Episode 239 - Transcript
So the philosopher Charles Taylor once said that authenticity… is the moral ideal of the modern world. And we all kinda know what he MEANS when he says this…because we can just look around us… and listen to what a lot of people SAY in the modern world.
BE yourself, they say! Which means FIRST of all: find out who you are. DEEP down INSIDE.
Then figure out what kind of PERSON you want to be.
And then… find a way to EXPRESS yourself, out there in the world in an authentic way, WHATEVER that is.
Could be a bumper sticker on your car, REALLY let people know who you are and kinda things you and your car CARE about. Could be just speaking your mind and making sure that what you say is a TRUE reflection of YOU, definitely don’t want to be saying stuff just because someone ELSE gave you the idea.
People SAY these things about how IMPORTANT it is to be authentic…and it’s often seen as WISDOM, about life…they’ll even POST these things on social media and people LIKE it: in fact, whether or not someone’s an AUTHENTIC person…is how a lot of people determine whether or not someone’s a GOOD person.
Again, authenticity becomes the moral ideal of the modern world.
But why are there so many OTHER people who will say… that THINKING like this…is just a poorly disguised brand of NARCISSISM, that POLLUTES how modern people SEE themselves. Why do people like Byung Chul Han say that authenticity, as MOST EXPERIENCE it these days, is just a neoliberal SALES pitch designed to get you HYPER FOCUSED on yourself… like you’re some kind of PRODUCT that needs to increase its market value.
Is authenticity, just a trap…that really has nothing to DO with whether you’re a good person or not?
Charles Taylor, is the philosopher we’re talking about today…and for whatever it’s worth: HE wouldn’t be as pessimistic as these LAST couple takes I just gave. Should be said: he DOES think, a lot of modern people MISUNDERSTAND real authenticity and what it takes to GET there. But he’s actually a FAN of authenticity if it’s done correctly.
He thinks the fact we FOCUS on it so much these days is evidence of REAL moral PROGRESS that’s been made over the years. But he thinks it’s CRITICAL, for ANYONE LIVING today that wants to NOT misunderstand it…to know WHY and HOW authenticity, BECAME a thing that we VALUE in the western world as one of our primary VIRTUES.
And if you wanted to DO THAT…you’d NEED to do what he does in his 1989 book titled Sources of the Self…you’d have to do a genealogy, OF the modern self.
What that MEANS is that Charles Taylor is going to trace back through KEY moments in history… and he’s gonna consider the ASSUMPTIONS people are making at EACH POINT in history, about the SELF.
How do they view who and what they are. HOW do they RELATE to the THINGS AROUND them…these are IMPORTANT assumptions that he thinks will REVEAL A LOT to someone… about WHY people view themselves SPECIFICALLY the way they do in OUR time.
Cause it’s interesting…authenticity…has not always been the main FOCUS for people.
You go back FAR enough, say back 2500 years to ancient Athens where he STARTS the book… around the time of Plato and Socrates…Plato never woke up a DAY in his LIFE and said oh boy, another day ahead of me. I sure hope I can authentically EXPRESS who I am DEEP down INSIDE today!
No, PEOPLE from around this time whether it was Plato or just your average Athenian…they VIEWED the self and its relationship to morality, very DIFFERENT than a modern person does.
As Charles Taylor says: they viewed themselves LESS in terms of being an individual…and MORE in terms of the ROLES they served…IN some higher ORDER that was going on.
More accurately: it was how they fit into MULTIPLE, different, higher orders that they were a part of simultaneously, and their ROLE in these higher orders made UP their sense of SELF.
Now what EVIDENCE do we HAVE for this? I mean, how do YOU know, people didn’t wake up and feel EXACTLY like I do, a lone INDIVIDUAL, I’ll do whatever I WANNA do.
Well look, people back then obviously understood the CONCEPT of being an individual. People signed CONTRACTS as individuals in ancient Athens. They owned private property. If they got in trouble… they’d be PROSECUTED as an individual. They UNDERSTOOD it.
But again the PRIMARY way they would’ve thought of themselves was in terms of their ROLE in something BIGGER. For example…
even just INTRODUCING yourself back then…you would NAME yourself…but then you’d DO it in relation to your family or your genos or your community. We’ve SEEN this sort of thing before: I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, this is Gimli son of Gloin, this is Legolas of the Woodland Realm. We are FRIENDS of Rohan. And the point is even LEGOLAS there, who apparently didn’t HAVE a father…EVEN HE is introduced ALWAYS in relation to the community he LIVES in.
