In Our Time - Authenticity

Episode Date: March 14, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what it means to be oneself, a question explored by philosophers from Aristotle to the present day, including St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre. In Hamlet, Polonius said 'To thine own self be true', but what is the self, and what does it mean to be true to it, and why should you be true? To Polonius, if you are true to yourself, ‘thou canst not be false to any man’ - but with the rise of the individual, authenticity became a goal in itself, regardless of how that affected others. Is authenticity about creating yourself throughout your life, or fulfilling the potential with which you were born, connecting with your inner child, or something else entirely? What are the risks to society if people value authenticity more than morality - that is, if the two are incompatible? The image above is of Sartre, aged 8 months, perhaps still connected to his inner child.With Sarah Richmond Associate Professor in Philosophy at University College LondonDenis McManus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southamptonand Irene McMullin Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of EssexProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, to thine own self-be-true is advice so apparently simple and compelling that when Polonia says it in Hamlet, he needs no further examination. To philosophers, though, from Aristotle to Sarge to today, it's been far from simple.

Is your authentic self something you are born with and you need to fulfill, or it's something you create for yourself throughout your life? Does your obligation to be yourself override your obligation to others? And if you really can be true to yourself, where does authenticity end and narcissism start? With me to discuss ideas about authenticity in philosophy are Dennis McManus, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton, Sir Richmond, Associate Professor in Philosophy at University College London, and Irene McMullen, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex.

Dennis McManus, I mentioned Aristotle, or why was he so concerned with the question of authenticity? Well, although the idea of authenticity is often thought of as a specifically modern ideal, you can actually see that there are, in a sense, an older conception of authenticity, which can be traced back to, for instance, to Aristotle or to Plato, which takes the form of the, it starts from the thought that each and every one of us is capable of judging their situation, forming their view about what should be done and then acting on it or failing to do so. So for instance, one of the ways in which you might fail to do so is you don't act on your own assessment of what should be done. You do what you think is going to please others, for instance. So you begin to get these, some of these kinds of themes can be traced back, perhaps because they're perennial in human existence, can be traced back as far as.

For instance, Aristotle. So what you see there is a question, a concern not just with whether someone does the right thing, but if you like, why they do it, what lies behind it? What's their relationship to that right thing? So for instance, Aristotle will say that the virtuous person is somebody who does virtuous things for their own sake. So, as it were, then they're not doing it for some ulterior motive,

for instance, because they think it'll please the crowd, but because they themselves think that these acts need to be done, that these acts should be carried out. So you can see already, even when we go back to the Greeks, you can see what are recognizably concerns with how you yourself relate to the actions that you perform. Are you really yourself the author of your actions, if you like? Are you the origin of your actions, as Arasotl says?

Or are you, for instance, you know, you're living because you want honour, so you want to be praised by others? Perhaps that's really what's driving your actions. It's the opinion of others rather than your own. Well, let's move on to Augustine now. What did he have to say? Well, so one of the things that you seem to get with the emergence of Christianity is an increasing sense of, if you like, human inwardness,

a sense of human beings as having inner depths, and sometimes inner depths that they don't themselves really understand very well. Why do you think that is? Why did it? You mean, why should Christianity have that kind of impact? Yeah. It's a tricky question. And also you'd get a question about causation as well.

You know, is it the Christianity brings it about? Or is it that other forces were in play which allowed the Christian understanding to be taken up? Okay. I know it was a digression. So how did you know Augustine take it on, as it were, as it might have been from Aristotle? Sure.

Well, so one of the things that you'll see, I mentioned already that one of the key images when people talk about authenticity is, if you're like, are you acting on your own behalf, are you acting just in the eyes of others? You're acting through, are you judging your actions through the eyes of others? That's a very prominent topic for St. Augustine. But I think in a way, one of the most interesting others that he asks us to think about it in this connection is God.

So as well as asking, are you just acting, are you doing what's, what to deem to be right because other people think it's right, they'll praise you for doing it. He also asks, are you doing what? are you doing what's right because you think it's right or because you think God will punish you if you don't? And he has this very interesting distinction between what he calls servile fear and pure fear. It's terrific. Now can you tell the listeners precisely what that distinction is? So basically the thought is that when you do, as well, the right action, are you doing it because you yourself think that that action is right and therefore has to be done?

or are you doing it because you really don't want to be punished? You don't want to be punished by God. And what Augustine says is that if like the true Christian experiences pure fear, chaste fear is another translation of it. And they're the true Christian because it's like they love what God loves. They actually love what God loves. So they're not just doing it because they're scared of God. And it's not just because they're scared of punishment.

