HICS, Peirce has said, depends onaesthetics, i.e., judgments of oughtdepend on the delineation of anideal, of what is admirable and what isnot.' Existentialism has given to the ad-mirable a new location-and hence byimplication has relocated judgments ofmoral value. What the existentialist ad-mires is not the happiness of a man's life,the goodness of his disposition, or therightness of his acts but the authenticityof his existence. This is, I think, theunique contribution of existentialism toethical theory. There are, of course, otherethical principles involved in existentialphilosophy, but they are principles whichit has in common with other ethical sys-tems. For example, the existentialistdenies the practical supremacy of reason,he denies the universality of moralvalues, he asserts the all-importance,ethically, of the historic individual in hisunique situation-all these tenets theexistentialist shares with numerous othermoralists, past and present. They aretenets which will appear obvious truthsto those who believe them and obviousfalsehoods to those who disbelieve them;in either event they are not unique. Butthe stress on authenticity is, I think, aunique existentialist emphasis-and animportant one.There are, in contemporary existen-tialism, two principal versions of thisnew ethical concept. For Heidegger,genuine existence is existence whichdares to face death: rising from the dis-sipating and deceptive consolations of to-day's concerns to the inner realizationthat its own past must take shape and sig-nificance in relation to its inevitable lasttomorrow. Contrasted with such genuineexistence is Verfallen, the distraction orscattering of one's freedom in the cares ofeveryday, where not the true individual,but das man, the indifferent "they," issovereign. In Sartre, on the other hand,genuine existence is conceived of as free,not in facing death so much as in facingthe meaningless ground of its own tran-scendence; that is, the fact that thevalues by which I live depend not ondivine fiat or metaphysical necessity buton myself alone. Contrasted with suchawareness is bad faith, the stultificationof freedom in the enslavement to an "ob-jective" truth or a consuming passion.In both versions, the concept ofauthenticity is rooted in the existentialinterpretation of freedom. We live frombirth to death under the compulsion ofbrute fact; yet out of the mere givennessof situation it is we ourselves who shapeourselves and our world. And in thisshaping we succeed or fail. To succeed isnot to escape compulsion but to tran-scend it-to give it significance andmeaning by our own projection of the ab-surdly given past into a directed future.But such shaping of contingency, suchimposition of meaning on the meaning-less, is possible only through the veryrecognition of meaninglessness-of thenothingness that underlies our lives.Such recognition means, for Sartre, theawareness, in dread, that the values bywhich I live are totally, absurdly mine;the contingency, the compulsion I mustface is the irrevocable givenness of myown creation. In the more radical concep-266AUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 267tion of Heidegger it is not the absurdity,the nothingness, of life which must befaced but the ultimate nothingness, thelast and total contingency of death,which must inwardly determine as it out-wardly delimits my existence. Thus forSartre it is a peculiar attitude towardfreedom in its relation to value that de-fines authentic existence; for Heideggerit is the orientation to the end of life, theresolve to death, that is essential toauthenticity. In both cases authenticityis a kind of honesty or a kind of courage;the authentic individual faces somethingwhich the unauthentic individual isafraid to face.If, in authentic existence, freedom caninform necessity and give meaning to themeaningless, it may also fail of its tran-scendence, it may succumb to the mul-tiplicity and absurdity of fact, it mayseek escape in the fiction of a supportingcosmic morality or in the domination ofa blind passion or in the nagging distrac-tions of its everyday concerns. In otherwords, freedom is not an abstraction tobe generically applied to "man" as such,but a risk, a venture, a demand. In asense we are all free, but we are free toachieve our freedom or to lose it. Thereare no natural slaves, but most of us haveenslaved ourselves. Existentialism is, inthis, a kind of inverse Spinozism. LikeSpinoza, it sees man as bond or free; only,unlike Spinoza, it finds in reason not aliberator but one of the possible enslaversand in imagination of a sort the sourcenot of enslavement but of emancipationfrom it.It should be