Amy Levine

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.

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life.