To Love the World or Leave It

On the Problem of Inauthenticity and How to Respond to It

In the popular movie The Matrix,¹ the main character Neo is given a choice by Morpheus between taking a red pill or a blue pill. The red pill will “wake him up,” allowing him to see the truth of a reality beyond the virtual one he has until then perceived to be real. The blue pill will allow him to default back to his state of ignorance about the truth, forgetting about Morpheus and the events that led up to his moment of radical choice.

Needless to say, he chose the red pill, taking him on a journey beyond the world of his previous perception, which, we find out, is nothing but a simulation projected by a tyrannical race of machines that have taken over Earth and that now use humanity to fuel their pernicious and perverse process.

The Matrix plot is an easy catalyst into conversations about the nature of reality and our place within it, as its narrative resonates with teachings found in many of the world’s esoteric traditions. These teachings suggest that the world, as we know it, is an illusion, and therefore the goal of spiritual practice is to see the “zeros and ones” of this illusion – just as Neo does after he takes the red pill, wakes up in a battle ship, and sees that the Matrix is nothing but scrolling digits on a computer screen. After spending his entire life asleep, he finally sees reality clearly.

It is perhaps no surprise that different traditions offer different theoretical understandings of what Andrew Holecek calls the “primary delusion” of waking life,² and thus different paths for dealing with it. While there is undoubtedly rich material in The Matrix for the interpretations of many spiritual paths, it is my suggestion here that the “red pill” is largely an appropriate analogy for a certain trajectory of spiritual experience, one we can refer to as the way of via negativa. Another way exists, however, that we’ll refer to as the way of via positiva.³ To express the difference of this approach, another Matrix analogy is necessary – one that might begin with Neo having chosen not the red pill, not the blue pill, but rather both pills.

Indian traditions can be categorized by the degree to which they proffer a world-denying (via negativa) or a world-affirming (via positiva) perspective.⁴ Both world-deniers and world-affirmers see everyday attitudes toward the world as, in important ways, illusory; it is thus their respective responses to the world’s illusions that distinguishes them. The world-deniers consider the task of contemplative practice either to get out of the world (in some future state of “heaven” or “enlightenment”) or to see beyond it. These individuals historically lean toward ascetic practice, monasticism, and rigorous meditation. World-affirming traditions see the task of spiritual practice as a transmutation of our perception and a re-figuring and re-situating of our conceptions of identity. These individuals tend toward practices and modes of behavior that can be integrated into the commitments and observances of everyday life.

But in what shared human experience do these seemingly divergent paths of via negativa and via positiva find their origin?

The Problem of Inauthenticity

German philosopher Martin Heidegger considered his task as a philosopher to return to the perennial question, “What is Being?”, a question inaugurated in the Western philosophical tradition by the ancient Greeks. In his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger couches this question partly in relation to a consideration of authenticity, or what might be called “genuine Selfhood.”⁵ According to Heidegger, human beings are either immersed in inauthentic modes of being or they are struggling to attain some semblance of authenticity (with varying degrees of success).

The “inauthentic” life is defined as a life “thrown” into the always-already organized and over-determined situatedness of the “they” world (or what Heidegger calls das Man). To be embedded in social life is to be embedded in a network of social relations that you had no role in creating. Dasein⁶ (Heidegger’s term for “what we are” prior to the socio-historical knowledge that tells us what we are), in other words, gets lost. As Stephen Mulhall puts it in his commentary on Being and Time, Dasein “typically loses itself in the ‘they,’ its Self is a they-self – a mode of relating to itself and to Others in which it and they fail to find themselves and so fail to achieve genuine individuality.”⁷ To be a member of society is to already be given over to the expectations and arrangements of life, to a set of laws and values that reign over us, and in turn alienate us from individuality and authenticity.

It’s important here to avoid interpreting terms like ‘individuality’ and ‘authenticity’ from the perspective of liberal individualism, which is arguably today’s most pervasive moral injunction (“just be yourself!”). The cultural context in which a notion like ‘being yourself’ makes sense is one that is already constructed around conceptions of selfhood that sanction and encourage authenticity and individuality, but only according to and within the coordinates of what has already been “decided” (and therefore unconsciously and implicitly deemed permissible) by das Man. It is a curious thing to consider, then, what an authentic individuality that rids itself of the branded categories of so-called authentic identity that sustain the current projections of social life might look like.