On authenticity - Samantha Rose Hill in Aeon (thanks to my friend E):

“From a young age, Arendt wrestled with the tension she felt between who she really was and how others perceived her. Young, brilliant and visibly Jewish, compared with her German classmates, she felt like she was different. It’s not difficult to imagine the young Arendt, living alone, refusing to attend morning classes, studying Homer in the afternoons for fun. Publicly, she was a star, delighting in the attention she received from her classmates and professors for her beauty and brilliance. But privately, inwardly, she was shy and more comfortable alone with herself.” (…)

“What does it mean to discover one’s true, authentic self? To act from a place of authenticity? Is there a truer self within the self that can be uncovered? What are we really talking about when we talk about authenticity? Authenticity emerged as a philosophical concept from Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), published in the aftermath of the Great War. Heidegger’s work attempted to recover Beingfrom the ordinariness of everyday life in which people exist in the world with others. For him, most of our everyday existence is inauthentic, because being in the world with others turns us away from being with our true selves, our true selves who are unaffected by the world.
For Heidegger, there was a difference between what is translated as ‘Being’ (with a capital B) and ‘being’ (with a lower-case b). This distinction does not indicate a transcendent Being, the way capitalising the ‘g’ in God does, but rather the fact that one is not always merely a being among beings. Or, to put it another way, Being means that there is a truer version of the self, a more authentic version, that can be experienced only when one steps out of the flow of everyday life, what Heidegger called ‘everydayness’.”

(…)

“But for Heidegger we are most fully ourselves only in those moments of exception, in that clearing of Being when we’ve left the well-worn path carved out by everyday routine altogether. The German word he uses for authenticity is Eigentlichkeit, which is defined as ‘really’ or ‘truly’. Eigen means ‘peculiar’, and ‘own’ or ‘of one’s own’. Literally, it might be translated as possessing the quality of being truly for oneself. Or, colloquially, today we might say something like ‘being true to oneself’. In those moments of exception, when one fully experiences the truth of themselves, they are apart from the herd, alone in their Being. And in this way, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity is a very lonely concept. It is to allow oneself to experience for a moment the terrifying aloneness of nonexistence – one’s death – while still alive.”

(…)

“As the Jaspers scholar Carmen Lea Dege put it in Psyche in 2020: ‘Jaspers is one of the very few existentialist thinkers who did not seek to master, tame or conquer the unknowable and finite condition of human life.’”

(…)

“Authenticity for the French existentialists was not about uncovering a pre-existing true self, but rather choosing to engage in a process of becoming.”

(…)

“Willing is what happens before one acts. To be in a state of willing is to be in the Now.”

(…)

“Loving the world, she realised, was a choice, and an act of willing, and the beauty of being together is that one is always coming undone in the dance of knowing and unknowing.”

Read the article here.

So we move from the question of authenticity to the act of throwing yourself into the world, in an attempt to love the world.

As far as authenticity is concerned, there are two options, it’s there where the performance ends. Or it’s the sublime performance.

What always will be is the dance of knowing and unknowing, this the choreography of love, but also under different circumstances the choreography of death.