I'm having trouble parsing Taylor's language when discussing the self. I understand she does not argee with Hume's view of self, but past that I'm blind. Taylor states at the beginning that she must be explain "self" and then instead, it seems, splices it into the explicit and implicit as well as the "consciousness-of-experiences-had-by-oneself" and "consciousness-of-oneself-as-the-owner-of-these-experiences".
I just am having trouble seeing where she goes, and what conclusions she makes. Some statements like, "agents whose basic point of view is wholly that of explicit self-consciousness will locate all their experiences within that framework." lose me. Could someone explain, in laymens terms, what Taylor is arguing the self is, or rather is not.
And secondly, could it be linked to what she believes the consciousness is and the role it plays. The part on page 55 in which Taylor discusses the "experience-material which the agent has ignored", makes me wonder how the role of intention will change.
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As I understand it, Taylor says there are two different orientations of the self which an agent may possess: the explicit or the implicit. A person’s self-conscious is explicit if he concentrates primarily on himself and his own place in the world, or, in other words, if he is the “subject” of his own worldview. The alternative to this is that he gives no specific thought to his own position; rather he sees the external world as the primary party and himself as an object (not the subject) within it—this is the implicit worldview. In my opinion, Taylor does not do a very good job elaborating on this latter scenario. She does propose that most agents employ a combination of these two extremes, not just one of them exclusively.
For Taylor, this dichotomy naturally leads to a discussion of desires and motivations. An explicit agent, she says, usually has “I-centered” desires. These usually take the following form: “I want (X) so that I may (Y).” For example, “I want food so that I will no longer be hungry.” I-centered desires are not necessarily selfish, though—Taylor says they can be altruistic. If a desire does not depend on an “I-desire,” Taylor calls that a “basic non-I desire.” Such desires can only be had only by wholly implicit agents, but Taylor fails to give any convincing examples of either “non-I desires” or truly implicit world-views. Here is another way of saying it: I-desires are those which can be expressed without any awareness or concern for the conscious state of others; non-I desires are contingent on the conscious state of others.
Hopefully that helps. As a caveat, I also found the writing a little tedious and unclear at times. I plan to bring up in class today what I see as some flaws in this theory.
I agree that Taylor uses a lot of big words and convoluted explanations to express her opinion but I think her idea is self is really simple. The self is a form of a personal idea of their being in the world. As she explains on page 56, the self involves all the experiences a person has in this world to combine and form a human perception. Each self is different and that is where the sins and vices can grab a hold of them. But there is also a view in which a self is simple a smaller part of a bigger world and like what the post above me has said, every person’s “self” is a combination of the two. Why Taylor would place this chapter after the section on sloth is beyond me since self is a key concept in understanding the vice of sloth. Two things which Taylor has made a mistake in this book is wordiness and organization. She convolutes chapters with arguments not associated with the vice itself and instead talks about something else. Like misers in the chapter before, self is a concept she should have established early on and the wordiness of her descriptions is making her idea of the “self” and “self consciousness” harder to understand, as with her conceptions of “self knowledge” and “self deception.” She tries to keep her ideas in the realm of the subjective but what is knowledge compared to deception clearly overlaps into her notion of the two, which is probably why the chapter is so confusing to me as well.
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