Episode 87 - Authenticity

Ellie: 0:17

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:20

The podcast where two sincere, authentic friends who are also real, genuine professors talk about philosophy and the everyday.

Ellie: 0:28

Yikes. I'm Ellie Anderson.

David: 0:32

And I'm David Peña Guzmán.

Ellie: 0:34

Perhaps the biggest compliment you can give a celebrity today is to say that they're authentic. And we live in this social media driven world where people constantly try and present a picture perfect view of their lives. You hear a lot about the curated dynamic of Instagram, which used to be the very fancy and nicely edited travel photos, but recently has become a weird dump of zoomed in photos of like a gas station. Regardless of the aesthetic changes that we have witnessed recently, a throughline underneath them is a craving for celebrities and lives that seem authentic to us. And in particular when it comes to celebrities, we're looking for people to seem real. So I read this article in preparation for the episode today called

Buying and Selling Authenticity: 1:20

A Decade of Reality TV, which was in the online magazine Dazed. And the author talks there about how reality TV especially promotes the value of authenticity. People like shows like Queer Eye, for example, because they feel so genuine. But it's also ironic because reality TV shows are heavily produced and often even scripted to a large degree. Plus, the person on TV is being filmed and we all act differently around cameras than we do when they're not around. So David, I'm curious what you think about this connection between reality TV and authenticity. The idea that reality TV peddles authenticity even as its reality, the reality of reality TV, is not an "authentic" one.

David: 2:07

Yeah, no, I think you're correct. And the author of this article is correct that we crave authenticity. It's something that's very appealing to us. It's something that draws us in, and maybe that's a critique of the extent to which we feel that we lack it in our everyday lives because here we are trying to find it in the domain of entertainment in reality television, but there does seem to be this tension between, on the one hand, this effort on the part of producers to create content that seems authentic, and on the other hand, the fact that most of us, I would say, can just sniff the veneer of inauthenticity in those shows, right? So most reality TV shows have something I would say that is fundamentally formulaic about them. And I'm not just talking about the scripted nature of the shows, I even mean the look of the environment, like the actual decor of the houses. Sometimes you get the feeling, this uncanny feeling that you've been there and you've seen it because it's the same house with the same. decorations, but just with a different cast that is constantly rotating. And beyond that, I think the formulaic-ness also appears in the proliferation of spinoffs. Whatever sells in reality TV gets reproduced ad infinitum, and what we get is an infinite reproduction of the same. How many versions of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, how many spinoffs do we need? Judging by the reality of reality TV, it seems like a ton.

Ellie: 3:46

Yeah, and as I do my research on Bachelor and Bachelorette. I watch every episode. So what happens in The Bachelor is that the initial episodes take place in a mansion, right? And it's always the same mansion, and it's decorated, I think more or less the same way. But there's a time at which The Bachelor or Bachelorette goes home to the final contestants' hometowns. It's called the Hometowns Week, and I was actually like having an argument with my mom about this recently because I had read that a lot of times when you go to the hometown dates, the homes of the final contestants are not actually their real houses. If the person lives in Dallas, for instance, the production team might actually rent a house in Dallas because it's gonna be better for filming than the family's actual home. So there's this veneer of authenticity oh, you're entering this family's home, but actually it might just be a staged home. And my mom refused to believe this. She was like no, look, you can see all, you can see their family photos and stuff. I was like, mom, I don't know what to tell you, but I did read that this is a thing. And so I think that also speaks to the fact that the veneer of authenticity works a lot of times for viewers. I wouldn't have known that it wasn't a real house unless I had read about it, right?

David: 5:00

No, I think you're right that it definitely works, which is why many of us consume reality television regularly. And I think in its inception in the 90s, reality television really was quite fascinating because it broke a number of rules about our relationship to entertainment. I'm thinking about shows like Big Brother, for example, where the general public suddenly got actively involved in the production of their own entertainment through voting. In its inception, there was a really interesting critique of our alienation from modes of cultural production that we consume. But now that it has become an empire and basically a new market, what we're seeing is the repetition of certain formulas that now fail to surprise us, and that now fail to act as critiques of the entertainment industry itself.

Ellie: 5:54

Yeah, and I think this way that we, as viewers at least, can simultaneously know in theory that something is not authentic, but still relate to it as though it were, right? Watching the hometown date episode of The Bachelor and being like, oh, she'd be a great fit with that family, or that dad was really mean. Like acting like what's happening is a genuine social interaction rather than this staged artificial spectacle that's not even happening at the person's house, I think for some reveals the insufficiency of a language of authenticity altogether. And so there's a book that has recently made waves by two philosophers called You and Your Profile that's about what they call profilicity? I've never said it out loud now that I'm realizing.

David: 6:44

How do you spell that?

Ellie: 6:45

Uh, like profile, but without the E, and then -icity at the end, profilicity. And their argument is that the very ideal of authenticity no longer holds water in our society because we actually just don't really care that much about authenticity anymore. However, what we're seeing through this Dazed article that I read and some of the other stuff that we're going to discuss today, David, arguably there is still an ideal of authenticity living in our society. So in this episode, we're going to be using that framework of like, how do we understand through the lens of authenticity, as well as our personal relations to ourselves. But I just want to note in passing at the beginning that there is an open question about whether this is even the right ideal to be thinking about in today's society. Today we're talking about authenticity.

