A Little Philosophy

In this post, I review a philosophical tome which I had to plough through twice during my postgraduate studies some years ago.  The book in question is the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's magnum opus on the self: Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 601 pp., 1989).  I use the description of "ploughing" merely to inform the reader that this book is no light read and that it takes a certain commitment of time and labour to engage with the substance and central argument of the book.  I was lucky to read five or six pages per evening -- in that way, I was able to think through and digest as best as I could what the author had written.  However, the task was worthwhile as I gained not a little wisdom and information from this obviously erudite and brilliant philosopher.  In other words, the struggle with the text was a worthwhile one.  Most philosophers and theologians who have reviewed this book are loud and enthusiastic in its praise as worthwhile reading for anyone engaged in getting to know themselves culturally or helping others reflect on their identity as human beings.  Among those who would find this book an interesting reference book would be sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, teachers, and all those who want to be challenged about the cultural origins of our modern notion of Self.  This book traces the origins and development of personal meaning and identity over the last several millennia of civilisation.  The text runs to 520 pages of closely argued thoughts and insights, along with copious notes that add a further 80 pages to the text.

Taylor is a moral and political philosopher, rather than a religious one.  However, a central argument in all his books is that cultural history in its entirety is important for our understanding of our identity.  Here in Sources, he magisterially marshals a veritable mine of material from more than two thousand years of reflection on how culture has shaped our identity.  So, the context in which we as a human species have lived during that time, as well as the context within which we live today, are sifted finely to show us how our modern identity has been formed. In the words of the late Rev. Professor Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J., for Charles Taylor and many other kindred philosophers, who would be at least partially neo-Aristotelian and communitarian in outlook, "context conditions consciousness."  In other words, our so-called "modern consciousness" can best be described as a reality deriving from a multiplicity of cultural factors that cannot be denied.

The reader may wonder what the present reader and reviewer got from his prolonged and continuing encounter with this text?  Firstly, one of Taylor's central contentions is that the moral sources of the self are equally as important as its ontological or epistemological sources.  This, for me, was a central insight.  Ever since Nuremberg, we humans have been seeking an ever higher court to judge the ever lower behaviour of some of our fellow creatures.  What, and indeed who, is the ultimate judge of the most wicked of crimes?  Indeed, why would we not be left reaching for the moral sources or origins of the Self in the wake of such catastrophes?  In judging others, if I dare to, what standards am I using as a Self, or to what judge am I appealing to validate them?  Good question, that!  Indeed, given Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine and so on, the moral sources of our identity have never been more needed.  Taylor argues that "much of contemporary philosophy has ignored this dimension of our moral consciousness and beliefs altogether and has even seemed to dismiss it as confused and irrelevant" (p. 4).  We have an instinct not to harm others, or as Hippocrates (c. 400 B.C.) famously said in his oath for medical doctors, "first do no harm", and a further instinct to run to the aid of others in trouble or in danger.  This is surely why Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that we are born naturally sympathetic to others. In this tome, Taylor seeks to describe in amazing detail the historical sources of our moral and spiritual intuitions, in an erudite and comprehensive attempt to elucidate what, in short, makes our life worth living.  This is a massive quest that results in a massive book.  In short, our identity as human beings has an amazingly complex cultural background.

Again, Taylor argues that modern moral philosophy tends to concentrate solely on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be (see p. 3). In other words, as a philosopher, he is asking about the notion of "being" and the notion of "the Good."  In this sense, we are talking about an ontological identity as well as a moral or epistemological one. (The epistemological self refers to that part of the self that is responsible for knowing oneself and understanding one's relation with the world.)  Taylor argues that there are "ontological accounts"  that offer themselves as "correct articulations" of our gut reactions to incidents where we witness a lack of respect.  In an example from my own life, I remember visiting my mother in a home for the elderly and finding her to have soiled herself and to have obviously been left in that condition for some time, being unable cognitively to call for help as she was at the end stages of dementia.  I was outraged at such a neglect of basic dignity owed to any human being.  Again, to place beside this very small example of moral outrage what is happening before the view of the world in Gaza is a million times worse, in the considered opinion of many humanitarians.  Why are some outraged?  Why are others not?  Both interesting questions if we go along with Taylor's thesis of the moral source of our identity along one contributory line.  These are all ontological claims made upon us as humans, claims that cannot be dismissed as mere "nonsense from a bygone age" (pp. 6 - 9). In short, Taylor argues that moral ontology makes human beings worthy of respect. 

