Authenticity in the Dhamma
Word “authenticity” as much as any other term is ambiguous. Sometimes it is understood as “free expression of ones own personality”. In that contextual meaning practice of Dhamma should be rather understood as “exercises in falsification”, or more seriously the attitude in opposition to such “authenticity”.
Nevertheless authenticity has also quite different meaning:
[On Heidegger’s notion of the ‘inauthentic’ man:] The word ‘inauthentic’ is used by Heidegger to describe the ostrich-like attitude of the man who seeks to escape from his inescapable self-responsibility by becoming an anonymous member of a crowd. This is the normal attitude of nearly everybody. To be ‘authentic’ a man must be constantly and deliberately aware of his total responsibility for what he is.
For example, a judge may disclaim personal responsibility for sentencing people to punishment. He will say that as a judge it is his duty to punish. In other words it is as an anonymous representative of the Judiciary that he punishes, and it is the Judiciary that must take the responsibility. This man is inauthentic. If he wishes to be authentic he must think to himself, whenever he sits on the Bench or draws his salary, ‘Why do I punish? Because, as a judge, it is my duty to punish.
Why am I a judge? Is it perhaps my duty to be a judge? No. I am a judge because I myself choose to be a judge. I choose to be one who punishes in the name of the Law. Can I, if I really wish, choose not to be a judge? Yes, I am absolutely free at any moment to stop being a judge, if I so choose. If this is so, when a guilty man comes up before me for sentence, do I have any alternative but to punish him? Yes, I can get up, walk out of the courtroom, and resign my job. Then if, instead, I punish him, am I responsible? I am totally responsible.’ Nanavira Thera
Again Nanavira:
But the question of authenticity (which more or less corresponds to the subjectivity-reflexion pair of attitudes discussed earlier) is another matter. If this mode of thinking can be achieved, it is capable of making a great deal of difference to one’s life. Once one recognizes that one is totally responsible for all one’s decisions and actions, one can no longer hide behind convenient ready-made excuses; and this, though it makes life rather less comfortable by removing one’s habitual blinkers, endows one with unexpected self-reliance and resilience in difficult situations. And once it becomes habitual to think in this way the task of living is discovered to be a full-time job and not merely a drudge to be got through by killing time as best one can. In other words, it abolishes boredom.* Finally, as I think I mentioned some time ago, it is only in this authentic or responsible attitude that the Buddha’s Teaching becomes intelligible.
* The common view is that the remedy for boredom is variety or distraction, but this only aggravates the malady . The real remedy is repetition.
Here is Kierkegaard again:
Whoever fails to understand that life is repetition, and that this is its beauty, has passed judgement upon himself; he deserves no better fate than that which will befall him, namely to be lost. Hope is an alluring fruit which does not satisfy, memory is a miserable pittance that does not satisfy, but repetition is life’s daily bread, which satisfies and blesses. When a man has circumnavigated the globe it will appear whether he has the courage to understand that life is repetition, and the enthusiasm to find therein his happiness…. In repetition inheres the earnestness and reality of life.
(…) . And here is a dialogue from Dostoievsky’s The Possessed:
—Old philosophical commonplaces, always the same from the beginning of time, murmured Stavrogin with an air of careless pity.
—Always the same! Always the same from the beginning of time and nothing else! echoed Kirilov, his eyes shining, as if his victory was contained in this idea.
This passage underlines the futility of the historical method of dealing with religions and philosophies. The Buddha’s Teaching is not simply a reaction to the earlier Hinduism, as our modern scholars inform us ad nauseam.
If it is, the scholars will have to explain why I am a follower of the Buddha without being a disgruntled Hindu. Modern scholarship is inauthenticity in its most virulent form.
Nanavira Thera:
Care, says Heidegger, can be ‘lived’ in either of two modes: authentic or inauthentic. The authentic man faces himself reflexively and sees himself in his existential solitude—he sees that he is alone in the world—; whereas the inauthentic man takes refuge from this disquieting reflexion of himself in the anonymous security of people-in-general, of the ‘they’. The inauthentic man is fleeing from authenticity—from angst, that is to say, or ‘anxiety’; for anxiety is the state of the authentic man (remember that Heidegger is describing the puthujjana, and he sees no way out of anxiety, which, for him, is the mark of the lucid man facing up to himself).
