The Malaise of Modernity by Charles Taylor

Author:Charles Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 1991-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

VII

LA LOTTA CONTINUA

I’ve been painting a portrait of the culture of authenticity as actuated, even in its most “narcissistic” variants, by an ideal of authenticity, which properly understood condemns these variants. It is a culture that suffers from a constitutive tension. This is in contrast with the common view of the more self-centred forms of self-fulfilment as merely a product of self-indulgent egoism, or at best as actuated by an ideal no better than the least admirable practices.

Why hold my view? Well, the first reason is that it seems to me true. This ideal does seem to me still operative in our culture, and the tension seems to be there. But what are the consequences for our action if my view is true? Seeing things the way I’m proposing leads to a quite different stance towards this culture. One common stance today, especially among such critics as Bloom, Bell, and Lasch, is to look askance at the goal of self-fulfilment as somehow tainted with egoism. This can easily lead to a blanket condemnation of the culture of authenticity. On the other hand, there are those who are very much “into” this culture, for whom everything is all right as it is. The picture suggested here leads to neither of the above. It suggests that we undertake a work of retrieval, that we identify and articulate the higher ideal behind the more or less debased practices, and then criticize these practices from the standpoint of their own motivating ideal. In other words, instead of dismissing this culture altogether, or just endorsing it as it is, we ought to attempt to raise its practice by making more palpable to its participants what the ethic they subscribe to really involves.

This means engaging in a work of persuasion. This seems neither possible nor desirable, if you take either of the other standpoints, but it is the only appropriate policy on the view I’ve been defending. Any cultural field involves a struggle; people with different and incompatible views contend, criticize, and condemn each other. There is already a battle going on between the boosters and the knockers as far as the culture of authenticity is concerned. I’m suggesting that this struggle is a mistake; both sides are wrong. What we ought to be doing is fighting over the meaning of authenticity, and from the standpoint developed here, we ought to be trying to persuade people that self-fulfilment, so far from excluding unconditional relationships and moral demands beyond the self, actually requires these in some form. The struggle ought not to be over authenticity, for or against, but about it, defining its proper meaning. We ought to be trying to lift the culture back up, closer to its motivating ideal.

Of course, all this assumes three things: the three premisses that I laid out at the end of Section II: (1) that authenticity is truly an ideal worth espousing; (2) that you can establish in reason what it involves; and (3) that this kind of argument can

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