Abstract
Authenticity, a long-established and highly valued value under other names, having received a new philosophical currency and a fresh face from Martin Heidegger's ruminations on mortality, figures prominently in Charles Taylor's account of the politics of recognition. Authenticity is encouraged by recognition, he observes, and it becomes problematic whenever recognition is denied. Resolution of the resulting tensions, he himself may have shown, requires a new balance of authenticity and diplomacy: more authenticity for some, more diplomacy from others. At any rate, authenticity, despite the confusing appearances sustained by uneven applications, seems to have gained the status of a multicultural value, even when the multicultural project appears under other names, such as interculturalism.
I hate that man like the very Gates of Death,
Who says one thing but hides another in his heart.
Homer’s Achilles
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Michel de Montaigne, Essays, III,v, “Of Some Verses of Virgil,” trans. Jacob Zeitlin (Knopf, 1936), III, 53: “I have enjoined it upon myself to dare to say all that I dare to do, and I dislike even thoughts that cannot be published. I do not think the worst of my actions and qualities so ugly as I think it ugly and base not to dare to avow them. Everyone is discreet in confession, they should be so in action. Boldness in sinning is in a measure compensated and held in check by boldness in confessing it. If a man obliged himself to tell all, he would oblige himself to do nothing on which he was constrained to keep silent.” Montaigne added the last sentence of this quotation to the third edition of his Essays in 1592, seeming to reverse the relation between saying and doing suggested by the earlier remarks. The term “authenticity” is now often associated with Martin Heidegger’s discussion of average everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) and what everyone (das Man) does and says (in Being and Time, II, i–v). Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) is the modulation of one’s inescapably social being that results from the anxious awareness of the finiteness of one’s existence and the resolute determination to resist absorption in the conflicting and distracting demands of the public world, with its commonly accepted and thoughtlessly enforced manners and morals (Sitten). A deeper awareness of the temporality of existence frees the authentic individual to stand aside, as it were, from the turbulence of the situation into which he has fallen in order to respond to it with greater steadiness and clarity. Authenticity thus suggests an “owned” and coherent expression of whatever can be called truly one’s own.
- 2.
Cf. Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford, 1958), 41, where Berlin equates equality of recognition with being treated as “a responsible agent, whose will is taken into consideration as being entitled to this, even if I am attacked and persecuted for being what I am, or choosing as I do. This is a hankering after status and recognition … I desire to be understood and recognized, even if this means to be unpopular and disliked.” Being recognized as unlikable and having one’s responsible agency acknowledged by a fine or a term in prison is not, of course, the kind of recognition that seems to be of interest to Taylor.
- 3.
Taylor, “Atomism,” in Philosophical Papers (Cambridge University Press, 1985), II, 205. Given Taylor’s interest in only the conformist alternative to authenticity (as inner harmony), not the antinomian one, we can put aside some fanciful possibilities, such as honestly self-revealing but seriously misguided radicals, racists, or paedophiles whose foolish demands for recognition would collide with the reluctance of others to provide it. We need to consider only those who are deeply, solidly conventional, such a Woody Allen’s Zelig: “Kids! You gotta be yourself. You know, you can’t act like anyone else, just because you think they have the answers and you don’t. You have to be your own man and learn to speak up and say what’s on your mind.”
- 4.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chaps. 3 and 4. Cf. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 30n7: “John Stuart Mill was influenced by this Romantic current of thought when he made something like the ideal of authenticity the basis for one of his most powerful arguments in On Liberty.”
- 5.
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991) and The Ethic of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1991). Henceforth, references to this source will be parenthetical using the abbreviation MM. (The pagination is identical in the Canadian and American editions of this book.) There is a still more detailed discussion, under the rubric of “expressivism,” in Taylor’s magisterial Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1989). The simple change of terminology, from expressivism to authenticity, may have kept some readers from seeing the considerable overlaps among Taylor’s intellectual-historical and philosophical-political publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
- 6.
At this point, he refers readers to his 600-page history of modern moral philosophy: “I have tried to develop a much fuller account of this as well as other strands of the modern identity in Sources of the Self.” Those unable to spare the time to read and digest (i.e., re-read) such a thorough and scholarly explanation—or even to do the preliminary reading of Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Goethe, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Schelling, Schiller, Shaftesbury, and others needed to follow Taylor’s intricate exposition, which has fascinated a generation of dedicated readers—may perhaps find a satisfactory substitute in the short course offered by Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (Routledge, 2004), which takes its bearings from some more familiar landmarks, such as Oprah Winfrey and Dr Phil, and which makes clear that authenticity, properly understood as a truly commendable higher value, is just the earnest engagement in public deliberation that fits a person to be an ideal citizen in the kind of democratic society we have, which can thrive, Guignon says, “only if it is made up of people who use their best judgement and discernment to identify what to them is truly worth pursuing and are willing to stand up for what they believe in,” because “a viable free and democratic society is possible only if there is a populace committed to discovering the truth through the unrestricted exchange of ideas” (159–160). According to Guignon, a society such as ours requires “people to get clear about what their own deliberations lead them to believe and … honestly and fully [to] express what they conclude in public space” (160). For an even lighter treatment of the theme, but with some shrewder observations about the uses of authenticity in contemporary democratic politics, see Andrew Potter, The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010).