noticed, however, that inHeidegger's conception the sphere of thenonauthentic, of Verfallen, is always withus. There is no easy distinction betweenthose who, leaving the fraudulent behindthem, achieve the level of genuine exist-ence and those who do not. We are all,always, a prey to the cares of here andnow; of a thousand and one trivialitiesall our days are made. Yet there is an es-sential, qualitative, recognizable differ-ence, a total difference, morally, betweenthe existence for which the trivialitiesare the whole and the existence for whichthe manifold of experience is transcendedin a unity not, like the Kantian, abstractand universal but intensely personal andconcrete.What does it mean to say, as Heideg-ger does, that what constitutes this unityis a "resolve to death," that it is "beingto death" or "freedom to death" whichemancipates the individual from bondageto the "they"? The arguments by whichHeidegger develops this thesis cannot betaken seriously as arguments. Like mostof his arguments they consist principallyin inversions of ground and consequentand in the kind of word play in whichGerman philosophy from Hegel onabounds. For example, if empirically it isfound that various peoples and individu-als face death in various ways, he can de-fine personal existence as "being todeath" and say that it is not the case thatdeath is essential to existence becausepeople die and face the fact of dying but,much more profoundly, people die andface the fact of dying because existenceis being to death. In other words, a pos-terioris are turned into a prioris: and,presto, there is the philosopher possessedof a foresight far finer than the hindsightof the ordinary man. Or, for instance, hecan play, much as Aristotle does withtelos in the Politics, with the meaning of"end": death is the end of life, and there-fore the end of life, etc.Yet, although Sein und Zeit is a tissueof this sort of pseudo-definition and re-definition, there is in its central thesis aserious truth. For the individual de-prived of supernatural support, cast268 ETHICSalone into his world, the dread of deathis a haunting if suppressed theme thatruns through life. What is more, if at alltimes communication between men istattered and fragile, it is in the face ofdeath that each man stands most strik-ingly and irrevocably alone. For thisEveryman there is after all no guide inhis most need to go by his side; and there-fore, more intensely than for his medievalcounterpart, his relation to death marksas nothing else does the integrity and in-dependence of his life. Thus, if authen-ticity is rare, authenticity in youth onemay expect to find extremely rare, for itis a virtue that flowers only in andthrough dread, in the living presence ofits own mortality.Yet whether "being to death" is thesole content and meaning of existentialauthenticity, as Heidegger makes it, isanother question. That the awareness ofdeath is a significant factor in any con-scious life is certain-and to have shownthis is an extremely important service ofSein und Zeit to contemporary thought.For this is, so far as I know, the first timesince Plato that death has been givencentral philosophic significance in the in-terpretation of life. In the case of Lucre-tius, for example, the fear of death and inthat of Hobbes the fear of violent deathare hinges, so to speak, on which theirphilosophic systems are hung; but theyare not, like Heidegger's "resolve todeath," internal to the analysis of life it-self. Whatever moralists wish to do here-after with this concept, they must cer-tainly reckon with it.On the other hand, in the fashion inwhich Heidegger presents it, the empha-sis on death involves an inescapable nar-rowness which warps the total concep-tion of the authentic individual. It isonly a man's death, Heidegger says,which is irreplaceably his own, which isnot interchangeable with the experienceof others; and therefore it is only in "be-ing to death" that he escapes the claimsof the public and corrupting "they" andis genuinely himself, genuinely free. His"freedom to death," the confrontationwith this one fact which is really his own,is the whole content and meaning of hisfreedom, and the existence of otherselves as of the world is for him only ameans to the achievement of this grimand lonely triumph. But this is not onlyemancipation from the bewildering dis-traction of the anonymous "they"; it isemancipation from all that might, by ourown creation, be made meaningful. It isindeed a transcendence of the meaning-less manifold, but a transcendence toodearly bought, for the very oneness andintensity of the achievement make it it-self almost empty of meaning. This isagain the Nullpunktsexistenz