This essay is the first in a series exploring Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self. All quotes are from his paper, ‘The Concept of a Person.’
We are entering a period not unlike previous eras in Western history. I don't mean merely the parallels with our predicament a century ago, with its crumbling institutions, rising fascism, and proliferation of violence—although these are clearly pressing. I mean the rise of a rational, scientific worldview that seeks to instrumentalize and optimize our experiences, our society, and ourselves. I believe the rise of science in the seventeenth century, and the romantic movement that arose in backlash to it, can serve as a useful lesson for those of us hoping to navigate the upheavals and transformations of our time, but to come to grips with this requires rediscovering and recovering the tensions and debates that raged in those centuries.
What I’m pointing toward might be described as a historical understanding of our current predicament, an exploration and analysis of how we got to this place we call modernity. This is what Charles Taylor attempts to do, among other things, in his book Sources of the Self. He does this through an exploration of modern identity, and I can think of no better place to start.
Of course, a book like Sources assumes much. Taylor assumes you know quite a bit of philosophy’s jargon, and his writing can be dense and abstract. Nonetheless I find his work invaluable, and I want to share it with you because we’re navigating together, not as individuals but as a society. I will go chapter-by-chapter or section-by-section, whichever is more appropriate, to unearth his insights. Along the way, I will put his ideas to use in analyzing contemporary phenomena. The end point of this exploration and exposition will not dismiss rationality and science, but place them in their proper relation to other human goods just as worthy of pursuit.
So, I invite you on a journey with me through Charles Taylor’s thought so that we may begin to have a clearer idea of what’s happening around, and to us. Before we begin, however, it might be useful to fill out this picture of a rational, scientific worldview, and to do this, we need to examine two fundamentally different ways of understanding what it means to be human.
The most immediate way of contrasting these differences is to ask, What is it that distinguishes humans from other animals?
Many of us would reply, “Our rationality and intelligence, of course.” What makes us human is our ability to plan, rationalize, strategize, and achieve our goals with maximum efficiency. Fundamental to our humanity is calculation, to see the paths ahead, predict their consequences, and act. What is crucial here is the power to see things clearly—to establish truth from fiction, the reasonable from the unreasonable, the probable from the improbable.
According to this view, what makes a person fully, ideally, human is the power to plan and achieve our ends, and clarity and complexity of calculation are indispensable to our evaluating and executing.
This is a performance criterion, one that could be matched on a machine. A sufficiently intelligent machine could be human, or at least humanlike, if it can envision long enough timelines and execute an optimal strategy to achieve some arbitrary goal. This view tends to see consciousness as the distinguishing mark between man and machine, and if we must be conscious to achieve all these intelligent feats, then perhaps machines are too? Or will be one day? This view of what it is to be human underlies much of the confused talk we hear today about AI consciousness, and leads to very confused conceptions of our humanity that try to assimilate human thinking to machine thinking. Clearly, the rise of talking machines puts the question of what it means to be human squarely on our agenda.
If rationality and intelligence are not the defining features of a human being, then what makes us unique among Earth's animals?
Another view focuses on the nature of agency. What is crucial to all agents, animals included, is that things matter to them, “that we can attribute purposes, desires, aversions to them in a strong, original sense.” We and animals alike possess original, non-derivative purposes, while machines are designed to achieve a task or set of tasks—they have derivative purposes. Humans and animals act because things matter; things in our lives carry significance, and we act out of our original sense of things.
When a cat hunts, its purpose springs from its own being; the hunger, the need, the drive to catch prey emerges from what it is to be a cat. No one assigned this purpose to the cat, no one programmed it in; it's original to the cat's nature; its purpose is non-derivative.
Contrast this with a chess-playing computer, which pursues victory by calculating millions of moves, but this goal of winning isn't its own—we gave it that purpose, wrote it into the code. The computer's purposes are derivative. It optimizes for objectives we've selected, solves problems we've defined. The difference is in the source of purpose: for humans and animals, purposes arise from within, from our own nature as beings for whom things matter.
But if animals have original purposes too, then what distinguishes us is our ability to achieve our ends better than other animals, and as long as we think in terms of strategic action, this seems undeniable. If we adopt this second view, however, we come to see that there are peculiarly human concerns. It’s not just intelligence, but the ends to which that intelligence gets used—the ends that make up human life are sui generis, unique; a performance criterion no longer suffices.
