#title Skye Cleary on Authenticity
#subtitle Skye Cleary approaches questions of human authenticity through the lens of French Existentialism, and particularly through Simone de Beauvoir's thought. She is in conversation with Nigel Warburton.
#author Philosophy Bites
#date 1 August, 2022
#source <[[https://philosophybites.com/podcast/skye-cleary-on-authenticity][www.philosophybites.com/podcast/skye-cleary-on-authenticity]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-01-03T05:16:58
#authors Skye Cleary, Nigel Warburton, David Edmonds
#topics philosophy, existentialism, authenticity, Simone de Beauvoir
Skye Cleary approaches questions of human authenticity throught he lens of French Existentialism, and particularly through Simone de Beauvoir's thought. She is in conversation with Nigel Warburton.
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Nigel Warburton: This is Philosophy Bites with me, Nigel Warburton.
David Edmonds: And me, David Edmonds.
Nigel Warburton: If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please support us. We’re currently unfunded, and all donations would be gratefully received. For details, go to [[https://www.philosophybites.com/][www.philosophybites.com]]
David Edmonds: The French existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir, thought a lot about authenticity. But what did she mean for an act to be authentic? What does it mean to choose authentically? These are questions that the philosopher Skye Cleary has chosen freely and authentically to investigate.
Nigel Warburton: Skye Cleary, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
Sky Cleary: Thank you, Nigel. Thanks for having me.
Nigel Warburton: Topic we’re gonna focus on today is authenticity. I wonder if you could just begin by saying what you mean by authenticity.
Sky Cleary: Yeah. I see authenticity as a person creating an authentic life, And I’m coming at it from Simone de Beauvoir’s perspective, and she defines it as the process of creating your essence.
Nigel Warburton: Okay. So essence in common parlance means the thing at the very heart of something. Is that what you mean by essence?
Sky Cleary: I do, but I mean something slightly different. From an existential perspective, existence precedes essence, meaning that we exist first, we’re thrown into the world, there are facts of our lives that we can’t change. And it’s not that there’s an essence inside of us, rather essence is something that we create. And so authenticity is a process of figuring out how to create that essence, how we can transcend the facts of our lives, how we can express our freedom and actively become who we choose to be.
Nigel Warburton: So you choose what you are even though you are thrown into existence. You just find yourself existing. There’s a sense in which everything after that is a self creation.
Sky Cleary: Exactly. The existential philosophers acknowledge that we can’t choose everything about our lives, and there are certain facts of our lives, what they call facticity. And authenticity is the process of figuring out what are the facts of our existence, what can’t we change, but also looking for that window of freedom where we can make choices about our lives.
Nigel Warburton: Could you give me an example of the kind of thing I can’t change then?
Sky Cleary: Well, I’ll give you an example of something I can’t change, which is I can’t change as you’ve noticed, I’m Australian from my accent. I can’t change that I’m Australian, that I was born in Australia, that I was born in an English speaking culture, but I can transcend my English speaking facticity by learning other languages. Just because I was born into an English speaking country and and background doesn’t mean that I can’t transcend that and learn French or German. If I learn that, then that would be an example of me transcending the facts of my existence.
Nigel Warburton: So what makes that authentic? I can see how that can be something you can choose to do. But why is that authentic?
Sky Cleary: So there are lots of pressures on us from all different directions telling us who we should be and what we can and can’t do. And so authenticity is a way of kind of raising our consciousness to understand, you know, what are those pressures in our lives and how can we untangle our authentic choices and create ourselves in ways that we choose.
Nigel Warburton: So for instance, at school, I had to learn French. I didn’t really get a choice about whether I learned French or not. But now I’ve decided to learn Italian, and that was entirely my choice. So am I being more authentic when I learned Italian than I was when I was forced to learn French?
Sky Cleary: Yeah. Absolutely.
Nigel Warburton: Though at the same time, I’m quite happy that I did learn French and I kind of embraced it. So then did I become authentic when I sort of liked learning French and reading Baudelaire or whatever?
Sky Cleary: Well, I think you can still make authentic choices consistent with what you’ve been encouraged to do in the past. But the difference is, are you making these choices because you’re on autopilot, or are you genuinely reflecting on why you’re doing it and saying, yep. Okay. Fine. I was forced to learn French, but I actually I I do like it, and I wanna keep learning it.
Nigel Warburton: So I can see that whether I learn French or Italian is my choice, and it can be an authentic choice or something imposed on me from outside. But usually when we talk about authenticity of a life, we talk about much more long lasting changes that people make, like the decision to get married, for instance.
