Six Our Pasts, Ourselves: Charles Taylor (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

When we borrow the language of philosophy and social theory to talk about ourselves, we often talk in an impoverished way. Trying to say what we care about, what makes sense of ourselves and our lives, we find ourselves using large abstract terms, such as “the good,” “the right,” “utility.” The relation of these terms to the actual fabric of our lives, to our strivings and our commitments, is puzzling. Sometimes the terms seem too vague to connect with anything that really matters when we make judgments in ordinary life. This lofty vagueness has been among the standing targets of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, as in J. L. Austin’s remark, “If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.” (Even within the analytic tradition, though, this call to concreteness has not always been heeded.) And sometimes the discrepancy lies deeper: not just in an abstractness that might be fleshed out, but in a deliberately reductive strategy, in a style of thinking that seeks to deny or to repudiate the diversity of the goods that people recognize in their lives, and the specific quality of their commitments to those goods.

Such reductive strategies play a part in many areas of social thought. They take a variety of forms, but common to most of them is the claim to have provided a more “scientific” view of the human being than is available in what is sometimes pejoratively called “folk psychology.” One common strategy is naturalistic: the observer assumes a detached perspective and attempts to describe the human being as just one more part of the physical world of nature, using no language that would not be used to explain the behavior of other physical objects. Some such enterprises involve the reduction of all psychological and mental language to physiological language. Others continue to use psychological language, but in a mechanistic way, treating the human subject as a thing that is activated by stimuli in specifiable ways. In both cases, the view that human subjects have of themselves—which usually includes the notion that they are committed to certain ends as higher and more valuable than others, and that they love and cherish what deserves and claims their love—all this is treated as a sort of subjective illusion, or at best as a projection onto the “real world.” From the scientific perspective, ethical value is not a part of the world of nature.

Some forms of utilitarianism in economics and public policy (and in the simpler philosophical accounts) are reductionist in a similar way. They hold that all our preferences are merely subjective, and so there is no reasonable way to make qualitative distinctions among them. Thus, the only notion of good that a science of economics can sensibly employ is one that refers to a simple aggregation of actual preferences or satisfactions of desire. In ordinary life, however, people usually consider that some things are so important, so claim our love and commitment, that they ought to be loved whether we currently love them or not; not to love them is a sign of obtuseness or callousness. And, conversely, people are usually aware that many of their desires are unreliable indices of real goodness, and would not stand up to critical examination. But the simpler utilitarianisms make no such distinctions. They consider that all evaluation is similarly unscientific.

There is, finally, a rather different type of reductionism, which has become popular in the humanities and the social sciences. This form uses the idea of “power” as its central notion and holds that all the ethical evaluations in which people ordinarily engage are simply the result of a dominant group’s exercise of social control. Appealing usually to Nietzsche and to Foucault, proponents of such views insist that our experience of loving what deserves love, respecting what commands respect, is based on political illusion: when we attend to such norms we only repeat the slogans that have been set down for us by authority. Once again our ordinary distinctions between well-founded preferences and arbitrary ones, between what we ought to love and what we happen to desire, go by the boards. True scientific insight teaches us to jettison these distinctions as relics of our unsophisticated past. All apparent ethical persuasion is really political manipulation.

In his important and impressive book, Charles Taylor criticizes all these forms of reduction and simplification, arguing that they simply do not succeed in making sense of the ways in which human beings actually live and strive after what they love. He argues that we need to recover a sense of the qualitative distinctions that we make among our commitments, and a more complex picture of the diversity of the goods to which we are implicitly committed, if we are to understand ourselves well enough to confront the problems that face us.

Taylor describes his project as “an attempt to articulate and write a history of the modern identity”—that is, of “the ensemble of (largely unarticulated) understandings of what it is to be a human agent” that finds itself “at home in the modern West.” He argues that we cannot even comprehend our unity and identity as subjects or selves without coming to grips with the complex set of goods to which we are committed. These commitments (such as political justice, the relief of suffering, the love of family and friends) are fundamental to our sense of who we are and what makes our lives hang together. By adopting forms of “scientific” social discourse that obscure or conceal all this, we become strangers to ourselves, we even mutilate ourselves. But a “close and patient articulation” of these goods makes their claim on us more evident, clarifying the nature of the choices currently before us.

