One further parameter is important to Taylor’s quest for a sound moral ontology–the constitutive good (C. Taylor, 1989, 91-107). The moral framework operates at two levels. At one level, there are the general life goods, those that are valued by the individual self. The life goods are things that make life worth living or the virtues they advocate: such as justice, reason, piety, courage, freedom, moderation, respect. They are features of human life that possess intrinsic worth. At a motivational level, Taylor reveals the vital category of the constitutive good. This good he also calls the moral source. With this emphasis, Taylor wants to recover the category of moral motivation for the self along with the other categories of the good. The constitutive good can be (but not necessarily) transcendent of the self. This source of inspiration and motivation for the good can be outside the self, or higher than the self. Moral sources provide the inspiration or motivation to live in line with life goods. This is especially the case for the dominant hypergood. Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 516) writes concerning this phenomenon, “High standards need strong sources.” The moral source empowers the individual self to realize the hypergood in moral life, at the level of both inspiration and praxis. It is also an important source of the self and its agency, or ability to both embrace and do the good. The constitutive good empowers/animates the moral agent and the moral horizon of that agent. It gives to the life goods their quality of goodness (C. Taylor, 1989, 93, 122). Many individuals are not consciously aware of this motivating good, but all of us seek for such inspiration. We do not flourish in the absence of such a source.
ConstitutiveGood refers to that which is essential to the particular nature or character of something; it has sustaining, energizing and nurturing power (C. Taylor, 1989, 264); it is the type of good that provides enabling conditions for the realization of strong qualifications in one’s life. Therefore, one’s relationship to such a good is vital to building one’s moral capacity. Knowing such a good also means loving it, wanting to act in accord with it (C. Taylor, 1989, 533-4), growing toward it. Crucial to the position of the constitutive good is that it has independence of the self. To clarify this category, Taylor wrote in an e-mail to me:
“A constitutive good is a term I used for what I also called moral sources, something the recognition of which can make you stronger or more focused in seeking or doing the good. It’s a matter of motivation, and not just definition of your moral position.”
This is a vital concept because without the empowerment of the constitutive good, the pursuit of the hypergood could be perceived to be a tremendous burden, even oppressive. Michel Foucault carried a fear of hypergoods for this reason. The source offers hope for benefits of embracing the good, and allowing the hypergood to rule in one’s life. One concludes that it also builds into one’s meaning structure. Taylor wants to broaden the definition of morality to include questions of what one should admire and love. “The constitutive good does more than just define the content of the moral theory. Love of it is what empowers us to be good.” (C. Taylor, 1989, 93).
Examples of the Constitutive Good A constitutive good tells a person what it is about a human being (sets the value of her existence) that makes her worthy of non-discriminating care and respect. Romantics would consider their source of the good to be in nature: Things are good because they are natural to human beings. Nature inspires and finds a resonance with the self. Theists would take God as a divine, transcendent source of the good: The individual moral agent is inspired to mediate God’s goodness to society, and to take other humans as worthy of respect because they are made in God’s image. Post-Romantics like Foucault would see the self, in itself, as the major source of the good: The autonomous individual makes things good by choice (subjective valuation) or positing and promoting a value (projectivism). A certain value such as creativity, autonomy or style is counted worthy because it is freely chosen, posited, and valorized by Foucault (following Nietzsche) and his schema of the moral self, not because it’s own inherent worth of goodness. Foucault substitutes the category of telos for constitutive good within his four fold schema. It is the desired and imagined ethos, style of life or mode of being (vision of life as a work of art). This is what motivates and inspires the self rather than a source of inspiration from outside the individual self.
Sources of the good (spiritual sources), according to Taylor, tend to be embedded in a particular culture and function for moral agents of that culture during a certain historical moment or era. Key to his argument is the insight that there have been major shifts in what people take to be the inspirational sources of the good down through the centuries. Modernization, in particular, involves a massive cultural shift with the replacement of one set of views about the self, nature and the good with another. The constitutive good is located differently, and therefore one’s relationship with this good can vary from one era to another. According to Taylor, sources tend to vary from a. those solely external to the self, to b. those both internal and external, to c. those totally internal. As Taylor notes, at one time, the good was wholly external to the self as it was perceived in Plato’s moral ontology of the Forms. Taylor notes the big transition in moral sources in the last four centuries:
Moving from an epoch in which people could find it plausible to see the order of the cosmos as a moral source, to one in which a very common view presents us a universe which is very neutral, and finds the moral sources in human capacities. (C. Taylor, 1994, 215)
He takes Plato as his representative of the first, the ontic logos: “The cosmos, ordered by the good, set standards of goodness for human beings, and is properly the object of moral awe and admiration, inspiring us to act rightly.” (C. Taylor, 1994, 215). This is, however, an important distinction: Taylor himself is a strong realist, but not a neo-Platonist: that is, the view that the good is part of the metaphysical structure of the world. Platonic moral realism has been discredited because it leans too heavily on the idea of an ontic logos, a meaningful order. But nor is Taylor, on the other hand, a radical subjectivist. His view of realism lies somewhere between the Romantic subjectivist Rilke, and the Platonic objectivist. He wants to champion both the subjective and objective dimensions of the moral individual, and maintain that there are sources outside and inside the self. Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 127-143) notes that Augustine first articulated the whole idea of a reflexivity of self. In this case, the constitutive good is both internal and external, and the relationship is importantly one of both reaching inside and reaching out— from within to gain access to what lies beyond the self in God. In Foucault’s case, as with many other late moderns, the constitutive good is reduced to one that is internal to the self: Here, the source of the good and the self is taken as inside the self and its capacities—revealed through artistic self-expression and self-shaping in a radically reflexive relationship with oneself. Taylor’s great concern about the constitution of the moral self is the loss of outside-the-self moral sources (C. Taylor, 1994, 216). It puts a heavy burden on the individual to inspire himself and decide the value of everything. He considers that the exclusion of outside sources is quite costly (making a deprivation) to the moral self and issues in the draining of moral culture.
On reflection, why is the constitutive good important? For Taylor, it is vital that one articulate, or make explicit, the constitutive good, in order to understand from where this inspiration or moral empowerment comes. It can also reveal/expose the less honourable or corrupt sources of a certain moral ontology, to expose false or less authentic motivations. Taylor challenges that the dedicated silence of many modern moral outlooks (including that of Foucault) about such external sources of the good prevents these outlooks from fully understanding themselves. They are in effect cut off from their own history. Taylor counts it as a vital task to put moral sources back on the philosophical agenda. It has practical consequences for moral agents. If one does not reflect on one’s moral sources, one is in danger of losing contact with them altogether. This can cause a breakdown/implosion in cultural vision. One is also in danger of losing the life goods which they both ground and empower. Agency must be empowered. Taylor argues for an independent constitutive good that resources the self. Foucault, on the other hand, sees the sources located within the self alone. In his case, sources of the self are merely human constructions, based on radical self-interest. Therefore, they should not have imputed to them too high a worth.
Thus, there seems to be in Foucault the strong potential of a slide toward celebration of one’s own creative powers and the reduction of sources of the good to one’s individual creative imagination. From Taylor’s perspective, this is a problem, a loss (read deficit) of a significant dimension in moral self-constitution. Sources of the self are severely limited in the quest for self-sufficiency and freedom of action. Taylor gives an example of the resulting problems.
People agree surprisingly well, across great differences of theological and metaphysical belief, about the demands of justice and benevolence, and their importance.… The issue is what sources can support our far-reaching moral commitments to benevolence and justice. (C. Taylor, 1989, 515)
This is his famous dilemma of modernity—coping with a strong hypergood without strong sources—a dilemma that often leads to cynicism. Taylor, over against Foucault, is not suggesting that one give up on these high ideals for justice, benevolence, and care for the other. Foucault seems to fear that the demands of benevolence can exact a high cost in self-care and self-fulfilment, which may in the end require a payment of either self-negation, or even self-destruction (in his view). Taylor does recognize the cost in the general truth that,
The highest spiritual ideals and aspirations also threaten to lay the most crushing burdens on humankind. The great spiritual visions [and ideologies] of human history have also been poisoned chalices, the causes of untold misery and even savagery. (C. Taylor, 1989, 516)
Chantal Delsol (Icarus Fallen) also writes about this sort of fear if the good in the history of twentieth century European wars. Ideologies initially captured people’s imagination, but they led to terrible devastation and death camps. This is especially true of certain Marxist and Fascist political ideologies that reigned in various decades of the twentieth century. Here’s her statement on meaning/spirituality:
To have meaning is to stand for something other than oneself, to establish a link with a value, an idea, an ideal beyond oneself. Life has meaning, for example, for those who spend their lives in search of a cure for a disease, or in the struggle against injustice, or just to show every day that society can be more than a jungle. The link one establishes with this value or idea confers a higher value on life…. A life that has meaning recognizes certain references…. In other words, it is paradoxically worth something only to the extent that it admits itself not to be of supreme value, by recognizing what is worth more than itself, by its ability to organize itself around something else. Everyone will admit that existence is at once both finite and deficient. We consider society to be mediocre, love insufficient, a lifespan too narrow. The person whose life has meaning is the one who, instead of remaining complacently in the midst of his regrets, decides to strive for perfection, however imperfectly, to express the absolute, even through his own deficiencies, to seek eternity, even if only temporarily. If he spends his life making peace in society or rendering justice to victims, he is effectively pointing, even if it is with a trembling finger, to the existence of peace and justice as such…. By pursuing referents, he points to them. He awkwardly expresses these impalpable, immaterial figures of hope or expectancy…. Individual existence, when it means something, points to its referent through its day-to-day actions and behaviours, the sacrifices it accepts and the risks it dares to take…. The seeker moves forward, all the while wondering, “What is worth serving?” Individual existence structures itself through the call for meaning. Existence is shaped by questions and expectations. (C. Delsol, Icarus Fallen, 4-5)
Morality as benevolence and responsibility for the other can breed self-condemnation for those who feel its import and yet fall short of its ideals. This can challenge the impulses to self-contentment or harmony within oneself. Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 516) understands, along with Foucault, some other negative results of an ethic of benevolence without proper moral sources: a. A threatened sense of unworthiness can lead to projection of evil onto the other as happens in racism and bigotry, or b. Some individuals try to recover meaning through political extremisms.
So Taylor, in dialogue with Foucault, would agree that high ideals can lead to destructive ends, and might do so without a robust constitutive good, but he disagrees that this is the only possible outcome. Not all humanisms are destructive. He believes that it is possible to move towards justice and a better social order, towards just relations, just institutions, and even constitutions. He sees the potential of the good for positive results in the individual and communal realm, especially as the proper sources of such good is realized from outside the self. The pursuit of justice and benevolence, for instance, often does require self-sacrifice, but this self-sacrifice can benefit both the giver and the recipient as in a good marriage or family, and contribute to mutual communal benefits, enhance personal freedom, and inspire others to pursue such noble ends. Thus, the issue of moral sources is vital to this debate on the qualities of freedom of the will, as Taylor emphasizes. Freedom’s motivation to execute responsible behaviour requires the good.
Application of Moral Sources
Transcendent divine goodness is present and accessible in the human sphere through the incarnation of Jesus who is called the Christ. Transcendence does not therefore mean aloofness and indifference, or a burdensome or unreachable standard of perfection, but rather a creative, fruitful engagement with the world, society and its institutions. Transcendent divine goodness takes on an historical and christological determination in order to impact the human moral world. By reading the moral life through the life of Christ, one cannot espouse a minimalist and juridical conception of the moral life that merely acts on what is permitted and forbidden. We find a moral life that makes sense in the light of a Christ who is full of goodness, who incarnates divine, infinite goodness in human flesh, and articulates it authentically, historically, and culturally. D. Steven Long highlights to the moral normativity of the life of Jesus.
