Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 117, Issue 1, 2025

Becoming oneself with others: Relational authenticity and self-affirming participation. Response to De Haan

Being yourself with others – the art of maintaining your individuality while engaging and growing in social interactions – is a challenge for everyone. A philosophical account of authenticity should be able to explain why this is inherently difficult. In this response, I start from De Haan’s exposition on relational authenticity to further explore the tension between experiences that feel as being ‘one’s own’ vs. ‘alien’ to oneself in relation to others. Does an enactivist understanding of authenticity provide any guidance in distinguishing between the two? I introduce the notion of self-affirming participation and explore how it might help clarify this distinction and elucidate the complexity of becoming oneself with others

Discrepancy between ‘being yourself’ and ‘feeling yourself’

This commentary puts forward two critical remarks and two suggestions regarding the concept of ‘experiential authenticity’ and the extent to which this concept ties into ‘everyday experiences of being oneself’. The first critical remark explicates a tension in the purported goal of De Haan’s article: on the one hand De Haan states that she wants to do justice to the everyday experience of inauthenticity, on the other hand the article seems to work towards a normative account of authenticity. I argue that the former, descriptive goal is suitable for ‘experiences’ of (in)authenticity, and the latter, normative goal fits ‘being (in)authentic’, but that a normative account of particular experiences is problematic. The second critical remark problematizes the distinction between ‘experiential authenticity’ and ‘existential authenticity’ by arguing that, in both cases, values play a decisive role (rather than values playing a decisive role in existential authenticity and experience playing a decisive role in experiential authenticity). The first suggestion is to take into account different modes of relating to oneself (namely, in a reflective and an unreflective manner). The second suggestion is to rely on existing data concerning experiences of inauthenticity rather than relying on self-formulated or hypothetical examples.

The self-portrait as a landscape. A relational perspective on discovering, creating and choosing yourself

Being yourself does not always come naturally. Sometimes, you need to actively work to feel authentic. But how do you go about that? Traditional views on authenticity suggest that you can search for who you are deep down inside, chart your own course, or consistently choose what you value. Following an enactivist perspective on authenticity, these practical ideals fail to do justice to our dynamic and relational nature; the self is neither fully self-discovered, self-created, nor self-chosen. However, I believe that an enactivist interpretation of authenticity does not exclude these activities but rather gives them new meaning. In this commentary, I explore how discovering, creating and choosing yourself might occur through our interactions with others and our environment, connecting desires for self-determination to our relational nature.

Being Yourself in Social Roles: a response to Sanneke de Haan’s conception of authenticity

In this response to de Haan’s relational and enactive conception of authenticity I consider its implications for the way we fulfil professional and social roles in everyday life. I argue that on de Haan’s conception of authenticity it is possible to fulfil those roles in a fully authentic way, as long as one experiences and perceives oneself and the world in a role-appropriate manner and acts accordingly. This implication shows the radical break of de Haan’s understanding of authenticity with the tradition, particularly the existentialist tradition in which social roles are mostly articles of bad faith and ways to hide from our fundamental freedom.

Towards an ethics of authentic interaction

Though authenticity is a popular ideal, it is at the same time contested in philosophical debates, in particular if it is regarded as an ethical ideal. Sanneke de Haan convincingly develops an enactivist approach to authenticity as a relational concept with moral and critical potentials. In my comment, I try to further develop the implications of this approach for understanding authenticity as an ethical ideal. I finally ask whether the ethics of an openness towards the other needs to be supplemented by universal principles of equity and how the relational approach can be extended beyond immediate interpersonal encounters.