Authenticity and Historicity

Erler and Hope conclude that the concept of authenticity is a rich one, with a wide variety of promising applications in psychiatry and psychotherapy. Nevertheless, they acknowledge that there are tensions within the concept—most notably, between the ‘true self’ account due to Charles Taylor, and accounts due to DeGrazia and others, which put more emphasis on self-creation and autonomy. If, in invoking the concept, a patient might either be trying to capture something about the importance of self-creation, or trying to capture something about the importance of discovering/maintaining her true self, or trying to avoid self-deception, or trying to work out what she really values (Taylor 1991, 36), we might reasonably wonder how much value such an endlessly flexible concept can really have. A more integrated (and thus more useful) concept of authenticity can be found in the tradition of post-Kantian European philosophy with which the concept originates. In particular, it is with reference to the primarily Hegelian notion of the historicity of the self that the real integrity of the concept can be grasped.

The most influential philosophical accounts of authenticity implicitly reject both the idea that the self could be entirely self-created, and the idea that the self could be entirely the object of discovery. Heidegger and Sartre disagree on many points, but they agree on the idea that the historicity of the self should be conceived in terms of thrown projection. Thrownness (Heidegger, 1927/1962, § 29) refers to the contingency of our physical and cultural circumstances, and their recalcitrance in the face of our projects and strivings. Our particular spatial, temporal, social, and cultural location in this world is something we did not choose. That I am the son of my parents may be a necessary truth. But there was no necessity that I should be born at all, or that I would be born when and where I was born. My life as it has been lived is a result of innumerable contingencies, with respect to which I have never exercised complete control.

At the same time, it is an evident feature of this life that I make decisions in it and about it. I find myself with projects, and it is in light of these projects that I am able to make decisions. (Equally, when I find myself unable to decide, it is in light of my projects that I am paralyzed with indecision.) These projects were never simply chosen. They grew out of, and into, other projects—in a process that began earlier than my earliest memories. When I decide I project into the future, or into possible futures, and the projective character of choice contributes to the distinctive temporal character of my existence (Heidegger, 1927/1962, §31). Just as in a melody each note is inflected both by those that preceded it and those that are anticipated, so human existence as thrown-projection is inflected at every moment by a specific past and at least one possible future.

Where existence has the above character, authenticity cannot be either a matter of sheer self-discovery or sheer self-creation. For the self to be simply the object of discovery, it would have to be the case that my projects were simply discovered, and of course this is not the case—those projects are laced at every turn with decisions that I make. On the other hand, for the self to be simply the object of self-creation, it would have to be projection without thrownness—in a kind of year zero of the self, at which all clocks were reset, and we were free to choose outside of all ‘situations.’ On the view of the self as thrown-projection, authenticity involves avoiding the kind of ‘bad faith’ implicit in such views. For Sartre, there are equal and opposite failures in (1) the failure to acknowledge the facts of our situation (c.f. his example of the woman seduced, who closes her eyes to the seducer’s actions, pretending that they are not really...