Authenticity is a concept of personality in the fields of psychology,

existential psychotherapy Existential psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy based on the model of human nature and experience developed by the existential tradition of European philosophy. It focuses on concepts that are universally applicable to human existence inclu ...

, existentialist philosophy, and

aesthetics Aesthetics, or esthetics, is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste, as well as the philosophy of art (its own area of philosophy that comes out of aesthetics). It examines aesthetic values, often expressed t ...

. In existentialism, authenticity is the degree to which a person's actions are congruent with his or her

values In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of something or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live (normative ethics in ethics), or to describe the significance of di ...

and desires, despite external pressures to social conformity. The conscious Self comes to terms with the condition of '' Geworfenheit'', of having been ''thrown'' into an absurd world (without values and without meaning) not of his or her own making, thereby encountering external forces and influences different from and other than the Self. In human relations, a person’s lack of authenticity is considered '' bad faith'' in dealing with other people and with one's self; thus, authenticity is in the instruction of the

Oracle of Delphi Pythia (; grc, Πυθία ) was the name of the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. She specifically served as its oracle and was known as the Oracle of Delphi. Her title was also historically glossed in English as the Pythoness ...

: “

Know thyself The Ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" (Greek: , transliterated: '; also ' with the ε contracted) is the first of three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi according to the Greek writer Pausania ...

.” Concerning authenticity in art, the philosophers

Jean Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and litera ...

and

Theodor Adorno Theodor is a masculine given name. It is a German form of Theodore. It is also a variant of Teodor. List of people with the given name Theodor * Theodor Adorno, (1903–1969), German philosopher * Theodor Aman, Romanian painter * Theodor Blue ...

held opposing views and opinions about

jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...

, a genre of American music; Sartre said that jazz is authentic and Adorno said that jazz is inauthentic. The musical subcultures of Punk rock and Heavy metal require artistic authenticity, lest the community consider an artist to be a '' poseur'' for lacking authenticity (creative, musical, personal); My Dark Places April 10th, 2006 by Godfre Leung (Domino, 2006). likewise, artistic authenticity is integral to the genres of House music, Grunge, and Garage rock, Hip-hop,

Techno Techno is a Music genre, genre of electronic dance music (EDM) which is generally music production, produced for use in a continuous DJ set, with tempo often varying between 120 and 150 beats per minute (bpm). The central Drum beat, rhythm is typ ...

, and

Show tune A show tune is a song originally written as part of the score of a work of musical theatre or musical film, especially if the piece in question has become a standard, more or less detached in most people's minds from the original context. T ...

s.Barker, Hugh and Taylor, Yuval. ''Faking it: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music''. W.W.Norton and Co., New York, 2007. In every human activity, personal authenticity extends the instruction of the Oracle of Delphi: “Don’t merely know thyself — be thyself.”

History

In the 18th century, Romantic philosophers recommended

intuition Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; ...

, emotion, and a connection to Nature as the necessary counterbalances to the intellectualism of the

Age of Enlightenment The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...

. In the 20th century, Anglo–American preoccupations with authenticity centre upon the writings of existentialist philosophers whose native tongue is not English; therefore, the faithful, true, and accurate translation of the term ''existentialism'' was much debated, to which end the philosopher Walter Kaufmann assembled the canon of existentialist philosophers, which includes the Dane Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the German

Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th ce ...

(1889–1976), and the Frenchman

Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and lit ...

(1905–1980), for whom the conscious Self comes to terms with existence (being and living) in an absurd, materialist world featuring external forces, e.g. '' Geworfenheit'' (Thrown-ness), and intellectual influences different from and other than the

Self The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhoo ...

. Therefore, personal authenticity is in how a man or a woman acts and changes in response to the influences of the external world upon the Self. Among artists, authenticity in art describes a work of art that is faithful to the values of the artist. In the field of psychology, authenticity identifies a person living life in accordance with their true

, personal values, rather than according to the external demands of society, such as

social conventions A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated, or generally accepted standards, norms, social norms, or criteria, often taking the form of a custom. In a social context, a convention may retain the character of an "unwritten law" of custom (for e ...

, kinship, and duty.

Existential perspectives

Jean-Paul Sartre

Intelligible descriptions of the abstract concepts that constitute ''authenticity'' usually indicate the descriptive limits of language; thus, to describe the ''negative space'' surrounding the condition of ''being inauthentic'', examples of inauthentic living illustrate the condition of ''being'' an authentic person. To that descriptive end, the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre are in language that makes ''authenticity'' conceptually intelligible through the stories of anti-heroic characters, men and women 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 the stories of men and women who do not understand their own reasoning for acting as they do, people who ignore crucial facts about their own lives, in order to avoid unpleasant facts about being an ''inauthentic'' person with an identity defined from outside the self. Absolute freedom is the vertiginous experience necessary for being an authentic person, 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 person. In that vein, Heidegger speaks of absolute freedom as ''modes of living'' determined by personal choice. As a philosopher, Sartre identified, described, and explained what is an inauthentic existence in order to not define what is an authentic mode of living.

