Authenticity, Cultural Identity and Horizon-Based Community
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Modernity is a time of disengagement, of breaking free from traditional communities and values to emerge as disembedded individuals in metropolises, of a crisis of belonging. Self creation was a privilege of very few people in premodern times, it is now the fate of every one. While the old community question was one of differentiating between a ‘they’ and a ‘we’, the postmodern question is the difficulty of sticking together any ‘we’ because there are too many differences among individuals recognized and not enough allegiance identified in an atomized society. This chapter proposes a new approach to cultural identity informed by the idea of authenticity, an aesthetics of self creation evolving since Romanticism. By examining Charles Taylor’s ethics of authenticity and his idea of the ‘horizons of significance’, I hope to explore an account of cultural identity based on one’s selfinitiated will to connect and to care and the possibility of a horizon-based community which starts off from individualism. Established through a mutual care towards something as part of one’s identity, it is accessible to all who care to enter, and more importantly, it is a concept of community supportive of self creation and meanwhile accommodating to differences and diversity. Under this approach, cultural identity ceases to be an essentializing discourse predetermined by race, nationality, sex or other non-autonomous factors and ‘connectivity’ supersedes ‘collectivity’ in the imagination of community and solidarity. It is hoped that this alternative approach will enable a more liberated and flexible account of cultural membership deemed needing in contemporary societies where migration, diaspora and regional cooperation are becoming increasingly commonplace.