Sources of the Self : The Making of the Modern Identity

“Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live…and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader.” -Martha Nussbaum, New RepublicIn this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are.The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led-it seems to many-to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst.Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good.Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality. The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and pol