And in REAL life this would’ve sounded very similar in ancient Athens. You’d hear someone say Hi, I’m Demosthenes, son of Demosthenes, of Paiania (pay-uh-knee-uh). That’s how you might introduce yourself where even at the most BASIC LEVEL… I DESCRIBE myself in terms of the relationships I play a ROLE in.
MORE than that, whenever you left the house, and you showed up to do something in a PUBLIC spirit…whether that’s paying taxes, jury duty, going to war, WHATEVER it was: you DID all of this as a REPRESENTATIVE of the CIVIC GROUPS that you were a PART of back then…for example every citizen of Athens is enrolled in a deme…kind of like a local district, then from THERE you might be grouped into a TRIBE, which if you went to war and did something good the TRIBE would often get the recognition for it…the POINT is it wasn’t just like, DEMOSTHENES is gonna stroll on down to city hall and lobby the GOVERNMENT for something today…you often ACTED on behalf of a civic GROUP. And the groups that you were a PART of…DETERMINED what your obligations were.
And this goes on at LARGER scales too at the level of the whole CITY. For example, it’d be common for someone to THINK of themselves in terms of the PART they play…within Athens. I am a baker they may say, I am a potter, a carpenter, a weaver, a fisherman…in other words I’m part of the fabric… that ALLOWS for Athens to BE what it is at ALL. And this ROLE I play BECOMES, one major way that I see my SELF, and how it’s linked to the world.
Very DIFFERENT than how a LOT of people feel about their jobs these days.
But EVEN higher than all THIS though…a person would ALSO usually see themselves…in relation to a larger, COSMIC order that’s going on. And for MOST people in Athens, this would be a cosmic order… that is MAINTAINED by a pantheon of GODS. The Olympian Gods.
The THINKING is if you FULFILL your roles in the world properly, you may earn FAVOR with these gods. If you choose to live immorally then the gods may punish you.
On a LARGER scale if ATHENS, COLLECTIVELY acts as a moral society, you might believe that that’s what’s responsible for the good HARVEST that your city just got. If Athens gets out of line, well you might think that’s why a big STORM just came through town and destroyed the fountain that we all get our water from. In other words: the belief is that acting morally…means your actions are ALIGNED with the cosmic order to things.
Even if you were more philosophical back then: take Plato’s philosophy, where as yet another person that’s LIVING during this time…he ALSO assumes a higher cosmic ORDER, that he’s progressively trying to discover through reason and philosophy.
Take the STOICS, familiar to us because we just TALKED about them a few episodes ago: think about what THEIR goals were around this time.
You weren’t a STOIC, because you individually have thought about it a lot, and JUSTICE and COURAGE are just the most important VALUES to me and I need to find a way to EXPRESS myself! No, you act with justice, courage, wisdom and temperance…because you believe it ALIGNS your behavior with the divine LOGOS…your ROLE is to live in ACCORDANCE with this higher, cosmic ordering principle.
So a couple things from this point in history that Charles Taylor would want us to keep our EYES on here…ONE: is that people from this time saw the SELF… MOSTLY in terms of their relationships to other people and causes BIGGER than just them…and TWO: that morality, is something OUT THERE somewhere, cosmically ordered… and that your moral IDENTITY…COMES down to how well your actions ALIGN, with that cosmic order.
Now lets continue with this story about the self, and how our ideas about it have EVOLVED over history.
And the next big CHANGE that goes on for Charles Taylor…is gonna be found in the work of St. Augustine.
See, AFTER this period we just talked about in ancient Athens, Christianity BURSTS onto the scene. And along with this new word of GOD people are following… comes a greater and greater focus that people start putting on EQUALITY, and universal DIGNITY.
Remember, back in GREEK society…there were a lot of hierarchies built in to how the GODS might TREAT people. There were CHOSEN PEOPLE, people MORE SPECIAL to the gods than OTHER people. And the RESULT of this is if you did really great THINGS in the world, if you LIVED a really moral LIFE…then the gods may FAVOR you and give you more REWARDS than they give OTHERS.
But this whole premise doesn’t really WORK… under the Christianity that St. Augustine is living through. See during HIS time: scripture says VERY CLEARLY… that EVERYBODY is wanted by God EQUALLY.
