The Ethics of Authenticity

Charles Taylor sets up the world in which we live as one beset by three malaises:

1. An age of narcissism – people are by and large narcissistic and self absorbed. We couch this in the language of individualism, but what we are really talking about is soft-relativism and extreme subjectivity.
2. The primacy of instrumental reasoning: our society values maximum efficiency and has largely accepted the dominion of technology – even at the expense of the holistic.
3. Fragmentation. Taylor is largely engaging the political sphere in this assessment.  He is concerned that our increased fragmentation creates space for soft-despotism, and that our slide into soft-relativism leaves our society open to political manipulation: because we are not politically united in our increasing subjectivity, we make a space for extreme rhetoric to grow and seize power in the political space we vacate.

The above contribute to a general feeling of disenchantment – the feeling that we are currently in decline as a society and that we mourn the loss of something great that once was: even if we mourn subconsciously.

Taylor spends most of “The Ethics of Authenticity” concerned with the first malaise.  He is clear in his assessment of the prevalent narcissism and search for individual meaning: the search for the authentic self is in itself not problematic, instead, we have limited the scope of our understanding so intensely as to uniformly narrow and flatten our understanding of it.  This is the real concern: we have shifted meaning in a way that constricts the nature of individualism, and have limited the sphere of the individual so much that we may neither touch nor overlap the sphere of another in their individuality. We are lonely and apart without shared meaning.

Taylor is very sharp on this issue. The insidious trick to the current age of narcissism is in the value we place on choice.  Where once “to choose” was the mechanism for increased understanding (the meaning came from the results of the action) we have ascribed meaning to the choosing itself – the act of choosing now contains the value: because I have chosen, I have defined a portion of myself for myself and it is meaningful to me. We reduce the nature of individuality to a series of binaries or dichotomies.  I choose this and not that.  I’m on this side, not on that side. On or off. Instead, Taylor champions an understanding of the self in dialogic relationship with others.  He argues that it is demonstrably false that a person is self actualizing in a vacuum. To admit to the dialogic nature of our reality is to begin to understand the true meaning of self – not in contrast to others, but in elevated relationship/conversation/community with others.

Not only must we be in dialogic relationship with one another, but we must recognize that we make choices within agreed upon “horizons of meaning”: some choices hold more weight than others; we agree on the value of some things in reference to other things. Taylor is largely discussing context when he refers to horizons of meaning: we make our choices and live our lives in a rich and complex world full of depth and layered meaning. When we open to the complexity of our world and allow this reality to influence our decision making, we inherently engage with the ethic of our authenticity. We inflate our understanding of the individual in such a way that it envelops binaries and engages our neighbor’s individuality – even overlapping with it.  To be a person in real relationship, within a rich context that recognizes shared value, is to be authentic: is to engage our ethic.

I made this image in an attempt to illustrate the above points.  The bottom of the “authenticity triangle” represents binary relationship. The bodies of the individuals in the picture are in contrasting relationship to one another: right or left, dark or light, dominant or submissive etc. The peak of the triangle is upon the overlapping or “shared head” of the subjects. This represents dialogic relationship  – an elevated understanding of self that allows for the other and results in authenticity that includes dichotomy but lifts the conversation off of the plane and away from simple contrast towards new understanding.  By pulling out further, we recognize that the individuals share horizons of meaning: their heads are inside one sweater, they are both inside an installation art project (Underground Space Station), and we can even admit that they are inside a very fine photograph: we contextualize the individuals and their relationship inside a rich environment.