In Christian theology, Jesus reveals to us not only who God is but also what it means to be truly human. This true humanity is not something we achieve on our own; it comes to us as a gift.… The reception of this gift contains an ineliminable element of mystery that will always require faith. Jesus in his life, teaching, death and resurrection and ongoing presence in the church and through the Holy Spirit … orders us towards God. He directs our passions and desires towards that which can finally fulfil them and bring us happiness … [and] reveal to us what it means to be human. (D. S. Long, 2001, 106-7)
This immanence offers the option of life of the self, lived not autonomously but in cooperation with divine wisdom and goodness. In the incarnation of Jesus Christ, goodness is made accessible, personal and real. It is not left as an abstract unattainable ideal, or a wholly other reality alone. It is transcendent goodness expressed in our immanent reality. Within this plausibility structure, the roots for the ethical life, the transcendent condition for this life, lie in God, not in a mythological ontology of freedom (Foucault). Jesus and his followers, the church, are the dynamic unity between the transcendent/eternal and the temporal, the absolute and the contingent. The relational goodness of God is discovered not by means of a mere abstract speculation but in human lives oriented toward God, subjectivity engaged and inspired by the needs of the human other, as well as by the goodness of God. Therefore, the first human life to consider for this position of hope is the life of Jesus, who found his moral sources in God, his Father. He promised the same potential goodness (righteousness) to his disciples through the work of the Holy Spirit. This trinitarian goodness is a gift, and profoundly it is the gift of Jesus Christ. He is God’s goodness embodied, embedded in human culture, sourced in God’s own self. The human self, in this case, is constituted by its engagement with the divine self in the process of discovering a spiritual and moral epiphany. This is an encounter which provides transformation and a new vision for the world. The focus is on agape love not on power. One does have a relationship with one’s own self, but one can also have a relationship with a transcendent self who is goodness, love in communion (The Christian Trinity).
There is a second aspect of incarnation, beyond Jesus’ particular presence on earth. It is God the Son’s presence in his church. The church offers an historical and cultural presence, performance and embodiment of God’s goodness, socially locating divine goodness in a human community and narrative. Schwöbel (1992, 76) notes that divine goodness, a communion of love in itself, “finds its social form in the community of believers as the reconstituted form of life of created and redeemed sociality.” (D.W. Hardy, 2001, 75) underlines that the task of the church is to face into “the irreducible density of the goodness that is God in human society” and elsewhere he (D. W. Hardy, 1996, 202) identifies “the existence of social being in humanity (the social transcendental), and the movement of social being through the social dynamic, as due to the presence of divine sociality and hence the trinitarian presence of God.”
Thereby, one’s own self-constitution is seen to involve the flourishing of the other, the honouring of the other, as well as receiving from the other in mutuality, in a communion of love. The other changes in significance, from a categorical threat (a potential dominator in the world of will to power and disciplinary practices) in Foucault’s ethics, to an esteemed opportunity of mutuality. The other is highly valued as an end in herself. The self, in this case, discovers and constructs itself within community, with a moral inclusiveness that involves the pursuit of a communion of love, rather than a pursuit of radical autonomy. However fragile or imperfect this incarnation of trinitarian goodness in Christian community, it is no less profound for the transformation of the self according to a strong transcendence of depth. Human creatures are called upward morally and spiritually to image and give witness to the dynamic being and activity of the triune God. This imaging transforms the moral vision of the self in a dynamic way, and enhances human possibilities for action towards the good of the other and the good of society.
That most poignant image of hope, the Kingdom of God, expresses the relation of free divine love and loving human freedom together in depicting the ultimate purpose of God’s action as the perfected community of love with his creation. (C. Schwöbel, 1995, 80)
This entails a transcendent moral turn for the self, beyond fear of domination and mutual competition (agonisme) or pursuit of self-indulgence (an anti-humanist stance), to a pro-human, pro-existence, self-giving love and mutual support.It is important to realize that raw self-construction is called into question in this blog series. It begs the question of human givenness and of the discovery of self in community. It is not the economy of a naked, free human will choosing to follow a moral law or choosing to design self autonomously. Goodness is no mere achievement of the human will; it is truly a mysterious gift of God.
Therefore, Wealth, Power, Pleasure, and Honour cannot be the key goals for our lives. Bishop Robert Barron says it well on YouTube: “Your Life is not About You.”
Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, author, blogger, meta-educator with UBC postgraduate students
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1994). Charles Taylor Replies. In J. Tully (Ed.) Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question (pp. 213-57). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Long, D.S. (2001). The Goodness of God. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.
Schwöbel, C. (1992). God’s Goodness and Human Morality. In C. Schwöbel, God: Action and revelation (pp. 63-82). Kampen, Holland: Pharos.
Schwöbel, C. (1995). Imago Libertatis: Human and Divine Freedom. In C. Gunton (Ed.) God & Freedom: Essays in historical and systematic theology (pp. 57-81). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Language & the Road to Freedom within the Moral Horizon
As in the previous post, shared language is key to moral realism. Sometimes our language can be quite restrictive. It is often hard to see beyond the picture of the world that has taken us captive. But fresh language and new interlocutors can free us from the grip of too narrow a perspective on life and reality–too small a social imaginary (worldview). Perhaps academics need to collaborate more on language, to expand their imagination whatever the discipline. I have been impressed over the years with engineering and science faculty who have done a second PhD in Fine Arts or Humanities. These were some of the most innovative academic program developers at University of Waterloo back in the day, pioneering communal learning in Systems Design Engineering. Can new language set us free for new levels of innovative genius and creativity? One could see language as a form of wealth to steward. It is harmful to close ourselves off, or to implode into a minimalist or reductionist language game (scientism, consumerism, materialism). Charles Taylor has a masterful coverage of two major types of language theories in his tome The Language Animal: Designative-Instrumental & Constitutive-Metabiological. The first is more scientific, the other more holistic including meaning, ritual, ethics, the arts, and religion. One longs to grasp the richness of the full human linguistic capacity. Ethics has more to do with constitutive language. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning and fundamentally shapes human experience. The quote below reveals a problematic deficit of language in the West.
Morality is what tells us how to act, what our obligations are to each other, (for example, to treat each other with respect and dignity). Are you a mere means to my ends, or someone of inherent, objective value or worth? Ethics attempts to define the good life which often includes the virtues and language about character (David Brooks, The Road to Character). Together they are interwoven and they can influence the shape of a whole civilization. Humanitarianism obliges us to come to the aid of human beings in need regardless of polis, nation, race, or religion (plus other differences). One of the key sources of this outlook is Christianity in the West: “there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female; all are one in Christ.” Taylor puts it this way:
Our sense is that in answering this call, we are acceding to a higher, fuller, truer form of human life, as individuals, as societies, as humanity in general. But then the highest principles of morality define also an ethical ideal, a view of the good life. (C. Taylor, 2016, 203)
Barriers to this higher life include narrowness of vision, incomprehension of the other, sliding into xenophobia, burying oneself in one’s own troubles, sinking into resentment about personal trials. Worse, it can involve projection of evil onto others, in order to feel good: the defence of identity by rejecting/excluding nonconformers, or lashing out at those who trigger our inner conflicts.
On the positive side, we are moved towards the good by Christian agape, the transcendent encouragement to love one’s neighbour and even one’s enemy. This is often seen as inspired by the love of God. There are such sources of the good in other religions as well. All of this relates to Constitutive language.
Three Key Aspects of Constitutive Language Semantics: Habitus; Articulation; Hermeneutics
Habitus (enactments) This involves the everyday received culture in which we are born, a culture that we did not invent, together with its regular activities, the pre-articulate, or tacit elements: enactments/ embodiment/performativity/praxis/ritual. Habitus includes existential habits, relationships and commitments within a pre-existing skein (web) of meanings. This in turn occurs within a larger overall landscape of meanings. Because the culture pre-exists us, we must perform and discover our identity within its parameters. Examples: wedding, bathing a child, funeral, family meal, baptism, fasting, planting a tree, justice/hospitality like defending the homeless, repeating The Lord’s Prayer, Christmas or Easter celebrations. Ritual can provide healing for the individual with respect to their larger social and cosmic whole. James K. A. Smith calls these religious and secular phenomena the liturgies of life (The Nicene Option). Ritual encourages us to slow down and reflect. It helps us to process life events that impact us— especially new commitments/covenants, suffering, and tragedy. To take on a habit is to embody certain social meanings. It does, however, allow for structured improvisation. All of this is included in Taylor’s concept social imaginary of a given society. Another word he uses is doxa: the taken-for-granted preconscious understandings of the world and our place in it that shape our more conscious awareness (C.Taylor, 2016, 272, 73).
Verbal Articulation (explanation and justification) This includes naming a norm together with its crucial features (a code, principles and precepts, rights, virtues to emulate, a family of values). This can also be captured by a great work of art, an exemplary life (Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela), a poem or musical performance. This is the symbolic-expressive. It can involve a metaphor or a meaningful story such as a novel: Les Misérables, or The Brothers Karamazov. Robust scholarship on this topic can be found in: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Live By. Articulation helps us grasp the meaning of our experience, gives us a handle on it. It is articulate meanings which animate our lives, give life to our longings and intimations. We need words to grapple with lived experience, to name things in their embedding. Language is the very house of our being in this case. It is important to know that these articulations are correct and that the norms we describe are valid. He also uses the term footings (meanings). (C. Taylor, 2016, 224)
Hermeneutics (interpretation) helps us make sense of human actions and reactions, responses and attitudes, behavioural causes and effects. This kind of reflection makes these humanly understandable, graspable and palpable or real for us. Such interpretation of self happens against the backdrop of a whole “landscape of meaning” within which an agent operates. This includes a whole constellation of motives, norms and virtues. Such packages of interpretation are rooted in an overall philosophical anthropology. This process of searching for coherence within ourselves, within our moral framework, is essential to a healthy, robust identity and essential to our own integrity. Whatever meaning we attribute to the part has to make sense within the whole, whose meaning it also helps to determine. (C. Taylor, 2016,, 218, 286)
In the CBC Series The Myth of the Secular, David Cayley and his guests open up for re-examination the language of the secular. It is an excellent series. They don’t buy the traditional thesis of secularization (flattened, one-dimensional secularism) that involves the subtraction of religion as science enters the picture in a bigger way. Today, religion is flourishing throughout the world. Charles Taylor, the featured philosopher in the series, suggests reflection on the transcendent condition of our having a grasp on our own language, especially as we explore the expressive-poetic tradition of language. We often discover this in dialogue (C. Taylor, 1989, 37) when pushed to the wall by colleagues who disagree with our personal convictions. It can be irritating but at the same time freeing and life-giving. Language is so embedded in our identity that we have a hard time transcending it without dialogue with others of a different worldview or academic field. Let’s celebrate what other language games and metaphors, figures of speech, can illuminate.
A return to transcendence is central to the recovery of one’s identity as George Steiner (Real Presences) notes. Unlike Nietzsche and Foucault, who produce a literature of escape from the self, transcending the self in Charles Taylor’s relationship to the good offers a different model. It helps us escape identification with any one particular voice in the conversation. We escape the trap of language games that are confining such as utilitarianism or tribalism. It means that we are able to step beyond our own place, to understand ourselves and others as playing a part in the whole, to see ourselves from the perspective of the larger whole, and even the common good. It is truly humbling in a good sense. This allows for the development of ‘common space’. As Taylor puts it, “Some of the most crucial human fulfillments are not possible even in principle for a sole human being…. Our sense of good and sense of self are deeply interwoven and they connect with the way we are agents who share a language with other agents” (C. Taylor, 1989, 40, 41; see also Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart). We know how good this feels when we genuinely communicate well with others, learn from each other through genuine, creative dialogue. Charles Taylor notes that: “Because language is never private, it serves to place some matter out in the open between interlocutors… to put things in public space. The constitutive dimension of language provides the medium through which some of our most important concerns, the characteristically human concerns, can impinge on us all. This makes possible judgments and standards.” He opens up these issues in more profound detail in The Language Animal.
Taylor notes that the contemporary quest for meaning or fullness can be met by building something into one’s life, some pattern of higher action or excellence, a good; or it can be met by connecting one’s life with some greater reality or redemptive story, or both (C. Taylor, 1989, 46). Ultimately, for the believer, conversation with God brings one into play with a transcendence of identity. We can make a transcendent turn into shalom or wholeness, or agape love (Romans 5: 1-5). Here, I am using language in a very fruitful, positive, and healing way, tapping into a richer heritage. We need more words today, more concepts, not less. Science is only part of the language on offer (Designative), one room in the large household of language.
Walking in the Clouds: Highest accessible point in Canada (7,100 feet above sea level)
I want to suggest that the liberated self together with other selves, operating under the grace of God, discovers such transcendence, and captures this sub-regent responsibility to constitute language (up to a point)—to name things and make culture, a creative task. There exists more of a dialectic, two-way phenomenon between self and language. Self is neither totally transcendent of language (modern tendency) nor a mere product or effect of language (late modern tendency). Things are much richer in real life, more complex and imaginative.
