Self-Discovery or Self-Creation: The Dilemma Cannot Be Avoided

We are grateful to both commentators for their remarks on our paper. In his commentary, which presents a detailed analysis of the concept of authenticity, Peter Lucas argues that the most influential philosophical accounts of the concept, those of Heidegger and Sartre, are incompatible with the idea that authenticity might involve either pure self-discovery or pure self-creation. He further claims that a plausible view of authenticity ought to follow such a middle ground. We fully agree with Lucas’s second point, if by this he means that the self is arguably something we can shape deliberately to some extent, yet that we do not have unlimited freedom to do so. However, our purpose in drawing a contrast (as other authors have done) between a ‘self-discovery’ and a ‘self-creation’ approach to authenticity was not to oppose extreme views that treat the self either as an entirely ‘given,’ unchangeable entity, or as infinitely malleable. Rather, we meant to contrast views according to which our having chosen, or at least endorsed, some feature is a necessary condition of that feature being a central aspect of who we are (the self-creation approach), with views that deny this (the self-discovery one). Neither of these approaches, it seems to us, need stray away from Lucas’s plausible middle ground. Even the early Sartre’s (1948) radical claim that ‘man is nothing else but what he makes of himself,’ which clearly encapsulates the self-creation approach to authenticity, need not entail a view of the self as entirely protean: one can in principle believe that the defining features of the self are always ones we have chosen without also believing that we can choose to be whatever we want to be.

Lucas (2014, 234) suggests that authenticity can be understood “as a mean between the twin vices of regarding oneself as essentially an object to be discovered, and regarding oneself as free to be whatever one chooses to be.” Again, it seems to us that this suggestion is compatible with both the self-discovery and the self-creation approaches. This does not mean, however, that we can thereby circumvent the question of which approach to favor. Indeed, each of them might yield a different conclusion regarding where exactly the mean between these two vices lies. A supporter of the self-discovery approach might thus argue that getting the balance right involves acknowledging more features as constitutive of who we are, and perhaps being less disposed to change those features, than the self-creation approach allows. In the context of mental disorder, the self-discovery approach might for instance involve a greater willingness to accept ‘disordered’ traits as part of the self, and a more ambivalent attitude to treatment in certain cases. If so, even if Lucas is right that the question of authenticity for a patient ultimately concerns “how to continue her own history” (2014 235), we do not see that noting this can help us avoid the self-discovery versus self-creation dilemma, if each of these approaches might in principle recommend a different kind of continuation of the said history.

In her valuable commentary, Ilina Singh (2014) provides a developmental perspective on the issue of authenticity based on her own studies of children and adolescents with attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Even young children on treatment for ADHD may say ‘I don’t feel myself’ in describing side effects (although, understandably, concerns relating to authenticity and medication use do not arise among children in quite the same way they do among adults with mental disorder). Singh emphasizes that the social environment has significant impact on how the idea of authenticity develops in children, including the ways in which parents and others help frame children’s moral views and values. This developmental perspective is important in understanding authenticity and Singh’s description and analysis stand on their own.

Toward the end of her commentary, Singh raises the question of how clinicians might make use of the concept of authenticity. This is an...