Wanderings

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.You can read the entire paper here: http://brokenhill.net/wanderings/value.html.