Charles Taylor
Tidying up some items in a desk drawer, I found a tin with several old coins inside. I must have put them there years ago. This was yet another of my collections (to go with Dinky toys, stamps, first editions of Puffin books, and so on). Among them was what looked like a bronze coin: on one side was ‘1 Skilling, Danske K. M., 1771’; on the other there’s a crown above C7, interwoven with C7 reversed. It appeared to be a Danish coin: a little research led to my discovering the C7 refers to King Christian 7th of Denmark. It was reasonable shape but rather dirty, and from the appearance I’d say it was made of copper. If I wanted to know more, I could go to a numismatist to get it authenticated. I have never bothered.
When we authenticate an object, like a coin or painting, we are hoping to prove that what appears to be the case is true. In this case, authentication would prove this old, worn coin really is a shilling from Denmark, minted 250 years ago. To repeat, authentic means something is what it appears to be. That can be easy when it relates to physical objects, as there are many robust procedures to help us determine whether or not an item is what it seems. However, when we apply the term to people, it gets a little more complicated. Now the characteristic isn’t physical, but rather we are facing the issue of what it means to say a person is authentic. Is this to be oneself, to be at one with oneself, or to be truly representing oneself? How can this be checked? It’s a puzzle. Surely being oneself must be inescapable, since whenever you make a choice or act, it is you who is doing these things. However, we sometimes claim that some of our views, decisions or actions were not really our own, but rather were the result of compulsion, or direction, or based on confusion, that they are not a genuine expression of who we really are. The philosopher Bernard Williams explained authenticity as “the idea that some things are in some sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t” (quoted in Guignon’s 2004 book, On Being Authentic).
Actually, it is a little more complicated than that. Quite apart from philosophers worrying about the term, authenticity is also an ideal. This is the view we should seek to be true to ourselves in what we do and say. Charles Taylor took this a step further in talking and writing on ‘the ethics of authenticity’, publishing an article, then a book with the same title in 2004. As we become increasingly uncertain about truth and the reasons why people act in the way they do, the ethics of authenticity seem increasingly important.
Charles Taylor is Canadian. He was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and while still an undergraduate student he became well known, initiating one of the first campaigns to ban thermonuclear weapons. Soon after he became the first president of the Oxford Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was appointed the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of All Souls College. He also held the chair of Political Science and Philosophy McGill University in Montreal, where he is now a professor emeritus. Not surprisingly, he is something of a superstar. In 1995, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. In 2007 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities, with a cash award of US$1.5 million and in June 2008, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category (often referred to as the Japanese Nobel Prize). Finally, among other awards and prizes, in 2016 he was awarded the inaugural $1-million Berggruen Prize for ‘a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity’. His major works are too complex for me, but The Ethics of Authenticity was written for a broad public, and it is the text for these brief comments.
Taylor, like Harvard’s Michael Sandel, is associated with ‘communitarian’ philosophy, one which emphasizes the connection between individuals and community, and in particular is based upon the belief that to a significant degree a person’s social identity and personality are shaped by their relationships with other people. For philosophers, communitarianism usually is understood as resulting from interactions among a group of people in a given place (a geographical location), or among a community who share an interest or who share a history. It rejects both extreme individualism and extreme laissez-faire approaches, emphasising the importance of social institutions in the development of individual meaning and identity.
This was the thinking that underlay his examination of what he called The Malaise of Modernity, a lecture which was to provide the basis for The Ethics of Authenticity. What was this discomfort Taylor felt with the way we live now? For him, modernity was about a society dominated by capitalism, liberalisation, the rejection of religion, and the importance of post-industrial life. He saw it as a world in which individuals were freed from previous ideologies and agendas, but, as a result, it was also a world in which people were becoming increasingly disconnected. As he outlined in The Ethics of Authenticity, (hereafter TEA), he felt this had created three concerns.
