I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
This week I’ve been wondering about whether my daily activities — trading options and walking dogs mostly — could be considered authentic. And could they be considered meaningful? Do they have value to the world beyond my enjoyment of them?
Charles Taylor on a new ethics of authenticity
In his book The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the ideal of authenticity has been corrupted in modern life to mean merely developing one’s individualism and optimizing the self for personal gain. He argues that true authenticity 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), and responsiveness (orienting yourself to meaning that transcends your personal whims and preferences).
Taylor believed that there exist objective horizons of significance which allow us to escape our individual concerns and connect to what matters to humanity beyond our singular selves. Taylor’s version of authenticity grounds itself in morality and rejects moral subjectivism. His work aligns with that of British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, which also rejected the idea that morality and authenticity are unique to individuals. Murdoch proposed that morality requires unselfing, putting down egoistic concerns and fantasies that obscure one’s experience of reality, especially the reality of others.
In his 1999 book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Taylor cites Murdoch and credits her with bringing back the idea that the Good is something we can recognize outside of ourselves. We don’t merely project our idea of it onto a neutral world. While Murdoch proposed that you should look at the world and its denizens with attention and love, dropping fantasies that obscure them and apply your selfish concerns onto them, Taylor expanded his efforts into a historical and social project. He suggested that our ability to perceive the Good depends on the health of the society we live in. His communitarian vision suggested we should work to improve that.
What activities count as authentic? As moral?
I returned to the question of authenticity and right (moral) action recently as I contemplated my recent emergeny life focus of trading and investing. I asked myself, “Is this an acceptable way to spend my time? It feels selfish, petty because it’s pecuniary, and lacking in obvious connection to, let’s use Taylor’s term, a horizon of significance.”
But curiously, my trading and investing activities have, in fact, connected me to meaning and helped me see beyond myself to the Other and to the Good (as well as the Bad). I’ve become newly interested in history to complement my long-time study of philosophy. My readings in philosophy over the past three years of reinvention blogging brought me into contact with many European thinkers whose ideas were forged during the period before, during, and after World War II: Arendt, Heidegger (an actual Nazi), Jaspers, Levinas, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Weil. Murdoch as well. As I read their work, I found it necessary to learn more about the history of the war, to situate their ideas within a time period of tumult and terror.
And then, the U.S. and Israel launched an attack on Iran (“a little excursion” Trump called it), this after the U.S. presidential administration had essentially declared war on a U.S. city via social media. What had been a project of studying to understand philosophical thinkers turned into a project of studying to understand the world I live in now.
Trading and investing doesn’t have much meaning of its own. For me, it’s an enjoyable exercise in intellectual understanding and mathematical application (with a large dose of emotional management). But it connects me to Taylor’s horizons of significance, so it is valuable in that way. An activity need not be intrinsically meaningful to have moral meaning, and meaning important to my developing authenticity.
The week ahead
It’s my 58th birthday today! 🎂 I’m going with my dad to brunch. His birthday was yesterday. We always celebrate our birthdays with a joint event. My paternal grandmother — his mother — shared his birthday so we used to celebrate three birthdays at once, now just two.
This week I’ll be spending lots of time walking dogs. I discovered (through a scary situation that fortunately worked out ok) that I cannot walk my dog Bo and foster dog Sally together, because Sally requires all my attention. She is reactive on leash to other dogs and sometimes to people. At 65 pounds, she can really pull me around, so I have to be completely focused on what is happening and what her state of mind is so I can distract her and refocus her attention as necessary. She needs lots of walking as does my dog Bo so I’ll probably end up walking three or four miles a day across the two of them.
This week I would like to write about fostering dogs and adopting homeless animals and how that connects to the Good, as well as how it’s helping me to cultivate attention. The foster organization volunteer who sends out lists of dogs slated for euthanasia at shelters includes this quote in every email of “dogs in need”: “Saving one animal won’t change the world, but it will change the world for that one animal.” I am glad I have the resources to help homeless dogs and cats, and that’s yet another reason why managing and growing my income and retirement portfolios matter. More money means more ways I can help homeless animals.
Tomorrow, I have an optometry appointment to continue the process of figuring out what is wrong with my left eye, which can no longer be corrected to 20/20 vision. It seems to be a corneal problem, so I’m going to be having it checked out at Kaiser later in the month.
Besides that I’ll continue developing my options trading practice this week which is so far going well. It’s enjoyable and seems to suit my personality much better than buy-and-hold passive investing. Whether it will be as profitable remains to be seen.