David: 7:33

What does it mean to be yourself in world driven by social media and personal branding?

Ellie: 7:38

How does the concept of authenticity emerge in Romanticism and existential philosophy?

David: 7:43

And how does the value of authenticity today speak to the paradoxes of contemporary life? Authenticity is something that we crave so much so that it is now basically rammed down our throats as a commodity. In recent years, corporations have become obsessed with appearing authentic. Starbucks is a perfect example of this. When Starbucks first launched in Seattle, it became extremely popular because it staged a kind of theater or ritual around the act of having a cup of coffee. It centered on the character of the barista, who was usually a heavily tattooed, maybe mohawk wearing person behind the counter who would carefully craft each cup of coffee and then call customers by their name, establishing a personal relationship to them. And through this theatrical performance of having a cup of coffee, quote unquote, the old way, the Starbucks coffee house became a gathering place for the modern age. Starbucks has been able to grow worldwide and has become established precisely because what it sold was authenticity.

Ellie: 8:58

Which is hilarious, because nowadays, Starbucks feels like the least authentic brand ever. But after this initial huge success of Starbucks, other corporations hopped on the bandwagon and became more focused in the 2000s on authenticity through generating experiences. I'm talking broadly about the 21st century so far, not like literally the 2000s as a decade, because it's, it is this broader trend over the past couple of decades. For instance, Legoland is a far better advertisement for Lego than a bunch of billboards or targeted ads for the company. You want that feeling that there's a curation of experience for you. Or I hear sometimes from my friends who work in marketing about activations, which like, as far as I can tell, I think are events that are brand oriented, right? And even more recently, the best advertisement has become the influencer marketing campaign and influencer playing with Legos is the most authentic advertisement of all.

David: 9:55

Yeah, and it also brings to mind something like Disneyland which sells a very particular kind of fantastical experience that you can only get at Disneyland itself.

Ellie: 10:04

Yeah, and Disneyland has pre existed this trend because it opened in the 1950s. My mom is from that area, so she was an OG Disneyland goer, but certainly Disney has capitalized...

David: 10:16

OG authentic searcher.

Ellie: 10:18

Yeah, but now you have the Disney bounders and all of these people who have made Disney into a lifestyle, and I think that is more recent, and it does have to do with the rise in this authenticity marketing that's oriented around events and even identity, right? You're the kind of person who goes to Disneyland all the time.

David: 10:36

And it is ubiquitous. In his book, The Critique of Authenticity, the philosopher Alessandro Ferrara argues that especially in the last 40 years or so, the concept of authenticity, which previously was only of interest basically to philosophers and maybe to some social critics, climbed

Ellie: 10:54

Okay, I don't know about that. But anyway!

David: 10:57

Like in general, like people, now we talk about authenticity in a way that maybe we didn't in the past, at least outside of academic circles, arguably, at least this is his claim. But he argues that the concept in the last 40 years climbed to unprecedented popularity, especially in the economic sphere that we're discussing. And by now, if you are a corporation, we can even tell you exactly what you have to do step by step if you want to give off a vibe of authenticity to your customers. And so I want to read a quote from Ferrara's book where he talks about these steps. He says, first, try to make your commercial offer look sincere by way of appearing above commercial considerations. Instill brand cult in your company's staff. Make a public show of interest in the community or communities within which your firm operates. Create the impression of dedication to, and pleasure taking in, the production of what is being marketed. Try to appear amateurish and artisanal. And try to look as someone sticking to his roots.

Ellie: 12:13

David, as you read this, like a lot of the brands that I stan are instantly coming to mind. Because as Overthink listeners may know, I've had a journey, for instance, with cottagecore, where I was first super critical of the rise of the cottagecore trend. And then I just hopped on the bandwagon. And I'm thinking about certain cottagecore brands that really provide that veneer of sincerity or authenticity or kind of like this grassroots connection to the people who wear their stuff. This emphasis on appearing amateur and artisanal is spot on.

David: 12:51

Yeah, and the thing is that it's not even just corporations anymore. Even countries, nation states are getting in on the act. And Ferrara talks about this new phenomenon that's called nation branding, which is where national governments will dedicate a budget to market themselves to tourists as destinations for encounters with an authentic national culture.

Ellie: 13:18

No, are you serious? Is this why Iceland became so hot about 10 years ago? Was that the national government or was it just Iceland Air? Remember when everybody was like, you gotta go to Iceland and go to the spas or whatever, the hot springs.

David: 13:34

Yeah, the hot springs, yeah, I definitely drank that Kool Aid and went to the hot springs in Iceland. Yes, I did. But the example that Ferrara gives, I think is really good. And he talks about Venice. Because in the eyes of a lot of potential travelers to Italy, Venice is so Italian. It's like the Italian town, with the canals and the architecture and the small size of the buildings, etc. And yet, if you actually go to Venice, what you encounter is a 200 to 1 visitor to local ratio. For every one person that lives there, there are 200 visitors, which means that if you go to Venice hoping to encounter Italianness, that's the last thing that you're actually gonna get. What you're gonna get is people looking for Italianness, so it's yet another ritual performance, like the Starbucks cup of coffee.

