Abstract
One of the central themes in Charles Taylor’s writing and teaching is his view that humans are basically dialogical animals. It is the theme that has been most important to me. If you have seen him teach or speak publicly you can understand why dialogue is so central to his view of the human condition. He manifestly comes alive in dialogues, enjoys them, and is “at his best” in them. But it runs deeper than this.
The theme of dialogue runs throughout his work. To say that human beings are dialogical animals is to say that human being is basically being-with (Mitsein); and being-with in the sense of always already in complex webs of interlocution. At their best, these are gift-reciprocity relationships that all partners enjoy-with each other (Mitfreude, to borrow Nietzsche’s neologism).
Taylor has explored the four main types of dialogical relationships at different times in his career. The first is the dialogical relationship one has with oneself and the practices of the self that accompany different modes of self-relationship: from Greek ethics, the Christian turn inward beginning with Augustine, the tremendous deepening of self-dialogue from Montaigne through the Romantics, and to the explosion of meditation, prayer, yoga, contemplation, and so on in spiritual and secular traditions today. The second is the vast variety of discursive and non-discursive dialogical relationships humans have with one another, individually and collectively. His political writings have been concerned with clarifying the conditions of mutual recognition, deep diversity, fusion of horizons, mutual learning, and coming to agree and act together through different types of dialogue: discussion, negotiation, bargaining, deliberation, communion, teacher-student, and so on. The third is the dialogical relationship that humans are capable of having with the living earth (anima mundi). Here dialogue involves all the senses (synaesthesia) as we try to understand how the living world sustains life on earth and how we can interact in reciprocally sustaining ways, from Goethe and Humboldt to deep ecology and the Gaia hypothesis today. Finally, there is the dialogical relationship with the spiritual realm, whether this is the human spirit of humanist traditions or the spiritual sources of religious traditions. His recent work explores how different types of secular societies block or diminish this type of dialogue, and how this has boomerang effects on the first and second types of dialogue. In each type of case, he explores the conditions that enable good dialogical relationships and the conditions that disembed and alienate humans from them, or cause them to turn from dialogue to anger, hatred, aggression, and counter-aggression, as we see all around us today.
“Dialogue” means “through” (not two) participation in and of “logos” (speech). As Taylor has shown in his expressive philosophy of language, although dialogue is manifest in speech, it is grounded in embodiment, in practices, in the living world, and, in many cases, in the living spirit; and it does not always require speech: as in dance, communion, and so on. But, I think there is one particular kind of speech dialogue that has a certain importance for him. This is when people come together not to argue, discuss, deliberate, or negotiate, but to try to suspend their emotional attachment to the deep-seated assumptions or prejudgments that pit them against one another in these other types of dialogue; put their conflicting assumptions into the intersubjective space of dialogue; and just share them until they begin to understand and trust one another. This non-attachment is exceptionally difficult in modern societies, and Taylor has seen many failures. But the idea, and it is a very old one, is that creative, shared, participatory (not literal) meanings might just become “emergent properties” of such uncoerced dialogical relationships and be the ongoing basis of cooperation, of living together nonviolently. This is the kind of practice of dialogical “transvaluation” (Umwertung) that he said “we can and should struggle for.” This is the great gift he continues to offer us through his remarkable speaking and writing.