Inauthenticity

Inauthenticity is the ordinary, anonymous mode of being-with in which a person understands the self through the shared purposes and ready-made forms of the social world. It makes the individual appear as anybody among everybody, but remains a freely assumed way of being that can be left behind through an authentic response to conscience and death.

The anonymous social world

In the unauthentic mode, the world reflects a person back to the self impersonally. Clothes, public transportation, parks, gardens, public places, and shelters made for anyone belong to an instrumental world organized for common use. These things indicate the person as one who acts for purposes, but do not disclose a unique personality. They show the self as anybody, sharing the facilities and possibilities that belong to everybody.

This shared world is not simply a collection of objects. Its ready-made instruments make the social unity of the “they” visible: the person encounters a pattern of possibilities that is both common to all and available to the self only as one among all. The relation between people therefore appears not as a meeting of irreplaceable individuals, but as the interchangeability of its terms. The individual is not set against the Other as a distinct self; in this mode, the self has not yet become “me.”

Being-with and responsibility

Inauthenticity belongs to a broader account of being-with that differs from a face-to-face relation of recognition or conflict. People are joined through their shared involvement in making a world of instruments serve their respective purposes. Their connection is an oblique interdependence: each helps make a world in which the other, too, pursues human ends. The Other remains a human reality, not merely another object among the tools of the world.

This condition is not passively received. Sartre argues that a person is responsible for being-for-the-Other because being-with is a mode of existence the person makes themself be. An original choice can realize that mode in the anonymous form of the “they.” Inauthenticity is thus ordinary, but it is not an unchosen destiny; its ordinariness does not cancel the freedom involved in living through it.

The movement toward authenticity

The contrast with authenticity clarifies what inauthenticity lacks. Individuality and authenticity have to be earned: under the call of conscience, a person must resolutely launch toward death as their own most peculiar possibility. In that movement, the person becomes authentic and raises others toward authenticity as well. The change is not described as an escape from being-with, but as a transformation in how the person inhabits it.

The image of a crew makes the contrast concrete. The original relation is not simply one individual confronting another; it is a shared existence made sensible in the rhythm of the oars and the regular movements of the coxswain, oriented toward a common goal and set against a world of spectators and performance. Against this common ground, the abrupt revelation of being-unto-death makes a person stand out in “common solitude,” while also raising the others to that solitude. Inauthenticity names the anonymous starting condition from which such distinctness must be won.