Ellie: 14:35

That might be an even worse ratio than on Hollywood Boulevard, which is really saying a lot. And this is something that, does happen in LA a lot in some of these really high tourist areas. But as we've actually discussed on our Kitsch episode, I'm not even sure that we can say that L. A. has any authenticity to it to begin with. Part of what I love about it is its superficiality. So here it's almost as if people come to L. A. wanting something that is a contradiction in terms. An authentic experience of Hollywood inauthenticity.

David: 15:06

I want to stay with that notion of contradiction for a hot second, because Ferrara's point is that in the wake of the appropriation of authenticity by capitalism, the concept of authenticity has become paradoxical. And he says that it's paradoxical because the more that corporations try really hard to be authentic, the more they start reeking of inauthenticity. And the less that we believe in their claims to be authentic, and beyond that, in the very possibility of authenticity itself more generally. And the problem is, and here is the heart of the paradox for Ferrera, that when we critique these corporations for being inauthentic in their efforts to seem authentic, what we're doing is that we're still presupposing the concept of authenticity in our very critique of those corporations. We're still assuming that there is such a thing as, let's say, authentic authenticity. And that the problem is simply that corporations are falling short of that standard.

Ellie: 16:14

We do love a paradox, add Overthink. But this idea that authenticity plays a larger role than we realize is there in the work of Charles Taylor, whose work Ferrara must be familiar with.

David: 16:26

Well, Yeah, he does mention Taylor by name in his book.

Ellie: 16:30

Oh great, because Charles Taylor has this 1991 book called The Ethics of Authenticity, which I think has been pretty influential, where he suggests that the ideal of authenticity motivates much of contemporary life as an underlying force. You often hear that our society is narcissistic or self centered, and even though we might associate this with the social media age, this is something that people have been saying since at least the 70s, that, oh, American culture is so narcissistic, so selfish. And also coupled with this is often the idea that our morality nowadays is all just selfish or about vibes. It relates to some of the stuff we talked about in the lived experience episode. And according to this view of the narcissistic society that we live in, we've fallen into a moral relativism that is, dangerously selfish. But Taylor's argument in The Ethics of Authenticity is that this is not quite what's going on. It's not accurate to describe our society as narcissistic. Instead, our society is organized around an ideal of authenticity that it never successfully lives up to. And so that's this idea, that's where this idea of the paradox might emerge.

David: 17:40

I see. And what is that ideal of authenticity for Taylor?

Ellie: 17:45

So it has three components for him. The first is about creation. He says that authenticity is about creating your world and yourself, and often even creating artworks. So this ideal of creation and authenticity emerges in the movement of Romanticism a couple of centuries ago. There's a big focus in Romanticism on aesthetic self expression. Or the idea of a lone, eccentric genius who's living his life, his usually, as a work of art, like a hero of Goethe or Hölderlin, perhaps. And this connects to a second component of authenticity, which is originality. To be authentic, Taylor suggests, is to be unique, unlike anyone else. And you can hear this in the injunction to be yourself, where being yourself is being different from everybody else. The romantic ideal of authenticity is. It's all about being true to who you are and connecting with your deep desires. Desires that are truly, authentically, and immediately yours, rather than being formed by society. So that also has to do with the romantic concern that the way that we socialize people and educate people tends to remove them from inauthenticity.

David: 19:01

Yeah. And I assume that the creativity point and then the aesthetic or the originality point are actually deeply connected because the way in which you express your originality is precisely by this aesthetic mode of creation. And so we've got creation and we got originality, but you said that there were three components of authenticity for Taylor. So what's the third one here?

Ellie: 19:26

The third is opposition to the rules of society.

David: 19:29

Ooh, I like it.

Ellie: 19:31

basically a form of rebellion against the status quo, right? And I think that's what leads him to say that our society is not narcissistic because there is this dimension of rebelling against what you perceive to be the conditions of your society and that's more complex than just like you doing you. And so he notes that, sure, rebelling against society can be anathema to what we recognize as morality. And this is sometimes what gets construed as narcissism or moral relativism. But he suggests that doesn't necessarily follow. He says we can oppose the status quo without devolving into a morality that's just about personal vibes. And the key here for Taylor is that we create and craft ourselves only ever in dialogue with others and with shared horizons of significance. So authenticity, even though it can appear to be at odds with morality, actually really depends on our relations to others, including norms of our society. And if we're rebelling against norms of our society, then presumably we're doing so in favor of other norms.

David: 20:34

Is authenticity primarily about ourselves, or is it primarily about our relationship with others?

Ellie: 20:41

What do you mean?

David: 20:43

The reason I say this is because the scholar Lionel Trilling wrote a book called Sincerity and Authenticity, in which he argues that what differentiates authenticity from sincerity, so they're different for him, is that authenticity is primarily about It is about me being who I am, and therefore it is a kind of self relation in which other people and their perception of me does not play a particularly important role. On the other hand, sincerity for Trilling is more relational. It has that communal dimension that you're talking about because Sincerity is when I try to convince others that I truly am who I have told them that I am. And so for him, this means that authenticity is something that we pursue because it is a good in itself. It is an intrinsic good. Whereas sincerity It's really good for the sake of something external to it. And what sincerity gives us, because it is more relational, is that it gives us a certain kind of social recognition. We get others to recognize us as we want to be recognized.

Ellie: 22:05

I haven't read Trilling's book on this, but I have read summaries of it in other texts, and one of the things that he says about the move from sincerity to authenticity, as I understand it, is that society was dominated by an ideal of sincerity when we lived in smaller groups that had really strong familial kinship and social bonds, right? And authenticity, by contrast, emerges once we get to a period in which we're seeing more class mobility, less of a determination of people's identities based on their outward, their gender, their community that they live in, their family, their class status, etc. And so authenticity has to do with our choosing what, who, and how to be, which would make it more about a self relation than a relation to others.

David: 22:54

Yeah, no, that's right. And it means that the gaze of other people for him is essential for us to say that we have succeeded at being sincere, but the gaze of other people and their agreement with us is not essential for us to succeed in being authentic. Because again, authenticity is something that we do for ourselves. And to be honest, I don't quite buy his argument that authenticity is just me in this self relation in which other people are secondary. I think authenticity is fundamentally relational by nature because I never worry. about whether or not I'm being truly authentically me when I am alone, right? I only ever worry about that when I am in the presence of others or when my image is up for grabs and I can't control it. So it's very similar actually to nakedness and shame. I'm never ashamed of my nakedness when I am alone and in my room, it's very different when other people are around.

Ellie: 23:57

Yeah. So does this mean that you would say you buy the ideal of authenticity, but you would want to see it as a social relation rather than as a self relation?

David: 24:08

I'm not quite ready to say that actually, because there are a lot of other critiques of the concept of authenticity, especially critiques by postmodern philosophers, that I actually find quite compelling. For instance, one common postmodernist critique of authenticity, which grows out of the work of people like Nietzsche and Freud is that in order for authenticity to make sense as a concept, there has to be a core self that somehow exists beneath or behind all the layers of inauthenticity. And that can break through those layers. But I just don't really believe that this core self exists in that way. I don't think that we're unified selves. I see subjectivity as fundamentally fractured as having opaque areas that are not accessible to the subject, so on and so forth. And so, how could we ever say in light of Nietzschean genealogy in the wake of Freudian psychoanalysis, how could we ever say for sure, I am being 100% authentic right now? What does that speech act even mean? I'm not sure that I know.

Ellie: 25:23

We wouldn't be able to say, I'm 100% authentic. We would have to say I'm authentic or not authentic, but not in a way that is, you know, admitting of a certain degree. And I think this shows that the way we talk about authenticity tends to be in terms of pure or impure. And this is a very limited way of thinking about the self. David, you said you don't believe in a concept of a core self in this way, but you meant you don't believe in a core self. You added a qualifier there that I don't think you intended.

David: 25:54

No, yeah, there, there is a qualifier. I do believe that there is a kind of minimal self, and I draw that from phenomenology. So I'm not opposed. That's why I'm not a postmodernist, because I do believe that there is a layer of experience that is fundamental, but I don't think that it has enough content for us to claim that we are being authentic or not at any particular moment in our lives.

Ellie: 26:18

Okay. I'm going to hold my tongue because I'm writing a book on this topic right now and I have thoughts, but we need to talk about the existential concept of authenticity. We've seen that authenticity becomes an important ideal in Romanticism and continues to the present day. And in this tradition, there's an ideal of being yourself free from the shackles of society and the expectations of other people. But David, you also mentioned that from the perspective of Nietzsche and Freud, as well as those who follow them, this is a problem because there is no core self that is transparent to itself, that has these inner desires that are free from socialization in a given culture. For these reasons, a lot of people have dismissed the ideal of authenticity today. I would say, at least within academic philosophy, in the continental tradition, authenticity, not a hot topic. Not popular. Everybody takes for granted that authenticity is like a bad thing. But, there's an alternative concept of authenticity that emerges out of existentialism. And I, for one, don't think it has the same problems as the standard romantic notion of authenticity. The reason I wanted to do this episode is because I wanted to talk about this.

David: 27:48

I hope you listeners are ready for us to drop some serious Heidegger on you

Ellie: 27:54

Indeed, one of the most influential concepts that comes from Heiddeger is his concept of authenticity, which is developed most in Being and Time. For Heiddeger, people go wrong when they think that authenticity is the same as genuineness. So far in the episode, David, you and I have been using authentic as a synonym with genuine or real and inauthentic as a synonym with fake or artificial. But as we've seen, this kind of opens up the problem of what is a real or genuine self. Heidegger, as an existentialist, denies that there is a real or core self that we have to get in touch with or discover behind the confines of society. So the idea that you could be yourself in some genuine way is an illusion, as is the idea that being inauthentic would mean being fake. So the starting point for this concept, which is why I think it's so promising, is that being authentic versus being inauthentic just is not the same as being real or fake.

