Interview with Sean D. Kelly: A Genealogy of Redemption in the Western Tradition (Part 1)

This edition of Philosophy and the Mirror of Technology is the first installment of a two-part interview with Sean D. Kelly. The next installment will be published Tuesday, December 14.

The central theme of this series is to explore the evolving relationship among science, philosophy, and faith, with a focus on the import of modern physics and technology.  To explore the perils of our technological, post-modern world, I reached out to Harvard professor Sean D Kelly.  He is writing a new book, The Proper Dignity of Human Being, exploring what it means to be authentic – in the way Heidegger talked about being “one’s own”.  I sought out Sean to explore Heidegger’s warnings about technology – how it hastens our decline and constricts our experience, as we increasingly view nature and human beings technologically.  Sean has also recently explored these questions in a podcast with Lex Fridman on Existentialism, Nihilism and the Search for Meaning. 

In response to my questions, Sean has written an essay exploring authenticity in our age, reflecting on his book, and warning of the absolute danger of a technological form of being.  The first portion of the piece traces the lineage of salvation through the Western tradition.  Sean explores redemption in the context of both traditional theology and its philosophical development through the Enlightenment.  In both cases, the Judeo-Christian moral vocabulary, which the Enlightenment tradition inherited and developed, relies on an economic interpretation of the self.  In the traditional Christian use, we are redeemed or bought back to be free.  For Locke, the economic analysis is furthered as a kind of self-ownership, explicitly growing out of the understanding of property rights.  The existentialists that followed – Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, etc. – may appear different, but their form of authenticity – “becoming one’s own” – is just a different kind of ownership.  Indeed, self-actualization is even more dangerous than the ambition to have an ownership right over ourselves.  The problem of mastery foreshadows the second installment of Sean’s essay, where he explores technology’s connections to banal forms of evil and suggests that the effort to control the self leads to the existential danger of a technological form of being.  Sean contends we need a new interpretation for our moment in history, with the aim to understand the dignity of our existence. How to understand the danger technology poses to our authentic dignity, and what could save us from it, is the aspiration of his book and focus of this interview.

Question: Sean, thank you so much for your willingness to contribute to this series, exploring authenticity in our post-modern, technological world.  Let me start with a few general questions that will ground the initial installment of your essay.  First, what is the challenge, or range of challenges, we face in the contemporary world?  Is our challenge different from or the same as those faced in previous epochs?  If it is different, does this difference have to do with technology in some way, or with the scientific or materialistic aspects of modern culture?  Does it have to do with the way we understand ourselves?

1. Getting started

Thanks so much for inviting me to do this interview, Charlie! Let me start out with a brief personal comment that speaks to my methodological approach. I do this not just because it helps to explain why my contribution to your interview took so long to produce (apologies!) but also why it takes the form it does.

In thinking about your questions, I have continually come up against an almost unnavigable impasse. Namely, every way I could think of to enter the discussion they invite seemed inadequate. Even to state the challenge that you are pointing to – the challenge of what you describe as “exploring authenticity in our post-modern, technological world” – feels like an impossibly difficult task. This is partly because the project is so enormous. Broadly speaking, it aims at what Foucault once called an “historical ontology of the present” – an account, in other words, of what it is to be human, or even of what it is to be at all, at this point in history. But the problem is not just the enormity of the task; it also has to do with its structural inaccessibility to us. This became clear to me through the series of fits and starts I underwent in trying to address your questions. The words we use to describe our condition, I kept discovering, always seem to cover up what it really is. As a result, every time I started out from one point of view or another, the inadequacy of that approach inevitably became clear. This often took some time, and it usually came as a surprise. I felt like Wile E. Coyote in the old cartoon – so focused on the task of chasing after the Roadrunner that I didn’t notice I had already run entirely off the cliff. Just so, each attempt to say clearly what I meant culminated in that nauseating moment when you look down to find the ground completely gone beneath you.

I say this here not just by way of personal anecdote, but because I think a deep point is hiding in that experience. After all, it is probably not an accident that there seemed to be no adequate way to start this project. Perhaps, in fact, this is even a crucial feature of philosophy itself. Philosophy is sometimes said to arise out of our natural ambition to ask questions – questions that seem to demand satisfying answers – even as we are beings inadequate to that demand. Kant called this ambition metaphysica naturalis – the natural predisposition to metaphysics – and his critical project was of course devoted to understanding the proper limits of this ambition. Even though I think Kant’s critique starts too late to do justice to our condition, there is nevertheless something insightful about his general idea: we naturally aspire to a state of understanding that necessarily eludes us. This is at least one aspect of the point that thinkers from Pascal and Kant to Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and beyond are highlighting when they emphasize our finitude: that what is to be engaged by beings like us is ultimately infinite or at least horizonal, whereas those who aim to engage it necessarily come to an end.^[i] What hadn’t occurred to me until now, however – at least not in quite this way – is that this limitation applies equally to our initiation as to our end. Just as it is impossible to complete the task of philosophical understanding, there is no satisfying way to begin it either. Something about this inadequacy is exacerbated, for me, by the written form. Plato wasn’t wrong, I think, to emphasize how strange the act of writing is.^[ii] Still, I must forge ahead.

