“This man is so authentic!”

 “That girl is fake, a phony!”

 “I will not listen to them – I must be true to myself!”

What does it mean to be authentic, or true to myself? Who should I be true to? Who do I betray when I am inauthentic, or fake? Who is my true “I”?

When I am true to myself, I am not true to everything I have – to my nose, or to my headache, or to my boredom. I am true to… to what? Who am I truly?  

Perhaps my true self is natural, spntaneous energies within me, as the Swiss-French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau said?

Or perhaps my true self is the rational part of myself, as the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius believed?

Or maybe there is no fixed self in me – I create myself again and again every moment, as the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre explained?

Or maybe something else?

Now that you are familiar with the issue of authenticity, you can reflect about it in the company of your friends, whether online or face-to-face. There are different ways of running such a group. It can be a reading group which discusses a short text, or a discussion group about a specific case-study, perhaps from the literature or the cinema. But an especially powerful way of doing it is in the “Contemplative Companionship.”

In a Contemplative Companionship, the participants don’t argue with each other. They don’t speak from their opinions, but from their heart, from their deep self – in togetherness with the others. Like a group of musicians creating music together, they create a philosophical symphony together. 

Here is a video-recording of the contemplative companionship of several Agora team-members.

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If you decide to start your own contemplative companionship, we invite you send us the results!

Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

The true self as the holistic “symphony” within us

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was an influential French philosopher, and a Nobel Prize winner in literature. In his philosophical writings, written in a poetic style, he emphasized the importance of intuition.

Bergson tells us that in everyday life we usually live on the surface of our being. We are normally aware only of our rigid, fixed ideas and emotions, which can be easily described and analyzed. But our inner life is much richer than it seems. Underneath this familiar surface, our inner life is a constant flow of infinite qualities and meanings, like a flowing symphony. This is our real being – a creative, free flow that includes our entire being.

In the following passage, Bergson describes those special moments in which the true self – the “symphony” with us – comes up to the surface.

(Adopted from the translation by F.L. Pogson, London: Allen & Unwin, 1959, p. 169-170)

 
When our trustworthy friends advise us to take some important step, the attitudes which they express stay on the surface of our ego, and there they become solidified. Little by little they will form a thick crust which will cover up our own attitudes. We will believe that we are acting freely, but later on, when we look back, we will realize how much we were mistaken.

And then, just before we perform the act, something may revolt against it. It is the deep self rushing up to the surface. It is the outer crust bursting, suddenly surrendering to an irresistible push. In the depths of the self, below these very reasonable thoughts about very reasonable pieces of advice, something else was going on… 

We wish to know the reason why we have decided, and we find that we have decided without any reason, and perhaps against every reason. But sometimes this is the best reason. Because our action does not express some superficial idea, almost external to ourselves, separate and easy to explain. It agrees with the whole of our intimate feelings, thoughts and aspirations, it agrees with our particular conception of life which is the equivalent of all our past experience—in other words, with our personal idea of happiness and of integrity.