Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity by Pickett Howard;

Author:Pickett, Howard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

There is a difference, in short, between a genuine hiddenness (that which the single individual addresses within her heart) and a public hiddenness (that which is on display for some group of people—whether tourists or fellow monks).

In lieu of a pretentious, hypocritical religious performance—whether associated with Catholic monasticism, as the previous quotation implies, or with the Danish state church, as Kierkegaard’s later writings indicate—Christianity concerns itself with the genuine, authentic, single individual whose worth is rarely, if ever, recognized by the world. As a result of the world’s perverse concern for external, trivial realities (status, appearance, conformity), Christianity’s true nature is fittingly represented—or, more to the point, not represented—by “the incognito.” Like Silentio’s knight of faith, like Johannes Climacus’s God-man (Jesus), the person of conscience and genuine love is also “incognito,” unrecognizable—at least, to worldly eyes. Like the Protestant reformers and Kantian philosophers before him, Kierkegaard assumes that efforts at externalization are too concerned with worldly recognition to suit an authentic person of faith; as Kant in particular had worried, because they smack of hypocritical self-displays, outward performances of faith stand at odds with true faith.

Likewise, when one has a “sincere faith,” one is somehow self-congruent, on one level, yet incongruent, on another. Love requires sincerity not “falsity” (SV 9:144/WL 151), or so Kierkegaard insists in an echo of his own earlier essay on love’s need for fruits. After all, “to love falsely is to hate” (SV 9:144/WL 151). As a result, “It is impossible to join the slightest lack of honesty with loving” (SV 9:144/WL 151). As the earlier essay on love’s fulfillment of the law puts the point, the earnest person is so hungry for honesty (including about himself) that he rejects the illusions of a popular conception of love and the self: “No earnest person, therefore, wearies of tracking down the illusions, because insofar as he is a thinking person he fears most to be in error, however cozy the arrangement is, however good the company—and as a Christian he fears most to be lost without knowing it—however flattering, however splendid the surroundings and company are” (SV 9:120/WL 124). Unlike the earnest person, the ordinary members of the crowd are pretentious in their self-understanding and “want the person they are supposed to love and cherish to be pretentious” (SV 9:120/WL 125).

To repeat a point from the earlier half of this deliberation, self-congruence involves something other than the pure self-relation of isolated self-reflection. The turn to conscience is not a private consideration of what one wants; it is “not a matter of drives and inclination, or a matter of feeling” (SV 9:137/WL 143). Conscience has long been a corrective for selfish impulses; it is, after all, conscience that tells you not to follow your worst impulses. However, in Kierkegaard’s analysis, at least, neither is conscience a purely intellectual encounter with one’s own best rational judgments; it is not, as he says, “a matter of intellectual calculation” (SV 9:137/WL 143).

Instead, the turn to conscience is a turn to God: “To relate to God is precisely to have conscience” (SV 9:137/WL 143).

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