🪟 Transcript 38 - Authenticity and the problem of self pt. II
Transcript #38 (Part 5): My theory of self, with a side of chronic existentialism.
Writer’s note: I am hitting ‘Publish’ on each chapter as soon as I am remotely happy with it, as a sort of minimum viable product. Once I have let everything on my mind out, they will all go under the knife, so to speak, and be tightened, refined, and made rigorous—both conceptually and aesthetically. Please read the following as one transcript among many transcripts.
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Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
PART 5: IDEALS
Authenticity and the problem of self pt. II
🪟 38 - Authenticity and the problem of self pt. II
I.
The ‘true self’ is an illusion. But it would be wrong to immediately write it off as a wrong idea. Does man have a true self? Indeed, man has a true self. Or, I could put it this way, man has a true centre. It is seen through the window of despair. Everything artistic, poetic, profound, meaningful, is illuminated in it. One might ask, what of one’s positive traits; his vocation or calling, his intellectual and political interests, his habits and tastes—his loves in other words—do they not subsume his true centre? No. The self is not an arbitrary matter of one’s favouriting this or that. The self is an outgrowth from its true centre; an extension encroaching all of time and space in order to relinquish a potent neediness within itself. As surely as thirst and hunger compels a plant from the soil into water and sunlight, despair compels the soul into sustenance beyond itself. This despair—as man’s infinite merit1, reeking with the wetness of longing—this is what flows from our true centre!
Despair flows from our true centre. It is not however the true centre, as much as it points us to it. Despair is the bruise that marks the living, but it is not the substance of life in itself. It is one thing to say that life is suffering, or life is affliction—and indeed we are all familiar of a pain inherent to living (although we tend not to speak of it). But it is another thing to say that life is no more than suffering itself, as if living and suffering were synonymous—one and the same. No, certainly it would be quite morbid, sadistic, on the order of things if that were the case! But something in me tells me that it is not the complete picture. Despair is not our true centre. It merely points us to our true centre. Insofar as it is possible to delineate a true self within a totality ridden with falsehoods, duplicity, and contradiction, there it lies!
II.
Despair flows from our true centre. What then is our true centre? What is our true self? It is nothing. But it is not only nothing, zilch, non-existent in the normative sense; for it is a positively-charged nothingness, a temperamental silence, a moving emptiness; it is a sort of weightlessness in my being that weighs everything else, and conjures dreams and desires when it is off balance. It is this nothingness that we fear, it is what we confront with fear and trembling—for it is not merely and simply nothing, since it is impossible to fear nothing, but this nothingness—oh, it is everything to be feared! Is this not past the boundary of everything explainable, and everything we can know and grasp? Is this not the realm of everything that acts upon us, that presses us into who we are, that 'works in mysterious ways’? Is this not Mystery’s lair, the infinite darkness, the realm of horror, the source of our insanity?
This nothingness—how it stirs in my whole being! Why, I have the ability to ignore of a great deal; I can remove myself from the noise of people, crowds, and the world outside my window; I can remove myself from the awareness of planets, stars, and galaxies; I can even remove myself from the concepts of heaven and hell as they are usually posited, as some figment of an endless afterlife; I can remove myself from world wars, sociopolitical turmoil, holocausts, poverty, if I so choose; and yet this mysterious nothing, it seems to grip me from the innermost centre of my being, past the realm of all self-deception and pretence2. Often I do drown it in the pandemonium of society, quite viscerally, pouncing when any trivial amusement becomes opportune. But even there and then I realise I am still not immune! As soon as I am left alone in silence for fifteen minutes, as soon as I am made to wonder about the fact that I am when I very well could have not been, as soon as I hear about the untimely demise of a fellow, as soon as I ponder my future and imagine my own end, I am confronted once again with the disquiet of silence—infinite nothingness!
I cannot run. I cannot hide! What madness is all this? I have said it once and twice and three times over. It is not that I refuse to reckon with this deranged nothingness. I have spent enough time tied in knots with it. It is that I cannot satisfy its demands! Though I do find it disconcerting, I do not find it too repulsive. I only find my weakness and stupidity repulsive, since I can hardly grasp what all of this means. But still—why does this nothingness keep coming for me? Has it a bounty on my soul? I renounce it like the most fervent of Stoics, with considerable muscular effort, and yet it keeps rearing its head, squashing my stillness, arousing my anxieties. Reality, life, the order of things, nature, the eternal void, Tao, God!—who or what am I addressing here? Am I not allowed my agnosticism? Am I not allowed to be permanently disinterested, and permanently uncertain? Ah! I recall that terrifying rebuke in the Book of Revelations: ‘because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth’. And now, so it seems—I have been born into this world only to be bullied into submission!