2. The Challenge of the Post-Modern, Technological World

So that’s the personal/methodological background in the context of which I hope the reader will put up with my ruminations. Since there is no good way to start the project, what I have decided to do instead is to offer a pithy statement of my view which I must then take back and correct in a series of stages. I must, as Frege once said in a very different context, beg the reader a grain of salt. The corrections and recissions, of course, will never come to an end. But perhaps they will point us in a direction worth pursuing. Here, then, is how I would like to begin.

2.1 Redemption

The challenge of the post-modern, technological world, as I see it, is to uncover and develop a mode of existence that “redeems” us as the beings we are. I put the word “redemption” in scare quotes here, and indeed I could have put most of the other words in scare quotes as well. Fuller reflection reveals the way each of them aims at something that is nevertheless covered up by what we normally take it to mean; or perhaps it is that each of them covers up what, without their influence, we would otherwise be able to see. This is true not least of the words “post-modern,” “technological,” “world,” “existence,” “beings,” and so on. But I focus here only on the notion of redemption. In this context, it is misleading in at least two related ways.

The first is that, for some readers, the idea that we need redemption will generate standard religious overtones that are absent from my intended use. In its normal theological meaning redemption is tied up with salvation – to be redeemed is to be saved. And I do believe that in some sense we need to be saved from our current condition, which is why I use the term here at all. Whatever our redemption consists in, however, I do not believe it involves any traditional kind of deliverance from sin and damnation or any kind of reconciliation with God. Indeed, the entire Judeo-Christian moral vocabulary in my view – even as it is developed philosophically over the course of the Enlightenment by figures from Locke to Kant, and as it comes to focus in our contemporary discourse through thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Rawls, Singer, and others – is inadequate to characterize our condition. I’ll say more about that provocative claim in Part 2 of this interview. Still, in some more prosaic sense I do believe the technological mode of existence presents a danger to us from which we must hope to be saved. To understand what that danger is, and to understand in what way the danger itself may hold at its core the very possibility of our salvation from it, is a descriptive project that lies at the center of my work.

The word “redemption” is misleading in a second way, too.  It is not an accident, I believe, that the Christian use of the term involves an economic metaphor. To redeem something is literally to buy it back.^[iii] We redeem the coupons we used to cut out of the newspaper. Jesus’ death in the Christian tradition, therefore, is in some metaphorical sense the payment that releases Christians from sin and bondage. At the ground of this metaphor is the idea that our freedom, which is to say our redemption and eventual salvation as the kind of being we are, consists in some form of self-ownership. The idea that we will finally be free when we own ourselves, in other words, assumes that we are at root a kind of property that can be owned – either by ourselves or others. This makes sense of the literal distinction between a slave, who is owned by another, and a free person who is “owned” by him or herself; and it is not an accident that the opposite of freedom in the Christian tradition is typically understood to be bondage, or the state of being a slave. This may have begun as a literal claim, as it was for Moses and his people in Egypt. But it was eventually extended to the view that sinners are slaves to their sinful desires, and Jesus’ death allows the sinner to be redeemed – to buy back his freedom – from this enslaved state. Whatever the details of this theological position however – and I don’t pretend to have come close to doing it justice here – I think it is not a stretch to see it grounded, at least implicitly, in what I call a market-economical interpretation of the self. ^[iv] The Enlightenment view tends to promote even further the economic analysis of the self that is found in the redemptive tradition. Locke, for example, defines the self explicitly in terms of a notion of self-ownership that grows out of a prior understanding of property rights.^[v]

There is something correct, of course, in this broadly Judeo-Christian interpretation of human beings. To be owned by another is indeed to fall short of the full kind of flourishing that human beings, qua human beings, are capable of. To say otherwise would be to accept the American South’s pre-Civil War position that slavery is a positive good for the slaves.[vi] That would be ridiculous. Still, there is a serious question whether the right response to this obvious fact is to say that human beings should aspire to own themselves. To say this is to assume that the self is properly classed as a kind of ownable property in the first place. Is it really very helpful to say that the relation I should hope to have to myself is the same as the relation I have to the toaster, after I have bought it at Walmart? So far, this is just a snarky question. I would have to do much more really to push on the market economical account of the self, and I do some of that work in the book. But for the time being, I hope it is enough to notice that the question who should own the self makes sense only if we have already accepted that to be human is to be just like anything else in the market economy – something that can be owned, traded, and given a “price” of some sort or another. Even Kant’s position that to be human is to have not a “relative worth (price)” but an “intrinsic worth (dignity),” defines human beings in terms of their market value – albeit negatively by claiming that their value is too high to measure.[vii] It is certainly wrong to say that some human beings are properly owned by others. But the alternative, that we are properly owned by ourselves, seems to interpret human being in terms of a property standard that is essentially alien to what it is to be us.

I take from all this the intuition that the Judeo-Christian moral vocabulary, which the Enlightenment tradition inherited and developed, may not be able to do what we need to capture and treat our contemporary condition well. In particular, the economic interpretation of the self, which I argue is a motivating background assumption of that tradition, may not be able to characterize what we are and what we need at this point in history. The background economic assumption about the self is so deeply rooted in our understanding of ourselves, however, that it is almost completely hidden from view. Because it is never really made explicit or scrutinized, it is allowed to govern our orientation with respect to ourselves all the more powerfully. A governing force like this happens on the sly, as Heidegger once said. [Being and Time, p. 166/128] The more pervasive and publicly acceptable it is, the slier and more hidden it becomes. To the extent that the orientation it sets us in with respect to ourselves and the world is inadequate for our current needs, to the extent that it covers up the danger we confront instead of freeing us for our salvation from it, it is an essential part of the danger itself.

