But the importance of recognition has been modified and
intensified by the new understanding of individual identity
that emerges at the end of the eighteenth century. We might
speak of an individualized identity, one that is particular to
me, and that I discover in myself. This notion arises along
with an ideal, that of being true to myself and my own particular
way of being. Following Lionel Trilling’s usage in his
brilliant study, I will speak of this as the ideal of “authenticity.”
3 It will help to describe in what it consists and how it
came about.
One way of describing its development is to see its starting
point in the eighteenth-century notion that human beings
are endowed with a moral sense, an intuitive feeling for
what is right and wrong. The original point of this doctrine
was to combat a rival view, that knowing right and wrong
was a matter of calculating consequences, in particular,
those concerned with divine reward and punishment. The
idea was that understanding right and wrong was not a matter
of dry calculation, but was anchored in our feelings.4 Morality
has, in a sense, a voice within.
The notion of authenticity develops out of a displacement
of the moral accent in this idea. On the original view, the
inner voice was important because it tells us what the right
thing to do is. Being in touch with our moral feelings matters
here, as a means to the end of acting rightly. What I’m calling
the displacement of the moral accent comes about when
being in touch with our feelings takes on independent and
crucial moral significance. It comes to be something we have
to attain if we are to be true and full human beings.
To see what is new here, we have to see the analogy to
earlier moral views, where being in touch with some
source—for example, God, or the Idea of the Good—was