions of authenticity. Firstly, does the self of a person A manifest in how A in fact is or in how A wants or values to be? To illustrate what is at stake here, imagine a person Anna who values courage and would therefore very much want to be courageous herself. Nevertheless, when Anna takes a look at her life so far, she has to admit that up to now she has not been courageous but has acted cowardly most of the time. If Anna’s self is constituted by Anna’s normative commitments, we have to conclude that so far Anna has lived an inauthentic life, as her cowardly actions do not express her valuing of courage and her corresponding desire to be courageous. If, in contrast, Anna’s self is made up by how Anna regularly acts, so far she has been true to herself as she kept on acting cowardly. Marina Oshana argues for a conception of authenticity that relies on such a descriptive notion of the self. According to her, a person’s self is constituted by what she in fact does, so that being true to oneself amounts to “‘standing behind one’s choices’ […] even while not endorsing them and even if one feels alienated from them” (Oshana 2007, p. 424). In contrast, Harry Frankfurt relies on an evaluative notion of the self since according to him “our essential natures as individuals are constituted […] by what we cannot help caring about” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 138). Hence, for Frankfurt a person stays true to herself and is thus authentic not if she continues to act as she has acted so far but if she does what she cares about (cf. Frankfurt 1999, p. 139). Let’s assume that we settle on an evaluative notion of the self. Above I have introduced this notion as one according to which the self of some person A manifests either in how A wants or in how A values to be. But while it might be appropriate to lump valuing and caring together to contrast an evaluative notion of the self with a descriptive one, we have to distinguish between these two aspects if we want to gain a better understanding of the evaluative notion. So the second question is: Does the self of some person A manifest in A’s desires or rather in A’s normative commitments? As in the case of the descriptive and the evaluative notion of the self, these two aspects can come apart. To see this, let’s return to Anna. Imagine Anna values being a trustworthy person, because she values being a good friend and considers trustworthiness to be an important element of flourishing friendships. Nevertheless, from time to time Anna is overcome with a strong desire to act out of character, to go out and do something crazy. Since acting upon this desire often results in new and exciting experiences, Anna is not

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opposed to it arising—in fact, she even desires to be a person who occasionally wants to go a little nuts. In these cases, her desire does not conform to her overall normative outlook, as being prone to acting out of character is not conducive to being trustworthy. So if we believe that Anna’s self crystallizes in her desires, she is staying true to herself while acting out—a conclusion we cannot come to if we accept that Anna’s self manifests in her normative commitments. Let’s call the first a conative notion of the self and the second a cognitive one. Frankfurt is a proponent of the former, as for him our selves are made up by what we care about or—to use his own term—by our “volitional necessities” (Frankfurt 2006, xi). Volitional necessities are those of our desires which we are both unable and unwilling to change as we endorse them wholeheartedly, i.e. as we unequivocally desire to have them. Consequently, for Frankfurt acting authentically is acting in accordance with those desires we wholeheartedly endorse. In contrast, in what follows I propose a cognitive notion of the self which in turn gives rise to a conception of authenticity based on normative commitments. Finally, different authors are of different opinion as to how much of our self is up to us. Obviously the self of some person A crystallizes in some of A’s properties (for instance, in her actions, in her desires or in her normative commitments), but depending on which properties these are, A can take a more or less proactive role in bringing her self about, i.e. in creating and shaping her own self. For instance, if Anna’s self is made up by her normative commitments or by her desires, Anna will have little to no leeway in creating her self because these are mental states people are assailed by and cannot willingly produce. We do not choose what we consider right or valuable, just as we do not choose what we desire (all we can willingly bring about are situations in which our normative commitments or our desires become particularly salient to us). Contrast this with the position that Anna’s self is made up by her actions. In this case, there is room for Anna actively creating and shaping her self as Anna can (at least under favorable con­ ditions) choose how to act. The latter position can be found in authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche or Michel Foucault. For them authenticity is therefore not a matter of discovering who we really are by examining our mental set-up and then conforming or living up to it, but of producing our self (cf. Varga 2012, pp. 70–77). Authors like Frankfurt and myself, who believe that the self manifests in mental states we cannot willingly produce, cannot accept such productionist notions of the self and of authenticity. Instead, we have to subscribe to discovery notions of the self and of authenticity.

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As I have already stated at the beginning of this section, it is beyond the scope of this paper to assess the merits of different notions of the self.2 Therefore, I confine myself to making explicit the understanding that underlies my conception of authenticity. The notion I rely on has been put forward by Eva Weber-Guskar. According to her, our selves are made up by our “Selbstbilder” (Weber-Guskar 2016, p. 147), i.e. by our self-conceptions. These are those of our normative commitments we have to express in our acting, feeling and reasoning to recognize ourselves as the people we take ourselves to be (cf. Weber-Guskar 2016, p. 147). Jor­dan, for instance, would not recognize himself as the person he took himself to be if he suddenly stopped chasing after money or caring for other people’s admiration. Weber-Guskar stresses that the complexity of our self-conceptions can vary from person to person, with some people having more elaborate self-conceptions than others. Jordan’s self-conception seems to be rather shallow as he sees himself almost exclusively as someone who cares about material things. But we can easily imagine people who are committed to more values and norms so that their self-conceptions consists of them being, say, good friends and loving spouses as well as helpful co-workers, responsible citizens and great cooks. If a person’s selfconception is complex, those values and norms which are fundamental, i.e. which would elicit the most radical changes in her remaining normative commitments if she dropped or changed them, are constitutive of her self to a higher degree than those that are less entrenched. Put differently, a person’s self is made up by her normative commitments, but in particular by her fundamental normative commitments. According to ­Weber-Guskar, the normative commitments that constitute a person’s self-conception need not be generalizable in her own eyes. For instance, Jordan might believe that for him—i.e. given his particular desires and skills—chasing money is constitutive, without also being committed to the belief that other people—with other desires and skills—have to do so too. Similarly, there is no conceptual necessity for our self-conceptions to be morally acceptable. As the example of Jordan shows, it is perfectly conceivable that people derive their sense of being themselves from valuing things or adhering to norms that are morally dubious. Likewise, to serve as self-conceptions, our normative commitments do not have to be spelled out in much detail nor do their distinct parts have to be interconnected or coherent. It might well be the case that a person is normatively committed to

2To

do so, I would have to draw on considerations far beyond the issue of authenticity, for instance on the metaphysical commitments of the different understandings of the self as well as on their implications for the theory of action, philosophy of mind etc.

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bringing about certain states of affairs or to observing certain norms that are, in fact, unrelated or even incompatible. Having such a disparate self-conception is problematic, as the person adhering to it will never be able to fully live up to it. For instance, if Jordan saw himself as someone who valued getting rich at all cost as well as being a trustworthy business partner, he would have a hard time fulfilling his self-conception. Still, while having a disparate self-conception might lead to practical problems, it is not conceptually impossible to have such a self-conception. Finally, a person’s self-conception does not have to be fixed once and for all, but can change over time. Such change is possible because, as I have said above, our self-conceptions need not be spelled out in all detail. This leaves room for the evolvement of a person’s self-conception when she realizes that her normative commitment to some consideration c1 implies that she is also committed to valuing or observing some other consideration c2. Change within a self-conception can also occur when a person makes new experiences that bring a valuable state of affairs to her attention she did not know of before or when she is forced to re-systematize her normative commitments because she realizes that some of them are incompatible. Let’s sum up. In the preceding paragraph I have presented a notion of the self which I take from Weber-Guskar and which will serve as the backbone of my conception of authenticity. This position is evaluative as according to it our selves are made up by what we are normatively committed to and not by how we in fact act. It is cognitive as our selves are constituted by our normative commitments and not by our conative states. And as our normative commitments are not something we can bring about willingly, we do not produce our selves but rather discover them either by introspection or by observing our own actions.

4 Acting Authentically In Sect. 2, I clarified that when it comes to persons and their actions, authenticity means staying true to oneself. In Sect. 3, I spelled out the notion of the self I rely on, according to which the self of a person crystallizes in her self-conception, i.e. in those of her normative commitments she has to observe to recognize herself as the person she took herself to be. Therefore, as a first approximation we can say that a person A acts authentically in some action x if and only if and because x expresses the normative commitments that make up A’s self-conception. This is only an approximation because, as I have stated above, it can be the case that a person’s self-conception is disparate, i.e. that her normative commitments c1–cn are either not suitably interconnected or even incoherent. If we

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contented ourselves with this approximation, a person with a disparate s­elfconception could never act authentically, since no action could express all aspects of her self-conception. But since it might well be the case that many people have disparate self-conceptions and as I do not want to argue for an understanding of authenticity that makes acting authentically an unattainable ideal, I propose to refine it so that A’s action x is not authentic insofar it expresses all of A’s ­self-conception, but if it expresses some part of it. Put more formally, A’s action x is authentic if and only if and because x expresses at least one the normative commitments c1–cn that make up A’s self-conception.

Such a conception of authenticity is not only potentially more inclusive, it also allows us to think of authenticity as something that comes in degrees. The degree to which A’s action x is authentic depends on how many parts of A’s ­self-conception it expresses as well as on how fundamental the parts it expresses are. Also, given this refined conception, A’s action x can be authentic in one regard and inauthentic in another. This the case if A subscribes to two incompatible normative commitments c1 und c2 and her action x is expressive of one of them and runs counter to the other. Finally, just as an action can be more or less authentic for the person who performs it, so can the person herself be more or less authentic, depending on how many of her actions are authentic and to which degree. Put more formally, A person A is authentic if and only if and because an adequate amount of her actions are authentic to an adequate degree.

Which precise amount of authentic actions is required so that we can say that A is an authentic person will be contested. But in this “authentic” does not much differ from other predicates such as, say, “friendly” or “witty” which can be applied both to particular actions and to persons as a function of their actions. To illustrate my conception of authenticity, let’s go back to the example of Jordan Belfort as he is depicted in Scorsese’s movie. Let’s assume that Jordan is really as shallow as the movie portraits him. In that case, his self-conception is made up by only two normative commitments, as he sees himself as someone who values money as well as someone who values the admiration of other people. Fortunately for Jordan, these two commitments fit together, at least in a capitalist society where admiration is often bestowed in proportion to material goods. Therefore, insofar his actions are authentic they will likely be so to the fullest

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degree as they will likely express both normative commitments that make up Jordan’s self-conception. But unfortunately for the people Jordan interacts with, neither of these two commitments is inherently moral. So when Jordan acts authentically, he runs the risk of not acting morally. For instance, Jordan would act authentically if he let himself be guided by his commitment to money and not, say, by the moral norm not to take advantage of others. Likewise, in the scene I described above in which Jordan decides to keep on being a crook instead of quitting his job, in doing so he acts authentically. Before I go on to discuss whether acting authentically is valuable, I want to point out two features of the conception of authenticity I propose. Firstly, note that my conception can be interpreted in two ways, as the phrase “x expresses at least one of the normative commitments c1–cn that make up A’s self-conception” is underspecified: Does A’s action x express A’s commitment to some consideration c1 if x is in accordance with c1? Or must it also be the case that A performed x because of her regard for c1? To see that these two aspects can come apart, imagine that Jordan decides to invest in a particular stock which turns out to be very profitable. But for once it was not his love of money that guided Jordan in his investment, but, say, a promise he made to a friend. His decision to invest is in accordance with his commitment to money, even though it was not his love for money that lead him to make this decision. As the example shows, the second interpretation is more exigent than the first one, since it demands that an authentic action not only fits a certain pattern but is also performed in a certain spirit. Given this interpretation it would be very hard to evaluate whether an action was authentic or not, as it is very hard to assess what rationale led an agent to act. Often we are not privy to the reasoning of one another and even when we are, it can always be the case that the person informing us about her reasoning is either confused about what really guided her actions or simply not truthful. To keep our conception of authenticity applicable, I therefore propose that we go for the weaker interpretation, according to which x expresses A’s commitment to some consideration c1 already if x is in accordance with this consideration. Secondly, note that in a specific regard my conception of authenticity is content-neutral. Whether an action is authentic or not depends solely on whether it conforms with the self-conception of the agent performing it. Therefore, every type of action can, in theory, be authentic. For instance, if Jordan’s ­self-conception changed radically so that from now on he was committed to blending in with the crowd and to leading a very conventional life, he would act authentically in doing so. Some might find this implication puzzling. For these critics, acting authentically precludes actions like blending in or conforming to

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social conventions as the “authentic self is the individual who can stand alone, shedding all status relations and social entanglements” (Guignon ascribes this position to the writer and poet Rainer Maria Rilke, cf. Guignon 2004, p. 72). This is an intuition that my conception of authenticity cannot do justice to.

5 What Is Good about Acting Authentically? After the state-setting of the previous sections, I can finally address the question raised by the example of Jordan Belfort. What is puzzling about Jordan’s case is that even though the self Jordan stays true to is anything but admirable, the fact that he does not betray himself somehow elicits a positive evaluative response. This suggests that acting authentically is as such valuable, i.e. that acting authentically is valuable even if the self the authentic person stays true to in her action has no other valuable characteristics or at least none which she realizes in acting authentically. Call this the independence claim, according to which the value we realize in acting authentically is independent of the value of the self we are staying true to. In this section, I investigate whether the independence claim can be substantiated. To do so, I discuss whether certain values are realized by the agent acting authentically independently of the self-conception she stays true to. The values I focus on are pleasure (or subjective well-being), self-respect, courage and autonomy because to me they seem the most promising candidates for corroborating the independence claim.3 In each subsection I (a) explain what I take the value in question to be, (b) discuss whether acting authentically realizes this value and (c) ask whether this connection holds in such a way as to corroborate the independence claim.

5.1 Pleasure Let’s start with pleasure. By “pleasure” I mean a psychological state which individuals experience as pleasing. Obviously there is a longstanding philosophical debate about the ethical relevance of pleasure. But even though many would

3I

do not discuss the connection between authenticity and self-knowledge since Nadja El Kassar examines the issues surrounding it in much more detail in this volume. For another assessement of this connection, cf. Feldman and Hazlett (2013).

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doubt that experiencing pleasure is the only thing that is ethically relevant, hardly anyone would call into question that experiencing pleasure is at least of some value. So if authentic action resulted in pleasure, this would indeed help to establish the value of authenticity. Let’s see whether such connection can be established. Consider the following example by Thomas E. Hill: “Suppose an artist of genius and originality paints a masterwork unappreciated by his contemporaries. Cynically, for money and social status, he alters the painting to please the tasteless public and then turns out copies in machine-like fashion. He does it deliberately, with full awareness of his reasons, but not without some sense of disgust at himself” (Hill 1995/1985, p. 118).

In altering and selling his painting the artist is not acting authentically. For even though he might have good reasons to do so, these reasons are not compatible with those that arise from his self-conception (which presumably includes his commitment to art) so that in following through on them, the artist is betraying himself. According to Hill’s description, doing so has negative consequences for the artist’s subjective well-being as he feels disgusted with himself. Hill invites us to picture him sitting miserably in his studio, feeling like a sell-out, hating himself and the world and turning ever more cynical and bitter. To me, this assessment seems psychologically plausible. But if we accept this as a valid scenario, there is a connection between acting authentically and pleasure. For this scenario suggests that acting inauthentically causes a person A to experience (at least to some degree) pain and that, in contrast, acting authentically would cause A to experience (at least to some degree) pleasure. Put differently, examples like Hill’s show that given how human psychology usually works there is a causal connection between acting authentically and pleasure. In the introduction to her work on the importance of how we see ourselves, Oshana seems to claim the opposite. Here Oshana states that “in conversation with a friend, I remarked that at times I could barely stand being with myself. […] I found aspects of my character—essential, identity-distinctive aspects bound up with who I am and with how I see myself—occasionally insufferable” (Oshana 2010, p. 1). I assume that Oshana’s observation resonates with many of us. But if many of us share Oshana’s sentiment, i.e. if many of us sometimes experience being ourselves as tedious or annoying, does that not refute my claim that there is a causal connection between acting authentically and pleasure? Luckily, it does not. Because remember that Oshana subscribes to a descriptive notion of the self (cf. Sect. 3), according to which our selves are not made up by our

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self-conceptions but by our patterns of behavior. Given this understanding of the self, we can easily see how staying true to oneself can be insufferable, namely if we continue to act in the way we usually do even though we are not normatively committed to this way of acting (and follow through on it only because we are weak-willed or live in circumstances that make it hard for us to change). Since I have argued for an evaluative notion of the self, the same problem cannot arise with my conception of authenticity. For given my conception of authenticity, in acting authentically a person A expresses normative commitments she endorses and identifies with. And Hill’s example suggests that doing so is something that usually makes us at least to some degree content. As Oshana’s counterclaim can be explained away, I conclude that acting authentically is indeed conducive to pleasure. What remains to be shown is that the pleasure realized by acting authentically does not depend on the self-conception the authentic agent stays true to but simply on the fact that the authentic agent does not betray herself. Let me be clear here: For the independence claim to hold, it does not need to be the case that the subjective well-being of the authentic agent is only influenced by her acting authentically. More often than not, our subjective well-being will depend on many different factors. All the independence claim demands is that whether or to what degree we have succeeded in staying true to ourselves is one of these many factors. To see that this is the case, let’s return to Hill’s cynical artist. Imagine we could ask him what exactly causes him to experience pain: Is it only that he has started painting pictures he considers ugly? Or does the fact that in doing so he has given up on his artistic vision and sold out constitute an independent cause for his pain? To me it seems plausible to assume that both aspects factor into his subjective state of (un)well-being. If this is so, i.e. if the fact that he is betraying himself influences his subjective well-being regardless of what exactly it is he is betraying, then the independence claim has been validated.

5.2 Personal Self-Respect The quote by Hill points to another way to support the independence claim. For Hill, the cynical artist is not a case of somebody who fails to act authentically (the issue of authenticity does not come up in Hill’s paper at all), but an example of somebody lacking self-respect. So could it be that there is a connection between acting authentically and being self-respecting and that we could also draw on this connection to support the independence claim?

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Let’s start with what it takes to be self-respecting. According to Hill, “self-respect would require that one develop and live by a set of personal standards by which one is prepared to judge oneself even if they are not extended to others. The standards might be ideals for which one strives or merely a minimum below which one cannot go without losing face with oneself” (Hill 1995/1985, p. 120).

Put differently, for Hill a person is self-respecting if she has personal standards (or—to return to the terminology I have been using so far—a self-conception) and if she lives by these. Robin Dillon has something similar in mind when she characterizes a person with what she calls personal recognition self-respect as someone who “strives to live according to a conception of a life that is worthwhile for her, a ­“self-ideal” that gives expression to the fact not only that she is a person, but also to the ideals, aspirations, commitments, and “points of no return” that define her as the particular person that she is” (Dillon 1992, p. 134).

Drawing on Hill’s and Dillon’s accounts, we can say that a person A is ­self-respecting if and only if and because A has normative commitments that define her as the particular person she is, i.e. if A has a self-conception, and if A lives in accordance with her self-conception. The work of Dillon also provides a helpful starting point to seeing why being self-respecting is valuable. According to her “self-respect is a manifestation of human excellence, a fine and fitting expression of our definitive human capacity to value and our definitive capacity as agents to be reflective about value and guide ourselves by what we determine to be the relative importance of value” (Dillon 2004, p. 59).

What Dillon points out here is that in being self-respecting, we display an important and distinctive human capacity, namely that of having normative commitments and being guided by them. Being self-respecting is valuable because by showing the proper regard for ourselves, we realize this important and distinctive capacity. Admittedly, there are other ways for us to realize this capacity (for instance, we also do so when we let ourselves be guided by normative commitments which we endorse but which are not part of our self-conception). But that being self-respecting is not the only way in which we can realize our capacity of having and being guided by normative commitments does not make it any less valuable.

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So far, I have explained what being self-respecting amounts to and why it is valuable. Let’s turn to the question whether acting authentically is conducive to being self-respecting. And given the understanding of authenticity I have argued for it clearly is. According to my conception of authenticity, a person A acts authentically in her action x insofar x expresses at least one of the normative commitments that make up her self-conception. And according to Hill and Dillon, A acts self-respectingly in her action x insofar in performing x she lives in accordance with her self-conception. Given what I have said about ­self-conceptions—i.e. that they can be complex and do not necessarily have to be well integrated or even coherent—it is not quite clear what it takes to live in accordance with one’s self-conception in toto, because it can well be that by performing x, A lives in accordance with one part of her self-conception (i.e. with one particular normative commitment) while violating another. But even if we keep this complication in mind, it is safe to assume that A can only live in accordance with her self-conception by performing those types of action that express at least one of the normative commitments that make up her self-conception. But then, A can only be self-respecting by acting authentically. Thus, acting authentically is constitutive of being self-respecting. The last question remaining open is whether acting authentically is constitutive of being self-respecting regardless of the particular self-conception the agent stays true to. But this is obviously the case as Hill and Dillon place no restrictions on the self-conception a person A has to live in accordance with in order to be self-respecting. According to them, to be self-respecting A has to perform actions that express at least one of the normative commitments that make up her ­self-conception whatever the content of her particular self-conception might be. Since acting authentically is constitutive of being self-respecting independently of the agent’s self-conception, this connection bears out the independence claim.

