The Rise of Expressive Authenticity
Charles Lindholm2013, Anthropology Quarterly 86 (2): 361-396.
This paper begins with the premise that there are two modes of authenticity. The first is based on genealogy or history (origin); the second is based on identity and immediacy (expressive content). For persons, the latter is conceptualized as ‘being oneself.’ Expressive authenticity arose in the 18th and 19th century as a reaction to the collapse of traditional forms of social life and the comingled rise of capitalism, Protestantism, empiricism, nationalism and possessive individualism. The evolution of expressive authenticity is traced through two related dimensions: the first is literary. The early satirical treatment of authenticity in Moliere’s Misanthrope is compared to the later sympathetic and corrosive portraits of authenticity in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew and Goethe’s Young Werther. The central figure is Rousseau, whose Confessions serves as the template for later high evaluations of expressivity evinced by European philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. In the United States, a parallel movement was championed by Emerson and understood by William James as a new therapeutic religion of the “once born”. In the 1960s the quest for personal expressive authenticity became a primary route to political and personal growth, leading to a backlash by conservative critics, and then to the moral resuscitation of the concept by the Canadian theorist Charles Taylor. I conclude by noting that theories of authenticity have thus far tended to focus on the expressive individual, ignoring historical and collective forms of this powerful modern quest for the sacred.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.