With Derek Parfit’s recent passing, Taylor might well be considered today’s greatest living philosopher. In his most famous book, Taylor traces how the changing conceptions of the Self have shaped modern notions of morality. In modernity, human welfare (and the conception of the “good life”) has come to be concerned not with the extraordinary, but with the ordinary life. “This sense of the importance of the everyday in human life, along with its corollary about the importance of suffering, colours our whole understanding of what it is truly to respect human life and integrity. Along with the central place given to autonomy, it defines a version of this demand which is peculiar to our civilization, the modern West…. There is a peculiarly modern sense of what respect involves, which gives a salient place to freedom and self-control, places a high priority on avoiding suffering, and sees productive activity and family life as central to our well-being.” For Taylor, as opposed to consequentialists like the utilitarians, life must be qualitatively, not just quantitatively, measured and judged. “I have been arguing that in order to make minimal sense in our lives, in order to have an identity, we need an orientation to the good, which means some sense of qualitative discrimination, of the incomparably higher. Now we see that this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as an unfolding story. But this is to state another basic condition of making sense of ourselves, that we grasp our lives in a narrative…. In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going.” Taylor makes the argument that some goods are not rank-able, they are qualitatively incomparable. “The modern naturalist-utilitarian hostility to ‘higher’ goods and defence of ordinary, sensuous happiness emerge from what I have been calling the affirmation of ordinary life, which in early modern times brought about a similar repudiation of supposedly ‘higher’ modes of activity in favour of the everyday existence of marriage and the calling. The original form of this affirmation was theological, and it involved a positive vision of ordinary life as hallowed by God.”
Modern man changed the conception of the Self and its relation to the world it inhabits. “Our visions of the good are tied up with our understandings of the self…. We have a sense of who we are through our sense of where we stand to the good…. Being a self is inseparable from existing in a space of moral issues, to do with identity and how one ought to be. It is being able to find one’s standpoint in this space, being able to occupy, to be a perspective in it.” With modernity grew the idea that each Self was actually in control of their own individual life. “If we follow the theme of self-control through the vicissitudes of our Western tradition, we find a very profound transmutation, all the way from the hegemony of reason as vision of cosmic order to the notion of a punctual disengaged subject exercising instrumental control. And this, I would argue, helps to explain why we think of ourselves as ‘selves’ today…. The modern ideal of disengagement requires a reflexive stance. We have to turn inward and become aware of our own activity and of the processes which form us. We have to take charge of constructing our own representation of the world…. Disengagement demands that we stop simply living in the body or within our traditions or habits and, by making them objects for us, subject them to radical scrutiny and remaking. Of course the great classical moralists also call on us to stop living in unreflecting habit and usage. But their reflection turns us towards an objective order. Modern disengagement by contrast calls us to a separation from ourselves through self-objectification. This is an operation which can only be carried out in the first-person perspective.”
The modern conception of the Self began with the Enlightenment thinkers. “Enlightenment naturalism didn’t only have an effect on our conceptions of cosmic time; it also generated its own forms of personal and historical narration…. These notions of reason and nature define a certain perfection for human beings, where the full exercise of self-responsible reason yields the fullest clarity about their own nature and its significance.” Kant’s morality gave primacy to a Self governed only by reason and focused on humanism. “This is a more radical definition of freedom, which rebels against nature as what is merely given, and demands that we find freedom in a life whose normative shape is somehow generated by rational activity…. Kant explicitly insists that morality can’t be founded in nature or in anything outside the human rational will…. And, like Descartes, at the centre of his moral view is a conception of human dignity. Rational beings have a unique dignity. They stand out against the background of nature…. Everything else in nature, in other words, conforms to laws blindly. Only rational creatures conform to laws that they themselves formulate. This is something incomparably higher…. The moral person may lead the same external life as the non-moral one, but it is inwardly transformed by a different spirit.” Reason rules.
