Summary
Charles Taylor, a professor of political science and philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, maintains that a person’s sense of self and of how that self may be related to other selves, to nature, and to God is fundamental to an understanding of what Taylor calls “hypergoods.” These are life- orienting moral goods that have captured one’s allegiance. The modern hypergoods of “justice for all” or “benevolent treatment of all” for many men and women in the twentieth century are unquestioned and unquestionable. It is with reference to these or other hypergoods that a person is able to construct a life narrative, the story that gives meaning to everyday moral choices in the context of larger human goods. Such stories differ from person to person, but all invoke what Taylor describes as “strong evaluation.”
Evaluation is part of the human enterprise; hypergoods “command our awe, respect, or admiration” because they “stand independent of our own desires, inclinations, or choices” and in fact “represent standards by which these desires and choices are judged.” They are not independent of the human person, but they are more than mere accidents of one’s personality. Thus, any exploration into the self which attempts to comprehend human moral life apart from or in denial of the significance of this strong evaluation is, at the very least, deficient. The first part ofSources of the Self takes issue with the “naturalist” temper, which seeks to reduce one’s sense of a moral hierarchy (in which some goods are seen to be incomparably higher than others) to mere emotional expression—or, as in the case of some forms of utilitarianism, to reduce all qualitative moral distinctions to quantifiable responses to pleasure or pain.
The naturalist, as Taylor uses the term, believes progress in the human sciences can come only as those sciences transcend any moral framework, frameworks that in the past—be they the honor ethic, Plato’s life of ordered reason, or the modern life of self-mastery—have compelled human beings to moral and artistic achievement but which are now seen as imperiling scientific objectivity. Qualitative distinctions among goods, and the supreme place of a hypergood in a person’s life- narrative, the naturalist takes to be elitist. What the naturalist requires is the “affirmation of ordinary life” that is both antielitist and tolerant or even supportive of the manifold ways in which people choose to structure their lives. This affirmation of the ordinary Taylor identifies as one of the strongest attractions to the modern mind, but it continues to coexist in the self with the strong sense of moral hierarchy (some exploits are more to be praised than others; some vocations are more admirable than others). Yet naturalism fails at its own project; as Taylor points out, “the affirmation of ordinary life, while necessarily denouncing certain distinctions, itself amounts to one; else it has no meaning at all.”
Taylor takes as his task the articulation of the complex interactions of ancient Greek, medieval Judeo-Christian, and eighteenth century Enlightenment ideas that are part of the modern sense of self. He finds that the moral sources of the modern self are multiple and in conflict, that hypergoods may themselves conflict or that their pursuit may end in mutilation. “Proponents of subjective fulfillment” he writes, “allow nothing to stand against ‘liberation’”; “the demands of benevolence can exact a high cost in self-love and self- fulfillment”; and the outworking of Christianity has been seen by many in the modern world as conducive to injustice visited on others and a stifling of inner freedom. “From all these examples,” says Taylor, ’’in my view, a general truth emerges,...
(This entire section contains 2499 words.)
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which is that the highest spiritual ideas and aspirations also threaten to lay the most crushing burdens on humankind.” This is as true of the many varieties of high-minded secularism as it is of Christianity.
The first part of the book establishes the moral framework within which Taylor’s analysis takes place. The framework is derived in part from the familiar Socratic formula that the unexamined life is not worth living; more specifically, that by clarifying by examination the nature of the particular hypergoods to which individuals give regard, those hypergoods found adequate as a basis for moral life also become the motivators of that life. The articulation of moral sources may well reveal their conflicting demands within the self, but Taylor is convinced that the revelation of the self’s moral sources will make available to the self new sources of moral energy. In turn, that energy will be needed by the self for a project of reconciling the “moral conflicts of modern culture” that “rage within each of us.” Ultimately, says Taylor, “We have to search for a way in which our strongest aspirations towards hypergoods do not exact a price of self-mutilation.”
