Reflective Authenticity

Rethinking the Project of Modernity

Alessandro Ferrara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415130622
• eBook ISBN: 9781134791316
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity is a challenging consideration of what remains of ambitious Enlightenment ideas such as democracy, freedom and universality in the wake of relativist, postmodern thought.
Do clashes over gender, race and culture mean that universal notions such as justice or rights no longer apply outside our own communities? Do our actions lose their authenticity if we act on principles that transcend the confines of our particular communities ? Alessandro Ferrara proposes a path out of this impasse via the notion of reflective authenticity. Drawing on Aristotle, Kants concept of reflective judgement and Heideggers theory of reflexive self-grounding, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity takes a fresh look at the state of Critical Theory today and the sustainability of postmodern politics.

1

AUTHENTICITY AND VALIDITY

Metaphors based on Babel abound in the literature on contemporary culture: Babel as the poisoned fruit of modern value pluralism, of the inconsiderate project “of finding a short cut to heaven,” of the enamorment of the modern self with itself. There is something unconvincing about them. For there begins to emerge, within the condition that the image of Babel is designed to capture, new ways of coming to terms with the task of forming common orientations, projects, interpretations – new ways which all involve a rethinking of universalism, justice and the project of modernity. This book is about making sense of these transformations and at the same time trying to initiate a rethinking of the notion of validity that might eventually bring it in line with our intuitions about the irreducible pluralism of lifeforms and conceptions of value. The nexus of validity to authenticity and the sphere of aesthetic value will play a decisive role in this respect.

One of the assumptions underlying this book is that the cultural change which over the past few decades has swept the advanced industrial societies affects not only the peripheral stratum of values, beliefs and lifestyles, but also that deep core of any culture constituted by the foundations of validity. Norms, values and beliefs, as well as scientific theories or political institutions, are in a state of almost constant change. Yet the kinds of reasons in the name of which these symbolic entities demand our consensus or bind our conduct change much less frequently. To Heraclitus’ saying “You cannot step twice into the same river” we can object, following Wittgenstein, that while the continuous flowing of the waters may prevent us from doing so, the bedrock on which the waters of a river flow – a culture’s basic assumptions concerning what counts as valid – changes much more rarely. To be precise, up to now Western culture has gone through only one cultural transformation so deep as to affect not just cultures, values and norms but also that bedrock of the symbolic network through which we relate to reality and reproduce our lifeforms – a bedrock constituted by what I will call the foundations of validity. Such transition is the transition to the Modern Age.

Today we in the West might be in the midst of another transition of similar magnitude. The notion of eudaimonia or well-being, reformulated as a normative ideal of authenticity, constitutes the center of this cultural change and at the same time one of the avenues through which the fragmentation of value that has made the Babel metaphors popular may begin to give way to a new cultural constellation. But in order to understand what the rise of such an ideal of authenticity means and what its implications are we must retrace our steps and reconstruct the path through which we have come to our present predicament. This path originates in the particular way in which Western modernity has connected rationality, subjectivity and validity, and subsequently undergoes turning points which again are specifically Western. As we shall see at the end, however, the congruence of our notion of validity with this path bears a significance that projects itself beyond the immediate circle of who we are. Paradoxically, the best way to ensure a significance of our conception of validity beyond that circle is to keep our view firmly within it.

The caravan at the ford

Supposedly, subjectivity is the seal of modernity – so founding fathers like Descartes, Kant and Hegel, as well as countless textbooks in their wake, have taught us. Where the truth of propositions and the normative cogency of norms are no longer thought to derive from their corresponding to an order inherent in the world, but merely from their conformity with laws of reason inherent in the mind of a human subject, there we enter the modern territory. The “principle of subjective freedom” formulated by Hegel sums up this insight in a canonical way.

According to the classical, premodern world-view, the validity of norms, theoretical statements about nature, and institutional arrangements rested on their capacity for reflecting the objective order of the world. When the order of Cosmos provided the foundations of validity, also Reason was conceived as objective, i.e. as Logos. Its objectivity trickled down to the various branches of knowledge. Physics was supposed to be the “mirror of nature” in a strong ontological sense. Ethics was supposed to draw prescriptions for the good life from insights into human nature and these prescriptions did not yet have a different status from that of true propositions. Political philosophy tried to derive from the same insights indications as to the institutional order most likely to promote virtue among the citizens.

The detachment of Western culture from this conception of validity – indeed, a tortuous and far-from-linear process which developed slowly and with occasional backlashes through the Middle Ages – came to a completion when, at the onset of modernity, the basis on which the validity of knowledge and practical conduct is supposed to rest was equated with their being “rational,” i.e. with their satisfying the requirements of the rationality of an ideal human subject. These requisites of reason, often condensed in the form of a method or of a set of categories or rules of inference, were no longer conceived as attributes of Being as such but as having a subjective quality. For the first time the rationality of Reason was thought of as an entirely human quality. The bearer of this rationality, however, was conceived in early modern times either as an abstract and ideal Subject, supposedly “inherent” in each concrete individual (Descartes, Kant), or as a macro-subject to which we all belong qua individuals (Spirit in Hegel, the human species in Marx).

