Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal

Authenticity has become a widespread ethical ideal, in that it brings up the issue of how to attain the good life under conditions of modernity. It represents a way of dealing with normative gaps in this age and suggests that one should be true to oneself and lead a life that is expressive of what one takes oneself to be. The vocabulary of authenticity is to the contremporary cultural context what the notion of autonomous subjectivity was to early modernity. Far from being merely a philosophical issue, this development suggests that the ideal of authenticity is part of Western thought and practice that has shaped the modern worldview substantially. Many contemporary thinkers have however pointed out that the ideal of authenticity has increasingly turned into aestheticism and egoistic self-indulgence. In this book, Varga draws on different traditions including critical theory, phenomenology, and analytical philosophy to construct a formal concept of authenticity that can serve as a critical backdrop against which aestheticism and atomist self-indulgence can be identified.