Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity

"This above all: To thine own self be true," is an ideal—or pretense—belonging as much to Hamlet as to the carefully choreographed realms of today’s politics and social media. But what if our "true" selves aren’t our "best" selves? Instagram’s curated portraits of authenticity often betray the paradox of our performative selves: sincerity obliges us to be who we actually are, yet ethics would have us be better. Drawing on the writings of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Emmanuel Levinas, Ho