Guignon - Authenticity

2008 The Author
Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Philosophy Compass 3/2 (2008): 277290, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00131.x
Authenticity
Charles Guignon*
University of South Florida
Abstract
This article discusses the ordinary, the existentialist, and the virtue-ethics senses
of the word authenticity. The term authentic in ordinary usage suggests the
idea of being original or faithful to an original, and its application implies being
true to what someone (or something) truly is. It is important to see, however,
that the philosopher who put this technical term on the map in existentialism,
Martin Heidegger, used the word to refer to the human capacity to be fully
human, not to being true to ones unique inner nature. Authenticity might also
be thought of as a virtue, and interesting questions arise whether such a virtue
should be regarded primarily as a personal or as a social virtue.
The Ordinary Conception of Authenticity
The terms authentic and inauthentic are widely used in humanistic and
existential psychotherapy theory writings to refer to optimal or deficient
ways of living. In philosophy, the use of the term authenticity seems to
be restricted to two primary contexts. First, it is used in existentialist
writings, especially those influenced by Heidegger, to refer to an ideal way
of life characterized by such traits as integrity, intensity, lucidity, coherence,
and honesty. Second, it can be used as a term that finds its natural home
in the area of virtue ethics. It is this second use that Bernard Williams has
in mind when he says, If there is one theme in all my work its about
authenticity and self-expression. Its the idea that some things are in some
real sense really you, or express what you are, and others arent (qtd. in
Jeffries 4). A conception of authenticity as a virtue is also found in
Alexander Nehamass Virtues of Authenticity and Charles Taylors The Ethics
of Authenticity.
A survey of the virtue ethics literature suggests that very little has been
written about authenticity in that area. I will return to this topic at the
end of this article. Before turning to Heidegger and virtue ethics, however,
it will be helpful to reflect on the ordinary use of the term authenticity.
All uses of the notion of authenticity in philosophy rely on the core
meaning of the word authentic, which is original or faithful to an
original. To say that something is authentic, according to the Oxford
English Dictionary, is to say that it is what it professes to be, or what it is
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2008 The Author Philosophy Compass 3/2 (2008): 277290, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00131.x
reputed to be, in origin or authorship. So, for example, to say that a
painting is an authentic Rubens is to say that it was (largely) painted by
Rubens, that it came from his hand, in contrast to forgeries, fakes, imitations,
mechanical reproductions, and so forth. Similarly, an authentic perform-
ance of Pachelbels Canon is a performance using instruments, tempo and
stylistic techniques of the sort Pachelbel himself most likely had in mind
when he composed this work. Questions about the authenticity of texts
and artworks can become pressing when issues of preservation or of the
authority of original words are at issue. But even where such issues are
absent, it is commonly assumed that authentic works and performances
are inherently superior to imitations, simulacra, counterfeits, and other
items that might be passed off as originals.
The core meaning of authenticity helps clarify the uses of this term
of interest to psychologists and philosophers. To say that a person is
authentic is to say that his or her actions truly express what lies at their
origin, that is, the dispositions, feelings, desires, and convictions that
motivate them. Built into this conception of authenticity is a distinction
between what is really going on within me the emotions, core beliefs,
and bedrock desires that make me the person I am and the outer
avowals and actions that make up my being in the public world.
We commonly suppose that authenticity has a considerable value even
if it does not produce such extrinsic goods as wealth, fame, or pleasure.
Rousseau, for example, attributed the value of authenticity to its role in
giving us access to an inner moral voice of conscience, an intuitive feeling
or sentiment that gives us moral guidance as to how we should act. But
we also see authenticity as valuable because we believe that each individual
has a distinctive potential for development built into his or her nature
from birth, a calling or fate that he or she ought to realize. Charles
Taylor points out that this ideal of being true to what one is in potentia
was formulated by Herder when he claimed that each human being has
an original way of being human, a way of being that is distinctively his
or her own.
