“Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (translated by Marjorie Perloff)

These notebooks were written by Wittgenstein while he was serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting on the Russian front in WWI. He wrote the private parts on the left-hand pages of his notebooks, in a code, which he had used as a child with his siblings, essentially transposing As into Zs, Bs into Ys, etc… Thus it was not meant to be impenetrable, but simply to stymy nosy eyes in the tight quarters of a boat patrolling the Vistula River. As Perloff relates, “The left-hand, or “secret,” pages have never been published in English, and there is not even an authoritative text in German.” 

Wittgenstein mainly recounts the mundanities of his day to day army life, which primarily consists of manning the ship’s spotlight, reading and rereading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, peeling potatoes, complaining about the baseness of his fellow soldiers, working on the logical puzzles that would eventually form the basis of the Tractatus, masturbating, and sleeping. But, in between, he coins witty aphorisms and thinks much about God, ethics, the purpose of life, death, and spirituality. On the crudeness of his fellow soldiers, he notes, “So it turns out not to be true that a great common cause inevitably ennobles people.” During his whole tour of duty, Wittgenstein felt himself very much alone, whether in the company of officers or his fellow enlisted infantrymen, “No choice but to carry out one’s work in all humility and for God’s sake not to lose oneself!!!! For the easiest way to lose oneself is to want to give oneself to other people…. Only one thing is necessary: to maintain one’s distance from everything that happens; to collect oneself! God help me!”

Wittgenstein ponders deeply on all things spiritual, “Over and over again I say to myself the words of Tolstoy, “Man is helpless in the flesh but free in the Spirit.”” He also contemplates his duty, “I am afraid, not of being killed but not of fulfilling my duty properly before that moment…. If this is the end for me, may I die a good death, worthy of my best self. May I never lose my self.” He is often questioning and reprimanding himself, “It is infinitely hard not to resist evil. It is difficult to serve the spirit on an empty stomach and without sleep.” Given the setting, he is appropriately fixated with issues of life and death, “One must live for the good and the beautiful until life ends of its own accord.” He also considers the inner life, “The grace I’ve been given to think & work now is indescribable. I must acquire indifference to the hardships of the external life.” He is moved often, fluctuating from extreme depression to resigned contentment, “I am all spirit & therefore I am free.” At other times, the depression gets the better of him, “Pull yourself together! And don’t work just to pass the time but devoutly so as to live!” He works on his logic in spurts, castigating himself for days of inactivity followed by bursts of output, “I am thinking a great deal about my life and that is also a reason why I cannot work. Or is it the other way around?” He often talks directly to God, “God give me sanity and strength!!!” Sometimes the darkness is almost too much, “Contemplating suicide…. Am morally blank…. My soul is worn out, so to speak…. The entire external life in all its infamy is bursting in upon me…. God is love.”

Wittgenstein returns again and again to his deep loneliness, “Be satisfied with yourself. For others will not give you support or only for a short time! (Then you will become a burden to them.)” But he continually strives to make himself a better person by his sheer will. “It is difficult to live the good life! But the good life is beautiful.” He falls back time and again to his faith, “Man needs only God…. Perhaps the proximity to death will bring me the light of life! May God enlighten me! I am a worm but through God I can become a man…. Only death gives life its meaning.”

In Notebook 2 and, particularly, in Notebook 3, Perloff starts to intersperse the right-hand side of Wittgenstein’s notebooks, his work on the Tractatus, as his ideas from both sides begin to merge. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein was gradually sensing that his book would contain an ethics and worldview beyond just pure logic, “The Ancients were actually clearer, in that they acknowledged a clear-cut limit, while with the new [modern] system, it is supposed to look as if everything can be explained.” God begins to seep into his formal philosophical work, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. That therefore good and evil are somehow connected with the world. The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God. And to that meaning we can connect the image of God as a Father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings in the world to my will; I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world—and so in a certain sense master it—by renouncing any influence on events.” He later continues, “The world is independent of my will. Even if everything that we wish for were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a gift of fate.” A few months later, Wittgenstein is still circling the same theme, “To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in a God means to see that life has a meaning…. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: the world—which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I…. Only he who lives, not in time but in the present, is happy…. Then one can say that he lives eternally who lives in the present.”