The first was individualism. “People lost the broader vision [of what life was about] because they focussed on their individual lives … the dark side of individualism is a centring on the self, which both flattens and narrows out lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society” (TEA, page 4). As he saw it, political theorists (he mentioned Locke, Hobbes, Rawls) focussed on the self at the expense of recognising individuals develop within a social context, and rather than emphasising individualism he wanted to argue for a more realistic understanding of the ‘self’ which both includes and responds to the social background, against which choices acquire importance and meaning.
In a way that reaches back to Marx and Engels, Taylor’s second concern was with the primacy given to ‘instrumental reason’, people acting like unreflective cogs in some kind of economic machine. How was it described in The Communist Manifesto? “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value … [i]n one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” If this was what modernity had created, it also led to a loss of any sense of broader purpose, with people focussed on their own personal issues, no longer concerned with the lives of others or with the broader challenges facing wider society.
Third, and in part a consequence of individualism and instrumentalism, Taylor added a third concern, which was two-fold. In part, this was that the institutions and structures of modern society restrict choices and shape our behaviour. If we are seeing little effort being made to address climate change, he suggested this is largely because instrumental behaviour by business and government agencies narrows peoples’ scope and awareness. However, he added a second ‘malaise’, that the forces encouraging people to enjoy the satisfactions of private life can lead to a new and ‘modern’ form of despotism, which he labels ‘soft despotism’, borrowing the term from Tocqueville. This is not a government controlling through terror and oppression, but rather a government left by default left to manage paternistically and bureaucratically, leaving individuals feeling powerless in the face of the processes that have been put in place, and retreating from engagement with the public sphere.
It’s not a happy analysis, and Taylor summarises his overview bluntly: “The first fear is about what we might call the loss of meaning, the fading of moral horizons. The second concerns the eclipse of ends, in the face of rampant instrumental reason. And the third is about the loss of freedom.” (TEA, page 10). He needed to be blunt, given the original lecture led to a very short book: The Ethics of Authenticity is only 121 pages. Given this choice, Taylor chose to concentrate on the first of these three malaises, the dangers of individualism and the loss of meaning. In case this sounds as though what follows is going to be narrow and academic, I want to make it clear it isn’t. The reason is very simple. Taylor sets out to argue that authenticity is an ideal, and an ideal worth pursuing. He does so by placing authenticity between subjectivism, or doing your own thing, and external control, or being ‘imprisoned’ in a system (capitalist, technological, bureaucratic) which defines and limits us. Incidentally, using the word ‘between’ might suggest authenticity represents a kind of trade-off between individualism and society. I prefer to see it as the third vertex in a triangular relationship.
The starting point in his analysis was to explain why authenticity is an ideal. It’s an important task, because frequently today the term is used to refer to ‘being true to yourself’, that authenticity is based on an internal assessment, known to you, but not to others. For Taylor authenticity isn’t about ‘doing your own thing’. When you consider it, doing your own thing is an odd perspective. It implies that you have worked out what to do in life independently of everyone else, and that’s clearly nonsense. What we choose to do is a function of how we’ve developed our views through reasoning, arguing, or disagreements. We can’t exist in a vacuum, and our ideas are shaped through interactions with other people.
This is a never-ending process. It begins in childhood, as parents, friends and teachers offer us ideas, guidance, prohibitions and encouragement. It’s an old-fashioned term, but we learn to reason through ‘engagement with others’, whether face to face, or at a distance (through books, podcasts, television and more). It’s an ongoing process. However, as adults, we can develop in one of two directions: we can continue to engage with others and allow that dialogue to further shape and influence what is true for us; or we can close our minds to others and become solipsists, (even end up becoming hermits). Solipsism is a crazy ideal, and fortunately one I suspect is almost impossible to achieve. It represents the meaningless logical extreme of individualism. We can’t live entirely in our own heads without engaging with the world, and as soon as we do that, others push back against the views we appear to hold. Even hermits have visitors, visitors who want to learn or to try out ideas on them!
