Defining Orange June 10th, 2015
Submitted by Lucy Pletman
Authenticity can mean many different things to different people, but is defined as the act of being true to oneself and acting and presenting oneself in accordance to your own individual beliefs. Philosophically being authentic can take on a much deeper meanings; Kierkegaard defined it as finding your own truths and meaning in life through an individual relationship with god and not the through the crowd, Nietzsche believed it to be not allowing the power of the majority to think for you and to decide your own morals and existential truths and lastly Heidegger believed it can be choosing to take a step back from our everyday reality in the large collective body of people to look at ourselves and our lives in relationship to our unavoidable death.
To me authenticity is arguably a combination of these; authenticity is like Kierkegaard said a matter of finding ones truth, “Truth is harder to get as an individual of a crowd because you either defer responsibilities of finding truth to the crowd or let the crowd make choices for you” (Lecture 5/5/2015). However, truth like Nietzsche says isn’t through god, and religion can be seen as a sickness because it is another form of grouping people together and when grouping others together the thoughts and behaviors of an individual are put below those of the groups and the pressure to conform doesn’t allow you to be authentic to yourself. He says in the gay science “By means of morality, individuals are led to be functions of the herd and to attribute value to themselves merely as functions”(Nietzsche, The Gay Science, pg. 116). So in order to be authentic to oneself one must not look at themselves as a function of a group but as an individual. An unavoidable fact of like that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard miss however is, “People and the crowd are an unavoidable component of human existence” (Lecture 5/5/2015). Knowing that collective bodies of people and being a part a group is an unavoidable obstacle to becoming an individual within your community.
So with that being said it is arguable that all of these philosophers are right in different ways, but they are all wrong as well. If the core idea of being authentic to oneself is finding your own truths, than the truth behind the definition of being authentic is entirely subject to an individual. With this idea it is important to note however, that even though every definition of truth and authenticity is different for an individual, being authentic to oneself is something completely subjective and should be decided on as an individual. The struggle behind being authentic to oneself today comes from the fact that like Heidegger said we are unavoidably a collective group of people, and it is much easier to differ the responsibility of deciding what our existential truths our and the true meaning of our being to the collective group of others. However, how can you be authentic to yourself if you just choose to believe and follow the truths of others? “A crowd is indeed made up of single individuals; it must therefore be in everyone’s power to become what he is, a single individual: no one is prevented from being a single individual, no one, unless he prevents himself by becoming many” (Kierkegaard, The Crowd Is Untruth, pg. 3). Even though no individual is prevented from being an individual, finding truth and meaning in life is an obstacle that cannot be given.
This is the reason that Nietzsche believes that god is untruth, “Even being able to say that religion can be interpreted takes away from the truth of it, and if religion is a human construct then there is no absolute truth” (Lecture 04/28/2015). In saying that religion is a human construct means that it could be constructed in many different ways. Meaning there is no absolute meaning of truth, which goes back to the fact that truth and meaning are subjective and absolute truth is something you choose. So those that choose to believe that god is absolute truth have made the choice to believe in another constructed idea of truth, but the truth they have chosen to believe in is not one of their own, their meaning and beliefs are given to them. Ultimately however, those around us and their beliefs are unavoidable and finding what it means to be authentic to oneself means you have to take a step back from the group to decide what your meanings and truths are.
Recognizing our unavoidable death in order to help us realize what it means to be authentic and the importance of living this short subjective experience of life true to who we are is a truth in defining what it means to you, to be orange.