Book Review: Charles Taylor Sources of the Self Making the Modern Identity

Описание: Charles Taylor Sources of the Self Making the Modern Identity

Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self examines how the modern identity emerged through long-term transformations in Western moral, philosophical, and cultural frameworks. He argues that modern selfhood cannot be understood without uncovering the “moral sources” that guide our strongest evaluations—our qualitative distinctions about what is higher, more worthy, or more meaningful in human life.
Taylor begins by insisting that all persons operate within “inescapable frameworks,” backgrounds of value that structure our moral intuitions. Modernity has made these frameworks problematic: they are no longer taken for granted, and individuals must articulate or even seek them out. This search produces a specifically modern condition in which questions about the meaning of life become central.
The second part traces the rise of modern inwardness. Taylor highlights Augustine’s turn to interiority, Descartes’s separation of mind from world, and Locke’s focus on consciousness as the basis of personal identity. Together, these developments establish the modern sense of the self as an autonomous, self-interpreting agent with inner depths.
The third part studies the “affirmation of ordinary life,” a decisive shift beginning with the Reformation. The value of everyday activities—work, production, family, the alleviation of suffering—comes to occupy the moral centre. Enlightenment thinkers secularize this shift, linking dignity and respect to autonomy, equality, and universal rights. Modern moral and political culture, from liberalism to utilitarianism, is shaped by this elevation of ordinary life.
In the fourth part, Taylor examines the emergence of nature as a moral source. Especially through Rousseau and the Romantics, inner feeling, authenticity, and expressive self-realization become standards for judging life. Nature is no longer merely external order but becomes something within us, an inner voice revealing moral truth. This expressivist turn profoundly affects modern conceptions of creativity, identity, and moral worth.
The fifth part explores how modern literature and art develop “subtler languages” to articulate experiences of fragmentation, epiphany, and self-discovery. Romantic and modernist artists attempt to express dimensions of human life that escape earlier moral vocabularies. Their work demonstrates both the richness of modern moral sources and the difficulty of articulating them.
In conclusion, Taylor argues that modern identity is shaped by multiple, often conflicting moral sources—Christian, Enlightenment, Romantic, and naturalist. Modernity’s crisis arises when its richest sources are obscured by reductive philosophies that deny the depth of moral life. Recovering these sources is essential for understanding the tensions of the modern age: its commitment to freedom and dignity, its sensitivity to suffering, but also its tendency toward moral fragmentation and loss of meaning.