Charles Taylor, On The Self Or The Modern Identity

This thesis is mainly to introduce famous cotemporary philosopher Charles Taylor's notion about self and modern identity.The ploblem about self and identity is always a focus in Taylor's thoughts and impenetrates all the domains he regards.His main point is that self cannot be defined without any understanding of "Background",say, a series of inarticulated ontological presuppositions,including Qualitative Distinction, Strong Evaluation,Framework and so forth.The ontological backgrounds are indispensable for forming and sustaining the self and identity.To abandon them altogether is impossible in Taylor's opinion,becouse it will transgress all the limits of a functioning self and thus lead to identity crisis.In addition,Taylor also emphasizes the constitutive effort of language and narrative on identity.This refers to the understanding of the language community and the unity of life.These two aspects together with the ontological "background" constitute the three transcendental conditions of identity.These arguments are dead agaist the naturalism in contemporary philosophy,which regards human as part of the objective nature.Naturalists morally incline to behaviorism and narrow morality to behavior principles and duties.Taylor argues that the study on human cannot but regard meanings of life and the significance things to us,so they cannot be "objective" and there cannot be any standards independent of us. Practical reason could only be a kind of provisional "Best Account" in an error-reducing process.Taylor points out that naturalists' repressing and rejecting framework and their moral source altogether makes their theories lack of power.The right understanding and fusion of different views and cultures,and the reconciliation between nature and morality in self cound only attain by articulating the moral sources.As a historian Taylor endeavors to articulate moral sources in history,as he believes we cound only understand a phenomena,notion and theory deeply,and eventually lead to the Best Account mentioned above by some kind of understanding about its genesis.Thus he traces nearly the whole western conceptional history from Plato to the post-modernism and reveals three essential features of modern identity:the concept of inner self,the affermation of the ordinary life and the conception of expressive nature.In this history we can see how moral source was internalized step by step and how our notion of self today came into being.Taylor does not end up with a certain conclusion in this process,in accordance with his methodology and notion of truth,but what could be certain is the richer and fuller understanding about human and human life cannot be attained in a naturalistic way.Taylor suggests that this understanding could be found in the Christian recources.