Sky Cleary: So Beauvoir had a lot to say about marriage in particular, and she thought it was a real problem that so many of us are brought up to believe that the arc of our lives involves falling in love, getting married, having babies, and living happily ever after. Now if you do that, that’s fine. But the problem is if you’re not choosing it in an active way, if you’re doing it just because it’s what’s expected of you. And so Beauvoir was hugely skeptical of marriage in particular so because it comes with so much baggage and and gender expectations that puts women as the second sex, which was the title of her most famous book published in nineteen forty five.
Nigel Warburton: So she didn’t get married herself. Was she saying in her choices that this is authentic for her not to get married then?
Sky Cleary: Yeah. It was authentic for her. And what I particularly admire about the choices that she did make was that there was a huge amount of pressure for her to get married and settle down, but she pushed back against that. And even before she met her lifelong partner, Jean Paul Sartre, she decided that she was gonna question all the expectations placed on her, and she chose otherwise. And she thought that those choices to choose not marriage, for example, or to make choices other than what’s expected of us is a core part of authenticity.
Nigel Warburton: Where do you think this authenticity comes from? It’s not as if her choice to be single in her particular way came from nowhere.
Sky Cleary: Yeah. And so this is what makes Beauvoir’s idea of authenticity a little bit different is that there isn’t, you know, some kind of jewel at the heart of our being, some kind of blueprint that we just need to dig deep and uncover. Rather, Beauvoir’s understanding is a much more existential view in that we don’t just have freedom, that we are freedom. And we’re the sum of our actions, certainly, so we are what we do, but we’re also our intentions and goals. And so what that also means is that we are free, and at the core of our being is free will, and we should be able to have the options to choose against what’s expected of us.
Nigel Warburton: That’s really interesting what you said in that answer that it’s not as if you look within yourself and find a blueprint. Because often when people talk about authenticity, they describe this as being true to yourself as if introspection will reveal what yourself really, really believes as if there’s a little book in there somewhere that has the ideal story of your life, and then you read from that book and then apply it to the world.
Sky Cleary: Exactly. And Beauvoir’s understanding is much different to that. I mean, certainly, we need to be self aware and reflect on our choices, but her understanding of authenticity is also much more outward looking. It’s about doing and choosing. And her point is that we don’t create ourselves.
We don’t create our essence in a vacuum, but rather we’re interconnected with other people and with the world. And so there are different dimensions of our being that are created with and through interactions with other people. So it’s not a solo inward journey.
Nigel Warburton: And presumably, it’s not anything that’s ever finished. It’s more like a process. Authenticity isn’t a goal as it were. It’s a series of choices.
Sky Cleary: Exactly. We’re always becoming. We’re always growing. We’re always overcoming ourselves and growing other than what we are today and what we were yesterday. So for Beauvoir, our lives are are an arc of certainly our past actions and our present choices, but also our intentions and goals.
And so her idea of authenticity is much more future oriented.
Nigel Warburton: Now, can see how authenticity can seem like a great goal if you’ve got time and money and are not forced into a kind of menial employment just to exist. But for lots of people in the world, there isn’t really that much choice about the job that they do if they have a job. The way that they earn money, how they spend their the majority of their time might well be earning money or looking after children. There isn’t that much scope for creating an authentic self for some people.
Sky Cleary: This is true. Beauvoir certainly recognized this, and, you know, a lot of women of color, scholars of color have also criticized Beauvoir for this point, which is that Beauvoir thought that rebellion was a really important part of authenticity, Not just rebelling against restrictions on ourselves, but clearing obstacles for other people to also become authentic. Now scholars such as Amiya Srinivasan and Serene Keder say that, well, actually survival and resilience and and being cautious are much more important than rebellion for many people because their lives depend on not risking any more that they already do. And Beauvoir’s point was that, well, yeah, that’s fair enough. But if you’re privileged, you are responsible for clearing oppression for yourself and others.
And if you respect freedom for yourself, then you must respect it for others.
Nigel Warburton: Wonder if what Beauvoir is saying is a little bit like Socrates’ approach to the question of how we should live. I mean, he’s famously said, at least according to Plato, that the unexamined life isn’t worth living for a human being. It’s okay for cattle, but human beings can reflect on their lives. A stage on from that reflection is deciding which choices are your own choices and which things are really imposed from outside. And, actually, Socrates modeled a kind of authenticity where he wasn’t prepared to go along with with what people expected of him.
It became quite an eccentric, rebellious figure even to the point of taking the hemlock when he probably didn’t need to.
Sky Cleary: Yeah. I would say through Beauvoir’s framework that he would be an authentic person. And one of the really important parts of Beauvoir’s perspective of authenticity is that we question ourselves. We question our desires, and we question these bonds and restrictions that are holding us back from living fully and stretching ourselves into an open future. Always looking for possibilities is a really important part of Boulogne’s authenticity.
