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Article Excerpt
1. The Task
The task of this paper is to distinguish conceptions of authenticity in an effort to find out which, if any, can be of service to a plausible theory of autonomous agency. In doing this I will go back several decades to look at an account of authenticity offered by Karl Jaspers, and to yet a different ideal of authenticity attributed by Charles Taylor to Johann Herder. My suspicion is that the view of authenticity that has come to dominate current discussion grows out of the Herderian ideal. According to this ideal, a person lives authentically when she is true to herself, and she is true to herself when she develops her life on the basis of what is of value to her. (1) The currently received view borrows from this idea and maintains that authenticity amounts to endorsement of, or absence of alienation from, the principles according to which one lives one's life.
As I understand the concept, to be autonomous is to act within a framework of rules one sets for oneself, and it is to have a kind of authority over oneself as well as the power to act on that authority. A theory of autonomy must explain what kind of authority and power is involved, given that we are speaking of adult persons who are interpersonally bound by political and moral frameworks. We correctly attribute autonomy to a person when the person has de facto power and authority to direct affairs of elemental importance to her life within a framework of rules (or values, principles, beliefs, pro-attitudes) that she has set for herself. These affairs are general and routine. They concern, for instance, intimate relationships, access to and control over information about oneself, and events that lend a distinctive pattern to one's life. While a person's behavior and motivations can be traced to a variety of factors, to describe a person as autonomous is to claim that the person is self-directed in this way.
Elsewhere I have suggested that authenticity is unnecessary for autonomy. I agree that autonomous people must be true to themselves, but deny that they are true to themselves when their lives are directed according to belief, desire, and valuational states that they would accept unreservedly were the occasion to consider their content and foundation to arise, as the ideal of authenticity described above contends. I have argued that our motives may spring from attachments, ideals, or traits of character that are indelibly inscribed on our personality but that we do not endorse as such, and that this does not undercut our autonomy. (2) In the following section, I will briefly revisit the argument. I think the argument stands. But I think, too, that it is incomplete. It is incomplete because it only addressed one interpretation of authenticity, one that Harry Frankfurt develops and one that is taken up by what has been called the "procedural authenticity" approach to personal autonomy. I think this interpretation has less to do with autonomy than we might think. However, there is a conception of authenticity that borrows from Jaspers--one we might call an epistemic conception--that is important for autonomy although it, too, is not so constitutive of autonomy as to make it impossible to be inauthentic in this sense and yet autonomous.
I hope to show that a person who is autonomous is disposed to acknowledge-to face up to--the features of her character and her history that anchor her identity, even those features from which she is estranged, but that acknowledgment is a "Jasperian" form of authenticity quite different from endorsement or absence of estrangement. A person can be autonomous even while she does not reflectively endorse key aspects of her identity.
In considering what authenticity amounts to I will consider two cases. The first is that presented by the situation in which David Kaczynski, younger brother of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, found himself before he assisted in the apprehension of his only sibling. The second case is that of the acclaimed German novelist Gunter Grass. In August 2006, at the age of 78 and in advance of the publication of his autobiography Peeling the Onion, Grass disclosed that at the age of seventeen, he had been conscripted as a Flakhelfer (3) in the Wassen SS during the Second World War. His service transpired after he had volunteered for and was rejected for submarine duty at the age of fifteen. What made Grass's admission so disconcerting was that he had spent the greater part of his life in the public eye as the critical moral and political conscience of post-war Germany. Having devoted half a century to reminding us of the great corruptibility of human nature, "the coexistence of mendacity and the greatness and ... the infinitely complex nature of guilt," (4) Grass now stands vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy. Joachim Fest, the recently deceased German journalist and biographer of Adolf Hitler, told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that "[a]fter 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late. I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off." (5)
Let us keep the cases of Kaczynski and Grass in mind as we turn to consider what authenticity might amount to, and how authenticity or its lack might figure in their lives.
2. The Standard Account of Authenticity
The term "authenticity" has been used with such frequency and such confidence in discussing the autonomy of persons that few have stopped to enquire exactly what is meant by the term. A number of philosophers have argued that autonomy is attributed to persons largely in virtue of the authenticity of the person's cognitive and psychological states, character, and choices. In ascribing autonomy to individuals, discussants assume that the individual is capable of unimpeded critical self-reflection. The idea is that a person's cognitive, affective, valuational, and dispositional states, as well as personal commitments, social roles, and ideals are authentic if the person would "wholeheartedly identify" with them or would embrace them without reservation were she to critically reflect upon their content and origin. (6) An agent's actions are regarded as autonomous because they are authentic expressions of her will (or expressions of her authentic will--the details are rather fuzzy) and they express what is most meaningful to the agent and most evocative of her deeply held concerns.
The devil is in the details, and assorted definitions of "authenticity" supply these details in distinct but overlapping ways. Gerald Dworkin, in some of the earlier writings on autonomy that have spawned current debate, made authenticity a cornerstone of his theory. He characterized it as the requirement of autonomy manifest when persons exercise their reflective and revisionary capacities--capacities that enable a person "to raise the question whether I will identify with or reject the reasons for which I now act." (7) Being authentic means that "persons define their nature, and take responsibility for the kind of person they are." (8) This seems wrong to me: a person can "define her nature" and "take responsibility for the kind of person she is" while failing to identify with the reasons that motivate her to act. For example, I might regret, or feel largely uncomfortable with, the fact that I am peevish and short-tempered, while conceding that I am largely responsible for these defining characteristics and while acknowledging that, too often, they spur me to act. A greater danger to autonomy is that the reasons that move a person to act might be ones the person fails to identify, or recognize. Let us put these thoughts forward for consideration and revisit them shortly.
The account of authenticity I shall focus on for critical purposes can be traced to Harry Frankfurt. I will call this the "standard account" to reflect the central place it occupies in current discussion. While he does not usually employ the term "authenticity," preferring to speak of "identification" or "satisfaction," Frankfurt states that "[a] person acts autonomously only when his volitions derive from the essential character of his will" (9) and then proceeds to locate a person's essential character in what is authenticated as "volitionally necessary." Volitional necessity constrains a person by rendering her incapable of making certain choices and rejecting others, thus setting the boundaries of the will,...
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