Charles Taylor
Sources of the
Self
Intellectual History of “The Self”
Assembled by Phillip M. Castaneda
pcastaneda@gmail.com
Western
Ideal:
The
• One of the traits of the Modern west is having a sense of self.
• Believing that there is something deep within me that needs
and longs to be expressed
• The expression of this self is ‘healthy’
• I am a unique work of art
• My identity is unlike any others
• “Being me” is morally right
• Allowing you to “be you” is morally right
• There is something deep within me
• Notions of the good that didn’t exist before or elsewhere
• One of those is the notion of the self or that I have a deep
and real inner self…and interior
This is not a quick production, but rather a slow
development over 2300 years of history
Contoso
S u i t e s
2
Plato
Augustine
Rousseau
Descartes
Four critical thinkers in the
evolution of the modern self
• Plato
• St. Augustine of Hippo
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Rene Descartes
• John Locke
John Locke
Contoso
S u i t e s
3
Plato
• Strong distinction between Reason in us and
desire.
• It is “Good” and moral to live by reason and
ignore our desires
• To be focused on the rational is to love the
“Good”
• Reason is good, desire is something we should
be wary of
Contoso
S u i t e s
4
Plato
• Observed a ‘rational’ and ordered
‘Cosmos’ (ordered by Logos)
• He deduced because the cosmos is
ordered therefore the polis (or city,
or city-state) should be likewise
ordered, and therefor the human life
should be ordered.
• To be ordered like the cosmos is to
desire the good life
• To attain to this order that is present
in the universe we must live rationally
and free of our passions
Contoso
S u i t e s
5
Plato
• There are not Greek words for inside and outside (like inside of
us, interiority, and exteriority – those concepts don’t exist in
Plato’s work)
• What reason is to Plato: Reason in us is our capacity to see this
order that is latent in the Universe
• Reason – is a way of relating to what’s outside of us
• Plato was did NOT have the “self” internalized the way we in the
west understand the self.
• You can’t read Plato and fully understand Plato with the modern
self at the center
Contoso
S u i t e s
6
Augustine
• Nodal point where the concept of interiority and
exteriority is evolving
• Heavily influenced by Plato (Drenched by Plato and
those influenced by Plato also referred to as NeoPlatonists)
• Augustine retains the idea of higher and lower
• Something in us can grasp the order of the
Universe
• Uses words that mean precisely “inner” and
“outer”
• For Augustine the power of rationality is not just
seeing the Universe, but seeing it’s Source…which
is God
Contoso
S u i t e s
7
Augustine
• How to see God?
• Turn within
• Don’t go outside self, turn within
• In the internal human being is truth
• Augustine writes ‘confessions’ a real
autobiography. Maybe the first actual
autobiography
• We read it and believe we have a
contemporary, but again, there is
*nothing* like our sense of self in
Augustine
• The next nodal point is Rousseau
Contoso
S u i t e s
8
Rousseau
• 1770’s writes The Confessions ~1400 years inbetween Augustine's Confessions and Rousseau’s
confessions.
• In this in-between 1400 years there is not the
attempt to go inside and write a meaningful story
Contoso
S u i t e s
9
Descartes
• Descartes takes from Augustine the way
Augustine takes from Plato
• Just like Augustine, God is there & proof of God is
there, but the difference is Descartes is looking
for epistemological certainty and fight of skeptical
doubts. To order our inner thoughts and have
certainty from within us…to the outside world
• Since Descartes there has been a strong influence
in the west to Order our inner lives, order our
thoughts, and order our lives by clear thinking
and unencumbered rationality. Detached
rationality is a feature that now takes us into
modernity
Contoso
S u i t e s
10
Descartes
• We disengage from our particular point of view,
relationship to authority, and even bodily
existence to have clear view
• We step away from the familiar to see the world
as it is
• To Descartes there is a strong sense of the inner
space inhabited by certain norms laid down by
God. Innate forms
Contoso
S u i t e s
11
John Locke
• Lock says we can build our understanding of the universe simply
from our own building process of our thinking
• From Locke we get a feature of the modern world that Charles
Taylor calls “The Punctual Self”
• The self is not defined by any substantive desires, tendencies, or
beliefs.
• The power of the self is JUST this power to construct and
defend something rational
• To truly exercise this power you should set aside *everything*
you have received and ideas that are handed down, authority,
instincts, etc… and submit them to examination
• What I am is defined by this ability to make myself over. This is
a new sense of interiority that I can turn on myself and remake
myself by careful examination
Contoso
S u i t e s
12
•
•
•
•
•
•
Romantic writers react to Locke and extreme rationality
They thought there is something ‘deep within us’ that we ought to try and find
Consider all the poetry that comes from the romantics where people are trying to find what is authentically true
“Looking for themselves”
It’s a dialectical response to the austere aim of one side of modernity to make ourselves over in a purely rational form
This leads to people looking for ‘hints’. Hints of what you really want, what you’re really looking for, what really fulfills
you, what is true vocation, etc…and to define that.
Contoso
S u i t e s
13
The Paradox of the Modern
• Locke's view and the reaction to Locke and modernity leave us
with this dialectical tension in modernity.
• On one hand we inherit this cold and austere rationalism
• On the other hand, we inherit this ethic of authenticity which is
focused on what I really am and what I really want
• New methods focused on expression
• I am utterly unique so I must find a unique way to be me
• We are teaching our children two ways of being:
• Rationality & Discipline, abstraction that has never been asked of
anyone before in human history
• Be who you are! What is the intimacy of your daily existence
• Modernity is not just weird it’s conflictual
Contoso
S u i t e s
14
Why it Matters
Christian integration thoughts
Biblical Interpretive Lens
Sense of Self
• The Greek split is not the way the Hebrews saw reality
• That there can be an understanding of the ‘self’ apart
from a broader community is difficult to extract from
scriptures. Identity is deeply woven into the fabric of
community
• Biblical interpretation becomes a challenge if we assume
Kind David had the *exact* sense of self the postmodern world developed
• Still, the Hebrews had naturally a more integrated view
of reality than we have inherited in the west
• Hebrews saw heaven and earth overlapped sometimes
linguistically indistinguishable
• Our view of eschatology is heavily Greek influenced and
highly rational – putting together a puzzle.
• The idea of an “I” without a “Thou” (neurobiology of
we) is not neurobiologically sound.
• We are ‘created’ in the presence of the other
• Our sense of ourselves as having a soul held within a
body is the “ghost in the box” is not a historical JudeoChristian concept
• The idea of the ideal or forms is so deeply embedded
into our culture and heavily influenced the puritans.
The challenge is that the ‘forms’ exist in Heaven and are
reflected on earth imperfectly
Contoso
S u i t e s
15