Authentic Orange

Submitted by Christopher Pavlovich

To be authentic is to act in good faith. The best way to describe this is to explain what it is not. Acting in bad faith is worst when the person does not even realize they are doing so. They are lying in their behavior by denying part of who they are, and at the same time deceiving themselves so they do not even realize it (Lecture, 6/2/2015).
We talked about two big things that make up humans. We have our facticity and our transcendence. Facticity is the part of us that we were born with: physical properties, some parts of our living situation, family, etc. Transcendence consists more of decisions, this is what we chose to be, the part of our existence we make for ourselves. Not being authentic, or acting in bad faith, would be denying either one of these parts of who we are (Lecture, 5/26/15). This is something that really should strike home to students at OSU. Looking at what college I wanted to go to, it came down to where I felt most comfortable. OSU seemed to be the most diverse, laid back, and even bizarre school I toured. Everyone was different and it made me feel at home. To authentically “Be Orange” means people stay true to themselves as well as the people around them, and a huge part of that is overcoming peer pressure.
One thing I found helpful in class was looking at example cases. One of which took a waiter at a restaurant and said he could be living in bad faith if he is hiding his personality to be what he considers a good waiter. In this example, the waiter is denying his transcendence, he is only looking at the fact that he is a waiter. An existential theme we learned about is freedom. This is what makes transcendence possible, it lets us choose who we want to be (Lecture, 5/21/15). Gift or curse, it is real and something we should use to our advantage. In school we can do the same thing as the waiter being students. Sometimes when the work loads get thick, we become absorbed in homework and spend days on end with little to no communication outside our school projects. Yes we are just doing what we need to, but are we denying a part of who we are by shutting ourselves out?
Similarly, students can have the opposite problem. Especially people just coming into college, it can be easy to feel the freedom in full force being away from our parents and feel like the rules no longer apply. In fact, a lot of them no longer do, but the consequences are more real than a grounding or losing your car keys for a week. When students take to partying too much, taking too many nights off school work, skipping too many classes, they are the opposite of the waiter. In this case, students deny their facticity. They ignore that they are in a situation that requires work and put off some things that simply can not be put off. “By means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth.” (Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, pg. 1). Through forgetting why we are here in college, as students we are coming to a sense of truth in bad faith as we are denying our situation.
In either of these cases, we are confronted with an obstacle. Whether our friends have perfect GPAs or do not do any of their homework, they are effecting us. Discussing the concept of “the crowd” in class we talked about how much responsibility is lost in our actions when it becomes something done as a group (Lecture, 5/5/15). This concept mixed with a college environment makes living in bad faith very easy. If it was one or two people partying, it would be uncommon. But because it becomes a norm in a group to blow off assignments, people feel much better about it because they are not alone in doing so. Not only do their peers direct their actions, but they lose the guilt that should be involved in doing the wrong thing. Authentically Being Orange is to stay clear of denying either our facticity in our situation or the transcendence through getting lost in the situation and denying who we are.