Charles Taylor on the Three Consequences of Representational Epistemology

[p. 428] Husserl asks in the first meditation whether the “Trostlosigkeit” [“despair”; “hopelessness”] of our present philosophical predicament doesn’t spring from our having abandoned Descartes’s original “spirit of radical philosophical self-responsibility.” And he continues:

Should the supposedly exaggerated demand for a finally possible [and] disengaged philosophy of presuppositionlessness [or impartiality] not, on the contrary, belong rather to a philosophy that in the deepest sense shapes itself in real autonomy out of finally self-produced evidences and, so, is thereby absolutely self-responsible? (Cartesianische Meditationen (The Hague, 1950), 47)

This ideal of “self-responsibility” is foundational to modern culture. It emerges not only in our picture of the growth of modern science as the fruit of the heroism of the great scientist […] Copernicus, Galileo (he wobbled a bit before the Holy Office, but who can blame him?), Darwin, Freud. It is also closely linked to the modern ideal of freedom as self-autonomy, as the passage from Husserl implies. To be free in our modern sense is to be self-responsible, to rely on one’s own judgment, to find one’s purpose in oneself.

And so the epistemological tradition is also intricated in a certain notion of freedom, and the dignity attaching to us in virtue of this [autonomy]. The theory of knowledge partly draws its strength from this connection. But also reciprocally, the ideal of freedom has drawn strength from its sensed connection with the construal of knowledge seemingly favored by modern science. From this point of view it has been fateful that this notion of freedom has been interpreted as involving certain key theses about the nature of the human agent; we might call them anthropological beliefs. [... T]he three connected notions that I would like to mention here are in fact historically closely connected with the epistemological construal.

The first is the picture of the subject as ideally disengaged, that is, as free and rational to the extent that he has fully distinguished himself from his natural and social worlds, so that his identity is no longer to be defined in terms of what lies outside him in these worlds. The second, which flows from this, is a punctual view of the self, ideally ready qua free and rational to treat these worlds—and even some of the features of his own character—instrumentally, as subject to change and reordering in order the better to secure the welfare of himself and other like subjects. The third is the social consequence of the first two: an atomistic construal of society as constituted by, or ultimately to be explained in terms of, individual purposes.

The first notion emerges originally in classical dualism, where the subject withdraws even from his own body, which he is able to look on as an object [.... p. 429] The second originates in the ideals of the government and reform of the self that have such an important place in the seventeenth century [... and] it continues today in the tremendous force that instrumental reason and engineering models have in our social policy, medicine, psychiatry, politics, and so on. The third first takes shape in seventeenth-century social contract theories [but continues] in many of the assumptions of contemporary liberalism and mainstream social science. [...]

To challenge these is sooner or later to run up against the force of this tradition, which stands with them in a complex relation of mutual support. [...]

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Source: Charles Taylor, "Overcoming Epistemology," in After Philosophy: End or Transformation, ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Forrest E. Baird and Walter Kaufmann (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 428-429.