That NOBODY out there…is MORE or less WORTHY of God’s love than anybody else. And this starts to EXTEND to the idea that when you act morally, or when you carry OUT the word of god in your ACTIONS…your ENEMY…is JUST as deserving of moral treatment, as your NEIGHBOR is.
For Charles Taylor…this is a very significant MOMENT in the history of western thought…where there’s this turn INWARD by St. Augustine in his philosophy, when it comes to what constitutes the self and someone’s moral WORTH.
BECAUSE inside of EACH of us…IS this equal ability to choose to live morally or not…the focus for people over the years, is becoming LESS on the actual STUFF you do, OUT THERE in the WORLD…and MORE on how well your internal experience… is organized around LOVE and God’s will.
And of COURSE, to be CLEAR here…its not that your actions are UNimportant to people…look, everybody understands that if you’re INTERNALLY doing good things…that’s almost CERTAINLY going to lead to you doing good things out in the world.
But the POINT is for Taylor…over time people are STARTING to think that the REAL ORIGIN place of these OUTSIDE things…and thus, WHERE our fofus should be MORALLY…is, again, on the INSIDE of an individual, and whether it’s organized properly around this cosmic order.
So you can START to see the evolution going on, building from those two things we saw during the time of the Greeks.
People are STILL, VIEWING morality during this time as something OUTSIDE of them as part of a cosmic order…but now the way you ALIGN yourself with it… is something an individual PERSON, has to do internally.
Ok, well the story of the self continues. For Charles Taylor history takes us to yet ANOTHER key moment in the evolution of how we view the SELF…cause not long after Augustine…there would be ALL the massive changes that went on, during the protestant reformation of the church.
Martin Luther. His 95 theses, that later lead to major reforms that are demanded of the church.
This was a time in history where BIG CHANGES were going on in terms of what it MEANT for someone to be a Christian.
This was a time in our history that, notably for Taylor… for almost EVERYBODY, the Bible’s only available to them, in Latin. So if you were a Christian, and you wanted to STUDY the Bible or at the very least be able to read it directly for yourself outside of a SERMON you were given…well, barring very RARE EXCEPTIONS you COULDN’T do this on your own.
What this meant was that prior to the Reformation a person’s spiritual life, becomes essentially just, trusting the TRANSLATION of the Bible that’s given to them by their local priest.
AFTER the Reformation though…the ROLE that the average individual plays in their own FAITH…becomes much more pronounced.
The Bible’s translated into vernacular…people can now, on their OWN, interpret a passage and APPLY it to the events of their life. This is THE moment in our history, where it starts to become COMMON for people…to believe their faith is centered around a personal RELATIONSHIP they have with the creator of the universe.
This hasn’t always been the way people SEE things. History is starting to move in a new direction for Charles Taylor, that FEELS a lot more, democratic, you could say.
What I mean is: you know, if back in ATHENS…you could DO the right things and it was believed the gods might SMILE upon a person if they DID those things…if in the time of AUGUSTINE, someone can join a monastery, or dedicate their entire life to a religion and it’s seen by people as a HIGHER moral PATH that they’re FOLLOWING…if being MORE RELIGIOUS…used to get you MORE CREDIT and you’d be SEEN by people as a MORE, MORAL PERSON…then after the Reformation one of the MOST important changes for Charles Taylor… is going to be that “ordinary life”...you know, the life of just raising a family, going to work, helping your neighbor, ordinary things like that…if you LIVE that kind of life, AFTER the Reformation…as LONG as you do those things in a MORAL WAY that follows the dictates of the Bible…then there is nothing WORSE, ABOUT that life, than if you dedicated every SECOND of that time to the church.
Nothing is SUPERIOR in God’s eyes about being, say, a nun…versus working in the fields.
Again, hasn’t always been SEEN this way.
So NOTICE… how our idea of the self moves a LITTLE bit more away from the Greeks with this change.
Again, we STILL HAVE that cosmic ORDER where we get our idea of morality from…but NOW people are becoming much more INDIVIDUAL, in terms of how they ENGAGE with it…it’s about NOT only morally organizing yourself properly in your individual, internal experience…but NOW it’s about APPLYING that morality, TO what’s going on in your particular, ordinary LIFE.
Starting to look like something more familiar to us.
But THEN… for Charles Taylor… history COMPLICATES things again; the Enlightenment comes along as yet ANOTHER, key event in our STORY here.
