Magical inner essence
A column I wrote for the April/May issue of Free Inquiry is online. It’s about “authenticity.”
The idea of an “authentic self” has, oddly, become a theme of political discourse as well as Oprah-style uplift. We’re being told that people have a right to live as their authentic selves, which often means as opposed to their outward appearance, that mere physical dross. It’s a weirdly religious idea, reminiscent of the contemptus mundi of medieval monks, but it’s presented as political rather than religious. What I keep wondering is how it’s possible to make a sane politics out of the denial of material reality.
The irony is that what is meant by the authentic self in the current dialect is not a self that comports with the actual facts—with the biography, the history, the Curriculum Vitae, the parentage, the body—but a self that contradicts such dull literal realities, as if some absent-minded official had simply made a mistake in the paperwork. The authenticity in question is not the kind we mean when we talk of an authentic Vermeer or Patek Philippe; it’s a distinction between the social self and the private one, between the self that others perceive and the one that we alone know from the inside.
As you probably already know, I don’t believe in such a thing as an “authentic self.” I also don’t believe that obsessing about one’s own self, authentic or otherwise, is a branch of politics; I think it’s the opposite of politics.
I wonder what Walter Mitty’s authentic self was and why he wasn’t allowed to live as it.
Apologies to anyone who missed the authentic sarcasm tag.
The idea of an ‘authentic self’ is a weird one, when you stop to think about it–reading this years ago made me do just that: https://www.richardsennett.com/site/senn/templates/general2.aspx?pageid=29&cc=gb
Gee, my authentic self has always been a woman who gets treated with respect, who is not judged by her physical appearance, who is never sexually harassed at work, who does not have to worry about being attacked by damaged men. Yeah………so much for authentic selves.
To me, the authentic self is when one is focused on the task at hand. When I am not alone, I analyze everybody in my sphere to assess how I fit and how I should respond and behave. But when I’m focused I may not even know people are around me. It’s beautiful, and for me, quite difficult to do for any good length of time.
Well, generations of gay men and lesbians grew up with no visible examples for their ‘authentic selves.’ As such they had to (re)invent or discover the way their sexuality worked among other people.
While that’s a real and reasonable thing to notice, its a dangerous precedent for dealing with trans-ness.
Not only is the genderist appeal to “authenticity” based on a naive conception of the (“authentic”) Self–it’s a particularly shallow naive conception.
Christians struggled to overcome the Self, which was riddled with Original Sin. They wanted to rise above the corrupt selfish particular natural Self and become a vessel for God.
The depth psychologists recognized the id (Freud) and the Shadow (capital S–Jung.) One had to bring these ego-threatening aspects of the Self from the depths of the awesome Unconscious to conscious awareness and integrate them with the ego in order to be a fully realized, well-adjusted civilized person. (Well, man. If you followed Freud, you saw women as more primitive. Their natural passivity and subservience kept most of them from the highest levels of human selfhood. Men asserted their manhood, but women had to “accept” their womanhood, and find fulfillment in their biological destiny.)
Fast forward. The woke Self has become Identity, and Identity is all about how one is perceived by others. This Self-Identity has no dark places that need to be contended with, risen above, integrated, or even acknowledged.* One’s dark impulses can be ritually acted out in the bedroom or the local Dungeon, and don’t you kink shame me.
* Beyond mea culpas acknowledging sins of thought, word or deed against the dogma.