Abstract
Authenticity has become one of the defining ideals of the modern world. It is the quality we are meant to demand in that which we consume; a value to be opposed to all that is ‘fake’ or ‘phoney’ or ‘artificial’. Above all, it is what an individual is meant to aspire to be: true to one’s self, self-actualising and self-expressing. Authenticity today has an almost ethical force. It underpins identity politics, legitimises transgenderism and informs the ubiquitous demand for often legal recognition and informal respect. But what does its elevation say about the condition of modernity? What is its historical and conceptual relationship to ideas of freedom and autonomy? And to what extent is it really possible or even desirable, as Shakespeare’s Polonius insisted it was, to be true to thine own self?
Even as the sun and planets stood, to salute one another on the day you entered the world—even so you began straightaway to grow and have continued to do so, according to the law that prevailed over your beginning. It is thus that you must be, you cannot escape yourself.
( Goethe , Dämon)
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Notes
- 1.
The term ‘noble savage’ was used long before Rousseau, most prominently by poet and playwright John Dryden. But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that it gained wider currency, thanks mainly to British anthropologists like John Crawfurd who, writing in ideological support of British colonialism, falsely attributed the idea to Rousseau to give the idea intellectual weight. From that point on, the assumption that the idea was Rousseau’s entered anthropological and ethnological discourse, and was taken as truth (see Ellingson 2001).
- 2.
For Hobbes, ‘war of every man against every man’, prevailed in the state of nature. It was a perpetual and violent state of competition in which each individual asserts a natural right to everything, regardless of others. It made for a life that was famously, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.
- 3.
‘Cash nexus’ was a phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in his 1839 pamphlet, Chartism. It was then taken up and used frequently by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, particularly in the Communist Manifesto (1848). For all three, it served as a pejorative reference to the means-ends rationale of capitalism.
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Black, T. (2019). Autonomy and the Birth of Authenticity. In: Kennedy, A., Panton, J. (eds) From Self to Selfie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19194-8_7
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