authentic selfhood

heideggerian my dude

what is the nature of authentic selfhood? to John Russon, it lies somewhere in the composition of Heidegger’s “anticipatory resoluteness” and Derrida’s notion of différance.

self-identity

let me start with a claim: A = A.

this looks pretty obvious. a thing equals itself. A could be just about anything—all this statement is saying is that whatever thing A is, is itself.

but spend a little more time staring at this. what is “A = A” saying? to Fichte and Schelling, A = A is more than a mere triviality. this principle of identity is the absolute principle of Schelling’s metaphysical system as a whole, while for Fichte A = A is “the very foundation of all our normal systems of proof,” something that is absolutely certain without any other ground. by merely stating “A = A”, we are “ascribing to ourselves the power of asserting something absolutely.”

Russon encourages us to make note of something interesting in this simplistic equation. what happens if I remove the A on the right-hand side? I get:

A =

in other words, A equals, or is, something. but what? that hasn’t been resolved yet: in other words, the first A is a statement of potentiality, a question that is met by the answer of the A which populates the right-hand side.

what is nonidentical is the respective status of the two As as potential and actual. The first A announces the possibility of an identity, and the second makes it actual (Russon 95).

Derrida’s notion of différance also helps articulate the issue here: the condition of our ability to affirm a self-identity is the non-identity of what is identified—the thing, A, necessarily differs from itself and this difference is the generative source of its self-identity.

being

this is all fun, but very abstract. what do these observations about self-identity mean for being, or for anything?

as a person, my self-identity can also be expressed in the form A = A. “I” am myself. since Descartes, self-identification has been far from a trivial problem. how can I be sure that “I” persist through time? am I the same “I” from five minutes or five years ago?

Hume, with Descartes, claims we never directly apprehend the self: I experience my thoughts and the constellation of perceptions that reveal themselves to me. but I, the supposed “container” of those perceptions, never perceive the container itself: to a justification empiricist, this means I have no reason to believe in the traditional notion of a “self.” I am not a unified “I” but merely a bundle of perceptions.

Kant also agrees that we do not apprehend the self and holds that we cannot but think of ourselves as persistent, singular beings. but, as with a number of things in the Critique, this conception of the self is merely a requirement for thought that does not support a substantive ontological conclusion. just as the idea that things have causes is a precondition for all experience, so is the idea that there is an “I” to experience things—this is the “transcendental unity of apperception,” which Fichte re-hashes by saying the first principle of all experience is that “the ego posits itself.”

let’s say we agree with Kant and co. that we somehow have to think of the self as something unified. what is the nature of the self that we engage with? the “A =” part of the identity equation is a statement of potential, waiting to be actualized. my self, in the same way, is a potential that has not yet manifested: the “I” in the present is simultaneously an actuality that is my current state and a potentiality that is all the possible futures that await me. in proceeding into the world, existing through time, I achieve one of those potentialities and negate the rest. the A who answers the demand of “A =” must not be something fixed, something already known, but something that could have been something else.

the artist who over and over again transforms our perception through her artworks, demonstrates precisely her power thereby, but that power as power, as possibility, never appears as such; on the contrary, her power always appears as an actual work. The works are the traces of her power, but that power itself never comes into view as such. What we will have left when she dies will be her oeuvre, but this body of work, this totality, will show what she did, not what she could have done. (96)

resolution, authenticity

we frequently make statements that impose a will, a specific actuality on our future selves: “I will lose weight,” “I will finish writing this article.” when I make these resolutions, I make a promise that I, in some sense, have insufficient authority to make—I am speaking on behalf of someone that I am not (I think this is interesting and wonder if re-framing the resolution for the future self as the action of the present self—I am writing the thing I would like to finish—commands more authority).

possible quibbles aside, Heidegger identifies authenticity as an anticipatory resoluteness. the resolutions we considered all involve my achieving a specific realization of the future, driven by a value or care that comes from within me.

authenticity becomes possible in a mood of anxiety, in which nothing seems meaningful and we despair of acting “because the grounding context of meaning in one’s life has been removed” (99). this anxiety discloses something about existence: it is “mattering” itself that matters, the way we care about the world imbues things with significance.

Authenticity is the distinctive stance in which I own up to this, my role as “caregiver,” so to speak, of my world: it is uniquely up to me to take my world up in a meaningful way. (99)

in other words, things only mean what they do on the basis of my setting of the terms—anxiety is our discovery that things to not have inherent meaning, and authenticity is the act of owning up to our role as the meaning-giver.

if it didn’t before, Heidegger’s take might strike you as existentialist: you might recall Sartre’s articulation in “Existentialism is a Humanism” of man’s fashioning his own image, willing to exist: “In fashioning myself I fashion man.” indeed, Being and Time did have a profound influence on Sartre’s existentialism.

the process of discerning meaning that Russon identifies, however, is not quite as simple as my deciding to impose meaning on something or treating things in the world as imposing their meanings on me.

The specific character of authenticity as a form of resolve, then, is that it is the resolution to hold oneself open to value, to meaning. Whereas resolutions typically involve the streadfastness of refusing to yield to changing circumstances, and to deciding oneself now what will be allowed to matter then, authenticity is the unique form of resolve that refuses to close off the terms of value now, but resolves to be open to letting value show itself. (100)

ethics, the meaning of being

Russon goes on to consider how selfhood-as-différance defines learning and ethics. learning, in line with what we saw above, is a stance of existential openness and transformation. the ethical, similarly, is our openness to encountering an Other who makes demands on us in their terms and not our own (I don’t know how convincing this ethic was to Heidegger, given that he did become a Nazi).

the “meaning of being” that we end up with here seems like the sort of thing that gets corrupted into annoying self-help clichés—embrace openness! possibility!—and indeed it is, on Russon’s reading, when the question of the meaning of being is alive that I am most authentically engaged with my “self.”

In sum, then, the self-proper of Dasein (being) just is the holding open of the question of the meaning of being. Anticipatory resoluteness is the sheltering of the strife of earth and world. Dasein is itself only as the leap into the abyss of différance, of being-as-question. (110)

but there is a little more than pithy statements here—“being” is a nebulous thing about which I can make few substantive ontological assertions. in the Logic, Hegel makes the argument that pure being is precisely nothing (what is pure being? I can’t really say, but I can say it’s not blue, not red, not you, not me, etc… nothing!)

it’s one of those (formless) things that, like consciousness, when describing it I have to throw up my hands and say “well, it just is” (although I think being might be even more resistant to our attempts to poke at it than consciousness). even if I can say A = A, it feels unsatisfying that what is so fundamental has to be so nebulous.

perhaps we will always stand on shaky ground, after all.

shaky words

I can't save us, my Atlantis, we fall
We built this town on shaky ground
I can't save us, my Atlantis, oh, no
We built it up to pull it down

(“Atlantis,” Seafret)