Summary: Samantha Rose Hill explores the concept of authenticity, contrasting Heidegger’s idea of the true self as found in solitude with Jaspers and Arendt’s views that emphasize our existence within a community. While Heidegger suggests that authenticity requires stepping away from others, Arendt argues that our choices and actions shape who we are in relation to the world. Ultimately, she asserts that the will, not a hidden true self, defines our autonomy and freedom in navigating everyday life.
By the age of 18, away at college, hiding in the library was no longer an option. She was actively wrestling with what it meant to become a person in the world, with her loneliness, and a feeling that there was something more inside herself. What does it mean to make something of oneself, to become a somebody rather than a nobody? ‘Is it more than I am? Does it have higher meaning?’ she asks of her hand, the hand that would go on to write some of the finest work of political theory in the 20th century. (View Highlight)
What does it mean to discover one’s true, authentic self? To act from a place of authenticity? Is there a truer self within the self that can be uncovered? What are we really talking about when we talk about authenticity? (View Highlight)
For Heidegger, there was a difference between what is translated as ‘Being’ (with a capital B) and ‘being’ (with a lower-case b). This distinction does not indicate a transcendent Being, the way capitalising the ‘g’ in God does, but rather the fact that one is not always merely a being among beings. Or, to put it another way, Being means that there is a truer version of the self, a more authentic version, that can be experienced only when one steps out of the flow of everyday life, what Heidegger called ‘everydayness’. And when we experience this Being, we do not just experience our common lives, we experience everything that being human means – including our own inevitable death, that part of ourselves – our nonexistence – that otherwise remains hidden from our consciousness. (View Highlight)
for Sartre, there is no human nature. We must always be imagining and reimagining who we are, which is to say we are always in the process of becoming. For Beauvoir, becoming was a creative enterprise, a work of art. And she argued that it was not enough to shape oneself within the existing conditions of the world, but that one must also shape the conditions of the world itself. Authenticity for the French existentialists was not about uncovering a pre-existing true self, but rather choosing to engage in a process of becoming. (View Highlight)
In place of an inner-authentic self, she argued that the inner organ of decision-making that guided one’s actions was the will. (View Highlight)
But for Arendt, this was an abdication of personal responsibility and choice. It was a way of handing over one’s decision-making power. And for her, it is only the choices that we make in real time when confronted with decisions that determine who we will become, and in turn determine the kind of world that we will help to shape. (View Highlight)
But for Arendt, the will was the means to our freedom, it was the promise that we can always be other than we are, and so to the world. The will is a space of tension inside the self where one actively feels the difference between where they are and where they would like to be. (View Highlight)
Willing is the mental activity that goes on between thinking and judgment. It has the power to shape us by drawing us into conflict with ourselves. Without inner conflict, there is no forward movement. These are the basic principles of willing:
• Willing is characterised by an inner state of disharmony.
• Willing is experienced as a felt sense of tension within the body where the mind is at war with itself.
• Willing makes one aware of possible decisions, which creates a feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at once.
• Willing can feel very lonely. Decisions and choices are shaped by one’s environment, by the everydayness of being, but ultimately the responsibility for deciding is up to oneself.
• Willing makes one aware of the tension that exists between oneself as a part of the world, and oneself as an individual alone existing in relationship to the world.
• Willing is the principle of human individuation.
• Willing relates to the world through action.
• The will is the inner organ of freedom. (View Highlight)
In order to engage the will, one must be willing to pause. Because, while thinking moves from past experience, and imagination fixates on what might happen in the future, the past and the future are beyond the reach of the will. Willing is what happens before one acts. To be in a state of willing is to be in the Now. (View Highlight)
Authenticity is attractive in part because it promises a sense of harmony, it is the promise that, if we know who we are, then we can act in a way where our actions are in alignment with our values. But the will is characterised by a sense of conflict. It is the inner organ that generates tension within the self, making one aware of the discrepancies between who they are and who they might like to be, or what they want and what they might be able to have. But it is this tension that is vital for bringing consciousness to decision-making. (View Highlight)
There is no true self inside the self. There is only the conflict of the will and how we decide to resolve it. It is human to reach for security in a time of unknowing. It is human to hope for a sense of direction in a time of uncertainty. Maintaining this inner friction of the will is the means to freedom, no matter how uncomfortable and frustrating it might seem at times. No matter how much we would just like someone else to decide for us, even occasionally. (View Highlight)
She would always be different, but instead of experiencing her difference as something that isolated her from others, it became the foundation for how she came to love the world of being with others. Loving the world, she realised, was a choice, and an act of willing, and the beauty of being together is that one is always coming undone in the dance of knowing and unknowing. (View Highlight)