5.3 Courage So far, I have succeeded in showing that by acting authentically we also realize (some amount of) pleasure and act self-respectingly. Regarding the next two values uncovering a similar connection turns out to be more problematic. I start with courage, i.e. with the question whether acting authentically and acting courageously are somehow connected. Aristotle famously claimed that courage is the mean between fear and confidence (cf. Aristotle 2002, p. 1107b). Put into more contemporary terms, we can

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say that a person A acts courageously in her action x if A performs x even though she believes that it is likely that she will face negative consequences for doing so. Of course, this is just an approximation and many details would have to be spelled out more carefully to gain a full understanding of what courage is. For instance, does A’s action x have to be a moral action or can A also be courageous regarding actions that are morally objectionable?4 I will not address these questions here as answering them is not necessary to understand the relation between authenticity and courage. I will also not address the otherwise very interesting question whether acting courageously is valuable but simply assume that it is—an assumption which I hope to reflect our moral intuitions. With this approximate understanding of courage in place, I now tackle the question whether there is a connection between acting authentically and acting courageously. This is the connection the example of Jordan Belford suggests most strongly. It certainly takes courage to defy the FBI and if Jordan chooses to do so in order to stay true to himself we have to conclude that in acting authentically he also acts courageously—whatever else we might think of him. A defender of the independence claim might be inclined to generalize from this example and to argue that staying true to oneself always implies acting courageously. In the case of Jordan, acting authentically does indeed imply acting courageously. But this is only the case because of the content of Jordan’s ­self-conception. If Jordan had a different self-conception—for instance, if he was normatively committed to being honest—expressing this particular normative commitment would not increase the likelihood of him being arrested by the FBI. So even though there might be a connection between acting authentically and acting courageously in the case of Jordan, this connection does not hold regardless but only because of his self-conception. So even though staying true to some ­self-conceptions implies courage, overall the connection between courage and authenticity is not close enough to support the independence claim.

4For

instance, Aristotle claims that courage is something we can only manifest in ethically admirable actions. He does so because for him courage is an ethical virtue (cf. Aristotle 2002, Book III, Chap. 11).

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5.4 Autonomy The last possible connection I want to examine is that between acting authentically and acting autonomously. Strategically speaking, trying to establish this particular connection is both pertinent and risky. It is pertinent because many of us take autonomy to be a central value of modern life. If a defender of the independence claim succeeded in showing that there is a connection between authenticity and autonomy, this would constitute a strong case for the value of acting authentically. On the other hand, going this argumentative route is risky because by now there are many competing conceptions of autonomy on the philosophical market and none can be assumed to have universal appeal (for an overview cf. Buss 2016). As it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a comprehensive defense of one particular conception of autonomy, I have to assume one, hoping that at least some readers find it acceptable. I choose the conception Ben Colburn proposes because its action theoretical commitments are similar to the ones my conception of authenticity relies on. According to Colburn, autonomy is the “ideal of people deciding for themselves what is a valuable life, and living their lives in accordance with that decision” (Colburn 2010, p. 19). An autonomous person decides for herself which normative commitments guide her life and lives in accordance with this decision. The central notion of this definition is “deciding for oneself”, which for Colburn does not imply an attitude of “picking-and-choosing” (Colburn 2010, p. 23) towards one’s normative commitments, but which he spells out in terms of endorsement and independence (cf. Colburn 2010, Chap. 2): For him, a person A decides for herself that she is committed to some state of affairs or practice S if and only if and because A would endorse S if she were to reflect upon it and if her endorsement would occur independently of distorting factors. As I have said at the start of this section, many would agree that autonomy is a central value of modern life. One way to validate this intuition is by pointing out that, given Colburn’s conception of autonomy, acting autonomously is valuable in the same way that being self-respecting is: By living autonomously we realize our capacity of having normative commitments and of being guided by them. But Colburn’s conception of autonomy has several appealing features over and above this: Firstly, it is not over-intellectualist, since an autonomous agent does not have to reflect upon her normative commitments continuously and to keep on affirming

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them. It suffices that she has the disposition to do so, i.e. that she would endorse them if she were to reflect upon them (cf. Colburn 2010, p. 26). Secondly, Colburn’s proposal comprises a relational element as an agent can only be autonomous if she has a certain standing vis-à-vis her social environment. For instance, a person who is brainwashed or coerced into adopting a certain normative commitment can never count as autonomous (cf. Colburn 2010, p. 27). Finally, while many relational conceptions of autonomy have strong perfectionist implications and exclude certain normative commitments from being autonomously chosen from the start, Colburn’s conception avoids being too perfectionist. Even a person who chooses a very restrictive way of life (say, for instance, becoming a nun) can still be considered autonomous if she would freely endorse her decision were she to reflect upon it (cf. Colburn 2010, p. 37). Now that I have clarified what I take autonomy to be and why it is valuable, let’s turn to whether there is a connection between acting authentically and acting autonomously. On the one hand, there is a connection as—given the conceptions I have assumed here—acting autonomously implies acting authentically: To act autonomously, a person A (inter alia) has to live in accordance with her ­self-conception, but to do so implies that she is acting authentically. But note that the other direction does not hold, i.e. that acting authentically does not also imply acting autonomously. Authentic and autonomous action come apart in cases in which an agent expresses her self-conception in her action but did not choose her self-conception independently. For instance, imagine Jordan had come to acquire his particular self-conception by way of coercion. Perhaps he grew up in a social environment so imbued with capitalist propaganda that he could not help believing that money is all that matters. In this case, in expressing his normative commitment to money by ripping off his clients Jordan would be living authentically. Nevertheless, he would fail to realize the value of an autonomous life since his self-conception was not chosen independently and therefore cannot form the base of autonomous agency to begin with. This shows that even though there is a connection between authenticity and autonomy, it is not strong enough to also bear out the independence claim. Whether an agent realizes the value of autonomy by acting authentically depends on her self-conception, more precisely on whether she has chosen her self-conception independently.

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6 Conclusion: Should We Act Authentically? What conclusion can we draw from the previous sections? The discussion in Sect. 5 has shown that by acting authentically we realize some values independently of what our particular self-conceptions are: Staying true to ourselves is likely to make us (at least to some degree) content and by staying true to ourselves we act self-respectingly. Whether acting authentically is good over and above this depends on the self-conception of the authentic agent: If a person A subscribes to an ethically admirable self-conception, A will likely realize all sorts of values besides pleasure and self-respect by staying true to the normative commitments she identifies with; if, in contrast, A subscribes to an ethically flawed self-conception like Jordan Belford, her authentic actions will be problematic even though they render A content and self-respecting. So even though authentic action is as such valuable, not all states of affairs it brings about are necessarily good. Put differently, authentic action is valuable in some respect (namely regarding pleasure and self-respect), but it might also be bad or good in others respects depending on the self-conception of the authentic agent. That authentic action is as such conducive to some values explains how someone like Jordan Belford—i.e. someone who has an ethically flawed ­self-conception—can elicit admiration by staying true to himself. Jordan is admirable insofar he takes himself seriously and is willing to incur considerable risks for not betraying himself. But even though his authenticity is admirable with regard to the self-respect and the courage he manifests, all things considered Jordan should not act authentically. Because given his self-conception and the circumstances he finds himself in, Jordan has to violate certain norms of justice (for instance, to exploit the trust of his clients) to stay true to himself and the value of acting ­self-respectingly and courageously does not make up for the wrong of injustice. Generalizing from Jordan’s case we can conclude that even though the value of acting authentically has to be taken into account when assessing how an agent should act, it is far from clear that it will always (or maybe even ever) be decisive. Does that mean that I am arguing in favor of being a hypocrite? Should Jordan and people like him—i.e. people who by staying true to themselves would end up realizing more harm than good or who would have to violate norms of justice—just pretend to have different self-conceptions? Is it not preferable if crooks like Jordan are at least honest about it, i.e. if they are authentic in their crookedness? To me, questions like these are beside the point as there is a third option: What people

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like Jordan should do is question their self-conceptions so that the normative commitments they identify with end up aligning (or at least not conflicting) with what is truly valuable and with what we owe to each other.

References Aristotle. 2002. Nicomachean Ethics. eds. S. Brodie and C. Rowe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buss, S. 2016. Personal autonomy. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E.N. Zalta: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/personal-autonomy. Colburn, B. 2010. Autonomy and liberalism. London: Routledge. Dillon, R. 1992. How to lose your self-respect. American Philosophical Quaterly 29 (2): 125–139. Dillon, R. 2004. What’s a woman worth? What’s life worth? Without self-respect! On the value of evaluative self-respect. In Moral Psychology, ed. P. DesAutels and M. Walker, 191–216. Oxford: Roman&Littlefield. Dutton, D. 2003. Authenticity in art. In The Oxford Handbook of aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson, 258–274. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldman, S., and A. Hazlett. 2013. Authenticity and self-knowledge. Dialectica 67 (2): 157–181. Frankfurt, H. 1999. Necessity, volition, and love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. 2006. Taking ourselves seriously and getting it right. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guignon, C. 2004. On being authentic. London: Routledge. Hill, T. 1995/1985. Self-respect reconsidered. In Dignity, character, and self-respect, ed. R. Dillon. London: Routledge. Newman, G., and R. Smith. 2016. Kinds of authenticity. Philosophy. Compass 11 (10): 609–618. Oshana, M. 1998. Personal autonomy and society. Journal of Social Philosophy 29 (1): 81–102. Oshana, M. 2007. Autonomy and the question of authenticity. Social Theory and Practice 33 (3): 411–429. Oshana, M. 2010. The importance of how we see ourselves. Lanham: Roman&Littlefield. Taylor, C. 1991. The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Weber-Guskar, E. 2016. Würde als Haltung. Münster: Mentis. Varga, S. 2012. Authenticity as an ethical ideal. London: Routledge. Prof. Dr. Christine Bratu  Professor for Philosophy with a Focus on Gender Studies at Georg August University of Göttingen. She studied Philosophy and Political Sciences in Munich. Research interest: analytical feminist philosophy, practical and political philosophy, theories of respect and disrespect.

Authenticity as a Modern Myth. Remarks from Social Philosophy and Anthropology Michael Reder 1 Introduction “I am not interested in knowing who I really am. Once I read that Elfriede Jelinek called me a character mask. […] I am happy with that, because I think about my everyday life as follows: First, I give an interview in a hotel, then I cross a parking lot and I am at the same time a jovial citizen of Cologne: ‘Hey Schmidtchen, you here!’ In addition, I am the person bringing my children to the kindergarten. A person who is stricken by the delusion of authenticity would say: For heaven’s sake! When are you yourself? I find it very stressful that so many people want to be himor herself all the time” (Schmidt 2013; translation by the author).

This quote expresses a personal perspective on authenticity, courtesy of Harald Schmidt, a famous German comedian. Of course, this argument is neither academic nor philosophically founded. However, it illustrates a current social imperative to be authentic. On the one hand, authenticity plays an important role in modern societies. The imperative forces all persons to be who they ‘really’ are and to act accordingly. The ‘authentic self’ functions as a framework for the different roles people have to fulfil in their everyday life. Schmidt, on the other hand, seems to be irritated by this demand, because he interprets himself as a person that always plays different characters that could not be harmonised under the umbrella of a presumably authentic self. A closer look at different social domains illustrates this widespread delusion of authenticity. Some examples: Every career counselling recommends that people be authentic during job interviews. Fitness centres lure their members with M. Reder (*)  Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_7

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advertisements that promise: ‘Nothing can stop a person who goes her own way!’ In addition, the private sphere, as in sexuality, faces the demand to be authentic as well. These three examples illustrate that authenticity is a dominant characteristic of our social and cultural life. Philosophically, authenticity expresses a certain quality of self-relation. An individual who is authentic seems to be in accord with her ‘essence’. Authentic individuals are able to express this essence both through words and behaviour. At the same time, authenticity does not only express a self-relation, but also a value because the capability to be authentic is interpreted normatively. Thereby, authenticity becomes a demanding ideal of modern societies. Furthermore, authenticity also corresponds with the self-image of modern societies. The promise of autonomy in modern societies means that all persons should be able to abandon traditional values and behavioural patterns. Today, however, being autonomous does not only mean being free and independent from traditional values and guidelines, but also being authentic. Authenticity becomes a main characteristic of individuals in times of rapid change in many social and political domains. People do not live in the same place for their whole life. They change their political opinions and their fashion preferences. But they should not change their own way of being authentic. However, is this argument convincing? Is authenticity the last anchor of modern societies? I am sceptical about this thesis, which is why I will argue that authenticity is a modern myth through which complex, heterogeneous and dynamic social processes should be stabilised (see Williams and Vannini 2009). In addition, I will discuss whether authenticity is also a kind of modern hegemonic discourse in the sense of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault whereby other (e.g. economic) interests are promoted. Therefore, my paper has two parts. The first part analyses the historical sources of the current debate on authenticity. In the second part, I will reconstruct and discuss three characteristics of the current discourse that are related to the historical analysis, namely, the anthropological, the social, and the political (or economic) limitations of this discourse.

2 Historical Sources of the Discourse about Authenticity One of the most important starting points for the philosophical debate on authenticity can be found in Enlightenment thought, namely in the works of Johann Gottfried Herder. His arguments mark an anthropological turn in philosophy. He no longer focuses on the general characteristics of (human) reality, but on

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the individual experiences of human beings. For Herder, reflecting upon these experiences is the basic philosophical approach to reality. At the same time, these experiences differ in form and content. This is why Herder interprets them as expressions of the particular person. Every individual person makes different experiences, which should be the base for philosophical reflections. On this basis, the individuality of human beings becomes important in Herder’s philosophical argumentation. Concerning individuality, experiences in general and feelings in particular (which are always closely connected with experiences) are again the central characteristic. Paraphrasing René Descartes’s basic theorem, Herder suggests: “I feel! I am!” (Herder 1994, p. 236; translation by the author). This means that experiences (and feelings) constitute the individuality of the person. At the same time, these feelings express the particularity of the person. In addition, every person has a sense for the coherence or harmony of her different feelings. “Every man has a particular proportion, a particular harmony as it were, between all his sensitive feelings” (Herder 1800/1803, p. 339). Authen­ ticity, then, means that persons must find a harmony between different feelings and, by doing so, become an individual and authentic person. This is a challenge all persons face. From a normative perspective, all persons also face the normative obligation to cope with this individual and original harmony. Jean-Jacques Rousseau connects his reflections on authenticity to Herder’s concept, but formulates it in a more normative way. He argues that a moral person’s self-fulfilment is only possible through an authentic relation that the person entertains with herself. This means, in consequence, that every human being should be faithful to her inner nature, as Sturma points out. “A genuine self-relation does not depend on moral instructions. It originates in the person’s own, individual feeling for her existence, which in turn originates from the person’s conscience” (Sturma 2001, p. 183; translation by the author).

A moral person must ‘listen’ to her own existence in order to become an authentic person. Similar to Romantic philosophers, Rousseau focuses on the idea of a deep inwardness by means of which a coherent (and harmonic) individuality is constituted. Only on this basis, moral acting is possible. Therefore, Rousseau might be the first philosopher that develops an ethics of authenticity. Although Lionel Trilling was more of a writer than a philosopher in the strict sense, he was one of the most influential intellectuals working on authenticity in the 20th century. In comparison to Rousseau’s concept of authenticity, Trilling points out that the moral relation between the individual and other persons is no longer at the centre of the concept of authenticity. In earlier times, he says,

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h­onesty, conceived as the moral relation between an authentic self and other human beings, was the defining element of ‘authenticity’, as e.g. Rousseau has argued. Nowadays, honesty has lost this conceptual role. “Which is not to say that the moral temper of our time sets no store by the avoidance of falsehood to others, only that it does not figure as the defining purpose of being true to one’s own self” (Trilling 1972, p. 9).

This new concept of authenticity entails two important consequences. First, a coherent or harmonic expression of a human being can no longer be assumed, as it is not possible to find out what this could possibly mean. In Trilling’s perspective, an authentic self is opaque to herself (see Strub 2009). Jean-Paul Sartre builds on this idea, arguing that no person can relate to herself, as ‘the self’ does not exist. Instead, human beings have to decide every single moment who they want to be and what they want to do. Authenticity can only be understood as openness for this insight about human reality; this means permanently being open to decide for yourself. Furthermore, in Trilling’s perspective the self-relation is conceptualised as something ‘unsocial,’ because the quality of this self-relation can not be identified as behaviour towards other persons, as Rousseau argues. In Trilling’s interpretation, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was the last philosopher trying to achieve this; but after Friedrich Nietzsche developed his concept of the ‘superman,’ self-relation was mostly conceptualised as (unsocial) self-creation. In the historic perspective, some philosophers in the second half of the 20th century also have to be mentioned in order to understand the transformations the concept of authenticity has undergone. Some pick up the ‘unsocial’ connotation of Nietzsche and Trilling’s interpretation of authenticity, others try to go back to the sources of the concept in Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Two philosophers seem to be most important, namely Foucault and Charles Taylor. First, especially the later Foucault (see 1988, p. 49) interprets authenticity as a typical discursive formation of modernity by which individuals are supposed to be trained for self-improvement. He criticises that authenticity is an illusion, because self-relations only exist in the plural. There is no authentic ­self-relation that harmonises the variety of self-relations, let alone one that could count as objective. From the perspective of bio-politics, the ideal of authenticity is employed in order to convince human beings that they have to improve themselves in order to become ‘good citizens.’ Foucault calls this a modern form of technology whereby structures of ‘governmentality’ try to integrate discursive mechanisms into the processes of the self.

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Hence, authenticity is part of the bio-political mechanism of self-optimisation. Foucault argues that modern capitalist societies suggest autonomy and freedom, but behind peoples’ backs, the social mechanisms form individuals, in order for them to fulfil their part in these societies perfectly. Everybody should optimise herself along the logic of the bio-power. In addition, they should feel good, if they fulfil their role. The fitness centre, again, might be a good example for the way bio-power works. This bio-power forces people to spend money, time, and effort on their body and, in turn, they feel better. They feel ‘authentic’ expressing their body perfectly. In Foucault’s perspective this is the promise of the modern capitalist society. The consequence of these processes of self-optimisation for modern societies is that bodily-trained individuals can work harder and longer and, therefore, turn out to be more efficient employees and citizens. Authentic individuals are better to fulfil their social and economic function. Thus, the self-optimisation becomes a guiding principle for modern individuals. However, it is not the state that is ruling and controlling these processes, but the individual itself. The discursive mechanism of authenticity becomes an integral part of all individuals. Second, Taylor develops a more positive perspective on the concept of authenticity (Taylor 1991, 1992). He argues that the authentic self is a precondition for human communities. Building on arguments from Herder and Rousseau, he points out: “Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover” (Taylor 1992, p. 29). Therefore, authenticity aims for self-creation and self-determination. Modern (liberal) societies face the challenge that the ‘power’ of authenticity seems to get lost, because liberal neutrality often seems to imply that everything (and also all behaviour) should be accepted. In addition, it should not be questioned whether this behaviour correlates with the biography and the self of the person as well as the moral connotations of the relations between persons. Referring to Hegel, Taylor argues that the need for recognition is an essential part of the process of self-realisation. Authenticity is an important aspect of this interpersonal process. In addition, it is easier for authentic individuals to criticise established social structures or narrow concepts of morality. Authenticity denotes, eventually, a genuine understanding of freedom that is realized in relations of ­recognition. The historical analysis shows that authenticity is a relatively ‘young’ phenomenon of modernity. Indeed, authenticity is an important and influential ideal of current societies. It plays an essential role both at the individual and the social level. In the beginning, authenticity was more of a moral ideal and, thus, identified with honesty. Later, the accordance between the self and the verbal and

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behavioural expression of the self becomes the central characteristic of authenticity. Some philosophers interpret this development in line with increasing individuals’ autonomy in modern societies. Others, like Foucault, are much more sceptical and interpret authenticity as a mechanism of bio-power, which, eventually, makes individuals more dependent than free. In what follows, I share some of Foucault’s scepticism. My thesis is that authenticity has become a veritable modern myth. While authenticity seems to serve as an anchor in turbulent times, it remains normatively silent. You can do what you want, but you have to behave authentically. Against this background, I will argue that social philosophy should reflect on this inflated notion of authenticity. Thereby, philosophy could analyse the concepts of (social) identity (Abschn. 3.1), society (Abschn. 3.2), and politics (Abschn. 3.3) that are implicit in the discourse on authenticity and critically discuss the inherent problems of these concepts.

