Sentimentality or Honesty? On Charles Taylor by Mark Oppenheimer
(via Mirror of Justice)

But Taylor is no Nietzschean, and he does not want to romanticize what we might call Extreme Catholicism. Not only is that premodern Catholicism unrecoverable, Taylor says; it had to expire in order for us to become a more charitable, humane species. Taylor argues that with the Protestant Reformation came an “affirmation of ordinary life” (the term is discussed at length in Sources of the Self) that refocused religious devotion on the daily acts and works of ordinary people while elevating the sufferings of those ordinary people to a matter of divine concern.

Where exactly is his evidence for this? Sounds like self-loathing Catholicism, if anything. Taylor has not been a priority, and I haven't acquired Sources of the Self yet... Another Canadian to bug me?

Proposition four: “That is the task at hand: how to live a life that is personally authentic—a goal the medieval church would not have understood, much less approved of—while giving that life meaning, spirituality, fullness.” In other words, how can we keep our modern humanity without losing what is best from the more enchanted past?

It is on this question that the personal Taylor and the political Taylor converge, in ways that can be quite satisfying. It might seem that the Taylor who writes about the modern personality (Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity) and the Taylor who writes about the modern state (parts of A Secular Age and Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”) are working on two different projects. I don’t think that is so. Although I could not find a place where Taylor connects the two urges, it seems to me that “authenticity,” a word he uses only for the personal project, is actually the word he wants for the political project too.

Philosophers like Rousseau tend to see political community as the natural enemy of personal authenticity; the state is what represses our true selves. (I have to thank my friend Matthew Simpson, the philosopher and Rousseau scholar, for clarifying this point.) But as I read Taylor, he seems to say that just as any given woman in Quebec wants to be true to herself, the Québécois want to be true to their culture. It is the same problem on two different levels. It is the Romantic urge personally and politically, and in both cases it seems to appear, historically speaking, just on either side of the year 1800. The political urge makes no sense without the personal one. Taylor recognizes this equivalence implicitly, and his work argues for it, but he never quite formulates the extent to which, for him, the personal is political.

True to their culture? Or true to their roots? What is Romantic about the desire to maintain one's identity in the face of those who would take it away? Such an urge pre-exists modernity.