of Kierke-gaard, from which even God himself hasvanished. Personal authenticity is a sig-nificant ethical concept, and the relationof the individual to death is an essentialaspect of it, but it is not an aspect whichcan stand alone as Heidegger makes itdo. If nothing else, some relation toothers in their authenticity, some livingcommunication or the attempt at it,must play a part. But Heidegger'sauthentic individual wanders his solitary"wood paths," and they are not after allvery admirable roads to follow nor is it avery admirable sort of man who followsthem.If, then, Heidegger's definition ofauthentic existence is inadequate, that ofSartre may at first glance appear morefruitful. For Sartre, again, the honesty ofthe authentic person consists in his facingthe nature of his own freedom. This de-scription, since it is tied to life ratherthan to its cessation, does not seem, es-sentially, to entail the same narrownessAUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 269as does Heidegger's version. Yet as theFrench existentialists have developedtheir theory they have, I think, impover-ished as much as they have enriched theconcept of authenticity.For one thing, instead of amplifyingthe concept of das Sein zum Tode or pro-ceeding from it, Sartre has, in his theo-retical statements, dismissed it rathercavalierly. My death, he says, since itcan never become part of my own experi-ence, is more real to others than to me. Itis true, of course, that the death ofothers, of those near to me in particular,forms an essential part of my experiencein a fashion which Heidegger ought tobut does not recognize. But my own rela-tion to my own death does also, in itsparadoxical fashion, constitute an essen-tial element in my experience. Sartrehimself has given a brilliant account ofthe most dramatic and visible kind of"being to death" in his moving tributeto the Resistance, The Republic ofSilence:Exile, captivity and especially death (whichwe usually shrink from facing at all in happiertimes) became for us the habitual objects of ourconcern. We learned that they were neitherinevitable accidents, nor even constant and exte-rior dangers, but that they must be consideredas our lot itself, our destiny, the profound sourceof our reality as men.. . . Thus the basicquestion of liberty was posed, and we werebrought to the verge of the deepest knowledgethat man can have of himself. For the secretof a man is not his Oedipus complex or his in-feriority complex: it is the limit of his ownliberty, his capacity for resisting torture anddeath.2And he has, though perhaps less success-fully, dealt with similar themes in suchworks as The Wall or The Unburied Dead.But theoretically, it seems, he is toomuch interested in what is called the"open future"-or perhaps the indefiniteextent of open futures which the existen-tial revolutionary needs to envisage-tobe much concerned, philosophically, withthe individual's awareness of death. Yetthe concept of authenticity needs thissharp edge to mark it. Genuine existenceis revealed for what it is in relation towhat Jaspers called Grenzsituationen, andthe dreadful awareness of my own crea-tion of myself in indeed such a situation.But my death is the most dramatic ofsuch boundary situations-and in fact itis more than that; it is the essential anddetermining boundary situation. If it isterrible that I am responsible for what Ihave become, it is always hopeful to re-flect that tomorrow I may do better. Butwhat is most terrible is that I cannot doso forever, that in fact if I have bungledand cheated and generally made a fool ofmyself, there is only a little while, per-haps not all of today even, in which to doit all over. Kierkegaard's favorite maxim,"over 70,000 fathoms, miles and milesfrom all human help, to be glad," is anessential constituent of existentialism,and in particular of the concept of theauthentic individual.And perhaps one may call on Kierke-gaard to support a second criticism ofSartre's conception of authenticity. Thistime it is the "knight of infinite resigna-tion" whom I should like to recall. It isnot necessary here to attempt to under-stand this character, let alone to endorsehim, so to speak, as a moral model, butthere is this about him which is impor-tant-though he is extremely differentfrom the ordinary sort of person, he may,Kierkegaard says, look and act just likehim. That, we have noticed, is true alsoof Heidegger's authentic person. In thecase of Sartre, however, those who liveby mauvaise foi are marked off from anelusive but admirable sort of individualwho presumably has left bad faith behindand lives entirely in the separate and dis-270 ETHICStinct area