Taylor focuses on three areas of ethical commitment and self-definition that are central to the western European tradition: on the development through history of a sense of “inwardness,” the sense that we are beings with inner depths and spaces, and the connection of this with our emerging notions of individuality and selfhood; on what Taylor calls “the affirmation of ordinary life,” or the development of the idea that personal relations, work, the household are spheres of deep spiritual meaning and engagement; and on the Romantic idea of nature as a source for the self. Taylor’s aim is to articulate the history of each of these ethical ideas in a way that reveals their power for us today, their highly complex interrelationships, and the tensions to which these relationships give rise.

It is no surprise that Taylor has undertaken this massive project of retrieval and articulation, or that he has succeeded in carrying it through. During the past twenty-five years Taylor has been developing a distinctive position in political and social philosophy, a position that has fruitfully combined respect for reason and rigorous argument with attention to the richness of our discourse and history. Taylor has been an unusual figure in contemporary philosophy. He bridges the gap between the Continental and the Anglo-American traditions, so often mutually hostile and uncomprehending. He combines the latter’s insistence on rigor, plain speech, and a close attention to the everyday with the former’s respect for history and the history of thought. And, as he repeatedly shows, it is a natural combination: we need plain speech and good arguments to make sense of our history, but we will have poor arguments, and a deficient sense of the everyday, if we do not see to what extent our imagination and our language are the products of the complexities of history. Retrieving the historical context in which our ideas have evolved makes the nature of their claim on us clearer, and clarifies the alternatives.

Taylor has always insisted that we can describe ourselves as subjects of political and social action in ways that are more complexly human, more fruitfully connected to the ways that we actually make sense of our lives, than the languages of the social sciences are when they closely emulate the natural sciences. And he has shown that we can do this without relaxing the demand for rationality and good argument characteristic of the natural science tradition at its best. The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), a meticulous and devastating critique of behaviorist psychology and its impoverished descriptive language, was followed by Hegel (1975), an impressive account of that then neglected thinker, which did an enormous amount to make Hegelian ideas available to the philosophical community.

These books were unified by Taylor’s philosophical clarity, and by his interest in the self-interpretations of human beings in history. Two volumes of collected papers (Human Agency and Language and Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 1985) developed Taylor’s account of self-interpretation and its role in the construction of an adequate discourse for the human sciences. Taylor insists that the attempt to describe the world of human life from a detached scientific point of view, disregarding the ways in which human beings themselves describe their lives and what has meaning in them, is both incomplete and incoherent: incomplete, because it omits so much of great importance; incoherent, because its conception of scientific rationality is not itself a feature of the universe as it is in itself, apart from human life, but a deep part of human life, whose claim to respect derives from its role within human history. It cannot provide us, therefore, with a detached external standard that can be used as a basis for repudiating other elements of our lives that have equal depth.

Taylor writes with forthrightness and clarity; most of his work is fully accessible to a non-professional audience. His work has a close relationship to that of several other political philosophers, such as Bernard Williams and Michael Walzer, who have defended a more “context-sensitive” and historically informed approach to problems of justice. But his anti-relativist position sets him apart from their (qualified) relativisms; and his insistence on deriving his positive conclusions from a close examination of history makes his work methodologically distinctive. Indeed, Taylor’s thought should be far better known than it is, in fields such as literature, anthropology, the law, public policy, and economics, where philosophers distinctly inferior to Taylor are sometimes in vogue.

Taylor never offers simple solutions to complex problems; it is always difficult to summarize what he has said. His current book is about complexity; and its strength lies in its concrete illuminations, in the sureness with which, again and again, it brings to light unnoticed connections and deftly articulates the claim of norms too seldom acknowledged. The measure of its power is the exhilaration with which one recognizes, repeatedly, parts of one’s own self that had been buried from view.

The first part of Sources of the Self contains the general philosophical arguments that motivate and justify Taylor’s project. Here, he argues cogently that a complex account of our goods and commitments is necessary not only for an adequate moral theory, but even for an understanding of the ways in which we move through time as continuous subjects. For human beings move through the world orienting themselves toward various goals; the movement and direction of their lives cannot be adequately understood without grasping the depth of those loves and commitments. “In order to make minimal sense of our lives, in order to have an identity, we need an orientation to the good…[and] this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story.” The artist orients herself around her striving after expressive fulfillment; the member of a family around the “rich joys of family love” and to efforts, over time, to fulfill the commitments exacted by that love; and most real people take their bearings from some complex combination of such aims and efforts. An adequate account of their identity cannot be given without telling how they are placed on the way to these goals.

