DIALOGUE ON ANXIETY
153
H:
It
is really not a very difficult concept.
It
is also a very old
one. Our German word for it is, I think, the clearest:
Eigentlichkeit,
the quality of being one's own self. Now, in life we frequently have
this experience of being put in what we call
unreal
situations–
where we are not, we say, at all ourselves. Most men go through life
in this condition: "reading the comics and the sporting page"–
and going to the movies. They also attend funerals as a social duty,
and attempt to behave there as "one should." Bit by bit their
own
life slips away from them, mastered by these external prescriptions
of social behavior:
one
does this,
one
does that,
one
does not do
something else. Inevitably these social prescriptions permeate con–
sciousness, and men are no longer able to stand face to face with
their own life. Imagine, if you will, the point of intersection of all
these impersonal prescriptions, and you get tl1e figure of the external–
ized and public individual whom I have called "the One."
F: One sees what you mean.
H:
But this scaffolding that obscures
one's
life is shaken at the
approach of death. The best description of this in all literature is
given by Tolstoy in his story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (which,
in fact, I have made basic to my own analysis of death). On his
deathbed Ivan Ilyich comes face to face for the first time with the
question, What am I, Who am
I.
Suddenly everything becomes
changed. His relations to his wife, children, and the world, become
founded now on a new basis : the conscious grasp of his own death.
During his life the claims of the world had led him away from him–
self; now he begins to exist truthfully, to exist as himself. That is
what I mean by authenticity.
F: To exist truthfully? But we never grasp our motives fully
at any given time: in retrospect, there was always more involved
than the fragment that we saw at the time. The mind is an iceberg,
seven-eighths under water-and even at the moment of death. I
can imagine poor Ivan Ilyich continuing to exist after death, and
looking back on tl10se last moments of revelation to find that there
too consciousness was fragmentary and incomplete: that is, there
were elements in his consciousness whose reasons he did not grasp
at the time.
H:
That is what we might call the Dialectic of Honesty.
Perhaps mankind cannot live "in the truth" after all. But this dia–
lectic of honesty is very difficult, and would take us too far afield;
I want to know what you think of my definition of authenticity.
F: Well, I wonder whether a good deal of what you inveigh
