Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern IdentityIn this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. |
From inside the book
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... experience . What this brings to light is the essential link between identity and a kind of orientation . To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space , a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad , what is worth ...
... experience of these being objects for us , in some common space . This is the truth behind Wittgenstein's dictum that agreement in meanings involves agreement in judgements . 11 Later , I may innovate . I may develop an original way of ...
... experiences . For him , everything would be confusion , there would be no language of discernment at all , without the conversations which fix this language for him . This is the sense in which one cannot be a self on one's own . I am a ...
... experience more and mature . So the issue for us has to be not only where we are , but where we're going ; and though the first may be a matter of more or less , the latter is a question of towards or away from , an issue of yes or no ...
... experience could be strong and convincing enough on its own . If it really were all there , Taj , Jumna , the city of Agra , bullocks , sky , everything , I would have to accept my new location , however mysterious my translation ...
Contents
3 | |
41 | |
53 | |
Moral Sources PART II | 105 |
Inwardness | 109 |
Moral Topography | 111 |
Platos SelfMastery | 115 |
In Interiore Homine | 127 |
The Culture of Modernity | 285 |
Fractured Horizons | 305 |
Nature as Source | 355 |
The Expressivist Turn | 368 |
Our Victorian Contemporaries | 405 |
Visions of the PostRomantic | 419 |
Epiphanies of Modernism | 456 |
The Conflicts of Modernity | 495 |
Descartess Disengaged Reason | 143 |
Lockes Punctual Self | 159 |
Exploring lHumaine Condition | 177 |
Inner Nature | 185 |
A Digression on Historical Explanation | 199 |
PART III | 209 |
God Loveth Adverbs | 211 |
Rationalized Christianity | 234 |
Moral Sentiments | 248 |
The Providential Order | 269 |
3 | 539 |
25 | 541 |
53 | 551 |
91 | 568 |
III | 573 |
127 | 582 |
143 | 585 |
185 | 596 |
211 | 599 |