Next, Taylor argues that such projects and commitments need not be merely subjective. The most common forms of relativism and subjectivism have failed to establish that we cannot reason, and reason well, about what is worth loving, about what is higher. Such reasons certainly cannot be found outside human lives and human practices; but that was always the wrong place to search for them. Human life and human history give standards of assessment that we can draw on to show that the goods we value are real and objective enough. “What better measure of reality do we have in human affairs,” he plausibly asks, “than those terms which on critical reflection and after correction of the errors we can detect make the best sense of our lives?” Against the naturalist, who holds that all moral evaluation is mere subjective projection, Taylor objects that the contrast between the internal human viewpoint and the viewpoint of scientific detachment has not been adequately made out. The detached perspective has whatever merit it has as part of the internal human viewpoint. If it really were totally detached from human history, it would have no relevance to that history. But then it is not clear how the scientific point of view is in a position to call these other central parts of our experience into question. In general, the question that scientific explanation should be answering is, “what properties or entities or features our best account of things has to invoke.” When we ask this question, however, ethical commitment will not be eliminated.

Utilitarianism is then criticized in similar ways, by showing that the cost of its abandonment of qualitative distinctions, and of the notion of commitment to the good, amounts to an inability to make sense of human practices. Taylor does not grapple here with the more subtle forms of recent philosophical utilitarianism (with, for example, the work of R. M. Hare, R. B. Brandt, or James Griffin, all of whom make distinctions among types of desires and preferences, and provide for various types of evaluation and correction); thus the utilitarian philosopher will be bound to remain unsatisfied with Taylor’s discussion. But against the simpler utilitarian views prevalent in economics and public policy, his criticisms are effective.

To the cultural relativist, who holds that all evaluation is either projection or in some other way bounded by local traditions, Taylor replies that the ethical outlook of traditional communities is itself, in almost all cases, inherently critical. Good history and good anthropology show that people do not cherish what they cherish because tradition or authority tells them to do so. They understand themselves, rather, to be striving after what is really good; and this is what explains the debate and the self-scrutiny that exist in every developed ethical tradition.

To the followers of Foucault and Nietzsche, and to the related views of Derrida, Taylor objects that the fact that some goods can serve power does not show that all must serve power: the case has simply not been made. The ethical nihilism of such views leaves us, moreover, with a world stripped bare of meaningful commitment, a world that could not possibly make sense of the way we view ourselves and our lives:

Derrida doesn’t have the saving inconsistency of Nietzsche, for whom there emerged, out of the uncompromising recognition of the flux, something which deserved unconditional affirmation, yea-saying. For Derrida there is nothing but deconstruction, which swallows up the old hierarchical distinctions between philosophy and literature, and between men and women, but just as readily could swallow up equal/unequal, community/discord, uncoerced/constrained dialogue, and the like. Nothing emerges from his flux worth affirming, and so what in fact comes to be celebrated is the deconstructing power itself, the prodigious power of subjectivity to undo all the potential allegiances which might bind it; pure untrammeled freedom.

But this, Taylor concludes, is an impoverished world, in which life is not worth living.

If it is difficult to give a summary sense of the richness of Taylor’s general arguments, doing justice to the 400 pages of historical articulation that follow is impossible. Taylor’s historical discussions are clear and economical, and based on remarkable scholarship. On Plato, on Locke, on the rise of the modern novel, on modernist poetry and painting, Sources of the Self concisely says original and penetrating things. It is rare to find this sort of philosophical history written so lucidly, without vanity or jargon.

Taylor begins his historical narrative by looking at the development, from Plato through Augustine and on to Descartes and Montaigne, of the sense that the self is constituted by inner space and depth, that it has a special sort of access to itself through inner reflection. He shows how this idea develops into the idea of radical reflexivity and self-consciousness. And, very revealingly, he shows how this emphasis on a special sort of subjectivity is intimately and unexpectedly related to the development of a conception of the person as the detached object of scientific study, and the related growth of political individualism.

