On Authenticity.

On Authenticity.

 

Just as, as Heidegger pointed out, one cannot have Truth without Untruth, Unconcealment without Concealment, or Rightness without Error, so it is and so it follows that one cannot have Authenticity without Fakeness. Any artistic act requires for it to be Art Contrivance (though not in the negative sense I had used that word previously). Any Act requires the filling of a Role, as does any game. If one is intent upon becoming a fixed entity, one will obsess over authenticity. One will ask one’s self, needlessly, “Am I REALLY being Real with my friends and family? With my world and with myself?” Yet the Absurdist will not bother to answer that question. One’s self is not a set of rigid values to be imposed upon others and to make others uncomfortable. Authenticity is not a noun but a verb: BEING authentic is the act of standing up for a value that is however ARTIFICIALLY chosen. Artifice is sometimes described as “that which is man-made”. So it is that all human action is “fake”, unless it is fanatical or nihilistic. How is one to retain the fluidity and playfulness of a child if one is fixed in place, unable to role-play and to experiment frivolously and spontaneously, without prior meditation, with the corcnucopia of personalities that are probably latent within one’s self? If Camus was right, and if Hope is illusory and Meaning unnecessary because the human condition is Absurd, then Authenticity must never be a solemn conviction except when it is in dynamic interdependence with Artifice. The mystery of one’s self can only be explored if one sheds the notion that the Self has been found; most often, what one clings to as the Self in such a crippling circumstance is no other, at root, than one of the earliest conditioned egos. One’s true Nature may never be permanently unveiled.

 

Dm.A.A.