I can already see many themes in the first 3 chapters that have been present in our past readings, making this selection a great fit for this book club.
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.
These are great connections to make more explicit.
I had read this before, but not closely and not recently, but I had a strong sense it needed to be here. I’m delighted by just how relevant it is given the other books we’ve read.
What I found particularly striking was the way that individualism (as popularly understood) seems to lead to a deficit of individual choice. That’s the sort of tension that gets my wheels turning.
"As we become more individualistic, we also narrow our vision. ‘The dark side of individualism is a centering of the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.’"
I've been writing an article on Family in Fiction and I'll be borrowing this quote from you and Taylor (if you don't mind). The flattening and narrowing of life is a reality many face as they sacrifice everything to succeed within a specific career, ironically capping their ceiling of purpose by the very act of trying to climb higher.
Perhaps that's a bit off topic, but it was thought-provoking to me.
As a constant re-reader of Whitman's "Song of Myself," it's interesting to consider my own place on the spectrum between Whitman's (and, really, Buddhism's) concept of "self" or "the individual," (whose singularity is dubious or nonexistent and whose value derives from a shared existence with other humans and other living things and elements) to that of the Romantic individual, whose conception generator is truly internal and has a seemingly distinct (and critical) border. Again, not even as a definition of "self" in a broad sense, but simply for my own self-conception, the spectrum is deep and daunting. **Actually, is it even a spectrum? Or are these two incompatible sources of selfhood? I guess a can of worms that seems parallel to discussions of free will.**
*Related side note: a performer I saw this weekend posited to the audience to consider what isms we have adopted from friends or family (like little quirks, expressions, flourishes, gestures, whatever) in an effort to make the point that we essentially, as a social species, can't help but share and absorb these facets of personality, and so a "self" is really a fluid collection of elements of many "selves." (My list of adopted isms is goofy and long.)
My thoughts: I recall a discussion when I started blogging (in 2001!) on “authenticity” online and whether it was good to “overshare” or how we constructed identities and a little bit of audience capture matters but these were just the beginnings. I think Taylor factored into this somehow but I wasn’t aware of him specifically, but what he is addressing in the book resonates greatly with what I remember from those days.
The first chapter mentioning of the “device paradigm” was interesting to consider central heating as much as a technology that changes the social landscape as we think of a cellphone today. Reminds me of Richard Hanania’s curious idea that maybe we have a drive to solitude like we have a drive to eat and, as when it becomes too easy to eat we have an obesity crisis and when we make it too easy to be alone (but feel semi-connected) we will choose that option and have a fertility/ pair-bonding “crisis”. But we can’t be alone all the time, since we want to be regarded and seen, but being seen by others brings up the question of whether we will have public regard for our “authentic” self or a curated mask thereof.
The feeling of online “liberation” of life in the days of Usenet or BBS giving voice to what was “enclosed in our own hearts” seems to have waned. There was a vigorous culture of politics like Tocqueville wanted but it took place in small corners. Is the “immense tutelary spirit” (i love when concepts of spiritual superorganisisms show up in all these contexts) still melting things into air?
Chapter starting with Allan Bloom and Closing of the American Mind really took me back because I was an english major in an ivy league university (Penn of course: you don’t say “Ivy league university” unless you’re at Penn) when it came out and it was attractive to my developing centre-right mind observing early fractions over political progressive ideas (this was the days of the Penn “Water Buffalo Incident” and FIRE getting started by Alan Kors) and I seem to recall that "relativism" was something the right-leaning people on campus were always concerned about.
That Taylor is going to a vigorous defense of a moral ideal core of “authenticity” over the criticisms of the seemingly obvious shallowness of the claims for it that Bloom and others raise is perhaps not what I expected from the book, which I thought maybe was more obviously going to criticize the concept. But he wants to speak “in reason” to those who major in self-fulfillment.
One thing I think that makes the book seem dated to me at least in terms of what is visible to me is that he is often concerned that young people are putting “career” first, sacrificing “love relationships” as well as care of children for pursuit of it. I feel like the Great Recession that hit millennials after this was written has changed the way career is viewed, but perhaps this is because I’m old and not currently in the career track place even to observe it. On the other hand, the fertility and pairbonding crisis seems to indicate love relationships and children might be being sacrificed for something (maybe not willingly)
He does deal with the shallows well “The affirmation of the power of choice as itself a good to be maximized is a deviant product of the ideal”
I was amused to see on page 22 that he is “suggesting a position distinct from both boosters and knockers of contemporary culture.” One of Taylor's disciples is the late New York City Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller and Keller is somewhat [in]famous for always speaking of christian visions of political life as a third way that rejects idolatries of left and right.
I 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)
Since you were at Penn at the right time, I’m curious what you make of the relativism charges. I wrote and then removed a large section on how I’m not sure this holds anymore. Now from the right you often see critiques of the moralism, not relativism, on college campuses. And I think things like recent Gaza protests show that many students don’t espouse relativism, at least not in deed. It takes genuine belief and commitment in an ideal to, say, risk expulsion for protest!
And conversely, right wing American intellectuals seem to have embraced very thin and sophistical connections to things like the Latin Christian intellectual tradition or the traditions of 18th c liberalism to veil what are ultimately Thrasymichian ideas about power and justice. It has been a very interesting if unhappy shift, although I would say it has its roots in earlier decades than this one.
Romanticism would be interesting, though I will confess that at least some of my interest in this book club had a lot to do with contemporary relevance (phil tech), so that consideration may be worth integrating into next year’s topic as well.
