The Ontological Laws of Authentication.

This essay is an edited transcript of a lecture, titled “No Excuses: Consciousness Between Authenticity and Bad Faith in Leadership”, delivered at the international conference Activating New Leadership: The Key to Humanity's Future (Nov. 22-24, 2024), organized by the Community of Living Ethics – the project founded by Sergio Bartoli, a physician and student of Roberto Assagioli. The intent of the paper is to critically reexamine the relationship between leadership and consciousness, from the perspective of general ontophenomenology. If one defines leadership as that process that enables the evocation and realization of an “unprecedented future” and the leader as the opened space where “the future can take place”, it becomes clear that consciousness is the first and foremost tool of the leader. However, building on an intuition of Prof. Renato Giorda (University of Perugia) we can distinguish, in general, three interpretations of consciousness: spiritual, psychological, existential. This contribution aims to show that activating a new leadership requires the leader to be capable of self-activation, and that this selfactivation necessitates the exercise of laws pertaining to an ontoexistential plane. These “ontological laws” (N. Hartmann) allow for a grip, in the “effectivity of lived experience” (M. Heidegger), on the forms of “bad faith” (J.-P. Sartre) in which the leader finds themselves ‘against’ what they declare themselves to be, and acting in a manner ‘contrary’ to the future they claim to care about. The determination of the three ontological laws is therefore an indispensable knowledge for the process of authentication of the leader: that is, to have at one’s disposal an existence that expresses the future and an action that realizes it in history. KEYWORDS: Occasion, question, leadership, leader, consciousness, ontology, existential, ontological barriers, point of view, bad faith, authentication, ontological listening, ontological body, ontological laws, singular existentialism, ontological law of authenticity, ontological law of responsibility, ontological law of commitment, ontological care.