This narrative of modern rationality is so trite that it would be of no import to relate it once more, were it not for an ambiguity implicit in it, the unraveling of which can help us to understand our own relation to modernity. The ambiguity lies in the notion of subjectivity. The subjective quality of the modern form of rationality was subjective only in a peculiar sense. In fact, the subjectified reason of early modern times continued to be in a certain sense objective. As classical Logos, it continued to constitute a “larger than life” or transsubjective standard of validity. The criteria for evaluating the truth of propositions and the rightness of actions continued to be somehow external to the individual. Rationality was no longer objective in the sense of reflecting the order of Cosmos, but was still objective in the sense of being as independent of common opinion and personal judgment as classical philosophical discourse.¹ Up until now, the heritage of the early modern notion of rationality is still so vital, that to be rational for many is still synonymous with being impartial, where being “impartial” in turn means being “unsubjective.” From the very beginning, this notion of rationality showed cracks and proved to be quite unstable. Rousseau’s work, for instance, offers a testimony of the early uncertainty as to the modern view of foundations, at least in the realm of morality.

Furthermore, while early modernity took it for granted that the kind of subjectivity capable of providing foundations for validity was that inherent in an autonomous subject, today the very notion of an autonomous subject has become disputable. Both of its components, primarily the notion of the subject but also, though to a lesser extent, that of autonomy – understood as the ideal of self-legislation guided by general principles – have become problematical. It remains unclear, however, with what the notion of autonomous subjectivity should be replaced.

From this perspective our situation resembles the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when the classical ontological view of validity had been discredited but no consciousness of a new paradigm yet existed. We are like a caravan standing uncertain in the middle of a ford. The secure shores of the early modern understanding of validity in terms of autonomous and rational subjectivity are definitively behind us, but we haven’t yet come ashore to the other side, where a new way of grounding the validity of statements and norms awaits us. Worst of all, a great confusion reigns among our guides.

Some want to take us back to the shore of Reason writ “Large.” They propose versions irrelevantly different of the same notions of a macro-subject, of an abstract rational subject and of an impartial “method” or “form of rationality” which led us to where we are. Among these we find the last defenders of “critical rationalism” in the philosophy of science who ironically find themselves in the company of most of those who call themselves “analytical Marxists.” In political and social theory the diehard defenders of the modern constellation occupy regional strongholds of some consequence in certain cases: game-theory, the theory of rational choice, methodological individualism, some theories of social movements and of cultural reproduction, systems theory, Artificial Intelligence and computer science.

Others among our guides protest that we should retreat much further back than to the shore behind us. According to them we should have never left the great plains of Logos in the first place, and we are paying now for that earlier mistake. If validity does not rest on objective foundations, as it did for Plato and Aristotle, then the only coherent conclusion is that it expresses the will to believe and to make believe, ultimately a will to power. The greatest of all illusions, continue these critics, is the Enlightenment project of envisaging validity as more “subjective” than in the classical view, and yet in another sense as equally “objective,” in the sense of undisputable and impartial. Once typical of conservative Roman Catholic theology, this position has been revamped in the 1980s from a radical perspective by MacIntyre and other authors of neo-Aristotelian inspiration. The task of the day for these authors is to recover as much as possible of the classical understanding of objective validity and to reconcile it with certain transformations that appear irreversible: for example, a certain notion of freedom. Charles Taylor provides another example of this attempt to bring together the freedom of the modern self and the classical sense of a meaning that transcends the self.²

Then a very vociferous group of guides denounces as a prejudice the preference, taken for granted by all others, for the mainland. As a solution they advocate settling on boats that float downstream and giving up once for all the pernicious myth of the existence of standards of validity. This is what the best among French intellectuals (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard), together with Rorty, invite us to do.

Finally, other guides – and these are the ones I personally prefer – do their best to spot out some clearings on the other shore through which it might be easier to accede to the new land. Some of them, for instance Rawls and Habermas, have much to say on how to rescue a notion of validity and rationality without invoking the early modern notion of an abstract or superindividual rational subject. Important as their attempt to rescue the positive aspects of modern autonomous subjectivity and to reformulate them in terms of intersubjectivity might be, they seem unable to convince the caravan to move toward the indicated point, probably because they still keep too close to the early modern ideal of a dehistoricized and depersonalized knowledge. The position defended in this book is that the goal of finding an entry point into a new land is best served by replacing the modern notion of a rational and autonomous subject not so much with the notion of intersubjectivity as with that of authentic subjectivity and by working out the methodological consequences of such move. In Chapter 8 I will briefly return to these alternatives and to the different stances that they presuppose with respect to the “project of modernity.”