We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression…. Language changes our world, introducing new meaning into our lives, open to the domain it encodes. Language doesn’t simply map our world but creates it. (C. Taylor, 2016)
As sociologist Peter Berger points out, there is a sense in which humans make the world (culture) and the world (culture), in turn, shapes them and their descendants (Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality). Language is a crucial factor in this shaping process, but so is the strong agency of a healthy individual. Just recently I was talking with a PhD student nearing graduation who remarked that it feels really good when you eventually hammer out the language into the robust and proper shape—representing years of research, reflection, and struggle. She has experienced this process of culture- and knowledge-making firsthand. You are literally a new person when you get through all those hoops and have that all-important final conversation with your examining interlocutors (the thesis defence), including mentors who have believed in you for five and six years sometimes. I will develop this more over the coming week.
Can language help us in our question for high quality freedom, a higher way of life, higher human aspirations? Eugene Peterson is a master word craftsman, a scholar-poet-theologian. Here’s what he says about language that can engage you and set you free, enhance your existence:
Christian followers of Jesus have an urgent mandate to care for language—spoken, heard, written—as a means by which God reveals himself to us, by which we express the truth and allegiance of our lives, and by which we give witness to the Word made flesh…. Contemporary language has been dessicated by the fashions of the academic world (reductive rationalism) and the frenzy of industrial and economic greed (reductive pragmatism and consumerism). The consequence is that much of the talk in our time has become, well, just talk—not much theological content to it, not much personal relationship involved, no spirit, no Holy Spirit…. We need a feel for vocabulary and syntax that is able to detect and delete disembodied ideas, language that fails to engage personal participation. We need a thorough grounding in the robustness of biblical story and grammar that insists on vital articulated speech (not just the employment of words) for the health of the body and mind and soul…. Words don’t just sit there, like bumps on a log. They have agency. Scott Cairns, reflecting on his work as a poet working with words in the context of a believing community reading the Scriptures, says that we “are attending not only to a past (an event to which the words refer), but are attending to a present and a presence (which the words articulate into proximity for their apprehension)… leaning into that articulate presence, participating in its energies, and thereby participating in the creation of meaning, with which we help to shape the future.”
In a future post, I will open an investigation into the sources of the good. Where do we discover the good and how does it feed into our lives?
Application of Moral Language Skill Set & Wisdom for Moral-Ethical Dialogue
Able to pursue ideas amidst diversity and think for yourself.
Champion a continual search for the truth, and disagreement with lies and deception, propaganda, poor scholarship.
Too much choice can be harmful to one’s psychological and sociological wellbeing.
Don’t buy into relativism or subjectivism/solipsism (unfortunately, 70% of Canadians do just that). It cannot be lived well, and is definitely not good for human flourishing.
Remember that your personal opinion on moral issues might be poorly examined and ill-informed, weak empirically, bigoted or seriously biased.
Celebrate high values/virtues/ideals: honesty, trustworthiness, humility, compassion, decency, respect for life, good environmental stewardship, taking responsibility for your behaviour and for others (inclusive humanism).
Shun dishonesty, cheating, abuse, exploitation, theft, fraud, plagiarism, things causing emotional pain and suffering to others, the dark side of human character.
Ask yourself what leads to a truly good life and how do I get there? Hang out with good, noble people.
Embody the principles you say you believe in.
Learn to distinguish between good, better, best decisions. Not all theories or worldviews are of equal value. Remember, there is a hierarchy among the moral goods.
Think hard about the consequences of your actions and decisions before you leap, including the unintended ones.
~Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, PhD Philosophical Theology, Meta-Educator with UBC graduate students and faculty, Author of Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture. GFCF Past Lectures: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl4NgIg_ht8IZCRIhho4nxA
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Penguin, 1967.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Harvard University Press, 1989.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, 2007.
Charles Taylor, The Language Animal, Harvard University Press, 2016. Jens Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
So far in our discussion on the qualities of our choices and agency, we have discovered some new language: qualitative discriminations, moral horizon, the hypergood. We are, in fact, in the process of unlearning nihilism. There is a lot to grapple with in the morality-identity-spirituality zone (spiritual geography). Charles Taylor does not make it simple or easy for us; morality is complex and it is very important to our wellbeing. We know that total, unqualified freedom is an actual impossibility. Paradox: If freedom alone is our first or only priority, we will not achieve it; we will have tyranny. Total freedom can become the enemy of freedom. It is appropriate limits that actually pave the way to freedom, in a city as well as in personal relationships. Moral claims are made by someone within an a priori web of obligations and it is grounded in some objective value. There is something intrinsically personal about the nature of obligation, and thus we can assume that perhaps the source of our intuited obligation is also personal. More of that in later posts.
In this light, it is time to talk about the important communal dimension of the moral self. In this post, I continue with the project of moral mapping, moral recovery, amidst the posture of critical moral realism. We want to face the full reality of our total moral makeup, within our moral universe. Charles Taylor, in his approach to cultural renewal, extends the concept of one’s moral map to include key terms of community, communality, and communion. How is one’s moral identity formation interwoven with the constitution of the good life within social spaces like family, village, guild, or profession? A strong qualification in Taylor’s notion of the freedom of the moral self is the communal (inter-subjective) aspect of self-constitution and self-discovery. We are active participants in shaping our desires, in pursuing wisdom, but the right community also assists immensely. The experience of moving from one community to another is very instructive. The good is not just a free-floating ideal that we champion, but truly something embedded in human story and the web of a human community. Life is hard, suffering is real, and it hurts. Suffering can also bring good into our lives. But the good offers us a currency for human flourishing, wholeness, shaping our desires, or developing a fruitful life. Taylor is pointing in the direction of the interface between the individual agent and the community. Above all, we must make peace with our humanity.
Our Current Cultural Problem In the West, at this time of major cultural transition, we are losing our moral skillset, says Matthew Crawford in his book, The World Beyond Your Head. Moral relativism has demoted morality to a kindergarten level of seriousness and that makes us much more vulnerable as a society and as individuals. We are morally autistic. We have lost much of our history, memory and heritage, much of our traditional sources of meaning-making (existential homelessness). We have lost the ability to work with others in developing moral values that matter and give structure and meaning to our lives (triangulation). Thus, we do not really understand ourselves well as whole persons: what is noble or despicable human behaviour or attitude. This creates new levels of anxiety and makes growing up much harder and more threatening. Instead of the ancient moral goods and virtues, we are left as victims of the values of the transactional marketplace: efficiency, productivity, usefulness or cash-out value, the bottom line, ability to meet deadlines. Our identity is being reduced to performance and that makes us quite vulnerable to our supervisors, who keep raising the bar and adding projects to our desk. It is leading to an epidemic in anxiety, depression, and eventually burnout, because in this competitive environment, enough is never enough. Too many people are talking about a mid-career crash. It is also leading to serious addiction to high performance drugs and pain killers (even opioids). We have become victims of our own high achievement goals, needing to be super heroic just to feel okay about ourselves. This is not freedom, but slavery–commodification and depersonalization of the self.
William Cavanaugh also has some urgent concerns and insights on our consumer society in his new book, The Uses of Idolatry. There is a real sense in which consumerism drains us of our very humanity. The things we consume take on a life of their own and our whole identity is shaped by them. This becomes our secular religion, filled with magical objects and rituals. We invest commodities with divinity. Branding and marketing invest products with meaning and spiritual imagination. Brands are the current opiate of the masses.
Consumer culture is in many ways the opposite of materialism; it is instead a form of excarnation, an attempt to transcend the material by making the material goods vehicles for the highest human aspirations…. In its attempt to create its own self-image, the self is constantly investing divinity in things (W. T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry, 299, 304)
Addictions to Radical Individualism/Personal Isolation
Self-help or Happiness Industry.
Self-invention Culture of Expressive Individualism.
Consumer-identity Culture: I am What I Purchase.
New Age Transcendentalism or Gnosticism (including drugs like LSD).
Therapeutic Culture: My feelings about myself are priority one.
In Taylor’s view, the self is partly constituted by a language, one that necessarily exists and is maintained within a language community, among other living, speaking individuals. He opens this up in a big way in his book, The Language Animal.
There is a sense in which one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors: in one way in relation to those conversation partners who are essential to my achieving self-definition; in another in relation to those who are now crucial to my continuing grasp of language of self-understanding … a self exists only within …‘webs of interlocution’. (C. Taylor, 1989, 36)
These webs of interlocution prove significant; the communal Other is critical to one’s moral self-constitution. In Taylor’s view, there is a necessary, ongoing conversation with significant others which is critical to one’s moral identity development. There is a current myth that says that one can define oneself in terms of a relationship with self alone (Foucault), and explicitly in relation to no communal web, that true creativity and originality demands that one should work out their own unique identity, that is, to become an original (C. Taylor, 1989, 39). Taylor uses the term expressive individualism to describe this phenomenon. But as he demonstrates, this is not possible at a practical level. It is rather an artificial and unhealthy abstraction of what it means to be a full and healthy human being. Thus, against the backdrop of Taylor’s convictions, the contemporary quest for freedom as mere autonomy can lead in an unhealthy direction, towards a harmful isolation of self with its consequent high anxiety. Late modernity is leading people in the direction of radical isolation and self-grounding. It raises a key question of what is important to moral constitution and what feeds healthy agency and robust subjectivity.
Taylor’s communal self contrasts starkly with today’s Western radically individualistic self. He contests this abstract posture:
I define who I am by defining where I speak from, in the family tree, in social space, in the geography of social statuses and functions, in my intimate relations to the ones I love, and also crucially in the space of moral and spiritual orientation within which my most important defining relations are lived out. (C. Taylor, 1989, 35)
Taylor notes that even from one’s earliest years, one’s language for the moral must be tested on others. Matthew Crawford agrees strongly with this viewpoint. Gradually, through this sort of relational-moral-conversation, the individual gains confidence in what life means and in who they are as a moral being and a good person. The community offers natural, healthy validation. The other person must be granted her intrinsic integrity, voice, and presence as well. One is moved, even transformed, by the lives, the wisdom and the deeper understanding of other people on the same journey and by moral mentors who take an interest in a younger person’s wellbeing and life trajectory. Taking his picture of the social dimensions of self a step further, Taylor argues for the socially embedded nature of the moral self. One relates to the good, not only as an individual self, but within a communal context, where the community also relates to and incarnates some good or goods. Thereby, we see the dynamics of an emergent moral culture, to which we can both contribute and benefit.
In terms of the social embeddedness of the morally recovering individual, community does not necessarily entail a dull uniformity, or cultic conformity, nor mere conventionalism. Rather, he suggests a dynamic, growing economy of being-with-others. Community emerges even while there is friendly disagreement at some level. But it must be stated that one cannot have community without some sort of normativity, some common commitment to the good. Otherwise, there is too much internal conflict and not enough social glue. The community must incarnate such a good within its matrices, because there is in reality no actual value-neutral, inter-subjective state of affairs. It is essential to trust and mutual respect, to basic human flourishing. There is a notable link between Foucault’s avoidance of community and his avoidance of normativity in general. The interpretation of self in terms of its relation to the good, to the moral horizon and to the hypergood can only proceed via recognition of an individual’s interdependence (not co-dependence) with other selves. Taylor presses the point more firmly: “The drive to original vision will be hampered, will ultimately be lost in inner confusion, unless it can be placed in some way in relation to the language and vision of others” (C. Taylor, 1989, 37). This is what he means by a thick identity.
Application in the Virtuous Community What kind of people form a virtuous community? How do we locate ourselves with respect to the good? What do wisdom, courage and hope, benevolence and love have to do with scholarship or everyday life? What do moderation, self-restraint and frugality, patience and gratitude have to do with academic excellence, business acumen, or scientific brilliance? Can we truly flourish if we live, work and love virtuously? Our moral vision shapes our goals and actions day to day. Many will know of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue which decried the cultural loss of this ancient language of virtue. In its place, late moderns have substituted the Nietzschean/Weberian language of an individual’s posited values, a self-invented morality which tends towards solipsism.
A moral virtue is an excellence of character, developed by conscious choices over time and thus for which we can and should be praised; virtue disposes one to act in such a reasonable way to avoid extremes, to act in short as a sage would act. It is hard to develop on one’s own, but rather requires community virtue to support the individual in virtue or character growth. We need others to learn how to practice virtue. Virtues are heuristic, they teach us about new dimensions of life as we embrace them and embody them. Professor Steven Bouma-Prediger (For the Beauty of the Earth, 140) a UBC visiting scholar articulates the language of virtue this way:
A virtue is a state of praiseworthy character—with the attendant desires, attitudes and emotions. Formed by choices over time, a virtue disposes us to act in certain excellent ways. Knowing which way is the truly excellent way involves avoiding the extremes of vice by looking to people of virtue as role models. As certain virtues shape our character they influence how we see the world. And the entire process of forming virtues is shaped by a particular narrative and community covenant. The settled disposition to act well, which makes us who we are, is nurtured by the stories we imbibe and the communities of which we are a part. https://ubcgcu.org/2014/11/23/recovering-the-virtues/
See you in the next post as I continue to pull on the thread of meaning with Charles Taylor.
Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, PhD University of Wales, Meta-Educator with Postgraduate Students and Faculty, University of British Columbia, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer.
Bruggemann, Walter. The Psalms and the Life of Faith. Fortress, 1995.
Carkner, Gordon E. Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding Our Identity in Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishing, 2024.
Carkner, Gordon E. The Great Escape from Nihilism: Recovering Our Passion in late Modernity. InFocus Publishing, 2016.
Cavanaugh, William T. Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.
Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2015.
Gregory, Brad. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Harvard University Press, 2012.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Taylor, Charles. The Language Animal. Harvard University Press, 2016
P.S. The Idea of Secular Who indeed are we moderns? Where are our roots? What can we salvage from the past to offer us wisdom for today? What do we have to say to each other? How can we live and work together in a fruitful way amidst intense plurality and difference? In his 2007 Templeton Prize tome, A Secular Age, top Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor offers a deep reflection on the history and current state of modernity in the West. He documents a major change in the social imaginary, the way things make sense to us, a change that spans 500 years. This change is a shift in ethos, involving people’s basic sensibilities, their assumptions and perceptions about the way things really are. Taylor notes that human flourishing has become the main focus of life in a period of unbelief in the transcendent or divine. We have moved from a transcendent to an immanent worldview over the past five centuries, from a world picture where God was the ultimate good for the majority of citizens, to one where human flourishing in itself is the ultimate good and prime goal of human existence.
Taylor is post-Durkheimian in his view of our secular age; religion has not been replaced by science. He claims that we are in pursuit of more, rather than less, spirituality today. This reveals what he coins as the “Nova Effect” of multiple spiritual journeys in this pursuit of human flourishing, where the individual’s search is the main focus. Think the movie Eat, Pray, Love. Western modernities are the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understanding, rooted in new consciousness and blends of consciousness, a new sense of self. Self, identity is a many splendored thing in late modernity.
He articulates in much detail here, and in his 1989 Sources of the Self, three contemporary Western spiritualities: exclusive/scientific humanism, Christian humanism and neo-Nietzschean anti-humanism. These three hypergoods (cultural drivers) vie for our attention, each with a radically different message to deliver. Taylor feels that this is where the greatest increase in understanding of our modern identity is available for our study and reflection, critique and dialogue. This insight is deeply profound and needs to be taken very seriously.
Amidst this documentation of our modern spiritual journeys, Taylor willingly raises the provocative question for our reflection: Does the best life involve our seeking or acknowledging or serving a good which is beyond (independent/transcendent of) mere human flourishing? Is human flourishing in itself the best prime directive, the one that leads to the best results for human experience? He adjures us to look beyond naïve to reflective, self-critical positions.
In this pursuit, he suggests the need for a recovery of thethickness of language; he wonders whether we have flattened or depreciated our language within the ethos of exclusive humanism and Analytical Philosophy. Have we given science and descriptive language too much purchase on our identity and our ability to know things? More on this issue of the flatness of language in a later post. It is the first time in history, notes Taylor, that a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely-available option (one where human flourishing remained the ultimate goal, and where there was an eclipse of all goals beyond this). We ought to be aware of this fact.
He mirrors this dimension of Modernity to us, and puts it under critical scrutiny. Many of our current most famous spiritual journeys (even though they start within the immanent frame), do not end in immanence, atheism or secularity, but end in belief in God with robust results for human insight (e.g. T.S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G.K. Chesterton, Theresa of Lisieux, as well as many contemporary leading intellectuals like Tom Holland or Larry Siedentop). This journey entails a transcendent turn towards agape love, a love which God has for us and in which we moderns can participate and engage through his power, one which can transform and mobilize us beyond mere human perfection, pushing out the edges of human possibility, and ironically human flourishing. See also on this theme my 2016 book The Great Escape from Nihilism.
Historian Brad Gregory from Notre Dame University captures the crux of our discussion when he writes about this cultural sea change: i.e., the subjectivizing of morality in the West. I suggest reading the whole of chapter 4.
A transformation from substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights constitutes the central change in Western ethics over the past half millennium, in terms of theory, practice, laws, and institutions…. [It entails] a formal ethics of rights rather than a substantive ethics of the good [managed by the state]: combining liberty with equality. It recognizes individuals to hold their respective conceptions of the good, whatever they might be, and to lead the lives as they please, however they might wish, within the laws that it stipulates and enforces, in a manner consistent with the same recognition for everyone else…. The highest political goods the maximization of individual choice, and the greatest social virtue is the toleration of others’ choices and actions. (B. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 184)
I continue, with constructive intent, my resistance (agonisme) against the idea that freedom can be reduced to a mere matter of the will alone: naked individual choice. Building on the concept of moral horizon in the previous post, I look inside that frame to examine the active ingredients. Within the moral horizon, according to philosopher Charles Taylor, the domain of the moral includes many different goods that cry for one’s attention. This can be frustrating and confusing; there is often competition and even conflict between these goods, especially in society at large, but also within an individual. Taylor wants to strongly affirm these goods for the self, in their plurality. But he does not want to stifle or lose their full moral and maturity potential just because they come into conflict. He believes that the tensions between moral goods are a healthy sign, and thus he does not want to resolve these tensions in any facile way: by allowing, for example, one good to devour, repress, or eliminate the rest. This actually does happen in various schools of moral thought. He believes that within the framework, one good—the hypergood—tends to surpass in value and organize the others in some priority. This is a very significant factor in understanding the dynamics within one’s moral framework.
The potential resolution of this dilemma of the plurality of goods and the tension between goods comes by way of a highest good among the strongly-valued goods. Within the moral framework, this is called the hypergood (C. Taylor, 1989, 63-73, 100-102, 104-106): “Let me call higher-order goods of this kind ‘hypergoods’, i.e. goods which are incomparably more important than the others, but provide the standpoint from which these [other goods] must be weighed, judged, decided about.” (C. Taylor, 1989, 63) The hypergood has hierarchical priority and dominance; it holds a significant shaping power within the moral framework. It is the good of which the individual is naturally most conscious, their greatest passion, a good that rests at core identity. It is the driver of one’s desires, sense of self, and destiny.
Why is this Diversity of Goods important to Taylor? He tries to explain in his tome Sources of the Self with a chapter entitled ‘The Conflicts of Modernity’ (C. Taylor, 1989, 495-521), a broad reflection on the diversity of goods and the conflicts of the good among the major movements within modernity. Taylor is quite convinced that there exists a diversity of goods for which a valid claim can be made; he means that they have a legitimate claim on the self. Ethics, in his view, ought not be reduced to the choice of just one good or principle, such as happiness, efficiency, or aesthetic-freedom (Foucault) to the exclusion of all others. This kind of choice is too simplistic and narrow, and it is Taylor’s conviction that the denial of certain goods or families of goods has led to serious imbalance (one-sidedness or even corruption) within Western moral philosophy. This has eventually led to negative consequences for how people live together in the world and can divide people in dangerous ways, even leading to violence or the cancelling of someone’s human rights. He cautions against a selective denial or exclusion of certain goods. Taylor wants to revive these goods in moral currency to “uncover buried goods through rearticulation—and thereby to make these sources again that empower” (C. Taylor, 1989, 520). He wants to affirm the complexity of multiple moral goods in his type of critical moral realism. This makes life interesting.
Taylor exposes an important error of thought:
What leads to a wrong answer must be a false principle. [This outlook] is quick to jump to the conclusion that whatever has generated bad action must be vicious…. What it loses from sight is that there may be genuine dilemmas here, that following one good to the end may be catastrophic, not because it isn’t good, but because there are others that cannot be sacrificed without evil. (C. Taylor, 1989, 503)
This is an important nuance. Extreme repudiations and denials of the good are not just intellectual errors; they are also “self-stultifying, assuming that a particular good can empower one to positive action” (C. Taylor, 1989, 504). Crucially, it is the affirmation of the tension between these goods that keeps an ethical theory and praxis in healthy balance. The tensions are not beyond resolution, but resolution requires the recognition of the need for a hierarchy of the goods. Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 503-507 & 514) promotes an important inclusive, anti-reductionist stance on the good. This is important background information in order to explain the key function of the hypergood.
A good example of the problem is the current emphasis on self-fulfilment or self-realization (my good). A society of self-fulfillers, whose affiliations are more and more seen as tentative, revocable, and mobile, cannot sustain a strong identification with community of any sort. This leads to social fragmentation.
Our normal understanding of self-realization presupposes that some things are important beyond the self, that there are some goods or purposes the furthering of which have significance for us and hence which can provide the significance of fulfilling life needs…. A totally and fully consistent subjectivism would tend toward emptiness: nothing would count as fulfilment in a world in which literally nothing was important but self-fulfilment. (C. Taylor, 1989, 507)
Orchestration of Various Goods Relationship to a good comes with a cost: There are times when one good has to be sacrificed for another, especially a lower for a higher. Taylor strongly claims that a conflict between goods should not entail or require the conclusion that one must refute or cancel out other important goods, nor to refute the general validity of goods The hypergood effectively orchestrates the arrangement of hierarchy among the goods, as it interprets their priority and their moral play. It can raise or lower their priority, promote or demote them, or even eliminate certain goods from moral play altogether. We should pay close attention to this moral driver in individuals and groups. It is vital that the individual self be very conscious of, and well-positioned with respect to this particular good. This pre-eminent good grounds and directs one’s overall moral beliefs, goals, and aspirations. It works to define and give important shape to one’s entire moral framework.
Here are some examples of the hypergood (C. Taylor, 1989, 65) given by Taylor: happiness, equal respect, universal justice, divine will, self-respect, and self-fulfilment. There can also be conflict between these hypergoods as there are between persons who hold them close to their heart. There tends to be a conflict among the three major hypergoods in Western culture: (a) universal justice and reduction of human suffering (concern for the victim), (b) self-determining freedom/aesthetic-freedom, and (c) the affirmation of everyday life or equal respect. More could be said about this later.
This hypergood has a major influence on how one articulates a particular moral horizon, the hierarchy of life goods and how one is generally oriented in moral life. The hypergood is independent, and shapes the desires and choices of the self. It is core to one’s very identity. It is not merely an ideal or the mere object of a high admiration or contemplation (a poetic entity). The hypergood can be quite demanding, and often asks for great personal sacrifice: for example, a hypergood oriented to preserve and protect nature could require a person lay down their body in front of logging trucks and risk arrest to save old growth forests.
What is the Key Role of the Hypergood? What is one’s possible relationship to this good? How does it impact one’s identity? According to Taylor, a self with the requisite depth and complexity to have an identity (a thick self), must be defined in terms of such a good, and is interwoven with it. One’s whole identity is essentially defined by one’s orientation to such a hypergood; it is deeply personal and held as sacred. Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 63) notes that, “It is orientation to this which comes closest to defining my identity, and therefore my direction to this good is of unique importance to me.” It is also a core ideal at the centre of one’s sense of calling. It provides the point against which an individual measures her trajectory in life.
Finally, the hypergood is something which one grows towards and something that moves and motivates the individual self deeply–it provides emotional and spiritual infrastructure, one could say. Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 73) stresses that, “Our acceptance of any hypergood is connected in a complex way with our being moved by it.” The hypergood has a major impact on one’s moral stance in life. His strong claim is that this is not only a phenomenological account of some selves, but an exploration of the very limits of the conceivable in the reflective human life, more like an anthropological given.
To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I try to decide from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done or what I endorse or oppose … It is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.… It is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary. (C. Taylor 1989, 27, 28)
What applies to the moral horizon applies to the hypergood. Taylor provocatively suggests that the hypergood that shapes the moral self could include the fulfilment of one’s duties and obligations (responsibility) to others. “Responsibility for the Other transports the self beyond the sphere of self-interest. Other-responsibility could also be seen as the greatest form of self-realization, featuring as the highest vocation of human subjectivity” (C. Taylor, 1989, 112). As a hypergood, Other-responsibility is integrated into the structure of selfhood without compromising the exteriority of the claims of the Other. Eventually, he provocatively posits the possibility that agape love could be such a hypergood to empower the moral self and bring unity amidst plurality.
