Charles Taylor has long been my favorite philosopher.

I think it’s because he bridges the focused, technical, epistemologically conservative style of analytic philosophy with the loose, literary, and socially ambitious style of continental philosophy. He tackles enormous subjects that analytic philosophers would never dream of attempting with a style that approaches analytical rigor, or at least an exhaustive explication.

Pro tip: Do not assign Taylor’s longer works to an undergraduate class

Taylor is best known for his three lengthy, ambitious, and astronomically erudite tomes: A Secular Age (2007), Sources of the Self (1989), and Hegel (1975).

Fun fact: Reading Taylor’s longer works can be a slog. But they go down pretty smoothly as audiobooks. Pick a series of long car rides.

I once made the maniacal mistake of assigning the most recent of these to an undergraduate class. I have since learned that, while the freedom granted to a graduate teaching assistant can be intoxicating, there are some things which should never be attempted in an undergraduate classroom. I hope my students at least learned that they can aspire to such volumes, even if it was a colossal overreach at the time.

Taylor writes short books, too

Fortunately for the aspiring philosophy professor, Taylor writes short books, too. And after the misadventure with A Secular Age, I scaled back my ambitions by a factor of ten and assigned The Ethics of Authenticity.

This much more accessible volume was originally published as an enlarged transcript of Taylor’s 1991 Massey Lectures, which were broadcast by the Candadian Broadcasting Company and published the same year as The Malaise of Modernity.

Taylor’s regular publisher, Harvard University Press later republished the volume as The Ethics of Authenticity. This was probably a shrewd move. Authenticity is something everybody wants to know about. But, as the American Democratic Party learned during the Carter administration, nobody wants to hear about malaise. If you’re looking for a political slogan, skip the malaise talk and go with “Morning in America.”

Malaises of modernity

Taylor begins with three features of contemporary culture and modernity that people experience as a loss or decline.

The first is loss of a larger sense of purpose, which Taylor links to a tendency to focus on one’s own individual life. Citing observations by Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Taylor suggests that larger moral horizons — human ideals, great causes, and spiritual hierarchies — have lost much of their former salience. What is left is a shallow moral relativism, in which the grounds for anchoring and/or criticizing one’s values is taken away. This has led to a flattening and narrowing of modern life, making it less meaningful.

The second is the disenchantment of the world and the rise of instrumental reason. Disenchantment is the loss of “magic” in the world, in which places and events had meaning independent of what we assigned to them, and where they might actually influence our own being. Instrumental reason is the kind of reasoning by which we use the the things in the world, now disenchanted and deprived of their own independent value, for our own purposes, and even for purposes that seem purely economic or mechanical and unconnected to human values at all.

The third derives from the other two and concerns how all of this affects our political life. The worry is that as people become more engaged in their own affairs, they will care less about the affairs of others and about their own systems of government. The erosion of democracy that Tocqueville warned about is perhaps now coming to pass, partly as a result of these changes.

Boosters and knockers

At the same time, there is also much to like about modernity. As Taylor observes, “We live in a world where people have the right to choose for themselves their own patter of life, to decide in conscience what convictions to espouse, to determine the shape of their lives in a whole host of ways that their ancestors couldn’t control.”

So, while there is a small but vocal group (which includes, for example, American evangelicals) whose aim appears to be to roll back modernity to a pre-modern state, there is a much larger group that would not willingly give up the freedom and self-determination that modernity sanctions. Modernity has its boosters as well as its knockers.

Even among the boosters, however, there is a sense of a tradeoff. The increase in personal freedom must be balanced against the loss of meaning and fragmentation. The question, perhaps, is how much of one to sacrifice for the sake of the other.

A better way to think about modernity

Taylor thinks that this is the wrong way to think about modernity.

Accepting the arguments of the boosters and knockers at face value obscures what he believes is a powerful ethic that lies just underneath. For what emerged along with modernity is the ideal of authenticity. Taylor’s argument is that this ideal, properly understood, could at least moderate some of the worst excesses of modernity.

There is no going back to a pre-modern state, where meanings are baked into the fabric of the world. And few of us would want to make the necessary sacrifices in personal freedom, even if it were possible. But neither do we have to merely tolerate the alienation, fragmentation, and disenchantment that have become the bane of the modern world.

The project that Taylor sketches out in this book is to retrieve and develop the ideal of authenticity, which has within it the power to reconnect us with ourselves, the planet, and each other.

