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Can We Avoid a Cultural Moral Lobotomy?

Charles Taylor wraps up his massive 1989 tome Sources of the Self with a provocative retrospective reflection on his work of recovering moral sources in Western culture. This reflection aids us in a critical understanding of Foucault and his followers. Taylor (1989, 520) writes concerning the horns of a contemporary dilemma, “Do we have to choose between various kinds of spiritual lobotomy and self-inflicted wounds?” Furthermore, he asks whether one has to choose between a form of soul-destruction or self-condemnation, the disavowal of moral goods or world-hatred? “Does one have to either judge oneself negatively, or mutilate oneself spiritually?” he asks wisely and profoundly (C. Taylor, 1989, 520). The crux of the dilemma is whether one can affirm the world and self, and at the same time affirm high moral standards/ideals and appeal to high moral sources. This is an existential concern.

Many thinkers today feel that this is impossible. At the centre of the dilemma is the human desire for affirmation—of self and the world—going back to Nietzsche. Taylor notes that often the more morally sensitive we are, the more likely that we are to reject the world. So many things about the world just seem wrong: suffering, injustice, unfair advantages of the elites. Indeed, Michel Foucault in his third oeuvre (Care of Self) felt that a person had to deny or deconstruct high moral standards, including the Christian quest for purity or holiness, in order to affirm self and shape the beautiful life. In essence, he believed that beauty can save us. This comes out in the way that Foucault reports on Christian technologies of self (spiritual exercises of the monastics). The logic of the dilemma for Foucault is as follows: One must overcome a traditional moral consciousness of normativity, a conscience which results in self-negation, a negation of the essential will to power that is the ground of my being, and thus how do I overcome guilt and self-loathing. He was in denial of the importance of repentance and forgiveness as a way to reckon with one’s inner self/soul.

But Taylor contends that this approach to the dilemma involves committing moral surgery (mutilation) to some of our most precious and powerful human spiritual aspirations such as benevolence (C. Taylor, 1989, 520). This seems like a heavy price to pay for this so-called liberation. Starkly put, one has to hate morality and the divine, and remove its influence over oneself (silence its voice) if one is to affirm oneself (maintain a positive self-worth) and affirm the world. Alternately, one has to hate self and the world if one is to love morality and live by the good and the summum bonum. Foucault and his ethics as aesthetics (which is rooted in Nietzsche) are bound by this dilemma, and he has chosen the first alternative in his technology of self-making—both the self-overcoming and the self-invention dimensions. He believes that one has to invent and reinvent oneself continuously as an act of defiance to moral law/the good. This is completely relevant to Millennials and Gen Z. The are caught on the horns of this dilemma and it is torture, multiplying their levels of anxiety.

Taylor understands the weightiness of this dilemma in late modernity, but he does not buy into the view that it is our tragic fate. He (C. Taylor, 1989, 520) articulates in clear terms the consequences of Foucault’s (late modernity’s) choice of gender, etcetera: “We have read so many goods out of our official story, we have buried their power so deep beneath layers of philosophical rationale, that they are in danger of stifling.” We’ve lost our positive cultural heritage of the good. We are caught in an intellectual fog. He feels that such moral lobotomy is dangerous, harmful, and unnecessary in the final analysis. Instead, his whole project attempts to uncover/revive these buried goods, that once were our champions, through their rearticulation, and thereby to make them sources that empower people once again (set them free on higher moral ground), to recover their true and vital spirit and value. This is the vision of his whole lengthy discourse in Sources of the Self (C. Taylor, 1989). By reconnecting the self to pre-modern (prior to the 18th century) spiritual sources of the good, he envisions a new fruitfulness in moral discourse, behaviour, and the qualities of human freedom of the will. A renewed or thick culture is definitely possible. This is surely the case with transcendent Christian agape, which he believes is a creative way to be released from the horns of our dilemma and to renegotiate relationships and the meaning of our role in the cosmos.

Taylor indeed owns the modern conundrum, and yet holds out hope for a constructive resolution, even a kind of miracle. He questions the cogency of Foucault’s radical/surgical analysis. It is too ephemeral and gives up too much that makes us human and helps us flourish as communal beings with giftedness and grace. On this point, he writes:

The dilemma of mutilation is … our greatest spiritual challenge, not our iron fate…. There is a large element of hope. It is a hope that I see implicit in Judeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and in a central promise of a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided. (C. Taylor, 1989, 521).