3 Systematic Perspectives 3.1 Experience and Identity from an Anthropological Perspective In order to understand how individuals develop identity in social and cultural contexts, I will refer to three different philosophers, namely John Dewey, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Judith Butler. At a first glance, this selection seems surprising, but I will show that these philosophers have something in common. Despite all their differences, they can contribute important aspects to a convincing interpretation of how individuals constitute themselves. Let me begin with Dewey and his pragmatist focus on experience that lies at the heart of his (social) philosophy. Dewey stresses both the actions of the individual and the indissoluble interrelation of individuals and community. The individual always forms an integral part of social structures, and this enables her or him to act. Social reality is a dynamic web through which a close relationship between humans and collective actions is realized. In this relational set of actions, experiences play a central role: “The continuity of any experience, through the renewing of the social group, is a literal fact” (Dewey 2005, p. 1). This emphasis on human experience pervades Dewey’s entire philosophical work and forms his understanding of philosophy. He argues that the distinction between universal reason and a subordinate experience is implausible. By contrast, a philosophical reflection that began with experience “would enable men to glorify the

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claim of reason without at the same time falling into a paralysing worship of ­super-empirical authority or into an offensive ‘rationalisation’ of things as they are” (Dewey 1920, p. 117). This enables Dewey to provide a theoretical framework with which to reconstruct the relational structure of (human) reality that is expressed in various, interactive forms of experiences. Thereby, Dewey interprets experience as an immediate stimulant by which human beings experience themselves as social. Simultaneously, each experience challenges human beings to provide a reaction. Experiences, therefore, always imply “a passive and an active element […], which are connected in a particular manner” (Schreier 1994, p. 140; translation by the author). Hence, experiences are human beings’ primordial form of accessing the world. When humans gain experiences they recognise themselves as relational beings and steadily further extend their own individual experiences. The person who makes experiences is also always inspired to react. In summary, Dewey provides a theoretical framework for reconstructing the relational structure of (human) reality, which is expressed in interactive forms of experiences. Why should this approach help us understand authenticity? First, Dewey lets us avoid a rationalistic approach to interpreting human beings. Through experiences, individuals feel connected with themselves and the social world around them. Therefore, anthropological reflections should not focus on an essence or nature of human beings, but on the capability to experience. Secondly, those experiences are always integral parts of various cultural contexts. At the same time, they enable different forms of self-interpretation. These forms change over time, because both cultural contexts and the subject who experiences them are changing continually. Schleiermacher’s argument (see Schleiermacher 1976) is similar to Dewey’s, but formulated from a different historical and systematic standpoint. Schleiermacher explicitly reflects on the way in which individuals develop ­self-confidence. If a person reflects on herself, she realises that the individual existence implies presuppositions, because individuals have to presuppose their own existence in order to reflect on themselves at all (Eckert 1984, p. 285). Thus, the person is not able to constitute herself, cognitively or reflexively. In contrast, the subject experiences herself through an immediate self-consciousness (unmittelbares Selbstbewusstsein). This experience is the universal form of relating to oneself (Schleiermacher 1976, p. 288) and integrates affective and reflexive aspects of the individual. Immediate self-consciousness means a comprehensive and unifying form of ‘self-presence’ (sich-gegenwärtig-Haben). It also integrates the different temporal aspects of the individual in a reified ‘point of the now’ (im Augenblick). Against this background, Schleiermacher’s most important argument

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is that this immediate self-consciousness is only possible as something which ‘takes place’ in the presence of the moment. Human beings can never have an objective knowledge of it, but can only reflect on it as something mediated. This concept of immediate self-consciousness has some consequences for understanding the current discourse about authenticity. Referring to Schleiermacher, human beings have a specific way of ‘knowing’ who they are, for which the immediate self-consciousness is the basis. However, Schleiermacher also points out that individuals can never objectify this self-consciousness; they can only experience it in practice. Hence, authenticity might only be the moment of self-experience that could never be objectified from an external point of view. Thus, it is not possible to determine whether and when somebody really ‘is’ authentic. In addition, the internal view of the subject is also limited. No person can induce the immediate self-consciousness deliberately; rather, it is something that only arises through practice. The impossibility of a reflexive self-grounding leads the person into a crisis, because she experiences herself as something antecedent that could not be expressed cognitively. However, this crisis does not necessarily imply resignation or self-abandonment for the individual. In contrast, Schleiermacher wants to support the subject as something individual and self-reliant. Schleiermacher helps “the person to reflect its crisis without resigning” (Frank 1985, p. 111; translation by the author), because the impossibility of an absolutisation of the person simply demonstrates the ways in which a person depends on the world and relates to ­others. Let me summarise my argument. Authenticity is a kind of fundamental concern for all humans, because they always experience both social reality and themselves. This experience is a way through which individuals gain an understanding of themselves. This process of understanding includes reflexive and affective aspects. However, the current discourse tends to presuppose an objective understanding of authenticity. Authenticity seems to imply a (more or less) fixed concept of identity expressed in social life. Following Dewey and Schleiermacher, I suggest we reject this view on the grounds that the experience one can have of oneself is always limited; people can never have an objective understanding of who they are. Many modern philosophers (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche or Martin Heidegger) emphasised this idea. They argue that identity—and in connection also authenticity—is not a fixed essence of the human being, but something, which ‘is lived’ in the current moment, changing over time, and also a kind of creative procedure.

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“It’s a myth to suppose that we will find our true self by leaving behind this or that or forgetting it. That we find ourselves back in the infinite. Rather we have to make ourselves, have to give form to all elements—that is the task. Always a sculpture! A productive human being” (Nietzsche quoted from Young 2010, p. 304; see Nietzsche 1988, p. 361).

Therefore, authenticity cannot be the accordance of the person with herself. Rather, authenticity is always a dynamic process of experiences. Hence, authenticity as a creative expression of the individual is something fluid and open-ended that can never be objectified. Judith Butler helps to enrich such a concept of identity. In her view, the structure of the subject is a paradox. The subject is antecedent and cannot be grasped at the same time. This paradox “implies a paradox of referentiality: namely, that we must refer to what does not yet exist” (Butler 1997, p. 4). In addition, the subject is the one who acts deliberatively and is, simultaneously, influenced by various social and cultural contexts. Butler calls this the process of ‘subjection’. “‘Subjection’ signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject” (Butler 1997, p. 2). Every person is always influenced by power mechanisms and, at the same time, acts within these structures, which, again, form persons, their body, and discursive forms of ­self-interpretation. Thus, humans are dependent and independent simultaneously. This argument, again, leads to the concept of performance that Schleiermacher, too, mentioned in his concept of immediate self-consciousness. We can never gain objective knowledge about identity, which is also why authenticity can never be established deliberately. Thus, identity only exists as performance constantly referring to previous experiences of self-consciousness, and, at the same time, creating itself in new forms. “Paradoxically, performance becomes the occasion for a grand and endless action that effectively augments and individuates the self it seeks to deny” (Butler 1997, p. 49). This does not mean that individuals are ‘new’ persons in every moment. However, all persons can create themselves every day and, therefore, could become ‘somebody else’, which is an expression of freedom and autonomy. This process is similar to creating a piece of art, as Foucault summarised. “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art” (Foucault 1983, p. 237).

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3.2 Authenticity and the Concept of Society Reflecting on authenticity does not only mean reflecting on individuals and their self-understanding, but also discussing the implicit concepts of society. For this reason, it is important to turn to current debates in social philosophy and to ask in what way society is conceptualized within the discourse about authenticity. Over the last decades, many social philosophers have developed different concepts of society. As an important example serves, again, the reflection on society and its dynamics by Taylor (1989). He distinguishes between (and criticises) liberal and communitarian understandings of society. Liberal models interpret society as the sum of a society’s citizens, who are viewed as self-contained independent actors. This places the ‘atomised’ individual at the heart of society; the network of interaction between people is secondary. Furthermore, this means that the concept of the political is also secondary to individual acts. Taylor argues that “there are grave problems with this model of liberalism, which only can be properly articulated when one opens up the ontological issues of identity and community” (Taylor 1995, p. 187). In contrast, the second model indicated by Taylor focuses on the links that unite citizens as the central characteristic of society. Taylor calls this a holistic concept. The ideas of (collective) identity and community play a much more important role in these concepts. Hence, communitarian theories emphasise shared values, common action settings or cultural traditions as constituting society. The current influence of the discourse on authenticity is an indicator that the liberal model of society is more important than the communitarian one, because the focus on authenticity suggests that society is the sum of individuals, who are requested to lead authentic lives. Hence, it seems that individuals are based on an essence that could be expressed authentically and that this is the base for individual actions.1 However, these models only give a reduced account of society because they neglect people’s indissoluble social interconnectedness. It is above all social practices and discourses through which people develop into who they are. However, these social networks are not as homogeneous as the communitarian approach seems to suggest. Today, the unifying social link is always plural (see Reder 2018).

1Of

course, there is a difference between the tradition of political liberalism and neoliberalism. Although some of the arguments are also true for political liberalism, some authors of this tradition also argue that philosophy has to emphasise the relationality of society as well.

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People are involved in different, linguistically formed practices. As people are simultaneously part of different (verbalised) practices at the same time, society can be best understood as a plural interaction of different practices and discourses. Therefore, authenticity understood as an ‘internal voice’, is misleading. This thesis suggests that people are primarily separated and interact as (atomistic) individuals. This concept of society is insufficient and, therefore, not convincing. In fact, society is a complex network of individuals. This net both influences the process of individual self-creation and the social sphere. Again, Butler could help to explain this relational structure of society. In emphasising it, she refers both to Foucault’s understanding of the discursive networks within which individuals always act as well as to Hegel’s concept of mutual recognition. Human beings are always part of a dynamic constellation of addressing and answering, and this (re-)constructs identity in an open-ended process. In Butler’s perspective, this relational characteristic of reality is also the reason why people cannot develop an objective knowledge about reality. She emphasises that “from the outset we are implicated in a mode of relationality that cannot be fully thematised, subject to reflection, and cognitively known” (Butler 2005, p. 102). The awareness of the limits of reason corresponds with the acceptance of the relational structure of (human) reality and openness to the dynamics of this structure. This approach also implies a relational concept of society: it is no longer the sum of the individuals that make up a particular society, but the relational process of experiences—addressing and answering—that give rise to both individuals and society. Concerning traditional social theory, Anthony Giddens also develops such a relational concept of society. Giddens (1991) argues that a sufficient concept of society should integrate two basic ideas, namely a structural and action-theoretical perspective on social dynamics. First, individuals act and, ­ therefore, influence society and the development of social structures. However, actions are not chains of independent and separated ‘units’, but always part of various structures. Thus, every action depends on structures from its very beginning, and, at the same time, influences just these structures. Society is the integration of both aspects: individuals act and form society and, simultaneously, refer to these structures, which are to some extend independent from them. In modern societies, reflexive knowledge is balancing these two dimensions of society. “There is a fundamental sense in which reflexivity is a defining characteristic of all human action. All human beings routinely ‘keep in touch’ with the grounds of what they do as an integral element of doing it. I have called this elsewhere the ‘reflexive monitoring of action’, using the phrase to draw attention to the chronic character of

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the processes involved. […] The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character” (Giddens 1991, pp. 36–38).

This means that all individuals have to reflect on the structural foundation of their actions and explain why they do what they do all the time. This is the reason why people are explaining why they choose their job, decide to marry, or move to another town. Reflexivity becomes a permanent duty for everyone. On the one hand, this is a kind of burden on all individuals, because people have to explain everything and—in times of authenticity—they also have to demonstrate in what way they behave authentically. On the other hand, this enables freedom, because structures do not completely determine people. Rather, they can always influence and create these structures. Against this background, the social dimension of the discourse on authenticity becomes clearer. Authenticity often implies a liberal concept of society, which interprets social dynamics as sum of separated individuals and actions. As I have argued, such an interpretation of society is misleading and insufficient. People are always related to social structures. Therefore, authenticity is always part of these discursive structures. Hence, to be authentic does not mean to correspond with an essence of a person. In contrast, authenticity is an integral part of structures, too. Therefore, one can only contribute to a discourse about authenticity and, therefore, also express a specific interpretation of society (see Nassehi 2006).

3.3 Political Dimension—Acceleration, Alienation, and Marketisation The previous sections show that the discourse on authenticity often implies a problematic concept of the person and society. In addition, the historical analysis has already highlighted another (critical) aspect of authenticity that is closely connected with both dimensions, namely the political or economic function of authenticity. I will discuss this function both referring to Foucault and to two current social philosophers or sociologists, respectively, namely Hartmut Rosa and Eva Illouz. As I have already argued in the historical section, Foucault analysed the close connection between the discourse on authenticity and the capitalist logic of modern societies. Authenticity is to some extend a (regulative) ideal to improve citizens. This ideal forces citizens to internalise the economic logic of

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s­ elf-optimization. To be authentic means that people are requested to be efficient and optimise their self-performance. In Foucault’s perspective, the fundamental problem is that only capitalism creates authenticity. Capitalism forces economic competition, referring to the ideals of growth and enhancement. The current development of capitalist societies does no longer control citizens from an external point of view (e.g. state, religion, tradition), but individuals adopt these ideals as part of their self-image. Persons want to perform better, live healthier or fulfil their tasks faster. Authenticity functions as a promoter for these internalised processes of self-optimisation. Foucault and Butler call this phenomenon bio-power. This expression describes the internalisation of these processes and, therefore, could be interpreted as an influential ‘soft power’ of capitalism. Hartmut Rosa is one of the current social philosophers working in the tradition of critical theory (e.g. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer) who analyses these developments in detail. In doing so, he identifies acceleration as a central characteristic of modern societies. These societies are characterised by a speed-up of all social, cultural and economic processes. Technological innovations are probably one of the most important factors of these processes. This accelerated structure of modern society is closely related to the importance of growth in these contexts. One main characteristic of this process is that the private life of all humans speeds up as well. Technologically enabled acceleration does not lead to a deceleration of life-worlds (Lebenswelten) and individual life cycles, but the other way round: the infinite possibilities enabled by technological progress and acceleration forces all people to speed up. “Accelerated social change will in turn lead to an accelerating ‘pace of life’: And finally, as we saw at the outset, new forms of technological acceleration will be called for to speed up the process of productive and everyday life. Thus, the ‘acceleration cycle’ has turned into a closed, self-propelling system” (Rosa 2010, p. 33).

In the tradition of critical theory, Rosa interprets alienation as result of these various processes of acceleration. As a ‘totalitarian’ aspect of current societies, acceleration forces all human beings to agree and internalise this idea. “The life script should enable people to keep up with the game of growth, and to be and to become competitive. Phantasies and energies of creation are focussed on developing the capability to grow and increase, individually and collectively. The fundamental promise of modernity is reneged, and the force to grow consumes the individual and political spaces for autonomy” (Rosa 2013, p. 63; translation by the author).

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Eventually, almost all social fields are sped up, and persons have to internalise this idea into their life plans or patterns of behaviour. Going back to my comments on Foucault, the working environment may be a good example. Today, all employees become entrepreneurs, who have to speed up and to compete with each other; this is also true for academics. In this process of self-marketing, authenticity plays an important role, because only those entrepreneurs who are able to express themselves authentically (e.g. through their behavioural performance, their form of clothing, their way of arguing) can ‘win’ this competition. Hence, authenticity becomes a soft power or even the motor of capitalistic logic itself. Regarding the private sphere of love, Eva Illouz also analyses the influence of authenticity as an economic functionalised logic. At first glance, it may seem that romantic love is one of the last strongholds against the accelerated and alienated dynamic of modern times. “Romantic love, we are told by some, is the last repository of the authenticity and the warmth that have been robbed from us by an increasingly technocratic and legalistic age” (Illouz 1997, p. 1). However, Illouz argues that our amorous attachments also follow the same economic logic. If someone lives in a romantic relationship, he or she has to express him- or herself authentically. Therefore, people have to invest a lot of energy and money in order to find a partner (e.g. on dating websites), to develop an authentic style of clothing, or to spend an exceptional holiday to experience ‘authentic’ romantic love. For example, Illouz argues, if a woman is buying clothes, she thinks: “I have to buy this dress, because ‘I am this dress’. I will be able to express myself authentically and thus strengthen my romantic relationship.” Thus, Illouz analyses mechanisms of how persons try to express themselves and, therefore, to ‘exist’ as individuals and in relationships to others. This process, again, leads to capitalist forms of self-optimisation in which authenticity plays a central role. Ways of consumption promise authenticity and, furthermore, a successful romantic relationship. In this regard, authenticity becomes the guiding principle for all forms of romantic communication. People have to “expose and express, as authentically as possible, one’s inner thoughts and self. Soap operas, popular psychology, self-help books, and women’s magazines have been the main vehicles for the elaboration, codification, and popularization of the principle that romantic communication is a way to attain self-knowledge, mutual understanding, and ultimately emotional fulfilment” (Illouz 1997, p. 234 f.).

However, these forms of romantic and authentic communication neglect the structure of the self and immediate self-consciousness introduced above. The force

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to be authentic ignores the heterogeneous plurality of experiences (Dewey) and the impossibility to develop a reflexive concept of our self (Schleiermacher). Therefore, “authenticity is a terrorist cultural idea” (Illouz 2011; translation by the author), because it forces us to harmonise all experiences, feelings, desires, thoughts etc. about ourselves and reality, although this is impossible because of the relationality of (human) reality and its epistemological limitations. Acceleration and capitalisation of all spheres of life ignore both and lead to alienation.

4 Conclusion The discourse on authenticity is influential in current societies and it is not easy to escape the normative claim to be an authentic person. Nevertheless, I have argued in the previous sections that authenticity is a modern myth. A myth according to which individuals can express and objectify their essence. A myth that society is the sum of authentic individuals, and a myth that authenticity helps to improve society. In contrast, I have argued that society is a relational network of individuals and cultural structures. In addition, I have suggested that all individuals could experience an immediate self-consciousness that can only be experienced in practice and not be interpreted as an authentic self-relation. Lastly, I have shown that capitalist interests often exploit authenticity. Therefore, authenticity could be interpreted as an ideal of modern societies aiming to naturalise both the condition of humans and society and to use this knowledge for economic interests. In contrast, relational theory provides an attractive alternative in order to understand humans and society. From this standpoint, the relational structure is dynamic and open-ended. An epistemological criticism of objective knowledge corresponds with this approach. As I have demonstrated, many philosophers have argued for such a theory during the centuries. Such a relational interpretation of reality and the limits of knowledge might also enrich the current debate on authenticity. Authenticity, then, means being aware of this relational structure of humans and reality and accepting the dynamic and open-ended process of (­self-) creation. Authenticity might be an expression for this awareness and the insight that we are always part of these processes. “I will argue otherwise by showing how a theory of subject formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can serve as a conception of ethics and, indeed, responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself, it is not thereby licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its obligations to

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others. The contrary is surely true. The opacity of the subject may be a consequence of its being conceived as a relational being, one whose early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge. Moments of unknowingness about oneself tend to emerge in the context of relations to others, suggesting that these relations call upon primary forms of relationality that are not always available to explicit and reflective thematization. If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency” (Butler 2005, p. 19 f.).

The critique of authenticity is, in the end, a criticism of objectifying and exploiting human (self-)experiences and society and, therefore, enables freedom.

References Butler, J. 1997. The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. 2005. Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Dewey, J. 1920. Reconstruction in philosophy. New York: Holt and Co. Dewey, J. 2005. Democracy and education. An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan. Eckert, M. 1984. Gott, Welt und Mensch in Schleiermachers Philosophischer Theologie. In Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß 1, ed. K.-V. Selge, 281–296. Berlin: De Gruyter. Foucault, M. 1983. On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, ed. H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 253–280. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. 1988. Politics, philosophy, culture, ed. L. Kritzman, 47–53. New York: Routledge. Frank, M. 1985. Das Individuelle Allgemeine. Textstrukturierung und Textinterpretation nach Schleiermacher. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Giddens, A. 1991. The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Herder, J.G. 1994. Zum Sinn des Glücks. In Werke in 10 Bänden, vol. 4, ed. J. Brummack and M. Bollacher, 233–242. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Herder, J. G. 1800/1803. Outlines of a philosophy of the history of man. Trans. by T. Churchill. London: Bergman. Illouz, E. 1997. Consuming the romantic Utopia: Love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Illouz, E. 2011. Interview mit Katrin Kruse. Der Spiegel, 11. Oktober. Nassehi, A. 2006. Der soziologische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Nietzsche, F. 1988. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1880–1882, vol. 9, eds. G. Colli and M. Montinari, 2nd Edition. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

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Reder, M. 2018. Is democracy ready for globalisation? Philosophical pathways to a globalised demos. Argumenta Philosophica 2 (4): 81–97. Rosa, H. 2010. Alienation and acceleration. Towards a critical theory of late-modern temporality. Malmö: NSU Press. Rosa, H. 2013. Resonanz statt Entfremdung. Zehn Thesen wider die Steigerungslogik der Moderne. In Zeitwohlstand – Wie wir anders arbeiten, nachhaltig wirtschaften und besser leben, ed. Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie, 62–73. Leipzig: Oekom. Schleiermacher, F. 1976. Dialektik, ed. R. Odebrecht. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Schmidt, H. 2013. Im Gespräch: „Ich bin eine Charaktermaske“. FAZ, 13. August. Schreier, H. 1994. Einleitung. In John Dewey. Erziehung durch und für Erfahrung, ed. H. Schreier, 9–86. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Strub, C. 2009. Authentizität. Information Philosophie 37 (2): 39–45. Sturma, D. 2001. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. München: Beck. Taylor, C. 1991. The malaise of modernity. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Taylor, C. 1992. The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Taylor, C. 1995. Cross-purposes: The liberal-communitarian debate. In Philosophical arguments, ed. C. Taylor, 181–203. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Trilling, L. 1972. Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Williams, J.P., and P. Vannini (eds.). 2009. Authenticity in culture, self, and society. Farnham: Ashgate. Young, J. 2010. Friedrich Nietzsche. A philosophical biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Dr. Michael Reder Professor for Practical Philosophy and Chair of “Praktische Philosophie mit Schwerpunkt Völkerverständigung” at the Munich School of Philosophy. Studied Philosophy, Catholic Theology and Economics in Munich, Tübingen and Fribourg/ CH. Research interests: pragmatism, social philosophy, theories of democracy, intergenerational justice, transnational practices of solidarity, environmental ethics.

Authentic Gestures: Modern Authenticity as Utopian Affirmation rather than Self-Articulation Christian Strub 1 Introduction Discourse regarding authenticity is normative insofar as it suggests to persons that they lead a satisfactory, fulfilling, and successful life if they act as authentic as possible. Authenticity thus signifies a successful relationship of a person to himself or herself. With respect to the conceptual uses of the word ‘authentic’ and ‘authenticity,’ this exclusive approach uncovers only a small portion of the entire discourses concerning authenticity. The history of the notion of authenticity displays a wide spectrum of alternative uses besides just an indication of fruitful self-relations. We speak of authentic documents, works of art, literary interpretations, theatrical representations, texts, and musical performances. If one examines the myriad of these instances of use, authenticity seems to denote some form of validity, of being unadulterated; it suggests originality, openness, immediacy, or straightforwardness; it hints at an easy and natural presence. Which of these forms it should take seems to vary greatly by the authors who interest themselves in authenticity, such that one may, with good reason, conclude to make an inventory of historical

C. Strub (*)  Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_8

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concepts and rather cease to use the word entirely.1 Accordingly, in what follows I will limit myself to authenticity as individual s­ elf-relations. The theses which my following remarks seek to make plausible are: (I) ‘To be authentic’ is not an expressive predicate, but can only be an attribution from another person; as an attribution it is (II) modernity’s response to a dual loss in a moral realm: (IIa) the loss of a plausible conception of a good life and (IIb) the loss of a plausible conception of individuals’ connections to general rules. (III) This response favors the concept of authenticity of a person affirmed as such by others, as the authentic gesture: the utopian moment in which the totality of one’s successful life is revealed as necessarily embedded in universal solidarity with all humans. The concept of authentic gestures has similarities to Schiller’s notion of “Grace,” as it is developed in On Grace and Dignity (1793); this connection will not be further explored in the following reflections. Schiller writes: “If, therefore, grace is a characteristic which we require of willful movements, and if, on the other hand, everything willful must be banned from grace, then we shall have to seek it out in that which is unintentional in intentional movements, which also corresponds to a moral cause in sentiment” (Schiller 1793, p. 354).

