Sources of the Self

A long history of the modern Western sense of self, subtitled The Making of the Modern Identity. Part I argues that selfhood and morality are inseparable: to know who you are is to know where you stand on questions of the good. We make "strong evaluations", judging some desires higher than others, within frameworks that we cannot do without, and some goods act as "hypergoods" ranking the rest. Taylor then traces three strands of modern identity. The first is inwardness, running from Plato's self-mastery through Augustine's turn inward to Descartes's disengaged reason and Locke's "punctual" self. The second is the affirmation of ordinary life, the new dignity given to work and family from the Reformation onwards. The third is the voice of nature, the Romantic idea that each person has an inner depth to express. A final part follows these sources into modernist art and asks whether modern people can still articulate the goods they live by.

It explains where modern ideas of individuality, authenticity and inner depth came from, and argues that we live by moral sources we often can no longer name.