テイラー Sources of the Self （1989） 序文

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

I've had a difficult time writing this book. It's taken too many years, and I've changed my mind a few times about what should go into it. In part, this was for the familiar reason that for a long time I wasn't sure what I wanted to say. In part, it was because of the very ambitious nature of enterprise, which is an attempt to articulate and write a history of the modern identity. With this term, I want to designate the ensemble of (largely unarticulated) understandings of what it is to be a human agent: the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality, and being embedded in nature which are at home in the modern West.

　　But I also wanted to show how the ideals and interdicts of this identity―what it casts in relief and what it casts in shadow―shape our philosophical thought, our epistemology and our philosophy of language, largely without awareness. Doctrines which are supposedly derived from the sober examination of some domain into which the self doesn't and shouldn't obtrude actually reflect much more than we realize the ideals that have helped constitute this identity of ours. This is eminently true, I believe, of the representational epistemology from Descartes to Quine.

　　In addition, this portrait of our identity is meant to serve as the starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. This issue, that is, coming to comprehend the momentous transformations of our culture and society over the last three or four centuries and getting these somehow in focus, continues to preoccupy us. The works of major contemporary thinkers such as Foucault, Habermas, and MacIntyre focus on it. Others, while not dealing with it expressly, suppose some picture of what has come about in the stance they take, even if it is one of dismissal, towards past thought and culture. This is no gratuitous obsession. We cannot understand ourselves without coming to grips with this history.

　　But I find myself dissatisfied with the views on this subject which are now current. Some are upbeat, and see us as having climbed to a higher plateau; others show a picture of decline, of loss, of forgetfulness. Neither sort seems to me right; both ignore massively important features of our situation. We have yet to capture, I think, the unique combination of greatness and danger, of grandeur et misère, which characterizes the modern age. To see the full complexity and richness of the modern identity is to see, first, how much we are all caught up in it, for all our attempts to repudiate it; and second, how shallow and partial are the one-sided judgements we bandy around about it.

　　But I don't think we can grasp this richness and complexity unless we see how the modern understanding of the self developed out of earlier pictures of human identity. This book attempts to define the modern identity in describing its genesis.

　　I focus on three major facets of this identity: first, modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, and the connected notion that we are ‘selves’; second, the affirmation of ordinary life which develops from the early modern period; third, the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source. The first I try to trace through Augustine to Descartes and Montaigne, and on to our own day; the second I take from the Reformation through the Enlightenment to its contemporary forms; and the third I describe from its origin in the late eighteenth century through the transformations of the nineteenth century, and on to its manifestations in twentieth-century literature.

　　The main body of the book, PartsⅡ−Ⅴ, is taken up with this picture of the developing modern identity. The treatment is a combination of the analytical and the chronological. But because my entire way of proceeding involves mapping connections between senses of the self and moral visions, between identity and the good, I didn't feel I could launch into this study without some preliminary discussion of these links. This seemed all the more necessary in that the moral philosophies have most trouble admitting. The book therefore begins with a section which tries to make the case very briefly for a picture of the relation between self and morals, which I then draw on in the rest of the work. Those who are utterly bored by modern philosophy might want to skip PartⅠ. Those who are bored by history, if by some mistake they find this work in their hands, should read nothing else.

　　The whole study is, as I indicated, a prelude to our being able to come to grips with the phenomena of modernity in a more fruitful and less one-sided way than is usual. I didn't have space in this already too big book to paint a full-scale alternative picture of these phenomena. I will have to leave this, as well as the analysis linking the modern identity to our epistemology and philosophy of language, to later works. But I try to set out in the concluding chapter what flows from this story of the emerging modern identity. Briefly, it is that this identity is much richer in moral sources than its condemners allow, but that this richness is rendered invisible by the impoverished philosophical language of its most zealous defenders. Modernity urgently need to be saved from its most unconditional supporters―a predicament perhaps not without precedent in the history of culture. Understanding modernity aright is an exercise in retrieval. I try to explain in my conclusion why I think this exercise is important, even pressing.

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Jonathan Glover の書評
God loveth adverbs
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v12/n22/jonathan-glover/god-loveth-adverbs