I hope it is clear from this brief discussion that, if I initially use the term “redemption” to name the mode of existence we are called to uncover and develop in the contemporary world, I am nevertheless rejecting not only the traditional Christian interpretation of this term but also the market-economical analysis of the self that I see lying at the ground of that interpretation. The word “redemption” does its work, of course: it highlights the need we feel at this point in history to be saved from a danger we cannot quite identify. But the presuppositions of the notion of redemptive freedom force an interpretation of that danger that seems inadequate to the conditions in which we find ourselves.

So, what exactly can we say about that danger? Different thinkers have characterized it in different ways. Nietzsche called it nihilism, and he distinguished between a positive and a negative form of it; Heidegger first called it levelling (following Kierkegaard), and later enframing [Gestell]; Camus and Thomas Nagel called it the absurd, and so on. However we characterize it, though, the danger we feel seems to have a distinctive shape. It is very different, for instance, from the danger to the Christian of being sinful and therefore condemned to damnation; it is different too from the danger to the Homeric Greeks of affronting the gods with their hubris. Our situation is felt as dangerous, for sure, but it is a danger of a distinctive kind.

Moreover, the “post-modern, technological age” that is shaped around this contemporary form of danger has a distinctive character as well. It is the age, for Nietzsche, in which God is dead and the free spirit and the Übermensch are called for;^[viii] it is the age, for Heidegger, in which we are confronted by the question whether god is fleeing from us, and by the related question whether we can still experience this flight genuinely;^[ix] it is the age, for Sartre, in which there is no God and so we must take his place;^[x] but it is also the age for Beauvoir in which we must contend with what it is not to have been born, but to become, a woman;^[xi] and the age for Fanon in which the black man wants to become white.^[xii] For David Foster Wallace, our age is characterized by a “stomach-level sadness … a kind of lostness.”^[xiii] In all these respects our moment in history is quite different, for example, from the Enlightenment as Kant understands it. For Kant, the Enlightenment is the age in which human beings are emerging from “our self-incurred immaturity.”^[xiv] But immaturity is not the problem from which we feel we must be saved, any more than sin and damnation is. And maturity is not the name for our salvation. The upshot, I take it, is that we need a new vocabulary to describe our epoch of history.

2.2 Authenticity

Perhaps, then, we should consider a different way of characterizing the project. Instead of aiming for a mode of existence that redeems us, for example, we might say that we should identify an authentic form of existence. There is a modern history to this approach, and indeed you use the term “authenticity” yourself in your questions. Now, this term does stand in contrast with the idea that the self is a kind of property to be owned, and so in some sense it is preferable to “redemption.” But it is not quite what I’m looking for either. Let me look briefly at the modern history of the term to develop this point.

“Authenticity” is the traditional English translation of the German word eigentlichkeit, a word that plays a central role in Heidegger’s Being and Time. It would be wrong to assimilate Heidegger’s position on authenticity to any kind of Romanticism, but it is true nevertheless that a focus on the importance of some notion of authenticity takes root at least as far back as the work of Rousseau, and the Romantic tradition that took inspiration from it.^[xv] Taking a more literal translation of the German word, we might say that authenticity, like redemption, also involves a kind of “ownedness.” ^[xvi] But there is a difference between the self-ownership of redeemed freedom and the ownedness of authenticity.

To be authentic is to “be one’s own” in the sense of “being what one truly is.”  Kierkegaard’s injunction to “become what one is,”^[xvii] makes an intervention that is crucial for the contemporary ethics of authenticity.^[xviii] His idea is that we own ourselves not when we are freed from the constraints of bondage – be they external, like the commands of a slave owner to a slave, or internal, like the sinful desires of the Christian or the heteronomous determinations of the will in Kant – but instead when we are somehow positively involved in becoming who we are. We may read the command to become what one is as the demand to act in such a way as to bring it about that you are true to, or a genuine and original manifestation of,the being (or the kind of being) that you are already.

In the traditional, contemporary interpretation, authenticity is tied up with a notion of self-authorship or self-actualization.^[xix] We can see this connection from the common root that the words authentic and author (seem to) share. To be authentic is to be the true or genuine author of one’s existence.^[xx] This form of self-ownership, therefore, stands in stark contrast with the economic account of the self that grounds the Christian idea of redeemed freedom. If we want a pithy motto to distinguish these two interpretations of the self, we can say that authenticity prioritizes “being one’s own” while the redemptive tradition prioritizes “being what one owns.”