What recourse have I? What will complete me? Fill my empty cup? Shan’t I laugh at the frailty of my nature, and ridicule the universe of the unknowable that goes beyond me? If only I could take leave of the cosmic circus, what privilege it would be… no, what privilege it is… for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field3, that they should contend only with the here and now—with reality in its utter simplicity. Have they been shown the vastness of the universe and the irony of their stature in comparison? Have they been shown that they could be tragically removed from this reality at any second, with the most trivial misstep, with the slightest tap of misfortune? Have they been shown to that deranged nothingness they have come from and to which they will inevitably return? Ah, this divine privilege of blissful ignorance—we humans have been originally and woefully denied. What happy, divine foolishness! This is happiness, true happiness, I’d say. We humans, on the other hand, only know despair, and laughably, we despair over—[ahem, pardon me]——nothing! The ultimate prize we name as ‘happiness’, life’s saving grace, ensues merely in those moments when despair becomes tolerable4. Hence, it is always ephemeral, momentary, for it is the exception—a miraculous cosmic synchronicity—and not the norm. This whole damned predicament is our infinite merit; it is our infinite curse; of this, I am well and truly convinced.
Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: ‘all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. For the individual, I think it is the other way round. Each happy person is happy in their own way but all unhappy people are alike. Consciousness is a wet sponge wrought with despair—a despair-over-nothing—which is the express articulation of our infinite merit. It is the impulse of our cosmic seed, out of which springs forth every growth—under or overgrowth—of flowers, leaves and thorns, that is, all our activity and narration in the world. Of course, on the social ‘stage’ of the world, when fellows talk about me, they will point to the explicit differences in me—I will be labelled (usually quite amusingly) by what I do or what I fancy or what I tend to. And yet, this is the truth which all serious endeavours of poetry, art, and philosophy have gone to show, that those things are not truly me! My true self is not founded in my being positively this or that. It is in that intangible and formless seed which compels me to difference in the first place. Like a seed from which the tree grows, this is my fundamental character prior to everything about me—this is my cosmic origin!
III.
My true self is nothing. But it would be wrong to conclude that my true self is nothing, therefore I have no true self and I am the fruits of my personal choice—whatever ‘self’ I choose to employ that fancies my amusement. It would be more correct to say, my true self contains nothing, but it is a moving, groping nothingness that compels the activity of my being. It does not make sense, after all, for me to be anxious over nothing. (It is also quite ridiculous to say.) But I nevertheless am anxious and disconcerted over nothing, and I despair over this fact. It may be said: out of the abundance of nothingness, despair speaks5 and wills much. Through despair as such, I have been sucked unwittingly into awareness of the nothingness that breathes life into it. By it, I have been made aware of my unknowing, and a fool it has made out of me!
Now, if instead, I conclude another way: despair flows from nothing, and out of its impulse everything emerges, hence, despair is the true centre—would it be wrong? Now, it is and becomes more acceptable the more I think about it, for is there really more to life than despair, even if it is an absurd despair-over-nothing? I am an honest man! I admit it is not beyond plausible. Life is irrational and absurd, and certainly there are those who see it only in this way, such as the absurdist Camus (who confronted this same immutable seed of despair and prescribed a glorious rebellion). Yet, despair is not our true centre.
Let me explain why I am so certain about this. Let me put forward my case! (And I shall attempt to do so without sounding overly philosophic.) If despair was our true centre, I would despair simply and perfectly. Instead, what happens is not that but this: I despair, and then I despair over the fact that I am in despair, and I despair over the fact that I can be neither perfectly happy nor perfectly unhappy (or perfectly something else), and I despair over the fact that my despair is absurd—for it continually fails to grasp its wants concretely—despairing over everything and nothing at once. Yes! Crucially, there is this double despair I am inundated by. The baseness of the simple, original despair—despair over particular afflictions of living (such as particulars weaknesses, or the pain of unrequited love)—gives rise to the wistful dreaming of a second despair—which casts my first despair under the cloudy, dispersed light of poignant longing. I do not despair simply and perfectly. Rather, I find it to be strangely complicated, and immeasurably profound.
