Authenticity

The problem it answers

What does it mean to be genuinely oneself, as opposed to being a function of one's social role, inherited expectations, or anxious conformity to what others think? The question is recognizable in many traditions, but the existentialist tradition gave it a distinctive formulation and made it the central category of mid-twentieth-century moral philosophy. The category is authenticity (German Eigentlichkeit; French authenticité); the contrasting condition is variously called inauthenticity, bad faith, the fall into the they, or the aesthetic mode of existence.

The doctrine of authenticity arose against a specific intellectual and cultural background. The Hegelian system had treated the individual as a moment of larger collective and historical processes; the social sciences of the nineteenth century had increasingly analyzed human behavior in terms of social roles, class position, and cultural patterns. The existentialist response was that something essential is missed by such analyses: the particular existing individual is not simply a function of these external categories, and the recognition of this fact — of one's own freedom, finitude, and responsibility — is the precondition for any genuinely human life.

The core claim

The core claim has three parts.

There is a distinction between being oneself and being a function of one's circumstances. The distinction is not metaphysical (humans do not have an essential core independent of their circumstances) but existential: a person can either take up their freedom, finitude, and responsibility consciously, or flee from them into roles, expectations, and anxious conformity.

Inauthenticity is the default condition. Most of us, most of the time, are inauthentic in the existentialist sense — we live as one is expected to live, in the categories given by the surrounding culture, with our deepest possibilities (especially the possibility of death) screened from view. Inauthenticity is not malicious; it is the comfortable, anxious, ordinary mode of existence.

Authenticity is an achievement, not a state. Becoming authentic is not a once-and-for-all transition; it is an ongoing project of confronting what one would prefer to avoid (especially anxiety, finitude, and the demands of one's own freedom) and choosing from that confrontation rather than fleeing it. Authenticity is therefore not a property one has but a way of taking up one's existence that must be continually renewed.

History in one paragraph

The central doctrine has nineteenth-century roots in Kierkegaard's account of the existing individual and the three stages of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious), where the movement from one stage to another requires the leap of authentic choice. Nietzsche's critique of the herd and his analysis of the last man presented a related (though differently articulated) contrast between authentic and inauthentic modes of existence. The doctrine receives its most systematic philosophical articulation in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), where the analysis of Dasein (the human being as the being for whom being is an issue) is organized around the distinction between authentic (eigentlich) and inauthentic (uneigentlich) modes of existence. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) develops the related concept of bad faith (mauvaise foi) as the inauthentic mode in which consciousness flees its freedom by identifying with its facticity (its role, its body, its given situation) or by fleeing facticity altogether. Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949) developed the doctrine in directions that emphasized its social and gendered dimensions. The doctrine has had wide cultural reception beyond academic philosophy; the popular discourse about being authentic and finding oneself that pervades contemporary self-help and ordinary moral talk is recognizably existentialist in origin. The contemporary philosophical literature engages authenticity both in continuing the existentialist tradition (Charles Guignon's On Being Authentic, 2004; Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity, 1991) and in critical engagement with it (the various postmodern and communitarian critiques).

Heideggerian authenticity

Martin Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time (1927) is the most systematic philosophical articulation. The human being (which Heidegger calls Dasein) is structurally either authentic or inauthentic in its relation to its own being. Inauthentic Dasein lives in the mode of das Man (the They in standard English translations): it does what one does, thinks what one thinks, dies in the way one dies. Its possibilities are pre-arranged by the surrounding culture; its anxiety in the face of finitude is screened by the busy-ness of everyday concern.

Authenticity is the condition in which Dasein takes up its own possibilities as its own. The crucial precondition is the recognition of being-toward-death — the acknowledgment that Dasein is fundamentally a finite, mortal being whose possibilities are bounded by death. The authentic existence is not a matter of having different external circumstances but of taking up the same circumstances differently — from one's own freedom and recognition of finitude rather than from anxious flight into the comfortable certainties of das Man.