of authenticity. Now the con-cept of bad faith has in fact served as akey for some brilliant portraits of varioussorts of depravity as, for example, in thePortrait of the Anti-Semite. Yet if onelooks, for instance, at the masterly pic-ture of life by mauvaisefoi painted in theopening episode of The Room, one getsthe feeling that the life of bad faith is theconventional one and, by implication,that of good faith unconventional. Infact this is, implicitly at least, the themeof the whole story-the story of a youngwoman who chooses to share the life ofher mad husband, even to try earnestlyand tragically to share his hallucina-tions, rather than to return to the va-cantly respectable existence of her horri-fied bourgeois parents. And here again, ifone equates convention with bourgeoisconvention, the interest of the existentialrevolutionary demands such a view. Lib-eration is the existential keynote allalong the line. It is the shackles of con-vention, of beliefs imposed from outside,that bind us personally, just as the eco-nomic interests of those who foster theconventions bind us socially. To cast offthe expressions of false privilege in ourprivate lives is to become authentic, tobecome ourselves, just as political revo-lution will, in this view, cast off for us theshackes that bind us in our economic andpolitical lives.Now of course it is true that theauthentic person is seldom a convention-al person. The concept of authenticity isnot a concept of adjustment-in factwith respect to the current ideal of thewell-adjusted member of society it istruly and deeply a heresy. One can evensay that some societies almost demandrebellion of a sort as the price of authen-ticity. Yet there may be authentic indi-viduals who live all their lives, like theknight of infinite resignation, as highlyrespectable members of highly respect-able societies. Elizabeth Bennett is anauthentic individual, though she neverdid anything more unconventional thanto walk three miles on a rather muddyday. Sartre's authentic existent, on theother hand, deprived of all the triviali-ties and all the substance of Verfallen andgiven only a highly mechanical un-Marxist Marxianism by which to live, re-mains a mere ideal, or a ghost of a per-son. Mathieu, for example, who in TheAge of Reason is a real person, has notachieved authenticity but is constantlyand desperately seeking it. He is unableto survive the Grenzsitucation which theFrench existentialists in their own per-sons met so courageously. Absurdly anddefiantly, he is killed during the fall ofFrance in 1940. The trouble is that anauthentic existent, as Sartre conceiveshim, has no end given him except his ownauthenticity; but authenticity is not somuch an end of acts as a value which isrealized as a by-product of acts. The fail-ure to recognize this essential complexityof the ethical situation is a serious lack ofexistentialism, as it is of most other sys-tematic moralities. Moralists seek to de-scribe the end of human action, but manyvalues, and perhaps the highest, are pro-duced as Hartmann puts it "on the backof the act." The self-consciousness in-volved in seeking them makes them im-possible to find. And authenticity is sucha value. Those who attain it are doingand seeking what others are doing andseeking; the unique and in a sense time-less value their life exhibits is a qualifyof, but not an end for, that life itself.But this lack of complexity reflects adeeper lack, for the central difficultywhich underlies all these errors or omis-sions of existentialism is the narrownessof the existential view of the free act. Itis because of that narrowness that theAUTHENTICITY: AN, EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 271existential hero has nothing to seek buthis own authentic act. The existentialisthas rightly seen that, "thrown into theworld," always already "engaged," weare nevertheless each totally responsiblefor our own destinies. But by singling outthe act alone by which a man faces hisown "condemnation to be free," theexistentialist isolates part of a complexsituation which cannot in fact be so iso-lated. It is true that it is I who have-al-ways-already-chosen the values by whichI live. But I have chosen, not createdthem; if they were not in some sensethere to be chosen, if they did not some-how compel me to choose them, theywould not be values at all. I could noteven, like Kirillov, choose suicide as thenegation of all values. Sartre says thatvalues "start up like partridges beforeour acts." That is how it looks in the re-flective moment of dread-but the aspectof total responsibility is only one aspectof a more complex situation. The choiceis my choice, yet it