But there are problems with the authenticity tradition too. After all, in its paradigmatic instantiation – not only in Kierkegaard but in thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and others – it substitutes the idea that we are an object to be owned with the idea that we are a subject who establishes the truth of what we are. But the reversal of the relative priority of subject and object, it seems to me, is not a sufficiently radical re-orientation. As Heidegger said in a related context, the reversal of a metaphysical statement is still a metaphysical statement.[xxi] To place our truth within the subject, I want to claim, is still to hew too closely to the traditional notions of subject and object, and to the Judeo-Christian morality these notions ground, to allow us to contend with our contemporary condition. I do not pretend to have defended this claim sufficiently here, but I address it at some length in the book. The discussion there draws on an interpretation of human being – present in nascent form already to various degrees in figures like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Levinas, Charles Taylor, and others – that sees in our finitude not only a refutation of the traditional Christian and Enlightenment claim that we are essentially inner beings, but also a refutation of the traditional Hegelian claim that the sense in which we extend beyond ourselves is by reaching out into a broader, historically situated, form of rationality.

In sum, the concept of authenticity, even as it releases us from the economic analysis of the self, tends to push us heavily in the direction of the idea that the self is what it is over which we must aim to have complete control and mastery.^[xxii] But this ambition, I suggest in the book, is even more dangerous for us than the ambition to have ownership rights over ourselves. After all, to think of oneself as a property over which one has ownership rights is to free oneself from the intrusion of others in decisions about what I should do. The desire to own oneself is essentially the desire for a certain kind of freedom. By contrast, if to be authentic is to find the sole ground for one’s existence in oneself, the threat is no longer merely the potential intrusion of others, but the overwhelming magnitude of the responsibility one has for oneself.

This position takes an extreme form in the work of Sartre in the 1940s, a position I explore in some detail in the book. Sartre recognizes, in the overwhelming burden of the responsibility he believes we have for ourselves, the source of all our existential angst; but he aims for a kind of “optimistic toughness”[xxiii] with respect to it. When Sartre says that “God does not exist, and we have to face the consequences of this,”[xxiv] for instance, he means that we alone are responsible for who we are. There is no mercy in a view like this. If I am the sum of my acts, for instance, and responsible for them all, then I cannot now be someone I have not already become, and I can never, coming out of this moment, be other than the person I already am.[xxv] It is only the infinitely willful act of a groundless leap that can bring me to be something new. It is a genuine question whether the position Sartre articulates is livable at all. He insists on a kind of optimism about it. But after all, he concedes, “We can understand why our doctrine horrifies certain people.”[xxvi]

2.3 Proper Dignity

I conclude from this that the terminology of authenticity is no more sufficient to characterize the project I am engaged in than the terminology of redemption is. Indeed, it may be worse. This suggests that we should try a third time to articulate the challenge of our historical situation. I don’t claim that this third interpretation of human being is in any objective sense “correct.” But I do believe it may be appropriate for us now, given the moment in history at which we live. So, what exactly is the interpretation I offer? In the vocabulary of the book, the aim that is appropriate to our existence must engage the proper dignity of human being. Dignity is also a term with a history, though I will not go into it here. A portion of the book is devoted to that task. Instead, I will rest content in the hope that this brief discussion highlights some of the difficulties we must confront in pursuing the project you ask about. Even identifying the challenge of the post-modern, technological world – finding a vocabulary that is sufficient to it – is itself a deep and difficult philosophical task. Let me give up on that task for the moment, though, and move on in Part 2 to say something about the conditions in which this challenge confronts us.

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^[i] Heidegger’s way of developing this point emphasizes not the infinity of what is to be engaged, but its structural inaccessibility. Our finitude consists at least partly, according to Heidegger, in the essential tendency that Being has simultaneously to reveal and conceal itself to us. This is, of course, a deep and pervasive aspect of Heidegger’s view, and so a careful presentation of it would require volumes. But you can get a simple idea of the relation between our finitude and the revelation-concealment structure of Being by thinking of a perceptual example. Leibniz says famously that God inhabits a perspectiveless point of view, a “view from nowhere.” God is absolute for Leibniz, in other words, in the sense that the whole is revealed to him simultaneously and at once. (This fact is tied up, for Leibniz, with God’s peculiar form of “divine intuition.” This is at least one reason the inaccessibility of the view from nowhere, as Leibniz understands it, is quite different from its inaccessibility as a contemporary figure like Thomas Nagel understands it. But I will leave that issue to the side in this context.) By contrast with God, to be a finite being is to be a being who essentially has a perspective on the world, a perspective from which what is revealed interacts necessarily with what is concealed. This is at least one sense in which a defining feature of our finitude is the revelation-concealment structure of what is. The upshot is that our engagement with being is not just de facto incapable of being completed, but also necessarily and structurally incomplete.We see from this that Heidegger’s interpretation of our finitude differs from that of earlier thinkers, even though it is an interpretation of our finitude. (For some discussion of the relation between Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel on this aspect of the absolute, see Paul Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 31-34. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist so influenced by Heidegger, discusses the essential unattainability of Leibniz’s view from nowhere in Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Don Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 69/95ff. For some discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s view, cf. my “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty,” in Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 74-110.)

