The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

point: once aesthetics is detached from some universal understanding of what it means to be human, from some universally authoritative moral metanarrative, from some solid ground in a larger metaphysical reality, then aesthetics is king.

Taste can drive what we think to be right

Ethically speaking, taste becomes trut...

the narrative of this book are the gradual emergence and then rise to dominance of the type of person that Philip Rieff calls psychological man and Charles Taylor characterizes as the expressive individual.

many find appealing the message preached in myriad movies and soap operas that life is about finding individual sexual satisfaction and that one’s sexual appetites lie at the very center of who one actually is.

Psychological man is also plastic person, a figure whose very psychological essence means that he can (or at least thinks he can) make and remake personal identity at will.

The idea that we can be who or whatever we want to be is a commonplace today.

constantly looking to the next purchase that will bring about that elusive personal wholeness.

Second, society is constantly changing its mind about what is and is not

fashionable, what is and is not cool, and what is and is not acceptable.

maleness. As Bruce became Caitlyn and was recognized as such by society, so Carl might now become Caroline, if I so wished.

effect in weakening and even abolishing the idea that human nature is a given, something that has an intrinsic, nonnegotiable authority over who we are.

with Freud, some of his terminology—“the will to power,” “the Overman,” “beyond good and evil,” “the genealogy of morality”—has become common currency in the jargon of popular philosophy; yet as with Freud’s vocabulary, many of these terms are often used by those who do not know precisely what they mean.

madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried: “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Enlightenment philosophy has quite purposefully rendered God implausible or unnecessary.

Enlightenment philosophers have failed to draw the necessary, broader metaphysical and moral conclusions from this notion.

basic point is that the foundation of religion may have been exposed as false, but the influence of religion, the systems of life and thought built on it, continue to live on, up until the present day.

“herd instinct in the individual,” a point that has affinities with Freud’s later notion of the relationship between the superego and the ego and also to Rousseau’s (and the Romantics’) notion of authentic humanity as being that exhibited by the least socialized and civilized.8

on the responsibility—the terrifying responsibility—of being god yourself, of becoming the author of your own knowledge and your own ethics.

You make yourself the creator of your world.

Christianity represents the instincts of the weakest and most oppressed, and it embodies the very hatred of life and of living;15

desires to subjugate the truly noble and strong;16 it makes men and women sick;17 and it disvalues everything that is vital and strong and natural.

Nietzsche it is morally repugnant.

tendency to be suspicious of any claims to absolute moral truth and a rejection of religion as distasteful.

of the pathologies of our present age is that the pleasure of the instant, the psychological satisfaction of the individual in the here and now, has become primary in how we think about human purpose. It can be seen, for example, in matters as disparate as pornography

personal satisfaction. Again, Nietzsche is no nihilist; life is to

“Be

whoever you want to be, and do whatever works for you.”

Hegel must be turned on his head: it is not ideas and the self-consciousness that grasps them that shape the material conditions of the world but the material conditions that shape the ideas and the self-consciousness.

Religion hinders human beings from being fully human.

Religion offers false happiness to an unhappy world; the tearing down of religion is thus the precondition for offering true

happiness through the establishment of an economic system that does not alienate the workers from the fruits of their labor.

world as we have it does not need a designer or divine architect.

Coming from earlier species by way of an immanent process of natural selection, they cease to be the crown of creation and to enjoy some kind of special, God-given status among (and above) other creatures. And having no God-given destiny, they have no transcendent ethical standards, either laws or virtues, to which they need to conform themselves.

and the issue of evolution as a battle between religious obscurantism and scientific freedom.

Whether evolution can be argued from the evidence is actually irrelevant to the reason most people believe

it.

The obvious implications of this situation are, first, that the sacred account of human origins given in Genesis is undermined and, second, that human beings are therefore relativized in relation to other creatures.

The average twelve-year-old girl attending an Ariana Grande concert may never even have heard of Nietzsche, but the amoral sexuality of the lyrics she hears preach a form of (albeit unwitting) Nietzscheanism.

And that leads to the second area where Nietzsche’s thinking is reflected in current social attitudes: living for the present.

When teleology is dead and self-creation is the name of the game, then the present moment and the pleasure it can contain become the keys to eternal life. While Nietzsche himself may have had a view of hedonism that was different from that which grips the popular imagination today...

adversity), the idea that personal satisfaction is to be the hallmark of the life—or perhaps better, moment—well l...

This wariness of tradition connects to another legacy of Marx: history is the history of oppression.

suspicion—the attitude that no claim to truth or judgment of value is as disinterested as it appears—finds powerful theoretical expression in both Nietzsche and Marx.

forms of social organization are political because all of them connect to the economic structure of society. By

Marx’s account, the family and the church exist to cultivate, reinforce, and perpetuate bourgeois values.

the Boy Scouts to Hollywood movies to cake baking—has b...

Certainly, Nietzsche’s notion of self-creation represents a philosophical rationale for a form of expressive individualism.

also points toward the age of the therapeutic, where psychological well-being is deemed to be the purpose of life and where happiness in the present moment is the overwhelming priority.