Application in the Middle East Recently I met the Dean of Nazarene Evangelical College, Yohanna Katanacho. He is a Langham Trust scholar, a Palestinian-Israeli-Christian. His stories of the Middle East bring tears to your eyes. So many thousands are killed, maimed, homeless and starving, eating out of tin cans. The church used to thrive in Gaza but now is only 800 persons. Some $65 Billion USA aid has been given to Israel for weapons of destruction. The church in the West Bank and Israel proper is poor and hurting from all the mayhem, restrictions, and hate speech. The Western/Global church has tragically abandoned the church in this area overall. Christian Zionism in America and Canada confuses so many people about the real situation on the ground and causes more suffering. Yohanna is a very humble and deep Christian believer. He is asking for our understanding and our help.
Yohanna has a vision/frame for Missional Justice: His hypergood involves the pursuit of justice with righteous/honest/good motives, bringing people together, offering forgiveness, loving the enemy, building bridges of reconciliation. He articulates agape love as a fresh worldview, a new culture, a new civilization needed among the various factions in the Middle East: Palestinian, Jew, and Christian. He sees a longterm vision of building such a new culture (not of violence and hate, but mercy and love). If ever there was a place where love and the moral good needs to be active and relevant today, it is in the land where the Palestinian Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, chose his first disciples, healed the sick, and brought the nations together. He preached a message of peace, honesty, humility, and social healing. Jesus clears a highway through the jungle of modern life that draws us towards a full humanization (common flourishing). People have found stability and wisdom by being grounded in him.
Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, PhD University of Wales, Meta-Educator with postgraduate students and faculty, University of British Columbia, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Carkner, G. (2024). Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding our Identity in Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishing.
p.s The Crisis of Affirmation: Philosopher Charles Taylor, later in The Sources of the Self, speaks of the twin horns of a dilemma that we face in Western culture, between self-hatred and spiritual lobotomy. If we believe in moral norms/standards of conduct, we may feel depressed that we cannot seem to live up to even our own weak standards–this leads to guilt, shame and self-loathing. We face the moral gap between our ideals and our personal moral capacity. On the other hand, we can do serious self-damage by cynically giving up on morality altogether–a spiritual lobotomy that leads to cynicism and ultimately nihilism (a living death). Taylor wisely claims that morality, spirituality and identity are inter-twined. That will become more and more clear through this series. Nihilism, the loss of meaning (Jean Paul Sartre’s empty bubble on the sea of nothingness), is not healthy for anyone. It constitutes an enormous emotional black hole. How can we love the world and love ourselves in the midst of the world’s (and our own) brokenness and imperfections? If there is no appeal to grace within this dilemma, we are painfully, existentially stuck. This is a terrifying fate indeed. Perhaps a transcendent turn to agape love offers a way out, suggests Taylor.
As you follow this series, you will realize that mature, healthy freedom is not merely liberty to do whatever you want. It involves responsibility for the impact of your actions on others and on creation/the natural world. Once the case is made for qualitative discriminations, Taylor continues to develop the case for moral realism by arguing that one has to make sense of these basic human moral intuitions within some structure. This means that one has to articulate self within a moral framework, in a way that makes sense of that experience. The various goods that vie for attention need to be organized within a defined moral worldview, a big picture of moral thought and action. This process involves the geography metaphor of moral mappingof a landscape, making explicit the existence within the self of a map which can describe, contextualize, and guide one’s moral experience and judgments; it includes a set of moral parameters. Taylor believes that this is very significant for healthy moral consciousness. He sees that this moral horizon is an essential dimension of the self’s moral reality, claiming that all people have such a framework, even if it exists in a fragile state, or if they are entirely unconscious of it. The self is interconnected in dialectical relationship with such a horizon. Inherent in this discourse is a call to a higher version of freedom. Taylor writes:
I want to defend the strong thesis that doing without moral frameworks is utterly impossible for us; otherwise put, that the horizons within which we live our lives and which make sense of them have to include these strong qualitative discriminations. Moreover, this is not meant just as a contingently true psychological fact about human beings … Rather the claim is that living within such strongly qualified horizons is constitutive of human agency, that stepping outside these limits would be tantamount to stepping outside what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged human personhood. (C. Taylor, 1989, 27)
He comments on the crisis that emerges with the loss of such a horizon as a disorientation of self, the kind of phenomenon that is endemic to nihilism (C. Taylor, 1989, 18-19). He notes that to begin to lose one’s orientation is to be in crisis—both a moral and identity crisis at once—and to lose it utterly is to break down and enter a zone of extreme pathology (C. Taylor, 1989, 27-28). Employing the metaphor of physical space, Taylor claims that the framework orients the self in moral space, a space of moral questions of purpose, conduct, and direction. One’s moral horizon is composed of a series of qualitative discriminations (spoken of in post 2/ in this series), strong evaluations, or judgments about which goods are of higher importance. The moral horizon automatically invokes a hierarchy of goods; it offers structure and guidance concerning how to relate to others, what it is good to be, and what is meaningful, important and rewarding, what one endorses and opposes. Some may lack this orientation, but it is not taken as a situation to be normalized or celebrated as a boon of freedom. Actually, it shows us concern for that individual’s moral and mental health, as a form of confusion. It exhibits a crisis of self.
The qualitative nature of the framework reads as follows:
To think, feel, judge within such a framework is to function with a sense that some action, or mode of life, or mode of feeling is incomparably higher than the others … available to us. Higher means deeper, purer, fuller, more admirable, making an absolute claim …. Higher goods command our respect, awe, admiration—act as a standard. (C. Taylor, 1989, 19-20)
This reference to incomparably higher speaks of the hypergood, an important aspect of the framework. This topic will be covered in the next post. The framework or horizon is one’s ultimate claim about the nature and contours of the moral world. It is the moral home in which we dwell. It is not held lightly or casually, but taken as real (as one’s moral ontology); it is essential to understanding oneself and one’s human world. Can freedom itself offer such a moral ontology? Let’s see as we examine to parameters of our framework. Importantly, one’s moral map transcends the self, is greater and higher than the self. Examples of such frameworks are found in a theistic religion like Judaism but also in secular viewpoints such as Scientism, Marxism or New Age. Nihilism denies that such a frame exists. One’s horizon contains a disciplined, life-shaping worldview. One’s identity lives in a dynamic relationship with, it is moved deeply–captivated by such a framework. The horizon is composed of strongly-affirmed goods. Inherently, there is a personal resonance of these goods with the self. One’s horizon offers a place to locate the self, and set one’s moral priorities, and build out from there in character and the goal trajectory of one’s life. Taylor takes note of this important distinction about the development of identity.
My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose … the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand (C. Taylor, 1989, 27). If the human is a self-interpreting animal [both Foucault and Taylor affirm this], the moral framework is deeply endemic to one’s self-interpretation (Taylor, 1989, pp. 34-36).
In terms of nuances, we learn that there are different moral horizons, different maps, for different people and groups. Taylor recognizes that the orientation in moral space of an anarchist is quite different from that of a Catholic or a feminist. In fact, one could say that various people live in different moral universes: operating with radically different assumptions, drives and concerns (a fundamental insight). Charles Taylor considers that it is quite positive to articulate these differences, rather than hide them philosophically, because it can works towards better understanding as in negotiation between different countries. Dialogue and communication is productive. According to our philosopher, the relationship with one’s framework is dialectical–i.e., the framework is not static. Contrary to Foucault’s assumption, such a framework is not simply something imposed by society, parents, or a ruling elite–part of a power/knowledge regime. It is chosen by adults with clear minds.
Spiritual Quest: I have learned much from Taylor about the link or interface between morality and spirituality. He firmly believes and demonstrates that one’s moral framework also includes a personal spiritual quest or narrative journey (C. Taylor, 1989, 17-18). It is something that is both invented and discovered at once “in virtue of which we make sense of our lives spiritually” (C. Taylor, 1989, 18). It also refers to the search for and discovery of one’s moral calling. The quest is to find a fit for one’s reflective moral experience, and discovering this fit depends on, is interwoven with inventing it. That is complex but very insightful regarding mature freedom. Making sense of life involves framing meaningful expressions which are adequate and carry moral substance and currency (C. Taylor, 1989, 18). Humans are creatively involved in the development and shaping of their moral horizon as they grow and mature. Taylor agrees with Foucault regarding this creative dimension of self-shaping autonomy.
Taylor uses the term articulatefor the process whereby the aspects of the moral world are identified, clarified, and made accessible, so that they can empower moral agents (C. Taylor, 1989, 18). To articulate is in a sense to draw the background picture which makes sense of one’s life morally speaking. It offers to locate the good vis-à-vis the self, and to specify the dynamics of how I am related to the good. He suggests that the self naturally has an urge to articulate (make explicit) this background picture (moral map). It can be a very liberating experience. The articulation produces an awareness of something that is unspoken but presupposed: the tacit becomes explicit. This process reveals itself, especially when there is a moral challenge to one’s framework by another person of significance in one’s life. It can also be triggered by a moral dilemma or a challenging circumstance as in suffering a loss or tragedy. This elicits the ideals that draw the self to a particular moral outlook, empowers the self, and inspires a person to act in accord with their emerging framework. It is also important to realize that one can adopt new goods into one’s moral framework as these are deemed valuable in the process of one’s quest for moral growth throughout one’s life. Human rights language can come later in one’s life and still have a very positive impact.
The Benefits of Articulation:
(a) It deepens one’s understanding of moral goods and responses by showing what underpins them. The process backgrounds and contextualizes the moral self, thought, and action. It helps us break out of our current moral autism where performance and productivity has replaced moral validation (Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head, 183-85). This can help with what ails modernity.
(b) It heightens and sharpens one’s consciousness/awareness of the complexity of the moral life and the diverse range of goods to which modern individuals adhere. This can be surprising, as it shows us what drives our friend or colleague.
(c) It enhances the rational discussion and evaluation of goods because they are brought to the surface of consciousness. This is one place where Taylor’s moral ontology really stands out: importantly, he believes in the possibility of rational discussion of ethical ideals and convictions. They are not strictly or rightly a private affair. People deserve to know where we are coming from, to avoid manipulation.
If articulacy is to open us, to bring us out of the cramped postures of suppression, this is partly because it will allow us to acknowledge the full range of goods we live by. It is also because it will open us to our moral sources, to release their force in our lives. (Taylor, 1989, 107)
(d) Finally, articulation provides a correction to the “self-enforced inarticulacy” (C. Taylor, 1989, 53-90) of much modern moral philosophy with respect to these qualitative discriminations. Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 84, 90) disagrees with those who want to obscure these frameworks or remain mute about the place of qualitative distinctions in the moral life. That seems quite ingenuous or dishonest, as pragmatic concerns alone are insufficient for human flourishing. It also helps them to seek foundations or sources for their moral convictions, to discern which are shallow and selfish and which are of substance and have longterm applicability.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it tends towards justice.”
Throughout his discussion about frameworks, Taylor recovers/revives an interest in a commitment to the good. In his understanding, development of identity emerges in a way that is closely linked to one’s orientation within a particular moral framework or horizon, that is, where one is positioned with respect to one’s moral map, plus the goods within one’s horizon. This is the defining edge of meaning in one’s life; he claims that a person with depth (a thick self) must be defined in terms of the good: “In order to make minimal sense of our lives, in order to have an identity, we need an orientation to the good, which means some sense of qualitative discrimination, of the incomparably higher” (Taylor, 1989, p. 47). What one calls the good is the most significant defining factor: “What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me and how I orient myself to the good” (C. Taylor, 1989, 34). Genuine self-understanding, clarification, moral self-discipline, and education require that the self be identified and articulated within such a moral horizon. It also means that, “one orients oneself in a space which exists independently of one’s success or failure in finding one’s bearings” (C. Taylor, 1989, 30). Good mentorship is often needed to work things through. One is able to grow up into one’s framework and get over intimidation by its complexity and demand. This adds another dimension to the objective pole in his moral ontology: the moral horizon has a status independent of the self, though intimately and dialectically entwined with the self.
