Sources of the Self

Introduction

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, published by Harvard University Press in 1989, is a history of ideas of some 600 pages. Its first part argues that selfhood and the good are intertwined: we orient ourselves through “strong evaluations” and “frameworks” of what is higher and lower. The historical parts trace three sources of the modern self – inwardness, from Augustine to Descartes and Locke; the “affirmation of ordinary life”, of work and family, since the Reformation; and the Romantic idea of nature as an inner voice. Taylor argues that modern people live off moral sources they often no longer articulate, and that naturalistic philosophy cannot account for them.

Connections

Builds on

• Confessionsc. 400 · Augustine
• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes

Criticizes

• An Essay Concerning Human Understanding1689 · John Locke

Taken up in

• A Secular Age2007 · Charles Taylor

More works by Charles Taylor

• 1992Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition
• 2007A Secular Age