But the normally smooth surface of the public world of the ‘they’ sometimes shows cracks, and the inauthentic man is pierced by pangs of anxiety, recalling him for a moment or two to the state of authenticity.
Chiefest amongst these is the apprehension of the possibility of death*, which the inauthentic man suddenly realizes is his possibility (death, of course, is certain: but this simply means that at any moment it is possible). He is torn from his complacent anonymity and brought up against the hard fact that he is an individual, that he himself is totally responsible for everything that he does, and that he is sure to die. The hitherto friendly and sheltering world suddenly becomes indifferent to him and meaningless in its totality . But this shattering experience is usually fleeting, and the habitually inauthentic man returns quickly enough to his anonymity. (…)
* It happens that, for Heidegger, contemplation of one’s death throughout one’s life is the key to authenticity. (…) Here, then, is a summary of Heidegger’s views on this matter (from 6ET, pp. 96-7):
Death, then, is the clue to authentic living, the eventual and omnipresent possibility which binds together and stabilizes my existence…. I anticipate death… by living in the presence of death as always immediately possible and as undermining everything. This full-blooded acceptance… of death, lived out, is authentic personal existence. Everything is taken as contingent.
Everything is devalued. Personal existence and everything encountered in personal existence is accepted as nothing, as meaningless, fallen under the blow of its possible impossibility. I see all my possibilities as already annihilated in death, as they will be, like those of others in their turn. In face of this capital possibility which devours all the others, there are only two alternatives: ac-ceptance or distraction. Even this choice is a rare privilege, since few are awakened by dread to the recognition of the choice, most remain lost in the illusions of everyday life. To choose acceptance of death as the supreme and normative possibility of my existence is not to reject the world and refuse participation in its daily preoccupations, it is to refuse to be deceived and to refuse to be identified with the preoccupations in which I engage: it is to take them for what they are worth—nothing. From this detachment springs the power, the dignity, the tolerance, of authentic personal existence.
Nanavira Thera: Heidegger tells us that we normally exist in a state of ‘fallenness.’ By this he means that most men hide from themselves by identifying themselves with the anonymous ‘one’ or ‘they’ or ‘the Others’ and people in general.
We have shown earlier how in the environment which lies closest to us, the public ‘environment’ already is ready-to-hand and is also a matter of concern [mitbesorgt]. In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others as distinguishable and explicit vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the “they” is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The ‘they’, which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. (B&T, p. 164)
This kind of existence Heidegger calls ‘inauthenticity’; and it is what Sartre calls ‘serious-mindedness—which, as we all know, reigns over the world’ (EN, p. 7213). It is the inauthentic, the serious-minded, the solemn, who are your non-laughers. Or rather, they do laugh—but only at what the ‘they’ have decided is funny. (Look at a copy of Punch of a hundred, or even fifty, years ago; you will see how completely the fashion in humour has changed. The ‘sick joke’ was quite unthinkable in Victoria’s day—‘one’ simply did not laugh at that sort of thing, it was ‘not done’.) The inauthentic, absorbed by the world ‘like ink by a blotter’ (B&N, p. 626), accept their views and values ready made, and go about their daily business doing whatever ‘is done’. And this includes their relaxations. To be ‘serious-minded’ is to go to see comic films and laugh at whomever ‘one laughs at’, and see tragedies and have one’s emotions purged by the currently approved emotional purgative—the latest version, perhaps, of Romeo and Juliet.
That, as you know, is to be ‘well-adjusted’. But if one should happen not to laugh at whatever ‘one laughs at’, or should find Romeo and Juliet emotionally constipating, then one is accused, paradoxically enough, of ‘not being serious’. Variations, of course, are permitted; Bach or the Beatles, both are recognized; and one is not obliged to laugh at Bob Hope or Kingsley Amis.
