Sources of
the Self, Charles Taylor, 1989
Some notes, clarifications,
responses, appreciations, counterarguments /SB, 2012
Brief summary: it's good
to have someone to argue with; thank you, Charles Taylor, CT; thank you, Eric Springsted, EOS, for sending me to Taylor
(1)
review and criticism
(2)
EOS - SB
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(1) review and criticism
CT argues against
reductionism in many forms, e.g. reducing arguments to mere struggles for
power; merely scientistic accounts; mere talk about values. He wants to recover the diversity of goods
that people care about. He wants to
recover the specific character of their commitments. He wants to recover their heartfelt,
unarticulated understandings of what it is like to want something -- which is,
to be an agent -- agency as wielding power on behalf of a desired end -- forces
aligned to promote a value.
Some of the commitments
that he wants to capture in their reality are: the commitment to political
justice; the relief of suffering; the love of family; the importance of
friends.
Some themes that he
derives from Greek scholarship and especially the leadership of A.W.H. Adkins
and E.R. Dodds are: from the many to the
one (the gradual development of a coherent self from its precursor
fragments); enthusiasm and the Homeric background of possession, being
overtaken, overwhelmed, being carried away, beside oneself with passion; thumos, psyche, kardia, etor, ker, noos,
phrenes, soma, menos (madness); everything in our natures that
"wanders between generation and corruption" (Rep 485b). Adkins' developmental account becomes an
important element in the book. Snell,
Schadewaldt, Jaeger, Gilson are here also -- also later scholars such as Walter
Burkert, Richard Onians -- also Nietzsche, Nehamas -- also Hannah Arendt.
A second important strain
of influence derives from psychology -- Jerome Bruner, Kohut, Kernberg,
Erikson, Ernst Tugenhat, Freud, Foucault -- writers who explore selfhood in its
granular construction up from earliest bits of competence (ego nuclei), to
stages, to big assemblages of experience, connectivity and idea-formation
(durable incorporations).
A third strain is from
social philosophy and sociology and concepts of selfhood that bind human to
human in social networks -- Marx, Gadamer, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, the Frankfurt
school, Humboldt, Weber, Robert Bellah, and especially Aristotle.
"One cannot be a self on one's own." "I am
a self only in virtue of certain interlocators." "I have
conversational partners who are essential to my achieving self
-definition." "A self exists
within webs of interlocution." (36)
A fourth strain is from
storytellers who narrate the struggle to become a self from many corners of
transcendence, elation, depression, oppression, dysfunction, illness, and
alienation: Joseph Conrad, Kafka, Breton, Goethe, Hoelderlin, D.H. Lawrence, de
Sade, Mallarme, Robert Musil, Poe, Pound, Zola, Yeats, Van Gogh, W. Stevens,
Dostoyevsky. CT mines many writers
attuned to their rich interior life, who portray this world as discussion and
rivalry and conflict -- Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus;
poets; generations of ascetics and puritans closely monitoring their sinfulness
and daily temptations to stray from the path; journal writers, aphorists;
everyone who "makes the dizzying descent into ourselves" (Andre
Breton).
There are conservative
icons such as Strauss, Sandel, Augustine, Shaftesbury, Grotius.
He is fighting against
liberal icons such as Socrates, Descartes, Spinoza, John Rawls.
