Page 230 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

Unit 30: Existentialism

concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of facticity Notes
(having a body (e.g. one that doesn’t allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound),
identity, values, etc.).
Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of
one’s facticity consists of things one couldn’t have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition in the
sense that one’s values most likely will depend on it. However, even though one’s facticity is “set
in stone” (as being past, for instance), it cannot determine a person: The value ascribed to one’s
facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person. As an example, consider two men, one of
whom has no memory of his past and the other remembers everything. They have both committed
many crimes, but the first man, knowing nothing about this, leads a rather normal life while the
second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for
“trapping” him in this life. There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he
ascribes this meaning to his past.
However, to disregard one’s facticity when one, in the continual process of self-making, projects
oneself into the future, would be to put oneself in denial of oneself, and would thus be inauthentic.
In other words, the origin of one’s projection will still have to be one’s facticity, although in the
mode of not being it (essentially).

Notes Aspect of facticity is that it entails angst, both in the sense that freedom “produces”
angst when limited by facticity, and in the sense that the lack of the possibility of
having facticity to “step in” for one to take responsibility for something one has
done also produces angst.

30.4.6 Authenticity and Inauthenticity
The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is often taken to
mean that one has to “find oneself” and then live in accordance with this self. A common
misunderstanding is that the self is something one can find if one looks hard enough, that one’s
true self is substantial.
What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as one acts or as
one’s genes or any other essence require. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with one’s
freedom. Of course, as a condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one’s facticity, but not to
the degree that this facticity can in any way determine one’s choices (in the sense that one could
then blame one’s background for making the choice one made). The role of facticity in relation
to authenticity involves letting one’s actual values come into play when one makes a choice
(instead of, like Kierkegaard’s Aesthete, “choosing” randomly), so that one also takes
responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have
different values.
In contrast to this, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one’s freedom. This can
take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing
oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of “mimicry” where one acts as “One
should.” How “One” should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as
oneself acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm, but this does not mean
that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main point is the attitude one
takes to one’s own freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which one acts in accordance
with this freedom.

30.4.7 Despair
Commonly defined as a loss of hope, Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the
reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one’s self or identity. If a
person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and
then finds their being-thing compromised, they would normally be found in state of despair—
LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 223