Finally, Wittgenstein contemplates the possible unification of the ethical and happy lives, “It is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment or reward…. How can a man be happy anyway since he cannot ward off the misery of this world? Precisely through the life of understanding. A good conscience is the happiness that the life of understanding preserves. The life of understanding is the life that is happy despite the misery of the world. The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the conveniences of the world. To it, the conveniences of the world are only so many gifts of fate.” Wittgenstein contemplates the nature of suicide again, but this time at some remove, “If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.”

“In the Margins” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is a collection of lectures written by Ferrante and given by an actress in her stead. Together, they focus on the process of writing, as well as the value of reading widely and deeply. Ferrante asserts, “The way we see ourselves dragging outside, by means of the written word, an imaginary “inside,” which is by its nature fleeting deserves more attention…. Everything begins with pencil and paper. Then a surprising split takes place: the I of the writer separates from its own thought and, in the separation, sees that thought…. When I write, not even I know who I am.”

Ferrante stresses that the task of writing begins with the readings that are already inside you. “My work, in fact, is founded on patience. I start from writing that is planted firmly in tradition, and wait for something to erupt and throw the papers into disarray…. The only thing we can’t do without, in literature and any other place, is form.” She begins her second lecture by musing on the phrase, taken from Diderot, to “tell the thing as it is.” She admits, “I didn’t know how to get an exact reproduction of reality, I wasn’t able to tell the thing as it was…. It’s arduous to speak truthfully, but you do your best.” Her breakthrough was realizing, “I will therefore try to tell it as I can, and, who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and tell it as it is.” In her third lecture, she points to the fact that when her fiction finally separated from realism, it became no less truthful. “With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through fiction.”

For Ferrante, the acts of writing and reading are inseparable. “We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own…. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune…. Thus when I talk about my “I” who writes, I should immediately add that I’m talking about my “I” who has read…. Thus writing is a cage and we enter it right away, with our first line. It’s a problem that has been confronted with suffering, I would say with anguish, precisely by those who have worked with the most dedication and engagement…. No language and no writing are made by themselves. That is to say: the scribe has to study and become so skillful that it’s almost as if the word, in becoming writing, were running autonomously from inside to outside, from the heart to the page.”

“The Books of Jacob” by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft)

This is a sprawling tome, which many view as Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. It is a historical novel based on the life of the mystical Jewish prophet Jacob Frank, who was, in turn, a follower of Sabbatai Zevi. Their devotees, the true believers, were heterodox Jews, who divined a mystical interpretation of the Talmud, steeped in Kabbalah. “All this is to teach the children that the Torah’s structure is the same. The shell is the simplest meaning of the Torah, its description of what happened. Then we start to get down into its depths…. P, pshat, that’s the literal meaning, R, remez, that’s the figurative meaning, D, drash, that’s what the learned say, and S, sod, that’s the mystical meaning…. “There were once four great sages, whose names were Ben Asai, Ben Soma, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Rabbi Akiba. One after the other they say they went to paradise,” begins the old man. “Ben Asai, well, he saw it, and he died…. Well, it means that he got into the River Pishon, a name that can be translated as: lips that learn the strict sense…. Ben Soma, well, he saw it, and he lost his mind…. That means he got into the River Gishon, a name that tells us that the person is only seeing the allegorical meaning…. Elisha ben Abuyah,” he goes on, “looked and became a heretic. That means that he got into the River Hiddekel, and he got lost in the great many possible meanings…. Only Rabbi Akiba went into paradise and came back out unscathed, which means that having plunged into the River Phrath, he got the deepest meaning, the mystical one…. And those are the four paths to reading and understanding.””

As soon as the young Jacob enters the plot, the other Sabbateans almost immediately regard him as the Messiah. “Jacob scolded them, “Don’t be such a fool. If a person wants to storm a fortress, he won’t get in by talking. Words come and go. A person’s got to have an army. We, too, must act, and not just speak. Did our forefathers not chatter, not pore over written words long enough? What did all that talking do for them? What came of it? It’s better to see with your eyes than write down a bunch of words.”” Jacob’s righthand man, Nahman, though, cannot help but be a scribe, in the dark of night recording their people’s history for posterity, “Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.” Another true believer, Reb Mordke, continues, “Every place has two characters—every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark of the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light. The Messiah is our doppelgänger, a more perfect version of ourselves—he is what we would be, had it not been for the fall.”