“The ends of survival and reproduction begin to appear in a new light. What it is to maintain and hand on a human form of life, that is, a given culture, is also a peculiarly human affair…the essence of evaluation no longer consists in assessment in the light of fixed goals, but also and even more in the sensitivity to certain standards, those involved in peculiarly human goals.”
Rationality and science are constituted by such standards. Science and rationality require that I stand back from my predicament, that I see things how they objectively are, that I disengage from my feelings about it, and dismiss my foolish beliefs until they can be verified by the instruments of science, and without these standards—these ways of going about my life rationally and objectively—I could not be a fully rational, autonomous creature capable of efficiently conquering my goals.
Any mode of life requires sensitivity to the standards of that life. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that a mode of life can only be lived through standards, that without these standards, I couldn’t call it a human mode of life at all—I would be just another animal. To be human is to live by certain recognized standards; this is one of Taylor’s theses in Sources. I am sensitive to these standards because they carry a certain significance. I live my life in this manner because being rational matters to me; it’s how I express myself to the world; it’s part of my identity.
But much of this can be unarticulated. It’s not that I identify these standards and then live them out—although that can certainly be true, and coming into explicit contact with them can help us more fully realize them—but often these standards are the assumed background, the inarticulate horizon out of which I act and carry myself. Part of what Taylor attempts to recover in Sources is exactly these background assumptions and what empowers them.
To understand how this scientific view gained such power, we must look back to a crucial distinction made in the seventeenth century—that between primary and secondary properties.
Secondary properties, like taste, smell, and felt heat, are anthropomorphic; they only exist because we experience them; they are subjective. True knowledge, then, requires that I look beyond these to what’s really, objectively there. To know something is to describe it in terms of primary properties, mass, volume, quantity, etc. Properties that would exist without human experiences of them.
“The eschewal of anthropomorphic properties was undoubtedly one of the bases of the spectacular progress of natural science in the last three centuries. And ever since, therefore, the idea has seemed attractive of somehow adapting this move to [understanding] man.” In other words, we may come to understand humanity by laying aside our experiences, by treating ourselves as objects among objects to be completely described and understood through primary properties and mechanistic forces.
And so we get reductive explanations of human behavior in terms of evolution, or neurochemistry, or cognitive computation, and the like. These accounts attempt to explain and make sense of ourselves and our behavior by sidestepping the significance things have for us, to come to an objective truth about how things really are, that is, without reference to anthropomorphic properties and subjective experience.
But this cannot be carried through, and we can come to see this by looking at some of our emotions like pride, shame, guilt, love, and our sense of worth. “When we try to state what is particular to each one of these feelings, we find we can only do so if we describe the situation in which we feel them, and what we are inclined to do in it. Shame is what we feel in a situation of humiliating exposure, and we want to hide ourselves from this; fear what we feel in a situation of danger, and we want to escape it; guilt when we are aware of transgression.” To feel an emotion is to judge a particular situation a certain way.
But we can also have irrational emotions, whereby I can see that the situation isn’t really shameful, but I can’t help but go on feeling that way. Or I can feel dispassionately, where I see that the judgment holds, but am not moved by it. “Feeling the emotion in question just is being struck, or moved by, the state of affairs the judgment describes.” I can often only describe an emotion by describing the situation in which it arises, and this I can only do by describing the significance things have for me. Let’s examine this by way of example.
The shame I feel when I stumble over my words during an important presentation cannot be adequately described simply as a neurochemical response or an evolutionary holdover from our need to maintain social standing within the group. To understand what shame is in this moment, I must describe how I interpret the situation: I see myself as exposed before others as incompetent, as failing to meet the standards I and they expect of me. The presentation matters to me—it represents my professional competence, my preparation, my respect for those listening. When I stumble, I experience the situation as one where my inadequacy is laid bare, where I have fallen short of what the moment demanded.
My shame involves being struck by this significance—by the gap between who I wanted to appear as and who I fear I have revealed myself to be. I want to disappear, to undo the exposure, to somehow restore the professional image that feels damaged. This wanting to hide isn't separate from the shame; it's part of what the shame is. The emotion cannot be separated from how the situation matters to me, from the meanings and values at stake: my sense of professional identity, my concern for others' respect, my standards for myself.