Then Taylor traces the development, from the Reformation onward, of the idea that ordinary life has deep moral worth. He shows how the changing sense of the role of the divine in human life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transforms the sense of how and why ordinary life has moral importance, and where the sources of its value reside. The passions became not heuristic, but normative; and this, in turn, transformed political thought. The third major strand in Taylor’s narrative is an examination of Romantic ideas about nature as source for the self—and of the connection between this idea and the further development of conceptions of individuality and sympathy in social discourse. Taylor shows that both Kantian autonomy and Romantic views of nature involve a critical reaction against the standard Enlightenment view of the subject: one involving a radical break with nature, one seeking the self in and through nature.

As an example of Taylor’s historical work, it is useful to consider his arguments concerning “the affirmation of everyday life.” In antiquity, and in most respects through the Middle Ages, the prevailing view was that activities of daily life, such as housework, child-rearing, work in a craft or a profession, even much of marital companionship, had no moral worth in their own right, were no part of what gave life its meaning and importance. At best, their role was to support the really important activities of politics and contemplation. At worst, they rendered the person who spent too much time in them unfit for such higher pursuits. Aristotle argues, for example, that neither farmers nor craftsmen should be permitted to be citizens in his ideal city—for, lacking the leisure for education and social conversation, they will lack the civic virtues.

Drawing on a rich variety of sources—historical, religious, philosophical, literary, and artistic—Taylor traces the rise, from the Reformation through the nineteenth century, of a different idea of the ordinary: the idea that the whole of life is “hallowed” and that “the substance of life” resides in the ways we serve God in a calling and in domestic life. (Elsewhere he also investigates the rather different origins of these views in Judaism.) Once this idea is widely accepted, in a religious or a secular form, it gives rise to a new political egalitarianism, which Taylor connects with the rise of the modern novel. Narrating ordinary lives in such a way that their daily particularities take on a rich significance, the novel provides a basis for viewing all human lives on the same footing.

Together with this idea, there develops a “growing idealization of marriage, based on affection, true companionship between husband and wife, and devoted concern for the children.” And this leads, in turn, to a greater emphasis on the personal choice of a spouse, and in some cases to a greater tolerance for divorce. A fascinating account of the organization of domestic space in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shows how this new ideal of the nuclear family generates a demand for domestic privacy, and a greater distancing of the nuclear unit from more remote kin and from neighbors.

Particularly revealing is Taylor’s account of the subtle shift in the moral weight attached to the care and the rearing of children. It is not, he says, that people in other times and other places have not loved or cared for children. What changed, rather, was the sense of the importance of this relation for one’s identity, and for the meaning of life; and the sense of the essential role of the nuclear family—as opposed to other relatives and neighbors—in fulfilling this moral imperative. Taylor argues that this sense of an absolute and unshirkable moral demand to care for children in this intimate way is something we have come to feel as a result of a particular Western history. We should not expect others who have not had this history to define their identity in precisely the same way, to have the very same attitudes to children and to domestic privacy—or the same agonizing moral dilemmas in connection with separation and divorce. Taylor holds that these social arrangements have enriched our lives morally; that we would not choose to discard them, whatever the tensions they generate; that we could plausibly argue—to an ancient Greek or to a contemporary person whose cultural traditions contain no analogous norm—that there may be something missing from their lives, something that we are right to affirm as among the “central human fulfillments.”

In a sense this is familiar material; these changes have been investigated by historians of the family, and such historians will probably find little new information here. And yet, in the way that history and moral reflection are combined, Taylor’s discussion is surprising, precisely because its material is so mundane in our lives. One recognizes oneself—and one is astonished that one did not see, before, how one was actually making sense of one’s life, and how easily things might be otherwise.

In his final chapters, Taylor traces the legacy of this complex history in contemporary political and social debates. Owing to the diversity of the goods for which compelling claims can be made, debate—about, for example, tensions between ecological values and technological progress—is a complex and delicate matter. It is no use, Taylor argues, to ignore these tensions, or to pretend that only one of the two contending goods is important, or that all goods can be easily reduced to a single good. These tensions are sometimes tragic: sometimes any choice will involve a violation of something important. But turning away from them conceals the motives we have for doing justice to all the things we love, insofar as we possibly can. To deprive ourselves in this way is “to incur a huge self-inflicted wound.”

