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Living in an Inauthentic Society?

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Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept

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Abstract

How can the individual live authentically in a society steeped in inauthenticity? This question received particularly acute analysis from philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Martin Heidegger, as well as the Existentialists inspired by the latter. In this chapter, we examine these ideas, but we focus on how they were received and adapted by individuals and groups who drew on them to engage with experiments in authentic living. There is another authenticity discourse that asks how society and its environment can be made true to the promise of modern technology and governance, and how weak, irrational humanity can also be remoulded into a new form that will integrate with the possibilities of the future. This notion of authenticity is not only deployed by totalitarian regimes, but also has its liberal manifestations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    L. Trilling (1972) Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

  2. 2.

    J.-J. Rousseau Émile, as quoted in M. Berman The Politics of Authenticity, 168.

  3. 3.

    J.-J. Rousseau (1953) The Confessions, translated by J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin), 529–30.

  4. 4.

    J. Bloch (1995) Rousseauism and Education in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation).

  5. 5.

    R. Darnton (1991) ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity’, in R. Darnton (ed.) The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Penguin), 209–49. On alternative Enlightenments, see M. Baxandall (1995) Shadows in the Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press); M. Umbach (2002) ‘Classicism, Enlightenment and the Other: Thoughts on Decoding Eighteenth-Century Visual Culture’, Art History, 25(3), 319–40; W. Hoffman (ed.) (1989) Europa 1789: Aufklärung, Verklärung, Verfall (Cologne: DuMont Verlag); H. Möller (1986) Vernunft und Kritik: Deutsche Aufklärung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). On national varieties of European Romanticism, see R. Porter and M. Teich (eds) (1988) Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

  6. 6.

    J.-J. Rousseau (1953) The Confessions, 17.

  7. 7.

    Berman, The Politics of Authenticity, 86. Emphasis in original.

  8. 8.

    Rousseau, in C. Lindholm (2013) ‘The Rise of Expressive Authenticity’, Anthropological Quarterly, 86(2), 361–95, quote 381.

  9. 9.

    R. Darnton (1968) Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), 115–16, 124 and 161. See also J. Riskin (2002) Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

  10. 10.

    Rousseau, The Confessions, 20.

  11. 11.

    F. Margonis (1998) ‘The Demise of Authenticity’, Philosophy of Education Archive, 248–57, quote 249.

  12. 12.

    T. J. Ellingson (2001) The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press).

  13. 13.

    J. Schmidt (1985) Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik 1750–1945, 1st volume (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft).

  14. 14.

    F. Cummings (1968) ‘Boothby, Rousseau, and the Romantic Malady’, Burlington Magazine, 110(789), 659–66.

  15. 15.

    C. P. Moritz (1962) ‘Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen (1788)’, in H. J. Schrimpf (ed.) Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag), 27–78.

  16. 16.

    W. J. T. Mitchell (1994) ‘Imperial Landscape’, in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) Landscape and Power (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), 5–34, argues that “landscape is not a genre of art, but a medium”, quote 5.

  17. 17.

    C. G. Boerner, (2001) Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801) und seine Zeit (Düsseldorf: Boerner); W. Busch (1992) ‘The Reception of Hogarth in Chodowiecki and Kaulbach’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, 46, 9–19; R. Krüger (1972) Das Zeitalter der Empfindsamkeit. Kunst und Kultur des späten 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Vienna: Schroll).

  18. 18.

    I. Sommer (ed.) (1977) Fortgang der Tugend und des Lasters. Daniel Chodowieckis Monatskuppfer zum Göttinger Taschenkalender, mit Erklärungen Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, 2nd edition (Frankfurt: Insel).

  19. 19.

    On the centrality of authenticity for European nationalism, see R. Handler (1986) ‘Authenticity’, Anthropology Today, 2(1), 2–4.

  20. 20.

    Lindholm, ‘The Rise of Expressive Authenticity’, 383. For an overview of Herder’s writings on the nation, see F. M. Barnard (2003) Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press); and F. C. Beiser (1992) Enlightenment, Revolution and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), especially chapter 8; A. Patten (2010) ‘“The Most Natural State”: Herder and Nationalism’, History of Political Thought, XXXI(4), 657–89.

  21. 21.

    F. M. Barnard (1983) ‘National Culture and Political Legitimacy: Herder and Rousseau’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44(2), 231–53.

