I love The Office because it juxtaposes absurd, delusional people against unabashed authenticity. This comparison isn’t exactly subtle, but it is never explicitly said. Jim and Pam become protagonists not because they receive the most screen time, or the story is told from their perspective, or they overcome all their challenges and become exceptional – rather, it’s precisely the opposite. They aren’t heroes. They are merely authentic, and we can only relate to them because they are the only real people within this office landscape of hollow appearances.
What I find fascinating is the distinction between Michael’s inauthenticity and Dwight’s – are they truly different? Or just two renditions of the same kind of inauthenticity?
Michael’s relentless scrambling to avoid blame, display virtue, and underscore his own importance always fall flat. Usually, episodes end with a convoluted explanation from Michael about how he didn’t really fail, how he wasn’t really a bad person, or how he was the center of it all. The actual events of the episode, though, create a cringeworthy irony. Michael is never outright condemned as a hypocrite, but he is painted as one by the contrast between his own words and reality.
Dwight indefatigably grapples with the pain of an uncertain existence, where unfortunate realities can’t simply be labeled ‘false.’ He struggles to reconcile lived experience and his emotions with the theoretical constructs he has used to rigorously define the world. For example, he completely misses out on the party while examining the construction of the house. He ignores lived experience if it does not fit his hypothetical framework.
Kierkegaard argued that we should strike a balance between the finite and the infinite (similar to what other existentialists refer to as facticity vs transcendance, but not exactly the same). These two qualities exist in a dielectric relation: they are opposed to each other, but cannot exist without the other. For instance, the two sides of a scale are opposed to each other, but the scale cannot exist without both sides.
“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self…. In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening
- The Finite – The finite represents our actuality or necessity, the concrete here and now. It is my reality as a definite thing in the world: the room I live in, the hands I hold with, the face I must present to the world, the physical structures I am embodied within.
Sartre and De Beauvoir referred to a similar idea as facticity. This word has many meanings for different thinkers, but these two thought of facticity as all the concrete details that frame our lives, by which human freedom is limited; the cement of our existence. Some examples of my facticity includes the fact that I was born, the time of my birth, the language I was taught, my race and the genetic composition of my DNA, the environment and year I was born into, and the inevitable prospect of my death. Even my own previous choices are factical. These past choices which I cannot change are the background against which I exist in the present moment, and they limit my freedom.
Facticity can also change. I might have a factical situation where I am unable to read. However, if I am given the resources and I make the choices necessary to become literate, this facticity could be transformed. - The Infinite – The infinite represents possibility, the capacity to envisage new thoughts and ideas, bring into existence new creations, change oneself and choose from innumerable potentialities.
This is also known as transcendence for other existentialists. Primarily through the faculty of imagination, we as humans can go beyond what simply is toward what can be. The possible can transcend the factual. See this excellent passage in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the dichotomy between transcendence & facticity in existentialism.
Michael is too immersed in his own experience, Dwight is not immersed enough; Michael is too immanent and Dwight too transcendent. Dwight seems to have a kind of dissociated distance from others, from his world, and from the people around him. Michael is the opposite in many ways, as he is wholly immersed in a solipsistic fictional world he has constructed in which he is the primary character. Dwight is too finite, Michael too finite? I don’t know if that’s true, actually. Maybe both of them are in the same situation of being too finite. I’ll have to think more about that. Either way, both are inauthentic, in a mode of bad faith: they embracing one side of existence while rejecting another.
Inauthentic people – and by that, I mean people in general, because none of us are wholly authentic – use elaborate schemes to portray themselves in certain ways and ignore others. In The Office, these schemes are almost as obvious, hilarious, and pathetic as they are in the real world — the writers just point out how funny and cringey they are, usually through the lens of Jim or Pam. The writers of The Office express a perhaps unconscious understanding of the imperative for authenticity — just as Sartre urges us to reject our bad faith and recognize our freedom to escape any factical situation (which Dwight has difficulty understanding), and as Kierkegaard exhorts us to strike a balance between infinity and finitude (which Michael has difficult understanding). This is the existential wisdom of the show.
“The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.”
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
And with that unnecessary overanalysis, back to The Office.