And the philosopher Rene Descartes… takes this trend we’ve been seeing towards the individual…and he creates a system out of it at a level that had never been done before.
We’re talking about the mind body dualism of Descartes… that would completely change the way that many future thinkers are gonna be looking at things.
Where the ASSUMPTION is that the mind is a separate substance than the body.
What follows from that is that the natural world is a separate thing from my consciousness.
And these are assumptions that support a FEW different things that are emerging over this time period, not the LEAST of which was the modern scientific method…where one of the big PREMISES…is that we can take a step back, we can REFLECT on the natural world, and if in the NAME of science, we can get RID of all our biases and LEAVE them at the door of the laboratory…then we can LEARN things about the universe that we’ve NEVER been ABLE to before…all thanks to this intersubjective, NEUTRAL… scientific method we now use.
But what happens when this gets applied to the way we look at the SELF?
Well, for the first time ever…people start seeing the SELF…as though it's an OBJECT of scientific study. That I myself, will step back FROM myself, OBSERVE the self, and then try to draw CONCLUSIONS about what it IS in as UNBIASED a way as I possibly can.
That the self, and my mind, IS the core of my identity.
That this INNER domain is the thing that’s the MOST mine.
And that I can separate this from my body and the world to the point that I HAVE this kind of, “view from nowhere” that I can ASSESS things from neutrally.
In other words: for Charles Taylor Descartes gives us a way of looking at the self… that’s rooted in what he calls disengaged reason. And he thinks this is a HUGE EVENT…when it comes to EXPLAINING the way that people think about things TODAY.
Now real quickly I want to clear a couple things up here that I think will be worth your time.
I fully realize the last year or so of the show has been mostly episodes talking about the EXCESSES of this disengaged reason, or what’s often called instrumental reason.
Just know that in the case of Charles Taylor…he is NOT someone that sees this trend during the Enlightenment… as a moment when things starting HEADING down the wrong moral path.
HE sees this move, that Descartes and many others are TALKING about…as a REAL MOMENT of moral progress in our history. Should be said he ALSO sees the religious turn from before THAT was a moment of moral progress as WELL.
We’ll talk about ALL of this more in a bit when we get to how he thinks this HISTORY we’re talking about can help us understand the people AROUND us…but just know for right now as you’re hearing this:
He’s not PICKING SIDES in this book… as MUCH as he’s trying to do an honest genealogy of where our ideas of the self have COME from.
Now ANOTHER thing to note here that seems worth mentioning…is that when it comes to ALL of these key moments from history that Charles Taylor has been talking about…he doesn’t VIEW these moments, as though the philosopher came along and saved the day for everyone.
As though some lone, genius comes along, you know, releases some world changing theory about the self, and then everybody follows along with it because this philosopher is so SMART we gotta LISTEN to them!
No, to him, in almost every ONE of these cases we’ve mentioned: the philosopher’s just LIVING during a time… when MANY cultural changes are going on simultaneously, then that combination CAUSES people’s thinking to SHIFT in a particular way…and any PHILOSOPHER we’re talking about…is just someone crystallizing the SPIRIT of their time… in a way that’s very detailed… and usually stated by them in a pretty memorable way.
So to Taylor, a philosopher ARTICULATES, MOVEMENTS in culture that are already going ON…but it’s ALSO important to note that in some cases…the way a philosopher describes things will be SO well stated…that it influences FUTURE thinkers that BEGIN their work from that set of assumptions. Philosophers and culture really are pieces of a dialectic in some ways.
And for whatever it’s worth: Descartes, is NO DOUBT one of these cases.
Because not long AFTER he PRESENTS this whole THEORY of mind body dualism…there’s ANOTHER famous thinker that comes along named John Locke.
John Locke PRESENTS an idea…that Taylor thinks gives us ANOTHER major moment in this STORY we’re telling about the history of the western self. I’m talking about his idea of the Tabula Rasa.
Locke makes the claim that we’re all born as blank slates into this world. Tabula Rasas. Meaning you aren’t BORN with any sort of pre-existing KNOWLEDGE. So who you ARE, and what you VALUE…comes down to how you organize, the stuff you’ve been EXPOSED to throughout the course of your life.
Now if that’s TRUE…and if Descartes’s right that you have this inner domain that you can observe from the outside…then if there’s something you NOTICE, about who you are that ISN’T the way you want it to BE…well you have the power to REORGANIZE your SELF… in essentially ANY WAY that you want. Any way you’re CAPABLE of at least.
