Authenticity as Inner Freedom

Recent work on authenticity has aimed to rehabilitate the ideal without appealing to the metaphysically and epistemologically dubious notion of the ‘true self.’ These arguments are in part genealogical: they describe the origin of the normative pressure that generates the ideal of authenticity, and then offer an account responding to that pressure without positing a true self. Making good on a genealogy which traces the ideal of authenticity to an increased emphasis on sincere self-expression in the 18th and 19th centuries, Charles Taylor (1989) and Rahel Jaeggi (2016) offer accounts of authenticity as an expressivist ideal. I propose an alternative deliberative genealogy, on which authenticity arises alongside an increase in the freedom to choose one’s own projects around the same period. This generates a requirement that expressivist accounts cannot meet: someone who is authentic is justified in thinking that she is living as she should. I argue for a novel account of authenticity without a true self, which meets the requirement of the deliberative ideal. Authenticity is a distinctive kind of positive freedom, which is achieved by taking responsibility for ongoing interpretation of the task that living a life seems to present and of the possibilities available within it.