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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... picture ' lying behind our moral and spiritual intuitions . I could now rephrase this and say that my target is the moral ontology which articulates these intuitions . What is the picture of our spiritual nature and predicament which ...
... picture of ourselves as pure rational agents ; or the Romantic picture just mentioned , where we understand ourselves in terms of organic metaphors and a concept of self - expression . As is well known , the partisans of these different ...
... picture of the frameworks people live by in our day . This has to do with what I called in section 1.3 the ' affirmation of ordinary life ' . The notion that the life of production and reproduction , of work and the family , is the main ...
... picture , that of human agency where one could answer the question , Who ? without accepting any qualitative distinctions , just on the basis of desires and aversions , likes and dislikes . On this picture , frameworks are things we ...
... picture . In the light of our understanding of identity , the portrait of an agent free from all frameworks rather spells for us a person in the grip of an appalling identity crisis . Such a person wouldn't know where he stood on issues ...
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 |