On 5/19/06, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
One was a seminar paper on construction of self in John Donne which I never turned in, another an M.A. thesis on selfhood in modern minorities literature which I never wrote. I felt that I didn't know what to look for and that I couldn't use the term meaningfully in any descriptive, still less analytic way.
Now that's an interesting admission. Your situation exemplifies the fundamental predicament of modern selves as Taylor describes it. We don't know what to make of ourselves, as "a human agent, a person, or a self." We have no firm answers to the questions: What are my obligations to other human beings? What is it to live a fulfilling life? By what criteria may I deserve others' respect?
Taylor's traditional self is precisely the opposite, a self that knows the answers to these questions. The specific answers may vary; the obligations of a woman may be different from those of a man, the merchant's fulfillment may be different from a farmer's; the respect owed a warrior may reflect different criteria than the respect owed a priest. Individuals may fall short on any of these dimensions; they may not do what they're obliged to do, their lives may fall short of fulfillment, they may not deserve respect. But the basic answers to the questions, the reasons by which their success or failure is judged, are taken to be self-evident.
The answers constitute a framework within which selves are situated (indeed, I note, borrowing a notion from the anthropologist James Fernandez, selves might be conceived as points in the three-dimensional space that the questions constitute). If modern selves seem vague and slippery, it is because the frameworks that define them are themselves problematic. Taylor writes (p. 17),
"What is common to [modern selves] is the sense that no framework is shared by everyone, can be taken for granted as **the** framework tout court, can sink to the phenomenological status of unquestioned fact."
Why this should be and the path by which it came to be is the central theme of Taylor's book.
John
-- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
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