The Need for Recognition

1. The Need for Recognition “You can’t take everything with you when you leave on the midlife journey. You are moving away. Away from institutional claims and other people’s agenda [sic.]. Away from external valuations and accreditations. You are moving out of roles and into the self. If I could give everyone a gift for the send-off on this journey, it would be a tent. A tent for tentativeness. The gift of portable roots… For each of us there is the opportunity to emerge reborn, authentically unique…” This quotation from Sheehy’s bestselling book is an illustration of the tension between our desire to be liberated from the expectations others place on us whilst simultaneously having our value and the value of our choices affirmed through the recognition of others. Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (New York: E.P.Dutton & Co., 1976), 251.

2. The Need for Recognition “I don’t define an identity for ‘me in 1991,’ but rather try to give meaning to my life as it has been and as I project it further on the basis of what it has been. My identity-defining relations can’t be seen, in principle and in advance, as dispensable and destined for supersession… In the light of the ideal of authenticity, it would seem that having merely instrumental relationships is to act in a self-stultifying way. The notion that one can pursue one’s fulfilment in this way seems illusory, in somewhat the same way as the idea that one can choose oneself without recognizing a horizon of significance beyond choice.” We cannot simultaneously treat relationships as purely instrumental to our own fulfillment and make them part of our identity. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 53.

3. Subtler Languages and the Specter of Relativism “What could never be recovered is the public understanding that angels are part of a human-independent ontic order, having their angelic natures quite independently of human articulation, and hence accessible through languages of description (theology, philosophy) that are not at all those of articulated sensibility. By contrast, Rilke’s ‘order’ can become ours only through being ratified afresh in the sensibility of each new reader. In these circumstances, the very idea that one such order should be embraced to the exclusion of all the others – a demand that is virtually inescapable in the traditional context – ceases to have any force.” The worry is whether it is possible to have a sense of meaning and order that is created in this way without succumbing to relativism. ontic = Relating to existence. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with determining what there is (i.e. what exists). Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 87.

4. An Iron Cage? “For some of the important issues of our time, concerning love and our place in the natural order, need to be explored in such languages of personal resonance. To take a salient example, just because we no longer believe in the doctrines of the Great Chain of Being, we don’t need to see ourselves as set in a universe that we can considered simply as a source of raw materials for our projects. We may still need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims on us.” Taylor is hopeful that it will be possible to see ourselves as part of a larger order and thus transcend the three malaises of modernity with which he began. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 89.