warren g.

frisina

VALUE AND THE SELF:

A PRAGMATIC-PROCESS-CONFUCIAN RESPONSE
TO CHARLES TAYLOR’S SOURCES OF THE SELF

Introduction

Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self is a powerful account of the way

classical, modernist, and post-modernist assumptions about the self
have led us into a philosophical and spiritual dead end. Specifically, he
claims that the gradual development of an “interiorized” sense of self
made it all but impossible to understand the objective reality of value
and led us into destructive forms of self-alienation. In this paper I re-
view and defend Taylor’s critique, though I go on to argue that it does
not contain the resources we need to meet his objectives. In order to
affirm the reality of value and overcome the negative consequences as-
sociated with an interiorized sense of self, we must look beyond the
sources that Taylor describes and criticizes. My recommendation is that
we turn to pragmatic, process, and Neo-Confucian discussions of self-
hood. These three traditions draw upon alternative metaphysical as-
sumptions that render plausible the claims that value is real and that the
self is directly related to the world and other selves.
By suggesting that we should turn to pragmatists, process thinkers,
and Confucians, I am building upon Robert C. Neville’s recent argu-
ment in The High Road Around Modernism that these traditions cannot
be charged with the sins of modernism.1 In effect they avoid the pitfalls
that led modern thinkers into the situation that Taylor bemoans. Along
these lines it is interesting to note that Taylor’s comprehensive study of
the history and development of the contemporary understanding of the
self never mentions the American pragmatic and process traditions.
While some Americanists might complain that Taylor’s history looks
myopically toward Europe and away from American contributions to
philosophic discourse about the self, I think Taylor’s omission makes
perfect sense—both pragmatic and process thinkers have been com-
plaining about modernist descriptions of the self for almost 100 years!
Thus, as I read them, Whitehead and Dewey (to select my two favorite
examples) should be seen as useful allies in Taylor’s project. 2

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 27:1 (March 2000) 117–125

© 2000 Journal of Chinese Philosophy
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Of course, the notion that value could be perceived as unreal or

purely subjective is utterly foreign to most Chinese thinkers. This is
especially true of Confucians who uphold the traditional Mencian posi-
tion that every human is born with an innate awareness of and tendency
toward the good. Moreover, like pragmatists and process thinkers, Con-
fucians draw upon a broad set of metaphysical arguments that create a
context within which it makes sense to claim that human values are
interwoven with the values that are ingredient in the whole of things.
While such talk may sound to modern ears like a form of wishful think-
ing, Taylor’s critique of Western philosophy effectively demonstrates
(by explaining all of its failures) why we ought to be looking to tradi-
tions like the Chinese where the fact/value and subject/object dichoto-
mies have not played the destructive role that Taylor brings to light.

The Reality of Value

Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self has at least two objectives. On the
one hand, it traces the historical sources of the modern understanding
of selfhood. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, it aims
to contribute to the reconstruction of our understanding of selfhood.
Specifically, it promotes the view that our description of the self must be
revised to take seriously the claim that value has an objective reality and
that our moral sensibilities play a central role in determining what it
means to be a self.
Though most readers are likely drawn to Sources of the Self by the
historical promise implied in its title, Taylor signals the importance of
his constructive objectives by prefacing his historical analysis with a one
hundred page defense (Part One) of the claim that to be adequate any
description of the self must acknowledge the extent to which human
identity is deeply intertwined with our understanding of the good.
Rather than appealing to historical sources to defend this claim, Taylor
develops a phenomenological argument that lifts up the extent to which
human experience is inevitably colored by our capacity (he might even
say need) to engage in qualitative judgments. “My identity is defined by
the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or hori-
zon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good,
or valuable, or what ought to be done.”3 Viewed from this perspective,
appetition is at the heart of what we mean by life, and the desire to be
rightly related to what we take to be good is among those cravings at the
core of human life.4
According to Taylor, our moral/aesthetic values are complicated con-
structs that combine broad cultural inheritances with dense mixtures of
 charles taylor’s SOURCES OF THE SELF 119

