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Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

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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.

The sources to which Taylor refers are the moral ideals, ideas, and understandings that have dominated in various historical eras. Taylor's basic premise is rather simple, "we are only our selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good (p. 34)." His purpose is not to specify the good, that is, he does not seek to set normative definitions or qualifications. His purpose is to show that self-definition requires a framework in which to be understood.

The historical course of his narrative begins with the classical perspective. In this view, self was dependent on a vision of the True or the Ideal. The hierarchical nature of reality presupposed in classical thought meant that self-definition was subservient to the whole. Traditional Christian thought embraced the classical perspective and the preference for self-definition by externals.

Obviously, this short sketch of classical thought seems to be absurdly irrelevant in our contemporary world. Self is definitely not defined in relation to externals, but by an extreme interiority, complete rejection of hierarchical schemes, and the assumption that reality is defined empirically rather than conceptually. This book traces the transformation 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.

I found Taylor's historical analysis of more value than his contemporary application; however, I have to admit that the latter was quite difficult for me to follow due to my lack of exposure to the material. In essence he claims that the near universal adoption of benevolence and justice as our predominant ethical values have insufficient foundation. Radical subjectivity, radical equality, and radical acceptance of nature do not provide a horizon capable of defending contemporary values.

Even though Taylor stops short of offering an external standard, his thorough critique of contemporary inconsistencies is excellent. I cannot really recommend this book to everyone because it is clearly written to a graduate audience. If you are not well-read in philosophy, theology, or psychology, it may not be worth your time.

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.

With 'Sources of the Self' Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written a seminal work along the lines of Ernst Cassirer's classic 'An Essay on Man'.

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

Taylor's quest into what made man into what he is, is traced back to classic Greek thought and Augustinian theology. Subsequently the author takes us to early modernity: from Locke, via Neoplatonists like Shaftesbury, to the period of Romanticism. Eventually this odyssee of the mind is germinating into present-day man as a self-expressing creature.

The richness of Taylor's argumentation is often dazzling; here speaks a man of wide and deep erudition, an authoritative voice of intellectual history, seemingly equally at home in science, history and the arts.

In the post-modern wilderness of de-construction, Taylor's articulate and subtle history of mentality is an intellectual joy.

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.

Taylor offers us an invigorating critique of the Western individualist tradition since the 17th century. His work focuses on how the Judeo-Christian tradition has been dismantled bit-by-bit as rationality has taken its place. This dynamic has left us with a "desiccated" self (e.g., no role for spirituality or grace). Taylor tells us that what is missing are powers of creative imagination and the substantive goods of ordinary life, but he does not reconcile these with the developments he critiques. Instead of sending us back to our religious roots or offering a new perspective, he leaves us asking the question we had on page 1: what gives life meaning in the 21st century.

Taylor would like to revitalize the ancients' emphasis on what he calls a substantive theory of the good. This he contrasts with a procedural conception of ethics that he ties to certain elements of Modernism. In particular, Taylor takes on modern ethical systems for being too focused on obligation rather than what he terms the "hypergood."

It is not a simple call for revisiting classical philosophy. Taylor is doing more than trying to draw attention to what he sees as wrong turns and misguided focuses in modern ethical thinking. There is a constructive element to the work.

It is not an introductory piece and many would find the depth of references frustrating. For those who have not read many works to which he refers (e.g. Locke, Kant, Rawls, Habermas, Williams) or who cannot distinguish a Kantian from a utilitarian, etc. it might be a bit of a slog. For ethicists or anyone interested in philosophical issues of identity, self, or conceptions of the common good, it is clearly a very important work.

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.

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.

After having long-suffered the hyped-up mumbojumbo of all that post-structuralist goobledegook and/or boring and infuriating cryptophila that has been running rampant in philosophy for years now, it's always a pleasure to find a book of philosophy filled with complex and beautiful ideas that you can actually read and perhaps even understand. Not that it's always an easy task grasping the multitude of relationships between the ideas that he outlines as constituting our notions of modern selfhood. But since such an undertaking is expressed so eloquently and thoroughly in this sprawling tome, "Sources of the Self" seems more than worth the trouble. If, like me, you're tired of all those knuckleheads spouting mindless half-understood deconstructionist platitudes and whatnot...buy this book! Taylor is good...damn good!

Ethics/morality always seems to be relegated to a marginal position, not because it isn't important, but because, as John Searle might say "it's too damn hard." So instead the focus falls on epistemological or metaphysical foundations with the promise that when we get such foundations cleared up we will start worry about ethics and politics. The problem is our easy division of labor is a false illusion: ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics - every position we take is a little of each of those and never only one sigle category or motivation. Ethics informs aesthetics informing epistemology informing politics, etc.
Taylor admits to such and rejects the foundational project, seeking instead historical understanding. What options do we have here and now based on our historicity? How has history made us what we are and how we think? Thus the larger second part of this book tells a historical story of how we got here and what options we can realistically choose from.
It is the smaller first part, the attempt to phenomenologically describe moral polarization, that seems to me to be of even greater philosophical import. Instead of pretending we don't have ethical motivations or pretending we can get to a point beyond good and evil, Taylor argues we are always polarized (Merleau-Ponty talk) by moral understandings. This is refreshing because if this description is accurate, we cannot realistically leave off ethical concerns while we establish solid foundational epistemologies. There is no avoiding ethics!
I highly recommend this important book. I also recommend Taylor's other work.