Contempt for modernity has become a familiar posture among intellectuals, preachers, and cultural critics. Modern individualism is blamed for self-obsession and moral decay. Charles Taylor gives these critics a name: the “Knockers.” While Taylor listens carefully to their complaints, he refuses their conclusion. He grants that modern individualism has developed genuine distortions, but he denies that the modern emphasis on the self is therefore a mistake.
Taylor insists that modern values such as individualism and authenticity arise from deep moral sources. For that reason, they cannot simply be discarded. The task, Taylor argues, is not to abandon these ideals but to retrieve their moral core and orient them rightly.
Authenticity, on Taylor’s account, is a demanding moral ideal. It presupposes that each person has his or her own way of being human and that this individuality is experienced as a calling. What is distinctive of our age is not merely that people value self-expression, but that they feel obliged to become their true selves—even at the cost of risk and sacrifice. Taylor regards this sense of vocation as a genuine moral achievement. In a culture tempted by nihilism and meaninglessness, authenticity offers a form of moral seriousness, even heroism, in responding to one’s unique calling.
Taylor locates the rise of authenticity in the historical development of the modern self. Descartes emphasized the inward turn of the thinking subject. But it was the Romantic tradition that articulated a self marked by inward depth and expressive individuality. The modern ideal of authenticity emerges from this evolution of self-understanding. Rather than condemning it, Taylor seeks to retrieve it.
This retrieval rests on two pillars. Authenticity requires, first, attentiveness to one’s inner depth and, second, orientation toward something beyond the self. We do not fulfill ourselves in isolation but by living for what Taylor calls “horizons of significance”—commitments such as family, vocation, country, or causes that give weight and direction to our lives.
Yet here Taylor’s account reveals a vulnerability. The horizons of significance that orient authenticity are left largely open-ended. While often noble, they lack an intrinsically selfless criterion. Take, for example, advocating affordable housing for low-income families. This can be pursued primarily as a vehicle for personal fulfillment. In such cases, steps made toward this cause risk becoming merely instrumental to one’s own self-realization. Even altruistic commitments can collapse into refined forms of self-centeredness. Without a principled safeguard, Taylor’s authenticity remains exposed to the very individualism it seeks to resist.
At this point, another philosopher enters the conversation—one who shares Taylor’s concerns but offers a more secure anchor against self-absorption. Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, develops a philosophical anthropology that parallels Taylor’s in striking ways while ultimately completing it.
Taylor and Wojtyła share three foundational commitments. First, both take human subjectivity seriously without surrendering moral realism; subjectivity, for them, does not entail subjectivism. Second, both resist reductionist accounts of the person and draw on continental philosophy to do so. Taylor turns to hermeneutics to show how self-understanding shapes identity, while Wojtyła employs phenomenology to analyze lived moral experience. Third, both articulate accounts of authenticity that emphasize the person’s unique individuality and interior depth.
Despite these shared commitments, Wojtyła offers a more complete account of authenticity because he binds it to an intrinsically selfless criterion: self-gift. Like Taylor, Wojtyła holds that each person has a distinctive way of being human that must be realized. And like Taylor, he understands authenticity as requiring fidelity to both one’s inner source and demands that come from beyond the self. But where Taylor leaves the content of those demands open, Wojtyła specifies them decisively. Authenticity, for Wojtyła, is ultimately fulfilled only in the sincere gift of self to others.
This claim illuminates the relational nature of the human person. For Wojtyła, the pursuit of moral perfection is not an end in itself; it is ordered toward communion with others. We do not find ourselves by perfecting ourselves in isolation, but by becoming persons capable of giving ourselves away in love—a love that enhances and perfects our existence. Self-gift rescues authenticity from degenerating into self-preoccupation by rooting fulfillment in communion. Without this horizon, Taylor’s authenticity remains vulnerable to becoming too self-referential. Wojtyła, by contrast, shows that the fullness of human flourishing lies precisely in the act of giving oneself.
Although Wojtyła provides a more secure foundation for authenticity than Taylor, the two thinkers ultimately stand together against the Knockers. Both affirm the modern discovery of the self while resisting its distortions. Their steering authenticity in the right direction discloses a profound truth: that each person possesses a unique depth and calling to self-fulfillment.
To reject modern individualism wholesale, as the Knockers urge, is to risk overlooking this achievement. For Taylor, failing to respond to one’s calling constitutes a failure of human fulfillment. For Wojtyła, it is a failure to become a self-determined person capable of self-gift.
From the pen of St. John Henry Newman, we are reminded that God leads us even “amid th’encircling gloom.” Taylor and Wojtyła share this confidence. They see that the moral trajectory of the West has not been abandoned, even when its distortions invite despair. Rather than knocking modernity, they retrieve its deepest insight: the irreducible dignity of the person. Wojtyła names this way of seeing the uniqueness of each person the “personalist view”—a view, he explains, we owe to modernity’s emphasis on the self. Created in the imago Dei, each person bears a unique and unrepeatable expression of God. C. S. Lewis once remarked that if we truly saw one another as we are, we would be tempted to worship. Wojtyła’s philosophy urges precisely this reverence. And it is only because modernity has taught us to take the self seriously that we are now able to grasp, more fully than before, the profound uniqueness of every human person.
