Authenticity

In my readings on existentialism, the idea of authenticity, of living authentically, has always resonated with me.  I certainly am not an expert on existentialism, refusing to jump into the more long-winded technical aspects in Sartre's Being and Nothingness, but his essay "Existentialism is a Humanism" (which he ironically later came to denounce on some levels) has much wisdom to behold.

As I said, I am merely an amateur so I will quote from Thomas Flynn's "Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction" on what it means to be an authentic individual:

"Frequently dramatized in the imaginative form that the topic invites, the existentialist view of the human being is that he or she is permeated with contingency, as Roquentin experienced in Nausea.  Like the Heideggerian in the face of personal mortality or the Nietzchean 'free spirit' who courageously welcomes the infinite repetition of the past, the authentic individual, on Sartre's account, is the one who embraces the contingency and lives it fully."

It is about accepting our contingency and not running from it, not denying, but accepting it with courage.  Sartre says, "There is not determinism - man is free, man is freedom.  If, however, God does not exist, we will encounter no values or orders that can legitimize our conduct.  Thus, we have neither behind us, nor before us, in the luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse.  We are left alone and without excuse.  That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

Some say this is a very pessimistic view to take.  Not so, says Sartre.  "What we mean to say," he says, "is that man is nothing but a series of enterprises, and that he is the sum, organization, and aggregate of the relations that constitute such enterprises.  In light of all this, what people reproach us for is not essentially our pessimism, but the sternness of our optimism...  When an existentialist describes a coward, he says that the coward is responsible for his cowardice...he is like that because he made himself a coward through his actions...What the existentialist says is that the coward makes himself cowardly and the hero makes himself heroic; there is always the possibility that one day the coward may no longer be cowardly and the hero may cease to be a hero."  And so existentialism cannot "be called a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic, since it declares that man's destiny lies within himself." Boom.

While there may be exceptions to Sartre's radical definition of freedom, to me he gets the core argument right.  We are what we make ourselves to be through our actions.  We define ourselves.  By taking this responsibility, we are authentic.

This does not mean, we fall for the luster of nihilism.  For in accepting our freedom, we accept the freedom of all men and women, and thus there is a universal character to the existentialist ethic.  Flynn states Simone de Beauvoir "argues that the real requirement of an individual's freedom is that it pursues what she calls 'an open future' by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others.  In other words, my freedom is enhanced, not diminished, when I work to expand the freedom of others."  So in accepting our responsibility and our freedom, we accept the responsibility and freedom of everyone else.  We're in this freedom thing together, each of us alone to choose the path for each other to be free.