Another Best Question for Identity

Response paper to Religion and Identity

Charles Taylor: The Self in Moral Space

Taylor thesis about the process of identity is as the dialectical process between us and our environment. He differs between condition and orientation (p.34). Those two are interwoven and make our identity based on our choice to choose what we feel the best for us. It means that there are no natural conditions that constitute us without our active action for those. In this sense, it seems to me that that Taylor tries to put the agency as the axis of life, which gives less for the role of structure such as society since we have and get our identity by choosing from our “conversation” with the situation outside. Although there is a dialectical process, we can see that the choice is coming from someone, rather than the influence from conditions outside.

In his paper, Taylor questions are more started with “Who.” I do not think that this question word is the best representation to question the identity. We have many other question such as When, Where, Why and What. The question word of “Who” seems to me that there is no stable or even no identity we have previously. It is very debatable then since we can ask when and where we should ask the question of “Who” should start. We do not have particular place and time to start the question of “Who” itself. It seems to me that Taylor assumes our identity as always in chaotic conditions, when there is no stable identity so that we should keep asking “Who am I?” in our whole life.

If this is true, then we could see that actually Taylor’s argument that Identity is “defined by the way things have significance for me” (p.34) is still blurring. Someone should take this as the main point to criticize Taylor when exactly there is no stable identity we have, so how we can choose those “significance things” without any correlation with our self building, which can be referred as our previous identity. Here is the contradiction I found from Taylor thesis. When we have no identity before, how then we could choose our action under the influence from ourselves and our environments.

I would argue that there is another appropriate question for our identity besides “Who”, which I think is more important than the question of Who as the first question of the identity. In this sense, I believe that those alternative questions are more appropriate for the assumption behind Taylor’s argument that we have a dialectical process for our identity.