The Ethics of Authenticity

Who are you? Where do you stand on [fill in the blank]? Are you for A or B?

No, it’s almost never put in those words. But it might as well be.

Almost every day I am given some form of two alternative stances that, if I don’t outright despise, I cannot simply choose between. Nor—to step upon the ol’ soapbox—can I aim to hold them in some (harmony-implying-but-ultimately-bullshit) “tension.” And though I do, on some rare occasions, consider myself a “centrist,” I never actually think of myself as occupying some average-of-the-whole or some equidistant space amid the clamoring noise-makers. Well, that last one might be accurate, but only because it describes how I feel whenever I read the news or hear about the latest imperative fear. That is to say, the experience of being stuck in the middle is descriptive and sad, not hopeful and prescriptive—and I want prescription!

Not only do I want some real prescription for life, I need it. It’s quite difficult to figure out “who you are” or “where you stand” when much of the time all you can tell is what you are not and where you do not stand. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s enough just to know what to say “no” to. But “authenticity,” however anyone understands it, requires more.

I was looking for a quote from Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity and decided to just reread the book. I think the first time I read it, I was reading for an objective knowledge (and by “objective knowledge” I mean “critique”) of the “culture of authenticity.” This time, I was reading it just for me—always a better way to read!—partly to take a look at my own “atomism” and “fragmentation,” of which there is plenty.

Here’s the line I was looking for:

We are expected to develop our own opinions, outlook, stances to things, to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, such as the definition of our identity. We define this always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us. And even when we outgrow some of the latter—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.

I happen to love the reality, the many implications, of that statement. For all its frustrations, I love the entangled and entangling reality of life. I love that authenticity is hard to define, that it can be good or bad. I love that trying to chase authenticity is almost always self-defeating, but that if you stop trying so hard you might find it where you least expect. Or, as C.S. Lewis put it, “if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed.”

If authenticity reflects the question “who am I?”, then the ethic of authenticity seems to reflects that question as we are meant to ask it of ourselves. Like most books that address widely entrenched notions and beliefs, the resolution it points toward is far from being clearly laid out. But the description, diagnosis, and general way forward are, I think, exactly right. (And the book is no less relevant for being over 30 years old!) The overarching warning Taylor repeats is quite simple: don’t be shaped or confused by two mutually-condemning forces. When it comes to “authenticity,” to “being true to oneself,” we should understand it as a good that is abused, and to join either the “boosters” or the “knockers,” as Taylor puts it, will help no one. We need to find better ground to stand on:

. . . not in a middle ground so much as on a completely different ground. I suggest that in this matter we look not for the Trend, whatever it is, up or down, but that we break with our temptation to discern irreversible trends, and see that there is a struggle here, whose outcome is continually up for grabs.

That last part seems very important, and my growing, entrenching cynicism needs to hear it. This is not simply a third viewpoint, a perch from which to watch the world burn or to wait while the two sides (of any given debate) eat each other alive. In fact, this “completely different ground” is a little deceptively described. It is an opportunity for an involved presence, one that is unwilling to concede any permanent losses but, instead, looks for a persistence of possibility—within the space being criticized! Much like James Davison Hunter’s “faithful presence,” rather than offering pessimistic critique, and better even than an impassioned contention for the truth, Taylor thinks what we need is to “enter sympathetically into its animating ideal and to try to show what it really requires.” (What does this remind me of…?)

The opposite, as Gilbert Meilaender once put it, though on a more sentimental level, would be “a failure to love that which we criticize and seek to change.”

And so I’m back to the middle after all. But I’m still not thinking of my being “in the middle” as defined by some midpoint. No, I am, or want to be, “in the middle” as defined by being among.

The problem, of course, is that most of this is really hard, long-suffering work. It takes a lot of faith to see a persistence of possibility, even in myself alone. Here, or anywhere that matters, there are no shortcuts allowed, and no final victories either. Instead, “we understand [our predicament] as open to contestation, as a locus of probably unending struggle.”

It may not sound very cheery, but given the helpless alternative, I’m hearing it today as good and hopeful news, and as an obligation to pursue it.

democratic obligations

Two quotes against the reign of pragmatic politics.

Marilynne Robinson:

I find that people are moved by good language. I think that one of the things that is an affliction, and has been increasingly an affliction, is that we condescend to one another. . . . When Abraham Lincoln, a virtually totally uneducated man, wanted to speak to people, he did it with a degree of refinement that is extraordinary by an standard, because he had that kind of respect for the kind of people he was speaking to. [People in politics today], I’m afraid, they speak in this kind of minimized language that you would use to sell a defective product. . . . To whom are we condescending? How have we allowed ourselves to have such negative assumptions about people in general. Democracy cannot survive if we continue to condescend at that level, where we don’t give good information, we don’t articulate things with the sensitivity that they require to be articulated if they are to be meaning at all. […]

[You cannot free and enlarge the people around you] if you have contempt for people in general, you have no articulated aspiration for their well-being, no great interest in protecting dignity that you really don’t assign them in the first place.

