Abstract
What is meant by authenticity? In ordinary life, authenticity is a nebulous concept (Vannini 2006:236; Waskul 2009:58), and “rather irrelevant to self and society”, as Waskul (2009:58) claims?
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Notes
- 1.
Golomb (1995:113) finds a link in Heidegger, reversing Nietzsche and Freud and dissolving “the clash between authenticity and ethics by making authenticity a necessary condition of morality via the phenomenon of guilt.”
- 2.
Also Weber (1946:329) implies the difference between moral and religious principles.
- 3.
My friends Sabine Jentsch and Martin Sehrt helped me to get clearer about the relevance of the examples.
- 4.
Cp. Beauvoir 1947:66–103, on the “l’homme sérieux, the serious man”.
- 5.
Aristotle rejects the pursuit of pleasure as the object of eudaimonia not for moral reasons but because it “is only a life for cattle” (E.N.1:1095b20). Thus, he appeals to the specific abilities of humans and presumes that not to be true to one’s abilities is wrong at least for the noble, presupposing what we call authenticity as an ideal; not as an ideal way to become moral or happy, but to pursue intrinsic goals, the only way, he claims, to avoid that life is meaningless, “futile and in vain” (E.N.1:1094a21; cp. above Chap. 3). So there are at least three kinds of criteria to judge the quality of a life. This is also pointed out by Susan Wolf (2010:3) and Thaddeus Metz (2013:34).
References
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Steinvorth, U. (2017). Moral and Metaphysical Norms. In: Secularization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63871-3_5
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