Authenticity, Bad Faith, and the Public Self A Wittgensteinian-Lutheran Reframing

Abstract

Contemporary culture treats authenticity as the highest virtue: to be “true to oneself” is to live courageously, even at the cost of disrupting family and community. Yet this ideal rests on the dubious assumption that the self is an inward essence waiting to be discovered and expressed. This essay challenges that assumption by drawing on Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Luther. Using a narrative case study, I show how the rhetoric of authenticity often functions as mauvaise foi—“bad faith” in Sartre’s sense — an evasion of freedom disguised as honesty. Wittgenstein’s critique of the private language illusion demonstrates that claims of “discovering” an inner orientation are not descriptions of hidden facts but public moves within shared grammars. Luther’s theology of the imago Dei and vocation reframes the issue theologically: the true self is not a hidden kernel but a public, relational reality enacted in faith toward God and love toward neighbor. Authenticity, far from being the opposite of repression, can itself be a subtle form of dishonesty. The alternative is not repression but responsibility: to lose the illusion of essence and find the reality of vocation.