Charles Taylor:

Now if something like this is true, then it matters to be able to say it. For then one has something to say, in all reason, to the people who invest their lives in these deviant forms [of individualism]. And this may make a difference to their lives. Some of these things may be heard. Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of an ideal that people are already living by more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion.

messy imaginaries

Taylor again:

Where the [“progressive”] Wendovers think their judgments are unproblematically scientific and rational, many of the orthodox of the day saw this kind of apostasy in equally stark terms as the simple fruit of pride. It is related that [Mary Augusta] Ward attended the first set of Bampton Lectures in 1881, at which the speaker, himself a nephew of Wordsworth, explained the abandonment of orthodox Christianity by a number of intellectual faults, including indolence, coldness, recklessness, pride, and avarice. It was this attack which spurred Mrs. Ward to write her novel [Robert Elsmere], which would show that this was a caricature. And indeed, what emerges from the novel is that good faith and honesty can be found on all sides of this controversy, even though the story awards the ultimate palm for courage and integrity to [the “Arnoldian”] Robert.

This is a place where I might clarify further my own understanding of these conversions and deconversions. I cannot accept the Whiggish master narrative that they are determined by clear reason. They look rational within a certain framework, indeed, but this framework attracts us for a host of reasons, including ethical ones. Among the ethical attractions is certainly that of the free, invulnerable, disengaged agent. Being one of these is something in which moderns take a certain pride. But to leap from this to saying, simply, that the move from orthodoxy is actuated by pride is quite invalid. In some cases, undoubtedly. But what we’re dealing with in talking of these frameworks is complex environing backgrounds of our thought and action, which impinge on our lives in a host of ways. In one respect, yes, this modern sense of impersonal orders can give us a sense of our dignity as free agents. But it also offers us powerful ideals, of honesty and integrity, as well as of benevolence and solidarity, just to name some of the most prominent. In the whole aetiological story of how these frameworks arose, pride has its place. But in individual cases, the stories can be as many and as different as there are people who inhabit them. In some cases, for a variety of reasons, the sense of an alternative was so far off the screen, that the principal response was determined by the ideals: say, honesty, integrity, and a sense of the human potential for moral ascent. This is what one sees with T. H. Green; and this is what Mrs. Ward shows us in her protagonist.

We are in fact all acting, thinking, and feeling out of backgrounds and frameworks which we do not fully understand. To ascribe total personal responsibility to us for these is to want to leap out of the human condition. At the same time, no background leaves us utterly without room for movement and change. The realities of human life are messier than is dreamed of either by dogmatic rationalists, or in the manichean rigidities of embattled orthodoxy.

muffled resonances

Charles Taylor:

To get farther with this, and bring out more what it involves, we have to venture on some phenomenology, and this is always hazardous. How to describe this sense? Perhaps in terms like these: our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.

This is the kind of lack which can show up with adolescence, and be the origin of an identity crisis. But it can also show up later, as the basis of a “mid-life crisis”, where what previously satisfied us, gave us a sense of solidity, seems not really to match up, not to deserve what we put into it. The things which mattered up to now fail.

This is just an attempt to give some shape to a general malaise, and I recognize how questionable it is, and how many other descriptions could have been offered here. But the malaise also takes a number of more definite forms, in terms of defined issues, or felt lacks.

One way of framing this issue is in terms of “the meaning of life”, Luc Ferry’s “le sens du sens”, the basic point which gives real significance to our lives. Almost every action of ours has a point; we’re trying to get to work, or to find a place to buy a bottle of milk after hours. But we can stop and ask why we’re doing these things, and that points us beyond to the significance of these significances. The issue may arise for us in a crisis, where we feel that what has been orienting our life up to now lacks real value, weight. So a successful doctor may desert a highly paid and technically demanding position, and go off with Médecins Sans Frontières to Africa, with a sense that this is really significant. A crucial feature of the malaise of immanence is the sense that all these answers are fragile, or uncertain; that a moment may come, where we no longer feel that our chosen path is compelling, or cannot justify it to ourselves or others. There is a fragility of meaning, analogous to the existential fragility we always live with: that suddenly an accident, earthquake, flood, a fatal disease, some terrible betrayal, may jolt us off our path of life, definitively and without return. Only the fragility that I am talking about concerns the significance of it all; the path is still open, possible, supported by circumstances, the doubt concerns its worth.