Is Authenticity Impossible?

Why it’s necessary to reconcile freedom and faith

In 2016, the American musician and songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. While he ultimately accepted the honor, for the first two weeks after its announcement he remained silent, prompting some to speculate whether he intended even to acknowledge it.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, poet Adam Kirsch suggested Dylan might decline the award for the same reason Jean-Paul Sartre did: as a way of refusing to go along with the idea that an elite academy of critics could define for readers and writers everywhere what Literature means. Sartre felt that to accept the honor under those circumstances would be an act of bad faith.

Bad faith… is the opposite of authenticity. Bad faith becomes possible because a human being cannot simply be what he or she is, in the way that an inkwell simply is an inkwell. Rather, because we are free, we must ‘make ourselves what we are.’ In a famous passage, Sartre uses as an example a cafe waiter who performs every part of his job a little too correctly, eagerly, unctuously. He is a waiter playing the role of waiter. But this ‘being what one is not’ is an abdication of freedom; it involves turning oneself into an object, a role, meant for other people. To remain free, to act in good faith, is to remain the undefined, free, protean creatures we actually are, even if this is an anxious way to live.

So Sartre thinks freedom requires the rejection of any and all labels. But is that even possible, or desirable? I’m not just talking about living without some kind of professional identity, though that’s hard enough. I can tell you from my own experience as a lawyer turned stay-at-home father that giving up a label associated with high social status, in favor of one that has yet to be widely accepted, is not easy on one’s psyche.

And my case isn’t nearly as rough as all those who’ve seen their livelihoods and cultures displaced by trade and globalization. I’m not sure you can remain professionally undefined and keep your mental (or physical) health in a culture that equates professional success with personal worth.

There’s an even bigger problem with Sartre’s idea of radical freedom: it ignores the fact that a human life is nothing but a jumble of random events unless it has some coherent narrative to thread them all together. When the psychologist William James talked about free will, he used the analogy of a string of pearls: our actions are the pearls, but our character is the string, and without character to make sense of our actions, the meaning of our life would fall apart.

The theologian Paul Tillich argued that none of us can help but be ultimately concerned with something. Maybe it’ll be something vulgar like money or fame. Maybe it’ll be something more lofty, like the pursuit of scientific or spiritual truth. But it’s impossible not to live for the sake of something.

For Tillich, and maybe for James if he had lived during the era of existentialism, it seems authenticity is found not in the renunciation of any and all roles, but in the devotion of oneself to a role that’s truly worth it. I would love to agree and just leave it there, but I don’t think human life is ever that simple.

The American artist Shepard Fairey created a work called “This is a Poster,” which features his trademark Andre the Giant image overlaid with text. The text is a commentary on the work itself, making the poster a kind of meta-art.

Its purpose is to illustrate the dilemma faced by the person who feels he must consume certain products in order to signal his sophistication to others, even though this means acting in conformity with marketing propaganda that undermines his sense of agency and therefore the very sophistication he thinks his purchase demonstrates.

You may think Fairey’s poster sophomoric — that was my first reaction — but I think you can glean from it a deeper point: we see ourselves and our lives in terms of many overarching values, and it may be impossible to act in furtherance of one of those values without compromising another. A genuine human life may require us to devote ourselves to multiple ultimate concerns, and it may be impossible to reconcile them all.

But reconcile them we must, or at least we must try. I don’t think we’ll ever completely succeed. Life isn’t like a movie or a novel where all the loose ends get tied up, where there’s a clear climax and denouement. But that was never the point, anyway. Instead, the point is to have integrity, so that our actions become evidence of our enduring character, instead of just random noise. That’s what it means to be free.