Aging and Self-Realization by Hanne Laceulle

(a summary by @nietzscheswritings) 

The chapter analyzes authenticity as one of the three fundamental strands of the self-realization discourse. Laceulle approaches the concept as both philosophically complex and historically layered, emphasizing that its coherence depends on how one resolves the status of the true self and the role of social influence.

1. Introducing authenticity

Authenticity is framed as fidelity to one’s real or essential self, but Laceulle stresses that definitions quickly encounter conceptual difficulties. The modern rise of authenticity is linked to the decline of traditional sources of meaning and the emergence of the individual as a moral locus. Critics describe contemporary authenticity as narcissistic or aestheticized, yet Laceulle notes that its conceptual problems do not eliminate its moral significance. The chapter therefore requires a genealogical approach that clarifies its contested foundations.

2. Rousseau and Romantic expressivism

Rousseau’s naturalized contrast between an innocent inner self and a corrupting social world inaugurates the modern authenticity ideal. The Romantic heirs extend Rousseau by interpreting human selfhood in artistic terms: life becomes the medium through which one reveals and creates the authentic self. Their contribution is the combination of expression and creation. The essentialist assumption of a natural core self and the suspicion of social embeddedness generate the two central theoretical problems for the discourse as a whole.

3. Existentialist authenticity, including all Nietzsche content

Existentialist thinkers reject essentialism and replace it with self-definition under conditions of contingency, freedom, and existential vulnerability. Kierkegaard anchors authenticity in a decisive identity-constituting choice. Authentic existence arises through crisis, responsibility, and the acceptance of existential risk.

Nietzsche receives a focused and substantial presentation. Laceulle follows Golomb and Nehamas in interpreting “becoming who or what you are” as the central expression of Nietzschean authenticity. The text cites specific works: Schopenhauer as Educator, The Gay Science, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche denies the existence of a stable core self. Authenticity is therefore understood as active self-creation rather than the recovery of an inner essence. It requires distinguishing what can be changed from what must be accepted and doing so under the ideal of amor fati. Authenticity demands overcoming ressentiment, affirming one’s multiplicity, and giving style to one’s character. Eternal recurrence becomes the ethical test of whether one can affirm one’s entire life as one’s own achievement. Laceulle presents Nietzsche’s ideal as regulative rather than achievable, since the process of self-formation never ends.

Heidegger centers authenticity in the confrontation with one’s finitude. Being-onto-death structures authentic selfhood by forcing Dasein to acknowledge its responsibility for its existence across past, present, and future. Inauthenticity results from absorption in the anonymous social world. The existentialist tradition thus solves the essentialist problem but retains a problematic treatment of social influence as inherently inauthenticating.

4. Charles Taylor

Taylor reframes authenticity as a moral ideal dependent on a horizon of significance, dialogical recognition, and shared cultural frameworks. He criticizes modern distortions of authenticity yet affirms that the ideal cannot be abandoned. Authenticity requires engagement with sources of meaning external to the individual, which undermines both atomism and relativism. Laceulle points out that Taylor’s account still insufficiently addresses structural inequalities and power.

5. Diana Meyers and intersectionality

Meyers grounds authenticity in the active, agential construction of selfhood within intersecting social structures. She treats authenticity as a set of competencies exercised across contexts. Social influences are neither to be uncritically accepted nor fully rejected but must be interrogated and appropriated through sustained self-reflective agency. Authenticity and autonomy develop through lifelong processes, and Meyers acknowledges that authentic selves maintain coherence without demanding perfect unity.

6. Authenticity and aging

Laceulle surveys three traditions in gerontology that implicitly engage authenticity. Spiritual perspectives describe aging as the realization of a more genuine inner self, involving transcendence, self-acceptance, and engagement with vulnerability. Tornstam and Moody and Carroll provide examples of this orientation. Existential perspectives emphasize meaning, finitude, and ethical engagement with one’s life course. De Lange, Kruse, and Rentsch each articulate forms of growth that resemble existentialist authenticity, including the appropriation of vulnerability and the shaping of identity in time. Art of living approaches draw on Greco-Roman philosophical practices and Foucault’s later work, focusing on disciplined self-formation, techniques of the self, and ethical cultivation. These perspectives show how authenticity informs models of aging without relying on explicit terminology.

7. Conclusion

Laceulle concludes that authenticity remains indispensable but must be reformulated to avoid essentialism, incorporate social constitution, and recognize vulnerability. It becomes part of a broader reframing of self-realization and moral agency that she develops in subsequent chapters.