Abstract
It is a great honor for me, as well as a pleasure, to participate in this extended tabula gratulatoria for Charles Taylor’s 85th birthday.
I first came across his work when I was a doctoral student, in the late 70s. At Berkeley, John Searle strongly urged us to take a look at “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” originally published in 1971. 1 Astutely showing how the up-and-coming cognitive science and Artificial Intelligence approaches of the time shared an objectifying view of human agency with their behaviorist-supposed adversaries, back then Taylor made a powerful case against “naturalism” – the misconceived ideal of circumventing all agent-relative dimensions of subjectivity as well as the fact that human agents, qua “self-interpreting animals,” are constituted by their self-interpretation. Years later, when working on the contribution of Rousseau to establishing authenticity as a normative category, and on generalizing this originally moral notion into a broader exemplary view of normativity, I was struck by Charles Taylor’s splendid book The Ethics of Authenticity, originally published in 1991. 2 Reconstructing how Rousseau (and Herder) contributed to convince us that a life of full human significance could be lived in close touch with something not beyond but within the self, Taylor, with unsurpassed eloquence, brought to the fore the paradoxical relation of authenticity to shared frames of meaning.
On the one hand “being true to myself means being true to my own originality…In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own.” 3 On the other hand, because “things take on importance against a background of intelligibility…one of the things we can’t do, if we are to define ourselves significantly, is suppress or deny the horizons against which things take on significance for us.” 4 As vulgar, undialectic Marxism was a caricature of Marx’s thought, so authenticity in the late 20th century has often resulted in a trite ideology based on the proposition that “all options are equally worthy, because they are freely chosen, and it is choice that confers worth.” 5 Analytic philosophy, when it addresses authenticity – think of Frankfurt’s idea of “wholehearted identification” – often sounds this way. No one has opposed these views more poignantly than Charles Taylor while holding on to the value of authenticity as a modern achievement. No one has cast a clearer light on the paradox of authenticity: “I couldn’t claim to be a self-chooser, and deploy a whole Nietzschean vocabulary of self-making, just because I chose steak and fries over poutine for lunch. Which issues are determinant, I do not determine. If I did, no issue would be significant. But then the very ideal of self-choosing as a moral ideal would be impossible. So, the ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice.” 6
Hence his trenchant critique of the ideology of authenticity: “I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters.…Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.” 7 In sum, “strong evaluations,” thick descriptions – what in the terminology of political liberalism are “comprehensive conceptions” – are not to be wished away. Their disappearance would no less endanger the sensibleness of our ideal of authentic self-expression than the thinning out of the resistance opposed by air would prevent the proverbial Kantian dove from soaring in the skies.
Another paradoxical relation that Charles Taylor brought out at center stage connects the “discourse of rights,” blessed by an inflationary fortune in contemporary democracies, with the idea of a “duty to society” as part of the thick normative backdrop against which choice and entitlement acquire their sense. “Asserting rights itself involves acknowledging an obligation to belong.” 8 Such duty to belong to and sustain society is independent of our will and binds us because even an extreme form of natural rights, the one theorized by Locke and Nozick, presupposes “affirming the worth of certain human capacities, and if this affirmation has other normative consequences (i.e., that we should foster and nurture these capacities in ourselves and others), then any proof that these capacities can only develop in society or in a society of a certain kind is a proof that we ought to belong to or sustain society or this kind of society.” 9 This argument casts the primacy of rights under a more nuanced light. It would be incoherent not only to consider rights “unconditional” and the obligation to sustain society as an “optional extra which we may or may not contract,” but also to “unreservedly assert our right in the face of, or at the expense of, such a society; in the event of conflict we should have to acknowledge that we were legitimately pulled both ways. For in undermining such a society, we should be making the activity defended by the right assertion impossible of realization.” 10 Briefly, duty-bound human beings are the flip side of individuals possessed of rights: the two cannot be separated as the standard narrative of modernity versus tradition pretends.
Some philosophers excel at the art of separation, others at the art of holding opposites together. These examples testify to Taylor’s outstanding talent for the second art and illustrate his philosophical endeavor, from The Ethics of Authenticity to Sources of the Self on to A Secular Age, 11 to “retrieve” the sources of our ethical intuitions in intersecting, converging, and sometimes conflicting traditions. Even though the ultimate ones may remain out of reach, the sources of our strong evaluations do not exist independently of our “articulating” them – as instead is the case in cognitivistic models from Plato’s myth of the cave to contemporary moral realism. In his quest for these, Taylor has thoroughly reshaped many crucial concepts. He has opened up an entirely new way of thinking about secularization, beyond the received versions of religious neutrality on the part of the state’s institutions and the (now dubious) shrinking of religious influence from the public and private life of late-modern citizens. In A Secular Age, becoming secular acquires the phenomenological, experience-near meaning of learning to see one’s faith as one option among others and of having to inhabit an “immanent frame.” At the same time, he has reconceived the nexus of Axial Age and transcendence by associating the axial rupture not so much with a (pretty much culture-specific) radical opposition of immanence and transcendence, but with a triple “disembedment” of human agents from society, of society from cosmos, and of cosmos from the divine. 12
For the past thirty years, Charles Taylor has been a wonderful guide in journeying up the stream of the genealogical sources that have made us who we are – responsive, mindful of our pace, and yet capable of showing the way. I feel privileged for the fact that, at some point, this guide has left the written page and become a fully embodied senior colleague with whom I could share instants of the journey: as in Evanston, in Prague or in Istanbul, when he was kind enough to listen to my views on judgment and exemplarity, or when he included me in the circle of scholars discussing “modes of secularization” every year in Vienna, or simply when, during one of his visits to Rome, together we admired the aesthetic force of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter in a church in Piazza del Popolo.
A happy birthday and a happy continuation of the philosophical journey in the years to come!