The Malaise of Modernity

By Charles Taylor1

CONTENTS2

LECTURE I: Against the View from “Dover Beach,” pp. 2-14 Social Settings of the Ethic of Authenticity p. 43-45Three Malaises: Individualism, Instrumental Reason and the Loss of Political Freedom, pp. 2-4

The Ideas and Logic Internal to the Ethic of Authenticity, pp. 45-46

A Closer Look at the Worry about Individualism, p. 5 The Aesthetic, p. 46A Really Big Error of Perception, pp. 5-6 The Artist Replaces the Contemplative as the

Paradigmatic Human Being, p. 47Another Way of Seeing: Individualism as a Moral Vision, p. 6 The Analogy of Art: From Imitation to Creation, pp. 47-48Why the View from “Dover Beach” is Powerful, pp. 7-9 Nietzsche: Self-fulfillment vs. Traditional Morality, pp. 48-49Moral Relativism: Disastrous Offshoot of Individualism, p. 9 Summary of the Inner Drives of Authenticity, pp. 49-50Sidelining the Moral Dimension in Public Discourse, pp. 9-12 Tension Between Two Sides of the Ethic of Authenticity and the

Challenge of Resolving It in a Balanced Way, pp. 50-52 Relativism & Atomism: Degraded Forms of Individualism, pp. 12-14 Drawing Together Conclusions: Perpetual Struggle, pp. 52-53Three Assumptions: The Ethic of Authenticity Deserves Our Re-spect; We Can Reason About this Ethic; We Are Not in an “Iron Cage” of Systems of Money and Power pp. 14-15

LECTURE V: For a Different Stance and a Work of Retrieval – the Political Dimension, pp. 54-66

LECTURE II: Nature and Background of Authenticity – and the Slide into Relativism, pp. 15-28

Three Assumptions Revisited: The Modern Ethic of Authenticity is Good and Admirable; Retrieving Its Goodness Can Make a Differ-ence; We Can Change the Course of History and Society, pp. 54-55

Sentiment, p. 15 An Ad Hominen Remark, p. 55The Germ of The Ethic of Authenticity: Rousseau and the Voice of Nature Within, pp. 16-17

Modern Society as “Iron Cage”?, pp. 55-56

Herder & the Romantics: Discovering Originality Within, pp. 17-18 “The Invisible Hand” and “Invisible-Hand” Mechanisms, pp. 56-57Originality and Identity: the Analogy of Works of Art, pp. 18-20 A Tempting View, p. 57Moral Reasoning, pp. 20-21 Important Question, p. 57 Defining Yourself – Backgrounds and Horizons of Significance, pp. 21-24

Instrumental Reason, Ecological Responsibility andGenerating Democratic Majorities, pp. 57-58

Rousseau and Mill: Self-Determining Freedom and Free, Self-Choosing Persons, pp. 25-26

How Democratic Majorities Emerge Around the Importance of Environmental Responsibility, pp. 58-59

The Picture of Life as Worthy Because it is Chosen isNot Something You Chose, pp. 26-28

Conflict Between Two Fundamental Philosophies ofHow Society Should Find Its Welfare, p. 59

LECTURE III: Atomism, pp. 29-41 Lesson in Democratic Will Formation, p. 59 Atomism as Disaffiliation on the Intimate, Social and Environmental Levels, pp. 29-30

Our Degrees of Freedom are Not Zero: Creation of New Constella-tions of Democratically Chosen Purposes is Possible, p. 59

Individualism as a Moral View, pp. 30-31 Instrumental Reason and Technology: Nature as Merely a Resource for Humans?, p. 60

Locke’s View of How Society Hangs Together: Consent and Popular Sovereignty, p. 31

Technology and the Stance of Domination, p. 60

Distinguishing Individualism as a Moral View fromSocial Breakdown, p. 31

Other Ways of Morally Enframing Technology, pp. 60-61

Identity and Recognition, pp. 32-33 Retrieving the Moral Sources of Technology, p. 61Identity as the Sense of Ourselves, Where We Stand and What’s Important, p. 33

The Ideal of Disengaged Reason: Its Distortion and Nobility, pp. 61-62

From Honor in a Hierarchical Society of Orders to Dignity in a Society Based on an Equality of Conditions, p. 33

Technology, the Ideal of Human Welfare and the Affirmation of Or-dinary Life, p. 62

Recognition, pp. 33-35 Enframing Technology with a Sense of Human Welfare, pp. 62-63Identity Depends on Recognition, pp. 35-36 The Political Dimension, p. 63Authenticity and a New Understanding of What Belonging Ought to Be, pp. 36-37

Political Implications of Individualism for the Crucial Ability to Form a Majority Democratic Will, p. 63

Authenticity Produces Deep Conflicts and Confusions, pp. 37-40 Fragmentation and Falling Away fromDemocratic Participation, p. 64

So What?, pp. 40-41 How Single-Issue Politics Endanger Democracy, pp. 64-66LECTURE IV: Why is the Ethic Authenticity Vulnerable to Relativism and Atomism?, pp. 42-53

Regaining Democratic Control Over the Direction of Society Requires Avoiding the Fragmentation of Single-Issue Politics, p. 66

An Important Distinction, pp. 42-43 NOTES, pp. 67-76

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CBC Host’s Introduction: “Professor Taylor’s writings have won him a wide and international reputation in the fields of political and moral philosophy. At the same time, he has maintained an active interest and involvement in public affairs. He did his graduate work in the 1950s at Oxford where he helped to found the influential New Left Review. In the ‘60s, he returned to his native Montreal and tried to establish a foothold for the New Democratic Party in Québec. Four times he stood for election to the House of Commons, once opposing Pierre Trudeau. Taylor was ultimately unsuccessful in his attempt to make the NDP his home in Québec and Québec at home in the NDP. But he has kept his interest in Canadian politics writing for the McDonald Royal Commission in the 1980s on Canada’s political future, advising the Québec government on language policy and speaking out on constitutional questions. As a philosopher, Taylor’s concerns are focused on what he calls philosophical anthropology, an effort to expose the roots of the contemporary sense of what it means to be human. His most recent book, Sources of the Self, traces the development of the modern identity and argues that this identity draws on much richer moral sources than its critics generally allow. ‘We have yet to capture,’ he writes in the book, ‘the unique combination of greatness and danger which characterizes the modern age.’ In these Massey Lectures, Professor Taylor continues his quest for a more balanced and comprehensive view of the modern age. He calls these lectures The Malaise of Modernity.”

LECTURE I: Against the View from “Dover Beach”

In these five talks I want to speak about the malaise of modernity. By that I mean fea-tures of our contemporary culture that people feel very worried about even as they seem to flow from the development of our civilization. Time scale can actually vary here. Sometimes people are worried about developments that have taken place in the last 10 years. Or sometimes they worry about very deep lying features that have been coming about over three centuries. But there is this widespread sense of malaise around a number of features of modern society.

Before I get into the number of features I want to talk about, I just want to mention one very strange thing about these. They’re very familiar to us. In one way, we understand them very well. In another we find them very perplexing. That’s really why it’s worth going at them again. Not that in looking at them again anybody, including myself, is going to say anything strikingly new. But that we have this tremendous trouble getting them somehow in perspective, in focus.

All right, let me launch in this first talk an attempt to outline three of them. And then in the other talks that follow I’ll go into one of them in much more detail and then maybe look more quickly at the other two.

THREE MALAISES: INDIVIDUALISM, INSTRUMENTAL REASON AND THE LOSS OF POLITICAL FREEDOM

What are these three? Well, the first one, the one I’m going to spend the most time on, is a kind of individualism. [The other two interrelated worries are the growing primacy of instru-mental reason and the decline of citizen participation in politics and the consequent loss of polit-ical freedom.] [Individualism] of course has been developing over many centuries. Individualism – by that I mean:

the change which has meant human beings in the modern West don’t feel them-selves anymore to be parts of a larger order – a larger order of nature, a larger or-der of hierarchical society that very often, in the old days, was linked to the order of nature. Rather, they understand themselves to be primarily individuals with

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rights that stand over and against these orders. They even think of the societies they live in as made by their own choices and will.

You can see for lots of us there’s something very positive about that. Some parts of that we just couldn’t conceive of doing without.

But at the same time it’s produced a lot of worry and anxiety because some people have seen in the development of individualism the fading of the older moral horizons, as making our lives in various ways perhaps less heroic or flatter and narrower.

Take some examples. The famous French theorist Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s and wrote one of the most perceptive books about American society which people still read today, Democracy in America (two volumes in 1835 and 1840). He was one of the first to talk about individualism3 and perhaps invented the word. He expresses the worry that in an individualist age, where people are turned away from the larger order of things, the larger society, they would get into a life filled with what he called “petty and vulgar plea-sures.” They would be enclosed within their own hearts.

At the other end of the 19th Century, we get something very parallel from a great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). No relation to Tocqueville at all. But something similar: this worry that individuals in modern western society would be interested only in, as he says, a “pitiable comfort.” That’s his description of what he calls “the last men.”

We can go on and on when we talk about the ways in which the worry about the possible consequences of individualism has occurred in the last couple of centuries.

Very quickly let me mention a second kind of worry that has been interwoven with this worry of individualism. It’s the increasing place in our lives of what we might call instrumental reason4 – means-ends reasoning – where we decide certain questions by how to be most effec-tive, how to organize our means most effectively for some end – as against deciding these ques-tions by other considerations or other criteria.

For instance, now you have all sorts of people, in a sense, designing their lives – where they’re going to live, where they’re going to move, what part of the world they’re going to live in – in terms of getting the best job. Or you get societies, at the same time, designing their lives where populations are going to concentrate, where there’s going to be large groups of people and so on in terms of the most effective modes of production or way of producing.

So decisions about where I’m going to live and about what communities ought to be and how they ought to sustain themselves – which, in previous centuries, were taken as given by the way of life we were brought up in – are now decided by, very often, considerations of efficiency, effectiveness. What’s the most effective way to distribute the population? Should we help people in outlying regions to maintain themselves there; or, should we encourage them to move into central cities like Toronto and Montreal – because that’s a more effective way they can enter the work force?

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In the modern world, we have the steady growth of instrumental reason – of means-ends reasoning – in our lives. Here again we are very worried. At the same time as we welcome this, in some ways we find it very worrying. We see the tremendous difficulty we have, for instance, in getting control of the runaway forms of instrumental reason like the growth of production in certain areas which threatens certain of the tolerances of the world in which we live. We worry about the ozone layer, for instance, because we produce certain products that threaten to thin it out. And we find we have the greatest difficulty in holding back on this, in somehow getting con-trol of this runaway engine.5

So that’s a second area of worry, the growth of instrumental reason.

There’s a third area which, in a way, grows out of the first two. That’s the political worry about our lives being, in one sense, out of control. I mentioned the example of the ozone layer, wondering whether a society where there is runaway instrumental reason is one that we can re-ally control.

But on a deeper level there’s a worry about the growth of individualism, too. Can we re-ally have a democratic society in which the members of it don’t strongly identify with it, don’t have a sense that it is their community and don’t find part of their fulfillment in being citizens in this community? This worry is about the decline in citizen identification and allegiance.

Of course, here again you can go back to Tocqueville because I suppose his is one of the greatest formulations of this concern, the concern that the rise of modern individualism will pro-duce a society in which people, in the end, turn off and lose their interest in, and sense of com-mitment to, public life.

Way back when Democracy in America was first published, Tocqueville draws this ex-traordinarily powerful picture of what he calls “soft despotism,” a society in which the govern-ment is, as he calls it “a vast tutelary power” that would take over people’s lives, in a sense, with their tacit consent as they withdraw from the public domain and just let things happen. Toc-queville saw this as a tremendous danger waiting for us in the democratic age.

So those are three worries. The worry about individualism, the worry about rampant in-strumental reason and the worry about people withdrawing from political society and citizen-ship.

In a way, you can see they are all interwoven with each other. It’s as though I were really talking about only three facets of the same worry because they are so interwoven.

I want, in the rest of today’s talk and in the four that follow, to try to go into these a bit to try to see what’s at stake. There won’t be time to do all three equally. So what I’ve chosen to do is to take the first one as the main area of concentration.

I want to talk about these worries about individualism and offer a certain view of how they should be seen. And then, I’m afraid all too quickly at the end, refer to how something like a similar approach might illuminate the other two: instrumental reason and the political one.

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A CLOSER LOOK AT THE WORRY ABOUT INDIVIDUALISM

But let’s look, first of all, in some detail at this worry of individualism. I mentioned ear-lier this worry as it developed over the last two centuries and 19th Century figures like Toc-queville and Nietzsche. What’s interesting is this worry keeps returning and has much more con-temporary forms.

I can take as an example a very influential recent book in the United States by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.6 Bloom actually gave a couple of talks here at the CBC recently and we can see that, in the last few years since his book has been published, it’s had a great impact.

What is Bloom talking about? He’s talking about a certain segment of modern youth, modern students. But he’s picking up on a recent form of modern individualism. He sees in his students the overwhelming predominance of a facile moral relativism, where each student thinks everybody is into their own values, have adopted their own values – and nobody else ought to criticize each person’s own values. That leads to a view whereby they say there aren’t any objec-tive criteria by which we can say to somebody that the values they’ve chosen in life are right or wrong. They feel somehow there’s something wrong with applying objective criteria. Rather, ev-eryone ought to be given the right – the space – to work things out for themselves. It’s a kind of individualism. Bloom goes on to talk about this very much in terms we find occurring in differ-ent ways in Tocqueville, Nietzsche and others:

The loss of the books [“the Great Books” people no longer read] has made them narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary, a real basis for their discontent with the present and an awareness that there are alterna-tives to it. They are both more contented with what is and despairing from ever escaping from it…. Flatter, because without the interpretation of things, without the poetry or the imagination’s activity, their souls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around (p.61).

So you have this picture of a kind of individualism breaking out of earlier moral horizons in a way that produces a narrower life with less depth. Bloom articulates this worry in that book. It’s that articulation that made the book a tremendous bestseller, a real phenomenon; a book by a professor of political theory which was on the New York Times best-seller list for several months. The Closing of the American Mind touched a chord.

A REALLY BIG ERROR OF PERCEPTION

We can think of a lot of other books in recent years, too. Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Con-tradictions of Capitalism (1976) talks about the hedonism of modern youth. Christopher Lasch, a very influential American historian, talks about the narcissistic self, the idea that somebody is to-tally involved in themselves in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The Minimal Self (1984). So you can see this worry is being articulated again and people are deeply concerned about it. Let’s look at this because I think for all the interest in these books by Bell, Bloom, Lasch, and others, there’s a really a big error of perception. Let me try to identify what it is.

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Such authors talk about these young people as though they were just sort of shucking off earlier moral constraints, losing the earlier moral horizons and falling into a kind of amoralism.

Of course, they admit these people often talk in moral terms about what they ought to do and what’s a good life and so on. But they tend to see this as a kind of relatively transparent screen for self-indulgence.7 Here’s another quote from Bloom:

The great majority of students, although they as much as anyone want to think well of themselves, are aware that they are busy with their own careers and rela-tionships. There is a certain rhetoric of self-fulfillment that gives a patina of glam-our to this life, but they can see that there’s nothing particularly noble about it. Survivalism has taken the place of heroism as the admired quality (p.84).

So there’s the notion that when these new young people talk of self-fulfillment it’s a kind of screen or patina or it’s not really where it is at.

ANOTHER WAY OF SEEING: INDIVIDUALISM AS A MORAL VISION

Now, I suggest, that’s a really important error of perception. There is another way of see-ing what these young people are doing and that is they are plugging into, or emerging from, a very important moral vision which I think is constitutive of modernity and which, in a way, this term self-fulfillment captures – a moral vision of individualism as involving a certain obligation on the individual to be what he or she really has it in them to be, to express or realize them-selves.8

Now, of course, a lot of the particular modes of behavior and action – picked up by these writers among modern youth or among modern people in general – is not at all admirable; and they are quite right about some of the more trivializing and ridiculous modes of it.

But, I suggest, we could see these in rather different terms. Instead of seeing them as an expression of amoralism, self-indulgence or the loss of a moral horizon, we might see them in a quite different way as degenerate forms of a very important moral ideal.

That way of looking shouldn’t surprise us or look strange because if you look back over history just a little bit we can see that there isn’t any major moral or spiritual ideal that hasn’t gone through periods when it’s lived by the people who believe they belong to it in a degenerate, debased or distorted form. As a matter of fact, the opposite may be the case. It may be better, with reference to the great spiritual ideals, to look for the exceptional moments and for the ex-ceptional people who really live them to their full.

So there’s nothing strange in looking at the more debased or trivialized forms of what’s been called by people like Lasch “the culture of narcissism” not simply as an expression of turn-ing out morality altogether but to look at it as what happens when people who are deeply into a certain morality nevertheless lose the sense of what it really involves and slide towards trivial-ized forms.

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INDIVIDUALISM: AMORAL AND SELF-INDULGENT OR A NEW MORAL IDEAL?

In other words, there are at least two ways of looking at it. I want to argue a lot of writers jump too quickly to the conclusion that we should look at it the first way: the amoralist or self-in-dulgent way. They see it that way instead of looking for, rather, the deeper sources of this in a certain morality.

If you look at it in the second way, what you do of course is try to see what that morality consists in at its best. That involves going back in history because this morality has developed over the last two hundred years and you can’t just capture it if you look at its contemporary man-ifestations. So looking at it the way I want to look at it – as an interesting, powerful morality gone wrong as against simply an abandonment of morality – involves digging into the sources or roots. Of course, once you dig into the roots then what you have to say to these people who are living in this way is something quite different.

But before I go into that, which I want to take up later on, I’d like to step back a little bit and try to understand better why these two views have arisen and, in particular, why the view I want to combat has such a powerful hold on modern consciousness.

WHY THE VIEW FROM “DOVER BEACH” IS POWERFUL

It’s not just the distemper of older people or teachers before some of their students whose behavior some of them find weird or upsetting. It’s something very much deeper in the whole way we tend to understand the last two centuries and the rise of modernity. The idea that we’re faced with let’s say the behavior of the “me generation,” of younger people who are turning off and so on, that we’re just dealing with people who have left moral standards behind – that read-ing is deeply anchored in the way we tend to think of the last three centuries.

In a way, I was already guilty of and partly responsible for this. I was falling into this my-self in the very beginning of this talk. Because I did describe the rise of modern individualism in terms of a loss of a horizon, of old horizons in which people felt they were part of larger orders disappearing or decaying. In others words, I was giving a picture of it as a pretty negative move-ment: there used to be moral structures and now the moral structures have gone. I think these im-ages are very deeply embedded in our consciousness. Some of them, of course, have been handed down to us by some of our greatest poets and thinkers.

I just want to read a passage from a very famous 19th Century poem, “Dover Beach,” by the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) because the image in this stanza so bril-liantly captures a view I want to identify and then argue against:

The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breath

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Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.

It’s a powerful stanza because it gives us that sense of the abandoned world, what Max Weber called the disenchanted world, the world in which something that was there before – “the Sea of Faith” – has just left. It’s left nothing but “the vast edges drear/And the naked shingles of the world.”

It’s a powerful view. I want to call this view for the rest of these talks the view from Dover Beach because I think that’s a way of capturing it.

Implicit in the way I want to see modern individualism is something very different. It’s the idea not that, or not just that, an old morality got lost but a new morality, a new moral vision was born and developed. So it’s not just a matter of a world abandoned, a world lost – it’s a world transformed.

We may dislike it in some ways. Or this new morality may make us uneasy in some ways. But it is not simply an absence. It’s not simply a non-existence of the moral.

But the view from Dover Beach is very powerfully anchored. It’s powerfully anchored partly because we do very often react whenever people come along with new modes. We feel very unsettled and we tend to look at this as purely negative.

But it’s deeply anchored for much more powerful reasons. Because we find it easy to identify as moral views the earlier horizons. The earlier horizons were often clearly religious views, for instance. And many people have abandoned religion, or at least abandoned a formal religion. So it looks as though they had a clearly identifiable set of moral limits made by the reli-gious views before – and now they no longer have them. Or the older views were a view of a larger order in the universe which gave meaning to everything – and now that is gone.

So it’s very easy to identify what we’ve moved away from over the last centuries as a moral view.

Now, it’s harder to understand what we’re about because it’s something much more cen-tered on ourselves and much less recognizable in traditional ways as a moral view.

So for all those reasons the view I’m arguing against – the view from Dover Beach – is something we constantly have to criticize. We’re constantly liable to fall into it again. And we have to make an effort to see the phenomenon of the modern world we’re living in this other light as also reflecting something positive.

So that’s one reason why it’s very easy to read what these young students are going through in the so called “me generation,” to read it just as an absence of morality.

But, ironically, there’s another reason, too, which makes it easy to read it that way. Which is precisely the kind of debased or trivialized forms in which this ethic of self-fulfillment

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has fallen have as their consequence that they cut these people off from some of the deeper sources and make them less easy to recognize.

MORAL RELATIVISM: DISASTROUS OFFSHOOT OF MODERN INDIVIDUALISM

For instance, Bloom points out that the belief in a kind of facile moral relativism – “Your ethical view is yours; mine is mine. I can’t criticize you. You can’t criticize me.” – is one of the consequences of this individualism. He’s very acute on this and he points out that it’s not just for reasons that might have to do with a theory of knowledge or the beliefs about the status of moral propositions that makes people believe in this. It’s also because they think there’s a moral reason to believe in this. There’s something wrong in criticizing someone else or saying to them, “I know better than you what you’re life ought to be about.”9

So we could see this kind of relativism as itself an offshoot from modern individualism.