That’s my major concern about it, though I think Romanticism can be very relevant to our present moment — I’d just need to find a way to make it explicit.
One text to consider for this potential book listwould be Taylor's newest book "Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment" (Belknap 2024), in which he explores Romantic and Post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations of language. I've started it, and so far it's good--i.e., typical Taylor, which is to say a nuanced, detailed, exploration of the historical, philosophical and cultural backgrounds of meaning-seeking and meaning-creating projects of influential writers and thinkers.
I can link you to some interesting tech criticism or tech histories I've found that talk about the relationship between romanticism and techno-utopianism if you'd like! I also think that Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by Justin E.H. Smith does a pretty good job of exploring romanticism as reactionary to the Enlightenment and presents it as evidence of a sort of historical dialectic between the reasoned vs. the felt, the disenchantment vs. attempts at re-enchantment. This ties it then to some of the more noxious places we are seeing Nietzschean ideas in particular re-emerge currently like the so-called "Dark Enlightenment" movement.
There's also definitely a relationship between modern libertarianism and romanticism going back to Rousseau that matters in our current political landscape.
That was my thought too. I think we could continue to pull on this philosophy of technology thread and barely scratch the surface of the good writing on it, fiction and nonfiction. Though I'm sure there'd be a lot of value in a study of the romantic period as well.
I should say that my interest in Romanticism has grown out of these readings. If I went in that direction, it would be to explicitly continue these sorts of investigations but to draw on more historical sources. But it’s all still up in the air!
Does anyone like “Malaise of Modernity” as a title more than “Ethics of Authenticity”. I like the ring to it more, and the meaning also gut punches me a tad more. I wonder why he changed it. I suppose to shift the central focus?
I'm unsure if it was published here under that title or if that was the title of the Massey Lecture series and then the book it evolved from adopted the new title.
While discussing the German Romantics was what I authentically felt that I should do
given my life up to the point of that comment, it also feels rude not to discuss the text at hand. Mutual regard is perhaps owed to things as much as anything.
I am very interested in where Taylor wants to go with this. Culture of Narcissism was a very important book for me in a lot of ways. I think it gave voice to many things I experienced but never understood as potentially being aspects of one phenomenon.
In that book, Lasch argues that changes in our institutions and how we relate to them have also changed our culture more broadly and that what you used to be able to identify as pathological symptoms of narcissism are now just general features of our society.
The person who ends up developing that idea in a more compelling form I would argue is Alone from the classic internet blog The Last Psychiatrist. He is an actual psychiatrist and based on the overwhelming evidence of his day to day interactions a with patients as well as his studies he gave a more full picture of what narcissism as a cultural condition that applies to everyone would look like.
One of the things you find in some of his writing would see like a straightforward critique from the standpoint of sincerity to members of this book club based on our readings. The be yourself idea is in fact pure vapidity. Does you finding yourself ever seem to improve the lives of anyone around you? Is it being authentic to decide that the social role of loving and raising your child no longer suits you? From the perspective of the child, they may not care about your sense of authenticity when they are dealing with the lifelong result and pain of your choice.
But, and especially in his book Sadly, Porn, you find emphasized that one of the things that evidences our hollow condition is actually ambivalence. We are always told what to think and who we can be and ultimately how we can want. We reproduce the forms we imbibed from television and now tik tok or YouTube. We may reply that we don’t just want only what we see on these platforms and that we are discerning but Alone would say that it’s not what you want it’s how you want and everyone manifests that in exactly the same ways.
What we lost to endless media, media that always expands to fill the time available, was the ability to daydream and imagine and work out for ourselves what it is we want to be in such a way that could sustain the actual long term projects of achieving that. One of the classic examples of this from the blog days was the Matrix, Neo simply exists until the day that he is shown that he is the hero he always was and everything he needs to know is downloaded to his brain. How many of us lived like this at times?
So this complicates the picture. Many people express the idea of authenticity in destructive and evil ways, by pursuing pathological actions with no sense of responsibility to anyone but themselves. But it is precisely a lack of ability to even have dreams and desires that can be expressed and pursued in an adult life that creates these ambivalent and arbitrary people. Sincerity requires the development of a subjectivity from its own resources, which sounds like authenticity.
Alone once said that conscience is a bond of yourself to yourself. It allows you to feel guilt for hurting someone unjustly even if no one will ever know about it. Kant formulated this as the moral law within. But you need not be a Kantian to have some idea that at the end of the day, you can have a non arbitrary moral core which you have to respond to lest you be destroyed. In this way, authenticity can actually require things of you which you may not want but which you nonetheless must do. Being true to
yourself may involve the discipline of your passions and sacrifice of some of your pleasure.
This is all to say I think there could be a very compelling account made for authenticity in a non-debased form. Given Taylor’s Hegelian leanings I am sure he was very alive to the need to negate some negations.
I feel like you could maybe marry Kant's ideas to authenticity and argue for an authenticity that isn't about you discovering some original inner voice, but just about instead having a values system that aligns intention with action to better ensure that you don't live your life within a framework of cognitive dissonance. The categorical imperative to me is interesting as just that guiding framework for making sure that you aren't living in that world of totally relevant morality or so inwardly that you do forget other people - Kant's work is very clear in offering just a secular way to expand the kind of golden rule that once was religious.