Taylor nexts deals with one facet of the counter-Enlightenment, Romanticism. “If our access to nature is through an inner voice or impulse, then we can only fully know this nature through articulating what we find within us. This connects to another crucial feature of this new philosophy of nature, the idea that its realization in each of us is also a form of expression…. Leibniz was an important source of expressivism. His notion of a monad already effected the connection between the Aristotelian idea of nature and a subject-like particular. The monad was a proto-self. Expressivism was the basis for a new and fuller individuation…. Just the notion of individual difference is, of course, not new. Nothing is more evident or more banal. What is new is the idea that this really makes a difference to how we’re called on to live.” A major critique of Enlightenment utilitarianism was its unapologetic instrumentalism, in which competing moral claims might be impossible to reconcile. “One of the great objections against Enlightenment disengagement was that it created barriers and divisions: between humans and nature; and perhaps grievously, within humans themselves; and then also, as a further consequence, between human and human. This last seems to follow both because of the atomist affinities of naturalism and because the purely instrumental stance to things allows for no deeper unity in society than that of sharing common instruments.” For the Romantics, nature wasn’t something to be conquered; nature was all-consuming life itself. “The Romantics developed an expressive view of nature, sometimes seen as a great current of life running through everything, and emerging also in the impulses we feel within.”
Modern man has had to reconcile the competing notions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. “The result for us has been a split-screen vision of nature. On one side is the vast universe which scientific discovery continually reveals, huge and in some ways baffling, stretching far beyond our imaginative powers in both the gigantic and the minuscule; indifferent to us and strangely other, though full of unexpected beauty and inspiring awe. On the other side is the nature whose impulse we feel within, with which we can feel ourselves out of alignment and with which we can aspire to be in attunement.” However, with regards to notions of the Self, these two dispositions share much in common too. “The ideals of disengaged reason and of Romantic fulfillment both rely in different ways on a notion of the unitary self. The first requires a tight centre of control which dominates experience and is capable of constructing the orders of reason by which we can direct thought and life. The second sees the originally divided self come to unity in the alignment of sensibility and reason. Now to the extent that both of these come to be seen as facets of a world and an outlook whose claims to embrace everything we want to escape, to the degree we adopt a post-Schopenhauerian vision of inner nature, the liberation of experience can seem to require that we step outside the circle of the single, unitary identity, and that we open ourselves to the flux which moves beyond the scope of control or integration.”
Modernity has become attached to the Whig theory of history, where morality is progressing ever-forward towards a better (and more rational) future. There is a certain inevitability to it all. “The very picture of history as moral progress, as a ‘going beyond’ our forebears, which underlies our own sense of superiority, is very much a Victorian idea…. Our history since 1800 has been the slow spreading outward and downward of the new modes of thought and sensibility to new nations and classes, with the transfer in each case involving some kind of adapting transformation of the ideas themselves…. The Enlightenment has bequeathed to us… a moral imperative to reduce suffering… the significance of ordinary life and the ideal of universal benevolence…. What is universal in the modern world is the centrality of freedom as a good…. These ideas of freedom and dignity, in association with the promotion of ordinary life, have steadily eroded hierarchy and promoted equality.”
Taylor concludes by reminding us of his division of the “moral sources into three large domains: the original theistic grounding for these standards; a second one that centres on a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms; and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism or in one of the modernist successor visions.” Prevailing morals are inescapably linked to current notions of Selfhood. “What I hope emerges from this lengthy account of the growth of the modern identity is how all-pervasive it is, how much it envelops us, and how deeply we are implicated in it: in a sense of self defined by the powers of disengaged reason as well as of the creative imagination, in the characteristically modern understandings of freedom and dignity and rights, in the ideals of self-fulfillment and expression, and in the demands of universal benevolence and justice.” Taylor’s own normative idea of morality is one that engenders the ‘best life’ based on higher ideals. Morality is not transactional, subjective, or concerned only with negative rights. “Prudence constantly advises us to scale down our hopes and circumscribe our vision. But we deceive ourselves if we pretend that nothing is denied thereby of our humanity.”
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