But I think we can show, and I’ll try to show it later on, that it’s a disastrous offshoot. It’s one that betrays the very thrust and purpose of modern individualism.

Why? Because in a world in which there are no standards whereby I can criticize you for falling short of yourself then there ceases to be a real issue about what being you ought to be. This kind of relativism undercuts the very ethic which generated it. There’s a kind of mistake or slide which produces this debased form, a relativism generated out of a genuine ethic of self-ful-fillment.

SIDELINING THE MORAL DIMENSION IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE

I want to come back later on to defend that in more detail. But I want just to look at this phenomenon for a minute in order to understand why it, in a sense, covers its tracks.

To the extent that you have people into the ethic of self-fulfillment and it takes, in their lives, the form of that kind of relativism, to that extent they themselves become less and less ca-pable of recognizing they have, and are defending, a powerful moral view.

It falls under the ax of relativism where no powerful moral view can be defended before someone else who disagrees with it because that would be interfering with that other person’s mode of life.

So, paradoxically, people who ought to be defending this individualism as a moral view get, in a way, awkward, shy, inhibited, and unable to defend it as a moral view – because they’re unable to espouse it as a full-blooded moral view the consequence of which would be they could criticize others for not following it.

So it’s as though the moral side here tends to get factored out and sidelined, as though the moral considerations behind this dispute tend to be put in the shade.

This is also contributed to by other developments that are very important in our day.

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Just think of the way in which the dominant trend in modern social science, which is very much seen through the popular consciousness, tends to understand the whole development of modernity over the last three centuries.

Here again, in a strange way you find the moral motivations underlying modernity side-lined or sidetracked.

It’s very common in social science explanations to try to explain the coming to be of modern society – of individualism, industrialization and so on – in terms of sometimes simply the institutional developments themselves, as though urbanization and industrialization came about – and the particular modes of outlook, like individualism, that go with them – developed as a consequence of these institutional changes. And if one thinks that way then the moral reasons for these changes in outlook tend to get totally forgotten, as if the outlook itself is produced as a kind of reflex to the new living conditions that people find themselves in, and we don’t need to look for the moral motivations or moral reasons.

Or if sometimes people do indeed think there were important changes of [moral] outlook and such changes of outlook are part of the cause of the coming to be of modern society, then people tend to look at things like the development of individualism, the new importance of free-dom and the greater emphasis put on instrumental reason.

But very often in the social science tradition these were understood in a sort of amoral mode. That is, they were understood as being changes in outlook people were attracted to not be-cause of the moral ideals underlying them but just because, in an understandable way, we can see how people might be attracted to them for their own purposes. We might understand that people might appreciate greater freedom because they’d be allowed to do whatever they wanted. Or would appreciate greater instrumental control over their environment because they could do with that whatever they felt like doing.

These were thought of as developments that were attractive to people because they, as it were, facilitated their lives, not because they represented a powerful moral vision or moral ideal.

It’s been the dominant trend in social science to steer away from moral ideals in their ex-planation of how things come about. They’re thought to be relatively less hard-nosed, scientific considerations; and, it’s been thought to be a weakness in science to have recourse to them.

So we’ve developed a self-consciousness of our history which is fed by the populariza-tion of social science theories. We developed a conception of our history in which the moral di-mension has been bleached out.

Modernity is seen as something which either came about in a fit of the absence of mind; or, modernity came about because of the attraction of nonmoral – not necessarily immoral but basically nonmoral – changes in our outlook.

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All that contributes to this sidelining of the moral or this relative inability to understand the development of the modern world – of our modern outlook – in terms of the intrinsic [moral] appeal that it has.

So does the mode of liberalism that tends to arise from all this. The mode of liberalism, which tends to arise from modern individualism, is one that’s closely parallel to the motives I’ve been talking about for soft relativism. That is, the notion that a properly liberal society ought to leave people to pursue their own plan of life without interference and without even making judg-ments as a society about that plan of life and simply erect a society that facilitates equally every-one’s pursuit of their plan of life, defends their rights and their freedom to devise this life plan, carry it out on their own, and prevents others from interfering with them – but doesn’t in any way involve society as a whole espousing some view of the good life.

This kind of, you might say, neutral or procedural liberalism has also become a very powerful force in modern society, a very persuasive definition of what liberal society is about.10

It too – by its attempt to sideline discussions of the good life in the public sphere – has tended to make us relatively inarticulate in our public discussions of what is valuable and impor-tant in human life.

So you have all these factors together: you have the tendency of those who support the culture of authenticity to slide toward a kind of relativism; you have the immense influence of social science understanding on our self-understanding of the history of our last 300 years; and, you have the impact of a very influential political formula.

In all these cases, what happens is not so much that the moral dimension is actually de-nied – because people are, after all, still aware that they’re moved by moral issues. But the poten-tiality and capacity to discuss these things – to articulate and make clear what they’re about – at-rophy.

They atrophy because of the ban on open, mutual criticism that relativism involves. They atrophy because of the disinterest in, and lack of attention to, moral factors in social science ex-planation. They atrophy because of a certain view of what public debate ought to be about in neutral liberalism.

It’s as though, although the moral instincts are still there, the capacity to say what they’re all about declines and withers.

So we’re in this rather weird predicament. We have a debate between people who are for and against these modern forms of individualism. There are people who want to boost them on one hand, and people who want to attack and mock them on the other.

The people who want to attack them tend to look at these modern forms of individualism simply as modes of self-indulgence, not as the reflection of a serious moral view. But strangely enough, the people who want to defend them, the people who are into these forms, are inhibited, shy, inarticulate, and incapable of articulating them as a serious moral view.

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So strangely enough, it gets to be accepted on both sides that one can’t seriously talk about them or analyze them and bring out what they have behind them in terms of moral im-pulse. The moral impulse is by an almost unwitting conspiracy left in the shade and forgotten.

I want to enter this debate from neither of these perspectives. I am neither a booster nor a knocker. What I want to do is shift the whole terrain of the debate so we can for the first time bring out and take seriously the moral impulses behind modernity and, in particular, behind this form of individualism.

RELATIVISM AND ATOMISM: DEGRADED FORMS OF INDIVIDUALISM

Let’s start, in the last minutes of today’s talk, by looking in more detail at this kind of in-dividualism and what I have been calling its debased and trivialized forms.

First, what do I mean by that? Well, a whole host of things but I want to pick out two strands. The first is the way in which this kind of modern individualism of self-fulfillment takes, as I just mentioned, the form of a kind of facile relativism, a disbelief, in a sense, in moral stan-dards that would cut across individuals and one could use to criticize somebody’s life. So let’s call it the relativist direction.

The second feature of it I’ll call, for short, atomism: the way in which this kind of indi-vidualism often tends to loosen people’s sense of identity and allegiance to any larger commu-nity. I need a word there. Community is perhaps not quite the right one. But I need a word gen-eral enough to cover all kinds of interpersonal knittings together, from families at one level to whole societies on the other.

What I’m pointing to is the way in which many forms of modern individualism – the sense of one’s life path and one’s fulfillment involving one’s life – are interwoven with other people in long term commitments in a family or say to a political society – and the way in which such en-gagements or commitments tend to get eroded, delegitimated, and disappear as people tend to turn inward on their own lives.

Or the way, for instance, for a lot of people, the idea of self-fulfillment makes them look at the relationships they enter in an instrumental way, as something there [merely] to serve their self-fulfillment.

Incidentally, here we’re beginning to see how the three malaises I am talking about inter-weave with the growth of instrumental rationality from the economic to other social spheres.

But I want to just look from the standpoint of what I want to call atomism: the idea that the individual developing her or himself looks at a relationship in an instrumental way, not as something which should be an object of allegiance or commitment.

So these are two ways in which I think you could say the ethic of self-fulfillment degen-erates to relativism and atomism – and does produce forms rightly criticized and rightly picked up on as something we ought to see as a decline by the writers I mentioned earlier.

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The issue is going to be therefore how to read these developments.

To repeat what I was saying earlier, to bring it together again, you can either read them as a slide of people away from all moral horizons altogether so they end up just being egoistic in their atomism and their relativism.

Or you can read them as a misreading or a misunderstanding of a very profound and im-portant moral view. And which interpretation you adopt makes a great deal of difference in how you talk to people in modern culture, how one argues this.

In one case, you’ll simply want say to them, “Snap out of it. Recognize that there are moral goals in life. Stop being self-indulgent. Stop being simply selfish.” You’ll be speaking to them as you do to a kind of egoistic child. “Snap out of it. Look around you. See something big-ger.”

In the second case, you have to do something rather different. You have to discover what this ideal that they, after all, espouse, really means and what it requires. You have to dig down to the roots of it and argue with them in the name of what they themselves really believe, or what they themselves have given their lives to, and try to show how it yields a very different kind of way of life than the one that they’re in – how, as I want to argue later, it negates relativism and takes us beyond atomism.

So in one case, you come at them with a rhetoric or exhortation to turn away from ego-ism. In the other case and from the other standpoint, you come at them rather as a discussion partner in a commonly understood ethic to which we as moderns, I believe in some way or an-other, are all committed or are, in a sense, all involved.

In the second case, of course, in order to come at them like this we have to dig deeper into the sources of this ethic and try to understand better what it involves, and dig more deeply into the nature of the human condition.

Therefore, what we’re involved with here is a kind of reasoning about morality, about what’s right and what’s wrong.11 In a way, being involved in this argument is itself almost an at-tack on facile relativism.

So seeing the nature of the discussion in very different terms, you also have a very differ-ent take on what the future might be of our civilization.

If you come at it again, if you look at this once more with the view from Dover Beach, and if you see modern individualism just as an absence of morality, then you’ll tend to despair of the future. You’ll despair because it does look as though individualism is gaining and if that means amoralism, then amoralism is gaining. So there doesn’t seem to be very much you can do about it beyond exhortation – and exhortation doesn’t always have a very good effect.

On the other hand, if you see these people as activated or moved by a moral ideal which they don’t properly understand, then you’ll see them as much more in tension, and pulled in

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more than one way, than the view from Dover Beach does. Not just as sliding into self-indul-gence but as actually galvanized by a moral view they don’t fully understand but can be con-cerned about if you can bring to them some understanding.

From that point of view, the future of our civilization doesn’t necessarily look as bleak. There is something we can do to turn its direction around to bring people back to a more integral mode of living the ethic that constitutes this culture.

THREE ASSUMPTIONS

There are of course three assumptions I am making here that could be questioned. I’ve made them in this first talk, or laid them out, without really defending them. I’ll have to defend them later on. Let me just mention them here in closing.

The first is that this modern ideal, the ideal I’ve been calling the ideal of self-fulfillment, actually is an ideal that ought to win our respect, that it isn’t just a cloak for self-indulgence or something rather contemptible.

The second assumption implicit in the last remarks I’ve been making is you can argue with people about this, reason can do something, you can say to people, “Hey, we share this ideal. You’re living it in a form which is not really at its best. So why don’t you reconsider what you are doing?” That reason has a role here.

And the third assumption is that people aren’t so imprisoned in the forms of modern in-strumental reason and the society, technology and economy built on that. That they can change their lives. That they aren’t forced in this track by the very structure of modern society regardless of what they believe.

So you have to believe it’s a valid ideal, you can reason about it and we have enough freedom in modern society to do something about it if you accept the arguments.

If either of all three of these assumptions isn’t true then of course I’m wasting my breath and your time in looking into this. So along the road of these remaining four talks I’m going to take up those challenges. I hope to be able to do that to some degree to your satisfaction.

But at the beginning of tomorrow’s talk what I want to start doing is exploring the ethic behind self-fulfillment. So for that, in the first case, I won’t be addressing these challenges right off. I’ll be going back in history to try to understand just what it is we are living today that un-derlies the ethic of self-fulfillment, which powers modern individualism.

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CBC Host’s Introduction: “In his first lecture he argues against what he calls “the view from Dover Beach,” after Matthew Arnold’s famous poetic lament for lost faith. This view holds that modernity is simply a falling away from earlier moral horizons, a matter of decline, loss, and forgetfulness. Instead, Professor Taylor proposed that we view worrying aspects of modernity, like peoples’ obsessive quest for self-fulfillment, in a different context. Not as a for-getfulness of morality but as a degeneration of a genuine moral ideal. Looking at the contemporary scene this way has very different consequences than the view from Dover Beach. Instead of simply condemning contemporary mores, one can try to awaken the higher impulse within them. What is needed, Professor Taylor says, is a work of retrieval, a search for the moral sources of modernity. In the second of his five Massey Lectures Charles Taylor be-gins that search.”

LECTURE II: Nature and Background of Authenticity – and the Slide into Relativism

Tonight I want to start by describing and tracing the development of the modern ethic of self-fulfillment, as I described it yesterday. But tonight I’d like to give it a new name, a name that I think is more appropriate for it. I want to talk about it as the ethic of authenticity.12

I picked this word up from a brilliant book by the American critic Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), Sincerity and Authenticity,13 which he published in 1971 in which he actually goes into these two moral ideals and distinguishes them. In talking about the second, authenticity, he picks up on what I want to examine here. So I want to use that work because I think it captures with some force what I hope everyone will see as I begin to describe this more.

The ethic of authenticity is extraordinarily recent in human history, which always sur-prises us because it’s so rooted in our lives. It’s so important for us that even when we try to deny it we find it hard to imagine our ancestors 250 years ago wouldn’t have understood a great deal of what we are talking about.

SENTIMENT

It was born in the late 18th Century out of a very common moral stream in the 18th Cen-tury. I think you could say it was born out of the ethic of sentiment, which we find with the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment like Francis Hutcheson.14 It was itself a reaction to and against a kind of morality which was also very modern, the kind of austere morality which was grounded by the notion of right and wrong, living according to certain rules where the sanction for the rules in those days was thought to be the will of God and the rewards and punishments God would offer in the afterlife. It was a kind of ethic that seems to have been espoused by the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Of course, the successors of that ethic go on to-day, perhaps not always or not often in this theistic form of being based on the rewards and pun-ishments by God; but an ethic which is concerned, above all, with discovering what is the right thing is to do, and molding our action on these demands of rightness.

As against what the theorists of sentiment thought was a rather bloodless ethic, this ethic that seems to give no place to the human heart, they developed the notion that God had im-planted in human beings, on the contrary, moral sentiments15, a sense in one’s emotional life of what was right and what was wrong. And one had to follow the voice of moral sentiment within oneself.

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THE GERM OF THE ETHIC OF AUTHENTICITY: ROUSSEAU AND THE VOICE OF NATURE WITHIN

That came to be a very important stream of thinking in the 18th Century; and the way it developed and took new form was in one of the most influential writers, perhaps the most influ-ential writer of the whole century, the French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).16

Rousseau turned this idea into the notion of having a voice of nature within. It’s a voice that comes from our authentic being and tells us what the right thing is to do. The danger that stands before that voice, what can in a sense drown it out, is our dependence on other people, our entering society in such a way that we become dependent on the opinions of people around us, on their good opinion of us, on our reputation in their eyes. We tend to want to play up to and be accepted by them. In all these ways we become dependent on others and lose the sense of depen-dence on ourselves by which he means this voice within. He sometimes talks of it in this image of a voice. Sometimes an oral image is used and sometimes he talks about it in terms of the very notion of sentiment. He talks about le sentiment de l’existence, the sentiment of existence.

In this first transposition of the morality of sentiment we’re beginning to see emerge the modern form of individualism.

Why? Because already the idea is being presented that in following the voice within I am doing something which is opposed to depending on others, listening to others, molding my life on the expectations of others. I have to generate from out of myself and the voice within what I ought to do – that is the path of morality.

You can see we’re beginning to develop a morality not based on the notion of externally imposed law but based on the notion of something that emerges from the heart.

Rousseau is of course an absolutely extraordinary figure because he is the source of more than one basic, fundamental, powerful idea in the modern world.

He is also the source of a conception of freedom, which I will call self-determining free-dom – the idea that I’m free when I determine the conditions of my own existence from out of my-self.

Because he’s the source of both of these ideas and because these are, I suppose, a little bit linked together, we can easily mistake them for each other, that is, the notion that morality comes from the voice within and the notion that we’re called to a kind of self-determining freedom.

They’re close brothers or cousins, in a sense, but they aren’t quite the same; and the fact that they can be confused will have fatal consequences that I want to talk about later on.

But for the moment, let me make clear the idea of following a voice from within is not necessarily the same thing as saying I reach my highest fulfillment just in virtue of choosing my own life.

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It’s not the fact of choice, which is what is stressed by self-determining freedom, but the fact of following the voice which is authentically mine.

You’ve noticed in these last sentences I’ve been using the word authentic to try to ex-plain this. So several times I find myself using the word authentic. That’s because I think it’s such a natural way of putting it. So even though it wasn’t Rousseau’s word, I want call this ethic the ethic of authenticity.

It’s an ethic that says what a human being ought to do is discover within himself or her-self the voice, the impulse or the sense of what is right – and to follow that.

It also tells us that this is not easy to do and that there are lots of factors in the human condition that tend to make this very hard to do because there’s a tendency for that voice to be drowned out by the influence of others, the voice of conformity and the pressure of others on us – all these externally derived forces which tend to drown it out, shut it up, make it inaudible to us – which we have to fight against.

So this is no easy path as this is conceived. Authenticity is not something that comes to you naturally. It’s something that very often has to be fought for.

That is the germ of the ethic of authenticity.

HERDER AND THE ROMANTICS: DISCOVERING ORIGINALITY WITHIN

There’s one more important twist, one more important turn here which we have to see this going through before we have the fully-fledged contemporary view that we live by.

That is something that happed after Rousseau but it was developed by people who were much inspired by him and built on him – and these were the writers of what you might call the Romantic generation, although all of them weren’t properly speaking romantics. The writers who go over the boundary of the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany perhaps first of all but also in England and elsewhere.

I want to take as my representative target figure a German critic and writer Johann Herder (1744-1803)17 who I think articulated one of the first and best expressions of this new change.

What is this new development, this new twist?

It takes off on this idea that each one of us must listen to, as it were, the voice or impulse within but it adds something very crucial: the notion each one of us, in listening for that voice within, is called on to lead a form of life, a way of being human, which is peculiar to himself or herself.

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It’s not just that we should listen to the voice within because it’s the general voice of hu-man morality. But it also tells us a peculiar way of being human which is really ours.

We can see a double-reason why we shouldn’t simply take our morality from outside. Not just that the proper nature of human beings is to listen to the voice within. But that if we simply listened to those outside we would get a model, a way of being human, that isn’t properly ours, that wasn’t meant for us.

We can only find our proper way of being – which is something original and different – by looking within ourselves.

That is what I want to call the full blown ethic of authenticity.

It’s the ethic of authenticity which not only calls on us to be true to ourselves. But calls on us to be true to ourselves also because there’s something very special and original – which each one of is – which can only be found that way.

I started to use the word originality along with authenticity and that lets us in on another aspect of this ethic – that it’s one which has made us conceive ethical life as something very closely interwoven with and connected to aesthetic life or, if you like, art.

ORIGINALITY AND IDENTITY: THE ANALOGY OF WORKS OF ART

We understand right away the demand for originality as a demand that has its proper place in the artistic domain. In applying this notion of originality to human lives we’ve been de-veloping a mode of thinking which has made us begin to see human lives on the analogy of works of art.

There’s been a close interweaving of artistic fulfillment, artistic creation and human lives. That has been of course part and parcel of a very important feature of modern culture – our sense of the heroic nature of the artist, our willingness in the 20th Century to take the opinions of artists with great seriousness as though they were people who have insight into things.

There’s been a massive shift in our whole culture here, to which I want to come back later, that’s been involved in this ethic of authenticity and one that’s raised very questionable things as well.

All that is part of the ethic of authenticity, which calls on each of us to be our own per-son. Herder had a wonderful way of putting it. He said each human being has his or her own measure. What I am measuring myself against, when I ask myself if I have a fulfilled or unful-filled life, is a measure which is mine. I can’t decide if my life has been a success, whether my life has been fulfilled, by looking at your life or a measure of your life. I have to find my own measure and, discovering that, carry it out.

To a lot of people what I’ve been saying will seem absolutely self-evident and banal. In a way, that’s exactly what I’m trying to say and argue – that this ethic has become very deeply en-trenched in our whole thinking and way of life.

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To other people what I’m saying will perhaps not sound strange but make them maybe uneasy. That’s because some of the words I’ve been using are words that they find it difficult to relate to or maybe even make them squirm.

That’s because of course of something I mentioned yesterday. That this ethic is often lived in rather debased forms. So we have people running around talking about self-fulfillment and we may even have some of these people we have met in our lives who, in living out their so called self-fulfillment, do either rather trivial or ridiculous things or perhaps very hedonistic things or hurtful things – and we shy away from this language. The same may be true with the term authenticity.

But let’s stand back for a minute from the allergy any one of you might have to one or another of these terms and try to see how deeply the ideas I’m talking about have bitten into our way of life, or have entered into our self-understanding.

Everybody understands if I talk of somebody’s life as a wasted life or somebody who didn’t realize his or her potential; or, someone who didn’t really find themselves.

I recognize each one of these terms I’m using is probably making another group of peo-ple listening to me squirm because that particular term is one that they found misused or abused.

But the point I’m trying to get across, if we reflect a little bit, is that some or other of this whole range of terms each one of us in some way relates to because the idea we have of a partic-ular way of being ourselves has become so deeply part of our lives.