  22. 22.

    J. S. McClelland (1996) A History of Western Political Thought (London: Routledge), 625.

  23. 23.

    G. Iggers (1983) The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, revised edition (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press).

  24. 24.

    D. Hettinga (2001) The Brothers Grimm (New York: Clarion); J. Zipes (2002) The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

  25. 25.

    K. Hagemann (2012) ‘A Valorous Nation in a Holy War: War Mobilization, Religion, and Political Culture in Prussia, 1807 to 1815’, in M. Broers, P. Hicks and A. Guimera (eds) The Napoleonic Empire and the New European Political Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 186–215; K. Hagemann (2016) ‘Celebration, Contestation and Commemoration: The Battle of Leipzig in German Memories in the Anti-Napoleonic Wars’, in A. Forrest, K. Hagemann and M. Rowe (eds) War, Demobilization and Memory: The Legacy of War in the Era of Atlantic Revolutions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 335–52; M. Hewitson (2017) Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), especially chapter 5. More sceptical about the cultural reach of this phenomenon is J. Breuilly (2002) Austria, Prussia and Germany, 1806–1871 (London: Longman).

  26. 26.

    W. Busch (2003) Caspar David Friedrich: Ästhetik und Religion (Munich: Beck); K. Hartley (ed.) (1995) The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790–1990 (London: South Bank Centre); C. Grewe (2009) Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate).

  27. 27.

    M. Heidegger (2008) Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, with a new Foreword by Taylor Carman, (New York: Harper Perennial), 223 [1927].

  28. 28.

    M. Heidegger (1950) Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann). The translation of the same title as Wrong Paths is used by J. K. Lyon (2006) Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).

  29. 29.

    A. Sharr (2016) Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).

  30. 30.

    M. Heidegger, ‘Creative Landscape: Why Do We Stay in the Provinces?’, in Der Alemanne, 7 March 1934, previously broadcast over Berlin radio in autumn 1933, cited from A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E. Dimendberg (eds) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 426–28.

  31. 31.

    M. Grene (1952) ‘Authenticity: An Existential Virtue’, Ethics 62(4), 266–74, quote 267.

  32. 32.

    C. B. Guignon (2008) ‘Authenticity’, Philosophy Compass, 3(2), 277–90, quote 287.

  33. 33.

    S. Mulhall (2005) Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time, 2nd edition. (London: Routledge), 73.

  34. 34.

    Mulhall, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook, 129.

  35. 35.

    Mulhall, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook, 131.

  36. 36.

    C.B. Guignon,(1984) ‘Heidegger’s “Authenticity” Revisited’, The Review of Metaphysics 38(2), 321-339, quote 333.

  37. 37.

    M. Heidegger (1990) ‘The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts’, in G. Neske and E. Kettering (eds) Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House), 29.

  38. 38.

    J. Habermas (1993) ‘Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lectures of 1934’, in R Wolin (ed.) The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).

  39. 39.

    H. Sluga (1993) Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

  40. 40.

    For an overview of Anti-Semitism in the NSDAP, see O. Heilbronner (1990) ‘The Role of Nazi Antisemitism in the Nazi Party’s Activity and Propaganda: A Regional Historiographical Study’, Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, 35(1), 397–439. On the relationship between Nazism and popular Anti-Semitism, see M. Wildt (2011) Hitler’s “ Volksgemeinschaft ” and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York: Berghahn). A different interpretation, which frames Nazi Anti-Semitism in terms of competition over claims to authenticity and narratives of origins, is A. Confino (2014) A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press).

  41. 41.

    T. W. Adorno (1992) Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie, 13th edition (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).

  42. 42.

    T. W. Adorno (1954) Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Suhrkamp).

  43. 43.

    W. Benjamin (1979) ‘Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays “War and Warriors” by Ernst Jünger’, New German Critique, 17, 120–28. This is a translation of the original German piece published in 1930.

  44. 44.

    J. Felstiner (2001) Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (New York: Norton), 395.

  45. 45.

    Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, 23–4.

  46. 46.

    Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, 22.

  47. 47.

    Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, 25–8.

  48. 48.

    P. Celan, ‘Von Dunkel zu Dunkel’ in Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, 36.

  49. 49.

    J. Felstiner (1995) Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press), 246.

  50. 50.

    Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, 218.

  51. 51.

