I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Today I’m considering Charles Taylor’s work on authenticity, The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), originally titled The Malaise of Modernity. In this brief book, Taylor traces the origin of the ideal of authenticity to the Romantic and Enlightenment traditions that emphasized individual freedom, self-determination, and inner voice. However, for Taylor, it’s not enough simply to live according to your inner demands. You must be true to your self as response to a shared moral horizon, what he calls a horizon of significance.
Taylor argues that the self is dialogical–it is formed through interaction with others and cultural horizons of significance, those frameworks that give meaning to choices. Authenticity, to Taylor, is both self-defining and morally embedded. It requires:
- Self-reflection – understanding what really matters to you
- Dialogue – allowing your interactions with others to shape your identity, and acknowledging their role in that
- Responsiveness – orienting yourself to goods that transcend your personal whims
Taylor’s goal in The Ethics of Authenticity is to rescue authenticity from relativism, and from devolving into self-indulgence and narcissism.
In the book, Taylor identifies three interrelated malaises of modernity that distort or diminish our moral and cultural life, each arising from legitimate modern ideals gone astray:
- The malaise of individualism — doing whatever feels right without reference to shared standards or responsibilities
- The malaise of instrumental reason — valuing efficiency, utility, and calculation over intrinsic worth, leading to a world where people and nature are treated as resources rather than bearers of value (think of Buber’s I-It vs I-Thou relations)
- The malaise of political disenchantment and loss of freedom — the rise of large bureaucratic states and corporate systems, justified by instrumental reasoning, creates feelings of powerlessness and disengagement. Citizens become alienated from their societies, and they retreat from democratic participation.
What is Taylor’s solution? To rearticulate the moral ideal of authenticity in order that it can resist these malaises:
- Recover moral depth — recognize that authenticity depends on connection to horizons of significance
- Reaffirm dialogue — see the self as relational, formed through recognition and communication
- Resist flattening – challenge the reduction of value to simple instrumental utility. Cultivate appreciation for intrinsic goods such as art, love, spirituality, and civic engagement.
How does Taylor’s work relate to the existentialists, of whom I am lately so fond? Taylor, like Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, has a deep concern with freedom, self-creation, and the need to resist conformity. Like Sartre, Taylor sees authenticity as requiring resistance to social roles. He agrees that you must live deliberately and reflectively, actively choosing your path rather than drifting passively along the roads of inherited norms. He shares the existentialists’ suspicion of technology rationality and mass culture, which flatten individuality.
But existentialists, especially Sartre, locate meaning only in the self’s acts of choice. Taylor rejects such moral subjectivism and what he calls “self-referential individualism.” He argues that meaning can’t just be made up. He develops a moralized version of authenticity that is not just about autonomy but about rightly ordered selfhood in relation to something beyond the self.
In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas prefigure Taylor’s project. She argues that genuine freedom isn’t merely the assertion of one’s will or the transcendence of the facticity of one’s life, but the recognition of others as free subjects. I wrote about Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity last Saturday.
Beauvoir writes, “To will oneself free is also to will others free.” She observes that we are both subject and object. We live an ethical life when we embrace this ambiguity and act in ways to affirm both our freedom and others’ capacity for self-determination. For both Taylor and Beauvoir, authenticity and moral freedom are relational, not solipsistic — not just residing in one person acting alone.
Does Taylor propose that each of us has a fixed, immutable essence, Martha Beck North Star style? No, he criticizes both Enlightenment rationalism (which saw the self as a detached, self-transparent subject) and Romantic essentialism (which treated authenticity as expressing one’s inner true nature). For Taylor, selves are formed dialogically through interaction with the world and other people. Our identities emerge through relation to others and to share moral horizons. Taylor thus promotes a kind of “becoming” version of humans rather than a static “being” view.
But he rejects the Sartrean idea that meaning is created ex nihilo (out of nothing) sheerly through choice. He argues that authentic becoming takes place in relation to horizons of significance–frameworks of value that we don’t create but rather inherit, interpret, and sometimes revise.
To Taylor, to be authentic is to discover what speaks to you as genuinely good, and then to shape your life according to that discovery. His authenticity isn’t expressivist (merely expressing a fixed individualist self) in any absolute sense. It is responsive to the world, not self-referential.
Taylor’s view of self thus blends elements of being and becoming. The self is dynamic, interptive, and historically unfolding–it is becoming. But this process unfolds within a moral ontology that exists outside ourselves–that’s the being that the becoming responds to.