We would like now to turn to a more straightforwardly philosophical and sociological critique of
the notions of radical freedom and individual authenticity, especially as they express themselves
in this sort of popular philosophy and popular culture that characterizes the the modern
and contemporary era. We do that by looking at the important work written by Charles Taylor
called The Ethics of Authenticity. Now, I should make clear at the outset that Taylor's
work is not some sort of point-by-point refutation or engagement with Sartre's existentialism
or anything like that. Again, we're we're talking here about a sort of Zeitgeist, a
kind of popular culture set of presuppositions which has come to dominate discussion and
which has to some degree sort of crept into the background, forming a kind of template
of our thoughts rather than being pushed out to the foreground as items that we might critically
evaluate on their own.
That's sort of what Taylor is attempting to do here--offer a kind of social criticism,
a philosophical criticism of contemporary culture from within. And the way that he does
it is he he tries to identify what he calls three modern malaises, three malaises of of
modernity, three areas where he identifies us as having a kind of distinctively contemporary
mindset that we are sort of, we've been bequeathed by way of the modern and postmodern philosophical
progress that we have been tracking, and which he thinks are to some degree pernicious. These
these three areas are those he identifies as individualism, instrumental reason (by
which he means the sort of exclusive monopoly of instrumental reason), and then finally
what you might think of as a loss of civic-mindedness or the civil virtues.
So when I discuss these one by one, sort of compare them against the ethos of an earlier
age, beginning with with the first, with individualism. What's Taylor mean by individualism? Well,
as he designates it, individualism designates the idea that it's the human being, each individual
human being who must choose for themselves their own values and their own life projects.
It stands in contrast to the notion that there is some sort of external, some set of external
facts, which could provide a or or determine the the values or the the role appropriate
to a human person, irrespective of their choice. So you know, this sounds quite modern, quite
contemporary, and it stands in contrast to a sort of pre-modern way of thinking. You
know, remember that in bygone ages, you know, the ancient, medieval, and even early modern
era, the sort of idea that there was a natural order to things. There was an order within
nature, perhaps it was ordained by God and manifests itself in nature for that reason,
or perhaps it was just the structure, the necessary structure of nature itself.
But the idea was that there's a sort of chain or hierarchy of being. There are lower and
higher forms of being. There are noble and less noble, more noble and less noble ways
of being, and this sort of natural hierarchy is then reflected in, replicated in the social
hierarchy. So you know, you you find yourself with a particular nature given the sort of
creature you are, and you find yourself in a particular social role, which is supposed
to be reflective of, imitative of the natural role that you occupy, being the sort of creature
you are and being the you know, possessing the the gender that you do or or whatever
it is. Okay, so this kind of framework obviously inasmuch as the order of nature is objective,
inasmuch as the decrees of God and the ordination of God comes from without, this gives you
a sort of determinant structure within which you can find yourself, plot yourself, within
which your life has a determinate, sort of preset meaning, and in which you can discover
what your purpose or your role is supposed to be. All right, so given that there is some
objective fact of the matter about what sort of creature you are, and that, you know, the
sort of creature you are is objectively tied to some form of life that contributes to the
flourishing of that sort of creature, constitutes the goal or the purposes of that sort of creature,
and given the fact too that social hierarchies are supposed to be somehow replicative of,
you know, the the hierarchy in nature within which you find yourself, there is an externally
set set of conditions which tell you how you ought to act, what your meaning or purpose
is, and what a good life or a virtuous life amounts to for a creature, a person such as
yourself. You know, once you take all of that away, you know, and you you by the wayside
goes the idea of a kind of objective natural or divine order of things, what you're left
with then is a kind of human individualism, which says to the extent that I have meaning
or purpose, it's got to be of my own making. And then this is paired together with a kind
of classical liberal posture, which says that the right sort of social structure is gonna
be one that allows for the sort of free play of the individual to decide for themselves
how best they should pursue their own happiness as long as it is consistent with the pursuit
of happiness, chosen by the way of pursuing happiness, chosen by fellow citizens, and
so forth.