With these theses I stand in opposition to the most influential theory of authenticity, namely that of Charles Taylor, which above all else has been developed in The Sources of the Self (1989); Taylor’s theory turns and pivots around his assertion that authenticity cannot be comprehensively discussed without addressing the question of a person’s meaningful, successful life.

2 Self-attributions of Authenticity: A Performative Contradiction The statement “I am (now) authentic” is a performative contradiction (compare Engler 1989, pp. 24–26; Wentz 2005, p. 23; Knaller and Müller 2006, p. 8 f.; Knaller 2007, p. 24). A performative contradiction occurs when the very act of manifesting a particular verbal statement directly challenges the content of the utterance. The phrase “I am now silent” is a performative contradiction because

1Meanwhile, there are some inventories (Noetzel 1999, pp. 17–41; Wentz 2005, pp. 15–23; Knaller and Müller 2005, pp. 40–43; Knaller and Müller 2006, pp. 6–14; Knaller 2007, pp. 7–33) that are admittedly informative; but nevertheless they generate a feeling of helplessness following the lecture because they fail to alleviate the term’s confusion.

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in the moment of the utterance, I, albeit trivially, cannot be silent; the remark “I am lying” is a performative contradiction because the statement is always associated with a truth claim that is negated by the remark’s content. How does this pertain to authenticity? Performative contradictions cannot come into existence because the assertion was made or because its very contents refute its claim to truth. Instead, it seems much more to be the case that what occurs is that one articulates something that, in the very process of articulation, is rendered inarticulable. The locus classicus to this circumstance is Schiller’s couplet ‘Speech’, “Why cannot the living Spirit appear to the Spirit? If the Soul speaks, as it speaks, it is no longer the Soul” (1797). Schiller’s comment should not be understood as though speech were a fundamentally inadequate medium for mutual understanding between humans—we can understand ourselves just fine when speaking about tables, numbers, the weather, or the personality of a pet— but rather, that the substantive or essential ‘about which’ one speaks fundamentally evades the linguistically articulated grasp of what is said. The performative contradiction does not arise simply during attempts to articulate something, rather it arises from one’s attempts to articulate one’s own being, essence, or dynamism. It does not refer to the inadequacy of language to communicate nor to indicate in-dividuality—a process in which words, as ‘dividual’, inevitably refer to more than one entity to say something about the world; and even here, the individual is inadequate. Rather, performative contradictions relate to one’s attempts to articulate one’s own ‘essence’ or ‘soul,’ which fundamentally fail. Performative contradictions depend on first-person self-attributions of authenticity; they do not emerge when one replaces the first person with the second or third: “Right now he really is authentic,” “You were quite authentic over there,” “This is her chance to finally be authentic” are not statements of performative contradiction.2 The truth content of these types of statements can be quite meaningfully discussed—except, of course, by the ones about whom they are spoken. The authentic self has no privileged access to itself and one’s own authenticity cannot be attested to by the authentic person.3 Therefore ‘authenticity’ or ‘being authentic’ is not a type of self-articulation, but is instead a form of attribution. If this claim is correct it means that the ‘essence’ of a self that cannot self-articulate is not at all concealed per se—it is concealed only from the person attempting to articulate it. 2It

arises above all in appeals such as “Be authentic!”; here one is reminded of something similar to Watzlawick’s famous “Be spontaneous!”. 3Certainly a person can retrospectively participate in a discussion about their (prior) authenticity.

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Moreover, it is relevant for the following reflections to point out that a performative contradiction does not arise when instead of the word ‘authentic’ one uses the word ‘sincere’: “Right now I am sincere” or “I am trying now to be sincere” are quite reasonable phrases—and naturally, someone who utters such a phrase may well be lying. Since Trilling’s seminal book, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), one must take notice to the difference between sincerity and authenticity. It is generally known from Trilling’s theses that the period around 1750 saw profound changes in individuals’ self-relations, which marked a shift from the ideal of sincerity to the ideal of authenticity. This does not imply that sincerity is irrelevant today nor that Trilling’s use of the word was just senseless; rather, it means that sincerity cannot quite fully capture what one does when they articulate their own ‘being,’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘dynamism.’

3 Authenticity as a Morally Positive Concept Authentic self-relations involve normative considerations: There is a particular type of behavior related to norms which would be called authentic. This type of relation is not engendered by perpetually fulfilling or by rejecting such principles. If an aspect of an agent’s behavior can indeed be considered authentic, it must be determined independently of the success or failure to realize ethical values of the social group in which the person’s authenticity is under consideration. Since the age of the Greek Sophists there has been a common distinction between two categories of normative concepts. What is considered morally justified does not stem directly from what is factually correct; convention is not a proxy for a moral perspective. For European culture, this was the beginning of the critical division between convention and morality—the difference between thesei and physei norms. Conventional norms pertain contingently to social groups and are enforced (officially or informally) via punitive measures. Moral norms, however, are subject to a much stronger rationale for justification: Rather than contingent, they should be universally applicable to all people and all timeframes. From this difference the following possibilities arise: A person can be authentic insofar as they are unconstrained by their contextually-specific conventions and/or insofar as they are unconstrained by conceptions of morality. If one understands unconstraint from moral norms to be the inverse to upholding them, four quite schematic possibilities emerge: 1) upholding both conventional and moral norms, 2) unconstraint from both conventional and moral norms, 3) upholding conventional norms and unconstraint from morals norms, and finally 4) upholding moral norms and unconstraint from conventional norms.

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A connection to authenticity ensues if the agent’s unconstraint is elucidated by the irrelevance of the norms for the agent in question. Consider someone who fulfills the conventional and moral norms of a social group under any circumstance; they may perhaps be labeled conforming, but would not in the least be called authentic. Or, consider someone who prefers moral standards to the social conventions they reject out of irrelevance; such a person may still not be called authentic, but rather be seen as civilly disobedient. Further still is the person for whom the moral conventions are irrelevant yet the social conventions are not; this person is surely not authentic, but has merely conformed. Overall, it seems to me that the civilly disobedient self is closest in proximity to the authentic self. But what about the second case? Can a person for whom conventions and morals are irrelevant ever be authentic? In the history of European culture, above all in its literary forms, there are ample depictions of characters who are authentic because conventional and moral standards are utterly irrelevant to them. Such individuals brand moral norms as mere convention and thus, as incidental. Hence it seems that any consideration of authenticity that connects the concept to upholding moral norms is quite obsolete.4 Nevertheless, it strikes me as quite apparent that the authentic self may perhaps be the unconventional self but is never the immoral self: mafiosi (not even the Godfather himself), rapists, torturers, and drug dealers are never authentic. On the other hand, as mentioned above, one who upholds moral norms at every given opportunity would also not be called authentic. The decisive question thus emerges: how is the authentic self to describe that its own authenticity is achieved through a—for now we could call it idiosyncratic—congruous, positive relationship with morals? Consequently, achieving authenticity does not entail merely a vulgar, Nietzschean battle against morals, but rather serves to describe a particular moral style; through this reconceptualization authenticity is freed from the wake of the immoral, without being completely explained by the concept of morality.5

4If

one wishes to contend that such individuals are indeed authentic, Callicles from Plato’s Gorgias would be the first authentic individual. The point of departure into authenticity, beginning with Kierkegaard’s burst of authenticity, is the figure of the normative outlaw: one can only fully realize oneself if, above all, one emancipates oneself from all norms entirely. Only then can one—as with Plato’s allegorical cave—begin to retreat back on the road to normativity. The Heideggerian variant to this same figure rejects the path backwards in the name of ‘authenticity.’ 5Flouting conventions is not decisive for determining authenticity: There are authentic subjects who are quite conventional and others who are not at all.

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4 Historical Traces of Authenticity: Modernity’s Experience of Moral Loss Up until this point, these reflections on authenticity should be plausible if one considers the way ‘authenticity’ is currently used colloquially: authenticity denotes one’s prosperous self-relations in a moral realm, yet such persons cannot attribute authenticity to themselves. Knaller’s investigation into the conceptual history of the word determined that ‘authentic’ was only used within the last half century to pertain to individuals (compare Knaller 2007, 7, with fn. 1). Historical inquiries into terms, however, can never preclude the possibility that the intended concept was not in fact used much earlier, and thus they only help to a certain extent—especially when involving such a broad and complex theme as the articulation of successful self-relations. Trilling and Taylor, to name the two conclusive theorists of authenticity, were already speaking in the 18th century about the ideal of authenticity with respect to individuals, without giving two hoots about the term’s historical roots. Eventually, in 1980 the late lectures of Foucault made it clear that it is actually quite beneficial, at least for European culture, to frame the concept of successful self-relations historically: since Greek antiquity various concepts of such successful self-relationships have evolved through European culture. Moreover, one can thread together genealogical commonalities in these historical studies of ­self-relations and thereby fashion a genealogy of the modern self. Authenticity’s relationship to such a genealogy can be determined in two very divergent ­manners. One theory purports that everything that contributes to the ‘truth of a self’ is authentic, and what does not further this truth is inauthentic. Winnicott, for example, also analyzed the anthropological parameters according to which the immature self could and can become an authentic, mature self—the entire psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic discourse is guided by the difference between successful and disordered self-relations, which themselves can be understood anthropologically and, in the very least in a traditional understanding of anthropology, ahistorically. In so doing he also prompts an evaluation of various culturally prevalent concepts of self-relations: Since there are anthropological criteria for their successes, self-relations that are discoverable historically may always be normatively assessed. Although Foucault would strongly reject such normative components in his historical accounts, hints of them are nonetheless perceptible in his texts: He prefers Greek Antiquity’s self-conceptions to those of Christian tradition. Against

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Foucault’s history of decay, finally one may establish a progressive history of self-relations. Nevertheless, the normative criteria are still anthropological: in Rousseau’s sense, authenticity is the result of a well-formed ‘natural development’ that is ultimately restored as none other than a ‘natural self.’ Another theory only deems authentic a historically specific notion of our successful self-relations, in use since 1750; therefore, corresponding concepts before 1750 could not be called authentic. Implicitly, this theory fundamentally redefines successful self-relations such that they would not have (or only have partially, or in a modified way) the same parameters they had before 1750. It does not imply normative judgments. Trilling is named as the first proponent of such a thesis of historicization. Notably, in both approaches authenticity is embedded within the aforementioned proposals of moral affinity—however, the performative contradiction of the self-attribution of authenticity is not included in the first. This can only play a role in the second, historicized approach. In the reflections that follow, I recognize the critical juncture, referred to by Trilling, in the history of individual self-relations in Europe around 1750;6 indeed, I wish to describe the ‘epoch of authenticity’ in an explicit reference to the ‘epoch of sincerity.’ The notion of authenticity thus should not denote the mere shift in the ideal of the successful self-relations, but should also include an experience of loss. The formulation of this experience pivots upon the thesis of two morally central notions: a sensible, successful life, and self-esteem. Nevertheless, this loss is also coupled with a somewhat defiant stance: to cite the Freudian Mourning and Melancholia, melancholy is ostensibly misplaced, and instead, the work of mourning is much more vital. And now onto the experience of loss. Normally there is a distinction between ethics that envision a person’s good life as the frame of reference of their reflections, and other ethical conceptions that concentrate solely on individuals’ actions and attempt to formulate universal rules for these actions. As a distinction between virtue ethics and action ethics, moral loss must by all means be understood systematically; but furthermore, it must be interpreted historically, as MacIntyre showed first and foremost in After Virtue (1981). On the cusp of modernity, ethics that involve the good life—so-called virtue ethics—have

6At

no point does Taylor cite Trilling’s work in The Sources of the Self; yet in The Malaise of Modernity (1991, p. 22 f.), there is a downright vague, although still apparent, formulation that accepts Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity.

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reseeded ­increasingly further into the background in favor of ethics which involve individuals’ actions.7 The two-toned—namely systematic and historical—specificity of the distinction between virtue ethics and action ethics is mirrored in the definition of authenticity posited here. Seen systematically, this definition refuses both the definition of ethics that sees the formation of the good life on the horizon of morals, as well as the notion of ethics that conceives moral actions as realizations of universal rules in individual cases. Seen historically, the concept of authenticity emerges into the determination of successful self-relations when virtue ethics is finally redeemed through action ethics and the most important action ethics, namely utilitarianism and deontology, have been developed. The ideal of authenticity is thus not a particular form of action ethics but is instead quite distanced from it.

5 The Inarticulability of the Concept of the Good Life: The Authentic Moment The concept of happiness as developed in Antiquity and maintained through the entire Middle Ages is irrelevant to the concept of authenticity. Instead, the concept of happiness (and thus all so-called virtue ethics) is prefaced by the substantialist conception of the good life: One can be happy only in regards to certain general conceptions of the human form of life which are to be determined substantively and which must be developed from fundamental anthropological assumptions; essential here is Aristotle’s distinction between the three forms of life in the Nicomachean Ethics (I, 3). In such substantialist conceptions, the notion that one is happy when one ‘realizes oneself’—regardless of how, so long as no one else is harmed in the process—is simply incomprehensible. This changes drastically on the advent of modernity. During this time the concept of happiness individualized. To be happy no longer meant to flesh out some sketch of life defined substantively, but rather, to lead one’s life in a particular manner, regardless of the content of that life (so long as no one else is harmed in the process). It is easier under this more personalized notion of happiness to grasp all behaviors of a self that promote one’s individual concept of a successful, harmonious—more precisely, happier—biography: ‘Become what you are.’

7The

difference between contractualism, utilitarianism, and deontology within action ethics is not important for my following reflections.

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Of note, alongside the individualization of the concept of happiness, still associated with the sketch of the good life, is an Enlightenment-era record of the punctuation of the concept of happiness that is decoupled from the concept of a good life: Happiness is distilled into a comfortable state of pleasure or avoidance of pain (which the sensory self will naturally prolong). Since Greek Antiquity the notion of happiness could not be elucidated without the idea of a person’s whole, integrated biography. The simplest hedonistic calculus, as presented in Plato’s Protagoras (353c ff.), wields the notion, albeit rudimentary, of an integrated life. The primary difference between the Greek and the Enlightenment’s pleasure principle lies in the reference to a good life. French Materialists most widely superseded this reference. Regardless of whether it has strands of individualization or punctuation, the authentic self must neither in a pre-modern nor in a modern sense be a happy self. It is not incorrect to speak of someone who is in the midst of misfortune—in misery, rage, despair—as authentic. Thus there is no intrinsic connection between happiness/unhappiness and authenticity. On the other hand, however, any determination of authenticity would be amiss without considering that a self that is authentic shows who it is—‘who it is’ not just as a momentary and punctual self, but rather as a self with a biography. To put it more pointedly, the authentic self takes reference to the notion of a good life, whether it is in its substantialist or individualistic form—but this cannot be an explicit or articulated reference to the concept. An authentic self catches the authentic moment: a short span of time in which “the wholeness of the self” is nonetheless shown.8 The authentic moment is a culminating moment in the storyline of a person that shows who one is, and this can only mean: who they have become and presumably will be.

6 Non-submission under Universal Rules: Style as the Authentic Factor Under the common classification of modern action ethics in deontological and teleological ethics is the ethical theory of utilitarianism, which of all theories has the most tenuous connection to the concept of authenticity. The self, as utilitarianism envisions it, has learned to distance itself from itself; the self must be treated

8Thus

the punctuation of the feeling of happiness in the Enlightenment is irrelevant for the concept of authenticity developed here.

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impartially, like any other acting agent. In other words, it is irrelevant who performs the necessary calculations that originate from pleasure or suffering—be it an agent or an affected person or someone else entirely, i.e. a ‘witness’—so long as the calculations would arise in a single person if the action in question were to unfold. In principle, utilitarianism has no conception of successful self-relations and thus does not concern itself with authenticity (though it does conceptualize wellness).9 The matter is a bit more complicated for deontological ethics. In all of its underlying notions, self-esteem cannot be understood without taking authenticity into account. All formulations of the Categorical Imperative see the decisive point to be: self-respect can only mean respect for humanity through its individual, autonomous agents. Initially, the concept of authenticity seemingly contradicts this: Authenticity is all about holding humanity at an arm’s length away from oneself. If one simply acts morally—by submitting oneself to moral rules which are tested by the universal meta-rule, the Categorial Imperative—this person has not achieved authenticity; rather, one is authentic who, in the process of acting morally, manages to achieve their own style. To be authentic means to be true to oneself—not to understand oneself as a part of humanity. An agent’s authenticity does not arise if humanity’s universal rules of action simultaneously safeguard their behavior. The authentic person has their own signature style of acting that does not emerge from the potential generalizability of their maxims. But this description deviates from the meaning of authenticity because it does not fulfill the aforementioned moral affinity: We do not speak of authentic mafiosi, drug dealers, rapists, or torturers, who may very well have their own style and be true to themselves. So it seems that self-esteem must include morality, without directly appealing to humanity. This sounds compelling for every concept central to virtue ethics: Virtue can only be embodied; the virtuous person is the paradigmatic embodiment of moral norms. ‘Paradigmatic’ here means representative for all people. In the case of virtue ethics, this representation is central to the relationship of individuals to morals: a person leads a harmonious and successful life if they do not simply submit themselves to special norms in special cases, but rather if the network of norms they have come to trust over long stretches of biography becomes their benchmark for action—and becomes the manner through which the person becomes exemplary.

9Finally,

classical utilitarianism could not be conceived without the punctuation of the feeling of happiness; this certainly does not apply to Singer’s preference utilitarianism.

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Authenticity, however, is not a paradigm. The authentic moment in the context of a self’s moral action should instead signify a relationship between an individual and the collective without recourse to the concept of humanity, which does not question moral rule but rather modifies while it is in use. The authentic self does not submit to rules; it upholds them. This should not be misunderstood as overdoing one’s obligations nor as some form of heroism, but rather as demonstrating that the self is something other than the norms it upholds. The self’s authenticity is expressed in its own moral style. From this examples should follow; however, it keeping with the concept of the authentic moment/the moral style, these examples must necessarily be quite ­context-sensitive and thereby extensively detailed. On the other hand the difference between negative and positive obligations must be taken into consideration. It is intuitive to see that one needs a moral style to ‘fulfill’ a positive obligation— for example, it is unseemly to give a homeless person money without looking at them directly—yet nevertheless it is not a duty to look. The matter is much more complex with negative duties: how can one stylistically not deceive another? Yet here too it seems to be the case that a person can artfully express their stance to a taboo: it makes a huge different whether or not in the midst of a moral action a person acknowledges the temptation to break a rule.10

7 Against Taylor: Authenticity as a Modern Refusal of Therapy in Moralibus To hearken back to the virtue ethics of Greek Antiquity without repetition, the ideal determination of the relationship between a self and moral norms arises from dissatisfaction with the basic principles of modern action ethics, namely, that an agent must obey moral rules. The notion of authenticity outlined above shares this same dissatisfaction but differs in a proposed solution. The thesis

10Perhaps

the model of interpretation in the performative arts is fitting for the description of the authentic moment and the authentic style: the norm is the musical score, and authenticity its individual interpretations. The musical score betrays its performative purpose only up until a certain point, and after that the rest depends on the performer. If a moral norm is understood as analogous to a musical score, then it exists without any interpretation only abstractly.

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p­ roposed thus far agrees in its second part with Taylor’s thesis in the Sources of the Self: “The focus is on the principles, or injunctions, or standards which guide action, while visions of the good are altogether neglected. Morality is narrowly concerned with what we ought to do, and not also with what is valuable in itself, or what we should admire or love” (Taylor 1989, p. 84).

Following from this, authenticity is used to critique universalistic morals at the intersection between norms and individuals: A person must develop their own style in which they behave according to socially applicable norms. Universalism overlooks the importance of the question of style because it gives little thought to the relationship between the standard and its application; the key notion here is that of “judicial power,” which Kant always saw as a “hidden art in the depths of the human soul” (Critique of Pure Reason B 18011). Taylor’s rejection of the first part of the thesis above follows directly from his claim that one’s moral style is evidenced solely by how one answers the question of a meaningful life for oneself. This can mean nothing other than that the self has a conception, however rudimentary, of its moral biography: we “must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form” (Taylor 1989, p. 52, here following Ricoeur). As Sautermeister demonstrated, all of these considerations lead to various concepts of the art of living, which always revolve around the question of a meaningful wholeness of life (Sautermeister 2013, pp. 33–90). We must reject Taylors assertion that one’s moral style can only been seen by how it answers the question of a meaningful life, because this claim cannot fully describe successful self-relations under the conditions of modernity. Musil chose a quote from Maeterlinck as the motto for his The Confusions of Young Törless (1906): “In some strange way we devalue things as soon as we give utterance to them. We believe we have dived to the uttermost depths of the abyss, and yet when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pallid fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We think we have discovered a hoard of wonderful ­treasure-trove, yet when we emerge again into the light of day we see that all we have brought back with us is false stones and chips of glass. But for all this, the treasure goes on glimmering in the darkness, unchanged.”

11Regarding

the practical power of judgments, see in particular Critique of Practical Reason, 119–126.