- 7.
If the moral law or moral values are not grounded in the will of God as revealed in scripture, and if we can no longer believe in any ethereal realm of Platonic forms with a knowable “form of the good” to guide our choices, where will we say that our laws and values come from? What is their basis? What other source could they possibly have but our own selves, individually or collectively? The “individual” option, individuality or authenticity, has become one of our highest values because we find the “collective” alternative—Vox populi vox Dei—repellent.
- 8.
Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future, 275, which provides the commission’s terms of reference. Unofficially, of course, their task was to take a dangerous issue off the agenda of an upcoming election, by giving Quebecers a safe place to blow off some steam. The election was held in March 2007, and it returned the Liberal government to power with a minority of seats in the National Assembly, seven months before the two professors launched their public hearings and 14 months before they submitted their final report, to clarify the nature of the problem that had led the politicians to create the Bouchard-Taylor Commission.
- 9.
Cf. Jean-François Lisée, Nous (Boréal, 2007), 97–98: “De ‘Canayens’ à ‘Canadiens français’, puis à ‘Québécois’, terms d’abord perçu comme ne s’appliquant qu’aux seuls habitants de la ville de Québec, puis, à la fin des années 60, aux indépendantistes, puis aux seuls francophones, puis à l’ensemble des résidants du Québec, toutes origines ethniques et linguistiques confondues. Cette dernière étape est la plus difficile à franchir, et les allophones utilisent aujourd’hui régulièrement le terme ‘Québécois’ pour dire ‘francophones de souche’. Pour parler, donc, de Nous. Mais Nous, nous voulons que le terme ‘Québécois’ ne s’applique pas qu’à Nous les francophones, mais à Nous tous, citoyens du Québec.” Lisée’s shrewd analysis of the intricacies and ambiguities of ethnopolitical nomenclature in Quebec applies as well to “Canadians” in English Canada.
- 10.
Specifically, Bouchard and Taylor recommended that the government adopt “an official text” (R 129) that would “better establish interculturalism as a model that prevails over intercultural relations in Quebec” (R 269). This text, which would “enshrine” a definition of interculturalism, they thought could be “a statute, a policy statement, or a declaration,” but whatever its legal form, the crucial point in their view was that there be consensus on its contents, and therefore they recommended that it be developed in a process that would include public consultation and that would be capped by a vote in the National Assembly. The result would presumably be something that could be laid alongside Trudeau’s 1971 statement instituting official Canadian multiculturalism, showing their equal status while clarifying the important differences between them. Bouchard and Taylor declined, however, to provide a first draft of such a significant text, evidently regarding it as beyond the competence of academic experts (R 118ff.).
- 11.
It is unclear whether Bouchard and Taylor thought that power was speaking truth to knowledge (and that they should therefore accept the correction) when, minutes after they had presented their final report to the waiting media, the Members of Quebec’s National Assembly voted unanimously to maintain a crucifix on the wall above the Speaker’s chair, dramatically repudiating one of the clearest of their experts’ specific recommendations, that “the crucifix … be relocated in the Parliament building in a place that emphasizes its meaning from the standpoint of heritage” (R 271). The MNAs no doubt thought they were in fact emphasizing its meaning from the standpoint of heritage when they voted to keep it where it had been since 1936.
- 12.
Cf. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1972), 2. Another relevant model of authenticity could be Shakespeare’s Polonius, who seems to suggest, when giving fatherly advice to Laertes, that his craftiness has always served only his own most important core values: “This above all, to thine own self be true,” Hamlet, I, iii, 76. Molière’s Tartuffe, who is so moved by the beauty of Elmire that he confesses the shallowness of his own piety (“L’amour qui nous attache aux beautés éternelles/N’étouffe pas en nous l’amour des temporelles.” Tartuffe, III, iii, 933–934), might also serve to illustrate its meaning. And could Callicles do so as well?
- 13.
It seemed from the terms of reference of the CCPARDC that it was originally meant to address all the questions of cultural accommodation in Quebec, that is, not just the ones posed by Quebec’s recent immigrants, especially those from the Middle East and North Africa, but also by the various First Nations within its borders. Given the delicacy of the problem of integrating aboriginal cultures and their territories into a modern, forward-looking Quebec, the two experts formally requested and were formally granted permission to put aside this large and treacherous part of the overall problem of accommodating diverse cultures.
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Forbes, H.D. (2019). Ethical Authenticity. In: Multiculturalism in Canada. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19835-0_7
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