David: 28:53

And this is quite different from the mainstream idea of authenticity that we usually work with. But, somebody could argue that authenticity is a synonym for genuine, though. For example, we could talk about an authentic Picasso versus a fake one. And how is Heidegger's conception not that?

Ellie: 29:15

Yeah, is it just a semantic splitting of hairs or like a technical definition that doesn't track our everyday use of it? It's true that in everyday discourse, genuine and authentic are used as synonyms, but it's really crucial to think about the German word that Heidegger is using here. And I have to apologize because this actually is not the first time I've done this on Overthink.

David: 29:34

And it won't be the last.

Ellie: 29:36

It may not be the last. I have indeed talked about the German word for authenticity in a shortened form in the Living Your Truth episode. So if you like this episode, go back and check that one out. And if you've already listened to it, then here's a quick refresher, but we're going to go deeper on it this time. In German, Authenticity is Eigentlichkeit. And my dad actually scolded me after our Living Your Truth episode for mispronouncing it. He said that I was pronouncing it in the low German way'cause I said Eigentlishkeit. he was like, no the proper Frankfurt pronunciation, 'cause he used to live in Frankfurt, is Eigentlichkeit, or at least that's like the closest that I as a non-German speaker will get. But one way that you can translate Eigentlichkeit is as actuality. Eigentlich means actual. And it certainly can refer then to something being genuine versus being fake, but Heidegger wants to play with the term Eigen, so the beginning of that term, which means own, as in something being one's own versus being someone else's. We might think about it in terms of what is proper to you? And authenticity for Heidegger means freely taking up one's own relation to oneself and world, including and especially embracing our finitude. Facing down our own deaths is crucial for authenticity.

David: 30:55

Well, you said that this would be very different than the traditional way of thinking about authenticity, but this sounds like Charles Taylor's definition of authenticity as creation and originality. No?

Ellie: 31:08

This is where it gets interesting. It seems so at first glance. But, recall that Heidegger doesn't think there is any core self. He also doesn't think that there is any pure state out of society that we could ever get back to. So authenticity is never going to be about a romantic ideal of a return to pure passion or desire that is uncontaminated by our upbringing. Instead, authenticity is first and foremost a transformation of how we understand ourselves and understand our relation to our world. It's understanding that we are not determined by our circumstances, but rather transcend them. This doesn't mean going out and quitting your job and moving to the forest, it can actually just mean understanding that you are freely willing to go to your job, and that this choice isn't inherently determined by anything outside of you. In fact, it's not determined by anything, because there is no core self.

David: 32:04

Yeah, one way that I think about this is in terms of owning up to your responsibility for your own life. It's a way of not blaming other people or circumstances for your actions. But this doesn't mean, again, that you can do whatever you want to do in life. It's rather that you can choose how you will respond to the circumstances in which you will find yourself. As Heidegger says, it's about how you play the hand of cards that you've been dealt. And so you have an open future. It is just up to you to decide how you're going to react to it.

Ellie: 32:41

And you can see that this notion doesn't need to be tied to any idea of a true self that is being expressed through actions. The scholar Taylor Carman writes that authenticity for Heidegger isn't about an ideal of wholeness or integration. And this is what makes it different from that romantic notion that I think Taylor is picking up on. Or, we might say more recently, the ideal of authenticity in psychotherapy, where it is tied to this goal of integration. Instead, for Heidegger, authenticity is about what he calls Anticipatory resoluteness. I'm sorry for the jargon here, it's Heidegger after all, but I can explain what he means by this.

David: 33:20

Please, we can all use a refresher on this. At least for me, it's been a while since I've read Heidegger.

Ellie: 33:26

Okay, so understanding anticipatory resoluteness begins with understanding that in our everyday lives we're immersed in activities. We're not usually going about our days on some meta level of reflection. When I'm running errands, I don't constantly have some inner self consciousness that explicitly realizes I'm running errands. I'm just doing my thing. Oh, I need to pick up dish soap. But occasionally, something will launch us out of this immersion and cause us to jump up a level and ask, what am I doing and why am I doing this? And I might realize then that I haven't been present for hours or even years. When I have this realization, There's a sense of vertigo, of total disorientation, of even standing at a remove from my life, which is the famous existential anxiety.

David: 34:14

Yeah. And check out our episode on existential anxiety, if you haven't already, because it's one of our earliest ones.

Ellie: 34:21

Yeah, we get into it more there. And when we feel this anxiety, we come face to face with our own nothingness, with the fact that there is no core self underlying all our experiences, rather our existence is groundless. And what's more, we're all going to die. My existence is finite, and I can flee from this realization and back into everyday comfort. So once I face this groundlessness and finitude of my existence, I can be like, nope, too scary, not for me, and then go back and, jump in the pool. Or get back to shopping for my dish soap. But there is a second option, which is to face this condition boldly and embrace it. That second option is anticipatory resoluteness. Anticipatory resoluteness doesn't mean that we think we're above our situation. It doesn't mean that we remain on that plane of self consciousness, of what am I doing and why am I doing it, that feeling of anxiety, but rather to recognize that we actively have to take up our situation in order to exist in the world. I actually think it's a beautiful way of recognizing your own vulnerability. More or less, authenticity is living in such a way that you understand your own fragility and act freely in the face of it.

