Taylor’s Critique of Foucault’s Aesthetic Self-creation continued
Foucault would agree with Taylor’s placement of his project in the twentieth century cultural transition called the Post-Romantic Turn (Taylor, 1989, pp. 434-455). The expressivism of this tradition gives a higher, even perhaps a normative significance to the aesthetic culture sphere, and opens a full challenge to the moral culture sphere (Taylor, 1991, p. 63). Foucault clearly wishes to transcend the code-morality of Old Europe, with its universal intent towards normalization, via a new morality of the evolving ethics of the autonomous, artistic self. The pressing question at hand is whether Foucault’s project of recovering the self is ironically captive to a totalizing impulse, the aestheticization of the moral. Does it become an ideology of the aesthetic which can be easily manipulated by higher or lower motivations?
There is a strong tendency in Foucault to celebrate the individual’s own powers to construct and interpret reality in a context shaped by immanence and the finite, and to deny the legitimacy of any binding moral horizon or moral culture outside or above the self. Taylor sees the picture this way. Read More…
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