To genuinely be "true" to oneself and nurture oneself and commit what we might call "self-care" in a truly authentic way vs. a malformed authenticity, to me, would be to recognize the basic precepts of things like the fact that if you become okay with lying, you also create a world and advocate then for a world where people are then going to lie to you that you have to navigate which is, ultimately, against your self-interest. Or if you become okay with saying yes to things you know will lead to bad outcomes to get ahead, you ultimately create a world where everyone else also says yes to get ahead and nobody speaks truth to power and power grows ever more manipulative. There's a "can't someone else do it?" mentality going on that people mistake perhaps for authenticity in hedonism or for self-care by putting oneself first that I think Kant offers a direct rebuke to that I keep turning back to for the simplicity of it. Don't make an exception of yourself because then you do tacitly create a world where everyone treats themself like an exception. Don't use other beings as instruments of your own will. Make sure that your intentions and your actions are in alignment regardless of the outcome being what you seek, because you actually have less control over the outcome in a social world.
Since Taylor didn’t leave us a large amount to discuss yet I’ll submit what I think would be good Romantics syllabus:
Plato, Timaeus
Spinoza, Ethics
Kant, Prolegomena
Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man
Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschafteslehre
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia or Fichte Studien
Holderlin, one of the collection of his essays and letters
Schelling, he has some shorter writings available online that give a good view of his early Naturphilosophie and Identity system periods and then I might pick something from late Schelling like Investigations on the Possibility of Human Freedom for a complete book of his.
I would definitely intersperse into this the Goethe, Herder etc you already mentioned.
Timaeus and anything major by Spinoza are somewhat indispensable source texts for Romanticism, along with the Critique of Pure Reason but I wouldn’t be mean enough to suggest that for a book club book. The major movement of German Romanticism is to feel a deep need to bring Kant as expounded by Fichte into harmony with Platonism and Spinozism, so it helps to have a little background. They didn’t feel that you could naively escape Kantian critique but they did feel that Kant gave an unsatisfactory picture of the world.
If you had to pick only Hegel or Schelling, I would pick Schelling. Hegel breaks with Romanticism and ends up forming its raw materials to his own ends but Schelling for much of his long career is giving elaboration and systematization to the Romantic strain of Absolute Idealism which was first explored by Holderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis. Schelling is also deeply under appreciated in the Anglophone world so you would be righting a wrong.
I am certainly all for Hegel being there, as he is significant in too many ways to list.
Our collective ignorance of Schelling is not our fault yet it falls to us to rectify it. My friend and I have dubbed this summer the Summer of Schelling as we are both trying to read as much of him as we can while enthusiasm runs high. It’s always good to strike while the iron is hot.
I thought I’d share a few general thoughts about reading Taylor which some might find helpful. I’ve found that he can sometimes be a frustrating author because he’s so committed to elaborating, in the fairest possible way, the competing perspectives on the issues he’s discussing, which can make it hard for the reader to figure out what, exactly, his own views are. This can come across as evasiveness or even obscurantism, but it’s a consequence, I think, of Taylor’s Hegelianism, which finds a kind of higher truth in the synoptic perspective which he’s so skilled at presenting. To his great credit, and unlike some of his modern-day followers, Taylor never comes off as an ideologue; he’s most interested in showing you how a problem appears from many different perspectives, often through a deeply learned historical account of the debate which leaves you feeling well-informed, even if you don’t find Taylor spending much time defending any particular view, the way other philosophers might do.
I would really encourage people to listen to the lecture recordings; they’re not exactly the same as the text, although they cover much the same ground. If I recall correctly, Taylor makes a number of illustrative comments throughout that aren’t in the book.
Here’s a link to the audio-only recordings from the website of the CBC, which originally aired the lectures in 1991:
First time reading Charles Taylor, and I don't think it will be the last! I'm glad we're reading this and taking a step back to ask questions a few steps upstream of the technological grievances that a lot of us share.
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.
Another topic that these first chapters bring up and that absolutely fascinates me is freedom. Or, I should say, "freedoms", as there seem to be several types of it. I'm a big fan of Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts Of Liberty" (namely, negative and positive) which directly addresses this. I suppose Taylor's "self-determining freedom" roughly maps to what Berlin calls positive liberty: self-mastery, autonomy, Kantian freedom—as opposed to negative liberty, aka being left alone. I wonder what else Taylor (and the reading group) have to say about this. From what I gather, Taylor is not entirely onboard with Berlin's view. Like you said, authenticity and positive freedom seem to go hand in hand. I'm really curious to see if Taylor's perspective on authenticity helps us understand why we gained freedom (both types, I'd argue) but lost something in the process.
I'm extremely excited to be reading "Ethics of Authenticity" with this group. I taught the book for several years as part of an IB Philosophy class I used to teach, and Taylor's text was a perennial favorite with my students--even though some of them struggled to understand it.
This text led me to some of Taylor's other books (which I highly recommend): "Sources of the Self" (1989), to which I've read that "Ethics of Authenticity" was written as a kind of Appendix to that larger tomb exploring modern senses of selfhood. "Philosophical Papers Vol 1: Human Agency and Language" in which the essays "Agency & the Self" and "What Is Human Agency?" are included, and were most helpful for rounding out my understanding of those ideas. "Philosophical Papers Vol 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences" in which you can find the extremely helpful essay "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?"--an essay that helped my students better grasp what Taylor was aiming at in "Ethics of Authenticity." I've read some of "The Secular Age" (2007) which, after "Sources of the Self" is considered by critics Taylor's most influential book.