abstract reasoning and the immediacies of concrete experience. Thus, in

defining the self, Taylor rejects the path of those who oversimplify the
self in an effort to identify it with a limited set of purely cognitive func-
tions. Instead, his description relies on narrative and metaphors like the
“quest for the good” in order to preserve the nuances, ambiguities, and
complexities of selfhood. Taylor also contrasts his approach with the
tendency among some modern thinkers to distill the moral self through
a few abstract principles like the categorical imperative (Kant) or uni-
versal justice (Habermas). As Taylor sees it, the tendency to limit the
range of moral reflection in this way parallels the rise of natural science
that eliminated the language of final causes, dismissed qualitative dis-
tinctions, and objectified all things, including the self. Followed to its
natural conclusion, he claims science has rendered us “inarticulate”
about the basis for our moral judgments.5 There is literally nowhere to
stand where we could justify the values we use to determine who we are
and why we respond to the world in the way that we do. This has led us
to speak as if we could identify a self in abstraction from such values.
For Taylor, the very idea of such a self is an illusion. He argues that we
should not be surprised or dismayed to learn that natural science fails to
discern anything like the qualitative distinctions that animate human life.
After all, science is a form of inquiry whose objective has been to
describe things from a perspective freed of anthropocentric conceptions.
Taylor’s defense of the language of values should not be confused
with seventeenth century obscurantists who fought feverishly against
the natural sciences in an effort to preserve a theological basis for
human dignity. He gives natural science free rein to construct whatever
languages seem appropriate to its pursuits. What he objects to, however,
is our tendency to treat scientific languages as if they were appropriate
for describing all dimensions of human life. This is possible, he claims,
only if we ignore or deny aspects of life which define it as human. Most
importantly, Taylor argues that those who promote these scientistic
reductions of the human can do so only while operating within the con-
text of the very values they claim to unmask as epiphenomenal. In short,
there is no way to climb out of the framework of human reflection, a
framework that is always partly structured by valuative thoughts, feel-
ings, and goals. Scientists who claim to have more accurately described
the world without the qualitative dimension are, he says, “changing the
subject” and describing an imagined world, one where human experi-
ence simply does not exist.
In light of all this, it is possible to read Part One of Sources of the Self
as raising the following pointed question: Why do we continue to allow
ourselves to take seriously modern descriptions of the self that seem to
render incomprehensible the kinds of activities that form the substance
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of human experience? The long description of how this situation came

about—how we got ourselves into this mess—is contained in 400 pages
of historical analysis in which Taylor traces the complicated history of
the West’s description of the self. The short answer, however, is that we
have (for a variety of reasons) allowed a particularly powerful form of
human discourse (natural science) to extend its range beyond the tasks
it was designed for. “Of course, the terms of our best account [of human
life] will never figure in a physical theory of the universe. But that just
means that our human reality cannot be understood in the terms appro-
priate for this physics. . . . Our value terms purport to give us insight into
what it is to live in the universe as a human being, and this is a quite dif-
ferent matter from that which physical science claims to reveal and
explain.”6 Viewed from this perspective, Taylor’s 400 pages of history lift
up what has gone into the construction of the modern understanding of
selfhood in order to point toward the possibility of a newly reconstructed
discourse about the self, one that affirms the objective reality of qualities
and values.
Though Sources of the Self points toward a reconstructed discourse
about the self, it remains for the most part a historical text. Taylor does
not actually explain how to reconstruct our language about selfhood in a
way that avoids the reductionistic elimination of value. True, he does
make a few suggestions that point in the direction he believes new
approaches to the self ought to follow. But his suggestions are at best
starting points for further reflections rather than true reconstruction.
For example, early on he coins the term “hypergoods” to refer to the
background values which set the stage for all of our moral and aesthetic
judgments. Though typically hidden behind a veil of inarticulacy woven
by the modern understanding of selfhood, hypergoods are “goods which
not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the
standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about.” 7
Thus, hypergoods are components of the moral/aesthetic frameworks
that we inherit and modify. They serve to orient us to ourselves and the
world around us. Absent of hypergoods, it is hard to see what we might
mean by human identity.
In light of Taylor’s quest to restore language about values and quali-
ties, as well as his constructive description of hypergoods, it is interest-
ing to note that both Whitehead and Dewey built their entire philo-
sophic projects around variations on the assertion that to make sense of
ourselves and the way we relate to the world value must be given onto-
logical status. For Whitehead it is a truism that all organisms are ori-
ented toward maximizing the intensity of experience, a trait he defines
in aesthetic/moral terms. Similarly, Dewey points to a line of continuity
that stretches from the amoebae’s quest for satisfactory physical trans-
 charles taylor’s SOURCES OF THE SELF 121

