Autor: Murray, John

Buch: Published and Unpublished Works by John Courtney Murray, S.J.

Titel: hier Murray

Stichwort: Charles Taylor; Werden des Selbst - 3 Schritte

Kurzinhalt: Taylor's various tracings of the genesis of the modern image of the self, have three key steps

Textausschnitt: 2b Charles Taylor's communitarian attempt to develop an 'ethics of authenticity' also criticizes the early modern notion of (what Michael Sandel has called) "the unencumbered self." This is the "disengaged rationality" proper to Hobbesian, Cartesian, and Lockean individualism.1 Taylor's various tracings of the genesis of the modern image of the self, have three key steps:2

(a) The person or self gets its bearings in a community whose already understood and agreed on standards and ends are derived from an objective or ontological order-one becomes oneself by clarifying these demands of this objective order and living up to them.

3a
(b) The person or self (epitomized by St Augustine) still gets its bearings from an objective, ontological, cosmological, or social hierarchy, but does so through interiority, introspection, or what Taylor calls "reflexivity."

(c) Modern individualism "interiorizes personhood,"--the standards are not located in an objective cosmological or social hierarchy, but are anchored in "radical reflexivity," in the subject's own capacities, feelings, inclinations, thoughts, decisions, and commitments.

3b For Taylor the unique "sentiment of one's own existence" thematized by Rousseau and the Scottish philosophers offers a way out of the confines of the disengaged self, by getting in touch with our ownmost feelings, our own desires, sentiments, and affinities, and by expressing what we are. "In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly its own."1 This procedure contrasts with a calculated choosing among alternative desires by the disengaged self, because for Taylor "we become free human agents, capable of undertanding themselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression." And since languages are necessarily acquired socially, "we define [our identity] always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the identities our significant others want to recognize in us."2 Although there is no longer any "publicly accessible cosmic order of meaning," Taylor is convinced that "in order to understand ourselves we have to see ourselves as part of a larger order ... to understand ourselves expressively requires that we acknowledge that."3 Taylor speaks in Nietzschean terms of an "indispensable horizon out of which we reflect and evaluate as persons,"4 because "things take on importance against a background of intelligibility."5 But Taylor parts ways with Nietzsche when he insists that it would be a pernicious subjectivism to suppose that either feeling alone determines significance or that choice confers worth, for on these grounds alone difference becomes insignificant: