Perhaps the use of George Michael’s guitar as the featured image for this blog post points to my somewhat buoyant mood…I have just finished penning the final couplet of this 14 piece series! Today, I release the fifth – a short and sweet….
Bad Faith and congruence
I might equally have titled this couplet “inauthenticity and authenticity” yet there is something about how these words are used in the self-development movement and indeed in the counselling community (in descriptions of “being real”) that nudges me toward Sartre / de Beauvoir’s and Rogers’ expressions instead.
We might be familiar with Sartre’s description of the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour that epitomises the paradoxical and freely made decision to deny oneself an inescapable freedom (to choose). The waiter, as an object in the world assuming social roles, “movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid” (1943, pg 59). It is perhaps in the writing of de Beauvoir that we see the consequences of sub-ordinating our freedom in order to comply; and perhaps all the more poignant given de Beauvoir was to acknowledge her unequal status in the union with Sartre. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir dedicates part III to “Justifications”, and a chapter on each of the three female archetypes of bad faith: the narcissist, the woman in love, and the mystic. In each, a woman’s authentic self is reduced to her existence as that in relationship to the Other (1949). The polarity of this inauthentic expression of one’s own being is what Rogers was to term congruence. And certainly, if one is to read the letters between Sartre and de Beauvoir, one might question her living as congruent to her belief that women needed to strive to be more than merely subplots to the lives of men.
Wo[man]’s striving to live a life of authentic expression pre-dates the existentialism of the left-bank; and so do its descriptions. We might look back to Kierkegaard’s critical stance toward social reality; suggesting that individual’s are not that and have become pawns. In contemporary terms (and this does seem to be a returning theme in society) society encourages inauthenticity and on some level to become content with mediocrity. Brene Brown’s work highlighting the difference between (authentic) belonging and ‘fitting in’ (by not living congruent expression) comes to mind (2022). Kierkegaard called this process of individual’s submersion into the collective ‘massification’, and leads to despair; the project thus is “becoming what one is” to bestow one’s life with meaning.
Somewhat later but more familiar might be Heidegger’s conception of authenticity. He created the word “Eigentlichkeit” (more accurately translated apparently as ‘being one’s own’) to underline one mode of being open to Dasein. This mode of authenticity is if you have “chosen, or achieved yourself in your being,” and you exist in the mode of inauthenticity if you have “lost or only seemingly achieved yourself” (Wrathall, 2021). What is important to grasp in these two conceptions of Kierkegaard and Heidegger is the “self” and Dasein are not objects but a relation of being: this brings in the notion of unfolding and temporality or happening of life; furthermore, we always ‘care’ about who and what we are in that process. Whilst both Kierkegaard and Heidegger share a knottedness in their language, if you can follow the sense and direction of their writing there is something incredibly important in the phenomenological ‘as-lived’ understanding of what it is to be a being-in-the-world.