So he has this nice line about if you're only doing what God's love, what's right because you're scared of punishment, then you're not scared of sinning, you're scared of burning. There's quite a lot of fast forward in this programme, Sarah. We've gone from Aristotle to Augusta and over several centuries, and now we're going whoop to the 18th century. What changed then?

What do you think changed then and made a difference to this argument? Well, probably the key figure from the 18th century, who has got some influence on the idea of authenticity, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was tremendously important philosopher, a sort of proto-romanticist and who produced an amazing body of writings in many, many different fields. He's most well known for his political philosophy. But across many of his writings, we get this same idea, which is a strand that gets followed through by other thinkers,

the idea that social existence, to some extent, corrupts human beings. So for Russo, we have, as well as a natural drive to look after ourselves and to preserve ourselves, we also have a natural capacity for compassion, which he calls piteer. And his view is that in society, we get corrupted in various ways so that our natural tendency towards compassion is stifled and overlaid. by other worse preoccupations, such as a preoccupation with what others think of us, which for Russo he calls Amoura Pop. Another strand in Russo's thinking, which I think is central to some conceptions of authenticity, is a slight distrust of reason and rationality.

So he felt that we were at our most authentic when we were in touch with, the more passionate side of our nature and that reason was very often used in a self-deceptive way or in a rationalising way a way that would divert us from what is good in our originally good nature.

I see it soon enough that we have Keikagard who was the champion of the single individual. So can you use Kierkegaard to show how the idea of authenticity has been changed altered by the idea of the individual. Yes. So Kierkega was, I think, the most important fact about Kierkega is that he was a very, very devout Protestant Christian, 19th century Danish philosopher. And he also took the view that social existence was by and large a negative thing and that, as it were, it encouraged conformity.

and it was for the individual to stand out against the crowd and in particular the relationship that Kierkega really cared about was the individual's relationship with God. And as a Protestant, of course, he thought that that was an unmediated relationship. It was a relationship such that ultimately the individual might find himself or herself damned or on the contrary might win South.

through their mode of existence. So another very central idea, which becomes important in existentialist thinking, and Kierkega is often thought of as the father of existentialism, is the idea of anguish, or anxiety, actually, as it's usually translated. Angst. So Kierkega has a distinction which Heidegger copies between anxiety and fear. Fear is an emotion that we may feel in relation to some particular worry or concern or danger, whereas angst or anxiety is existential.

It's about existence. Thank you. I'd like to pull it back as far as we can to the idea of authenticity. And we've talked about, sorry, but you can tell us about can't. He brings, he brings a lot of ideas, of course. But his idea of autonomy, how does that contrast with support, negate authenticity? What are we talking about there? Yes. So Kant talks about autonomy.

Autonomy basically comes from the autonomous, meaning giving oneself the law. So the idea is that if you're autonomous, you are in a condition of self-governance. You are in charge of yourself. You're in control of yourself. And that, he thinks, is absolutely essential to understanding what genuine free freedom. is. So genuine freedom isn't just acting on whatever whim happens to grip you in the moment. So there's a kind of skepticism that whatever kind of inclinations or desires that are gripping you at the moment are genuinely what you want to act on. Instead, what you want to be acting on is

reasons, right? So you should be essentially deliberating about what you do, who you want to be. And autonomy is a condition where whatever incentives present themselves to you are basically assessed and then decided if you decided if they're endorseable. Is this something that I want to actually do? Is it consistent with my vision of who I am? Or is it something that I want to reject and cast aside? And that's for Kant, it is going to be basically the same in all people because he thought that we all. all share a kind of universal rationality. And if we're assessing our incentives in the same way, you know, submitting to this kind of, submitting them to this kind of formal assessment procedure, then essentially we will all be bound by the same constraints. And that differs from authenticity insofar as authenticity, especially as the existentialists understand it, is all about the individual and the uniqueness of the individual.

