Philosophy Compass 3/2 (2008): 277290, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00131.

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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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 performance 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
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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 meaningfulness 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 significantly 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
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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 concerned 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
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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 introduced 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 conceptions 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
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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 selfmaking 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 selfdefinition. 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 component 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
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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 fundamental 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).
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An authentic life integrates and unifies the temporal structures of thrownness and projection into what Heidegger calls being-a-whole (BT 231 4). 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-forbeing-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
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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 perfection 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
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really, truly are as an individual. So the Heideggerian ideal can be accomplished 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 configuration 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 themselves, 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,
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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, steadfastness, 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 authenticity. 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
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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 authenticity is possible only in a free society with a solid foundation of established 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
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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 coedited 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.
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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. 268 92. . 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. 119 34. . 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: 79 102. 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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