Some Frankist followers seem to have converted to the heterodox faith more for possible secular rewards. “Shorr thinks that it is bad to be a Jew, that Jews have it hard in life, but that being a peasant is harder. There really is no fate worse than theirs. In that respect, Jews and peasants are equals, in the sense that they share the lowest rung in the hierarchy of creation. Only vermin might be ranked beneath them. Even cows and horses, and especially dogs, get better care.” The Frankist Jews are considered heretics within their own faith and so must hide their true religion. Mayer teaches his young daughter, “When the last little spark of divine light returns to its source, the Messiah will appear to us. All laws will be invalidated. The division between kosher and non-kosher will disappear, like the division between holy and cursed. Night will cease to be distinguishable from day, and the differences between men and women will disappear. The letters in the Torah will rearrange themselves so that a new Torah will come to be, and everything will be opposite…. Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss…. Remember that. Thoughts must be concealed…. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you mislead others…. We don’t do that because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play fools, pretend to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks. But we bear the burden of silence: masa duma.”

In Poland, both the traditional Jews and the Frankists live under the thumb of the king, the landowning nobility, and the Catholic Church. Bishop Dembowski has a hard time figuring them out. “If only he could understand these Jews the same way he can more or less comprehend the intentions of a peasant! Yet here you have their tassels, their hats, their bizarre speech… their suspicious religion. Why suspicious? Because it’s too close. Their books are the same, Moses, Abraham, Isaac on the stone under his father’s knife, Noah and his ark—all of it’s the same, and yet, with them it appears in some strange new context. Even Noah doesn’t look the same, exactly—he’s disfigured, somehow, and his ark is not the same, but rather Jewish, more ornamental, Eastern, bursting at the seams. Even Isaac, who was always a blond little stripling with rosy skin, has now transformed into a wild child, sturdier, not quite so defenseless…. Their faith is dark and concrete, almost uncomfortably literal. Their Moses is an old pauper with bony feet; ours a dignified elder with a flowing beard…. The worst is when a foreign thing is disguised as something that belongs. As though they were mocking us. As though they were making a joke out of the Holy Scriptures…. After all, the Jews have been around for longer, and yet they persist in their error. It is certainly not unreasonable to suspect that they must be up to something.” 

The traditional Jews despise the Frankists even more than the Christians. “Pinkas is profoundly convinced that the old tradition of their forefathers was the right approach, to pass over all matters connected with Sabbatai Tzvi in silence; nothing good, nothing bad, no cursing, no blessing. A thing that is not talked about ceases to exist…. So great is the power of the word that wherever it is lacking, the world just disappears…. Why talk? If you want to rid the world of someone, it does not take fire and sword, nor any type of violence. You just have to pass over that person in silence and never call him by name. In this way, he will gradually recede into oblivion. If another person insists on inquiring into the matter, you must threaten him with herem.” The Frankists, however, have faith even in their darkest hour. “The Messiah must stoop as low as possible, down into those dispassionate mechanisms of the world where the sparks of holiness, scattered into the gloom, have been imprisoned. Where darkness and humiliation are greatest. The Messiah will gather the sparks of holiness, which means that he will leave behind him an even greater darkness. God has sent him down from on high to be abased, into the abyss of the world, where powerful serpents will mercilessly mock him…. The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Exodus” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter proposes that the Book of Exodus is preeminently about Moses. “The general rule in Exodus, and again in Numbers when the story continues, is that what is of interest about the character of Moses is what bears on his qualities as a leader—his impassioned sense of justice, his easily ignited temper, his selfless compassion, his feelings of personal inadequacy…. Moses, as forger of the nation and prince of prophets is, after all, not an absolutely uniques figure but a man like other men.” God has also transformed. “God in Exodus has become essentially unseeable, overpowering, and awesomely refulgent.” Alter discusses the structural form of Exodus, “The narrative is organized around three thematically defined spaces: Egypt, the place of bondage; the wilderness, a liminal space where freedom will be realized and new obligations incurred, where a tense struggle between leader and people will play out as part of the initiatory experience of nationhood; and the promised destination of the Exodus from Egypt, the land that remains beyond the horizon of this book. Egypt is associated with water…. The wilderness is, antithetically, a zone of parched dryness…. Finally, beyond well-watered Egypt and the burning desert where uncanny fires flare, the new Israelite nation is repeatedly told of a third space, a land flowing not with water but, hyperbolically, with milk and honey.”