That there exists the reality of this second despair is quite radically suggestive! It hints at an order of things in which despair is indeed not my true centre, for my despairing is not straightforward, but in a constant state of flux. It must have its synthesis in something else. It must have its source! What is it? What is it, exactly? Ah! I think it is within this region: the reality of my second despair refers to a wistful possibility of everything being otherwise. My second despair seizes the particularity of my first despair, and then the general, ambiguous true nature of my being which presupposes that despair, and then it longs for an alternate state of being, or more accurately, an ideal state of being—in which despair and the conditions for despair are nullified. A-ha! The nothingness at the centre of my being is that which splits me apart and empties me; it is that which compels me forcibly to seek myself in everything other to myself, thereafter constituting all my positivity and difference. Ultimately, by extension, what I despair imperfectly and wistfully over is the miserably finite and self-annihilating nature of my being which presupposes my despair in the first place, which is why despair’s wistful longing expresses vague yet lucid dreams of wholeness, unity, completeness—for the nothingness in me to be something, for the multitude in me to be unified. Yes! It is the terrorism of the deranged nothingness at the centre of my being that is at fault. It is to be blamed for basically everything.
Ah! But this is not the only sort of deranged, groping nothingness I am familiar with. Is this not the very pattern of desire as such? I am reminded of how I came to think, read and write incessantly in the first place. My desire to think, read and write was birthed and fed none other than by its own deranged, groping nothingness. It had become a thirst, a hunger—but it was one whose emergence was contingent on the disconcerting and destabilising of my understanding in the first place. Its want is naturally for such things, yes, but it does not emerge freely by its own self. Longing proceeds deprivation or negation, first of all, just like hunger, thirst, loneliness. A child does not know hunger until she lacks food. A man does not know loneliness until he lacks companionship. Yes! Longing proceeds lack. The wistfulness of my longing proceeds a lack. The nothingness I am confronting here is a lack! It is fearsome, deranged, precisely because it is what it is: to confront a lack.
The quality of longing in despair emerges out of despair pointing to this fundamental lack at the centre of my being—this is the moving, groping nothingness—and the lack emerges from the self-annihilating nature of my being that compels me to fulfilment in things outside of being. When I am in despair, wistfully in despair, I am lacking something—and the lack is timely, for I will not be needy of things until I am sufficiently deprived of it (which is when dreaming occurs, as Freud theorised, ‘representing the disguised fulfilment of a suppressed, repressed wish’). Surely I am not a madman in saying this! No—I believe quite strongly, that for each one of us, there comes the time for a disturbance to awaken us to our own incompleteness. It always proceeds in the same way—exactly like hunger—beginning with a soft and gentle whisper, growing louder and louder, until it terrorises us like a thief in the night, rippling through our being, compelling us to confront it.6
Of all this I am certain! But now, what is it that I am in lack of? What I realise here, now, is that the answer to this question has been right before me this whole time! This nothingness is indeed a lack—a lack at the centre of my being—that constitutes my explicit self… and ah, I see it now!—more precisely, it is because the lack at the centre of my being is, in fact, my lack of being! I despair over a lack at the centre of my being that sets me on a million courses, because I despair over a lack of my being! This despair leads me to everything—to find, obtain, conquer my being in everything outside of my being—for my being is nothing—and this is the origin of my despair. This is my predicament. My true centre is in my lack thereof—my true centre is in my lack of a true centre!
IV.
Despair flows from my true centre. It is not my true centre. The lack of a true centre is my true centre. My true self is incapable of being fully and independently what it ultimately longs to be—that is, absolved in itself: a perfect, absolute, irrefutable self-identity. Instead, it clings onto countless forms of otherness over the course of living, into the multitude of ‘this or that’s, in order to complete itself—and the realisation of this constitutive otherness is the revelation that provokes my awareness to the original, sacred lack which first set me on my path. What a troublesome, ridiculous state to be in! This is the origin of how my damned self splits into a multitude, how the one becomes the many, for everything in me is additive and duplicating; they are many orders of being me and not me. I identify positively or negatively with the otherness in me, for it identifies me, and yet I know none of it is original or authentic (in the full, unconditional sense). In truth, I am a fraud among frauds; a mere appropriator of everything other to me, which I parade as if it was originally and authentically me! I am only a sham. An onslaught of imposter syndrome is merely when we have our finger on this fact, and become disturbed by it.