And what a NEW way to be viewing the SELF that starts to emerge for people here.
You can be ANY PERSON you WANT to be… if you just organize your inner experience in the right way. Benjamin Franklin, is a pretty good example of this way of thinking. He LIVES right around the TIME of John Locke.
And an important DIFFERENCE to point out for the sake of this example: is that Benjamin Franklin…was not a Christian. When Benjamin Franklin thought about what his VALUES were and how to LIVE his life more morally…he wasn’t referencing some cosmic ORDER that he thought he had to be following…but he WAS trying, to ALIGN his behavior, with CERTAIN virtues that HE chose as important.
This is a KEY DIFFERENCE to NOTE here.
For example he’d famously say that a wise person budgets their money well…and a wise person doesn’t get drunk in public.
And his REASONING for this was again: NOT because a god TOLD him to do it…but because he CHOSE certain VIRTUES…that he thinks its WISE to ALIGN yourself with. In HIS case the virtue of independence, or as he says in his writing it’s good to be publicly USEFUL or PRUDENT.
The POINT is: notice the GIANT CHANGE that’s going ON here compared to the way we’ve always DONE things.
This idea from Locke, BUILT on top of Descartes, that we can OBSERVE our self and REORGANIZE it to become whatever person we WANT to be…well, for one that’s pretty EXCITING…I mean I have more possibilities now in terms of who I can BE…but on the OTHER hand Taylor would say…this ALSO places upon the modern person what he calls, “The Burden of Self Interpretation”.
This CHANGE from Locke is going to be the dawn of a WHOLE NEW ERA…of the personal RESPONSIBILITY we PLACE on people…for COMING UP with their moral approach to LIFE. And then ACTING on it.
What I mean is: if it USED to be that people MOSTLY saw themselves in terms of their relationships to things, and that MORALITY was something that’s GIVEN to them…then NOW a moral life…is you need to not only take an unbiased INVENTORY of yourself INSIDE this inner domain that is YOU.
But then you need to be AWARE of your shortcomings. You need to make a decision from ALL the options out there, of what KIND of person do you want to BE. THEN you need to figure out the right virtues that are going to GET you to that place. And THEN you need to actually EXECUTE on it… and LIVE by those virtues consistently every day.
In fact if at any point you’re living your life and you DON’T do any of these things…if at any point there is some weakness you have that is hurting you or other people around you…and then you’re NOT actively trying to figure out how to FIX it and LIVE in a more virtuous WAY…well, expect to be met with moral JUDGMENT from all the people AROUND you.
This is the modern BURDEN, of self-interpretation…of knowing yourself and KEEPING your self ORGANIZED… with FAR LESS of a HANDBOOK to be able to DO it, than people have ever HAD in the west before.
Now an important detail to NOTICE here… ABOUT the example of Benjamin Franklin…is that although he’s personally CHOOSING which virtues he ALIGNS himself with…virtue is STILL at this time something that’s OUTSIDE of us.
Importantly for Charles Taylor…we are STILL at this point ALIGNING ourselves with some EXTERNAL thing like independence, justice, WHATEVER it is. And to HIM this is a detail… that’s gonna end up mattering a LOT once we get to present day.
Which we’re getting close to, by the way, you can see it getting CLOSER to where we are now…but there’s still a couple more big changes that are important to include here for Taylor.
BECAUSE ADDING ON…to this modern burden of self interpretation…is gonna be what COMES out of the work of David Hume from around this same time.
See, if people are starting to think more and more in naturalistic ways…if there IS no cosmic ORDER that we ASSUME our morality is COMING from…then one of the first questions you have to answer as a philosopher that starts from that premise…is where DO our IDEAS about morality actually come from? If it’s NOT something that’s written into US or into the UNIVERSE…why does almost EVERYBODY think that… murder is wrong, for example?
And HUME’S response to this is gonna be that morality, comes from the way we FEEL. It’s not that there’s a good reason WHY murder is wrong…and then we FEEL that it’s wrong BECAUSE of that reason. It’s that we first FEEL that murder is WRONG…and then we come up with all sorts of rational arguments and religious explanations AFTER the fact to JUSTIFY that feeling.
