Comments on Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor

Abstract

Sources of the Self has two parts which are quite different from one another. The first is fairly brief and, among other things, explains the notions of source and of with which Taylor is working. The second is very long and presents an historical reconstruction of the making of the modern identity-the story, that is, of how we have come to be the people that we now are. In an digression on historical explanation Taylor tells us how he conceives his own contribution to the telling of this story. Although he draws on the work of a great many students of past, he is not, he says, offering a diachronic-causal explanation as an historian would, but rather an interpretive account of why people were drawn to the various new versions that were offered to them of their identity as beings. Such an interpretation of the spiritual power of such ideas would not seem to oblige Taylor to take a stand on their philosophical merits. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is indeed often hard to tell, in this part of the book, just what his attitude is to the developments he is describing. Where Taylor's own philosophical views do emerge clearly is in the framework of ideas that is put in place in the first part; and it is some features of that framework that I want to comment on here. In a general way, what I want to suggest is that there are unresolved tensions between the philosophical stands Taylor takes in first part of his book and the historical account he gives in the second. At the beginning of his first chapter Taylor says that the book is to be an essay in moral ontology and that he will be dealing with our modern notion of what it is to be a agent, a person, or a self' (p. 3). This makes it sound as though must be interchangeable with these other concepts and presumably with that of human being as well. Although Taylor has made the concept of self the vehicle of his argument, we are not really told why he chose it over the others. Whether it was a happy choice is, I suggest, a matter that needs more consideration than it gets in this book. Perhaps it is simply a stand-in for all the other concepts with which it is apparently supposed to be equivalent. Even so, it seems to me that there is a danger that