But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness; this eventually turned against morality, discovered its teleology, its partial perspective–and now the recognition of this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant. Now we discover in ourselves needs implanted by centuries of moral interpretation–needs that now appear to us as needs for untruth; on the other hand, the value for which we endure life seems to hinge on these needs. This antagonism–not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves–results in a process of dissolution. (Nietzsche n.5)

In an age of disaffection, Taylor’s serious and reverent study Sources of the Self seems strangely out of place. In it he offers us an exploration of self-hood which draws as much upon a phenomenology of the self as it does upon a genealogy of the self. This enormous undertaking is unified by his concern with values in the shaping of the self. Perhaps the central argument of the book is that one must value to be a self. Valuing can take the form of denouncing any values which conflict with others already held (however hidden the already held values may be), and it can also take the form of implicitly or explicitly affirming some set of goods. The implicitness/explicitness of moral values lies at the root of some of our society’s core concerns, as do the issues of identity and cohesion. Both issues are related. All sides carry useful knives.

Taylor’s contention is that the modern self is not one which has banished all values or goods from intellectual pursuit, but rather one which has suppressed any articulation of goods in the interest of furthering the goods of universal benevolence, freedom and the affirmation of ordinary life. Through his genealogy of the modern self he shows how the rejection of goods does not come about arbitrarily, but rather follows inevitably from the “progress” a culture wants to make. This progress comes about through sifting through those goods which have been seen to be destructive or unsatisfactory or most importantly, inhibitive of the goods one wishes to promote. In other words, the naturalism so prevalent today is not, as commonly conceived, a discarding of primitive value assertions for the sake of the intellectual possibility and epistemological semi-certainty that values may not exist, but rather because the destruction of hyper-goods enhances the goods of freedom, universal benevolence and ordinary life.

Taylor also uses a non-genealogical argument for his position, an argument which could be roughly classified as a psycho-phenomenological account of the necessity of values for a human being. When I speak of values in this paper, I, like Taylor, am not talking about values in the trivialized sense–something we recognize in a good product, or issues we feel may be preferable to others. I am not speaking of “family values”, in the sense so naively thrown around today in politics, but rather of values and concerns by which we orient the core of our lives, values for which we may actually sacrifice other contingent values in the hope of keeping intact the ones necessary for our identity.

Taylor’s argument for the necessity of strong valuation for the formation of an identity goes something like this: To be a self is to have a specific set of ideas about who one is, and what one wants/needs to be, and to orient and organize and motivate oneself around this set of ideas. This set of ideas and concerns is a directional one, i.e. one can move toward or away from fulfilling one’s concerns. This orienting space must be structured by some strong poles of concern which override all others, or it would be impossible to orient (actualize or fail possibilities) oneself in relation to this space. Thus, without strong-valuations, a self cannot exist.1

In theater, that which lends reality to the characters and story within a play is whether the actor’s are doing more than reading words with their lines. A good actor is one who does something with her lines–for whom words are actions through which she fulfills needs, desires, or combats someone else’s encroaching upon what she considers necessary for her well-being. In other words, what lends reality to theater is how well it mirrors our lives, and our lives are ones fueled by needs and goals and hopes that stem from dreams, fears, and past hurts. Similarly, what makes a self more than a history of actions and words is the organizing principle (the desire) behind those actions, and that organizing principle (and this is my move, not Taylor’s) would perhaps be akin to the ancients’ notion of Eros. I will return to this later. However, it is thus that Taylor can conclude:

Doing without frameworks is utterly impossible for us;…the horizons within which we live our lives and which make sense of them have to include these strong qualitative discriminations…. living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human agency. …to know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. (Taylor 27)

