Horizons of Significance

The Ethics of Authenticity, Part II

Welcome back to our philosophy of technology book club. This month’s book is The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor. Here is the reading schedule:

• June 8: Chapter I-III (approx. 30 pages)

• June 15: Chapters IV-VI (approx. 40 pages)

• June 19: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern

• June 22: Chapters VII-VIII (approx. 22 pages)

• June 29: Chapters IX-X (approx. 30 pages)

• July 5: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

I pushed the final Zoom call to July 5, as I’ll be in New York the last week of June for a workshop with the Marc Sanders Foundation.

In July, we’re reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and in August, we’ll read (selections from) Mumford’s Technics & Civilization.

For the next week, I’m offering a discount on annual subscriptions. If you become a subscriber using this link, you’ll save 15%. Nearly all of my work is made freely available, but I rely on your support. If you are able, please consider taking out a subscription.

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We saw last week that Taylor is attempting to explain the ‘modern malaise.’ This is a sense that something has been lost, which Taylor attributes to (1) individualism, (2) disenchantment, and (3) restricted choice in an institutionalized society. He has chosen to investigate this malaise by investigating the first, which is what brought us to authenticity in the first place. Taylor thinks that a spirit of authenticity, along with a presupposed subjectivism, has run rampant through our culture, but that the correct response is to reclaim authenticity. He refuses to side with the critics of, say, the culture of college campuses who suggest we throw out authenticity altogether. What we instead need is a better idea of what authenticity is, what it entails, and what it requires.

Taylor provides a helpful contrast between his view and the critics' at the beginning of Chapter VI:

This contrasts with two other common ways of looking at this culture. These see it either (a) as indeed powered by an ideal of self-fulfillment, but this ideal is understood as being just as self-centered as the practices that flow from it; or, (b) as just the expression of self-indulgence and egoism, that is, views not actuated by an ideal at all.

What Taylor believes is that authenticity is an ideal worth striving for, but we must understand the need for others in our pursuit of individual authenticity.

This brings us to this week’s reading: Chapter IV (‘Inescapable Horizons’), Chapter V (‘The Need for Recognition’), and Chapter VI (‘The Slide to Subjectivism’).

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The question Taylor begins with this week: how do you reason with someone who has adopted a ‘soft relativist’ worldview? If someone is a committed relativist, especially if they are a committed subjectivist, then it would seem that reasoning with them is impossible.¹ Taylor writes:

A person who accepted no moral demands would be as impossible to argue with about right and wrong as would a person who refused to accept the world of perception around us be impossible to argue with about empirical matters.

The problem is that reasoning takes place on top of a set of assumptions, a background. And if we do not share this background with our interlocutors, then what reasons could we muster to convince them? Suppose you’re talking to someone who is a committed egoist, who recognizes no good except for what personally benefits them. How do you convince them to care about the welfare of others, to refrain from ruthlessly pursuing their self-interest? It would seem that you cannot.

But Taylor says that we are ‘not left with just the bare facts of [the relativists’] preferences.’ We know that the people we have in mind have an ideal toward which they strive: self-realization. We can take this adopted ideal, flesh it out, and then reason together from there. In that way, we can (hopefully) convince them on their own terms as to what they should do. That is Taylor’s project in Chapter IV and in much of The Ethics of Authenticity.

Human beings are fundamentally dialogical

We can begin by making a simple observation: we are all human beings. As such, we share some features in common. So, we can appeal to these shared features of the human condition – there is no need to pursue an analysis of human nature here – when speaking to the relativist. Taylor wants to stress the dialogical character of human life. What we take to be significant (this is a keyword for Taylor) is not even available for self-articulation without the introduction of language, which we learn from others. (Taylor has a broad view of language, including art, gesture, emotion, etc.) Our means of self-conception are socially derived. But it is not only a point about the acquisition of the tools of self-definition:

It’s not just that we learn the languages in dialogue and then can go on to use them for our own purposes on our own…We are expected to develop our opinions, outlook, stances to things, to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, such as the definition of our identity. We define this always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us.

So, as we go about forming our self-conception, we do this against a background of social relations. I cannot form my own self-conception out of nothing; I form my self-conception already by recognizing how others view me, how others wish to view me, and how the self-conception of those significant others is affected by my own self-conception. As a husband, I am committed to a lifelong project of building a life together with my wife. As a father, I am committed to a lifelong project of the cultivation of my children’s character.² These are ongoing projects that must be dynamic, because all of those involved will constantly change. And these are only two examples.

Further, our own preferences – which I assume are part of that authentic self the Romantics wished to be true to – ‘can be transformed by our enjoying them in common with people we love.’ What matters to me, then, has to do with us.

Choices about what matters require horizons of significance

Taylor begins breaking up his points here in a slightly unnatural way. You may have noticed on page 35 that he labels one of his points as (1). (2) won’t appear until the beginning of the next chapter. This first point is:

When we come to understand what it is to define ourselves, to determine in what our originality consists, we see that we have to take as background some sense of what is significant.