    A useful summary of this controversial reception history is V. Farias (1989) Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).

  52. 52.

    J.-P. Sartre (1958) Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, translated by H. E. Barnes (London: Routledge), 38 [1943].

  53. 53.

    J.-P. Sartre (1946) ‘Existentialism is Humanism’, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm (accessed 22/07/ 2017).

  54. 54.

    Guignon, ‘Authenticity’, 285–6.

  55. 55.

    Grene, ‘Authenticity’.

  56. 56.

    Grene, ‘Authenticity’, 272.

  57. 57.

    Guignon, ‘Authenticity’, 288.

  58. 58.

    A. Bloom (1987) The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (London: Penguin). Neither this nor (especially) Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism are direct commentaries on Existentialism, but both are commentaries on what Lasch labelled the ‘cult of authenticity’. C. Lasch (1979) The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.).

  59. 59.

    Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 222.

  60. 60.

    K. Marx and F. Engels (2002) The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin) [1848].

  61. 61.

    K. Marx (1844) ‘Comments on James Mill’, Marxists, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill (accessed 16/7/17. Emphasis in original).

  62. 62.

    A. Rand (2007) The Fountainhead (London: Penguin).

  63. 63.

    Quoted from C. Poggi (2009 ) Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press). An alternative translation under the title ‘Against Traditionalist Venice’ is provided in A. Danchev (2011) 100 Artist’s Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists (London: Penguin), M5 (unpag). On Futurism and authenticity, see G. Berghaus (ed.) (2009 ) Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi); and Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 128–32.

  64. 64.

    A. Bonnell (2001) ‘“Cheap and Nasty”: German Goods, Socialism, and the 1876 Philadelphia World Fair’, International Review of Social History, 46(2), 207–26.

  65. 65.

    M. Umbach (2003) ‘Made in Germany’, in H. Schulze and E. Francois (eds) Deutsche Errinerungsorte, 2nd volume (Munich: C. H. Beck), 405–38; D. Head (1992) ‘Made in Germany’: The Corporate Identity of a Nation (London: Hodder & Stoughton).

  66. 66.

    Differing interpretations on the Werkbund’s relationship with modernism are provided in: M. Jarzombek (1994) ‘The Kunstgewerbe, the Werkbund and the Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 53(1), 7–19; F. J. Schwartz (1996) The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War ( New Haven and London: Yale University Press); J. V. Maciuika (2005) Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics and the German State, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); M. Umbach (2009) German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).

  67. 67.

    H. Muthesius (1915) ‘Die Zukunft der deutschen Form’, in E. Jäckh (ed.) Der Deutsche Krieg: Politische Flugschriften 50 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt), 36.

  68. 68.

    B. Rieger (2005) Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Umbach, ‘Made in Germany’.

  69. 69.

    On the new Soviet man, see H. Alt and E. Alt (1964) The New Soviet Man: His Upbringing and Character Development (New York: Bookman Associates, Inc.); B. Rosenthal (2002) New Myth, New World: From Nietzche to Stalinism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press); L. Attwood (1990) The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press); and, in comparative global perspective, Y. Cheng (2009) Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). On the ‘new man’ in Fascism, see G. Bottai (2000) ‘ Fascism as Intellectual Revolution’, in J.T. Schnapp (ed.) A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press); A. Ponzio (2015) Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press); R. Griffin (2007) Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave).

  70. 70.

    J. Dagnino (2016) ‘The Myth of the New Man in Italian Fascist Ideology’, Fascism, 5(2), 130–48, 131.

  71. 71.

    Some of these controversies are outlined in M. Steber and B. Gotto (eds) (2014) Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and E. Harvey, J. Hürter, M. Umbach and A. Wirsching (eds) (2019) The Private in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

  72. 72.

    P. Joyce (2003 ) The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso); N. Rose (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); C. Otter (2002) ‘Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City’, Social History, 27(1), 1–15; M. Valverde (1996) ‘Despotism and Ethical Liberal Governance’, Economy and Society, 25(3), 357–72; M. Umbach (2007) ‘Culture and Bürgerlichkeit in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, in H. Scott and B. Simms (eds) Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 180–99.

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  1. Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Maiken Umbach

  2. School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Mathew Humphrey

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Umbach, M., Humphrey, M. (2018). Living in an Inauthentic Society?. In: Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68566-3_3

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