In a nutshell, the authenticity-thesis claims that the notion of authentic subjectivity is to contemporary modernity as the notion of autonomous subjectivity is to early modernity. While the Enlightenment is the age of autonomy par excellence, ours is the age of authenticity. This could be taken as a statement that belongs in the sociology of culture or at best in the history of moral ideas. But there is more to it. The normative ideal of authenticity brings with it a methodological appendix which implicitly calls into question the early modern universalism and replaces it with a new universalism based on the model of reflective judgment. I cannot claim to do justice to the full scope of this thesis in the context of this book. I will be satisfied if I succeed in making it plausible by way of highlighting some of its main points and implications. In the next sections of this chapter I will elucidate the distinction between autonomy and authenticity, the intersubjective nature of the concept of authenticity and some of the methodological implications of the authenticity-thesis.

Autonomy and authenticity

The authenticity-thesis presupposes a distinction between autonomy and authenticity. They are not just versions of the same concept. While authenticity includes the notion of autonomy, and should not be construed – at least in the version that I try to defend – as implying a radical break with it, there is no way of generating the notion of authenticity from within the perspective of autonomy alone. Some “additional content” is needed, which represents the specific contribution of contemporary modernity – wherever one conventionally sets its temporal watershed – to the “discourse of Western rationality.” The meaning of that “additional content” is the object of the contest between the various notions of authenticity that will be examined in Chapter 6.

“Autonomy” and “authenticity” can best be contrasted with reference to a theory of social action and to moral theory. From the standpoint of a theory of social action, autonomy and authenticity are properties of human conduct. “Autonomy” refers to the actor’s accountability in his or her choosing a course of action, regardless of the grounds and type of rationality that inspire his or her choice. Weber’s typology of action may be useful here. Only purposive-rational and value-rational action fully qualify as “autonomous” conduct – traditional and affective action, instead, fall short of it.³ “Authentic” conduct cannot be accommodated within this typology. It can neither be reduced to “self-determined” conduct nor be derived from it. Why? What does the notion of authentic conduct require that self-determination cannot supply? Authentic conduct has the quality of being somehow connected with, and expressive of, the core of the actor’s personality. It brings into play the actor’s uniquely personal, as opposed to culturally or socially shared, identity. If I am insensitive to my deepest needs, if I betray them, or if I inscribe my action into a life-plan which in turn fails to fit with who I am, then I may act in a purposive-rational or value-rational way inauthentically.

Autonomy and authenticity appear, then, to be related in an asymmetrical way. On one hand, authenticity presupposes autonomy. Neither traditional nor affective action, as Weber understands them, can be authentic. These types of action exhibit a deficit of individuation and self-determination which prevents us from making sense of “authentic traditional action” or “authentic affective action.” Of course, we could revise our theory in such a way that these expressions would then make sense, but that would lead us beyond Weber’s categorization, only to find the same problem cast in a different vocabulary.

On the other hand, the conceptual gap between autonomous and authentic conduct cannot be bridged with materials derived analytically from autonomy. Weber offers an implicit illustration of this point. He never uses the term “authentic conduct,” but his notion of political action inspired by an ethic of responsibility – the “Here I stand. I can do no other” stance that Weber’s responsible politician borrows from Luther – shares all the characteristics of authentic conduct. It combines considerations of expediency and value with a deep emotional resonance which stems from the link that this kind of action manifests with the identity of the actor. The exemplary interplay of affective, moral and pragmatic moments accounts for Weber’s description of such conduct as “immensely moving”⁴ – a qualification that usually does not apply to purposive-rational or even to value-rational action. In sum, while on one hand the conduct of the politician inspired by an ethic of responsibility presupposes the categories of purposive and value rationality, on the other hand there is no way of deriving the “immensely moving” quality of the responsible politician’s conduct from the concepts of purposive or value rational action.

It is interesting to note that the conditions of success or validity for autonomous and authentic action vary dramatically. While the validity or success conditions for purposive-and value-rational action are captured by the principle of maximization of utility or of value realization – and thus fall entirely within the scope of what Kant has called determinant judgment – in the evaluation of the conduct of the responsible politician no rules, no principles, not even concepts, let alone demonstrations, can be produced under which the correctness of a given course of action can be exhaustively subsumed – and thus the validity of action seems to be conceivable only in terms of exempl...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Reflective Authenticity
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Authenticity and validity
• 2 Postmetaphysical phronesis
• 3 From Kant to Kant: a normativity without principles
• 4 Reflective authenticity and exemplary universalism
• 5 Post-modern eudaimonia: dimensions of an authentic identity
• 6 The fulfillment of collective identities
• 7 Authenticity, the text and the work of art
• 8 Rethinking the project of modernity
• Notes
• References
• Index