Topic: Existentialism & Authenticity
Chairman:
Robert Light
Moderator:
Spencer Sinclaire
Meetup Date:
Wednesday, September 2nd, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., with a 15 minute break at 8:00 p.m.
Meetup Location:
Upstairs at The Bent Mast, 512 Simcoe St. Victoria, BC, V8V 1L8
Members:
If you plan to attend, please take a moment and RSVP. If your plans change and you cannot attend, to the right of your name there are three dots, please click on them and move yourself to “Not Going.” Thank you.
Quotes:
“To be authentic is to strip away the layers of pretense we have adopted to please others. To be authentic is to abandon the senseless roles we play to meet the imagined expectations of society.” ~ Anthon St. Maarten
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” ~ Carl Gustav Jung
Synopsis:
Authenticity and inauthenticity
If freedom is existentialism’s central fact about human life, then authenticity is its central ethical demand. To live authentically is to acknowledge and embrace one’s freedom, to take ownership of one’s choices, and to resist the pressure to define oneself entirely through external roles, social expectations, or the judgements of others.
Bad faith: Sartre’s concept of self-deception
In Sartre’s terminology, the failure of authenticity is called mauvaise foi, or bad faith. Bad faith is a psychological phenomenon in which individuals act inauthentically by yielding to external pressures, adopting false values, and disowning their innate freedom. It is not ordinary lying – when lying, you know the truth and hide it from someone else. Bad faith is a form of self-deception in which a person convinces themselves that their circumstances leave them no choice, that they simply “have to” live as they do.
Sartre’s most famous illustration is the café waiter whose movements are a little too precise, a little too eager – a man who has so completely identified with his professional role that he has reduced himself from a free human being to a thing. As Philosophy Break explains, the problem is not that the man works as a waiter. The problem is that he believes that is all he is – collapsing his boundless existential potential into a single, fixed identity. By clinging to a rigid self-definition, he shrinks his freedom and lives in bad faith.
Sartre also describes another form of bad faith: denying one’s facticity – the concrete, unchosen facts of one’s life – while hiding behind a fantasy of unlimited transcendence. True authenticity requires holding both dimensions in tension: acknowledging the real, concrete constraints of one’s situation while still recognising one’s continuous power to choose a different path.
Heidegger and the “they-self”
Martin Heidegger approached inauthenticity differently. In Being and Time (1927), he described how most people live under the sway of what he called das Man – “the they.” We follow conventions, adopt the opinions of the crowd, and avoid the anxiety of confronting our own individual existence. Authentic life, for Heidegger, requires wrenching oneself free from this anonymous, comfortable drift and taking genuine ownership of one’s own possibilities – including, above all, the possibility of death.
The absurd
One of the most striking and widely discussed themes in existentialist philosophy is the experience of the absurd. While Sartre and Heidegger focused primarily on freedom and authenticity, Albert Camus placed absurdity at the very centre of his philosophical work – even as he resisted the existentialist label itself.
The absurd refers to the conflict between the human desire for clarity, meaning, and purpose on one side, and the universe’s utter indifference to that desire on the other. Humans cannot stop asking “why?” – why do we exist, what does it mean, what are we here for – but the world offers no answer. This silence is the absurd.
Watch: Heidegger on Authentic Freedom: The Freedom to Choose Yourself on Youtube: https://youtu.be/Tu6i4CNERsI?si=yzcdiy5KgH56Zf4j
