“Words, Words, Words - Issue #5: “Authenticity”

Part Five of an Exercise in Amateur Etymology for Practical Use

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." ― Jiddu Krishnamurti, (likely apocryphal)

“But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.” ― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." ― 1 John 3:2

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“Just be yourself”. The summum bonnum of our age. Ay, there's the rub: for in that search of Self what woes may come.

I don’t think the platitudinous advice to “be yourself” is wrong. I’ll even go so far as to affirm, with many a caveat to come, that “being yourself” is the supreme means in human life, in sincere contrast to my ironic use of Latin above. But we must ask why the advice is now a platitude and why it rings hollow and offers no real path toward the end it prescribes. I’ll attempt to address this problem presently and see what sense we can make of the idea for our lives. For I do think that the only real way to any human growth is through “authenticity”. And so, we land upon our word for this piece.

We can define it very simply at the outset by looking at its Greek root words, αυτός (autos) and ἕντης (hentes), meaning respectively “self” and “doing or being”. Now if we jam them together, drop a sigma and add a theta, we get the noun αὐθέντης (authéntēs), which has a range of meanings way too big to get into here, but is basically something like “one who acts or is, in his own power”. Toss in an -ῐκός for good measure (really to make an adjective) and we get αὐθεντῐκός (authentikós), which is more or less the same word as the English “authentic”. Of course from here we derive “authenticity” as the noun, which is more of a reified version of the adjective than a designation of a person. As far as I know, we have no English word corresponding to the Greek noun αὐθέντης (authéntēs).

But in sum, the word almost literally means “be yourself”. Actually doing this of course requires some thought on what the hell that even means.

About Which We Would Do Well to Discard

Let’s start by dismantling what I think is the common understanding of authenticity these days. Or if not the understanding or stated goal exactly, the song and dance that seems invariably to play out in pursuit of it. 

I’m not certain of the genesis point for what I view to be the contemporary interpretation of “authenticity” but it’s easy enough to flesh out what it is. The salient feature is that authenticity, i.e. “being yourself” is seen as a means to a questionable end. That end is typically praise or money or validation or anything in that galaxy of concepts that implies the approval of others. So here is the supreme irony that is hinted at by that dubious Krishnamurti quote in our epigraph. In order to be what is uniformly considered good (yourself), you have to alter that self to conform to a social standard of what is “authentic”. In other words, what should be a release from pretense becomes a stylized and performative version of what is agreed to be “authenticity”. Let me give a more down to earth hypothetical example of what I mean.

Let’s say, for reasons that can only be presumed to be total derangement, you want to build a following on a social media platform. We are now told that people can sniff out when someone is being “fake” and so what will really garner the attention of others is “authenticity”. And so in one of the many cruel mockeries of modernity, you adopt the appearance of authenticity in order to gain approval. This leads almost unvaryingly to what I’ll call “performative vulnerability”. We all know that we’re somehow broken and deficient in any number of ways and so the way to be ostensibly “authentic” is to proclaim your brokenness from the rooftops. I have this or that mental disorder, I am in therapy and so should you be, I have anxiety, I am socially awkward, I am just like you, really. Well, are you any of those things? I submit that if you really are, there is no shame in quietly and humbly admitting them. That is in reality what being authentic is, and we’ll get there shortly. The problem I see is that these obvious flaws are transmuted into pseudo-virtues for external validation. And thus you’ve left behind humility. I’ve said elsewhere that humility is simply accurate appraisal of what you are, nothing added, nothing removed. But in exaggerating by over-focus these potentially very real issues, we leave humility behind and paradoxically exalt our weaknesses in a way that makes them seem positive. And they are not. The list of conditions I gave are not good things. They may be real things worthy of compassion and support of community, but we must take utmost caution in not making them something they are not. And by extension making ourselves something we are not, further making us something decidedly inauthentic. In pursuing this false authenticity, we pervert the very thing we proclaim to be searching for into a house of cards of fakery. This path leads not to anything restorative but instead to a heightened state of dysfunction that makes us into a trembling mess of disorders.

So I announce to all “what I am” in a way that is not me, and precipitate the process that makes me into the thing that I perform. I become the bad thing in total which I have presumed to admit in humility as only a part of myself. And then we all get caught up in this game of “I’m more real and honest than you are”, all the while being neither of those things. If I don’t have more weaknesses than you, I will invent them for profit. And so under the banner of authenticity I become thoroughly fraudulent.

In short, “performative vulnerability” does a violence to the good things which also constitute your Self by the misguided pursuit of the very validation that inevitably follows from legitimate humility and honesty with people you trust. This is why I think true vulnerability and authenticity are only available to us in close relationship with those we trust and who love us as we are. The very nature of a large viewership destroys the hope of true authenticity. You simply cannot be who you really are to everyone at all times. Nor are you meant to. Social media, as a proxy for celebrity, forbids genuine interaction. We must invariably don a mask to enter that arena. That is fine, I say. But let’s not call it something it is not. If the pursuit of unaffected authenticity is a worthy goal, we must begin by seeing reality as it is, not attempt to manipulate it for gain.

In a phrase: You cannot try to be yourself. And if you do, in order to profit, you’ll become something else entirely. At the risk of being a bit overdramatic, the process I’ve described above is utterly dehumanizing. 

