Authenticity

Living from commitments one actually owns, rather than from those absorbed unexamined from everyone else.

Theme: Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition: Continental
Term: Eigentlichkeit
Term fixed: 1927

In plain terms

Most of what anyone does is done because it is what one does. You hold opinions you never chose, want things because they are wanted, and live a shape of life that arrived already assembled.

That is not a criticism - it is the normal condition, and no one could examine everything. Authenticity is the name for the alternative: taking hold of some of it, and living from commitments you have actually made rather than inherited.

What it is not is being true to an inner self that was there all along. On the accounts that take the term seriously there is no such self waiting to be expressed. There is only what you do, and the question is whether you own it - which makes authenticity an achievement rather than a discovery, and a repeatable one rather than a state you reach.

As a philosopher would put it

Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit is opposed to das Man, the impersonal they that dictates what one does; falling into it is the everyday condition rather than a failure, and authenticity is a modification of it rather than an escape. Anxiety and being-toward-death are what individuate, by making the borrowed shape of a life show up as borrowed.

Sartre's bad faith is the counterpart concept and sharper. It is the flight from freedom by pretending to be a thing with a fixed nature - the waiter who is playing at being a waiter, the person who says they cannot when they mean they will not. Since there is no essence to be true to, authenticity cannot mean expressing one, only owning the choosing.

Kierkegaard supplies the ancestor: the crowd is untruth, and becoming a self requires a passionate relation to one's own existence. Beauvoir extends the analysis to situations where the options are constrained by others, which raises the question the tradition handles worst - whether authenticity is available to people whose circumstances are chosen for them.

Where you meet it

From the 1970s a movement in classical music proposed to perform early works as they would have sounded: period instruments, original tunings, historical bowing, no vibrato, small forces. It was called the authentic performance movement, and its recordings displaced the older style commercially and critically.

In 1988 Richard Taruskin published an essay arguing that the whole thing was a modernist invention. The clean, brisk, unsentimental sound the movement produced was not the eighteenth century recovered but the twentieth century's own taste - Stravinskian, objective, anti-Romantic - projected backwards and given a historical warrant it did not have.

The movement largely conceded the label and dropped it; the term of art is now historically informed performance. The music did not change and the practices did not stop being valuable. What collapsed was the claim that they were more authentic, once it became clear that the standard being met was a contemporary one wearing period dress - which is the difficulty the concept has in every field it enters.

What is actually disputed

Whether authenticity is a coherent standard.

If there is no fixed self to be true to, then the word has no obvious content: any choice is as much yours as any other, and the distinction between owned and unowned collapses. Sartre's answer is that it is about the mode of choosing rather than the content, which critics find too thin to guide anything.

Adorno's objection is political. In The Jargon of Authenticity he argues that the vocabulary functions as a style - a way of sounding profound that flatters the speaker and dissolves social questions into personal ones. The related worry is that in practice authenticity has become an idiom of consumption, where being yourself is something purchased. And Beauvoir's problem remains: an ideal that asks people to own their choices says little to those whose choices are made elsewhere.

Commonly confused with

being true to yourself This assumes an inner self that already exists. On the accounts that gave the term its meaning there is no such thing, and the work is in the owning rather than the expressing.
authenticity in heritage or marketing There it means genuine rather than fake - a matter of provenance. The philosophical term is about a relation to one's own life and is not a property an object can have.

Defined against

Alienation Both name a distance between a person and their life, and each tradition treats the other's diagnosis as too individual or too social

Philosophers

Martin Heidegger Ownedness against the anonymous they
Jean-Paul Sartre Bad faith, and the impossibility of being true to an essence
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard The crowd as untruth, and becoming a self
Simone de Beauvoir Authenticity under conditions one did not choose
Friedrich Nietzsche Becoming what one is, without an inner self to uncover

Works

Being and Time Where the concept is set out
Being and Nothingness Bad faith, and its examples
Concluding Unscientific Postscript Subjectivity as the site of truth
The Second Sex The problem of authenticity in a constrained situation
On the Genealogy of Morals The suspicion that self-knowledge is itself a construction

Schools

Existentialism Where the term does its main work
Phenomenology Where it is formulated
Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where it is attacked as an ideology
Lebensphilosophie Where the ancestor notions are found

Related concepts

Self 1694 · Free will c. 397 · Agency c. 340 BC · Responsibility c. 340 BC · Alienation 1844

Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit is built from eigen, own, and means owned rather than genuine; the English word imports connotations of sincerity and originality that the German does not carry.