Charles Taylor: Sources of the Self

Abstract

In the Preface to Sources of the Self, Taylor suggests that his ambition in writing the book is a genealogical one: he hopes to “articulate and write a history of the modern identity” (Sources: ix). Shortly afterwards he declares that “This book attempts to define the modern identity in describing its genesis” (Sources: x). Looking back on his work several years after its publication, Taylor reiterated and elaborated on this characterization:The book is genealogical. I start from the present situation, from formative ideas, from our conflicting forms of self-understanding,and I try to unearth certain earlier forms from which they arise … it is not a complete historical reconstruction, it is a very selective step backwards to rediscover certain sources. (Taylor 1998: 362)2This suggests then that Sources of the Self aims at nothing less than a genealogy of modern morals.3 But unlike Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase genealogy of morals, and Michel Foucault, who styled himself as Nietzsche’s legatee (Foucault 1984), Taylor undertakes a genealogy of morals without a hermeneutics of suspicion.4 By this I do not mean that Taylor takes a naive attitude towards those things that he identifies as the moral sources of the modern self, nor that he accepts their meaning at face value. On the contrary, commentators often observe what subtle, insightful and illuminating interpretations Taylor offers of the sources of the modern self. Rather, claiming that his genealogy of morals proceeds without a hermeneutics of suspicion signals that Taylor does not adopt a mercilessly sceptical or hostile attitude towards the values, selfunderstandings or moral sources of modern selfhood. His project is not undertaken with primarily critical intent; his aim is not to disabuse people of their ethical illusions nor loosen the hold of their most cherished values. Instead, he focuses on what is attractive and positive in modern values and outlooks. Thus Jeremy Waldron describes Sources of the Self as “an optimistic, affirmative work” (1990: 325; cf. Baum 1991), while Martha Nussbaum says that “Taylor’s account aims to show how traditional views can justify themselves through careful argument … [he mines] the dominant intellectual tradition for moral insight” (1990: 32).5 Further evidence that Taylor lacks a hermeneutics of suspicion comes from Judith Shklar’s observation that he systematically ignores the darker side of some of the influential philosophies he discusses. As she says:Throughout his review of virtually every phase of European literary culture, Taylor only seems to dwell on the sunny side of the street: Montaigne without contempt, Pope without misanthropy, no Swift at all, Rousseau without his curses, Romanticism without violence, Dostoyevsky without gloom and rage, and, finally, modernist authors engaged in epiphanies, among whom Beckett is not to be found. This is a very upbeat book. (Shklar 1991: 106)Nor does Taylor accentuate the goods, values, ways of life or worldviews that have been eclipsed or effaced by the arrival of these new values, self-understandings and moral sources: once again, his focus is on the benefits and bonuses of modernity rather than its losses (cf. Calhoun 1991: 240; Skinner 1991: 142-5; Ricoeur 1998: 31).