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What Maeterlinck describes is the end of a long path towards ‘inwardness,’ which Taylor saw as beginning with Augustine and whose most important tangent was Rousseau.12 At the beginning of this path one is assured of finding stable ground for existence through self-articulation; by the end one feels utterly unable to selfarticulate—not because the (linguistic) method of articulation is unfit for the task, but because the self eludes every proper attempt at articulation, despite being struck with the need to s­ elf-articulate. Self-articulation is therefore always “inhibited” (Plessner); the belief in one’s ability to sincerely voice oneself is destroyed. It is noteworthy that in the geneses of modern subjectivity, contrary to the wishes of a person who wants to ­self-articulate, more intense attempts to self-articulate lead only to the increasing sense of inner opacity: the self always becomes less and less transparent to itself. Trilling’s investigation made these altered self-relations after 1750 the point of departure of his thesis on the replacement of sincerity with authenticity. The self that can no longer understand itself as sincere must still come to terms with its insatiable need to adequately articulate and express itself in its biographical totality, while simultaneously understanding the impossibility of this task. The authentic self suffers from the fundamental impossibility of such immediate self-articulation. Nevertheless, it urgently strives to articulate itself immediately. This is its plight. This explains how the performative contradiction mentioned early on arises not during self-attributions of sincerity, but those of authenticity: the modern self cannot ascribe authenticity to itself for it has realized just how opaque it really is. Additionally, it should now be underscored that the modern self cannot attribute authenticity to itself, but can, without performative contradiction, ascribe a need for authenticity to itself.13 To be clear, should this description pertain to the most fundamental aspects of experience that a modern person with autobiographical intuitions has, this does not preclude or take for granted that a person has an autobiographical image of him or herself; however, it does preclude that the image is an expression of their own confidence to be unestranged from themselves. Here Descartes’s “morale

12Compare

Taylor (1989, chaps. 7–10 and chap. 21). Williams’ Truth and Truthfulness (Williams 2002, Sect. 8.2) is informative, above all in its comparison to Diderot, who developed a model of the self in Le neveu de Rameau that precludes self-transparency a priori. 13Knaller (2007, p. 24) is imprecise regarding this point when she sees a performative contradiction in the sentence “I want to be authentic (in my actions and communications, in my statements about myself)”; this sentence is not quite a self-attribution of authenticity, but is rather a formulation of the need to be authentic.

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provisoire” rhetoric can highlight the crucial difference: Descartes lives such that at any decisive moment, he cannot yet comprehend how he can stand behind the norms which he lives by; the modern self withdraws from this ‘yet.’ Naturally, even the modern self has an idea of a meaningful life, albeit a rudimentary idea— but it also has quite some experience with its own concept of its meaningful life as tentative—without confidence to change this tentative status. Taylor spares no effort to marginalize the experience of self-alienation, which he sees quite well (see below). His systematic, key notion is the “epiphany” (see Taylor 1989, Chaps. 23 and 24). The epiphany is intended to grant a person access to meaning that is indispensable but which is otherwise unattainable through normal means of articulation. This meaning is in no way identical to the need for authenticity described above; it should not merely be a “regulative idea” in the Kantian sense, but rather boldly have an objectivity and transsubjective weight that goes above and beyond one’s anticipated self-transparency. Ultimately, Taylor’s epiphanic notion should allow access to the realm of truth that, once and for all, relieves the self of its self-alienation. Above all, art develops a creative articulatory process, through which the modern self hopes to arrive at this realm of truth. In the midst of the certainty that the modern self, despite its profound experience of opacity, can have a secure sense of its place in the world (Rousseau’s “sentiment de l’existence”), Taylor also reaches a broad conclusion about the demand for self-articulation in modern ethics. According to Taylor, modernity represses each person’s pursuit of a fulfilled, sensible, and meaningful life. Although human nature is not characteristically silent in this respect, modern repression can be seen in one’s silence in the face of this question. The goal of therapy must thus be to articulate one’s meaning of life. For Taylor, it is “intellectually asphyxiating” to disregard of the search for the good life.14 He even goes so far as to reproach a performative contradiction apparent in all modern ethical theories: “It seems that they are motivated by the strongest moral ideals, such as freedom, altruism, and universalism. These are among the central moral aspirations of modern culture, the hypergoods which are distinctive to it. And yet what these ideals drive the theorists towards is a denial of all such goods. They are caught in a strange

14“[This

cast of thought] suppresses so many questions and hides so many confusions that one cannot but experience it as intellectually asphyxiating, once one has escaped, even partially, from its spell” (Taylor 1989, p. 98).

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pragmatic contradiction, whereby the very goods which move them push them to deny or denature all such goods. They are constitutionally incapable of coming clean about the deeper sources of their own thinking. Their thought is inescapably cramped” (Taylor 1989, p. 88).

Modern humans lose their “humanity” by rejecting the question of the good life: “There are good reasons to keep silent. But they cannot be valid across the board. Without any articulation at all, we would lose all contact with the good, however conceived. We would cease to be human. The severest injunctions to silence can only be directed to certain classes of articulation, and must spare others” (Taylor 1989, p. 97, my emphasis).

Taylor can therefore only understand the modern cultural state as a kind of collective repression: “It will be my claim that there is a great deal of motivated suppression of moral ontology among our contemporaries, in part because the pluralist nature of modern society makes it easier to live that way, but also because of the great weight of modern epistemology [for Taylor this means different varieties of naturalism] […] So the work I am embarked upon here could be called in large degree an essay in retrieval“ (Taylor 1989, p. 10, my emphasis).

Again, in order to avoid a misunderstanding (which would be the converse of the aforementioned misunderstanding): It would be trivially wrong to interpret Taylor’s claim to reference to the plight of people who, in their average everyday lives, do not pose his very same questions about life’s meaning—just as it would be trivially wrong to understand it to be about one who proclaims to constantly pose these questions. We sometimes ask questions about meaning in everyday life, and sometimes do not at all. Taylor’s claim (and its repudiation) only makes sense if it refers to the moments—which stand apart from everyday life— in which individuals struggle to ‘come to themselves.’ It would be going too far to discuss the cause of this repression in Taylor’s thesis in depth. In a nutshell, he sees repression in a specific conceptualization of the feeling of self-respect: Its “favored formulation has come to be in terms of rights,” meaning that self-respect has come to be understood as autonomy (Taylor 1989, p. 11), and with it has come the “affirmation of ordinary life” and the emphasis on relief from suffering (Taylor 1989, p. 13), which has only intensified “after we no longer see human beings as playing a role in a larger cosmic order or divine history” (Taylor 1989, p. 13).

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Finally, it is necessary to trace his argument such that, taking seriously his use of the word “suppression,” one can reevaluate ordinary life (alongside his emphasis on autonomy and account of alleviating suffering) as a symptom of what one could call the long retreat inward, which Taylor sees as beginning with Augustine (Taylor 1989, ff.). One may perhaps over-emphasize Taylor’s use of the concept of repression if one scours for some underlying trauma; Taylor focuses instead on the motivating factors. But he still speaks of the “predicament” of a “certain subjectivism”—“we should seek the key to the order of things within”—and of Rilke’s Panther as “an emblem of our own alienated inwardness” (Taylor 1989, p. 429). In short, “the very nature of epiphanic art can make it difficult to say just what is being celebrated: the deep recesses beyond or below the subject, or the subject’s uncanny powers” (Taylor 1989, p. 429). To drastically simplify Taylor’s point, one could say that modern trauma has led to repressed questions about the good life, and that this trauma represents the growing inner experience of opacity. Taylor’s suggestion for therapy is to end the impasse of inwardness and restore the connection to an objective system of goods: “Realizing an epiphany is a paradigm case of what I have called recovering contact with a moral source” (Taylor 1989, p. 425). What defense exists against the accusation of repression? If we reject Taylor’s appeal to articulate our own good lives, we find ourselves in a situation akin to that of secularized theorists who cannot see modernity through the repression of their theological roots (the debate between Schmitt and Blumenberg), or that of the first-phase linguistic analytic philosophers who advanced a critique of metaphysics through analyzing language, without engaging in a discussion about whether the language in which they present these criticisms does not itself take on the status of that which it criticizes, that is, of an ultimate metaphysical justification. In both cases, if the respective opponents were correct regarding their diagnoses of repression, this inner struggle would produce revenants that would overtake the proud newcomers and—to adopt Freud’s own terminology from Mourning and Melancholia—at last turn them into despondent, somber souls. In the case of authenticity, the ultimate revenant would be the sketch of one’s own life; champions of authenticity refuse such pertinent therapeutic interventions by insisting on the authentic moment and the authentic style. It seems to them that only this insistence truly takes into account the modern self’s profound experience of opacity to itself.

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The authentic person is thus characterized by three types of reticence as inarticulability: (I) Reticence to others: in modernity the once-secure bond between the individual and the collective, which manifests as sincere articulation, is destroyed. The self remains ultimately alone. In moralibus this leads to the precariousness of the concept of self-respect as respect for all of humanity. (II) Reticence to oneself: the self is opaque to its own history—meaning that it no longer trusts its own notions about its own successful biography, which are necessary for everyday life. In moralibus, this leads to the precariousness of the concept of one’s own good life. (III) Reticence against therapeutic interventions, to surrender in epiphanic articulation to the two other forms of reticence: a modified revival of virtue ethics (Taylor’s suggestion for therapy) is impossible for the authentic self.

8 More than Silence: Authentic Gestures as the Source of Self for Others Acting authentically is momentous in light of the pre-modern horizon of virtue ethics and is stylistic in light of in modern action ethics. Both conceptions merge together in the concept of the authentic gesture. Authentic gestures are fragile. They disclose an abyss between acting agents, their biographies, and universal norms. Revealing this abyss means that a person can never perfectly uphold norms nor be virtue ethics’ exemplar of the good life.15 If this conception of authentic gestures is plausible, then authenticity is not an exemplary characteristic, but rather is a utopian and thereby constellate characteristic. If such gestures were exemplary, and thus symbolic, they would successfully instantiate universality—whether in the sense of action ethics regarding universal rules or the virtue ethics of a good life: Such gestures would symbolize an integrated whole. But instead, as constellate properties authentic gestures can only manifest themselves in the fragments of successful self-relations— in the way that, to use Adorno’s formulation (compare 1951, Nr. 153), “merge together” the utopian image of a successful life in solidarity with humanity. Authentic g­ estures have to do with the need for reconciling the opaque self with

15Amoral—though

not necessarily unconventional—gestures, however, serve only as a predictable, p­ reviously-determined codex.

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the ­collective: Those authentic gestures illuminate that this reconciliation has been realized. In an instant, the abyss between the individual and the collective is bridged. Authentic gestures are the utopian constellation of one’s own successful life as a human being. If one accepts that the aforementioned performative contradiction arises during one’s attempts to ascribe authenticity to oneself and that it stems from a specific modern experience of inner opacity within individuals, certainly no one can knowingly create such gestures; rather, they can only exist involuntarily. In an instant these gestures reveal a person’s entire life—and they do this so that all other individuals strive to achieve similar gestures, gestures that ‘pertain to all.’ Such a gesture ‘occurs’ to the authentic self—one encounters it, as it were— which reveals to others a utopian unity between the individual, their biography, and humanity. Authentic gestures indicate (not for the individuals themselves, but quite well for their observers) that a person has been so affected by a situation that their spontaneous reaction reveals what it could mean to lead a meaningful life in a community—such gestures do not indicate that one actually leads such a life.16 This attribution of authenticity pertains to a widespread silence—at the least on the part of the person to whom authenticity is attributed. Through these gestures and the reactions of others to them, one experiences oneself as authentic; but when asked what such gestures have to do with ‘the wholeness of a self,’ one can only remain silent. In this moment one honestly does not know it oneself. The same holds true for upholding universal norms: one can say nothing to the assertion that in the process of acting in their own particular style, they have just shed light on a norm to be upheld. As a refusal to articulate, the particular dignity of this silence entails that one does not claim to have found an intelligible solution to the widening rift between individuals, the concept of a good life, and one’s embeddedness in humanity. Therefore the attribution of authenticity is perhaps expressive but not articulatory. Authentic gestures are not self-articulatory, because they are involuntary. But they are expressive insofar as for those who attribute authenticity (in these gestures) to a person, that person is entirely apparent in the gesture. Authenticity is thus not a predicate of recognition but is rather an attribution that the authentic person has succeeded. It differs from a predicate of r­ ecognition

16In

its foundational structure, this determination resembles Hans-Otto Hügels determination of the ‘authentic moment’ (which is certainly formulated without any moral implications); compare Hügel 1997, pp. 54–58.

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in multiple respects. First, attributing authenticity does not lead to reciprocal relations. Hegel’s classical theory of acknowledgement is about individuals who acknowledge themselves as acknowledging; but such reciprocity is unimportant to attribute authenticity and can only arise incidentally. Secondly, attributions of authenticity do not refer to a person’s achievements; the authentic person did not exert themselves—they achieved something without quite knowing how. And finally, attributions of authenticity are only acceptable for individuals who are granted them—such individuals cannot sensibly criticize or reject the attribution; yet it is critical for acknowledgement that individuals can struggle against the attribution if it comes from the wrong side. All three points make the authentic person passive; strictly speaking they cannot take part in the discourse about their own authenticity. The authentic person is therefore the screen for others’ utopian projections. In the best of circumstances, authentic gestures trigger reflections in others about the composition of their own biographies and their relationship to moral norms: ‘where’ is one actually when planning one’s life and assuming social responsibility? In the best of cases, attributing authenticity prompts self-reflection in the person who attributes: it leads to the “ephiphany” that there is no complete self-enlightenment concerning one’s life course and stance on the norms whereby they live. In this respect the notion of authenticity corrects the feeling of ‘really living our life.’ Indeed: in the moment it occurs, the authentic gesture shows what such a life could look like. Translated by Edith Harris

References Adorno, T. W. 1951/1974. Minima Moralia. Reflections from damaged life. Trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books. Engler, W. 1989. Die Konstruktion von Aufrichtigkeit. Zur Geschichte einer verschollenen diskursiven Formation. Wien: Verband der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs. Hügel, H.-O. 1997. Die Darstellung des authentischen Moments. In Authentizität als Darstellung, ed. H.-O. Hügel and H. Kurzenberger, 43–58. Hildesheim: Universitätsverlag. Knaller, S. 2007. Ein Wort aus der Fremde. Geschichte und Theorie des Begriffs der Authentizität. Heidelberg: Springer. Knaller, S. and H. Müller. 2005. Art. ‘Authentisch/ Authentizität’. In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 7, eds. K.-H. Barck et al., 40–65. Stuttgart: Metzler. Knaller, S., and H. Müller. 2006. Einleitung. In Authentizität. Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs, eds. S. Knaller and H. Müller. München: Fink. Noetzel, T. 1999. Authentizität als politisches Problem: Ein Beitrag zur Theoriegeschichte der Legitimation politischer Ordnung. Berlin: Akademieverlag.

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Sautermeister, J. 2013. Identität und Authentizität. Studien zur normativen Logik personaler Orientierung. Fribourg: Herder Academic. Schiller, F. 1793/1988. On grace and dignity. In Poet of Freedom, vol. II, Ed. and Trans. by Schiller Institute Washington D.C., 337–396. New York: New Benjamin Franklin House. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the self. The making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Trilling, L. 1972. Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wentz, D. 2005. Authentizität als Darstellungsproblem in der Politik: Eine Untersuchung der Legitimation politischer Inszenierung. Stuttgart: Metzler. Williams, B. 2002. Truth and truthfulness. An essay in genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PD Dr. Christian Strub  Teacher at a Berlin school. Studied Philosophy, Ancient Greek and German Philology at the University of Tübingen, Bonn and Freiburg/Br.

Approaches from Psychology and Psychiatry

Authenticity: A Selfie Admired by Others? Eckhard Frick SJ

1 Introduction The word “authenticity” may be used as a (1) descriptive or as a (2) normative concept. Art experts descriptively recognize that a painting is an “authentic” Rubens, Rembrandt, or Picasso, and not an (inauthentic) falsification. That a person implicitly or explicitly expresses a wish for authenticity is also a descriptive statement. When individuals or groups affirm that one should be authentic it is (2) a moral aim which may be reflected within the ethics of authenticity (Taylor 1992). Etymology points to authenticity’s dark side: in Greek, authéntēs does not primarily mean author in a generic sense but murderer, one of a murderer’s family, perpetrator. Accordingly, in the present paper, we shall not restrict our scope to an old ethics which consciously or unconsciously rejects and projects the inauthentic shadow in order to attain bright authenticity. Rather, we shall follow Erich Neumann’s Depth psychology and a new ethic (1949/1969) as well as his conception of an ego-self axis.

2 From Sincerity to Authenticity Sincerity, for many contemporarians an old-fashioned term, is the precursor of authenticity, imbued with a strong moral accent:

E. Frick SJ (*)  Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_9

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“If sincerity is the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one’s own self, we can see that this state of personal existence is not to be attained without the most arduous effort. And yet at a certain point in history certain men and classes of men conceived that the making of this effort was of supreme importance in the moral life, and the value they attached to the enterprise of sincerity became a salient, perhaps a definitive, characteristic of Western culture for some four hundred years” (Trilling 1971, p. 5).

“Sincerity” enters the English language in the 16th century, derived from the Latin word sincerus (“clean, sound, pure”, another etymology is: “sine cera” [without wax], not patched up and passed off). Sincerity refers “to a congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (Trilling 1971, p. 2). The crisis of sincerity and its substitution by the term “authenticity” is a consequence of its social context, of the sincere person and his or her interactants: “Sincerity has lost its former status, if the word itself has for us a hollow sound and seems almost to negate its meaning, that is because it does not propose being true to one’s own self as an end but only as a means. If one is true to one’s own self for the purpose of avoiding falsehood to others, is one being truly true to one’s own self? The moral end in view implies a public end in view, with all that this suggests of the esteem and fair repute that follow upon the correct fulfilment of a public role” (Trilling 1971, p. 9).

Sincerity as well as authenticity are interactive, dramatic (belonging to theatre) concepts, based on the tension between the author (of a text, a drama, a role) und the actor who plays (acts out) what the author prescribed. Author and actor may be two different persons: The author as a spectator observes how the actor executes his text and performs his role on stage, and he may “authentify”, approve or not of the actor’s performance (actions). On the stage of our daily lives, we all are author and actor, showing or hiding our personal role-book. Sincerity, the “congruence between avowal and actual feeling”, is privately and publicly staged, according to society’s requirements. C.G. Jung uses the term “persona” (signifying the mask worn by actors in antiquity) for the masks we all wear in social relationships, even the mask we wear when we present ourselves as being sincere: “In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic”. The word ‘authenticity’ suggests “[…] a more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life. At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up

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the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason” (Trilling 1971, pp. 10–11).

Notably, the decline of sincerity and the increasing importance of authenticity brings back the dark aspects present in the Greek authéntēs, at least unconsciously. Much more than sincerity, authenticity is not only a normative but also a descriptive term. This “museal” connotation is maintained in the basically normative sound of authenticity: “It is a word of ominous import. As we use it in reference to human existence, its provenance is the museum, where persons expert in such matters test whether objects of art are what they appear to be or are claimed to be, and therefore worth the price that is asked for them—or, if this has already been paid, worth the admiration they are being given. That the word has become part of the moral slang of our day points to the peculiar nature of our fallen condition, our anxiety over the credibility of existence and of individual existences” (Trilling 1971, p. 93).

During the 18th century, we can observe a displacement of the moral accent linked to the subjective turn of modern culture. In earlier moral views, “[…] being in touch with some source – God, say, or the Idea of the Good – was considered essential to full being. Only now the source we have to connect with is deep in us” (Taylor 1992, p. 26).

For human beings, it is a crucial challenge to remain human and authentic after “the death of God”: “[…] as soon as God’s position becomes vacant they feel compelled to be a candidate for it. That is, of course, the reason why from now on they have the task, which was previously God’s affair, of making everything” (Marquard 1981/1989, p. 73).

The modern preoccupation with identity and recognition entails the collapse of social hierarchies understood as a basis for honour. Honour (intrinsically linked to inequalities, Taylor 1992, p. 46) is replaced by the universalist and egalitarian concept of citizen dignity.

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“Self-truth and self-wholeness are seen more and more not as means to be moral, as independently defined, but as something valuable for their own sake. Self-wholeness and the aesthetic are ready to be brought together […]” (Taylor 1992, pp. 64f.). “My discovering my identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internalized, with others. That is why the development of an ideal of inwardly generated identity gives a new and crucial importance to recognition. My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations to others” (Taylor 1992, pp. 47f.).

Coexisting contemporary sets of demands as shown in the following list: Authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery (ii) originality (iii) opposition to the rules of society/morality (B) requires (i) openness to horizons of significance (ii) self-definition in dialogue Sets of demands for authenticity (Taylor 1992, p. 66) entail individual and collective conflicts between the clusters (A) and (B), notably between a more or less narcissistic amoralism of creativity and the desire of recognition. Bringing together, as Taylor writes, self-wholeness and the aesthetic aesthetifies the ­self-image which is not only an ideal image of myself and for myself but an image shown to others, admired by others, and co-constructed by others. Not only professional artists but everybody becomes a self-working artist. “The ·work of art is itself authentic by reason of its entire self-definition: it is understood to exist wholly by the laws of its own being, which include the right to embody painful, ignoble, or socially inacceptable subject-matters. Similarly the artist seeks his personal authenticity in his entire autonomousness – his goal is to be as self-defining as the art-object he creates. As for the audience, its expectation is that through its communication with the work of art, which may be resistant, unpleasant, even hostile; it acquires the authenticity of which the object itself is the model and the artist the personal example” (Trilling 1971, p. 99).

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3 Authenticity: Realizing “My True Self”? The psychoanalytical term “false self”, coined by Winnicott (1960/1965), is characterized by its defensive function “to hide and protect the True Self, whatever that may be” (p. 142). The False Self, encompassing a carefully trained social façade, corresponds to the Jungian “persona”. In analysis, we should not “unmask” the false-self/persona but acknowledge its – at least temporarily – nurturing function: “In analysis of a False Personality the fact must be recognized that the analyst can only talk to the False Self of the patient about the patient’s True Self. It is as if a nurse brings a child, and at first the analyst discusses the child’s problem, and the child is not directly contacted. Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain alone with the analyst and has started to play” (Winnicott 1960/1965, p. 151).