I also have to highly recommend Ruth Abbey's "Charles Taylor" Second Edition (Routledge 2024), which is part of the Philosophy Now series. Abbey's exploration of Taylor's work is fantastic. She does a really excellent job of tying together all of Taylor's many themes, as well as considers his critics along the way. The Second Edition is a clear improvement over the 1st edition, so I really recommend to people who want to get a better idea of Taylor's projects to start with Ruth Abey's book (while reading Taylor's texts first, of course).
One question that I hope we explore together is "What's the difference between mere "desire satisfaction," what Talor calls a "calling" (p. 17, ch 2), and the idea of "flourishing"? Taylor alludes to this idea of a "calling" when he attempts to fill out the moral dimensions of self-fulfillment that the critics of authenticity gloss over.
My tentative answer is that A) "desire satisfaction" as part of a person's self-making reflects the subjectivist view of morality that Taylor mentions on p. 18 (ch 2), or even possibly a more debased form of mere hedonism (which the critics of authenticity culture assume); B) that by a "calling" Taylor intends something beyond mere whim, something that heeds an "inner voice" (p. 26) that is itslf a response to something both internal and external--like Rousseau's "voice of nature within us" (p. 27) and a reaction to social conformity like Herder's "original way of being human" (p. 28). This sense of a calling requires "articulating it" (p. 29, presumably to onself and others). But earlier senses of human "flourishing" apparently were more objectively discerned and pursued, as explained by Aristotle in antiquity and by people like Alasdair MacIntyre in contemporary debates (see note #15). But I'm left to wonder how Taylor would distinguish a "calling" form something like "flourishing."
Is "authenticity" merely our modern, individualist, subjectively-tinged version of "flourishing"? Clearly, taylor will in later chapters explain why authenticity cannot merely be purely a product of a subjective willing consciousness (as he will begin to explain in the next chapter "Inescapable Horizons").
I'll try to find the essays you mentioned. I'm interested in the connections between self, agency, freedom (or freedoms), and ethics. I also feel in desperate need of finding the vocabulary to ask and answer questions about them.
At some point during this year's reading group I tentatively added "Sources of the Self" to an overly ambitious and ever-expanding reading list (which I keep mostly in my head). Right after starting "The Ethics of Authenticity", I became quite convinced that I want to read it. However, I don't think I'm ready for 500+ pages of nuanced & dense philosophy yet. Perhaps his essays are a good intermediate step.
To your point on "callings" and "flourishing": do you think the Aristotelian idea of flourishing is as central to the authenticity era as it was to the Greeks? I suspect it's not. Liberal individualism certainly doesn't prescribe *one* way to flourish (or does it, implicitly?). Rather, it focuses on letting individuals live "their own lives in their own way"—ideally, but not necessarily, leading to their flourishing. By the way, this might be better than being told how to flourish.
I agree that there's a difference—between ancients and moderns—in where the guiding principles for the good life come from. I'm not sure it's a simple as "from outside" vs "from within", although that's not entirely inaccurate. Did pre-modern people felt no "callings" or did they just not give them the ethical weight that we do?
Like you, I'd love to discuss this with the group!
I was excited to dig into the Taylor. Another commenter mentioned him already, but Taylor made his way into my world through the work of Pastor Tim Keller. He is, as far as professional contemporary philosophers go, the most widely read philosopher among Christian pastors.
FWIW: You might be interested to know that this work is one of the most circulated works of serious contemporary philosophy among the conservative Christian clerical community.
Beyond that, and focusing on the reading itself, I find the most convincing element of Taylor’s early argument is when he is willing to acknowledge that even if the contemporary notions of authenticity are “debased” or “narcissistic” or “travestied,” he is unwilling to jettison the project of moral agency underlying them.
From a Christian WV, one of the reasons Taylor’s arguments resonate so deeply is that he is often making arguments that are congruent with a Christian understanding of personhood. Specifically, image of God/design.
Out of curiosity are you a DBH guy? I find that he has a similar ethical commitment to certain aspects of modernity to Taylor while exploring them in a classically derived Platonist Christian metaphysics.
With Taylor I am not as clear on his ultimate views but he’s a very insightful commentator.
Haven’t done a ton of work or reading on DBH, so can’t speak to it. But it seems that those who traffic in Taylor, among the clergy, also traffic in DBH.
I've neglected to keep up with these readings as my own projects have taken up too much time.
I'm incredibly intrigued by this book, and feel like it could provide more detail to the modern malaise pointed to by both McIntyre and Deneen in their own way.
I've noticed the 'flattening' of culture, products, and human experience. It seems that the three reasons Taylor lists have just been further advanced in recent years.
It’s been years since I read Deneen’s post-liberalism book (which I found intriguing but ultimately unconvincing), but I would say this book captures what’s true in that work without baggage of the larger political postliberal project.
Yeah, I felt the same way. I read End of History after, and found the counters posed there way more robust. I've been circling around this topic for a little while trying to find a solution that seems right to me. I've found many good descriptions, but few satisfying prescriptions (looking at you MacIntyre). Maybe Taylor can help with that.
I can already see many themes in the first 3 chapters that have been present in our past readings, making this selection a great fit for this book club.
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.
These are great connections to make more explicit.
I had read this before, but not closely and not recently, but I had a strong sense it needed to be here. I’m delighted by just how relevant it is given the other books we’ve read.
What I found particularly striking was the way that individualism (as popularly understood) seems to lead to a deficit of individual choice. That’s the sort of tension that gets my wheels turning.
