Authenticity (philosophy)

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Romantic thinkers emphasized intuition, emotion, and a return to nature as responses to Enlightenment rationalism, anticipating later philosophical concerns with authenticity and individual self-expression. In the 20th century, Anglo–American preoccupations with authenticity centered on the writings of existentialist philosophers whose native tongue is not English; therefore, the faithful, true, and accurate translation of the term existentialism was much debated, to which end the philosopher Walter Kaufmann assembled a canon of existentialist philosophers. Kaufmann's canon includes the Dane Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the German Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). For these existentialists, the conscious Self comes to terms with existence (being and living) in an absurd, materialist world featuring external forces, e.g. Geworfenheit (Thrown-ness), and intellectual influences different from and other than the Self.

Personal authenticity is exhibited in how a person acts and changes in response to the external world's influences upon the Self. Among artists, authenticity in art describes a work of art faithful to the artist's values. In the field of psychology, authenticity identifies a person living life in accordance with their true Self and personal values rather than according to the external demands of society, such as social conventions, kinship, and duty.

To identify, describe, and define authenticity, existential philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger investigated the existential and ontological significance of the social constructs that compose the norms of society. For a journalist, not blindly accepting social norms contributes to producing intellectually authentic reportage, achieved by the reporter choosing to be true to their professional ethics and personal values. Yet, in the praxis of journalism, the reporter’s authenticity (professional and personal) is continually contradicted by the business requirements of corporate publishing.

Existential perspectives

Søren Kierkegaard

According to Søren Kierkegaard, personal authenticity depends upon inwardness and the individual’s subjective relationship to truth, particularly in matters of faith. Kierkegaard criticizes the conformity of “the crowd” and the levelling effects of modern society, arguing that individuals often lose themselves in public opinion rather than taking responsibility for their own existence. In Practice in Christianity (1850), he emphasizes that authentic faith requires the individual to stand alone before God, accepting the risks and responsibilities of personal commitment rather than relying on social convention or institutional religion. He writes:

Therefore, it is a risk to preach, for as I go up into that holy place — whether the church is packed or as good as empty, whether I, myself, am aware of it or not, I have one listener more than can be seen, an invisible listener, God in heaven, whom I certainly cannot see, but who truly can see me.... Truly, it is a risk to preach! Most people, no doubt, have the idea that stepping out on the stage as an actor to venture into the danger of having all eyes focused on one requires courage. Yet, in one sense, this danger, like everything on the stage, is an illusion because the actor, of course, is personally outside it all; his task is precisely to deceive, to dissemble, to represent someone else, and to reproduce, accurately, someone else’s words. On the other hand, the proclaimer of Christian truth steps forward into a place where, even if the eyes of all are not focused on him, the eye of an omniscient one is. His task is: to be himself, and in a setting, God’s house, which, all eyes and ears, requires only one thing of him — that he should be himself, be true. That he should be accurate, that is, that he, himself, should be what he proclaims [to be], or at least strive to be that, or at least be honest enough to confess, about himself, that he is not that.... How risky it is to be the I who preaches, the one speaking, an I who, by preaching and as he preaches, commits himself unconditionally, displays his life so that, if possible, one could look directly into his soul — to be this I, that is risky!

— Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity (1850) pp. 234–235

Friedrich Nietzsche

Personal authenticity can be achieved—without religion, which requires accepting pre-determined virtues (eternal valuations) as unquestionably true. In living authentically, a person elevates himself/herself above the mass culture to transcend the limits of conventional morality, thereby personally determining what is and what is not good and bad, without the pre-determined virtues of conformity “on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem”. An authentic life is achieved by avoiding the “herding animal morality”. To “stand alone [is to be] strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvaluate and invert ‘eternal valuations’”. Common to the existential perspectives of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are “the responsibilities they place on the individual to take an active part in the shaping of one’s beliefs, and then to be willing to act on that belief”.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It is difficult to describe authenticity intelligibly. One possibility is to describe instead the negative space surrounding the condition of being inauthentic by giving examples. To that end, the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre make authenticity conceptually intelligible through the stories of anti-heroic characters, people who base their actions upon external, psychological pressures — such as the social pressure to appear to be a certain kind of person; the pressure to adopt a given way of life; and the pressure to prostitute personal integrity (moral values and aesthetic standards) in exchange for the comfort (physical, mental, and moral) of social conformity. The novelist Sartre explains existential philosophy through characters who do not understand their reasoning for acting as they do—people who ignore crucial facts about their own lives to avoid learning about being an inauthentic person with an identity defined from outside the self.

Absolute freedom is the vertiginous experience necessary for being authentic, yet such freedom can be so unpleasant as to impel people to choose an inauthentic life. As an aspect of authenticity, absolute freedom determines a person’s relation with the real world, a relation not based upon or determined by a system of values or an ideology. In this manner, authenticity is connected with creativity, and the will to act must be born of the actor. In that vein, Heidegger speaks of absolute freedom as modes of living determined by personal choice. Sartre identified, described, and explained what is an inauthentic existence, not to define what is an authentic mode of living.

Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm proposed a very different definition of authenticity in the mid-twentieth century. He considered behavior of any kind, even that wholly in accord with societal mores, to be authentic if it results from personal understanding and approval of its drives and origins, rather than merely from conformity with the received wisdom of the society. Thus, a Frommean authentic may behave consistently in accord with cultural norms, if those norms appear on consideration to be appropriate, rather than simply in the interest of conforming with current norms. Fromm thus considers authenticity to be a positive outcome of enlightened and informed motivation, rather than a negative outcome of rejection of the expectations of others. He described the latter condition – the drive primarily to escape external restraints typified by the "absolute freedom" of Sartre – as "the illusion of individuality", as opposed to the genuine individuality that results from authentic living.