It should be obvious that this conception of authenticity has very little to do with the older idea of being true to one’s own pregiven feelings and desires. But there is still a clear respect in which the idea of “being true to oneself” has a role to play here. What distinguishes this conception from the conceptions of pop psychology and romantic views of authenticity is the fact that the “true self” to which we are to be true is not some pre-given set of substantive feelings, opinions and desires to be consulted through inward-turning or introspection. On the contrary, the “true self” alluded to here is an on-going narrative construction: the composition of one’s own autobiography through one’s concrete ways of acting over the course of a life as a whole. Feelings and desires are, of course, profoundly important, as are the features of one’s situation and one’s concrete connections to others. Heidegger wants to recover a firm sense of the wholeness of the existing individual. But this wholeness is found in the connectedness of what Heidegger calls the “happening” or “movement” of a life—that is, in the unfolding and constantly “in-progress” storyizing that continues until death. What is at stake in the ideal of authenticity is not being true to some antecedently given nature, then, but being a person of a particular sort. Heidegger emphasizes that being authentic presupposes that one instantiate such virtues as perseverance, integrity, clear-sightedness, flexibility, openness, and so forth. It should be obvious that such a life is not necessarily opposed to an ethical and socially engaged existence. On the contrary, authenticity seems to be regarded as a “executive virtue” that provides the condition for the possibility of being a moral agent in any meaningful sense whatsoever.