Taylor on Self-Celebration and Gratitude

Abstract

In The Sources of Self, as in his earlier Philosophy and Human Sciences, Charles Taylor takes on two principal sets of opponents: reductionist naturalists, heirs of Enlightenment, on one hand and self-involved expressivists, heirs of Romanticism, on other . Taylor sees naturalists as caught in self-referential inconsistency, unable to account for own passionate belief that we ought to uncover irreducible reality behind reducible appearances. Theories of materialist utilitarianism, he says, hard to bring into focus. They have two sides-a reductive ontology and impetus-which are hard to combine. (p. 337) Taylor thinks that any movement with size, strength and endurance of reductive naturalism must have been motivated by some sense of what he calls hypergood, constitutive good. There must be which functions as moral source-that is, as something undistorted recognition of which empowers us to do good. (p. 342 ) On Taylor's view, it is a recognizable feature of whole class of modern positions which descends from radical Enlightenment class of which Marxism is paradigmatic-that their principal words of power are denunciatory. Much of what they live by has to be inferred from rage with which enemies are attacked and refuted. Such position draws its ideals, if not directly from its enemies, at least from culture which they have better articulated. (p. 339) So it is parasitic on hypergood which it refuses to acknowledge. Taylor admits that the mere fact that position may be at its inception parasitic on sources it cannot itself acknowledge doesn't prove that it is unfit to build new world. It may have resources which are yet to flower. (p. 340) But he makes little attempt to explore possibility of non-reductive naturalism, one which would reject the disengaged subject and takes account of what he calls situatedness of self-and of all antiCartesian and anti-Kantian lessons we have learned from Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, later Wittgenstein, and Polanyi. (p. 514, esp. n. 27) This was