Abstract

In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor proposes that modernity is much richer in moral resources than what its critics allow, though "this richness is rendered invisible by the impoverished philosophical language of its most zealous defenders." Modernity, he insists, must be regarded as an "epistemic gain," even if it is true that its philosophy has proved to be persistently inarticulate, wrongheaded, and, on the whole, has betrayed the distinctive contributions of modernity. His stringent criticism of what he variously calls the "disengaged," "procedural," and "punctual" self of classical modern theorists is not altogether different from the analyses familiar to readers of communitarians like Michael Sandel. Sources of the Self is a revisionist history that refits the career of the modern "self" to the problems favored by communitarians: the failure of all efforts to subordinate the good to the right; the shallowness of procedural rather than substantive accounts of the self; the need for what Clifford Geertz has called "thick descriptions" of agency; the need to attend to the narratival and socially contextual features of action rather than to quasi-scientific accounts; and finally what has become a recurrent theme among nearly all the critics of Enlightenment moral philosophy: that the agent's vision and allegiance to the good holds a higher place in morality than do action-guiding prescriptions about conduct.