There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to
live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone elses. But this gives a
new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my
life, I miss what being human is for me. (Ethics of Authenticity 289)
In his classic work, Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling suggests that
the ideal of authenticity is a relatively new notion in Western civilization,
dating back only a couple of centuries. On Trillings account, authenticity
as a character ideal can arise only when there is a widespread sense that
social existence is something alien to our true being as humans. This
negative estimation of social existence is evident in the various social
contract theories that sprang up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Contractual theories of social life tend to assume that society is an artificial
Authenticity 279
construct, a mechanical and ultimately inhuman aggregation of initially
separate individuals. Such a conception of social existence goes hand in
hand with what Robert Bellah and his colleagues have called ontological
individualism, the belief that at the most basic level humans are discrete
individuals, with the corollary that all relations to others must be human
constructions and therefore artificial or unnatural. The idea that social
existence is an imposition led many of the Romantics of the nineteenth
century to seek meaningfulness and an experience of a deeper kind of
connectedness through self-reflection rather than through the relationships
of the social domain. For Trilling, the modern notion of authenticity
suggests a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of
life and a wider reference to the cosmos and our place in it (11). For this
distinctively modern conception of authenticity, the source of meaning-
fulness and intelligibility lies not in an independently existing order of
reality, such as the divine logos or Platonic Ideas, but rather in the subjective
inner life of the individual.
The conception of the self as a self-encapsulated individual with its own
inner resources and depths makes the modern idea of authenticity signif-
icantly different from earlier ideals that in other respects seem the same.
Certainly Socrates and St. Augustine, among other premodern thinkers,
had a vivid sense of the importance of self-knowledge and a commitment
to being true to oneself in what one says and does. But they lacked the
experience of the self as a bounded center of experience and action with
no defining connections to anything distinct from itself. The older ideal
of being true to oneself was bound up with a concern to manifest in
all ones actions ones defining commitment to God, to the principles
of rationality, to the cosmic order, or to some other transpersonal or
transcendent source of direction. Our modern ideal of authenticity, in
contrast, sees the only authoritative source of guidance as located within
ourselves.
We just noted that the ideal of authenticity first emerged as part of an
attempt to lay a foundation for a moral stance that is more authoritative
and better grounded than the tendency to follow the crowd and be a team
player that dominates so much of everyday existence. As we grow up into
the public world, we come to absorb the patterns of action and styles of
response that are deemed proper by our cultural context. We are initially
and for the most part conformists, internalizing social norms as a sort of
second nature, and then going with the flow in our actions in the world.
Certainly, relegating large parts of our lives to habit is for the most part
harmless. Yet such a life can come to seem inauthentic, for in simply
enacting socially approved modes of behavior, our actions spring not from
our own choices and motivations but from the trends and fads of the
surrounding world. When we live in terms of public norms and standards,
we are not the origins of our own deeds, and so our agency in the world
is unowned, not really ours. It is a reflection of what others expect from
280 Authenticity
us, and it therefore manifests our dependency on others and our failure
to take responsibility for our own lives.
The initial impetus toward the ideal of authenticity arose, then, from
moral concerns. What was at stake was becoming a moral agent in the
fullest and richest sense of that term. As Trilling and others have noted,
however, this initial moral concern came to be compromised as the ideal
of authenticity evolved over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This
evolution is easily understood in retrospect. First, the stance of suspicion
toward the social that accompanied the rise of authenticity shifted the
conception of the ideal life from achieving independence from the crowd
to a stance of active conflict with the bourgeoisie. This is evident in what
comes to appear as the paradigm of the authentic individual: the artist.
The artist, Trilling says, ceases to be the craftsman or the performer,
dependent upon the approval of the audience. Now the artist is con-
cerned only with him or herself. We rightly speak of this change as a
revolution. And having done so, it seems natural to connect it with social
revolution: down goes the audience, up comes the artist (97). The aim
of the artist is to slap the bourgeois in the face, and the more quickly the
bourgeoisie co-opt and embrace this rough treatment, the harder and
faster the artist works to be outrageous in order to produce authentic art.
