/lit/ - Literature

There is another error in the standard framing of authenticity as an
ideal, and that is the philosophical realism (which is nowadays usually
called “essentialism”) that seems inherent in the way questions of au-
thenticityarenormallyposed.Authenticityspeaks oftherealselfburied
in there, the self one has to dig out and express. It is only later, after
romanticism, that the idea develops that one’s self is something that
one creates, makes up, like a work of art. For reasons touched on in
chapter 1, neither the picture in which there is just an authentic nugget
of selfhood, the core that is distinctively me, waiting to be dug out, nor
the notion that I can simply make up any self I choose, should tempt
us. As we saw, we make up selves from a tool kit of options made
available by our culture and society. We do make choices, but we don’t,
individually, determine theoptions among which wechoose. To neglect
this fact is to ignore Taylor’s “websof interlocution,” to fail to recognize
the dialogical construction of the self, and thus to commit what Taylor
calls the “monological” fallacy.

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