Of course, this primordiality of understanding (which according to Heidegger is always a direction of being) presupposes at least the equiprimordiality of a space within which we dwell and must “constitute” ourselves. We are dealing with a metaphysic which posits knowledge as a construct, specifically a construct of language. Taylor’s notion of the self is then to some degree formed by the history of those languages and practices within which that self has been born. After all, could one orient oneself to a good which had never been conceived or articulated? (Perhaps most of us do?) Whatever the case may be, and however explicit this articulation, to be a self is to be oriented–defining what is important to us or not (either verbally, or by our patterns of living). Thus, to be a self must be a function of answering the questions within which one has been born. “To be someone who qualifies as a potential object of this question [of identity] is to be such an interlocutor among others, someone with one’s own standpoint or one’s own role, who can speak for him/herself.” (Taylor 29) Though thrown-ness is a basic experience for the human, we can also say that to experience thrown-ness is a direct result of our need to construct an orientation of the self, a mode of being. It isn’t long before we brush off our pants and look around for a way out.

So we end up with a genealogical argument and a phenomenological argument for the necessity of valuation. What I want to do with this starting point is to ask some questions regarding the implications of both these arguments, to take them further down the road, to explore and hunt a little more of our moral and valuative terrain, in essence pursue the question: Why do we value and how? Maybe in this way we may have some occasion to smell the flowers along the way.

I

Even in the most anti-normative philosophies, values are encountered as (or even openly admitted to) having a necessary existence. (We take the term anti-normative as being normative.) Nietzsche has Zarathustra preaching that the only way to destroy old law-tables is to create new ones. A proposed title for his planned latest work (now The Will to Power) was “Principles of a New Evaluation”. In this sense, Nietzsche can be read to support Taylor in his contention that the erasure of values without replacement with new ones is impossible (though I can well see him laughing on this point). Sartre’s ethic is a famous example of how value formation is possible and even extremized (as in Sartre’s conception of freedom) in a supposedly amoral vision of the universe. And for Derrida, the task of deconstruction is fueled by the vision of free-play in interpretation as well as in society. Even Lyotard, with his vision of knowledge as technology, admits that Narratives are necessary for any society to be able to exist and perform. However, according to him, Meta-Narratives have been permanently de-legitimated for us modern/post-moderns. Yet, it seems to me that with his notion of performativity2 he manages to introduce some form of meta-narrative with which to tell the story of our present condition. We may then well ask “Perform what? and why?”

Performativity is useless as a tool for legitimation because the reason we are valuing performativity is because of what we are wanting qua its effectiveness. If one takes a step back, and answers in Foucault’s terms that this thing we want through performativity is power, we are left with the question “Power for what?”. What do we wish to control and why? I will discuss this in more detail later. Also, with Richard Rorty we see a similar pattern. In Rorty’s view of the self as totally constituted linguistically through a Deweyan, pragmatist evolution of language (allegedly minus the notion of progress), we are faced with such a completely arbitrary notion of self-hood that even a discussion of the self as actually existing becomes ridiculous. And of course that is what Rorty wants us to believe. The trouble is that the facing up this (oops) ‘reality’ is very unsettling to us, and so Rorty proposes a form of disengagement called post-modern irony. The Samuel Beckett one would, upon scrutiny, find behind this euphemism, is gracefully hid under a bourgeois delight in the emperor’s new clothes.

The problem here is obvious: why face up to the “reality”? If, as Rorty admits, even his conception of the self is just a linguistic invention, why not hide behind the more comfortable inventions of the past? And even if Rorty’s conceptions of the self are “true”, why even then face up to them?3 Doesn’t this sort of thought render what is commonly called pathology (flight from concerns and fears) as a more estimable approach than to confront them and have our commitment to ‘sanity’ cost us? It is, unless–and it is here that Rorty betrays himself–we are actually dealing with a suppressed value of truth-fulness (c.f. Introductory quote).

Nietzsche, in his introduction to The Will to Power states that the advent of nihilism has become necessary because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals–because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had.–We require, sometime, new values. (Nietzsche pref. 5) Similarly, the thing which necessitates post-modern irony in Rorty is the value of “truthfulness”. Without holding the value that one must live in full recognition and cognizance of truth, there is no point to his advocacy for post-modern irony.