The outcome is an art scene where authentic works of art, intentionally
baffling, shocking or even disgusting, are regarded as valuable because they
have originated in the artists autonomous impulses and because they offer
the bourgeoisie a glimpse into authenticity attainable in no other way.
A second path of development in modern times, examined in detail in
On Being Authentic, runs from the placid assurance that human beings are
fundamentally good at heart, their natures having been distorted only by
socialization, to the recognition that all of us have dark and brutal
instincts, products of our evolution from more primitive life-forms, that
make us capable of unimaginable cruelty and evil. What becomes evident
by the end of the nineteenth century and is intensified through two world
wars is the magnitude of the capacity for aggression and hostility we all
have within us. Freud sums up this recognition of our shared death
instinct in the ominous phrase, Homo homini lupus: Man is a wolf to man
(qtd. in Guignon, On Being Authentic 1012). The discovery of the heart
of darkness that lies within us all transforms the notion of authenticity
from a moral ideal to a deeply unsettling injunction to let it all hang out,
to get it all out front, openly displaying the rage and aggression we bear
within us. To be authentic, it now appears, is to be able to vent the
feelings and desires lying within the darkest recesses of the soul.
This evolution in the concept of authenticity creates a deep tension in
the project of being authentic.
1
On the one hand, the character ideal of
authenticity is seen as offering a replacement for the now-lost access to a
timeless, objective, universally binding source of guidance in dealing with
moral questions. Being authentic was supposed to provide us with dependable
Authenticity 281
insights into how we should act as moral agents in situations that pose
difficult ethical challenges. It counsels you to be yourself , to do what
feels right, or to follow your conscience, and it assumes that our inner
feelings and inclinations will provide us with guidance in a godless world.
On the other hand, there is the growing recognition that the inner self,
far from being a totally loving and altruistic being, is endowed with a
capacity for cruelty, hostility, and aggression that is as much a part of our
original nature as are the morally acceptable inclinations we commend.
Given this truth about our nature, genuine authenticity comes to be seen
as a matter of giving uninhibited expression to these tendencies, and
this means rejecting the sorts of making nice and common courtesy of
so-called polite society. This is why we often take as our models of
authenticity gangsta rappers and slam poets who are not afraid to get in
your face and call you on your shit, and it shows why we can feel
repulsed by the sappy behavior of self-righteous do gooders and people
pleasers.
Heidegger on Being Authentic
Though the word authenticity is seldom found in the writings of
nineteenth-century philosophers, the idea is clearly present in the works of
precursors of the twentieth-century movement we now call existentialism.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard intro-
duced the word existence to characterize individuals whose lives express
intensity and commitment to something of life-defining significance for
them. Kierkegaard also placed the greatest emphasis on inwardness and
infinite passion in living out ones life. Writing several decades later,
Nietzsche praised the individual whose life is characterized by intellectual
integrity, Dionysian intensity, and a willingness to break out of traditionally
defined boundaries in order to incorporate in oneself the whole of human
experience and capacities. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had an
immense impact on Heidegger, the philosopher whose writings brought
the term authenticity into common parlance, and Heideggers use of this
word in turn influenced Sartre and Beauvoir and, through them, the
entire existentialist tradition. All of these thinkers had distinctive concep-
tions of authenticity. For the purposes of this short discussion, I will
concentrate on the idea of authenticity as it appears in Heideggers
writings, in part because his account of authenticity is quite different from
the ordinary conception discussed in the first section.
Heidegger is an existentialist to the extent that he rejects the essentialist
view that there is a substantive human nature which determines in
advance the content and proper way to be human for all human beings.
Existentialists hold that there is no timeless Form of Humanity, no proper
function of Man or deterministic genetic code, that dictates the specific
sorts of traits making us human. Heideggers view is that, although all
282 Authenticity
possibilities for self-definition are taken from the cultural context in which
we are located, each of us takes up those possibilities and configures them
into the self-interpretations that define our own personal identity. Using
the German word for existence, Dasein, to refer to being human, Heidegger
says,
Only the particular Dasein decides its existence, whether it does so by taking
hold or neglecting. The question of existence [i.e., what determines our identity
or being as humans] never gets straightened out except through existing itself.