^[ii] As everyone knows, Socrates discusses the strangeness of writing most famously in the Phaedrus.“You know, Phaedrus,” he says, “that’s the strange thing about writing … [W]ritten words … seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say … they go on telling you just the same thing forever.” [Phaedrus 275d]. Aside from the fact that this seems an important cautionary tale for the field of Artificial Intelligence, at least if we hear the word “same” in a sufficiently rich way, two other things strike me about this passage. The first is the dialectic between apparent intelligibility and its ultimate withholding. Like paintings, according to Socrates, words seem to say something; but in the end, they “maintain a most majestic silence.” (The relation between saying the same thing forever and saying nothing at all, between repetition and muteness, is fascinating; but I can do nothing more than note it here.) This dialectic, I believe – the back and forth between the apparent intelligibility of the written word and the majestic silence into which it ultimately recedes – is one clue as to why it is hard even to initiate any philosophical writing. The apparent intelligibility of the words one writes seems inevitably to fade away into nothing as one interrogates them. I have felt Socrates’ intuition about this forcefully in my own struggle to write about your questions. But the second thing that strikes me in this passage is the word “strange” itself. This is the word Hackforth uses to translate the Greek δείνος [deinos]. Δείνος has a range of meanings in Greek that is not adequately captured by any single word in English. On the one hand, it means strange, as Hackforth suggests. The word “uncanny” is sometimes used in this context, and Heidegger’s use of the term unheimlich in Being and Time (uncanny in the sense of being not at home) is clearly an attempt at this kind of interpretation. But it can also mean “terrible.” The dinosaurs, for example, are the terrible lizards (deinos “terrible” + sauros “lizard”). And in a reversal that is itself strange, δείνος [deinos] can also mean “wonderful,” in the sense of “worthy of standing in awe before.” This is the way it is often translated in the famous “Choral Ode to Man” from Sophocles’ Antigone. “Many are the wonders of the world,” the chorus sings, “but none more wonderful than man.” [This line opens the Ode at 332-3; the entire Choral Ode to Man runs from 332-383.] This strange combination of phenomena – simultaneously unsettling, terrifying, and awe-inspiring – is used in the Greek world to characterize the written word just as it is used to characterize human beings ourselves. It is as if, in the end, the struggle with writing is just the same as the philosophical struggle to engage ourselves and the world. Both are involved in the same process – at once unsettling, terrifying, and awe-inspiring – of continuously seeming to present an intelligible meaning which ultimately, upon further inspection, is forever withheld.

^[iii] The Latin root from which the word derives is redimere, from re- (back) + emere (to buy).

^[iv] Luther’s Reformist intervention in Christianity problematizes this economic interpretation of redemption by bringing freedom and bondage together into a paradoxical unity. As he writes in On the Freedom of a Christian (1520), “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none. A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone.” Kierkegaard’s Lutheran interpretation of faith emphasizes this inherently paradoxical quality. But while the idea that complete freedom paradoxically requires utter servitude does push on the background economic metaphor, it remains firmly rooted in that basic framework. To say that we own ourselves most when we are owned by others is paradoxical; but it does not invent a new understanding of self-ownership so much as strip away the rational ground for the old one. By analogy, we sometimes say, regarding someone’s political commitments, that they “went so far to the left that they became an extreme version of the right” (or vice-versa). This is not to reject the traditional interpretation of left-wing or right-wing political positions; it is just to point out that they are properly ordered in a circle instead of a line.

It is worth noticing, too, that the economic metaphor is found in the Greek tradition in addition to the Hebrew. In the Phaedo for instance, Socrates says

All the same, Cebes, I believe that this much is true, that the gods are our keepers, and we men are one of their possessions. [62b7-8]

The relevant phrase reads ἡμᾶς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ἓν τῶν κτημάτων τοῖς θεοῖς εἶναι (hēmas tous anthrōpous hen tōn ktēmatōn tois theois einai). Although there is some controversy over how to interpret the word κτήματα [ktēmata], the standard translation is “possessions” or “belongings.” Foucault, following Vicaire, suggests the possibility of translating κτήματα [ktēmata] as “flock.” [See The Courage of Truth, Foucault’s final set of lectures at the Collège de France in February-March 1984, p. 100.] But it seems to me that even if we offer this metaphorical substitution, it is not an accident that the literal meaning is “a piece of property, a possession,” and more broadly (like the word χρῆμα [krēma]) “a thing.”

^[v] In the Second Treatise on Government, for instance, Locke writes: “Though men as a whole own the earth and all inferior creatures, every individual man has a property in his own person [i.e., ‘owns himself’]…” (5.27). This aspect of the Enlightenment view is developed at least through Kant, as I argue in my book, and it holds on stubbornly even to the current day.

[vi] The most famous proponent of the “positive good” theory of slavery in the pre-Civil War American South was Senator John C. Calhoun. Calhoun had previously served as Vice President of the United States, under both John Quincy Adams (1825-29) and Andrew Jackson (1829-32), but on February 6^th, 1837, he spoke from the floor of the Senate as the Senior Senator from South Carolina. In his speech that day he refused to accept the Abolitionist criticism of slavery, or even the Revolutionary War era defense of it – that slavery was a necessary evil without which the labor-intensive economy of the American South would collapse. Instead, he proposed that slavery is a positive good for the slaves themselves. “I take higher ground,” Calhoun insisted.

I hold that, in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good.