Terms of art:
constitutive goods (the conceived order of being into which actions
flows -- this defines what 'good action' is, the empowering love that urges
forward);
disengaged reason (Socratic reason departing from the current ethos; Descartes'
pretensions; rationality as conceived in opposition to parochial attachments);
counter-epiphanic (showing things in their crude, lowly reality and disabusing any
sentiment of deeper meaning -- the opposite of transfiguration or
transcendence);
hypergoods
(goods that exemplify and provide the standpoint from which lesser, regular and
ordinary kinds of goods are valued -- second-order qualitative distinctions
that define and provide the basis of discriminations in value judgment);
inescapable frameworks (defining cultural and social standpoints and codes
or forms of life, within which entire epochs unfold historically -- basic
horizons; no framework is shared by everyone,
no framework can be taken as the
framework, no framework can be accorded the status of a fact; instead, we have traditions, ideologies, supercontexts; for
which the question arises, whether
adopting them is optional?; also, from which we can become disenchanted;
which we can leave behind; a frame of commitments and identifications, a shared
space of moral concern; that without which, in normal experience, we would be
at sea and not know who or what we are, or what the significance of anything
might be; which define a narrative by means of which we assign meaning and
contemplate new ideas -- the basis projected meaning; a way of talking about structural requirements for human agency
which nonetheless do change and which present themselves to philosophy as a
problem; which yet we see from the standpoint of the horizon that we ourselves
stand within; which CT conceives as a kind of cultural co-embeddedness,
directly opposed to the concept of disengaged reason);
"To articulate a framework is to explicate what
makes sense of our moral responses" -- CT gives an example of this at 541
in discussing how the warrior/honor ethic makes sense of Cicero's talk about
self-control as manly dignity that steels us against childish, slavish,
cowardly, womanly weakness. The command
relation explains the ability to bear pain with equanimity, developing
fortitude, soldierly virtue, scorning pain and death. The framework defines constitutive goods and
hypergoods.
lifegoods
(facets or components of life as actually lived, which spell out what is aimed
at, in concrete terms, in the context of a cosmic order of being of
constitutive goods);
ordinary life (the life of production and the family, merely infrastructurally
important to Aristotle, a merely necessary background to the 'good life' of
contemplation and action as a citizen; affirmed
for the first time as having central importance for the good life via the
Reformation, when it is seen as living in the context of a calling --
dethroning the 'higher forms' of life identified in antiquity; putting simple
things in the center and underscoring the import of suffering; the key and
world-changing focus of Christianity).
With these influences and
this new vocabulary, CT contributes to the human project of understanding
itself. He takes on the crucial and
mysterious process by which an organism becomes a person. This big project deserves our respect and critical
review…
Some big problem-regions
here are: the push-pull of being a one within a many; the long road to
integration by which manyness become oneness; the special circumstances in
which some one person breaks out from a big framework and begins to live in a
different order of being; the life-context of embedded reason vs. the purity of
disengaged reason; and tensions between the method and the results of
science.
Some stages of developing
selfhood that CT identifies for critical reflection:
Homeric disintegration
Platonic psychological
monism and playfulness about psychological polyphony
Augustinian inwardness
Cartesian disengaged
reason
Lockean subjectivity of
perception
Protestantism and the
affirmation of ordinary life
The Enlightenment and reason
becoming overconfident and blind to its other
Romanticism, listening to
nature and reading nature, expressivism
Modernism, postmodernism,
the hodge-podge world and the hodge-podge self; world-
pieces and self-pieces setting uneasily with each other
The current conflict space
-- trying to get clear about the choices in front of us
Tasks: trace the histories
of these various self-conceptions; reveal the power these ideas have for us
from their deep sources; trace the sources of our inspirations for the many
ways we look at things; describe the resultant situation we face in postmodern
times; find a way out
Part of this is the
Hegelian history of ideas project -- but going beyond Hegel in the Heideggerian
claim that rationality is not a disengagement that grasps what the world looks
like without us (supposed neutrality or objectivity or scientific truth) but
instead reason is a deep part of our humanity with its own special history --
reasoning is something that cultural co-embeddedness instills in new members of
our tribe
A basic CT argument: we
move through the world via goals (loves, commitments, values) -- thus to see
ourselves as agents (and this is what CT is trying to do) is to see ourselves
as pursuing what we are after (what we desire, the things we sight in desire,
the character revealed in desiring).
Identity is conferred via a person's sense of the good. This is a bedrock argument in the text. "To know who I am is a species of
knowing where I stand" (27).
"To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space" (28)
Cultural relativism says:
evaluation is essentially a projection of local tradition.