(BT 12)
2
For Heidegger, ones being is determined by what one makes of the
possibilities one finds in ones historical culture. In this sense, we are self-
making beings.
But even though Heidegger rejects the idea of determinate universal
properties common to all humans, he does claim that there are certain
structures of human existence that provide the framework or scaffolding
in which social possibilities of self-understanding can be incorporated
in forming a substantive identity. These structures are the conditions of
possibility that make any self-interpretations and cultural constructions
possible, so they underlie all ways of being human.
To see what these universal structures are, we must get an overview of
Heideggers account of human existence. The most important feature of
human beings, on this account, is that they care about their being. We are
distinctive among entities in that, for us, our being is at issue. To say that
our lives are at issue is to say that in our choices and actions at any time
we are always taking some stand on what we are, and this stand is crucial
to defining our being. In writing a philosophical essay, for example, I am
enacting the role of a philosopher, a role that comes to be realized in my
own case because I care about this socially available possibility of self-
definition. In enacting this and other roles, I am bringing to realization
the task of living out my life. Part of what defines my being, then, is the
way I comport myself toward the fulfillment of commitments that define
my identity in the world (BT 12). To say that my identity or being
consists in the projects I undertake is to say that I exist as a future-directed
happening or becoming, a being-toward the possibility of being, in this
case, a philosopher.
Being a projection toward the realization of possibilities is one compo-
nent of my potentiality-for-being as a human. Another crucial dimension
of this potentiality consists in my being embedded in a context of
concrete relationships that define in advance the range of possibilities that
are open to me. As Heidegger puts it, I find myself always already thrown
into a world in which things, other people, and the consequences of
past choices exert a counterthrust to my attempts to master my own
fate. This structural dimension of thrownness includes my entanglement
in life-situations that are recalcitrant to my control. This is why my project
Authenticity 283
of being a philosopher can be frustrated by obstacles and accidents arising
from all sides.
The description of Dasein as a thrown projection reveals the most funda-
mental underlying structure of human existence. Understood as unfolding
events, human beings display the structure of temporality, of human lived
time, that is the basic structural determinant of their being. Being human,
we are coming from somewhere in the sense that each of us has a set of
motivations that give us an orientation and a frame of reference. And we
are going somewhere in the sense that we are always engaged in projects
and commitments concerning what we hope to accomplish in our lives.
What Heidegger calls the movedness (Bewegtheit) of life consists in the
circular relationship that obtains between these two structures. On the one
hand, my possible projects and goals are made possible by what has come
to matter to me in my dealings with lifes affairs. On the other hand, the
eventualities that arise constantly compel me to reassess and revise my
understanding of the projects I am undertaking, thereby revising my sense
of what my life is all about. To be human is to live in the tension between
thrownness and projection.
Our existence as temporal happenings makes it possible for us to
disclose a world and to encounter entities within this world as being
such and such. We exist as a clearing or lighting in terms of which things
are lit up in determinate ways. This disclosedness or clearing is something
we do jointly as participants in a community: Heidegger says that our
existence is always a co-Dasein or being-with. To be a concrete case
or instance of Dasein, then, is to realize the structures of human being in
a particular form at a given time. So, in being a philosopher, I give some
form to the socially defined undertakings of philosophical activity.
Through this activity, I define the meaning (i.e., being) of the books,
pencils, laptop, and so forth that surround me, and I do so as a representative
of a community of practitioners. In this way, my existing manifests and
defines the structure of human temporality.
