Discourse on Charles Taylor and Saint Augustine

Though Charles Taylor never confesses to a particular ethical framework or moral source for the making of an (moral) identity, his particular style of writing and unarticulated beliefs seem barely apparent to me. I believe that he has a tremendous respect for the philosophical and theological writings of Augustine.  I will make an effort to bring them together for similarities in their understanding of the moral self and  moral sources. For Taylor, he believes that the framework of self-mastery through reason (one of many moral frameworks), has theistic variants in Jewish and Christian thought and the change has come about as the work of grace. For Augustine, everything that the moral being is possesses the gift of grace including the will. Augustine believes that virtues depend on right and rational choices. In Augustine’s description of the will, it had a central position in every ethical action, inclusive of the virtues of justice, prudence, self-control and courage.

However, the will must have a certain direction as distinctions of higher and lower in terms of altruism and selfishness has come to the fore. Augustine agrees with the Stoics of his time more than the Epicureans that happiness comes not from the pleasure of the body but from the pleasure of the mind. Virtue of the mind is a necessary condition for happiness, which is a gift of God and not an achievement of human achievement. As we strive for happiness in the afterlife, God has also made the world for our aesthetic pleasure in our accomplishments in science, music, art and literature. The two types of value that Augustine asserts are intrinsic and values that we assign for purposes of utility.  Humans have intrinsic value and the virtuous person would never regard it as merely the means to his own end. Christ’s command for us to love one another prohibits the value of utility to another person. We love people because they belong to God and not to us. Our value is never independent of God, as he is the creator of us, nature and all things. Virtue for Augustine is rightly ordered love, rooted in charity and the love of God; for virtue is not the product of natural aptitude, sound upbringing or individual human effort. In loving God, we naturally love ourselves and there is no need for a third commandment of love. Loving ourselves is as natural as breathing and likewise there is no commandment to breathe.

 As Taylor speaks about moral and spiritual intuitions as we articulate our moral being, he uses the term strong evaluations that describe discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse and higher and lower as they relate to issues of justice, dignity and respect for other people’s lives. This accountability of our intuition is often described as inarticulate, as Taylor understands the ethics of inarticulacy. Taylor prefers to think that our moral reactions are more than instincts, but also an assent to an affirmation of a given ontology of the human. Augustine says that the grace of God gives illumination to what is right and additional assistance when needed to improve the control and understanding of the will. Only grace can restore authentic freedom and that of the will.

 Augustine sees moral philosophy as an enquiry into the supreme good and how we can attain it; in this sense, he is a Platonist. One seeks happiness for one s own sake and not as an end to some other means. He was no different than other philosopher of his own period and it was not necessarily a distinctive Christian view. For him, it was also the art of living. Attaining material goods and wealth in this life to achieve happiness is not necessarily undesirable, but one must not love it. One must be aware of falling in love with objects unworthy of love. Happiness is finding the truth and knowledge and to do this. One must live as God lives and that our mind and reason should be subjected to God.  Faith is prior to our understanding of God, yet our understanding remains a matter of reasoning and philosophical inference Taylor would understand this as one of many moral frameworks, and that of Christianity. Jesus Christ, the incarnation of God, without whom, no human being could ever succeed in being happy and this happiness lies in immortality. As Taylor approaches the value and nature of goodness, he believes that modern moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than the nature of what it is good to be. Here, one finds a particular type of resonance between the two.

As Augustine was a follower of Plato through Plotnius, he understands the ideals of the eternal against the temporal and the immutable against the ever-changing. The platonic idea of the Good is foundational for Augustinian’s Goodness of God, His thoughts, His Word, His order, His Ideas, His eternal law and our participation in it. As we observe these spiritualities, we must then turn the attention of our desires and our will to God so that our will is absorbed into the Goodness of God. For Taylor, we participate in dialogue with others, the universe and God as we discover our moral lives. We narrate our lives as we travel upwardly to attain meta values and eventually the hyper-value and inwardly to discover our inner being and nature.

Turning and direction are very important for Plato and Augustine because the direction of the gaze is the decisive element. It is the gift of God’s love and not concupiscence that assists us to do this. This is a dialogical approach in our relationship with God that helps us to attain to this Goodness. Taylor would agree that we can only know ourselves and have a direction to this higher Good and by having consistent and narrative moments in our lives as we progress through life. He also posits an inner and an outer in his approach to understanding the nature of existence and understanding of the soul which he sees as the inner. The understanding of this basic difference between the outer and the inner is that the inner is that sense, our spiritual purpose for going from the lower to the higher which is the road to God. Plato differs from Augustine in that God is out there with the externals, but for Augustine, God is in us as an inner light guiding the way and to knowing God. God is found in the activity of “knowing itself”, as opposed to the objects known.

Turning towards our inner self and the light within us is described as reflexive, also meaning that we should take more care of the inner than the outer. Here we take the first- person standpoint. Even though Taylor engages more of the second-person, dialogical approach, in understanding the self and knowing God, Augustine and Taylor both agree that the “experiencing itself” has value more-so than the objects experienced. Awareness takes on a different meaning and value when the agent himself is aware that he is aware. To understand the presence of one’s self in the world is very important for Augustine and reflexivity brings us closer to God. It is important to note that this reflexivity that comes with turning inwards is a personal and immediate and founded in the first-person standpoint. Taylor has an interest in the modern identity. He believes that there is an array of understandings of what it is to be a human agent, including senses of awareness, freedom, and individuality; humans are fit objects of respect and have immunity. His understanding of the ethics of inarticulacy announces that we have many inarticulate understandings of the moral self.

The modern identity for Taylor has three major facets, “modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, and the connected notion that we are “selves”; second, the affirmation of ordinary life which develops from the early modern period; third, the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source”. He also conjectures three axes in moral thinking; our sense of respect for and obligations to others, our understandings of what makes a full life and the range of notions that deal with dignity. As these facets and axes in moral thinking form a framework, no framework is shared by everyone; and not having a framework is to fall into a life which is spiritually senseless. There is a relationship between self and morals in the modern identity and understanding of the self. This modern identity is richer in moral sources, but this richness is often made invisible by philosophical languages.

The natural susceptibility to feel sympathy for others is more than the consequence of upbringing and education as we have moral concerns for the respect of life, integrity, well being and flourishing of others. Moral reactions are also more than gut reactions or socio-biologically explained.  We are all universalists in our moral descriptions and moral reactions as we consider the ontological nature of human beings, i.e. something grounded in the nature of being as he notes that there is a great deal of motivated suppression for moral ontology by contemporaries for various reasons and especially from modern epistemology..