Becoming More Authentic

    Authenticity means creating our own comprehensive life-meanings
—our "Authentic projects-of-being".
When we re-center and re-integrate our lives
around our freely-chosen purposes,
we become more focused, unified, & decisive.
We gain greater autonomy
and increase our capacity to resist and transcend enculturation.
This approach to life was developed by
such existential philosophers and psychologists as:
Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, & Maslow.
But only we individually can decide what content
to put within this structure of Authentic Existence.

OUTLINE:

I. From Conformity to Autonomy

The power of enculturation—providing our basic life-scripts.

Writing our own scripts—deciding what to live for.

From scattered, tangled, superficial living
to organized, simple, purposeful living.

Creating an Authentic Project.

My Authentic Project-of-Being.

Several Possible Projects-of-Being.

1. Albert Camus: Rebelling Against the Absurd.

2. Jean-Paul Sartre: Inventing Meaning in a Meaningless World.

3. Martin Heidegger: Confronting Existential Guilt and Death.

4. Søren Kierkegaard: Willing One Thing.

5. Abraham Maslow: Becoming Self-Actualizing.

   Cast into the blind, purposeless whirl of existence,
we must either choose our own lives
or have our lives chosen for us
by the social forces already in operation when we were born.
There are no given, automatic meanings in human life.
We human beings must create whatever goals we will pursue.

I. From Conformity to Autonomy

    But before we can even consider inventing our own life-purposes,
we must become well-integrated, thoughtful persons.
Becoming adults persons requires years of learning and growing.
Each of us grew up in a fully-developed human culture,
replete with rules, regulations, & assumed life-meanings.

    Even if we are not pleased with the enculturation we received,
there was no way to avoid or skip that part of human development.
We had to become integrated conformists
before we could consider becoming more autonomous.

    The process of education itself empowers us to look back
on the social processes that created us.
When we understand our own enculturation,
we can begin to resist and transcend that socialization.

    Autonomy means being self-governing
—from the Greek for self (autos) and law (nomos).
We can become more autonomous
thru a long process of making free choices.

II. Centering and Integrating

    The social forces and expectations all around us
(beginning first with our parents, then later our peers)
will shape us into persons who are centered around society's goals.
If we make no truly free choices for ourselves,
we will find that we are pursuing the assumed purposes-in-life
that surrounded us where we grew up:
money, achievement, marriage, children, pleasure, & religion.

    However, thru a process of trial and error,
we can decide how best to re-center and re-integrate our lives,
this time around purposes we have freely chosen,
rather than the values and meanings we inherited from the culture.

III. Authentic Projects-of-Being

    We are what we pursue.
If we want to become more Authentic,
we will devise our own reasons for living,
which may go well beyond what anyone has ever tried before.

    Our first Authentic project or task
is to explore, imagine, & experiment with various life-meanings
until we devise a set of purposes and goals
that seem worthy of our comprehensive efforts.

    My Authentic project-of-being is
helping others to become Existentially Free
—which means living beyond their existential anxiety,
meaninglessness, loneliness, despair, depression, etc.
A preliminary purpose is helping others to become more Authentic,
which is the basic function of this article.

    If you were completely free, how would you use your life?
You might decide to pursue a contemplative life,
in which you give your time to your interior development
and possibly to the spiritual development of other persons.

    At the another extreme, you might devote yourself
to a comprehensive ecological project, intended to save the planet
—or at least some part of the eco-system.

    Or you might focus your life around reforming or replacing
some social institution that needs to be changed:

• Ending violence against woman.
• Making schools less conformity-producing and more liberating.
• Correcting the problems of the 'correction' system (prison reform).
• Establishing new institutions to enhance human life
in some practical, intellectual, or spiritual ways.

IV. Five Versions of Authentic Existence

    The concept of Authenticity has deep and strong roots
in existential philosophy and psychology.
Five thinkers will be discussed here,
each with a slightly different approach to the quest for meaning.

   1. Albert Camus: Rebelling Against the Absurd.

    The French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus (1913-1960)
describes our Existential Malaise as absurdity.
The life into which we find ourselves thrown is absurd.
But instead of giving up right away because life has no meaning,
we can take absurdity as a challenge to create our own meanings.
Because there are no given absolutes,
we must live consciously for what is relative,
without deceiving ourselves that our values are absolute.
Besides rejection of the gods (denial of all given meanings),
Camus recommends in his philosophy and illustrates in his novels
a hatred of death and a passion for life.