CT wants to fight against
this reduction. He argues: people do not
cherish what they do because their tradition tells them to do so. Instead, they see themselves as striving
after what really is good. CT also
argues: people are largely ignorant of, and not too worried about, the various
conflicting desires that emerge in even their simplest actions. He wants to bring more self-consciousness to
selfhood.
CT argues that over a long
period of history there emerges the idea of inwardness, inner depth, the whole
interior life of thoughts and feelings that has an odd kind of access to itself
via reflexivity and self-consciousness.
Joseph Conrad has described in a powerful way these inner reaches which
lie at some distance from ordinary mind in a hidden heart of darkness
The Enlightenment self
breaks away from nature by setting up a process of scientifically observing
nature. The Romantic self returns to
nature and listens to nature and is refreshed and reanimated by nature. These strains still conflict in us. There are stresses, tensions. We cannot put everything we care about and
all of our insights, attractions, constructions, into ONE formula, hierarchy,
assemblage, in final form.
More genuinely, the
project is to try to do justice to ALL the things we love. If we do not do this, we "incur a huge
self-inflicted wound" (513,520).
Critique:
CT's conclusion advocates
a particular way out from the postmodern dilemma but does not argue for it --
he calls it a hunch, an intuition. CT wants to recover the specifically religious sources of value that help us
navigate our life-projects -- but this is a hunch and represents CT as
advocating a way out, his particular
take, rather than the main work of the book, i.e. to lay out the sources of the
self and their history (71, 105, 106, 342, 518)
CT has an important
insight in grasping that we move through the world via goals. However, relying on this insight tends to
cloud the sense of self that arrives via our mere thinghood and experiences in
which one is not being treated as an agent, or seeking good, as value-maker and
value-pursuer. E.g. a human being is
someone who makes choices, but a human being is also someone who gets hit by a
car. If the goal is to see selfhood in
its wholeness and all its complexity, we have to face the agency/thinghood
divide and figure out some ways of getting at this and working with it; the
self has lots of "sources"
CT wants to bring
self-consciousness to the project of selfhood but at the same time much of the
work attacks self-consciousness in its guise of disengaged reason. The sense of the self that we get from
reflecting on our experience needs better integration with the sense of the
self that we get by being part of a tradition.
This is a tension throughout the book and is not resolved
successfully. Pascal says: I do not want
the God of the philosophers and scholars, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In a sense, CT has made this mistake. He has given us the self of the philosophers
and scholars.
Another weakness here is
that CT wants to blame cultural relativism, secular humanism and the big
complex mess that we face in the postmodern dilemma for people's current sense
of meaninglessness, despair, loss of roots, waywardness, alienation,
anomie. But this is absurd, really, and
pretty obviously so. The despair we feel
that opens up the chasm of meaninglessness is a legacy of the (now forever lost)
centuries-long dependency on religious dogma.
Godlessness is not the result of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism and the whole big mess of
modernism emerge when God dies.
We used to say (with
Aristotle) that if you raise people with love, material support and a good
education, then they will be capable of virtue.
CT recognizes that this model does not work anymore because we are more
conscious than our ancestors of "the murkier depths of human motivation"
(517). We see how much more than these
simple inputs can change the picture.
(This is why the sense of self as non-agent is so important to an
integrated conception of the self … we need to bring in chance, fate, politics,
economics, intellectual factors, accidents … then we have a better chance of
learning the ropes)
There are two poles on
opposite sides: a reductionist account, in which explaining means explaining
away, and an idealistic account, in which explaining gets us to see that
everything depends on us -- on choices, decisions, human agency, the values we
live by
There are things we care
about and ideas that move us that are really difficult to square with each
other. Just to take one example: CT
describes the change from Aristotle to Augustine as progress; but many writers (e.g.
Gibbon) argue just the reverse. Both
perspectives are important and insightful.
But they are irresolvable. There
is conflict. And CT sees that we cannot
reduce everything to one measure or tell only one story.
