Abstract

In her text “Über die ‘Art’ eines Menschen und das Erlebnis der Maske” [On a Person’s “Manner” and the Experience of the Mask] (1923), Else Voigtländer uses expressions such as “true essence,” “authentic” and “genuine” as though their meaning were completely self-evident. She develops a differentiated theory of the relationship to the self that is fully aware of the perspectival character of any evaluation of a personality “from the outside” and by no means interprets every form of “mask” as necessarily “inauthentic” or “dissimulation.” She illustrates her theory with some sources on Nietzsche’s personality. Voigtländer’s text can be read as allowing for several equivalent sides of a personality and it does not assume a rigid hierarchy of different layers of personality. In this essay, I will reconstruct Voigtländer’s theses (also their incoherencies) and ask what it means to speak of authenticity and genuineness against the background of her theory of self-feelings. In particular, I will critically examine Voigtländer’s talk of the “core” and “periphery” of the person. In the conclusion, I will contrast her theory in a brief sketch with Heidegger’s alternative conception of authenticity and inauthenticity.