Ethique de l'authenticité de Charles Taylor

If Francis Picabia was right in asserting that "only cowards celebrate every idiocy that emerges from History in the name of Modernity", then charles taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity testifies to its author's intellectual courage. In this opus, the Canadian philosopher presents a thoughtful and original criticism of Modernity's pernicious drifts and inner discrepancies. Building on Alexis de Tocqueville's prophetic insights on the transition to the democratic age, he begins defining the position of the "modernity's knockers". These thinkers, such as Bloom, Lasch or Bell, tend to criticise the perilous modern veer towards the prevalence of "mild relativism", which refuses any moral judgment, "subjectivism", which confers equal value to each and every personal choices and "instrumental reason", which focuses on means and consequently denies any possibility to debate the ends of one's existence. They ground their disparagement on the assertion that these modern ailments stem from a broader, overarching pathology: individualism, narcissism or egoism, defined as the modern men's tendency to pursue their own idiosyncratic teleological purposes of existence, in the name of authenticity to themselves. Far from supporting this comprehensive dismissal of authenticity and subjectivism, taylor depicts the opposition between the "knockers" and the "boosters" of Modernity as inarticulate insofar as both of them constantly fail in engaging properly with the notion of authenticity.