YES! Well said.
"As we become more individualistic, we also narrow our vision. ‘The dark side of individualism is a centering of the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society.’"
I've been writing an article on Family in Fiction and I'll be borrowing this quote from you and Taylor (if you don't mind). The flattening and narrowing of life is a reality many face as they sacrifice everything to succeed within a specific career, ironically capping their ceiling of purpose by the very act of trying to climb higher.
Perhaps that's a bit off topic, but it was thought-provoking to me.
I don’t mind at all!
Thanks, Jared!
As a constant re-reader of Whitman's "Song of Myself," it's interesting to consider my own place on the spectrum between Whitman's (and, really, Buddhism's) concept of "self" or "the individual," (whose singularity is dubious or nonexistent and whose value derives from a shared existence with other humans and other living things and elements) to that of the Romantic individual, whose conception generator is truly internal and has a seemingly distinct (and critical) border. Again, not even as a definition of "self" in a broad sense, but simply for my own self-conception, the spectrum is deep and daunting. **Actually, is it even a spectrum? Or are these two incompatible sources of selfhood? I guess a can of worms that seems parallel to discussions of free will.**
*Related side note: a performer I saw this weekend posited to the audience to consider what isms we have adopted from friends or family (like little quirks, expressions, flourishes, gestures, whatever) in an effort to make the point that we essentially, as a social species, can't help but share and absorb these facets of personality, and so a "self" is really a fluid collection of elements of many "selves." (My list of adopted isms is goofy and long.)
My thoughts: I recall a discussion when I started blogging (in 2001!) on “authenticity” online and whether it was good to “overshare” or how we constructed identities and a little bit of audience capture matters but these were just the beginnings. I think Taylor factored into this somehow but I wasn’t aware of him specifically, but what he is addressing in the book resonates greatly with what I remember from those days.
The first chapter mentioning of the “device paradigm” was interesting to consider central heating as much as a technology that changes the social landscape as we think of a cellphone today. Reminds me of Richard Hanania’s curious idea that maybe we have a drive to solitude like we have a drive to eat and, as when it becomes too easy to eat we have an obesity crisis and when we make it too easy to be alone (but feel semi-connected) we will choose that option and have a fertility/ pair-bonding “crisis”. But we can’t be alone all the time, since we want to be regarded and seen, but being seen by others brings up the question of whether we will have public regard for our “authentic” self or a curated mask thereof.
(Hanania https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-weve-been-thinking-about-the)
The feeling of online “liberation” of life in the days of Usenet or BBS giving voice to what was “enclosed in our own hearts” seems to have waned. There was a vigorous culture of politics like Tocqueville wanted but it took place in small corners. Is the “immense tutelary spirit” (i love when concepts of spiritual superorganisisms show up in all these contexts) still melting things into air?
Chapter starting with Allan Bloom and Closing of the American Mind really took me back because I was an english major in an ivy league university (Penn of course: you don’t say “Ivy league university” unless you’re at Penn) when it came out and it was attractive to my developing centre-right mind observing early fractions over political progressive ideas (this was the days of the Penn “Water Buffalo Incident” and FIRE getting started by Alan Kors) and I seem to recall that "relativism" was something the right-leaning people on campus were always concerned about.
That Taylor is going to a vigorous defense of a moral ideal core of “authenticity” over the criticisms of the seemingly obvious shallowness of the claims for it that Bloom and others raise is perhaps not what I expected from the book, which I thought maybe was more obviously going to criticize the concept. But he wants to speak “in reason” to those who major in self-fulfillment.
One thing I think that makes the book seem dated to me at least in terms of what is visible to me is that he is often concerned that young people are putting “career” first, sacrificing “love relationships” as well as care of children for pursuit of it. I feel like the Great Recession that hit millennials after this was written has changed the way career is viewed, but perhaps this is because I’m old and not currently in the career track place even to observe it. On the other hand, the fertility and pairbonding crisis seems to indicate love relationships and children might be being sacrificed for something (maybe not willingly)
He does deal with the shallows well “The affirmation of the power of choice as itself a good to be maximized is a deviant product of the ideal”
I was amused to see on page 22 that he is “suggesting a position distinct from both boosters and knockers of contemporary culture.” One of Taylor's disciples is the late New York City Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller and Keller is somewhat [in]famous for always speaking of christian visions of political life as a third way that rejects idolatries of left and right.
I 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)
Since you were at Penn at the right time, I’m curious what you make of the relativism charges. I wrote and then removed a large section on how I’m not sure this holds anymore. Now from the right you often see critiques of the moralism, not relativism, on college campuses. And I think things like recent Gaza protests show that many students don’t espouse relativism, at least not in deed. It takes genuine belief and commitment in an ideal to, say, risk expulsion for protest!
And conversely, right wing American intellectuals seem to have embraced very thin and sophistical connections to things like the Latin Christian intellectual tradition or the traditions of 18th c liberalism to veil what are ultimately Thrasymichian ideas about power and justice. It has been a very interesting if unhappy shift, although I would say it has its roots in earlier decades than this one.
Romanticism would be interesting, though I will confess that at least some of my interest in this book club had a lot to do with contemporary relevance (phil tech), so that consideration may be worth integrating into next year’s topic as well.
That’s my major concern about it, though I think Romanticism can be very relevant to our present moment — I’d just need to find a way to make it explicit.
