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Charles Taylor (1931–)

Taylor’s project is a genealogy of the modern self — how we came to experience ourselves as having inner depths, as oriented toward authenticity, and as defined through dialogue with others. Sources of the Self (1989) traces three axes of modern identity: inwardness (the sense that I have an interior life with its own depth and authority), the dialogical self (identity formed through shared language and recognition), and authenticity (the demand to be true to one’s own originality). The three are not a theory of the self but a history of how the modern West came to live selfhood this way — a genealogy, not an ontology. Taylor insists the moral sources have to be articulated if they are to have force: they are real, but they need language to work.

Life

Born in Montreal in 1931 into a bilingual family (English-speaking father, French-speaking mother). Educated at McGill University and then at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he studied with Isaiah Berlin and Elizabeth Anscombe. He spent most of his academic career at McGill and at All Souls College, Oxford, moving between the anglophone and francophone philosophical worlds — unusually at home in both analytic and Continental traditions. He ran for the Canadian federal parliament four times as a New Democratic Party candidate in the 1960s, losing each time to Pierre Trudeau. His political engagement — Québec nationalism, multiculturalism, secularism — runs through his philosophical work rather than sitting alongside it. He was awarded the Templeton Prize (2007) and the Kyoto Prize (2008).

Sources of the Self — the three axes

Sources of the Self (1989) is Taylor’s central work. It traces the history of modern identity through three dimensions, each constitutive of how the modern self experiences itself:

Inwardness. The idea that the self has an interior — not just beliefs and desires, but a depth that can be explored, expressed, or betrayed. Taylor traces this from Augustine (the turn inward as the road to God), through Descartes (the disengaged subject finding certainty within), through Montaigne (the essays as self-exploration), to the Romantics (inner nature as a source of moral authority). The modern sense that “I have an inner life” is not a universal human experience — it was made, and the making can be told.

The dialogical self. Identity is not monological — it is formed in dialogue, through the languages of shared understanding we are given by our communities. Taylor draws on Hegel’s recognition, Herder’s expressivism, and Mead’s social self. The claim is not that others influence the self (trivially true) but that the self is constituted through shared language: “We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.”

Authenticity. The demand to be true to one’s own originality — to find and express what is uniquely mine, rather than conforming to external models. Taylor traces this from Rousseau (the sentiment of existence, being in touch with oneself) through Herder (each person has their own measure) to the Romantic and post-Romantic culture of self-expression. Authenticity is a genuine moral ideal, not merely self-indulgence, but it can slide into narcissism when it loses the dialogical dimension — when “being true to myself” is cut loose from the shared frameworks that give it substance.

Language as constitutive expression

Running through Taylor’s work is a philosophy of language drawn from Herder, Humboldt, and the Romantic tradition, set against the dominant Lockean-empiricist account. Language is not a tool for encoding pre-linguistic thoughts — it is constitutive of the thoughts themselves. “New, strong, clear meanings arise for us in speech” that could not exist without it. Expression is not packaging; it is disclosure. This makes language a communal achievement (shared language precedes individual thought) and places the quality of expression at the heart of what it means to think and to be a self.

Taylor calls this the “HHH” tradition — Hamann, Herder, Humboldt — and contrasts it with the “HLC” tradition — Hobbes, Locke, Condillac — in which language is an instrument for designating independently existing ideas.

The communitarian critique

Taylor is one of the principal communitarian critics of liberal political philosophy, alongside Sandel, MacIntyre, and Michael Walzer. The critique targets the liberal conception of the self as “unencumbered” — a self that exists prior to its values and attachments, capable of stepping back from any commitment and choosing freely. Taylor argues this gets the relationship backwards: the self is constituted by its commitments, its community’s languages, its moral frameworks. You cannot step behind them and choose, because without them there is no “you” to do the choosing.

The practical consequence: politics cannot be merely procedural (neutral rules for individuals to pursue their own goods). It must engage with the substantive visions of the good that communities carry — otherwise it is not neutral but covertly committed to an atomistic conception of the self.

A Secular Age

A Secular Age (2007) asks not why people stopped believing in God but how we moved from a society in which belief in God was the default to one in which it is one option among others. The answer is not a subtraction story (science removed the grounds for belief) but a transformation: new frameworks of meaning — humanism, the immanent frame, the buffered self — emerged that made unbelief possible and then normal. Belief and unbelief now exist within a shared “immanent frame” in which the transcendent is neither given nor foreclosed.

The key concept is the “buffered self” — the modern self that experiences itself as bounded, disengaged from a porous world of spirits, signs, and cosmic forces. The pre-modern “porous self” was open to influences the buffered self has sealed off. Taylor does not argue for return to porosity; he describes how the buffering happened and what it costs.

Where Taylor stops

Taylor’s project is genealogical — it tells how the modern self came to be this way, not what the self is. The three axes (inwardness, dialogical self, authenticity) describe a historical achievement, not an ontological structure. Taylor argues the moral sources are real, but he traces their emergence rather than grounding them. The result is a rich account of how we got here that stops short of a metaphysics of selfhood.

The communitarian critique names the constitution of the self through shared language and moral frameworks, but Taylor does not develop a systematic account of how those frameworks interact, conflict, or change. MacIntyre’s tradition-based rationality takes one step further; Taylor’s own work stays closer to genealogy and cultural hermeneutics.

The philosophy of language — expression as constitutive, not instrumental — is perhaps Taylor’s deepest commitment. It connects inwardness (what I have to express), dialogue (the shared language I express through), and authenticity (the demand to express what is genuinely mine). Taylor draws the scope at the human language animal and means to — his late book is literally The Language Animal. The constitutive power of language is a claim about what makes human selfhood possible, not a general principle extended beyond it.

Key works

See also: MacIntyre · Berlin · Hegel · Gadamer