## 1. Origins and Meaning of the Concept of Authenticity


### 1.1 Sincerity and Authenticity



A number of significant cultural changes in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries led to the emergence of a new ideal in the
Western world (Trilling 1972). During this period, human beings came
to be thought of more as individuals than as placeholders in systems
of social relations. This emphasis on the importance of the individual
is seen in the prevalence of autobiographies and self-portraits, where
the individual becomes the centre of attention not because of
extraordinary feats or access to special knowledge, but because he or
she is an individual.



In the same period, society comes to be seen not as an organic whole
of interacting components, but as an aggregate of individual human
beings, a social system with a life of its own, which presents itself
to the individual as not itself quite human but rather as artificial,
the result of a "social contract". Being human is
understood as being best achieved through being unique and
distinctive, even when these collide with certain social norms. At the
same time, there is an increasing awareness of what Charles Taylor
(1989) calls "inwardness" or "internal space".
The result is a distinction between one's private and unique
individuality, and one's public self (Taylor 1991; Trilling
1972).



With these social changes there is a sharp shift in the conceptions of
approbation and disapproval that are commonly used in judging others
and oneself. For instance, concepts like sincerity and honor become
obsolescent (Berger 1970). In earlier times, a sincere person was seen
as someone who honestly attempts to neither violate the expectations
that follow from the position he holds in society, nor to strive to
appear otherwise than he ought to. However, by the time of Hegel, the
ideal of sincerity had lost its normative appeal. Hegel polemically
refers to sincerity as "the heroism of dumb service"
(Hegel 2002 [1807]: 515) and launches an attack on the bourgeois
"honest man," who passively internalizes a particular
conventional social ethos. In the condition of sincerity, the
individual is uncritically obedient to the power of society--a
conformity that for Hegel leads to subjugation and a deterioration of
the individual (Hegel 2002 [1807]; Golomb 1995: 9; Trilling 1972). For
Hegel, in the progress of "spirit", the individual
consciousness will eventually move from this condition of sincerity to
a condition of baseness, in which the individual becomes antagonistic
to external societal powers and achieves a measure of autonomy. Hegel
shows this clearly in a comment on Diderot's *Rameau's
Nephew*, a story in which the narrator (supposedly Diderot
himself) is portrayed as the reasonable, sincere man who respects the
prevailing order and who has achieved bourgeois respectability. In
contrast, the nephew is full of contempt for the society in which he
figures as a worthless person. However, he is in opposition to
himself, because he still aspires to a better standing in a society,
which he believes has nothing but emptiness to offer (Despland 1975:
360; Golomb 1995: 13-15). For Hegel, the narrator is an example
of the sincere, honest soul, while the nephew figures as the
"disintegrated," alienated consciousness. The nephew is
clearly alienated, but for Hegel this alienation is a step in the
progression towards autonomous existence (Williams 2002: 190).



In the midst of this conceptual change, the term
'authenticity' becomes applicable in demarcating a
somewhat new set of virtues. The older concept of sincerity, referring
to being truthful in order to be honest in one's dealings with
others, comes to be replaced by a relatively new concept of
authenticity, understood as being true to oneself for one's own
benefit. Earlier, the moral advice to be authentic recommended that
one should be true to oneself *in order thereby* to be true to
others. Thus, being true to oneself is seen as a *means* to the
end of successful social relations. In contrast, in our contemporary
thinking, authenticity as a virtue term is seen as referring to a way
of acting that is choiceworthy in itself (Ferrara 1993; Varga 2011a;
Varga 2011b).


### 1.2 Autonomy and Authenticity



The growing appeal of the idea of authenticity has led to the
emergence of a highly influential modern "ethic of
authenticity" (Ferrara 1993; Ferrara 2017). This ethic
acknowledges the value of the dominant "ethic of autonomy"
that shapes modern moral thought (Schneewind 1998; Dworkin 1988). The
idea of autonomy emphasizes the individual's self-governing
abilities, the independence of one's deliberation from
manipulation and the capacity to decide for oneself. It is connected
to the view that moral principles and the legitimacy of political
authority should be grounded in the self-governing individual who is
free from diverse cultural and social pressures. According to the
ethic of autonomy, each individual should follow those norms he or she
can will on the basis of rational reflective endorsement. To some
extent, authenticity and autonomy agree in supposing that one should
strive to lead one's life according to one's own reasons
and motives, relying on one's capacity to follow
*self-imposed* guidelines. In both cases, it is crucial that
one has the ability to put one's own behavior under reflexive
scrutiny and make it dependent on self-determined goals (Honneth
1994).



One crucial difference is that the ethic of authenticity introduces
the idea that there are motives, desires and commitments that
sometimes should outweigh the restrictions of rational reflection.
This is because those motives are so fundamental to the cohesion of
one's own identity that overriding them would mean
disintegrating the very self which is necessary to be a moral agent.
The point is that there are types of moral philosophical reasoning
that can be repressive if they arise from "an autonomous moral
conscience not complemented by sensitivity to the equilibrium of
identity and by authenticity" (Ferrara 1993: 102). Besides
leading an autonomous life, guided by one's own, non-constrained
reasons and motives, authenticity requires that these motives and
reasons should be expressive of one's self-identity.
Authenticity guides the moral agent to follow only those "moral
sources *outside* the subject [that speak in a language] which
resonate[s] *within* him or her", in other words, moral
sources that accord with "an order which is inseparably indexed
to a personal vision" (Taylor 1989: 510). Hence, authenticity
entails an aspect that lies beyond the scope of autonomy, namely, a
"language of personal resonance" (Taylor 1991: 90). This
points to the gap between (Kantian) autonomy and authenticity: one can
lead an autonomous life, even if this way of living fails to express a
person's self-understanding.



In recent years, more attention has been devoted to highlighting how
autonomy and authenticity can come apart (e.g. Oshana 2007; Roessler
2012; MacKay forthcoming). Some argue that authenticity demands more
than is necessary for autonomy: a person does not have to reflectively
endorse key aspects of her identity in order to qualify as autonomous
(Oshana 2007). If she acknowledges that aspects of her identity
contradict her self-conception, she might still be autonomous, even if
this acknowledgement injects ambivalence into her life.



In all, the ideal of authenticity does not object to the importance of
the self-given law, but disagrees that full freedom consists in making
and following such a law (Menke 2005: 308). It is not just about being
involved in the authorship of such a law, but about how this law fits
with the wholeness of a person's life, and how or whether it
expresses who the person is. In this sense, the idea of autonomy
already represents a counterposition to an ethic that is solely
concerned with strict adherence to social norms.