II

Beyond the nagging presence of value is the question of how these philosophers can account for the phenomena of value. Obviously, they must be arbitrary in the sense that these values have no special anchor with which to legitimate themselves. The issue resolves itself into something like a divine command theory metamorphosed into a “human command” theory. Taylor shows how the Calvinistic desire for the supremacy of man cultivated a negation of natural law theory, that things could not be good apart form God’s declaration of their being good. Naturally, later on, in a God-less and essence-less universe, something else must create the value–hence the view that humans can “will” value, decide it on their own, not on any basis of its inherent or essential goodness, but simply in anthropocentric terms. What are these terms?

The general heading I wish to explore is one of socio-cultural pragmatism. I have already touched on this regarding Foucault, Lyotard and Rorty, but would here like to develop the issue of pragmatism further. “The true goal of the system…is the optimization of the global relationship between input and output–in other words, performativity” (Lyotard 11), but it seems to me that to base all value formation on pragmatism is to overlook some crucial facts about the role of goods (especially hyper-goods), and what makes them play that role effectively. At once it must be admitted that the efficacy of an idea or object is the most common generator of value. A broken hammer is thrown away. A functional one isn’t. The fact that we label an ineffective hammer as broken (i.e. in a state which cancels its ability to do what it was designed to do) is a clear sign that even the status as a hammer has changed. It is not longer a hammer in the same sense that a functional one is; it is rather a broken one. Similarly with a proof or truth-statement: If it doesn’t perform its proving or its truth-telling, it is no longer a proof or truth-statement. Its ontic status is different due to our changed ontological being towards it.

However, to use a pragmatic machinery to construct hyper-goods seems self-abortive at best. Obviously, if one doesn’t want to build a fence, one doesn’t value a hammer even if it is in perfect shape. Thus, to say that a pragmatic criterion can give rise to hyper-goods (which according to Taylor are goods which we arrange our lives after even to our detriment or pain), is to hold the somewhat untenable thesis that one cannot choose to do another task. Put another (I hope simpler) way, to place efficacy without efficacy-toward- this is to create a good which has no legitimation or coercive force on people; hence its untenability as an hyper-good. Tools are only tools and valued as tools as long as they help us along to something else which we value even more. Thus to render goods exclusively into a category of performativity is in effect to render the hammer not a hammer, and this not because it is broken but because there is nothing to bang it against.

Another problem with this notion of performativity as an adequate machinery for strong value-formation is that there is an unspoken assumption that pragmatism is somehow less arbitrary than other criteria, that it is of the essence for some things to work and not others. The only sense I can make of this is that there must be an implicit assumption of a neutral and fixed context or universe in which these mechanisms can be compared and evaluated.

A second, related term by which we cause value is the will to power. This is a more noticeably problematic view because it does not, as alleged, allow humans the freedom to impose whatever goods are necessary to the fulfillment of power precisely because it dictates that all the goods we will are necessarily willed towards the hyper-good of power. This is obviously, even as stated by Foucault and Nietzsche, an ironic twist to their philosophies, that the only way to reject goods is to embrace the good of power. The reason they can get away with it is because the idea of power as a good just doesn’t seem like much of a good to us. It is not ideal enough for our refined sensibilities of what should be desirable. And obviously, another reason for the longevity of this idiosyncrasy is that it does make sense to the cynic. (and these days, who isn’t a cynic?) Lyotard defines post-modernism (reductively) as “Incredulity towards meta-narratives” (xxiv) and in this contemporary climate of incredulity or cynicism, to say that all we are concerned with is power is very palpable. However, to place this in a context of the rejection of any meta- narrative or transcendent goods is inadmissible.

A deeper fissure lurks in the background. If power is the good, the doctrine of values as the will to power loses power. The power of knowledge and of values lies exactly in its construal as being neutral. In espousing free play and the articulation of the historicity of value, Foucault is destroying the power of deception. Power can only come from deception and thus articulation is society’s greatest enemy. I will explicate this further below.