One text to consider for this potential book listwould be Taylor's newest book "Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment" (Belknap 2024), in which he explores Romantic and Post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations of language. I've started it, and so far it's good--i.e., typical Taylor, which is to say a nuanced, detailed, exploration of the historical, philosophical and cultural backgrounds of meaning-seeking and meaning-creating projects of influential writers and thinkers.
I can link you to some interesting tech criticism or tech histories I've found that talk about the relationship between romanticism and techno-utopianism if you'd like! I also think that Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by Justin E.H. Smith does a pretty good job of exploring romanticism as reactionary to the Enlightenment and presents it as evidence of a sort of historical dialectic between the reasoned vs. the felt, the disenchantment vs. attempts at re-enchantment. This ties it then to some of the more noxious places we are seeing Nietzschean ideas in particular re-emerge currently like the so-called "Dark Enlightenment" movement.
There's also definitely a relationship between modern libertarianism and romanticism going back to Rousseau that matters in our current political landscape.
That was my thought too. I think we could continue to pull on this philosophy of technology thread and barely scratch the surface of the good writing on it, fiction and nonfiction. Though I'm sure there'd be a lot of value in a study of the romantic period as well.
I should say that my interest in Romanticism has grown out of these readings. If I went in that direction, it would be to explicitly continue these sorts of investigations but to draw on more historical sources. But it’s all still up in the air!
Does anyone like “Malaise of Modernity” as a title more than “Ethics of Authenticity”. I like the ring to it more, and the meaning also gut punches me a tad more. I wonder why he changed it. I suppose to shift the central focus?
I think it was published as ‘Malaise of Modernity’ in Canada. I’m not sure why it was renamed for the US.
I'm unsure if it was published here under that title or if that was the title of the Massey Lecture series and then the book it evolved from adopted the new title.
A romantic book club seems interesting! I am sure a lot of people would be into that.
I think the Romantic period as a theme for next year sounds wonderful.
I’m looking forward to reading the Charles Taylor! I’ve been looking for texts that explore enchantment/disenchantment, this was so helpful.
Have you read his other books? If you’re looking for something on disenchantment, A Secular Age is a must.
While discussing the German Romantics was what I authentically felt that I should do
given my life up to the point of that comment, it also feels rude not to discuss the text at hand. Mutual regard is perhaps owed to things as much as anything.
I am very interested in where Taylor wants to go with this. Culture of Narcissism was a very important book for me in a lot of ways. I think it gave voice to many things I experienced but never understood as potentially being aspects of one phenomenon.
In that book, Lasch argues that changes in our institutions and how we relate to them have also changed our culture more broadly and that what you used to be able to identify as pathological symptoms of narcissism are now just general features of our society.
The person who ends up developing that idea in a more compelling form I would argue is Alone from the classic internet blog The Last Psychiatrist. He is an actual psychiatrist and based on the overwhelming evidence of his day to day interactions a with patients as well as his studies he gave a more full picture of what narcissism as a cultural condition that applies to everyone would look like.
One of the things you find in some of his writing would see like a straightforward critique from the standpoint of sincerity to members of this book club based on our readings. The be yourself idea is in fact pure vapidity. Does you finding yourself ever seem to improve the lives of anyone around you? Is it being authentic to decide that the social role of loving and raising your child no longer suits you? From the perspective of the child, they may not care about your sense of authenticity when they are dealing with the lifelong result and pain of your choice.
But, and especially in his book Sadly, Porn, you find emphasized that one of the things that evidences our hollow condition is actually ambivalence. We are always told what to think and who we can be and ultimately how we can want. We reproduce the forms we imbibed from television and now tik tok or YouTube. We may reply that we don’t just want only what we see on these platforms and that we are discerning but Alone would say that it’s not what you want it’s how you want and everyone manifests that in exactly the same ways.
What we lost to endless media, media that always expands to fill the time available, was the ability to daydream and imagine and work out for ourselves what it is we want to be in such a way that could sustain the actual long term projects of achieving that. One of the classic examples of this from the blog days was the Matrix, Neo simply exists until the day that he is shown that he is the hero he always was and everything he needs to know is downloaded to his brain. How many of us lived like this at times?
So this complicates the picture. Many people express the idea of authenticity in destructive and evil ways, by pursuing pathological actions with no sense of responsibility to anyone but themselves. But it is precisely a lack of ability to even have dreams and desires that can be expressed and pursued in an adult life that creates these ambivalent and arbitrary people. Sincerity requires the development of a subjectivity from its own resources, which sounds like authenticity.
Alone once said that conscience is a bond of yourself to yourself. It allows you to feel guilt for hurting someone unjustly even if no one will ever know about it. Kant formulated this as the moral law within. But you need not be a Kantian to have some idea that at the end of the day, you can have a non arbitrary moral core which you have to respond to lest you be destroyed. In this way, authenticity can actually require things of you which you may not want but which you nonetheless must do. Being true to
yourself may involve the discipline of your passions and sacrifice of some of your pleasure.
This is all to say I think there could be a very compelling account made for authenticity in a non-debased form. Given Taylor’s Hegelian leanings I am sure he was very alive to the need to negate some negations.
I feel like you could maybe marry Kant's ideas to authenticity and argue for an authenticity that isn't about you discovering some original inner voice, but just about instead having a values system that aligns intention with action to better ensure that you don't live your life within a framework of cognitive dissonance. The categorical imperative to me is interesting as just that guiding framework for making sure that you aren't living in that world of totally relevant morality or so inwardly that you do forget other people - Kant's work is very clear in offering just a secular way to expand the kind of golden rule that once was religious.
