IN SEARCH of AUTHENTICITY: from Kierkegaard to Camus 1

In Search of Authenticity ‘This man has, I repeat, no place in a community whose basic principles he flouts without compunction…’. I tried to explain that it was because of the sun, but I was only too conscious that it sounded nonsensical… I explained that I didn’t believe in God… I told him that I wasn’t conscious of any ‘sin’; all I knew was that I’d been guilty of a criminal offence… In Camus’s The Outsider, Meursault’s struggle with authenticity leads to his being judged more than just a criminal. Other fictional heroes, or anti-heroes, have been created by philosophers to explore certain ideas or theories: like Meursault, Kierkegaard’s Abraham, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Sartre’s Mathieu all embody the contradictions of trying to live outside society’s accepted norms. Jacob Golomb’s In Search of Authenticity examines these characters in his analysis of the ethics of authenticity. His own passionate commitment to the quest for such an ideal is clearly evident in his writing. Golomb is particularly concerned that postmodernism devalues the subjectivity and pathos that inextricably link an individual’s search for authenticity. He argues that this search is now all the more pertinent and relevant when set against the general disillusionment characterizing the mood of the late twentieth century. In Search of Authenticity provides invaluable insight into the heroes and anti-heroes of the great Continental philosophers. Like them it marries philosophy and literature by looking at the rational model of ethics compared with the romantic ideal of authenticity. Consequently, it will prove vital reading for students of both philosophy and literature. Jacob Golomb is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is author of Nietzsche’s Enticing Philosophy of Power (1989) and Introduction to the Philosophies of Existence (1990) PROBLEMS OF MODERN EUROPEAN THOUGHT Series Editors Alan Montefiore Jonathan Rée Jean-Jacques Lecercle Also published in the series: Situation and Human Existence Freedom, Subjectivity and Society Sonia Kruks Philosophy at the Limit David Wood Poetics of Imagining Richard Kearney IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY From Kierkegaard to Camus JACOB GOLOMB London and New York First published 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1995 Jacob Golomb All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Golomb, Jacob In search of authenticity/Jacob Golomb. p. cm.—(Problems of modern European thought) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-415-11946-4—ISBN 0-415-11947-2 (pbk.) 1. Authenticity (Philosophy) 2. Existential ethics. I. Title. II. Series. B105.A8G65 1995 179′.9–dc20 94–43130 CIP ISBN 0-203-00679-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-22454-X (Adobe eReader format) ISBN 0-415-11946-4 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-11947-2 (pbk) This book is dedicated to my daughter Orianne, in the hope that, having been born an individual, she will not turn into a copy. This page intentionally left blank. Contents Editors’ Foreword viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 11 1 Authenticity, sincerity and honesty 15 2 Authenticity, literature and irony 23 3 Kierkegaard’s ironic ladder to authentic faith 34 4 Nietzsche’s pathos of authenticity 60 5 Heidegger’s ontology of authenticity 75 6 Sartre: from phenomenological ontology to psychoanalysis and politics 104 7 Camus’s return to authentic human morality 133 Conclusion: Authenticity and ethics 157 Bibliography 162 Index 166 Editors’ foreword During most of the twentieth century, philosophers in the English-speaking world have had only partial and fleeting glimpses of the work of their counterparts in continental Europe. In the main, English-language philosophy has been dominated by the exacting ideals of conceptual analysis and even of formal logic, while ‘Continental philosophy’ has ventured into extensive substantive discussions of literary, historical, psychoanalytic and political themes. With relatively few exceptions, the relations between the two traditions have been largely uncomprehending and hostile. In recent years, however, Continental writers such as Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Habermas, Foucault, Althusser, Lacan and Derrida have been widely read in English translation, setting the terms of theoretical debate in such fields as literature, social theory, cultural studies, Marxism and feminism. The suspicions of the analytical philosophers have not, however, been pacified; and the import of such Continental philosophy has mostly been isolated from original philosophical work in English. The PROBLEMS OF MODERN EUROPEAN THOUGHT series is intended to help break down this isolation. The books in the series will be original philosophical essays in their own right, from authors familiar with the procedures of analytical philosophy. Each book will present a well-defined range of themes from Continental philosophy, and will presuppose little, if any, formal philosophical training of its readers. Alan Montefiore Jonathan Rée Jean-Jacques Lecercle Acknowledgements As in other matters that concern authenticity, this book is a product of personal pathos as well as fruitful interaction with others. The space is insufficient to mention all those who contributed, but the most significant assistance was generously provided me by the following: Alan Montefiore, who trusted me to do the job; Jonathan Rée, whose patience, encouragement and many helpful suggestions made his maieutic role invaluable; and Eva Shorr, who read some chapters. Special thanks to Nessa Olshansky-Asthar, whose meticulous linguistic editing has made this book readable. I also wish to express my gratitude to the S.H.Bergman Center for Philosophical Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for its financial support, and to the Thyssen Stiftung for enabling me to visit the Nietzsche and Heidegger archives. Finally, I wish to thank the editors of Philosophy Today and The International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, where earlier versions of the chapters on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were published. To them, and to the many others who were part of this journey, I can only say that I have tried my best to be worthy of the trust placed in me. This page intentionally left blank. Introduction I have not found any reliable example of the knight of faith…. Here he is…. I clasp my hands and say half aloud, ‘Good Lord, is this the man? …Why he looks like a tax-collector!’…He tends to his work…. Toward evening he walks home, his gait is as indefatigable as that of the postman. On his way he reflects that his wife has surely a special little warm dish prepared for him…. He lives as carefree as a ne’er-do- well, and yet…he does not do the least thing except by virtue of the absurd…what a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming a murder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back to Abraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there where thinking leaves off… The ethical expression for what Abraham did is, that he would murder Isaac; the religious expression is, that he would sacrifice Isaac… This contradiction consists the dread which can well make a man sleepless, and yet Abraham is not what he is without this dread.1 This is the first fictional description in modern philosophical literature of an authentic hero and the problematics such a hero entails. Unable to point to any historical figure who could be objectively judged an authentic individual, Kierkegaard used the Biblical (or mythological) figure of Abraham to exemplify authentic faith. Nietzsche, too, unable to come up with any historical example of an authentic hero, or Übermensch, instead portrays the fictional figure of Zarathustra: When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it. But at last a change came over his heart, and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: ‘You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine?…I must descend to the depths, as you do in the evening’… Human existence is uncanny and still without meaning…. I will teach men the meaning of their existence—the overman…. Like the sun, Zarathustra too wants to go under; now he sits and waits, surrounded by broken old tablets and new tablets half covered with writing. Behold, here is a new tablet…. Man is something that must be overcome…. God died: now we want the overman to live.2 More recent work by existentialist philosophers also makes much use of fictive portraits, biographies and diaries of heroes of authenticity. Sartre’s hero in Road to Freedom is depicted as follows: Mathieu stiffened, and threw an agonised look at the driver’s back: all his freedom had come back on him once more. ‘No’, he thought, ‘no, it isn’t heads and tails. Whatever happens, it is by my agency that everything must happen.’… Even if he let himself be carried off like an old sack of coal, he would have chosen his own damnation: he was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate: to marry, to give up the game, to drag this dead weight about with him for years to come.

Load more