REASON is the slave of the PASSIONS as his famous quote goes. And for Hume what this is gonna mean is that when it comes to morality: we GET our moral sentiments…from the CUSTOMS of the PEOPLE around us…and SYMPATHY that we feel for others. STILL located partially outside, shared with other people, but not WRITTEN into the universe.
Well AS this way of viewing things starts to grow in popularity…it adds even MORE weight TO that BURDEN of self-interpretation that a modern person carries around.
Cause THINK about it: IN ADDITION…to all that we had to do in light of Descartes and Locke…NOW to be a self…requires you to be in TOUCH with your own FEELINGS, in an intimate way.
NOT only now, do you need to know WHAT you’re feeling, but now you need to understand the true reasons WHY you’re FEELING it. And if you DON’T understand those…then you REALLY don’t understand YOU.
And listening to that language being USED there…consider for a second JUST how far we’ve COME in our view of the SELF…from the time of the Greeks.
But despite ALL this change we’ve SEEN so far…Charles Taylor says we still have ONE more person …that comes onto the scene here that you NEED to be able to understand the modern self…maybe one of the people MOST RESPONSIBLE of ANYONE, for the MODERN hyper focus we place on authenticity. The man’s name was Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Rousseau had a view of the self…where he said, look: sorry Hume, but society is not where we GET our understanding of morality, or the self. In fact, in the KINDS of competitive societies we live in and all the messaging it sends…THAT’S the thing that CORRUPTING people.
SOCIETY is what PREVENTS people… from KNOWING who they TRULY are UNDERNEATH.
That the self is ACTUALLY something… that exists deep down INSIDE of you, BENEATH all the NOISE and the SOCIAL expectations that TELL you who you are and how you should be FEELING about things.
Meaning that underneath the stories we’ve inherited…Rousseau believes each of us has a more NATURAL self that, ONE: we need to individually study to be able to truly understand…and TWO: the VOICE of this more natural self NEEDS to be PROTECTED, and it needs to be able to express itself IN our societies if we want to make them better…societies by the way he thinks need to be largely RESTRUCTURED, in order to ALLOW for this.
For Charles Taylor, THIS is the MOMENT…when modern AUTHENTICITY language, starts to become a way that we TALK about someone’s moral worth.
Be YOURSELF, we say! Figure out who you TRULY ARE…and don’t just SAY things because someone ELSE gave you that idea! No, BE who you are DEEP DOWN INSIDE!
Add ON to this the movement of Romanticism… which comes onto the scene shortly AFTER Rousseau does his work, and they take this view of the self that Rousseau talks about…and follow it all the way to its logical ends.
The Romantics are going to say that NOT ONLY is it TRUE, that your self is something that lies UNDERNEATH all this social CONDITIONING we receive…but they say that WHEN you DISCOVER, your self…what you ALSO DISCOVER there…is a totally unique, PERSPECTIVE and VOICE…that will ADD something to the world if it is HEARD.
Meaning it’s not JUST that society should be a place where people CAN express themselves…but that when you arrive at authenticity about who you are…you SHOULD, EXPRESS that VOICE, and leave those unique fingerprints have on the world by CREATING things, or putting BUMPER stickers on your car.
Now as you can imagine, from THIS set of premises…we’re pretty far REMOVED from a good portion of our HISTORY…where there’s some kind of cosmic ORDER that determines what is GOOD.
So if authenticity is GOOD. Then to be a GOOD person…is to be an authentic person. And if being authentic means getting in touch with ME as I TRULY am unencumbered by anyone else’s moral approach…then you can see how this is NOT very far AWAY from the idea that it often turns into in practice…that what makes something MORALLY GOOD…comes down to my subjective PREFERENCES about it.
MORALITY in other words…is not something, OUT THERE, anymore. CERTAINLY not ordained by a god and NOT existing in outside moral categories that we align ourselves with. Morality is something generated by ME, from the inside. So authenticity…becomes the moral ideal I shoot for.
So now that we’ve done all this work, TRACING the history of the self over the years…let’s talk about Charles Taylor’s work.
How does he think this knowledge of our history can help us understand people around us better, and what’s WRONG with how MANY people see authenticity and try to apply it to their life.
First of all it NEEDS to be said: NONE of these shifts in thinking that have been laid out so far…are entirely WRONG to Charles Taylor.
