Authenticity

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what it means to be oneself, a question explored by philosophers from Aristotle to the present day, including St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre. In Hamlet, Polonius said ‘To thine own self be true’, but what is the self, and what does it mean to be true to it, and why should you be true? To Polonius, if you are true to yourself, ‘thou canst not be false to any man’ - but with the rise of the individual, authenticity became a goal in itself, regardless of how that affected others. Is authenticity about creating yourself throughout your life, or fulfilling the potential with which you were born, connecting with your inner child, or something else entirely? What are the risks to society if people value authenticity more than morality - that is, if the two are incompatible?

The image above is of Sartre, aged 8 months, perhaps still connected to his inner child.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Sarah Richmond No other episodes
  Associate Professor in Philosophy at University College London
• Denis McManus 2 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton
• Irene McMullin No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex

Reading list

• The Jargon of Authenticity
  Theodor Adorno (trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will) (Routledge, 1973) Google Books →
• Ethics of Ambiguity
  Simone de Beauvoir (trans. B. Frechtman) (Citadel Press, 1976) Google Books →
• On Being Authentic
  Charles Guignon (Routledge, 2004) Google Books →
• Being and Time
  Martin Heidegger (trans. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson) (Blackwell, 1978) Google Books →
• The Present Age
  Soren Kierkegaard (trans. A. Dru) (Harper Torchbooks, 1962) Google Books →
• Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self
  Denis McManus (ed.) (Routledge, 2015) Google Books →
• Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues
  Irene McMullin (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations
  Irene McMullin (Northwestern University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• Being and Nothingness
  Jean-Paul Sartre (trans. Sarah Richmond) (Routledge, 2018) Google Books →
• Existentialism is a Humanism
  Jean-Paul Sartre (trans. Carol Macomber) (Yale University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• The Ethics of Authenticity
  Charles Taylor (Harvard University Press, 1992) Google Books →
• Sources of the Self
  Charles Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 1989) Google Books →
• Sincerity and Authenticity
  Lionel Trilling (Oxford University Press, 1972) Google Books →

Related episodes

• The Examined Life
  
  9 May, 2002 100 Philosophy
• Existentialism
  
  28 Jun, 2001 100 Philosophy
• Virtue
  
  28 Feb, 2002 170 Ethics
• The Individual
  
  21 Oct, 1999 100 Philosophy
• Sartre
  
  7 Oct, 2004 840 French and related literatures
• The Philosophy of Solitude
  
  19 Jun, 2014 120 Epistemology
• Originality
  
  20 Mar, 2003 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Truth
  
  18 Dec, 2014 100 Philosophy
• Imagination and Consciousness
  
  29 Jun, 2000 120 Epistemology
• Human Nature
  
  7 Nov, 2002 150 Psychology

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Programme ID: m00035z4

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00035z4

Auto-category: 100 (Philosophy and psychology)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, to thine own self be true is advice so apparently simple and compelling that when Polonia says it in Hamlet, he needs no further examination.