There is a genre more popular in America than in Europe: It is the essay as fireside chat, agreeable, intelligent, and wryly confessional. The author and reader nod along companionably. Not much information is imparted, but familiar things are enjoyed together. The philosophy is perhaps a little homespun, but that is all right as well. There are no extremes, nothing to guffaw at, and no sermonizing, but small pleasures of mutual recognition. There is — dare one say it — just a touch of sentimentality, occasionally an embryonic sigh as well as a smile. Richard Todd’s genial little book “The Thing Itself” (Riverhead, 253 pages, $24.95) is a collection of just such essays, and a classy one at that, even standing alongside such distinguished examples of the genre as Anne Fadiman’s enchanting book “Ex Libris.” It should find a similar place in literate bathrooms across America.

The essays dissect the quest for authenticity in our search for objects (antiques, heirlooms), places (wilderness, countryside), and emotions (tears, celebrity lives), and finally in the mirror, as we seek to uncover that elusive beast, our true self. Richard Todd is pleasantly skeptical about the investments we nearly all make in this quest, and in this I join him. The quest for the true self is, in fact, even more self-deceived than he supposes. In moments of disenchantment, there is consolation to be had imagining a “real me,” a butterfly escaped from the chrysalis of the social and the conventional. The everyday self is repetitive, indecisive, confined by the office and the mall, bourgeois and cautious and prudent. The “real me” is a very different kettle of fish: free, wild, romantic, courageous, creative. As Nietzsche puts it, the one is a camel, patiently bearing the social luggage placed upon it, but the other is a lion. But now the fantasy begins to dissolve. Why on earth should the real me be a lion, or even a butterfly? Presumably it is more likely to be a human being who has grown whichever way I have, but lions and butterflies have not.

Walter Mitty thought that the real Walter Mitty was a Hollywood hero, fearlessly commanding great machines and great enterprises. He was wrong: The real Walter Mitty was Walter Mitty, hopelessly imagining being what he foolishly fancied a hero to be, as an escape from the humdrum life he lived. His Hollywood blueprints of authenticity were themselves fakes. This may be obvious in Walter Mitty’s case, but he is all of us, and if we escape his fantasies it will only be to fall victim to more insidious ones. Our imaginings may dwell on authentic country living, or authentic adventure, but be similarly infected by the fake and constructed scripts of the heritage industry or the travel brochure. “Authentic country living” tends to involve an imported Swedish stove and Australian wine, while authentic wilderness adventure requires a guide and an insurance policy

Many traditions in philosophy and psychology, from Christianity to Freud, have insisted that the true self lies only at the end of a long quest, after hard processes of analysis, discovery, and purification. But do such processes result in the discovery of some authentic self that was there all along, or only the invention of a new way to act, a new script to follow, a new persona to put on? The metaphor of being born again may be more accurate than it sounds, but there is never a guarantee that who is newly born is less self-deceived, less of a bore or an idiot, or in any admirable sense more authentic, than whoever came before. It is not enviable to have friends and spouses who go in for self-improvement, or put a lot of store by realizing their true natures. It often just signals a narcissistic midlife crisis, reckless expenditure on sports cars and handbags, and a credit hangover to come.

In one fine essay here, Mr. Todd considers Polonius’s famous advice to his departing son Laertes, also discussed by the great literary critic Lionel Trilling: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” Fine words, but why should we believe them? What if Laertes’s own self is insincere and insecure, irresolute and unknowing? If this is how he is, and Laertes is true to his own self, he might give promises he cannot keep, begin undertakings he cannot follow through, use language that means nothing or implies what is not true, and say things about which he is self-deceived, and just because he would most like them to be true. He would be being true to Laertes.

Perhaps Polonius was abetted by the rise of inner-light Protestantism, which treated conscience as an unmistakable voice that must be heard. To be deaf to it implies being wilfully deaf to God.

A related idea of virtue as integrity, harmony, or wholeness is at least as old as Plato. In Plato, however, the harmonious self is something to be worked for, an achievement only attainable by the wise and the just. These will be the select few whose natures have the gold within them from the beginning, but they will also need to have undergone the most extraordinary upbringing and rigid education. Nobody could become wise and just simply by listening to their deepest inner voice.

Virtue is not the birthright of every man, or even every man uncorrupted by insidious external influences. It took what Nietzsche saw as the sentimental, democratic, feminine touch of Christianity to introduce that conceit. We suppose there must be an inner candle somewhere, however much the subject has tried to hide from its light. If we dare to strip ourselves bare, we will become pure, whole, authentic, so the mantra goes. Surely it cannot be the office and the mall, irresolution and fragmentation all the way down, we think. But perhaps we are wrong.

Mr. Blackburn is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including “Think,” “Being Good,” and “Plato’s Republic.” His book “How to Read Hume” will be published by Granta later this year.