Back to the Individual: on the educational importance of commitment

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is widely known in the field of ‘pure’ Philosophy as well as within the Social Sciences. His Explanation of Behaviour (1964), Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1985) and particularly The Sources of the S e F The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), by many regarded as essential for understanding today’s debates, are widely studied also within the educational field. The two recent publications that are dealt with here have to be understood in the light of earlier writings. In earlier publications he had argued that to be a full human agent, ‘. . . to be a person or self in the ordinary meaning, is to exist in a space defined by distinctions of worth. A self is a being for whom certain questions of category value have arisen, and received at least partial answers. Perhaps they have been given authoritatively by the culture more than they have been elaborated in the deliberation of the person concerned, but they are his in the sense that they are incorporated into his selfunderstanding, in some degree and fashion’ (Taylor, 1985, p. 3) . The Ethics of Authenticity on the other hand deals with what is indicated by many as the heart of the malaise of modernity: the concept of ‘authenticity’ or ‘self-realisation’. Though Taylor recognises the dangers that go with this pursuit (such as rendering ineffective the whole tradition of common values and social commitment), he tries to show how, rightly conceived, ‘being authentic’ is the antidote against the loss of meaning and of shared values, because, so he claims, human beings can simply not exist with such losses. At the level of education this means that children can be initiated into particular values and that many of the postmodernists’ conclusions have to be repudiated. After raising some doubts about Taylor’s recent claims concerning the concept of a human being, it is argued here that though he cannot convince those who do not already share his basic idea of a person, he indicates nevertheless something extremely