No reductive account that sidesteps these meanings, that tries to explain shame purely in terms of brain chemistry or social conditioning, can capture what makes this particular emotion—and the resulting behavior—the specific human experience it is. The shame is inseparable from the world of significance in which I live and move. It seems clear that our behavior, especially our most complex behaviors, the kinds that weigh on us most heavily, cannot be adequately interpreted without incorporating the way things matter to us.
And so these two views differ on how to explain human behavior—one reaching for reductive explanations, the other for the significance in our lives—but they also differ in how we should go about understanding our situation and what we should do in it.
“The subject according to the significance perspective is in a world of meanings that he imperfectly understands. His task is to interpret it better, in order to know who he is and what he ought to seek.” But a man according to the reductive view already understands his ends, and “His world is one of potential means, which he understands with a view to control. He is in a crucial sense disengaged.”
And to truly know something is to know it from the outside, as it were, without the significance it carries. “To be able to look on everything, world and society, in this perspective, would be to neutralize its significance, and this would be a kind of freedom—the freedom of the self-defining subject, who determines his own purposes, or finds them in his own natural desires.”
Control and the freedom it offers partially empower this view. To be rational and objective is to be in control, and to be in control is to be free. I can define and determine my life because I can see things clearly and control them. My ends are given by nature and discoverable by objective scrutiny, and so what matters is how to achieve them, “reason is and ought to be instrumental.”
Typical questions when trying to grasp a situation and the kinds of actions appropriate to it include: What is the most efficient way to achieve my goals? What resources do I need, and how can I acquire them? What are the causal relationships at work here? What are the probabilities of all possible outcomes? What biological or evolutionary factors shape my behavior? What biases and emotions are getting in my way? What are the laws that govern this phenomenon? How can I model this system mathematically?
“Utilitarianism is a product of this modern conception, with its stress on instrumental reasoning, on calculation, and on a naturalistically identified end, happiness (or on a neutral, interpretation-free account of human choice, in terms of preferences). The stress on freedom emerges in its rejection of paternalism. And in rationality it has a stern and austere ideal of disengaged disciplined choice.”
Beyond freedom and control, there’s another source for this worldview’s power, and it can be found in Western religious traditions. We see a similar aspiration in the religious impulse to rise above the merely human, to step outside the prison of typical human concerns, to be free from the demands they place on us, and to turn to what truly matters: the holy and sacred. This is another thesis in Sources, that we can locate what spiritually empowers this flattened view of the human in the very aspiration of our religious forefathers. The irony, of course, is the denial of the spiritual by those so deeply imbued by it, but a fuller explanation will have to be put off for now.
The significance view takes a different route. What is paramount is self-exploration and -expression, and by listening to our emotions we may come to find what really matters to us. We might ask ourselves: What is properly shameful? What should we feel guilty about? In what does dignity consist? What does the natural world demand of me or call forth from me? What do our emotions reveal about what truly matters to us? How do my feelings of pride, love, or admiration point to values I hold dear? What constitutes my authentic self versus mere surface preferences?
These questions do not always have clear, definitive answers; they are often exploratory and tentative, but that makes the process of expression crucial. For self-definition comes about by exploring and articulating the significance things have for us, by making clear what exactly matters. Those who hunger for certainty and clairvoyance will not find it here.
These competing models of our humanity are everywhere today; they are the water we swim in, but most people operate with some (inconsistent) combination of the two. We often feel the pull of one, then the other; perhaps one in our social sphere and the other in the economic realm. We feel the need to express ourselves, and we are often compelled toward instrumental rationality, the need to optimize our lives and order them by the dictates of efficiency.
The tragedy of our time is that we've forgotten these are both human achievements, both necessary, both partial. When tech evangelists promise to optimize human experience through algorithms and machine learning, they're channeling one side of our inheritance. When wellness influencers urge us to "follow our truth" and "honor our feelings," they're channeling the other. Neither side seems to remember its origin story, which is why their solutions feel so thin.
And why I’ve neglected religious views entirely, for both the reductive and significance views ultimately find their roots in religious traditions.
Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self is worth our time and energy, because he offers a genealogy of these views, their shared origins and intertwined histories, each feeding off the other and developing together. This is the historical understanding that we must recover and put to work if we’re to navigate the transformations of our time.