Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

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"immersion" course in the ideas [Posted on 2005-02-15]
Someone told philosophy is simply a specific genre of European literature; I would tend to agree if permitted to add that to validate itself as "philosophy" the opus has to include references to the previous philosophical works. Otherwise, however similar in vein and content, a book of philosophy it will not be.
According to that definition philosophers are writers doomed to retell stories heard from their predecessors; far is the day when the Allegory of the Cave will drop off that rambling and overburdened philosophical cart (driven by the Buridan donkey, no doubt) and be moved out of readers' sight.

Whether this definition is true or not, Taylor in his book behaves exactly as described, repeating and condensing others' treatises and opinions. They are many in the long history of our civilization, so the author's tactic is to find connecting "narratives": here is the great "Inward Turn", from which premises of Romanticism easily follow, there came "veneration of the ordinary", which brought about the phenomenon of the modern novel.
It is precisely in this that both the greatest weakness of the oevre and its greatest utility lie: the book has collected innumerable praises from the horde of us, intellectual sloths, for in it we immediately spotted the opportunity to use the results of this marvellous compression, with the narratives as aids to jog our lazy memories, without reading the whole philosophical library of Taylor's sources shelf after shelf, and cover to cover.

The weakness of the approach could be in a certain arbitrariness of the found stories and connections. They make what was announced as "history of the central terms on which the modern man appreciates himself" seem too logical and inevitable. Those threads or constantly developing themes, when historical rather than invented, could be simultaneous, interweaving and interplaying - not consecutive and orderly.
In short, they are patterns half discerned and half imposed on history and philosophy by Taylor himself.

The second peculiarity of the book is the Taylor's style.
Once, they say, physisists came to a University bursar to ask for funds. The bursar studied their proposal for a long time, and then complained: "It's always like this with you, physisists. You always ask for huge sums to do your experiments. Mathematicians are so much better! All they use is paper, pencils and erasers." Then he thought a bit and added: "And philosophers are best of all. They do not even need erasers."
Taylor's style is unnecessarily dense and repetitive. I had an impression that he was more engrossed in wording than in laying out logically when writing. Very often, when the thread has been followed through to the very end, one realises, it could have been greatly reduced, and reduced to almost a platitude, I caught myself thinking at times: yes, "the original unity" of religious worldview was shattered and became multiple disciplines in modernity, emergence of protestant churches is habitually used to explain the Western individualism et cetera et cetera et cetera.
The "difficulty" of the book may be in the density of its style, and not always in the subject matter being discussed.

But still...
they say laziness is the King and true source of all Good in the world, so I cannot help but give the deserved 5 stars to this crash "immersion" course in the ideas of Western philosophy (in the guise of a treatise about Good, Ethics and sources of Modernity), nicely condensed and organized in a number of stories to follow for a curious reader but less than dedicated philosopher.
Digesting the Taylor's tome is the easiest way to read one book and then be able to convincingly claim to know many, many more.

A True Classic! [Posted on 2005-03-29]
Sources of the Self is an exceptional piece of scholarship. In SOS, Taylor engages in a course of philosophical anthropology to demonstrate that our understanding of the self as interior is by no means universal. For Taylor, understandings of the self are inextricably linked to our understandings of the good. Thus, self-understanding is directed by evolving conceptions of the source and location of the good. This idea has been lost, according to Taylor, because of the narrow conception of the good in our modern world and the naturalist suppression of moral ontology.

Taylor defends this argument in two ways. First, he provides a strong argument that the self exists within inescapable moral frameworks. "To know who you are" Taylor argues, "is to be oriented in moral space." These frameworks are composed of hierarchical moral distinctions (i.e., some things are viewed as better than, or more important than others -- for instance, in our time, the notion of respect for persons). Second, Taylor argues that previous goods have been victim to historical suppression.

The bulk of the text is aimed at re-articulating historically suppressed goods. This illustration provides a fascinating romp through the history of ideas from Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau and MANY others, as well an interesting pieces about cultural history (e.g., the Puritans, art theory, etc).

One caution -- this is NOT an easy read. The argument itself is in the first few chapters, the remander is illustration. But keep the argument in mind the whole way. You will have to work to get through it - but it is well worth it! You will never see the self the same way again.