Analytical psychology clearly differentiates ego and self. The ego, we can presume with Erich Neumann (1957/2017), becomes the more authentic the more it is orientated, centred towards the self. During the baby’s and toddler’s development, the self “gives birth” to the ego. Neumann’s term “ego-self axis” reminds us that ego and self will be differentiated but not separated. In life-long development, the constellated ego-self axis centres the ego on the self which, however, will never be attained nor identified with the ego. Consequently, individuation is neither egotism nor ego-perfection. It is, on the contrary, even more a non-ego: “Individuation is not that you become an ego — you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange. Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego. The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection” (Jung 1932/1999, p. 39).

An authentic individuation in the Jungian sense is, however, neither an idealisation of the self nor a devalorisation of the ego but a kind of coexistence of the everyday ego and the eternal (never completely reached) self: “When we speak of the archetypes and the self of the human psyche which become creative in man, the implication is that in this realm man extends into his eternity, into himself as eternity. But this eternal self-ego-integrity is not an ‘authenticity’ which must be distinguished from the non-authenticity of the ego and defended

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against it. Nor must one be ‘sublimated’ or elevated to the other. Man always exists in the realm of the authentic, lives from it, is one with it. There are merely differences in the transparency of this authenticity, not differences in the authenticity itself or in our nearness to it” (Neumann 1957/2017, p. 235).

A major problem of current authenticity-discourses consists in the split between an idealised, true, succeeding self on the one hand and an everyday, not yet advanced ego on the other. This dividing judgement of value conveys a sort of competition – an inner one as well as an outer one. Neumann quotes the ­self-revelation of YHWH (Exodus 3), the strange divine name Ehyeh asher ehyeh: I am who I am, understood as a formula not only of divine co-wanderership but also of the human wanderer’s existence: “And this timeless point of the ‘I am’ is a supremely numinous presence and actuality, expressed through my ego, which not only ‘pro-jects’ (entwirft) me myself and the world in consciousness, but, as a ‘pro-jecting’ agent, is also simultaneously a ‘pro-jected’ ego. And this ego-self, in which the ego joins with the self, always transcends itself in a transcendent self-ego, a joining of the self with the ego” (Neumann 1957/2017, p. 238).

According to Neumann, it would be a “frightful misunderstanding” to oppose the “being” of the self to the ego’s “seeming,” “authentic” to “fallen, inauthentic”: “Precisely, once it has become transparent how easily the ego-self dual structure of the human psyche can mislead us into distinguishing between a world of appearances, a fallen world, and a world of essence, an authentic world of the self, one cannot emphasize too strongly that this dual nature is a unity appearing in ­twin-form. The division of the world into being and seeming, or into pure and impure, authentic and inauthentic, not only gives rise to the catastrophic split in the Western world, but also to the fundamental inhumanity of its misguided humanism, whose abstractness culminates in disdain for merely human, merely worldly life” (Neumann 1957/2017, pp. 247–248).

4 A New Ethics of Authenticity In his seminal work Depth psychology and a new ethic, written shortly after the crimes of World War II and the Shoah, Neumann (1949/1969) rejects the old ethics which, according to his analysis, projects the psyche’s dark side onto dictators, enemies, perpetrators, etc. who are all “authentic” in their actions. The new moral challenge, on the contrary, is to realize one’s shadows and to withdraw pro-

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jections from the outer world. Accepting one’s shadows, however, does not at all banalize my dark side. The shadow is not morally indifferent. The moral effort, however, is no longer directed towards the others’ crimes but towards the inner perpetrator, the criminal I am myself: “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. ­ Indeed, s­elf-knowledge as a psychotherapeutic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period” (Jung, CW 9/II, par. 14).

The “shadow” is indeed a moral concept, but not in the meaning of optimizing a shadowless and beautiful authenticity. By underlining the “moral effort” of shadow-work Jung focuses on the recognition of what is neither avowed nor admitted, and often unconscious. Paradoxically, the shadow is the sum of all I do not consider as authentically mine, which is opposed to my quest for wholeness. By accepting this paradox the true self will be easier reached than by an association of a beautiful selfie and repressed shadows. “Closer examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow – reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality. Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment” (Jung, CW 9/II, par. 15).

In his book’s (1971) last chapter, Trilling refers to Freud’s psychology of the ego. In opposition to folk-psychology and earlier psychoanalytical theories, Freud’s structural model of the psyche does no longer affirm the dichotomy between the conscious ego and the unconscious id. On the contrary: The ego, too, is partly unconscious, “not master in its own house”. There is a performative contradiction in the sentence: “I am authentic”: My partly unconscious (or, as Jung highlights, “shadowy”) ego can never affirm my own authenticity. When imagining myself and presenting this “selfie” to others, the ego-self axis is jeopardized. My ego is separated from the self, yearning for authenticity, however in a paradoxical inauthenticity.

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References Jung, C. G. 1932/1999. The psychology of kundalini yoga: Notes of the seminar given in 1932, vol. 99. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marquard, O. 1981/1989. Farewell to matters of principle: Philosophical studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Neumann, E. 1949/1969. Depth psychology and a new ethic. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Neumann, E. 1956/2017. Creative man and the “Great Experience”. In The Essays of Erich Neumann, vol. 3, The Place of Creation, eds. H.V. Nagel, E. Rolfe, J.V. Heurck and K. Winston, 131–202. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Neumann, E. 1957/2017. Man and meaning. In The Essays of Erich Neumann, vol. 3, The Place of Creation, eds. H.V. Nagel, E. Rolfe, J.V. Heurck and K. Winston, 203–263. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, C. 1992. The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Trilling, L. 1971. Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Winnicott, D. W. 1960/1965. Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, 140–152. Oxford: International Universities Press.

Prof. Dr. Eckhard Frick SJ Professor for Psychological Anthropology at the Munich School of Philosophy and Associate Researcher for Spiritual Care at the Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine of the Technical University of Munich. Studied Medicine, Philosophy and Catholic Theology in Freiburg/Br., Münster, Dijon and Paris. Research interests: spiritual care, anthropology.

Being Oneself: The Functional Basis of Authenticity and Self-Development Julius Kuhl

1 Introduction In psychology, authenticity is often associated with the notion of the self: Authenticity presumes that a person is in harmony with his or her true self (Harter 2002); that he or she is aware of his or her true self, including needs, emotions, and values; that he or she has an open mind for both positive as well as negative experiences; and that he or she integrates the multitude of personally relevant experiences into a coherent self (Ryan and Deci 2000; Gilligan 2014; Goldman 2006; Rogers 1961). How then can the notion of the self be qualified psychologically? Without doubt, the self touches on the first-person perspective. It is related to one’s ability to be aware of oneself (the ability to develop a valid representation of one’s self) as well as one’s capability to integrate the goals, beliefs, values, abilities and actions that are characteristic of oneself into a coherent whole. With this object of investigation, however, psychology as a natural science is faced with a Herculean task: Scientific explanations are based on an objectifiable ­third-person perspective. Is it possible to analyze the first-person perspective from the third-person perspective? This question touches on more than just a controversial philosophical topic; it represents an enormous challenge for scientific

This chapter is an elaborated version of an article published in the journal “PsychologieUnterricht”: Kuhl, J. (2011). Wie funktioniert das Selbst? Psychologie-Unterricht, 44, 23–27. J. Kuhl (*)  University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_10

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psychology. For personality psychologists engaged in empirical research it means facing questions about the “mechanics” of the self. When we ask: “How does the self work?”, we don’t understand the self to be a metaphor or a state of mind that can only be perceived subjectively. Rather, we understand it as a system that can be described by functional features, which in turn can be analyzed empirically. This system called ‘self’ becomes more and more important in psychotherapy as well as in consulting and coaching (Gilligan 2012; Kuhl et al. 2006; Strehlau and Kuhl 2014). Yet asking about the mechanics of the self seems odd in ­everyday-life, because we tend to see the self from a subjective rather than an objective point of view, as is still often the case in classical theories of personality psychology (Rogers 1961; Ryan and Deci 2000). When considering the functionality of the self from the third-person perspective of a (scientific) observer, not only do we learn about many concrete details regarding the functional properties of this system, but we are in many instances also able to connect the objective and subjective perspectives. In everyday life, when we do something just “by ourselves”, that is without conscious intention or external support, we are, scientifically speaking, accessing the intuitive experiential network of the self. When the solution to a problem does not arise “by itself” (which is tantamount to activating the intuitive self), the analysis of the functionality of the self becomes especially helpful: If we are not able to solve a problem intuitively (by “ourselves”) and without contemplation or analyzing, it is often due to the fact that our access to the self is weakened or temporarily lost. As soon as we can explain how the self works, many ways to restore the access to the self arise. That is why an analysis of the functionality of the self can serve as a good example of the practical benefit of a theory (to paraphrase Kurt Lewin: “There is nothing more practical than a good theory”). However, assuming a self as a coherence-oriented neuro-psychological system is not very popular. “Who Am I—and If So How Many?” This bestselling book by a philosophically committed German journalist Richard Precht (2011) seems to suggest that something like a coherent self might simply not exist. In fact, there seems to be a noticeable tendency to deny the existence of the self in terms of a coherent system: If indeed I can state something about myself, I am likely to name many different realms of self in which my behavior varies widely, rather than being able to perceive and describe myself as a homogeneous being. It seems that this view fits quite well with the (postmodern) attitude towards life many people exhibit, as well as current philosophical, psychological, and neurobiological approaches: Is a person and that which it is considered to be by others a consistent construct? After all, the same person feels, thinks, and acts very differently depending on the situations, moods, or roles he or she is in (Harter 2002).

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Could the notion of a highly integrated person, of a coherent (consistent) or even homogeneous self, be fictional? On the other hand, the notion of an incoherent self can be perceived as an indication of immature personality development or even psychological disorder (Benjamin 2010). Indeed, what is called the multiple personality phenomenon is well known in psychopathology and its neurobiological basis has been demonstrated (Reinders et al. 2018). People displaying this disorder seem to suddenly change their entire personality when, for example, something about their situation is altered or when they come under stress. Such a person might conduct herself as a decent, restrained woman with the buzzing voice in one situation while suddenly acting like an impulsive-frisky ten-year-old girl, and even sounding childlike and squeaky, in another. People with dissociative or multiple personality disorders do not even have a shared basis of memory for different realms of life: One “person” does not know about the other. Even in the postmodern and, even more so, in the “post-factual” society with constantly changing, inconsistent and oftentimes contradictory images of the world and humanity, the impression can easily be formed that people, in one situation, do not know or do not want to know that they have acted very differently, if not contradictorily, in another situation. Are we approaching a shift in our view of a “normal human being” towards what formerly has been described as multiple personality in psychopathology? Is an incoherent self the new idea of a normal self? Is the quest for coherence an instance of wishful thinking? It goes without saying that highly integrated personalities are badly needed today. This need for coherence might arise, for example, from the dissatisfaction with those politicians who nowadays seem to adapt their opinion so quickly to the daily tide, such that it is impossible to get an (coherent) idea of them. People’s wish for stronger stability and less vicissitude also applies to scientists, doctors, teachers, and other “pillars of society”. This wish seems to be based on the following assumption: If those professionals had a coherent personality, doctors would not reduce their causal investigation to those “fragments of knowledge” that can be proven scientifically (“evidence-based medicine”), but summon their intellectual and personal strength in order to consider also complex causations of diseases (that, in principle, are harder to verify than simple ones). Scientists would refrain from prematurely publishing solitary results before a consistent view has evolved and before the relevance for society has become clear in a comprehensive and basically established way. And teachers would find it easier to support their students’ evolvement into responsible, highly integrated and perceptive adults, opposed to merely transferring knowledge, a task that is far from easy to accomplish even in everyday school life, where demand for it is once again on the rise.

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These examples already show the great importance befitting the psychological analysis of the self as a coherence-oriented mental system that promotes extensive integration of knowledge, circumspect judgment and reliable authenticity. Below, after a short discussion of philosophical and neuroscientific points of criticism of the notion of personal coherence, a short depiction of psychological research results will serve to elaborate upon the seven functional features of what I call the “integrated self”. Conclusively, the question will be approached as to how the development of a highly integrated self can be supported in education and teaching, and moreover why it is relevant to the evolvement of talents in school.

2 Criticism from Philosophy and Neurosciences Postmodern philosophers (Foucault and Derrida, for example) pick up on the unease about the technocratic and one-dimensional attitude of modernity, which they perceive as an autocratic form of oppressing plurality and freedom. This discomfort can be perceived in many spheres of life today: Strong leadership is sensed to be anti-democratic, arrogant, or oppressive in both families and politics, as well as in educational institutions (or it is, more recently, almost blindly accepted, perhaps as a surrogate for personal authenticity and coherence). Many parents forgo “strong leadership”, because they think the only way for them to support the free development of their children is to allow them to decide for themselves as frequently as possible, and as early as possible (thereby paradoxically undermining children’s sense of security and autonomy: Winterhoff 2009). In addition, authorities are socially depleted more and more (noticeable, for example, in the growing wish for “grassroots democracy”). This trend is reinforced by leading neuroscientists who claim that the brain does not in fact have a freely operating directing center, but that, instead, its performance is constituted by a huge number of specialized networks. There could be no talk of directive nexus that is consistent and decides freely (Singer 2004). In contrast to this skeptical view I have argued that, by taking into account the functionality of the self, it is rather simple to explain that the notion of a freely operating coherent self is indeed compatible with a scientific worldview (Kuhl and Hüther 2007; Kuhl and Luckner 2006; Kuhl et al. 2015). As mentioned above, aversion against central authorities exists not only in philosophy and neurosciences, but in our everyday world as well, especially in education. In workshops I have organized for teachers’ continuing education typical questions asked by participants are: Why do schoolchildren and students often

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react defensively when faced even with reasonable requests? Why do many children (and adults) find it so hard, these days, to distinguish between oppressive and integrative leadership? Why do many parents, educators, or teachers think the only choice they have is between “freedom with no boundaries” and “boundaries with no freedom”, as the Munich personality and family psychologist Klaus Schneewind puts it (Schneewind and Böhmert 2010)? As I want to show in this chapter, the mental system called the “Self” is very much able to differentiate between oppressive and integrative leadership, as long as it is provided with the necessary conditions for growth. It holds the potential to integrate antagonisms, to solve conflicts, to consider many different parameters in complex decisions (one’s own needs, abilities and values as well as those of others), and to perceive, articulate and regard emotions. In a nutshell, I will argue that the self integrates the various experiences, capabilities, needs, and values of the own and of other persons—including physical perceptions and the regulation of bodily functions from stress regulation to immune defense—in a way so comprehensive that it is able to keep finding opportunities for action which live up to the different capabilities and needs of the own person without ignoring other persons’ capabilities, needs, and values. Not least, the integrative self is computationally capable of integrating two seemingly opposing accomplishments: adapting decision-making and action to changing conditions in a context-sensitive way and, nonetheless preserving its coherence that can be perceived, albeit intuitively, by human interaction partners. From a computational point of view, this paradoxical accomplishment can be derived from the functional characteristics of parallel processing in connectionist neural networks (Lake et al. 2018; Maldonato et al. 2018).

3 Seven Functional Features of the Self I propose that the conceptualization of the self as a mental system that integrates all experiences of personal life describes the functional basis of what we associate with a mature, responsible, perceptive personality: It demands too much neither of oneself nor of others; is capable of reconciling one’s own and others’ needs and values; does not think in one-sided either-or categories; is seldom faced with post-decisional conflicts; allows for emotions without getting lost in them; and considers mistakes without being paralyzed by them. All of these accomplishments can be deduced from three basic features of the self that are complemented with four further features in Table 10.1. The table shows all seven functional features of the integrated self in comparison with those features that Carl Rogers,

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Table 10.1  Features of a “fully functional personality” according to Rogers mapped against the functional features of the self as meanwhile confirmed by research in experimental psychology and neurobiology (source: author’s own table) The fully functioning person (according to Rogers)

Functional features of the integrated self

… has trust in his or her own feelings

(1) Inner Assurance (and basic trust): taking positive stock of personal experiences, including negative ones (overall affirmation of one’s own existence) (2) Interconnection with Emotions, needs, and physical perception: perception and expression of emotions

… leads a life full of meaning, personal appreciation, and responsibility

(3) Parallel processing: comprehensive experience of existential meaning is facilitated by simultaneous consideration of many (also remote) implications and references of personal experience (“polysemantic” instead of categorical either-or thinking)

… shows openness to experiences

(4) Awareness (encompassing implicit mindfulness for personally relevant experience) (5) Feedback processing: letting the consequences of one’s actions get to “oneself” (feeling and understanding success and failure, for example, instead of only “knowing” them; accepting responsibility rather than assigning guilt)

… shows growth of consciousness: More (6) Nonconscious, preconscious, and and more parts of implicit self-awareness “superconscious”: Because of its extensive, become consciously available and explicable parallel processing characteristics, only sections of the widely implicit self can be explicated (biphenomenality). … is ready to, if necessary, risk pain and sorrow (instead of one-sidedly fending off emotions)

(7) Self-confrontational emotion regulation facilitating the integration of both positive and negative experiences

founder of the person-centered (“humanistic”) psychotherapy, had named in his description of the healthy, “fully functional” personality. The well-developed self described as a “system” by the functions listed in the table is not conceived of as a hard-wired center in a specific part of the brain (like

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a hardware-component of a computer). Instead, the integrated self is considered a network of cooperating functions (supported by various cerebral regions) evolving only in the course of an extended developmental process. In order to detect such functional networks, neuroanatomical research findings are highly useful (see Sporns et al. 2004): The closer two processes or functions take place in the brain, the more easily and quickly they can cooperate and build a functional network (i.e. a “system”). It’s known about all seven of the functional features listed in Table 10.1 that they are supported more by the right hemisphere than by the left, especially by the right prefrontal cortex (up front on the right, below the forehead). This can already be interpreted as hinting at the functional features being extraordinarily good and efficient at building a functioning functional network (Kuhl et al. 2015). Exemplary findings on this for each of the seven functions are listed in the following references. The right hemisphere supports the ability mentioned first in Table 10.1, to empathize with others and to figure others for trustworthy (Winston et al. 2002). Empirical findings from mood diaries support the assumption that “basic trust” and the inner assurance allow for learning from painful experiences instead of constantly needing to block them out (Kuhl et al. 2017): Inner assurance is based on the ability to maintain trust in the recoverability of positive feelings even when confronted with negative experiences (Biebrich and Kuhl 2004). Those who don’t have this sort of trust are likely to find it difficult to grow in the face of painful experiences because they cannot afford to engage with such experiences (as they might trigger despondency or even despair far too easily). Inner assurance is highly shaped by early relationship experiences (Ahnert 2011), but can also be strengthened later on by positive relationship experiences, especially when they are accompanied by an improvement of the perception of one’s own needs (Storch and Kuhl 2011). Inner assurance furthermore provides the basis for the mentioned ability to positively evaluate everything related to the own person (self-positivity), without having to block out personal weaknesses or painful experiences. One example for empirical evidence demonstrating this tendency to self-valorize is an old experiment by Harvard professor Ellen Langer (1975): Participants were given lottery tickets, which they were then instructed to sell. In one group, they were allowed to pick their tickets themselves, in another group participants were plainly handed one. In the first group (where the “self” took part in the choice), the tickets were sold for an average of $8.67, while tickets that had been handed out by the examiner scored an average of $1.96. The second functional feature is the interconnection of the self with emotions and bodily perceptions (Table 10.1). There are many studies showing that the

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right hemisphere, and again especially the anterior part, is connected to emotions and bodily perceptions far more directly and comprehensively than the left (Prete et al. 2018). This is true not only for negative emotions (Davidson 1993), but also for positive ones (e.g. Wittling 1990). Furthermore, the right prefrontal (anterior) cortex (cerebral cortex) is particularly active when somebody is embracing another person, both in positive or negative emotional states (Packheiser et al. 2018) or when young mothers are asked to differentiate between distinct emotions shown by their babies, i.e. whether the baby is currently looking sad, happy, or grumpy (Nishitani et al. 2011). This cerebral region is close to regions that take part in the regulation of emotions, e.g. when participants are asked to cope with emotions evoked by pictures of crash scenes or the like (Levesque et al. 2003). Almost a century ago, existential philosopher Martin Heidegger already suggested that the self was connected with emotions closely: “Dasein” always is something (emotionally) “tuned” (Heidegger’s notion of “Dasein” is supposed to describe a person’s comprehensive involvement for everything related to his or her existence). The practical consequence of the close interconnection of the self with emotions is that we do not get at the encompassing intelligence of the self if we disregard emotions (e.g. when we want to approach a task as soberly as possible or when we suppress emotions because we are not able to deal with them): An objective analytical attitude disallowing emotions partly or even completely is very useful for logical thinking, but not for creative comprehensive accomplishments. This is probably due to the fact that we need emotions to get at the comprehensive, intuitive networks of the right hemisphere. What now does the “encompassing intelligence of the self” consist of? The third functional feature (see Table 10.1) is based on the fact that the right (anterior) part of the brain supports the simultaneous (parallel) processing of information more comprehensively than the left hemisphere does. This extended holistic processing characteristic is necessary, for example, when participants are requested to provide various meanings of a word (e.g. recognizing the equivocation of words like bank (i.e., as a piece of furniture versus a place for deposing money), or generating remote associations (generate alternative uses of a brick), or finding a relational term connecting different words like “plant, mower, switch” respectively: Jung-Beeman et al. 2004). On the other hand, the right hemisphere is not as good as the left one in discerning means-ends relations (“What are scissors for?”) or formally logical derivations (Deglin and Kinsbourne 1996), but it is superior to the left hemisphere in regard to holistic judgment, e.g. concerning accumulated life experience, the appearance and aesthetic appeal of an object, or similarities between different objects or people (Levy and Trevarthen 1976). All of these processing characteristics can be explained on the basis of