Søren Kierkegaard

Personal authenticity depends upon the person finding an authentic faith, and so be true to himself and to herself. That moral compromises inherent to the ideologies of bourgeois society and Christianity challenge the personal integrity of a person who seeks to live an authentic life, determined by the self.Holt, Kristoffer. “Authentic Journalism? A Critical Discussion about Existential Authenticity in Journalism Ethics”, ''Journal of Mass Media Ethics'' 27 (2012) p.0000. That a mass-culture society diminishes the significance of personal individuality, by way of social “levelling”, which is realised through news media that provide people with beliefs and opinions constructed by someone other than the self. A person can attain authentic faith by facing reality and choosing to live according to the facts of the material world, which is denied by passively accepting religious faith that excludes authentic thought from a person’s world-view. Kierkegaard’s philosophy of existentialism shows that personal authenticity is a personal choice based upon experience of the real world; thus, in ''Practice in Christianity'' (1850), Kierkegaard said:

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 or herself above the mass culture in order to transcend the limits of conventional morality, thereby personally determining what is and what is not good and evil, 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.”Nietzsche, F.W., & Zimmern, H. (1997). Beyond good and evil: Prelude to a philosophy of the future. Mineola, NY: Dover. To “stand alone s to bestrong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value, to transvaluate and invert ‘eternal valuations’.” Common to the existential perspectives of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are “the responsibilities they place on the individual to take active part in the shaping of one’s beliefs, and then to be willing to act on that belief.”

Uriel Abulof

The call of personal authenticity — of being true to one’s self — conceals the chasms between the essential self and the existential self, which are psychologically divergent interpretations of the Self. Essentialist authenticity demands that a person find and follow a prescribed system of values in order to reach a pre-ordained destiny. Existentialist authenticity prescribes to the individual man and woman “determine your destiny!”, by being aware of the absolute freedom to choose. The essentialist person searches for signs of self-betrayal; the existentialist person asks: “How am I not myself?” and answers “Only when I act in bad faith”.

Erich Fromm

A very different definition of authenticity was proposed by Erich Fromm in the mid-1900s. 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 a manner that accords with cultural norms, for the reason that 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.

Musical subculture

Artistic authenticity is required of the artist who would be a denizen of the subcultures of punk rock and heavy metal, which are societies that criticize and exclude musicians, composers, and bands for being '' poseurs'' — for being insufficiently

authentic Authenticity or authentic may refer to: * Authentication, the act of confirming the truth of an attribute Arts and entertainment * Authenticity in art, ways in which a work of art or an artistic performance may be considered authentic Music * A ...

or plainly inauthentic as artists. A ''poseur'' is a man or a woman or a musical band who copies the dress, the style of speech, and the

manners Etiquette () is the set of norms of personal behaviour in polite society, usually occurring in the form of an ethical code of the expected and accepted social behaviours that accord with the conventions and norms observed and practised by a ...

of the subculture, yet is excluded for not understanding the artistic philosophy, not understanding the sociology, and not understanding the

value system In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of something or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live (normative ethics in ethics), or to describe the significance of di ...

of the subculture; talking the talk, without walking the walk. The authenticity of an artist has three bases: (i) long-term dedication to the music scene; (ii) historical knowledge of the subculture; and (iii) the personal integrity (inner voice) for correct artistic choices. At the extreme metal end of the heavy-metal genre, the subgenre of

black metal Black metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music. Common traits include fast tempos, a shrieking vocal style, heavily distorted guitars played with tremolo picking, raw (lo-fi) recording, unconventional song structures, and an emp ...

who value artistic authenticity, emotional sincerity, and extreme expression. In light of such systems of moral value in the arts, a working-class band with a formal recording contract might appear to be sell outs to the heavy metal and punk rock communities. The academic Deena Weinstein said that “The code of authenticity, which is central to the

heavy metal subculture Fans of heavy metal music have created their own subculture that encompasses more than just appreciation of the style of music. Fans affirm their membership in the subculture or scene by attending metal concerts (an activity seen as central to the ...

, is demonstrated in many ways”, such as clothing, an emotional singing voice, and thematic substance to the songs.

Journalism

To identify, describe, and define ''authenticity'', existential philosophers, such as Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855),

Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ...

(1844–1900), and

(1889 –1976) investigated the

existential Existentialism ( ) is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centers on human thinking, feeling, and acting. Existentialist thinkers frequently explore issues related to the meaning, purpose, and valu ...

and

ontological In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...

significance of the social constructs that are the norms of society. For a journalist, aversion to and turning away from the unquestioning acceptance of social norms contributes to the production of intellectually authentic reportage, achieved by the reporter choosing to be true to his and her professional ethics and personal values. Yet in the praxis of journalism, the reporter’s authenticity (professional and personal) is continually contradicted by the business requirements of corporate publishing.Merril, J.C. ''Existential Journalism'', Revised Edition (1995) rev. ed.) Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, p.0000.

Criticism

The philosopher Jacob Golomb argues that existential authenticity is a way of life incompatible with a system of moral values that comprehends all persons.Golomb, Jacob. ''In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus'' (1995) London: Routledge.