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Authentic being

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Authentic being involves living in accordance with one’s true self rather than conforming to external expectations. It emphasises self-awareness and responsibility.

Detailed Definition
Rooted in existential philosophy, authentic being requires confronting one’s freedom and mortality to live genuinely. In poetry, it appears in confessional modes, introspection, and resistance to societal norms. Poets explore authenticity through personal voice and unfiltered expression, often revealing the struggle to live truthfully in a world of pressures and illusions.
Example
Example in poetry:
Heidegger's concept of authentic being (Eigentlichkeit) — owning one's existence, especially one's mortality, rather than losing oneself in "das Man" (the they-self) — is dramatized in Rilke's elegies, where the speaker repeatedly confronts the inauthenticity of modern life against the demand for genuine existence; Confessional poetry (Lowell, Plath, Sexton) can be read as a quest for authentic being — stripping away social persona and poetic convention to make contact with genuine experience, however painful; A poet writing a personal elegy might frame the grief work as an encounter with authenticity — the death of the beloved forces the speaker out of everyday inauthenticity and into a confrontation with genuine finitude; Keats's negative capability — the capacity to remain in uncertainty without irritably reaching after fact and reason — is a version of authentic being, the willingness to inhabit one's actual existential situation without false consolation; The tension in confessional poetry between the authentic (the raw experience) and the crafted (the made poem) raises the philosophical question of whether art can ever achieve authentic being or whether form inevitably aestheticizes and thus falsifies; Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist ethics, requiring authentic being against the bad faith of social roles, informs much feminist poetry that strips away performed femininity to claim an authentic voice and subjectivity
Additional Notes
Heidegger's concept of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity, literally "ownedness") in "Being and Time" describes a mode of existence in which Dasein takes ownership of its own being — its thrownness, its facticity, its being-toward-death — rather than losing itself in the anonymous "das Man" (the they-self). Authenticity is not a permanent achievement but a possibility that must be continually renewed. Sartre's existentialist account of authenticity involves acknowledging radical freedom and responsibility rather than fleeing into bad faith. Beauvoir extends authenticity to the social domain: genuine authenticity cannot be achieved in isolation from others and requires the recognition of others' freedom. For poets, authentic being is both a personal and a literary challenge — the authentic poem cannot merely reproduce inherited conventions but must genuinely confront the poet's own situation. Related terms: inauthenticity, das Man, bad faith, thrownness, being-toward-death, existentialism.
Also Known As
genuine existence true selfhood existential integrity
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