is also the choice ofsomething-and of something thatobliges me to choose it. For Sartre, how-ever, there is a crude and absolute dis-junction between the free act of genuineexistence and the bad faith of belief invalues as metaphysically self-existent orsupernaturally revealed. Either I myself,all alone, simply act or I enslave myselfto a falsely hypostatized being; hence thedesperate endeavor to make of the act it-self-of my freedom as such or the hones-ty to face my freedom-the whole endand object of the free man. But there areno pure acts. An act involves a referenceto values which in some way make aclaim on the agent and perhaps, at leastindirectly, bind him to other agents or tothose affected by his acts.It is probably in some such context,moreover, that the problems of the rela-tions between individuals need to betreated. And that brings me to my finalcriticism, that is, the all too familiar butnecessary objection that the authenticindividual, while facing with admirablecourage the ultimate loneliness of humanlife, is nevertheless even lonelier than cir-cumstances warrant. To be sure, Sartreand, presumably with his knowledge andassent, Beauvoir have tried in variousways to meet this common objection,but, in my opinion at least, with verylittle success.They try to relate one self to others inaccordance with two favorite maxims(each of which is the slogan for a Beau-voir novel): Hegel's "Every conscious-ness wants the death of another" andDostoevski's "We are all responsible forall." The Hegelian maxim serves as aguiding principle for Sartre's detailedanalysis of the circle of conflicts in L'Etreet le Neant, and it also serves as a basis forthe description of class-consciousness andtherefore as a bridge to his theory of revo-lution. That it is not an adequate prin-ciple for a complete or essential analysisof human relationships has been saidoften enough, and that some uneasinessis felt about it even at headquarters isevidenced by the extremely crude argu-ments with which Beauvoir has since at-tempted to dismiss it in The Ethics ofAmbiguity. The first view one takes ofanother, that the other consciousnesswants the death of mine, is naive, shesays, for one at once realizes that ofcourse, as we all know, if anyone takesanything away from me, he is really giv-ing it to me all the while. This is un-doubtedly one of the worst philosophicalarguments ever penned-not to mentionthe shocking fact that there are in thiscase four hundred pages of naivete in themaster's masterpiece. Nor have other at-tempts to get from the first to the secondmaxim had better success. Sartre and,272 ETHICSfollowing him, Beaufrom my concrete, indom to freedom as aalways with curious sophistry-exceptperhaps in the argument that I cannot befree unless others are so. It is true thatminimal requirements of civil and eco-nomic freedom are the sine qua non of myfreedom. Yet we believe in freedom forothers not only because it facilitates ourown. This argument, though valid, is in-sufficient. And what is worse, the politicswhich is developed on this basis has,despite its opposition to dialectical ma-terialism, the same lifeless and mechani-cal quality as the article it seeks to re-place. One need only instance the longseries of articles called What Is Litera-ture? in which, after a rather ingeniousanalysis of the differences between thearts, Sartre embarks on a completelystock Marxian account of the functionsof the prose writer, in which RichardWright becomes the greatest Americannovelist and Flaubert is no good becausehe did not take his political responsibili-ties seriously, and so on.Yet it does seem likely that somehowand in some sense the concept of authen-ticity does involve not only the winningof freedom but the respect for freedom,not only the achievement of dignity inthe individual but the acceptance of theKantian maxim of the dignity of all indi-viduals. Some such connection does seemto exist; one cannot imagine an authenticindividual who really has no respect forthe liberty of others, and one cannotimagine the existence of authenticitywhere some sort of liberty does not exist,in idea even if not in fact. But there hasbeen, so far as I know, no convincingphilosophic statement why this should beso. Certainly to take away substantivevalues as mauvaise foi and then to putfreedom back in as a substantive value isnot good enough. But on the other hand,like Heidegger, to view the existence ofothers only as a means to my freedom isworse than not good enough-it is posi-tively evil. Yet it is difficult, at least inexistential language, to say why.Perhaps this failure of existentialism-its failure adequately to relate my free-dom