Forget Thyself

About a week ago I was part of a discussion on authenticity. We were examining the nature of authenticity, and during the discussion we asked the basic question: what is authenticity. It seems rather amazing that a group of educated persons would start a conversion on something as complex and the nature of authenticity and not start with such a basic question. I assume we all assumed we knew what we meant by "authentic."

In the spirit of Rousseau I had assumed that there are degrees of authenticity (such as writing is less authentic than speech, or wife is less authentic than mother, masturbation is less authentic than sex), but only one type authenticity. But through the discussion it was brought up that there are, in fact, different types of authenticity. For instance, there is the classic Platonic idea of the the concept being more authentic than the physically rendered thing; the "thingness" is more important than the "thing" itself. But say it was the other way around, where the concept was less real than the thing itself. For anyone who ascribes to Greek thought, this is rather tough to consider, but it is all a matter a perception of reality.

Take this example from Jorge Luis Borges in his Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, where a fictitious society of people on a planet known as Tlon conceive of no such thing as "thing" or "thingness." Their very language illustrates this, in that in their language there are no nouns. So there is no word for moon, rather it is referred to by a string of adjectives, such as "aerial-bright above dark-round." Imagine a reality in which no thing is real, only by how it is perceived or what is done with it. An American football would simply be called, "long-round leather throw." We have an understanding of a thing because of our understanding of its thingness, where on Tlon their thingness is really a summation of the thingness.

In the case of Tlon thingness is no more less or real than the thing, because in that reality there is no thing, only a consequence of action and description. Thingness and thing are one in the same. So, can we conceive a reality in which a thing is more important, more authentic than its mental conception? Definitely, and it does exist, and we see it everyday; namely, we see it when someone is bullshitting us.

Take for instance the art of post-rationalization. I call it an art because it takes some serious bullshitting to make sense of something completely pointless, arbitrary, and irrational. As a personal example, I decided when I was in high school, senior year, while driving to school, I wanted to be an architect. Why? To be honest, I have no idea. Maybe it was because I had an uncle I never met who was an architect. Maybe it was something about the musical structure of Dream Theater (which I was listening to at the time) that inspired me. Maybe it was because I was good at math and I liked drawing. They are all excuses to a decision that had no rational basis. I decided to be study architecture, and I had no precognitive reasoning why I chose to do so. I make up stories so I actually have an answer to: "Sooooo... why did you want to be an architect?" But really, the excuse is less authentic to the decision. It seems that in anything we do, any choice, any action, the action is more authentic than the explanation.

Why did you forget to set your alarm? [Insert excuse here] is less authentic than the myopic answer of "because I forgot to set it." There isn't a rationale to most decisions, if we make decisions at all. We have come to grasp our lives as a series of choices, when, in fact, most choices are unconsciously already made. We get to the end of a page, we can flip the page or not, but unconsciously the choice is already made to flip the page because we want the story to keep going. When the sun is setting we have the choice to turn on the lights or walk around in the dark. Unconsciously we have already made the choice, because there isn't much of choice there anyway. I would say on a give day the average human probably makes two choices, and those probably largely involve the choice of food.

Or again, these actions and their excuses don't have to be negative, such as in an instance where we take credit for a complete accident. Another personal example would be a building design a friend of mine and I did for a prison in a skyscraper. Our concept was to make a nurturing prison, and, since the primordial concept of nurture is the "womb," we went for the concept of invagination, which would challenge the typical phallic form of a skyscraper. Arbitrarily we took imagines of the uterus and vagina from Grey's Anatomy and cut them up and played with the forms. We picked out which one we liked best, placed two giant spheres on it to represent the ovaries (and to be anti-phallic), and then took a picture and Photoshopped it. Once I was done I showed it to my partner's girlfriend, who said it looked like a giant limp penis, to which my partner said, "Well, then the skyscraper doesn't have any [male] ego!" Then we concocted some bullshit to make the penis-building seem deliberate, when, in fact, it was completely an accident.

All of the above leads me to an article I just read recently, in which the more educated we are the more biased we are. The more educated we are the more shortcuts to thinking we make. We tend to judge others for their biases and their irrationalities, while at the same time forgiving ourselves of similar biases and mistakes; sometimes we don't even know what our biases are. We easily dismiss or excuse a fault of ours, we make excuses for things that need no excuses. We prepare a piece of bullshit to supplant an authentic action.

As it turns out, the more we excuse ourselves, the more we bullshit our way through faulty decisions and actions, the less we understand ourselves. Essentially the study found that the more meditation and self-reflection we do, the more we try to understand ourselves and why we have these faults, the less we understand ourselves. So, not even self-reflection will save us from our shortcomings. More or less, "know thyself" is bullshit. I would say this a direct factor of the type of authenticity in which the thing is more authentic than the thingness. A simple way to put it: the more we bullshit away our actions, the less our actions mean anything, and the more our bullshit explains who we are. And if who you are is primarily understood through bullshit... well, then... I guess that make you a pile of shit.

So from that study, I would say some of the most authentic people are not people who don't bullshit, but rather are stupid people, simply because they are usually too stupid to bullshit (that's a mental shortcut by the way, and completely fallacious of me).

"We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand."