And I suppose that’s the question: are we defined by the actions we perform or by the ideas that we think? Are these two entirely seperate things?
It is the way you act that will dictate the way you are defined by the “mit-sein” (the “others” - sorry, I gotta stop reading Heidegger). Like it or lump it, whether you decide to act simply to please them or not, this is how you will be judged, and judgement - as awful a concept as it may be - is almost inevitable in this sense. Unless you are able to explicitly manifest - verbally or through action - your ideas or other patterns of thought, then your own “ego” will be defined by the “others” purely in terms of the modality of your actions, and you will not be defined by what we could reasonably call your “inner-beauty”. What you think, in the eyes of the others, is only important only to the extent to which these thoughts are expressed in your actions. In the eyes of the others, you are what you do.
But of course, we cannot discount the latent self - ourselves as we know ourselves to be - in defining “who we are”. Most of the things we think, our most cherished beliefs and ideas, are never revealed in the manifest self (the way we present ourselves to others through action and verbal communication) and even when the latent self does expose itself in this way, it is virtually impossible to represent it properly. Our actions can never completely represent who we are, and I’m sure that we’ve all been involved in situations where we’ve been caught out by this discrepency. If I try to present my latent self to the world, I run the risk of having my actions being misinterpreted by those individuals that they were intended for, and of being completely misrepresented in this way. People may assume - via my own inadequecy to convey my latent self through action - that I “am” someone that I am not. They may only have certain pieces of my jigsaw puzzle, that they then attempt to piece together and form some conception in their own minds of who I - in the latent sense - really am. But of course, as I said, you rarely have the opportunity to provide people with all these pieces, and even when you provide others with some of these pieces via your actions, there is no guarantee that you haven’t unintentionally misrepresented your self, or that they haven’t misinterpreted these actions as meaning something else. Very often, for instance, you can say or do something without having a reason (unless you are of the Freudian train of thought that there is a reason behind everything you do) and people will read to deeply into it, adding pieces to your puzzle that were never there to begin with.
The dichotemy of the latent self and the manifest self isn’t so distinct, however, as we very often - over time - begin to act in the same way that we think, and think in the same way that we act. In this sense the lines seperating thought and action - or the latent self and the manifest self - are indeed quite blurred. To suggest that the set of all our actions and the set of all our thoughts are entirely seperate entities would be to draw quite a long bow.
And to touch on self-deception/bad-faith (mauvaise fois) for a second, this would be to act in a way contrary to the way you think, and to think contrary to the way you act.
As for the issue of alcohol, I will agree that it allows us to reveal more of our latent self than we would otherwise be inclined to do so (as we do - for whatever reason - decide that it is no longer as necessary to wear “masks” of any kind in the act of socialising), but I do not believe that it necessarily reveals our “true self” (whatever that may be). If alcohol did reveal our true selves, then how come so many of us have a latent desire to slur our speech, stumble a lot and then pass out in a pool of our own vomit and the end of the night?
