Abstract

The aim of this paper is to circumscribe the nature of the ideal of authenticity, so widespread in our culture and our contemporary societies. First of all, does not authenticity play a similar role, by its amplitude and its tendency to be applied to life as a whole, of the ideal of wisdom for Antiquity? On the other hand, is it possible to define authenticity only as a complete sincerity? Is it not closer to the virtue of integrity? This article attempts to show the insufficiency of the two major approaches to that notion : the expressivist conceptions of authenticity, issued from Romanticism, and the voluntarist conceptions that take shape in the wake of Existentialism : neither of these approaches is really able to answer to what we called « the hard problem » of authenticity.