Abstract

This essay interrogates the contemporary focus on authenticity and the moral force attached to being “real” in personal, cultural, political, and creative life. Drawing on existential philosophy, sociology, cultural theory, Indigenous scholarship, and aesthetics, it traces the concept’s etymological roots, philosophical lineages, and ethical tensions. Authenticity is shown not as an inner essence but as a relational, historically situated, and power-laden practice. The essay examines performance, cultural borrowing, leadership, and generative AI as sites where authenticity is contested and reconfigured. It ultimately proposes authenticity as an ongoing ethical commitment to responsibility, care, and answerability rather than a stable property or purity ideal.

Introduction

We are, it seems, besotted with the authentic. We want authentic food, authentic travel, authentic designs, authentic leadership, and authentic relationships, to name but a few. We flick past advertisements promising “authentic Italian cuisine” and swipe through dating profiles pledging a desire for “authentic connection.” Authenticity has become a moral credential, a shorthand for trustworthiness and depth in a world saturated with surfaces. Yet the question lingers, quietly unsettling: what exactly are we asking for when we ask for authenticity, and why does this word carry such heavy ethical weight?

This is not a merely semantic riddle. To accuse someone of being inauthentic is to level a serious charge: to suggest falseness, bad faith, or a kind of existential fraud. When we call something fake, we mark it as counterfeit, as lacking legitimacy. The fake pretends to be what it is not; the inauthentic person wears a mask that has fused with their face. And yet, as Charles Taylor reminds us, authenticity “is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands” (1991, p. 41). Authenticity is never simply about turning inward. Paradoxically, it is always shaped in dialogue with others, with traditions, norms, obligations, and the discourses that exceed the individual. To be authentic is not to invent oneself from nothing but to take responsibility for how one inhabits the cultural inheritances and relationships that make selfhood possible.

The Word Itself

The etymology of authenticity reveals something important about its meaning. The word derives from the Greek authentikos (genuine, principal), itself from authentēs, meaning one who acts on their own authority, compounded from autos (self) and a root related to accomplishment or action (Ferrara, 1998). The authentic, at its origin, is that which proceeds from its own source, which is self-authored rather than derived or delegated. Notably, authentēs also carried darker connotations in ancient Greek: a perpetrator, even a murderer, meaning one who acts with their own hand (Trilling, 1972). Authenticity thus carries a shadow of transgression, of acting outside sanctioned channels.

Morphologically, the English word is built from the adjective authentic plus the suffix -ity, which derives from Latin -itas and denotes a state or quality. The word thus names not a thing but a condition: a way of being rather than a fixed property. Its cognates (authenticate, authentication, author, authority) circle around questions of origin, legitimacy, and the power to speak or act in one’s own name. To ask about authenticity is already to ask about authorship and authority: who made this, and by what right?

Philosophical Roots and Existential Unease

The modern fascination with authenticity has deep philosophical roots, most notably in existentialist thought. For Martin Heidegger, authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) names a mode of existence in which one owns one’s being rather than drifting along in the anonymous currents of everyday life. In Being and Time, he observes that “Dasein is for the most part lost in the ‘they'” (1962, p. 312), absorbed in routines, clichés, and inherited opinions. The German term das Man, often translated as “the they” or “the one”, captures this anonymous mode of existence in which we do what “one does,” think what “one thinks,” and say what “one says.” To live authentically, for Heidegger, is not to become eccentric or expressive for its own sake but to confront one’s finitude and take responsibility for one’s projects in the face of death. It requires what he calls “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit): a steadfast commitment to one’s own possibilities rather than a passive acceptance of the ready-made paths society offers.

Jean Paul Sartre sharpened this insight through his account of bad faith (mauvaise foi). We act in bad faith when we deny our freedom by pretending that we are fixed roles rather than choosing beings. The famous example of the waiter who “plays at being a waiter” captures this self-deception: by collapsing into a role, performing its gestures with excessive precision and deliberateness, he evades the anxiety of freedom. He treats his identity as a given thing rather than as something he must continually create through choice. Authenticity, for Sartre, requires acknowledging that we are always more than the scripts we inhabit and that human existence is characterised by a radical freedom that we cannot escape, however much we might wish to.

Paul Tillich approached authenticity from a different angle, linking it to what he called “the courage to be” (1952). For Tillich, authenticity demands that we confront the anxieties of existence, which include the anxiety of fate and death, of emptiness and meaninglessness, of guilt and condemnation, without fleeing into conformity or despair. The courage to be is the courage to affirm oneself despite the threat of nonbeing, to claim one’s own existence in full awareness of its precariousness. This is not mere bravado but a form of ontological faith: a trust in the ground of being that enables one to be genuinely oneself even amid uncertainty and threat.