So I want to try to get us to see beyond the particular range of ways of saying this, which are just leached in our culture, and see beyond the particular ones that may have turned any one of you off and to understand and to grasp how broadly and deeply this way of seeing things comes down to us.

Then I want to try to get us to be as astonished as we ought to be that we have come to accept this as a human ideal in light of the whole story of the human race. Because I come back to the point I made at the very beginning: 200 years ago this wouldn’t have been self-evident or understandable.

The understanding was that what was right and wrong was universally determined in terms of universal principles or laws or universal realizations of human nature that were the same for all human beings. Of course, it was recognized human beings were different. But the idea that the differences would have this moral significance – my being the particular person I am lays on me the obligation of living my particular kind of life – would’ve seemed strange and weird.

The very language of authenticity – and let’s remember its etymological origins has the notion of the self in it – the idea of being myself, the very notion of authenticity would’ve been impossible for our ancestors of 300 years ago to understand.

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Yet, to us, it is totally understandable whether we like it or not, whether we approve of the forms around this or not. It’s something we immediately grasp. That’s the measure of how much this way of thinking has entered our ordinary cultural blood stream.

It can take an immense variety of expressions all the way from this fine Greek-derived word, authenticity, down to something like doing your own thing. It’s the same idea at work at every level of realization.

What I want to show, as I was saying yesterday, is that it is in the very nature of this ideal that it can bring us from the lower forms up to the higher ones. You can get into the debased forms and bring them back to their highest and most authentic realization.

Yesterday, I was talking about two such. The way in which this ethic of authenticity, as I want to call it, can somehow lead people to adopt a kind of relativism in which they believe we can’t criticize each other’s moral views, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, a kind of atom-ism where people get shaken loose from their commitments and engagements to other people, families and communities.

Of course, that means, implies or assumes, as I said yesterday, we can argue about this. We can say to someone, “Look, your way of living the ethic of authenticity is not the right one.” It assumes that relativism is wrong, that we actually can argue.

Let me say a few words before I launch into a bit of an argument about why I think we can reason about these matters.

MORAL REASONING

Moral reasoning is sometimes thought to be impossible – that is, you can’t convince peo-ple that they are right or wrong about their moral views – because people have an exaggeratedly extreme notion of what it demands.18

They sometimes think if moral reasoning were valid, if you could convince somebody something was right, you’d have to start, as it were, from the ground up, maybe with somebody who didn’t accept any moral commitments at all, had no moral ideas, was totally amoral. You have to take that person from point zero, as it were, and build up by sheer, undeniable argument to the point where he or she was accepting your view.

That’s not the way moral argument is actually carried on because that’s of course not the way human beings ever really are. We carry our moral arguments always within the bounds of certain agreements, certain common intuitions and a certain sense something is right. Always, I’m saying, within some sense.

Of course, it may differ with a people with a culture or a view very far removed from ourselves. We may find it hard to discover the common ground from which we can start. But nevertheless to argue is to start from some common ground.

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In the case we’re looking at here my whole point is that those who are, let’s say, deeply into a kind of moral relativism on the grounds developed out of an ethic of authenticity, and someone like myself who finds this ethic admirable and wants to convince them that that’s not the right path, we have a lot of common ground. We have the common ground of precisely this ethic of self-fulfillment, of being true to oneself.

But we have more than that. We not only have this ethic but we also have certain under-stood background features of the human condition we both share and can be brought to recog-nize when we bring them out.

So moral argument in this kind of area consists, in large part, not in developing syllo-gisms or proofs as in mathematics. It consists to a great degree in articulating – articulating things there in the background half understood, more or less seen and felt but which haven’t been appreciated because they haven’t been brought out. In bringing those out we can hope to show that some ways of living and acting are better than others.19

That’s exactly what I want to do in giving – I won’t say really full blown arguments be-cause there isn’t time here but – at least argument-sketches today and also tomorrow whereby I can try to show these debased forms of the ethic of authenticity don’t actually live up to its de-mands.

I want to do this in regard to the two kinds of sliding away or debasement of the ethic of authenticity I mentioned today and also yesterday: a slide toward atomism and a slide toward rel-ativism.

DEFINING YOURSELF – HORIZONS AND BACKGROUNDS OF SIGNIFICANCE

Today, let me look at the slide toward moral relativism, that is, the idea that if we really took it seriously, the idea that people should be true to themselves, then we oughtn’t to criticize others, we oughtn’t to believe we can say to others they are wrong in the values they espouse. We ought to accept each person can be sovereign in their own values.

Why is this wrong? Why is it wrong especially in the light of the ethic of authenticity?

Let me try to look at this in the following terms.

When you come to understand what it is to define yourself, to determine, in other words, in what your originality consists, you can readily see with a bit of reflection that you can’t do this unless you have some background sense of what is really significant.

Let’s take it in terms of the question of how somebody defines their identity, which is one way of putting this point of finding one’s originality, defining what makes you different from others, what makes you special, what gives your life its meaning or its sense.

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Let me take a ridiculous example. I may be the only person with exactly 3,732 hairs on my head or with exactly the same height as some tree in the Siberian plain. But so what? Can that be how I define myself? It sounds ridiculous and it is ridiculous.

If somebody asks me to define myself, what my life is about, what gives meaning to my life, I may say something like, “I define myself by my ability to articulate important truths” or maybe, “play the Hammerklavier like no one else has every played it”; or, perhaps I might say, “What really matters to me is that I’m reviving the tradition of my ancestors.”

Anyone of these three answers and others like them we would immediately recognize, and as something like understandable self-definitions. Yes, I can see how someone’s life can be organized around these things.

What’s the difference between these three answers on the one hand and having 3,732 hairs, the other one I mentioned, on the other?

Because we understand right away that the three good answers I gave pick out properties that have real human significance like articulating important truths or playing this great work of Beethoven in an unparalleled fashion. They have real human significance.

Whereas having exactly 3,732 hairs on my head doesn’t.

You might say doesn’t unless we find some special story. You can always find some spe-cial context in a given culture where let’s say the number 3,732 is a sacred number. That marks me out as some kind of important religious leader.

But if you don’t put that context in and note what we’ve done by putting that context in and we’ve related this otherwise trivial property of the number of hairs to something really sig-nificant in human life like the religious life of a society, unless we do that it would just be incom-prehensible. We would think that somebody was playing a joke on us or maybe this was some Dadaist work of art or modern theatre of the absurd if somebody answered our question, “What’s your life all about?,” by citing the number of hairs he has on his head.

So what does all this have to do with relativism?

What this little thought experiment showed – this rather crazy experiment about the num-ber of hairs and so on – is how we actually reason about our lives, how we reason about moral-ity, and in particular, how we reason about what gives our lives sense about our own identity. It shows when we reason about these things, we have to take some things as given.

In other words, you couldn’t imagine someone reasoning about their lives, about some important moral issue, and when you push them to the final ground, the final point on which ev-erything rested, you would come to a decision that they were taking to make something impor-tant or to make something unimportant; rather, when you think out your life yourself or when you’re forced to defend your own position in life in argument with someone else, you find your-

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self articulating the grounds – the sense of significance, the sense of importance – you’ve taken as the background to your argument and you are now bringing out.

What this little thought experiment shows is the way in which in the fashion that we actu-ally argue, reason and think things out, we all take something very important as given in our ar-gument – and not as simply chosen.

But once there are things out there we don’t decide, are already given, then there has to be the basis for criticisms we can offer one to the other.

But you might also say something else comes out of this little fable here, particularly the example of the hairs, that the things we do take as background can differ greatly from one per-son to another and even more from one culture to another.

So I had this fanciful notion a minute ago that perhaps might in some other society have really important religious significance and that brings out to us how different we can find other people, how different we can be, how hard it can be to align what we take for granted with what they take for granted.

This certainly has been one of the really important grounds that has led people to adopt a relativistic position because it does seem we can’t – there’s no way we can – arbitrate the differ-ence between us.

But here too when we look at what’s going on we can see that the differences between these two societies, our own and this imagined one, aren’t simply based on premises that come out of nowhere to the effect that some number has religious significance for one society and not for another.

On the contrary, there is always a very large and rich surrounding picture, surrounding understanding of human life, in this case the religious dimension of human life within which this number has the significance it has.

Because there is this larger and rich surrounding picture, this is something about which we can argue, something which we can discuss, something which is probably even contested in that society between different variants of different parties and different versions of its culture.

The nature of human reason, whether it be our own reasoning about our own lives, or dis-cussions with others where we differ, or our attempts to understand and criticize very different societies, we always find that the foundations of our beliefs and our positions are not simply premises which are there in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion but large, ramifying and complex views about what is important in human life – which invite further discrimination, interpretation, and argument.

What we never get to in any of these discussions – our own deliberations or our debates with others – is simple starting points, what we might call just surds,20 just sitting there as unar-

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gued, unarguable, undiscussable axioms which we can’t get behind and which determine every-thing else we believe.

But that’s what makes the relativist picture so deeply wrong.

Because we don’t get back to these simple axioms and, in particular, because we can’t understand therefore our fundamental positions as just either brute givens or as simply chosen, there always is something we can say to each other, some criticisms we can offer to each other, and some issues we can take up with each other.

I give you my plan of life and you say, “Well, there’s something I don’t quite see in that. It doesn’t take account of, it doesn’t relate you to, this or that very important significant thing in human life. You just left that out of your life. That’s a criticism I am making of you.”

It’s a criticism and when you say that to me I have to listen to you. I have to have a rea-soned argument why I’ve left that out. I may want to argue that’s not quite as important as you think and other things are of greater importance. But I can’t simply sweep that aside by saying that doesn’t count for me because I’ve decided that it won’t count.

There is room – and there has to be room – for criticism of each other.

Now we can see right away there’s an important distinction to be made here which is lost from view in the kind of soft relativism that I’ve been talking about.

We’ve moved in the modern age to an ethic of authenticity, that is, from a view that thought all the major issues of morality were to be put in universal terms to a view which says there are some issues which have to do with how I ought to be, where the answer is peculiar to myself.

In other words, there’s an important personal dimension to the good life for me, namely, my finding the life that properly suits me. But that doesn’t mean at all that I have the right to de-cide what that is. It doesn’t mean at all I am not open to criticism – because you can criticize me for failing to live my life.

It’s just as much, if you like, a question of right or wrong whether I’m living my life, the life proper for me, as it could’ve been 200 years ago, whether I’m living the right life for human beings in general.

In other words, that the good life is one that has a personal index to it, that there’s a good life for each one of us, doesn’t mean in any way that there isn’t a question of right and wrong.

ROUSSEAU AND MILL: SELF-DETERMINING FREEDOM AND FREE, SELF-CHOOSING PERSONS

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We might say there is, after all, another way the culture of authenticity might generate this view that each one of us can choose for himself or herself because one thing we might con-nect with the culture of authenticity is the idea that people should choose their own lives. They should not simply slide into them but be active – be agents – in the choice of their own lives.

I mentioned this yesterday talking about Jean-Jacques Rousseau in pointing out that he’s one of the great founders or culprits, depending on your point of view, one of the great origina-tors of the ethic of authenticity and also an originator of a notion of freedom, self-determining freedom.

I said these two were crucially not the same because the idea my life ought to be chosen by me is not really the same as the notion that my life has a certain form which is properly mine, which I have to cleave to.

It’s important to keep them apart. But somebody might reply and say nevertheless, “These are two separate ideals. But isn’t it true we also are deeply into the ideal of choice in the modern world, the idea somebody ought to be the agent of their own lives?”

That indeed is true. Let me quote now another major 19th Century philosopher that I’ve been keeping in reserve until now who I think is an admirable exponent both of the ethic of au-thenticity and of this modern idea of choice. I’m talking about the English philosopher and econ-omist John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and perhaps his most famous work, his essay On Liberty (1859).

There, he says in chapter 3 that in order to be full human beings we need more than a ca-pacity for what he calls “ape-like” imitation. He goes on: “A person whose desires and impulses are his own, are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture, is said to have character.” It’s a wonderful statement. What Mill is doing there is of course annexing this word character which has been very much part of the vocabulary of moral-ity for centuries but used in a quite different pre-authenticity sense. He’s annexing that for the ethic of authenticity as he is saying somebody has character when his desires and impulses are his own.

Then he goes on: “If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and ex-perience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.”

There again, and throughout that work, Mill emphasizes the importance of being active choosers of our own lives. So there’s nothing terribly strange, perhaps, in saying, although this notion of choice is not exactly the same as the ethic of authenticity, it fits well with it and it’s part of what we are very much involved in and have taken in as our heritage in these last 200 years.

Yes, but then let’s look again at what’s involved in this ethic of choice. Supposing I say something like Mill does here, a life can’t be really a good life for anyone not only unless it’s the

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life proper to them but also it can only be a good life if it’s something they have actively chosen as against sort of sliding into it or sort of led into it by others.

All right. That indeed is so. Let that be so. Let us agree on that.

But then even here we see right away there is, as it were, a fixed background that has to be accepted as fixed for this to be true.

If it’s the case that life isn’t good unless it’s chosen that’s because we have some under-standing of the human condition such that, independent of anybody’s will or choice, there is something noble or courageous or significant about giving shape to your own life.

That there is something noble or courageous or significant in this, is not something you choose. It, too, becomes an ideal that is, as it were, given to you by the nature of human life.

THE PICTURE OF LIFE AS WORTHY BECAUSE IT IS CHOSEN IS NOT SOMETHING YOU CHOOSE

We have a picture of life as being worthy because it’s chosen as against simply going with the flow, coping or conforming with the masses. This is something which is true in human life, not something you choose.

So even taking that part of the ideal which seems to focus most on the individual choice, we see it doesn’t open the door for relativism. On the contrary, it opens another way in which you can criticize somebody’s life. You can say to them, “Look, the life you’re living, the values you’re espousing are not really yours. They’re not really chosen. You’re not really into that. You’re not authentically endorsing them.”

Once again, the very fact at looking at what’s really involved in authenticity, looking at what’s really involved in choice, shows that the facile relativism that has been drawn from this melts away or self-destructs or is shown to be incompatible with taking that ethic seriously.

As a matter of fact, we could turn this around and look at some point from another angle, and see what happens when we allow ourselves to make this mistake and to think that relativism is the proper conclusion to draw.

Then what do we find ourselves saying? What do people who grant this relativism find themselves saying? They find themselves saying in the end, “Well, you can’t criticize this per-son’s life because he or she has chosen it. That’s their choice. They find themselves in the end making choice the only criterion of rightness. That the person has chosen it is a sufficient reason not to criticize it.

But if you follow that thought out then you dissolve all these horizons and backgrounds of significance. Then the most trivial choice on the part of those people could have the same im-portance as the most significant choice. They could determine their own lives as much by choos-

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ing strawberry ice cream as against walnut ice cream as they could in making the most signifi-cant career choice or a choice of their ultimate commitments.

Everybody recognizes the ultimate absurdity if you push this to the very end.

But we can also see how a climate in which choice is the criterion is one that ends up trivializing choices by putting them all on the same footing and producing among everyone, both those who would live this kind of life and those who are looking at them from the outside, one of those senses of malaise about which I’ve been talking a lot in these talks, that is, the sense that something has been lost, that the lives are narrower and flatter – exactly the kind of criticism that we found Tocqueville making of the individualism of his day, that we found Bloom making of the younger people.

In other words, the slide downwards to an ethic which is grounded simply on choice – the relativistic notion that no one can criticize another for a life they have chosen – is a slide which produces the sense of trivialization, of a lack of significance which dissolves, or maybe that’s not the right word, which pushes to the distance and occludes the horizons of significance21 within which alone the choices of one’s life or the determination of one’s identity make sense.

So we can see this in two ways. We can see this connection between authenticity and a continued sense of the significance – given significance – of human life, either by following the logic or by trying to see what makes a choice a choice of one’s identity and not something else, or if we see what makes us precisely ill at ease in the present day culture of authenticity where this intuition has been lost from sight, and people have slid into relativism.

So otherwise put, you can see the basis of an argument here whereby we could tell each other, or perhaps remind ourselves, that certain forms which are justified today on the basis of everybody being true to themselves and the culture of authenticity are actually betrayals of it – and ought to be abandoned.

We could see here a kind of argument which I will call an argument of retrieval where we can reach back into the rather rich sources of the moral ideal, which animates so many of our contemporaries, and find again what it really involves and use that as a standpoint from which we can criticize a lot of contemporary practice.

If you take what I described yesterday as the view from Dover Beach, that is, the view of the development of modern individualism as just to be understood negatively as the collapse and disappearance of old horizons, then you’ll have nothing to say or nowhere to stand or criticize this development except to shake people and say, “Remember morality” or, once more, “Think of something bigger than yourself.”

If you take the view I’ve been defending here that the contemporary culture of authentic-ity emerges from this very powerful ideal I’ve been describing, then you will have something to say, you will have an argument to put forward, you will be able to engage in a kind of retrieval as I’ve been describing.

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This is what I’ve been doing today, in regard to the slide into relativism by looking at the nature and background of the ethic of authenticity and trying to show that it takes us outside of relativism.

Tomorrow, I want to do something of the same for the other kind of slide I mentioned be-fore, the slide to atomism – the way individualism tends to occlude the value and importance of our commitments to communities around us.

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CBC Host’s Introduction: “The malaise in the title is the uneasiness we feel in the face of the moral relativism and social fragmentation which seem to characterize our age. This unease makes us susceptible to conservative critiques which claim that modern people have simply lost their moral bearings. Professor Taylor rejects this pessimistic posi-tion which he calls the view from Dover Beach after Matthew Arnold’s famous poetic lament for lost faith. He ar-gues that modernity actually draws on rich moral sources. When modern persons seek authenticity or self-fulfillment they should not be accused of immorality but instead be reminded that self-fulfillment is itself a moral ideal with its own stringent requirements. In his previous lecture he tried to show how moral relativism misreads these require-ments. Tonight, in the third of his five lectures, Charles Taylor continues with a parallel analysis of atomism.”

LECTURE III: Atomism

Yesterday, I was talking about relativism because in these talks I’ve been trying to ana-lyze and look at the culture of authenticity, the ethic of fulfillment, the modern individualism that is one of the great sources of worry for many people today. If you remember one of the things that has been pointed out about this is that this ethic of self-fulfillment, or individual self-cre-ation, tends to fall into a kind of soft moral relativism where people say everyone has his or her own values and you can’t criticize other people’s values.

Yesterday I was proposing a different way of looking at this where we don’t see this kind of relativism just as a straightforward consequence of individualism or the culture of authentic-ity. On the contrary, we went back into history and tried to look at the sources of this culture, this ethic, very rich sources. What seemed to come out was far from relativism being an ordinary, straightforward consequence. Actually, this idea of authenticity generates something quite differ-ent. It really is, in the end, hostile and incompatible to relativism. We get a kind of reversal of view when you look at this in historical perspective

ATOMISM AS DISAFFILIATION ON THE INTIMATE, SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL LEVELS

Today I want to do something similar but in connection with another criticism people levy at the culture of individualism today. That’s, if you want to put a single word on it, what you might call atomism.

What do I mean by this?

A tendency for people who are very much into the culture of self-fulfillment to disaffili-ate on all sorts of levels, disaffiliate on the intimate level, that so many relationships, so many marriages end early, break up. More than that, people very often seem to feel it’s not necessarily such a bad thing that they do break up, almost as though they looked on the relationship as some-thing that ought to be temporary or that could just as easily be temporary.

Or even worse, perhaps, the way in which people can look upon these relationships in-strumentally. That is, instead of feeling their marriage or their life partnership is something to which they’re deeply committed, unconditionally committed, they tend to look on it as some-thing instrumental to their own fulfillment. And, like any instrument, when it ceases to fulfill its purpose it can be thrown over.

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So there’s a sense that modern individualism produces people who can’t make these life commitments. That of course is on the intimate level, the level of close relationships.

But this kind of disaffiliation people also see and worry about on a broader level, the level of the whole society – whether the people into the culture of individualism can really feel a strong sense of allegiance to a bigger community. In particular, of course, people are thinking here of the political community.

So we come back to the worry I mentioned in the first talk a few days ago that we con-nect with the name of Tocqueville, the worry a society of these kinds of individuals will be a so-ciety of people who don’t really feel strongly committed as citizens, won’t want to participate in the political life, will kind of back out into privacy, be enclosed in the solitude of their own hearts, to quote the famous line of Tocqueville.

That’s the criticism. Or, rather, that’s what people pick up as a set of developments that do seem to be occurring in our world and for which they blame the whole ethic of authenticity, the concern for self-fulfillment.

That seems a pretty obvious thing to blame because doesn’t it just follow that if you’re into some kind of individualism, individual development, then you’re less into any kind of com-munity or affiliation or belonging? It just seems to be almost an axiom.

But I want to argue that’s not really the way it is. That simple way of looking at it doesn’t really capture what’s going on here.

I want to do something very similar to what I did yesterday. I want to try to go back and see some of the sources and therefore the nature of this kind of individualism to offer a very dif-ferent picture.

INDIVIDUALISM AS A MORAL VIEW

But first let’s say something just in general here. If you understand individualism as a moral view, then you can understand that it isn’t necessarily antithetical to belonging, belonging to a community.

Individualism as a moral view gives us a picture of what human life ought to be, individ-ual human life as involving some kind of self-affirmation or freedom. But it doesn’t follow from that, that it doesn’t carry along with it a picture of what society ought to be. On the contrary, since our understanding of human life always involves placing human beings among others – be-cause how can we be otherwise? – it really is going to follow that pictures of individualism as a moral view will generate pictures of society.

