Experience and the wisdom of the major religions teaches me so. Of course, in the parlance of our time, one simply re-invents oneself. Or, the self is an epi-phenomenal fiction of the brain. But, if the self was established by another power, then authenticity involves resting transparently in the power that established it as Kierkegaard put it and to do otherwise is despair.
Authenticity: which is a long form of authentic. Whom among us has lived an authentic life?
Or can one even live an authentic life in this day and age of crap and bullshit that is at the center
of our lives. We have to spend X number of hours a day at work and we sure the hell don’t
have anything resembling authenticity at work. Personally, I work between 24 and 32 hours a week.
Trust me when I say, not one minute of those hours even resembles being authentic.
You spend roughly 8 hours a day sleeping, 8 times 7 is 56. You have to eat, crap, brush your teeth,
other such stuff. I would bet we spend 2 hours a day doing such junk so that is 14 hours a week,
So in a week of 168 hours, so in those areas, we have roughly 100 hours we are spending on them,
(and that is a minimum given most people work over 35 hours plus commuting) So when
are we supposed to be authentic? On every other Tuesday? The modern age is designed to prevent
any body from having a life, little less an authentic life. Actually come to think of it, we wouldn’t know
an authentic life if it came up and bit us. (not to mention, the trouble of deciding what an authentic life
even means, which is a whole another area)
Kropotkin
Sleeping is not authentic?
Eating, crapping and brushing teeth is not authentic?
A squirrel gathering nuts is authentic but you working at Walmart is not authentic?
Amen, brother.
I think Lenny Bruce was authentic.
Authenticity amounts to a lifetime of self discovery.
How will you know if/when you discover the authentic you?
Since it’s discovery, you never do. The only thing permanent is change—Heraclitus.
What’s the point of searching if you won’t recognize it when you see it?
And if you will recognize it, then you already have it. Maybe you are just not using it consistently.
One never arrives. The journey is all the authenticity you need.–Hesse
It appears we are equating authenticity with perfection. Does one have to be perfect and unchangeable to be authentic?
I would define authenticity as an “attempt” rather than as an “accomplishment”. We can fail in our attempts but that does not mean a lack of authenticity.
It appears we are ever changing but permanently inauthentic. It does not make sense.
It is enough to watch a magician. Either we have to accept that our senses can be wrong, or suppose that he made a pact with the devil.
Willing to being X or Y seems to be. Felix is giving the subject a nice twist.
I was thinking more about Asian religion here when I was reading your statement. To will, seen as a craving, as desire, leads to the possession of masks. Willing distorts rather than reveal who we are…in that Asian frame of mind.
Thank you. That’s closer to what I was saying. Now shifting this to the sphere of faith and…you get my OP.
I was also thinking that. The Tao Te Ching speaks of “wei wu wei”, literally “doing not-doing,” which can be seen when a good athlete enters a state of body-awareness in which the right move happens as if by itself, effortlessly, without any interference of the conscious will. But, confirmation from multiple independent witnesses is better, and Kierkegaard’s brilliant exposition on despair in “The Sickness Unto Death” analyzes the antithesis of authenticity in terms I think are compatible with the Tao.
When speaking of Buddhism, for example, the belief in authenticity or non-authenticity is a belief that causes harm.
Personally I do agree that even what looks like the most firm knowledge has some percentage of ‘belief’ in it, and by that I mean the assumption of a context, or the usage of implicit default assumptions - consciously or not. So, indeed, pretending that we see things as they are is exactly that: pretension. (And I am not implying that this forgery is a bad thing).
Yet belief is not exactly Faith. That is a more comprehensive set of beliefs and of something else, which goes well beyond ‘holding something for true’.
But, before that, let’s assume that the belief in the existence of a transcendent God, the Summum Ens at the beginning and the end of the universe and life, it’s just a belief like any other. And let’s assume that I believe the Hippogriff existed, while I don’t believe the Dodo ever existed.
There’s no real evidence about the existence of the Dodo (or we can quibble about that, but this is just an example functional to my argument, so let’s say that its sub-fossil rests can’t count as evidence, let’s say that sub-fossils of Dodos can be forgeries - that which has indeed happened). There are descriptions drawn from memories of voyagers, whose origin is not really qualified, and there are drawings, but it seems that these were based on vague descriptions and it’s certain that some of those painters actually never saw the animal they represented. (This is somehow less than accurate, I repeat that it’s just an example for the sake of the argument). In fact we do not exactly know what the Dodo looked like.
On the other hand, why not believing that Hippogriffs have existed? There are more sources describing Hippogriffs and from more famous authors - and, hence, maybe, more reliable sources than those attesting the existence of Dodos. It would seem that Hippogriffs were seen in a much larger geographical area than one small island in the Indian Ocean (more or less the Mediterranean and the Middle East). Moreover, it seems that they were first introduced in the ancient Persian literature, which means that they cannot be described as unique to Greek-Roman mythology.
We also know that there was a time when Mammoths were living in Europe, while today no such animal can be found alive in the whole world. So maybe some fossils remains, which we believe belong to some ancient horse or eagle, are in fact the remains of a Hippogriff…
So why most people believe in Dodos and not in Hippogriffs?
I guess the same Vattimo, which you seemingly quote to support an epistemological right to any belief, explains that very well.
The same insight that declares that “scientific paradigms [are] fraught with historicity”, what Nietzsche would call the ‘historical sense’, declares that Hippogriffs are a myth, or that a religion and the belief in a religion’s tenets are a ‘structure’ fraught with historicity at least as much as scientific method - and mostly that both have a longing to transform ‘facts’ into elements of a supposed greater design. Regardless how unreliable the sources may be, how inaccurate and ‘creative’ the drawings of Dodos may be, the tales of voyagers of the XVIII century, which after analysis seem however plausible, are more trustworthy than poems describing Hippogriffs. We clearly understand that a work of poetry, mythology, epos and even religion is not concerned with a reality that it has not stipulated to be existing ex ante, even just as a mere poetic fiction.
And if that was all, one can easily retort that the operation would consist in swapping God’s will with something that is even more vague and impenetrable, such as the concept of ‘historicity’. (By the way, as for ‘impenetrable’, I guess that Burckhardt, Huizinga, Dumézil, and others would seriously object).
What makes Hippogriffs only a myth it’s that they conflict with zoology, with evolution, with those ‘beliefs’ that, however, have to remain always open for falsification if they are to maintain their status of science. In that respect those beliefs are ‘justified’, while those that cannot sustain the same trial are not (is that only ‘historicity’?). If one accepts the network of scientific beliefs (while the opposite looks like denying evidence), framed by consistent theories and pinned on continuous experience, one can maybe still maintain local quirky beliefs, maybe even in Hippogriffs. Yet God is not ‘local’, the same ‘epistemological space’ cannot contain both God and science - actually there’s no God in any ‘epistemological space’, since the XIX century there’s been no need for knowledge to suppose the existence of any God. Wherever scientific knowledge advances, God retreats…
Then, go on, believe whatever you like, just don’t pretend you have an equally firm basis as those beliefs that conflict with yours, when these beliefs are science.
This is “fine”, I have no comments on that. But, well, it’s not really about belief, it’s about how you want to define yourself. And you say it pretty well: there’s a culture, there’s a moral heritage of Christianity by which we still live today… This is where you find the source of what you qualify as a ‘belief’ - it’s morality, not knowledge. It’s not a “why not?”, it can’t be a “why not?”. It’s the commitment to a moral code, the promise to be saved from oblivion and death, the guarantee of a purpose and of one’s ‘meaning’, the deepest basis of values by which whole societies live.
Ciao attano,
I believe that to say that they cannot occupy the same space is the exposition of a prejudice. It is not evident why this has to be so. It only becomes so once “God”, the term, is loaded with “attributes” that have no correspondence with nature. If God was an artist then would it be still so difficult for God and science to occupy the same space? Regardless of this alternative being chosen, the history of Catholicism giving weight to science and concepts like evolution (provided that space is left for the supernatural spirit) make me doubt that science and religion are necessarily at odds. When Einstein said: God does not play dice (paraphrasing), was he being scientific, religious, or both?
Nahh. My intention was not moralistic, in the sense of prescribing A morality, but in shaking the degree of confidence people feel with regards to God and God’s products. With God or in a world without God there still are questions about right and wrong conduct. Morality was not invented by theism. Theism serves as a mouthpiece for a biological bias or disposition. That is why, even though God is dead (for some) not everything is permitted.
Somewhere else in the Forum, in another section, there is a discussion about the origin of morality…includes a video.
Which means that you believe in God exclusively as an artist?
Well… the Church’s record is not exactly ‘immaculate’, is it? Regardless, their hypothesis about how it would not conflict requires some tinkering and, anyway, surely that is not a scientific hypothesis.
Surely not scientific, and he knew the difference pretty well.
I never maintained that Theism invented morality - I can happily consider the opposite.
I still think the idea of God is functional to morality. The same way some people refuse God on a moral ground, some others assume Him on a moral ground.