And so they're sort of pushing back on the idea that there is a kind of universal formal condition that will mean that we're all autonomous in the same way. It occurs to me, and it occurred to me while reading about this. Is this subject, is this idea something which is pertinent and very, very important for a very small group of people? Or did it permeate society? Was individualism discovered in the 18th century by a great number of people? Did it see the earthlings, as it were, or was it simply in the ivory towers? No, well, I mean, it depends on the culture, of course.

But so, for example, in Germany, it really took everyone by storm, especially with Goethe on the trials of Young Verde. It was all about this sort of the individual wrestling with his own inner passions and attempting to be himself. and there were young men who sort of dressed up like Vother. So it did permeate beyond the philosophers, so to speak. What did Nietzsche bring to the table? So Nietzsche was very interested in the idea of the individual.

So he sort of rails against the conformism and this emphasis on the idea that the rules governing how we ought to be will be the same for everyone. Instead, he says, you know, each one of us has to sort of get in touch with our own inner genius and engage in the process of self-becoming, which he views as a process. It's a task. It's an ongoing labor of self-creation, which he compares to basically the making of art. So the ideal is that you sort of get in touch with your most basic loves and passions, but they're, you're, the ideal is that you sort of get in touch with your most basic loves and passions. then you submit those to a kind of discipline aimed at becoming an ideal version of yourself. So there's this emphasis on allowing the inner sort of bud to blossom. And so there you can really see the kind of romantic influence on Nietzsche. But he resisted the idea that, you know, we were fully formed in utero, so to speak, and we just needed to stand back and watch the unfolding occur. Dennis McManus, we're coming to Heidegger, but before we do, can you tell us, can you give the listener some idea of why the idea of authenticity, if it was, was something that they expected people to be very interested in?

Well, I think in Heidegger's case, so you often get this question of why should I be authentic? Why is it matter that I'd be myself in the way described? I think sometimes people feel, well, we can't really give you a reason if it doesn't appeal from the very off. Certainly I think with Heidegger himself, I think in some respects, he takes us back to that older conception of authenticity where the question is, you know, you are capable of judging your situation, you're capable of acting on your own judgment, do you do it?

So I should say, Heidegger is absolute murder. He's incredibly difficult philosopher. There are so many different opinions about what he's up to, including in this room, I think. But just to give you a kind of flavour of what I think he brings, I think one of the things that he brings in is the notion that one of the reasons why we are inauthentic is because we can't tolerate the thought of our finitude, of our mortality.

The kind of picture he paints is one in which, you know, you always find yourself confronted with a range of different demands that are made on you, you know, as a son, a father, whatever it might be. So, but you don't choose that. You find yourself in that condition. So that's one form of finitude. Another one is that you are then going to have to decide between those different demands,

which are going to be met and which ones aren't. But how do you think that generally speaking, we don't make that decision? Instead, what we do is we live a kind of dream of indetermacy, where we think, yes, okay, I'm not going to be able to meet these demands now, but I'll meet them later. I'll get round to it eventually. And this ties into a big theme in Hidinger's work,

which is the idea of being towards death. So he thinks that the inauthentic have a very specific relationship towards death. So they'll say, for instance, they'll say, death's definitely coming, but not yet. There's still time. And in a way, they have to say that

because they're not willing to judge the situation that they're in right now. They have to believe that there's still time for them to change, to become different, to be other than what they are now. So it's only really the authentic, who, at least on this understanding, are those who are, as a way, ready and willing to make decisions about the conflicting demands they see.

Only they are actually in a position to tolerate the thought that death might come now, because it's only them who are actually setting to work their assessment of how they should live. Well, you've made that. You've made very clear something which is murderously difficult to work out of yourself. So we're all in your debt for that. Sarah Richmond. So still on Hyderga, he has the idea of only. one's own life. Now what does he mean by that? Well, this is actually quite interesting in terms of some translation history because the German terms that Heidegger used for authenticity

was Eiggenlichite. And if you try and look that word up in a German-English dictionary, you probably won't even find it as an entry. It's not a normal ordinary word in German at all. and Heidegger was very fond of doing this. This is one of the ways in which he can be murder. He was very fond of sort of packing all kinds of meanings into a term. So what did he mean by this? Well, that is a big discussion. Let's have a little one.

We'll have a little one. What he seems to have wanted to do was exploit the component parts of that word, Eigntlichite. And the most important component part is Eiger. which in German means own, as in to own something, to possess it. So authenticity is very connected for Heidegger with the idea of making something our own. And I think actually if we're thinking about authenticity

in the existentialist tradition, it's probably closer to an idea of responsibility than to an idea of sincerity or something like that. So he's moving towards the idea that The only authentic thing to do is to take control of your own life. Well, to take control over the way you live your life. Yes. It's not necessarily the case for the existentialists

that we can take control over what happens to us. Yes, I accept your amendment. Irene Mullen, we've talked a little about Heidegger, is authenticity and so on. He was also a member of the Nazi Party. What does that say about his authenticity? Does it say that authenticity, his authenticity, is trumping morality or what?

Yes, so this is obviously a very contested dimension of Heidegger studies or controversial and difficult to deal with. So some people think that his entire philosophy is essentially corrupted by or saturated with this kind of, of Nazi disposition. Other people think, well, he was a bad person, but it is fundamentally unrelated to his philosophical views. The thing about the idea of authenticity in Heidegger

is that it is very much related to this idea of responsibility, of taking responsibility for your own life, refusing to just sort of lapse into the anonymity and passivity of conforming to whatever dominant social, norms happen to be governing you at the time. So there is this idea of, you know, sort of seizing yourself and becoming yourself without, yeah, the comfort of these conventions. And he says that when it comes to the actual content of what you're going to sort of resolutely commit to once you are authentic, he says, well, we can't make any determinations about that. Each person

person's situation will determine what it is that you resolutely and authentically take ownership of. And so in response to that, some people have said, okay, well, what if, you know, I resolutely and authentically feel that my best or most true self is somebody who likes torturing people or likes sending people to the gas chamber? And so there's this real problem with whether there's room for any moral constraints in the Heidegarian idea. What is his solution to that? What is his solution to that? Well, he doesn't really provide a solution to that. But that's because he wasn't really interested in that question so much. I mean, fundamentally for him, the question of authenticity takes place within the context of his question about how it's possible for us to ask the question, what does it mean to be?

So he's interested in these broader questions about the nature of being, the nature of existence as such. And his discussion of human existence takes place against that context because he says, well, look, human beings are the only ones who ask the question, what does it mean to be? And normally they ask that question, not in a kind of abstract philosophical way, but in a highly personal individualistic, what does it mean for me to be? Who am I? And so the discussion of authenticity takes place in terms of that. It doesn't really take place in terms of the question about what is it to be a moral person. Thank you very much. Increasingly, Dennis, it seems that more and more thinkers and philosophers are giving us many more reasons to be inauthentic than to be authentic.

Can you develop that? Certainly it's often said that you get a clearer picture of inauthenticity from these authors. from these authors than you get of authenticity. So there's quite often there apparently were students of Heidegger's who were complaining that he's telling us that we have to be resolute. This is another expression he uses in terms of authenticity. So we know we've got to be resolute, we just don't know what we've got to be resolute about. There does seem to be a view that social norms, conventional behavior,

moving as the rest of people move, is something to be opposed from which you seek to disassociate yourself and set up an independent state of war against this, is that right? It can do, but if that's what authenticity is, then it's problematic. All right, then talk about inauthenticity then. It's certainly that there's no denying

that a crucial theme in all of these discussions is this notion of conformity, of conformism, the way in which we end up just falling into line with what other people have to do. And this is a bad thing? Well, this is a good question. You know, what's so wrong, what's so bad about doing what other people do? I'm asking you, you're the expert.

Yeah. Is that authentic or inauthentic? Well, people are not around all the world, falling in with the crowd, doing what everybody else does, getting away the life. How are they inauthentic? Well, it will have to depend on how they take up these shared common activities. Because what we certainly don't want, we don't want to end up in a situation where the authentic are people who, for instance, have some kind of cookie eccentric lifestyle. You know, so the authentic person is the, you know, the guy on the, the unicycle.

You know. He came in from left field, in he? So there's also a nice expression. This guy, Charles Gignon, talks about how, you know, we mustn't end up with a picture of the authentic as odd ducks.

You know, so it looks like the authentic are going to have to, essentially live in the same kind of world as all the rest of us, engaging in one sense in the same kind of activities as we do. But those of us who are, as we're fans of authenticity,

are going to have to make out some distinction between the ways in which we authentic people do it, which is different from the way that the inauthentic do it. But more and more ideas keep teeming in as the century ago past from the 18th century, actually on the side of the inauthentic, and we come to the...