### 1.3 Authenticity and the self



Another decisive factor in the development of the ideal of
authenticity was that it emerged together with a distinctively modern
conception of the self. This is visible in the work of Rousseau, who
argues that the orientation toward life that should guide the conduct
one chooses should come from a source within. This led to questions
about inwardness, self-reflection and introspection, many of them
addressed in his *Confessions* (1770). When the space of
interiority becomes a guiding authority, the individual must detect
and distinguish central impulses, feelings and wishes from ones that
are less central or conflict with one's central motives. In
other words, interiority must be divided into what is at the core and
what is peripheral. In this picture, the measure of one's
actions is whether they spring from and express essential aspects of
one's identity or whether they come from a peripheral place.



Such a conception of the self exhibits decisive parallels to the
tradition of "religious individualism" that centers
religious life on the individual and stresses the importance of
inwardness and the introspective examination of one's inner
motives, intentions and conscience. Investigating the characteristics
of the modern subject of inwardness, Foucault (1980: 58-60)
suggests that "it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most
secret nature, 'demands' only to surface." For
Foucault, confession--the look inward to monitor one's
interior life and to tell certain "truths" about
oneself--has become a part of a cultural life, reaching from
religious contexts to psychological therapy. The radicalization of the
distinction between true and false interiority has led to new
possibilities; inner states, motivations and feelings are now
increasingly thought of as objectifiable and malleable in different
contexts.



Rousseau also adds that acting on motives that spring from the
periphery of the self, while ignoring or denying essential aspects of
one's self, simply amounts to self-betrayal and annihilation of
the self. Rousseau's *The New Heloise* (1997 [1761])
emphasizes this aspect by showing how the novel accentuates the
significant costs and the potential self-alienation involved in
suppressing one's deepest motivations. But, in addition, in the
*Discourse on the Origin of Inequality*, Rousseau argues that,
with the emergence of a competitive public sphere, the ability to turn
inward is increasingly compromised, because competitive relations
require intense role-playing, which Rousseau calls an "excessive
labor" (Rousseau 1992 [1754]: 22). The ongoing instrumental
role-playing not only causes alienation, but ultimately inequality and
injustice, since it destroys the immanent moral understanding with
which, according to Rousseau, humans are hard-wired. Social life
requires identification with social roles, but because role identity
is determined by other people's normative expectations,
role-playing leads to a tension that might be understood as a matter
of politics more than anything else (Schmid 2017). 


## 2. Critique of Authenticity



The idea of autonomy--the view that each individual must decide
how to act based on his or her own rational deliberations about the
best course of action--has in many ways paved the way for the
idea of authenticity. However, authenticity goes beyond autonomy by
holding that an individual's feelings and deepest desires can
outweigh both the outcome of rational deliberation in making
decisions, and our willingness to immerse ourselves into the reigning
norms and values of society. Whereas sincerity generally seems to
accept a given social order, authenticity becomes an implicitly
critical concept, often calling into question the reigning social
order and public opinion. In Rousseau's optic, one of our most
important projects is to avert from the social sphere and to unearth
what is truly *us* underneath the 'masks' that
society forces on us. But when authenticity comes to be regarded as
something like sincerity for its own sake (Ferrara 1993: 86), it
becomes increasingly hard to see what the moral good is that it is
supposed to bring into being.



A frequently mentioned worry with the ideal of authenticity is that
the focus on one's own inner feelings and attitudes may breed a
self-centered preoccupation with oneself that is anti-social and
destructive of altruism and compassion toward others. Christopher
Lasch (1979) points out similarities between the clinical disorder
referred to as Narcissistic Personality Disorder and authenticity.
According to Lasch, narcissism and authenticity are both characterized
by deficient empathic skills, self-indulgence and self-absorbed
behavior. Similarly, Allan Bloom (1987: 61) maintains that the culture
of authenticity has made the minds of the youth "narrower and
flatter," leading to self-centeredness and the collapse of the
public self. While Lasch and Bloom worry about the threat that the
self-centeredness and narcissism of the "culture of
authenticity" poses to morality and political coherence, Daniel
Bell voices worries about its economic viability. What Bell fears is
that the "megalomania of self-infinitization" that comes
with the culture of authenticity will erode the foundations of market
mechanisms that are "based on a moral system of reward rooted in
the Protestant sanctification of work" (Bell 1976: 84). More
recently, critics have argued that when properly analyzed,
authenticity demands positing the existence of a "true
self." It requires positing an essentialist structure leading to
metaphysical problems that current accounts of authenticity fail to
solve (Bialystok 2014). Correspondingly, Feldman (2014) argues in
favor of abandoning the ideal of authenticity because it builds on
confused assumptions about the self, the value of one's
"gut feelings" in revealing one's values, and the
supposedly corrupting influence of the "external" social
realm (for a critique of this position, see Bauer 2017; Ferrara 2009)




However, one might argue that this only becomes a problem if one
thinks of authenticity as entirely a personal virtue. In other words,
there is only a clash between morality and social life and being
authentic if the "true" self is regarded as fundamentally
prone to anti-social behaviour. But many thinkers at this time
understood human nature as fundamentally disposed toward beneficence,
so that evil was seen as arising from socialization and upbringing
rather than from deep drives within the human being. For instance,
Rousseau holds that certain immoral characteristics are immanent in
man but were produced by the dynamics of modern society, which is
characterized by a competitive way of relating to others and striving
for acknowledgement in the public sphere. Rousseau thus externalizes
the origins of societal evil and alienation from the original nature
of man. The undistorted self-relation of natural man inspires sympathy
and considerate relations with others, sensitive to "seeing any
sentient being, especially our fellow-man, perish or suffer,
principally those like ourselves" (Rousseau 1992 [1754]: 14). In
somewhat the same way, economic theorists of the time supposed that
unregulated markets are self-correcting, as human beings are naturally
inclined to engage in mutually advantageous commercial activities
(Taylor 2007: 221-269). On this view, authenticity does not
amount to egoism or self-absorption. On the contrary, the prevailing
view seems to have been that, by turning inward and accessing the
"true" self, one is simultaneously led towards a deeper
engagement with the social world. This is why Taylor (1989:
419-455) describes the trajectory of the project of authenticity
is "inward and upward".



It might however be objected that supposing that the
"inner" is a morally worthy guide is deeply misguided and
builds upon an overly optimistic idea of human nature. It may be
argued that once the idea of rational deliberation is set aside, the
powerful impact of the non-rational becomes apparent. Thinkers such as
Nietzsche and Freud have put in question the conception of human
nature, and especially of our "inner" nature, as
fundamentally good. Following their "hermeneutics of
suspicion" (Ricoeur 1970), human nature comes to be seen as
including forces of violence, disorder and unreason as well as
tendencies toward beneficence and altruism. In that case, any idea of
an ethic based primarily on the ideal of authenticity is simply
untenable.