David: 35:37

Look at you, Heidegger fanboy, which is not a popular thing to be these days.

Ellie: 35:42

I know, many people have cancelled Heidegger because he was a literal Nazi, but I think this idea, for me, is too philosophically rich to give up. Also, Overthinkers know I tend toward more of a separate the work from the creator view than you do, David. So I could talk more about that, but I will just say for now that I really like this idea of anticipatory resoluteness, and I don't think that it has necessarily Nazi undertones.

David: 36:08

Well, I disagree. I actually think that it does. And I'm not a fan of Heidegger's notion of authenticity, not necessarily because I think it's covertly Nazi, although I do think it has some tones and we can talk about that. One issue that I have with the Heideggerian notion of authenticity is that it relies on a notion of resoluteness that just doesn't jive with me very well. And the reason for this is because for Heidegger, resoluteness, as you point out, really is resoluteness in the face of our own mortality. The authentic individual is basically a lonely character who is just staring at finitude in the face. But in being in time, because this is the conception of resoluteness, there is no role for other people to play. There is no social dimension. And this is why a lot of people have said that there simply is no ethics in Being and Time.

Ellie: 37:11

Yeah, I really disagree with that interpretation. I think that there is something so right about the fact that no one can face your mortality besides you. I'm not going to die your death. But this doesn't mean there's no ethics. It's just that authenticity is first and foremost a self relation, not a relation to others.

David: 37:31

Yeah, but the connection to ethics here is that it's clear that for Heidegger, authenticity and resoluteness are philosophical objectives. They are a goal to which we should aspire. And in order for me to achieve that goal that is central to his existentialist philosophy, I don't need other people at all, and in fact, there is virtually nothing in Heidegger's writings about me even caring for the mortality of other people. I just care about my own finitude, about my own death, and even if it's true that nobody else can literally die for me, the absence of care for the mortality of others really troubles me. And that's for me what marks the absence of ethics in his work.

Ellie: 38:18

I think that's a common reading of Heidegger, but one that I think is quite unsubstantiated. I think there's a really big concern in Being and Time for the mortality of others. I've actually presented on this before about ethics of mourning that I think we can draw out of Heidegger. But I think the point still stands, which is that fundamentally what individualizes me is my relation to my own death. That's what nobody else can experience for me. And that's not unrelated to ethical engagements with others, but in a sense it's underlying them.

David: 38:57

Well, We are on different pages on reading Heidegger on this point, because I do worry about how the notion of my relationship to death being exclusively individual is already the wrong way to frame the question of finitude. But even beyond that, Heidegger does turn the community and the social into the enemy of Dasein who is in search for authenticity. And this has to do with the fact that being authentic, again, is just me having this weird face off with my own finitude by myself, completely alone. And if anything, other people are the obstacle that I have to overcome in order to come to resoluteness because he's very clear in being in time that the they, or as he says in German, das man, are the ones who get in the way of me being resolute. If I, as an individual, listen to what they want, to what they say, I jeopardize my eigentlichkeit. And it seems as if, in order to be resolute, Within the parameters of Heidegger's philosophy, I actually need to separate myself from others. And if I am not resolute, if I somehow fail in my quest for authenticity, there is a real danger that I then come to the conclusion that the reason I didn't do it is because other people got in the way. And so being in community with others, has a uniquely negative character in his work.

Ellie: 40:37

That depends on A I think a controversial reading of whether authenticity is "morally better" than inauthenticity, which Heidegger repeatedly says it's not, and B, this idea that to say that death individualizes us is to say that makes us into a solitary individual, and I'll just focus on that last point for a second. I think it's wrong to see this as a solitary individualism where our relation to death is separating us from others in the way that we might usually think about that. We have to keep in mind that there is no such thing we can identify as a self in Heidegger. So anytime we talk about individual, we have to be really careful not to assume some entity that is separate from others. In fact, he doesn't really talk about the individual. He talks about individualizing in a verb sense. Inauthenticity for Heidegger is our default condition. And then we can occasionally generate an authentic relation out of that. That authenticity is indeed something that no one can share with me, but I'm with him on that. I think no one can share our same perspective or die our deaths for us. But most of our lives are lived within community with others, and even inauthentically, and that doesn't have a negative connotation for him. In fact, authenticity doesn't have any content to it. This is, again, why it's importantly different from the romantic ideal of authenticity. That romantic ideal is about getting in contact with your secret hidden truths and desires. Whereas for Heidegger, authenticity is actually about realizing that you are and have nothing beyond your situation.

David: 42:14

But this is, for me, precisely why it is ethically empty, which is why I made the argument that it has, that there is no ethics in being in time, because there is no way to conceive positively of the role of the communal. And there is no way also of talking about better or worse ways of being resolute if there is no content to resoluteness itself and to authenticity. And all he says on that is that Dasein can find an authentic sense of community. in what he calls destiny or fate. But a number of people have pointed out, and I'm here thinking of the work of Thomas Claviez, his idea that we can find or forge community only through a shared destiny is actually quite scary because this is where we see, even in his early works, the Nazi inclinations of his thinking, especially when you read it in wake of the subsequent discourse in Germany about the fate of the German people, right? Like the destiny of the nation.

