How to Be Authentic with Skye Cleary
How to Be Authentic with Skye Cleary
Wisdom NOTES | Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment
Welcome to Wisdom NOTES, a short reflection/summary capturing insights from my conversations on In Search of Wisdom. This edition comes from my interview with Skye Cleary, the author of the new book How to Be Authentic.
How to Be Authentic
Who is Simone de Beauvoir, and why is she an important figure today? What is the idea of becoming, and how does it connect to authenticity? Is it possible to truly know yourself? These are just a few questions I asked Skye Cleary, the author of How to Be Authentic.
Who is Simone de Beauvoir?
For any listeners unfamiliar with Simone de Beauvoir, who is she, and why is she an important figure today?
Cleary explained,
She was a French existential philosopher most famous for her book called The Second Sex, which was published in 1949. And that book was all about what it means to be a woman and why women have been subordinate to men for so long in so many cultures. And so it was very much an analysis of women's situation. But it also included some forward-looking chapters, such as thinking about what does it mean to be an independent woman.
What is Existentialism?
I've learned that the question “What is Existentialism?” is not the greatest or too big of a question to briefly answer. So I asked Skye to explain the idea that “existence precedes essence” and how it relates to Existentialism.
Cleary answered,
Defining existentialism is a quagmire because there are many different existential philosophers, and they all had different ideas. It's more like a group of overlapping themes like choice, freedom, responsibility, death, authenticity, and anxiety. But, if I had to sum up existentialism in three words, it would be what you said, existence precedes essence. And this is certainly what Beauvoir focused on. The idea is that we don't choose to be born. We're thrown into the world. We don't choose how we arrive, we don't choose where we arrive. But once we're here, once we become conscious, we have to create our lives, we have to choose our lives. And this is one of the reasons that John Paul Sartre was famous for saying were condemned to be free because were responsible for our choices.
Always Becoming
If I could ask Skye one question, it would be about the idea of becoming. She writes in the book, “For Beauvoir, there's no fixed essence to our being since we are always becoming something other than we are today.”
How do we embrace the idea of becoming in our daily lives?
Cleary suggested,
It's a difficult question. I love how you picked up on the element of becoming as opposed to being. Beauvoir talks about there's part of her idea here is romantic, I guess, with a capital R in the sense that we're constantly annihilating our past selves and creating ourselves a new. But it's not like we’re completely getting rid of our past selves. What we need to understand about our lives is that we are a synthesis of our past, present, and future. And our past doesn't shape who we're becoming, it shapes how we project ourselves into the future, but it doesn't define us in an absolute way.
John Paul Sartre talked about being a nothingness because we're actually both; we are the facts of our existence. But we're also nothingness in the sense that we're never complete; there's always that gap or that lack of what we're becoming and our future, explained Cleary.
Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful. If you’re interested in learning more, listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts and pick How to Be Authentic wherever books are sold.
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Until next time, be wise and be well,
JW