What this example shows is that concrete existing the actual business
of living out my life defines and realizes the underlying structure of
human being in a distinctive way. To be is to be an ability-to-be that is
made explicit in some way or other through ones actions. In terms of this
conception of possible ways of making the structure of human existence
concrete, Heidegger distinguishes two basic possibilities of living. A person
can simply drift with the crowd, doing what one does, while avoiding any
responsibility for his or her own contribution to the emergence of a
clearing. In that case, the persons life is inauthentic (uneigentlich, literally
unowned). Or the individual can clear-sightedly take over the task of
being a clearing by realizing the structure of lived time in his or her
actions in a way that is vivid, focused, steady, and intense. This second form
of life owns up to the structure of human lived time and truly realizes
what each of us is in potentiality. As owned, it is authentic (eigentlich).
284 Authenticity
An authentic life integrates and unifies the temporal structures of
thrownness and projection into what Heidegger calls being-a-whole (BT
2314). In order to explicate this conception of being a whole, Heidegger
proposes to examine the lived phenomenon of being-toward-death, which he
identifies as the ontologically constitutive state of Daseins potentiality-for-
being-a-whole (BT 234). But in Heideggers account, neither death nor
the idea of a whole can be understood in the ordinary way. When we
think of the whole of life, we naturally think of a life that reaches its
completion, one that has run its course from birth to death. However,
Heidegger points out that in treating the wholeness of human existence
as being-toward-death, he is not presupposing our ordinary idea of death
as reaching the end of a life and passing away. From the lived, existential
point of view that interests Heidegger, Death is a way of being, eine
Weise zu sein (BT 245); it is a mode of existing that we all enact in some
way or other as long as we are alive. On this view, death is not an event
that comes at the end of a life. Rather, as Heidegger says, death is only
in an existentiell being towards death [Sein zum Tode] (BT 234).
How are we to understand the sort of wholeness Heidegger envisions
here? The most natural reading of this notion would see the wholeness as
the completion of a life, as the termination of a story that comes with the
final event in the tale. We might call this sort of wholeness narrative
wholeness, since it focuses on the way a course of events comes out, that
is, its denouement, and it conceives of life as a story with a terminus ad
quem that it will reach some day. But Heidegger is explicit that this sort
of narrative wholeness is not what he has in mind when he speaks of
death. On the contrary, conceiving of death as a culminating event what
he calls demise would fall prey to Sartres criticism that, because death
always comes too soon or too late, it can never round out a life or impart
meaning to it.
3
A second sense of the wholeness of life might be called a telic conception,
because it pertains not to a terminating event, but to a projected ideal
(a telos) in which a person brings to realization the defining ideals of his
or her existence. Alasdair MacIntyre finds such a telic conception of the
wholeness of life in Aristotle, who takes the telos of human life to be a
certain kind of life; the telos is not something to be achieved at some future
point, but [is achieved] in the way our whole life in constructed (175).
Understood in this way, human existence is seen as reaching out toward
the realization of a configuration of possibilities it tries to realize in its
actions, a reaching out toward that is present even at those times when
it seems to be falling into discord and confusion. Thinking of life as
having a telos is not the same as comparing it to a path that leads to a
terminus. Instead, on a telic view, the wholeness of life is conceived as a
condition of integration and coherence that we might approximate from
time to time while striving to reach it all the time. It is because the proper
end of life is an ideal that we can either approach or miss during our
Authenticity 285
actual sojourn on earth that Aristotle would not be interested in deathbed
conversions and last-minute redemptions: This is why the notion of a
final redemption of an almost entirely unregenerate life has no place in
Aristotles scheme; the story of the thief on the cross is unintelligible in
Aristotelian terms (175). On a telic view, life is seen as an ongoing
project of moving from our everyday condition as agents in a public world
our normal falling into the distractions of the anyone-self toward
the realization of what is definitive of our humanity, the ability to fully
realize our ability-to-be through being a focused, clear-sighted, and
coherent thrown projection. The telic conception of wholeness can
convey a sense of both our limits and finitude (in recognizing that per-
fection may never be achievable) together with a life-defining sense of
purpose (in understanding what we should be shooting for).