actions to the exquisitely complicated satisfactions that culminate in

higher order human experiences. Value and valuing is thus seen as an
essential aspect of all organic activity.
Now, some might complain that by describing human valuing as a
subset of broader organic tendencies, Whitehead and Dewey effectively
reduce human experience to a more complicated version of mere ani-
malistic responsiveness. The fear behind such an accusation is that both
thinkers are engaging in the kind of scientistic reductionism that Taylor
roundly criticizes. But such a claim is wrong for two reasons. First, nei-
ther Whitehead nor Dewey are willing to allow their understanding of
organic activity to be ruled by mechanistic metaphors. Organic transac-
tions are simply not reducible to mechanical transactions. Second, both
Dewey and Whitehead present extensive arguments that explain why
efforts to protect the integrity of human ends by elevating and separat-
ing them from ends-in-nature will always lead to confusion. But for this
point, we don’t have to rely on Dewey and Whitehead since Taylor’s
own historical analysis shows that the isolation of human values from
nature renders unclear how, or even whether, we are connected to the
natural world.
Thus, in affirming the ontological status of value both Whitehead and
Dewey anticipate key themes in Taylor’s analysis even as they reaffirm a
commitment to nonscientistic forms of scientific discourse. In fact, one
advantage both have over Taylor is their conviction that it is possible to
be a nonreductionistic naturalist. There are times in the early chapters
of Taylor’s book where he simply equates naturalism with reductionism.
Dewey and Whitehead, however, are scientifically oriented naturalists
who reject reductionism. As I read them they avoid reductionism by
undertaking metaphysical and cosmological arguments that award onto-
logical status to value. As a result, human valuing is not considered a
mere subjective imposition on a purely objective world. Human values
are emergent from and embedded in a natural world that is already
value-laden. Taylor, who steers clear of such metaphysical talk in
Sources of the Self, is on shaky ground when he calls for a reconstructed
discourse about the self without explaining the ontological status of
value. Absent such metaphysical arguments, all Taylor can do is rely
upon the phenomenological argument that we can’t imagine ourselves
operating in the world without value. As Dewey and Whitehead make
clear, however, a redescription of the self that takes seriously the role of
value entails a complete redescription of everything, including matter,
knowledge, and action. From their point of view, every thing is an
instance of value. Moreover, knowledge is not the apprehension of
abstract characteristics by a disembodied mind, but rather the process
whereby an organism actively values and responds to the things around
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it. And this, of course, means that knowledge is always a form of action,
a way of being in relation to things rather than a static state of mind.
For some, the above description of the pragmatic and process tradi-
tions will seem either confusing or just plain wrong-headed. After all,
I’ve just claimed that in order to engage in the task Taylor puts before
us—to redescribe the self in a way that takes seriously the objective
reality of value—we must engage in a systematic reconstruction that
entails ontology, value theory, epistemology and action theory. It is nat-
ural to be skeptical about a call for such a fundamental undertaking.
Whitehead, of course, called for just such a project in books like Science
and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Modes of Thought. But
he’s been largely ignored for the past 30 years or so. Dewey also talked
about reconstructing philosophy in a radical way, but there are now doz-
ens of scholars who have managed to siphon a great deal of wisdom
from Dewey without buying into the entire metaphysical project that is
implicit in later books like Reconstruction in Philosophy, Experience
and Nature, and Art as Experience. In light of recent history then, it is
fair to ask what leads me to take seriously the more radical route? The
short answer is Chinese Confucianism. My encounter with Chinese
thinkers, especially the sixteenth century Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-
ming, has shaped my approach to Whitehead and Dewey. It was Wang’s
slogan “chih hsing ho-i” (the unity of knowledge and action)—a slogan
that I believe he meant us to take literally8—that led me to see two things
about pragmatism and process thought that I simply would not have
realized on my own. First, the very idea that knowledge and action are
really one thing is implicit in Whitehead, and explicit in Dewey, and yet
almost no one remarks on this. From the beginning, both Whitehead
and Dewey have been calling on us to redefine knowledge in a way that
is far more fundamental than we typically assume. For both, knowledge
is always a kind of activity.9 Wang’s slogan helped me to see this. Second,
when I realized that Wang’s slogan emerged from his attempt to under-
stand the epistemological implications of an organismic ontology—
an ontology that resonates in many ways with pragmatism and process
philosophy—I knew it would be wrong to follow scholars who claim we
can simply jettison Dewey’s metaphysics while clinging to his theory of
knowledge (e.g., Richard Rorty). Both Dewey and Whitehead could say
what they did about knowledge precisely because they had a metaphysi-
cal vision within which it made sense.
All of this brings me back to Taylor. If Taylor is right, as I think he is,
in calling for a new understanding of selfhood—one that treats value as
an objective reality, and an essential ingredient in every self—then he
needs to look beyond those traditions whose ontologies, value theories,
epistemologies, and action theories caused the problem. The Western
 charles taylor’s SOURCES OF THE SELF 123

