The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

Credit: Derek Lyons
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Taylor continues the discussion of identity and moral space by asking, "Why this link between identity and orientation?" (See my previous post on Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self for a little background to this question.) The answer arrives in two parts.

One part of the answer is historical in nature. Developments in our self-understanding precondition us to stating the issue in terms of identity. Living in a post-Romantic era, our understanding of individual differences--and the importance we give to expression in each person's discovery of his or her moral horizon--that is, questions of moral orientation cannot be solved in universal terms. "For someone in Luther's age [for example], the issue of the basic moral frame orienting one's action could only be put in universal terms"(28). Talk of "identity" in the modern sense would have been incomprehensible to Luther. When Luther entered into a time of crises, he was overwhelmed by a sense of condemnation and irremediable exile, not a sense of meaningless, lack of purpose, or emptiness. For the modern person, we tend to reject the notion that questions of moral orientation are solvable in simple universal terms.

For most people, though, we do understand fundamental moral questions through universal terms: right to life, dignity, and so on. The difference between modern people and the people of past eras is that we don't see all such questions as axiomatically framed in a universal nature. This means that our identities are complex and multi-tiered. We are framed by what we see as universal commitment (e.g., Catholic, anarchist) and also by what we understand as particular identifications (e.g., British, Chinese).

The second part of the answer is not historical but addresses the "who" of the question "Who am I?" Why do we think of moral orientation in terms of "who"? "Who is speaking?" we may ask on the phone. "Who is that?" or "Who do you think you are?" The answer comes in a form of a name: "This is John Doe." Or, perhaps in a description of a social role: "It's the repair man." Taylor States: ""To be someone who qualifies as a potential object of this question is to be such an interlocutor among others, someone with one's own standpoint or one's own role, who can speak for him/herself" (29). The ability to answer for oneself is to know where one stands, what one wants to answer. We naturally talk of our orientation in terms of who we are. Once attained, this orientation defines where one answers from, hence identity. To lose orientation is to not know who one is.

"We take as basic that the human agent exists in a space of questions. And these are the questions to which our framework-definitions are answers, providing the horizon within which we know where we stand, and what meanings things have for us" (29)