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parallel processing networks. Parallel processing suits the idea of the self as a mental system of which we can—adding to and continuing the pioneering work of Carl Rogers—give a very detailed description in terms of its mechanics. The self simultaneously calls forth all personal experiences relevant to a decision or a concrete situation, thus allowing for circumspect judgment and decision-making based on the principle of the “as well as”: Instead of falling for black-and-white categories or either-or thinking (e.g. a person or an experience can only be positive or negative, a statement is exclusively true or false), parallel processing of a lot of information allows us to “think” of everything important (i.e. to take into regard everything important) without having to (explicitly) think of everything. This characteristic of parallel networks is called multiple constraint satisfaction (the simultaneous processing of multiple boundary conditions): A ­well-developed self can apply this feature of parallel information processing on an enormously high level of integration, so that it can repeatedly find actions that let its needs come into their own, for example, without ignoring other needs or values, be they its own or those of others (Engel and Kuhl 2015). Someone who is able to bring up all personally relevant life experiences simultaneously on an implicit level of awareness, that is who has “self-access”, will not be as inclined to demand too much or too little of him- or herself. This is because the access to the “accumulated life experience” enables him or her to repeatedly assess whether he or she is fit for a task or not, whether a goal is set realistically or not, and which concrete options for action are promising (Engel and Kuhl 2015; Kuhl et al. 2015). Based on the parallel processing characteristics of the self, many concrete strategies emerge which can be used to help people regain formerly unavailable access to their selves and then assist in further developing them. Examples include all tasks that require someone to expand their horizon, for example through all creative and experience-oriented activities. One’s horizon can, for example, also be broadened through humor (which often is based on the play with different meanings), or by getting more “personal” when interacting with others in a context-sensitive way (i.e. not reducing the other to particular characteristics or purposes, but rather addressing the whole person and being open for whatever he or she shows). When someone is in a situation where it seems that he or she has only one thought, one feeling, or one action left to choose, or is restrained to choosing between only two options, expanding their horizon can, literally, work miracles: Take for example a client’s report of a neighbor’s “clearly derisive” smile—what else could it, if only “theoretically”, mean? As soon as the person who was unable to perceive the neighbor’s smile as anything but “derisive” can

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be encouraged to name other possible meanings, the “space of opportunities of the self” opens up. Many people are prone to saying yes, that is they tend to conform to others’ expectations. Others tend more toward saying no: The former are often quite popular, while the latter are often perceived as being cumbersome, defiant, or even antisocial. But both types of people have something in common: They make no use of the tremendous range of opportunities of the self. A person with a ­well-developed self is not restricted to the choice between a perhaps unauthentic “yes” or a defiant “no” when faced with somebody else’s suggestion. Instead, drawing from his or her enormous experiential network, he or she can construe the suggestion in multiple ways and thus create a scenario where he or she can authentically say yes (and in case he or she still decides against the suggestion, his or her “no” is not premature or defiant, but indeed authentic and it can even be conveyed with an intelligible explanation). For example: Instead of answering the question “Can I copy your homework?” with a timid-submissive “yes” or a defiant-defensive “no”, a student with good access to her self could reply: “What about working on the exercise together?”. Analytical thinking (which has been seen as a central function of the ego since Sigmund Freud) is, in distinction from the holistic feeling of the self, not only “monosemantic” (i.e. it tries to reduce polysemous information to the singular, currently relevant point), but also abstracts from the emotional and personal meaning of a message or an experience (the analytical thinking of the left hemisphere is, after all, unlike the self not directly and comprehensively connected with the autonomic nervous system and thus with emotions and bodily signals). That is good when it comes to solving logical problems and making plans: Who would like the result of a calculation (e.g. 2+2) to be dependent on how one feels at the moment? But the decoupling of thinking and feeling can also hold disadvantages when the solution to a problem requires the consideration of many boundary conditions (e.g. solving a conflict, bringing about peace, solving a complex problem that involves many causal factors, such as complexly caused diseases or dealing with the environment). As the logical ego finds much more support for its development than the holistic self in the media- and ­achievement-oriented society, it is increasingly important to understand and optimize good self-development (Storch and Kuhl 2011). Even more important, however, is thinking and deliberating about how self-development could be effectively supported in educational institutions (day care, school, university) and at home despite difficult circumstances (see Kuhl et al. 2011). I will address this at the end of this chapter.

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The next three functional features of the self (see Table 10.1) are implications of the parallel processing characteristics related to attention (vigilance), dealing with feedback (feedback processing) and phenomenal status (conscious vs. unconscious): Parallel (simultaneous) processing allows for a special form of attention that we call vigilance (Posner and Rothbart 2007). This term refers to the simultaneous consideration of large amounts of diverse information, and therefore to a very broad form of attention, that works from the background of consciousness and draws our attention to everything personally relevant to us (i.e. to opportunities to fulfill needs, to act on intentions, or react to things jeopardizing our personal interests). Thus, vigilance is, in distinction from mindfulness, more selective (“more intelligent”): Vigilance does not consider just anything, it is not “open to anything” passing by my inner eye in the here and now, but selects what is of personal relevance. In everyday-life this monitoring function supports “distancing” (from others) and protecting oneself against “transgressions” (e.g. when somebody intrudes in my affairs). Vigilance is, so to speak, “the self’s border control”. From a computational point of view, to immediately know where somebody is transgressing, I need to have thousands of pieces of information simultaneously ready at the back of my consciousness, describing what suits me and what does not, so that I instantly recognize the transgression (all borderlines must be covered, as I mostly do not know where the next transgression could take place). This task requires parallel processing of virtually innumerable pieces of information. Parallel (i.e. simultaneous and comprehensive) processing also supports future utilization of error feedback. Detecting and correcting an error does not guarantee that one will be vigilant enough in the future to avoid repeating that error in situations in which one’s conscious mind is not aware of the risk of committing the same error again. To the extent that the self operates as a largely unconscious monitoring system, it has the capacity of reminding the actor that he or she is running the risk of repeating an error. However, for this form of feedback utilization, it does not suffice to detect and correct an error. In addition, the error or, more generally speaking, the consequences of one’s own actions have to be fed into the self (see functional feature 5 in Table 10.1). In contrast to merely noticing the consequences of actions of the ego, the input into the self is more than mere knowledge of the feedback: It is the holistic sensing of the consequences of an action and its concomitant circumstances. This often includes the kinesthetic (proprioceptive) feedback coming from the entire body when executing an action. Obsessive-compulsive people seem to have to execute the same, often senseless and not even truly desired actions again and again (e.g. having to go back home

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in order to check whether the stove is turned off), because they do not sense their deeds’ (here: turning off the stove) proprioceptive feedback (Hoffmann 1998). Besides sensing the implementation of an action (more precisely: its proprioceptive feedback), sensing the consequences of one’s own actions is important as it allows the self to decide whether an action is to be repeated without alteration, altered, or terminated (see Brandstätter 2003). If the feedback about consequences of actions does not connect to the self, it can happen that one is not able to leave a project in which one has already invested a lot of work despite it presenting more risk than opportunity; that one continues to make the same mistake (“compulsive repetition”); that one is never content with one’s output and overexerts oneself over time (e.g. workaholism, burnout, or obsessive-compulsive disorders); or that one quickly arrives at his or her wit’s end in case of failure. With self-contact, however, after failure, one comes up with many new possible actions because one’s accumulated life experiences are simultaneously (in parallel) at one’s disposal. Highly talented people sometimes face a similar problem even regarding sensing their successes: If their intelligence is supported one-sidedly by the left hemisphere, they are aware of their successes (i.e. they are accessible to their analytical ego), but they may nevertheless not sense them. In this way they cannot form a realistic self-image, for example, constantly demanding too much or too little of themselves, or suddenly losing their motivation when efforts come to nothing. Finally, the comprehensive “sensing” of the consequences of one’s own actions is also the basis for the ability to take on responsibility. Self-access and healthy self-development are important for moral judgment and responsible conduct: Thanks to its parallel processing ability, its enormous integrative potential, and its interconnection with the autonomic nervous system (the emotions), the self is able to consider the consequences of one’s own actions in such a comprehensive and emotionally understandable way that it can be considered the functional (“computational”) basis for empathy, assumption of responsibility, morality, and justice. The previous summary of the first five functional features of the self enables us today to explain in detail why and for which reasons the self is so important. All the more urgent becomes the question of how to help people to come into their self and to develop it. As we have seen, every functional feature also allows the derivation of practical clues as to how self-access can be improved. This is valid especially for the last two functional features listed in the table that have not been elaborated yet: Self-access is facilitated if conscious control can be reduced and the unconscious intelligence of the self is granted more space: The 6th functional feature of the self listed in Table 10.1 addresses the “letting go” known from many handbooks, i.e. the withdrawal of conscious control in order to grant

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more space to the unconscious intelligence (of the self). Methods for activating the unconscious were developed in the century-old tradition of hypnosis, and have been developed from the pioneer works of US-American psychotherapist Milton Erickson into effective measures used in consulting, training, and therapy (Revenstorf and Zeyer 2007). Finally, self-access is furthermore facilitated, if a quiet and calm mood can be established (see Table 10.1: emotional regulation). This activation of the self (including extension memory) as a function of the down-regulation of negative affect is described by the modulation assumption of PSI-theory (Koole and Kuhl 2018; Kuhl 2000, 2001). Numerous experiments of our Osnabrück laboratory have confirmed the correlation between self-access and the downward regulation of negative affects resulting in a calmer, more relaxed mood: If a participant’s mood is rather negative (e.g. sad or helpless) and their conscious ego is engaged on top (e.g., ruminating on the causes of the negative mood), they are likely to commit the error of mistaking assignments or recommendations of others for self-chosen ones. This “false self-attribution” of external influences on one’s own behavior can be seen as a measure for impaired self-access (that was associated with an under-activation of the right forebrain in one of our studies: Quirin et al. 2018). Blocked self-access could be restored, at least temporarily, in one of our experiments, when we helped participants to reactivate the right hemisphere, e.g., by squeezing a soft ball with their left hand for three minutes (Baumann et al. 2005). When people are able to sustainably cope with stress and negative experiences (i.e. in a self-confrontational and action-oriented way), self-contact remains intact under stress even without additional measures aimed at activating the right hemisphere (Kuhl and Kazén 1994). But how is emotional control learned? Psychologists have known for some time that children learn to regulate their feelings through repeated experiences of having their feeling regulated by their persons of reference (especially parents). Specifically, children have an opportunity to internalize external regulation when parents soothe children in moments of grief and when they encourage them in case of loss of motivation. However, mere external encouragement and comfort do not suffice even when external regulation is successful. For example, during a mass event, a motivational guru might very effectively increase the motivation of participants through the activation of collective energies. Most often, however, the motivational effect evaporates over time. This is because the experienced encouragement (or comfort respectively) is not easily integrated into the self unless the self is activated during a personal interaction with the encouraging (or comforting) person. An experience imparted by another person, such as encouragement

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or calming, can only be integrated into the self (i.e. one is able to later generate it “by oneself”, without external support) when the self is activated. This leads to the crucial question: When is the self activated? In general, mental functions or their respective brain regions are activated when they are needed. The self is needed primarily when one feels personally addressed and understood. This is the case in positive, caring, and personal relationships. Herein lies the scientific explanation for the immense importance of the relationship quality for all learning dependent on self-competencies: When the self is activated (because the person feels perceived and accepted as a whole), all positive experiences like encouragement and self-calming (and unfortunately the negative ones as well, e.g. self-depreciation) can be integrated into the self, so that one can, in case of need, “by oneself” (i.e. without external support) retrieve them (emotional autonomy). Unfortunately, the same is true in the case where a person of reference reacts negatively just when (or intentionally when) the self of the child is being activated (e.g. when it is occupied with itself, bubbling over with joy about an activity): In this case, negative emotions (like fear or pain) are conditioned upon the activation of the self, so that the child may become almost “salvation resistant” as an adult, because the person can become very scared (usually inexplicably to him or her or outsiders) just when he or she is offered an authentic relationship (or merely encouraged to show his or her feelings, or to express his- or herself otherwise).

4 Self-Development and Development of ­SelfCompetences in Upbringing and Education The insight that self-development and therefore all (self-)competences dependent on it are in turn crucially dependent upon the quality of relationships is scientifically verifiable today. This places old, in some realms of life almost forgotten, pedagogical principles back at the center of attention. Numerous studies have proven just how strongly the quality of the relationship between a child and those responsible for its education (parents, child care workers, teachers) impacts the development of many competencies such as coping with stress, emotional regulation, and school achievements (Ahnert 2011). For example, positive effects on the development of aptitudes are held by forms of achievement motivation closely connected to the self, such as intrinsic joy of learning, and “sensed” as opposed to ‘controlled’ achievement motivation (Kuhl et al. 2007). On the other hand, not every form of motivation to achieve has a positive effect on the relationship between aptitude and performance in school: Competition-oriented (“I want to score better than others”), discipline-oriented (“With every success I am

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already thinking of the next goal”), and outcome- rather than learning-oriented achievement motivation might even diminish chances of existent aptitudes to shine through in school achievements (Elliot and McGregor 2001). Each of those problematic forms of achievement motivation is in some way impersonal, which implies that even effective forms of encouragement or stress-reduction cannot easily give rise to self-competences because they cannot be integrated into the self unless it is activated. Since the integration of any experience into the self is dependent on the quality of the relationship (because the person, psycho-functionally: the self, “opens” itself up only if it feels accepted and understood), it is worth it to take the relationship into account more strongly within pedagogical activities, even beyond all humanistic and health-economic considerations. Even friendly eye contact or a personal remark can make a child “thrive” (i.e. activate the self so that positive experiences can become self-competencies within the respective relationship episode). However, this does not mean that the development of self-competences is confined to dyadic personal interactions: Positive experiences in relationships and therewith the self-development of a child can also be imparted within groups. Even as early as with infants in day care, the positive, appreciative, and personally engaging attitude of care workers within a group have been proven to have an improving effect on secure attachment of the individual children (Ahnert et al. 2006). A particular challenge thereby—especially as children and adolescents grow older—lies in the joining up the two attitudes that were mentioned in the beginning and are hard to reconcile: setting boundaries (clear demands) and leaving freedom (caring support). Against the backdrop of the presented functional differences between the holistically feeling self and the analytically thinking ego, it is possible to explain why these two systems are so hard to be integrated and how methods work that enable the integration of demanding and supporting behavior (Martens and Kuhl 2011; Schneewind and Böhmert 2010). The sequential thinking of the ego and the parallel-interconnected, sensed intelligence of the self are very different from each other in their processing characteristics. They are supported through different hemispheres and different emotions: A positive-calm mood facilitates ­self-access, while analytical thinking rather gains from an objective-sober mood, if not from negative moods. PSI-theory describes these correlations between moods and the synergy of different mental systems (see Kuhl 2000, 2001; Kuhl et al. 2018). With this theory, we were able to develop new methods for diagnosing self-competencies and offering respective training programs which holistically support specific individual facilitation of self-competencies (www.impart. de; see also Storch et al. 2018).

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The integration of demanding and supporting in educational and pedagogical relationships is one of many examples for the tremendous integrative strength of a well-developed self that can only evolve on the conditions mentioned (i.e. in personal accompaniment by persons of reference who can reconcile clarity and affection, demanding and supporting, discipline and love): On the highest developmental level, the self is, indeed, able to create a coherent overall picture of the own person and integrate seemingly contradictory styles and attitudes.

5 Who Am I—and If So How Many? We have seen that the coherence brought about by a well-developed self is no mishmash in which all kinds of tendencies, conflict elements, and views meld into an amorphous “everything goes”. The self’s accomplishment of coherence is not based on melting dynamics or any form of premature pursuit of harmony, but on a detailed involvement with specific experiences, inner and external voices, feelings, no matter how contradictory they may seem at first (Kuhl and Keller 2008). Herein seems to lie a core feature of the occidental, Judeo-Christian culture (Kuhl 2015): The development of an autonomous, yet socially interconnected individual is significantly depending on whether parents, educators, therapists, and other interaction partners are consistently striving for the delicate balance between biding and helping, demanding and supporting, structure and emancipation (Kuhl and Keller 2008). PSI-theory explains how this balance enables the self to grow, which constantly integrates new, as well as difficult and painful experiences into a permanently growing, autonomous, yet socially interconnected self. However, this conceptualization of self-development does not fit into the prevailing dichotomy between independent and interdependent cultures (Markus 2017; Markus and Kitayama 1991). This dichotomy conceptualizes a socially disconnected, independent self as the opposite pole contrasting western cultures from Asian and African “interdependent” cultures. The integrative self described in the context of PSI-theory combines independence with social integration. ­Non-integrated independence does not reflect the original form of the western ideal of personal development as some cross-cultural comparison approaches in psychology suggest. Rather, it is a lapse of the proper, originally suggested ideal of development, a lapse that occurs when the balance mentioned is tilted in one direction or the other (i.e. either too much demand up to the frustration of existential needs, or too much support in the sense of an emancipation without borders). The embracing of personal experiences, which can be very tedious or even painful in the case of experiences that are highly alien (to oneself), is the

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p­recondition required for individual elements of experience to not lose their sovereignty after integration into the big network of experiences of the self, i.e. such that they do not conflate into an amalgam, striving to avoid conflicts and gloss over discord, but rather can be separated again from the whole at any time. According to PSI-theory, only a parallel processing self system located on the highest integrative level of the overall system, which is extensively interconnected with feelings and bodily perceptions, can attain this coherence, which enables, on the one hand, cohesion and a stable identity of the self and, on the other hand, the plurality and consistent transformation respectively of both the integrated and what is yet to be integrated. The sentence cited at the beginning: “Who am I—and if so how many?” can thus be left as is, but it gains another meaning that is diametrically opposed to its postmodern interpretation: Plurality, on the level of a coherence-making, perceptive self, is not an unconnected juxtaposition of more or less contradictory voices but a cooperation of many voices and moods. It provides autonomous decisions with conflict resolution potential as well as the reliability and flexibility which preserves sovereignty for all voices (“unmeshed”) and, at the same time, incorporates them into joint, coherent decisions and actions (“undivided”).1 Schulz von Thun and his colleagues (2002) have developed methods for consulting that can help to take the inner voices seriously and integrate them step by step in a way such that they can all contribute to joint problem-solving and decision-making. The fact that this paradoxical accomplishment of integration is indeed possible and useful is shown in the successes of such consulting methods. I have discussed PSI-theory as an attempt toward clarifying how it is possible that different, partially contradictory experiences, opinions, even people (e.g. in partner relationships) can form a unified whole without losing their sovereignty and identifiability, i.e. without the occurrence of some “harmony”-oriented amalgamation of such different elements or persons respectively. PSI-theory explains the

1This

paradoxical integration of two seemingly contradictory features of self-integration (i.e., unmeshed and undivided) implies a view of human nature that is reminiscent of the solution provided by the Council of Chalcedon (anno 451) struggling with the question how Jesus could simultaneously be god and human: The two attributes should be understood as being “inconfused” and still “inseparable” (which amounts to an integration of parts in a way that their separable status remains preserved, just as the two persons forming a loving couple can form an inseparable unity without each individual person losing his or her autonomy).

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process dynamics of this “plurality-preserving entity formation” with a particular dialectic of system interactions: Every individual experience is processed in ­isolation from the rest of experiences first and is thus given its own mental existence, in order to later, on a higher level, be integrated into the extensive networks of experience of a consistently growing self without losing its sovereignty, i.e. without the need for ignoring differences between people (i.e. in opinions, needs, values etc.) or for denial or embellishment of painful experiences.

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Prof. Dr. Julius Kuhl  Professor of Psychology at the University of Osnabrück (retired). Graduate and postgraduate studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, University of Michigan and Stanford (CASBS). Research interests: personality research, dynamic theories of personality, self-regulation, motivation, talent and giftedness research, development-oriented personality assessment.

Authenticity—Psychiatric Perspectives Felix Tretter

1 The Concept of “Authenticity”—Metatheoretical Issues The meaning of the term “authenticity” basically can be described as the “reliable, accurate representation” (Varga and Guignon 2017). In philosophy and social sciences, authenticity is seen as a cultural orientation of self-expression, ­self-fulfillment, etc. (Taylor 1989). In context of humanistic psychology and psychotherapy, the salutogenetic role of high authenticity for the therapy of mental disorders is assumed. In context of person-centered approaches, authenticity essentially means more or less explicitly the relation between experience and/ or behavior and the “real self”. Concerning psychiatry, a key question often is raised, namely if persons with mental disorders can act authentically, or whether a mental disorder comprises more authenticity than the healthy state as one cannot lie so easily or as the “internal” conflicts come apparent in an unsuppressed form etc. In this paper, some general and basic conceptual, methodological, and theoretical difficulties for applications in psychiatry are discussed. Then, possible applications are mentioned, but finally no “solutions” can be offered as integrated interdisciplinary discussion still is lacking.

