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Foucault, by privileging the aesthetic hermeneutic of self, the ontology of freedom, and the power of the creative imagination, has managed to launch a whole new discourse for ethics; it is an ethics of aesthetic self-empowerment, and expressive individualism. For Foucault, the clear weight of bias in his discourse on subjectivity is towards a radical autonomy, not construction as a communal dialogue, nor was it a communal ethics. It is an ethics of the individual. This tends to skew Foucault’s theory of the moral self towards an ethics of self-interest or even narcissism (excessive self-care). According to Foucault, ethics means that the self studies the power relations within the social matrix, abstracts itself from the problematized social matrix, rethinks itself, and then imposes the newly invented self combatively onto society. “The understanding of value as something created gives a sense of freedom and power” (Taylor, 1991, p. 67). Foucault attempts to deal with self-constitution issue through his strong emphasis on the creative, constructive imagination. For him, the language of a transcendent good is repressed in self-making, in favour of the language of creative imagination and radical individual self-articulation. The grammar of the good is rethought and refigured in terms of the artistic self; self and its expression are taken as the proximate source of the good and the true. 

The sources of the self, to use Taylor’s language, are contained within the creative self. Once this is realized, suggests Foucault, individual freedom and power will emerge. Unlike other conceptions of transcendent moral sources in reason, nature or God, Foucault focuses on sources of the self within the self, in the register of moral empowerment. Such a perception of sources, such a “love affair with power” makes it possible to relativize, even marginalize the other and the social world. This gives one power over the other and the world, a power which could easily be abused by such a subject. It at least decreases vulnerability to the other. This is especially acute given Foucault’s emphasis on the kind of accountability that is merely a self-reflexive phenomenon, a responsibility to care for self as a prime directive. It produces a radical self-determining form of freedom: “It seems that significance can be conferred by choice, by making my life an exercise in freedom” (C. Taylor, 1991, 69). The one remaining virtue is choice itself. The kinder side of this, says Taylor, is that this is “taken as supports for the demands of difference” (C. Taylor, 1991, 69). But overall, it pushes towards the atomization of society–social chaos. 

Characteristics of the Aesthetic, Post-Romantic Self as gleaned from C. Taylor, 1989, 434-455: 

1. Art is superior to morality, and sees itself in conflict with the social moral order. 

2. Humans live in a chaotic or fallen natural and social world, rooted in chaos and the will to power. One can take an affirmative stance towards the world through seeing it as beautiful—seeing the world through an aesthetic lens. This is the only remaining basis for its justification. 

3. Being itself is not good as such, nor is human being per se taken as good. 

4. Hope resides in a strong belief in the power of the creative imagination to transfigure or transform the world and the self, or to reveal it afresh as beautiful. 

5. Language is a key means of changing the world, or at least the way one sees the world—key to one’s poetic self-expression, and re-writing of one’s self. 

6. This tends to result in an aesthetic amorality, a move beyond good and evil, an embrace or affirmation of violence and cruelty as well as patience and care. There can be no logical or moral distinction between them. We are experiencing this in Western culture and politics today.

Foucault would agree basically with Taylor’s placement of his project in the twentieth century cultural transition called the Post-Romantic Turn (Taylor, 1989, 434-55)30. The expressivism (desire for freedom of expression) of this tradition gives a higher, even a normative significance to the aesthetic, and opens a full challenge to the moral (Taylor, 1991, 63). Foucault wishes to transcend the code-morality with its universal intent towards normalization, by a new morality of the evolving ethics of the autonomous self. The pressing question at this stage of the argument is whether Foucault himself is captive to his own totalizing and unexamined impulse, the aestheticization of the moral self. 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, any transcendent principle or ideal, or moral culture outside the self. Taylor (1989) sees the picture in the quote below. 

