TEHRAN - Professor Martin Jay says “if there is any criterion of ‘authentic’ thinking, it would probably be the ability to think for oneself, although without the hubris to believe you can dispense with the wisdom of past thinkers.”

“I am very suspicious of the evocation of authenticity by those who want to assert their priority over others,” Jay, a professor of history in the University of California, told the Mehr News Agency.
Following is the text of the interview:
Q: There are different methods for writing papers. Phenomenological, hermeneutical, constructivist, deconstructivist, or thematizatic are some of these methods. What is your method and why do you use it? What are its basic characteristics?
A: The word ""method"" originally came from a Greek word meaning pursuing or traveling after something. Insofar as there may be many paths that ultimately lead us to the same goal, it is wise to be flexible in applying the means to reach it. Because each path approaches it from a different angle and direction, different facets of the objective may be revealed by alternate methods. No one method is sufficient to provide total knowledge. Moreover, we may even wonder if truth can ever really be achieved by a formulaic method at all. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has suggested in his classic work Truth and Method, they may be even at odds. We need a recipe to bake a cake, but philosophical questions may not be so efficiently answered by applying a rigid method.
In my own work as an intellectual historian, I sometimes try to work closely with texts and examine all of the steps in an argument, including its rhetorical and metaphorical dimensions. If there are contradictions or unexamined premises in the way the argument is made, I try to expose them and ask what implications might follow for the plausibility of the argument as a whole. At other times, I paraphrase what I take to be the gist of the argument, summarizing it in my own terms, and then attempt to situate it in larger contexts: the author's oeuvre or biography, the general discourse in which it is embedded, the social interests it may serve, etc. In my work, I have taken insights from hermeneutics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, conceptual history, Frankfurt School ideology critique and other methods without being a slave to any of them. I always tell my students to be theoretically and methodologically self-conscious, but not to make a fetish out of finding the one right method. The ultimate test of a good pair of glasses is what they allow you to see, and unless you stop polishing them and look out at the world you can never know which ones improve your vision and which do not.
Q: There are some thinkers in every discipline who have some specific authority. For example Plato and Aristotle have this position in philosophy, and Weber and Durkheim in sociology. In your opinion, what characteristics have created such a position for those thinkers? What is the justified relation with them?
A: It never easy to explain why at certain moments in human history a figure will arise who acts as the originator of a new discourse or as the founder of a new tradition of thought. Sometimes it takes generations before the true innovator is recognized as such, and there are many examples of figures hailed by contemporaries as geniuses but then forgotten by posterity. In our recent past, at least in the West, there have been a number of theorists who are likely to be taken seriously by future scholars, even if they are not universally accepted: Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, to name a few. And of course a scientific genius like Einstein will be recognized by generations to come for his remarkable contributions to our understanding of nature and the laws of physics. At this moment, there is doubtless someone in emerging countries outside the West who will startle us all by his or her radical innovations.
Q: What is your definition of authentic thinking? Why do we need to have authentic thinking in our time?
A: I hesitate to answer because each word in your question would require a book to address. After Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking? and Arendt’s On Thinking, we have become supremely aware of the complexity of the term. Related but not equivalent to reasoning, intuiting, knowing, judging, willing, or imagining, thinking implies a subtle operation of the mind which resists being reduced to methods or rules. Perhaps one way to learn how to do it is to read widely in the literature of philosophy and observe how the masters of the tradition themselves thought, paying attention not to their conclusions but to the various ways in which they reached them. And then after you have freed yourself of the illusion that there is one correct way to think, you can begin to think for yourself.
If there is any criterion of “authentic” thinking, it would probably be the ability to think for oneself, although without the hubris to believe you can dispense with the wisdom of past thinkers. That it, is will require a delicate balance between courage and humility, the willingness to be critical of received opinion and the acknowledgment of your own limits. Although at times it is a solitary activity, it also often benefits from thinking out loud, communicating your thoughts to others and listening to theirs in turn, opening yourself up to criticism and being willing to learn from it.
There is, of course, an extensive literature on the concept of “authenticity,” including Adorno’s celebrated critique of The Jargon of Authenticity, directed against Heidegger and his followers. Having written an essay on his very powerful arguments against the fetish of originality and self-sufficiency—it will be reprinted in my forthcoming collection Essays from the Edge—I am very suspicious of the evocation of authenticity by those who want to assert their priority over others. Whether it be in the rigid interpretation of a constitution, as in the case of what in America we call “strict constructionism,” or the orthodox application of religious dogma by those who claim to know what was intended by the authors of sacred texts, the claim to authenticity can be used to silence dissenters who have fresh and provocative ideas. It can, in other words, be a way to thwart thinking rather than enable it. In the Jewish tradition, there is a great deal of respect for the practice of on-going, even unending, commentary on texts rather than dogmatic assertion of a single “authentic” meaning. The oldest commentary is not necessarily the best, nor is even the intention of the author the most authoritative standard of value (in large measure because we cannot know it except through subsequent interpretation). Sometimes, of course, endless commentary can descend into petty squabbling over trivial differences of meaning, but at least it avoids the danger of the authoritarian imposition of a single truth, which is the death of thought.
Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned intellectual historian and his research interests have been groundbreaking in connecting history with other academic and intellectual activities, such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, other figures and methods in continental social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography among many others.