Episode #239 ... Authenticity and the history of the self. (Charles Taylor)

Introduction

0:00Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today. So the philosopher Charles Taylor once said that authenticity is the moral ideal of the modern world. We all kind of know what he means when he says that, 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 of you.

0:30Then 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. You know, really let people know who you are and the kind of things you and your car care about. Could be just you 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

1:01and people will 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 out there 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 a product that needs to increase its market value?

1:34Is 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

2:05to know why and how authenticity became the thing 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 going to 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

2:38about why people view themselves specifically the way they do in our time.

Ancient Athens

2:42Because it's interesting, authenticity has not always been the main focus for people. You go back far enough, say back 2,500 years to ancient Athens where he starts the book. Around the time of Plato and Socrates, you know, Plato never woke up a day in his life and was like, oh, 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.

3:13As 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 that people didn't wake up and feel exactly like I do? A lone individual, I'll do whatever I want to do. Well, look, people back then obviously understood the concept of being an individual.

3:43People 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 have thought of themselves was in terms of their role in something bigger. For example, even just introducing yourself back then, you would tell your name to someone, but then you 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.

4:14We 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 have sounded very similar in ancient Athens. You'd hear someone say, Hi, I am Demosthenes, son of Demosthenes of Paeania. That's how you might introduce yourself. Or even at the most basic level, I'd describe myself in terms of the relationships I play a role in. More than that, though, whenever you left the house and you showed up to do something in a more public spirit, whether that's paying taxes, jury duty, going to war, whatever it was,

4:48you 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 deem. It's 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, you know, Demosthenes is going to stroll on down to city hall today and lobby the government for something. No, 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,

5:19at the level of the whole city. For example, it would be common for someone back then to think of themselves in terms of the part they play within Athens. I am a baker, they may say. I am a potter, or 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 myself and how it's linked to the world. Definitely 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.

5:52And for most people in Athens at this time, this would be a cosmic order that's 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, 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 your city just got. If Athens gets out of line, well, you might think that's the reason a big storm just came through town and destroyed the fountain that we all get our water from, or whatever it is.

6:22In 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 from around this time. You weren't a Stoic because you've individually thought about it a lot, and justice and courage are just the most important values to me,

6:54and 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

7:25to how will your actions align with that cosmic order.

St Augustine

7:28Okay, now let's 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 going to 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 into how these gods might be treating people. There were chosen people, people more special to the gods than other people.

7:59And the result of this is that 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 to other people. But this whole premise doesn't really work that well under the Christianity that St. Augustine's living through. See, during his time, scripture says very clearly that everybody's 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

8:31as 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 and 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 about how well your internal experience is organized around love and God's will. And of course, to be clear here,

9:01it's not that your actions are unimportant to people. Look, everybody understands that if you're internally doing good things, that's almost certainly gonna 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 focus 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,

9:32as part of a cosmic order. But now the way you align yourself with it is something an individual person has to do internally. Okay, 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.

Protestant Reformation

9:46Because not long after Augustine, there'd 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're 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,

10:16well, barring very rare exceptions, you couldn't do this on your own. What this meant is 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 at this time. 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

10:47to believe their faith is centered around a personal relationship they have with the creator of the universe. This hasn't always been the way that 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.

11:17If 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 the 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

11:48about 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.

12:19Starting to look like something more familiar to us in present day. But then, then, for Charles Taylor, history complicates things again.

Enlightenment

12:27The Enlightenment comes along as yet another one of these key events 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 really been done before. We're talking about the mind-body dualism of Descartes that would completely change the way that many future thinkers are going to be looking at things. Where the assumption is that the mind is a separate substance than the body and 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.

12:57Not the least of which though was the modern scientific method where one of the big premises there 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'd never been able to before, all of this thanks to that 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.

13:27That 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 is the most mine, and that I can separate this from my body and from 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

13:57this is a huge event when it comes to explaining the way that people think about things today. Now, real quick, I want to clear a couple things up here that I think will be worth your time. Look, I fully realize the last year or so of this show has been mostly episodes talking about the excesses of this disengaged reason, or in its method form, what's called instrumental reason. Just note that in the case of Charles Taylor, he is not someone that sees this trend during the Enlightenment as a moment when things started heading down the wrong moral path. He sees this move that Descartes and many others are talking about here as a real moment

14:28of moral progress in our history. Should be said, he also sees the religious turn from before, that was also a moment of moral progress for him. We'll talk about all this more in a bit when we get to how he thinks this history we're talking about can help us better 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 these key moments from history that Charles Taylor has been talking about,

