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June 27, 2008
Charles Taylor has argued that an explanatory key to contemporary life is expresssivism: “Expressive individuation,” he writes in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, “has become one of the cornerstones of modern culture. So much that we barely notice it.” As Victoria Fareld observes in Charles Taylor’s Identity Holism: Romantic Expressivism as Epigenetic Self-Realization in Telos (Winter 2007) 'expressivism for Taylor refers to
the most crucial interpretative tool in Taylor’s understanding of German Idealism, notably Herder’s, Humboldt’s, and Hegel’s philosophies. But it is also used diagnostically to capture and evaluate trends in contemporary life, indeed tied to Taylor’s effort to normatively use the insights of the German philosophers to articulate “a contemporary expressivism which tries to go beyond subjectivism in discovering and articulating what is expressed. Expressivism is thus both a hermeneutical, historico-analytical concept aimed at orienting us in the terrain of history of philosophy, and a highly normative concept directed against what Taylor perceives as the dominant trends in contemporary thinking on personal identity, that is, against the Anglo-American liberal notion of identity, as well as against its poststructruralist and conservative critiques
Expressivism for Taylor has its roots in self-expression and is linked to subjectivity through making or bringing about. Fareld says that:
Taylor’s expressivism embraces the twofold lexical meaning of expression as a medium or an outward form conveying or reflecting an inner content, something that precedes and exists independently of the expression itself, as well as something that is brought into being in and by the expression itself.
Taylor, in effect, returns us the idea of expressive self-realization in Romanticism. If self-realization is a key element in Romantic expressivism, then it is formulated in terms of Bildung, or as an individual’s process toward self-realization. The organic connotations of Bildung suggest, the individual’s self development is seen as growth from within, as a self-organized process, where the individual is master of her own unique self-realization.
Bildung is both individual development and at the same time a process where the individual makes herself part of a larger social whole and makes it into a part of her own individuality.This, in pointing toward the
nonsubjective sources constitutive of who we are as subject, so avoids subjectivism, since a 'self' is to be realized through a 'we.'
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