Heidegger claims that we discover our capacity for being authentic
humans through the call of conscience. Conscience, understood in an
existential sense, makes us aware of the fact that we are guilty, where the
German word for guilt (Schuld) is heard in the sense of indebted,
owing, or coming up short. What is definitive of our existence is
a shortcoming of a particular sort. Our existence does not spring from a
ground that ensures it will lead to a proper goal, and it does not have a
pregiven end-state that will legitimate our lives if we can attain it. The
conception of guilt revealed by conscience points to the fact that we are
always self-making in the sense that we must start from where we find
ourselves and we must define our own version of the telos of life in our
own case. To say we are finite beings, on this account, is to say that, unlike
gods, we will probably always fall short of being what we always already
are in potentia.
Heideggers conception of authenticity shares with the ordinary view
the idea that there is an underlying origin we can and should be true to
for Heidegger, this is the temporal structure of human existence in
general. But it should be obvious that in other respects the Heideggerian
view is quite different from the ordinary conception. First, for Heidegger,
there is no substantive content we must attain in order to be true to our
origin. For, on his view, this origin is neither a concrete human essence,
as in traditional thought, nor is it a collection of personal feelings and
transient desires, as in Romanticism. All of us are moving toward realizing
the underlying structure of human existence, and we can do so either
authentically or inauthentically. But it would be wrong to think of
authenticity as a matter of being a unique kind of openness or a distinctive,
individual version of the human essence. Instead, authenticity is a matter
of achieving and expressing the openness that is the defining potential of
Dasein as such. In Heideggers view, this can be accomplished in the fullest
way only by clear-sightedly owning up to ones being human, regardless
of the sort of content one imparts to ones life. The injunction to be
authentic tells us: Be human! rather than: Get in touch with what you
286 Authenticity
really, truly are as an individual. So the Heideggerian ideal can be accom-
plished in almost any specific identity one happens to take up. Seen in
this way, authenticity is a matter of style rather than of content it is a
matter of how we live rather than what we do.
Second, Heidegger rejects the dualisms of inner vs. outer and individual
vs. social that dominate modern Western thought. For him, the so-called
inner just is what becomes manifest in giving shape to ones identity
through ones worldly expressions, and the individual just is the configu-
ration of possibilities that have been taken over from the public world and
given form in taking a stand in the world. As we shall see, since the self
is always inextricably bound up with the public world, authenticity, when
properly understood, will involve social responsibility and discharging and
cooperation rather than conflict.
Authenticity and Virtue Ethics
As mentioned earlier, even though authenticity is clearly an example of
what we call a virtue or character ideal, it has not received much
attention from virtue ethicists. A virtue may be defined as a good quality
of character, where this is understood as a disposition to respond to items
included in its range of application in a good or at least a proper way.
4
To
be authentic seems to be a virtue in this sense: as an authentic individual,
I know where I stand on things and am forthright and open in expressing
that stance in what I say and do. In thinking of authenticity as a virtue,
it is appropriate to ask whether authenticity is to be regarded as a moral
or nonmoral virtue. Is it more like kindness, which is clearly a moral
virtue? Or is it like perseverance, which is a virtue but not necessarily
associated with moral behavior? Posed in these terms, it seems that
authenticity is not a moral virtue. We can imagine people who are
authentic in either the ordinary or the Heideggerian senses who are also
quite immoral. A sexual predator might be authentic to the extent that
he knows what he wants and expresses what is within him (e.g., the
Marquis de Sade), and Heideggers own involvement with the Nazis suggests
that one might be authentic by his standards and nevertheless engage in
the most odious behavior.
Should we conclude from these considerations that there is no connection
whatsoever between authenticity and morality? As I suggested above, it
seems to be part of the common conception of authenticity that the
authentic person will be at odds with the norms and mores of society, and
would therefore seem to be an immoral or at least amoral individual.