As I alluded to before: every ONE of these is SEEN by him as SOME kind of a move FORWARD in terms of moral progress. But he’d want to point out: that there are THREE of these that we’ve talked about today… that he thinks STILL occupy a CENTRAL place in how people THINK, and that they’re worth considering again, on their own, as a trio.
One… is the equality and universal dignity of Augustine based on a cosmic order, the more religious approach. THAT way of thinking is still very prevalent today.
Two, is the instrumental reason of the Enlightenment. CLEARLY still around us.
And three is the Romantic REACTION to that enlightenment thinking, where getting to the TRUE self is underneath, authenticity is seen as the most important value.
Now, Charles Taylor… thinks that NO, ONE of these THREE…is a perfect DEPICTION of the modern self. In FACT he thinks the FIRST thing to recognize if you want to understand PEOPLE today… is that ALL THREE of these ways of thinking, COEXIST in our world… and that MORE importantly: when it comes to how to move forward in our immediate future…none of these three are going ANYWHERE, any time soon. .
We live in a type of modern society… that’s what he calls irreconcilably multileveled. Meaning you have to ACCEPT the fact that our HISTORY is complex…and that the modern self is just GOING to BE multileveled like this during our time here.
Because if you DO that to Charles Taylor: it puts you in MUCH a better place to see that to better UNDERSTAND the modern self…is to pay attention to the INTERPLAY, BETWEEN these irreconcilable VIEWS of the self.
How they create tensions between different people, when one person leans into one of these and another person leans into another. How they create tensions… as they coexist in the mind of a SINGLE person.
See, we run into problems MOSTLY for Charles Taylor…when we mistake ONE of these views of the self…as THE WAY that people need to be thinking about it.
For example, as we mentioned at the beginning…if Byung Chul Han sees a big problem in neoliberal society and how it reduces everyone’s self to performance metrics, and data and market value…well Charles Taylor would probably AGREE that that’s a problem…and his diagnosis of the PROBLEM there would be that this is OVER INDEXING, on one of these three ways of LOOKING at human beings. In THIS case the instrumental REASON side.
Where people are reduced to just neutral cogs in a MACHINE, everything is solved for efficiency, not for meaning or the HUMANITY of the people IN the machine…and he’d probably AGREE with Han that it’s connection to OTHERS and reinstating human DIGNITY that’s part of what we sacrifice in that kind of world.
In other words: if any ONE of these three approaches…gets TOO DOMINANT in a person, or in a culture…if any ONE of these gets EXPANDED to the point that it tries to CROWD OUT the OTHER two…it will ALWAYS lead us down the road of real problems.
And IMPORTANTLY…to Charles Taylor when that happens SPECIFICALLY… with that ROMANTIC style of authenticity we just talked about…he thinks we run the risk of losing SIGHT…of what REAL authenticity requires.
His argument for this is what he lays out in his book titled The Ethics of Authenticity…and to get started on what he means: TAKE one of those statements we said before that COMES from this Romantic style of authenticity.
That saying something’s GOOD…is JUST another way of saying that it’s my subjective PREFERENCE. That ultimately each PERSON decides what’s good for them: this is MY TRUTH. A kind of moral relativism.
But Charles Taylor thinks that this is wrong. First of all it’s a totally circular argument, he thinks.
Something is good…because I THINK it’s good. And I THINK something’s good…because it’s GOOD.
But what EXACTLY, makes something GOOD? Or better or worse than anything ELSE? How can you ever rank ONE good, as MORE good than some OTHER good? It just comes down to your whims in a particular moment?
Without what he calls “strong evaluation”...if you can’t say why THIS choice is better than any OTHER choice, then you don’t really know the ACTUAL values that are driving your choice in the first place. And how can that be AUTHENTIC? Authentic to WHAT is a good question?
He says ANYBODY making moral CHOICES like this…while it may APPEAR to them that it’s just their own subjective preference…they’re OFTEN choosing based on shared moral frameworks, that they inherit from the culture AROUND them, whether they’re self AWARE that they’re DOING it or NOT.
He CALLS these moral frameworks: horizons of significance.
See, for Taylor, a meaningful choice…PRESUPPOSES a background of shared narratives, traditions…shared languages and values that we almost always make our decisions in REFERENCE to. A horizon of significance.
Kind of by the way…like ALL the different sets of ASSUMPTIONS we’ve talked about today that EVOLVED over the course of our HISTORY. Each of THESE eras lived in their OWN, horizons of significance, and we’re no DIFFERENT.