tradition that he chronicles simply does not have the metaphysical

resources to handle the direction he wants us to take.
Interestingly, there is a similarity between the issues confronting Tay-
lor and Wang. Taylor looks out over the history of Western reflection on
the self and finds himself asking why we have been led into such a spiri-
tual desert. He asks: How did it happen that we find ourselves so alien-
ated from ourselves and unable to affirm the reality of those values that
clearly give shape and substance to our daily lives? Wang Yang-ming
found himself in an analogous situation in the sixteenth century. Wang
was struggling to understand why so many of the good Confucian schol-
ars that he knew were led into academic dead ends, away from true spir-
itual development. Wang’s answer was that they had made a fundamen-
tal epistemological mistake at the beginning of their studies. By
assuming they could study questions first and then put their knowledge
into action, they missed the essential point that they should have begun
their quest for sagehood by renovating themselves. This involved not
simply asking the right questions, but forming the resolve to begin a
quest that would alter their behavior. The quest for sagehood could not
begin with abstract knowledge because it required a new existential
beginning.10 Scholars made the mistake of trying to start with purely
cognitive learning because, as Wang pointed out, they were mistaken
about the very structure of knowledge. Knowledge, according to Wang,
is not an abstract representation of reality; it is rather a way of being in
relation to things. This position is most evident in Wang’s Inquiry on the
Great Learning, where he spells out his claim that the investigation of
things (ko wu) is actually a renovation of oneself in an effort to attain
the sincerity of will that enables us to deal with the world well. 11
In short, Wang’s diagnosis was that his colleagues were suffering from
a misplaced dualism. They pursued their studies as if there were two
orders: a knowing order, where one garnered a cognitive awareness of
the world’s essential characteristics, and a physical order where that
knowledge was put to use. In rejecting this epistemological dualism
Wang was able to appeal directly to a traditional Confucian ontology
which does not admit dualisms in any form. According to Wang, Chi-
nese metaphysical assumptions simply do not allow the bifurcation
between knowledge and action, heart and mind that was implicit in six-
teenth century scholarly practice. To make his case all Wang had to do
was appeal to metaphysical assumptions that he knew he shared with his
colleagues.
Taylor finds himself in a much more awkward position. He has
identified a host of problems in the way the West has come to under-
stand selfhood—in this article I’ve focused on his complaint that the
contemporary descriptions of the self eliminate any sense that value can
124 warren g. frisina

