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.

If You Can Read This, You Are Already Presupposing Many Complex Conceptual Frameworks.

In the Prolegomena to Ethics T.H. Green, speaking to us from 1883, offers a different way of thinking about what a person is. What Green seems to salvage (and by ‘salvage’, I mean ‘preemptively prescribe’) is an account of the individual that is neither isolated from the exterior world, nor biologically determined to carry out their pre-set performances. For Green, a person is not an empty vessel, and knowledge is not a substance in which it might contain. We have rich and developed set of tools as soon on as we are conscious.

What follows in this paper is a closer examination of Green’s account of person, and how it differs greatly from what we think of in our contemporary sense. It will be interesting to consider the reasons why this notion has been largely left behind. Although I will not discuss this too much here in this paper, I might offer the consideration that it is the fault of the modern distaste in metaphysics, in favour of self-creation and self-truths.

However inadequate his metaphysical setup¹, what is important to take away from Green is the stark contrast to the liberal view of persons that we have today. According to Green, our focus ought to be on how we consider context, cause and intention in the process of developing our moral selves. With some development and buttressing, a proper criticism of those liberal “preferences” might be made. Green had these philosophical problems coming and attempted to show a framework for how this incoming view would ultimately be problematic.

Green holds that we rely heavily on our social institutions and structures for the very base of our understandings of the world. Through this framework we are then made aware of what the self is and how we are cognitive ‘users’ a complex conceptual framework.

The common objects of experience… the particular things we perceive, this flower, this apple, this dog – in the only sense in which they are objects to us or are perceived at all, have their being only for, and result from the action of, a self-distinguishing consciousness.

As perceived, they consist in certain groups of facts, which again consist in possibilities of sensation, known to be related in certain ways to eachother and to some given fact of sensation. (§63)

The fact that we even perceive these things as objects suggests that we have some kind of object-oriented calibration of how we navigate the world. Furthermore, the organization and assumption of further concepts is achieved by a kind of process of inference, using the existing information as arbitrary (in the objective sense) and filling the empty spots in.

Knowledge is a kind of constant regurgitation of our prior experiences. It is an internal knowing that, in the sense that our every day experiences are constantly adding and checking our system of belief. This is a process of compounding networks of concepts that create a framework of what the world is.

The most primitive germ from which knowledge can be developed is already a perception of fact, which implies the action upon successive sensations of a consciousness which holds them in relation, and which therefore cannot itself be before or after them, or exist as a succession at all. (§70)

We do knowledge, a person is a knowledge-er. All of these aspects are entirely context dependant, and are occurring all together, at all times. Everything together, all at once.

We begin to see how this might differ from our modern conception of self when applying this to how we go about living according to our moral standards. The process of our moral beliefs is typically seen as some combination of our desire interests in dialogue with our rational ones.

Sometimes desire and reason have been represented as inviting the man in different directions, while the will has been supposed to decide which of the two directions shall be followed. (§116)

This is the typical form of morality of which we are familiar. The idea that ones heart can be in the ‘right place’, or that our minds can ‘say’ things that are different than other parts of our anatomy.

Green makes a case that these distinctions of sensation, or feeling, and desire are not objects of our consciousness that differ in kind. Instead, these objects require a consciousness to process them as sensations, feeling or desire to begin with. We only make sense of these objects as they are conscious objects that relate to the self, just as we are only able to make sense of our world spatially if we are presupposing an object-oriented world.

There is a difference here between the occurring of an object of consciousness and the act of organizing and articulating those objects. The world only exists as we are acting upon it in this way.

The real agent called Desire is the man or self or subject as desiring; the real agent called intellect is the man as understanding, as perceiving and conceiving; and the man that desires is identical with the man that understands. (§129)

It is problematic to talk about the objects of consciousness as though they are responsible in the decision making process, when we must always consider the subject of which they are the object of. This is the subject that is already rich and complex in its development of a conceptual framework. To assume that an inner dialogue between one’s “quasi-personifications” (§116) is to entirely ignore the process in which how our decisions are made.

Given that objects of consciousness are functions of the same intellectual tools that we use to make our decisions, moral or otherwise,

It lies in the view that in all conduct to which moral predicates are applicable… whether virtuous or vicious, expresses a motive consisting in an idea of personal good.(§115)

We are interested here in how all of these objects of consciousness are functions of the same intellectual tools that we use to make decisions.

We always make decisions based on what we think is best.

A moral life, and the answering of moral consciousness is then something that is not able to achieve with the individual, given the social process that it is.

It is important to note the difference in treating causality as intentional rather than mere occurrence in Green. That our beliefs are come to for specific reasons

We are already working out moral questions, as one reads this, and before, and after, these are always in the process of being checked and re-checked.