An ideal that needs retrieval

The reader might well ask why, if authenticity is such a great idea, it needs retrieval in the first place. An idea with the power to restore meaning and a sense of connection to an alienated and fragmented world should not require a philosophical excavator.

And yet it does, says Taylor, partly because the moral commitments of its most likely proponents make it hard for them to put up a full throated defense. We are inarticulate about authenticity because of our commitment to value neutrality in general, which, ironically, is an expression of our commitment to authenticity.

We are, Taylor might have said, tied up in our own shoelaces.

Taylor’s foil for this argument is a bestselling book from the 1980s, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), by Allan Bloom. Bloom’s view was that an epidemic of self-centeredness and relativism had infected the minds of his college students, making them uninterested in larger issues that transcend the self. Every person has their own ‘values’, which must be respected and cannot be challenged. This view, laments Bloom, is defended not so much as an epistemological position on what can be known, but as a moral principle: A person’s values are their own concern, their own life choice, and they ought to be respected.

Bloom, along with other commentators such as Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Gilles Lipovetsky, sees this as as a worrisome development. If one’s values are voluntaristically generated out of the self and not subject to challenge, then what does morality amount to, beyond mere self-assertion?

Taylor shares these concerns but, in disagreement with Bloom, he sees a moral ideal hiding underneath. Perhaps it is hidden, even to Bloom’s students, but it is present in the sense that discovering one’s own values is not merely voluntaristic self-assertion. It is, rather, seen as a responsibility. And it must, as Taylor will argue later, be carried out in relation to values that transcend the self.

Authenticity, which is the name Taylor gives to this moral ideal, is not mere self-assertion but rather a moral calling. And if this calling is understood correctly, it implies moral integrity, transcendent values, and deep connections with other people.

An ethic that struggles to be articulated

There are problems, though.

The first problem is that authenticity is hard to articulate, even by its boosters. As Taylor puts it, “That the espousal of authenticity takes the form of a kind of soft relativism means that the vigorous defense of any moral ideal is somehow off limits.” Authenticity, which Taylor argues is at the foundation of the respect we must have for other people’s values, is swept up into the general uneasiness we feel when talking about values at all.

The second problem is the strong hold that moral subjectivism has in our culture. The prevailing belief is that moral positions are not, ultimately, grounded in reason but in views we adopt because we just happen to be drawn to them. If this is accepted, then a reasoned defense of any moral ideal can hardly get off the ground.

The third problem is a fashion for privileging social science explanations over moral and philosophical ones. So, for example, if individualism and instrumental reason have taken hold in modernity, this is to be understood less in terms of any philosophical shifts and more in terms of, for example, the effects of industrialization and social mobility.

The combination of these three problems has made the ideal of authenticity difficult to see and hard to talk about. Critics like Bloom disparage it freely, while defenders are held back by their commitments to value neutrality, moral subjectivism, and the fashion for social-science explanation.

What is needed, argues Taylor, is a work of retrieval. We need to bring this ideal out of the dark and work out its implications. The reward will be a greater understanding of our own moral commitments and a reduction in the negative features of modernity.

Where did authenticity come from?

So, how did all of this talk about authenticity get started? How did we become “authentic” in the first place? Before continuing with his argument, Taylor takes a moment to trace the roots of authenticity in Early Modern and Romantic eras.

To begin with, in the late Middle Ages, authenticity was not much of a concern. There was little social mobility, everybody had their place, and people were defined by their functions in society. There was no question of “finding oneself.” Everyone already knew who they were. And if there were any questions or doubts, the church or the magistrate would answer them posthaste.

The trouble started with Descartes

Descartes’s revolutionary idea was that one should not take truth on authority. One can and should seek out the foundations of truth for oneself. Whether Descartes cogito (“I think therefore I am.”) got him very far epistemologically was not the point. The point was shifting the epistemological responsibility from institutions and authorities to the individual. The first person to wear a “Question Authority” tee shirt was Descartes.

The first person to wear a “Question Authority” tee shirt was Descartes.

Another important figure in the development of authenticity was Locke. We all remember the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Those words come straight from Locke, whose idea it was that individuals are prior to governments and institutions. From there it is natural step to affirm the rights of individuals to their own ways of being human.

A third figure is Rousseau. Rousseau is important because he was able to articulate the idea of interiority. Morality for Rousseau included following the voice of nature within us. If we are drawn off track by pride or some outside pressure, moral salvation “comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.”