While Foucault would like us to think that this freedom from strong-evaluation is a liberating force, it seems to me rather that we are faced with terror–terror of suppression. If knowledge, ideals, and values are instruments of power, and if they get their power by being presented as truth or transcendent or legitimate, then the uncovering of them as empty notions would effectively counter-act (sic.) their usefulness to the furtherance of power. In effect, the articulation of the illegitimacy of any values would be the last thing a society would want. Therefore a culture must suppress this. In the ensuing suppression, the question not just of the emptiness of all values, but also the question of which ones, if any, are legitimate cannot be raised. In order to live the good life, one of creative power in society, we must be dishonest.

To grope further in this direction, is to find that this notion of flourishing is also rather anachronistic to historicist writers. Is power itself human flourishing? Does it feed on itself? Again, the question to ask is pour quoi? Power for what? What things are constituted as flourishing? What do we want power for? For itself? Again, in the search for power, there must be deception, for to admit to the search for power is to lose all power. If all citizens in this world were to be effectively re-educated into believing that all their knowledge and political views and religious views were constructed in order to further a certain hierarchy of power and dominance and the flourishing of certain types of human activity, then the people in check would be dissolved. The only way for a society to flourish is to provide a legitimation for its narratives, to further a deception. To reach for power is to lose it. To reach for `freedom’ or `democracy’ is to gain power.

The troublesome point of course is this, that the idea ;that humans or anyone for that matter can simply command value or impart or impose it regardless of what the idea or object in essence really is, is to render all valuations completely innocuous. What power is there really here? Maybe that’s the point. There is no power and consequently nothing to be slave to, nothing to obey, no reason to kill. In the desire to embrace free play “Nothing emerges from this flux worth affirming, so what in fact comes to be celebrated is the deconstructing power itself. …pure untrammeled freedom.” (Taylor 489) But this freedom is empty because it lacks any direction, any orientation. It is a framework without a frame, an existence without essence (to appropriate-ively maim an overused and already misunderstood Sartrean phrase).

III

In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a signification over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, …but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation. (Heidegger 190)

The other alternative is to admit that values are “there” in whatever sense that means–as a function of Dasein’s primordial understanding of being-in-the-world, or as eternally existing forms, or as existent in the nature of the cause of the universe. The values that we are primarily concerned with in this paper are values of “strong evaluation”. In Taylor’s terms, strong evaluation involves “discriminations of right or wrong…which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged” (4). This is an important definition because it immediately renders “queer” any explanation of strong-evaluation qua our own wishes. Granted, our goods may be chosen with a great degree of `preferencing’, but what makes them more than mere wishes is their binding nature. It is hard to imagine someone considering herself bound to some framework which the self knows is a simple construct without any truth force or legitimation outside itself, especially when that framework may cost the individual in terms of happiness or pleasure or gain. Strong evaluation must presuppose at the least an un-thematized or unconscious construction of goods, or at the most be accounted for by means of some form of `realism’ of goods.

However, in dealing with the existence of goods, Taylor will be the first to point out that our self and moral space is not there like our “hearts and livers. We are living being with these organs quite independently of our self-understandings or -interpretations, or the meaning[s] things have for us. But we are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good.” (34) There is a strong sense in which goods are constructed, woven into the making of the self through the evolution of the language a culture has used to describe its moral experience. As for Heidegger, language plays a crucial role in our ontological make-up. Of course, as I said at the beginning of my paper, this is all played against a back-ground conception of existence which is spatial and directed in the sense of living with an understanding of possibilities and past actualities. Taylor never makes explicit the extent to which the self is a construct and to what extent it is shaped by a necessity or essence. The basic point is that both extremes of either hard realism or total contingency of self are untenable.

The task of determining how much each source plays in the make-up of the self will probably never be disclosed, and deep as the issue is, the more immediate landscape and more interesting looking questions seem to be along the lines of “So what?” If we have shown the inescapability of frameworks, where does that leave us? Does it in any sense give us an Archimedean point in the sense that Bernard Williams thinks is necessary for the continued significance of ethics?

