The Authentic Self

The Authentic Self

1. Summerhill

   • Private school founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill
   • Aims to follow the interests of students and for children to have the freedom to be themselves.
   • Students can express their feelings without adult's judgement
   • Students read books, create experiments/art, negotiate with teachers

2. Nietzsche

   • Claims that the traditional moral is portraying false pictures of human nature and human moral purpose to keep masses in order
   • We take up societal and institutional values like sheep
   • His work relies heavily on irony and uses devices such as cryptic aphorisms
   • Many of the things we think we know are wrong.
   • He argues that in the absence of God/conventional morality, the individual will have to embrace life creating values to live by.
   • Calls himself an innmoralist; he believes the superior person is the creator and arbiter of their own values
   • Made philosofical ethics self consious

3. Rousseau

   • Concern: how to preserve the individual's liberty and authenticity in a world that's shaped by society
     • Spent his life moving
       • Believed women deserved little education beyond homemaking
         • Blames emergence of society for creating wants that are not needs
   • Violence and opression: Human's story
     • Humans have an essence that distingueshes form animals
     • Education should concentrate on actualizing the child's inner potential rather than conforming on their social expectations.

4. Sartre

   • If we recognize our own freedom, we must also recognize our responsability
     • Determining the rightness or wrongness of acts is why we choose to do as we do; our motive
       • Leading figure of the existentialist movement; means that we create our own values.
   • He wants us to face the blunt reality of the world without relaying on external values
     • being moral is knowing oneself and being true to that self
       • Constantly reflect on our acts and be authentical
         • Denies that decisions are ever arbitrary
           • responsible for every choice.
             • "condemned to be free"