Building on Rousseau was the German philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried Herder, who articulated the idea that each person has an original way of being human. Taylor observes that this idea is now very deep in our conception of what it is to be human. “There is,” Taylor writes, “a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new important to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life. I miss what being human is for me.”

This is a powerful ideal. Being true to oneself is essential to being fully human, as we now understand it. And it seems to demand that we follow Descartes and find our own truths. Moreover, it requires us to look inside ourselves, because it is not someone else’s truths that will make our lives authentic.

So far, so good. But does this help us to say anything against moral shallowness and subjectivism?

What are the moral implications of authenticity?

Taylor promised that the ideal of authenticity contained within it implications that would require us to take seriously the sorts of moral commitments that Bloom feared had been left behind. Now it is time for him to make good on that promise.

Lacking space for a full analytic treatment, Taylor sketches out the following argument.

Starting from the ideal of authenticity itself, Taylor asks, “What are the conditions in human life of realizing an ideal of this kind? And what does the ideal properly understood call for?”

Taylor first aims to show that attempts to realize authentic self-fulfillment without regard to moral demands emanating from something other than our own desires are self-defeating. When we attempt to determine in what our originality consists, we have to take as background something that is significant, independently of the moral weight we project upon it.

For example, we cannot just decide that there is something morally significant about having 3,732 hairs on our head. Maybe that’s a magic number in some theology, but independent of that there’s nothing significant in it. We can try to claim that this number means something. But choice, by itself, does not confer value. In order for our values to have significance they must be tied to values that are independently significant.

Thus, Taylor concludes, “Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial.”

Likewise, Taylor aims to show that attempts to realize authenticity without regard to the moral demands of our ties with others lead us to the same trivial endpoint. Our identities are formed in dialog with significant others. We cannot trivialize these others without trivializing ourselves. To deny them their significance trivializes our own.

Nor can we get away with trivializing others on the social level. If we start from view that all people are equal then it can only be that they are equal in terms of something that matters. It cannot be because they have the same number of hairs on their heads. It must be because they are equal in terms of dignity, in terms of love, or reason, or something else with moral significance. We cannot hold our own lives to be morally significant without according the same significance to the lives of others.

Are we there yet?

Taylor’s argument is that if we draw out the implications of authenticity, we can answer the criticism that it amounts to nothing more than self-interest and subjectivism. To realize the ideal of authenticity, we must recognize in the world and in others a moral significance that is at least as great as what we accord to ourselves.

And if we turn around and say that we accord no great moral significance to ourselves, and therefore there is no requirement for us to accord it to others, then we have no claim to authenticity.

For those who would go one step farther and deny any claim to authenticity, Taylor has no answer. His project is not to invent morality out of thin air. It is, rather, to retrieve and articulate an ideal that most modern people already subscribe to.

At this, I think he succeeds. Most readers will be pleasantly surprised, and even excited, to learn how much the ideal of authenticity requires of us.

The adventure of authenticity

When I first taught The Ethics of Authenticity I was most interested in Taylor’s arguments against subjectivism and soft relativism. I was troubled by the same fears Bloom articulated and so I was happy to find an argument that began from an ideal that most people already accept.

What excites me now is the adventure that the ideal of authenticity opens up. To live an authentic life requires us to confront for ourselves all of the questions of morality, meaning, and values that used to be the province of culture and religion.

This is a huge shift, and one we still have not yet fully embraced. Many of us are still taking our morality meals at the corporate cafeteria. Many more of us have not yet experienced the excitement and rewards of working out meaning and morality for ourselves. Modernity has made this possible.

What has happened with modernity is not a collapse of morality, as Bloom feared, but rather a displacement of responsibility from institutions onto individuals.

Whereas, in the pre-modern era, meaning and morality were things that individuals received from their communities and religions, they are now things that individuals are expected to develop for themselves. They are not “up to us” in the sense that we can voluntaristically create them, but rather they are our responsibility in the sense that we must construct them for ourselves. It’s a lot more freedom and a lot more responsibility. And it’s a lot more exciting than merely receiving a set of rules and values from an institution or authority.

I see books as indispensable to the sort of exploration that authenticity demands of us. And that is one of the reasons why I am proud and happy to bring BookDiscovery to you. My hope is that it will be a resource for your own explorations, as you travel on your own personal journey toward authenticity.