Others have expressed serious concerns not about the optimistic view
of human nature, but about the conception of the self that underlies
the idea of authenticity. Some argued that the dichotomies that the
concept authenticity was built on, like conformity vs. independence,
individual vs. society, or inner-directedness vs. other-directedness,
were entirely misguided. The underlying assumption that considers the
individual separate from the environment is an absurd assumption that
erodes that bond between the individual and community, which
ultimately is the source of the authentic self (Slater 1970: 15; Sisk
1973). In agreement with Slater (1970) and Yankelovich (1981), Bellah
et al. (1985) and Fairlie (1978) contend that such a pursuit of
authenticity is self-defeating, for with the loss of the bond with
community, the sense of self is also diminished.



Additionally, in *The Jargon of Authenticity*, Adorno contended
that the "liturgy of inwardness" is founded on the flawed
idea of a self-transparent individual who is capable of choosing
herself (Adorno 1973: 70). The doubtful picture of the self-centered
individual covers up the constitutive alterity and mimetic nature of
the self. In the concluding part of *The Order of Things*,
Foucault maintained that present society was witnessing a crisis, not
only of authenticity but also of the whole idea of the subject in its
temporary historically contingent constitution, foreseeing that
"man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of
the sea" (Foucault 1994: 387). Foucault clearly opposed the idea
of a hidden authentic self, which he critically referred to as the
"Californian cult of the self" (1983: 266). The
recognition that the subject is not given to itself in advance leads
him to the practical consequence that it must create itself as a work
of art (Foucault 1983: 392). Rather than searching for a hidden true
self, one should attempt to shape one's life as a work of art,
proceeding without recourse to any fixed rules or permanent truths in
a process of unending becoming (Foucault 1988: 49). In a similar vein,
Richard Rorty has argued that the idea of coming to "know a
truth which was out there (or in here) all the time" (Rorty
1989: 27) is simply a myth. Postmodern thought raises questions about
the existence of an underlying subject with essential properties
accessible through introspection. The whole idea of the authentic as
that which is "original", "essential",
"proper", and so forth now seems doubtful. If we are
self-constituting beings who make ourselves up from one moment to the
next, it appears that the term "authenticity" can refer
only to whatever feels right at some particular moment.



Yet others have based their criticism of authenticity especially on
the emergence of a pervasive "culture of authenticity".
Cultural critics have argued that the ostensible "decline"
of modern society might not primarily be a result of economical or
structural transformations, but as the outcome of an increasingly
ubiquitous ideal of authenticity. Before we turn to these critiques,
it is helpful to understand how the ideal of authenticity became so
widespread. First, we should mention that Rousseau's work, made
a significant contribution to the popularization of authenticity.
Indeed, some argue that authenticity can be seen as a
"keystone" in Rousseau's work, giving unity to his
reflections on sociality, political order, and education (Ferrara
2017: 2). Particularly *The New Heloise* (1997 [1761]) was
enormously influential, with at least 70 editions in print before 1800
(Darnton 1984: 242). This dispersion of the ideal of authenticity into
popular culture was further strengthened by several factors. For
instance, a wide array of intellectuals of the nineteenth and the
early twentieth century had embraced the idea of authenticity, and
even radicalized it by resisting established codes and publicly
defending alternative, "artistic" or
"bohemian" modes of life.



The reception of the work of Sartre and Heidegger has surely
contributed to the popularization of the idea of authenticity, and the
decisive impact of this idea first began to manifest itself after the
Second World War (Taylor 2007: 475). Rossinow contends that the
politics of the 1960s were centered on questions of authenticity.
Following his account, the main driving force towards political and
social changes of the New Left movement in the 1960s was "a
search for authenticity in industrial American life" (Rossinow
1998: 345). Both J. Farrell (1997) and Rossinow argue that the New
Left emerged partly as a reaction to traditional American liberalism
and Christian existentialism, replacing the negative concept of
"sin" with "alienation" and the positive goal
of "salvation" with that of "authenticity".
Confronted with what they understood as alienation that
"isn't restricted to the poor" (Rossinow 1998: 194),
New Left activism reached beyond civil rights to moral rights and
attempted to bring about a recovery of a sense of personal wholeness
and authenticity by curing the institutions of American society.



The emerging youth culture was characterized by a severe
dissatisfaction with the "morass of conformity" of the
parental generation (Gray 1965: 57). The critique of the growing
conformity of life got more persistent during the 1950s, and a number
of social scientists in widely read books criticized what they saw as
widespread conformity and inauthenticity. Among these, *The Lonely
Crowd* (1950) by Riesman and *The Organization Man* (1956)
by Whyte received the most attention. Riesman points out that the
efficacious functioning of modern organizations requires
other-directed individuals who smoothly adjust to their environment.
However, he also notes that such people compromised themselves, and a
society consisting mostly of other-directed individuals faces
substantial deficiencies in leadership and human potential.



On the background of this development, it seems that at a time when
relativism appears difficult to surmount, authenticity has become a
last measure of value and a common currency in contemporary cultural
life (Jay 2004). So, under the impact of existentialism on Western
culture, the ubiquitous desire for authenticity has emerged in modern
society as "one of the most politically explosive of human
impulses," as Marshall Berman argues (1970: xix). 


## 3. Conceptions of Authenticity


### 3.1 Kierkegaard and Heidegger



Kierkegaard's work on authenticity and his suggestion that each
of us is to "become what one is" (1992 [1846]: 130), is
best seen as linked to his critical stance towards a certain social
reality and a certain essentialist trend in philosophical and
scientific thought. On the one hand, he (1962 [1846]) condemned
aspects of his contemporary social world, claiming that many people
have come to function as merely place-holders in a society that
constantly levels down possibilities to the lowest common denominator.
In more contemporary terms, we can say that Kierkegaard provides a
criticism of modern society as causing "inauthenticity".
Living in a society characterized by such "massification"
lead to what he refers to as widespread "despair" that
comes to the fore as spiritlessness, denial, and defiance. On the
other hand, he rejected the view that a human being should be regarded
as an object, as a substance with certain essential attributes. Rather
than being an item among others, Kierkegaard proposes to understand
the self in relational terms: "The self is a relation that
relates itself to itself..." (Kierkegaard 1980 [1849]:13).
This relation consists in the unfolding project of taking what we find
ourselves with as beings in the world and imparting some meaning or
concrete identity to our own life course. Thus, the self is defined by
concrete *expressions* through which one manifests oneself in
the world and thereby constitutes one's identity over time. In
Kierkegaard's view, "becoming what one is" and
evading despair and hollowness is not a matter of solitary
introspection, but rather a matter of passionate commitment to a
relation to something outside oneself that bestows one's life
with meaning. For Kierkegaard, as a religious thinker, this ultimate
commitment was his defining relation to God. The idea is that
passionate care about something outside ourselves gives diachronic
coherence in our lives and provides the basis for the narrative unity
of the self (Davenport 2012).