to freedom in general-is connectedwith the more limited or more concreteproblem which it equally fails to treat,that is, the problem of the manner inwhich authenticity is determined or de-fined or influenced by the direct relationof one individual to another in his free-dom. Both Jaspers and Marcel have in-troduced concepts of communication intoexistentialism, but in both cases thetreatment is so vague and sentimental asto contribute little. Yet it is here, in thequestion of communication as well as inthe implications of the concept of authen-tic existence for the general concept ofliberty, that more needs to be said.Is it wholly in loneliness that authen-ticity is achieved? If genuine existence istranscendence successfully accomplished,giving form and meaning to the meaning-less succession of hours and needs, does itnot, in transcending contingency andnothingness, in some sense transcendloneliness as well? Is not-sometimes, atleast-the transcendence of lonelinessneeded for the very achievement ofauthenticity? True, authenticity itself,the core of genuine existence, is a valuewhich must center in the individual whobears it; the inner dissipation of the selfin seeming devotion to other selves is,existentially speaking, deeply immoral.Even the "self-sacrifice" of an authenticperson perfects and dignifies the individ-ual and inalienable person that is him-self. Yet, if one can distinguish betweena fraudulent and an authentic aspect ofthe self, may one not distinguish also be-AUTHENTICITY: AN EXISTENTIAL VIRTUE 273tween a fraudulent and an authentic rela-tion between selves? The quality of theconcern with others on the distractivelevel is evident in all gregariousness; itsmost extreme expression, perhaps, is thecozy friendliness of radio announcers totheir disembodied audience. But, in theprojection toward one's own freedomwhich focuses distraction into authen-ticity, the bewildered and bewilderingdiffusion of everyday sociability wouldseem likewise to be, if not replaced, atleast reoriented in the direction of a gen-uine and decisive reaching-out to the fewothers whose existence shows a signifi-cant kinship to one's own. Even ifauthenticity is in an essential aspect "be-ing to death," it is in that very aspect, inthe light of the ultimate dissolution ofthe person loved or loving, that the ur-gency and the reality of communicationare most strikingly exhibited. In short,between the two Beauvoir maxims, be-tween the sadism of the Hegelian masterand the sainthood of Zossima, there lies awhole range of kinds of and endeavors atcommunication-of times and places inwhich, fleetingly and in devious ways,perhaps, but still truly, minds do meet.And, without the actuality and possibili-ty of such meetings, the irrevocableloneliness of human life, however authen-tic, would be indeed too great to bear.But whether existential philosophy assuch can produce an adequate solutionfor this problem-whether it can buildagain the bridge it has broken-is an-other question. Every philosophy "ex-plains" only such phenomena as itspremises already include; it can onlyamplify what its basic beliefs already as-sert. So, for example, Descartes's failureto understand the living-both animallife and human passion-is determinedby the concept of "clear and distinctidea" with which he starts. If, then, forthe existentialists the beginning is the in-dividual in loneliness and peril, the wholecontent of their doctrine is the elabora-tion and expansion of this same theme:and, to go further, to describe the ties ofmen as well as their isolation, their loyal-ties as well as their momentary decisions,demands at least, as we have suggestedearlier, a recognition of the complexity ofthe free act, of the element in every actof submission to a claim as well as re-sponsibility for choosing to submit.This is not to deny the significance ofthe existential insight but to demand itsinterpretation in a wider, other thanexistential, setting. Without some suchimmersion in a more inclusive view ofman's nature, existentialism remains asignificant but static insight into one as-pect of human consciousness. True, it isan aspect peculiarly characteristic of ourpresent mentality, and existentialism is aphilosophy peculiarly descriptive of thecrisis of our time. But it is the kind ofphilosophy which sees something thatmust be seen and goes no further. And togo further, or rather to go back, to makea new and richer beginning, is no longerexistentialism. Yet if, for the existential-ist, freedom is transcendence, he shouldperhaps be willing to acknowledge that,in the projective creation of the future,existentialism itself is among the data tobe transcended