Everyone says that you ought to be your authentic self. But what if your authentic self is an asshole...

t. Martin Heidegger

>i have no argubment so take dis u heiddegerfag!!

Come on guys, at least try harder. I fucking despise logical positivsm and social constructionism, but I have yet to read a convincing dscriptiong of what constitutes the "real self". Hell, even Jung just gives vague answers and proposes a method of individuation without ever considering that people themselves might not know who they truly are. Ask yourselves, why do you do certain things? Why do you like certain things? Why do you think about certain things? Would you do all those things if you were borin in a completely different culture and location? Go ahead and reply with a pseud answer you brainlets.

Even an asshole isn't an asshole 100% of the time.

Most assholes are employed you know, because you have to, to survive.

Heidegger talks about the necessity of and the struggle against the social understandings that faces every one of us. Coming to terms with society is one of the many struggles for authenticity that we have, besides grappling with the temporality of our various stands that we take.

Can't avoid becoming absorbed in the world because we need to be involved in order to survive. Can't avoid the social practices of Das Man because it provides the framework that makes certain existential possibilities intelligible. Can't be authentic by following in the footsteps provided by Das Man because we'd be allowing the social practices to overcome us while we're busy with our involvements in the world and the decisions we make would not be our own.

nice quints and triplets. I don't think we'll ever become the übermensch Nietzsche envisioned us to become though. I think we are just a bridge to something greater, which is most likely superintelligent robots. They will transcend any human notions of value and accurately represent reality; lacking in meaning and pursuing only perfection. Humans simply can't do this, we are imbued with foul notions of humility and altruism which have no place in reality.

I think Leibniz' idea of perpetually unfolding monadalogical substance is one way to address this concern.
It just completely does away with the idea of causation in favor of pre-established harmony

Not sure exactly what the existentialists would say though.

It's actually quite ironic to read Heidegger, because he stresses authenticity and Being-Towards-Death, and resistance to Das Man, but he still became a Nazi.

It has to be the epitome of postmodernism to be able to articulate what people should do, but never be able to actualize it in yourself.

This should have been aimed here

>what people should do, but never be able to actualize it in yourself
sounds like someone i know

t. Hegel

You're desiring a contradiction in looking for a philosopher who describes in depth what it means to be your "real self." If a philosopher wrote that living authentically involves x, y, and z, once you started doing these things, would you be doing them because you have a real desire for the things themselves, or simply because you desire the connotations of living a real experience without ever deeply knowing what it means? Take Heidegger, for instance: he describes authenticity as a conscious and deliberate connections with the things and people around you that let you reflect on the choices you have for your future. Heidegger of course recognizes that the choices you have are determined by the culture in which you live, but why should this make you question the possibility of authenticity? Culture makes our options for action and expression finite, but we can still make choices within this finite set.

Just because there might be psychological or sociological explanations for why we pick certain things doesn't negate the interior feeling we have when we experience them. Cultural pressures guide us to enjoy certain things, but if we reflect on them and find that we truly enjoy them, then is that not authentic? Being your "real" self is a matter of ensuring you're not blindly following expectations that are doing you harm, not a complete rejection of the culture in which you live. You will never be reducible to the social constructs or animalistic forces that animate you, because there will never be an explanation for why you chose certain inclinations over others. Being you "real self" isn't even about discovering a way to perfectly explain them to yourself, either; it is sufficient to just know *how* to connect with things that give your life meaning.

Any philosopher who encourages being your "real self" can only gesture at the path you have to take because you are going to determine the path for yourself. When a writer gets too specific, this is only dogma. The best a writer can do is to help you see past the illusions heaped on you by society (Nietzsche being the prime example). What you see after that will be unique to you.

>Culture makes our options for action and expression finite, but we can still make choices within this finite set.
Welcome to 100 years ago. Today, you can bag your shit and go on a plane and live in Japan if you so desired. Hell, you can even be a different gender or race if you want and medical procedures can help you acheive that.

>Cultural pressures guide us to enjoy certain things, but if we reflect on them and find that we truly enjoy them, then is that not authentic?
Authenticity is when you know how bad a McDonald's cheeseburger is for you and you dislike it, but you still go and buy one. If you're dumb, authenticity is the flipped in this example and you're truly your authentic self when you don't go and eat that cheeseburger, no matter how much you think you want it (you really don't).

I think the approach people should take is a scientific one, wherein you don't go out to prove to yourself who you are, but you go out and prove to yourself who you're not and this true enough.

Thank you

Yeah, Sartre and the other existential thinkers of his era are hacks, but Nietzsche and Heidegger don't succumb to your criticisms of failing to articulate the 'Real Self' and ignoring societal forces and the unconscious drives. Read more.

>Today, you can bag your shit and go on a plane and live in Japan if you so desired. Hell, you can even be a different gender or race if you want and medical procedures can help you acheive that.
Embarrassingly naive. Your perception of Japan is irreversibly determined by the culture(s) in which you grew up, your approach to assimilating will always be determined by Western values ingrained in you, and the Japanese will never fully accept you. Funny that you chose Japan since they're one of the most isolationist, xenophobic countries on the planet. Even considering all this, you didn't even make a point. If you move to Japan and feel at home there, then this is a choice culture has given you. Are airplanes not part of our culture? Isn't sex change surgery just another option added to our milieu?

