Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor

This book was far too long and complex for me to do it justice in my haphazard posting, or for us to even discuss it thoroughly in a four-hour class. So I'll just preserve here a couple of the points and passages that struck me without any pretense of adequate summary.

From our class discussion and my reading, I've tentatively understood Taylor's perspective in this manner: The Cartesian self is rendered non-functional through our actual experiences. Further, we know that there is a moral dimension to the ethical ordering of our lives, because we are constantly making value judgments, no matter what we might say we are doing.

"My underlying thesis is that there is a close connection between the different conditions of identity, or of one's life making sense, that I have been discussing. One could put it this way: because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a 'quest.' But one could perhaps start from another point: because we have to determine our place in relation to the good, therefore we cannot be without an orientation to it, and hence must see our life in story. From whichever direction, I see these conditions as connected facets of the same reality, inescapable structural requirements of human agency" (51-52).

Taylor, though not explicitly writing as a Christian, interjects what he clearly views as the solution to the otherwise insurmountable Nietzschean critique of liberal modernity:

"For Plato, once we see the Good, we cease to be fascinated by and absorbed in the search for honour and pleasure as we were before, and we will even altogether want to renounce certain facets of these. On a Christian view, sanctification involves our sharing to some degree God's love (agape) for the world, and this transforms how we see things and what else we long for and think important" (70).

In his conclusion, Taylor states this outright:

"Only if there is such a thing as agape, or one of the secular claimants to its succession, is Nietzsche wrong" (516).

I appreciated Taylor's support of my thesis from my Victorian lit term paper last semester:

"This is the powerful alternative morality that knocked such a breach in Victorian religion. It was not some supposedly logical incompatibility between science and faith but this imperious moral demand not to believe which led many Victorians to feel that they had to abandon, however sorrowfully, the faith of their fathers" (406).

I also found Taylor's location of the solution in Dostoevsky fascinating:

"Just as 'no one is to blame' is the slogan of the materialist revolutionaries, so 'we are all to blame' is of Dostoevsky's healing figures. Loving the world and ourselves is in a sense a miracle, in face of all the evil and degradation that it and we contain. . . . It is not an accident that Dostoevsky's positive figures have to go through the experience of modernity. . . . Dostoevsky's healing grace lies beyond the modern identity, not anterior to it" (452).