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
... kind was invoked by Dostoyevsky and discussed by Leszek Kotakowski in a recent work : " If God does not exist , then everything is permitted " . But this level of argument , concerning what our commitments really amount to , is even ...
... kind of belief . It is what is left over , what takes on moral importance , after we no longer see human beings as playing a role in a larger cosmic order or divine history . This was part of the negative thrust of the utilitarian ...
... kind of worry is being articulated in these words . We can perhaps get at the point of these questions in the following way . Questions along the second axis can arise for people in any culture . Someone in a warrior society might ask ...
... kind play a role in all three dimensions of moral assessment that I identified above . The sense that human beings are capable of some kind of higher life forms part of the background for our belief that they are fit objects of respect ...
... kind of reflective awareness . But there is an important difference . It is not essential to the Ego that it orient itself in a space of questions about the good , that it stand somewhere on these questions . Rather the reverse . The ...
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 |