What we have to understand in the modern world – the modern European world from the 17th Century, the age of individualism if ever there was one – is not that people develop a sense of individuality in which gradually their sense of belonging atrophied and regressed. But on the

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contrary, that people develop new senses of individuality and along with these go new under-standings of society.

LOCKE’S VIEW OF HOW SOCIETY HANGS TOGETHER: CONSENT AND POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

So, to take another example, when we get the theories like that of John Locke in the 17th Century of human beings being first in a state of nature prior to forming society, and being indi-viduals as bearers of rights independent of society, this goes along with a new view of what po-litical society ought to be, a view which sees society as grounded in consent and ultimately in the consent of the people and, ultimately, leading to your notions of popular sovereignty. An under-standing of popular sovereignty is a new understanding of how society hangs together. Individu-alism here goes along with and is complemented by a view of human beings in society.

That always has to be so if one thinks for minute. The reason why it isn’t is because peo-ple mix up two things. That’s because of what I’ve been calling the view from Dover Beach. If one thinks of the growth of individualism just negatively as the collapse of old horizons and old notions of belonging, then it does seem to follow that individualism leads to an atrophy of social allegiance.

DISTINGUISHING INDIVIDUALISM AS A MORAL VIEW FROM SOCIAL BREAKDOWN

But that’s exactly what modern individualism isn’t; or, rather, we have to make a very clear distinction between modern individualisms as a set of moral outlooks on one hand, and genuine cases where there just is something like an atrophy of social belongingness on the other.

We see cases of this in different parts of the world at various times, very fast transitions of industrialization and very fast transitions of urbanization. Sometimes people are just winched loose from their old community allegiances and don’t yet manage to recreate new ones. So you get certain developments of slum areas in larger cities in 19th Century England and in certain parts of the world today in the 20th Century where there’s a lot of what you might call anomic22 crime, very raw human relations without very much solidarity. In this kind of case you can speak of a sort of individualism or breakdown. These are cases when the horizons of belonging atro-phy.

But we’ve got to distinguish this kind of breakdown phenomenon from modern individu-alism as a moral view.

Let’s get to the kind of individualism I’ve been talking about here which, of course, goes way beyond what Locke was onto in the 17th Century: the individualism of self-fulfillment, the idea of authenticity, that each person has their own way of being. And let’s ask ourselves what images and understandings of belonging and of society are intrinsically connected with this kind of individualism as, let’s say, notions of popular sovereignty are intrinsically linked with Locke’s idea of humans beings as bearers of rights?

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IDENTITY AND RECOGNITION

The answer is our conception of human beings as needing each other because they need each other’s recognition23 to be the human beings they are. This is the new understanding of what it is to be together with other human beings which goes along with the individualism of au-thenticity.

If you look around the world today you can see that what I’m calling recognition plays a very big role in peoples’ lives, or the demand for it. We take it as axiomatic, for instance, that human beings in growing up need to be given a certain love and recognition by the immediate caregivers – parents, others – to first bring them up, if they want to be whole, capable human be-ings at all.

Beyond that – if we go beyond the intimate level and look at the social level – what’s striking about the modern world is the way in which groups in the last 100 to 150 years have in-vested a great deal in achieving this kind of recognition and respect from other groups in order for them to be able to take what they think is their place in the modern universe.

We see this right away of course in the massively important phenomenon in the last hun-dred years of nationalism. A great deal of the driving force of nationalism is precisely the drive for recognition on the part of the group that feels sometimes it’s not respected, isn’t given the place it deserves and isn’t given the recognition that they are of a valid culture and way of life. This is one of the things that drives nationalist movements to, in some way, demand this recogni-tion sometimes by the classical well-known means of its achieving statehood. Of all parts of the world, this country [Canada] ought to be very familiar with that phenomenon.

If we look more recently at what’s happening in many western societies, we can see something of the same between groups at another level which we don’t quite classify as national-ism but which is a phenomenon we can gesture at with the term multiculturalism. It is something that has a great resonance in Canada in one way. It has resonance in the United States in another way where we have the whole problem of groups – let’s think particularly of the United States today – who are saying that they haven’t been adequately recognized. Of course, this goes be-yond simply groups defined by culture, which is true of course of African Americans.

But this is something which is also put forward in a quite different context in the relations between the sexes. There’s a great, important stream of modern feminism which tries to make the case that women have not been recognized for what they are, they have been offered a de-meaning, partial or reductive identity by the male-dominated world which surrounds them.

The sense in all these cases is that to be offered this kind of reductive identity – not to be recognized for what you are – inflicts real harm. Why? Because of the underlying recognition that humans can become what they have it within them to be if they are recognized.

In other words, we can see now complementing the culture of authenticity, that is, the no-tion that everybody has a task to become their own person – the particular, original person that

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they are – complementing that is the belief that in order to do this they need the recognition of others.

In other words, the individualism of authenticity carries with it, as an inescapable com-plement, a picture of what it is to be a human being among other human beings with the kind of needs each one of us has for others in the way in which we could relate together to others.

You can see this – if you don’t, just go over the last two centuries – arising; and you see these as arising together.

IDENTITY AS THE SENSE WE HAVE OF OURSELVES – WHERE WE STAND AND WHAT’S IMPORTANT

Let me go back a couple of centuries and talk about the origin of this. I’ve talked about in the last minutes this term of recognition and I’ve thrown in from time to time the notion of iden-tity. This talk of our identity – by that I mean the sense we have of ourselves which gives us an understanding of where we stand and what’s important to us.

This modern concept of identity is closely bound up with that of recognition in the sense that we see that to achieve our identity we have, in some way, to be recognized.

This kind of talk would’ve been, I think, incomprehensible to our ancestors two centuries ago. They wouldn’t have understood what we are talking about.

Let’s just look quickly at the developments that have occurred since then which have made this kind of language perfectly comprehensible to us where before these developments it would not have been comprehensible to the people who preceded us. I think there are two devel-opments we have to have in view.

FROM HONOR IN A HIERARCHICAL SOCIETY OF ORDERS TO DIGNITY IN A SOCIETY BASED ON AN EQUALITY OF CONDITIONS

The first is the coming of a society based on equality. To use the language of Tocqueville who talked – in a tremendously clear way that is yet to be surpassed – about when we moved from a society of orders, that is, a society based on the idea of hierarchical rank, to a society based on an equality of conditions, as he called it.

RECOGNITION

When we moved from one to the other we had to transform the terms in which we could talk about these issues of, let’s call them, recognition: the issues whereby we come to focus on how each of us stands in relation to others in a public space with others and, given his or her views, is either seen for what we are as having some validity or, on the contrary, looked askance at, despised or looked down on – the language by which we can talk about this perennial human hunger to be respected and seen as something good by the people that surround us.

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The language in which that demand, that requirement, that aspiration was traditionally talked about for many, many centuries, before the 18th Century, was the language of honor. Peo-ple sought honor. They wanted to avoid dishonor and shame.

But, as was pointed out by the French lawyer and political philosopher Charles-Louis Montesquieu (1689-1755),24 intrinsic to this concept of honor central to that society was the no-tion of hierarchy. Montesquieu puts it very neatly by saying it is the nature of honor to demand préférences,25 to demand the ranking of some above the other.

Of course, we’re still quite familiar with that concept of honor today because it still plays some role in our world though, as I want to point out in a minute, it plays a secondary role. We’re aware of it when we talk about honoring someone by, say, giving them the Order of Canada. We’re aware that, if you imagine that same government one day giving this to every adult Canadian, you can see right away that would destroy altogether the value of this award. The very nature of this kind of honor depends upon it not being given to everybody. It depends upon marking certain distinctions. That’s the traditional concept of honor, where it’s intrinsically linked to the idea of some and not others.

What you have when we move from a society of orders to a society of equality of condi-tion is a radical shift in that main language with which we talk about this issue of human respect – from a language of honor to a language of dignity.

It’s a key feature of the modern use of the word dignity that it has exactly the opposite as-sumption behind it as the traditional concept of honor. When we talk about the dignity of the hu-man person, or the dignity of the citizen, we’re talking about something which all human beings have – equally. That’s the background understanding in talking about dignity.

But then added on to this – coming on top of this move from honor to dignity – is the cru-cial change that I’ve been talking about throughout these talks: the rise of this picture of human beings as seekers of authenticity, that is, the view that each human being has his or her own way of being human.

That introduces a new phenomenon which takes the move from hierarchy to equality a step farther.

It used to be that in hierarchical society what we would now call the identity of individu-als was already defined by their position within the hierarchy – their rank, their standing within the whole was what defined who they were, that is, insofar as we can speak of differences in identity between people in that society, they were defined by their differences of rank.

Passing to a society of equality, first of all, wipes out rank as a possible differential defi-nition of identity. Then, taking a step farther, and saying each human being has to discover, in a sense, for him or herself, what their own particular way of being is, utterly removes the possibil-ity of defining identity simply by one’s social placing – where you are in the web of social rela-tions. You can’t exclusively define yourself anymore as someone of this rank or as the son of X

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or the father of Y or the person who occupies a particular role in your village and so on. That can no longer be the exclusive, sufficient definition of your identity.

This modern notion of authenticity calls on you, on the contrary, to discover something new in yourself, which is your own particular way of being, and to define it, you almost might say, out of yourself.

We’re tempted to say identity is defined now inwardly and not outwardly. Except as soon as you say that you realize that that’s not really an adequate way of talking either. Because, in a strict sense, there is no inward identity definition. Why is that?

IDENTITY DEPENDS ON RECOGNITION

Because of this very insight I was talking about earlier on, the insight that my identity de-pends on recognition, the insight that the very nature of the human condition is that I need oth-ers. I need to be in dialogue and debate with others to be able to discover who I am. It’s just very evident why that has to be so.

How can I discover who I am without an adequate language in which I can define my as-pirations, what’s really important to me, the relationships that are defining for me? And where do I get this language if I don’t get it originally, and even throughout life, in conversation with others where I test out – first of all I get the very terms from others in which I can begin to think about this and then I can test out – these terms and perhaps modify them, argue with those who have given or offered them to me, maybe fight with them. Nevertheless, only in some kind of ex-change with them, manage to define myself.

The very nature of the human condition – let’s call it the dialogical nature of the human condition – ensures that in defining my own identity I have to do it in conversation with others.

Nevertheless, something very big has happened when we move from a society of orders to an equal society governed by the ethic of authenticity because the whole way in which other people help me with my identity radically shifts.

In a society of orders where it just goes without saying that my identity is defined by my social placing, there isn’t such a thing as struggling to find my identity. I get it from others, yes, but I get it from others in a completely unproblematic fashion in which everyone just agrees that I’m the head man or I’m the lowest slave or I’m the son of this family, or whatever, and that’s what all of us accept as my identity. It comes to me, if you like, from the surrounding world that I’m in relation to but in a quite unproblematic way.

I relate to others in a way in which I am in conversation with them, seeking who I am, seeking to define myself. I don’t need them any less than I did before in the society of orders. But the whole pattern of relationship is different. It’s not that we all agree unproblematically this is what I am. But, on the contrary, we’re engaged in the kind of struggle over what is for all of us a question, an issue, sometimes a problem, sometimes a deep source of division.

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Think of how one’s whole life can be shot through with a very deep sense of division, which becomes in a way an inward division because my own sense of what my identity really is has never been able to go harmoniously together with how my parents saw me, how they under-stood me – which can’t help being important to me my life long.

Here we have another way in which my identity fits with or is developed in relation to others but in this kind of always problematized dialogue in which something can fail.

So we can see this very profound interlink between the culture of authenticity and the struggle for recognition, the politics of recognition, the need for recognition, concern for recogni-tion – a picture of how we hang together and need each other, how we ought to relate to each other, which is built into this very concept of individualism.

AUTHENTICITY AND A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT BELONGING OUGHT TO BE

Far from being a floating away from all belongingness to others, the culture of authentic-ity goes along with a new understanding of what that belonging ought to be.

Let’s look at this, again, on the two levels I’ve been moving between throughout this talk, which I think are the two very relevant levels. Let’s call them the intimate and the social.

On the one hand, there’s a picture of the ideally fulfilling relationship which goes along with the culture of authenticity where two people in love with each other really fully recognize each other for what they are and give each other, in a sense, the gift of being what they really are. That is what people strive for.

In saying this I’m saying, really, a banality. Everyone recognizes this. Critics just forget it when they talk glibly about individualism as having nothing to do with belonging. They don’t see what, with the other side of their minds, we all can see very clearly that this modern culture of authenticity puts a tremendous importance on the intimate relationships of love.

Indeed, for some people, that is the problem. A tremendous weight is put on these rela-tionships which sometimes they find it very hard to bear. Be that as it may, it’s very clear that this is one way of relating to others which is seen as supremely important.

Then, on a social level, there is this ideal of the mutual equal recognition of different peo-ple, different groups, different genders, and different cultures. There’s a demand for a kind of mutual recognition which, again, is a very powerful ideal which drives a lot of our politics, in-cluding a lot of our very conflictual politics in modern society.

If we just look back over the last few years of debate on the Canadian Constitution and see how not only between French and English Canadians, not only in Quebec and the rest of Canada, not only in relation to aboriginal societies but also on the level of what is called in Canada multiculturalism. A very important strand throughout all this has been the sense that a really just and open Canadian society would have space to recognize all these differences. This has been a tremendously important driving force in our politics.

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This is part of the culture of authenticity as well. It’s a reflection on the global, social level, if you like, of what emerges on the intimate level in the tremendous importance of intimate relationships.

What picture does this give us of the human condition in the present day culture, and in particular, does it change what I’m calling the view from Dover Beach?

Remember, the view from Dover Beach is the view that the rise of modern individualism is simply the result of a kind of receding of the tide of, in this case, belongingness.

The picture one has from that angle of let’s say young people today who might in a way seem from the outside to be cavalier in their relationships, rather detached from their citizenship and their social belonging, even perhaps thinking in instrumental terms about their relationships, the picture you get from that angle, or from the Dover Beach angle, is, well, that just follows, as they become more turned in on themselves, or as they become just more and more disinterested in others, less and less committed to others.

So it seems that there’s nothing you can really say to them. They aren’t really conflicted inside. They’re just turning off and losing their allegiance to the kinds of things their parents and ancestors thought were important – life-long, intimate relations on one hand, belonging to their country or society on the other.

But once you look at it from the other perspective, the one that I’m trying to put forward here, a quite different picture emerges because what you see now is people that are actually quite conflicted.

AUTHENTICITY PRODUCES DEEP CONFLICTS AND CONFUSIONS

In a way, the culture of authenticity generates a very deep set of conflicts.

Let me take the intimate level first.

Yes, there is a way in which the drive for authenticity can produce a kind of disaffilia-tion, can make people ready to break up their relationships precisely because of what I men-tioned earlier, because of the weight and importance which is put on the relationship as the pri-mary matrix and locus in which we discover our identity and have it confirmed by others. There is a great weight on it, a weight a particular relationship can fail to bear, or can seem to fail to bear and that can lead to break up.

But the very same thing that makes it fragile is what makes it tremendously important.

So, for these people, there’s not a kind of easy, laid back sense of the relative unimpor-tance of these relations; and it’s not that which allows them to go in and out of them, to live them purely temporarily and so on. Rather, it’s the opposite – the sense of a very important demand here. The relationship is fraught with something of tremendous importance.

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So we’re not dealing with people who are in an uncomplicated and unruffled way sailing out from the safe harbor of their ancestors’ horizons of value. We’re dealing with people who are deeply conflicted by a very powerful modern ethic. You got a completely different picture of what is going on here.

Something analogous can be said about disaffiliation on the social level. Yes, there is the phenomenon of people turning off, of growing privatization and so on. But at the same time with some of the same people there are these very powerful demands on a modern society for univer-sal recognition. There’s a new notion, a new set of demands on society which go along with the seeming disaffiliation. The phenomenon is, in other words, double-sided, double-edged. It is not a simple fading into atomism.26

This means that we can take up the argument between those who are deeply into the more debased forms of the culture of authenticity and those who are standing around holding their heads thinking this isn’t terribly good. We can take up the argument, the discussion, between these two sides in a quite different spirit.

Once again if you’re into the view from Dover Beach, and you think these people are just fading away from our old moral horizons, you have nothing left to say to them but moral exhor-tation: “Wake up! Stop being so amoral. Stop being so unconcerned.” And you also are filled with a certain despair because deep down you feel you don’t have anything really to say to them except moral exhortation and you feel in your heart that this is not going to have very much ef-fect.

On the other hand, if you understand the people who are into this culture – I think that means all of us – as deeply conflicted on these issues and very often deeply confused, you can see what needs to be said. You can put forward an argument. You can put forward a new way of looking at it which can help people that perhaps are drifting off into atomism to understand why they have good reason to come back.

Let’s take, for instance, these two levels again. The intimate level first and then the social level.

On the intimate level, suppose you meet people for whom relationships are understood purely instrumentally, that everybody needs their fulfillment and that one’s in a relationship for one’s own fulfillment and when it ceases to be valid one leaves it, when it ceases to offer that one leaves it. This is basically an instrumental stance to fulfillment.

Or people think there’s something perfectly valid about relationships defined from the very beginning as temporary. I don’t just mean relationships which unfortunately fail to stay the course but relationships which are seen as perfectly validly temporary from the very beginning.

This is certainly a phenomenon of disaffiliation, of atomism.

Can you say anything to people who have this outlook, have this attitude?

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I think something can be said which comes from the background understanding of what is going on here, of the kind of aspiration that they – and all of us – are seeking.

If you think, for instance, that what people are seeking in relationships is, among other things, the full confirmation of their identity as human beings, and if you reflect that, for in-stance, our identity is not something that is just our identity for a year or a few years, but we de-fine our identity over a whole life, that is, we define our identity by understanding who we are, the we that lives from birth to death through a whole life, that we’re looking for an identity not for just ourselves in this particular year, but for ourselves as we are the livers of a whole biogra-phy, then we can understand how a relationship, which is simply conceived as a temporary one, can never be one that can touch us so deeply that it can help to define our identity.

To confine one’s relationships merely to temporary relationships is to condemn oneself not to find the kind of partner that can be one’s significant other, the kind of partner with which one’s identity can be defined.

In other words, one of the deep needs and aspirations with which people enter relation-ships in our time will be crucially frustrated if one takes this disengaged stance.

So it makes a difference to try to go into what authenticity is all about, what it is to try to seek your own identity, what it is to try to seek your own fulfillment – and the kinds of relation-ships that alone will make that possible.

You find that, after all, in the face of a certain kind of atomism in the intimate sphere, you’re not altogether without arguments. We can discuss and talk about this. We can help to ar-ticulate what’s really at stake in a way that can help illuminate.

Once again, on one hand, when you move from the view from Dover Beach to, on the other, this richer view which sees the background, depth and richness of the moral ideas behind authenticity, you find the range and depth of the discussion can widen and deepen.

Something analogous can be said on the social level if we look at this issue of the strug-gle for – or the politics of – recognition between groups.

There, of course, it’s a much more complex problem and one that we’re deeply into with-out having found an adequate solution in any modern society.

I just want to say a couple of brief things because I only have time to say very brief re-marks here just to point in the direction of a kind of reflection and consideration that can help us to see further in this.

Different groups, yes, demand equal recognition and many groups in our society have the sense that they haven’t been given that. The dominant models and images of excellence or citi-zenship in society have somehow excluded them or made them appear as second class citizens.

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We have to ask ourselves how we could get beyond this and achieve a kind of mutual recognition where everyone would feel that they were somehow accepted and acknowledged for what they are.

I think you could argue – and this is all too short and in these minutes I’ll just lay out what I think one could argue – that the only way this can be achieved is if we manage to attain a stronger sense of common citizenship. That’s because the demand for equal respect and equal recognition supposes that there be some sharing of the fundamental criteria and standards by which people are judged and recognized. As long as these standards are very different, it’s not going to be possible to achieve a sense of common recognition. But different groups are always going to feel that the standards by which they are judged are alien to them and ones that they can’t really accept.

All modern societies as a matter of fact are entering a period now where this problem of mutual recognition is going to get much more acute and that’s simply because all modern soci-eties are becoming much more diverse culturally and ethnically. We’re living in a world with very large scale international migrations and in which large numbers of the population in all ad-vanced countries come from and retain ties to other countries, even other cultures and civiliza-tions, feel themselves as part of a diaspora centered elsewhere. And these must all live together in the same modern industrial society.

So the problem of mutual recognition is going to get greater and not less. But this de-mand can only be met to the extent that these diverse people can develop a strong enough sense of commonality and this they can only achieve, or they can mainly achieve, by what they actu-ally do share from the very beginning in coming together in this kind of modern democratic soci-ety, which is a common citizenship.

It’s only to the extent that being citizens and participating as citizens, can be something important for everyone and shared as something important, can we hope to achieve some kind of resolution of the problems of mutual recognition.

SO WHAT?

So, what emerges from this discussion? Far from producing an outlook in which we see ourselves as necessarily farther and farther away from each other and more and more in our own private worlds – the private world of the individual or the smaller world of the cultural commu-nity – we find the very way we live together in modern society calls on us to have a stronger sense of common citizenship; and, out of the culture of authenticity, and the politics of recogni-tion that it breeds, comes a demand for a citizen republic, a mode of being together which in-volves a very strong degree of affiliation and allegiance to a common enterprise of citizen self-rule.

