Authenticity
By exploring the theories that underpin our participants’ experiences, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how these frameworks apply in practical settings.
Summary
- Being an authentic person means having qualities like consistency, energy, depth, and maturity.
- To become more authentic, a person needs to reflect on themselves, understand who they are, gain wisdom, and accept reality.
- Talking about authenticity brings up important questions about how individuals connect with their communities.
- Understanding someone’s life story in this way means recognising the beliefs and values they truly embrace versus those that have been forced on them by society.
Since the Romantic era, authenticity has become a very influential moral ideal of character. Being true to yourself, becoming your ‘real’ or ‘essential’ self, being genuine and sincere, are all highly valued qualities in modern societies. We strive to express our identities as ‘our own’, living a life that is truly ‘ours’. If this life of one’s own is restricted or disabled, for example by social convention, oppression or marginalisation, we tend to view the quality of this life as diminished. Several philosophers have pointed out that the rise of authenticity as a modern moral ideal is related to the decline of traditional sources of meaning and morality in modern societies. Living a life of one’s own seems to have taken the place of a life lived subjected to the rules and norms prescribed by tradition and community. It is important, however, to stress that an authentic life is not a life devoid of social influences and can perfectly coincide with a sense of belonging to a community. However, authenticity discourse emphasises that people’s social embedding should be conducive to their flourishing, rather than an enforced framework of rules and norms that are not freely chosen or embraced by the members of the social community.
The ideal of an authentic person has several features, such as coherence, vitality, depth and maturity. The development of authenticity relies on self-reflection, self-knowledge, wisdom and a willingness to come to terms with the reality as it is. Authenticity discourse raises valuable questions about the relationship between an individual and its communities. Interpreting people’s life stories from this perspective requires being sensitive to the values and ideas they have appropriated authentically, versus the ones that have been installed in them by dominating or oppressive social mechanisms. It presupposes that people will lead more flourishing lives if they have the strength and courage to live authentically. This does not mean overcoming the influence of external influences on the self, as this is neither possible nor desirable. It does mean developing an active, agential attitude towards the socio-cultural forces that co-constitute our identities.