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
... action . But the notion that we ought to reduce it to a minimum is an integral part of what respect means to us today — however distasteful this has been to an eloquent minority , most notably to Nietzsche . Part of the reason for this ...
... action , or mode of life , or mode of feeling is incomparably higher than the others which are more readily available to us . I am using ' higher ' here in a generic sense . The sense of what the difference consists in may take ...
... action . But it may be left entirely to us , observers , historians , philosophers , anthropol- ogists , to try to formulate explicitly what goods , qualities , or ends are here discriminated . It is this level of inarticulacy , at ...
... action could only be put in universal terms . Nothing else made sense . This is linked , of course , with the crisis for Luther turning around the acute sense of condemnation and irremediable exile , rather than around a modern sense of ...
... action strategically in the light of certain factors , including one's own desires , capacities , etc. This is part of what is meant by having ( or being ) an Ego in the Freudian sense , and in related uses . This strategic capacity ...
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 |