Calhoun was not the first, nor the most sophisticated, proponent of the positive good theory of slavery. But he was among a group in the pre-Civil War American South who traced this theory to Aristotle’s defense of natural slavery in Book 1 of the Politics. (See especially Politics I.vi, running from 1255a3-b15.) Aristotle had argued that not all slavery is just, since sometimes men who “seem to be of the most noble birth” [εὐγενεστάτους εἶναι δοκοῦντας (eugenestatous einai dokountas), at 1255a27)and who therefore are “undeserving of being a slave,” [τὸν ἀνάξιον δουλεύειν (ton anaxion douleuein), at 1255a25) are nevertheless enslaved through defeat in war. Still, he claimed, there are some who by birth are “natural slaves,” and these are best treated by the institution of slavery. “It is manifest,” Aristotle writes,

that there are cases of people of whom some are … slaves by nature, and for these, slavery is an institution both expedient and just. [Politics I.v, 1255a1-2.]

Moreover, Aristotle, continued, it is not only expedient [συμφέρει (sumpherei)] and just [δίκαιον (dikaion)] in general that the natural slave submits to his master, it is also “to the interest of” [συμφέρει (sumpherei)] both. There are, Aristotle insisted,

cases where it is expedient for the one to be master, the other to be the slave. Whereas the one must be ruled, the other should exercise the rule for which he is fitted by nature, thus being the master. For, if the work of being a master is badly done, that is contrary to the interest of both parties. [Politics I.vi, 1255b5-9]

Aristotle’s position on natural slavery is roundly and rightly repudiated nowadays, of course. It is relevant to us today, however, not least because of the role it played in the Antebellum South in justifying slavery there. For an interesting discussion of the American South’s reliance on Aristotle for their defense of slavery, see S. Sara Monoson, “Recollecting Aristotle: Pro-Slavery Thought in Antebellum America and the Argument of Politics Book I,” in Richard Alston, Edith Hall, and Justine McConell (eds.), Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 247-278.

The Judeo-Christian account of freedom as the proper ambition of the Jew and Christian, and the Enlightenment’s universalization of this ambition to all human beings, stands squarely against the Aristotelian tradition. This is obviously important and good. It is a further question, however, whether the background conception that motivates this position – the conception of the self as a kind of property that could be owned – sets us up well to think about the challenges we face today.

[vii] This is, of course, a bold claim that I cannot defend in full here. But the rough move I make in the book is to recognize that, like Locke, Kant starts from the assumption that the fundamental kind of thing is what has a price given its position in the economic market. He then goes on to define human beings as what stand beyond any proper trade value. (For the passage distinguishing what has a price from what has dignity, see Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), pp. 4:434-5 in the Academy edition.)

The distinction between price and dignity seems like it should be effective if your main goal is to argue that slavery is morally impermissible. Interestingly however, although Kant does argue in a limited context that slavery is inconsistent with the pure duties of personhood, he doesn’t seem to use the dignity of persons to defend this claim. Instead, he argues that since it would be irrational to sign a contract selling oneself into slavery, no such contract could be morally just. “A contract,” Kant writes,

by which one party would completely renounce its freedom for the other’s advantage would be self-contradictory, that is, null and void, since by it one party would cease to be a person… [See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals (1797), p. 6:283. The translation by Mary J. Gregor can be found in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant)(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 431.) ]

Indeed, far from arguing that because of their inherent dignity no person could be owned by another, Kant in fact argues that there exists a right to persons that is akin to the right to things. As he says,

So we see here again, as in the two preceding headings, that there is a right to persons akin to a right to things (of the head of the house over servants); for he can fetch servants back and demand them from anyone in possession of them, as what is externally his, even before the reasons that may have led them to run away and their rights have been investigated. [Metaphysics of Morals (1797), p. 6:284.

In this way, Kant assimilates the right that one person may have to own another person to the right that a person may have to own a thing. This is a stronger sense in which it seems to me that the market economical account of the self, operating in the background of Kant’s position, comes to the fore.

Moreover, despite the irrationality of slavery on Kant’s view, he does defend a theory of race that is much in line with the one that Aristotle uses to defend the concept of natural slavery. This seems to me a potentially separable, but nevertheless crucial, weakness of Kant’s position. For some discussion of Kant’s theory of race, see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. For discussion of the way Kant’s theory of race helped to determine the formation of the philosophical canon, see Peter K. J. Park, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), esp. chapter 1, “The Kantian School and the Consolidation of Modern Historiography of Philosophy.”

^[viii] See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (esp. §§108-125, §343, et passim) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

^[ix] See Martin Heidegger, “A Retrospective Look at the Pathway,” in Mindfulness (London: Athlone, 2006), Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (trs.), p. 368. Originally published as Besinnung (Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1997); volume 66 of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe. This short essay was written in 1937/8.

^[x] See Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” in Essays in Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1988), p. 35.

^[xi] See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2012), tr. by Constance Borde. The famous opening line to Book II, Part IV, Chapter 12 reads (in H. M. Parshley’s well-known translation), “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (As the first line of the opening chapter of Tome II in the original French edition, this reads, “On ne naît pas femme : on le devient.”)

^[xii] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]), tr. by Richard Philcox, p. xiii.

^[xiii] See Wallace’s 1996 interview with the online journal Salon.

