ABSTRACT
The present chapter examines one of existentialism’s basic concepts, authenticity, and argues that authenticity is an existential norm, distinct from the traditionally recognized norms of ethical, practical, and cognitive life – the good, the right, and the true. Authenticity concerns what it means to ‘exist’ as a self as such, and it measures the character of our commitments, by which we own or fail to own the finitude and fragility of our ‘projects.’ Critics have charged that authenticity is normatively empty and that commitment is thus a normatively promiscuous ‘decisionism.’ In response, the chapter focuses on Martin Heidegger’s account of authenticity and commitment in Being and Time, drawing on Martin Hägglund’s concept of ‘secular faith’ and Noreen Khawaja’s analysis of the ‘religious’ aura of existential thought. A look at the connection between the existential concept of Existenz and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of meaning yields a distinction between trying to be something (e.g. our ‘roles’ as teacher, father, and friend) and trying to be a ‘self.’ Can I succeed or fail at the latter task? A positive answer is found in Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential ‘death,’ distinguished from all concepts of the ending of a life. According to Heidegger, existential death is experienced in the breakdown of all our roles or practical identities, the inability to act for the sake of what usually moves us in those roles. The charge that existentialism is decisionistic rests on the mistaken notion that secular faith, commitment, is a kind of unmotivated ‘leap’ out of existential breakdown. However, a proper understanding of the existential norm of authenticity shows that to exist as a self is to be the addressee of a demand that one be responsible for the reasons upon which one acts and answerable to those with whom one shares the world.