There is another extreme in this, of course. Instead of seeking subjectivism, living as a solipsist, we could decide to go to the other extreme, and have the external world determine everything we do. This is imagining a world in which we don’t think or reason, but we slavishly follow what we are programmed to do. This includes some entertaining and challenging philosophical views of the universe and how it works, but it’s another crazy extreme. We do have brains; we do make choices. Even in my over-excited moments of support for Marxist accounts of capitalism, people slaves to the machine or to technology, I have never suggested such a model over-rides and determines all areas of behaviour!
What Taylor’s essay does is force us to address possibilities outside these two extremes. In particular, he wants to rescue authenticity from being another term to describe self-centred or selfish behaviour, but rather a meaningful ethical stance. Briefly, he makes a case for retaining the concept of authenticity (and the practices associated with it) on the grounds that the original and undistorted idea of authenticity contains an important element of self-transcendence, of going beyond yourself. Despite the views of some critics, Taylor argues authenticity does not necessarily lead to aestheticism or self-indulgence. Of course, a self-indulgent version of authenticity deserves criticism. However, for Taylor authenticity is an ideal, and understanding this ‘undistorted’ version guards it against being meaningless and becoming one of the “malaises of modernity”. Self-transcendence, which he sees as a crucial element in the ideal of authenticity, is often lost from the concept, allowing authenticity to become downgraded into self-absorption, and ultimately deteriorate into isolated absurdity.
The confusion at the heart of authenticity has to with the idea of an ‘inward turning’, a rejection of the world outside and a disengagement from it. Self-determining freedom is the idea that I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me, rather than being shaped by external influences. It is a standard of freedom that obviously goes beyond what Berlin and others have called negative liberty (being free to do what I want without interference by others) because that is compatible with one’s being shaped and influenced by society and its laws of conformity. Instead, self-determining freedom demands that one break free of all such external impositions and decide for oneself alone.
Taylor argues not only is self-determining freedom not a necessary part of authenticity, but it is also counterproductive. The process of articulating an identity involves adopting a clear relationship to what is good or what is important, and that is a function of one’s membership in a community. “Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it presupposes such demands” (TEA, page 41). It can’t be up to me alone to decide what is important since this would be meaningless. He points out that versions of contemporary culture that opt for self-fulfilment without regard to others are self-defeating. Not only do we need the recognition of others to form our identities, but we also need to engage through a common vocabulary of shared value orientations. Authenticity is sustained by shared values that make up our collective horizons. To repeat, we can’t exist in a vacuum.
Taylor’s analysis could take us back to Marx and Engels, and the view that modern society is like an ‘iron cage’, capitalism and technologies shaping and controlling us. It is a powerful image. However, we aren’t just cogs in a machine. Writers, artists, activists and even people in their everyday lives still examine and critique what is happening, as has been well illustrated by the environmental movement over the past sixty years. Since Rachel Carson warned us about the ‘Silent Spring’ we have, in small yet significant ways, sought to look after our environment and fought against attempts to stop us doing so. It is not just a matter of protests, important as those are. It is also shown in the everyday choices we make, ways to push the economic system to change. When I buy a coffee, I see growing numbers bringing their own cups. You might think it trivial; I see it as an example of authentic behaviour.
A much more difficult battle is to sustain authenticity in the face of the bureaucratic state. Bureaucracies thrive on systems, processes and orderly behaviour. As Taylor foreshadowed thirty years ago, abortion reform was being successfully pursued by determined pressure groups and activists. We should learn from the way a small group has successfully thrown over a key right. We can change governments, laws and decisions that go against our interests, too, and in that sense the ethics of authenticity are central: it is about what is true and good for us, not just what is good for me alone. Taylor’s analysis reminds us authenticity is not about self-centred activities; it is about mutual agreement and understanding. I\As I see it, it is a central element of living in society, of being human.
