Søren Kierkegaard According to Søren Kierkegaard, personal authenticity depends upon inwardness and the individual’s subjective relationship to truth, particularly in matters of faith. Kierkegaard criticizes the conformity of “the crowd” and the levelling effects of modern society, arguing that individuals often lose themselves in public opinion rather than taking responsibility for their own existence. In
Practice in Christianity (1850), he emphasizes that authentic faith requires the individual to stand alone before God, accepting the risks and responsibilities of personal commitment rather than relying on social convention or institutional religion. He writes:
Friedrich Nietzsche Personal authenticity can be achieved—without religion, which requires accepting pre-determined virtues (eternal valuations) as unquestionably true. In living authentically, a person elevates himself/herself above the mass culture to transcend the limits of conventional morality, thereby personally determining what is and what is not
good and bad, without the pre-determined virtues of conformity “on account of which we hold our grandfathers in esteem”. An authentic life is achieved by avoiding the “herding animal morality”. To “stand alone [is to be] strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to
transvaluate and invert ‘eternal valuations’”.
Jean-Paul Sartre It is difficult to describe
authenticity intelligibly. One possibility is to describe instead the
negative space surrounding the condition of being
inauthentic by giving examples. To that end, the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre make
authenticity conceptually intelligible through the stories of
anti-heroic characters, people who base their actions upon external, psychological pressures — such as the
social pressure to appear to be a certain kind of person; the pressure to adopt a given way of life; and the pressure to prostitute personal integrity (moral values and aesthetic standards) in exchange for the comfort (physical, mental, and moral) of social
conformity. The novelist Sartre explains existential philosophy through characters who do not understand their reasoning for acting as they do—people who ignore crucial facts about their own lives to avoid learning about being an
inauthentic person with an identity defined from outside the self. Absolute freedom is the
vertiginous experience necessary for being authentic, yet such freedom can be so unpleasant as to impel people to choose an inauthentic life. As an aspect of authenticity, absolute freedom determines a person’s
relation with the real world, a relation not based upon or determined by a system of values or an ideology. In this manner, authenticity is connected with creativity, and the will to act must be born of the actor. In that vein, Heidegger speaks of absolute freedom as
modes of living determined by personal choice. Sartre identified, described, and explained what is an inauthentic existence, not to define what is an authentic mode of living.
Erich Fromm Erich Fromm proposed a very different definition of authenticity in the mid-twentieth century. He considered behavior of any kind, even that wholly in accord with societal
mores, to be authentic if it results from personal understanding and approval of its drives and origins, rather than merely from conformity with the received wisdom of the society. Thus, a Frommean authentic may behave consistently in accord with cultural norms, if those norms appear on consideration to be appropriate, rather than simply in the interest of conforming with current norms. Fromm thus considers authenticity to be a positive outcome of enlightened and informed motivation, rather than a negative outcome of rejection of the expectations of others. He described the latter condition – the drive primarily to escape external restraints typified by the "absolute freedom" of Sartre – as "the illusion of individuality", as opposed to the genuine individuality that results from authentic living. ==Authenticity paradox==