Nevertheless

I have been attacking use of the adjective “authentic” by extension from the concrete meaning of the term, meaning something in the semantic field of genuine, real, and true. Calling a painting an authentic Goya, calling an Indian meal authentic South Indian cuisine, calling a saxophone manufactured by the Selmer company an authentic instrument – all of this is entirely legitimate and meaningful. What I am warning against is speaking of authentic Judaism, for example, or authentic jazz.

Still, I must concede, people do try to mean something when they use the word. What is it?

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Years ago my son-in-law worked for a tour company that brought groups to a Bedouin encampment in the Negev. Once, as he told us, he and our daughter were in the encampment, waiting for a bus full of tourists to arrive and talking in Hebrew with the Bedouin, who were all dressed in jeans and tee-shirts and talking on cell-phones. As soon as they got word that the group would be arriving, they put picturesque robes on over their jeans, hid their cell-phones, and prepared to make coffee and flat bread on campfires in a tent. Obviously, the tourists were not going to have what we might call an authentic encounter with the Bedouin. On the other hand, their hosts were undeniably Bedouin, and making a bit of money from tourists is an entirely authentic activity on their part.

My point is that the authenticity of the experience is irrelevant. I'm pretty sure that only the most gullible of the tourists would have failed to realize that the Bedouin were putting on a show. The Bedouin, for their part, were trying to make their way of life interesting and attractive. If the tourists felt they had gotten their money's worth, and the Bedouin felt that they had explained something about themselves to their visitors, isn't that satisfactory?

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These days people are expected (or permitted) to reinvent themselves: an engineer resigns from a high tech company and becomes a high school math teacher; a lawyer leaves a big firm and becomes a social worker; a comedian, Al Franken, becomes a senator. Indeed, men now reinvent themselves as women and vice versa. Yet there are limits to the permission for self-reinvention granted by society. A white woman, Rachel Dolezal, who decided to reinvent herself as an African-American was seen as an impostor. A person who puts on a white coat, drapes a stethoscope around her neck, but who is not a physician, risks arrest, just as a person who pretends to be an attorney and represents clients in court is a criminal.

Oddly, impostors, I have read, often feel that the roles they illegitimately assume are, in fact, reflections of their true selves. Their impersonation of a policeman or a psychologist feels authentic to them, while we, looking at them from the outside, regard them as mentally unbalanced. In other words, there's a difference between a confidence man (or woman), who pretends to be someone else, for the criminal purpose of cheating people, and unhinged impostors who believe they are or ought to be what they claim to be.

None of the above, however, addresses the feeling that one is somehow unable to be what one really is, or that someone else is apparently unintentionally and even unconsciously false.

Long ago, in 1961-62, when I was a senior in high school, the best students in French had a fourth year course, given by an impressively worldly, European woman of fifty or so. The course was centered on existentialism, which is a good topic for seventeen and eighteen year olds. We read Sartre and Camus and talked about the meaningless of life, the need to make an existential choice to give life meaning, and about “mauvaise foi,” literally, "bad faith," usually rendered as "false consciousness," belief in a false meaning of life, accepted because of bourgeois conformism. At least that's how I remember it, after all these decades.

The realization that one is living in bad faith is painful, and that is the realization which deprives one's life of authenticity. Looking back at the person I was between, say, the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and the choices I made, I am struck by how clueless I was – even though I was, on paper, a very intelligent young man and a high-achieving student, and even though I had imbibed existentialism. I often think that, had I had a better idea of who I was, I would have made wiser decisions. I would have been more authentically myself. More often, I think this is a ridiculous and damaging way of thinking about my life.

Ultimately, I reject that mode of thought and that notion of authenticity, because it always involves passing judgment from outside. Either one looks at another person and says to oneself, “There's no way a person can honestly believe what that person professes to believe. Therefore his belief and behavior are dishonest. He is inauthentic.” Or one looks at oneself as if one were someone else and passes the same judgment on oneself. But who is to say that the judgmental self is any more trustworthy than the judged self? Suppose that, under the influence of a charismatic religious teacher, I had decided in my twenties, to become a Hasidic Jew, and then, ten years down the line, I saw through the teacher's charisma, and rejected Hasidism. My later self, looking back on my earlier self, would see the earlier choice as inauthentic. But most likely, in another ten years, an even later self, would look back at the self who rejected Hasidism and see that choice as equally erroneous?

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The way out of this infinite regress is the Buddhist view that the “self” is merely a construct, a cluster of largely unexamined ideas, not anything real. Therefore it is, by definition, illusory, hence inherently inauthentic, making authenticity unattainable and therefore not a useful category of thought.