Sir Richard, we come to the man himself, Sartra, who seems to represent a great deal about this and talk a great deal about this. Can you... Can you discuss how he upset the apple card if he did? I think he did. Do you think you did? I don't know if he upset it. He definitely took the centre of action somewhere slightly different.

So Sartre was very influenced by Heidegger. And Sartre's what's regarded as his philosophical masterpiece being a nothingness, the title was chosen deliberately to echo Hidegger's philosophical masterpiece, which was being in time. So Sartre is in dialogue with Heidegger, but he, in a very typical Sartrean way, devotes a lot of effort to showing how his ideas are better as he sees them than Heidegger's.

So one of the things he does in being a nothingness is he picks up Heidegger's idea, which Dennis has talked about, the idea of being towards death, and possibly caricaturing that something, that idea to some extent. He rubbishes it. Sartre says there is no way in which the key to authenticity can have anything to do with the way in which I relate to my own death or my own mortality. Why? Well, for a start, he says, it's an absurd idea, given that I don't know

when my death is going to occur. It's not exactly an event that I can anticipate. He says, using language borrowed from Hydera, this idea of relating to death. So as Sartre sees it, death was a bit of a blind alley. Yes. Thank you for that.

Can I say a bit more about what he did think for sensitive? That would be good. Okay. So he thinks Heidegger was wrong. What he thinks the central concept has to be is freedom. So for Sartre to be inauthentic is to not want

to acknowledge the freedom that all human beings possess simply by virtue of being the kind of thing that human beings are. So most of the time for Sartra, most of us live in a state of bad faith or inauthenticity, where we choose to believe that we're not actually free, that various extraneous forces determine us, that moral values are simply given and don't need to be questioned. Those kinds of attitude would be part of inauthenticity for Sartra. I mean, can you develop the idea of bad faith, which is a strong idea there? Yes, yeah. So exactly as Sarah was saying, the idea of bad faith,

it generally involves a kind of tendency to get the ontology wrong. So ontology is the study of being, the way things. things are, the way they exist. And the existentialists were very interested in the way of existing that is specific to human beings, which is different than how numbers exist and ideas exist and rocks exist and so on. And one of the primary features of inauthenticity or bad faith is the tendency for human beings to treat themselves as if they were just sort of causally determined things, that they aren't responsible for the task of self-making, that they aren't responsible. That they aren't responsible for their own freedom.

And so bad faith is, you know, the way that we avoid this recognition of what we are by thinking of ourselves in these kind of deterministic terms. So Sart has this very famous example of the waiter in the cafe who's just sort of performing his role as a waiter as if he were just sort of determined by the role, that he's not the one who is constantly responsible. for committing himself to the role and endorsing his choice to take up this role

and play it out in his life. But there's also the sort of other tendency in bad faith. The real waiter is the one who's enjoying it and determined to do it. We've had the bad faith one. What about the unauthentic one? Is there an authentic waiter? Are all waiters a bit like the one you've described? Well, I mean, so this is getting back to what Dennis was saying

about how it's not that the authentic person or the person in good faith is doing radically different things. It's that the person is doing it out of an awareness or in light of an understanding of the kinds of things that human beings are. So rather than sort of avoiding or evading the recognition that we're going to die, that we're free, that we're not caused by some kind of internal essence or soul that we're born with, but rather we're constantly responsible for the task of deciding who we're going to be, people in bad faith just sort of try and avoid that. And there's a

huge emphasis on the various avoidance techniques that we're all constantly engaged in. And before I come to you, Dennis, can I quote something that Sartre says, which I think is essential to what we're talking about in the Roaster Freedom, where he's talking about a character called Mathieu. He says, quote, he could do what he liked. No one had the right to him. There would be for him no good nor evil unless he brought them into being. He was alone and enveloped by this monstrous silence. He was free and alone without assistance and without excuse, condemned to design without support from any quarter, condemned forever to be free. Now that's quite an agenda, isn't it? It certainly is. And that, in a way that passage

sums up a certain picture of the classic existentialist hero. Now, I think there are reasons to wonder about whether that's really what Sartre is fully signed up to. But I think it's worth having that sort of that image on the table because certainly that image of what the existentialist hero is has been hugely influential. So it's that image of the person who's purely free. They don't take any given value as having authority over them. They have to, they choose without any kind of restraints.