To genuinely be "true" to oneself and nurture oneself and commit what we might call "self-care" in a truly authentic way vs. a malformed authenticity, to me, would be to recognize the basic precepts of things like the fact that if you become okay with lying, you also create a world and advocate then for a world where people are then going to lie to you that you have to navigate which is, ultimately, against your self-interest. Or if you become okay with saying yes to things you know will lead to bad outcomes to get ahead, you ultimately create a world where everyone else also says yes to get ahead and nobody speaks truth to power and power grows ever more manipulative. There's a "can't someone else do it?" mentality going on that people mistake perhaps for authenticity in hedonism or for self-care by putting oneself first that I think Kant offers a direct rebuke to that I keep turning back to for the simplicity of it. Don't make an exception of yourself because then you do tacitly create a world where everyone treats themself like an exception. Don't use other beings as instruments of your own will. Make sure that your intentions and your actions are in alignment regardless of the outcome being what you seek, because you actually have less control over the outcome in a social world.
Since Taylor didn’t leave us a large amount to discuss yet I’ll submit what I think would be good Romantics syllabus:
Plato, Timaeus
Spinoza, Ethics
Kant, Prolegomena
Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man
Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschafteslehre
Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia or Fichte Studien
Holderlin, one of the collection of his essays and letters
Schelling, he has some shorter writings available online that give a good view of his early Naturphilosophie and Identity system periods and then I might pick something from late Schelling like Investigations on the Possibility of Human Freedom for a complete book of his.
I would definitely intersperse into this the Goethe, Herder etc you already mentioned.
Timaeus and anything major by Spinoza are somewhat indispensable source texts for Romanticism, along with the Critique of Pure Reason but I wouldn’t be mean enough to suggest that for a book club book. The major movement of German Romanticism is to feel a deep need to bring Kant as expounded by Fichte into harmony with Platonism and Spinozism, so it helps to have a little background. They didn’t feel that you could naively escape Kantian critique but they did feel that Kant gave an unsatisfactory picture of the world.
If you had to pick only Hegel or Schelling, I would pick Schelling. Hegel breaks with Romanticism and ends up forming its raw materials to his own ends but Schelling for much of his long career is giving elaboration and systematization to the Romantic strain of Absolute Idealism which was first explored by Holderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis. Schelling is also deeply under appreciated in the Anglophone world so you would be righting a wrong.
Yes, I think Hegel could only be included at the very end. He abandoned most Romantic attachments quite early. To my shame, I have not read Schelling.
I am certainly all for Hegel being there, as he is significant in too many ways to list.
Our collective ignorance of Schelling is not our fault yet it falls to us to rectify it. My friend and I have dubbed this summer the Summer of Schelling as we are both trying to read as much of him as we can while enthusiasm runs high. It’s always good to strike while the iron is hot.
I thought I’d share a few general thoughts about reading Taylor which some might find helpful. I’ve found that he can sometimes be a frustrating author because he’s so committed to elaborating, in the fairest possible way, the competing perspectives on the issues he’s discussing, which can make it hard for the reader to figure out what, exactly, his own views are. This can come across as evasiveness or even obscurantism, but it’s a consequence, I think, of Taylor’s Hegelianism, which finds a kind of higher truth in the synoptic perspective which he’s so skilled at presenting. To his great credit, and unlike some of his modern-day followers, Taylor never comes off as an ideologue; he’s most interested in showing you how a problem appears from many different perspectives, often through a deeply learned historical account of the debate which leaves you feeling well-informed, even if you don’t find Taylor spending much time defending any particular view, the way other philosophers might do.
I would really encourage people to listen to the lecture recordings; they’re not exactly the same as the text, although they cover much the same ground. If I recall correctly, Taylor makes a number of illustrative comments throughout that aren’t in the book.
Here’s a link to the audio-only recordings from the website of the CBC, which originally aired the lectures in 1991:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1991-cbc-massey-lectures-the-malaise-of-modernity-1.2946849
First time reading Charles Taylor, and I don't think it will be the last! I'm glad we're reading this and taking a step back to ask questions a few steps upstream of the technological grievances that a lot of us share.
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.
Another topic that these first chapters bring up and that absolutely fascinates me is freedom. Or, I should say, "freedoms", as there seem to be several types of it. I'm a big fan of Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts Of Liberty" (namely, negative and positive) which directly addresses this. I suppose Taylor's "self-determining freedom" roughly maps to what Berlin calls positive liberty: self-mastery, autonomy, Kantian freedom—as opposed to negative liberty, aka being left alone. I wonder what else Taylor (and the reading group) have to say about this. From what I gather, Taylor is not entirely onboard with Berlin's view. Like you said, authenticity and positive freedom seem to go hand in hand. I'm really curious to see if Taylor's perspective on authenticity helps us understand why we gained freedom (both types, I'd argue) but lost something in the process.
I'm extremely excited to be reading "Ethics of Authenticity" with this group. I taught the book for several years as part of an IB Philosophy class I used to teach, and Taylor's text was a perennial favorite with my students--even though some of them struggled to understand it.
This text led me to some of Taylor's other books (which I highly recommend): "Sources of the Self" (1989), to which I've read that "Ethics of Authenticity" was written as a kind of Appendix to that larger tomb exploring modern senses of selfhood. "Philosophical Papers Vol 1: Human Agency and Language" in which the essays "Agency & the Self" and "What Is Human Agency?" are included, and were most helpful for rounding out my understanding of those ideas. "Philosophical Papers Vol 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences" in which you can find the extremely helpful essay "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?"--an essay that helped my students better grasp what Taylor was aiming at in "Ethics of Authenticity." I've read some of "The Secular Age" (2007) which, after "Sources of the Self" is considered by critics Taylor's most influential book.