While I esteem Taylor’s exploration of the modern self, I wonder if he gets us out of the essential quagmire of moral philosophy. The attempt to extricate oneself–as in quicksand–seems to lead to frustration and all sorts of tenacious untenabilities. The first question to ask is the simple “Which framework?” Taylor gives us no real basis for how to compare conflicting claims. His hope is that we can somehow generate an Aristotelian co-grouping of goods, but what do we do with actually conflicting demands, and how do we determine the hierarchy necessary for its inner balance and harmony? Taylor hopes that with some form of best account (B.A.) epistemology, we can achieve a satisfactory synthesis. Maybe. But to take the question a step further: Less obviously, even a right framework cannot make itself authoritative. Truth is not coercive4. Even a King cannot place a scepter in hand without force. Is irreducibility or inescapability or even a best account sufficient to create the needed move from fact to obligation? The Augustinian response would be that the will must be involved. We must will the good. We are here at the limits of our selves. For even if an ethical framework could be proven true and assented to as true by a broad consensus of all populations throughout time, even if the ethical project were “solved”, rebellion is always an option. No one can be forced to be reasonable. Unless we use force.

Ironically, it is the desire to not use ‘force’ which drives our quest for truth.

This, as Taylor points out, is a modern predicament precisely because we are still dealing with a procedural rather than a substantive view of reason. He is doubtful (as am I) about our chances of regaining the older form. This is a similar point as one made by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue. In his critique of the enlightenment project of grounding ethics he says it had to fail because all ethical views “reject[ed] any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end.” (54) MacIntyre traces this change to the Calvinistic doctrine of the fall of mankind as including the fall of his reason; Taylor traces this change to Descartes’ disengaged reason. Nevertheless, the important consideration is just that by making reason a tool for the gathering of knowledge–rather than the container of knowledge–either through disengagement (Descartes) or through distrust in reason’s ability to determine anything divinely given or essential in us (Calvin), the reasonable loses its force. In our flight from the coerciveness of substantive reason (a la Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas), we are left with no coerciveness ‘to hand’ except force. The is-ought question is a fiction, but a fiction completely in line with the empty (and therefore pure?) reason which was espoused in the name of freedom and science.

But why do I say freedom? Because disengaged reason, radical doubt, the continual attempt to re-ground belief from square one, was in effect a decentralization of authority from the group to the individual’s rational capability (democracy). Ethics (which must always appeal to a communal knowledge or capacity for knowledge) becomes incommensurate (and incommensurable) with a procedural or disengaged reason.

Can the current trend in hermeneutic epistemology return us to a substantive notion of reason and thus finally help us stumble over the is-ought question?5 I doubt it, but I think there is a beginning of a generalized, or vague, societal bias towards it. Heidegger may lead the way when he points out that being in the world is not just staring at something present at hand, but rather “Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned.” (H 88) Disengagement is a fiction of ‘classic’ (as opposed to ‘post-modern’) modernity (Lyotard, Rosen). However, this retreat from the ‘objectivist hope’ does not constitute a relativistic subjectivism: This rehabilitative exploration of subjectivism should show us that yes, epistemology is problematic, but we cannot deny that we do value, that we cannot not value. Dasein’s relationship to the there is a result or outflowing from a cognition of the world, but it is in the nature of Dasein’s involvement with the world that the relationship (the world-ness of the world) is equiprimordial with the thing-ness of the world. Being is always being there. Engagement always exists, and with that, perhaps we can slowly get beyond this superficially sterile ethical landscape.