Ellie: 43:25

Okay, so that idea of the fate or destiny. I'm with you on having potential concerns with. I do think sometimes it gets strawmanned a bit, but I'm not trying to say I want to go with that here. But I don't think that's core to Heidegger's notion of authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness. The question of whether we can be communally authentic, I think, is a very different one and what that would mean. However, I will grant that even though I see Being and Time as actually being. pretty profoundly about our everyday interactions with other people in an ethical plane and like how we respond to those. There is an insufficient attention that's given to how those encounters shape us in Being and Time. So I can agree with you on that, and I also see that as one of the main interventions that the French existentialists, especially Simone de Beauvoir, is making. Where authenticity is tied to active taking up of the human condition, which we already see in Heidegger. But showing that depends on actively also recognizing the freedom of others. And I know we don't have time to really get into that here, but if you want to learn more about that, I know that Sky Cleary has a really exciting book recently out on Simone de Beauvoir called How to Be Authentic that addresses this.

Segment: 44:44

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David: 45:11

Ellie, I want to pitch to you an idea. about how I see authenticity working in the present moment, especially in connection to reality television and social media, but primarily reality television.

Ellie: 45:25

Okay. After our disagreement about readings of Heidegger, we've got an original theory. I love it.

David: 45:31

Yeah, definitely. From moments of deep discussion to a little bit of levity, although hopefully this is also a little deep. It seems to me that reality television has altered the meaning of authenticity. In fact, it's altered it in a radical way. Authenticity is nowadays no longer about the alignment of inner feeling with outer comportment as with the romantics. And it is not about resolutely facing our inevitable demise as in Heidegger. And it's not even about facing our radical freedom as in the case of Simone de Beauvoir. Rather, authenticity is now about exposing our deepest traumas for public entertainment. It's about essentially showing our wounds in public.

Ellie: 46:22

Woo! What makes you say this?

David: 46:24

I had this thought while watching the Spanish version of RuPaul's Drag Race that I got into recently. During season two.

Ellie: 46:31

That is so you. Like Spanish version of RuPaul's Drag Race. There is nothing more David than that.

David: 46:36

I know if they just added non human animals, it would be me embodied as a show.

Ellie: 46:41

They're all vegans and then it's your perfect show.

David: 46:43

But for people who don't know the structure of RuPaul's Drag Race is that there are all these. drag queens who compete and they do these little challenges. And then at the end of the show, they do a runway show where they wear their best drag, often, based on a theme that is given to them ahead of time. And along the course of each episode, they also have these like heart to heart moments where they talk with one another, they share their experiences as queer individuals, as drag queens, and they reflect on the politics of being queer today. So the show gives you, moments of playfulness and levity with the challenges and the fun and the outfits, but then it hits you in the gut with, these testimonials about, say, a homophobic bashing story or about being ostracized by one's own family.

Ellie: 47:39

It's like the paradigm of 2020s reality TV.

David: 47:43

Yeah, in many ways it is. And so it has this up and down and up and down emotional profile that feels like a roller coaster. And heads up, I'm about to talk about a sensitive subject, which is a violent death. So there is a contestant in the spanish version of RuPaul's Drag Race, who at one point in an episode, tells a really horrific story about how he lost his father. His father was burnt alive in a fire. It was an accident, but this 22 year old kid who is telling the story was probably in his mid teens at the time. And he watched it happen. And his father didn't die immediately. So this kid saw his father burn, and later got to see him one more time at the hospital with his charred skin right before he finally passed away. So we're talking about sharing a very intense trauma, the kind of trauma that molds you for the rest of your life. Now, RuPaul's Drag Race, as a show, implicitly encourages contestants to confront their traumas precisely as a way of being authentic, being their true selves, and finding some sense of closure through their queerness.

Ellie: 49:09

Okay, please don't tell me that this is going where I think it's going.

David: 49:13

So I think it is. So this young kid for his runway look wore an outfit that included fire in it so he walked around essentially reenacting the burning of his father symbolically through fire, and not just that, halfway into his runway look, he also did a reveal, which in drag lingo is when reveal that you have a second look underneath the first one and it's meant to be surprising. Yeah. And so initially he was wearing like a mask and then he took off the mask to do a reveal of a second look, which was him literally dressed as his charred dead father

Ellie: 50:05

Wait, what?

David: 50:06

He, I know it, it was really hard to watch, and he used makeup to make his face look burned with blood and skin falling.

Ellie: 50:17

Okay, David, enough detail,

David: 50:20

I know!

Ellie: 50:20

It's freaking me out.

David: 50:22

it was really difficult to watch in the moment.

Ellie: 50:25

This was on network television?