The three central parts of Sources of the Self are narratives unpacking what Taylor sees as the main, and often antagonistic, constituents of modern self-awareness. He is careful to stress that his is not a study of cause and effect, and that there is no simple linear account possible of the effect of one philosophical idea on another. The study is not meant as an answer to “what caused the modern identity”; rather, its purpose is to provide an interpretation of what in the streams of philosophic thought—especially from the eighteenth century onward—the modern mind has found so attractive. These include what Taylor characterizes as “inwardness,” “the affirmation of ordinary life,” and “the voice of nature.”
For many moderns, Plato’s conception of a human being situated within a preexisting cosmic order, called by reason to conform to that order (thus fulfilling the highest human good in love and contemplation of that order), is unavailable as a live moral option. It has been replaced by what Taylor calls “internalization…in which the order involved in the paramountey of reason is made, not found.” The exemplar is Rene’ Descartes, who also sought to be free of the destructive passions that lead to error, as the ancients had taught. By Descartes’ time (the seventeenth century), however, reason no longer discovered a cosmic moral order; rather, Descartes looked inward to find something sure. He found, he said, an immaterial self the existence of which could not be coherently denied (for who would do the denying?). Just as clear in Descartes’ mind was God’s existence, a God who would not allow his creatures to live in illusion. It followed that Descartes’ perception of the existence of the physical universe must also be correct. Yet it was a very different moral universe Descartes looked on when compared with that of the ancient philosophers. For Plato, as well as for Aristotle, the use of right reason was itself a commitment to a universe ordered by the Good; for Descartes, reason was disengaged and instrumental. That is, reason saw the universe, and the physicality of humans within it, as morally neutral. This disengaged reason could then in essence create a narrative of one’s place in the “scheme of things,” the scheme itself the product of human rationality. The human being “goes within” to construct ideas useful in controlling the natural world.
John Locke, born a generation after Descartes, denied the notion of innate ideas and a mind naturally attuned to truth. Rather, Locke asserted, one’s understanding came from the mind’s putting together simple ideas; with the will, a human being, following procedures of obtaining evidence (procedures developed by instrumental reason), could decide what constituted the greatest good and could choose to move in that direction. The self, by the use of “procedural reason,” had objectified not only its surroundings but itself as well. Reason was not substantive, forming the connection between the person and the cosmic order, but methodological, endorsing a kind of self-construction. There is no goal or telos of nature, as Aristotle would have it; rather, as we take the inward turn, “we become constructors of our own character.”
Another component of the modern self is the affirmation of ordinary life, supremely a product of Puritan theology, which rejected earlier Christian conceptions of a higher life or calling through the renunciation of this world. Instead, one’s daily life was hallowed, and what was important was how one conducted one’s life, not what life one led (this observation, of course, was not absolute). As this stream of influential thinking flowed on into the eighteenth century Enlightenment, it mingled with the philosophy of Locke to produce a forceful number of tributaries that emphasized the dignity of the individual. Instrumental reason—the genius of science—was to be used to preserve one’s ordinary life; nature itself could be seen as a vast, interlocking system designed by the Creator to perpetuate itself. The human being had great dignity because he or she was an autonomous agent participating in the order of nature through disengaged reason, free of traditional authoritarian constraint. The idea of grace, something superadded by God to fulfill what nature had provided only in part or deficiently, was becoming unfashionable.
A Lockean kind of deism, with its emphasis on disengaged reason, was not the only tributary that emphasized the dignity of the person. The theorists of moral sentiments (and here Taylor focuses on Francis Hutcheson) also affirmed such dignity, though for a different reason. Hutcheson maintained that what gave moral power to human beings was the discovery of the good within, which amounted to feelings or sentiments of benevolence (the ultimate source of which was God). The practice of universal benevolence was an acknowledgment of the dignity of its recipient. One’s sentiments became one’s access to the order of nature; not as the ancients saw it, as a cosmic hierarchy to be loved by the man of right reason, but nature as simply the fount of moral sentiments. Nature became the voice within.