Getting Real

So what is the point of authenticity? Why do I think it is important, if seen for what it really is? The simple answer is that authenticity properly construed is essentially synonymous with the definition of humility that I’ve given above and elsewhere. And as such, I think it is the only ground for real spiritual development. To use the language of AA, step one is admitting you have a problem. The end here is radically different from profit or validation. For lack of more precise terms, the end of true authenticity is the growth in goodness of your soul. And if other people admire this and you are materially or socially rewarded in some way, that is entirely a byproduct of the pursuit and cannot by definition be the goal. As detailed above, the wrong end precludes “authentic authenticity”, if you’ll permit me a slightly silly designation.

What makes a character in a novel feel “authentic” to us? I say it is exactly that mix of good and bad qualities I’ve alluded to already. Why is that? Because it reflects our true state as human beings. The point is not the precise mixture of laudable or shameful qualities but simply the presence of dichotomy. For myself, I am sometimes honest, sometimes cunning; sometimes loving, sometimes cruel; sometimes compassionate, sometimes cold; sometimes hopeful, sometimes despairing. In a word, imperfect. We all are. The very nature of being human is imperfection. And yet there is a beauty in this. To get your head around why that is, is perhaps an impossibility. For my Christian readers, consider “for while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”. I don’t know why. Not for any reason of our commendation to Him. But there is something of that merciful love of God that shines through in our appraisal of an authentic character or person. We see that this mixture is the real state of us all and we resonate with it deep in our being. We see then that others really are just like us. In their nature, not because they have put on some façade for the social environment. And when the mask comes off, if we are honest about what we are, we are able to love others without condemnation, knowing that perhaps if things were different, we could be as they are. Confronting an authentic person leaves us in a position where we cannot pretend anymore. The lie we tend to build up for approval is exposed by a person being who they truly are, for good or bad.

This and the preceding section are distilled powerfully in the Camus quotation at the start of this exploration. The performative version of authenticity is precisely seeming. The degree of consciousness of this fact is polluted almost linearly with how far you pursue it. I can pretend long enough that I completely and, God forbid, perhaps permanently lose sight of what I really am. Seeming prevents being.

A Confession; and Also Confessing as Practice

Lest you think I am proposing resigning ourselves to a permanent mixture of good and evil, I want to state categorically that I believe in the progressive perfection (which is to say being what we are meant to be) of the human being. As a believer in Jesus, I think this is an inevitability for those that would follow him. But I also think that moral progress is a possibility for all people. That might catch me some flak from certain corners of the believing community. But I will also categorically state that outside the Faith, I think we’re talking about something qualitatively different. However, I think it flies in the face of simple observation to say that people can’t do good things or improve without being Christians. I don’t think we can be perfected without God, but we can all get better. Now, I will refrain from a long theological digression in order to get down to some practicalities that I believe apply to all people, what in my circles is called common grace.

Having just told you that I am about to diverge from theology, I may be indulging that cunning of mine I mentioned a few paragraphs above. I want what I’m about to say to be read first psychologically and allegorically. And then, after, for those reading who are Christians, literally.

In Christianity we have a practice called confession. I fear that in the popular mind this practice is sorely misunderstood. It has grown strange by an accretion of centuries of human oddity and doctrinal debate and just plain error. I want to give you a bonus simple word study in defense of the thing. In the New Testament, the word commonly rendered “confess” is ὁμολογέω (homologeo). You might recognize the words in Greek that make up this compound word. “Homo” means “same” and “logos”, while a good Greek dictionary will have pages of definitions, means something like speech or discourse. It’s the same word translated “Word” in John’s gospel but has a rich and long history in all the Greek dialects that dealt in philosophy. So, a more or less literal translation of ὁμολογέω is “saying the same thing”, i.e. agreement or repeating back. In Christian confession, you are “telling it like it is” to God without any evasion. This is the same thing we do when we confess something to another person. You’re just admitting what the real situation is, without guile or pretense. Why does this have a curative function in our lives? I suggest, in human terms, for the same reason I detailed that a character in a novel feels “real”. We are simply telling the truth. Confession is usually admitting wrongdoing of course, and this is merely what I said about AA’s Step One. Confession makes for growth because it admits that we have problems without trying to dodge them or seem to be something we are not. And growth can only happen in fertile soil of reality. To mix metaphors, we cannot build anything sturdy on a foundation that is hollow.

How to Become What You Are

There is something in us which is profoundly good. Man was not created a bad thing. We became that through our decisions and by living in a corrupted world. But I think again that simple observation of a child, for instance, will show you plainly the mixture of good and evil in a person. I’ll reproduce here the Solzhenitsyn quote from the epigraph:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.”

What I’m attempting to get at from various angles is that we can’t make a choice for the good parts if we don’t acknowledge the evil ones. On the flip side, we can’t pursue the genuinely good things if we turn the bad ones into fake “goods” by performative “authenticity”. The good can only be grown in the soil of confessed reality as we make moment to moment decisions to act out the next Right thing.

So my ultimate contention is this:

Real authenticity is the forthright admission of the real state of ourselves, which will help us to see the true soil in which we can cultivate the seeds of goodness in us. And as that seed matures through continual choice for truth, the goodness we find fully grown will be a real tree. We won’t need to make-believe. Instead of something artificial or pretended for the eyes of others, we will find a progressive attainment of a state of being that really is True, Good, and Beautiful - the whole process being one that is authentic in its truest sense.

We will “be ourselves” our whole life through, yet different and better throughout each stage of growth.