Our Ontological Baggage: Charles Taylor’s Account for Modernity’s False Conception of Self
The character of modernity has led us to have freedom from a set of moral restrictions. Our ’self’ is no longer suppressed and labelled as any one particular thing. I’m not just an insurance salesman, man, I’m also interested in social and political philosophy. There is a considerable amount that we have lost with the shedding of these supposedly oppressive labels, and more distressing is what have we have ‘gained’.
Instead of having the social aspects of ‘insurance salesman’ define us, our convictions lay in an over-arching view of cost-benefit analysis. We are instead led to maximize our ‘label-less’ personhood in ways that fall outside of what our social practices are. Other social ‘objects’, be them persons, places or things are merely instruments and resources in our exploits.
It is difficult to be encouraged to produce a criticism of modernity when it allows us to live in a society in which we are mildly happy, extremely entertained and very well fed. How can our distate of this modern character promote an ideological coup if we are so “well kept”?
The solution begins with Charles Taylor’s attempt to move away from the conception of the universe as a mechanism, and toward a world-view that is based on Ideas. Taylor charges that the modern conception of the self is misguided and it does not capture how persons operate in a social system.
A person, Taylor defines in Human Agency and Language, (p.3) is one who “…not only has some understanding of himself, but is partly constituted by [that] understanding” and who “exist[s] in a space defined by distinctions of worth”. There is no separation between who we are and what we do. Our social interactions and practices, wherever they are performed, are reflections of our moral character. They are always aimed, then, at what we think of as ‘good’.
This conception of a ‘good-centered-self’ is much different than that of the modern-self outlined above. Instead of a freedom from our ‘insurance salesman’-ness, we have a range of distinctive possibilities to act given what ‘insurance’ is, and what ’selling’ means. The individual is so rooted in a community with a specific ‘horizon’ of meaning, our world is constituted by these and other practices. With this notion of the self, Taylor seeks to find solution to the problem of our liberal lethargy.
Among many anticipated contentions of Taylor, I will pursue criticisms that question the neutrality of the good. How can we as ‘good-centered-selves’ account for the ultimate truth of falsity of our goodness? How are we to say that any one social framework is better than the other? If “good” is to be neutral, how do we reconcile other persons with backgrounds that differ with our own, whose intent is to (for example) oppress and/or destroy us?
Another argument of Taylor I intend on exploring is the notion of the ‘good’-centered-ness. Is it the case that we cannot help but be good? Are all actions, however grandiose or minuscule ‘good’ actions? My coin-toss, my nose-wiping, my vote, my Nazi-ism? Furthermore, what does it mean to be moral, and therefore accountable at all times? What does this say about rehabilitation, forgiveness and what it means to “save face”?
As stated, my main concern is to unpack Taylor’s claim that modernity has assumed a false conception of self. Lastly, after exploring Taylor’s notion of the self at length I will take a look at how a ‘Taylorian’ account of personhood would apply to social institutions. What kind of damage has this ‘false conception’ done?
Furthermore, in applying the notion of the ‘good-centered-self’ to these institutions, how might it suggest corrections to their modern disenfranchisement and relieve us of our ontological baggage. My intuition is that there are solutions to these issues and much can be said about a social and political view that is consistent with a correction of the most basic ontological structures that we employ.
comments…
RSS