Foucault’s spiritual profile: an even higher estimate of the unrestricted powers of the imagination than the Romantics had, and hence a celebration of those powers … This subjectivism of self-celebration is a standard temptation in a culture which exalts freedom and puts such value on the creative imagination. (C. Taylor, 1989, 489, 490) 

According to this sentiment resulting from a strong atheism, all values are welcome to the table of open hospitality, indicating a moral levelling. The consequence is that nothing appears to be of ultimate value, better or worse, innately. Virtues and vices, good and evil are levelled and reduced to an individual’s stylization; only one’s individually chosen values remain–with the freedom to cherish them or discard them later. It is ethics as self-assertive politics; one posits and then promotes one’s values in the name of style. This is a Nietzschean embrace of it all in the name of beauty. There is no higher or lower morality, no higher or lower marks of authenticity in Foucault. They are all just expressions of the self, all legitimated in and of themselves. “Beauty is a satisfaction for itself … gives its own intrinsic fulfilment. Its goal is internal” (C. Taylor, 1991, 64). Also, “aesthetic wholeness is an independent goal with its own telos, its own form of goodness and satisfaction” (C. Taylor, 1991, 65). Taylor makes the connection between Nietzsche’s nihilism and Foucault on the issue of the aesthetic (C. Taylor, 1991, 60) 

It is here that one more clearly recognizes that Foucault’s project of the recovery of the subjective agency is threatened by a loss of meaning. There is a potential implosion into a fatal and tragic nihilism, self imploding in upon itself, without a broader horizon of significance and the recognition/validation by the other (triangulation). Foucault strategically sought to escape nihilism through the invention of the aesthetic self, but it has failed. Taylor (1989) notes that in this philosophical turn, there is a tendency to legitimate action and ethical behaviour according to beauty rather than by its inherent good. 

What in the universe commands our affirmation, when we have overcome the all-too-human, is not properly called its goodness but comes closer to being its beauty…. Part of the heroism of the Nietzschean superman is that he can rise beyond the moral, beyond the concern with the good, and manage in spite of suffering and disorder and the absence of all justice to respond to something like the beauty of it all. (C. Taylor, 1989, 454) 

The interpretative lens of goodness (perhaps even right and wrong) is exchanged for the lens of the beautiful. The beauty of it all makes all things tolerable. In William T. Cavanaugh’s (2024) language, this is a form of idolatry of the self. If Foucault’s ethics as artistic life is passed through such a repudiation of the moral, any socially empowering moral principle is recognized and yet demoted in favour of the individual’s controlled agenda over the self. This entails a distortion of reality and a distortion of the self. A prestigious place is given to one’s own inner powers of construing, imagining or interpreting the world, while making over the self. Self-confidence is encouraged, but sensitivity to, and responsibility for the other is wanting. 

Aestheticism naturally endorses violence and undercuts Foucault ‘liberating’ ethics. Taylor reveals the dark side:

 This is the revolt from within unbelief … against the primacy of life … from a sense of being confined, diminished by this sense of primacy. This has been an important stream in our culture, something woven into the inspiration of poets and writers—for example Baudelaire and Mallarme. The most influential proponent of this kind of view is undoubtedly Nietzsche, and it is significant that the most important antihumanist thinkers of our time—for example Foucault, Derrida, behind them Bataille—all draw heavily on Nietzsche. Nietzsche rebelled against the idea that our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering. He rejects that both metaphysically and practically. He rejects the egalitarianism underlying this whole affirmation of ordinary life … Life itself can push to cruelty, to domination, to exclusion, and, indeed, does so in its moments of most exhuberant affirmation … There is nothing higher than the movement of life itself (the Will to Power). But it chafes at the benevolence, the universalism, the harmony, the order. It wants to rehabilitate destruction and chaos, the infliction of suffering and exploitation, as part of the life to be affirmed. Life properly affirmed affirms death and destruction. To pretend otherwise is to try to restrict it, hem it in, deprive it of its highest manifestations, which are precisely what makes it something you can say yes to. (Taylor, 1991, p. 27) 

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Taylor, C. (1991). The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, ON: Anansi. 

Cavanaugh, W.T. The Uses of Idolatry, Oxford University Press, 2024.

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