Existential Authenticity, Populism and the Ideal of a Good Life

Authenticity is a guiding concept in existentialism, as it provides the basis of a proper understanding of peculiar existentialist themes and notions such as anxiety, individuality, otherness, freedom, selfhood, self-consciousness or responsibility. Basically, authenticity regards our own innermost self, our sheer individuality. Authenticity gives us a sense of self. However, authenticity is not a natural given, but a challenge for the individual to embark on a journey towards becoming a true self. Starting from S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard's fundamental distinction between the individual and the crowd, we will discuss the fate of the postmodern concept of authenticity that has been slowly stripped of its initial meanings in the philosophical discourse. On the surface, this authenticity still resembles its existentialist meanings, but at the core has become a customizable commodity, able to accommodate a more free-floating, versatile, opportunistic view of the person, one that means whatever the speaker wants it to signify, and promises to be radically liberating. This "new kind" of authenticity implies, among other meanings, the requisite of reaching a different, superior version of the self, following the assumption that people are born and grow into a sort of imperfect, flawed, inferior, rigid state, that they need to transcend. The pressure to restore or discover an ideal of authenticity that is just a placeholder can be easily transformed into a powerful ideological device, a political instrument. In this respect, we draw on a few views that treat authenticity as central to understanding various populist movements of our times. We believe that what might operate as an antidote to the empty contemporary popular understanding of authenticity is to link it to the ideal of a good life, one that comes with the idea of responsibilization and continuous questioning of one's current commitments, including values such as authenticity itself.