Of course, there’s still a lot to be said in that sketch of an argument I’ve given. A lot of objections can be made and a lot to answer. But I think we can see how by looking at the devel-opment of authenticity in the angle I’m proposing here, the perspective I’m putting forward, we can see it opens a field for discussion and exploration together of the moral requirements of our

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culture of authenticity – which is completely obscured from view if you take simply the view from Dover Beach.

So just as yesterday with the case of relativism, which seemed to be a straightforward consequence of authenticity but turns out to be quite the opposite, we can see something that frustrates the demands of authenticity, and I think we can show this in argument.

So today, where atomism and disaffiliation seemed like straightforward consequences of the culture of authenticity, we can see something very different is the case and this is something we can bring out and make people aware of.

In these two ways, we can see that understanding this culture from a new perspective makes it look very different.

So in both relativism and atomism we see two undeniable problems and dangers of mod-ern society. They seem to emerge from the culture of authenticity. But, as I’ve tried to argue, they don’t authentically and straightforwardly follow from it.

But the question comes to mind: Why do these distorted, debased and trivialized forms of this culture emerge if they don’t belong to it properly? I’d like tomorrow to take this issue up, and to see why there is a sort of slide in modern culture towards its less admirable forms. So to-morrow, I’ll be looking at the history, again, of the culture of authenticity from this other angle, from the angle of how fragile it is to distortions and deviations.

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CBC Host’s Introduction: “In 1989, Professor Taylor published Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. In this monumental and widely-praised book he investigates the historical roots of our contemporary sense individuality, uniqueness and selfhood. His purpose is to make his readers see the full complexity and richness of the modern identity. He opposes himself to conservative writers like Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcis-sism (1979) or Allan Bloom in his recent best-seller The Closing of the American Mind (1987). These thinkers, ac-cording to Taylor, describe their contemporaries in terms of a loss of moral character. They adopt what Taylor calls “the view from Dover Beach” after the English poet Matthew Arnold’s famous lament for lost faith. But Taylor wants us to see how much the contemporary impulse for self-fulfillment and self-expression is itself a moral impera-tive. In these lectures he calls this moral imperative “the ethic of authenticity.” In previous lectures he has argued that the moral relativism and social atomism, which the conservatives deplore, result from a misunderstanding of this ethic. Tonight he tries to show why this ethic is susceptible to this misreading.”

LECTURE IV: Why is the Ethic of Authenticity Vulnerable to Relativism and Atomism?

So in the last two talks I’ve been looking at the culture of authenticity and considering two forms of deviancy, two phenomena that worry people a lot, that seem to emerge from what I am calling relativism and atomism. I’ve been arguing that contrary to appearances, these don’t really emerge out of authenticity, that is, they don’t follow from the ethic of authenticity as something it truly requires. As a matter of fact, you could mount an argument that, properly car-ried out, properly lived, the ethic of authenticity requires the reverse, requires the contrary, re-quires not a relativistic moral view but a sense of moral horizons of significance; and, it requires not atomism and disaffiliation but new kinds of affiliation.

But, on the other side, there’s no doubt that in some other sense, which I’d like now to explore, these difficulties, these deviant forms do emerge, in a sense, out of the culture of authen-ticity. That is, they arise in the society and civilization that this culture animates and, in some way, shapes. I want to say that the way in which they arise is as a kind of debasement or trivial-ization of this ethic.

AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION

In other words, I want to make a distinction, which I think we have to have always in mind, between the kinds of things that can be considered straightforward consequences of a moral and spiritual view in that they actually are, if you like, logically required by that view. And the kinds of things that may arise out of a spiritual or moral view, because it may be, in some ways, uniquely vulnerable to certain kinds of deviation but which don’t really belong to it prop-erly as something which it prescribes.

Examples abound in human history. Perhaps there are more examples of this kind of de-viancy than the actual living of the great spiritual ideals than there are of its finest expressions being lived out. Take the great monotheistic religions and of course this is always controversial. At their highest, they have called for a kind of universalism and an openness to human beings in general and a charitable understanding of different human beings – which in the case of certain exceptional figures has been quite extraordinary.

But everyone who knows them well can see that the very strong sense of commitment to a particular view of God and God’s will, which you find in these monotheistic religions in differ-

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ent forms, can very easily deviate into a closed, sectarian attitude which condemns outsiders, wants to force them into conformity and so on.

There’s no doubt that this kind of hard, persecutory attitude to outsiders, to unbelievers, is a perpetual danger which these great religious movements incur. There’s a particular kind of deviancy that they are peculiarly vulnerable to, which perhaps other religious forms like that of Hinduism or Buddhism are not. Similarly, with Hinduism and Buddhism there would be other deviancies, other more or less debased forms that they are more vulnerable to.

So I now want to talk about atomism and relativism as characteristically vulnerable forms that can arise out of the ethic of authenticity.

Then how do they arise? Why is it that this ethic, if it doesn’t generate these as its logical complements, as its logical consequences, why is it that this ethic is particularly vulnerable to these two forms of deviancy among others? That’s what I want to look at today.

There are two quite different orders of reason why this is so. Of course, they interpene-trate and interact in practice. But we can separate them in our analysis. One is the social level, the way in which modern society has developed explains part of the slide toward atomism and relativism. But on another level, there is something to do with the very ethic of authenticity itself which makes it peculiarly susceptible to these kinds of deviation. Let me take the two in order. The social forms in which this ethic has arisen is part of the explanation for the deviancy; and then, secondly, certain intrinsic features of this outlook itself which makes it vulnerable.

SOCIAL SETTINGS OF THE ETHIC OF AUTHENTICITY

The social forms – well, this is fairly obvious to us and of course it has its own connec-tions to modern individualism. Modern individualism arises in a society which is more and more marked over the last centuries by a high degree of mobility, industrial growth and an orientation, anyway in the recent century, towards a consumer type of society.

So you might say in a society characterized by growth, by concentration – concentration geographically, concentration of great structures of power and bureaucratic rule – and by a high degree of mobility: people who are mobile socially, people who are mobile geographically, peo-ple who are mobile in the sense that they very often break out of the mode of life they were brought up in and move somewhere else – there’s been a complex relationship between some of the ideas we’ve been looking at and the development of this kind of society.

It’s complex enough to be worth looking at because it defies any simple unilinear rela-tionship. You can’t simply say this kind of society – with a high degree of growth, concentration and mobility – produces this kind of individualism. Because, in certain crucial respects, you could argue that some facets of modern individualism arose very early, earlier than the industrial revolution, earlier than the development of this kind of society – that, in a way, they helped to fa-cilitate it.

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But the opposite causal relation, just as a simple proposition, would be just as misleading – that the ideas of modern individualism arose and then out of that a society was born which re-flects that.

There’s a much more complex circular relationship, something of the following kind. Without the development of certain facets of modern individualism in European society, it’s quite possible, indeed probable, that the full development of modern industrial society wouldn’t have taken place as it did. But once this development takes place, then the outlook that helped to bring it about becomes entrenched.

Because, unlike the early pioneers of individualism, we don’t acquire the ideas involved in its outlooks simply from our own philosophical inspiration or moral insight. We have them played back to us all the time by the whole way of life in which we live.

We can take as an example the picture of human beings – as agents on their own, prior to society, entering into contracts with each other – which is born in the development of European thought quite early. In the 17th Century, for instance, it’s already there very strongly in writers like Locke. And this is well before people are living in a society recognizable to us in which in-dividualism and contracts play such a big role.

But once this kind of society does develop – this highly mobile society in which individu-als move around, change their way of life and their position in life, and enter into voluntary rela-tions with others; once this way of life arises, once the way we earn our living, once the way we’re trained in school to think, once the development of modern forms of scientific endeavor come into place; in other words, once the whole fabric of our lives plays back to us this picture of the individual – then it becomes something virtually inescapable as part of our outlook.

Where for Locke, some of these new modes might’ve been a kind of insight leaping ahead of the actual situation, for us they become woven into the fabric of our lives.

The same thing can be said about the ethic of authenticity itself when you see it with a writer like Herder living in late 18th Century Germany, which was still a very backward society, economically speaking, in terms of the standard set by Britain and France at that time, particu-larly Britain economically. Germany was still a society in which people were very rooted in their local communities, although Herder travelled around quite a bit.

This picture of each individual having his or her own measure involved an original leap of the imagination. If you live in a modern consumer society where you’re told all the time by beer commercials, or whatever, to be your own person, do your own thing, fulfill yourself, these ideas become banalized and they’re played back at you from everywhere around you.

So in understanding how the ethic of authenticity works out we have to take account of and keep before our minds the social setting in which it exists.

When we ask the question, Well, why does this ethic – in spite of the fact that, as I have argued, when you explore its moral depth this ethic ought to push us towards a strong sense of

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horizons of significance and a strong sense of new affiliation – seem to slide always in the way it’s lived toward subjectivism, a relativistic view on one hand and atomism on the other? A lot of the explanation can seem to reside in the kind of society that we live in. Because the kind of con-sumer, industrial, capitalist society we live in is one which encourages people to see themselves as disaffiliated individuals, individuals who ought to be seeking their life fulfillment on their own, moving away from where they’ve been brought up, the communities they’ve belonged to, the relationships they’ve had in the past.

When their own development requires it that is the way in which this kind of society plays back our lives to us. And so it’s very easy for us to take on the culture of authenticity as it’s handed down to us in this mode which stresses the individual and the individual’s fulfillment.

At the same time we live in a technological society in which instrumental reason, instru-mental control of our world, plays a bigger and bigger role. It seems to be more and more im-portant.

Living in this kind of society, it’s easy to pick up on the subjectivism, the sense that indi-viduals in particular, and human beings in general, just dispose of the world around them, which they ought to use for whatever purposes they find fit and ought to treat as instruments.

In this picture of the individual conferring meaning on his or her world because of the role it plays in his or her purposes – in this, let’s call it a subjectivist picture of the world, it’s easy to carry on and consider all our moral commitments in the same light and when we do that, when we think of them as simply commitments that people, as it were, take on because they con-fer value on things by their own choices, then we get the relativism I talked about earlier.

So in these two ways, the fabric of contemporary society encourages us to slide in our liv-ing of the ethic of authenticity from the deeper and truer forms of it – as I would like to argue – to the more trivial, atomized and relativistic forms. There is built into our very way of life a ten-dency for this spiritual outlook to slide toward its least valuable forms. That’s one way in which these forms emerge from it without really properly belonging to it.

THE IDEAS AND LOGIC INTERNAL TO THE ETHIC OF AUTHENTICITY

But now let’s look at the second level because that’s not the whole explanation. The whole explanation isn’t social. There is something to do with the ideas themselves, with the out-look itself, with the internal logic of the ethic of authenticity which also tends to slide it towards its least important, its least valuable modes.

So we’re not just looking at what you might say in popular culture that the general under-standing of the society tends to produce debased modes. But we’re looking at some of the devel-opments in philosophy – in what people consider to be the highest level, highbrow philosophy – which tend to carry it in the same direction.

This trend is actually evident today in the form of a kind philosophy that has gone beyond the academy and penetrated society more broadly, which is known fairly widely under names

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such as “post modernism” or “deconstruction.” These of course are terms used for a wide variety of philosophers. But there is, among the things they cover, a certain core of philosophical views which, for instance, have been associated with names like Jacques Derrida and Michel Fou-cault,27 French philosophers of our time which have drawn heavily on Nietzsche.

The thrust of these philosophies is to present a picture of the human condition in which precisely all horizons of significance are called into question in which the picture of the human agent – and this is one reading of Nietzsche – imposes order on the world, imposes orders of value on the world, and doesn’t find himself or herself in them.

Let’s look at this high philosophical current, the one that passes through Nietzsche and comes into post modernism, which has also helped to fuel a mode of the culture of authenticity which is highly relativist, subjectivist and, I want to argue, atomist.

THE AESTHETIC

What is that vulnerability in the culture of authenticity which opens it to this? I think we can see it if we look at this modern category of the aesthetic, and through this category of the aesthetic, look at the way in which the search to be myself, the search to be authentic, has given a peculiarly important role to art, the artist and artistic creation.

This became evident at the very beginning of the late 18th Century with writers like Jo-hann Herder (1744-1803). It’s not just an accident that he was perhaps most importantly of all a literary critic. But it was also evident that he and his generation gave a particular importance to the artist as, one might almost say, the paradigm human being. Why is this?

I think it’s fairly easy to reconstruct. The notion that each of us has an original way of be-ing human entails that each of us has to discover what it is to be himself or herself. But of course the discovery by hypothesis can’t be made by consulting pre-existing models. It can only be made by each one articulating it fresh. We have to discover what we have it in us to be by, in a sense, becoming that mode of life, giving it expression in our speech and in our action. Giving expression to something that is originally ours.

The words I’ve been led to use here trigger off immediately the associations that, I think, are at work in this whole movement. I’ve used the word expression, giving expression to; and, that of course is something very much central to our understanding of the creation of art. Art is a kind of expression. Our writing of a poem, for instance, is something which we find ourselves impelled to do by, at first, a very inchoate sense of what we want to say, and then we give articu-lation and expression to it when we manage to write down, to capture, what we want to say.

The process of self-discovery – on this understanding of self-discovery – is very akin to the process of artistic creation. That is exactly the link the writers of the Romantic period began to make. In a sense, self-discovery, self-creation and self-realization become very close to artistic creation.

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THE ARTIST REPLACES THE CONTEMPLATIVE AS THE PARADIGMATIC HUMAN BEING

So much so that in a sense the artist begins to be the paradigm human being, that is, the one most capable of original articulation, in a sense, and expresses in a paradigmatic and striking form what it is to be human.

Whereas, for let’s say Plato, the paradigm human being would be the one capable of philosophical contemplation, for Herder and the culture that followed, the paradigm is rather the creative artist.

You can see this in the way we use this term creative. Because we use it as a term of praise, perhaps the highest term of praise for an artist. But we very often let the term wash over into other domains. We speak of a person who is doing something original or new in his or her life as a creative person, or as living creatively.

In all these ways, we can see how the link is being made between realizing yourself as a human being and being an artist, how once again the artist in us is what is understood as paradig-matically human.

THE ANALOGY OF ART: FROM IMITATION TO CREATION

Of course, this aligning of the expressive human being to the artist took place only be-cause of and along with a parallel revolution in our understanding of art. I said our expression as human beings is obviously parallel as our expression as artists but that of course presumes we understand art primarily in terms of expression.

That wasn’t always the case. There was an original, longstanding model of what art was, which centered around the concept of imitation, of mimesis. The artist tries to imitate the world, perhaps not just the world, empirically as it is. Perhaps the world at its best, perhaps the world of ideas. But the main goal of art is imitation of reality.

It’s precisely in this period that I’m talking about: the late 18th Century, roughly speaking, the Romantic period. The period in which the ideal of authenticity develops is also the period in which there comes to be a revolution in our understanding of art. The concept of expression re-places that of mimesis or imitation as the central concept.

It’s almost as though these two revolutions – 1) a revolution in understanding art, from imitation to expression; and, 2) a revolution in understanding human life, which puts the discov-ery of one’s own originality as central – were made for each other. And as a result, they brought together living a successful or full life and artistic creation as two similar kinds of achievement. Indeed, not just similar but interwoven to the extent that the artist could be seen as the paradigm human being.

But what comes out of all this is a very important consequence of this aligning of artistic creation and self-expression; this coming together of the aesthetic – as artistic expression came to be seen – and human fulfillment.

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I mean human fulfillment comes to be situated in a different way in relation to morality. The two were seen as the same before. We go back to the Greeks and their ethic – living a good life, living the good life, living a properly [fully] human life – was thought to be the central goal of ethics. This defined ethics.

With the redefinition of living a full life in terms of originality and the analogy with art, the possibility arises of prying these two apart. The aesthetic begins to be contrasted to the moral; and, as contrasted to the moral it becomes a potential rival set of standards for living the good life.

At the beginning, these two were still held together. For instance, in the German poet and playwright Johann Schiller (1759-1805), you get one of the most influential statements of this new picture of human self-realization in the category of the aesthetic with the idea that a full life is one in which the leading, guiding principle is beauty. A life led under the impulse of beauty is a life in which all the different facets of a human being, such as reason and passion, are perfectly harmonized.

But this picture of the aesthetic ideal in Schiller is still seen to be absolutely congruent – on all fours – with the demands of morality. He doesn’t see this as a rival goal. He sees this as a way of living what everyone would recognize as a moral life in a harmonious and spontaneous fashion.

But we can already see with Schiller that the possibilities are there for these two goals – the aesthetic and the moral – to come apart. Already with Schiller in the 18th Century it was rec-ognized that the demands of being true to myself, of having full contact with myself, of harmony within myself, could run against the social demands on me for conformity with the rules of soci-ety. There was a sense of commonplace that the demands for conformity were often the greatest obstacles to being true to myself and discovering myself.

What if these demands for social conformity came to be seen as the laws of morality themselves as traditionally understood – particularly if we define morality relatively narrowly as not concerned with the entire set of considerations governing the living of a full and successful life, but just with that narrow range which have to do with what my obligations are to other peo-ple, the demands of justice, the demands of fair treatment of others, and so on?

It could easily be argued that the demands of morality, in this sense, can run athwart the demands of self-creation, self-expression, self-realization. This is the breach this new ethic, in a sense, opened up.

NIETZSCHE: SELF-FULFILLMENT VS. TRADITIONAL MORALITY

I suppose the most famous thinker in the 19th Century who walked into this breach, who, if you like, exploited this breach, is Fredrick Nietzsche. He developed this extremely stark oppo-sition in which he wants to argue that what I’ve been calling the demands of self-realization – he uses other terms, a kind of self-realization in which in Nietzsche, too, was understood under the banner of the aesthetic – is quite incompatible with the traditional ethic that descends from

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Christianity as he understands it: the ethic of benevolence, the ethic of pity, concern for others. Nietzsche makes a very stark opposition between the demands of self-fulfillment and the de-mands of traditional morality.

So we see this obvious potentiality of the new ethic of authenticity being realized. It can move in this direction in which self-fulfillment breaks free from morality and finds for itself a new set of standards articulated around the notion of the aesthetic.

The aesthetic becomes, instead of a category confined simply to art, a category that is now introduced to life as a set of life goals and which, as a set of life goals, is different from and is rival to morality.

Nietzsche – and it wasn’t only Nietzsche of course, there were other thinkers but let’s take him as our representative thinker – had a tremendous impact on the culture that followed him. The ideal developed in a bourgeois ethic in a bourgeois world of conformity against which the truly creative person, the superman of Nietzsche, strives – developing an aristocratic minority culture and ethic of real achievement above and beyond the masses.

It’s quite sobering, even frightening to think of how many of what we think of as the great artists of the 20th Century, the great figures of modernism in English literature, for instance, were at one time or the other, deeply influenced by this particularly elitist view – Pound, Eliot, Yeats, among others. Which explains why so many of these people at various times in their ca-reers align themselves with the [political] right.

But there was something even more troubling about certain manifestations of this post-Nietzschean mood. In their urge to separate themselves from the ethic of benevolence and fair-ness, there was even, at times, a fascination with a cult of violence. Think of figures like Marinetti and the Futurists and the theatre of Antonin Artaud and others. 28 As a matter of fact, some of these artistic movements and these movements of artists played into and were part of the background support for European fascism.

So we can see some very troubling developments that seem to emerge out of the culture of authenticity just as well as, just as much as, the ones I’ve been describing earlier, which place it rather firmly in a moral framework; and, there are these ones I’ve been talking about now, which take it quite outside a moral framework and even pit it against that framework.

SUMMARY OF THE INNER DRIVES OF AUTHENTICITY

Perhaps I could sum it up by drawing together some of the things that I’ve been saying over the last three days to give a kind of picture of the inner drives, as it were, within this outlook of authenticity.

It involves, on one hand, that our fulfillment of ourselves, finding our own path, requires creation and construction as well as discovery because we see the discovery of my own path is a kind of act of original discovery. We see this on analogy with the discovery of the artist. We note the artist can only make the discoveries he or she makes by also, in a certain sense, creating. If

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the artist is going to make new discoveries by creating and articulating and developing a new language, a new set of poetic images, a new form of music, the discovery in art is always going to involve a certain component of creation – a framing or forging of a new language. So under-stood in this way, linked with artistic creation, moral self-discovery has this important compo-nent of construction, creation.

Secondly, this creation involves originality.

Thirdly, this creation frequently involves opposition to the accepted norms of one’s soci-ety. It involves breaking away.

So we have a picture of self-fulfillment as having this component of creation, originality and nonconformity. But I’ve been arguing in the previous talks self-fulfillment, in this sense, also necessarily involves openness to horizons of significance because otherwise, as I said, the creation of self loses the background which alone can save it from meaninglessness. And it in-volves also a self-definition in dialogue.

TENSION BETWEEN THE TWO SIDES OF THE ETHIC OF AUTHENTICITY AND THE CHALLENGE OF RESOLVING IT IN A BALANCED WAY

So there are these two sides to the ethic of authenticity. One stresses creation, originality, breaking away from the surrounding. The other, which points to the inescapable dimension of discovery, of recognition, of horizons of significance, and of continued dialogue with the people that surround one.

It faces both ways. It has these two sides to it. Which of course is to say that living this ethic is something always in tension, always pulled two ways. The demands of originality, break-ing away and creation must always be somehow made compatible with the demands of acknowl-edging the horizon, the demands of continued dialogue.