Sartrean bad faith

Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) develops the inauthentic mode under the heading of bad faith (mauvaise foi). Consciousness, on Sartre's analysis, is structurally a for-itself (a free, self-aware activity) that is also necessarily situated (a facticity — a body, a history, a context). Bad faith is the mode in which consciousness flees the tension between freedom and facticity by treating itself as only the one or only the other: identifying entirely with its role (the waiter who is nothing but a waiter) or fleeing its situation entirely into pure self-creation.

The famous examples in Being and Nothingness (the waiter who plays at being a waiter; the woman on a date who pretends to herself she does not understand the man's intentions) illustrate the structure. Bad faith is not lying to others (which is straightforward deception); it is the more difficult condition of lying to oneself in a way that requires both knowing and not knowing the same thing simultaneously.

The positive contrast — authenticity — would be the consciousness that lives in the tension between freedom and facticity without fleeing into either. Sartre is less systematic about the positive ideal than about the negative diagnosis, and the relation between his ontological analysis and his ethical recommendations has been continuously debated.

Common confusions

Authenticity is not the same as honesty or sincerity. Honesty is the disposition not to deceive others; sincerity is the alignment between what one says and what one feels. Authenticity is a more structural condition: the right relation to one's own freedom, finitude, and responsibility, regardless of whether the content of one's statements is honest or sincere. A sincere person may be deeply inauthentic.

Authenticity is not self-expression. The popular discourse about being yourself often treats authenticity as the unobstructed expression of one's preferences and feelings. The existentialist concept is more demanding: authenticity is not the expression of a pre-existing self but the achievement of a particular relation to one's existence, which requires confrontation with what one would prefer to avoid.

Authenticity is not individualism. Some readings of existentialism have treated the doctrine as licensing radical individualism (do what you want, regardless of others). The serious existentialist tradition (especially through Heidegger's account of Mitsein — being-with-others — and Beauvoir's ethical work) holds that authentic existence is necessarily socially situated and that authentic relations with others are constitutive of authentic existence.

Live debates

The contemporary critique. Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) defends a sophisticated version of the doctrine against postmodern and communitarian critiques that treat authenticity as either incoherent (because there is no self to be authentic to) or as a recipe for narcissistic self-absorption. The contemporary literature continues to engage these questions.

The political-feminist development. Beauvoir's extension of the doctrine to questions of gender (The Second Sex), and subsequent feminist engagement with authenticity in the work of Iris Marion Young and others, has developed the existentialist framework in directions that emphasize the structural and political conditions of authentic existence.

The relation to virtue ethics. Some contemporary virtue ethicists (especially MacIntyre and his successors) have argued that the existentialist account of authenticity is parasitic on richer traditional frameworks of virtue, which it implicitly assumes while explicitly rejecting. Defenders of authenticity have responded that the doctrine adds something the virtue tradition lacks: an explicit recognition of the freedom and finitude that traditional virtue ethics tends to take for granted.

Contemporary engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Charles Guignon's On Being Authentic (2004), Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) and Sources of the Self (1989), Jacob Golomb's In Search of Authenticity (1995), Stephen Mulhall's Heidegger and Being and Time (1996), and Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café (2016) for general audiences. The contemporary phenomenological literature (especially the work of Dan Zahavi, Shaun Gallagher, and Hubert Dreyfus) continues to engage authenticity as a structural feature of human existence. The Heidegger conferences and the Continental Philosophy Review document continuing engagement.

Further reading

• Existentialism — the tradition
• Kierkegaard — the religious-existentialist source
• Nietzsche — the related nineteenth-century critique of the herd
• Belief Systems — the structure authenticity addresses through critical engagement
• Free Will — the metaphysical condition authenticity presupposes
• Fear and Trembling — the Kierkegaardian text where the doctrine takes early form

This is a Pillar concept. Satellite concepts should link here as their parent.