Yet even here, suspicion is warranted. Theodor Adorno warned that authenticity had hardened into what he called a “jargon”: a way of speaking that promises depth while often delivering subterfuge or mystification (1973). In late capitalist culture, the language of the genuine is easily mobilised as a marketing device. Authenticity becomes not a lived ethical struggle but a badge, a style, a tone of voice. Ironically, the more insistently authenticity is proclaimed, the more reason we may have to doubt it. The authentic self becomes yet another commodity, packaged and sold back to us as an aspirational lifestyle.

Performing the Self

Sociology further complicates any simple opposition between authenticity and performance, between the real and the fake. Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of everyday life showed that social interaction is unavoidably theatrical. We move between front stages and back stages, adjusting our conduct in response to audiences and situations (1959). This does not mean that we are always lying or that there is no genuine self beneath the performance. Rather, it suggests that selfhood is multiple, relational, situational, and skilled. The self is not a fixed, singular essence waiting to be expressed but something accomplished through interaction, something that emerges in the space between persons, and something that is multiple and fluid.

From this perspective, the problem is not that we perform, for performance is inescapable, but that we forget we are performing or refuse responsibility for how we do so. Carl Rogers framed authenticity not as raw self-expression but as congruence: an alignment between experience, awareness, and communication (1961). The authentic person, for Rogers, is one whose outward expression matches their inner experience, who does not hide behind professional facades or social masks. When this alignment falters, something feels off. We may struggle to name it, but we sense the gap. Inauthenticity announces itself less as outright deception than as a subtle hollowness, a sense that no one is fully home.

This raises a difficult question about process and product. Is authenticity a matter of how something is made, or what it finally is? Can an authentic outcome emerge from an inauthentic process? The answer matters enormously for creative work, for leadership, for relationships. A politician who cynically adopts positions to win votes may nonetheless implement policies that genuinely serve the public good. An artist who borrows heavily from others may produce work that resonates with profound truth. Conversely, someone acting from the purest motives may produce hollow results. Authenticity, it seems, cannot be located solely in intentions, nor solely in outcomes, but exists in the tension between them.

Cultural Roots and Non-Western Perspectives

The Western philosophical tradition is not the only source of wisdom on authenticity, and an exclusive focus on Heidegger and Sartre risks provincialism. In African philosophical traditions, the concept of Ubuntu, often rendered as “I am because we are”, offers a fundamentally relational and communal understanding of selfhood that challenges individualistic accounts of authenticity. As Metz (2007) argues, Ubuntu ethics locates identity and moral standing not in isolated selfhood but in communal belonging and mutual recognition. To be authentic, on this view, is not to stand alone against the crowd but to realise oneself through harmonious relationships with others. The self is constituted by its connections, and authentic living means honouring those bonds rather than severing them in the name of individual expression.

Similarly, Confucian thought emphasises the cultivation of authentic selfhood through ritual practice, social roles, and relational obligations. As Ames and Rosemont (1998) note, the Confucian self is not a pregiven entity but an achievement, something developed through the disciplined inhabitation of roles such as child, parent, friend, and citizen. Authenticity here is not opposed to convention but realised through it. The question is not whether to follow social scripts but how to inhabit them with sincerity (cheng) and genuine feeling. This stands in productive tension with existentialist accounts that tend to view social roles as threats to authentic existence.

Indigenous perspectives add further complexity. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), in her influential work on decolonising research methodologies, shows how authenticity has been weaponised against Indigenous peoples. Colonial regimes have long policed Indigenous identity, demanding that Indigenous people prove their “authenticity” according to criteria imposed from outside: blood quantum, cultural practice, appearance. This politics of recognition, as Glen Coulthard (2014) argues, traps Indigenous peoples in a bind: they must perform an identity legible to colonial institutions, often freezing culture in an imagined past and denying the living, adaptive character of all traditions. Authenticity becomes a colonial tool, used to delegitimise contemporary Indigenous claims by measuring them against a romanticised and static notion of the “real Indian” or “real Aboriginal.”

Aileen Moreton Robinson (2015) extends this analysis in the Australian context, showing how white possession structures the very terms through which Indigenous authenticity is understood. Indigenous peoples are caught between competing demands: to maintain traditional practices in ways recognisable to non-Indigenous observers, while also adapting, innovating, and engaging with modernity. The demand for authenticity, in this context, is rarely innocent. It often serves to contain, constrain, and delegitimise Indigenous agency. A truly decolonised understanding of authenticity would recognise that culture is always living, always changing, and that rootedness in tradition does not mean stasis but ongoing creative engagement with inherited practices and meanings.

