No. 1 (2022): Authenticity. Become yourself

School is one of the main places in which individual identity is built. Self-knowledge and self-construction are a lifelong process, but the school years are absolutely crucial in it: here systematically, for the very first life in time, relationship becomes decisive for self-construction,  self-esteem, the ability to face and dialogue with others. The construction of the personality passes through school, improving one’s communication skills and abilities to discern among emotions, desires and attitudes. In this way, the school itself could - and perhaps should - be seen as the place and time in which each person learns who they is and who they would like to be, and not just the place where one learns something else.

We decided to focus on a single aspect of this intricate dynamic, namely on the dimension of authenticity. This instance has become a sort of motto of contemporary society: "Be yourself", "Become what you are" or "Become what you want", as the case may be, are slogans we hear almost everywhere.

To encourage and inspire reflection on this topic, we propose the Italian translation of an article about authenticity by the French philosopher Claude Romano, which has the merit of proposing new perspectives starting from a comparison with the main twentieth-century reflections on this question (Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, etc..). Claude Romano is Maître de Conférences at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and member of Husserl archive in Paris. Author of many works on the phenomenology of the event, he dedicated a recent work to the topic of authenticity: "Ètre soi même" (Édition Gallimard, Paris, 2019).