Abstract
It is imponderable to be grateful to someone who has shaped your intellectual development so indelibly, so quietly and yet so relentlessly. I would have wanted to style this brief greeting in the form of three postcards, each addressed to “Dear Chuck”; each closing with “In gratitude, Eduardo”; each postcard would have been titled. The first would have been titled “Hegel in Manhattan.” I first began to read Charles Taylor as a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary and then at the New School in the late eighties and early nineties. I remember very clearly working through Taylor’s big book on Hegel (1977) and its sequel, Hegel and Modern Society (1979). 1 These two books already modeled two qualities of Taylor’s scholarship. First, the expansive, historically rich, hermeneutically generous study of key philosophical figures in the development of modern philosophy. Second, the way in which the history of philosophy has always been at the service of making an intervention in our contemporary self-understanding. Reading these texts made Hegel sound like a contemporary, someone who was addressing our times and our issues. In order to do this, Taylor had to translate Hegel into some of the language that had become the lingua franca of the late twentieth century, and this meant that Taylor himself was a philosophical polyglot. Through these two books, the emergence and evolution of post-Hegelian thought was opened up to me in an inviting and provocative way. Having studied closely Taylor gave me the then surely arrogant feeling that I could tackle Hegel’s Science of Logic with Richard Bernstein at the New School.
The second postcard would have been titled “Herder in San Francisco.” My philosophical studies took me to Germany, Frankfurt am Main, specifically, and then to San Francisco, where I landed my first teaching job. I was fortunate to get a fellowship to work on Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas and the linguistic transformation of Frankfurt School critical theory. I was particularly interested in working on Apel’s essays from the fifties and sixties on what he called simpliciter the Transformation der Philosophie (the title of Apel’s two-volume collection of essays), by which he meant the linguistic transformation of modern philosophy. 2 While Apel looked outside German philosophy for the sources of this transformation, going back to Dante and Vico, and later Charles Sander Peirce and Charles William Morris, I was also studying Taylor’s essays on the emergence of a new conception of language. In fact, Taylor’s two-volume Philosophical Papers (1985), 3 and especially volume 1, titled most tellingly “Human Agency and Language,” provided me with an alternative genealogy of modern philosophies of language. I remember also very clearly the two last essays in volume one: “Language and Human Nature,” and “Theories of Meaning.” 4 It should be noted that these essays go back to the late seventies and early 1980s. Nonetheless, it was in these essays that Taylor first began to talk about Herder and Humboldt, and their “expressive” theory of language, which he juxtaposed to the “designative” theories of language (to be later identified with the HLC – Hobbes, Locke, Condillac – tradition 5 ). Taylor argued that it was in the Romantically inflected expressive theories of language of Herder and Humboldt, later he added Hamann (then to be referred to as the HHH tradition), that he identified three key pillars of a non-behaviorist, non-instrumentalist, non-Cartesian, non-atomistic philosophy of language. First, according to Taylor, Herder is the first modern philosopher to identify the “reflexive” character of language. Language may be used to “designate,” to “point” and “signal” at things in the world, but this is a derivate function of a more fundamental aspect of language, namely that fact that it is through language that humans express themselves while reflecting about their world and themselves. Language is expressive because it is reflexive. Language makes manifest not simply how things stand in the world, but above all, how they appear to a linguistic creature that lives in a linguistic world. To be able to designate entities in a world presupposes that we can make them manifest within a web of meanings that are significant to speakers. Making things manifest means to express them, but in expressing them, the speaking creature manifests itself; it reveals itself to itself in language. Thus, language is neither external nor aleatory to the “language animal,” but is instead constitutive and originary. Our very way of being a rational and thus linguistic animal depends on language. Language is constitutive of our humanity.
Second, in both Herder and Humboldt, Taylor identified a holistic theory of language. Language is not built like a Lego construction, one made up of single, interlocking, bricks. Taylor called this view of language “atomistic.” Each word presupposes the whole web of language. The first word of a child is not a single word, but a tread in a complex web that will be woven as the child enters the linguistic horizon of her human existence.
Third, it is in Humboldt above all that Taylor identified a distinct characteristic of the expressive theory of language, namely that language is an energeia and not an ergon, that is, an activity, an active power, and not what has been already accomplished, a finished task. Language as energeia entails, for Taylor, the primacy of speech. Language is above all speech, the speech of a historically given community of speech. Insofar as language is the speech of a community, it is always in the process of being remade. Language is the ceaseless activity of speakers, in which language is “continually extended, altered, reshaped.” 6
What took hold of my philosophical imaginary in these essays, however, was the way Taylor read in the expressive theory of language a new, radical, transformative, and generative way to relate to our agency and sense of selfhood. Here is a passage that still reverberates in my mind: If language serves to express/realize a new kind of awareness [in so far as what is made manifest in and through language is not just a world but an “interiority”]; then it may not only make possible a new awareness of things, an ability to describe them; but also new ways of feeling, of responding to things. If in expressing our thoughts about things, we can come to have new thoughts; then in expressing our feeling, we can come to have new transformed feelings.
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The third postcard would have been titled “Habermas in Mexico.” While I have devoted a lot of my philosophical attention to European, and mostly German and French, philosophy, about the other half of my attention span has been devoted to Latin American philosophy, and most specifically the “philosophy of liberation” tradition that emerged in the late sixties in Latin America, in part as reaction to the crisis of European philosophy. This tradition also drank at the wells of Hegel and Marx, but also Dilthey, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, the young and unknown Heidegger, and the then untranslated into English, Levinas. While I was in Germany, writing on the “semiotic transformation of philosophy,” I was studying, dialoging, and translating Enrique Dussel who, during the late eighties, was embarking on a decades-long debate with Apel, and through him, with “discourse ethics.” Taylor’s Sources of the Self, and his “Politics of Recognition” (1992) 10 became bridges for Dussel, and for me, to develop a dialog about the too often neglected and decisive role of colonialism in the constitution of our modern moral imaginary and topology of moral agency. I traveled often to visit Dussel in Coyoacan, Mexico City, and we would have long conversations about Habermas and Taylor, as well as Apel, Rorty, Vattimo. In retrospect, I am able to appreciate the role that Taylor’s expansive and ecumenical philosophical genealogies played in authorizing and lending legitimacy to the kind of work that has become even more urgent today, namely the kind of philosophical work that opens up to different philosophical traditions, to different moral vocabularies, to different social imaginaries.
In Habermas’ work, postmetaphysical thinking and postsecular consciousness are closely aligned; one potentiates the other. But it was Taylor who taught us to think that our modern social imaginaries are horizons that expand with the transformation of our moral lexicons. Taylor has taught us to think of the “West” in new ways, in ways that both “provincialize,” to use that wonderful expression by Dipesh Chakrabarty, and “cosmopoliticize” it, to coin a new term. But to be made cosmopolitan, is only made possible by opening to the pedagogy of other moral vocabularies.
The “West” as a philosophical tradition – I have learned from my four decades of engagement with Taylor’s expansive oeuvre – does not belong to the West, but to all who are creatures of language. If language is primordially an energeia and not an ergon that lives in speech, then all language is also always the task of translation, within and across languages. And all translation, as Walter Benjamin taught us, is not simply transposition but essentially creation, one that leaves the translated languages transformed. Taylor’s work, for me, has been precisely about the solicitude of translating across different moral lexicons so as to expand our moral topologies.