You know, in in addition to that, there is what Taylor identifies as a sort of monopoly
of instrumental reason. What's he mean by that? Well, a couple things. Remember that
according to David Hume, you know, against the mainstream philosophical tradition, Hume
argues that reason itself can't provide you with ultimate value. Reason itself, that is
to say, can't tell you what your ultimate end or goal should be. Rather, reason can
only be instrumental. It is used in order to tell you what the best means of achieving
your ends or goals are, not to tell you what the goals themselves should be. That is something
that is up to passion, is something up to--it's something non-reason, some kind of arbitrary
choice. It's not something reason can dictate for you. Now, you put that together with the
rise of, you know, utilitarian thinking in the 1800s and beyond. Then what you get is
a a kind of instrumental reason brought to the ascendancy in the form especially of a
kind of our collective attention being turned to questions of technology, scientific management,
efficiency--the the best, most quick, and able ways of achieving our aims, rather than
turning our attention to fundamental questions of what our aims and goals should be.
Finally, there is the the loss of political participation and civic-mindedness. The idea
here is this: to the extent that your personal relationships, your social relationships have
meaning, it's only because they have the meaning that you have decided to attribute to them
after you've freely entered into them, and only for as long as you've decided you should
maintain those relationships, perhaps because they they're meant to be furthering your own
life agenda. When they stop furthering that agenda, you're free to retract yourself from
them and so forth. So there's a kind of along with this individualism, this instrumental
reason monopoly, there's a kind of an inward turn where people look more and more inwardly,
away from others, towards themselves, and see themselves as more and more atomic or
isolated from other people, rather than being in any sense sort of relationally defined.
Okay, so Taylor sees all of these as being pernicious to human life. He offers a number
of critiques on a number of fronts. I want to focus on one principally, and that is the
critique that he gives of the notion of individualism as he defines it. So this by now is gonna
be a very familiar theme, right. The the individual person is supposed to create from their own
bootstraps, from their own the wellspring of of their own being, is supposed to create
for themselves what their own value, what their own meaning, what their own purpose
in life is going to be. You know, remember that because reason can't adjudicate here,
and you know, there's no sort of external structure given by nature or God or both telling
us that one form of life is objectively better or worse than another form of life, it becomes
the case that there's no way sort of rationally to ground one ultimate form of life, the choice
for one ultimate form of life or one set of values over another.
And this in part explains according to Taylor why a lot of our moral debates seem so interminable
and shrill. We recognize that on some fundamental level, everybody's choosing arbitrarily and
nobody really has a reasoned basis for the decisions that they make. Nevertheless, we're
supposed to hang on to the idea that the individual human choice and the values expressed thereby
are in a way sacrosanct. I mean, that the cardinal sins it seems of our age have to
do with not being tolerant of another person's choice of how they wish to live or what they
wish to value, no matter what it happens to be, so long of course as it doesn't harm other
people, in their own arbitrarily selected form of life or or pursuits or or what have
you.
There's a philosophical problem here that Taylor points out, and he points it out by
distinguishing between the value or meaningfulness or significance of the act of choosing a form
of life, and the value or significance or meaningfulness of the form of life chosen.
So there's supposed to be this great value in freely choosing for yourself what your
values and form of life are going to be, and this is so sacrosanct that it can't really
legitimately in a morally permissible way be questioned by anyone else. At the same
time, it's difficult to see how the life lived, you know, the form of life chosen itself can
retain the kind of significance or meaning or value that we think that it does have.
You know, this is because once you think that the meaning or value or purpose of your life
comes not from anything stable or objective or external or reasoned but is is simply a
product of one's own non-reasoned arbitrary act of choice, this cuts, undercuts the idea
of authenticity that it is supposed to support. It's it's rather like, you know, firing a
an arrow at the wall and then painting a target around it. You know, when you do that, the
very idea, the very concept of hitting the bull's-eye or of missing becomes a meaningless
concept, and so too does part of the point of archery you might think, right. So the
idea here is in this attempt to find, or, the locus of value and meaning and purpose
in an individual's free but non-reasoned and arbitrary choice of some form of life, this
actually relegates the form of life chosen to a kind of insignificant or morally content-less
result.