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Shakespeare gave the instruction five hundred years ago: to thine own self be true. Yet almost no one lives up to it, and this lecture from Academy of Ideas asks why. Beneath the armor we build to please others lies a true self — the spontaneous, creative core that children know and adults bury. Kierkegaard called losing that self the greatest danger, and Heidegger described how we flee into ‘the they’ to escape the burden of being an individual. The way back, both agreed, runs straight through the anxiety we spend our lives avoiding.
Full Video Transcript
Poets, philosophers, and seers have always concerned themselves with the idea of a true self.
And the betrayal of the self has been a typical example of the unacceptable.
From its beginnings over 500 years ago, the ideal of authenticity has been embedded in the value system of modern Western civilization.
Shakespeare’s words,
To thine own self be true, reflect as well as any others what authenticity has meant to the Western mind.
Each of us, according to this ideal, has our own path to tread.
But despite its significance in the West, very few people live up to the ideal of authenticity.
To shy away from the task and to seek comfort and conformity is far more common.
In this video, we’ll explore what it means to live authentically and the benefits of doing so.
If the ideal of authenticity is to have any merit, a true or real self must exist,
at least as a potentiality within each of us.
While such a conception of the self may seem vague and indefinable,
numerous thinkers have attempted to elaborate coherent positions regarding its existence.
The psychiatrist Donald Winnicott conceptualized the true self as the source of one’s spontaneous and creative energies,
the sort of which are abundant in children at play, but often repressed in adulthood.
William James, likewise, envisioned the true self as the palpitating inward life,
while the psychotherapist Karen Horney described it as
The alive, unique, personal center of ourselves.
The only part that can and wants to grow.
The task of living authentically has two elements.
First, we must become aware of the existence of our true self,
a task which requires self-reflection and introspection.
And secondly, we must express this true self in our day-to-day lives.
Taking these actions may be necessary to live a fulfilling life.
For as the Gospel of Thomas says,
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
In the lives of most, however, the true self is denied and given little opportunity for expression.
Rather, in response to feelings of insecurity and vulnerability, or a general apprehensiveness about life,
many people develop what is called character armor, or a false self.
Character armor is formed due to the fear that our true self, being an expression of our uniqueness, will be rejected and perhaps ridiculed by others.
While protecting us from such threats, the formation of character armor is done at the cost of cutting us off from the feeling of being alive.
Only the true self can be creative and the true self can feel real, wrote Donald Winnicott.
The existence of a false self results in a feeling unreal or a sense of futility.
The more one allows their true self to be masked by a false self, the more it becomes deadened and ineffectual.
And the more one begins to fall victim to what Soren Kierkegaard called the biggest danger, that of losing oneself.
Kierkegaard discussed the various ways in which one can succumb to the spiritual sickness of losing oneself in his book The Sickness Unto Death.
One of the primary ways is to suppress one’s real self by succumbing to an extreme identification with society.
Instead of facing up to the challenge of living authentically, that is, individually and creatively,
most people find it much safer and easier to lose themselves in the crowd.
What we call worldliness, Kierkegaard wrote,
simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world.
They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations, etc.,
and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves.
In a spiritual sense, they have no self.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger likewise took note of the tendency of human beings
to flee from what he called the authentic ability to be self, into the comforts of conformity.
Heidegger observed that our normal, everyday mode of existing is a form of inauthenticity he called falling.
One of the main ways we fall is by existing as das Mann, which is German for the one or the they,
As in, one simply doesn’t do things like that.
Das Mann represents the anonymous or average member of the social group,
and thus the modes of thought, belief, and behavior which are considered normal and expected.
When we exist as Das Mann, we allow our experience and behavior to be shaped and determined by what one says, one thinks, or one does.
We do not say what we see, wrote Heidegger, but rather the reverse.
We see what one says about the matter.
To extricate ourselves from our tendency to think, behave, and live as one does,
Heidegger advised we transform the attitude we hold towards death.
Generally, we do not face up to our own death, but instead we evade it in a myriad of ways.
We tell ourselves that death is not relevant to the living,
and that to think about it is morbid and a waste of time.
Or we relate to death impersonally.
We recognize that others die and that one day we will too,
but we tell ourselves, for the time being, not yet. In other words,
we fail to recognize both the importance of death in our life, as well as the ever-present possibility of it. To remedy this,
Heidegger recommends cultivating what he calls
resoluteness toward death. He advises running ahead toward it and relating to it with
anticipation, that is to say, of living with an awareness of the importance of death and of the fact that our end could come at any
moment.
Adopting this stance is what Heidegger calls being towards death.
Such a way of being is difficult. The more aware we are of the omnipresence of death, the more anxiety we invite into our life.
Being towards death, Heidegger explains, is essentially anxiety. Yet, for Heidegger, this anxiety is also the key to freedom and authenticity.
In existing as das man, we take the values of our society for granted and immerse ourselves in social roles and societal games.
To use Heidegger’s terminology, we tend to do what one does without question.
When overcome with a mood of anxiety, on the other hand,
the ways of the world no longer seem normal and familiar, but strange, unintelligible and meaningless.
Our thoughts about what one does, and thus what is expected of us, appear absurd and tend to vanish.
And we are left free to reflect upon what matters most to our existence,
to choose our own original path, in short, to live authentically.
Or as Heidegger wrote in Being and Time,
The anxiety stimulated by being towards death individualizes me down to myself.
Yet Heidegger did not think we could escape the grips of Das Mann once and for all.
An authentic existence is not something that can be accomplished and forgotten about.
Rather, our deep-rooted tendency to conform requires we confront this challenge anew each day.
And while most will shrink from this task, the few who welcome it will be greatly rewarded.
For as the poet E.E. Cummings wrote,
Source: Academy of Ideas