By Appiah INVENTION AND AUTHENTICITY At this point, it may be helpful to consider two rival pictures of what is involved in shaping one’s individuality. One, a pic ture that comes from romanticism, is the idea of finding one’s self—of discovering, by means of reflection or a careful attention to the world, a meaning for one’s life that is already there, waiting to be found. This is the vision we can call authenticity: it is a matter of being true to who you already really are, or would be if it weren’t for distorting influences. “The Soul of Man under Socialism” is one locus classicus of this vision. (“The personality of man … will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.”) The other picture, the existentialist picture, let’s call it, is one in which, as the doctrine goes, existence precedes essence: that is, you exist first and then have to decide what to exist as, who to be, afterward. On an extreme version of this view, we have to make a self up, as it were out of nothing, like God at the Creation, and individuality is valu able because only a person who has made a self has a life worth living.39 But neither of these pictures is right. The authenticity picture is wrong because it suggests that there is no role for creativity in making a self, that the self is already and in its totality fixed by our natures. Mill was rightly emphatic that we do have such a role, however constrained we are by our nature and circum stances. Man “has, to a certain extent, a power to alter his character,” he writes in A System of Logic: His character is formed by his circumstances (including among these his particular organization); but his own desire to mould it in a particular way, is one of those circumstances, and by no means one of the least influential. 18 u CHAPTERONE We can not, indeed, directly will to be different from what we are. But neither did those who are supposed to have formed our character directly will that we should be what we are. Their will had no direct power except over their own actions. They made us what they did make us, by willing, not the end, but the requisite means; and we, when our habits are not too inveterate, can, by similarly willing the requisite means, make ourselves different. If they could place us under the influence of certain circum stances, we, in like manner, can place ourselves under the influence of other circumstances. We are exactly as capable of making our own character, if we will, as others are of making it for us.40 By the same token, the existentialist picture is wrong because it sug gests that there is only creativity, that there is nothing for us to respond to, nothing out of which to do the construction. “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow … according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing,” Mill told us. His metaphor makes the constraints apparent: a tree, whatever the circumstances, does not become a legume, a vine, or a cow. The reasonable middle view is that constructing an identity is a good thing (if self-authorship is a good thing) but that the identity must make some kind of sense. And for it to make sense, it must be an identity constructed in response to facts outside oneself, things that are beyond one’s own choices. Some philosophers—Sartre among them—have tried to combine both the romantic and the existentialist views, as Michel Foucault sug gested some years ago: “Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves—to be truly our true self. I think the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity—and not to that of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”41 Now Foucault, in this passage, speaks of creativity without, perhaps, sufficiently acknowledging the role of the materials on which our cre ativity is exercised. As Charles Taylor notes, “I can define my identity THE ETHICS OF INDIVIDUALITY u 19 only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I f ind in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters.”42 Let me propose a thought experiment that might dissuade those who speak of self-choice as the ultimate value. Suppose it were possible, through some sort of instantaneous genetic engineering, to change any aspect of your nature, so that you could have any combination of capac ities that has ever been within the range of human possibility: you could have Michael Jordan’s fade-away shot, Mozart’s musicality, Groucho Marx’s comic gifts, Proust’s delicate way with language. Suppose you could put these together with any desires you wanted—homo- or het ero-, a taste for Wagner or Eminem. (You might saunter into the meta morphosis chamber whistling the overture to Die Meistersinger and strut out murmuring “Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?”) Suppose, further, that there were no careers or professions in this world because all material needs and services were met by intelligent ma chines. Far from being a utopia, so it seems to me, this would be a kind of hell. There would be no reason to choose any of these options, be cause there would be noachievementin putting together alife. One way of explaining why this life would be meaningless comes from Nietzsche: One thing is needful.—To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinter preted and made sublime.43 To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you. As we saw, Mill’s rhetoric juxtaposes the value of self authorship with the value of achieving our capacities, perhaps because the former can seem arbitrary; but once it is tied to something out of our control, once our self-construction is seen as a creative response to our capacities and our circumstances, then the accusation of arbitrari ness loses its power. 20 u CHAPTERONE Thinking about the capacities and circumstances that history has, in fact, given each of us will also allow us to address the worry about the unsociability of the individuated self, further elaborating on the social dependence we ascribed to Mr. Stevens. The language of identity re minds us to what extent we are, in Charles Taylor’s formulation, “dia logically” constituted. Beginning in infancy, it is in dialogue with other people’s understandings of who I am that I develop a conception of my own identity. We come into the world “mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” (as Shakespeare so genially put it), capable of human individuality but only if we have the chance to develop it in interaction with others. An identity is always articulated through concepts (and practices) made available to you by religion, society, school, and state, mediated by family, peers, friends. Indeed, the very material out of which our identities are shaped is provided, in part, by what Taylor has called our language in “a broad sense,” comprising “not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define our selves, including the ‘languages’ of art, of gesture, of love, and the like.”44 It follows that the self whose choices liberalism celebrates is not a preso cial thing—not some authentic inner essence independent of the human world into which we have grown—but rather the product of our interaction from our earliest years with others. As a result, individuality presupposes sociability, not just a grudging respect for the individuality of others. A free self is a human self, and we are, as Aristotle long ago insisted, creatures of the poliw, social beings. We are social in many ways and for many reasons: because we desire company, because we depend on one another for survival, be cause so much that we care about is collectively created. And the pros pect of such sociability was basic to Mill’s own ethical vision. “The social feeling of mankind” was, he thought, “a powerful natural senti ment,” and one that formed a basis for morality: The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body; and this association is riveted more and more, as mankind are further removed from the state of savage independence. Any condition, therefore, which is essential to a state of society, becomes more and more an insepara ble part of every person’s conception of the state of things which he is born THE ETHICS OF INDIVIDUALITY u 21 into, and which is the destiny of a human being…Thedeeply-rooted conception which every individual even now has of himself as a social being, tends to make him feel it one of his natural wants that there should be harmony betweenhis feelings and aims and those of his fellow creatures… To those who have it, it possesses all the characters of a natural feeling. It does not present itself to their minds as a superstition of education, or a law despotically imposed by the power of society, but as an attribute which it would not be well for them to be without. This conviction is the ultimate sanction of the greatest happiness morality.45 Andit’s worth returning to the point that Mill’s conception of happi ness or well-being included individuality, freedom, autonomy; that these had a constitutive, not just an instrumental, relation to it.46 To value individuality properly just is to acknowledge the dependence of the good for each of us on relationships with others. Without these bonds, as I say, we could not come to be free selves, not least because we could not come to be selves at all. Throughout our lives part of the material that we are responding to in shaping our selves is not within us but outside us, out there in the social world. Most people shape their identities as partners of lovers who become spouses and fellow parents; these aspects of our identities, though in a sense social, are peculiar to who we are as individuals, and so represent a personal dimension of our identities. But we are all, as well, members of broader collectivities. To say that collective identities—that is, the collective dimensions of our individual identities—are responses to something outside our selves is to say that they are the products of histories, and our engagement with them invokes capacities that are not under our control. Yet they are social not just because they involve others, but because they are consti tuted in part by socially transmitted conceptions of how a person of that identity properly behaves