In Exodus 2:3, Alter comments, “she took a wicker ark…. The basket in which the infant is placed is called a tevah, “ark,” the same word for Noah’s ark…. As the ark in Genesis bears on the water the saving remnant of humankind, the child borne on the waters here will save his imperiled people.” In Exodus 2:10, Alter calls attention to the etymology of the name, Moses. “This is an authentic Egyptian name meaning “the one who is born,” and hence “son.” The folk etymology relates it to the Hebrew verb mashah, “to draw out from water.” Perhaps the active form of the verb used for the name mosheh, “he draws out,” is meant to align the naming with Moses’s future destiny of rescuing his people from the water of the Sea of Reeds.” Further along, in Exodus 2:13, Alter calls attention to a biblical device, “Why should you strike your fellow? The first dialogue assigned to a character in biblical narrative typically defines the character. Moses’s first speech is a reproof to a fellow Hebrew and an attempt to impose a standard of justice (rasha’, “the one in the wrong,” is a legal term).”

Alter will admit when there is deabte about the proper translation of the Hebrew. In Exodus 3:14, he relates, “‘Ehyeh-‘Asher-‘Ehyeh. God’s response perhaps gives Moses more than he bargained for—not just an identifying name (the implication of offering one such name might be that there are other divinities) but an ontological divine mystery of the most daunting character…. “I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be” is the most plausible construction of the Hebrew, though the middle word, ‘asher, could easily mean “what” rather than “who,” and the common rendering of “I-Am-That-I-Am” cannot be excluded.” In Exodus 6:3, Alter expounds, “as El Shaddai, but in My name the Lord I was not known to them. The designation El Shaddai, which is in fact used a total of five times in the Patriarchal Tales, is an archaic, evidently Canaanite combination of divine names. El was the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, though the Hebrew term is also a common noun meaning “god.” No satisfactory explanation for the meaning or origin of the name Shaddai has been made, but some scholars link it with a term for “mountain,” and others associate it with fertility…. Were the patriarchs in fact ignorant of the name YHWH?” In Exodus 6:7, Alter relates, “you shall know that I am the Lord your God Who takes you out from under the burdens of Egypt. This idea is emphasized again and again, in the Torah as well as in later books of the Bible. It is the cornerstone of Israelite faith—that God has proven His divinity and His special attachment to Israel by the dramatic act of liberating the people from Egyptian slavery.”

Alter points out where the biblical text deviates from the geography, natural phenomena, or history of the referenced time period. In Exodus 10:13, he states, “an east wind. The Hebrew idioms were coined in the geography of Canaan, not of Egypt. In Canaan, locusts and parching winds come from the deserts to the east. In Egypt, such winds and blights would typically come from the Sudan, to the south.” In Exodus 10:19, Alter continues, “west wind. The literal meaning is “sea wind,” but because of the geographical situation of ancient Israel, “sea” (that is, the Mediterranean) is often used to designate the west. Again, the wind reference reflects the geography of Canaan.” In Exodus 13:17, Alter explains, “by way of the land of the Philistines…. The Philistines in this period are an anachronistic reference, they arrived from the Aegean region (and thus are known as the Sea People) in this coastal strip during the twelfth century B.C.E., perhaps as much as a hundred years after the conjectured date of the Exodus in the later thirteenth century.” Finally, in Exodus 13:18, “the Sea of Reeds. This is not the Red Sea, as older translations have it, but most likely a marshland in the northeastern part of Egypt. (Marshes might provide a realistic kernel for the tale of a waterway that is at one moment passable and in the next flooded.) But it must be conceded that elsewhere yam suf refers to the Red Sea, and some scholars have recently argued that the story means to heighten the miraculous character of the event through the parting of a real sea. Even if the setting is a marsh, the event is reported in strongly supernatural terms.”

Alter discusses the importance of Exodus 21:1, “And these are the laws. After the ten divine imperatives, couched in absolute terms and addressed to each Israelite in the second-person singular, we have a series of miscellaneous laws formulated casuistically…. This collection of laws, which make up chapter 21 through chapter 23, is conventionally called the Book of the Covenant…. It is probably one of the oldest collections of law in the Bible; it exhibits numerous parallels with (as well as divergences from) the Code of Hammurabi, with sundry other Sumerian and Akkadian codes, and with Hittite law.”