That there is this tension, though, means there is a standing temptation to resolve the ten-sion in an easy way. The way of resolving this tension in an easy way is simply to forget the sec-ond range of considerations, forget acknowledging the horizon, forget the need for dialogue and give a picture of the ethic of authenticity simply in terms of creation, originality and breaking away.

If you do that you get a view of it which is exhilarating in its simplicity, just tremen-dously tempting in that it resolves the tensions, difficulties and inner divisions living this ethic fully carries with it. It gives one a sense of freedom and a sense of power – and I think that is what lies behind the tremendous attraction of these various forms of neo-Nietzscheanism.

But exactly what makes these forms attractive, we can see, is what makes them crucially inadequate: in order to achieve this sense of freedom, this sense of wholeness, this absence of self-division, they simply ignore something which is crucial and inescapable in the very ethic of authenticity itself.

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The consequence is, not surprisingly, this attempt to live a form of the ethic grounded simply on creation and breaking away leads, in the end, to a kind of trivialization as the horizon of significance is lost from view because it’s set aside in the name of understanding ourselves as creators. As the horizon of significance fades from view, so the understanding of what is a vital question or a less vital question, what is important or unimportant, gradually fades. Since that horizon is the very condition of meaningful action, this mode of conceiving the ethic trivializes itself.

So we have a picture of how this ethic should be lived which is, at one and the same time, perpetually a strong temptation. It’s always being reproduced as a temptation but which we can also see is crucially wrong.

I’d like to say I am not including the master himself, that is, Nietzsche, in this criticism I am now making. It’s possible to read Nietzsche as somebody who was profoundly aware of both these sides, profoundly aware not only of the importance of creation and self-construction but also of the importance of recognizing what is there. You have in Nietzsche not only this empha-sis on the will to power and the imposition of order on the chaos of the world but also the side of Nietzsche where he speaks about yea-saying, about the necessity of saying yes to the world, which brings in that other dimension.

What I am attacking or trying to analyze is what I’m calling neo-Nietzscheanism, which has fed off this one side of Nietzsche but nevertheless has become a tremendously influential mode of thinking.

In seeing the tension within authenticity itself we can understand at the same time how this kind of subjectivist, volunteeristic notion of the creative human being as imposing order on his or her world emerges from the ethic of authenticity and yet doesn’t properly emerge from it in the way I was trying to distinguish at the beginning of this talk.

It doesn’t really emerge from it in the sense of following properly from its inner logic. But it does emerge from it in that it is obviously a standing temptation – because of the very in-ner tension of this position – to simplify it by adopting it and going that road.

So we can see how there is an inner event. It’s not simply the existence of certain social pressures or certain social forms which tend to push this ethic towards its most subjectivist modes but it’s also something within the very ethic itself, a vulnerability to sliding in this direc-tion.

We can even see the two, in a sense, collaborating. The point of contact between the two is perhaps the world of students, exactly the world that Allan Bloom talks about in his book. Be-cause here we have people who helped make the bridge between the broader culture outside the university on one hand and the culture of philosophical, literary experts and scholars on the other.

It’s through them that the neo-Nietzschean philosophies – which are very often developed at a very high level of abstraction with impenetrable language that even experts have trouble un-

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derstanding nevertheless – repercusses out in more and more popularized forms into justifica-tions for common or garden soft relativism.

So when Jacque Derrida talks about Nietzschean “free play” or Michel Foucault talks about “the aesthetics of the self,” they’re putting forward philosophies which then play out into the kind of soft relativism – the sense that anyone’s values are as good as anyone else’s – that Bloom denounces in his book.

DRAWING TOGETHER CONCLUSIONS: PERPETUAL STRUGGLE

The level of philosophy and the pressures of society come together beautifully or tragi-cally to slide the ethic of authenticity constantly towards its least admirable, its most trivialized forms. Where does this put us in the debate we have in our society? I want to draw together the conclusions from these last talks now at the end of this night’s discussion.

The view from Dover Beach, as I’ve called it, gives us a picture of a debate in which the upholders of traditional culture, of traditional ethics, fight against a younger generation as more and more sliding away from the old landmarks, the old horizons, the old allegiances and in which ultimately nothing can be said to them except exhortation to return to the fold.

This produces a very gloomy picture of the future. And if we factor into this the under-standing that the developments of a highly mobile and growth-oriented society have helped to produce this kind of individualism, then we’re even more gloomy because it looks as though these developments are probably called on to continue and intensify.

You get a quite different view if you try to see it the way I’ve been putting forward here today where we see these deviant or trivialized forms as emerging from the culture of authentic-ity in one sense but not in the other. They emerge from it as standing temptations, dangers and something to which this culture is vulnerable. But they do not emerge from it as something which the ethic of authenticity properly generates out of its own inner logic.

Because that means the world in which these deviant forms arise is a world in tension. It’s a world which is pulled two ways. It is, moreover, a world that can be pulled back towards a sense of moral horizons, a sense of the importance of affiliation, by trying to bring out this inner logic.

It’s a world in which we could see and do see a struggle between the tendency to slide to-wards the trivialized forms and the efforts we can make to bring it back by retrieving the true logic of this ethic – by trying to articulate better what it really requires.

It’s a world, if you like, in perpetual struggle.

The view from Dover Beach is a profoundly pessimistic view of a world sliding ever far-ther toward the night, toward absence. It’s the view we get in that great stanza of “Dover Beach” itself – of the water of the tide moving down the shore leaving only the drear sands there.

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The view that is generated by the perspective I’ve been proposing is one, rather, which doesn’t have a direction which is built into it but a view of a struggle – a tension, you might al-most say a cultural struggle – perpetually going on between a tendency to slide down to the trivi-alized forms and the possibility of retrieving these forms and bringing them back up.

That’s both good news and bad news depending on your point of view. If you’re looking for one big revolutionary change which will take us beyond all the dangers of modernity then it’s bad news because it tells us the struggle between the debased forms and the true logic will go on indefinitely. If you have the culturally pessimistic view – the view from Dover Beach – then this ought to be good news. We can never win a decisive victory but we can also avoid decisive de-feat.

We have to see our world not as the locus either of irretrievable loss or as perhaps on the threshold of some great revolution to take it beyond any of the dangers that lie in wait for it. But it’s a field of perpetual advance and retreat but one in which our efforts to understand – our ef-forts to retrieve – can make a real and important difference.

Tomorrow, I want to look at how this struggle might be carried on. In particular, I want to face squarely the issue of whether there are not such structural difficulties to carrying it on that it’s defeated from the start. I want to try to refute that view. And I want, in doing that, to look at the political dimension of this whole set of problems which I haven’t had time to talk about up to now. In my final lecture tomorrow I’ll try to bring all that together.

CBC Host’s Introduction: “Taylor believes that critics of modernity have missed something extremely important. They have failed to see that modern aspirations to self-expression and self-fulfillment are moral aspirations. In the opening lecture of this series Taylor identified Allan Bloom’s recent best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), as typical of this mistake. Bloom, according to Taylor, treats the moral relativism and political indifference of contemporary youth as failures of moral character. Taylor, on the other hand, wants to treat these things as fail-

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ures to live up to a moral ideal, which is actually implicit in modern individualism. He calls this ideal the ethic of authenticity and in these lectures he’s attempting to reveal both its grandeur and its moral stringency. Tonight, Charles Taylor concludes his presentation.”

LECTURE V: For a Different Stance and a Work of Retrieval – the Political Dimension

I’ve been trying to make a plea in the last four talks for a different stance towards the ethic of authenticity and modern individualism and to try to induce us to look at these not simply as the ineluctable slide toward disaster but as complex moral developments which are open and vulnerable to very deviant and dangerous forms but that come out of a depth of moral under-standing which, properly understood, can redirect them and put them back on track.

So I’ve been pleading here for a work of retrieval – reaching back and trying to discover the sources in order to change our practice and bring our practice back to the highest aspirations of these moral views.

THREE ASSUMPTIONS REVISITED

At the end of the first lecture I allowed that this whole approach is based on certain as-sumptions which might not be granted. Let me remind you of them now. There were three.

The first was that the ethical view underlying these modern developments, the ethic of au-thenticity, for instance, really does represent something good and admirable.

The second assumption was that discovering what was good and admirable in it can make a difference because you can reason with people and convince them that this more admirable view ought to be adopted.

The third assumption was that, if you could convince people, they can do something about it because they aren’t totally locked into a certain direction that modern society imprints on them, that they aren’t caught in what the great German sociologist and political economist Max Weber (1864-1920) called an “iron cage,”29 that when we all come to see things differently we can actually change the course of our history and our society.

All three of these have been challenged.

I hope I’ve nearly partly answered, by implication, objections against the first two as-sumptions, though I recognize that the arguments are very incomplete.

For those who might think that the ethic of authenticity isn’t actually all that impressive of a moral view, I hope that simply these rather sketchy attempts I’ve made to describe the kinds of aspirations and the view of human beings behind the ethic of authenticity will have partly con-vinced them to change their mind.

If it hasn’t, if they still don’t think it’s all that impressive, I don’t know what else I could say here except to go over the same ground again perhaps in greater detail and more vividly.

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AN AD HOMINEN REMARK

Except I would like to just throw in one ad hominem remark. I think whatever we offi-cially believe about it, whatever we tell ourselves what we believe about this ethic, we actually are all very deeply embedded in it. Even those in our culture who claim to condemn it and find it contemptible, uninteresting and shallow, one very often finds with them as well that when they are making certain decisions in their lives – choosing their life partner or choosing their career – they begin to talk in their own deliberation in terms which resonate with the notions of self-ful-fillment and having a fulfilled life and so on. So strongly is this ethic embedded in our culture, even those who seem to be rebelling against it are very often living it. That is an ad hominem ar-gument. Perhaps a not entirely fair one but I think one which forces us to take this very seriously.

Against the second assumption, that is, if someone thinks argument makes no difference, I also hope, perhaps a bit presumptuously, the arguments or argument-sketches or hints of argu-ment I’ve been putting forward in these talks might also help to convince them of the opposition. That there is some way we can reason about these things and, in reasoning, convince people.

So I’ll take the first two assumptions if not as proven at least as sufficiently defended to be able to leave them alone or to be able to take them for granted.

But how about the third assumption? The third assumption is that we can do something about it and what challenges that is the view of our fate as people living in an “iron cage,” that is, the view of our society and civilization as having so determined our way of understanding ourselves, our way of acting, that we in fact are left with no choice.

IS MODERN SOCIETY AN “IRON CAGE”?

Many people have given this kind of picture of technological society or alternatively, looking at it from another angle, capitalist society. One sees this of course in the great German political activist and social theorist Karl Marx (1818-1883) himself, this kind of picture of capi-talist society where whatever the intentions of the actors they are all forced by the competitive situation in which they find themselves ineluctably to move towards greater and greater capital-ization, greater and greater suppression of working standards of the working people and hence, in Marx’s picture, a growing crisis.

Without having to pick up on Marx’s exact version, there are lots of people today who think we are similarly driven ineluctably by the nature of our society in certain directions. In the directions, for instance, of perpetual growth; perpetual pressure on the limits of tolerance of our environment – constantly endangering it; perpetual concentrations of populations in larger and more unwieldy centers; greater and greater bureaucratic control – and bureaucratic constructions centralizing control – over vast areas of life. And therefore, as a result of all this of course, in the direction of greater and greater control of our lives by instrumental rationality.

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We’ve all seen pictures of this kind and they do pick up on something very central in modern society. I don’t mean in any way for a single moment to underestimate these theories or views. They are definitely on to something very important about modern life.

“THE INVISIBLE HAND” AND “INVISIBLE-HAND MECHANISMS”

I suppose you could sum it up by saying that in a modern society, as against earlier modes of society, a great deal of the way in which our different actions are all coordinated and become compatible together as we exist in society, a great deal of this coordination is carried by what one might call “invisible-hand” processes. These processes are neither planned or decided by anyone nor determined by purely traditional norms but simply emerge out of the structures we’ve come to live in as they operate impersonally around us. The paradigm example of this of course is the coordination of economic activities through a market.

We’ve seen the demise of communist societies in the East, the end of the last great at-tempt in a modern industrial society to coordinate economic activity in some other way, by cen-tral planning. In other words, by the decision of those who operate the central plan.

Of course, the very nature of modern society having broken free of traditional modes of action means economic activity, the activity of different economic agents, is not coordinated simply by traditional norms. We’ve gone way beyond the period in the Middle Ages where the kinds of clothes one wore and the kind of pattern of consumption one engaged in, was deter-mined by one’s position in a society of orders; and, therefore the way in which different eco-nomic agents fitted together, anyway in that respect, was determined by traditional norms.

How we coordinate in a modern industrial capitalist society is by no conscious – I mean by a great degree without conscious – coordination at all by mechanisms like the market, which bring about a pattern of coordination, in a certain sense, behind the backs – without calling on the decisions – of the various people coordinated.

The Scottish moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) of course used his famous expression “the invisible hand” for this kind of coordination through the market. That’s what I’m referring to in general by this term “invisible-hand” mechanisms.

In a sense, we could argue there are two big types of these in modern society. Those con-cerned with markets on one hand, and those which arise out of bureaucratic methods of organiza-tion on the other.

The existence of these “invisible-hand” modes of coordination is something which, at one level, has been shown, particularly with the demise of communism, to be indispensable for mod-ern society. We couldn’t do without these to some degree.

But it’s also been seen naturally as very threatening. If one believes one of the directions these “invisible-hand” mechanisms push us in is, for instance, towards ever-greater growth, or towards ever-greater concentration, or towards ever-greater bureaucracy, then one will indeed fear that maybe we can’t do anything about it.

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A TEMPTING VIEW

Maybe we can discover, yes, that certain forms of modern society tend to drive us toward the trivialized end of the spectrum in our ethic of authenticity. But, alas, those forms are, as it were, written into the very structure of our “invisible-hand” mechanisms and we can’t do any-thing about them. That’s a very tempting view. People who hold that view are tempted just to throw up their hands and say nothing can be done.

I want to say to this kind of view it has a lot of truth to it. It certainly is true coordination through markets does tend to entrench individualistic modes of conceiving my life and so on. It does tend to give a premium to instrumental efficacy, to the application of instrumental reason as I try to calculate the best manner of surviving in this market environment. It does tend to put a premium on growth and so on.

I think a great many of these theories – which pinpoint the directions which we’re pushed in by these mechanisms – are right.

IMPORTANT QUESTION

But the important question we have to ask ourselves is, while these mechanisms certainly reduce our degrees of freedom, certainly make it impossible to do anything we want, do they re-duce our degrees of freedom to zero? Do they make all effort in this field impossible?

This seems to me to be just wrong.

INSTRUMENTAL REASON, ECOLOGICAL RESPONSIBILITY AND GENERATING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITIES

Let’s try to look at bits of recent history in order to see why this is so. Let’s take as our example an example from the area of the second major concerns I mentioned in the first lecture: the runaway control over our lives of instrumental reason. I’ve been talking in the last three talks almost exclusively about the first main area of worry, the worry about modern individualism. Let’s give a run now to the second one, the concern about galloping instrumental reason.

One of the areas where this concern is most evident, of course, is the area where we feel ourselves pushing towards pressing the limits of tolerance of our natural environment, constantly on the brink of destroying the environment we have to live in. The sense we may be ineluctably locked into a pattern where we’re driven in this direction is very frightening.

We can see all sorts of examples. The recent discovery of an even faster thinning of the ozone than we thought before means the decisions painfully arrived at to phase out certain chem-icals by, I think, the year 2000 must now be revised, and revised in an even more urgent direc-tion to phase them out even quicker.

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We think of the immense difficulties we have in coming to these decisions. The thought we might be driven by our whole economic way of life to threaten, in all sorts of directions, the limits of tolerance of our existence in the world is a very worrying thought.

But let’s just look at exactly this same type of issue: the issue of environmental responsi-bility, and look at it from another angle. Think of the way in which the development of society in the past just savaged all sorts of natural, wilderness environments with very often a total lack of concern. Then think of how, in the past, various small groups living in or close to these environ-ments have tried to fight for their preservation and defense and have been more or less mowed down by the great juggernaut of progress. And we can think of the almost inevitable defeat of those rearguard actions in the past as the product of another kind of “invisible-hand” process: the process of political will formation in a modern democratic society.

What happens when people understand themselves, in general, as being in the business of increasing production, increasing prosperity and raising GNP: and, then particular groups in small localities discover the way we’re doing this involves destroying a whole forest to feed a very rapacious lumber industry, or destroying a wilderness area? They react against that and want it stopped.

But in the reigning climate of understanding of what politics is about, what legitimacy do they have? What hope can they have of stopping it? Because it looks as though the issue is the interest and concern of a small minority group on one hand against the general prosperity of the population as a whole on the other.

As long as the issue is encoded in these terms, the small group defending the wilderness area is bound to lose. They’re even bound to look as though they ought to lose because they just are a small minority with their own particular attachment to some area against the welfare of the majority.

So we have the kind of battle that, for instance, has been going on in certain areas in British Columbia, Canada concerning logging of certain areas where it’s very often been pre-sented in the past as this small minority of local residents – or what are called disparagingly “tree huggers” – are standing in the way of progress, investment and prosperity for the majority of the society. That’s the way it’s been encoded. Coded that way, you can see a virtual certainty each one of these small battles will be a losing battle.

HOW DEMOCRATIC MAJORITIES EMERGE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY

But now look at what has happened to some degree. When there comes to be a general understanding in society as whole that there’s a real danger in the destruction of these wilderness areas for everyone, for our whole future, perhaps going beyond simply the notion of a danger to life and an understanding of how this is a danger perhaps to our very humanity. But, whatever the reasons, there comes to be a more broadly spread understanding of this.

A CONFLICT BETWEEN TWO FUNDAMENTAL PHILOSOPHIES OF

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HOW SOCIETY SHOULD FIND ITS WELFARE

Immediately, quite different kinds of coalitions become possible. It becomes possible for the battle – between those who want to savage the wilderness area and those who want to defend it – no longer to be encoded as in the interests of the majority and prosperity against the special interests of a small group. But, rather, encoded as a battle between two very fundamental philosophies of how the society as a whole should find its welfare in the modern world and in its environment.

Encoded in that second way, we sometimes find those who are on the side of ecological responsibility can win out and the defenders in the local area are no longer this isolated group in-terested in their own particular interests but are part of a majority spread across the whole society in many different milieu.

A LESSON IN DEMOCRATIC WILL FORMATION

What does this teach us? It teaches us that the very conditions in which the “invisible-hand” mechanisms of the market and bureaucracy – the very directions in which they drive us – can be, as it were, inflected very considerably depending on the condition of democratic will for-mation, if I can call it that, in a society.

If the society is utterly insensitive to framing some kind common mind – a democratic will – around issues like environmental protection, then the mechanism I described earlier will be in full force and each small group will go down in defeat in its own local, isolated battle be-fore the forces of mindless development.

If, however, another kind of democratic consensus is emerging on the importance of en-vironmental issues, then this won’t necessarily be the outcome and some real possibility of envi-ronmental protection will open up.

OUR DEGREES OF FREEDOM ARE NOT ZERO: CREATION OF NEW CONSTELLATIONS OFDEMOCRATICALLY CHOSEN PURPOSES IS POSSIBLE

This example just in itself shows clearly, I think, our degrees of freedom are not zero. The direction we’re driven in is not ineluctable. It’s not to say we have grounds for tremendous optimism. It’s not to say anything is possible, we can take any direction we want or we can make a 180 degree turn. That may not be in the cards. But it is possible to change directions by the cre-ation of new constellations of democratically chosen purposes. That, I think, is sufficient to show we are not, after all, inhabiting an “iron cage.”

INSTRUMENTAL REASON AND TECHNOLOGY: NATURE AS MERELY A RESOURCE FOR HUMANS?

When we come to this issue of technology and instrumental reason, some people think we’re locked in to a certain path for another reason. Not so much only because of the social and

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political forms in which we live but because of the very nature of technology itself. People feel in a technological civilization we are trained – by the very nature of this technological mode of existence – to treat the world around us as so much raw material, so much neutral stuff which we can use to fulfill our purposes. Technology itself is almost endowed with a certain direction im-plicit in it, a direction which pushes us more and more towards instrumental reason.

This is another reason, another set of considerations, which makes people feel we’re locked in, as well as their assessment of the “invisible-hand” mechanisms. These two are often interwoven in the discourse people feel that we’re entirely locked in.

There’s something in this too. There’s no doubt that living in a technological civilization is living in a world in which the instrumental rational approach to things comes very easily too us and is a very normal way of looking at things. We talk about a lot of things in our world in terms of handling problems, in terms of means and ends, in terms of getting what we want and so on – even in matters you think ought to be far removed from the categories of instrumental rea-son in, for example, the affairs of the heart, self-fulfillment and so on.

So there is some truth in this view as well. Yet, it is also crucially inadequate, crucially incomplete. This is something we have to look at more closely.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE STANCE OF DOMINATION

The simple view behind what I’m talking about is the view that technology – the techno-logical project of modern civilization – is bound up with a stance of domination towards nature – controlling and dominating the world. That is the human stance or purpose that enframes30 our technological activity. To be engaged in technological activity is to be in this stance – enframing it by this set of purposes.

Here again, we have an example of the kind of thing I’ve been talking about in all the previous lectures. There, of course, I was talking about it in connection with modern individual-ism. But here, the same kind of thing emerges in relation to technology and instrumental reason, that is, the stance of domination, yes, in a sense, emerges out of technology but yet doesn’t emerge. That is, it isn’t something which is built into a technological way of life as a logically in-separable part of it. But it is something which it tends to slide into in the kind of society we live in for all the reasons I mentioned earlier in connection with modern individualism.

