Selfhood and Authenticity [Paperback]

Corey Anton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 2001

Explores the notion of selfhood in the wake of the post-structuralist debates.

Winner of the Media Ecology Association's 2004 Erving Goffman Award.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Corey Anton is quickly becoming a major voice in the developing interdisciplinary field of communication and philosophy. Selfhood and Authenticity explores the landscape marked out in his investigations with a combined theoretical incisiveness and praxis-oriented understanding. It makes a very important contribution to the existing literature in the field. --Calvin O. Schrag, author of The Self after Postmodernity

Corey Anton's creative utilization of phenomenologies of embodiment as a basis for a communicative self is accentuated by a clear command of phenomenological literature. The discussion of sociality is excellent, and the explication of temporality is grand in scope. The work is, in other words, a short systematic treatise. --Lewis R. Gordon, Brown University

From the Back Cover

Drawing upon numerous influential thinkers of the twentieth century, including Heidegger, Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Goffman, Schrag, and Taylor, Selfhood and Authenticity articulates the phenomenological constitution by which social construction is a real possibility. Anton brings phenomenology and existential philosophy to wider audiences and makes complex insights refreshingly lucid by systematically radicalizing and integrating the notions of embodiment, sociality, symbolicity, and temporality.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 181 pages
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr (February 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791449009
• ISBN-13: 978-0791449004
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #740,570 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Madison Wisconsin 1968, Corey Anton earned his PhD at Purdue University in 1998 and took a teaching position at Grand Valley State University, where he now is Professor of Communication Studies.

Past-Editor of the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, and Past-Chair of the Semiotics and Communication Division of the National Communication Association, Anton is a Fellow of the International Communicology Institute, and he currently serves as Vice-President of the Institute of General Semantics.

His book Selfhood and Authenticity received the Media Ecology Association's 2004 Erving Goffman Award, and his book Sources of Significance: Worldly Rejuvenation and Neo-Stoic Heroism won "Best Book Award," presented in 2011, by the Philosophy of Communication Division of National Communication Association.

In addition to his hobbies of juggling, cooking, and dog walking, he maintains a Youtube channel by the name of "Ideas and Things Said."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Selfhood and Authenticity, December 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Selfhood and Authenticity (Winner of the Erving Goffman Award 2004) (Hardcover)

Corey Anton's work is rich account of the unique and once occurent ways self and world emerge into meaningful existence. Springing forth from Charles Taylor's, The Ethics of Authenticity, Anton provides a compelling account of selfhood that furthers the modern quest for authenticity, that is, the sense that "many people today feel that it is their right to live personally meaningful lives." Keeping at bay two responses people might take in regard to this quest, as a license for moral laxity or as a moral calling for poetic license, Anton makes recourse to the dialogical nature of self and the requirements of horizons of significance.
With a critical eye towards overly atomistic accounts of self in social scientific research, Dr. Anton, taking up the voice of existential phenomenology, describes the ways the self is primordially out side of its fleshy boundaries thrown into a meaningful world with others. As a matter of emphasis on this insight, Anton provides lucid descriptions of essential features of self: embodiment, sociality, symbolicity, and temporality.

The following are some highlights of the work.

The opening section on embodiment represents an almost mythical account of the body. Here Anton writes of the ground meaning of embodiment as being "thrown-out-from-yet-indigenous-to-earth." And, following Sartre's account of Being-in-itself, he writes "Earth as Earth is a non-existing event...as so full of itself, it exists not." If Earth is to fall into existence it will require "events of existential decompression." As Anton continues, "an embodied self is earth's way of taking flight from its fullness and first coming to itself...humans are not simply things on the earth; we are something it is doing." This section dives further into the phenomenological notion of intentionality, ala Merleau-Ponty, and concludes with the observation: nothing separates my body from the world.

