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

by Carl R. Trueman

they do reveal something important that must be taken into account when we are talking about psychologically constructed identity:

not all psychological identities are considered to be legitimate,

not all sexual minorities enjoy the protection either

one could easily argue that expressive individualism really only requires freedom for me to be who I think I am, as long as that does not interfere with the lives of others.

Why would I need my neighbors to affirm my homosexuality as a good thing?

It is clearly indisputable that mere tolerance of sexual identities that break with the heterosexual norm has not proved an acceptable option to the sexual revolutionaries.

Nothing short of full equality under the law and full recognition of the legitimacy of certain nontraditional sexual identities by wider society has emerged as the ambition of the LGBTQ+ movement.

Satisfaction and meaning—authenticity—are now found by an inward turn, and the culture is reconfigured to this end.

The era of psychological man therefore requires changes in the culture and its institutions, practices, and beliefs that affect everyone.

Rieff calls this societal characteristic the analytic attitude.

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That which was previously deemed good comes to be regarded as bad; that which was previously regarded as healthy comes to be deemed sickness.

they are now seen to be part of the problem rather than the solution.

For example, language will become much more contested than in the past, because words that cause “psychological harm” will become problematic and will need to be policed and suppressed. To use pejorative racial or sexual epithets ceases to be a trivial matter. Instead, it becomes an extremely serious act of oppression.

speech crimes.

hate speech

this represents a serious challenge to one of the foundations of liberal democracy: freedom of speech.

The foot fetishist, too, surely suffers psychological harm when he is denied the right to proclaim his proclivities in public and receive acclamation and even legal protection for so doing. Yet few if any care to take up his cause. Why not?

The question of why some identities find acceptance and others do not is simply a version of the question of how identity is formed in the first place.

individual personal identity is not ultimately an internal monologue conducted in isolation by an individual self-consciousness. On the contrary, it is a dialogue between self-conscious beings. We each know ourselves as we know other people.

Yaasss!!!

I have to acknowledge that I do exist on the grounds that there has to be an “I” that doubts.

What exactly is this “I” that is doing the doubting? Whatever the “I” might be, it is clearly something that has a facility with language, and language itself is something that typically involves interaction with other linguistic beings.

I cannot therefore necessarily grant the “I” the privilege of self-consciousness prior to its engagement with others.

The “I” is necessarily a so...

Charles Taylor has done much to show that expressive individualism is a social phenomenon that emerges through the dialogical nature of what it means to be a person.

One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to those who surround it.

The general feature of human life that I want to evoke is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. . . . I want to take “language” in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the “languages” of art, of gesture, of love and the like. But we are inducted into these in exchange with others. No one acquires the languages needed for self-definition on their own. We are introduced to them through exchanges with others who matter to us.

who we think we are is intimately connected to those to whom we relate—family, friends, coworkers.

This also connects to another point: the human need to belong.

To have an identity means that I am being acknowledged by others.

Amish practice of shunning

the idea of the isolated Rousseauesque man of nature, living all by himself and for himself, may be superficially attractive, but a moment’s reflection would indicate how strange, if not completely absurd, it would be.26 In fact, to conduct such a thought experiment is likely to induce a kind of intellectual vertigo precisely because so much of who we are and how we think of ourselves is tied up with the people with whom we interact.

Her clothing is both a means of self-expression and a means of finding unity with a larger group at one and the same time.

How can I simultaneously be myself and belong to a larger social group?

“Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”

there is a need for the expressive individual to be at one with the expressive community.

Anyone who has ever traveled in a country where they could not speak the native language

It is only as the traveler acquires the local language that she is able to give expression to her personal identity in a way that is recognized by the locals and that allows her in some sense to belong.

Taylor argues that central to this thinking is the shift from a society based on the notion of honor to that based on the notion of dignity.

First, technological and economic changes have over the centuries broken down the old hierarchical structures of society.

Second, certain intellectual developments have proved lethal to traditional, hierarchical ways of thinking.

“Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.”

all human beings therefore possess equal dignity.

The question of identity in the modern world is a question of dignity.

For this reason, the various court cases in America concerning the provision of cakes and flowers for gay weddings are not ultimately about the flowers or the cakes.

They are about the recognition of gay identity and, according to members of the LGBTQ+ community, the recognition that they need in order to feel...

the present day, in fact, rest on different, even antithetical, premises, the former grounded in a notion of dignity based on a universal human nature, the latter on the sovereign right of individual self-determination. But they do share this in common: they represent demands for society to recognize the dignity of particular individuals, particular identities, and particular communities in social practices, cultural attitudes, and, therefore, legislation.

understanding of selfhood relative to forms of dance. Commenting on earlier forms of dancing,

“What sets us apart is not that we recognize no God, either in history or in nature or behind nature—but that we find that which has been reverenced as God not ‘godlike’ but pitiable, absurd, harmful, not merely an error but a crime against life. . . . We deny God as God.”

Nietzsche’s point is that claims to transcendent moral codes are oppressive of the individual and deny true life.