And certainly that image, I think, was, to some extent, it was made popular through those who criticized Sartre, so people like Iris Murdoch, who was fascinating in all sorts of ways in our own right. But in her early work, she had a famous criticism of the existentialist, where she argued that the kind of freedom that they insisted on was only really possible in, if you like, a sort of moral desert. The world would have to have all values sucked out of it in order for that kind of freedom to be possible. She has this kind of, she has this allusion to Lucifer in

Paradise Lost. So the thought would be yes, you can, you can, just as he can reign in hell and to reign in heaven. Exactly, yeah. So the thought again would be, yes, the existentials hero can be utterly free, but only as long as they're willing to live in this hellish world where nothing matters. Which she also thought is, not only is it rebarbative, but also it's not clear that

it really makes sense. So what kind of choices could you make on what basis could you make a choice? Now, what I think that almost certainly says is that if we're going to have a coherent philosophy, authenticity cannot be the only value in town. It has to be just one value alongside others. But in terms of whether this is fair to Sartre, I would defer to Sarah. Well, Sarah is nodding, so we're going to find out what she, whether she accepts what you say. Yes, well, not entirely. Iris Murdoch did make various criticisms of Sartra. I think there may have been a little bit of rivalry between the two of them. Insofar as there aren't that many novelist

philosophers, and both Sartre and Iris Murdoch were novelist philosophers. But they did have quite a different temperament. But I would say that the idea that in Sartra, authenticity, is an attitude which encourages us to sort of create moral values in a vacuum. I would definitely you say that that is a caricature of what Sartre has in mind. What he tries to do from being a nothingness onwards is to show that authenticity does have moral implications. And basically what he tries to do is to say, it's not that we can choose any value we like. The only value that makes philosophical sense for us to choose is freedom, because we are free.

so we have to be committed at least to freedom. His partner and lover and superior in exams, wasn't she? Simone de Beauvoir took up issues of his. Yes, she did, definitely. And partly in terms of what Sarah was saying about freedom and having to be committed, both to your own freedom and the freedom of others. So she makes an argument for the necessity of trying to enhance the freedom of others as being part of your own process of becoming free.

But I think one of the most interesting things about what Beauvoir brings to the table when she's talking about this is she does a little bit of a developmental account of the person because she says part of the problem for us and part of the sort of root of our attempts to evade responsibility is to be found in the fact that we were first children. And when we're children, the world is sort of an established, settled place where values and rules are givens in the world in the same way that the law of gravity or rocks and so on. These things are real. They're in the world. And that is a source of tremendous comfort because we know what one must do.

And then as we get older, and she talks about adolescents as being a kind of time of crisis where you begin to recognize. that these values, that these norms are ultimately human constructions and that the adults who have been holding them up and propagating them and so on are just confused, failed persons like everyone else. And so there's this tremendous sense of loss and confusion and an attempt to get back the sense of stability that one had as a child. Do you agree with that? Yes, so I think Sima de Beauvoir was a much more practically minded philosopher than Sartre. We don't get Sartre really talking about development.

He doesn't talk about children. There's all kinds of parts of ordinary life, which surprisingly perhaps Sartre never gets around to discussing. And I think the other thing about de Beauvoir is that she saw possibly sooner than Sartre did, although, of course, there's always a debate about who pinched whose ideas or who was more indebted to whom. But certainly if one looks at the texts, I think she saw faster than Sartra did that one had to take social position into account

when one was talking about freedom and that there were degrees of freedom depending on the kinds of social relations in which we find ourselves. And that women, for instance, had been put in a social position which they had to accept and that defined the way they thought about things. Absolutely, as she says in the second sex. Second sex, yeah.

Dennis, how can we be authentic ourselves or even know what that means without being influenced by others? Well, in a way I think this takes us back to some of the earlier issues that we've touched on a couple of points because it can look as if the only, way in which you're going to be authentic is by separating yourself off from the rest of society

and living your isolated little existence. If that's what authenticity is, then it doesn't look like it's viable for 99.9% of us. So it looks like there's going to have to be some notion of how we can live an authentic life amongst, you know, with each other, amongst one another. now. Now, I think, you know, there are various different ways in which people have tried to accommodate these different needs. And it's especially important for people like Haydiger, Sartre de Beauvoir, because, you know, they all stress this idea that we are, to use Heidegger's expression, we all are in the world. Our mode of existence is being in the world. So it's a social, historical, cultural existence. There's no getting away from that.