These are what Taylor calls ‘horizons of significance.’ Taylor is not making an a priori argument about significance. He is observing some features of our social and moral lives and extrapolating. His first observation: when we want to determine what makes us different and unique, we do not choose mundane facts. The number of hairs on our head does not seem to matter, even if I am the only one to have this exact number of hairs at this exact moment. What seems to matter – things like musical talent, place in a tradition, ability to articulate important truths, what Taylor says are ‘in the domain of recognizable self-definitions’ – has a particular character. Try as we might, we can’t deem by fiat that some bare facts are significant; our options are already constrained. They are constrained by the horizons of significance, which are neither discovered nor decided but rather given to us.

So, Taylor says:

[The] ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice. The ideal couldn’t stand alone, because it requires a horizon of issues of importance, which help define the respects in which self-making is significant.

This is Taylor’s most interesting insight, at least this far in the book: Adopting subjectivism renders self-making trivial and insignificant.

I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters…Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.

So, we have made some progress. We have supposed, along with our imagined interlocutors, that self-definition and authenticity are important—but we now see that in order to self-define or be authentic, we must be part of something larger than ourselves.

A critical note: I wanted at this point in the book to have a better understanding of the sources of significance. In other words, I want to know how a horizon of significance becomes significant in the first place.

The need for recognition

Taylor’s second point, which comes at the beginning of Chapter V, is that ‘a purely personal self-fulfillment’ makes ‘the various associations and communities in which the person enters purely instrumental in their significance.’ In other words, if we have the simple view of authenticity we’ve now explored for two weeks, we cannot truly build the sort of relationships we desire with other people; these relationships exist only to aid us in our self-fulfillment; we instrumentalize everyone else.

But how do we reason against this? Again, that is the goal: to speak to the subjectivist in reason.

And here is Taylor’s answer: we must understand the need for recognition. This is a need that developed alongside self-determining freedom and authenticity. In fact, it seems to have only become important once our socially defined identities became less significant to our self-conception. In short, we do not only desire to self-define—we also desire for our self-definitions to be recognized by others. We want others to recognize ‘the equal value of different ways of being.’ This is the social component of Taylor’s view.

There is also the more intimate sphere, primarily found in love relationships. And here Taylor says that we cannot view these as purely tentative – as some have suggested – if they are really going to be important to our identity. He writes:

My identity-defining relations can’t be seen, in principle and in advance, as dispensable and destined for supersession. If my self-exploration takes the form of such serial and in principle temporary relationships, then it is not my identity that I am exploring, but some modality of enjoyment.

It seems that we are faced with a choice, then. If we view relationships as identity-defining, then we recognize the need for others in our self-definition; that’s another point in favor of Taylor’s dialogical model. If we view relationships as not identity-defining, then we cannot place the emphasis on them that we have traditionally seen in the authentic age.

The slide to subjectivism

But now we are left with a question. If authenticity, properly understood, is more like Taylor’s theory, then why does this deviation (characterized at the beginning of this post) arise in the first place?

First, we have the simplest explanation. If the deviant ideal of authenticity appeals to self-interest, then some will always pursue it—people are prone to behave in self-interested ways. But this does not go very far.

Second, the rise of individualism. It is important to distinguish between individualism and authenticity, though they are related. (You can imagine an individualist ethic that says each person ought to pursue their self-interest, but that this requires relatively uniform and objective patterns of right action.) With the rise of individualism, perhaps we have become less prone to considering the significance of others in our lives.

Third, our technocratic and bureaucratic society fortifies atomism, ‘because it induces us to see our communities, like so much else, in an instrumental perspective.’ In other words, we are concerned with the use of these communities; we do not consider their significance.

These are external explanations. Taylor also believes there are two ‘complex, criss-crossing’ explanations internal to the ideal of authenticity. These are: the rise of the more self-centered mode in popular culture, and the movement of high culture toward nihilism.³ Taylor’s discussion of expressivism and the relationship between authenticity and art is, I think, very helpful. On this understanding, we discover who we really are through expression and creation; however, this creation is not limited to mimesis, but rather to the making of something wholly new. What I think he is saying: taken together, this leads to a view where there is no model for the authentic self, where it cannot (or should not?) be shaped by imitation.

If we become ourselves by expressing what we’re about, and if what we become is by hypothesis original, not based on the pre-existing, then what we express is not an imitation of the pre-existing either, but a new creation. We think of the imagination as creative.

Taylor goes on to note that ‘self-definition comes early to be contrasted with morality’ — morality itself is another chain that binds us, and so to be authentic, it is supposed, we must cast morality off.

Indeed, the very idea of originality, and the associated notion that the enemy of authenticity can be social conformity, forces on us the idea that authenticity will have to struggle against some externally imposed rules.