In Exodus 26:33, Alter comments on how God’s detailed instructions, throughout Exodus, relate to and call forth both the history and the future of the Israeli people, “the Ark of the Covenant, and the curtain shall divide for you between the Holy and the Holy of Holies. If the tent structure of the Tabernacle looks backward to an early nomadic period, its dimensions—exactly half those of Solomon’s temple—and its divisions mirror the structure of the Jerusalem temple…. The 100-cubit length (about 60 feet) of the Tabernacle is divided symmetrically between a western half, or outer court, where there is an altar for burnt offerings, and an eastern half, which constitutes the Holy Place (maqom qadosh), in which the lamp stand, the table, and the altar of incense are located, and a small inner zone, screened by a curtain, the Holy of Holies, in which the Ark of the Covenant is kept. The verbal construct “X of X” has the idiomatic sense in biblical Hebrew of “the supreme X” (compare “the song of songs, which is Solomon’s”).”

In Exodus 32:1, Alter comments, “make us gods that will go before us. Here, and repeatedly in the Golden Calf episode, ‘elohim, which regularly refers to God (in the singular) is used in the plural: despite all the spectacular demonstrations of the Lord’s supreme power, the people have not liberated themselves from polytheistic notions.” Alter later expands, “The Golden Calf is thus a kind of anti-Tabernacle or anti-Ark.” Alter contrasts this blasphemous episode with Moses’ concurrent meeting with God, atop Mount Sinai. “Show me, pray Your Glory. We are not likely to recover precisely what the key term kavod—glory, honor, divine presence, and very literally, “weightiness”—conveyed to the ancient Hebrew imagination. In any case, Moses, who first fearfully encountered God in the fire in the bush, is now ready and eager to be granted a full-scale epiphany, a frontal revelation of the look and character of this divinity that has been speaking to him from within the pillar of cloud.” On Exodus 32:3, Alter continues, “I shall make all My goodness pass in front of you. In response to the request that God show Moses His glory, He offers instead to show him His “goodness” (tuv), a manifestation of His moral attributes as divinity. But God’s goodness is not amenable to human prediction, calculation, or manipulation: it is God’s untrammeled choice to bestow grace and compassion on whom He sees fit, as He has done with Moses.” Alter goes on, in connection with Exodus 32:23, “you will see My back, but My face will not be seen. Volumes of theology have been spun out of these enigmatic words. Imagining the deity in frankly physical terms was entirely natural for the ancient monotheists…. Through it the Hebrew writer suggests an idea that makes good sense from later theological perspectives: that God’s intrinsic nature is inaccessible, and perhaps also intolerable, to the finite mind of man, but that something of His attributes—His “goodness,” the directional pitch of His ethical intentions, the afterglow of the effulgence of His presence—can be glimpsed by humankind.”

Finally, Alter discusses the material aspects that recognize the covenantal pact between God and the Israelites in Exodus 40:20, “set the Covenant in the Ark. The Covenant, ‘edut, is a synonym for berit, the other common biblical term for pact, treaty, or covenant, and it clearly refers to the two stone tablets on which the words of the Covenant were written by the finger of God. The Tabernacle, then, has a double function: it is the place where sacrifices are offered, as in all ancient Near Eastern cults, and it is the place where the material document of an eternal contract between God and Israel is preserved.” In Exodus 40:38, Alter closes by stating, “in all their journeyings. Pointedly, “their journeyings,” mas’eyhem, is the last word of the Book of Exodus, just as this same verbal stem inaugurated the Wilderness narrative in 13:20, “And they journeyed from Succoth.” We have been left with a sense of harmonious consummation in the competition of the Tabernacle, likened by allusion to the completion of the tasks of creation; but the condition in which the Israelites find themselves remains unstable, uncertain, a destiny of wandering through arduous wasteland towards a promised land that is not yet visible on the horizon.”

“The Ethics of Authenticity” by Charles Taylor

Taylor, in this monograph, defends modern culture’s affinity for authenticity from its traditionalist detractors, while pointing out its deficiencies to those who proclaim the supremacy of subjectivism and instrumental reason, untethered to morality and community. Taylor does not seek a middle ground of compromise, but forges his own path towards a more enduring and objective authenticity.

Taylor cautions modernity’s defenders against “the individualism of self-fulfillment [which] involves a centring on the self and a concomitant shutting out, or even unawareness, of the greater issues or concerns that transcend the self, be they religious, political, historical.” Taylor continues, “The culture of self-fulfillment has led many people to lose sight of concerns that transcend them. And it seems obvious that it has taken trivialized and self-indulgent forms…. That the espousal of authenticity takes the form of a kind of soft relativism means that the vigorous defence of any moral ideal is somehow off limits…. In adopting the ideal [of self-fulfillment], people in the culture of authenticity, as I want to call it, give support to a kind of liberalism, which has been espoused by many others as well. This is the liberalism of neutrality…. The good life is what each individual seeks, in his or her own way…. The affirmation of the power of choice as itself a good to be maximized is a deviant product of the ideal.”

