Abstract

The theory presented by Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self, his tome on modem identity, constitutes what I consider to be an original and necessary contribution to the field of moral philosophy. I contend that Taylorian theory usurps the dominant paradigm of post-Enlightenment, modem "naturalist" philosophy wherein meaning is limited to subjectivity. In Taylorian theory moral agency depends upon making contact with the plurality of "moral sources" that populate reality, influencing the development of substantive moral identities through "engaged" rational reflection and "articulation" of these "goods". My thesis argues that in going beyond the modern paradigm of "disengaged" reason and "radical subjectivity" Taylor enters the context of postmodern philosophy identified most strongly by the work of French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Taylor's theory shares core postmodern concerns for difference, pluralism and the experience of non-subjective reality. Further, I assert that Taylor presents a framework wherein the idea of a postmodern identity does not intuit a post- moral identity and that religious agents, those who orient their sense of the "good" towards a transcendent, completely other "moral source", are uniquely well equipped to illustrate what a postmodern moral identity can consist of, and finally that Taylor himself "articulates" just such a radical account.