Great, BUT  [Posted on 2006-03-17]
I read this very popular, yet scholarly, and extolled book when it first was published, and found it elegant, helpful, and problematic. The title is the subject of the book: What sources have gone into making of modern identity? Obviously philosophy and theology are the dominant contributors, with psychology pulling up the rear (which is as it should be, since the latter only came to be 150 years ago).

While I agree with Taylor that philosophy, more than either theology or psychology, actually informs our sense of self, particularly the modern self, I'm not sure psychologists would agree. In today's marketplace of ideas, it's psychology that crowds bookstore shelves with a panoply of "self-help" books. Conversely, while the sense of self is implicit in earlier philosophy, not many modern philosophers address the matter at all. Ergo, the need for this book.

Taylor weaves his theory through the prism of philosophical history and the evolutionary unfolding of how the sense of the modern self has come into being. It's a compelling, perhaps unattractive, pinnacle to which we have come. The "modern" sense of self begins with the works of Rene Descartes (i.e., the thinking being), which may or may not have improved on Boethius's medieval ontology (i.e., the rational animal). Still, the sense of "self" is far more complex than either a rational animal or a thinking being alone would suggest. Perhaps either thesis is the starting point, and obviously necessary, but it's certainly not sufficient, to capture what we mean by "self" today.

To Taylor's credit, he begins to add other necessary features, and the features he adds aren't uncontroversial. Yes, phenomenology is a part of the structure; so too is language a key feature to the identity of the modern self; but where are the well-spring of the emotions? This particularly salient feature of emotions barely registers on Taylor's radar. And it's this deficit, the failure to bring our emotional features to bear, that makes this work such an enormous disappointment.

For the other facets, dimensions, and features, Taylor elegantly, eruditely, and heuristically surveys philosophical history and culls most of its ideas. But how could the emotions (e.g., love, hate, joy, grief, etc.) not figure into Taylor's conception of the "modern self." Even if Taylor relies primarily on philosophical perspectives, the philosophy of emotions is not a nil set. David Hume devoted Part II of his seminal "Treatise on Human Nature" to the passions; numerous contemporary philosophers have addressed focused on the emotions in the years immediately preceding the publication of this book. And even if Taylor had been deprived of the philosophical accounts, he certainly could not have been deprived of psychological accounts. So, the minimalist attention to this most salient of features is jarring.

Why such a fuss about this omission? Robert Solomon, whose works both precede and follow Taylor's book, insists that it is the emotions that make life itself meaningful and valuable: Not independent of the other salient features, but intrinsically integrated with them. The "passions" are what give life zest and interest and dynamic. When's the last time that looking at language's performatives brought "joy" to one? What happens when the self ratiocinates that makes it meaningful to us? Of course, the "eureka" of discovery, the pride of accomplishment, the joy of understanding, the hope of implementation, the desire to act, etc., are what make ratiocination interesting and valuable. Cogitation qua cogitation is significant, no doubt, but we cogitate in order to understand, and understand to implement, and implement to enjoy. Thus, pleasure is integral to the cogitation, for without it, it's simply cold, calculating, and indifferent ratiocination. Per Solomon, the passions (i.e., emotions) are what give life meaning.

If Solomon's thesis about emotions giving the self meaning is true, and it is, how could something so obvious and necessary have been overlooked in this magisterial tome? This singular omission marrs this otherwise fascinating and comprehensive history and analysis of what it means to have a "self." It's as if Taylor started to analyze the pictures on the wall, but ignored the elephant in the middle of the room. The emotions are what give life meaning, and any examination of "the self" that omits them may have given us the container, but has also forgotten to fill it.

Happily, despite this serious omission, Taylor provides a probing and detailed exegesis of the development and structure of the modern self. As long as one supplements this massive tome with other reading (e.g., Solomon's "The Passions," "Love," "The Philosophy of Erotic Love," etc., or Martha Nussbaum's "The Therapy of Desire," "Upheavals of Thought," etc., or Ronald de Souza's "The Rationality of Emotions"), Taylor's work provides the outline and identity of the other salient features, but having given us the wall, but missed the nucleus, of the cell, the work lacks life.

An essential book for anyone interested in following up the Socratic maxim: "Know thyself!" [Posted on 2008-03-03]
Charles Taylor is among the most learned of contemporary philosophers, and has the gift of taking a familiar story or idea from the history of philosophy and giving it new life, allowing it to reveal insights that are both unfamiliar but become obvious once stated. Reading "The Sources of the Self" is like a re-education into the significance for us and our sense of self and of what is of ultimate importance of the shifts that took place away from the ancient world to the modern. At its most basic, the shift is from a conception (and corresponding practices) of reality itself as having a normative structure to which our actions and ideas must conform toward a conception of reality as in itself neutral and only invested with value by our projects and goals. Taylor traces meticulously some of the motivations behind this seismic shift, while emphasizing that his project is primarily interpretive rather than explanatory. The question, ultimately, is one of who we are and how we define ourselves and whether such self definitions can be ultimately satisfactory.

There are some brilliant insights along the way. In fact, it is the kind of book where there are so many intriguing insights that you want to follow up, you could easily get lost along the way and never get to the end. The solution, of course, is to read it through once and then go back, as I plan to do a few times.

The book opens with a thorough and convincing (to me) critique of naturalism as applied to ethics. Values can't be explained naturally because they are presupposed by selfhood. To be a self is not merely to be capable of experiencing, but is to have concerns, which means to encounter what there is in terms of what matters to oneself. The neutrality that is presupposed by science, and built into naturalism, is an achievement and not a starting point. The broader concern with which Taylor opens the book and returns to several times is that technical philosophy has defined the scope of ethics far too narrowly upon the question of permissible and impermissible courses of action -- what we really need is an ethics of everyday life, and ethics of self-definition. It is not just a question of what we can and cannot do but of what we should aspire to, of how we should define ourselves and live our lives, of what really matters.

Another intriguing set of insights comes with Taylor's careful reinvestigation of the processes involved in "secularization" (the subject of his newest book, nearly as long as this one). Secularization can't be explained as the natural result of progress, as if faith must of necessity fail in the face of science. In fact, he argues, enlightenment is not so much a radical departure from, but is closely connected with and anticipated by developments in Christian thought and practice in the modern period. At the same time, secularization does not result from a rejection of traditional morality in favor of a more rationalist outlook. The real motivation towards secularization is the growing awareness of alternative moral motivations besides a transcendent God: in nature and beauty, on the one hand, and in the dignity of the autonomous self, on the other. Taylor shows how our modern sense of self has been born out of the recognition of competing moral sources: the traditional one of a transcendent God, the Romantic conception of nature and artistic self expression, and the humanistic conception of the sacred character of the individual human being. These strands can be interwoven and varied, and lead to ambiguous sets of values in terms of which we moderns define ourselves and the meaning of our lives. Taylor's book is an important contribution towards sorting out some of the ambiguities that move us in contradictory and confusing ways, and is to be highly recommended for anyone who wants to figure out who we really are and why we are so confused about ourselves.

Exhausting, but enlightening! [Posted on 2008-10-21]
Another reviewer wrote: "Taylor took two years to write this book; it took me nearly as long to read it! It is a five-part tome of 525 pages of text and 71 pages of footnotes. In this entire collection I cannot remember a single section that could be read without my complete concentration. Quiet and solitude are minimal prerequisites before tackling this book - a good grasp of the history of philosophy wouldn't hurt either.",which I would say is a very accurate reflection of how you feel after you're done this work and while taking on this work.

In my review I have decided to take on chapters 10 ( Exploring `L' Humane Condition) and 11 (Inner Nature) of this work since trying to review the whole thing would be close to dissertation-like in comparison.

This book is principally a chronological explanation of the modernist disapproval against the extricated and active modes of thought and action that arose when theistically viewed ethics crumbled, but that they focused too little upon our internal life, i.e., our powers of creative imagination and the substantive goods of normal life, which Taylor declares, give meaning to human life. Relating each philosophy with an exacting conception of our individuality as selves, he supports the modern view, keeping in mind that self-apprehension must identify that some things are essential beyond the self. Taylor rambles somewhat and often talks about "the good," as though human beings were fungible in their capacities for approval and action; but the wealth of explicatory material and recurrent insights are thought-irritating.

In Chapter 10 of this book, titled, `Exploring `L' Humane Condition', Taylor is of the opinion that `self-exploration becomes central to our culture, another stance of our radical reflexivity becomes of crucial importance to us alongside that of disagreement. Rather then objectifying our own nature and hence taking it as irrelevant to our identity, it consists in exploring what we are in order to establish this identity, because the assumption behind modern self-exploration is that we do not already know who we are' .

