Beauvoir also builds on Sartre’s notion of engagement to extend the idea of authenticity. Following Sartre, we are always already engaged in the affairs of the world, whether we realize it or not. To be human is to be already caught up in the midst of social and concrete situations that call for commitments of certain sorts on our part. Sartre takes this ground-level fact of engagement as the basis for exhorting us to be engaged in a deeper sense, where this implies that we decisively and wholeheartedly involve ourselves in what the current situation demands. Of course, once we have abandoned the spirit of seriousness, we will recognize that there are no antecedently given principles or values that dictate the proper course for our existential engagement, so that any commitment will be tenuous and groundless. But the authentic individual will be the one who takes up the terrifying freedom of being the ultimate source of values, embraces it, and acts with a clarity and firmness suitable to his or her best understanding of what is right in this context. In this way, the conception of authenticity is continuous with the ideal of being true to ourselves: we are called upon to become, in our concrete lives, what we already are in the ontological structure of our being.