Authenticity involves a person coming to terms with the fact that he will never be at one with himself, that he will never become a kind of thing that no longer has to choose what it is. Surprisingly though, authenticity does not involve a person abandoning the desire for one- ness, substantiality and foundation. The desire to have a foundation, to be its own foundation, is fundamental to the human will so it can never abandon this desire. Sartre says, ‘The first value and first object of will is: to be its own foundation. This mustn’t be understood as an empty psychological desire, but as the transcendental structure of human real- ity’ (War Diaries, p. 110). Any attempt to abandon altogether the desire for foundation collapses into a project of nihilism. In trying to escape his desire for foundation a person can only aim at being nothing at all.
Far from being in good faith, a nihilistic person who tells himself that he is in fact nothing, is actually in bad faith. His bad faith consists in his false belief that he is his own nothingness in the manner of being it, a nothingness-in-itself, when in fact his nothingness consists in his being nothing but a relationship to the world he is conscious of. For a person to believe that deep down he is a nothingness-in-itself is equiva- lent to believing that deep down he is something fixed and determined. As both attitudes involve considering himself to be a self-identical being that is what it is without having to choose what it is, both attitudes are equally in bad faith.
In her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir compares the nihilist who wants to be nothing with the serious person who seeks to annihilate his subjectivity by treating himself as an object entirely defined by social norms and conventions.
The failure of the serious sometimes brings about a radical disorder. Conscious of being unable to be anything, man then decides to be nothing. We shall call this attitude nihilistic. The nihilist is close to the spirit of seriousness, for instead of realising his negativity as a living movement, he conceives his annihilation in a substantial way. He wants to be nothing, and this nothing that he dreams of is still another sort of being. (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 52)
So, the project of authenticity is still motivated by the search for sub- stantiality and foundation, but it differs crucially from bad faith in that, as Sartre says, ‘it suppresses that which, in the search, is flight’ (War Diaries, p. 112). What does he mean?
What Sartre means is that the authentic person does not aim at one- ness, foundation, substantiality, by means of a futile flight from his free- dom. Instead, he aims at substantiality by continually founding himself upon the affirmation and assertion of his freedom. He takes the affirma- tion and assertion of his freedom as his basic principle or ultimate value. He seeks to identify himself with his inalienable freedom rather than flee his inalienable freedom in the vain hope of becoming a fixed thing.
The project of authenticity is actually more successful at achieving a kind of substantiality than the project of inauthenticity because the
project of authenticity reconciles a person to what he really is, an essen- tially free being, whereas the project of inauthenticity is only ever a flight from what a person really is towards an unachievable identity with the world of objects. In fleeing freedom a person does not establish a foundation, but in assuming his freedom he establishes freedom itself as a foundation. In assuming his freedom he ‘becomes’ what he is – free – rather than failing to become what he can never be – unfree. To put it another way, the desire for constancy can only be satisfied by embrac- ing freedom because freedom is the only thing about a person that is constant. Sartre says, ‘Thus authenticity is a value but not primary. It gives itself as a means to arrive at substantiality’ (War Diaries, p. 112).
It is important to note that the form of substantiality arrived at through authenticity is not a fixed state. As said, it is logically impossi- ble for consciousness to achieve a fixed state and all attempts to do so involve bad faith. The substantiality achieved through authenticity is not achieved by consciousness once and for all, it is a substantiality that has to be continually perpetuated and re-assumed. A person cannot simply be authentic, he has to be authentic. That is, he has to con- stantly strive to be authentic without ever being able to become an authentic-thing. If a person ever thinks he is authentic in the same way that a rock is a rock, he is no longer authentic and has actually slid back into bad faith. Authenticity is not a permanent foundation that a per- son chooses to establish at a particular time once and for all, but rather what existentialist philosophers call a metastable foundation that a per- son must constantly maintain by constantly choosing authentic responses to his situation.