The most familiar conception of "authenticity" comes to us
mainly from Heidegger's *Being and Time* of 1927. The
word we translate as 'authenticity' is actually a
neologism invented by Heidegger, the word *Eigentlichkeit*,
which comes from an ordinary term, *eigentlich*, meaning
'really' or 'truly', but is built on the stem
*eigen*, meaning 'own' or 'proper'. So
the word might be more literally translated as
'ownedness', or 'being owned', or even
'being one's own', implying the idea of owning up to
and owning what one is and does (for a stimulating recent
interpretation, see McManus 2019). Nevertheless, the word
'authenticity' has become closely associated with
Heidegger as a result of early translations of *Being and Time*
into English, and was adopted by Sartre and Beauvoir as well as by
existentialist therapists and cultural theorists who followed
 them.[1]



Heidegger's conception of ownedness as the most fully realized
human form of life emerges from his view of what it is to be a human
being. This conception of human *Dasein* echoes
Kierkegaard's description of a "self". On
Heidegger's account, Dasein is not a type of object among others
in the totality of what is on hand in the universe. Instead, human
being is a "*relation* of being", a relation that
obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the
concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as
the temporally extended unfolding or *happening* of life into
an open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation
is to say that, in living out our lives, we always *care* about
who and what we are. Heidegger expresses this by saying that, for each
of us, our being (what our lives will amount to overall) is always
*at issue*. This "being at stake" or "being
in question for oneself" is made concrete in the specific stands
we take--that is, in the roles we enact--over the course of
our lives. It is because our being (our identity) is in question for
us that we are always taking a stand on who we are. Since the German
word for 'understanding', *Verstehen*, is
etymologically derived from the idea of 'taking a stand',
Heidegger can call the projection into the future by which we shape
our identity 'understanding'. And because any stand one
takes is inescapably "being-in-the-world", understanding
carries with it some degree of competence in coping with the world
around us. An understanding of being in general is therefore built
into human agency.



To the extent that all our actions contribute to realizing an
overarching project or set of projects, our active lives can be seen
as embodying a life-project of some sort. On Heidegger's view,
we exist *for the sake of* ourselves: enacting roles and
expressing character traits contribute to realizing some image of what
it is to be human in our own cases. Existence has a directedness or
purposiveness that imparts a degree of connection to our life stories.
For the most part, having such a life-plan requires very little
conscious formulation of goals or deliberation about means. It results
from our competence in being members of a historical culture that we
have mastered to a great extent in growing up into a shared world.
This tacit "pre-understanding" makes possible our familiar
dwelling with things and others in the familiar, everyday world.



Heidegger holds that all possibilities of concrete understanding and
action are made possible by a background of shared practices opened up
by the social context in which we find ourselves, by what he calls the
'They' (*das Man*). Far from it being the case that
social existence is something alien to and opposed to our humanity,
Heidegger holds that we are always essentially and inescapably social
beings. As he says,



> 
> 
> They itself prescribes that way of interpreting the world that lies
> closest. Dasein is for the sake of the They in an everyday
> manner... In terms of the They, and as the They, I am
> 'given' proximally to 'myself'.... (1962
> [1927]: 167, translation modified)
> 
> 
> 



To be a teacher, for instance, I must adopt (and perhaps blend) some
set of the ready-made styles of classroom presentation and of dealing
with students laid out in advance by existing norms and conventions of
professional conduct.



To say that we are always the They is not to say we are automata,
however. Heidegger suggests that even in the bland conformism of
"average everydayness" we are constantly making choices
that reflect our understanding of who we are. Nevertheless, in average
everydayness, we are as a rule adrift, acting as one of the
"herd" or "crowd"--a form of life
Heidegger calls "falling" (*Verfallen*). Heidegger
(1962 [1927]: 220) emphasizes that calling this way of living
"falling" does not imply that it is "a bad or
deplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of
human culture might be able to rid themselves" (1962 [1927]:
220). On the contrary, since there is no exit from the social
world--since it is the "only game in town"--it
plays a positive role in creating the background of shared
intelligibility that lets us be fully human in the first place.
Nevertheless, Heidegger is aware that there is something deeply
problematic about this falling mode of existence. In "doing what
one does", he suggests, we fail to own up to who we are. We do
not take over our own choices as our own and, as a result, we are not
really the authors of our own lives. To the extent that our lives are
unowned or disowned, existence is inauthentic (*uneigentlich*),
not our own (*eigen*).



Our condition as They-selves is one of dispersal, distraction and
forgetfulness. But this "downward plunge" captures only
one aspect of Dasein, Heidegger says. In order to be able to realize
the capacity for authenticity, one must undergo a personal
transformation, one that tears us away from falling. This is possible
only given certain fundamental insights arising in a life. The first
major shift can occur when one experiences an intense bout of anxiety.
In anxiety, the familiar world that seemed to assure one's
security suddenly breaks down, and in this world-collapse one finds
that the significance of things is "completely lacking"
(1962 [1927]: 186). One finds oneself alone, with no worldly supports
for one's existence. In anxiety, Dasein encounters itself as an
*individual*, ultimately alone. In Heidegger's words,
"Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as
'*solus ipse*'" (1962 [1927]: 188). The
second transformative event is the encounter with one's
"ownmost" possibility, the possibility of death as the
possible loss of all possibilities. In facing our own finitude, we
find that we are always future-directed happenings or projects, where
what is crucial to that ongoing forward movement is not its
actualization of possibilities, but the "How" with which
one undertakes one's life. Heidegger tries to envision a way of
life he calls *anticipatory running-forward*
(*Vorlaufen*) as a life that clear-sightedly and intensely
carries out its projects, no matter what they may be. The third
transformative event is hearing the call of conscience. What
conscience calls out to us is the fact that we are
"guilty" in the German sense of that word, which means
that we have a *debt* (*Schuld*) and are responsible for
ourselves. Conscience tells us that we are falling short of what we
can be, and that we are obliged to take up the task of living with
resoluteness and full engagement. Such resoluteness is seen clearly in
the case of vocational commitments, where one has heard a calling and
feels pulled toward pursuing that
 calling.[2]



The three "existentialia" that structure Dasein's
Being-in-the-world make up the "formal existential totality of
Dasein's structural whole", what Heidegger calls
*care*. To be Dasein, an entity must have some sense of what it
is "coming toward" (*Zu-kunft*, the German for
"future"), what has "come before" (what is
"passed", *Vorbei*), and what one is dealing with
in one's current situation ("making present"). The
defining characteristics of Dasein's potentiality-for-Being are
displayed in the transformative events that lead to the possibility of
being authentic (*eigentlich*, as we saw, from the stem meaning
"proper" or "own"). When Dasein confronts and
grasps its authentic possibility of being, it becomes possible to see
the *whole* of Dasein, including both its being as a They-self
and as authentic being-one's-self. "Dasein *is
authentically itself* in [its] primordial
individualization", where the "*constancy*
[*Standigkeit*] *of the Self* ... gets
clarified" (1962 [1927]: 322). What defines the wholeness and
unity of Dasein is determined not by an underlying substance (e.g.,
the sub-ject, that which underlies), but by the "steadiness and
steadfastness" (*bestandigen Standfestigkeit*, ibid)
of authenticity.



The key to understanding authenticity lies, as we have seen, in the
characterization of Dasein's being as a *relation*
between two aspects or dimensions making up human existence. On the
one hand, we find ourselves *thrown* into a world and a
situation not of our own making, already disposed by moods and
particular commitments, with a past behind us that constrains our
choices. With respect to this dimension of human life, we are
generally absorbed in practical affairs, taking care of business,
striving to get things done as they crop up from time to time. This
"being-in-a-situation" naturally inclines us to everyday
falling as Heidegger describes it.



At the same time, however, to be human is to be underway toward
achieving ends that are understood as integral to one's
overarching life-project. My actions at any moment, though typically
aimed at accomplishing tasks laid out by the demands of circumstances,
are also cumulatively creating me as a person of a particular sort. In
this sense, my futural projection as "understanding" has
the structure of being a projection onto one's ownmost
possibility of being. So, for example, when I attend a boring
parent/teacher conference, I do so as part of handling my current
duties. But this act is also part of *being a parent* insofar
as it contributes to determining "that for the sake of
which" I understand myself as existing. Given this distinction
between current means/ends strategic actions and long-range
life-defining undertakings, it is possible to see that there are two
senses of freedom in play in Heidegger's account of human
existence. There is freedom in the humdrum sense of doing what I
choose to do under ordinary conditions, a freedom Heidegger presumably
interprets in an agent-libertarian way. But there is also freedom in
an ethically more robust sense. In addition to choosing courses of
action among options, Dasein is capable of "choosing to choose a
kind of being-one's-self" (1962 [1927]: 314) through its
ongoing constitution of that identity for the sake of which it exists.
Thus, I attend the parent/teacher conference and behave in a
particular way because I care about being a parent and a citizen of a
particular sort. I understand this stance as having repercussions for
my life as a whole, and I grasp the need for *resoluteness* in
holding steady to undertakings of this sort if I am to shape my
identity in the way I can care about. For Heidegger, the resolute
commitment that is made concrete and defined in one's day-to-day
actions is what imparts *steadiness* and *steadfastness*
to a life. It is also the condition for being responsible for
one's own existence: "Only so can [one] *be*
responsible [*verantwortlich*]", Heidegger says (1962
[1927]: 334, translation modified). Authenticity, defined as standing
up for and standing behind what one does--as *owning* and
*owning up to* one's deeds as an agent in the
world--becomes possible in this sort of resolute commitment to
the "for the sake of which" of one's existence.



It should be obvious that this conception of authenticity has very
little to do with the older idea of being true to one's own
pregiven feelings and desires. But there is still a clear respect in
which the idea of "being true to oneself" has a role to
play here. What distinguishes this conception from the conceptions of
pop psychology and romantic views of authenticity is the fact that the
"true self" to which we are to be true is not some
pre-given set of substantive feelings, opinions and desires to be
consulted through inward-turning or introspection. On the contrary,
the "true self" alluded to here is an on-going narrative
construction: the composition of one's own autobiography through
one's concrete ways of acting over the course of a life as a
whole. Feelings and desires are, of course, profoundly important, as
are the features of one's situation and one's concrete
connections to others. Heidegger wants to recover a firm sense of the
wholeness of the existing individual. But this wholeness is found in
the connectedness of what Heidegger calls the "happening"
or "movement" of a life--that is, in the unfolding
and constantly "in-progress" storyizing that continues
until death. What is at stake in the ideal of authenticity is not
being true to some antecedently given nature, then, but *being*
a person of a particular sort. Heidegger emphasizes that being
authentic presupposes that one instantiate such virtues as
perseverance, integrity, clear-sightedness, flexibility, openness, and
so forth. It should be obvious that such a life is not necessarily
opposed to an ethical and socially engaged existence. On the contrary,
authenticity seems to be regarded as a "executive virtue"
that provides the condition for the possibility of being a moral agent
in any meaningful sense whatsoever.



Others argue that Heidegger uses authenticity in both
evaluative-normative and purely descriptive senses. In the descriptive
use of the term, inauthenticity is simply the default condition of
everyday life, in which our self-relations are mediated by others. In
this sense, authenticity involves no judgment about which mode of
being is superior for Dasein. But sometimes Heidegger's language
turns normative (Carman 2003), and the seemingly neutral inauthentic
form of relating transforms into something negative. Inauthentic
Dasein is now "not itself", loses itself
(Selbstverlorenheit), and becomes self-alienated. At this point, it is
argued that when introducing the normative-evaluative sense, Heidegger
presents three modes of life:
authentic--average(ness)--inauthentic, where the authentic
and inauthentic modes are existential modifications of average
everydayness (Blattner 2006: 130; Dreyfus 1991). In this picture, an
authentic way of life is owned, an inauthentic disowned, and the
middle one--which is how we live much of the time--is simply
one that is unowned. Dasein and authenticity emerge in contrast to
this background and out of this background, so that the primordially
indifferent mode is the condition of possibility for authenticity or
inauthenticity. In addition, Carman (2003: 295) argues that
Heidegger's notion of conscience can help us further illustrate
his account of authenticity and shows how the "call of
conscience" may be interpreted as expressive responsiveness to
one's own particularity.


### 3.2 Sartre and de Beauvoir



Published in 1943, Sartre's opus magnum, *Being and
Nothingness*: *A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology*, had a
significant influence on philosophical thought and intellectual life
in the second half of the twentieth century. His principal goal in
this book is to "repudiate the *spirit of
seriousness*" of traditional philosophy as well as of
bourgeois culture (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 796). The spirit of
seriousness assumes (1) that there are transcendent values that exist
antecedently to humans, and (2) that the value of a thing is part of
the actual being of the valued thing. Sartre's view, in
contrast, is that all values are generated by human interactions in
situations, so that value is a human construct with no extra-human
existence in things.



To address the question of human existence, Sartre scrutinizes our
everyday lives, focusing on two particular aspects. He notes that
human beings, like other entities in the world, have certain concrete
characteristics that make up what he calls their
"facticity" or what they are "in themselves"
(*en soi*). Facticity makes up the element of
"givenness" we must work with: I find myself with a past,
a body and a social situation that constrains me in what I can do.
This "just being there" is above all contingent: there is
no prior justification or reason for the existence of my being. On
Sartre's view, the "in itself" does not even have
any determinate characteristics, since every determination (every
"this, *not* that") is first introduced into the
totality of being by our specific interpretations of things.