Art, Reproduction, and the Question of Appropriation

Questions of authenticity take on particular intensity in art and aesthetics, where the distinction between the genuine and the fake has profound implications. Walter Benjamin famously argued that mechanically reproduced artworks lack the “aura” of the original, tied as it is to presence, history, and place (1969). The authentic work of art is embedded in a tradition, bears the marks of its making and its journey through time, and offers a mode of experience unavailable to the copy. What is lost in reproduction is not merely uniqueness but a certain mode of relation, a faithfulness, which includes a felt connection to an origin that anchors meaning.

Jean Baudrillard (1994) radicalised this analysis, arguing that in contemporary culture the distinction between original and copy has collapsed entirely. We live in an age of simulacra, where signs refer not to reality but to other signs, where the fake has become indistinguishable from, and perhaps more real than, the real. Disneyland, for Baudrillard, is not a fake America but rather exists to make us believe that the rest of America is real. In such a world, appeals to authenticity become nostalgic gestures toward a ground that has already dissolved or never existed.

Contemporary creative practices complicate any nostalgic longing for purity. Sampling, remix, appropriation, and collaboration challenge the romantic myth of the solitary genius creating ex nihilo. As Bourriaud (2002) argues, much contemporary art is relational, concerned less with so-called originality than with reconfiguration and encounter. Artists work with found materials, existing images, inherited forms. Creativity lies not in making something from nothing but in making something new from what already exists.

This raises urgent questions about borrowing and appropriation. When does creative borrowing become theft? Young (2008) offers a careful analysis, distinguishing between content appropriation (using stories, symbols, or knowledge from another culture), subject appropriation (representing members of another culture), and style appropriation (adopting the artistic techniques of another culture). Not all appropriation is wrong, Young argues, but context matters enormously. Appropriation becomes ethically problematic when it reinforces power imbalances, misrepresents or trivialises the source culture, or profits from traditions that have been violently suppressed.

Appiah (2006) offers a cosmopolitan counterpoint, arguing that cultures have always borrowed, blended, and transformed through contact. The demand for purity, he suggests, is itself a kind of inauthenticity and a denial of the hybrid, mongrel character of all cultural traditions. What matters is not whether borrowing occurs but how it is done: with respect, acknowledgement, and genuine engagement, or with ignorance, exploitation, and contempt. In this light, authenticity may lie not in untouched originality but in the integrity of engagement, in whether choices matter, whether form serves expression rather than habit or calculation, and whether the borrower takes responsibility for understanding what they borrow.

Politics, Leadership, and the Theatre of the Real

Nowhere is authenticity more loudly demanded and more performative than in politics. We claim to want leaders who are “real,” who “tell it like it is,” who resist spin and polish. The authentic politician is supposedly one who speaks from conviction rather than calculation, who shows us their true self rather than a focus grouped persona. Yet Lionel Trilling long ago noted the irony here: the performance of authenticity can itself become a highly strategic act (1972). The politician who cultivates plainness, roughness, or emotional transparency may be staging the most carefully managed persona of all. What reads as spontaneity is often rehearsed; what feels like honesty may be the most sophisticated form of manipulation.

Empirical research supports the importance of authenticity while simultaneously destabilising any simple understanding of it. Lehman et al. (2019) show that perceived authenticity is strongly associated with trust, commitment, and legitimacy across organisational and political contexts. People respond to leaders they perceive as genuine, consistent, and self-aware. But what counts as authentic varies across cultures, contexts, and expectations. What reads as honesty in one setting may register as insensitivity or crudeness in another.

Authenticity, it seems, is not a fixed inner essence that can simply be revealed but a negotiated social achievement, co-constructed between performer and audience, shaped by shared expectations and cultural scripts.

Who Judges Authenticity

The question of authenticity is never merely descriptive; it is always also a question of power. Who gets to decide what counts as authentic, and what is dismissed as fake, derivative, or counterfeit? As Bourdieu (1984) demonstrated in his analysis of taste and cultural capital, judgments of authenticity are never neutral. They reflect and reinforce social hierarchies, distinguishing those with cultural authority from those without. The gatekeepers of authenticity, including critics, curators, institutions, and now algorithms, exercise considerable power in determining what is valued and what is marginalised.

This is not simply an abstract concern. Bendix (1997) shows how the search for authenticity in folklore studies was bound up with nationalist projects and the exclusion of hybrid or supposedly contaminated cultural forms. Similarly, Banet Weiser (2012) argues that in contemporary brand culture, authenticity has become a valuable commodity, with corporations investing heavily in appearing genuine while obscuring the calculated nature of that appearance. The judgment of authenticity, in these contexts, becomes a tool of control and profit rather than a disinterested assessment of value.

If judgments of authenticity are inevitable, then the question becomes not whether to judge but how. Lindholm (2008) suggests that assessments of authenticity must attend to questions of fairness, legitimacy, and care. Fairness requires that the criteria for authenticity not be rigged in favour of the powerful. Legitimacy demands that those making judgments have standing to do so. Indigenous communities, for instance, have voice in determining what counts as authentic Indigenous culture. And care requires that judgments be made with attention to their consequences, recognising that to label something inauthentic is to diminish its standing and, often, the standing of those who produce or value it.

