Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

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.

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 habituall

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.

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.

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!