F. Tretter (*)  Bertalanffy Center Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 G. Brüntrup et al. (eds.), Authenticity, Studien zur Interdisziplinären Anthropologie, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29661-2_11

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1.1 Authenticity ― a Relational Concept In context of human sciences, the term “authenticity” essentially indicates a relation between observations of the experiences and/or the behavior of a person made by an external or internal observer: It indicates an equivalence, similarity, consistency, congruence, concordance, coherence—or simply: an identity—between these observations. These latter relational terms are understood here in the sense of one of the most influential clinical psychologists, Klaus Grawe (2004): In order to classify the state of order of the global mental state he uses the general concept “consistence”. The term “congruence” refers to the ­person-environment relation, whereas “concordance” indicates the internal consistency of desires, emotions, and cognitions. In a dynamized view, the term “coherence” can be used. In case of persistent inconsistencies, so his general theory, a mental disorder can develop. Going back to the observational level, the observations of the consistency of the behavior, as mentioned above, can be classified in a horizontal and a vertical dimension: a) diachronous (i.e. intertemporal) identity: (Nearly) regardless of whether situation S occurs, the person P exhibits behavior B. In this case, we often say in everyday context: “This behavior is typical for this person, she acts always in this way”. This could be classified as a concept of a horizontal intra-level consistency (or: indifference, identity) that, for instance, can be identified in empirical research in time series data as it will be discussed later. b) synchronous identity: A relation between manifest behavior and latent behavior is identified. This can be seen as a (vertical) inter-level identity (concordance, coherence). The behavior is related to a hypothetical mental nucleus of the person, the “self”. The notion of a self, in psychological context, is supposed to consist of values, emotions, desires, volitions, and other mental factors that finally act as “drivers” and “brakes” of behavior. The self is not a substance or an area in the brain, but it can be conceptualized functionally by the notion of trans-situational invariances of behavior and/or as the basis of experienced identity. However, the self also changes over years. In this context, it should be borne in mind that the construct “self” is a concept still under discussion in psychology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry. Interestingly, it is also only poorly distinguished from the “I” (or ego). Methodologically, it must be also mentioned that, in psychology, these basic conceptual issues of “authenticity” are discussed mainly from a third-person

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p­ erspective (horizontal authenticity). However, also from introspection (first-person perspective), authenticity is a category that captures the experience to be oneself or not—any decision (or behavior) appears to be strange, not fully intended by the respective subject, but probably elicited and/or controlled by external factors (vertical authenticity). This understanding of the term authenticity indicates that a person behaves more consistently with the internal mental conditions than with external environmental demands—she behaves as (relatively) autonomous agent. In addition, authenticity usually is judged as a positive trait of a person as she does not modify her personal dispositions by pressure of demands of the social environment. In this context and in practical consequence regarding psychotherapy, “authenticity” as a very high level of internal consistency (i.e. concordance) very often is a developmental goal for the client. But how can we quantify the degree of authenticity for precise diagnosis and therapy evaluation?

1.2 Implicit Quantification—Problems of ­­Pattern/ Noise-Identification The quantification of authenticity could be discussed here based on the distinction of horizontal and vertical authenticity: a) As a dialectic contrast to identity, which is a significant property of authenticity, “changes” and “alterations” of behavior and/or consciousness over time can be conceived—within certain limits—as “deviations of order”. These deviations also can exceed these limits to the realm of a “disorder”. In this context it is useful to keep in mind that terms like “order” and “disorder” are constitutive terms for classification of any observed pattern, not only human behavior: Regularity, symmetry, smoothness, randomness (noise), and other structural properties of the respective pattern, for instance of a data series, are used for this judgment. They are key aspects to classify an observed behavior within any diagnostic reference system to be in order or to be out of order. Of course, there are fine graduations between these polar states. For instance, very often a time series of observations (e.g. rating scale values) is the basis to classify the degree of order of a pattern. In that data-analytical context, chaos theory has shown that obvious irregularities, similar to random patterns, can be conceived as orderly but in a nonlinear sense—there is a latent order of behavior that only comes out if the time series data are transformed by mathematical mapping into a “time-free” parameter space of

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a set of c­oupled nonlinear differential equations where “attractors” appear. This approach is well known by the so-called “butterfly attractor” by Eduard Lorenz (Lorenz 1994). In consequence, modern natural science offers a quite subtle concept of order of patterns in the world (Peitgen and Saupe 1998; Wolfram 2002). It only can be mentioned here that these issues of order in the temporal domain (i.e. structure of dynamics) should be considered much more in the discourse of psychiatry, psychopathology, and psychotherapy and not only in context of “authenticity” (Tretter 2018). b) Referring to the notion of degree of inter-level concordance, authenticity can be understood as a term for the intensity (and quality) of the relation of the latent core pattern to the manifest pattern. It is a category to indicate that a behavior is very concordant to personalized behavioral dispositions that are closely related to the category “personality”. In other words, the behavior is strongly related to known internal personal properties or the diachronic personal self. Interestingly, the hypothetical relation (e.g. contingency, coincidence or correlation) between the level of manifest observable data and latent pattern generators is an issue of long controversies in context of measurement theory and of epistemological discussions in behavioral sciences (Skinner 1945; Palmer 2003; Lazarsfeld and Henry 1968; Collins and Lanza 2010). Concluding this first section on basic issues of the semantic structure of the concept of authenticity and its measurement, it seems to be beneficial for interdisciplinary discussions to explicate the semantic and methodological issues of this concept as precise as possible. Additionally, the theoretical context of this term regarding the implicit model of the “mental apparatus” should be considered briefly.

2 The Need for a Psychological Reference Model Any description of the psychological features of authenticity has implicit relations to an implicit multi-level model of the mental system. For instance, as mentioned before, there must be a hidden mental core of the person (e.g. the self or implicit basic affective-cognitive assumptions about one’s self) in relation to which the observed behavior is authentic or not. In this view, at least two relative autonomous levels or subsets of mental processes—the behavior and the self (or self-model)—have to be assumed. But if it is supposed that the relation between the self and the behavior can be modulated, the concept of a “regulator” (e.g. the ego in context of psychoanalytic the-

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ory) as a third entity appears to be reasonable. Referring to theoretical models, namely psychoanalysis, the self-psychology (Kohut 1971) has to be combined with e­go-psychology (Hartmann 1976), conceiving the ego to be the operating conscious part of the self (Jung 1960). Additionally, the issue of (normative) “expectations of expectations” as an individual behavioral guideline implicates a fourth instance of the mind besides behavior, self, and ego. This entity, according to psychoanalysis, could be classified as the (normative) superego that by large is conceived as the mental representation of socio-cultural rules. In consequence of these constructs and in line with this extended structural model of psychoanalysis, the actor has the implicit experience that she wants something but she also experiences that she should not follow this desire and therefore she experiences more or less explicitly a conflict and her behavioral performance is a compromise and not authentic. In accordance with ego-psychology the acting ego, that is rooted in the self, obviously has to find a balance between the id and the superego. As an example, in reference to this extended structural model, the well known effect of alcohol can be described (Tretter 2017): If we consume about 20-40 g of alcohol (one or two large glasses of beer), we experience a slight mental alteration, our social inhibitions can be reduced, and we don’t worry about the impression we exert on others. This might also be observed by an external observer. There is a reduction of tension and we feel as if we were highly concordant with ourselves, we experience ourselves as “authentic”. Some psychoanalysts say that the superego is dissolved by alcohol. We also can experience the feeling to be better, or to be even the greatest individual, and subjectively the “real” person free from limitations seems to come up. From first-person perspective one can say that the behavior is in concordance with the experienced self. This raises the question: Is this experience under alcohol (or other drugs) to be authentic the manifestation (or image) of the real self, or is it the effect of the ideal self as a potential to be, or is the idealized real self experienced? Or what else? And how do we distinguish these “selves”? But then the basic question is: Which of these mental units is the reference unit (or generator) of this identity experience? And additionally: We have to declare how the self can be observed from the third-person perspective.

2.1 Self and/or Personality as Reference Units If authenticity indicates the relation between overt behavior and the covert affective-motivational level of the mind (e.g. the id), the question arises if this

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“deeper” level of the mind is the basis of the trans-situational identity. This level is conceptually similar to the experienced self or—in some regards—the personality. The self and the personality are two concepts that are not totally equivalent but here they can be seen as two sides of a core reference unit of mental processing, somehow in the sense of Carl G. Jung. In line with this, it is suggested that there is a high semantic overlap between these categories, depending strongly on the epistemological perspective: The first-person perspective suggests a self (e.g. personal self), whereas the third-person perspective suggests the essentialistic concept of a “personality”. Unfortunately, there is no consensus between experts on whether and how these constructs are conceptually related to each other. For example, regarding the first-person perspective, we know from everyday experience that we act not always according to our intentions, mainly depending on our perception of the respective social situation (at home, in public, at work, etc.). In line with this ecopsychological view that integrates external and internal structures (Tretter 2008), the main question in introspection is: Who am I and if so, how many (Precht 2015)? The answer to this question might be that I have a multiple, fragmented self (or personality) that acts very different in different or even similar situations. But on the other hand, it might also be that there is an invariant entity of subjectivity that can be named “personal self” or “personality”. Indeed, authenticity seems to indicate a trans-situational invariance of behavior. In this context, it has to be mentioned that there is no consensus about the notion of a self. Regarding this, the most interesting definition of the self was constructed by the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who wisely defined the self as “a relation that relates itself to its own self” (Kierkegaard 1849/1980, 13). He had not only a structural view but also a dynamic one: He suggested that each of us is to “become what one is” (Kierkegaard 1846/1992, 130). This conception is partially the basis of current philosophical discussion on self and authenticity. Looking to academic psychology, a pragmatic definition of the self means the total of individual and characteristic cognitive, emotional, and motivational dispositions. In this view, the self can be easily related to the concept of personality. Another component must be considered further: the self-image (or: ­self-model) representing the experienced “real” self and also the ideal self, a composition that often results in an unrealistic idealized self if conflicts have to be suppressed. For instance, the notion of self-fulfillment, that Charles Taylor describes as a developmental goal, requires a sense of a self that is constituted by explicit and implicit desires and behavioral plans regarding the image of an intended environmental situation and/or the state of the person.

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2.2 Towards a Systemic Framework of the Mind Looking back here, this discourse results in an implicit model of the mind consisting of at least five functional components: ego, self, personality and real/ideal self-image. Now the problem becomes evident that we lack an integral psychology that covers these arguments within an integrative conceptual framework that models the functional structure of the mind in fields like psychology, psychopathology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. In these fields crucial concepts should be integrated into a comprehensive model of the mind that explicates an affective and cognitive structure of functions of goal-directed action, and that also considers differentially the function of ego and self (Tretter and Löffler-Stastka 2018). This theory deficit becomes evident in discussions of “decisions” as one of the most specific domains of human information processing. Regarding authentic decisions, four relevant properties can be identified (Brunskill 2015): (I) to be aware of good and bad sides (II) being able to decide considering these sides (III) behavior should be congruent with the true self; (IV) transparency towards others. It can be seen that affective and cognitive processes are to be combined with constructs like the “true self”. Concluding this theoretical section, with the aim of framing the concept of authenticity, not only a psychological model of the mind as a system but also the model of the “situated subject” (Ismael 2007) or the “ecology of the person” (Tretter 2008) should be considered in this context. In other words, to make it simple again: In regard to authenticity, the relation between the person and her environment and the respective control of the behavior should mainly be determined by the internal forces (autonomy) and not by external forces (heteronomy). Now, the relevance of these issues for psychiatry has to be discussed.

3 Psychiatry—Basic Issues Psychiatry is a science whose epistemic object is focused on mental illness (and disorder). Essentially this discipline can be seen as being composed of two basic subsections like psychopathology for diagnosis and with a large list of syndromes, and psychopharmacology with a list of pharmaceuticals for treatment

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(Sadock and Sadock 2005). In psychopathology, operationalized criteria are supposed to help to distinguish normal and pathological mental states (Scharfetter 1980; Broome et al. 2018).

3.1 The Concept of “Mental Disorder” In regard to the metatheoretical and theoretical issues mentioned above, the question of disorder and order is very essential for psychiatry and has a long tradition of discussions. Only rarely is it discussed in a field like “philosophy of psychiatry” (Kendler and Parnas 2015). To say it briefly: Psychiatry is interested in changes of mental functions towards dysfunctional states, namely regarding a “too much” or “too less” of perceiving, expecting, thinking, memorizing, planning, deciding, emotional processing, behavioral activity, motivational activity, etc. relative to the individual standards and/or to our culture-specific collective standards. As mentioned above, there is no systemic conception of psychopathology elaborated in psychiatry yet. One of the basic problems with academic psychiatry is that there is no consensus about the borders between ordered and disordered mental states, because they are mainly described from a first-person perspective. This is problematic because many mentally ill people do not experience themselves as mentally ill, and therefore the third-person perspective is important, too. In order to reduce this vagueness in diagnosis, quantifying rating scales were developed and the search for bio-indicators was stimulated up to now. For this reason, the question if a mentally ill person—e.g. a person with anorexia nervosa—has the experience to live against her personal true self is not very easy to be answered. For instance, depression as a diagnosis is not only reactive sadness, but also having selective negative perceptions and expectations, negative thoughts and memories, no plans, no drive, and mainly negative emotions (anxiety, dysphoria) regarding the environment, oneself and the environmental relations of the self. The mind of a depressive person is occupied by the feeling to have no feelings, being a worthless being, having no future, etc. After successful treatment the blackness of all issues—self, future, environment—are gone. Now the question arises if “normality” is the necessary condition of authenticity. One can discuss extensively if these states are distinct and different to singular non-pathological states that can occur in everyday life, or if they occur only in case of a mental illness. Here we assume that the intensity and combinations of these symptoms determine the clinical relevance of the respective mental states.

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Now, the main question is this: Is the experience during the depressive episode “authentic” as a “deeper level” of the mind determines experience and behavior? Or is authenticity only possible in the healthy state? This question is practically relevant for treatment contracts that demand basic and proper intellectual and emotional functionality in order to provide a functional and reliable decision for acceptance of therapy. What could be the proper reference? Maybe the personality traits of their premorbid episodes could serve as a reference, but usually therapists do not know these at first episodes of mental disorders. These issues are problematic, as also explanatory concepts in psychopathology are still not developed sufficiently. Regarding these explanatory deficiencies psychoanalytic models and theories again can be used as it was discussed briefly before: They assume that hidden former motivational conflicts (aggression and anxiety) change normal human information processing to a pathological mode (general anxiety disorder).

3.2 Psychiatric Theory—Causation of Mental Behavior Psychiatry today sees mental disorders as the integrated result of biological factors (genes, transmitters, brain circuitry, etc.), psychological factors (traumatic experiences, personality, stress coping competence), and social factors (economic status, educational states, family structure, religious affiliation, cultural orientation, language literacy), that act as risk factors and protective factors. Of course, the factors overlap, but this three-dimensional framework allows to subsume a lot of different and individual developments of mental disorders. In contrast, psychodynamic descriptions and explanations of clinical syndromes are rejected by current psychiatry, which is focusing on biological approaches in its research domains. As it was discussed at the beginning, authenticity is closely related to identity that is strongly related to biological factors—if a brain tumor changes the hormonal situation of the person, the behavior and, in consequence, the authenticity regarding the premorbid person will change as well. Neurobiology suggests that changes in brain properties (neurotransmitter metabolism, circuitry, synaptic efficiency) determine the altered mental states. But also extreme psychosocial stressors like traumatic experiences will change behavior persistently. It has to be mentioned here that during the last years most of research resources for psychiatry where used for biological studies. In spite of these investments, the explanatory potential of biological psychiatry faces some categorical gaps between psychologically determined states and neurobiologically

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measured states, a problem very similar to that of the famous paper of Thomas Nagel “What is it like to be a bat?” (1974). Here we would like to say analogously: “What is it like to be a spike?” In line with this epistemological and methodological gap, I suggest that it is necessary to remain on the psychological level for discussion of “authenticity” as it is very unclear what the neurobiological correlate might be.

4 “Authenticity”—Feature in Psychiatric Psychopathology? In context of psychiatry, authenticity reveals several periods of discussion, until lately in the 2010s: Many authors think that this issue is underestimated in psychiatry, as it might be relevant for understanding bipolar disorder and anorexia nervosa, and even the validity of decision making in psychiatric treatment context (Erler and Hope 2014; Sjöstrand and Juth 2014). The observational level of authenticity that is relevant in the field of practical psychiatry is related to the question if a person is able to make “autonomous” decisions, an issue that is relevant for any social contract of the respective person (Johanson et al. 2011; Södland 2014). Authenticity and mental disorders are slightly contradictory: Is the person authentic without the disorder or during the illness or in both cases? This appears rather controversial as most psychiatrists don’t use the category “authenticity” in the repertoire of descriptive terms in context of psychopathology (or “psycho-orthology”, Scharfetter 1987). However, some psychiatric disorders ­ should be discussed more intensively: a) Bipolar disorder, that exhibits an endogenous rhythmicity: This disorder entails manic states, where everything seems to be good, and successive depressive states, where everything seems to be bad. Because of this variation of behavior and experience the question arises if authenticity is related to the “normal” self in the healthy periods. On the other hand: Is the manic state more authentic than the depressive state? b) Anorexia nervosa is an obsessive disorder regarding the body shape and body image. Is authenticity, the feeling of congruence, in this disorder only possible in case of severe underweight? c) ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders) and treatment effects (Singh 2014): Is the change of mental functions and behavior by drugs and

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medications a gain of authenticity? I guess not, as the core of the experienced self is the reference object and there is an experience of restlessness since early childhood. Is the feeling to be altered by successful medication a change of personality and therefore a new root of authenticity? d) Psychotropic drugs change experience and behavior: The experience to have no anxiety due to benzodiazepines or to be a “good thinker” under influence of amphetamines or to be creative by cocaine poses the question if these “new” features of the personality are only a latent feature that can be activated or if these features are persistently suppressed by the sociocultural setting that disabled an authentic mental life. These are some examples to test the utility of the notion of authenticity in psychiatry. Unfortunately, several basic metatheoretic problems of the concept of authenticity and basic problems of psychiatry are not considered sufficiently in these discussions: As already mentioned, the very basic construct of a “true self” is not central in psychiatric theories anymore. Also, as discussed in the first section, in context of present theoretical clinical psychology, the degree of disorderedness in case of clinical syndromes is denoted with the general terms “inconsistency”, “incongruence” and “discordance”, that correspond highly but not fully to authenticity (Grawe 2004). According to these categories, a clinical syndrome like depression, anxiety, or obsession can occur if these inconsistencies or a lack of authenticity persists. These are questions that should be elaborated in a framework of an explanatory psychopathology, but we might start with reference to psychoanalytic psychiatry as it was outlined in the second section of this paper (Lacan 2008; Mentzos 2015).

5 “Authenticity”—Supporting Patients and Therapists Authenticity is an intervention goal in preclinical psychotherapy that aims at mental wellness but not at facilitation of recovery from severe psychiatry illness: “Become yourself”, “be you”, etc. are slogans that indicate the suggested direction of personal development for a more conflict-free and happier life. Although these goals are not helpful in acute mental diseases, they are supposed to be useful for the patient as well as for the therapist who is in danger to develop a burnout syndrome if he lives against his authentic desires.

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5.1 Authenticity for Psychiatric Patients—a Stress Reducer? In clinical psychotherapy, when severe mental disorders such as addictions are treated, authenticity is an important issue. For instance, for drug addicts and alcoholics it is important to refuse drug offers at various opportunities. Therefore, in treatment of those patients a module is integrated where patients are trained to present their disorder in public life with maximal authenticity: For instance, patients with alcohol addiction have to explore their experiences with various coping strategies if they are invited to drink at social events—it is important for them to find authentic arguments for alcohol rejection. One true argument could be that they have a physical disease and that this is the reason why the doctor has forbidden them to drink alcohol, because of a high blood pressure, for example (that is a secondary disorder of alcohol addiction). In other cases it can be argued that one wants to drive with the car after the social event. The best argument could be that one is an alcohol addict who does not want to drink, although this statement might yield severe social disadvantages. In therapy, these different arguments are tested by role-playing under video-control and after this ­role-playing, the patient, the therapist, and the other patients try to find out individually the most authentic pattern of alcohol refusal. This training is very important as alcohol (and/or drug) addicts are people who suffer easily from stress that in turn disposes to consumption of drugs: If inconsistent and inauthentic arguments are brought up in social life, conflicts arise and the disposition for a relapse increases. Similar challenges to communicate their mental disease exist for persons with schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, etc.

5.2 Authenticity of Therapists—Increasing Consistency Psychoanalysis as the most traditional concept, program, and setting of psychotherapy forces the therapist to be as neutral as possible. For this reason, in the classical setting the patient should lie on the sofa so he can be seen by the therapist without seeing the therapist in return. This setting is supposed to help control the many kinds of interference and counter-interference that were identified by psychoanalysis and that influence the therapeutic process. However, some patients cannot stand this special setting and therefore the therapist must use a

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situation of a face-to-face interaction. In line with this, it became clear quite soon that for treatment of drug addicts and alcoholics this setting is not very productive: The patients want to experience the other directly, because their self-image is too labile for them to stand the ambivalence that occurs in a psychoanalytic setting. Therefore, in treatment of addicted persons, the goal of “selective authenticity” was employed for treatment (Heigl-Evers and Heigl 1983). In line with this evidence, authenticity was a keyword in psychotherapy already in the 1970s: As the pragmatic behavioral therapist Arnold Lazarus said later, the therapist should be an “authentic Chameleon” who has to adapt to the single patient but should keep his identity (Lazarus 1993). As empathy is an important competence in clinical practice, the paradoxical situation comes up, that for introverted therapists high authenticity might be contra-productive and they have to be trained to be empathic. In consequence, some medical universities educate their students to be empathic. By training, they are supposed to be able to express facial, voice, and verbal patterns of empathy. Interestingly enough, this is also a goal for the development of medical robots—they should exhibit expression profiles of empathy. Here the final question rises, if “authentic empathy” can be realized by medical robots. Concluding this section on psychiatry, it should be considered that empathy is an important clinical aspect of authenticity.

6 Conclusion and Perspectives In context of psychiatry, authenticity could be an interesting additional dimension for the description of psychopathological states. The notion of authenticity could also improve the understanding of the causal dynamics of symptoms in some disorders. In line with this, it is important to explore the utility of this concept for theoretical psychopathology. Currently dominating biological psychiatry probably will only be able to integrate the concept of authenticity into its research domain by reference to the clinical field of Neuropsychoanalysis. In line with this, for all future practical psychiatry it seems to be necessary to develop the field of theoretical psychopathology with descriptive and exploratory theoretical models in order to realize a proper functional understanding of the mind. Within this framework, authenticity can be characterized as a type of human information processing. As it was discussed here, psychoanalysis might probably serve as a basic pool of fruitful concepts.

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Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Felix Tretter  Vicepresident of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna. Studied Psychology, Philosophy, Medicine, Sociology, Economics and Statistics. Research interests: systems research in medicine, human ecology, ­digitalization.