Abstract
This paper offers an alternate solution to the puzzle of transformative experience raised by Paul (2014), through an appeal to Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of the acquired character, which speaks to the intuition that authenticity entails a notion of the ‘self-as-guide’ (Rivera et al., 2019). On Paul’s solution to the puzzle, transformative decisions may be made authentically by adopting a meta-preference concerning personal transformation, such that the self is constituted after a decision is made. Yet when comparing Paul’s account of authenticity to that of Somogy Varga’s (2012), we see that the former is too formal in that it neglects certain requirements of personal identity-formation, which Varga defines as wholehearted commitment based in strong evaluation. However, in defining these requirements as such, Varga’s account of authenticity is unequipped to adequately address the puzzle of transformative experience. Varga’s account further falls short with respect to specifying sufficient criteria for personal fitness, as Rings (2017) argues. In connection with this deficiency, Varga’s account also does not fully reckon with the threat of manipulation, given the possibility of egoistically driven self-deception in conjunction with oppressive social conditions. I argue that with the aim of character acquisition via acts of subjective contemplation, the authenticity of transformative decisions can be understood at least partly in terms of self-discovery. To expand on authenticity’s ethical dimension, as first introduced by Varga, in a way that is compatible with this established dimension of self-discovery, and with the help of Christopher Gill’s (1996) analysis of an ancient Greek conception of personhood, I suggest that we conceive of authenticity also as a process of value-interpretation, while employing a concept of the self that I will refer to as the metapersonal. This process is congruent with a metapersonal self in so far as it is aimed at defining and clarifying the human good in general, from within a community whose fundamental ethical demand consists of maximizing mutual and reciprocal benefit.
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Notes
Apparent tensions between authenticity and ethical demands, as a conflict between self- and other-interested actions, lend to doubts concerning the potential ethical value of the authenticity ideal. See Feldman (2015) for an argument for rejecting the authenticity ideal as an action guiding principle, based on five variations of what it means to “be oneself”, each failing to establish authenticity as distinctly important for meeting the goals of well-being, rationality, or morality.
See Mogensen (2017) for an account of the connection between authenticity and the perceived trouble with moral testimony, i.e., the potential for acquiring understanding and knowledge of moral ‘facts’ by deferring to others.
Rivera, et al. (2019) “Understanding the Relationship Between Perceived Authenticity and Well-Being”.
In this sense, authenticity is a matter of sufficiently expressing the self in terms of one’s deeply held personal values, including their normative orientation (see Bratu (2020). This leaves us with the question of what constitutes the source of such values (i.e., the “self” that contains them).
Varga (2012) sees the question of authenticity as “How should I live my life, so that it expresses who I truly am?” (62), and this conception appears to generally hold (see Bratu (2020). While some might dispense with the concept of a “true self” as metaphysically and/or epistemically implausible (Bialystok (2014), defining and evaluating authenticity in terms of selfhood remains a current topic of interest (Shuttleworth, 2021; Cleary, (2022).
This puzzle is somewhat orthogonal to the question of how authenticity might function to ethically guide individuals, which constitutes a separate issue. Here the focus is on the intrapersonal matter of deciding between competing goods of comparable (moral) worth. While I will primarily be focusing on this aspect of authenticity, I am still concerned to bridge the personal and the ethical and will signal a potential avenue for doing this in the last section of this paper.
Paul, 118 − 20.
Ibid., 122.
Varga, 85.
Zimmerman & Ullman (2020) argue that adopting such a “naive View from Nowhen” is neither theoretically nor practically plausible.
These would be meta-preferences, i.e., preferences about preference change. Thanks to the reviewer who pointed this possibility out during the review process.
For example, an agent who decides to join an underground militia or reside in a war-stricken nation for the sake of exploration and thrill of seeing who they’ll become in the process would seem inadvisable, because the value of such exploration is not defined well enough to justify such decisions, or to discern a substantive good to be achieved in the process, beyond the individual’s personal sense of satisfaction.
Thus we would have to answer the question of why it is good not just for the agent, but for anyone, to seek out or avoid transformative experiences.
We might still debate whether transformative experiences would help or hinder personal identity constitution, and it might be the case that the answer will differ among agents. But in this case, agents wouldn’t be engaged in collaborative deliberation over concrete projects or values with which to identify as worth standing upon, but over the formal structures necessary for arriving at such projects and values.
The character of Michael Scott from the fictional setting of television’s The Office is a particularly vivid example that Rings provides. It seems that we need additional criteria to ensure that agents are properly fitted to their chosen projects that goes beyond the quality of their willingness to pursue them, regardless of strong evaluation.
Varga (2012), 85.
Ruth Chang’s work on “hard choices”, shared in a popular TED talk, seems to complement that of Paul, in so far as Chang argues that when weighing options regarding significant decisions, we have the space to “create reasons for ourselves” and become the person who can stand behind certain ways or courses of life over others.
Thanks to John Davenport for the helpful language of source conditions.
To clarify, I agree with Varga that discernment of value is an inherently intersubjective process, however his account of authenticity might be considered “procedural”, such that externally corruptive influences may go undetected by the agent themselves, hence the need to explore the mechanisms involved in deliberation and/or define more substantive conditions under which agents might authentically arrive at their particular evaluative stances. Given that autonomy is a prerequisite for authenticity, we must take into account limits of procedural accounts of autonomy. See Stoljar (2022), § 4.
