Charles Taylor on why the modern self is freer, and more restless

Modern human beings are freer than they have ever been. They are also more ill at ease than they have ever been.

Set those two sentences side by side and they demand an explanation. Charles Taylor has given sixty years of work to providing one.

He was born in Montreal in 1931. He read history at McGill and then philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, where he took his doctorate in 1961. Most of his academic life has been spent at McGill University, where he is now emeritus professor of philosophy.

To take Taylor's measure by his academic career alone, though, is to miss half of him. He stood repeatedly for parliament in Canada, sat on public commissions, and never allowed philosophy to drift free of the arguments going on around it.

How the modern self was built#

Taylor's masterwork is Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, published in 1989.

Its question is this: where does the modern conviction come from that each of us is an individual with an inner world?

It looks natural to us. It is not. In ancient Greece a person's identity was fixed by his place in the city and the work he did. The idea of a true self hidden away "inside" is the product of a long history.

Taylor traces that history to three main sources.

Augustine's turn inward. With the Confessions, the road to truth is redirected from the outside to the inside. One reaches God by examining oneself. The newly discovered sermons of Augustine that we covered here yesterday bear the traces of the same method of inner interrogation.

Descartes's detached subject. The thinking self becomes a centre that can be separated from its body and its world. Reason no longer discovers an order out there; it constructs an order of its own.

The original voice of Romanticism. At the end of the eighteenth century a new idea appears: each person has a way of existing that is his own and cannot be imitated. Fidelity to oneself becomes a virtue.

It is here that Taylor's real thesis enters. Modern identity cannot be accounted for by freedom and reason alone. What people take to be good and worth having, and the moral horizon within which they live, are decisive too.

Self and value, in other words, cannot be thought apart. No one can answer the question "who am I?" without appealing to the things he cares about.

Where the restlessness comes from#

Out of this comes Taylor's critique of modernity.

The modern individual is freer, but he has also moved away from the traditional sources of meaning. As social bonds weaken, options multiply. But more options do not mean more meaning.

The reverse, rather: having to choose makes the question of what one ought to choose heavier. If no option is legitimate of itself, every choice has to be justified — and the ground on which justification once stood has gone.

Taylor calls this the narrowing of the moral horizon. Fidelity to oneself survives as an ideal; but the shared world that would give content to the "self" in question has been weakened.

What matters is that Taylor draws no conservative conclusion from this. He does not argue for a return to the past. He proposes instead that the resources internal to the modern ideal of authenticity be strengthened.

Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, published in 2024, is the latest form of that search: it argues that poetry and art can still establish shared fields of meaning in a disenchanted world.

What "a secular age" means#

Taylor's most argued-over book is A Secular Age, of 2007.

To read secularity as "the disappearance of religion" is to miss the book's thesis altogether.

Taylor's question is finer than that: in 1500, in western Europe, not believing in God was all but impossible; by 2000, believing had become, for a great many people, one option among many. How did that happen?

His answer is not a subtraction. Modernity did not remove religion to reveal scientific truth underneath. Taylor calls that narrative a "subtraction story" and rejects it.

What happens in his account is a construction: a new form of existence — the buffered self — has been made. The self of the medieval world was porous: spirits, powers and sacred objects could act on it directly. The modern self is bounded: meaning does not arrive from outside, it is produced within.

There is a price for the change. The enclosed self is safe, but it is alone.

Taylor's conclusion is that belief does not vanish in a secular society; belief and unbelief become options for each other. That is why the modern condition cannot be captured by the pair "religious" and "not religious". Everyone now lives in awareness of more than one world of meaning.

Why recognition is a political concept#

Taylor's third great contribution is the politics of recognition, set out above all in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1992).

The thesis: an individual or a community does not possess an identity solely within its own inner world. How others see it, and the standing on which society accepts it, play a constitutive part in the making of that identity.

The consequence is that tolerance is not enough. Misrecognition is a form of harm — it forces on a person a demeaning image of himself, and that image can be internalised.

So the question is not "should we tolerate difference?" It is this: how does a society make it possible for people of different identities to see themselves as legitimate members of it?

Taylor did not only write about the question. In 2007 he served, with Gérard Bouchard, as co-chair of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, which examined how cultural and religious difference might be reconciled with society in Quebec.

The contrast with Judith Butler's account of recognition, which we covered today, is instructive: Taylor trusts a common public world to be capable of recognising difference; Butler suspects that the framework of recognition itself produces an exclusion.

The objections#

The objection from narrative: Taylor's history of modernity has been criticised as selective. Is a story centred on western Europe and North America being offered as a universal account of modernity?

The theological objection: Taylor is a Catholic thinker and does not hide it. Some readers have argued that A Secular Age only appears descriptive and is in fact normative — that it carries a longing for a lost wholeness.

The analytic objection: the precision of his concepts has been questioned; terms such as "moral horizon" and "strong evaluation" are hard to make operational.

Why he matters now#

Taylor's currency comes from the fact that his questions remain open.

People today live in different worlds not only politically and economically but in identity, culture, religion, language and form of life. Digital media, far from reducing those differences, makes them visible.

Here Taylor's central warning takes effect: a human being is not merely an independent individual. He lives inside a language, a culture, a history and a shared world of meaning.

To understand the modern person, then, the question "what do I want?" will not do. One has also to ask:

In what common world do I learn who I am?

That is exactly where Taylor's lasting force lies: he marks the limits of individualism without denying the modern individual's freedom; he defends secularity without ignoring religion's power to make meaning; he accepts difference while insisting that a common public world is necessary.

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In Turkish: Taylor's principal works have been translated, among them Benliğin Kaynakları (Sources of the Self), Modernliğin Sıkıntıları (The Malaise of Modernity), Seküler Çağ (A Secular Age) and Çokkültürcülük (Multiculturalism).