While human beings share their "facticity" with other
entities in the world, they are unique among the totality of entities
insofar as they are capable of distancing themselves from what is
"in itself" through reflection and self-awareness. Rather
than being an item in the world with relatively fixed attributes, what
is distinctive about me as a human being is that I am capable of
putting my own being in question by asking myself, for example,
whether I want to be a person of a particular sort. This capacity for
gaining distance inserts a "not" or a
"nonbeing" into the totality of what is, which allows me
to organize what surrounds me into a meaningfully differentiated
whole. In addition, human consciousness is the source of the
"not" because it is itself a "nothingness". In
other words, a human being is not just an "in itself" but
also a "for itself (*pour soi*), thus characterized by
what Sartre calls "transcendence". As transcendence, I am
always more than I am as facticity because, as surpassing my brute
being, I stand before an open range of possibilities for
self-definition in the future.



Sartre's notion of transcendence is closely linked with the idea
of freedom. Humans are *free* in the sense that they have the
ability to choose how they are going to interpret things, and in these
interpretations they are deciding how things are to count or matter.
We constitute the world through our freedom to the extent that our
ways of taking things determine how reality will be sorted out and
matter to us. At the same time, we constitute *ourselves*
through our own choices: though the facticity of my situation creates
some constraints on my possible self-interpretations, it is always up
to me to decide the meaning of those constraints, and this means that
what I take to be limitations are in fact produced by my own
interpretations or meaning-giving activities. Such limitations are
grasped in light of antecedent commitments, on the background of which
situations becomes intelligible, as affording certain actions and/or
modes of evaluation. It is our antecedent commitments that shape our
world, making situations and objects intelligible as threatening or
favorable, easy or full of obstacles, or more generally, as affording
certain actions (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 489). Our engagements provide a
hermeneutic structure within which our situations and motives become
comprehensible and reveal themselves in the way situations appear to
us--as significant, requiring our attention, etc. (1992a [1943]:
485).



It is important to note that Sartre's notion of freedom is
radical. Freedom is absolute to the extent that each person decides
the significance of the constraints in his or her facticity: "I
find an absolute responsibility for the fact that my facticity
... is directly inapprehensible", because supposed
"facts" about me are never brute facts, "but always
appear across a projective reconstruction of my for-itself"
(Sartre 1992a [1943]: 710). For Sartre, only our choices and their
projected ends define our situations as meaningful, as threatening or
favorable, as affording certain actions etc. The resistances and
obstacles that one encounters in a situation acquire meaning only in
and through the free choice. Thus, individuals are responsible not
only for their identities, but for the way the world presents itself
in their experiences. Even others are just
"*opportunities* and *chances*" for my free
creative activity. According to this early formulation, it is up to us
to interpret how other people are to matter to us relative to
situations in which we find ourselves engaged (Sartre 1992a [1943]:
711).



But human beings are not merely characterized by facticity and
transcendence; they are also seen as embodying a deep and
irreconcilable tension between facticity and transcendence. This
tension comes to the fore in Sartre's account of "bad
faith". Bad faith, a kind of self-deception, involves believing
or taking oneself to be an *X* while all along one is (and knows
oneself to be) actually a *Y*. The most familiar form of bad
faith is acting as if one were a mere thing--solely
facticity--and thereby denying one's own freedom to make
oneself into something very different. Thus, the person who thinks she
is a coward "just as a matter of fact" is excluding from
view the ability to transform her existence through changed ways of
behaving. Such bad faith is a denial of transcendence or freedom.



At first, it might seem that one could escape bad faith by making a
sincere, deep commitment to something and abiding by that
commitment--for example, a total, resolute engagement of the self
comparable to Kierkegaard's notion of an "infinite
passion". In this regard, Sartre considers a person who tries to
wholeheartedly believe that his friend really likes him. "I
*believe* it", he says, "I decide to believe in it
and maintain myself in this decision..." (Sartre 1992a
[1943]: 114). My belief will be steady and solid, like something
"in itself" that informs my being and cuts through all the
tenuousness and unsteadiness of my subjective life. I *know* I
believe it, I will say. *If* I could make myself believe
something in this way, then to achieve this might be what we could
call "good faith:" to actually *be* something,
without the questionability of the "not" creeping in.
However, Sartre doubts that such an absolute, being-determining
commitment is possible. In fact, Sartre claims that any such sort of
"good faith" would actually amount to little more than
another form of self-deception. For if my decision to believe is in
fact a decision, it must always be something that to some extent
distances me from what is decided. That is why we use the word
'believe' to imply some degree of uncertainty, as when we
say, "Is he my friend? Well, I *believe* he is".
Lucid self-awareness shows us that in making a choice, we can never
attain the condition of the "in itself", because what we
are is always in question for us. This is what Sartre means when he
says human being is always "previously corrupted" and that
"bad faith [always] reapprehends good faith" (Sartre 1992a
[1943]: 116). Thus, the project of being in good faith seems
impossible, as we are always necessarily in bad faith.



The inescapable nature of bad faith seems to leave no room for the
possibility of authenticity. This might be why the word translated as
"authentic" only appears twice in this vast tome. On one
occasion, Sartre attacks Heidegger for introducing the idea of
authenticity as a way of providing something foundational in an
otherwise totally contingent world. The concept of authenticity
"shows all too clearly [Heidegger's] anxiety to establish
an ontological foundation for an Ethics..." (Sartre 1992a
[1943]: 128). A second and more obscure appearance of the word comes
at the end of the discussion of bad faith early in the book. Here
Sartre acknowledges that his account of bad faith seems to have the
consequence that there can be no such thing as good faith, so that
"it is indifferent whether one is in good faith or in bad
faith", and that in turn seems to imply that "we can never
radically escape bad faith". Nevertheless, he goes on, there may
be a "self-recovery of being which has been previously
corrupted", a recovery "we shall call authenticity, the
description of which has no place here" (Sartre 1992a [1943]:
116n).



One might thus conclude that there is no way to be true to what one
is, because there is nothing that one is. However, such a negative
conclusion would be reached only by someone who embraced from the
outset the "spirit of seriousness" Sartre sets out to
attack. Seriousness would lead us to think that there is simply a fact
of the matter about a person: the person is either a believer or he is
not. But, as Linda A. Bell (1989: 45) has noted, there is another
possibility. If one rejects the spirit of seriousness, one might
lucidly acknowledge that, *as* transcendence, one's
belief is always in question and so not really a secure belief. Yet,
at the same time, one might also recognize that, *as*
facticity, one genuinely holds a belief, and that the belief is
central to one's being as an engaged agent in this situation. In
Sartre's convoluted style of formulation, "he would be
right if he recognized himself as a being that is what it is not and
is not what it is" (Bell 1989: 45). On this account, I believe,
but I also acknowledge my ability to retract the belief, since nothing
is ever fixed in stone.