CT has a huge insight in
talking about the good. If we want to
say what it is about human beings that makes them worthy of respect, you have
to talk about suffering, about what is repugnant about injustice, about the awe
we feel at the dimension of human life.
But argument does not seem to go from a neutral place that everybody can
agree about to what CT calls "insights about moral ontology." What is this ontology? Maybe it's our imagination at work. Our instincts. Our senses.
Our mode of access to the world (the way the world looks to us includes
important differences between things and people). CT blames pluralism for making it too easy
for us to hold incompatible moral ideas without trying to square them together
and come up with a coherent view.
Pluralism leads to thoughtlessness.
But this seems absurd. We cannot
blame a larger consciousness about the ways people approach the problem of life
for making us less rational or less thoughtful
or less willing to do the work of trying to resolve contradictions. The modern condition is crazy-making (like
mortality generally) and needs thoughtfulness.
People make their lives
thoughtful or no -- not abstractions like pluralism. Pluralism is just the reality of the variety
of frameworks, which variety is irresolvable, as CT himself spells out very
clearly.
"Our identity is
deeper and more many-sided than any of our possible articulations of it"
(29)
CT claims that it is an
exclusively modern problem that
people are confused about which account of the good makes most sense to them --
or of human nature, of what makes people worthy of respect. This is absolutely false. The ancients faced exactly this problem --
probably every age shows us some of this conflict, confusion, struggle …
ancient China, ancient India, Melitus, Egypt under Akhenaton, medieval
France.
There are other problems
too; CT's account of selfhood is self-avowedly parochial and only addresses the
Western self and probably only a small fraction of this kind of
experience. He seems to be arguing that
selfhood is contingent at the root and that Indian or Chinese selfhood and
other varieties are not covered by his account; and his Western account has
been criticized for its monolithic reading of history ("Taylor's account
applies only to views that succeed each other within a continuous
history," Martha Nussbaum). For
some reason CT quotes Descartes in French even though Descartes wrote in Latin
and never approved a French translation of his works.
Overall: this text makes
some huge steps forward and also makes important mistakes. In my reading, the spirit of helpfulness in
this text far exceeds its shortcomings.
(2) EOS - SB
boss thanks again for
taking the time to do this. In the end
we agree about everything essential and as you eloquently state: living without
questions is not something that an intelligent person is going to do; we are
going to wonder what a person like this is trying to protect; we would worry
about them. 'Course people are probably
worried about us, too. Anyhow your final
invocation of something like a test of love or by love is cool: love is the
guard watching over being assured; love can see when the big thing that a
person is trying to affirm and protect has turned into hatred and become
destructive. I like this kind of love
and I will block the way to my skepticism.
Some say that love is blind, some that love gives us eyes to see. I wrote something recently about philosophy
and love and I think lovers of learning will like the comparison of questioning
to loving -- and assert that some kinds of love keep us sane rather than
driving us nuts -- but in another way we also know that love sometimes goes
bonkers, and getting your bearings and having some scrap of sanity may be a
helpful companion if part of our loving goes nuts.
Certitude as you define it
is part of a big whole -- it is a connection to something larger than just
oneself. It's a group feeling, like Ibn
Khaldun talks about. Since its social it
is natural to connect it with the kind of love we were talking about above,
that understands when devotion to the cause has degenerated into something
base. There is a kind of connectivity
and being part of something that palpably incorporates a background orientation
("inescapable framework") and helps to explain judgments that people
make unthinkingly on a daily basis. The
problem is how to problematize this background, or open it to revision; how to
understand it, how it changes as well as how it endures. Certitude without questioning degenerates
into a condition we will worry about and which may become destructive -- which
often has been destructive -- so we will look for a group-feeling that love
hopefully reads correctly, and does not lose its head about, and give up the
critical project. This is taking a lot
on ourselves but we have no choice -- we have to rely on what we can do --
sometimes we are called upon to be smart about love -- and when we think of
ourselves as playing a part of a big whole, we are using our imaginations to
help create the common space in which we live our lives (527).
