So you want to be authentic

Thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud have put in question the conception of human nature, and especially of our “inner” nature, as fundamentally good. Following their “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricouer 1970), human nature comes to be seen as including forces of violence, disorder and unreason as well as tendencies toward beneficence and altruism. In that case, any idea of an ethic based primarily on the ideal of authenticity is simply untenable.

Over the course of our lives, our identities are always in question: we are always projections into the future, incessantly taking a stand on who we are.

The most familiar conception of “authenticity” comes to us mainly from Heidegger's Being and Time of 1927. The word we translate as ‘authenticity’ is actually a neologism invented by Heidegger, the wordEigentlichkeit, which comes from an ordinary term, eigentlich, meaning ‘really’ or ‘truly’, but is built on the stem eigen, meaning ‘own’ or ‘proper’. So the word might be more literally translated as ‘ownedness’, or ‘being owned’, or even ‘being one's own’, implying the idea of owning up to and owning what one is and does. Nevertheless, the word ‘authenticity’ has become closely associated with Heidegger as a result of early translations of Being and Time into English, and was adopted by Sartre and Beauvoir as well as by existentialist therapists and cultural theorists who followed them.[1]