[lit-ideas] Re: SOS or Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 23:45:16 -0700
Acting on Phil's suggestion, I would like to kick off the discussion
by reposting what I wrote about Chapter 1, Section 1.1
--------------------------------
First, a few basic questions to keep in mind as we read:
1. Do we really know what Taylor is trying to say?
2. Do we understand, historically or logically or both, why he frames
it this way?
3. In what particular ways does it explicate, challenge or alter our
own usual assumptions?
In that spirit, let us consider Taylor's first two paragraphs. He
begins by describing his project: "I want to explore various facets of
what I will call the 'modern identity'." This apparently simple
sentence raises all sorts of issues.
"I want to explore": Why "explore"? Why not "define," "analyze," or
"explain"?
"various facets": Why just "various facets"? Why not the whole thing?
"what I will call the 'modern identity'": Why call attention to the
act of personal labeling? And why is that the outside the quotation
marks that bracket 'modern identity'?
RP: I think you may be making too heavy going of some of this, John. I
didn’t find Taylor’s sentence especially hard to understand as a
statement of intentions and a way of delimiting his project. If he’d
said, e.g., ‘I want to define…,’ I’m sure I’d have been ready to look at
what followed in a different light: this guy is going to give us the
necessary and sufficient conditions of the ‘modern identity,’ in much
the same way that Robert Paxton attempts to define Fascism in The
Anatomy of Fascism. (In truth I’d probably not have looked at what
followed.)
RP: What you call ‘an act of personal labeling’ comes from a certain
candor: he doesn’t want to argue about what ‘the modern identity’ is
really; he wants instead to explore (examine, investigate) certain
cultural phenomena that have struck him as worth exploring).
All these questions point to a tentativeness that, we shall see later,
is, according to Taylor, characteristic of modern selves.
Taylor continues:
"To give a good first approximation of what this means would be to say
that it involves tracing various strands of our modern notion of what
it is to be a human agent, a person, or a self."
"a good first approximation" and "tracing various strands": No
definitive argument this. Instead the start of a process that follows
multiple paths and still (remember "tracing") produces only a sketch,
a simulation if you will, of a topic that evades final resolution.
RP: ’[T]racing various strands,’ need not be read as meaning that he’s
going to lay a translucent sheet over something and through it trace
the pattern beneath; it may mean ‘following various strands,’ especially
when they can’t be separated: pull on one and others come with it. This
fits with the next paragraph:
"But pursuing this investigation soon shows that you can't get very
clear about this without some further understanding of how our
pictures of the good have evolved. Selfhood and the good, or in
another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably
intertwined themes."
"how our pictures of the good have evolved": Why "pictures"? Why not
"theories" or "logic" or "mathematics" or (stealing from Stanley
Cavell) "conversations" instead? Is this just the unthinking use of
cliché or is there something deliberate about the choice of pictures,
visual representations that are grasped as wholes before analysis
picks them apart?
RP: I’m not sure what your worry is. None of the other candidates,
except, perhaps, ‘theories’ do the work it would seem Taylor wants done.
They’re all philosophical buzz words that fail the Orwell test.
"Selfhood and the good....turn out to be inextricably intertwined
themes": Here, as the next paragraph makes clear is the starting point
of Taylor's analysis, the proposition that selves cannot be understood
apart from they way they envision the good, a proposition that
positions Taylor in opposition to sociobiological or other naturalistic
reductions that treat how the good is envisioned as epiphenomenal,
something to be explained away by more 'fundamental'
factors that suffice to explain the nature of selves as we encounter them.
RP: If I understand this, you’ve put Taylor on the side of G.E. Moore,
who thought that to believe that the property of being good rested on
something ‘more fundamental’ was to committ, of course, the Naturalistic
Fallacy. Moore was wrong if the good-making purpose of things is brought
in; and I’m not sure that ‘selves’ can think themselves out of the way
in which they function as biological and social beings.
Taylor again:
"Much contemporary moral philosophy, particularly but not only in the
English-speaking world, has given such a narrow focus to morality that
some of the crucial connections I want to consider here are
incomprehensible in its terms. This moral philosophy has tended to
focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be,
on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the
good life; and it has no conceptual place left for the notion of the
good as the object of our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch
portrayed it in her work, as the privileged focus of attention or
will.”
RP: Moral philosophy might look like this if one hadn’t read any since
1958 (the date of Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’). It
would look like this only to one who hadn’t read the great works of
Philippa Foot, which began to appear in the late 1960s. This
characterization of ‘contemporary moral philosophy’ is, on my view, an
Aunt Sally of dubious origin.
“This philosophy has accredited a cramped and truncated view of
morality in a narrow sense, as well as of the whole range of issues
involved in the attempt to live the best possible life, and this not
only among professional philosophers, but with a wider public."
RP: Again, this ignores the not-all-that-recent renewal of interest in
‘virtue ethics’ on the part of Anscombe, Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse,
James Wallace, Peter Geach, and many others.
Here I would like to hear what others have to say, and particularly
about the distinctions
"what is right to do" vs. "what is good to be" and what comes to mind
when you read, "a cramped and truncated view of morality in a narrow
sense."
RP: I’d respond by saying that the doing vs. being distinction only
looks real, insofar as it might turn out to that what it was good to be
was a person who did certain kinds of things, a formula which should
please both Kant and Aristotle. The question, ‘How should I live?’
(Aristotle? Grice) is different from ‘How ought one live?’ (Kant, R. M.
Hare): if one focuses on the nature of moral judgments one will be drawn
to talk about ‘judging for all,’ ‘universalizability,’ etc., and if one
focuses on the nature of the best life one will focus on the virtues.
Yet, as ‘selves,’ we are agents, and to be an agent is to do things and
one of the things we do is to make judgments, silently or aloud.
Robert Paul
(interloper)
Reed College
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