Authenticity, Meaning and Values 3
Authenticity as a Process of Creating Meaning and Value
Reflecting on the Authentic
I make choices and engage in projects passionately.
On reflection, I create meaning in my life, and I articulate this meaning in the form of values.
Acting authentically creates meaning, is a value creation process.
I reflect on my creations, my projects, the meaning I embrace, and I reflect on other people’s creations, their meaning and values.
And sometimes I create with others. I create in a social context, I can create authentically in a social context; indeed, it is impossible for me to create in a social and historical vacuum.
Fulfillment as Personal and Social
Engaging authentically is a process of the creation of the remarkable. It is immanent, in the field, informed by personal and collective human experience, a coherence of values to a greater or lesser extent.
We create in society by making connections.
And value creation as social is free: we are free to connect and disconnect, and find our own articulation and resonance in a social setting.
We freely engage with authenticity and the sum total of the meaning and values created is our own thick sense of fulfillment.
An overall process of engaging authentically over a lifetime is the pursuit of a fulfilling life, the creation of a fulfilling life.
Fulfillment as a Process of Becoming
To create meaning is expressive, inherently social. It resonates within but finds full expression in society.
An articulation of fulfillment that resonates with each of us socially is not inconsistent with a process of becoming; it constitutes it in the immanent field.
We are in the field, and we create in the context of what we view as having meaning and value. We care about what others think and do.
But we need not resort to objectivity and truth as validation; we need not become disengaged or alienated by reactive forces stemming from the look of the other.
We can release, start over, re-engage, in a pure process of becoming in the world. Authenticity, meaning and value creation, is an iterative process.
Deleuzian Authenticity
Authenticity in the thick sense described above can take on a Deleuzian character.
In a Deleuzian vision, acting authentically is staying at the level of the problem and not grasping for solutions.
Authenticity is acting from a place within us that is in touch with the virtual, with the creativity of pure difference. Meaning and value are the actualizations of this process: they are effects, and they evolve.
We engage and evolve, then we disengage and re-engage, and evolve further. We are continually reinventing, connecting, disconnecting, deterritorializing.
Authenticity and the Will to Power
Our creations come together through a process of lines of flight forming singularities and multiplicities.
But the creations or formations or actualizations that result are not the static conclusion; for we, who are at the center of the genetic process of creativity itself, move on, dive down again to come into contact with virtual within us.
As per Nietzsche, We encounter the active forces and drives within and without that define our mode of existence.
We connect and re-connect with the will to power, and go to the limit, not via a thin sense of authenticity, but a thick authenticity steeped in desire as overflowing, personal resonance and enchantment.
The Self that Eternally Returns
We, our selves, are an immanent process of creativity and reiterative self-interpretation that eternally returns difference. Life is engagement in immanence, finding a perspective, embracing, changing perspectives, experimenting, creating the new in the open whole.
We are a story of themes that arise and evolve, but which has no specific plot.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
Please join my email list here or email me at tomas@tomasbyrne.com.
Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2022 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