In particular, we need to see more clearly the concrete tensions we face between the claims of universal benevolence and justice and the claims of individual self-expression, for these tensions color every facet of our lives. Taylor’s history has shown that until recently benevolence was shored up by religious love and aspiration. He is not certain that it will be possible, without the belief in God, to sustain a basis for extending help to those who do not appeal to us, or to help our personal projects. Sources of the Self ends with a highly tentative move toward the recovery of religious sources of value—not in the sense of church authority curbing disobedience, as in Alasdair MacIntyre’s recent work, but in the very different sense of a love of that which is “incomparably higher.” For Taylor, this love gives point and motivation to other loves. He tells the reader that he has no arguments here, only “hunches”; and he leaves the reader with the question whether a secular humanistic morality can succeed in motivating benevolence and a universal respect for human dignity without “any religious dimension or radical hope.”

What prompts these hunches? Taylor observes that secular humanistic visions of justice have not prevented the spread of a sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness in human life. He also notes that such visions frequently seem insufficiently rich to sustain our love, since they derive their affirmations through a negation of the religious morality that preceded them. But the second criticism does not seem to apply equally to all secular ethical views: it does not apply, for example, to Kantian ethics, or to an Aristotelian morality based on ideas of virtue. It seems unfair, moreover, to blame secularism for the meaninglessness experienced by people who have ceased to believe in God. Surely Nietzsche is right that this despair is a pernicious legacy of that dependency.

Taylor’s other hunch is that we now understand too much about what he calls “the murkier depths of human motivation” to have Aristotle’s confidence that people who are raised with love, with material support, and with good education will be capable of virtue. But, once again, objections come to mind. Have those happy conditions ever been realized on a large scale? And what sort of evidence should we require before concluding that the human heart is radically defective, that it is insufficient to its own highest hopes? My own hunch is that the best work on the “murkier depths” of the human heart shows something rather different: that love proves to be, in the end, a more powerful source of motivation than hatred, and that even ugly childhood feelings of aggression, and guilt at one’s own aggression, can frequently become powerful promptings toward benevolent action in adult life. (Such views have been powerfully defended in the work of Melanie Klein and Richard Wollheim.) Certainly Taylor has (as he says) no arguments against such views. So the discussion has barely begun. And one might ask, moreover, whether it is actually possible to turn to religious sources of motivation without also going in for religious authority, and putting that authority ahead of reason. The low likelihood of such an outcome, given our cultural arrangements, is yet another motive one might have for choosing the secular view, even if all else were equal.

Many questions are bound to be raised about Taylor’s procedure. Most will concern, very properly, the concrete details of his history, which I have not adequately described. But there are general questions that must also be raised. Taylor devotes considerable attention to the absence of the history of political and economic structures from his history of our selfhood. Aware that he could easily be charged with offering an “idealist” account that subordinates these factors to intellectual ones, he plausibly replies that, although economic factors are indeed important, and are themselves essential to a more complete self-understanding, ideas do have their own power in history, shaping practices as they are shaped by them. He claims to offer not a complete historical explanation of what produced the modern sense of identity, but something more modest, an articulation of various visions of the good and their appeal.

Unfortunately, there are other objections that are less squarely faced in the text. One concerns the restriction of his account to the history of Western conceptions. Taylor articulates so much so brilliantly that it seems mean-spirited to suggest that his account is narrow. Still, if we want to know who and where we are—say, in the United States—an account of Western traditions will not suffice. The articulation of who “we” are and what “our” history is had better involve, for the purposes of moral and political reflection, some understanding of African, Asian, and Latino traditions. (The last is in some sense Western, but it is not included in Taylor’s picture.)

There are three reasons for this. First, these traditions have in various ways made important contributions to the formation of the sense of self of most Americans and many Europeans. Take the example of the arts: this book, which devotes so much attention to the shaping role of literature and the other arts, describing figures such as Defoe, Trollope, Pound, Eliot, and Kandinsky as central actors, contains no reference to the blues or to jazz—which are surely, in Taylor’s own sense, “moral sources” of enormous depth and power. How many of his readers, when they think about love or pain, owe as much to Trollope or Eliot or Holderlin as they do to Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday? And is the vision of suffering, joy, endurance—and justice—that unfolds in the searing, broken cadences of Holiday’s last recordings any less worthy of close philosophical scrutiny than the forms of art and literature that Taylor does discuss, if what we are seeking is an articulation of the visions of goodness that have made us who we are? Related points could be made about other non-Western traditions.

