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Debate

Adorno and the Jargon of Authenticity

1964 · Is the language of authenticity a genuine philosophical insight into human existence, or an ideology that dresses up social conditions as timeless fate?

In 1964 Theodor W. Adorno published “Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie” (English 1973: The Jargon of Authenticity), written between 1962 and 1964. In Germany, he writes early in the book, a jargon of authenticity is spoken and even more written – a solemn vocabulary of words such as “existentiell”, “Begegnung” (encounter), “Auftrag” (mission), “Anruf” (call) or “Bindung” (commitment), which he traces from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Martin Buber’s thinking of the I–Thou relation and Otto Friedrich Bollnow to theology, adult education and the speech of business and administration. The book is a critique of ideology carried out as a critique of language, and it remains a reference point in arguments about Heidegger and about whether authenticity is an ideal worth having.

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Ideology in the guise of depth

Adorno argues that the jargon’s words sound as if they said something higher than they mean; sacred without sacred content, they lend an aura to whatever they touch, regardless of argument. In this way the language of authenticity presents conditions with social causes as timeless structures of human existence and invites consent instead of thought. In Being and Time, he argues, Heidegger gave this mood its philosophical form by making authenticity a technical term; and this language moulds thought towards submission even where it believes it resists – language, Adorno writes, grants fascism asylum, letting a smouldering disaster speak as if it were salvation.

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An ontological concept, not a moral grade

Defenders of Heidegger reply that Adorno attacks a tone, not the concept. Already in Being and Time (1927, §9) Heidegger had written that inauthenticity “does not signify any ‘less’ Being or any ‘lower’ degree of Being”: everyday existence – busy, interested, ready for enjoyment – can be inauthentic in its fullest concreteness. Authenticity, on this reading, means owning one’s existence, not holding a moral or social rank. Hermann Mörchen (Adorno und Heidegger, 1981) looked for common ground behind what he called a philosophical refusal of communication; later work, such as the volume Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (ed. Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek, 2008), has gone on weighing affinities and differences.

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Authenticity as a moral ideal

A different defence, not addressed to Adorno, comes from Charles Taylor’s Massey Lectures “The Malaise of Modernity” (1991; US title The Ethics of Authenticity, 1992). Taylor argues that the modern ideal of being true to oneself is a genuine moral ideal, not mere narcissism, and seeks a path between modernity’s “boosters” and its “knockers”. Its debased forms – self-absorption, relativism – can be criticised from within the ideal itself, since “authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it presupposes such demands”. Where Adorno saw a jargon, Taylor sees an ideal that can be lived well or badly.

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As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made

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