Taylor begins by looking back historically, “In Rousseau’s work [self-determining freedom] takes political form, in the notion of a social contract state founded on a general will, which precisely because it is the form of our common freedom can brook no opposition in the name of freedom…. Although Kant reinterpreted this notion of freedom in purely moral terms, as autonomy, it returns to the political sphere with a vengeance with Hegel and Marx…. Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own “measure”…. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me…. Being true to myself means being true to my own originality.”

Taylor stresses that an enduring authenticity does not separate the idea of the personal Good from that of others’ in a sort of subjective nihilism. “Our understanding of the good things in life can be transformed by our enjoying them in common with people we love…. Some goods become accessible to us only through such common enjoyment…. The making and sustaining of our identity, in the absence of a heroic effort to break out of ordinary existence, remains dialogical throughout our lives…. More particularly, I want to show that modes that opt for self-fulfillment without regard (a) to the demands of our ties with others or (b) to demands of any kind emanating from something more or other than human desires or aspirations are self-defeating, that they destroy the conditions for realizing authenticity itself.”

Modernity has lost the component of authenticity that regards the other’s viewpoint. At its worst, modern culture no longer seeks to mesh together a common understanding of the good life. “The contemporary culture of authenticity slides towards soft relativism. This gives further force to a general presumption of subjectivism about value…. It is clear that a rhetoric of “difference,” of “diversity” (even “multiculturalism”), is central to the contemporary culture of authenticity…. [However,] difference so asserted becomes  insignificant…. Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues are more significant than others…. Which issues are significant, I do not determine…. So the ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice…. To shut out demands emanating beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization…. I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter…. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.”

Modern man is not born into a predetermined station in life. Man is no longer born into a social hierarchy. He creates his own identity. However, for that identity to make sense, others must recognize him as such. Man has never lived in a bubble. He depends on how others’ view him to assert himself as himself. “The development of an ideal of inwardly generated identity gives a new and crucial importance of recognition…. The thing about inwardly derived, personal, original identity is that is doesn’t enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and it can fail.” At worst, modern authenticity devolves into narcissism. “The self-centred forms are deviant…. They tend to centre fulfillment on the individual, making his or her affiliations purely instrumental; they push, in other words, to a social atomism. And they tend to see fulfillment as just of the self, neglecting or delegitimating the demands that come from beyond our own desires or aspirations, be they from history, tradition, society, nature, or God; they foster, in other words, a radical anthropocentrism.” Taylor proposes an alternative, “We ought to be trying to persuade people that self-fulfillment, so far from excluding unconditional relationships and moral demands beyond the self, actually requires these in some form…. Authenticity points us towards a more self-responsible form of life. It allows us to live (potentially) a fuller and more differentiated life, because more fully appropriated as our own.”

To live a fuller life, modernity has to get away from life as subjective relativism, in which all morals and life’s goals are up for grabs. “Things centre more and more on the subject, and in a host of ways. Things that were once settled by some external reality—traditional law, say, or nature—are now referred to our choice. Issues where we were meant to accept the dictates of authority we now have to think out for ourselves. Modern freedom and autonomy centres us on ourselves…. The sacrifices that runaway instrumental reason imposes on us are obvious enough, in the hardening of an atomistic outlook, in our imperviousness to nature.” Taylor suggests taming instrumental reason. “Technology in the service of an ethic of benevolence towards real flesh and blood people; technological, calculative thinking as a rare and admirable achievement of a being who lives in the medium of a quite different kind of thinking.” For Taylor, this also requires a new kind of political culture—a return to the polis. It requires common aims and objective morals that are anathema to special interests, rent-seeking, and identity-politics. “The danger is not actual despotic control but fragmentation—that is, a people increasingly less capable of forming a common purpose and carrying it out…. This fragmentation comes about partly through a weakening of the bonds of sympathy, partly in a self-feeding way, through the failure of democratic initiative itself…. The idea that the majority of the people might frame and carry through a common project comes to seem utopian and naive. And so people give up…. A fragmented  society is one whose members find it harder and harder to identify with their political society as a community. This lack of identification may reflect an atomistic outlook, in which people come to see society purely instrumentally. But it also helps to entrench atomism, because the absence of effective common action throws people back on themselves…. A fading political identity makes it harder to mobilize effectively, and a sense of helplessness breeds alienation.”