ABSTRACT
I want to begin with Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, in which he famously argues that, ‘We are selves only in that certain issues matter for us’. My self, alongside similar selves, takes shape in relation to things defined as important, things accepted if not defined as important by me as an individual: ‘these things have significance for me, and the issue of my identity is worked out, only through a language of interpretation which I have come to accept as a valid articulation of these issues.’ Languages of interpretation do not take shape once there are selves existing to shape them, but themselves frame the taking shape of selves: ‘To ask what a person is, in abstraction from his or her self-interpretations, is to ask a fundamentally misguided question, one to which there couldn’t in principle be answer.’ Indeed, it might seem to be a strictly impossible question. Be that as it may, Taylor continues to make the central point that, ‘we are selves only insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good’.1