The subject of negativity, of nothing, runs through out the work as a reminder of the self's dialogical/inseparable relation to world and others. For instance, in the chapter on sociality, Anton not only acknowledges that "hortatory don'ts" and "tribal thou shall nots" (a nod to Kenneth Burke) provide social regulations of appropriateness and acceptability, but he also delineates the primordial negativity implicit in face-to-face encounters. Anton writes, "My face as it is for me, is an intentional absence, yet it is the absence by which others' faces come to seeable existence. I do not have a face; other people have mine and I have theirs. Ridged boundaries between others and self need to be loosened because part of me is manifest only through others. Said simply: nothing separates me from others."

Nothing separating world, self, and others means that all talk is talk about others and the world. Hence, in the chapter on symbolicity Anton's account of self turns towards sonorousness (i.e. speech and language). Anton writes, "Human beings are naturally sonorous entities, caring for more than the here and now of their own bodies by releasing and appropriating the sayableness of existence." Being critical of those who would conceive speech and language as inventions, tools, or an unnatural add on to the human being, Anton maintains that such conceptions that hold the belief "that language is alien or not natural (perhaps humanly created) must be carefully scrutinized."

Of the various features of the self temporality is perhaps the most under appreciated in contemporary social theory. "It is so easy to forget (or never even notice) that we are temporality," writes Anton. "The human is more than extant, is not simply a body resting `in' time...World [and] self are happening through earth's internal negations and corresponding existential decompressions." In revealing the meaning of freedom in human beings relation to time, he sums up: "humans are time as temporality, which means that the past remains a future possibility; this is the past we are still moving toward. What we normally call the future is actually the past; it is the past that will-have-been."

The whole of Selfhood and Authenticity provides a compelling account of self that is indebted to others and world. The pursuit of authenticity with in the context of Anton's work, is struggle to meet fitting responses to and from the project of existence. "What could be less original, less authentic, than a job, any and every task, done with less than vital concern?" The inauthentic person is lacking a sense of duty, and harbors an indifference to the moments of existence. Authenticity, in Anton's last account, is a passionate responsibility, "a practice of openness by which we are called to fitting responses...a blissfully seduced obedience...a dutiful autonomy, one liberated by indebtedness."

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Self Project, June 10, 2009

By 

Advocatus Diaboli (Indiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selfhood and Authenticity (Paperback)

In Selfhood and Authenticity, Corey Anton argues that the self is radically more than a thing, a mere object that occupies Euclidian space and linear time. For Anton, the self is constituted through four distinct yet irreducibly related modalities: embodiment, sociality, sonorousness, and temporality.

Succumbing neither to overly rigid and totalizing conceptions of the modern self, nor to ever evasive and nihilistic postmodern perspectives, Anton carves out a space for the self that responsibly situates individuals within the driver's seat of being. A must read for anyone interested in an ethics of selfhood.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you are serious about the study of communication..., May 1, 2009

By 

a reader from the Midwest (Wisconsin, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selfhood and Authenticity (Paperback)

Garden variety studies of communication take the concept of "self" and the relationship between "self" and "other" for granted, and proceed as if these concepts require no further deliberation. Yet surely the well-being of (serious) communication study requires the continual problematizing of these commonsense concepts. Anton's book does just that. Thankfully, he turns his attention to the communicative constitution of selfhood and, in so doing, he provides a rigorous and much-needed foundation for social constructionist perspectives on the subject, and indirectly addresses Ian Hacking's perceptive criticism of social constructionism in the process. Most revelatory and intriguing is his chapter on the relationship between temporality and selfhood (chapter 5). The sociologists, Zygmunt Bauman and Harry Redner have lamented the constriction of time in our everyday lives, contending that time has been all but "flattened" out of existence. Anton brings Martin Heidegger's work to life and, in so doing, proposes a corrective to this "flattening" by reminding us that "the past" and "the future" are concepts, and that "grave consequences" result from the way we talk about time. His corrective is highly provocative yet, at the same time, elegantly practical. For those who take communication study seriously, this superb book is a must read. To reiterate: I recommend this award-winning book only for those who take communication study seriously.