Authenticity (philosophy)

Authenticity is a philosophical concept that denotes the genuine, original, true state of human existence. The concept arises from the insights that human beings generally live or exist in inauthentic way and the genuine self and one's genuine relationships with others (God and/or other people) are lost. The authentic life is often described as a life of freedom, joy, meaning, value, happiness.

Religious traditions generally contain the insights for authenticity. They have teachings to restore authentic self and society. In philosophy, the concept has also been discussed by many thinkers throughout philosophical history, and it was thematised by Existentialists. From their perspective, social relationships, cultural values and norms are generally inauthentic and the attempt of discovering the authentic self requires radical reexamination of and even transcendence from the whole cultural contexts and habitual life style and ways of thinking.

Religious perspective

Religions traditions generally have a concept of authenticity. Based upon the insight that human beings are vulnerable to various temptations, religions offer teachings, practical methodologies, rituals, trainings, institutionalized mechanism, and other ways to allow human beings to recover authentic self and life. The concept of salvation, for example, is build upon the idea that there is some authentic state of being.

The concept of authenticity can be applied to almost all key concepts in religious teachings. It functions as the concept to distinguish religious ideals from secular notions. For example, religious teachings often distinguish genuine happiness, which is built upon spiritual awakening or oneness with the divine or some other spiritual elements, from secular happiness built upon material wealth and secular values alone. Genuine joy is also distinguished from hedonistic pleasure in pejorative sense. Even genuine love is distinguished from secular notion of love. Authenticity thus separates and establishes the religious realm or the sacred realm in sharp contrast with mundane or secular realm.

Religious teachings are, in a sense, attempts to present authenticity to the world, thereby the world is distinguished into the sacred and the secular. Religious teachings are in this sense radically challenges to people who otherwise live as they are without even questioning the way they live.

Philosophical perspectives

The concept of authenticity has been discussed in diverse ways throughout philosophical history. For example, Socrates's such dictum as "Unexamined life is not worth living," "Know yourself," can be seen as his attempt of leading others to the discovery of the authentic self and way of life. Kierkegaard found the loss of the genuine self in the mass in society and tried to present the process of recovering the authenticity within theistic contexts. Other existential thinkers such as Nietzsche, Pascal, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Sartre equally discussed the issue of authenticity and developed various ways to deal with the issue.

The term "eigentlich" (authentic) in German contains the element of "eigen" (one's own). Authenticity, thus, includes the element of "one's own unique self." Accordingly, recovery of authenticity, at least in German, implies the recovery of one's own unique identity. When existential thinkers speak of authenticity, they often include this element and contrast the unique self against the concept of mass, in which individual is no more than just a number.

General characteristics

If authenticity can only be described in very abstract terms, or as the negative of inauthenticity, what can be said about it directly? All writers generally agree that authenticity is:

• Something to be pursued as a goal intrinsic to "the good life."
• Intrinsically difficult, due in part to social pressures to live inauthentically, and in part due to a person's own character.
• A revelatory state, where one perceives oneself, other people, and sometimes even things, in a radically new way.

One might add that many, though not all, writers have agreed that authenticity also:

• Requires self-knowledge.
• Alters radically one's relationships with others (God and/or people).
• Carries with it its own set of moral obligations.

The notion of authenticity also fits in to utopian ideas, in as much as many believe that a utopia:

• Requires authenticity among its citizens to exist, or
• Would remove physical and economic barriers to pursuing authenticity.

Culture and authenticity

Secular and religious notions of authenticity have coexisted for centuries under different guises. For these writers, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces and influences which are very different from itself; authenticity is one way in which the self acts and changes in response to these pressures.