I touched briefly on the problem of the will before. I would like to return to it here. Even with a substantive theory of reason, or even a Platonic realm of forms after which to order our lives, reason is unable to be a legislator. Reason can legitimate, can “demand” allegiance in the same way that science does today, but it can never enforce it. The Kantian project of making the unreasonable life un-livable just doesn’t work. There has to be, fundamentally, a will to morality. And this is why I mentioned Eros earlier. Whether that takes the form of loving the truth, or just plain obedience, ethics without will is insufficient. We have to choose at some point whether to remain disengaged, to continue our nihilisation and face a fundamental frameworkless-ness disguised as freedom, or we can re-engage and accept our moral limitations. It is a hard choice because it comes at the cost of our modern conception of freedom (Rosen), and at the cost of an easy “laissez-faire” harmony and tolerance between our conflicting world-views brought ever closer in an ever smaller world. This desire for tolerance is one of the main foci of strong evaluation in our age.

We may have this injunction then, to love, to value, to engage ourselves, but in which direction should this valuation, or engagement take place? As I asked above, can the necessity of valuation ground a specific vector of valuation?

I think here it is necessary to to flesh out what may be meant by the best account principle. A best account is one which makes “sense across the whole range of both explanatory and life uses.” (Taylor 58). Does this indicate that the best account is one which gives us an explanation of the greatest breadth of lived experience? Taylor fills us in on more details on page 72 where he says that “We show one of these comparative claims to be well founded when we can show that the move from A to B constitutes a gain epistemically.” What sort of epistemic gain? Probably a substantively epistemic gain, rather than just a procedural one, for he is not dealing merely with refining methodologies. But the word BEST is the problematic word here. Best in the sense that it leads to greatest flourishing? Best in that it leads to increased power?

By relegating the construction of our ethical frameworks to only that which works best, it seems to me that Taylor leaves the issue of legitimation wide open. Best account for whom or whose experience? What is then going to be called legitimate experience will have to be relegated to that which fits those equipped to set such a paradigm in place–those in political or educational or technological power. Taylor is leaving us morally where science leaves us epistemically–with a technology of truth.

And yet, the raising of the issue is itself a step from tyranny. The exploration of the issues is a liberation of sorts both from the terror of suppression, and the terror of moral lost-ness. The use of the best account principle gains us some ground for evaluation, and maybe more importantly, for re-evaluation, but it does not remove the possibility of abuse and hurt. This is not a surprising conclusion. Taylor himself argues that one of the main reasons why strong-evaluation has been a suspect notion is just the powerful force it can have, a powerfully destructive force at times. Yet, the tyranny of suppressed valuation may, in the long run, cost us more. Maybe the point of this whole discussion is this: That our best protection against tyranny is our almost instinctual need to explore and re-examine the potentialities and pitfalls of freedom in its most human sense. Maybe the continued project of knowing oneself and considering and reconsidering what the good life is, maybe the act of the debate itself, is our only salvation from the Scylla of tyranny and oppression and the Charybdis of dissolution. In that sense, the modern ethical project, far from being dead or irrelevant, is as important and life-saving as ever.

— Chicago, 1992, Kristofer Widholm
&copy 1991 Kristofer Widholm

Notes

  • 1. I have been lent assistance with the line of this argument from Dr.. Robert C. Roberts’ lecture notes from his class on the Nature of Persons (Wheaton College, 1991). (Return)
  • 2. A notion similar to and inspired by J.L. Austin’s theory. Certain statements (moves) in society (a game) legitimate themselves–further their own institution. Thus, for example, with science: Its authority is lent it by how well it continues to make itself needed and authoritative. (Return)
  • 3. Of course, if Rorty’s theory is true, then it’s false. (Return)
  • 4. The urge to emphasize the text here betrays an underlying frustration with text and argument. If I could only “push” the words, or the argument, hard enough, surely you’ll see my point. Have I made my point? (Return)
  • 5. The recognition of relationship and the confrontation with rather than exploration of the subject leads us a lot further along than simply viewing the mind as the sole operator–an unfortunate epistemological solipsism. (Return)

Explicit Bibliography

  • Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader (Rabinow, Paul ed.). New York: Pantheon books, 1984.
  • Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (Macguirre, Robinson trans.). New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
  • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
  • MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue (Second ed.). Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power (Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale trans.). New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
  • Rosen, Stanley. Hermeneutics as Politics. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 19??.
  • Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.