I am sorry, Jared. I am misplacing energy which should go into my own Substack posts but I will begin to cultivate brevity. Though as we know, the cultivation of a virtue is a slow process.
For me, two questions came up in the Zoom discussion which I want to restate as they occupied me reading the next chapters. 1) Does the ideal of authenticity suppose a specific metaphysical ground? 2) Does the ideal of authenticity require any specific likelihood for one to be able to achieve a specific aim they set for themselves?
The introduction of the German Romantics becomes an occasion for him to begin treating nature as some kind of concept by way of referencing their ideas about it. The poets who are moving beyond the neoclassical "make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no adequate words." He quotes Caspar David Friedrich who says that nature can speak directly in art, "their power released by their ordering within the work of art."
And Taylor will add "Friedrich too is seeking a subtler language... whose meaning has to be sought in his works rather than a pre-existing lexicon of references." But Taylor stresses that this is also more than a subjective reaction, and quotes CDF again: "Feeling can never be contrary to nature, is always consistent with nature." Taylor will reformulate this for his own purposes and presumably for us today by saying that though "we can no longer believe in the Great Chain of Being... we may still need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims on us."
While Restoration or Elizabethan poets would have inhabited a world that had such a lexicon of references available to it, having been collected since the classical learning of the days of Bede, they would have certainly not had an identical metaphysical geography to one another, and much less to the reign of Alfred. But they all would have had a general metaphysical background which I think the poets actively accommodated their lexicon of references to. The subtleties and their place in the overall whole may have shifted but they retained and place and I think it is arguable that they remained a part of a socially understood whole.
Taylor says that it's not possible to believe in the Great Chain of Being anymore, but I think it's better to be like Deleuze who said "Can one imagine a Leibnizian in the 1980s?" It would be a strange and wondrous thing but I think it's possible. I believe what Taylor rather means is that one can now only believe in the Great Chain of Being as an individual, and if one wanted to articulate it, even by first studying the requisite sea of texts to become intimate with its prior exposition, one would still have to do so today as an individual developing their own unique constellation of ideas and ways of making them known. In order to become compelling and to speak to people, you would have to do this. To merely parrot Ficino or Aquinas would leave people feeling that they might as well read those authors instead. You would not be able to enter the philosophical or literary dialogue with the Great Chain as a background feature of everyone's mental life. You would need to be like the Romantics, allowing the Great Chain to show itself to us, in a way that as yet no one has found adequate words for.
Earlier on, Taylor suggested that we would need to find fulfillment in things which involved something larger than us and which by their nature matter to more people than just ourselves. He suggested "God, a political cause, or tending the earth." His last example was one of several times when an ecological concern seems to surface. I think it's significant, then, that he uses the Romantics to conjure an idea of nature before us, but he doesn't leave it behind when he moves on.
Another fun year-long reading group could be a history of nature, actually. From whatever the Greeks all meant by physis to what modern day hippies and technologists seem to mean when they say it. But I digress when I truly cannot afford to lengthen my comments.
Taylor observes that it is truly no coincidence that the early Romantics such as Holderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel each attempt to independently develop from Fichte's subjective idealism a return to metaphysics, not the Leibniz-Wolff variety which they all agreed Kant had thoroughly destroyed, but in resurrecting the idea of the rational intuition, an immediate experience of reality which is different from the application of the concepts of the understanding to the manifold of sense, which could provide warrant again to posit the possibility of having an experience of The Whole or The All or The Absolute.
The Romantics, Schelling, and Hegel all, for their own differing reasons but also with a basic affinity, wanted to articulate that when I look into the cosmos, I also gaze within myself. For I am only distinct from The All from a particular point of view which we call subjective, but this point of view is not the ultimate reality. Though the Great Chain and substantial forms may have been set aside in some respects, man as microcosm and universe as macrocosm has been powerfully restated, in a new vernacular, developed in different directions by these men, which was able to demand the notice of a public who had largely dispensed with metaphysics altogether.