But I think that jumping to such a conclusion fails to grasp the relations
among virtues. Certain virtues clearly have no moral significance in them-
selves, yet they may have a crucial role to play in making a person into a
mature, fully developed moral agent. This is especially true of dispositions
required for self-regulation, such as self-discipline, steadiness, resoluteness,
Authenticity 287
integrity, and courage. We can imagine a person who has all these traits
and is still a sort of moral monster. But it also seems that having a set of
self-regulatory virtues is necessary for being a moral agent in the fullest
sense of that term. One of the greatest works of ethics of all time,
Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, is mainly devoted to identifying the character
traits one needs in order to be a moral agent. Much the same can be said
of Heideggers Being and Time, I believe. Heidegger famously denied he
had anything to say about morality, but he does have a great deal to say
about an ethos, where this is understood as a way of life that makes an
agent capable of addressing moral issues in a mature and resolute way. Seen
in this light, Being and Time is a book about ethics from start to finish.
A little reflection reveals that virtues are not free-standing qualities of
persons with no relations to one another, but instead are interdependent
in complicated ways. This is also true of authenticity in its relations to
other virtues. Being authentic obviously requires that an individual have
other virtues, such as honesty (with oneself, certainly), courage, constancy
(no one could be authentic for just one minute), and a capacity for
self-knowledge. Heidegger claims that his own conception of authenticity
requires coherence (Zusammenhang), clear-sightedness, resoluteness, stead-
fastness, loyalty, and even reverence. In turn, authenticity seems to be
required by a number of other virtues. A person we regard as having
integrity, it seems, would also have to have the character trait of authen-
ticity. It is hard to imagine someone who stands for something in an
admirable way that is, not just with pig-headed obstinacy who does
not also have self-knowledge and honesty in expressing what it is he
stands for.
One especially interesting question is whether authenticity should be
considered to be a personal virtue or a social virtue. Some virtues are
clearly personal in the sense that they apply to individuals and are conducive
primarily to the well-being of the person who practices them. For example,
frugality, temperance and rationality apply to the individual and could be
exercised by Robinson Crusoe on his proverbial desert island, as Francis
Fukuyama says (46). Other virtues, such as reliability, cooperativeness and
a sense of duty, are social virtues, conducive to the well-being of the
society as a whole, even if they are not always beneficial to the individual.
Given this distinction, we might ask: Is authenticity a self-regarding virtue,
like moderation, or is it a virtue that contributes to the well-being of
society, like justice?
Considering this question will help us see how intricately bound
together virtues can be. What we find is that certain character ideals we
admire, such as authenticity, are only possible within a civil society in
which respect for various social virtues have already become deeply
ingrained in the attitudes and forms of life of the community. So, for
example, valuing authenticity makes sense only in a social context in
which freedom is valued by most members of the community. But here
288 Authenticity
freedom cannot be understood as the freedom to do anything one wants.
That sort of unconstrained freedom is consistent with looting, pillaging,
and rape, practices we certainly do not admire. The freedom we admire,
in contrast, involves such traits as the ability to pursue worthy ends, the
ability to form considered judgments about the direction ones society is
to take, and the ability to freely express ones views in the free marketplace
of ideas. Moreover, it seems that freedom of this sort is possible only in
a social world that has evolved practices that are grounded in commitment
to certain character ideals such as responsibility, fairness, and trust. It takes
many centuries of social evolution for such commitments to evolve and
become sedimented in the lives of a social group. As the ideal of authen-
ticity is possible only in a free society with a solid foundation of estab-
lished 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.
The relationship of dependence between personal and social virtues also
goes the other way. We admire a democratic society in which the consent
of the governed plays a crucial role in determining the course of public
events, and for this reason we promote the practices and virtues that make
possible such a system of government. Among these virtues and practices,
it would seem, is the ideal of authenticity. To be authentic is to be clear
about ones own most basic feelings, desires and convictions, and to
openly express ones 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. And if this is the case, then it would
seem that a democratic society should be committed to promoting and
cultivating authentic individuals.
I have tried to suggest a way of seeing the modern ideal of authenticity
as inseparable from the equally modern conception of society as a moral
order undergoing constant construction by a community of free and
community-minded people. This conception of authenticity as a social virtue
gives us a way of combining Walt Whitmans vision of American democracy
as an experiment in national creation with our personal concerns about
self-fulfillment and the enrichment of our lives.