David: 50:27

Yeah, it was on network television. And the thing is that within the economy of RuPaul's Drag Race, contestants are often rewarded for this kind of self exposure for these public reenactments of trauma. And, as the audience, we are told that this is what makes contestants authentic, truthful, honest, sincere, and therefore likable. And at the end of the episode, the judges were basically eating up the look and talking about how great it was that he put himself out on the line so that we could see who he is, even as this kid, was literally crying while walking around the stage. What are your thoughts here

Ellie: 51:16

Wow. You've already gotten a few of them, based on my, noises. Yeah, this is horrifying to me. It's so sad, so dark. For this person obviously, I don't know his situation. I can't imagine being in it, and I don't know what would be the most, I don't know self loving and felicitous response to a particular situation. But I do find it hard to believe that reenacting his father's traumatic death on live television would be it. And I think at the same time, though, like what in these 1960s encounter groups is a therapist at the front of a room, it's a group therapy setting, and a bunch of people watching as this therapist just like breaks down the person in question and asks them to confront their earliest traumas. And that, there is a performance aspect to that, it actually is a performance. And so you add the cameras, but the central structure doesn't change. And I find that to be a pretty troubling. picture of authenticity, in part because we know that the nature of memory is that it's always taking shape and it's not just like getting in contact with a memory that's unchanged by your encounter with it.

David: 52:41

Yeah, and one of the central goals of a lot of strands of psychotherapy is to bring about a kind of psychic reunification of the subject with what somebody like Jung might call the shadow self like the everything that's repressed and traumatic and finding some way of folding that shadow self back into our conscious self. And the reason that I bring this story up is because what interests me. is the way in which authenticity is exploited in the context of reality television. And one really troubling consequence of this is that it sets a certain expectation for authenticity that is tied to the level of intensity of the trauma that people are willing to reveal. And what I mean by this is that sometimes when other contestants start talking about their backgrounds. If they don't share or don't have a particularly traumatic experience or a deep trauma in their background, I think audiences feel cheated out of this reenactment that we come to associate or equate with authenticity. And that's what really worries me about this.

Ellie: 53:54

Well And one consequence of this would be that people with more trauma would have the capacity to be more authentic than those who have less trauma, which is a very bizarre way of thinking.

David: 54:05

Yeah. Very bizarre. And all, aside from the literal measuring of trauma, then the assumption that those with less trauma are to be seen with greater suspicion because they are concealing something from us to which we, by virtue of being spectators, are entitled. And I think that's a kind of spectacular violence, let's see, the violence of the spectator that expects somebody on the stage or on the screen to bear out and expose the deepest wounds that mark their lives for the sake, not just of entertainment, but for the sake of being recognized by a public as authentic individuals.

Ellie: 54:47

Yeah, and I think beyond the lens of trauma that we're talking about, drag is a really interesting example in thinking about authenticity, because in drag we find a contemporary critique of authenticity and realness. There is a self conscious, in your face artificiality of it. So we, I'm using authenticity here in like the, romantic way, not in the Heideggerian way, where, drag is a postmodern play with appearances. I think we could say that the drag queen is the quintessential postmodern subject. Drag is a critique of the supposed naturalness of gender. I almost wonder whether you could see the contemporary backlash against drag, in Florida and Texas and stuff like that, or Drag reading sessions as being, like, A conservative backlash against postmodernism, honestly, but here we see, postmodernism is all about paradoxes and contradictions. And in drag culture, there's this emphasis on realness, on like somebody reading you for filth or somebody, which I know you've talked about in a previous episode, or somebody being real. Even as there's always a subversion of that, this recognition that realness is actually not a realness in the real sense.

David: 56:05

Well, yeah, that realness in the world of drag is not really real and that it's really all make believe fantasy or rather that what is real is just a fantasy that you choose to believe. So in drag culture, people often describe the looks that they put together as real X, Y, or Z. I'm giving you corporate CEO realness by wearing this outfit, with a suitcase and something ridiculous next to it, like a hat full of feathers. And it raises the question, what does it mean to be authentically anything, really? And from a direct perspective, to be really something, it's just to be perceived as such by other people. And sometimes not even by other people. It's just to be perceived as such by yourself through a willful assertion of a fantasy. Like I might not be seen as a real CEO by literally anybody, but I am living this fantasy for myself. without giving a shit about that public check on my make believe. But here I think I, I would want to draw a distinction between the concept of realness in drag culture, which is about playing with signifiers in this postmodern fashion, and authenticity in drag, which is queerness, and it's about being willing to enter into the sphere of playfulness in the first place. And so in drag culture, to be authentically you is to be willing to be a drag queen, to be queer, to bend the norms, to play. And so there is still a commitment to maybe that, let's say romantic conception, with a postmodern twist.

Ellie: 57:51

That's a great point.

David: 57:53

Thanks. And, if that's what authenticity would mean in the context of drag culture, then I would draw a further distinction between authenticity in drag, again, being willing to play with the meaning of established norms, and authenticity in reality television, which is about this self flagellation and this reopening of old wounds in order to be perceived as vulnerable. And that's why when you get a show like RuPaul's Drag Race that combines drag and reality television, you get both of those concepts of authenticity playing off against one another. You get the comedy of drag postmodernism, and then also those hard to stomach narratives of trauma on TV.

Ellie: 58:41

Obviously talking about the dark sides of our lives is important. There may be some utility to it in public spheres, but I do worry about this intense association of identity and an authentic expression of identity with trauma.

David: 58:59

And the expectation, which is a stronger term here, that in order to be seen as how you want to be seen, you have to bear out your darkest secrets.

Segment: 59:10

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