We are thrown into this kind of condition. So, in a way, all of all of the people who, work on these figures trying to make sense of these ideas are in the business of trying to figure out how you can do this. Now, just to very briefly go back to the kind of picture that I gave from Heidegger, I think there you can see that the kind of different obligations between which you have to adjudicate are, if you like, could well be social obligations. So, you know, being a father is a social position, being a son is a social position, being a neighbour as a social position. I think on that picture of authenticity, if you like, my contribution is not that I will into existence a new way of life, but instead I pull all those different obligations together and I

adjudicate between them. I take responsibility for deciding how I'm going to take up those different kinds of roles. The idea was even further elaborated by Freud and others saying what is this self and the post-structurally is saying there isn't a core self. We invent different selves at different times. Now can you take that on briefly towards the end of the program, Sarah? Yes. So I suppose if we're thinking about a body of theory that's perhaps more recent, even than the existentialists, we could think about some of the ways in which Freudian ideas have been developed. In particular, I'm thinking of a quite a well-known paper by a post-Froidian psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, who belonged to the British School of Psychoanalysis. And he mentions in the title to one of

his papers, the difference between the true and the full self. Now, I think it's very important not to parody what the idea is here. So the difference between the true and the full self isn't, as one might think, the difference, say, between the public show and the private self. Rather, the difference depends on a developmental story, basically about the way in which one has been parented. And an infant whose mother has, or parent or caretaker, it's not necessarily the biological mother, although Winnicott tends to use that term, but an infant whose caretaker has responded to it sufficiently empathically will be able to hold on or to develop a sort of sense of who he is and what his needs are.

but a mother who, for whatever reasons, is not responsive in the right way to an infant, is going to be imposing her own agenda, as it were, on the child. She's not going to be focused so much on what the child might be thinking and on trying to make sense of that. She's going to be imposing her own needs and wishes, and what that will lead to is what Winnicott calls a false self. Finally, then I, and do you think the, the, the idea of a true self is a myth.

And is that what the debate about authenticity is about at the moment? Certainly there are people who are very interested in that idea, whether or not this whole conversation is fundamentally misguided. So some people also emphasize that, you know, maybe this kind of fixation on talk of authenticity is just a kind of feature of modern Western capitalist individualism and that it's a kind of fetishizing of uniqueness and individual freedom, and that in fact it's a distortion of what we actually are,

which is, as Dennis was saying, you know, socially embedded creatures who are fundamentally defined by our relationships to others. So now authenticity, discussions in authenticity are really trying to accommodate this intuition we have, that there are unique selves that we should try and be instead of just sort of, sort of, you know, coasting along in this mode of irresponsible anonymity. But that doesn't mean that it's just a kind of narcissistic self-assertion, but is instead going to have to be responsive to the kinds of things that we are, that we're social beings who love and are responsible to others.

I think some people would say we're happy coasting along in responsible anonymity, but that's another program. Thank you very much. I'm in Mullen, Sir Richmond, and Dennis, MacManus next week. Gerald Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest who's been called the greatest Victorian poet. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Sarah? Well, I'd like to make a point about something Irene said about narcissism, which is that that is indeed the case that people sometimes criticise the idea of authenticity

on the basis that it involves some kind of excessive, you know, self-importance or self-indulgence. You know, I shouldn't really be thinking about myself. I should be much more outward-focused. I think that criticism absolutely can't apply to Sartre and Beauvoir, because one of the things that their conception of authenticity stressed was that we shouldn't actually think of ourselves in terms of a being at all, and that even the concept that we have some kind of self, even if it's a self for which we take ownership, can actually be another instance of bad faith. So the self... Sorry, can you take me from one of those, the two, the penultimate sentence to the last sentence?

