Episode 20 engages with the most overused and yet least understood words of our time: authenticity. But instead of treating it as a destination or a perfected state of being, we follow the existential tradition with Beauvoir, Sartre, and Charles Taylor to approach authenticity as a process, a practice of becoming attuned to one’s own freedom.

Through Beauvoir’s portraits of the “types of man”—the sub-man who flees freedom, the serious man who hides behind absolutes, the adventurer and the passionate man who risk dissolving themselves in intensity, authenticity appears not as a heroic posture but as a subtle ethical practice: refusing self-deception, resisting the temptation to dissolve into ready-made roles, and taking responsibility for the meanings we bring into the world.

Weaving then to Sartre’s insight, authenticity will not rebel for its own sake. To be authentic is not to swim against every stream, but to discern which currents are ours to follow. It is to acknowledge that even in constraint, we remain the authors of our actions. We choose, and we answer for those choices.

With Charles Taylor, authenticity becomes deeply situated. Our choices gain weight only against a “horizon of significance” that is background values, histories, relationships, and inherited meanings that make anything matter at all. Authenticity, then, is never purely inward; it unfolds within a world that already speaks to us.

Against this background, the self comes to the fore only through an endless dialogue with the Other, maintaining what we might call a dialectical posture. This dialectic is not a clash but a movement: a continual back-and-forth between self and world, self and Other, familiarity and strangeness. It is the recognition that I discover who I am not in isolation but in the shifting interplay of perspectives, where the Other disrupts me, challenges me, reflects me back to myself, and opens new possibilities of becoming. Authenticity emerges from staying with this movement without collapsing into either pole: neither dissolving into the Other’s expectations nor retreating into a closed and self-certain interiority.

In this conversation, we explore authenticity not as purity, stubborn resistance, or a polished ideal, but as a way of inhabiting this dialectical space—a way of encountering one’s freedom openly, responsibly, and in relation. A way of asking, again and again: How do I become someone who can answer for the life I am shaping, in the presence of others who are shaping theirs?