Discerning Between Differing Horizons: There is another important distinction in Taylor’s proposal. He identifies the existence of many different and conflicting horizons that frame an individual’s moral space. Is he merely proposing another sophisticated form of relativism, one of moral frameworks? In this regard, he does clarify an important qualifier about frameworks in a response to critical papers on his work, Philosophy in An Age of Pluralism (J. Tully, Ed., 1994). He strongly denies the arbitrariness of one’s framework, or the equality of all frameworks, in favour of a more critical and thoughtful perspective, where some frameworks actually calculate as being of higher value than others. This is essential to his critical moral realism:
Realism involves ranking (some) schemes and ranking them in terms of their ability to cope with, allow us to know, describe, come to understand reality. Some schemes are better or worse than others …. Moral realism requires one be able to identify certain moral changes as gains or losses, yet it can be sensitive to the complexities of life and of moral choice. (C. Taylor, 1994, 220 and 224)
This is not exactly the same as scientific critical realism (although there is some overlap) where the forces of nature operate in a certain way whether humans observe them in that way or not, and where the scientist bends her analysis or theory to fit newly discovered data sets from research. The moral goods do not exist actually outside of the human realm; it is human beings only that see significance in a moral good and a particular moral framework–Taylor’s concept of resonance. Moral realism means that some frameworks are truer to authentic human experience and make more sense than others, that is, that they are more plausible, and nobler. This remains an important nuance in his discourse.
From the average person’s perspective, there are no final criteria for evaluating or judging between different frameworks, except to transparently reveal what they actually claim. Frameworks are evaluated rationally by their highest ideals—hypergoods—and by their personal resonance with the self (sense of fitness). They are deeply connected to one’s self-interpretation, one’s sense of self in the relationship to others. Taylor puts forward an honest appraisal of the actual situation, a critique of the superficial notion of soft relativism.
The point of view from which we might constate that all orders are equally arbitrary, in particular that all moral views are equally so, is just not available to us as humans. It is a form of self-delusion to think that we do not speak from a moral orientation which we take to be right. That is a condition of being a functioning self, not a metaphysical view we can put on or off. (C. Taylor, 1989, 99)
Significantly, it is not possible for anyone to hold a position where all horizons are created equal, or to hold one’s moral horizon lightly or superficially, because it shapes one’s very identity; it is a serious matter, one with gravitas.
Taylor does offer hope that when one could become dissatisfied with one’s horizon, and that there is a way forward of searching/working through it to a better alternative. This is the way of error reductionor filling the gaps within one’s view. He also emphasizes that one must be able to live consistently and non-ambivalently within one’s horizon: It must have liveability. This is the direction of increased plausibility or resonance. Both subjective and objective dimensions are recognized together in his ethics. Therefore, one can engage in intelligent rational dialogue about horizons, and even across horizons. Horizons are to be respected and not to be feared or shunned as a mere ploy of controlling forces.
Application: It is highly documented that humans are susceptible to corruption. Sometimes they lack discernment between right and wrong, good and evil. Taylor is no moral relativist as I have argued above. I believe that he would agree with French philosopher Chantal Delsol in her book, Icarus Fallen, that even though Europeans have been shy about language of the good since World War 2, they do want to discern between Good and Evil. I take this definition from my recent publication, Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture (G. Carkner, 2024, 83-84). It can be applied to social justice and harmony across difference–towards societal renewal.
Delsol’s Definition of Evil: The Greek concept of diabolos literally means “he who separates,” he who divides through aversion and hate; he who makes unjust accusations, denigrates, slanders; he who envies, admits his repugnancy. The absolute Evil identified by our contemporaries takes the form of racism, exclusion or totalitarianism. The last in fact appears to be the epitome of separation, since it atomizes societies, functions by means of terror and denouncement, and is determined to destroy human bonds. Apartheid and xenophobia of all varieties are champions of separation. This features the Machiavellian psychological profile.
Delsol’s Definition of the Good: For contemporary man, the notions of solidarity and fraternity, and the different expressions of harmony between classes, age groups, and peoples, are still associated with goodness. The man of our time is similar to the man of any time insofar as he prefers friendship to hate and indifference, social harmony to internal strife, peace to war, and the united family to the fragmented family. In other words, he seeks relationship, union, agreement, and love, and fears distrust, ostracism, contempt, and the destruction of his fellow men. . . . The good has the face of fellowship, no matter what name it is given, be it love, the god of Aristotle, or the God of the Bible.
Since the time of Paul, Christian thought had been directed to the status and claims of humans as such, quite apart from the roles that they might occupy in a particular society. It is hardly too much to say that Paul’s conception of deity provided the individual with a freehold in reality. It laid a normative foundation for individual conscience and its claims. (L. Siedentop, The Invention of the Individual, 152)
Dr. Gordon E. CarknerPhD Philosophical Theology, University of Wales, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer, Meta-Educator UBC Potgraduate Students & Faculty
Charles Taylor Wagers on (Critical) Falsifiable Moral Realism
Human subjectivity, human freedom is the combination of being (ontology), moral conviction, and action (agency). Indeed, who are we late moderns and where are we headed culturally? Charles Taylor challenges the current superficiality regarding moral convictions with its over-emphasis on living one’s desires on a philosophical trajectory of freedom of choice/self-interest/love of self first. Self is the a priori. Some call this the cult of self or idolatry of self (Augustine). Shouldn’t we aspire to higher ideals? Taylor’s argument for moral realism starts with the following. In terms of moral givens, he argues that certain perennial features of the self are present irrespective of culture or the way they are expressed or understood. He starts his analysis with the question of how humans operate as moral beings in their actual moral experiences in real time and space, and how they actually reflect upon those experiences–the phenomenological dimension. He is interested in praxis (behavioural practices) as well as moral theories. Beginning with humans and the way they experience morality (the moral phenomenon), he claims that the most plausible explanation of morality is one that takes seriously a person’s perception of the independence of moral goods. It has been my privilege to wrestle with Taylor’s engaging ideas for a couple decades. I find him weighty, nuanced, wise, resonating with my personal experience and observations of human behaviour, desires, and needs. There is real depth to his take on morality that avoids many of the traps/conundrums in moral discourse today. It ought to captivate and challenge the best minds and the most genuine hearts in this complex field of ethics, spirituality, and identity.
Taylor does not feel it appropriate to substitute a philosophical abstraction (for example, utilitarianism or personal happiness) for how people live, reflect, and think morally. His first point of departure is that he argues for the ubiquity of moral intuitions and judgments in human experience. News flash: we all judge others and ourselves morallycontinuously. These are intuitions that transcend basic human desires for survival, sex, or self-realization. They are referred to as second-order desires, strong evaluations or qualitative discriminations. One notes the important reference to the qualitative aspect of the free will. This concept of second-order desires invokes the ancient idea of the good, a concept that goes all the way back to Plato. Taylor has a critical engagement with Plato’s moral ideas, but recognizes his gift to us in the transcendence of the good. The good, for Taylor, is one which, although interwoven with the self, transcends the self in significant ways. It is broader, higher and deeper, so to speak, not reducible to an individual’s being or choice. We are deep into the hermeneutics of the self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6081klkdqGo
Ruth Abbey (2000, 29), a Taylor scholar, comments that: “He does not suggest that in trying to explain morality we imagine a moral world devoid of humans and attempt to separate its subject-dependent properties from its objective or real properties.” Both are vital to the discussion. He begins by claiming that all humans have certain moral intuitions, and all make moral judgments, including judgments about the behaviour of others. They all have a qualitative sense of their significant moral choices and deliberations; moral agency can never be reduced to mere decision. For example, he points out that respect for human life is one of the deepest and most universally held moral instincts across multiple cultures (C. Taylor, 1989, 8, 11-12), which includes a concern for the Other; it is not merely a characteristic of self-survival, or an obligation to family or tribal survival. For example, “Human beings command respect in all societies; the West articulates this in the language of rights” (C. Taylor, 1989, 11). All societies condemn murder and lesser forms of abuse such as harassment. When this respect is not shown to someone, it is judged negatively–that is, there is strong moral conviction, an intuition about such behaviour. One exercises a moral or qualitative evaluation of the situation, appealing to some moral standard or moral good which transcends the situation and the parties involved. It is instinctual and natural to human society and relationality. One might say that it is inescapable for a healthy, adjusted person.
Our moral reactions have two facets … On the one side, they are almost like instincts, comparable to our love of sweet things, or our aversion to nauseous substances … on the other, they seem to involve claims, implicit or explicit, about the nature and status of human beings. From the second side, a moral reaction is an assent to, an affirmation of a given ontology of the human … The whole way in which we think, reason, argue, and question ourselves about morality supposes that our moral reactions have these two sides: that they are not only ‘gut’ feelings but also implicit acknowledgments of claims concerning the objects. (C. Taylor, 1989, 5 & 7)
Taylor’s form of critical moral realism means that the emphasis includes both objective and subjective aspects (poles) of self and morality, both a subjective and objective givenness. Humans do not just act, but regularly evaluate, praise and condemn other’s actions and motives, and their own speech and conduct, always appealing to certain objective standards. We always want to justify what we do–appealing to validity. We feel guilt when our desires or behaviour do not measure up to such standards. It is ironic that we can be disgusted with our own actions or thoughts.
According to Taylor, humans are strong evaluators by nature; strong evaluation is an essential feature of identity and a permanent feature of moral life (C. Taylor, 1989, 3-4, 14, 15). He sees this capacity for evaluating or judging desires to be distinctively and universally human. He believes that human beings experience the goods that command their respect in a non-anthropocentric way, that is, as not deriving solely from human will or choice, nor depending only on the fact of individual affirmation of their value. We may indeed ask where they are derived from–at a higher level of reality. He strongly challenges the projectivist hypothesis (C. Taylor, 1989, 342). Human interpretation is always involved (moral convictions are human convictions after all). But there is also an objective element in this evaluation process that Taylor wants to make quite explicit and clear–to underline. Projectivism holds that the world is essentially meaningless and that one must create meaning for life by what one affirms or creates. Foucault affirms something like this in his concept of self-invention. A moral good, under projectivism, would calculate as only a myth or an illusion, even if a myth by which one lives. The bottom line: we all appreciate these goods at some level, because they inspire and protect us from harm, build a community of expectations and security, give hope of a positive future.
Taylor’s term, strong evaluation, comes from Harry Frankfurt’s (1971, 5-20) argument about second order desires, that is, desires one has about one’s desires, evaluative desires (such as respect, rights, or justice) that transcend other desires (sex, safety, food, and survival). These are “standards by which basic desires and choices are judged” (C. Taylor, 1989, 20). Humans experience a range of desires, but do not view them all equally; some are naturally seen as higher or more admirable than others. There is a hierarchy and contrast in human desires (C. Taylor, 1989, 4, 20, 47). Individuals do not see all their values or desires as being of equal worth. One must overpower one kind of desire for the benefit of others–for example to build community and peaceful relations. Strong evaluation is inherently contrastive and hierarchical; it appeals to certain goods that are independent of the self and independent of human choice (C. Taylor, 1989, 58, 68, 74). These goods are always related to the human moral sphere, and are never mere abstract categories. Ruth Abbey sharply captures the nuance of Taylor’s view:
The best account of morality must be one that incorporates the fact that individuals experience goods as being worthy of their admiration and respect for reasons that do not depend on their choice of them. Beginning with humans and the way they experience morality, Taylor claims that the most plausible explanation of morality is one that takes seriously humans’ perception of the independence of the goods. (R. Abbey, 2000, 28)
This independence of goodsis vital to the debate between Taylor and Foucault; it is a point where they differ sharply. Taylor refuses to reduce morality to a power relations or truth games struggle: a contestation. Those who have brought moral reform to society were often a small minority that appealed to something higher in the human condition (our better angels). The good to which we challenge one another must be transcendent of what we regularly do and how we treat one another. It promotes higher expectations of attitudes and actions–the appeal to something higher and deeper.
Furthermore, as Flanagan (1996, 147) notes in his commentary on Taylor, this concept of strong evaluations is both descriptive of how people are and act, and normative regarding what is required for full personhood. Individuals do make these working moral assumptions, says Taylor, even if they are not conscious about relating to, evaluating, sorting, and ordering goods that impinge upon them. The process is often tacit, unconscious or intuitive, but nevertheless real. Taylor emphasizes this fine distinction to focus on the normativity and hierarchy of moral goods:
I want to speak of strong evaluations when the goods putatively identified are not seen as constituted as good by the fact that we desire them, but rather are seen as normative for desire. That is, they are seen as goods which we ought to desire, even if we do not, goods such that we show ourselves up as inferior or bad by our not desiring them. (C. Taylor, 1985a, 120)
Moral realism for Charles Taylor, means that (C. Taylor, 1989, 4, 20) strongly valued goods command the respect of individuals because of their intrinsic value, not one’s choice to value them; they are experienced as making calls or demands upon individuals, rather than being just freely or arbitrarily chosen by them. This means that Taylor takes existential moral experience of the good seriously and imputes ontological significance to it–thus, critical moral realism. He resists the slide towards moral subjectivism/relativism, which suggests that one’s choice among the various goods/values can only be justified according to individual preferences or inclinations–the lazy, selfish person’s ethics. These preferences can be judged objectively, rationally examined, discussed, and debated with the hope of better outcomes in future–towards individual flourishing and social harmony.