be objectively real—but the traditions he describes offer few conceptual

resources for constructing an alternative vision. By contrast, Wang,
Dewey, and Whitehead could each appeal to metaphysical visions which
awarded ontological status to value, and were therefore in a position to
posit an enlarged theory of experience, one that included the direct
experience of objective value. Dewey called such experience primary
experience, Whitehead called it causal efficacy, and Wang called it liang
chih (innate knowledge). An explanation of why I think primary experi-
ence, causal efficacy, and liang chih all mark out similar epistemological
territory is beyond the limits of this article.12 Suffice it to say that I see in
all three, resources that could contribute to Taylor’s stated goal of
reconstructing our understanding of the self in a way that takes seri-
ously the role that value plays in human life.
Toward the end of Taylor’s argument he presents a critique of
Locke’s “fully interiorized, purely autonomous extensionless self.” By
this point in Sources of the Self, readers have learned why a description
of a fully disengaged self must be wrong, and how it is that Locke
arrived at it. The point of this brief article is that those who find Taylor’s
complaints persuasive should look to Confucianism, pragmatism, and
process philosophy where the self is always understood as a nexus of
fully embodied relationships within a continuous transactional medium.
Instead of Lockian disengagement, these thinkers offer an image of the
self as always fully engaged, constantly negotiating its way (for better
and worse) through an indeterminate number of qualitative relation-
ships. Strip away the relations, and like an onion, there is nothing left to
a process, pragmatist, or Confucian self.
I can’t tell from reading Sources of the Self how Taylor would respond
to my overture. I do know, however, that when you do not find what you
are looking for in your own neighborhood, it sometimes pays to explore
more foreign territory. My hope is that those who find Taylor’s argu-
ments persuasive might be willing to take a look at what the pragma-
tists, process thinkers, and Confucians have to offer.13

HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY
Hempstead, New York

Endnotes
1. The phrase, “high road around modernism” is taken from Robert C. Neville’s book by
that title. In it he argues that the American process and pragmatic traditions should not
be subjected to the same critiques post-modernists apply to modernist thinkers, since
thinkers like Whitehead and Dewey took an alternative, nonmodernist path in develop-
ing their positions. The High Road Around Modernism (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 1992).
2. In a recent article, John Teehan has pointed to Taylor’s failure to cite Dewey or any of the
 charles taylor’s SOURCES OF THE SELF 125

other classical American pragmatists in Sources of the Self. He goes on to argue that Tay-
lor’s “anti-naturalistic” tendencies belie a natural affinity between Taylor’s moral philoso-
phy and Dewey’s moral philosophy. See John Teehan, “In Defense of Naturalism,” The
Journal of Speculative Philosophy 10, no. 2 (1996) pp. 79–91. Though Taylor has engaged
in converstations with contemporary American philosophers such as Richard Rorty and
others, he typically eschews any connection between his thinking and what he takes to be
the pragmatic position. I would suggest, however, that not all pragmatists think alike
these days. While he may be right in seeing little affinity between himself and someone
like Rorty, both Teehan and I are pointing to a version of Deweyan pragmatism which is
much closer to Taylor’s position than he realizes. It is unfortunate that few have explored
the connections between Taylor’s work and the more metaphysical versions of pragma-
tists like Dewey, Mead, James and Pierce. This paper, along with Teehan’s, represent first
attempts to establish what I believe could be a very fruitful conversation.
3. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 27.
4. Ibid., p. 44.
5. Ibid., pp. 53–91.
6. Ibid., p. 59.
7. Ibid., p. 63.
8. Warren G. Frisina, “Are Knowledge and Action Really One Thing?” Philosophy East and
West 39, no. 4 (October 1989): 419–447.
9. Warren G. Frisina, “Knowledge as Active, Aesthetic, and Hypothetical: An Examination
of the Relationship between Dewey’s Metaphysics and Epistemology,” Philosophy Today
(fall 1989): 245–263; and “Knowledge as Active, Aesthetic and Hypothetical: An Exami-
nation of Whitehead’s Theory of Knowledge,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 5,
no. 1 (1991): 42–64.
10. Tu Wei-ming, Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming’s Youth (1472–1509)
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 169.
11. Wang Yang-ming, Instructions for Practical Living, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1963), p. 279.
12. I explore this topic in a forthcoming volume titled The Unity of Knowledge and Action:
Toward a Nonrepresentationalist Theory of Knowledge.
13. This paper was first presented at the meeting of the Philosophy of Religion Section of the
American Academy of Religion during the 1998 Annual Meeting in Orlando. I am grate-
ful to those who heard and discussed the paper, and especially acknowledge the helpful
commentary of Professor Philip Clayton.