Nigel Warburton: I can hear in your voice, you’re excited by these ideas, and existentialism is an exciting, liberating philosophical framework. But at its heart is this notion that we actually genuinely are free, and that is the kind of core belief of existentialism, the French existentialism of Sartre and Beauvoir, particularly. But lots of people don’t feel that they’re free, and lots of science seems to suggest we’re probably a lot less free than would be convenient for an existentialist.
Sky Cleary: You’re right. It’s an assumption of existentialism. Free will is an assumption. From an existential perspective, I mean, the problem with not believing in free will is that we risk being a passive object in the world. We risk being just pushed around by other people’s demands, and we miss out on being active agents in our own lives.
And now neuroscience is also conflicted about these ideas. You know, there is science to show that we seem to be able to override our impulses, and we seem to be able to create new pathways in our brain and learn new things. And sure, you can give yourself up to fate, but that’s kind of a a very nihilistic attitude. And Beauvoir says there’s no sadder virtue than resignation. And, you know, the existential view would be that, well, if you believe everything’s determined, then that’s a convenient excuse to escape your problems.
But Beauvoir would say, well, that’s like dying before you’re dead.
Nigel Warburton: So you think authenticity is a good goal in life, something worth striving for?
Sky Cleary: I think it’s exciting to think about your life as an authentic quest. And there’s something that Beauvoir talks about in The Second Sex is that once we’re able to live freely and make choices about our own lives, we’ll become poets of our own lives. When we’re free to act with creative daring and, you know, our life will become like a poetic quest with no prescribed rules or goals, and we turn ourselves into a poetic artwork.
Nigel Warburton: Now I know with Sartre’s approach to freedom, he thought that each of us make some kind of fundamental choice that’s a big choice. Like, he decided to become a writer. And then there are other choices that follow on from that throughout his life, but there was behind everything something that is a major choice. Is that something that Beauvoir believed as well?
Sky Cleary: I think Beauvoir wasn’t as tied to an original choice as Sartre was. For Beauvoir, it’s a lifelong quest to figure out who you wanna become. And it’s okay if you change your mind halfway through, but it’s not like you’re you’re digging back into your childhood for that gem of whatever choice you made pre reflectively or or reflectively.
Nigel Warburton: That’s an interesting point that just sort of emerged in what you said there pre reflectively. It seems to me that many of the things that we subsequently retrospectively describe as choices were not things that we’ve necessarily mulled over. The extreme case is if you’re in playing a sport and you kick the football, you don’t have a thought, I’m gonna kick it and curl it into the top left hand corner. But you do it, and afterwards, it wasn’t accidental, but it wasn’t like you have a an introspectable decision that you weigh up the pros and cons with. It’s just you act.
Sky Cleary: Right. And most of life is just doing and acting. You know, we all need to get up and go to work or in the in a game where we’re kicking a ball around and there isn’t time to make those choices. But, for example, someone kicking a football might have had lots of practice that that led up to that, and they may have thought about their kicking style and where it was going, like, in their training. So just because they’re not thinking about it in that particular moment, they’ve still prepared themselves for that time crunch when it happens.
Nigel Warburton: Now you’ve immersed yourself in the world of existentialism. How has it changed your life?
Sky Cleary: It has changed my life a lot. Existentialism came into my life, actually, from an unusual place. I was studying for an MBA. I had learned philosophy in my undergraduate degree, but it was a very analytical type philosophy course, so it didn’t grab me then. Yeah.
In my MBA, I started hearing about Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Heidegger, and I was blown away. I was like, wow. What is this? And it seemed to me that they were asking similar questions as I was about life. In particular, how much freedom should you give up to be with another person?
I was in a relationship and, you know, navigating choices to be with another person and navigating my career. And especially Simone de Beauvoir really resonated with me at that time because it’s exactly what she talked about in the second sex, that women in particular are set off on this path, especially geared towards having children and a family and having their career take a backseat to their partners. And I found myself on a similar kind of trajectory. And Beauvoir’s philosophy helped me reflect on this situation and understand that it wasn’t an authentic choice. Like, I knew there was something not right about it, but I didn’t have the language or the framework to think through those decisions I was making.
And so, yeah, Bourbeau’s philosophy really, really resonated with me at that time that I had all these questions.
Nigel Warburton: Skye Cleary, thank you very much.
Sky Cleary: Thank you, Nigel.
David Edmonds: For more Philosophy Bites, go to [[https://www.philosophybites.com/][www.philosophybites.com]] You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.