Authenticity is often "at the limits" of language; it is described as the negative space around inauthenticity, with reference to examples of inauthentic living. Sartre's novels are perhaps the easiest access to this mode of describing authenticity: they often contain characters and anti-heroes who base their actions on external pressures—the pressure to appear to be a certain kind of person, the pressure to adopt a particular mode of living, the pressure to ignore one's own moral and aesthetic objections in order to have a more comfortable existence. His work also includes characters who do not understand their own reasons for acting, or who ignore crucial facts about their own lives in order to avoid uncomfortable truths; this connects his work with the philosophical tradition.

Sartre is concerned also with the "vertiginous" experience of absolute freedom. Under Sartre's view, this experience, necessary for the state of authenticity, can be sufficiently unpleasant that it leads people to inauthentic ways of living.

Authenticity and critique to modern cultures

In all writers, authenticity is seen as a very general concept, not attached to any particular political or aesthetic ideology. This is a necessary aspect of authenticity: because it concerns a person's relation with the world, it can not be arrived at by simply repeating a set of actions or taking up a set of positions. In this manner, authenticity is connected with creativity: the impetus to action must arise from the person in question, and not be externally imposed. Heidegger takes this notion to the extreme, by speaking in very abstract terms about modes of living; his terminology was adopted and simplified by Sartre in his philosophical works. Kierkegaard's work (such as the "Panegyric Upon Abraham" from his Fear and Trembling) often focuses on biblical stories which are (naturally) not directly imitatable. Sartre, as has been noted above, focused on inauthentic existence as a way to avoid the paradoxical problem of appearing to provide prescriptions for a mode of living that rejects external dictates.

These considerations aside, it is the case that authenticity has been associated with various human activities. For Sartre, Jazz music was a representation of freedom; this may have been in part because Jazz was associated with African-American culture, and was thus in opposition to Western culture generally, which Sartre considered hopelessly inauthentic. Theodor Adorno, however, another writer and philosopher concerned with the notion of authenticity, despised Jazz music because he saw it as a false representation that could give the appearance of authenticity but that was as much bound up in concerns with appearance and audience as many other forms of art. Heidegger in his later life associated authenticity with non-technological modes of existence, seeing technology as distorting a more "authentic" relationship with the natural world.

Most writers on inauthenticity in the twentieth century considered the predominant cultural norms to be inauthentic; not only because they were seen as forced on people, but also because, in themselves, they required people to behave inauthentically towards their own desires, obscuring true reasons for acting. Advertising, in as much as it attempted to give people a reason for doing something that they did not already possess, was a "textbook" example of how Western culture distorted the individual for external reasons. Race relations are seen as another limit on authenticity, as they demand that the self engage with others on the basis of external attributes. An early example of the connection between inauthenticity and capitalism was made by Karl Marx, whose notion of "alienation" can be linked to the later discourse on the nature of inauthenticity.

Criticisms of authenticity

Authenticity has its paradoxical components. Sartre illustrated these in his extensive writings, pointing to the conflict between seeing the self as unique and different from the world, but the self is embedded in a world which clearly contains other such beings.

Stated as a doctrine authenticity can be thought to be self-defeating. This is because it is thereby classified and becomes part of the non-self, an object of perhaps methodical study among others. This is opposed to the notion of the individual self which seeks its own solution independently of competing external ideologies.

Another criticism is that the solution to Sartre's difficulties involves some compromise to allow unique individuals to co-exist in a way which is acceptable to all of them. Therefore public ethics or morality may be a limit on authenticity.

Because authenticity is such a slippery concept, and because it can never be rigorously defined, it can be seen as a threat to rationality or to Enlightenment ideas about the transparency of laws.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Lionel Trilling Sincerity and Authenticity; ISBN 0-192-81166-5; Harvard UP 1974
• Charles Taylor The Ethics of Authenticity; ISBN 0-674-26863-6; Harvard UP 1992
• Walter Kaufmann, whose life increasingly focused on a search for authenticity.
• Authentic Business is a non-profit British online community exploring doing business with purpose
• Stagisblog is a blog run by communication consultants discussing the paradoxial idea of the 'authentic organizational identity'

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