ABSTRACT
Charles Taylor, whose account I initially follow, has written that it ‘is evident that the expressivist conception of man is of more than merely historical interest’ (Taylor, 1975, p 29). The expressivist approach to morality involved a strong belief in the perfectibility of human being. It stressed a sense of the self-unfolding of individual human life, at ease with itself, with nature and with a moral community. Taylor describes it as entailing an anthropology of free expression and discovery by each individual of their uniqueness: ‘man comes to know himself by expressing and hence clarifying what he is and recognising himself in this expression’ (ibid, p 17). This flowering from within of the qualities of individual life is at the same time a ‘passionate demand for unity and wholeness’ (ibid, p 23) through overcoming the modern dichotomies of mind and body, reason and feeling, desire and calculation. It insists on freedom not in terms of autonomy from interference, but in terms of authentic self-expression, an awareness of self in communion with both nature and other human beings. Moral expressivism ‘responds with dismay and horror to the Enlightenment vision of society made up of atomistic, morally self-sufficient subjects who enter into external relations with each other’ (ibid, p 28). It seeks a ‘deeper bond of felt unity which will unite sympathy between men with their highest self-feeling’. Such self-feeling is ‘woven into community life rather than remaining the preserve of individuals’ (ibid). This view was popular in Germany in the last decades of the 18th century. Its leading thinkers included Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the poet Hölderlin. Hölderlin was an old college friend of Hegel’s, and he was to be a strong influence on the young Hegel, coming to philosophical life in the 1790s. However, alongside this personal link, moral expressivism was part of the spirit of the times. It reflected the optimism that was unleashed by the French Revolution as well as a reaction against the narrow materialist ideology that had preceded it. There was a sense of the possibility of changing the world radically, of overcoming the negativity and deathly quality of the present in favour of a future of self-actualisation, harmony and community.