^[xiv] See Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”

^[xv] How much further back is not clear to me. Polonius’ famous advice to Hamlet for example – “To thine own self be true” – might seem like a natural precursor to the modern culture of authenticity. I am persuaded by Charles Guignon’s claim, however, that Polonius is not enjoining authenticity as an end in itself, but instead as a means to the greater end of being true to others. See Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 25ff. This seems an important enough difference to disqualify the case. On the other hand, a famous story from the Hasidic tradition might qualify. Martin Buber recounts it in his Tales of the Hasidim: “Before his death,” Buber writes, “Rabbi Zusya said “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” (See Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim (Schocken Books, 1975 [1947]), p. 222. The passage is also quoted in the Prologue to David Cerbone’s book Existentialism: All That Matters (Teach Yourself, 2016).) Zusya does seem to take authenticity to be an end in itself; indeed, to be the end by which one’s life will ultimately be measured. This example, however, does not push the tradition back very far in time. Rabbi Zusya of Hanipol (1718-1800), it turns out, was a rough contemporary of Rousseau.

^[xvi] The word eigen means “own” or “proper,” and the word eigentlich means “proper,” “actual,” or “true.”

^[xvii] Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Vol. 1, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 [1846]), p. 130.

^[xviii] For some discussion of this contemporary form of ethics see, for example, Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Taylor’s fuller discussion of the sources of this contemporary view, from Augustine forward, can be found in his Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

^[xix] For instance, Isaiah Berlin’s famous 1958 lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” offers a distinction between negative freedom (“freedom from”) and positive freedom (“freedom for”). Positive freedom as Berlin presents it is one important and influential interpretation of authenticity. The idea is that the proper kind of political, social, and educational upbringing frees us for an authentic or genuine existence – an existence, in other words, that genuinely manifests and expresses the truest form of the human self. The interpretation Berlin gives of positive freedom, however, which he draws from figures like Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and others, focuses on the idea that I am freed for a good life when I am free to control or master my own choices and decisions. When I am doing that, I am being most true to myself.This pushes us strongly in the direction of an interpretation of authenticity that links it essentially to self-authorship.

^[xx] Here’s a place where I will need to comment on my claim almost immediately after having made it. For one thing, despite how it seems, it is probably wrong as a matter of fact to say that “author” and “authenticity” have a common root. The classical Latin word authenticus, which is the proximal origin of our word “authentic,”comes from the Hellenistic Greek word αὐθεντικός [authentikos], meaning warranted, original, authoritative. It often applies in classical Latin use to documents that are original instead of copied or forged. By contrast, the classical Latin word auctor, from which our word “author” derives, has no Greek original. And while an auctor is a person with the authority to take action or make a decision – so the notion of “authority” is shared in both “authenticity” and “authorship” – the Latin verb that stands as the root of auctor has a different connotation altogether. Augere means to increase or grow – as in the word “augment” – so that an auctor is someone who grows beyond himself. I won’t go into this further here, though it seems to me there is an important distinction between something’s being genuine or original and something’s growing beyond itself.

If there is any reason to make the faulty etymological claim in the first place however, and indeed to leave it in the main text, it is because the tradition has often (mis)interpreted authenticity in terms of self-authorship, and this interpretation has played an important role in our understanding of the phenomenon. Rousseau’s influence on both the Kantian paradigm of autonomy and self-legislation (self-authorship, in one sense of the phrase) and also on the Romantic ambition to find one’s genuine and true motivations within oneself (authenticity, in one sense of the phrase) naturally puts the two phenomena in close association with one another. Despite this reason for leaving the claim in the main text, there is further reason – beyond mere faulty etymology – to take back it as well. That has to do with the fact that the interpretation of “authenticity” that ties it to self-authorship in the more traditional sense is actually quite narrow.

As Charles Taylor emphasizes, there is nothing inherent in the notion of authenticity that grounds it in the distinction between one’s true, original inner self, on the one hand – a self that is characterized as private and inwardly determined, and over which one properly seeks to have control or mastery – and one’s more public, shared self. To say that these are inherently connected with one another is to read authenticity in terms of autonomy (in the sense of self-legislation or self-authorship), and Taylor gives us good reason to separate out notions of authenticity from notions of inwardness. (See Sources of the Self. In a more recent book Taylor traces the development of what he calls the “buffered” self from earlier notions of a “porous” self that resist this idea of inwardness. See Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).)

In the text above I am illegitimately accepting this connection between authenticity and autonomy, while Taylor works hard to distinguish the two positions.I accept Taylor’s correction. In my defense, however, I am here aiming simply to report the traditional view, the historical authority of which is shown precisely in the fact that Taylor, and others in recent years, have had to work so hard to undermine it. (For one recent intervention, see Marina Oshana, “Autonomy and the Question of Authenticity,” in Social Theory and Practice, vol. 33, no. 3, (2007) pp. 411-439. For a helpful overview of the current state of play on this issue, see Somogy Varga’s update on Charles Guignon’s original article on “Authenticity” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

[xxi] See Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism’,” in Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 250. In the letter, Heidegger contrasts Sartre’s view of human beings with his own. Heidegger had said in Being and Time, almost 20 years before the 1946 letter, that “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” [BT 67/42]. The constitutive nature of this claim (that the one lies in the other), along with the scare quotes around the word “essence,” according to Heidegger, suggest that the traditional relation between essence and existence is being brought into question in that passage. Traditionally, something’s essence (what it is to be the thing) and its existence (that it is) are independent of one another. The answer to the question “What is it to be a triangle?” is given by geometry: A triangle is a closed, three-sided, planar figure. It follows from this definition that there are various essential facts about a triangle: that its internal angles, for example, sum to 180 degrees. But whether there are any triangles is a question about triangle existence. One could give a complete account of the essence of the triangle without even addressing the question of its existence.

