On authenticity

The only time I’m able to glimpse wisdom in myself is when I realize that I’m always liable to change my opinion on something I used to have a very strong opinion on. Time and again I remind myself that my opinions change based on my perspective and that my perspective changes based on whatever series of chance occurrences happen to instigate said change. I am sure this has been the cause of some frustration to the people around me. I used to be frustrated by it too. For the longest time I would forcefully hold on to my positions, all the while disregarding everything in my experience that urged me to release them. To change a strongly held belief would be to betray myself, to be fake. In philosophical terms, to be inauthentic. I used to think about authenticity a lot. When I was an adolescent, the concept resonated strongly with me. I thought I knew what my professors said that existentialists meant when they spoke of authenticity. I tied it to notions of honesty and integrity and honour. I thought of myself as honest even though I lied constantly. To some extent I still do, both of those things. If I had to justify myself, I’d say that honesty doesn’t mean not telling lies. Most relationships and probably whole civilizations are based on lies. But even the cynic that I am, I don’t necessarily think that all these civilizations and friendships and romances are dishonest because they’re based on lies. We may have invented language just to be able to lie. It seems logical: everything that is real can be observed or felt without the need for utterances. I would therefore venture to argue that lying on its own does not make one dishonest. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ll lie from a place that feels honest to me. But purposefully lying in order to deceive is another matter. Deceit is evil. Naturally, most deceit begins with the deceiver deceiving themselves. It is certainly true for me. Not that I’ve stopped deceiving myself, but rather I’ve just become aware of it, sensible to its trappings. So how can I be authentic if what I think and stand for seem to change without my consent? How is it that I can be equally set on a principle at one point in time and then adopt another, often opposite, at another time? I suppose I could forgive myself several stubborn misconceptions by ascribing them to youthful ignorance. That still leaves me with a number of inconsistencies that developed at later stages. I’m no logician, but it seems obvious to me that it this disability makes me an unreliable source of my own thoughts and feelings. I can live without being principled, I’m probably even better for it. But, to put it crudely, I don’t think that an inauthentic life is a life worth living. I don’t necessarily know what I mean by what I just said, it just feels as a correct statement to me. I have made slight progress in thinking about it, though. I’m confident that investigations of authenticity are exclusively a self-reflexive act. By this I mean there can be no ascertaining of authenticity of another person. I cannot ever say of someone that they are authentic. Nor can anyone else pass that kind of judgment on me. It’s simple logic at work again: knowing what I know about my own inability to stick to my positions, I must, in good faith, allow the same to be true for you. I should, therefore, not care whether anyone else is authentic or not, for it is in the most exact sense of the phrase – none of my business. Authenticity, I would now say, is a consequence of one’s living with oneself. It is perhaps not a state I must strive to achieve, but rather a consciousness of the very fluidity of this manufactured selfhood. Therefore, I should also not care whether somebody else lies or not. I can choose to take everything at face value or to be distrustful of all information that comes my way. It may be that it amounts to the very same thing. To be authentic is to be aware that when I think about myself I mostly lie to myself about myself and the only solution to that problem is not to think about myself at all.