Other Taylorian terms that appear in this book are "strong evaluations," examples of which I have given in the previous paragraph, "horizons" (meaningful narratives), "disenchantment" (a concept borrowed from Weber) and "frameworks."  These terms are all closely related and refer to the gradual eclipse of a sense of wonder, awe and mystery in the universe.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a wonderful expression that sums up what I am attempting to articulate rather poorly here about the effect of the rationalism, consequent on the influence of the Enlightenment, that "the world had been untenanted of its God."  In short, Taylor argues throughout this tome that modernity and post-modernity have thrown out much of their cultural inheritance to our collective detriment in being creatures who both search for and indeed must make meaning for ourselves in an all too confusing world.  We cannot deny the impact of the horizons of our ancestors and our various cultures on us, can we?  No wonder so-called moderns and post-moderns experience their lives as meaningless or empty?  Rollo May spoke a lot about the modern sense of meaninglessness, which he called by the term "emptiness" in his many books on existential psychotherapy.  Taylor maintains that much of this alienation, meaninglessness and emptiness can be written down to a loss of "frameworks," or "horizons" by which or relying on which the emptiness can be at least partially filled.

Again, other terms we encounter in this book are "a sense of inarticulacy," "the disengaged self," "moral orientation," "a space of questions," "webs of interlocution," "connectedness," "orientation linked to narrative," "nature as a great current of sympathy" (p. 369) that runs through all things, "voice of nature within us" (p. 370), "opening up to the élan of nature" and from there to the grace of God (p. 371), the movement from mimesis to expressivism (pp. 377 - 8).  All of these orientations run counter to "disengaged reason/reasoning," "mechanical reason/reasoning," or "instrumental reason/reasoning."  What I am getting at here, through mentioning Taylor's unique terminology, is to give the reader a sense of his approach to tracing the moral and ontological sources of identity over the last two millennia of civilisation. In his book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously stated, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Taylor would not agree with this, and while he admits that much of the moral, ontological and aesthetic or expressive strands that make up identity are difficult to express ("a sense of inarticulacy"), we must never cease from attempting to express them through all the cultural means at our disposal.  In this way, we feel at home in a meaningful universe.  The disengaged self is cutting itself off from such sources of meaning and is bereft of a "moral orientation,"  while a lack of such orientation results in meaninglessness or emptiness. Moreover, "orientation in moral space" is central to a human's identity.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a major inspiration of Romanticism with his call on human beings to open up to the "élan of nature." "Disengaged/mechanical/instrumental reason are all terms for the same narrow naturalistic approach to reason or reasoning consequent on the mathematical approach to reality stemming from the Enlightenment.  Furthermore, Taylor argues here that the "engaged self" is one firmly rooted in "horizons" or "frameworks of meaning," is "morally oriented", and rooted in "a space of questions."  Karl Rahner, after one of his philosophical mentors, Martin Heidegger, often repeated "Man is the Question."  Again, we are communitarian creatures and "webs of interlocution" is a way of expressing that human quality.  Finally, all this orientation in moral space is rooted in the self as a narrative reality or a work of unique story.  A story by its nature is holistic and engages not alone with our own personal identity but that of our fellows and of our intergenerational forebears and offspring.  

Modernity and post-modernity are, to a great extent, "disembedded" in many of the cultural claims of our inherited past.  We are happier when we are embedded authentically within a horizon or frameworks which we have honestly engaged with. We find more meaning in clarifying, deciphering and discerning the moral claims made on us in our call to act in as human a way as possible in our relations to others.  Taylor has taught this reader at least that pure clarity and linear progress do not exist.  They have to be contextualised and complexified by sifting through a mass of inherited cultural conditioning.  Pure clarity becomes an idolatry of a certain Cartesian or mathematical kind.  Life is far more complex, as is our identity as human beings.  We just have to accept that and learn the skills to deal with that complexity. 

Again, Taylor teaches us not to shrink our authenticity down to mere self-fulfilment without conscience.  Sources is a deeply complex and challenging book.  Any religious formation must be much more than providing us with long-looked-for certainty and security in life; it must teach us to be spiritually aware and to be deeply critical of the dehumanising factors that rob people of spiritual awareness.  This is a challenging moral call to authenticity and to a moral ontology that can fearlessly call out the many injustices that bedevil our world.  Existentially, what price do we so-called moderns pay for our blindness to blatant injustices?  How authentic is our identity in that context?  

Finally, the poet in me is impressed by Taylor's breadth of knowledge in literature and his deep attunement to the impact poets have made on our identity over the centuries.  Poets are often our best spiritual guides, because they can tap into our imagination and put us in contact with possibilities that get suppressed in our quotidian routine of living.  Again, music and art can do likewise, and Taylor is equally at home therein.