If only reality was simple like it was, indeed, for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field! Yet, for us, life is immeasurably complex. Unbearably complex, very often. Nihilism is a common ensnarement. Why? No, why not? It is not uncalled for. To be nihilistic is not necessarily about a rebellious hatred of life, in the same way being atheistic is not necessarily about a rebellious hatred of God—they make very, very reasonable developments and indeed, land on some grand, cosmic truth. The nihilist is convicted of the futility of action, the impossibility of realising themselves (whether they formulate this way or some other way), and/or the absurdity of life’s predicament, and justly so. The atheist is convicted of the disconcerting nature of being, doubt, and/or the inexplicable and perplexing nature of the universe, which is hardly different to the nothingness and silence of God. (I am referring mostly to genuinely-unbelieving atheists who have not taken offence towards some caricature of God or the institutions that purport to represent God. That is a separate, and milder issue.) And indeed, they are correct! This is the paradox of action: the perfect, absolute, irrefutable self-identity we so dearly seek and go after is impossible. There is no realisable self-identity as such, for we are split subjects at the mercy of split-ness, and yet we dream of the impossible.
This is our lot to carry, as humans! The only thing resembling perfect, absolute self-identity is the lack thereof. Everything else is relative. A matter of values. The nihilists, the hedonists, the relativists were right about that. Nietzsche was right about power driving everything. Freud was right about the sexual impulse driving everything. Except that everything (including the various drives) is a natural outgrowth from the seed of man: that is his traumatic nothing—his lack of a perfect, absolute self-identity. This negation, this constitutive lack thereof, is the only thing resembling perfect, absolute self-identity! Or—if I were to take it another step further, perhaps it may be said: the only thing resembling perfect, absolute self-identity—is in our unceasing search for it! My true self is in the impossible search thereof.
But now, consider this!—grace rests upon the equally absurd idea that impossibility is not the end. For there is a soft and sweet voice, and a seductive and arousing voice, that says there is something higher, greater than it. Namely, it is the possibility of impossibility—of completing the lack, of unifying the multitude, of overcoming the despair that permeates living. Ah! Is this not the spectacular truth behind the power of stories and its infinite power to captivate and edify? The infinitude of my becoming is higher than the impossibility that limits my being. Striving is higher than impossibility—in fact it is higher because of it. The telos is higher than the contradiction—in the same way my whole task writing about unknowable things is an absurd task, for it is impossible to grasp these things fully, such are the limits of language, and yet I continue to wrestle with the word—because to write nonetheless is higher than not writing (which, mind you, would be just as reasonable, or even more, it would in fact be much more reasonable not to write!).
This is truth, the truth is edifying—it is truth that sets me free! With the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, though they are indeed divinely blessed, for them, there is only being and no becoming. Only man is blessed and cursed with this task—for there is no becoming without there being a lack of being! This is the ultimate pattern that weaves through stories, from the richest and most esoteric texts to the most tasteless and commercialised Hollywood film—stories have always to do with a becoming and not being, because being is nothing, and becoming is everything allowed by the urgency of my lack of being!
V.
This is my true centre: the unceasing search for a perfect, absolute, united self-identity. This is the origin of the stairwell that emerges out from my lack, showing me the way up into the ethereal region of divine sustenance. I can see this stairwell, but I cannot see where it leads. All I see ahead of a thousand steps is infinite blackness—infinite, fearsome nothingness. Despair is the latent, unconscious expression of this predicament, and it is just as departing and as ambiguous as the longing in itself. This is my great Beyond. Our great Beyond. A stairwell to everywhere and nowhere at once.
Where am I climbing to? Which path am I headed on? I can’t tell. I can see the stairwell up to a certain point, before it fades into blackness. A’las! There at the borders, it is as if great doors guard the lair of Mystery. It is fearsome and awe-striking, expanding to the universe and beyond, and it is provoking and revivifying, all at once. Why—here is the universal site of thought’s ruin, which also is the site of thought’s inspiration! I see the borders and have a fantastic sense of what it conceals. I cannot see beyond the borders and possess it, for I am too weak, but I can let it possess me, illuminate me! Perhaps it is this enlightenment at the borders, the possibility of synchronicity with the beyond, the divine inspiration of revelation—and not happiness—that is most truly life’s saving grace.