Enter the Machine

Generative AI intensifies all these tensions. When machines can produce text, images, and music that are difficult to distinguish from human work, the old markers of authenticity begin to wobble. If we cannot tell whether a poem was written by a person or a language model, does it matter? If an AI generated image moves us, wins prizes, shapes public discourse, does its machine origin render it fake?

One response is to retreat into provenance, insisting that authenticity depends on knowing who or what made something. This echoes Benjamin’s concern with origin and history, relocating authenticity not in form or content but in lineage. On this view, the human made poem possesses something the AI poem lacks, regardless of their surface similarity. There is a long tradition behind this intuition: we value handmade objects differently from machine made ones, original artworks differently from forgeries, even when we cannot perceive the difference.

Yet this response may be too quick. As Coeckelbergh (2022) argues, authenticity is better understood as relational and performative rather than as a property of isolated individuals or objects. If an AI assisted text expresses ideas I genuinely hold, demands judgment and responsibility, and is integrated into a meaningful practice, what exactly is lost? The tool does not think for me; it extends the possibilities of my thinking. Perhaps what matters is not the purity of the process but the presence of care, attention, and accountability. An authentic engagement with AI might involve using it thoughtfully, critically, and creatively, thus acknowledging its contributions while taking responsibility for the final work.

This suggests that authenticity in the age of AI is less about origins than about relationships and responsibilities. It asks not “Was this made by a human?” but “Was this made with care? Does someone stand behind it? Is it offered in good faith?” These questions cannot be answered by examining the artefact alone; they require attending to the practices and intentions that surround it.

Conclusion: Living with the Tension

We cannot simply abandon authenticity. It is too deeply woven into how we think about value, trust, and meaning, not only in who we are but in what we make, how we make it, and what we choose to value in the making of others. The distinction between the real and the fake, however unstable, continues to matter to us. We want to know that the friend who listens to our troubles genuinely cares, that the leader asking for our vote believes what they say, that the art we admire emerged from genuine creative struggle rather than cynical calculation. We want to know that the cultural traditions we inherit have been engaged with respectfully, that those who borrow from others do so with acknowledgement rather than erasure, and that the objects and texts and images circulating in our world carry some trace of care and intention. These desires are not mere nostalgia; they reflect something important about what it means to live with others, to trust, to commit, and to practise faithfulness in both our relationships and our creative lives.

But neither should we treat authenticity as a self-evident virtue or a purity test, whether applied to persons or to processes. The injunction to “be yourself” is deceptively simple, even erroneous, and the demand that creative work be untouched by outside influence is equally naive. Both ignore the fundamentally relational and mediated character of human existence. Whose self? Which version of myself? Made with what tools, drawing on whose traditions, judged by what criteria and by whom? The courage to be authentic is not a courage to discover some pre-existing essence, nor to create from nothing, but a courage to claim responsibility for who one is becoming and for what one is making in full awareness of the constraints, inheritances, collaborations, and relationships that shape both.

Perhaps the most defensible understanding of authenticity is one that resists both the romantic myth of pure self-expression and the cynical conclusion that all is mere performance or simulation. We are beings who perform, who adapt, who borrow, who try and fail and then learn, who use tools and technologies that extend and complicate our agency. We are also beings who care about truth and honesty, who seek resonance rather than hollow display, who want our outer expressions, whether personal or creative, to connect with something genuine. Authenticity in process means attending to how we work: with care or carelessness, with acknowledgement or concealment, with openness about our methods and sources or with strategic obscurity. Authenticity in outcome means asking whether what we produce serves expression or mere habit, whether it contributes to understanding or adds to the noise, whether it honours or exploits the traditions it draws upon.

This means attending to how we inhabit our roles and relationships, and equally to how we engage with the cultural materials we inherit and transform. It means acknowledging what we borrow and from whom, taking seriously the power relations that structure both cultural exchange and the authority to judge what counts as genuine. It means approaching traditions not as fixed essences to be preserved in amber nor as resources to be extracted at will, but as living inheritances to be engaged with creatively, critically, and responsibly. It means being honest (with others and with ourselves) about how our work is made, what tools and collaborations have shaped it, and what debts it carries. And it means recognising that the question of who judges authenticity is never innocent: judgments must be made with fairness, with legitimate standing, and with care for those whose work and identity are at stake.

That, in the end, may be the most human demand of all: not authenticity as a possession or achievement, but authenticity as an ongoing commitment to truthfulness in what we say and make, to responsibility for the processes we employ and the outcomes we produce, and to the difficult work of becoming who we are and creating what we create in a world we did not make but must nonetheless make our own.

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25/1/2026