OTHER WAYS OF MORALLY ENFRAMING TECHNOLOGY

It’s very important therefore to see the first point that the technological stance of domina-tion doesn’t emerge from technology ineluctably. It’s important to see, in other words, there are other ways of morally enframing our technological existence, other ways of practicing the work of technological control and advancement within another kind of moral attitude and stance to-wards ourselves and the world.

RETRIEVING THE MORAL SOURCES OF TECHNOLOGY

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In order to see that, we have to do the same kind of thing as I’ve been trying to do in ear-lier talks with the ethic of authenticity. We have to go back and retrieve certain of the moral sources which preside over the growth of technology.

THE IDEAL OF DISENGAGED REASON, ITS DISTORTION AND NOBILITY

There are two I want mention here among the many others we could mention. One is a view or understanding of ourselves as the kind of agents who can engage in technological progress and change. This is a view of ourselves as possible agents and subjects of science and scientific progress. This view, which we find arising in the 17th Century, is a view of ourselves as potentially disengaged reasoners. This in turn is grounded on a moral ideal, the moral ideal of ourselves as, one might use the expression, self-responsible reasoners, that is, by self-responsi-bility I mean we ourselves are checking and criticizing our own reasoning processes to make sure they live up to certain standards. You might also put it as a view of ourselves as self-criti-cal thinkers, self-critical reasoners – which is built into the very foundation of the modern scien-tific revolution. We find this kind of ideal articulated by great founding thinkers like French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes and Locke.

So here you have a certain embedding of the technological project which has to do with an ideal of reason, an ideal of self-responsible knowledge. Of course, this ideal has been itself very badly misunderstood and applied in a very dangerous and damaging way: wherever it’s been understood as not simply and not properly as an ideal human beings aspire to, but as some-thing like the very nature of human thinking itself. Because in the very nature of things we, as human beings, can only stand at that disengaged stance to the world natural science demands from us with part of ourselves and part of the time. If we think of this stance as being our whole existence then we’ll denature and distort the way we live in the world among human beings in nature and the whole rest of our existence.

But if we draw back from this attempt to make disengaged reason our whole existence and just think of it as an ideal, it is a lofty and noble ideal. It’s something which, in a sense, is one of the glories of modern civilization we’ve developed – this standard of rigorous, well-rea-soned and self-critical knowledge and argument.

The development of technology therefore doesn’t need to be understood simply within a stance of dominating the world. The drive for scientific progress and technological change doesn’t need to be powered simply by the desire to control the world around us.

It also has been in the past, and it could again be in the future, partly powered by an ideal understanding of getting at the truth, you might say a properly philosophical idea. That’s another enframing of technology which has been there from the beginning, [but which] can easily get relegated to the side, to the margins, particularly by the drive of big bureaucratic mechanisms, big industrial corporations who give another kind of impress to the development of technology. But it’s nevertheless there in our civilization as something we can retrieve.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE IDEAL OF HUMAN WELFARE AND THE AFFIRMATION OF ORDINARY LIFE

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There’s a second important source, quite different from the first one. We forget too easily that at the origin of the development of technology – you might say the technological turn in modern European civilization which I think you can in a way situate in the 17th Century – was a very important set of moral ideals about human welfare.

This emerges clearly in the writings of the 17th Century thinker who is very often credited with, or taken as representative of, this technological turn. I’m thinking of the English philoso-pher, scientist, lawyer, member of Parliament, orator, and essayist Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

Bacon insisted science should not be understood, as it was among the Greeks, as an at-tempt simply to understand the world as a contemplatively pleasing order. Rather, our endeavor in science ought to be about the ways in which we could change the world. As he put it, What use is science if it cannot serve in some way to relieve the condition of mankind?

This technological stance, which Bacon builds into science itself as a criterion of its suc-cess, wasn’t powered simply by the desire to dominate. It was much more than that. There was a sense of the importance of practical benevolence. It went along with a new value given – which we see in this whole period of European culture – to life, to the continuation of life, to, one might say, the ordinary life31 in which people make the means to life, live in families, have children, re-produce themselves. Tremendous value is accorded to this and to producing the conditions to al-low this to go on in plentitude and prosperity.

So you have underlying the development of modern technology also this, you might say, philanthropic drive, not in the sense where people find this word to apply to charity. But in the sense of the original meaning of the word – a sense of the value of human life. That is also one of the enframing ideas that has underlain the development of technology – and could again.

Now imagine what could happen if instead of being enframed so predominantly by the desire to dominate, the developments of technology were enframed by these other purposes to a much greater degree: by a love of knowledge and understanding on one hand, and by a sense of human welfare on the other.

ENFRAMING TECHNOLOGY WITH A SENSE OF HUMAN WELFARE

Let’s look at the second case particularly. Enframed by a sense of human welfare, some of the dehumanizing results of technology could be checked by the very nature of this enframing. Runaway applications of a technological view in, as we sometimes see in the field of medicine, for instance, where the development of new cures, new research, new understanding of the mechanisms of the body, can go along with the treatment of the patient as though he or she were simply the locus of certain of these processes – neglecting the patient as a whole person with a history, hopes and fears, and who can dialogue with and understand along with the doctor what’s happening to himself or herself.32

The relegation of all this to the boundaries with a runaway concentration on technology as control, here control over the disease, could be checked to the extent this technological activ-

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ity were understood and enframed in another kind of sense of purpose where the original Baco-nian sense of the human being concerned was brought once more back to the fore.

So we can see how even the picture of technology as ineluctably linked with domination has gotten challenged. Yes, it can easily tend to be that and does tend to be that in our civiliza-tion. But it doesn’t need to be that.

So in these two ways we can see we are not, perhaps after all, locked in an “iron cage.” There are other ways of living a technological mode of life. There are other ways available in the very moral background which has led to the development of technology.

THE POLITICAL DIMENSION

Unless we’re so totally locked in by the “invisible-hand” mechanisms that we’re inca-pable of making good on those insights, we can perhaps inflect the direction of our civilization by retrieving these other moral enframings, these other moral sources – and by finding a way of changing the direction of our life in order to give fuller expression to these moral sources.

That is the political goal that lies before us.

So we come to the political dimension of all these reflections perhaps all too late. I just mentioned a minute ago and tried to argue against a picture of us as being in an “iron cage” driven by our “invisible-hand” mechanisms. I just argued a change in the direction of our demo-cratic will formation can actually change the direction our society is carried in, and I tried make this point with the example of ecological policy.

POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF INDIVIDUALISM FOR THE CRUCIAL ABILITY TO FORM A MAJORITY DEMOCRATIC WILL

What one can draw from that is an essential part of our being able to affect our fate in this regard is our being able to develop such wide ranging modes of democratic will and consensus.

We have to be able to form majority democratic will on these crucial issues.

But there, we run up against another of the great malaises of modernity, another of the great fears people have put forward. The fear, precisely, that the growth of individualism when it slides towards its more deviant forms; rampant instrumental reason, when it slides toward its most deviant forms, and the development out of both of these large-scale bureaucratization – that all of these can produce a kind of falling away from democratic participation.

FRAGMENTATION AND FALLING AWAY FROM DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION

The famous Tocquevillian fear that people will slip back into private life, will be en-closed in the solitudes of their hearts, and as a result the government of a society will run on in a way in which is less and less responsible to them, less and less under their control. What we see

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here is a picture of a kind of fragmentation in which the formation of a broad-based democratic will is harder and harder to achieve.

Tocqueville gives a quite frightening picture of this under his description of what he calls “soft despotism” in which individuals go about their affairs less and less concerned with public life and politics and, as he calls it, “a vast tutelary power” rules over them benignly, giving them the welfare, the things they want – but having control over their lives.

Tocqueville’s nightmare of a “soft despotism” hasn’t exactly happened in the form he feared in particular in the United States which was the society about which he was making this prediction. But you could argue something almost as worrying, from the point of view I’m rais-ing here, has happened. What I mean by this is a kind of fragmentation.

The society we see in the United States today is certainly not a Tocquevillian “soft despo-tism.” It’s full of movement, energy, challenges, protests, and the organization of campaigns of all kinds. It’s a society in which the rulers are justifiably apprehensive about their popularity and about potentially losing this popularity in the public. It’s not at all a docile society ruled by bu-reaucrats.

HOW SINGLE-ISSUE POLITICS ENDANGER DEMOCRACY

But there is one danger and problem here. It’s that in all this movement, once it gets channeled towards a certain kind of politics, it makes the formation of majority democratic will harder and harder. That is, one gets a politics in which different groups become less and less ca-pable of allying with others to form a majority of the population. They have recourse more and more to a politics of protest and attack rather than a politics of majority creation and policymak-ing.

Let me try to explain this a little bit more.

You can have a pattern of political life in a modern democracy where people feel a sense of hopelessness in joining together, backing a political party behind a program which is then to be carried out by legislation made the law of the land.

In their despair of going this route and in making a success of this route, they turn to an-other route, the route of single-issue action in politics, mobilizing people in protest around their particular narrow band of concerns along with very often another political strategy, the strategy of judicial review, of intervening through cases put forward in the courts perhaps in the light or framework of a charter of rights.

These two – single-issue politics and judicial action – of course fit neatly together be-cause they are always interventions that tackle particular issues at any one time. So people will make cases in court about the permissibility or impermissibility of abortion. Along with that they will have single-issue campaigns mobilizing people, pro-life or pro-choice. Their energies will go into these single channels of protest and demand in order to get their particular single con-cerns agreed on to make them win out – regardless of the overall pattern of social life that re-sults.

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This is a very different kind of thing from the politics where the people are mainly con-cerned to develop policies for the life of the whole society and to put them into effect by helping to create and be a part of a majority coalition which can, in turn, express itself through elected representatives and legislation.

One can easily find that the more this single-track type of politics on single issues and ju-dicial review become strengthened and entrenched, the more of course it fragments the potential base and constituency of a broad-based party, the more it renders this other kind of politics – the politics of broad, popular will – difficult and problematic. Then the more the broad formation of will is difficult and problematic, the more people are driven towards single-track politics.

There is a danger then of not exactly a “soft despotism” in the Tocquevillian sense. But there is a danger in modern society I think exemplified very much by the present situation on the American scene of single-track politics.

What does that mean? It means certain issues require a broad conscious consensus on the part of the people – which requires therefore a sense, among that majority, of empowerment that they can develop such a consensus and it will have political effect. The issues that require that are issues that can’t be properly handled [through single-issue politics].

It’s rather worrying, I think, looking at the present American scene to see the imbalance that’s been created in that society: extremely successful single-issue campaigns, strikingly suc-cessful and spectacular turnovers occurring because of judicial decisions – but a political process which, in some ways, seems to be less and less capable of even approaching a semblance of ra-tional debate between the parties vying for office – so that in some way through that debate a broad popular consensus can have some leverage and control on what is decided.

It seems to me that if we’re going to be able to inflect the direction of our civilization, and not going to be drawn ineluctably by the “invisible-hand” mechanisms in which we live, are not going to be sucked ineluctably into the directions technology seems to slide into enframed by domination, we have to be a society politically capable of generating majority democratic will.

We have to be a society in which the politics of democratic will formation will always take precedence over single-track politics. It seems to be the case that we, and most modern democracies, are in danger of once more sliding toward that kind of single-track politics.

There are ways to combat that. As a matter of fact, when you go back to read the extraor-dinary insightful words of Tocqueville we find that these issues were already adumbrated. It has to do with the decentralization of power and the creation and sustenance of the instruments of democratic will formation. In particular, a party system in which people in a broad base really participate.

But this is the crucial concern that we have to have before us if we’re going to realize the goals which arise from the kind of understanding we can achieve by a retrieval of our moral sources. It won’t do us any concrete good if we make this return to the past to understand the

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richer moral sources of the ethic of authenticity and of our technological civilization, to under-stand the way we’ve split away from them towards the facile, trivialized or more dangerous modes of them, but are incapable of acting on that understanding to change the direction of our society.

In order to do that we have to be concerned with the health of our democratic polity in a way that we haven’t been up to now.

REGAINING DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OVER THE DIRECTION OF SOCIETY REQUIRES AVOIDING THE FRAGMENTATION OF SINGLE-ISSUE POLITICS

We have to be concerned not just to make sure we remain, in some sense of the word, “free” societies, that there is a possibility of protest, organization, and self-expression. We have to be concerned that the kind of politics of our society don’t slide toward the fragmented, single-track politics which will make it difficult to get control over the direction of our whole society.

And this is a third domain of worry, a third great domain of malaise, where once again something can be said about the other two – it isn’t written in the very stars or structure of our democratic tradition that it should slide in this direction. But it is in perpetual danger that it will do so.

So I’ve reached the end of these talks. I’ve tried to range rather widely, range over three areas of concern and worry: individualism, instrumental reason and politics. And I hope I’ve been able to make a little bit clearer why these three areas have to be dealt with together, the ways in which they are interlinked, the ways in which finding a solution to one requires finding a solution to the others.

But I also hope I’ve made a bit more evident how closely analogous the three are, how in each case we find ourselves pressed with a certain worry and malaise about the development of our modern civilization.

In each case we perhaps are tempted to blame the very central developments into moder-nity themselves for these ills. But in each case we find that – in analyzing more closely what these developments have amounted to – we can see richer moral sources which actually give us choices, choices about what direction to take these modern developments: the ethic of authentic-ity, instrumental reason and technology and our democratic traditions. In each of these cases, therefore, the work of retrieval is something which is not only intellectually important and chal-lenging but could be of tremendous significance for our future.

Notes

1 Charles M. Taylor is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emeritus at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has taught in numerous institutions including the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, Frankfurt University in Germany, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 1976 to 1981, he held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University. His research focuses on modernity, pluralism, mul-ticulturalism, identity, and secularism. He has written more than 20 books, including Hegel and Modern Society (1979), Sources of the Self (1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), The Politics of Recognition (1992), Modern Social Imagi-naries (2004), A Secular Age (2007), with Hubert Dreyfus Retrieving Realism (2015), and The Language Animal (2016). Born in Montreal in 1931, Taylor earned a B.A. in history from McGill in 1952 and as a Rhodes Scholar pur-sued studies in political science, philosophy and economics at Oxford University where he obtained a B.A. (1955), M.A. (1960) and Ph.D. (1961).

The Latvia, Russian-born British political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), the first Jew to be elected to a Prize Fellowship at Oxford’s All Souls College, supervised Taylor’s dissertation, which was published in 1964 as The Explanation of Behavior. Berlin wrote of Taylor:

… I have known him since 1956 and felt the deepest friendship and admiration for him ever since. He is a man of acute intelligence, total intellectual and moral sincerity, unswerving integrity, and a re-markable insight into a variety of philosophical traditions, their central animating ideas, uncluttered by ingenious and sometimes highly complicated means of defence against actual or possible objec-tions….

… Charles Taylor is … basically a teleologist … [who] believes … human beings, and perhaps the entire universe, have a basic purpose – whether created by God, as religious Christians and Jews be-lieve, or by nature, as Aristotle and his followers … have taught. Consequently, everything that he has written is concerned with what people have believed, striven after, developed into, lived in the light of, and, finally, the ultimate goals towards which human beings as such are by their very natures de-termined to move….

Berlin contrasts his own metaphysical position with Taylor’s:

… I do not believe in teleology. I do not deny that society and cultures develop in a certain fashion – nobody can understand either human beings or history who does not grasp that. But like Spinoza, Hume and other thinkers less sympathetic to Taylor than they are to me, I believe purposes are im-posed by human beings upon nature and the world, rather than pursued by them as part of their own central nature or essences. I think that Taylor believes in essences, whereas I do not. I believe that it is human beings, their imagination, intellect and character that form the world in which they live, not, of course, in isolation but in communities – that I would not deny; but that this is in a sense a free, unor-ganised development – which cannot be causally predicted. It is not part of a determinist structure … [marching] inexorably towards some single predestined goal, as Christians, Hegelians, Marxists and other determinists and teleologists have … believed and still believe….

In spite of their differences, Berlin adds:

… [He] is a noble, gifted and deeply interesting thinker, every one of whose works has stimulated and excited me…. His unique position among social and political philosophers is due as much to his hu-manity and his empathy with differences of groups, individuals, societies and nations, which prevent him displaying any degree of dogmatism or narrow insistence on some cut and dried schema in which alone salvation is believed to lie, which, whatever one may think of his central beliefs, cannot fail to broaden the outlook of anyone who reads his works or listens to his lectures or, indeed, talks to him. He is, in short, a great fertilising force, a creative and original thinker than which there cannot be any-thing more wonderful to be…. (From Berlin’s “Introduction” to James Tully, ed., Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 1-3)

In 1960, Taylor helped found the New Left Review (http://newleftreview.org/history). During the 1960s in Canada, Tay-lor ran four times for election to high office as candidate for the social democratic New Democratic Party. In the 1962 federal election, he placed third. In 1963, he placed second in federal parliamentary elections. Most famously, in the 1965 election, he lost to newcomer and future prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. This campaign garnered national atten-tion since both Taylor and Trudeau were considered intellectuals and “star candidates.” In 1968, in his fourth and final effort to win a seat in the Canadian House of Commons, Taylor came in second as a NDP candidate in the riding of Dollard, a federal electoral district in Québec.

In 2007, Canadian Premier Jean-Charest appointed Taylor and Gérard Bouchard to Co-Chair a one-year Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodements reliées aux différences culturelles, to study and explore the wide-spread, highly charged debate centering on the social accommodation of religious and cultural minorities in Québec. In May 2008, the commission presented its 300-page report.

In 1992, the Québec provincial government awarded Taylor the Prix Léon-Gérin, the highest honor given for contribu-tion to Québec intellectual life. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2000, he was named a grand officer de l‚ Ordre national du Québec. In 2007, Taylor, a practicing Catholic, won the Templeton Prize ($1.5 million) for exceptional contribution to the affirmation of life’s spiritual dimension. In 2008, he won the Kyoto Prize ($460,000) for lifetime achievement in arts and philosophy.

In 2015, with the German social and political theorist Jürgen Habermas, the United States Library of Congress awarded Taylor the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity ($1.5 million). He was awarded the Kluge Prize because he “is one of the most prominent, influential and powerful active philosophers on the world stage. Best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy and intel-lectual history, his work has received international acclaim and has influenced academia and the world at-large. Pub-lished in 20 languages, his writings link disparate academic disciplines and range from reflections on artificial intelli-gence to analyses of contemporary multicultural societies to the study of religion and what it means to live in a secular age” (Source: http://www.loc.gov/loc/kluge/prize/taylor.html ; accessed 12/28/2015).

Taylor is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2 Unauthorized, Samuel C. Porter, Ph.D. transcribed Taylor’s 1991 Massey Lectures and edited the transcript herewith for readability. The table of contents, lecture titles, headings and endnotes are Porter’s. The Canadian Broadcasting Cor-poration aired the lectures in November 1991 as part of the CBC Radio’s Ideas series (Source: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1991-cbc-massey-lectures-the-malaise-of-modernity-1.2946849: accessed 1/6/2016). Taylor revised and published his Massey Lectures in Canada as The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi, 1991) and in the United States as The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). The Canadian and U.S. books contain the same 10 chapters or sections entitled: Three Malaises, The Inarticulate Debate, The Sources of Authenticity, Inescapable Horizons, The Need for Recognition, The Slide to Subjectivism, La Lotta Continua, Subtler Languages, An Iron Cage?, and Against Fragmentation.

In the 8 April 1993 issue of the London Review of Books (Vol. 15, No. 7), in a review of The Ethics of Authenticity enti-tled “In a Flattened World,” the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) wrote, “The great merit of Taylor’s brief, non-technical, powerful book ... is the vigour with which he restates the point which Hegel (and later Dewey) urged against Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social…. Being authentic, being faith-ful to ourselves, is being faithful to something which was produced in collaboration with a lot of other people.... The core of Taylor’s argument is a vigorous and entirely successful criticism of two intertwined bad ideas: that you are won-derful just because you are you, and that ‘respect for difference’ requires you to respect every human being, and every human culture – no matter how vicious or stupid.”

3 French statesman and author Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) defined individualism as a “calm and considered feel-ing which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of his family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself…. Individ-ualism is of democratic origin and threatens to grow as conditions get more equal…. As social equality spreads there are more and more people who, though neither rich nor powerful enough to have much hold over others, have gained or kept enough wealth and enough understanding to look after their own needs. Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus, not only does democracy make men [and women] forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man [and woman] is forever thrown back on himself [or herself] alone and there is danger that he [or she] may be shut up in the solitude of his [her] own heart” (Democracy in America trans. George Lawrence, ed., J.P. Mayer, New York: Doubleday, 1969 [Vol. I, 1835; Vol. II, 1840], pp. 506-508). In Habits of the Heart (1985), Robert N. Bellah and his co-authors define “individu-alism” as “[a] word used in numerous, sometimes contradictory, senses. We use it mainly in two: (1) a belief in the in-herent dignity and, indeed, sacredness of the human person. In this sense, individualism is part of all four of the Ameri-can traditions we have described in this book – biblical, republican, utilitarian individualist, and expressive individual-ist; (2) a belief that the individual has a primary reality whereas society is a second-order, derived or artificial construct, a view we call ontological individualism. This view is shared by utilitarian and expressive individualists. It is opposed to the view that society is as real as individuals, a view we call social realism, which is common to the biblical and re-publican traditions.” (Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 1996, 2008, p. 334).

