Topics Value

Question Why do we desire authenticity? Why do we want to be the cause of our own happiness rather than, say, medication? Why do we want to know that the jazz musician is truly improvising her solo rather than playing some pre-composed part crafted to sound improvised? Why is it so important to us that we experience the real world, and not a utopian virtual reality fed to us by machines?

Accepted:
March 24, 2008

Comments

I don't have an answer at all, except to say what you already know: in our society authenticity is usually valued, and its opposite (which might be deception, or B.S., or being a phony) is usually disparaged. Why do we hold some values on high and reject others?

Authenticity, as a value, is related to truth telling. Yet why is truth better than falsity? My buddy Nietzsche would say that it may not be. We are free to take fresh looks at long established values, perhaps to uncover the unsavory, hidden dark sides of our values - even values such as 'truth.'

I really liked your question and have enjoyed being puzzled by it!

Like Lisa, I also enjoyed your question and have been mulling it over for several weeks -- without making a lot of headway. But here is a thought. It's true that we do value various sorts of authenticity (real creativity, "real" as opposed to "surrogate" experiences, etc.), but there are different ways we could go about asking why.

One way would be to ask a sort of scientific/psychological/biological question: what is it about the way we're wired or raised that leads us to put a high value on the things you've labeled as authentic? Not being a scientist, I can't say, but it's reasonable to think that as the world actually works, authenticity and genuine effort are more likely overall to produce beneficial results. If we didn't care about real creativity, for example, then the kinds of innovations that make life better from just about any point of view might never come about. On that way of looking at things, we might say that authenticity has an instrumental value, and that this rubs off on our attitudes even in cases where not much is really at stake. For example: because being truthful is by and large useful (imagine what life would be like if most of what you said to other people was false), we come to value truthfulness even in cases where lying won't lead to any bad consequences. Because there will be more enjoyable music if people put forth the effort to create, then we come to value musical creativity, even if in any given case, our enjoyment doesn't depend on whether the musician we're listening to is a genius or a plagiarist.

But another way to think about your question is as a way of probing hedonism -- the view that ultimately, what makes things valuable is the pleasure they produce. What your question points out is that we tend not to think that way: we tend to think that really experiencing the Grand Canyon is more valuable than seeming to, even if the experiences are indistinguishable. And we also tend to think a genuine but failed effort may really be better or more noble than getting the result by lazy luck, even if the lucky sloth feels better. So one way to answer your question might be to say: we desire authenticity because it really is valuable, even if that value can't be explained in purely hedonistic terms.

Even hedonists worry about this. John Stuart Mill famously maintained that ultimately, value is to be understood in terms of happiness. But on Mill's account, happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. And so in Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, Mill sets out to defend his doctrine from the claim that it is "a doctrine worthy only of swine." Mill addresses this worry by way of his famous discussion of quality of pleasure versus quantity. He tells us that those who have experienced both the "lower" and the "higher" pleasures are best equipped to judge their value, and they deem the higher pleasures more value.

One might wonder (and many have) whether turning this into a question about pleasure is the best way to go. But a Millian sort of move suggests itself here: whether we're hedonists or not, we might argue in the style of Mill that those who have experienced both the inauthentic and the authentic are likewise the ones fit to judge their relative value, and such people do in fact (as your question presupposes) assign a higher value to authenticity. That, Mill would say, is all the proof we can reasonably expect.

Whether this is an adequate argument is controversial to say the least. But the question you've raised is a lovely one, and I'm sorry you had to wait so long before any of us got around to offering any sort of answer.