Taylor claims that there is an inherent quality (a goodness) in the good that individual selves ought to recognize in their openness and wisdom. The good is the key element in morality that helps an individual self-transcend the animal level of desires for food, sex, and survival. Taylor (1989, 42) offers a key test of a good: Can it be the basis of attitudes of admiration or contempt? It raises questions about “what kind of life is worth living … what would be a rich, meaningful life, as against an empty one?” (C. Taylor, 1989, 20). One can easily discern the difference in the goods appealed to between medical relief work as in Doctors Without Borders and child prostitution/trafficking; peace-making and war mongering invasion of other countries; compassion towards the marginalized and fear-hatred towards the person who is different. Taylor claims that this discernment, this instinct is linked to a second order desire, or qualitative discrimination which is part of who we are as moral beings. The former garners one’s admiration, while the latter draws one’s contempt and even condemnation. Taylor wants us to affirm this capacity for evaluating or judging desires, claiming that there is a capacity within the human person (discernment or wisdom) which can be revived and educated. This is key to cultural renewal. It can help us look critically at our own desires and behaviour in light of the good, with the prospect of moving towards it. He resists the stance of the nihilist, where the good is demoted to subjective choice or group values, or even harmful, belligerent politics. Ethics that emphasizes the will and freedom of choice is too often poorly focused on a Dionysian release of the base desires. Dr. Abigail Favale shows some implications for the discussion of identity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwZAB1CzAcA
Individuals are not always aware of the hierarchy that is in play; it can be held pre-articulately or tacitly as a background to moral understanding. One can also repress these helpful instincts and become less human. The language of strong speaks more about quality than force or power. Taylor believes that all individuals are strong evaluators, but does not believe that they all value the same things strongly. He does, however, believe that some goods do feature in all moral codes and are strongly valued by all cultures: for example, the value of human life, protection of children, the dignity of the person, basic respect and cooperation. Taylor’s voice is vital to contemporary international and national relations. See you in the next post as the momentum of Taylor’s wisdom develops its gravitas.
Gordon E. Carkner, PhD Philosophical Theology, University of Wales, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer, Meta-Educator UBC Graduate Students & Faculty
Key Readings for Dialogue with Charles Taylor
Taylor, C. (1985c). Connolly, Foucault, and Truth. Political Theory 13 377-85
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Abbey, R. (2000). Charles Taylor. Teddington, UK: Acumen.
Frankfurt, H. (1971). Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person. Journal of Philosophy 68 1 5-20.
Flanagan, O. (1996). Self-Expressions: Mind, morals and the meaning of life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Towards the Recovery of Constructive Ethical Dialogue/Discourse
Let’s talk about the glue that holds relationships and society together. Many people today are discouraged and confused by the moral drift in Western society, wondering if they can have any voice or influence in a world with such a strong emphasis on individual choice, subjectivist approach to values, aesthetic taste in ethics and radical, self-defining (self-justifying) concepts of freedom. Freedom currently in the West is often claimed as an ontological position, a reality within which one can justifiably choose one’s own moral parameters and construct or re-invent the self. In his important book, Sources of the Self (1989), followed by A Secular Age (2007), and The Language Animal (2016), eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor attempts to track and understand the moral soul of early and late Western modernity, especially what he calls the North Atlantic viewpoint. The narrative is a complex one, but vital to comprehend if we are to truly understand ourselves and our friends and colleagues. There are many ideological forces at work today and many experiments in promoting an ethics of happiness, or consequence, or situation, one of pleasure or principle. The focus of ethics can be radically varied.
Religiously-oriented people today can feel powerless and a bit odd, even guilty, for holding any moral convictions at all, that is, besides a consumeristic will that follows its self-interest desires. On this important topic, visiting Notre Dame Early Modern European History scholar Brad S. Gregory has a most profound Chapter 4. “Subjectivizing Morality” in his 2012 publication The Unintended Reformation. Many today feel themselves caving in or abandoning their inherited standards of behaviour under the weight of the cultural slippage–towards nihilistic relativism and radical individualism or autonomy without responsibility. Where can people turn for assistance, discernment, and wisdom on this matter?
McGill University Philosopher Charles Taylor’s first great tome
In the West, is there any basis left for normativity, for accountability, even for responsibility for the Other? Is it all just about my agenda, my choice, my naked will, my career, or my aesthetic self-invention and personal fulfilment? “What is the quality of this choice, this will?” asks Taylor as he retrieves an ancient idea of qualitative discriminations in ethics–the language of the moral good or goods (See especially Part 1. of Sources of the Self). In what is choice grounded, and how is it guided? We late moderns can be very naive about our Faustian deals when we make expressivism (performativity) an absolute within an ideology of unshackled freedom and self-determination. Post-Romantic philosophers like Michel Foucault offer an Art of Self or an ethics as aesthetics as a morality substitute in an age of nihilism and anomie (transgressive, norm-less existence). Is that our future?
This twelve part blog series on The Qualities of Freedom of the Will suggests that pre-eminent Canadian philosopher of the self Charles Taylor offers himself as a very strategic interlocutor on this issue of freedom in his discussion of moral frameworks as a source of thick identity. He wants to retrieve a robust moral grounding in order to avoid contemporary solipsism (think Julia Roberts in the movie Eat, Pray Love). He believes that these goods can empower us as moral beings once again. They need not remain buried in contemporary moral discourse beneath the fragmentation of our choices, desires and distractions. Following in the footsteps of one of Oxford’s greatest philosophers, Iris Murdoch, this project (Malaise of Modernity; Sources of the Self) entails a dynamic, adventurous and exciting recovery of the ancient language of the good and a renewal of a fresh social normativity–a renewal of robust moral discourse in the polis.
Taylor is highly skilled in employing an engaging language that a pluralistic audience can understand and grapple with, both at the intellectual and practical moral agency level. He encourages us to think more deeply about the qualities of our freedom. It resonates with many people who feel morally lost in a pertinent way. One has to be willing to think harder and go deeper than much contemporary thought on ethics, ideals, and morals. It impacts our politics as well. I want to attest to the fact that it is worth the effort, and the grappling with unfamiliar vocabulary. It offers fresh hope for Western pluralistic cultures and sub-cultures. This is definitely part of the Western intellectual heritage, The Great Conversation.
The following series outlines his monumental contribution to moral and ethical thinking (the ontology of the good). It reveals a phenomenological aspiration to the good inherent in most humans if they are willing to reflect more circumspectly with Taylor. He proposes an aspiration which can be a robust challenge to the ethical solipsism and Zarathustra will-to-power outlook so common in culture today.
What are the valid and sustainable parameters of our current moral quest, our current quest for freedom, wholeness, identity, happiness? Within our various spiritual journeys, the quest for meaning and identity impacts our lives existentially. How do we map this language of the good in today’s world and put it to work for positive change and for higher meaning and purpose? Taylor as a philosopher is an avid moral geographer. Moral ontology is deeply important and central to all other discussions about the moral self. It offers real insight into the inner landscape (deep structure) of the self. Therefore it remains central to engage the current debates of our day in the midst of a loss of moral consensus, as astutely noted by brilliant philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue). Moral autism (inability to speak and articulate morally) and relativism is not an acceptable or stable place to rest for our future wellbeing. It will lead to bigotry, oppression, and violence, says Bishop Lesslie Newbigin (a formidable UK intellectual).
I trust you will enjoy reading and reflecting upon, perhaps debating with me in this series of posts.
Gordon E. Carkner, PhD Philosophical Theology, University of Wales, Meta-Educator with Postgraduate students and faculty at UBC, author of The Great Escape from Nihilism; and Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture, Champion of The Great Conversation.
PhD Dissertation: “A Critical Examination of Michel Foucault’s Concept of Moral Self-constitution in dialogue with Charles Taylor.” Find it in the British Library in London, Oxford University Library, or Oxford Centre for Mission Studies Library.
More Great Resources: On the recovery of substantial ethical discourse, see also Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, Moral Believing Animals; plus his more recent book: Atheist Overreach: and R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy. IVP Academic, 2014; Houston & Zimmermann (eds.), Sources of the Christian Self. Eerdmans, 2018.
Proposition 3: Redeemed freedom flourishes within a trinitarian horizon. Trinitarian divine goodness proves to be a fruitful plausibility structure within which to think about freedom and the moral self. Trinitarian goodness-freedom takes us to one more dimension of the self. It reveals new possibilities for identity, discovery, and personal transformation. It also adds sophistication to some of Taylor’s categories of the horizon of the good. It is in the life of the God-man Jesus that one can visualize this goodness-freedom dynamic.
What is full liberation? Michel Foucault, the philosopher of freedom, claimed that, “Ethics is the deliberate form assumed by freedom.” So what form will endure as a stable, longterm identity? What is the possibility of a transcendent paradigm shift in this conversation? The language of strong transcendence implies some dynamic that resides outside the economies of human experience, and human culture spheres: science, art, religion and ethics. It plays a key role in the drama of moral self-constitution and personal freedom through the validation of the self from a larger horizon of significance. We achieve more not less human meaning.
Here we propose a further recovery of ethics in partnership with trinitarian relationality. Jesus of Nazareth offers an exemplum of redeemed human freedom. In my PhD dissertation, I show that the human good could be linked through a transcendent turn to trinitarian goodness. Jesus’ life constitutes reconciliation, rather than enmity between goodness and freedom. In the philosophical turn towards transcendent goodness, Foucault’s ontology of liberty is subverted by the ontology of agape love without losing anything. We move from the aesthetic to the ethical and now the religious plane of existence (Kierkegaard), towards maturity.
How does Jesus’s life interpret freedom uniquely in light of this suggested turn to transcendent goodness? The interpretation starts as trinitarian theonomous goodness-freedom, a God-related freedom, that is qualified by transcendent divine goodness. It begins with the living God of the Christian story, who is constituted by a form of relation, mutuality and reciprocity, in which freedom is given to that which is Other. In this case, it is other Persons within the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Christian Trinity is a tri-unity of Persons with a history of self-giving freedom that defines God’s being as agape love. It is the constitutive good, the highest moral source and inspiration for human, finite goodness.
The position we are taking is clarified by British theologian, Alistair McFadyen, who reflects on the hermeneutic of freedom and self-giving within the Trinity. Human freedom, he claims, is grounded in, and defined by, God’s freedom.
God’s inmost being is constituted by the radical mutuality of the three divine Persons, in which they both give and receive their individuality from one another. In their intersubjectivity, there is the creative intention and recognition of subjectivity, and therefore transcendence in form of the integrity of personal identity, in the giving of space to one another. This giving of space is an interpersonal event, and must not be thought of as analogous to the evacuation of physical space. It is not a form of absence, but a way of being present with others in creative recognition of their autonomy within the relationship. It is a letting-be, rather than a letting-go: a structuring of the relationship so that it includes space and time for personal discreteness and autonomous response. Thus, the trinitarian life involves a circulation of the divine potentialities of being through the processes of self-giving, in the unity of which the three Persons receive their distinct personal identities. (A. McFadyen, 1995, 46-7)
This is the same gift of benevolent divine freedom that is expressed through the presence in the world of God the Son (Jesus of Nazareth) and God the Holy Spirit, the second and third Persons of the Trinity. God is a community of Persons in movement towards and present within creation, stimulating and opening up a future possibilities for robust human freedom. Because God is free, loving and relational, humans should be confident that they are not victims of fate, domination, and materialistic determinism. The character of redeemed freedom is creative and dynamic in its existential engagement with human sociality. Human freedom takes its cue from God, and flourishes within the ethos of God’s freedom. In fact, the dependence of human freedom on God secures its integrity. God creates the larger horizon for freedom, God affirms and validates human freedom within this order. Thus, the relationship between divine and human freedom is a profound gift.
God’s gift of freedom also entails God’s willingness to take/suffer the consequences of human freedom, even human assertions ofautonomyand disbelief in God.