Well, so narcissism, I think, is dependent on the idea of a self. Authenticity, as the French existentialists construe it is probably opposed to the idea of herself, precisely because we're tempted always to reify the idea of a self and to use it to restrict our freedom rather than to expand it. So in a way, I would argue that as Sartre and de Beauvoir conceive it, authenticity is the opposite of narcissism. Yeah, can I just jump in on that? Because it seems to me that a lot of what many of these thinkers are wrestling with is the fact that we are both defined by certain factors that over which we have no control, but we also have this freedom to interpret and take up and understand our situation in various ways. And so we have freedom, but it's a constrained or confined freedom. And so it puts us in a difficult position because we want to make ourselves, but we don't have total control over that self-making.

And that the different kinds of bad faith that Sartre talks about involves both trying to sort of understand oneself fully in terms of one's sort of factic, given I have no control, domain, dimension of ourselves, or going the other way and just saying, well, I'm pure freedom. anything I may have done in the past, any relationships in which I find myself, those don't really define me because, hey, I can always just, you know, create myself anew, you know, out of nothing. And so it seems that really the task at hand is to face up to the kinds of things that we are, which is both factic and free, right? We're thrown into a situation, but we have to take it up and take responsibility for how we take it up. And so that's the difficult task of sort of negotiating that tension.

Yeah. I mean, I think just to carry on with this, the theme of narcissism, I think in a way, throughout the people we've been discussing, you see a distinction between different kinds of self-love or self-concern. So just to take the case, I know best. I think with Heidegger, I think he thinks that the authentic, they exhibit a self-concern in that they judge for themselves, they look for themselves to see what's happening,

to judge what needs to be done. But that need not be a concern with, as well, as were, their own personal welfare. They might realise that actually my personal welfare needs to be sacrificed here because something else matters more. And I think in a way you can see something similar, you go right back to someone like St. Augustine, where, you know, in a sense it's a battle between two kinds of self-concern,

Are you doing what you yourself think is right? Or are you just worried about not being punished? Are you being, is your life being controlled by what you might think of as the parts of yourself that you don't really want to allow to take over your existence? Or do you just want to be seen to be doing life? Well, that's another question. Yeah. Yeah. So certainly I think that notion of narcissism, I certainly think in the Heideggerian case, I think it kind of misses the target.

You can understand why people think it because there seems to be this concern with the self. But I think certainly in his case, you know, the thought is that you need to take responsibility for your existence. And one of the things that that might involve is a very self-sacrificial existence. If you like, the element of self-assertion is that you look for yourself. So you don't take another person's word for what needs doing or you don't look through another person's eyes. You, as a way, turn your attention to your own existence and you look yourself. So I think it might be helpful to point out that for all these people, authenticity is difficult. It's not the default. It's difficult.

As Sartre puts it, we have to win it. And the temptation is constantly to fall back into this kind of anonymous mode of irresponsibly coasting along. So it's not like you achieve a state of authenticity and then you're authentic from there on out. it's a constant temptation to slide back. Yeah. The other thing that we didn't really talk much about, although you mentioned it, Sarah, was the idea of anxiety and this sense that what interrupts

the conformist anonymous mode of inauthenticity is a kind of, especially in Heidegger, anxiety, this existential terror and sense that the way that you always ordinarily give meaning and structure to your life has fallen away. And you come sort of face to face with the kind of thing that you are. And that anxiety is not something that you can sort of call up on your own. So there's sort of a lot of discourse about the lack of control over even the process of becoming authentic or moving away from inauthenticity. When you teach it to your students these days, are they taken with the ideas?

Is it something that they think applies to them? I think so. Yeah, that's my impression. I think that it does, it grabs people because, you know, in a way, it's talking about this question of, are you living your own life? Are you, or are you just coasting?

So I think, you know, when these, with all of these authors, you get these very vivid pictures of inauthenticity and these elusive characterizations of authenticity, but I think they are magnetic. And I think, I think, I think in some respects maybe

there are difficulties in knowing what are the red herrings in the idea of authenticity so sometimes you wonder about whether a certain concern with individualism might be a red herring you know that that insistence that you be different from other people does that really matter but I think often when when we talk about individualism really what we're concerned about are other things

like you know are you allowing other people to tell you what to do or are you developing your own talents. So I think one of the difficulties that we face when we teach authenticity now is helping people think about which elements in this big cluster of concepts might be bogus and which ones might be crucial. Well, thank you very much. Simon's going to come in and make you a BBC offer your cartiff.

Yes, please. Yeah, tea, tea, please. Tea. Tea. I'll have some tea, please. Four cheese. Authenticity. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Science. and Tillotson.

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