Charles Taylor: Sources of the Self (1989)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
A Different Approach: The Sources of the Self
Charles Taylor shares Habermas’ concerns, but his approach differs. Habermas argues transcendental-pragmatically: what are the conditions of the possibility of mutual understanding? Taylor argues historically-hermeneutically: where do our moral intuitions come from? What are the “sources of the self”?
Sources of the Self (1989) is a monumental work – a history of modern identity from Plato to the present. Taylor shows how the modern self-understanding arose: out of the Platonic idea of the good, out of Augustinian inwardness, out of Cartesian reflexivity, out of Romantic expressivity.
The Proximity to Hegel: Against “Flat” Liberalism
Taylor is an expert on Hegel – his book Hegel (1975) was one of the important rehabilitations against Anglo-American neglect. In Sources of the Self, Hegel appears as a thinker who saw something important: that the modern individual is not atomistic but constituted through community, history, culture.
Liberal individualism – from Locke to Rawls – conceives the individual as given prior to community. First there are individuals with their rights and interests, then they join together to form society. Taylor says: this is anthropologically wrong. The individual arises only within community, through language, upbringing, recognition. Hegel had understood this.
The Critique of Postmodernism: No Orientation Without Strong Evaluations
Taylor’s argument against postmodernism differs from Habermas’. Habermas criticizes the performative contradiction. Taylor criticizes the ethical consequence: without “strong evaluations,” human life is impossible.
“Strong evaluations” are convictions about what constitutes a good life, about what really matters, about what transcends mere preference. Postmodernism, Taylor argues, undermines these evaluations. If everything is relative, if all vocabularies are contingent, then there is no longer any basis for commitment, for criticism, for orientation.
Taylor shows: even the postmoderns have strong evaluations – they value “difference” over “identity,” “plurality” over “unity.” But they do not admit this to themselves. They live off evaluations that they deny in theory.
Recovering the Sources
Taylor’s project is one of recovery. Modernity has forgotten its own sources – the moral and spiritual intuitions underlying it. Naturalism claims we are merely matter. Utilitarianism claims we merely want to maximize utility. Both miss what human life actually is.
The sources are manifold: the ancient idea of the good, the Christian idea of love of neighbor, the Romantic idea of authenticity, the Enlightenment idea of dignity. They stand in tension with one another, but they are not arbitrary. They are what we live by.
For Taylor, Hegel is a thinker who wanted to preserve these sources – against the reductionisms of his time. But Hegel also wanted to reconcile them – in a synthesis that Taylor regards as overreaching. The sources remain in tension. The task is not reconciliation but articulation: understanding what we live by.