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

by Carl R. Trueman

Hegel is useful because he is the key philosopher who wrestled with the quintessential problem of identity in the modern era: how to connect the aspiration to express oneself as an individual and to be free with the desire for being at one with (or belonging to) society as a whole.

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence. All these things play into legitimizing and strengthening those groups that can define themselves in such terms. They capture, one might say, the spirit of the age. This helps explain why these identities are recognized and others are not.

The person who objects to homosexual practice is, in contemporary society, actually objecting to homosexual identity. And the refusal by any individual to recognize an identity that society at large recognizes as legitimate is a moral offense, not simply a matter of indifference.

Put simply, modern ethical discourse is chaotic because there is no longer a strong community consensus on the nature of the proper ends of human existence.

All three would argue that an overriding desire for inner personal happiness and a sense of psychological well-being lie at the heart of the modern age and make ethics at root a subjective discourse.

Emotivism as a theory is that which explains why those with whom we disagree think the way they do, but it is not something we care to apply to ourselves. It is in reality a social theory that explains all our inability to have meaningful ethical discussion today, but each side in any debate tends to use it polemically as if it were the moral theory to which their opponents are committed.

the basic outlines of modern expressive individualism. The real identity of an individual is to be found in the inner psychological autobiography. The authentic individual is one who behaves outwardly in accordance with this inner psychological nature. Society and its conventions are the enemy, suppressing desire and perverting the individual in a way that prevents the real, authentic self from being able to express itself.

Human nature as it exists in civilized society is a corrupt construct. Only by going back before the effects of “civilization” can one hope to find that which is truly human, and enabling people to do this is the task of the poet.

In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth. And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste become those who exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards. While he would no doubt have retched at the thought, William Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian.

Put simply (or as simply as possible, given that this is Hegel and Marx), the dynamic dialectical process by which history moves forward is for Hegel an intellectual one, a struggle between ideas in the self-consciousness. For Marx, the basic pattern of Hegelian dialectic is sound, but it is not ideas that drive the historical process; rather, it is material conditions and relations. 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.

In fact, it is the intuitive simplicity of his theory that has made him so influential. The science may have proved far more complicated than Darwin ever imagined, but the basic idea is easy to grasp. And it has come to shape the way many people who are quite incompetent to assess the science have come to imagine the world.

Freud has, in fact, provided the West with a compelling myth—not in the sense of a narrative that everybody knows is false but in the sense of a basic idea by which we can understand the world around us, regardless of whether it is “true” in the commonsense way of understanding the word. That myth is the idea that sex, in terms of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment, is the real key to human existence, to what it means to be human.

Yet at the core of the various approaches of critical theorists lies a relatively simple set of convictions: the world is to be divided up between those who have power and those who do not; the dominant Western narrative of truth is really an ideological construct designed to preserve the power structure of the status quo; and the goal of critical theory is therefore to destabilize this power structure by destabilizing the dominant narratives that are used to justify—to “naturalize”—it.2

Patterns of private sexual behavior are not simply private; they are public and political because they constitute a significant part of how our culture thinks of identity. And it is only through public acknowledgment of their legitimacy that those identities are recognized and legitimated. To outlaw, for example, gay sex or merely to tolerate it, is to outlaw or merely tolerate a certain identity. Both are ultimately forms of oppression, albeit the one more overtly so than the other.

To follow Rousseau is to make identity psychological. To follow Freud is to make psychology, and thus identity, sexual. To mesh this combination with Marx is to make identity—and therefore sex—political. And, at the risk of offering a truism, the politics that is produced thereby has a distinctive character precisely because the reality that it thinks it is addressing is at base a psychological one. To transform society politically, then, one must transform society sexually and psychologically, a point that places psychological categories at the heart of revolutionary political discourse. Where once oppression was seen in terms of economic realities (e.g., poverty, lack of property) or legal categories (e.g., slavery, lack of freedom), now the matter is more subtle because it relates to issues of psychology and self-consciousness.

The sexual revolution is just that—a revolution—and its artistic vanguard represents a qualitative, not merely quantitative, change.21 And in surrealism this change is rooted in the marriage of the Freudian notion that the unconscious is the true determinant of who we are and the Marxist idea that human liberation can be achieved only through the revolutionizing of social relations. And this requires art to transform attitudes toward sexuality and toward identity.

When sex is identity, then sexual morality is a function of expressive individualism, not some greater theological or metaphysical reality.