My ultimate drive is to fulfil my lack of being. As René Girard wrote: “All desire is a desire for being”. My ultimate drive is wistful and despairing, persisting in full impossibility. Nevertheless, my being is absolved in my doing. The lack of being is absolved in the impossibility of its becoming. Simone de Beauvoir quotes this of Sartre: “Man is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being”. I would say: man is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be becoming. All action (and by extension, the neediness for action) is staked on this possibility of impossibility, by default, whether one is aware of it or not. And is this not the true definition of freedom? It is not about one’s being allowed or disallowed to do this or that. One is free, when one has the freedom to be authentic, ‘authentic to oneself’ (as they say)—to derive one’s being from the original lack thereof. And this freedom is constituted by freedom (in the trivial sense) and its negation; if I am fighting or protesting over my lack of freedom, it is because I am able to do so authentically—I am free to be authentic to the whims that arise out of the urgency of my lack of being; hence, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl deduced from his personal experience that one could be free to choose authentically as such even while at the pinnacle of unfreedom—at the height of slavery and torture—in a Holocaust prison camp. It is this freedom—the freedom to be authentic and self-determining—which is absolute, and precedes all the other freedoms.
This is also the true meaning of being ‘true to oneself’. This is the true meaning of authenticity! Authenticity—true inside-out authenticity, as opposed to its trivial, express counterpart (as deemed by the jury of society), that which we can celebrate as true freedom—begins with engaging richly with our lack of being and our search thereof. It is to confront the possibility of impossibility—of completing and filling the impenetrable lack in oneself—with full wisdom and full transparency, which is what endows us the divine gift of creativity and generativeness. It is to align our will to the whims that drive us from the blank space of our innermost centre—the moving, groping nothingness that pulls us apart at the seams and leads us to search for ourselves. It is to dance at the borders of Mystery’s lair, in interplay with the inexplicable lack that impresses on us from beyond, which the theologian Paul Tillich describes, represents the ‘eternal wisdom in all its darkness and inexhaustible depth [even if it is as extreme as Job’s]’.
Authenticity’s stumbling block, in contrast, is to live in ‘bad faith’7. It is to entertain the will to self-deceit, to ensnare the becoming of our being, to ensure that being and becoming remains entangled—that either becoming has no being, or being has no becoming—for this is everything that goes against the spirit of being in full transparency before the whims of my true self! Even as I am in the knowledge of this, however, I am conflicted within myself much of the time. Paul laments, with agony: the good I will, I do not8. It’s quite the same matter with me! That which I truly am, I am not. I fail miserably to live up to the whims of own true self. I abide instead by that which splits me apart, by the multiplicity that speaks loudly, that seeks to multiply itself, while unity is the soft and still voice of silence, which requires listening, which requires attention—or thereby, silence, meditation, prayer. This is the movement of acceptance and atonement, that is, to humble and absolve myself before the laws of my indecipherable, erratic true centre—the pompous lack of being that seeks impulsively to complete itself in everything other to it. Insofar as it is possible to delineate a true self, it is here—in the abyss of being in me that cries out for the impossible! To be honourably ‘true to oneself’, thus, is to be in tandem with the impulse at the centre of my being. It is to will the possibility of impossibility, that is being’s breath of life, for all desire is a desire for being—or, all desire is a desire for the glorious, triumphant becoming of being. This is the raw, naked substance of the human drive which corresponds to our elusive true centre. This—and only this—is what will complete me!
Cover image source: Anton Barnard
Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death: “It is an infinite merit to be able to despair.”
Pray, don’t mistake this to be merely some toxic psychical matter I have latched onto over the course of overthinking. I know there are such things. This is not one of them. This nothingness in the centre of my being, and my despair over it, feels infinitely more close to me than everything else, and yet it feels also infinitely far removed from me.
A reference to Matthew 6:26-29 (ESV): “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
“People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.” — Kierkegaard
A reference to Luke 6:45: “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
Is this not the concealed lack so many like to refer to by saying ‘self-actualisation’? Self-actualisation is impossible, I need not explain further than I already have. This matter is all very misunderstood! What about all the other loose concepts we like to hang on this, such as ‘staying authentic to a true self’, ‘living true to oneself’, or ‘realising one’s potential’, or ‘being unapologetically me’? They merely struggle with relating the self to others. Once they learn to express honestly and without inhibition, or once expression is grounded effectively under a higher ideal—like love, or power—then they no longer suffer the ‘problem of authenticity’ in this social sort of sense. But then the struggle arises with relating the self to itself. One asks: ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I?’ ‘What am I staying true, which should determine my path?’ ‘Where do I ought to go to?’ Then they realise their question of the true self has not even been answered in the least! What is the true self that is to be actualised? How ironic, seeing then that their true self lies more closely to that region where they cannot find their true self!
Coined by Jean-Paul Sartre.
A loose capture of Romans 7:19–20: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do—Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.”