What is suggested here is that a correlate of authenticity can be
found in the idea of being true to the inescapable tension at the core
of the human self. This would be attained if one clear-sightedly
acknowledged the fundamental *ambiguity* of the human
condition. Authenticity would then be what Sartre calls a
"self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted"
(1992a [1943]: 116). In a sense, humans can never really *be*
anything in the way brute objects can be things with determinate
attributes. In Bell's words, authenticity would be "the
awareness and acceptance of--this basic ambiguity" (1989:
46). This conclusion is supported by Sartre's later work,
*Anti-Semite and Jew* where he writes,



> 
> 
> Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true
> and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the
> responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it ...
> sometimes in horror and hate. (1948: 90)
> 
> 
> 



Lucid recognition of the ambiguity of the human condition is the
leading idea behind Beauvoir's *The Ethics of Ambiguity*.
Beauvoir takes over Sartre's characterization of the human
condition and expands on ideas only hinted at in Sartre's famous
lecture, "The Humanism of Existentialism" (1946), in
developing a conception of authenticity. According to Beauvoir,
Sartre's conception of the human being as "engaged
freedom" implies not just that each individual finds his or her
"reason for being" in concrete realizations of freedom,
but that willing one's own freedom necessarily involves willing
the freedom of all humans. In achieving one's own freedom, she
writes, freedom must also will "an open future, by seeking to
extend itself by means of the freedom of others" (1948: 60). The
point here is that a dedication to freedom, when clearly grasped in
its full implications, will be seen to call for a future in which an
unrestricted range of possibilities is open to all.



Beauvoir also builds on Sartre's notion of *engagement*
to extend the idea of authenticity. Following Sartre, we are always
already engaged in the affairs of the world, whether we realize it or
not. To be human is to be already caught up in the midst of social and
concrete situations that call for commitments of certain sorts on our
part. Sartre takes this ground-level fact of engagement as the basis
for exhorting us to be engaged in a deeper sense, where this implies
that we decisively and wholeheartedly involve ourselves in what the
current situation demands. Of course, once we have abandoned the
spirit of seriousness, we will recognize that there are no
antecedently given principles or values that dictate the proper course
for our existential engagement, so that any commitment will be tenuous
and groundless. But the authentic individual will be the one who takes
up the terrifying freedom of being the ultimate source of values,
embraces it, and acts with a clarity and firmness suitable to his or
her best understanding of what is right in this context. In this way,
the conception of authenticity is continuous with the ideal of being
true to ourselves: we are called upon to become, in our concrete
lives, what we already are in the ontological structure of our
being.



This is in agreement with the manner in which Sartre describes the
consequences of acting against one's deepest commitments.



> 
> 
> There is no doubt that I could have done otherwise, but that is not
> the problem. It ought to be formulated like this: could I have done
> otherwise without perceptibly modifying the organic totality of the
> projects that make up who I am?
> 
> 
> 



Sartre goes on to say that the character of the act may be such
that



> 
> 
> instead of remaining a purely local and accidental modification of my
> behavior, it could be effected only by means of a radical
> transformation of my being-in-the-world... In other words: I
> could have acted otherwise. Agreed. But at what price? (Sartre 1992a
> [1943]: 454)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, acting otherwise or, more precisely, failing to act on
one's fundamental commitments, comes at the price of
transforming who one is. This change effectively precludes one from
carrying on with an unchanged self-conception.


## 4. Recent Accounts of Authenticity



In the last three decades, authors like Taylor (1989, 1991, 1995,
2007), Ferrara (1993; 1998), Jacob Golomb (1995), Guignon (2004, 2008)
and Varga (2011a) have attempted to reconstruct authenticity by
maintaining that the justified criticism of self-indulgent forms of
the idea does not justify the total condemnation of the idea itself
(see Taylor 1991: 56). Instead of abandoning the notion of
authenticity, they attempt to reconstruct it in a manner that leads
neither to aestheticism nor to atomistic self-indulgence.



In *The Ethics of Authenticity*, and the more fully articulated
*Sources of the Self*, Taylor makes a case for retaining the
concept of authenticity (and the practices associated with it) on the
grounds that the original and undistorted idea of authenticity
contains an important element of self-transcendence (Taylor 1991: 15;
Anderson 1995). Unsatisfied with the widespread criticism of
authenticity as an adequate ethical orientation, Taylor sets out to
prove that authenticity does not necessarily lead to aestheticism or
self-indulgence: the justified criticism of self-indulgent forms of
the ideal does not justify the complete condemnation of the ideal
itself (Taylor 1991: 56). This would mean extricating aestheticism,
subjectivism, individualism, and self-indulgent interpretations of
this ideal from what Taylor (Ibid.: 15) holds to be an original
understanding of that concept as achieving self-transcendence
(Anderson 1995). Restoring an undistorted version, Taylor says, could
guard against meaninglessness, which is one of the "malaises of
modernity" that Taylor regards as tied to trivialized forms of
the culture of authenticity. Self-transcendence, which once was a
crucial element in the ideal of authenticity, is practically lost from
the contemporary version, giving rise to cultures of self-absorption,
which ultimately deteriorate into the malaise of absurdity.



Already in *Sources of the Self*, Taylor draws attention to how
modernism gives birth to a new kind of inward turn that not only
attempts to overcome the mechanistic conception of the self linked to
disengaged reason but also the Romantic ideal of a faultless alignment
of inner nature and reason. Instead, for the modernists, a turn inward
did not mean a turn towards a self that needs articulation.