And what better rule to struggle against than morality itself?

What authenticity is

Near the end of Chapter VI, Taylor gives us a more robust definition of authenticity:

Briefly, we can say that authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery, (ii) originality, and frequently (iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognize as morality. But it is also true, as we saw, that it requires (B) (i) openness to horizons of significance (for otherwise the creation loses the background that can save it from insignificance) and (ii) self-definition in dialogue.

What is significant about Taylor’s definition is that it breaks the strong association with self-determining freedom. Surely, authenticity and freedom are related—but taken together, self-determining freedom undermines authenticity, perhaps rendering it impossible.

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The comments were especially robust last week, which pleased me greatly. Here are some of my favorite comments from our discussion.

Kim found a number of connections with our previous readings:

Taylor’s talk about life being ‘flattened’ is reminiscent of Han’s ideas of non-things ‘de-reifying’ the world. Just as Han described us having less of a relationship with the physical world, Taylor is describing how, turning inward, we are experiencing less of the world and community that used to exist.

Additionally, Taylor mentioned how institutions are limiting our choices, and this reminded me strongly of Nguyen’s work that we just read. Metrics that institutions are gathering are used to make choices for us, and we don’t have a lot of choice in those decisions.

I was struck by how relevant these ideas are to today’s current culture, especially in the US. Now more than ever, it seems important to engage with a community and not just do things for yourself. Corporations and institutions have tried to separate us, and want us to stay that way, because they know there is strength & power in numbers & community.

I am glad you made these connections explicit, Kim. I worried that The Ethics of Authenticity would seem like a curveball, so I’m glad it’s making sense. What I think has cropped up in all of these discussions is a sense that we’ve been cut off from something. Han says it is the physical world; Nguyen says it is a playful attitude toward life. What Taylor is doing, I think, is giving us a sketch of a map back toward that connection. I even think there are some interesting connections between Taylor and Pressly, though I’m still working on those ideas in some private writing.

Incidentally, that is part of pduggan_creative’s comment:

think I want to relate what Taylor is on about most closely to the Right to Oblivion and the concepts of being seen by others and evaluated or determined as to what is “really inside you” by observation (particularly secret observation). Do we need to connect to a source “deep inside us” because we find the way we’re determined by others who observe us intolerable and God as outside observer (who always would “call into account every idle word”) was also intolerable and maybe tolerable because the relationship we have with Him is internal and private (prayer in the closet, not to be “seen by men”)

Rousseau says our Pride is drowned out by our “dependence on others” (and being visible to them as well). That’s what I wonder about Herder’s concept of an “original way of being human” and that expression of that is deeply moral, because it would be necessary for it to be public and recognized to really feed the needs for personality and performance that we have inside of us (at least us moderns do, the WIERD people)

pduggan, apologies for excerpting, but your comment was long enough to be a post of its own.

I’ve spoken to Pressly about authenticity before, and it might be surprising to learn that he’s quite critical of the concept. He thinks it is too limiting. (He might share this with Moeller & D’Ambrosio.) But I think if we go the Taylor route of understanding authenticity, he might be more amenable to it.

Miguel asked a question about disenchantment:

Your post, and other people's comments mention "disenchantment". What is disenchantment, exactly? I've used the word before to label my own disappointments when they last too long and are too fuzzy to be called just "disappointments". There's probably some philosophical context that I'm missing. But going with my intuitive understanding of the term, I ask: perhaps authenticity is a kind of necessary condition for disenchantment? Can you be disenchanted without first thinking of yourself as someone with inner depth, with the potential to own your life and fulfill a calling? Surely that's fertile ground for long-lasting and fuzzy disappointments.

First, two apologies. (1) I should have answered this in a comment, but I somehow missed your question. (2) I should have defined my terms.

The answer is: it’s complicated, and so take what I’m saying with some skepticism. I personally understand disenchantment to be a shift in our cultural understanding of the world that strips it of mystery; the world is something to be rationally explained. (I personally go back and forth on whether or not I think disenchantment is a good or a bad thing, to put it in overly simple terms.) I believe the term originates in Max Weber’s work. You could see the ideal of self-definition as a way of holding on to some mystery. If you can’t find it in the world, you can find it in yourself. (Though that wouldn’t necessarily be the case for the Romantics.)

Taylor happens to have a lot of work that speaks to related issues, in particular A Secular Age and Cosmic Connections. Jason Josephson Storm’s book The Myth of Disenchantment might be worth reading, too.

1. I use ‘relativism’ to mean the idea that some set of truths is relative to some perspective. Subjectivism is a particular form of relativism under which that set of truths is relative to a particular person.

2. I particularly like this example because it illustrates how shifty these relationships are. I’ve only been a father for a few years, but already I see how much my role, and my accompanying self-conception, must change as my children grow.

3. I wish here that Taylor had specified exactly what he meant by ‘nihilism,’ which is said in many ways.