Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
13 - Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Maybe the authentic self, should it be there, is not discoverable by a conscious effort. Self-consciousness, inescapable posturing, cognitive biases all interfere with finding it. What if, however, the authentic self is less a thing to be known than an experience to be had and, bizarrely, an experience of that true self's own escape from self-consciousness? Losing track of the self as self may be a way of finding it. (Sounds kind of flaky – if, like me, you resist it as so much chuckle-headed nonsense – or Buddhist if you wish to vest it with worthier authority.) There has been floating around since the romantic period an idea that one can achieve certain grand epiphanies of self-realization in moments claimed to have a supra-authenticity to them, and that these in turn are often triggered by confrontations with the beautiful and the sublime in nature and in art. But since when does the contemplation of the beautiful or the sublime necessarily lead to escaping self-consciousness any more than it is likely to bring in its wake instead a whole assortment of worries about whether you are feeling deeply enough or whether others will think you a phony for looking as if you are feeling too deeply? The pure experience of the aesthetic does not escape the long shadow of faking it. Unmediated unself-conscious immersion into the beautiful is often something that must be worked at, struggled for, or, if we are lucky, achieved as a gift of grace.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Faking It , pp. 154 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003