> 
> 
> On the contrary, the turn inward may take us beyond the self as
> usually understood, to a fragmentation of experience which calls our
> ordinary notions of identity into question. (Taylor 1989: 462)
> 
> 
> 



While in modernism, the turn inward still contained a
self-transcending moment, the critical point where the ideal of
authenticity becomes flattened is when it becomes
'contaminated' by a certain form of
'self-determining freedom' that also contains elements of
inwardness and unconventionality (Taylor 1991: 38). Self-determining
freedom



> 
> 
> is the idea that I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me,
> rather than being shaped by external influences. It is a standard of
> freedom that obviously goes beyond what has been called negative
> liberty (being free to do what I want without interference by others)
> because that is compatible with one's being shaped and
> influenced by society and its laws of conformity. Instead,
> self-determining freedom demands that one break free of all such
> external impositions and decide for oneself alone. (Taylor 1991:
> 27)
> 
> 
> 



Not only is self-determining freedom not a necessary part of
authenticity, it is also counterproductive because its
self-centeredness flattens the meanings of lives and fragments
identities. For Taylor, the process of articulating an identity
involves adopting a relationship to the good or to what is important,
which is connected to one's membership in a language community
(Taylor 1989: 34-35). As he clearly states, "authenticity
is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it
presupposes such demands" (Taylor 1991: 41). It cannot be up to
me to decide what is important, since this would be self-defeating.
Instead, whatever is important for me must connect to an
inter-subjective notion of the good, wherefrom a good part of its
normative force lastly emanates. In this sense, authenticity simply
requires maintaining bonds to collective questions of worth that point
beyond one's own preferences. Taylor wants to show that modes of
contemporary culture that opt for self-fulfillment without regard



> 
> 
> (a) to the demands of our ties with others, or (b) to demands of any
> kind emanating from something more or other than human desires or
> aspirations are self-defeating, that they destroy the conditions for
> realizing authenticity itself. (Taylor 1991: 35)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, not only do we need the recognition of concrete others in order
to form our identities, but we must also (critically) engage with a
common vocabulary of shared value orientations. In other words, Taylor
points out that authenticity needs the appropriation of values that
make up our collective horizons.



In his *Reflective Authenticity*, Alessandro Ferrara also sets
out to defend authenticity as an ideal, but in contrast to Taylor he
is interested in the social and philosophical issues of the relation
between authenticity and validity. According to Ferrara's
diagnosis, we are currently witnessing a profound transition that,
besides affecting cultures, values and norms, also touch on the
"foundations of validity," thereby affecting the
"bedrock of the symbolic network through which we relate to
reality and reproduce our life-forms" (Ferrara 1998: 1). At the
core of this transformation is the reformulation of
"well-being" (*eudaimonia*) as the normative ideal
of authenticity, which can be of help in reconstructing a contemporary
understanding of normativity. For Ferrara, it can ground a new ideal
of universal validity "ultimately linked with the model of
exemplary uniqueness or enlightening singularity thus far associated
with 'aesthetics'" (Ferrara 1998: 10). Authenticity
is then characterized by the "self-congruency" of an
individual, collective or symbolic identity (Ferrara 1998: 70), and is
thought of as providing a new universal validity that does not build
on the generalizable but rather on the exemplary. Ferrara views
Simmel's idea of an individual law as an instructive example of
such an anti-generalizing universalism, and it is exactly this
characteristic that makes it better suited to the pluralist contexts
faced by modern Western societies. More recently, Ferrara (2019) has
argued that authenticity currently faces a "dual paradox"
and is misconstrued by many critics advocating its deconstructionist
dismissal.



Golomb (1995) provides an informative historical overview of the
genesis and development of the concept of authenticity, paying
attention to both literary and philosophical sources. While
continuously reminding us of the inherently social dimension of
authenticity, one of the achievements here is the focus on boundary
situations where authenticity "is best forged and
revealed" (Ibid.: 201). Golomb takes a neutral position on the
ethical value of authenticity, maintaining that "there is no
reason to suppose that it is any better or any more valuable to be
authentic than to act inauthentically" (Ibid.: 202).



Guignon (2004) explores both the philosophical roots of authenticity
and its contemporary manifestations in popular culture. He
thoughtfully criticizes pop-psychological literature that deals with
the authentic life by making recourse to the subdued 'inner
child'. Since Rousseau, the dichotomy between authentic and
inauthentic has often been interpreted akin to the distinction between
child and adult (Guignon 2004: 43). Like the inner child, the
authentic self is depicted as not yet corrupted by the pressures,
competitiveness, and conformity of modern public life. Guignon draws
on the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung to remind us of less
romanticized visions of the inner child. Additionally, Guignon (2004:
151) aims to identify the manner in which authenticity can be
understood as being at the same time a personal and a
"fundamentally and irreducibly" social virtue.
Authenticity then involves reflectively discerning what is really
worth pursuing in the social context in which the agent is situated
(Ibid.: 155). If the ideal of authenticity is possible only in a free
society with a solid foundation of established social virtues, it
would seem that trying to be authentic, if it is to be coherent, must
involve a commitment to sustaining and nurturing the type of society
in which such an ideal is possible. A reflection on the social
embodiment of virtues therefore suggests that authenticity, like many
other character ideals, carries with it an obligation to contribute to
the maintenance and well-being of a particular type of social
organization and way of life (Guignon 2008: 288; 2004: 161). On the
other hand, Guignon (2004, 2008) argues that in a democratic society,
in which the authority of government--in setting the political
course--stems from the consent of the governed, there is good
reason to promote virtues like authenticity that sustain such an
organization of government. To be authentic is to be clear about
one's own most basic feelings, desires and convictions, and to
openly express one's stance in the public arena. But that
capacity is precisely the character trait that is needed in order to
be an effective member of a democratic society (Guignon 2008:
288).



Varga (2011a) shares the fundamental assumption that authenticity has
a certain potential (and therefore deserves to be reformulated), but
he also thinks that it could be used for a critical inquiry into the
practices of the self in contemporary life. By way of an analysis of
self-help and self-management literature, Varga detects a
"paradoxical transformation:" the ideal of authenticity
that once provided an antidote to hierarchical institutions and
requirements of capitalism, now seems to function both as an
institutionalized demand towards subjects to match the systemic
demands of contemporary capitalism and as a factor in the economic
utilization of subjective capacities. Varga argues that it is in
"existential" choices that we express who we are, and that
these have a complex phenomenology characterized by a sense of
necessity. In such choices, described as "alternativeless
choices", we articulate who we are, bringing into reality some
tacit intuitions that often only take on a gestalt-like formation. In
these cases, we both discover who we are "on the inside",
and actively constitute ourselves. Varga's examination of the
structure of our commitments culminates in the claim that the internal
structure of our commitments commits us to more than what we happen to
care about. In many cases it may actually commit us to publicly
intelligible values that we take our commitments to embody--an
aspect that may constrain the manner of our practical deliberation and
the way in which we can pursue our commitments (Varga 2011a,b).



Along similar lines, Bauer (2017) defends authenticity as an ethical
ideal, arguing that the ideal should understood as the combination of
the ideal of expressing one's individual personality and the
ideal of being an autonomous and morally responsible person. Others
have argued that authenticity might require more than living in accord
with commitments that one wholeheartedly endorses. For example, Rings
(2017) highlights an epistemic criterion. The point is that the
commitments in question have to be chosen in light of an
acknowledgment of facts concerning one's personal history and
present context. Thus, self-knowledge might matter more than hitherto
recognized, even if the self-relation most pertinent to authenticity
is not primarily of an epistemic nature.