>you're truly your authentic self when you don't go and eat that cheeseburger, no matter how much you think you want it (you really don't)
like I said, becoming your "real self" isn't a matter of following rigid dictates laid out by others. all you're saying here is that people should be healthy. and just because our body craves things that might be bad for us doesn't negate that the desire itself is actual. don't even think about giving me some scientific explanation for why i dont "really" want the burger: i could pick it for a whole host of other reasons that i have reflected on and decided that it is my authentic decision to consume it (eg for nostalgia purposes, comparing different restaurants, deliberately consuming high calories for body reasons)

if your "scientific method" is what makes *you* the true you, then fine, but it's literal autism to impose this on everyone else.

Hmm. Is being authentic necessarily include embracing your personal issues versus getting help in resolving them?

Asking because being an asshole usually means you're mentally disturbed in some capacity.

You're under no obligation at all whatsoever to succumb to those "enviromental pressures" if you don't want to user.

Diogenes lived alone in a barrel shitting on the streets, why can't you?

There is no authentic self. There is no self.

There is no whole self. He who defines personal identity as the private possession of some depository of memories is mistaken. Whoever affirms such a thing is abusing the symbol that solidifies memory in the form of an enduring and tangible granary or warehouse, when memory is no more than the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way. Moreover, if I root personality in remembrance, what claim of ownership can be made on the elapsed instants that, because they were quotidian or stale, did not stamp us with a lasting mark? Heaped up over the years, they lie buried, inaccessible to our avid longing. And that much-vaunted memory to whose ruling you made appeal, does it ever manifest all its past plenitude? Does it truly live?

what if you're authentic self is to be a phoney fuck? what should that person do?

authentic self shit just seems like their talking about gay shit in a time when being gay was taboo desu

Diogenes of Sinope left his home city as an outcast (he was either exiled, or left on his own, after either he or his father (or both of them) defaced some currency). It's commonly agreed upon that he may have received an oracle (on his way to Athens/Corinth) telling him to "deface the currency", which he interpreted as a command to pick and pull apart the obfuscation of society. So there we go, his ideas didnt just come out of nowhere.

>he thinks the entire set of traits which make up your "Self" is solely rooted in remembrance of an individual

Back to le leddit with you.

What else is the self besides using the experiences held within your conscious and subconscious memory as a decision-making tool for future actions?

How can you be otherwise than yourself? Have you been someone else? Tell me your secrets OP!

Bump

You don't understand authenticity.

If you're an "asshole" in the sense that you enjoy causing others pain, that means you have been inauthentic for so long that you have lost certain (caring, empathetic, or sympathetic) parts of yourself. Coming to terms with one's own assholery is how one moves past it. People enjoy other people, exempting folks like Sartre who only understand authenticity in its negation. Although I'd say that he wasn't an "asshole" because he hated people, but because he was afraid of them.

"Authenticity" is for schizoid philosopher types and has little bearing upon the fact of our social reality. Not 'authentic', but 'social'. Machiavelli was right, when normies pervade your pretend-normie is a political necessity and fixating on authenticity or on spirit is a recipe for disaster and self-ruin. You exert truth with power and leverage, it doesn't relate to you or this world by sheer principle or 'essence', truth must be actualized to bear meaning and social actualities are always inauthentic.

Why does conforming to society while despising it make you inauthentic? The hate and fire are still there, those authentic feelings are still present but you realising acting on them will only end badly. It would be inauthentic to mindlessly follow the flock, emphasis on mindlessly. Conforming doesn't make you inauthentic, if anything it makes you a wuss

> What is a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Nobody said that being authentic will solve all your problems. It's just that if you're not authentic the game is over before it started. The idea is to be authentic and also strive to improve so that that authentic being is also good. But if your authentic self encounters resistance and chooses fakery as a defense mechanism, the jig is up.

>But what if your authentic self is an asshole?
That's not how this language game works for existentialists, who you seem to associate with, it doesn't pertain to such ideas of fixed personalities. On the contrary, there's no such thing as a "true" asshole to existentialists just like there are no true nice people to them.

Christ, no. Nobody should be their authentic self. Veeky Forums exists to teach us that lesson.

>Everyone says that you ought to be your authentic self
This is modernist degeneracy. You should strive to fulfil whatever societal and filial roles and duties you are allotted by Providence and to be a good Christian, not seek some special snowflake "self".

Certainly, because as we all know, using the phrase "special snowflake" to describe an idea immediately and totally invalidates it.

If you are advanced enough, you realise that your authentic self can never was and can never be an 'asshole'. So that's not a problem :)

Not an argument.

Just be entirely yourself

Neither is spouting groundless oughts.

Not an argument.

Sartre and Nietzsche definitely were quite asshole-ish irl, you know.

Now the real problem is that none of us has any access to "our real selves". We can interpret ourselves and play out what we "find", but there is no direct access. A permanent self doesn't even exist.

So what if your spontaneous acts are asshole-ish? Are they "the real you"? No.
Your spontaneous acts are the stuff that is really made up of your environment and your imaginary relationship to it. There's nothing authentic about sticking to spontaneity. You're at your most authentic when you consciously choose something and then do it. This does not require ditching morality - just be responsible for the very morality that you choose to base your acts on.

Being nice to your employer - just do it if you choose to do so, either for ethical or for pragmatic reasons or whatever. That is the part where authenticity comes into play.

His becoming a nazi was... kind of the opposite what you're describing. He saw and opportunity and seized it, but it ended up failing miserably. He is actually kind of a rare case of a heavyweight philosopher doing even as much as failing at actualizing his theories on a societal level. Most stick to theory, or at least don't take up the dirty work like Heidegger did.

So I guess we'll keep shouting "not an argument" at each other until one of us dies or gets bored?

That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate?