[lit-ideas] Re: Honor? Charles Taylor anyone?
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 May 2006 13:48:28 -0400
Some background via a review:
http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/jul1991/v48-2-bookreview1.htm
Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
By Charles Taylor
Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989. 608 pp. $37.50.
Charles Taylor's latest work is undoubtedly one of the most
significant works in moral philosophy and the history of
ideas to appear in recent decades. In this ambitious and
insightful work, he moves the conversation about the
relationship between identity and the good ahead in at least
four ways. He presents a historical narrative of the
development of modern identity in its relation to moral
goods and their sources. He articulates a modern ethic of
benevolence and universal justice that is gaining increasing
acceptance in the West. He describes the increasing
separation of that modern ethic from the theistic and
Enlightenment sources that spawned it. Finally, Taylor
suggests three sources for a metaethic that can undergird
our modern moral stance, two of which are uniquely modem and
arise from the development of the modern self.
Taylor comes at this task with a profound and far-reaching
knowledge of Anglo/European philosophical thought and its
epistemological and methodological dilemmas. Drawing on
Heidegger's notion of the historicity of being, he
unabashedly claims the historical narrative itself as the
locus of meaning. Rejecting both ideational and cause/
effect theories of explanation, he presumes a situated human
freedom and uses adequacy as his criterion of correct
interpretation. Taylor's method keeps his claims modest, his
descriptions concrete, and his direction clear.
For more than a decade, Taylor has debated the nature of the
human sciences, asserting that the naturalistic world-view
is “wildly implausible.” In 1985, he hinted that he was
working on a history of the modern self that would “explain
plausibly the spiritual roots of naturalism” and show how
“the very nature of modern identity has tended to make us
reluctant to acknowledge this moral dimension” (Human Agency
and Language).
In the present volume, Taylor masterfully outlines a history
of ideas that shows strong connections between a sense of
identity and one's notion of the good. He describes how
morals became separated from their moral sources as
procedural reason and an Enlightenment view of nature gained
sway over substantive reason and theistic moral sources. In
the process, he debunks reductive approaches to defining the
self without reference to moral goods that orient one's
sense of place and purpose in the world. He shows the
paradoxical concealment of moral sources that such views
inevitably undergo. But Taylor goes farther, describing the
development of uniquely modern moral sources in a
self-empowering notion of human dignity and a sense of
inwardness as a locus of moral depth. He sees possibilities
of steadying modern moral commitments not only in
traditional theistic sources but also in those modern
sources of constitutive goods.
Taylor's rather opaque title makes it appropriate to state
what his project is not. He uses the terms self and
identity, each of which has been defined in multiple ways by
sociologists, psychologists, and theologians, as well as by
philosophers. But his book is not a sociological or
psychological analysis of the self, tasks which would
involve entirely different literatures and definitions of
the self. Other terms, such as sources of the self and the
making of modern identity, might imply that Taylor is
offering a causal explanation of the development of modern
self-identity though his history of ideas. Although Taylor
tends to slip in this direction, it is most avowedly not his
intent. Finally, this is not an account of the development
of the modern self in the North American setting with its
diversity and distinct philosophical emphases, although a
deeper appreciation of those traditions may have helped
Taylor see moral sources that he doesn't articulate.
Taylor organizes his work in three parts. He begins by
outlining his philosophical-moral framework. This framework
puts moral evaluation at the center of human identity.
Persons understand who they are in large measure by the
“strong evaluations” they make about what is good, and how
that understanding will direct their lives. He ends the book
with an assessment of the modern situation: (1) a consensus
on morals such as universal human rights, the demand to
reduce suffering, the ideals of freedom, equality, and
self-determination; and (2) a lack of moral sources or
agreed upon constitutive goods to undergird that consensus.
Taylor devotes the bulk of the book to a historical
development of three themes that influence the modern
identity: a radical turn inward, the affirmation of ordinary
life, and a view of nature as a source for moral evaluation
and self-identity.
Through exploring those themes, Taylor shows how the notion
of self changes through Western history. In the modern era,
identity and the good still intertwine. But major
developments change the character of both. The substantive
reason that related strong evaluations to the world shifted
to an idea of reason as a proper procedure of thought,
unrelated to a world of order that could be counted on.
Reason itself was divided, practical reason becoming subject
to one's personal “gods and demons,” as Max Weber so
poignantly put it. In the modern era, the ontic logos so
necessary to earlier theistic views of the self can no
longer be assumed but must be related to one's inward journey.
When he brings us to the modern era, Taylor describes a
consensus on morals but a poverty of moral sources. His
cogent articulation of that consensus challenges Alasdair
Maclntyre's analogy of modern moral discourse as an attempt
to make sense of a blown-up laboratory. One notes also the
consensus on a modern Western ethic of freedom,
individuality, justice, and benevolence that appears in
works as disparate as Jurgen Habermas' Theory of
Communicative Action, Talcott Parsons' Evolution of
Societies, and John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights.
Unfortunately, the moral sources of those views are no
longer apparent. Having jettisoned traditional theism as a
moral source, moderns are left with disengaged reason or
expressivisma as arenas in which to search for a metaethic.
Taylor outlines three options for developing moral sources
for the modern ethic: (1) a no longer assumable theistic
basis, (2) the power and dignity of the human person, and
(3) expressivistic resonances within the self. (Taylor
defines these resonances neither in correspondence to an
assumed reality nor in entire subjectivism.) He encourages
the search for moral sources especially in the expressivist
area, combining deep personal insight with visions of the
good that may connect with outside sources, for examples,
nature as an inner voice or stream of life. While we lack a
public consensus on moral sources, moral sources indexed to
a deep personal vision could be convincing. At the same
time, Taylor wonders if modern moral sources can be
sustained without a vision of hope or a religious dimension,
“a love of that which is incomparably higher than ourselves.”
Taylor thinks that the modern moral predicament is
dangerous. He suggests that the gap between moral sources
and their articulation must be closed in order to provide
strong reasons for the universal benevolence ethic that
abounds (at least in Taylor's audience). Part of our
humanity, he argues, is denied by the modern tendency to
reject and deny deep spiritual aspirations and intuitions.
Without deeper moral sources, benevolence exacts a high
cost, both in commitment and in a sense of guilt for not
living up to its high ideals. On the other hand, linking an
ethic of benevolence to religious or nationalistic ideology
has led to destructiveness, not only in past centuries but
in our own. Taylor insists that avoiding this problem is
impossible; we must risk one danger or the other, and
neither choice is without cost. On the one side we risk
stifling the human spirit, and on the other we risk the
potential dangers of the power of religious faith.
Taylor's task is an important one-understanding ourselves in
a stream of history, seeking insights about moral goods and
their relation to our sense of self. He courageously, yet
modestly, tackles the project, and his enthusiasm
contagiously infects the reader. He astutely follows the
center of the discussion about identity and the good through
its carriers in theology, philosophy, philosophy of science,
literature, and the visual arts. His discussion, which
ranges from Plato to Augustine,
from Descartes through Adorno, and from Kant to Nietzsche,
holds the reader's interest as one listens to the story of
ideas and feels the tug of each era.
Taylor is never dull. The chapters on the Victorian and
modern eras are especially fascinating as Taylor traces
epiphany in modern art, giving an account of the transfer of
essential meaning and morals from philosophy to art as
personal vision became necessary for an articulation of
moral sources. Taylor also works against a sense of chaos
and disintegration in modern life by finding moral threads
and weaving them together. The book celebrates rather than
laments modernity, offering creative insights into
furthering the search for moral sources.
Taylor deplores the lack of exploration of personal
resonances as a way to uncover moral sources. Yet there is
much work being done here in the novels of Frederick
Buechner, Madeline L'Engle, and Toni Morrison, among others.
Recent emphases in theology and ethics on narrative,
character, experience, and practice also reflect the deep
connections between personal vision and moral sources that
Taylor wants to see. He judiciously directs us toward the
appeal and urgency of those tasks in the modem era. In doing
so, he brings understanding and encouragement to us as
Christian theologians.
Are there other moral sources that Taylor neglects? Any
rendering of history is selective and gaps are pardonable in
such a vast work. But the lack of anything on the medieval
period leaves the reader without connecting links between
Augustine's deprecation of reason and Descartes' admiration
of reason in theological deliberations. Aquinas' recovery of
Aristotle reconnected reason and theology severed by
Augustine. This seems a crucial link to Decartes' attempt to
link reason, however redefined, to theology. It is also
important to a modern recovery of natural law as a moral
source, exemplified by the work of John Courtney Murray and
John Finnis.
Taylor limits his apprehension of moral sources in another
way by tracing the history of a monological self. Although
Taylor is aware that, to put it in his own terms, “the
community is also constitutive of the individual” and that
“common meanings are embedded in our institutions and
practices,” (Human Agency and Language) he somehow in this
work loses touch with the communal dimensions of moral
self-interpretation. Although he refers to communities and
moral practices, the modern moral sources he points to focus
on a disengaged individual self.
Taylor wants to utilize personal resonances of the modern
self in order to get in touch with an outside order since no
public consensus on that order is possible. His hunch is
that theism may be necessary for an adequate account of
moral sources and this route leaves open that possibility.
He stresses the individual self, although he insists that a
disengaged self offers a wrong view of agency, and he agrees
that the self is socially constituted.
If Taylor understands this, it is puzzling that he focuses
so exclusively on modern moral sources that arise from a
disengaged view of the self. I suppose the history itself
moves one in this direction. Or perhaps he is trying to
utilize modern self-perceptions of a disengaged self as a
point from which to develop new possibilities. In either
case, strong American traditions that focus on communal
understandings of the self might have opened Taylor to
socially-oriented moral sources. The narrative theology of
African American slaves, the social realism of Charles S.
Pierce and John Dewey, and the responsibility ethics of H.
Richard Niebuhr are but three examples.
If the dilemma of risk is as serious as Taylor claims it is
in his last chapter (and I think that it is), these
additional modern moral sources must be considered
seriously. An inability to articulate moral sources may
result in a consensus sought through persuasion or even
coercion in the absence of reasons related to moral sources.
The furor over “politically correct” values at the
university reflects this dilemma of risk. When my eldest
daughter, a first year student at the University of
California at Santa Cruz came home for the holidays, she
announced loudly, “I am NOT politically correct” and then in
a more tentative voice she added, “although I agree with
most of what they're saying.” A few days later the often
irrational and even violent political correctness debate hit
the cover of Newsweek with the headline, “Thought Police:
Watch What You Say.” Jenny does agree with the values of
equality, ecological and multicultural awareness, and an end
to hunger and oppression in evidence in current attitudes on
campus. But the pressure to be “politically correct” seems
to contradict the ethic of self-chosen values and tolerance
that is so much a part of her Bay Area milieu. The
contradiction confuses Jenny. Somehow it feels wrong to be
pressured into touting values she thinks are right.
The moral sources underlying many “politically correct”
values remain hidden to many holding those values. Disparate
values are linked together, conflicts among goods concealed,
moral sources that could aid evaluation of those goods
remain unexplored. The pressure to conform without analysis
undercuts the very goods purported, thus presenting a new
authoritarianism. Taylor's illumination of some of the
history behind this moral predicament is a tremendous gift
to those of us who would like to understand better the
plurality of goods that we hold, the inevitable conflicts
among those goods, and the moral sources that make them
compelling.
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