I primarily have in mind the text of Rousseau’s Second Discourse and La Nouvelle Heloïse: Julie, or the New Eloise, and the analysis of these texts in relation to the modern concept of authenticity provided by Ferrara (1993).
Intrinsic motivation is distinct from extrinsic in that it is the enjoyment or satisfaction that an agent feels in doing a certain activity in itself (Brüntrup SJ & Jaskolla (2020).
Calhoun (2009) regarding the good of commitment.
Simone de Beauvoir (1949) provides a strong case for such conditioning.
Mackenzie (2000) uses this example to illustrate the force of male-centric cultural imagery on the imagination, which functions subtly to diminish autonomy, and by extension, authenticity. Ahmed (2010) similarly exposes the ways in which not only certain conceptions of the good but also their justifications can be subtly enforced, affectively.
Moureau & Tavernier (2011) suggest adopting Foucault’s account of power relations informing the self as a correction for Charles Taylor’s account of authenticity in terms of interpersonally navigating one’s sense of value.
These limitations may be understood further in terms of how we are prone to conceptually interpret our past experiences and activities (by imposing certain narratives) or aspire to our future experiences (by imposing certain imagined ideals).
Paul, 127;132. In a more recent article by Bloom & Paul (2022), this fact is not emphasized, and rather it is suggested that on Paul’s view, the choice (to transform in a certain way) in fact simply determines what one wants, and that one ends up simply wanting whatever it is to which the transformation amounts (163). But as I think Bloom suggests, if this were the case, we need not care about authenticity (such that it is us and not an AI, for instance, making the decision), since the outcome will be in our favor regardless. As Bloom also points out, it is possible for us to regret our decisions or develop cognitive dissonance as a result of a mistaken choice.
This concept is introduced in The World as Will and Representation (Vol. 1) (WWRv1), § 55. Sean T. Murphy (forthcoming) helpfully discusses the acquired character in terms of what it means ordinarily to “get one’s stuff together”, which seems relevant for being authentic and “being true to oneself”.
§ 55; pp304-5.
Ibid., § 18, p101-2; § 21, p109; § 28, p155-8; § 55.
Ibid., § 55, p294.
Ibid., p302.
Ibid., pp302-3.
The World as Will and Representation (Vol. 2), Chapter V and VI; Chapter VII, p68-69; WWRvI, § 55, p294.
Consider Jerry Mander’s provocative criticism of the advertising industry in “Privatizing Consciousness” (2012).
I would argue that many decisions, aside from the momentous can be personally transformative given the inherent novelty in every new act or decision. Even if it is the umpteenth time I’ve done X, the cumulative effect of having done X so many times, and in this particular context of circumstances with this particular history, etc., might reveal to me something important that I hadn’t realized before, and thus produce a transformation as a kind of gestalt shift. Personal revelation can occur spontaneously in ways that we may perhaps never anticipate. This observation would comport with the finding in Molouki, et al. (2020) that the degree to which an experience is considered transformative for a person depends on how much the outcome of that experience clashes with one’s expectations.
This holds true for the most radical transformations, as in the case of conversion to a “good” character, represented as religious conversion which requires lifting the “veil of Maya”. See WWRv1, § 66; WWRvII, ch.XIX, p223.
For this reason, we should not aim at transformative experiences that pose significant dangers to our well-being, despite that such experiences can still function to reveal aspects of our character in a way that might be beneficially revelatory of some personal strengths, desires, etc.
Katalin Balog (2020) defines such contemplative reflection: “Experiences being non-conceptual representations, contemplation does not involve reasoning but associations among memories, images, fantasies and thoughts. In contemplation, experience is “held” in attention and explored without a particular goal in mind. This is different from other forms of attention deployed in thought or perception in which it is fast-moving and task-oriented.” (260) This is akin to Schopenhauer’s conception, according to which “we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what.” (WWRv1, § 34).
See especially Gill (1996) Chap. 5, “Being Yourself and Meeting the Claims of Others” for explanation and discussion of this ethical framework with respect to Aristotle’s notions of friendship and “what each of us is”.
See Gill (1996), pp310-311.
Medea’s actions too can be seen as revealing another essential aspect of ethical authenticity, which is that of a willingness to sacrifice, or neglect and deprioritize, the immediate concern for one’s individual and personal needs (such as those associated with saving one’s own children).
In a separate work, I would argue we might regard Rousseau’s initial critique in the Second Discourse (which has helped pave the way to conceiving of the authenticity ideal) as signaling a commitment to communal benefit, in terms of returning to our human nature with the original motivations of self-love and compassion.
In this sense I agree with Charles Taylor’s suggestion that we continually negotiate what matters through interpersonal dialogue (see Varga (2012), p.95), but not with the aim of forming a personal identity around any one single conception of the good, and rather with the aim of collectively defining the ‘good life’ in general. My divergence from Taylor (and thus from Varga) may be in line with what Strub (2020) argues, if my understanding of this is correct, in so far as we may steer away from regarding authenticity as an “expressive predicate”, and rather “an attribution from another person”, such that a person’s authenticity is “affirmed as such by others, as the authentic gesture: the utopian moment in which the totality of one’s successful life is revealed as necessarily embedded in universal solidarity with all humans” (134). See also p.150.
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Pope, S. Authenticity as self-discovery and interpretation of value. Synthese 203, 78 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04489-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04489-z