Oxford professor Larry Siedentop agrees in his fine book The Invention of the Individual. Taylor suggests that there is a sphere of sublime love, truth, beauty, and goodness that doesn’t capitulate to either extreme of the dilemma: self-harm/self-hatred or moral-spiritual lobotomy. It both transcends and rethinks the forces of suffering, injustice, and will-to-power, which are well-known to cause world-hatred, anxiety, depression, and even self-mutilation or suicide. He refuses to believe that we, like Nietzsche, have to embrace both good and evil, benevolence and violence, in the register of the aesthetic/beautiful (also known as ‘yea-saying’). Indeed, the need for higher wisdom to discern good from evil is at a critical level in our day (Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen).

Professor Taylor points to a redemptive possibility within the Christian and Jewish traditions (Old Testament and New Testament/Proverbs and Gospels). This includes evidence of those who remain morally sensitive, while still resonating with full heroic affirmation of personhood: “an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong” (C. Taylor, 1989, 452). This is Dostoevsky’s notion of the miracle of grace, something that empowers one to love both self, God, and fellow humans. This is a particularly significant/impressive stance in our day of cynicism and selfishness.

Mutilation seems to be the only option for those who have bought into a disenchanted world, trapped within an immanent frame of existence, Taylor’s well-known ‘Secular Age’. These people have sacrificed strong transcendence of the good for the myopic ideology of a Closed World System or social imaginary. But those who have not done so, enjoy the benefits of grace: they experience a fresh recovery of their moral-spiritual agency, a sense of validation and affirmation from the divine other (God), and a renewed sense of their freedom as persons in community. They bravely allow themselves to be loved by God. This stance of hope expresses a profound poetic openness which releases them from the horns of Foucault’s dilemma through a dramatic  transcendent turn. William Greenway captures its impact:

Taylor hopes for a participation with the divine that returns us to this world in such a way that we are able fully to embrace our deepest spiritual aspirations and fully to affirm the world, others, and ourselves without spiritual mutilation and without simply denying the reality of suffering and evil—a miraculous transformation indeed…. As a thinker situated within the mainstream of Western culture, Taylor’s proposed path to resolution of the crisis of affirmation involves appeals to God, grace, and agape, and there is no a priori reason to judge these appeals false or misleading“ (W. Greenway, 2000, 38-39)

These claims must be examined seriously and at depth because they do provide a plausible alternative with real integrity including weighty scholarly backing. There is a long and strong tradition that supports it. Taylor does not believe that one has to kill the moral soul in order to save freedom, creativity, and the self.  His alternative releases people from the trap of such nihilism. Nihilism offers no foundation for human rights, which has massive social implications. Could it be that there is a possible dynamic and fruitful relationship between mature freedom, responsibility, and transcendent goodness? We meet many people in various careers and walks of life who are in earnest search of such a hope. Many have discovered such substantial hope in the divine Word who became flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, called King of the Jews.

Those who make gods become less than earthly raw materials by trying to fashion themselves into gods, while those who allow earthly materials to be signs of God who made them become assimilated to the divine life…. Human-made images mire humans in creation; God-made images elevate humans to participation in the Creator. For Saint Augustine, sacramental signs  are not mere products of human creation but participate in the Incarnation, in which God takes on material creation. The most important God-made images of God, however, are human beings themselves. When they live as they are called to live in charity, they reflect God rather than see their own reflection in the images they create. (W. T. Cavanaugh, 2024, 189)

~Gordon E. Carkner, PhD. Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinars and Lecture Producer

Cavanaugh, W. T. (2024). The Uses of idolatry. Oxford University Press.

Franaszek, A.(2017). Milosz: A Biography. Harvard University Press.

Greenway, W. (2000). Charles Taylor on Affirmation, Mutilation, and Theism: A Retrospective Reading of Sources of the Self. Journal of Religion, 80, No. 1 23-40. 

Hart, D. B. (2024). All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Yale University Press.

Siedentop, L. (2014). Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard University Press.

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press.

Taylor, C. (2024). Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Harvard University Press.

See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u74STiS7Yfc Radically Rethinking Identity