I doubt Taylor believes that the self-obsessed youth of the campus in 1991 will become Absolute Idealists, so I don't think he is suggesting that the recovery of the ideal of authenticity will involve the proselytization of Naturphilosophie. As he has said earlier, "we can never return to the age before these self-centered modes could tempt and solicit people." Much less could we go even further back. But much like the German Idealists made much that was old new again, I think Taylor is perhaps looking forward to a people who can do this in our time. Perhaps he believes that the significance of things like nature could be found by us again in our own way. So the answer to question 1 I believe is rather complicated, as Taylor does not seem to presuppose any currently understood or existent metaphysics but merely the possibility of one which is currently only potential. it would perhaps be developed in tandem with the recovery of the ideal of authenticity.
As for question 2, in light of the readings of this week, I would venture to say that the standpoint of the ideal of authenticity is not the exclusive property of the wealthy but is a description of a way of thinking which grows more general every passing second. And conditions that obtain now have not always. When Kant was writing that each human being has an infinite worth and fundamental dignity which means that they should never be treated as a means but only an end, Europe had lying ahead of it the Napoleonic wars, multiple revolutions, violence and unrest, and as some might see it a struggle to obtain forms of government which would respect and enshrine this dignity and other Enlightenment values.
While it may have originated in this form in Europe, the ideal of authenticity is now found all over the earth. Indeed, for someone to feel a frustration at their inability to fulfill their potential and bitterness and regret at dreams they harbored not yet finding purchase in the world, they have by these sentiments already presented to us their passport, issued by a nation which, whether it exists anywhere or ever will exist is no matter, for this is the only nation in whose politics they can ever take part.
Unrelated to today's post, but I wanted to make a suggestion. Can we possibly add Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitatis in our readalong this year somewhere?
Ted Gioia published a long essay on Honest Broker yesterday about Authenticity and music where he talked about The Ethics of Authenticity extensively. He said nothing makes music inauthentic faster than when the musician is pandering to the audience. Whereas music without an audience (a group of amateur musicians hanging out, a congregation singing a hymn in church, a person singing in the shower) is most authentic. The more music is like the music played in private, the more "authentic" it is. Appalachian folk music feels more authentic than K-Pop, in other words.
Extending this, you could say that Authenticity is behaving in public as close as possible to how you behave in private.
That's the idea I was grasping for on the Zoom call, and expressing badly. Your authentic self is your private self. It isn't something you do. In his essay, Ted says authenticity is like the quantum mechanics phenomenon where the act of observing a thing alters the thing. Once you have an audience, you'll want to play to that audience and if you aren't careful you'll no longer be authentic. So becoming an author, for instance, doesn't help you become your authentic self. If anything, becoming a successful author makes it *harder* to be your authentic self. Authentic art, according to Ted, is art you create *with* people, not *for* people.
I loved Ted's essay. There's way more to it than that, but I was so happy to have this idea expressed for me, and very eloquently too! Here's the link, though I think it's paywalled: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/authenticity-in-music
[I may post again about this week's reading. I'm starting the book over from the beginning. Maybe it will make more sense this time.]
I always ask: To...what ends? (not, so what?) within my independent research. on personality.
I came across a problematic paradox, which has yet been fully realized nor discussed properly in accordance to action-based reality.
A 14-year psychological study, performed within the University of Michigan (NetFlix: Babies docuseries) - Humanity is altruistic: caregiving/caregivers in nature - requiring/needing natural resources for survival - the definition of sustainability - We, Us, Together?! Has humanity ever allowed a pure altruistic personality (never mind a whole altruistic society) to exist without fracturing/offering the tantrum/the guilt complex consciousness, in association with the Solomon-Animal Farm-1984-Leadership/Epstein/behavioral Complex?
This offers the defining line behind guilt - The longer an infant into developmental growth without fears/leadership/scarcity - the more altruistic the individual - the lesser the caregiving, so then more narcissistic/controlling the individual becomes over others.
Is this a some small finding/discovery?! Is not this idea the defining system and systematic approach, into toto, within this work being promoted?! Just an inquiry...
