WRITERS AND MADNESS
7
to the degree that he has not risked the maximum of his being in it,
he has missed the main chance, his only chance. The scientist too
may insist on the personal prerogative of discovery: he wants the new
element, planet, or equation to bear his name; but if in this claim for
prestige he responds to one of the deepest urges of the ego, it is only
that this prestige itself may come to attend his person through the pub–
lic world of other men; and it is not in the end his own being that is
exhibited or his own voice that is heard in the learned report to the
Academy.
So we have come quickly to the point, and may now let the
categories of
authentic
and
unauthentic
out of the bag. I am not very
happy about the terms, I wish we had better in English, but it should
be clear from our instances so far that they are not really new notions,
and that they do come forth now at the real pinch of the subject
matter.
If
a certain amount of faddism has recently and regrettably
become attached to their use, they have on the other hand also become
obsessive for the modern mind-a recommendation which we, existing
historically, cannot help finding a little persuasive. The Marxist -will
not fail to point out that a highly developed technology, which is not
directed toward human ends but capable on the other hand of over–
running all areas of the social life, has plunged us into this civilization
of the slick imitation, celluloid and cellophane, kitsch and chromium
plating, in the morass of which we come inevitably to speak of "the
real thing" and "the real right thing" with an almost religious fervor.
And he will go on to explain then why·the category of authenticity
should play such a crucial role in modern existential thought. He
would be right, of course, but he ought also to drop his bucket into
the deeper waters of the well. One deeper fact is that modern man
has lost the religious sanctions which had once surrounded his life
at every moment with a recognizable test capable of telling him whe–
ther he was living "in the truth" or not; Hegel drew a map of the
divided consciousness, and Freud explored it empirically beyond
anything Hegel ever dreamed, showing us, among other things, that
Venus
is
the goddess of lies; and so we come, as creatures of the
divided and self-alienated consciousness, to wrestle with the problem
of how we are to live truthfully. But if these categories have become
historically inevitable, and we borrow their formulation from existen–
tialist philosophers, we have on the other hand to
insi~t
that it is not
these philosophers who ·can tell us, after all, how authenticity is to
be
achieved either in art or life. Freud, not Heidegger, holds the key.
The mechanism by which any work of art becomes authentic-