    2. Jean-Paul Sartre:
        Inventing Meaning in a Meaningless World.

    Another French philosopher and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre,
was a contemporary of Camus.  (Sartre lived from 1905-1980.)
Sartre describes our Existential Predicament as meaninglessness.
The people of the world are very busy doing things.
But they do not usually realize the ultimate futility of their efforts.

    However, when we are bitten by the meaninglessness bug,
this can stimulate us to put ourselves into gear
toward creating our own meanings in a world initially devoid of meaning.
We create meaning by moving away from 'bad faith'
(trying to become identified with our roles or temperaments)
and creating our own comprehensive projects.
Then our everyday activities can be organized toward the fulfillment
of whatever we choose as our ultimate purposes in life.

    3. Martin Heidegger:
        Confronting Existential Guilt and Death.

    Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is the German existential philosopher
who gives the most systematic account of our Existential Predicament
(focusing especially on existential anxiety, guilt, & being-towards-death).
He also has the most to say about how we become more Authentic.

    We are born into the 'they',
into a fully-scripted, well-organized ongoing social structure.
And we will remain absorbed in the 'they' for our whole lives
unless we discover how to become more Authentic.

    If we pay attention to our vague awareness of death,
this discovery of the deepest part of our beings
will empower us to wrench ourselves free from the clutches of the 'they'.

    We can then become whole and resolute
if we harness the power of guilt and death (our Existential Malaise)
as the driving force behind our freely-chosen life-meanings.

    4. Søren Kierkegaard: Willing One Thing.

    Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
is often called the father of existentialism.
Before anyone else, he exposed the routine ways of life
that possessed his contemporaries
(and which still shape the lives of most people).

    Instead of remaining well-adjusted conformists,
we can purify our hearts by willing one thing.
Kierkegaard describes in great detail
the process of living more Authentically.
Perhaps we will never achieve our goals
(as Kierkegaard was not recognized during his life-time).
But we are responsible for making sure
that we live each day clearly focused around one thing.

    5. Abraham Maslow: Becoming Self-Actualizing.

    Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) is an American psychologist
best known for his concept of "self-actualization".

    Instead of spending our lives trying to satisfy our deficiency needs,
we can become more self-actualizing
by creating and pursuing meaningful life-purposes.
We are self-actualizing if we pursue meanings and values
beyond ourselves and our families.
We transcend our earlier concern for what other people think
and focus instead on being the persons we choose to be.
In short, we grow away from conformity toward autonomy.

Conclusion

    Becoming more Authentic is not a sudden, once-for-all change.
Rather we move from conformity toward greater autonomy
by the daily choices we make.
We can either remain well-adjusted members of society,
pursuing all the conventional purposes in the approved ways.
Or we can re-create ourselves
by deciding and then consistently pursuing
whatever we regard as worthy of our deepest efforts.
In Maslow's challenge:
Are we making the safe choices or the growth choices?

AUTHOR:

    James Park is an existential philosopher and author of the book
which is the basis for this article:
Becoming More Authentic: The Positive Side of Existentialism .
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/AU.html
If you click this title, the Table of Contents of the book will appear.
From there, you will be able to open several sample pages from the book.
Becoming More Authentic is now in its fourth edition, 1999.

    Much more about the author will be found on his home page:
An Existential Philosopher's Museum .
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/

    About 20 books are reviewed in the Authenticity Bibliography ,
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/B-AU.html
which is divided into four sections:
Philosophy, Psychology, Literature, & Biography.

    If "Becoming More Authentic" has stimulated you to think,
pass it on to friends in your computer's address book.
(But be selective, don't just send it blindly to everyone.
We do not want such articles to become
another form of electronic junk mail.)
You might simply send the URL of this article:
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/HMS-PG1.html

    This article is just the beginning
of an on-going discussion of Authenticity.
Send your comments and questions to the author,
who promises to respond to all e-mails.
James Park's E-Mail address is: PARKx032@TC.UMN.EDU
The best of such exchanges will be posted on the HMS home page,
linked from this article.

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The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.