Second, the fact is that a large number of our fellow citizens are members of non-Western traditions and define their identity even more centrally in terms of those traditions. Any account of a “we” in any modern Western nation had better show respect for “our” real complexity, and seek a broader understanding. I suspect that Taylor’s careful attention to Voltaire and Rousseau would not satisfy even his own French-speaking fellow citizens in Quebec as a sufficient articulation of their identity.

Third, an inquiry broader than Taylor’s would have value well beyond the boundaries of domestic politics. For many political problems to which the accounts of identity in this book have relevance—problems of global ecology, of hunger and poverty, of education, of gender justice—are increasingly being confronted in an international and multicultural way. Even if “we” North Americans were shaped only by Western ethical sources, and even if domestic social justice did not require any larger understanding, we would still need to do more to understand the larger “we” who will be deliberating about such matters.

In many ways, the self-recognitions engendered by this book do indeed promote that larger understanding. For only when we can grasp and articulate the specific contingencies that have fashioned our deep conceptions of the meaning of family life, or of romantic companionship, or of political freedom, will we be in a position to recognize that people from different traditions might not share exactly those conceptions. We will be likely to be less clumsy in dealing with them, more appreciative of, and less bewildered by, the evidence of their differences. Self-understanding is an essential prerequisite for sympathy and for justice. Still, Taylor might have done more to prepare the reader for the larger interpretive task that awaits her—and to have shown how its completion would enrich, in the ways I have described, both our understanding of others and our grasp of ourselves.

Taylor’s account has another, related limitation. By confining his account to philosophy, to mainstream European religion, and to high culture, Taylor tends to omit, at many important points, the voices of the powerless and the marginalized, those cut off by gender or class or race from these forms of cultural expression. This is reasonable enough, up to a point: for the project is to study the ideas that have shaped us, not those that failed to have an impact. I am fully in agreement with Taylor that these intellectual traditions cannot be dismissed by asserting that they are merely systems of domination. They are much more than that, and obviously worthy of close scrutiny as valuable moral sources; to deny them this role is to impoverish our own possibilities. But there are other sources, too. They are less easily accessible to a historian with Taylor’s text-centered methods, but they are powerful and deep: oral tradition, myths, stories, the self-understandings of women and oppressed people, insofar as these resourcefully reacted against and affected the cultures in which they lived.

Taylor would not deny this, I am sure. A compassion for the oppressed and a passion for justice are evident in every chapter of his book. But his methods do not permit him to reach very deeply into such lives. To take just one example: a story of the conception of the self in ancient Greece that bases itself on Plato and the philosophers cannot pick up much of what even an ordinary male Greek citizen thought and said—and hardly anything of what Greek women had to say about themselves and their identities.

Again, this simply means that Taylor has not told the entire story. It does not mean that his book is undermined, or exposed as a record of mere power-grabbing. His sort of Western-centeredness is altogether different from the unreflective ethnocentrism of the traditional undergraduate curriculum, and also from the militant ethnocentrism of Allan Bloom, because Taylor’s account aims to show how traditional views can justify themselves through careful argument, and because all visions of goodness, in principle, are of interest to him, wherever they touch upon and shape human lives. In the current academic climate, where there is so much strident and ill-argued debunking of famous books and authors by appealing to ideas of power, it is refreshing to see a philosopher with Taylor’s historical sensitivity, social compassion, and philosophical acumen argue against what is excessive in such approaches, and defend the practice of mining the dominant intellectual tradition for moral insight.

Still, such reflections lead to a deeper philosophical question about Taylor’s narrative: to a question about justification. Once we recognize that our sense of self is made up of the complex and heterogeneous strands that Taylor’s narrative disengages, where do we go from there? How, precisely, do we move from understanding to endorsement? There are really two questions here, closely related. First, how do we decide to reject a part of our current view of the good—say, one that is in tension with another part—if to do so will incur the self-mutilation that Taylor fears? Second, how do we deal with challenges to our own complex conceptions that come from other traditions of thought?