Knowledge of this goodness-freedom is not invented sui generis. It is offered through relationship with God as Trinity. God’s creation opens the latitude that affords space for human response in a non-coercive environment. It even includes the possibilities of human misunderstanding, rejection, disobedience towards and even disbelief in God.McFadyen, (1995,44) writes: “We find God subjecting Godself, first of all to the limitation of the incarnation in a human person; secondly, allowing Godself to be subject to human freedom—even to the extent of death—to bear the consequences of the human refusal of freedom.”
Human freedom is enhanced and empowered when there is a grateful response to the God who built into creation the very possibility and parameters of human freedom. The created, ordered ecology of relations is respectful of both divine sovereignty and a large degree of finite human choice and autonomy. Space is given for growth in individual integrity, uniqueness and particularity. This matches Foucault’s strong emphasis on the creativity in the self, without sacrificing many other positive infrastructural dimensions. At the end of the day, Foucault resists this limited but rich definition of freedom as a gift from God. He wants instead unlimited, unrestricted freedom for the self–radical autonomy–which falls into nihilism and narcissistic obsession with oneself.
Jesus, on the other hand, is the free and loyal Son of the Father, exemplifying the positive marriage between goodness, freedom and obedience, revealing its existential world impact. The irony of our discovery is that freedom as radical autonomy leads to a loss of self, crisis of identity and alienation from the Other. Jesus is completely free within a communion of love. In the practice of redeemed freedom, the human freedom of Christ vividly discloses God’s creative freedom–an important epiphany or revelation of strong transcendence.
[It is in the] Image of Christ, where freedom is exercised as rooted in the will of the Father and mediated in the power of the Spirit that the true character of the image of God is disclosed to us, both as the divine freedom for grace and as the human freedom of obedience …. Christ is … both the revelation of the divine freedom of grace and the disclosure of the human freedom of obedience, where obedience to the will of God the father is not the abrogation of human freedom but the form of its exercise. (Christoph Schwöbel, 1995, 80)
For Foucault, obedience to the Christian religion is negative and repressive, but in Jesus, it is never a contest between God the father’s freedom and his own. It entails an intimate cooperation rooted in this loving communion. Jesus reveals that modern freedom can be liberated from the weighty obligation to live self-reflexively out of one’s own power and resources. It also reveals a divine-human relationship rife with grace. This is carried on even in the midst of many attempts to oppress Jesus and repress his voice.
Form Works Beautifully with Freedom in this Furry Creek Waterfall
McFadyen illuminates some nuances of the divine-human interface of freedom, revealed through the incarnation.
[By] incarnation in the body of the crucified one implies that God’s freedom does not, after all, entail a transcendent aloofness from the world, but a form of involvement with it in which the divine being and freedom are staked. God subjects Godself to the risks, vulnerabilities and ambiguities of historical existence, including the risk of rejection, suffering and death, as well as of misinterpretation. God’s freedom and sovereignty must be of a radical kind: the freedom to give oneself in relation; to be with and in creation in ways that are costly to God, but which do not abrogate God’s sovereignty, freedom and transcendence. (A. McFadyen, 1995, 42)
In the incarnation, one sees God communicating and relating, not as a tyrannical, coercive, absolute sovereign, but vulnerably in and through the form of human individual, by uniting the divine freedom of self-giving agape love with that of a human being. I cover this idea in chapter 5. of my book, Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture. In the Christ event, one is confronted with a divine power that is highly personal, and which consequently has impact through forms of interpersonal communication and personal presence. This God posture makes creative appeal to human freedom. Divine freedom and will is the proper context of human freedom. It is not a divine monologue of commands, but a dialogue in which humans are intended and respected as subjects with free choice and freedom of speech. Abraham Joshua Heschel often says in his understated way, “God continues to be interested in human beings.”
Freedom and the moral self, its content and definition, was a central concern in my PhD dissertation. The upshot of this dialogue is that not all definitions of freedom are deemed equal. When freedom embraces goodness, it transforms freedom from an end in itself, to freedom as a benevolence toward the Other (agape love). Within the plausibility structure of trinitarian transcendent goodness, love becomes the content of freedom as well as freedom’s trajectory or raison d’être. The exercise of redeemed freedom takes seriously the human and divine Other, especially the weaker, more vulnerable Other. Schwöbel captures it succinctly.
The true measure of freedom is love as the relationship which makes the flourishing of the other the condition of self-fulfilment. Human freedom becomes the icon of divine freedom where the freedom of divine grace constitutes the grace of human freedom … That most poignant image of hope, the Kingdom of God, expresses the relation of free divine love and loving human freedom together in depicting the ultimate purpose of God’s action as the perfected community of love with his creation. The fulfilment of God’s reign and the salvation of creation are actualized together in the community of the love of God. (C. Schwöbel, 1995, 80-81)
More power to you in discovering rich, true freedom directed to the common good and God’s pleasure.
Gordon E. Carkner, PhD, Meta-Educator with UBC Graduate Students and Faculty, author of Towards and Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding Our identity in Christ, Wipf & Stock, 2024.
McFadyen, A.I. (1995). Sins of Praise: the Assault on God’s Freedom. In C. Gunton (Ed.). God & Freedom: Essays in historical and systematic theology (pp. 36-56). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Schwöbel, C. (1995). Imago Libertatis: Human and Divine Freedom. In C. Gunton (Ed.) God & Freedom: Essays in historical and systematic theology (pp. 57-81). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Friendly Mama Bear on Blackcomb Mountain Slopes June 6, 2024
This siting 50 meters from me on the hiking trail ‘Little Burn’ added a thrill to my early morning hike. I was free to be in awe, wonder, and gratitude for creation; she was free to consume her morning breakfast of lush grasses.
Proposition Two: Redeemed freedom by definition takes on a distinctively communal character; it is contextualized within a discussion and relationships between fellow interlocutors, against the backdrop of larger narrative which makes sense of self. Individual freedom gives up ground to community and makes space for the Other, in order to avoid some of the pitfalls of radical autonomy and provide for a richer moral experience.
This transformation of the Foucauldian thin aesthetic self is desirable under this proposal. The move is towards a deeper, more complex communal character of self, a thick self. Foucault articulates freedom as flight from one’s neighbour; the aesthetic self is part fugitive, part manipulator. Its context is reduced to a life of contest with the Other, within power relations and truth games. There is a certain validity to these concerns, but from the perspective of Taylor’s comments and those on trinitarian goodness, they lack vision for relationships that are other than manipulative, that is, relationships informed by love, compassion, and cooperation. In the light of this investigation, it is suggested that there is a need to rethink Foucauldian freedom in terms of a reconciliation between self and the Other, self and society, to put it metaphorically, in terms of self and one’s neighbour. The direction of reformulation/reassessment is the recovery of a social horizon, including a stronger concept of the social body, and the common good. This promotes the inspiration and courage to face the neighbour as a good. Lévinas encourages us to look into the face of the Other.
A radical pursuit of private self-interest, to the exclusion of the presence and the needs of the Other, is a far less tenable option after this critical dialogue. Foucault holds to a faulty assumption of chronic distrust, that is, that the Other will always try to control and manipulate my behaviour for their own purposes. Or they will try to impose their agenda on me–assumed hostility. Although such manipulation exists, this is a jaded and cynical perspective on human society, and the meaning of human relationships. The autonomy that modernity cannot do without, needs a dialectical relationship with community as a balance to one’s self-reflexive relationship to oneself. The nature of autonomy cannot be confined to a radical self-determination but must involve the possibility of recognition by and dependence upon other people within a larger horizon of significance. Flight is the easier and less complex default option. It is more challenging to take other selves seriously in terms of the good that they are, and the good that they can offer. I suggest that trust building (mutual listening) is a tentative but necessary exercise for the moral health of the self and society. Redeemed freedom can emerge through a wiser discernment and exploration of the communal dimensions of subjectivity, as freedom to cooperate with, and freedom to serve the Other.
This newly discoverable type of freedom is destined to find its fulfilment, not in a self- justifying control left alone in self-sufficiency, but in seeking out a communion of love, a healthy vulnerability, interdependency and mutuality, with an ear to the voice of the Other. It promotes the relocation of the dislocated self into a new narrative, a new drama which involves us, within the relational order of creation. Healthy human experience is intensely relational. One big weakness in Foucault’s quest for identity is that, by contrast, he assumes a denial of the social body when it comes to ethics and personal progress. This conclusion suggests the positive outlook for the future of the self will involve a communal experiment. The word discernment above speaks of exploring the potential of these relationships as they relate to a communal horizon of the good, the good that can be carried in the community and its narrative as Taylor articulates in his ethics of the good. It can lead to communion and friendship of a significant sort. Others can help one discern oneself, expand one’s understanding of oneself. This allows one to find spaces for both freedom and a deeper calling with responsibility.
Foucault highly values individual creativity, but he lacks appreciation for how this relates to communal creativity of interdependencies and complementarity. Fulfilment in community prevents the self from extreme forms of self-interest, narcissism, and solipsism (R. Wolin, 1986) which can be quite painful and alienating. Alister McFadyen (1995) offers a helpful reflection on this point concerning the deceptions and distortions of radical freedom.
The free pursuit of private self-interest has a naturally conflicting form, since the otherness of the individual means their interests must be opposed. One needs freedom from what is other in order to be oneself. Personal centeredness is essential, for autonomy is a private place that has to be protected by fencing it off from the sphere of relation and therefore from the otherness of God and one’s neighbours … Autonomy is something one has in self-possession, apart from relation to God and others in an exclusive and private orientation on an asocial personal centre…. Freedom and autonomy are had apart from relationship: they inhere within oneself. (35)
Foucault’s language of freedom has a mythological flavour that offers a mask for a disguised self-interest, the freedom to be and do whatever I want, even if it is harmful to others. Redeemed freedom reveals this outlook as a distorted reality-construction. M. Volf in Exclusion and Embrace (1996) shows how this reconciliation or redemption of sociality can occur even amidst the most abusive and oppressive of situations. He believes in the possibility of reconciliation and firgiveness–social healing. The lack of communal discernment is one of Foucault’s significant limitations.
In this anatomy of community, the good can be mediated and carried more fruitfully and robustly. One’s individual relationship to the good can be strongly enhanced by involvement with a group that allows the good to shape its identity. Not just any, but the right non-toxic community environment can provide a positive school of the good. Mirrored through others, the good can offer both accountability, encouragement, and empowerment to the self. Group covenant and commitment to one another sustains the self in its agency. The younger self in formation is released from the burden to invent its whole moral universe. Moreover, communal discernment supports the weak and challenges the strong with accountability, promoting societal justice. Moral self-constitution of this thicker, weightier, and more complex sort exceeds the capacity of the individual self. It requires a community. J. Habermas in response to Foucault argues that the preoccupation with the autonomy or self-mastery is simply a moment in the process of social interaction, which has been artificially isolated or privileged:
Both cognitive-instrumental mastery of an objective nature (and society) and a narcissistically overinflated autonomy (in the sense of purposively rational self-assertion) are derivative moments that have been rendered independent from the communicative structures of the lifeworld, that is, from the intersubjectivity of relationships of mutual understanding and relationships of reciprocal recognition. (Habermas, 1987, p. 315)
A moral journey in life requires narrative and communal reflection. This is the path to holism and peace-making in today’s tribal and fragmented world. In an important note, Charles Taylor points out something significant regarding the difference between the American and Continental European reception of Foucault (Taylor, 1994, 232). In America, Foucault is appreciated by those on the Left, those of a more egalitarian perspective (for example, pragmatic neo-liberal Richard Rorty at Berkeley) as a critique of power relations and the ubiquity of attempts to dominate, plus exposure of societal inequalities, or the liberation of women. Taylor balances this view, “But, saying that all human beings are equally worthy of respect is part of a different moral universe from Post-Romantic Bataille (one of Foucault’s sources of inspiration). The somewhat darker, more problematical, anti-humanist side of Foucault is better understood in France.” This is part of the revolutionary story of the aesthetics of power relations and truth games that would be wrong to hide.
~Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, PhD Philosophical Theology
Carkner, G.E. (2024). Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding Our Identity in Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.
Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
McFadyen, A.I. (1995). Sins of Praise: the Assault on God’s Freedom. In C. Gunton (Ed.). God & Freedom: Essays in historical and systematic theology (pp. 36-56). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Taylor, C. (1994). Charles Taylor Replies. In J. Tully (Ed.) Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question (pp. 213-57). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Volf, M. (1996). Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness and reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
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