Abstract
In 1958 as a seventeen-year-old Oxford undergraduate my good luck was to be sent to Charles Taylor at All Souls College for philosophy tutorials, because our regular tutor was on leave. For the last 58 years he has influenced my conception of what serious intellectual work involves – with respect both to its range and to its relation to live issues in what (other) philosophers typically call the “real world.”
We began with some standard philosophical dilemmas (Zeno’s paradoxes, I think it was) but by the third week we were grappling with “Merleau-Ponty and the pre-objective world” – a topic and an author completely unknown to the philosophy then taught at Oxford. I recall a spirit of adventure in those tutorials, a sense of being coaxed beyond the limits of the syllabus, not just coached within it. As an undergraduate I followed his involvement in the founding of the British New Left and his contributions to its journal Universities and Left Review and attended philosophical meetings where he participated with R. M. Hare, on the one hand, and Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe (with both of whom he was broadly allied), on the other, in riveting debates about fundamental issues in moral philosophy. He was then working on his doctoral dissertation that eviscerated psychological behaviorism, which became his book The Explanation of Behaviour. 1 He then went further, pursuing what became a sustained critique of “naturalism” in the “human sciences,” to expose claims to “neutrality” in the political science of the time, and later made similar arguments against cognitive psychology and theories of language. These critiques culminated in his magisterial essay “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” 2 which, among other good things, includes an unsurpassed account of the hermeneutic circle. He entered the so-called “rationality debate,” initiated by Peter Winch, when he joined Martin Hollis and myself in teaching an Oxford seminar that brought philosophers into discussion with the sociology of science and social anthropology, contributing a brilliant chapter on “Rationality” to our edited book Rationality and Relativism. 3
Getting to know him revealed something rare and special: his capacity for instant rapport. He will engage with you as a philosopher and as a political junkie, and he is a practicing multiculturalist, with interlocutors across the world, as this collection of tributes amply demonstrates. Our paths have crossed in various places, where his engagement with real-world issues is apparent. One such place was Eastern Europe, where, before I knew him, he had gone to Vienna to help resettle hundreds of refugees after the Hungarian revolt of 1956. He was actively involved, and much appreciated, I can attest, as one of the many Oxford-based visiting philosophers to underground seminars in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s.
It has often occurred to me that there is an interesting contrast between Charles Taylor and his contemporary Alasdair MacIntyre. Both are highly influential philosophers whose work has closely engaged moral philosophy and the social sciences (in MacIntyre’s case, anthropology above all). Both are believing Catholics and both have been labeled “communitarians” in dispute with “liberals.” (Interestingly, though, they have interacted very little.) MacIntyre has moved no small distance across the political and religious spectrum in the course of his long career: baptized as a Presbyterian, he found the “difficulties in Christian belief” too great by the time his book with that title was published, 4 and he had become a Marxist, first sympathetic to communism, then to Trotskyism, converting finally to what he calls an Augustinian-Thomist Catholicism. The one continuing thread across this trajectory, it can be said, is a consistent hostility to liberalism. This last has never been the case with Taylor (although he convincingly showed what was “wrong with negative liberty”). MacIntyre, it appears, finally arrived at a tradition that, he believes, resolves the conflicts among rival traditions: for Taylor the rivalry continues. By contrast with MacIntyre, the various positions he has embraced (initially Catholicism, Marxism and Existentialism), instead of succeeding one another, actively coexist within his exceptionally capacious mind-capacious and aiming, like Hegel, at synthesis and an ever-higher level of reflection and self-consciousness, recalling Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I don’t, of course, mean for a moment to suggest that Taylor is indifferent to inconsistency. He is not, however, averse to paradox, as when he writes of values being “incommensurably higher.” 5 His work certainly deploys the skills of the Anglo-American analytical philosophical style, though there is little of what his friend and colleague Bernard Williams once described to me as conceptual “needlework” (referring, in a not unfriendly spirit, to Taylor’s successor at Oxford, G. A. Cohen). But fine-grained and helpful distinctions abound in his writing, as, for instance, as between regular and “strong” evaluation. I see that I have not even mentioned the path-breaking later writing about religion (in relation to which I confess to being, as Max Weber described himself, “unmusical”). This is not a survey of his remarkably wide-ranging and deep-reaching oeuvre, but rather a tribute to a much-valued teacher, colleague and friend.