1.
For the most part, the atrocities and violence were committed by ordinary people, people acting deep in bad faith. They offered the common, threadbare excuses: “I was just doing my job.” “I was just following orders.” “They told me to do it.” “I had no choice.” (p. 154)
2. Authenticity — meeting reality head-on
The inauthentic person is one who ceaselessly tries to avoid responsibility for their situation or their past behavior. They do not admit that they themselves bear responsibility for their own bad faith. More concretely, they do not admit the self’s inability to coincide with itself as either facticity or pure transcendence. They refuse to admit the self’s freedom — which is without limit, or essentially without limit — and what that freedom implies. They refuse to admit the fact that, because a human being cannot simply be themselves, they must always choose what they are. As you know, because action in our situation is chosen, we must take responsibility for that action. Even choosing to do nothing is a choice we must take responsibility for. (p. 158)
A person who pursues authenticity faces reality squarely, and faces the harsh fact that they are a free being that cannot coincide with themselves.
It’s said that authenticity “consists in accepting human reality as one’s own reality.” In other words, authenticity is accepting human reality as it is and living in step with that reality.
Just as affirming that we are in fact free, responsible beings who do not coincide with ourselves is a radical conversion, so too does accepting human reality as one’s own require a fundamental change in one’s attitude toward oneself, and toward the self that is “unavoidably in a situation.” (p. 159) A human being who has attained authenticity, instead of acting in bad faith by exercising freedom to deny freedom, or by choosing not to choose, actively “takes up” freedom and acknowledges it.
To take up freedom, we must fully assume responsibility for ourselves, irrespective of the situation we’re in. To do that, we must accept without complaint that this situation is the situation we’re in, that it is a facticity, and that within this facticity we must choose who we are.
Of course you can refuse your situation by running away from it. In fact, there are times when “thirty-six options, and fleeing is best” is true. But even fleeing requires a choice. That choice creates a new situation and gives rise to yet another demand to choose. Except for suicide, there is no escape from being “unavoidably in a situation.” Above all, to take up freedom, we have to realize that because in the sense that we are whatever we are we are not anything, outside of the choices we make in the situation we’re in we do not exist as anything at all. (p. 160)
Attaining authenticity is being fully aware of your own being-in-situation, whatever that situation may be. And, through that authentic awareness of being-in-situation, deeply understanding that we can bring both the situation and human reality to full existence. This requires patient study of what the situation demands, and then a way of casting oneself into the situation that follows, defining oneself as “being-for” that situation.
… Paul, who faithfully performs the role of a soldier, makes it his goal to remain a soldier from start to finish, defines himself as “being-for” the situation of being in the army, and throws himself into it. The authentic Paul does not think he is a soldier in the sense that he “is” a soldier, but he does think he is a soldier in the sense that he doesn’t think he is anything other than what he really is — anything other than the role he is currently playing.
If you want to reach authenticity, you must clearly recognize that there is no excuse for your actions. Sartre puts it this way: “The issue is not to stop at ‘recognizing’ that we have no excuse, but to resolve not to excuse ourselves.” … Sartre — a cultured Parisian intellectual driven by circumstances to a unit in some unknown location — instead of complaining, tried to do what he could do in the situation he was in. He tried to devote himself, without regret, to the “soldier’s” duty he had taken on.
3. Freedom as value
“The first value and goal of the will is to be the source of itself. This must not be understood as an empty psychological desire, but as the transcendent structure of human reality.” Any attempt to rid oneself entirely of the desire for a ground only ends in “nihilism.” Because if you try to rid yourself of all desire to be your own source, you’ll end up wishing to be nothing at all.
To reach authenticity, we must gladly accept that we will never coincide with ourselves, that we cannot become a kind of “thing-being” for which no choice is required. Even so, reaching authenticity doesn’t require us to throw away the desire for self-coincidence, for substantiality, for a ground. The desire to have roots, the desire to be the source of oneself, is too essential a trait of the human will to ever be shaken off. (p. 165)
It means an authentic person does not pursue self-coincidence, substantiality, or a ground in the futile way of fleeing from their freedom. Instead, the authentic person pursues substantiality by continually making themselves on the basis of affirming and exercising their own freedom. They take the affirmation and exercise of freedom as their basic principle, their ultimate value. Rather than trying to flee from unavoidable freedom with the vain hope of becoming some fixed “thing,” they try to stay with that unavoidable freedom. (p. 167)
Indeed, through the project of authenticity, it’s actually easier to attain a kind of substantiality than through the project of inauthenticity. That’s because through the project of authenticity we can reconcile ourselves with our actual form — that of a being that is fundamentally free. On the contrary, the project of inauthenticity merely flees from its actual form by trying to coincide with the world of objects — an alignment that can never be achieved. Someone who flees from their freedom cannot establish a ground. Someone who is willing to take up their freedom establishes that very freedom as their ground. Someone who is “for” their freedom “becomes” themselves as they truly are — a free being. Because they aren’t trying to become what they can never be — an unfree being — they cannot fail. In other words, the desire for the unchanging can only be fulfilled by embracing freedom. Because the only unchanging thing in a human being is that they are free. In Sartre’s words: “Authenticity, therefore, is not a ground so much as a value. Authenticity gives itself value as the means of reaching substantiality.” (p. 168)
