CONCEPT
The Expressivist Turn
Taylor's name for the late-eighteenth-century transformation in how Western culture understood creation — from imitation of pre-existing forms to the expression of an inner vision unique to the creator — and the cultural revolution that made authenticity the highest modern moral ideal.
The expressivist turn is Taylor's term for the shift, associated with Rousseau, Herder, and the Romantics, that transformed the understanding of creative and productive work in the modern West. Before the turn, creation was understood primarily as imitation — the faithful reproduction of forms existing independently of the creator. After the turn, creation was understood as expression — the externalization of an inner vision uniquely the creator's own. This transformation reshaped not only the arts but eventually all forms of productive work, producing the contemporary cultural expectation that meaningful work must express the authentic self. The AI amplifier simultaneously fulfills and undermines this expectation in ways that produce the characteristic crises of the age of amplification.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Taylor traces the expressivist turn through Herder's insistence that each person has an original measure — a distinctive way of being human that cannot be derived from any