I also have to highly recommend Ruth Abbey's "Charles Taylor" Second Edition (Routledge 2024), which is part of the Philosophy Now series. Abbey's exploration of Taylor's work is fantastic. She does a really excellent job of tying together all of Taylor's many themes, as well as considers his critics along the way. The Second Edition is a clear improvement over the 1st edition, so I really recommend to people who want to get a better idea of Taylor's projects to start with Ruth Abey's book (while reading Taylor's texts first, of course).
One question that I hope we explore together is "What's the difference between mere "desire satisfaction," what Talor calls a "calling" (p. 17, ch 2), and the idea of "flourishing"? Taylor alludes to this idea of a "calling" when he attempts to fill out the moral dimensions of self-fulfillment that the critics of authenticity gloss over.
My tentative answer is that A) "desire satisfaction" as part of a person's self-making reflects the subjectivist view of morality that Taylor mentions on p. 18 (ch 2), or even possibly a more debased form of mere hedonism (which the critics of authenticity culture assume); B) that by a "calling" Taylor intends something beyond mere whim, something that heeds an "inner voice" (p. 26) that is itslf a response to something both internal and external--like Rousseau's "voice of nature within us" (p. 27) and a reaction to social conformity like Herder's "original way of being human" (p. 28). This sense of a calling requires "articulating it" (p. 29, presumably to onself and others). But earlier senses of human "flourishing" apparently were more objectively discerned and pursued, as explained by Aristotle in antiquity and by people like Alasdair MacIntyre in contemporary debates (see note #15). But I'm left to wonder how Taylor would distinguish a "calling" form something like "flourishing."
Is "authenticity" merely our modern, individualist, subjectively-tinged version of "flourishing"? Clearly, taylor will in later chapters explain why authenticity cannot merely be purely a product of a subjective willing consciousness (as he will begin to explain in the next chapter "Inescapable Horizons").
Thanks for the Taylor references, Michael!
I'll try to find the essays you mentioned. I'm interested in the connections between self, agency, freedom (or freedoms), and ethics. I also feel in desperate need of finding the vocabulary to ask and answer questions about them.
At some point during this year's reading group I tentatively added "Sources of the Self" to an overly ambitious and ever-expanding reading list (which I keep mostly in my head). Right after starting "The Ethics of Authenticity", I became quite convinced that I want to read it. However, I don't think I'm ready for 500+ pages of nuanced & dense philosophy yet. Perhaps his essays are a good intermediate step.
To your point on "callings" and "flourishing": do you think the Aristotelian idea of flourishing is as central to the authenticity era as it was to the Greeks? I suspect it's not. Liberal individualism certainly doesn't prescribe *one* way to flourish (or does it, implicitly?). Rather, it focuses on letting individuals live "their own lives in their own way"—ideally, but not necessarily, leading to their flourishing. By the way, this might be better than being told how to flourish.
I agree that there's a difference—between ancients and moderns—in where the guiding principles for the good life come from. I'm not sure it's a simple as "from outside" vs "from within", although that's not entirely inaccurate. Did pre-modern people felt no "callings" or did they just not give them the ethical weight that we do?
Like you, I'd love to discuss this with the group!
I was excited to dig into the Taylor. Another commenter mentioned him already, but Taylor made his way into my world through the work of Pastor Tim Keller. He is, as far as professional contemporary philosophers go, the most widely read philosopher among Christian pastors.
FWIW: You might be interested to know that this work is one of the most circulated works of serious contemporary philosophy among the conservative Christian clerical community.
Beyond that, and focusing on the reading itself, I find the most convincing element of Taylor’s early argument is when he is willing to acknowledge that even if the contemporary notions of authenticity are “debased” or “narcissistic” or “travestied,” he is unwilling to jettison the project of moral agency underlying them.
From a Christian WV, one of the reasons Taylor’s arguments resonate so deeply is that he is often making arguments that are congruent with a Christian understanding of personhood. Specifically, image of God/design.
Loving the comments and engagement so far.
Out of curiosity are you a DBH guy? I find that he has a similar ethical commitment to certain aspects of modernity to Taylor while exploring them in a classically derived Platonist Christian metaphysics.
With Taylor I am not as clear on his ultimate views but he’s a very insightful commentator.
Haven’t done a ton of work or reading on DBH, so can’t speak to it. But it seems that those who traffic in Taylor, among the clergy, also traffic in DBH.
I've neglected to keep up with these readings as my own projects have taken up too much time.
I'm incredibly intrigued by this book, and feel like it could provide more detail to the modern malaise pointed to by both McIntyre and Deneen in their own way.
I've noticed the 'flattening' of culture, products, and human experience. It seems that the three reasons Taylor lists have just been further advanced in recent years.
It’s been years since I read Deneen’s post-liberalism book (which I found intriguing but ultimately unconvincing), but I would say this book captures what’s true in that work without baggage of the larger political postliberal project.
Yeah, I felt the same way. I read End of History after, and found the counters posed there way more robust. I've been circling around this topic for a little while trying to find a solution that seems right to me. I've found many good descriptions, but few satisfying prescriptions (looking at you MacIntyre). Maybe Taylor can help with that.