Now it’s POSSIBLE to be making moral CHOICES in your life that you THINK are just your own preferences…but this only POSSIBLE because you haven’t really THOUGHT about your preferences much…and it can SEEM to you like they just materialize out of NOWHERE.
But the MORE you look at them the more you’re REALIZE…that there is USUALLY one of these shared ideals that GROUND whatever your preference is. What you’ll ALSO notice is that in the cases where there ISN’T one of these horizons of significance… you’re usually PREFERRING what you are for shallow reasons: because an AD suggested it to me, because my guidance counselor TOLD me it was a good idea, it’s just the way I’ve always DONE things, I don’t KNOW why I do it.
In other words: CHOOSING based on PREFERENCES…WITHOUT doing the work to REALLY consider what GROUNDS those preferences…can be a way to live out your life in one of the most INAUTHENTIC ways possible.
This is why Taylor thinks authenticity is definitely a good thing that’s worth preserving…but he thinks a LOT of modern people don’t understand what it TAKES to truly be AUTHENTIC. PRETENDING you’re someone who is COMPLETELY self GENERATING every value that you ever live by is NOT authenticity, to Taylor. It’s a lack of self awareness.
And to be authentic… REQUIRES someone to understand the shared, horizons of significance, that culturally GROUND, their set of values. It requires you to make these horizons of significance, authentically YOURS. In your ACTIONS.
And CONSIDER for a second how this RE-PLACES a piece of morality…OUTSIDE of us, SHARED with other people, like we saw so OFTEN as we looked throughout history. And CONSIDER how that WHOLE premise disappeared…the SECOND we started thinking of a hidden SELF we have, as the ultimate arbiter of meaning.
This is ANOTHER example for Taylor…of one of those three, versions of the modern SELF…being TAKEN too far, to the EXCLUSION of the other two.
So on that note: we KNOW how instrumental REASON taken too far can degrade authenticity, because it turns people into machines and denies their humanity.
We know how making the SELF the ultimate source of meaning can degrade authenticity, because it denies how much of the SELF is created by our connection to others.
But how about the last of the three? The more religious approach of St. Augustine. The commitment to our self and our moral path GIVEN to us by some authority, like a God? How could THAT be taken too far?
Well to Charles Taylor, if someone leans into THAT direction too hard…then it runs the risk of cutting off one of the most IMPORTANT things we need to MAINTAIN authenticity over the years…participating in dialogue with OTHERS about the problems we face…where then that PARTICIPATION…SHAPES these horizons of significance heading into the future.
The thinking is: look the only way we’re ever going to CALIBRATE our VALUES IN REAL TIME…is if work through these tensions that are created by these voices that all coexist in the same world.
And the only way we’re going to work through TENSIONS like that…is if we don’t GO IN to every conversation trying to WIN, and SILENCE the other ways of LOOKING at it, because I have the single, CORRECT way to see things.
ANY way of VIEWING what a SELF is or what MORALITY is that is TOO STATIC. Like something written into the UNIVERSE perhaps that we have divine REVELATION about.
This may work for a period of time. You may only live long enough in one lifetime to RESENT the changes that have gone on from back in YOUR day when things were BETTER. But ANY approach to Taylor that’s based on monopolies or dogmatic RULES that are WRITTEN and will NEVER CHANGE no MATTER what HAPPENS…this approach taken too far will NEVER be able to account for how dynamic human minds are over time. The false certainty… WILL eventually fracture, and crumble as the world changes around it.
What this MEANS at the level of a society for Charles Taylor…is that we’re not DONE in this process of evolution when it comes to the self and morality…and that one of the most IMPORTANT THINGS that needs to be protected, that allows for ANY of this ongoing, calibration of values to happen at ALL…is we need to protect the BACKGROUND conditions, that allow for truly authentic individuals, to come together and have a DIALOGUE. Free speech. Due process. Individual protections and rights.
This may SEEM like basic stuff. Like the solution should be much more complicated here. But for Charles Taylor what we REALLY NEED… is people becoming MORE self-aware, which would make us MORE authentic… and more capable of PARTICIPATING, in the important conversations that will SHAPE the preferences of people to come.
Anyway, there’s way more to talk about with Charles Taylor. If anyone’s interested let me know and I’ll consider it a vote in that direction. As always thanks to the people on Patreon discussing all this stuff on the episode page, always learn from all of you.
Hope you have a good week. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
