Caleb Anderson: Authenticity and the Unexamined Life

Socrates is known for his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. What did he mean by that, and what implications does this have?

I have spent thousands of hours counselling others, often young people. I have been struck by an explosion in the number of young people (and not so young people) who seem devoid of direction, desperate for certainty, lost in the convenience of dogma.

One of the most common pleas a counselee will make, if you push deeper, is to rescue them from the inauthenticity of their lives. They will often say that this is their biggest problem, this is where they are stuck, and the more they seek it, the less accessible it seems.

While we struggle to define what authenticity is, we know there is such a thing, because we know what it is like not to have it.

In fact our determination to define it, to find it somewhere, is often the very thing that takes us farthest from it. This may be one of the greatest paradoxes of life, the more desperately we pursue something, without any necessary counterbalance, the more it eludes us, and the more we become its very opposite.

Truly, this is the root of many psychological complexes.

After thrashing this about with counselees, we often end up with the simple (or maybe not so simple) idea that authenticity is the pursuit of (over the near full embodiment of) the highest possible good, whatever that means, however that looks.

So authenticity is inevitably a process (rather than something static), something we discover (rather than something we invent), something that unfolds.

I have become convinced that our greatest inner desire, and the key to authenticity, is the reconciliation of certainty and possibility.

I think that authenticity resides at the interface of both certainty and possibility, of what we can know with relative certainty, and what we cannot ... and in the acknowledgment that these make sense only in light of each other. The substance of one resides in the other, the acceptance of one, is contingent on the acceptance of the other. It is about what we do with opposites. The denial of certainty makes possibility impossible, the denial of possibility makes certainty impossible. They have meaning only in respect of each other, not to be manipulated, or disembodied, but to be allowed to co-exist.

It may be the preeminent pathology of our time that authenticity (and meaning), always elusive, always unfolding, has slipped beyond the grasp of so many people.

This has inevitably created a void that others, sometimes well meaning, and sometimes not, have been more than willing to fill. Never before, in one place, or time, have so many psychological modalities been available, so much money been invested, so much controversy and conflict emanated, and so little progress made.

Mental illness is on the rise, conflict is endemic.

Some of the key authors of the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disabilities have lamented its limitations, and policy makers have reflected at length on the failure of many tens of billions of dollars spent on mental health with only modest gain. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that mental health services globally are in crisis. The more we know about mental illness, the more we know that we do not know.

The idea that there is no such thing as truth, your truth is yours, and mine is mine, has not freed people from the burden of expectation, it has laboured them with a sense that everything is negotiable, that there is nothing worth persevering for, that nothing is certain, and that possibility has no bounds.

In short, that the highest good is what you wish it to be.

Dogma and pursuit of "things" have stepped into the authenticity void. Dogma has displaced reason, self-examination, personal responsibility, duty and virtue. And in its place, political activism, finger pointing that is near pathological, and deepening political, and societal, division, has provided a form of denial that demands little introspection or personal sacrifice.

It is my view (and I am far from alone) that authenticity, anchored in the highest good, does not reside in what we can grab, in the labels we assign, in the enemies we find, in how loud we can be, in our political affiliations, or in the cleverness of our arguments.

Authenticity resides in genuine self examination, in orientation to service, in pursuit of meaning, in personal responsibility, in regard for others, and the acceptance of possibility.

To me this is the examined life ... and I have seen the difference this can make, and how liberating this can be.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.