Nanavira Thera:
People, for the most part, live in the objective-immediate mode (discussed earlier). This means that they are totally absorbed in and identified with positive worldly interests and projects, of which there is an unending variety. That is to say, although they differ from one another in their individual natures, the contents of their respective positivities, they are all alike in being positive. Thus, although the fundamental relation between positives is conflict (on account of their individual differences), they apprehend one another as all being in the same boat of positivity, and they think of men generally in terms of human solidarity, and say ‘we’.
But the person who lives in the subjective-reflexive mode is absorbed in and identified with, not the positive world, but himself.
The world, of course, remains ‘there’ but he regards it as accidental (Husserl says that he ‘puts it in parentheses, between brackets’), and this means that he dismisses whatever positive identification he may have as irrelevant. He is no longer ‘a politician’ or ‘a fisherman’, but ‘a self’. But what we call a ‘self’, unless receives positive identification from outside, remains a void, in other words a negative. A ‘self’, however, is positive in this respect—it seeks identification. So a person who identifies himself with himself finds that his positivity consists in negativity—not the confident ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’ of the positive, but a puzzled, perplexed, or even anguished, ‘What am I?’. (This is where we meet the full force of Kierkegaard’s ‘concern and unrest’.) Eternal repetition of this eternally unanswerable question is the beginning of wisdom (it is the beginning of philosophy); but the temptation to provide oneself with a definite answer is usually too strong, and one falls into a wrong view of one kind or another. (It takes a Buddha to show the way out of this impossible situation. For the sotāpanna, who has understood the Buddha’s essential Teaching, the question still arises, but he sees that it is unanswerable and is not worried; for the arahat the question no longer arises at all, and this is final peace.) This person, then, who has his centre of gravity in himself instead of in the world (a situation that, though usually found as a con-genital feature, can be acquired by practice), far from seeing himself with the clear solid objective definition with which other people can be seen, hardly sees himself as anything definite at all: for himself he is, at best, a ‘What, if anything?’. It is precisely this lack of assured self-identity that is the secret strength of his position—for him the question-mark is the essential and his positive identity in the world is accidental, and whatever happens to him in a positive sense the question-mark still remains, which is all he really cares about. He is distressed, certainly, when his familiar world begins to break up, as it inevitably does, but unlike the positive he is able to fall back on himself and avoid total despair. It is also this feature that worries the positives; for they naturally assume that everybody else is a positive and they are ac-customed to grasp others by their positive content, and when they happen to meet a negative they find nothing to take hold of.
It quite often happens that a positive attributes to a negative var-ious strange secret motives, supposing that he has failed to understand him (in a positive sense); but what he has failed to understand is that there is actually nothing there to be understood. But a negative, being (as you point out) a rare bird himself, is accustomed to positives, by whom he is surrounded, and he does not mistake them for fellow negatives. He understands (or at least senses) that the common factor of positivity that welds them together in the ‘we’ of human solidarity does not extend to him, and mankind for him is ‘they’. When a negative meets another negative they tend to coalesce with a kind of easy mutual indifference. Unlike two positives, who have the differences in their respective positivities to keep them apart, two negatives have nothing to separate them, and one negative recognizes another by his peculiar transparency—whereas a positive is opaque.
Summary:
It is obvious enough that there can be no progress in the Dhamma for the inauthentic man. The inauthentic man does not even see the problem—all his effort is devoted to hiding from it. The Buddha’s Teaching is not for the serious-minded. Before we deal with the problem we must see it, and that means becoming authentic. Nanavira Thera
***
See also Huxley:
The man who will lightly sacrifice a long-formed mental habit is exceptional. The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar.
Trotter, in his admirable Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, has called them the ‘stable-minded,’ and has set over against them a minority of ‘unstable-minded people,’ fond of innovation
for its own sake…. The tendency of the stable-minded man… will always be to find that ‘whatever is, is right.’ Less subject to the habits of thought formed in youth, the unstable-minded naturally take pleasure in all that is new and revolutionary.
(…)
Nanavira Thera: But although the passage from Huxley is quite good, I really mean something rather more subtle than the mere expression of unorthodox opinions.
L 101
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