ABSTRACT
By the middle of the eighteenth century the sensibilities of Enlightenment ideals had begun to incense some young intellectuals, writers, musicians and artists. Identifying themselves as Romantics, this young cabal prioritized the virtues of intuition, imagination and feeling over reason and method, replacing the notion I think, therefore I am with a philosophy more akin to I feel, therefore I am (Boyle 2004). In his short treatise on the ideal of authentic selfhood, Charles Taylor (1992) contends that the residue of these aesthetic standards has diffused into the contemporary social milieu, manifesting as a cultural preoccupation with selfrealization predicated on the belief that human beings are imbued with moral codes that must be explored and clarified in order to actualize their intrinsic potentialities. Proposing that we live in a “culture of authenticity” (29), he argues that humans have come to construe themselves as beings with inner depths and that being in touch with oneself has taken on independent moral significance, supplanting prior efforts to attain connectedness with God. This chapter explores the links between this Romantic ideal of authenticity and the ideologies and cultural practices espoused by members of the punk subculture.