5
But it should be kept in
mind that it is exactly this happy affinity that leads critics of our modern
secularized world to see the modern moral order as one that corrupts the
human capacity for heroism and toughness, turning people into pathetic
last men who seek only comfort and peaceful productivity. Such a bland
form of existence turns its back on supposedly higher or more heroic
modes of life, and it levels all dimensions of existence down to the least
common denominator of social utility and self-congratulatory complacency.
6
Authenticity 289
Very different versions of this criticism can be found in social critics as
diverse as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Christopher Lasch. Whether there
can be a reconciliation among these competing views of authenticity is
yet to be seen.
Short Biography
Charles Guignon did his graduate work at the University of Heidelberg
(under Hans-Georg Gadamer) and at the University of California, Berkeley
(under Hubert Dreyfus), where he received his Ph.D. He taught at The
University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, and the University
of Vermont before becoming professor of philosophy at the University of
South Florida in 2001. He is the author of Heidegger and the Problem of
Knowledge and On Being Authentic and co-author of Re-Envisioning Psychology.
In addition, he edited The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, The Good
Life, The Existentialists, and Dostoevskys The Grand Inquisitor, and he co-
edited Existentialism: Basic Writings, and a volume for the Cambridge
University Press series Philosophy in Focus titled Richard Rorty. His
primary area of interest is hermeneutics: drawing on the hermeneutic
tradition, he writes on questions concerning human nature, its virtues,
and shortcomings. He has recently written on Bernard Williams and is
currently working on a Routledge Arguments of the Philosophers volume
on Martin Heidegger and an edition of Dostoevskys Notes from the
Underground.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, 4202 E.
Fowler Ave. FAO 226, Tampa, FL 33620, USA. Email: guignon@cas.usf.edu.
1
A fascinating study of this tension in the life of the influential psychoanalytic thinker, R. D.
Laing, is found in Thompson.
2
All references to this work will be cited parenthetically using the abbreviation BT followed
by the pagination from the German edition (since all available translations have the German
editions pagination in the margins). For more extended discussions of Heideggers notion of
authenticity, see C. Guignon, Becoming a Self ; Guignon, Authenticity, Moral Values, and
Psychotherapy; Guignon, Philosophy and Authenticity: Heideggers Search.
3
See Sartre.
4
The definition is a slightly modified version of Christine Swantons definition in Virtue Ethics 19.
5
Richard Rorty refers to Whitmans description of America as the greatest poem in Achieving
Our Country 22. Note that the interdependence between personal and social virtues we have
uncovered undermines Rortys sharp distinction between public and private as made in Contingency,
Irony and Solidarity.
6
See Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries 812, 103.
Works Cited
Bellah, Robert N. et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New
York, NY: Harper & Row, 1985.
290 Authenticity
Fukuyama, Francis. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York, NY: Free
Press, 1995.
Guignon, Charles. Authenticity, Moral Values, and Psychotherapy. The Cambridge Companion
to Heidegger. Ed. C. Guignon. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 26892.
. Becoming a Self: The Role of Authenticity in Being and Time. The Existentialists:
Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. Ed. C. Guignon. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. 11934.
. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge, 2004.
. Philosophy and Authenticity: Heideggers Search for a Ground for Philosophizing.
Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus. Eds. M. A. Wrathall
and J. Malpas. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1: 79102.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York, NY:
Harper & Row, 1962.
Jeffries, Stuart. Bernard Williams: The Quest for Truth. The Guardian, November 30, 2002,
online edition. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/
0,,850674,00.html, accessed February 13, 2008.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1984.
Nehamas, Alexander. Virtues of Authenticity: Essays on Plato and Socrates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1999.
Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP, 1998.
. Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. My Death. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.
Trans. H. E. Barnes. New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1956. 53153.
Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.
. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004.
Thompson, M. Guy. A Road Less Traveled: The Hidden Sources of R. D. Laings Enigmatic
Relationship with Authenticity. Journal for the Society of Existential Analysis 17.1 (2006): 15167.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971.

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