ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters I have argued that the inner sense and productionist models fail. Authenticity, rather than being a matter of discovery or production, concerns the (wholehearted) manner in which one relates to one’s commitments. Drawing on the work of Frankfurt, I have defi ned wholeheartedness as involving centrality (being engaged in a ‘project’ that is so central to one’s self-understanding that betraying it would also mean betraying oneself) and continuity (being committed to both the actual content of a project and to entertaining the commitment itself). In the last chapter we went beyond Frankfurt (and, in general, the range of discussion on personal autonomy) and added a further characteristic of wholeheartedness: ‘embeddedness.’ This relates to being immersed in an inter-subjectively constituted background or ‘fi eld’ that is (at least partly) constituted by qualitative distinctions of worth, and that we become immersed in through second-personal interactions. The practice of authenticity is then about situating us in such a context through wholehearted commitments that articulate aspects of this background. When we make up our minds about our wholehearted commitments we consider what is truly worth pursuing and position ourselves on this ‘map’ made up by qualitative distinctions of worth. In practical reasoning through strong evaluations we constitute our wholehearted commitments in relation to the goods that our commitments attempt to articulate. Thus, when acquiring wholehearted engagements that constitute our personal horizons, we articulate the background of choice-transcendent values on which they are based and from which their normativity originally springs. These, as we have seen, constrain our commitments in important ways.