Taylor makes us suspicious of large general solutions to these problems. And yet he appears to commit himself to the view that at least some elements in the conception of good that he discusses can be defended as best for human life generally. He argues, for example, that the idea of universal respect for human dignity is no mere accident of our local history, but a way of seeing the world that can be shown to be good for human beings the world over, a necessary mark of any “higher” civilization. And in his early theoretical remarks he suggests a general view of how we should justify a conception of the good. The core of Taylor’s account (he has given it more fully in a recent essay) is as follows. To show that an ethical view is a good and reasonable one for us to hold, we do not need to provide the sort of argument that Western philosophers ever since Aristotle have tended to favor as their paradigm of rational argumentation: that is, a deductive argument proceeding from premises that are true, necessary, and external to all history. The belief that only such an argument can validate an ethical conclusion, Taylor argues, is an error that has been at the bottom of many forms of skepticism and extreme cultural relativism in ethics. For many thinkers, when they find that such arguments do not appear to be available there, have too quickly concluded that no good arguments are available, that all ethical argument is a matter of mere power.

But, Taylor continues, there are good arguments of a different sort available in the ethical sphere: practical explanations of a view’s merits that are fully internal to human history, non-deductive in structure, seeking coherence and fit between theory and our deepest and most indispensable beliefs about ourselves. (Here Taylor comes close to John Rawls’s idea of “reflective equilibrium” as the desired outcome of a process of ethical reasoning.) In particular, Taylor argues, it is possible to show that a new view, B, is superior to an earlier view, A, by showing how B responds to tensions and problems in A and helps us understand why A got into difficulty—all this in a way that signals a genuine gain in understanding, not simply a transition from one authority to the next.

The test for this is found through historical narration. If B is really superior to A, it will be possible to tell a compelling story of the transition from A to B, an account showing progress in understanding; but it will not be possible to tell an equally compelling story in which the transition is reversed, going from B to A. Once all the relevant material is brought to light and articulated, the decisive considerations should be such that both sides will recognize their validity; and the movement from A to B is thus a move to preserve a deep part of what is common to both A and B, by removing a dissonance.

Taylor’s book provides many compelling examples of such narration. He convinces the reader, for instance, that the progression from ancient Greek aristocratic conceptions of politics to a universal respect for human dignity is a progress in understanding that was generated by tensions within the ancient conceptions themselves (with their unarticulated acknowledgments of the humanness of women and slaves), and one that could not be reversed. “Once you grasp this possibility,” he writes, “it can’t help but seem prima facie right.” Still, the general philosophical issue seems to me to need more extended and explicit discussion than he has given it. Granted that there is a real and urgent difference between progress in understanding and the imposition of political or cultural power, it is still not easy to tell the difference in particular cases. For power frequently masquerades as illumination. What criteria should we look for, whose lives, whose intuitions, whose interests should we consult, when we ask whether a new conception is a gain in understanding? Taylor’s narrative tells us little about how to unmask pretenders.

Let A be the Aristotelian view that the “natural” situation of the human being combines capability with limitedness and vulnerability. Let B be the Augustinian view that our fundamental situation is one of sinfulness. To me, it seems most illuminating to narrate the story going not from A to B, but from B to A: people at some time come to realize that their basic situation is not original culpability, but capable finitude, and this is a gain in understanding. One can even describe such a development as prompted by tensions internal to the Christian view, since many early Christian views placed the stress on human helplessness and human freedom. Yet many Christians would find the actual historical transition, from A to B, the truly illuminating one—generated (as in Taylor’s arguments for religion) by a sense that the Aristotelian view cannot explain all the ways in which life goes badly. I may strongly suspect that church power played the driving role here; but my opponent will reply that in this case power supported the truth. There are many ways to adjudicate this situation; the enterprise of justification does not need to collapse. But I do not see exactly which way Taylor favors, and how the developmental emphasis of his account of rationality will work in such cases.

Only a more extended account, moreover, will tell us how to assess tensions in our current set of ends, how to decide which are fruitful, which are the result of arbitrary and dispensable elements. And this becomes more urgent still if we wish to take in the entire human world. Taylor’s account applies only to views that succeed one another within a continuous history. But many confrontations between views do not have this form. When members of two different traditions encounter one another, with subtly different ideas of freedom, of the meaning of family life, of nature, what structure can the conversation have, and what outcomes count as progress in understanding?

That more remains to be done is no surprise. For Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live. He has shown the importance of the history of our ideas and conceptions for the sort of complicated self-articulation that we need in the further pursuit of the question. And he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader. To have accomplished so much is an important philosophical achievement, which will considerably enhance the contribution made by contemporary philosophy to private and public life.