For human beings by contrast, Heidegger is suggesting, the only sense in which we have an ‘essence’ at all lies in, or is constituted by, the facts about our existence. These include particular, “existentiell” facts about us, like our practical identity, our social context, the social norms that we understand to govern us, and so on. Heidegger calls these collectively our “facticity.” But they also include “existential” facts about our kind of being, like the fact that we are always taking a stand on what it is to be us, that we are always “thrown” into a situation and projecting forward into possibilities, that some of these existential facts about us are structurally covered up, and so on. Precisely because these “existential” facts about us are not merely answers to the question whether there are any being of our kind, the question of our existence, for Heidegger, is not the same kind of question as the traditional one. The constitutive claim that our ‘essence’ lies in our existence, therefore, is meant, as much as anything, to put pressure on our understanding of the metaphysical categories of essence and existence themselves.

This is one natural way into Heidegger’s claim that his project brings the history of metaphysics to an end. If the metaphysical project of determining the ‘essence’ of what is turns out to be founded on an inadequate interpretation of the nature of ‘essence,’ or at least is founded on an interpretation of ‘essence’ that does not apply to human beings, then the project itself is revealed to be bereft. This, at least, is Heidegger’s post-facto interpretation of what he must have been aiming at in the important passage from Being and Time.

By contrast, when Sartre appropriates the Heideggerean project for his existentialist ambitions, in a 1945 speech whose title is usually translated “Existentialism is a Humanism,” he subtly transforms the central move. Whereas Heidegger aimed make a constitutive claim about the relation between ‘essence’ and existence for human beings, Sartre re-writes it as a claim about temporal priority. “Atheistic existentialism,” Sartre writes,

which I represent … states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or as Heidegger says, Dasein. [“The Humanism of Existentialism,” in Essays in Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1988), p. 35. Translation modified; my italics.]

Heidegger’s discussion of this passage from Sartre in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” is brief, but in my reading it is meant precisely to draw out the distinction between Heidegger’s constitutive re-interpretation of the nature of essence and existence, and Sartre’s much less interesting re-orientation of their relative priority. “By way of contrast,” Heidegger writes,

Sartre expresses the basic tenet of existentialism in this way: Existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which from Plato’s time on has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement.

Just so, one might argue that Kierkegaard’s notion of subjective truth, although it takes truth out of the objective realm and puts it into the realm of the subject, nevertheless retains a metaphysical commitment to the idea that to be human is in essence to be a form of inward subjectivity. As Kierkegaard writes, the highest truth there is for an existing person is “An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness…” (Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Hong and Hong (trs.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), Vol. 1, p. 203.) To place truth in passionate inwardness is to change its criterion from an objective one to a subjective one. But it is not, in and of itself, essentially to challenge the notion of human subjectivity. As I will say in a moment, there is an interpretation of Kierkegaard, which I prefer, that emphasizes the way in which the “passionately inward” self must go outside of itself to ground itself upon another. In this sense, Kierkegaard does begin to push against the traditional metaphysical distinction between subject and object. But just focusing on his notion of subjective truth is likely to mislead one in this respect. (See note 22 for further discussion.)

^[xxii] As I have mentioned already, Taylor tries to “redeem” the notion of authenticity by separating it out from notions of inwardness, subjectivity, and autonomy. (See note 20.) In this Taylor is following Heidegger, for whom “ecstatic temporality” grounds authentic Dasein. Heidegger is clear that to be “ek-static” is to be in such a way as to stand (stasis) outside of (ek-) yourself. Even Kierkegaard’s idea that one must “become what one is” depends on his prior commitment to the idea that the individual finds his or her ground in another. (Contra what I was suggesting, temporarily, in note 21.) For the Christian that other is Jesus, of course, but Kierkegaard develops the view in a much more general way that seems to allow for the possibility that any finite, risky, losable, person or project could be such a ground. (An individual can “concentrate the whole of life’s reality” in “any … interest whatever,” Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio writes. See Fear and Trembling, tr. Alasdair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 71.) This is one of the important aspects of the famously puzzling definition of the self at the beginning of Sickness Unto Death, the 1849 book that Kierkegaard published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Anti-Climacus says the self is “a relation which relates to itself, and in relating to itself relates to another” [my italics]. The idea that authenticity is tied to inwardness or self-grounding, in other words, is clearly resisted in all these approaches. Despite this tradition, however, it seems to me that the contemporary use of the term authenticity is too contaminated by a commitment to the idea that the self is an inner realm to work for us. That is why I, like the Heidegger after Being and Time, believe a different approach is needed. Whatever our dignity amounts to, it seems less obvious that the contemporary, colloquial use of the term presupposes either the commitments of economy or autonomy that are problematic in the notions of redemption and authenticity.

[xxiii] See Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” op. cit., p. 49.

[xxiv] See Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” op. cit., p. 40.

[xxv] “When the existentialist writes about a coward,” Sartre observes,

he says that this coward is responsible for his cowardice. He’s not like that because he has a cowardly heart or lung or brain; he’s not like that on account of his physiological make-up; but he’s like that because he has made himself a coward by his acts. (Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” op. cit., p. 49.)

[xxvi] See Sartre, “The Humanism of Existentialism,” op. cit., p. 48.