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Taylor’s Concern with the Overreach of Aesthetic Self-Making in Morality 

This post explores a critical appraisal of Foucault’s ethics as aesthetic self-determination, which ultimately yields a full-orbed self-making or self-invention. A strategic starting point is with Taylor’s diagnostics of self-constitution in his book, The Malaise of Modernity (Taylor, 1991, 65-67). This chart is employed as a criteria grid to begin the critical examination of the robustness of Foucault concept of aesthetic moral self-constitution, which is lively in late modern culture today. It highlights what is present and what is excluded (the gaps); it leads us on a trajectory of opening up our awareness of the full dimensions of the self. Taylor begins by agreeing with Foucault that, in the West, one is self-consciously involved in one’s self-development, and that one’s identity, one’s spirituality, and one’s moral self are intimately linked; those dimensions are common to both philosophers. Both are also critical of a cultural over-emphasis on scientific definitions of the moral self. Their debate begins when one asks who and what else is involved in one’s self-shaping. 

In Taylor’s analysis, there are five significant criteria in the chart below, divided into categories A and B, indicators of the shape of one’s own moral self-constitution/formation. It is a chart which is respectful of the plurality of contemporary approaches. Taylor suggests that all five elements tend to be involved, in some combination, in the pursuit of an authentic life. 

Taylor’s Moral Self-Construction Diagnostics 

Category A (Creativity) 

(i) Creation and construction (as well as discovery) of the self. 

(ii) Pursuit of originality in one’s self-crafting. 

(iii) Opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what one traditionally recognizes as morality, the moral sense, or the moral order. 

Category B (Social and Communal Accountability) 

(i) Openness to horizons of significance prevents one’s self-creation from losing the background that can save it from insignificance and trivialization (self-destructive tendencies). 

(ii) Self-definition needs to be developed in dialogue with significant others, that is, fellow moral interlocutors. (Taylor, 1991, 65, 66)

This chart is rooted in Taylor’s moral ontology of the good, but contains a broad application. While admitting the strong impact of the Post-Romantic Turn in philosophy (of which Foucault is a part), Taylor understands the existence and currency of the language of self-construction. [Post-Romantic Philosophy, in the late nineteenth early twentieth century, traces from Schopenhauer to Baudelaire to Nietzsche to Foucault.] Taylor takes Foucault seriously, even though he disagrees with him on certain key emphases. Taylor does not reject the Romantic and Post-Romantic traditions out of hand, but he does bring a critical reflection to bear on them. 

Taylor believes in both objective, social, and subjective components to ethics. He does not concede the legitimacy of just any form of self-construction, a view that puts him into a significant tension with Foucault’s perspective on the self. Referring back to the chart above, Taylor’s concern with Foucault (as with other Neo-Nietzscheans) is the extreme emphasis that he places on Category A (Creativity), and the near exclusion of an emphasis on Category B (Social Accountability and Mutuality). Moreover, he contests that Foucault’s radical nominalism, which denies the possibility of self-discovery along with self-creation (Ai); his problem is with what he considers an over-emphasis or skewing/unnecessary bending of reality. Taylor has a higher stake in, puts a higher value on, certain human and natural (even moral) givens than Foucault. Taylor is not a nominalist but a falsifiable moral realist.

Furthermore, Taylor questions the merits and overall legitimacy of category Aiii, that self-constitution should automatically, by definition, involve denial of the moral rules of society—the anarchic/narcissistic stance. This makes an idol of self and one’s choice. He does not have an inherent bias against social norms, but nor is he an uncritical social conventionalist. Taylor (1991, 63) can ask seriously why aesthetic self-making should necessarily pass through a repudiation of the moral and moral history. Also, why are all moral regimes and all humanisms written off so thoroughly by Foucault? Finally, his concern with Foucault is the inherent denial of the significance of category Bi and Bii, including the idea of moral horizons and the more social dimension of self-making, which includes important elements of triangulation (Matthew Crawford) in identity production. Foucault’s idea of moral self-constitution is extremely individualistic.

Taylor, as a more communitarian thinker, brings a fresh set of concerns to the table of discussion on the self. He suggests that, 

“What must be wrong is a simple privileging of one over the other (A over B) …. That is what trendy doctrines of “deconstruction” involve today … they stress (Ai) the constructive, creative nature of our expressive languages, while altogether forgetting (Bi). They capture the more extreme forms of (Aiii), the amoralism of creativity … while forgetting (Bii), its dialogical setting, which binds us to others …. These thinkers buy into the background outlook of authenticity, for instance in their understanding of the creative, self-constitutive powers of language … while ignoring some of its essential constituents.” (Taylor, 1991, pp. 66, 67) 

Taylor’s concern is that Foucault makes such a move, ignoring certain key constituents of self-articulation or self-constitution, such as the dynamics of Category B (Accountability). By abolishing all extra-self horizons of significance, and demoting the significance of dialogue with other moral interlocutors, morality can become a monologue, narcissistic, an abstract self-projection onto the world, rather than a source of communal conversation and cooperation–which is essential for one’s emotional health and sanity. It entails a kind of excarnation–living in one’s own head. It does not promote responsible citizenship or build community.

Bibliography:

Taylor, C. (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, ON: Anansi (also published as The Ethics of Authenticity).

Crawford, M. (2016). The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.

Eagleton, T. (1990). The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell