On Being Authentic. By Charles Guignon

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is signaled not only in his poetry, however, but in novel after novel in which, as J.
Hillis Millar observes of The Return of the Native, ‘the main actions . . . focus on a
noncommunity of distinctive individuals who interact with one another destructively
and without mutual understanding’ (p. 169). Although most of the contributors to
this book would agree with that observation, they would also agree with Garson’s
phrase that Hardy’s pessimism ‘while it renders the human situation ironic . . . renders
the poet’s apprehension of it sublime’ (p. 112). These are essays that indeed do honour
to Michael Millgate.
Arrupe College, Harare Anthony Chennells
On Being Authentic. By Charles Guignon. Pp. 185, London and New York, Routledge,
2004, $17.95.
On Being Authentic – Charles Guignon’s contribution to the relatively new series
Thinking in Action – explores the philosophical roots of the appeal that authenticity
possesses as an ideal. As a former student of Hans-Georg Gadamer and author of
numerous books and articles on existentialism, psychology, and the good life,
Guignon is well qualified to speak with some authority about the notion of
authenticity. In an effort to identify what value, if any, authenticity can have today as
a personal and social virtue, he carefully probes this ideal, examining the history of
ideas to which it is linked and questioning the unstated assumptions that underwrite
the notion.
Prior to the eighteenth century, the conception of a well lived life was tied to an
individual’s socially established role in the polis and the meanings and values
embodied in the cosmos at large. Consequently, as Guignon notes, the pursuit of
authenticity would not have been obviously compelling to the pre-Enlightenment
mind since there really wasn’t an assumed rupture between one’s ‘true self ’ and one’s
public persona to render intelligible the call of authenticity: ‘be true to one’s real self ’.
This changes, however, with the rise of the modern liberal conception of the self as an
essentially self-contained, private capsule of pure subjectivity, a view that debuted in
the epistemological context of Descartes’ experiment in skepticism, and the
psychological and social import of which only came to expression a century later in
the individualism and social atomism of the Enlightenment and the Romantic quest to
recover a deep sense of oneness with the cosmos, its embrace of inner and deep
feelings as the route to ultimate truth and value, and its affirmation of the self’s
transcendental reality.
Contemporary pop-psychological quests for the authentic life rely not so much on
an explicit doctrine of the transcendental Self to get their programs off the ground,
but rather on a repressed ‘inner child’ construal of the pre-social, innocent and
spontaneous self, a pristine self whose full expression has been drastically diminished
by modern societal pressures of conformity and normalization. By going inward
through all the personae mandated by social expectations and legitimations, we will
discover our inner child unadulterated by the artifice and dissimulation of adult public
life, and by embracing this child we recover inwardly the enchanted garden of pure
meanings and spontaneous feelings that authenticity purportedly consists in being
true to. Guignon, however, rightly reminds us that there are darker visions of the
inner child found in the psychoanalytic writings of Freud and Jung. For Freud, the
inner tike turns out to be the libidinous and savage ‘Id’. For Jung, the inner child
carries a collective unconscious in which resides all the repressed ‘beyond-good-and-
evil’ wisdom of pre-civilized vitalities. Guignon suggests that the ideal of authenticity
needs therefore to be seen as having not only inspired the benign pop-psychology of
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Oprah and Dr. Phil, but also (given darker readings of the inner child) as having given
impetus to such venting of nastiness found in the writings of Marquis de Sade and the
lyrics of gangsta’ rap.
But there is an even more conspicuous challenge to the inner-child assumption.
What becomes of authenticity when the inner-self is viewed as merely a contingent
deposit of cultural forces we are barely aware of and over which we have virtually no
control? That is, what if the inner-child is not a pre-social integral self to whom one
must be true, but nothing more than a social construct? Post-structuralists have, after
all, done a pretty convincing job of deconstructing the humanist self, showing its
apparent unity and stability to be more geyser-like as the contingent site of coalescing
cultural forces, than a reflection of an intrinsically unified substantive self. This is
where Guignon begins his re-constructive work, hinting at how a dialogical-
narratological conception of selfhood might lend the notion of authenticity a broader
basis of affirmation as a social virtue. If authenticity is to be a coherent ideal today, it
will have to go public as a social virtue essentially linked to cultural meanings and
values that pre-exist individual selves and connect them to something greater than
their own personal desires and preferences. In the end, Guignon proposes something
of a via media between the sacrosanct unified self of modernity and the dispersed
centerless self of postmodernity, appealing to Nietzsche, Heidegger, MacIntyre,
Taylor, and even Frankfort, in an earnest attempt to revise the notion of authenticity
into a dialogically structured, historically informed, and socially responsible ideal.
This book is important. Not only does it offer a fascinating overview of ideas about
‘the good life’ and the meanings of authenticity in Western thought, but it also
clarifies and focuses the notion of authenticity, helping us to think critically about its
limits, and creatively about its potential for our contemporary world. Although some
won’t be convinced by Guignon’s attempted reconstruction of authenticity for the
twenty-first century, few will be sorry for having spent a few hours watching him
carefully clear the ground for it.
Trinity Western University, Canada Robert Doede
Philosophy and Literature: A Book of Essays. By M. W. Rowe. Pp. xii, 238, Aldershot,
Ashgate, 2004, d47.50/$94.95.
The preface to this book asserts that ‘the idea which stands out most clearly [in the
following essays] is their argument that philosophy and literature have a much greater
affinity than is commonly supposed’. Although this statement may hold for
philosophy, it does not for literature. Studies abound in which the influence of
philosophy on literary works is studied. Moreover, the principles of aesthetics, as a
branch of philosophy, apply to literature as much as they do to other art forms. But
this is only a minor quarrel with the preface to this volume. The uninspiring title of
this book largely belies the significance (and high quality) of the essays. Rowe clearly
has a deep interest in the interaction between literature and philosophy and has
produced a series of wide-ranging essays in which he addresses questions about
literature, truth, art, and abstraction. He examines Wittgenstein’s strongly romantic
outlook, and reinterprets works by Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold, and Philip Larkin.
The subjects are well-researched and many new perspectives from which to read these
writers are brought out.
The three essays on Wittgenstein with which the volume opens examine the
philosopher’s debt to the Romantics, and to Goethe in particular. In the first essay
Rowe suggests that the philosopher learnt from the poet that the world cannot be
interpreted by the intellect alone, but that the senses too can play an important role in
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