'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that modern subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.
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This book is primarily a historical account of the modernist protest against the disengaged and instrumental modes of thought and action that arose when theistically grounded morality crumbled, but that themselves focused too little upon our inner life, i.e., our powers of creative imagination and the substantive goods of ordinary life, which Taylor alleges give meaning to human life. Associating each ideology with a particular conception of our identity as selves, he defends the modern view, keeping in mind that self-realization must recognize that some things are important beyond the self. Taylor rambles somewhat and often talks about " the good," as though human beings were fungible in their capacities for appreciation and action; but the wealth of illustrative material and frequent insights are thought-provoking. For scholarly collections.
- Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Robert Hoffman, York Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live...and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader. To have accomplished so much is an important philosophical achievement. (New Republic )
Sources of the Self is in every sense a large book: in length and in the range of what it covers, but above all in the generosity and breadth of its sympathies and its interest in humanity...Few books on such large subjects are so engaging.
--Bernard Williams (New York Review of Books )
A magnificent account, full, fair, well read, well written, complicated and high spirited--a credit, one might say, to the modern self that is capable of plumbing the depths of its own heritage in such a generous way.
--Jeremy Waldron (Times Literary Supplement )
Surely one of the most important philosophical works of the last quarter of a century.
--Jerome Bruner
For sociologists, there is no more important philosopher writing in the world today than Charles Taylor.
--Alan Wolfe (Contemporary Sociology )
Undoubtedly one of the most significant works in moral philosophy and the history of ideas to appear in recent decades.
--Frances S. Adeney (Theology Today ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Sources of the Self is in every sense a large book: in length and in the range of what it covers, but above all in the generosity and breadth of its sympathies and its interest in humanity...Few books on such large subjects are so engaging.
--Bernard Williams (New York Review of Books )
A magnificent account, full, fair, well read, well written, complicated and high spirited--a credit, one might say, to the modern self that is capable of plumbing the depths of its own heritage in such a generous way.
--Jeremy Waldron (Times Literary Supplement )
Surely one of the most important philosophical works of the last quarter of a century.
--Jerome Bruner
For sociologists, there is no more important philosopher writing in the world today than Charles Taylor.
--Alan Wolfe (Contemporary Sociology )
Undoubtedly one of the most significant works in moral philosophy and the history of ideas to appear in recent decades.
--Frances S. Adeney (Theology Today ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By D. David Bew
Format:Paperback
Taylor offers us an invigorating critique of the Western individualist tradition since the 17th century. His work focuses on how the Judeo-Christian tradition has been dismantled bit-by-bit as rationality has taken its place. This dynamic has left us with a "desiccated" self (e.g., no role for spirituality or grace). Taylor tells us that what is missing are powers of creative imagination and the substantive goods of ordinary life, but he does not reconcile these with the developments he critiques. Instead of sending us back to our religious roots or offering a new perspective, he leaves us asking the question we had on page 1: what gives life meaning in the 21st century.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
With 'Sources of the Self' Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written a seminal work along the lines of Ernst Cassirer's classic 'An Essay on Man'.
Deploring the minimal ethics of modernity and dissatisfied with post-modern nihilism, Taylor positions his moral theory in the Aristotelean tradition of 'ethos'. But Taylor does not embrace a pre-defined, teleological destiny. Rather, his premise is that in articulating 'the self' we will discover who we are, what we are supposed to do and where we are going.
Taylor's quest into what made man into what he is, is traced back to classic Greek thought and Augustinian theology. Subsequently the author takes us to early modernity: from Locke, via Neoplatonists like Shaftesbury, to the period of Romanticism. Eventually this odyssee of the mind is germinating into present-day man as a self-expressing creature.
The richness of Taylor's argumentation is often dazzling; here speaks a man of wide and deep erudition, an authoritative voice of intellectual history, seemingly equally at home in science, history and the arts.
In the post-modern wilderness of de-construction, Taylor's articulate and subtle history of mentality is an intellectual joy.
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Most recent customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
An overlooked gem of modern philosophy
Taylor is a Professor of Philosophy at McGill. He is a Catholic and his book is written from a Christian view of what human beings owe the society in which they live. Read more
Published on July 1 2010 by William Fox
5.0 out of 5 stars
A powerful analysis of Modernity
Usually Modernity is a cause of a big division: there are some people who love it and some people who hate it. Read more
Published on July 18 2000 by "chileanreader"
5.0 out of 5 stars
Philosophy you can read and maybe even understand!!!
After having long-suffered the hyped-up mumbojumbo of all that post-structuralist goobledegook and/or boring and infuriating cryptophila that has been running rampant in philosophy... Read more
Published on July 29 1998
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