Less and less is a theistic framework needed to provide a moral impetus. Moral sources lie with disengaged reason, with human dignity itself or with the impulses of nature within. In fact, Taylor maintains that modern notions of dignity, universal benevolence, and individual freedom came, in the last two centuries, to be perceived as undermined by adherence to Christian faith, which the disengaged self began to see as a rival. The utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and his heirs ushered in a kind of naturalism (not to be confused with the position espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) which concealed its incoherence by remaining inarticulate about its moral sources. Utilitarianism reduced the good to pleasure but could not provide an answer to why one ought to seek the optimally benevolent society as opposed to the egoism of a Marquis de Sade. Any basis for strong evaluation had been lost.
With Rousseau, the voice of nature called for the human will to be transformed, and nature itself was seen as a strong moral source, in some sense actually defining the good. One must find nature within in order truly to pursue the good life, in the face of the chains of a society that had shackled human autonomy. Immanuel Kant also called for a transformed will, conformed to the moral law within, but Immanuel Kant broke with Rousseau (though both condemned utilitarianism). The moral law had as it source neither an external cosmic order nor an internal order of nature; rather, it was a product of procedural reason which itself)acked content.
Taylor’s analysis is completed with his consideration of another form of the inward turn, that of “expressivism,” or the Romantic movement. By the late eighteenth century, this expressivism was not merely an acknowledgment of nature as a moral source; rather, “each individual is different and original, and … this originality determines how he or she ought to live.” This emphasis on creative individualism is one source constituting the modern self but Taylor points out that it is in tension with another source, that of the disengaged reason of the Enlightenment.
By the Victorian period, various forms of unbelief had become genuine sources of moral motivation competing with Christianity. In the early twentieth century, art itself lay claim as a source of moral epiphany (a perceived contact with a moral source). This art sought to capture “lived experience,” but with a twist: The modernist plunged not into a universe of cosmic order, even interior order, as had his Enlightenment or Romantic brother, but one of flux. The unitary self gave way to fragmentation in order to be at one with that flux; the poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot relied on juxtaposition of fragments to produce its epiphany, not within what is written, as it were, but between the stanzas. This was no longer the expressivism of the individual self, but words or images driving the reader inward into a kind of multilevel consciousness. Nothing seemed to fit together neatly, but that realization itself was an empowering force against the instrumental reason that had endeavored to remake nature to suit man’s own will to power.
Such moral sources, as Taylor understands them, are not simply subjectivist; they intend to capture something very deep in human life, accessible only through “personal…resonance.” He wants to see the modernist impulse as a positive force unleashed against destructive naturalism and faulty religious authoritarianisms. The human spirit, he says, is being stifled. Yet having traced the lineaments of the modern self, Taylor implicitly acknowledges that none of its moral sources is adequate to adjudicate between conflicting hypergoods, or to order those hypergoods in a hierarchy. A proponent of strong evaluation, the author characterizes disengaged reason as technologically productive but morally barren; yet the inward sources of nature and art, because they are ultimately human constructs, do not seem to offer the kind of evaluation and reordering of the hypergoods for which Taylor is searching. In the final chapter, he dispenses with analysis and instead delivers what he calls the hunch on which he bases his optimism: “There is a large element of hope. It is a hope that I see implicit in Judaeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and in its central promise of a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided.”
Sources of the Self—meticulous, subtle, and clearly articulated—is a magisterial study of the history of ideas which affirms the human necessity of strong (moral) evaluation, and which suggests that a true understanding of the goods that empower human beings must come ultimately from a source both other than, and morally greater than, the self.
Sources for Further Study
Chicago Tribune. May 23, 1990, V, p.3.
Choice. XXVII, February, 1990, p.964.
The Christian Century. CVI, November 15, 1989, p.1066.
Dissent. XXXVII, Fall, 1990, p.534.
Library Journal. CXIV, August, 1989, p.136.
The New Republic. CCII, April 9, 1990, p.27.
The New York Review of Books. XXXVII, November 8, 1990, p.45.
Society. XXVII March, 1990, p.92.
The Times Literary Supplement. March 23, 1990, p.325.
Washington Times. October 30, 1989, p. E9.