I am sorry, Jared. I am misplacing energy which should go into my own Substack posts but I will begin to cultivate brevity. Though as we know, the cultivation of a virtue is a slow process.
For me, two questions came up in the Zoom discussion which I want to restate as they occupied me reading the next chapters. 1) Does the ideal of authenticity suppose a specific metaphysical ground? 2) Does the ideal of authenticity require any specific likelihood for one to be able to achieve a specific aim they set for themselves?
The introduction of the German Romantics becomes an occasion for him to begin treating nature as some kind of concept by way of referencing their ideas about it. The poets who are moving beyond the neoclassical "make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no adequate words." He quotes Caspar David Friedrich who says that nature can speak directly in art, "their power released by their ordering within the work of art."
And Taylor will add "Friedrich too is seeking a subtler language... whose meaning has to be sought in his works rather than a pre-existing lexicon of references." But Taylor stresses that this is also more than a subjective reaction, and quotes CDF again: "Feeling can never be contrary to nature, is always consistent with nature." Taylor will reformulate this for his own purposes and presumably for us today by saying that though "we can no longer believe in the Great Chain of Being... we may still need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims on us."
While Restoration or Elizabethan poets would have inhabited a world that had such a lexicon of references available to it, having been collected since the classical learning of the days of Bede, they would have certainly not had an identical metaphysical geography to one another, and much less to the reign of Alfred. But they all would have had a general metaphysical background which I think the poets actively accommodated their lexicon of references to. The subtleties and their place in the overall whole may have shifted but they retained and place and I think it is arguable that they remained a part of a socially understood whole.
Taylor says that it's not possible to believe in the Great Chain of Being anymore, but I think it's better to be like Deleuze who said "Can one imagine a Leibnizian in the 1980s?" It would be a strange and wondrous thing but I think it's possible. I believe what Taylor rather means is that one can now only believe in the Great Chain of Being as an individual, and if one wanted to articulate it, even by first studying the requisite sea of texts to become intimate with its prior exposition, one would still have to do so today as an individual developing their own unique constellation of ideas and ways of making them known. In order to become compelling and to speak to people, you would have to do this. To merely parrot Ficino or Aquinas would leave people feeling that they might as well read those authors instead. You would not be able to enter the philosophical or literary dialogue with the Great Chain as a background feature of everyone's mental life. You would need to be like the Romantics, allowing the Great Chain to show itself to us, in a way that as yet no one has found adequate words for.
Earlier on, Taylor suggested that we would need to find fulfillment in things which involved something larger than us and which by their nature matter to more people than just ourselves. He suggested "God, a political cause, or tending the earth." His last example was one of several times when an ecological concern seems to surface. I think it's significant, then, that he uses the Romantics to conjure an idea of nature before us, but he doesn't leave it behind when he moves on.
Another fun year-long reading group could be a history of nature, actually. From whatever the Greeks all meant by physis to what modern day hippies and technologists seem to mean when they say it. But I digress when I truly cannot afford to lengthen my comments.
Taylor observes that it is truly no coincidence that the early Romantics such as Holderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel each attempt to independently develop from Fichte's subjective idealism a return to metaphysics, not the Leibniz-Wolff variety which they all agreed Kant had thoroughly destroyed, but in resurrecting the idea of the rational intuition, an immediate experience of reality which is different from the application of the concepts of the understanding to the manifold of sense, which could provide warrant again to posit the possibility of having an experience of The Whole or The All or The Absolute.
The Romantics, Schelling, and Hegel all, for their own differing reasons but also with a basic affinity, wanted to articulate that when I look into the cosmos, I also gaze within myself. For I am only distinct from The All from a particular point of view which we call subjective, but this point of view is not the ultimate reality. Though the Great Chain and substantial forms may have been set aside in some respects, man as microcosm and universe as macrocosm has been powerfully restated, in a new vernacular, developed in different directions by these men, which was able to demand the notice of a public who had largely dispensed with metaphysics altogether.
