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.”
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