A Critical Analysis of Authenticity: The Moral Virtue of Sartrean Philosophy

Abstract

This article offers a critical analysis of the idea of ‘Authenticity’ as the moral virtue of Sartre’s existential morality. Sartrean approach to morality leads us to the idea of authenticity which is treated as an alternative to traditional approach of morality in present time. The question is ‘how is man to live the life of a moral creature?’ From the existential approach, by being a social creature man must have to maintain the individuality. As we know, the individuality is the prime concern of any existentialist philosophers; and for them, we can attain our individual existence by apprehending the freedom as an inherent value of human reality. Jean-Paul Sartre, the most eminent existentialist philosopher so far, too begins his philosophical investigation with the same issue to offer a new kind of moral perspective to the socially living being apart from traditional and conventional moral system in our modern society. At the same time he offers an idea of ‘Authenticity’ as the moral virtue that focuses on the interpersonal relation in the society. Here my prime concern is to demonstrate the idea of authenticity after Sartre and then to search whether it would really be an accessible alternative approach to the moral man in the society. On the way to search I must go through a short description of his phenomenological ontology to understand the nature of human reality.