The foundations to which Taylor refers are the moral principles, ideas, and understandings that have overlooked in different historical periods. Taylor's basic disagreement is rather simple, `we are only our selves insofar as we move in a definite space of questions, as we search for and discover a direction to the good'. His intention is not to stipulate the good, that is, he does not seek to set normative meanings or qualifications. His rationale is to show that self-definition needs a structure in which to be understood.

According to Taylor, `there is no constant existence, neither of our being nor of objects. And we and our judgements and all mortal things else do have a time period in which they exist and then pass away'1.
Obviously, Taylor's opinion of classical thought seems to be ridiculously unrelated in our contemporary world. Self is definitely not defined in relation to externals, but by an extreme interiority, complete refutation of hierarchical schemes, and the conjecture that reality is defined empirically rather than conceptually. Chapter 11, `Inner Nature' traces the renovation of the classical perspective through history in each of these areas: the movement toward inwardness, the affirmation of ordinary life, and the voice of nature.

Exploring the minimal ethics of modernity and dissatisfied with post-modern nihilism, Taylor positions his moral theory in the ancient tradition of 'ethos'. But Taylor does not squeeze a pre-defined, teleological fate. Rather, his premise is that in articulating 'the self' we will discover who we are, what we are presumed to do and where we are going.

Taylor merges his theory through the prism of philosophical history and the evolutionary describing of how the sense of the contemporary self has come into being. It's a convincing, perhaps unattractive, pinnacle to which we have come. The "modern" sense of self is successfully highlighted in chapters 10 and 11 of the book, which may or may not have improved on medieval ontology (i.e., the rational animal). Still, the logic of "self" is far more complex than either a rational animal or a thinking being alone would suggest. Perhaps either thesis is the starting point, and obviously necessary, but it's certainly not sufficient, to capture what we mean by "self" today.

To Taylor's credit, he adds other crucial features, and the features he adds aren't uncontroversial. Yes, phenomenology is a part of the formation; so too is language a key feature to the character of the modern self; but where are the well-spring of the emotions? This particularly salient feature of emotions barely registers on Taylor's radar. And it's this deficit, the failure to bring our emotional features to bear, that makes this work such an enormous disappointment.

For the other facets, dimensions, and features, Taylor sophisticatedly, eruditely, and heuristically surveys philosophical history and culls most of its ideas. But how could the emotions (e.g., love, hate, joy, grief, etc.) not figure into Taylor's conception of the "modern self." Even if Taylor relies primarily on philosophical perspectives, the philosophy of emotions is not a nil set.

Taylor insists that it is the feelings that make life itself meaningful and valuable: Not independent of the other salient features, but intrinsically integrated with them. The "passions" are what give life zest and interest and dynamic. When's the last time that looking at language's performatives brought "joy" to one? What happens when the self ratiocinates that makes it evocative to us? Of course, the "eureka" of discovery, the pride of accomplishment, the joy of understanding, the hope of achievement, the desire to act, etc., are what make ratiocination interesting and valuable. Cogitation qua cogitation is significant, no doubt, but we cogitate in order to understand, and understand to implement, and implement to enjoy. Thus, pleasure is integral to the cogitation, for without it, it's simply cold, calculating, and indifferent ratiocination. Per Solomon, the passions (i.e., emotions) are what give life meaning.

In chapter 11 of the book, titled, `Inner Nature', Taylor emphasizes that `as long as the order of things embodies within the human being then ideas and valuations are also seen as located in the world and not just in the subjects. Indeed their privileged locus is in the realm of ideas in which both world and soul participate' .

Taylor's point in chapter 11 is to say that we do not need to posit the human being primarily as the theme of depictions in order to understand rule-following behavior or something like driving down the highway. Taylor argues that it is an error to presuppose that we are inherently cut off from the world and our understanding of it essentially mediated by representations. When we act, for example, we act with our bodies whether linguistically or through grasping with the hand. But little of what is involved in our action, whether the goals of action or the rule specifying movement, are consciously articulated. In fact, he argues, it is only against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us at all.

Rather our aptitude to walk is a bodily knowledge. Instead, Taylor argues, our ability to follow rules is founded in the relationship between a background of practices and bodily habits. On occasion we do follow rules but Taylor wants us to consider that the rules do not contain the principles of their own applications. As such we need to understand the more complicated relationship between our bodily know-how and the social and historical "forms of life" which explain our actions and of which rules often only supply an after-the-fact explanation and description.

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