I doubt Taylor believes that the self-obsessed youth of the campus in 1991 will become Absolute Idealists, so I don't think he is suggesting that the recovery of the ideal of authenticity will involve the proselytization of Naturphilosophie. As he has said earlier, "we can never return to the age before these self-centered modes could tempt and solicit people." Much less could we go even further back. But much like the German Idealists made much that was old new again, I think Taylor is perhaps looking forward to a people who can do this in our time. Perhaps he believes that the significance of things like nature could be found by us again in our own way. So the answer to question 1 I believe is rather complicated, as Taylor does not seem to presuppose any currently understood or existent metaphysics but merely the possibility of one which is currently only potential. it would perhaps be developed in tandem with the recovery of the ideal of authenticity.
As for question 2, in light of the readings of this week, I would venture to say that the standpoint of the ideal of authenticity is not the exclusive property of the wealthy but is a description of a way of thinking which grows more general every passing second. And conditions that obtain now have not always. When Kant was writing that each human being has an infinite worth and fundamental dignity which means that they should never be treated as a means but only an end, Europe had lying ahead of it the Napoleonic wars, multiple revolutions, violence and unrest, and as some might see it a struggle to obtain forms of government which would respect and enshrine this dignity and other Enlightenment values.
While it may have originated in this form in Europe, the ideal of authenticity is now found all over the earth. Indeed, for someone to feel a frustration at their inability to fulfill their potential and bitterness and regret at dreams they harbored not yet finding purchase in the world, they have by these sentiments already presented to us their passport, issued by a nation which, whether it exists anywhere or ever will exist is no matter, for this is the only nation in whose politics they can ever take part.
Unrelated to today's post, but I wanted to make a suggestion. Can we possibly add Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitatis in our readalong this year somewhere?
Ted Gioia published a long essay on Honest Broker yesterday about Authenticity and music where he talked about The Ethics of Authenticity extensively. He said nothing makes music inauthentic faster than when the musician is pandering to the audience. Whereas music without an audience (a group of amateur musicians hanging out, a congregation singing a hymn in church, a person singing in the shower) is most authentic. The more music is like the music played in private, the more "authentic" it is. Appalachian folk music feels more authentic than K-Pop, in other words.
Extending this, you could say that Authenticity is behaving in public as close as possible to how you behave in private.
That's the idea I was grasping for on the Zoom call, and expressing badly. Your authentic self is your private self. It isn't something you do. In his essay, Ted says authenticity is like the quantum mechanics phenomenon where the act of observing a thing alters the thing. Once you have an audience, you'll want to play to that audience and if you aren't careful you'll no longer be authentic. So becoming an author, for instance, doesn't help you become your authentic self. If anything, becoming a successful author makes it *harder* to be your authentic self. Authentic art, according to Ted, is art you create *with* people, not *for* people.
I loved Ted's essay. There's way more to it than that, but I was so happy to have this idea expressed for me, and very eloquently too! Here's the link, though I think it's paywalled: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/authenticity-in-music
[I may post again about this week's reading. I'm starting the book over from the beginning. Maybe it will make more sense this time.]
I’m so glad this book is getting the love and attention it deserves. Well done
I always ask: To...what ends? (not, so what?) within my independent research. on personality.
I came across a problematic paradox, which has yet been fully realized nor discussed properly in accordance to action-based reality.
A 14-year psychological study, performed within the University of Michigan (NetFlix: Babies docuseries) - Humanity is altruistic: caregiving/caregivers in nature - requiring/needing natural resources for survival - the definition of sustainability - We, Us, Together?! Has humanity ever allowed a pure altruistic personality (never mind a whole altruistic society) to exist without fracturing/offering the tantrum/the guilt complex consciousness, in association with the Solomon-Animal Farm-1984-Leadership/Epstein/behavioral Complex?
This offers the defining line behind guilt - The longer an infant into developmental growth without fears/leadership/scarcity - the more altruistic the individual - the lesser the caregiving, so then more narcissistic/controlling the individual becomes over others.
Is this a some small finding/discovery?! Is not this idea the defining system and systematic approach, into toto, within this work being promoted?! Just an inquiry...