4 Also known as “instrumental rationality,” that is, “the subjection of activity to the criterion of effectiveness alone” (E. Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book. London: Collins Harvill, 1988). “This form of rationality is often regarded as the essence of the process of rationalization underlying the transformation of the premodern, preindustrial societies to mod-ern industrial societies” (David Jay & Julia Jary, eds., The HarperCollins Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Harper-Collins, 1991, p. 240). Instrumental rationality is a form of reason oriented toward means, not ends. According to the German sociologist Max Weber, social action, like all action, is oriented in one of four “rational” ways: instrumentally, morally, emotionally, and traditionally. 1) In utilitarian logics, the expectations an actor has of others (human beings or objects in the environment) are used as a means to attain his or her own rationally pursued and calculated ends. 2) In moral logics, a conscious belief in the value for its own sake – independently of its prospects for success – of some ethi-cal, aesthetic, religious, or some other form of behavior, determines social action. 3) In emotional logics, specific af-fects or feeling-states determine social action. 4) In traditional logics, ingrained habituation determines social action (Weber, Economy and Society, 1978: 24-25).

5 The German social theorist Jürgen Habermas expresses this tendency in modern societies toward the primacy of in-strumental reason Taylor is talking about with the critical term, “the colonization of the lifeworld” by the market econ-omy and the administrative state, that is, money and power. By “lifeworld” Habermas means not simply the private realm of family, religious and local communities and voluntary associations but also the sphere of public discourse, public opinion formation and the communicative exchanges of a free society where citizens discuss and argue about what they ought to do together as a society. Habermas argues the medium, or steering mechanism, in the lifeworld is language. He recognizes there are all sorts of distorted and blocked communication. But the point is language is crucial, and in some kind of ethical conception of a free society, the lifeworld ought to be setting the terms for the systems. The systems generate means. Money and power are not ends. They are means – and they need to be used for morally thought out ends. There is a tendency in modern society to turn means – money and power – into ends. When that hap-pens, Habermas says, the systems begin to colonize the lifeworld. Normally, the lifeworld sets the terms and the sys-tems provide the means. But this tends to get reversed in modern societies. The lifeworld becomes subordinated to the systems. (Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1985, pp. 332-373) – SCP.

6 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, reissue edition, 2012. A philosopher and classi-cist, Bloom taught at Cornell, the University of Toronto, Yale, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and the University of Chicago where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D.

7 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1973) defines self-indulgence as “excessive or unrestrained gratification of one’s own appetites, desires, or whims.” We might consider that while our society maximizes choice, the educational and religious institutions of our society seem to do little to guide us regarding the standards and criteria we might use to choose well, to judge what is “excessive” or deficient, too much, enough or not enough in concrete particular circum-stances. Indeed, our society appears to deny standards and criteria by which good decisions might be made – SCP.

8 In contrast to the debased, degenerate forms of individualism, Robert Bellah defines ethical individualism with refer-ence to individuals who “exist in a society of citizens … ready to recognize each other” and, “while belonging to many groups,” are “neither defined by them nor encapsulated in them” but move “in the free space of a democratic society.” Modern societies at their best enhance principled individualism, which premodern societies often suppressed. But ethi-cal individualism is possible only in a society organized in a way that supports and makes such individualism possible. Such a society includes not only democratic political structures but also voluntary associations and certain forms of family life that require the active and intelligent participation of individuals, not limit it (Robert N. Bellah, “Confronting Modernity: Maruyama Masao, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor,” chapter one in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 46).

9 Of course, it would be repugnant for someone to tell someone else that they know what’s good for them. But there is an important distinction between that moralistic stance and the moral dialogue Taylor is talking about.

The English moral philosopher and University of Newcastle Philosophy Professor Emeriti Mary Midgley (b. 1919) helps to make this distinction clear in her book, Can’t We Make Moral Judgements? New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. She points out several common objections to moral judgements including certain ways morality has been en-forced. For example, through vindictive actions such as punishment and oppression. Objections also include particular ways of judging marked by bias, narrowness, chauvinism, lack of imagination, and the willingness to limit individual freedom for the sake of society. Objections to moral judgments concern as well the sometimes intrusive nature of the expression of moral opinions. The criticism is against nosey-parkerdom.

But some, perhaps not unlike the kinds of students Allan Bloom is talking about as Taylor points out, would even ban the formation of opinions and judgments. This ban is premised on claims such as we are not in a position to make moral judgments or to decide moral questions; nothing can be known in the sphere of morals; moral questions are just a matter of taste and one’s own subjective opinion; and, there is no rational way to decide moral questions, that, moral questions are decided by personal preferences, not rational grounds. Anti-judgmentalists want to protect victims of moral intru-sion. Concerned with the values of the inner life, they are eager to save us from spoiling our lives by imposing mistaken moral standards on ourselves.

Midgley acknowledges the validity of some of these objections but points out moral judgments, like other judgments, are accountable. We can be asked to give reasons for our moral judgments, reasons consistent with the rest of our lives and which are publicly discussible. This seems very close to what Taylor is saying in these lectures.

Author of Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978, rev. ed. 1995) among other books and essays in the areas of ethics, science and animal rights, Midgley emphasizes that judging is not arbitrary. It is connected to our nature. Yet, anti-judgmentalists claim, she observes, it is always wrong to interfere with other people’s actions, because we can never know that any action is wrong. But, she asks, what does it mean to know something is good or bad, right or wrong? People who object to moral judgments usually take a skeptical approach to knowledge and exalt individual free-dom. But, Midgley presses, what is freedom and why is it so important?

We might also ask what sort of validity can non-scientific forms of thought, including moral judgments, possibly have in a culture where science has such tremendous symbolic prestige? Science is a method of thinking clearly. Scientific methods are among the best ways we come to know the universe in which we live – which it describes. But science has nothing to say about how we should live in relation to the world it describes – nothing about the reasons for the uni-verse’s existence and its moral meanings.

So, as Midgley says, judging is not simply choosing among alternative courses of action or states of affairs. It is seeing reason to think and act in a particular way. It involves our whole nature as we make our way through a forest of possi-bilities. There is no systematic science of judging, as Midgley rightly says. But moral discernment does include such things as expanding (not contracting) the points to consider, general guidelines or rules, and boundaries anchored in values. According to Midgley, decisions stem from our wider attitudes and are consistent with the rest of our lives – the sort of person we are and the sort of family, neighborhood, community, and society in which we live – though this con-sistency is never complete because the attitudes and morals are never fully articulated. And, I would add, always subject to question, correction and revision in a community of fallible interpreters – SCP.

10 See Michael J. Sandel’s essay, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” Political Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 81-96; and his book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

11 Can we reason together about ethical and moral matters? Taylor writes,

Well, how do we reason? Reasoning in moral matters is always reasoning with somebody…. [Y]ou start from where the person is, or with the actual difference between you; you don’t reason … as though you were talking to someone who recognized no moral demands whatever. A person who accepted no moral demands would be as impossible to argue with about right and wrong as a person who refused to accept the world of perception around us be impossible to argue with about empirical matters.

But we are imagining discussing with people who are in the contemporary culture of authen-ticity. And that means that they are trying to shape their lives in the light of this ideal. We are not left with the just the bare facts of their preferences. But if we start from the ideal, then we can ask: What are the conditions in human life of realizing an ideal of this kind? And what does the ideal properly understood call for? [So] … to define better what the ideal consists in … [and] to bring out certain general features of human life that condition the fulfillment of this or any other ideal…. (The Ethics of Authenticity, 1992, pp. 31-32.)

12 In 2015, Taylor defined the ethic of authenticity as

… the idea that each human being has their own way of being human and they should find it and not simply conform to some external standard. That ethic has become utterly widespread in western soci-ety. It starts at the time of the romantics and, certainly among one minority of cultural creators during the 19th Century, it was absolutely standard. The idea of artistic creation was inseparable from origi-nality. But this has become something where people talk in a banal way of doing your own thing and

so on. So it’s made a tremendous difference to the way people understand their spiritual lives. This of course went along with the great sexual revolution of the 1960s and there came to be a lack of fit be-tween all these people searching on the one hand, and the lives of the established churches on the other (“Charles Taylor Discusses Meditation and the Lives of Faith Today,” Berkley Center, George-town University, Washington, D.C., April 15, 2015, Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PpxppiucC8; accessed 12/7/2015, 13:00 to 14:45).

13 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971. Literary critic and University Professor at Columbia University, Trilling’s books include Matthew Arnold (1939), E.M. Forster (1943), The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950), and The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays (published posthumously in 2001) edited by Leon Wieseltier.

14 Hutcheson (1694-1746) was an Irish-born Scottish Presbyterian minister and Glasgow University moral philosophy professor. His books include Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728) and Reflections upon Laughter and Remarks on the Fable of the Bees (1725-6) the latter of which addresses the egoist psychology of Hobbes and Mandeville. Influ-enced by John Locke, Cicero and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson in turn influenced David Hume and Hutche-son’s student Adam Smith as well as Jeremy Bentham and Joseph Butler.

15 Before the great Scottish moral philosopher and political economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

16 According to University of Bristol Social and Political Philosophy Professor Christopher Bertram,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains an important figure in the history of philosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology and because of his influence on later thinkers. Rousseau's own view of philosophy and philosophers was firmly negative, seeing philoso-phers as the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity's natural impulse to compas-sion. The concern that dominates Rousseau's work is to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance. In the modern world, human beings come to derive their very sense of self from the opin-ion of others, a fact which Rousseau sees as corrosive of freedom and destructive of individual au-thenticity. In his mature work, he principally explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest. However, though Rousseau believes the co-existence of human be-ings in relations of equality and freedom is possible, he is consistently and overwhelmingly pes-simistic that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. In addi-tion to his contributions to philosophy, Rousseau was active as a composer and a music theorist, as the pioneer of modern autobiography, as a novelist, and as a botanist. Rousseau’s appreciation of the wonders of nature and his stress on the importance of feeling and emotion made him an important in-fluence on and anticipator of the romantic movement. To a very large extent, the interests and con-cerns that mark his philosophical work also inform these other activities, and Rousseau's contributions in ostensibly non-philosophical fields often serve to illuminate his philosophical commitments and ar-guments (Source: Bertram, Christopher, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Phi-losophy  (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/rousseau/; accessed 12/19/2015.)

17 The poet, theologian and philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) influenced many, including Hegel, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Dilthey, J.S. Mill, and Goethe and did more than anyone else to establish the general con-ception and interpretive method of modern anthropology (Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/; accessed 12/12/2015).

18 See note 11.

19 Taylor writes, “Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of an ideal that people are already living by more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion” (The Ethics of Authenticity, 1992, p. 22). And

what does Taylor mean by “a moral ideal”? “I mean a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be where “better” and “higher” are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire.” (Ibid., p.16)

20 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1973) defines a surd as “something lacking sense: irrational; voiceless; an irra-tional root; irrational number.”

21 What does Taylor mean by “horizons of significance”? In a chapter on “Inescapable Horizons” in the published ver-sion of these lectures, Taylor shows how “the contemporary culture of authenticity” reinforces “a general presumption of subjectivism about value: things have significance not of themselves but because people deem them to have it – as though people could determine what is significant, either by decision, or perhaps unwittingly by just feeling that way….” Against this, Taylor writes, “You feeling a certain way can never be sufficient grounds for respecting your po-sition, because your feeling can’t determine what is significant. Soft relativism self-destructs.” He adds,

Things take on importance against a background of intelligibility. Let us call this a horizon. It follows that one of the things we can’t do, if we are to define ourselves significantly, is suppress or deny the horizons against which things take on significance for us. This is the kind of self-defeating move being carried out in our subjectivist civilization. In stressing the legitimacy of choice between certain options, we very often find ourselves depriving the options of their significance….

… [T]his discourse slides toward an affirmation of choice itself. All options are equally wor-thy, because they are freely chosen, and it is choice that confers worth…. But this implicitly denies the existence of a pre-existing horizon of significance, whereby some things are worthwhile and oth-ers less so, and still others not at all, quite anterior to choice….

… [A]uthenticity can’t be defended in ways that collapse horizons of significance. Even the sense that the significance of my life comes from its being chosen … depends on the understanding that independent of my will there is something noble, courageous, and hence significant in giving shape to my own life. There is a picture here of what human beings are like….

… [I]t may be important that my life be chosen, as John Stuart Mill asserts in On Liberty, but unless some options are more significant than others, the very idea of self-choice falls into triviality and hence incoherence. Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues are more signif-icant than others…. Which issues are significant I do not determine. If I did, no issue would be signif-icant. But then the very ideal of self-choosing as a moral ideal would be impossible….

So the ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice….

The agent seeking significance in life, trying to define him- or herself meaningfully, has to exist in a horizon of important questions. That is what is self-defeating in modes of contemporary cul-ture that concentrate on self-fulfillment in opposition to the demands of society, or nature, which shut out history or the bonds of solidarity. These self-centered “narcissistic” forms are indeed shallow and trivialized; they are “flattened and narrowed,” as Bloom says. But this is not because they belong to the culture of authenticity. Rather it is because they fly in the face of its requirements. To shut out de-mands emanating from beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization….

Otherwise put, I can define my identity only against a background of things that matter…. Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters cru-cially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.

So you do have something to say to, and you can try to reason with, “those who are enmired in the more trivialized modes of the culture of authenticity” that “some self-transcending issues are indispensable” to authenticity. Or so Taylor writes in “Inescapable Horizons.” In the following chapter, “The Need for Recognition,” he addresses the issue of “whether there is something self-defeating in a mode of fulfillment that denies our ties to others” (Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 1992, pp. 36-41).

22 The HarperCollins Sociology Dictionary (1991) defines anomie as

(‘without norms’ – a concept introduced into sociology by [Émile] Durkheim) a condition of society or of personal relation to society in which there exists little consensus or lack of certainty on values or goals; a loss of effectiveness in the … moral framework that regulates collective and individual life…. Anomie exists, and unhappiness and social disorder result, when society fails to provide a limiting framework of social norms…. Durkheim saw anomie as pervasive in modern societies. For example, an anomic division of labor existed within these societies since they failed to allocate jobs fairly, that is, according to talents. In more general terms, economic activity in these societies remained essen-tially unregulated….

23 Taylor’s original essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” was published in Amy Gutmann, ed, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992) and in an expanded edition, Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politic of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1994) with commentary by Kwami Anthony Appiah, Amy Gutmann, Jürgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf.

It might be worth considering that, in a 2015 discussion of “The Life of the Church in a Secular Age,” Taylor, talking from a Christian perspective, seems to root “recognition” in one of its religious and moral sources. With refer-ence to the story of the mustard seed in Christian sacred texts (Mark 4:26-32, Mathew 13: 24-32, Luke 13: 18-19), Tay-lor interprets the story of the great tree or bush as a metaphor for the growth of human consciousness and moral aspira-tion. The Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium B.C.E.; see Taylor’s essay “What Was the Axial Revolution?” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Harvard University Press, 2011) marks a point in human evolution in different parts of the world when, for Taylor, people – normally fo-cused on their own society and normally seeing others as outsiders and possible enemies – rise to some sense of univer-sality or some notion of the good beyond simply our society doing well. That’s why, Taylor observes, the Gospel of Mark says Jesus taught with authority. He was a person who managed to see people in a way they had never been seen before, with a clarity of what they were about and what they needed. The authority comes from the experience of “I’ve been seen. I’ve been listened to.”

Taylor asks, How do you become capable of really seeing? There is a negative side, he says, pointing to the English poet John Keats (1795-1821) who talked of “negative capability” in terms of constraining your own take on things, the way you project on things – and getting that out of the way so you can actually see the person, the thing, the landscape, and so on right in front of you. Taylor doesn’t quote Keats directly but Keats wrote,

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Lit-erature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pur-sued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration (John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899, p. 277).

But, Taylor adds, it also – looking at this from a Christian perspective – needs something positive. It needs that kind of love for the person concerned. Negatively, take away the scales created by my own preoccupations and so on; and, posi-tively, have a sense of this person as lovable. This is, according to Taylor, the great secret. This is another dimension of kenosis (the belief that the preexistent Christ “emptied” or “impoverished” himself in order to become human, Phil. 2:7) we have to add to the dimension we’ve been talking about, the very important dimension of sacrifice of the self, putting the self aside or even sacrificing your life. In a slightly different way, Taylor points to another dimension of kenosis which is being able to get out of our own preoccupation and really see. The Bible seems to be telling us it is that seeing by God – in that way – that can actually call up the best that we have in us. Taylor said he always interpreted Genesis’s “And God saw that it was good” and the Beatitudes as performative, not descriptive. So God seeing something as good is performative; and, in Christ’s case, is something performative as well. We have, Taylor says, a great hunger in the world for being able to see like that (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=152Ng0qYRIM; accessed 12/8/2015).

So it seems possible and worth considering that Taylor’s emphasis on recognition in much of his work – with reference to “the politics of recognition” and the dialogical nature of the human condition, which ensures that in defin-ing my own identity I have to do it in conversation with others – is partly rooted in these religious and moral sources, among others – SCP.

24 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) most influential essays include The Persian Letters (1721), Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of their Decline (1734) and The Spirit of the Laws (1748). 

25 “La nature de l’honneur est de demander des préférences et des distinctions.” Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des Lois, Livre III, chapter vii.

26 In her “Introduction” to Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” 1992, p. 7), editor and Princeton Univer-sity Professor of Politics Amy Gutmann writes:

The unique, self-creating, and creative conception of human beings is not to be confused with a pic-ture of ‘atomistic’ individuals creating their identities de novo and pursuing their ends independently of each other. Part of the uniqueness of individuals results from the ways in which they integrate, re-flect upon, and modify their own cultural heritage and that of other people with whom they come into contact. Human identity is created, as Taylor puts it, dialogically, in response to our relations, includ-ing our actual dialogues, with others. The dichotomy posed by some political theorists between atom-istic and socially constructed individuals is a false one….

27 The French philosopher Jacque Derrida (1930-2004) was an Algerian Sephardic Jew who founded “deconstruction,” a way of applying deep, critical thought to literary and philosophical texts and political institutions. He reconceived the notion of difference toward the ends of preventing violence and rendering justice. He is the author of many books in-cluding these three from 1967: Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology. During the 1960s, he taught at the École Normale. From 1983 to 2004, he served as “Director of Studies” in “Philosophical Institu-tions” at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He also taught at several American universities in-cluding Yale and the University of California, Irvine (Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/#LifWor; ac-cessed 12/18/2015). The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is associated with 20th Century structuralist and post-structuralist intellectual movements. He has had a strong influence not only on philosophy but also the humanities and the social sciences. In 1969, he was elected to the prestigious Collège de France, where he was Pro-fessor of the History of Systems of Thought until his death. He was politically engaged in prison reform and agitated on behalf of homosexuals and other marginalized groups. His books dealt with huge themes such as the history of madness and medicine, the order of things, from archaeology to genealogy, discipline and punishment, and the history of sex in the ancient and modern worlds. His books include History of Madness (1961, English: 2006); The Birth of the Clinic (1963, English: 1973); The Order of Things (1966, English: 1973); Discipline and Punish (1975, English: 1977); and, History of Sexuality (3 volumes, 1976, Introduction, Uses of Pleasure, and Care of the Self, English: 1988-90) (Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/; accessed 12/18/2015).

28 Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (1876-1944) wrote the 1909 Futurist Manifesto, which re-jected the past and celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth, and industry and advocated the modernization and cul-tural rejuvenation of Italy. Largely an Italian phenomenon, the Futurists, an artistic and social movement, had parallels in Russia and England. Although it had some influence on Art Deco, Surrealism and Dada, the movement ended with its founder’s death in 1944, though the emphases on youth, speed, power, and technology still find expression in much of modern commercial cinema and culture, for example, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. French dramatist, poet, essayist, and actor Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is a major figure in 20th Century theatre and the European avant-garde. He advo-cated what he called a “Theatre of Cruelty,” which in part meant not exclusively sadism or causing pain but a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality, a cruelty “identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid” (Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley), Penguin, 1968, p.66). His work exerted an influence on the Theatre of the Absurd, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and the poet Allen Ginzberg among others. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Artaud; accessed 12/18/2015)

29 To get a better sense of the meaning of “iron cage,” it might help to quote the paragraph in which the term appears. At the end of his classic essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the great German sociologist and political economist Max Weber (1864-1920) wrote,

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron

cage” (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The Relationships Between Re-ligion and the Economic and Social Life in Modern Culture. With an Introduction by Anthony Gid-dens. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904-05, 1958, 1976, p. 181).

30 With reference to “the discussion of enframing,” in note 55 of The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), Taylor says he obvi-ously borrows a lot from Martin Heidegger, especially “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Con-cerning Technology and Other Essays,” trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland Publishers, 1977. See also “In-escapable Frameworks,” the opening chapter in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989; and, “The Immanent Frame,” chapter 15 in A Secular Age (2007).

31 See Part III, “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life,” of Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 1989, pp. 211-302.

32 In this regard Charles Taylor cites, in The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), Patricia Benner and Judith Wrubel’s book, The Primacy of Caring: Stress and Coping in Health and Illness. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1989. See also Su-san S. Phillips and Patricia Benner, eds., The Crisis of Care: Affirming and Restoring Caring Practices in the Helping Professions. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995. Essays in the latter book include Robert N. Bel-lah’s “Understanding Caring in Contemporary America” as well as Taylor’s “Philosophical Reflections on Caring Prac-tices.”