Brief Overview of the Sartrean Notion of Authenticity

Authenticity is one of the most controversial topics that has captured the attention of some influential contemporary thinkers. In this age of the 'death of God', the attention is focused on man. Today, "where humanity is left without any 'pillars of fire' to guide its way, is the cultural and intellectual background for the emergence of the search for authenticity."

Thinkers on authenticity are diverse in their explication of this topic. Nevertheless, they all agree in principle that a positive definition of authenticity would be self-nullifying. Authenticity defines itself as lacking any definition. It is a pathos of incessant change, as opposed to a passive subordination to one particular ethic. Thinkers of authenticity tend to call into question and eventually replace conventional with unorthodox concepts of truth.

Authenticity is discussed vis-à-vis freedom in the philosophy of the controversial French Existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre. At the core of Sartrean thought is an aletheia of extreme freedom. It is inferred from the stand of atheistic Existentialists that "if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality."

The precedence of existence over essence ultimately resolves in the negation of human nature. This same negation endows with man with the freedom to make himself. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. He is nothing else than the summation of his free actions.

However, we cannot conceive of freedom without responsibility. Responsibility is always proportionate to freedom. The Sartrean view of extreme freedom then resolves in positing unlimited responsibility. Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world in his shoulders. One is not only responsible for his own acts; he is responsible for all men. As Sartre says, "I am creating an image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man." Roquentin, the hero in his novel Nausea remarks, "I am all alone, but I march like a regiment descending on a city … I am full of anguish."

The gravity of the responsibility we carry makes room for anguish, forlornness and despair in our existence. We always feel responsible for anything that happens in the world. The tendency, then, is to attempt to avoid this sense of responsibility. Thus commences the Sartrean discussion of the notion of bad faith, that is, inauthenticity.

Sartre originally discussed authenticity as a value of an individual. Indeed, early Sartrean thought affirmed the impossibility of intersubjectivity. However, certain experiences and an evolution of thought characterizing a mature mind led him to a discussion of authenticity in a societal perspective. The struggle for authenticity becomes not a personal but a collective nisus. It must always be considered in reference to the society; it is only when the society is authentic that we can have authentic individuals. In his Notebooks, he writes, "One cannot be converted alone … ethics is not possible unless everyone is ethical." The Sartrean notion of authenticity, then, is ultimately negative. It has no meaning apart from the society - it has no meaning for the individual per se. It requires the liberation of society from bad faith.

Moreover, Sartre is the first thinker to supplement his philosophy of authenticity and bad faith with a call to a direct political action. If authenticity is the ultimate consummation of freedom, social reconstruction is the proper means to achieve this. The social framework thus plays an important role in authenticity. A framework that is not conducive to or is even antithetical to authenticity must thus be reconstructed.

Sartre's persistence to uphold a cause fighting for a liberating society paved the way for his eventual attachment to Marxism. He argues that the authenticity of philosophy finds its categorical fulfillment in human history. Politics must always be projected towards the achievement of collective authenticity. He then worked for the reconciliation of his existential theses with those of Marxism. He even claimed in the end that Marxism is the philosophy of our day, and that Existentialism always be of assistance to it.