14:59he doesn't view these moments as though it's the philosopher that 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 them because, oh, it's a philosopher. They're so smart. We got to listen to them. No, to Charles Taylor, in almost every one of these cases we mentioned, the philosopher's just living during a time when many cultural changes are going on simultaneously. That combination of things causes people's thinking to shift in a particular way and any philosopher

15:30we're talking about here is just someone that's 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. You know, philosophers and culture really are pieces of a dialectic in some ways. And for whatever it's worth, Descartes is no doubt

16:01one 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 into the world as blank slates, 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

16:31exposed to throughout the course of your life. Now, if that is true, and if Descartes 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 yourself 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

17:02of this way of thinking. He lives right around the time of John Locke. An important difference to point out here 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 referenced in 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. There's a key difference to note here. For example, he'd famously say things like, you know, a wise person budgets their money well and a wise person

17:33doesn't get drunk in public. And his reasoning for these things was again, not because God told him to do it, but because he chose certain virtues that he thinks it's 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. 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 ourself and reorganize it to become whatever kind of person we want to be. Well, for one, that's a pretty exciting thing.

18:03I 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, quote, the burden of self-interpretation, end quote. 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 own moral approach to life. And solely for the sake of not interrupting the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today. Check out the new Fuel Your Thirst game in the Racetrack app.

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20:14The trick play to the plate. Catch the Savannah Bananas and other fan-favorite teams all season long with select games streaming with ESPN on Disney+. Let's go! U.S. residents. 18 plus only. Select banana ball games available to all Disney Plus subscribers. Terms apply. And now, back to the podcast. 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 that you need to not only take an unbiased inventory

20:44of 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 you want to be then you need to figure out which virtues 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's some weakness you have that's 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,

21:15well, 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 yourself 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 this 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

21:45with some external thing like independence, justice, whatever it is. And to him, this is a detail that's going to 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 new modern burden of self-interpretation we have to work with is going to be what comes out of the work of David Hume from around this same time. See, a problem comes up. If people are starting to think more and more in naturalistic ways, if there is no cosmic order

22:16that 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? I mean, if it's not something that's written into us or into the universe, why does almost everybody think that, you know, murder is wrong, for example? Why does everybody seem to think that? And Hume's response to this is going to be that morality comes from the way we feel. It's not that there's a good reason why murder is wrong and that we feel that it's wrong because of that good reason. It's that we first feel

22:47that 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 going to 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. Notice, still located, partially outside of us, shared with other people, but not something that's written into the universe. Well, as this way of viewing things starts to grow in popularity,

23:17it adds even more weight to that burden of self-interpretation than a modern person carries around. Because think about it, in addition to all we had to do in light of Descartes and Locke's work, now to be a self requires you to be in touch with your 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 reasons, then how can you say you really understand you? Consider for a second just how far this language is from how the Greeks

23:48were talking about things. But look, despite all this change we've seen so far throughout the years, Charles Taylor says we still have one more person that comes onto the scene that you need to be able to understand if you want to understand the modern self. Maybe one of the people that's 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's not where we get our understanding of morality or the self. In fact,

24:18in the kinds of competitive societies we live in and all the messaging it sends, that's the thing that's corrupting people. Society is what's preventing 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 these 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 that each of us has a more natural self that one, we need to individually study to be able to truly understand it.

24:48And 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 people talk about someone's moral worth. Be yourself, people start to say. Figure out who you truly are deep down and don't just say things because someone else gave you that idea. No, be who you are

25:18deep down inside. Add on to this the movement of romanticism which comes onto the scene shortly after Rousseau is doing his work and they take this view of the self that Rousseau is talking about and they 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 when you discover yourself down there what you also discover there is a totally unique perspective that will add something to the world if it is heard.

25:48Meaning it's not just that society should be in a place where people can express themselves but that when you arrive at authenticity about who you are you should express that voice you have and leave those unique fingerprints on the world by creating things or speaking your mind putting bumper stickers on your car. Now as you can imagine from this set of premises here we're pretty far removed from a good portion of how our history has been where there's some cosmic order that determines what is good for us. So what kind of guidance do we have now? If authenticity is good

26:19then 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 non-existing in outside moral categories that we align ourselves with. Morality from this view is something that's

26:50generated by me from the inside so authenticity becomes the moral ideal I shoot for.

Charles Taylor's Work

26:55So 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 then try to apply it to their life? First of all it needs to be said