Our author gives us the
following opinion: God loveth adverbs; that is, how you do something is everything, not just that you do it. The critical
element is preserved in a way or modulation of conducting or going on with this
project -- the project encoded in our inescapable framework. And this implies some escape, some
transcendence, a distancing from "identification with a particular
voice" (526), which works like this:
"Transcending the
self in the model I am working with here is to escape identification with a
particular voice in the conversation … There is no doubt that we have the
imaginative power to step beyond our own place and to understand ourselves as
playing a part in the whole … what is not clear is to what degree one can actually
assume this standpoint and live it … (526-7).
CT seems to be dismissive
of a bunch of recent views that try to deal with the element of transcendence,
which he calls "half-baked reflections on language and the impossibility
of full presence." Probably I don't
know the references he is getting at in this note, but to me the main thing is any admission of transcendence at all. If he admits it, then the relationship to the
group-feeling is secondary, or becomes secondary. To me, this gives Descartes his argument, and
CT's critique of Cartesian disengagement becomes weirdly self-contradictory,
since (1) it was intended to remind Mr. Descartes that not everything was up to
him, that he lived in France, spoke French, and had untold contingencies and connections
to things real or imagined; but now, admitting transcendence of some kind, so
that I can get outside the group and give up my place ("our own
place") -- "no longer to be the one who stands in a certain
perspective in moral space" -- now (2) everything is up to me, and I have
to figure things out pretty much on my own
We disagree on the stuff
about selfhood. To me the self is much
more fragmented and to you much more solid and reliably constant, but that is
probably my pathology.
We disagree on Plato and
Descartes. I see the cave analogy, I can
imagine Cartesian space; I think of reason as an absolutely new standpoint, but
it is not identifiable with any of its results.
I don't buy the rejection implied in Nagel's "view from
nowhere"; reason is not a view from nowhere but it is not the natural one
-- it is simply, a view not from where you started; Nagel has missed the main
point of almost all his arguments.
We disagree about the
transcendence issue. You (as I take you
to argue) are thinking that transcendence is a giant step beyond the starting
point in the natural attitude. I see it
as a very small change in perspective.
We are moving the origin, or we enter a new cave. This is the difference between the worldview
we learned growing up and the explicitly learned project of philosophical
questioning -- or close matches in other tribes
We disagree about
frameworks. You talk about them as the
formation of attention and assert that frameworks are not necessarily
failures. I would say that they are
formations (plural) of attention, lots of them, and I think it's wrong to talk
about them failing -- this doesn't seem right.
People fail, societies fail. A
guiding framework is like a flashlight.
It maybe doesn't show you everything, but it is not failing (at least
when it works). It's a tool. The form of life, the inescapable framework,
is escapable; and it keeps changing. The
flashlight becomes a torch, beacon, laser pointer, lots of new crazy
gadget-ideas.
We disagree about
criticism. You say that it is a higher
order capacity. To me it is universal
and happening all the time, but gets dumb-normalized, co-opted, squelched,
messed with, manipulated, left hanging -- it needs an education to flourish
We disagree about the
malaise. I think we should go forward
and make more pluralism, cosmopolitanism,
criss-crossings-and-i-ching-tosses-or-whatever; and become learned about many
things, keep going on with the learning process, questioning, the elenchus
We disagree about the
elenchus and Socrates and Hebrews 11, but these are good arguments.
Something useful must be
happening between us, since we disagree about so much but in the end we agree
about everything essential and as you eloquently state: living without
questions is not something that an intelligent person is going to do
My
idealism sets you upon a mighty throne.
You inspired me to work hard on reflecting about hope when you made hope
the theme of your campaign. Though you
speak to me, I rarely speak to you, not just because you are in the center of
power and I am no one in particular, but because I would much rather listen to
you than speak myself, and I rarely think of useful things to help you; though I would
help you if I could. Just now I feel
like offering my help, even if it is bad advice, simply to let you know that
someone like me exists and cares very deeply about you, the example you set,
what you are doing and not doing. 
