Abstract
Charles Taylor has been publishing steadily and prolifically for nearly six decades. 1 He marks the year of his eighty-fifth birthday with the publication of a new book – The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity in 2016. 2 Inspired by the thought of eighteenth-century German thinkers such as Herder, Humboldt and Hamann, this new book weaves together and elaborates on a number of the themes that have concerned Taylor across his oeuvre: how do we understand the function of language in human life? In what ways does the linguistic capacity separate humans from other animals? If language is part of what makes us human, how much flexibility and variation does language allow in ways of being human? How is language connected to embodiment? Two considerations make this latest publication all the more remarkable. Firstly, Taylor recently co-authored a book on epistemology that was published in 2015: Retrieving Realism, with Hubert Dreyfus. 3 Secondly, he is working on a companion volume to The Language Animal to appear in the near future. This companion volume will extend his study of language by examining post-Romantic poetics.
Over the decades Taylor’s voluminous output has been responded to in kind. Ever since he started publishing, commentators and critics from a wide variety of scholarly and language traditions have engaged and applied his ideas. 4
Yet it seems to me that one important and consistent thread of Taylor’s thought that has not yet received the attention it deserves is his philosophy of freedom. Taylor’s 1979 defense of positive liberty in response to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Conceptions of Liberty” is, of course, well known. 5 But there is a way of seeing reflection on freedom as a thread that runs, sometimes silently but always significantly, through his whole body of work. Taylor can be seen as asking what freedom means, how many varieties it has, what it (or they) require, how it (or they) are supported and promoted, or threatened and diminished. His early influential essay on “Atomism” 6 is indeed about political ontology but it also unearths and underscores the ideas of freedom that underlie defenses of individual rights. It urges examination of those forms of freedom – authentic choice, moral autonomy, civil and political liberties – and the significant human capacities that underpin, and are, even if only implicitly, affirmed by them. It also inquires into the background conditions – culture, values, institutions, social and political relations – that make individual freedom conceivable and achievable.
Throughout his work, Taylor tacitly encourages us to think about what types of freedom are possible and desirable for embodied entities. Our conceptions of freedom must keep in mind that humans are closely anchored to and enabled by our bodies, just as any ideal of freedom that failed to acknowledge that would be ultimately impossible as well as undesirable. For a chilling illustration of the link between freedom and embodiment, one need only read the opening pages of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 7 Coates writes powerfully about the difficulty black bodies face in achieving even basic liberal freedoms such as freedom from fear and freedom of mobility in contemporary America. Taylor is also attentive to internal barriers to freedom: even in a society that provides myriad opportunities to individuals, psychological constraints can hold some members back from pursuing those possibilities that are notionally available to all.
Humans are also constrained and enabled by language, and so a robust theory of freedom must take linguistic use and its limits and its creativity into account. And because there is no such thing as a private language, attention to language points us immediately to community. How we achieve freedom in communion with others has been a long-standing concern of Taylor’s thought, and turns us to his defense of the civic-humanist tradition in Western political thought. Here freedom takes the form of self-rule, as Taylor agrees with Rousseau that an invaluable form of freedom is attained when people obey laws that they have given themselves. Even Taylor’s important and influential interventions in the “politics of recognition” debate can be read through the lens of freedom. It is not just the dignity, equality, and self-esteem of certain groups that are compromised by misrecognition from others, but their sense of their own agency, their freedom, is also curtailed.
In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor asks how the very idea of a free market came into being and what it presupposes about human action and interaction. 8 And in Secularism and Freedom of Conscience 9 (2011), a short work that serves as an addendum to A Secular Age, 10 he and Jocelyn Maclure wrestle with the question of what a commitment to freedom of religion and conscience requires from the state and its citizens. It is interesting to note that in some of these more recent reflections on freedom, the arc of Taylor’s thought curves in a Rawlsian direction.
There is, of course, much more to be said about what a fully fledged Taylorian philosophy of freedom would look like. Here I have merely sketched some of its contours and indicated, I hope, what a worthwhile exploration this would be.
Shortly after the publication of his monumental A Secular Age, Taylor was recounting to me the next series of projects he was planning. I wished him a life of Hobbesian duration so that he could achieve all, or even some, of his varied and ambitious goals. Without hesitation, he quipped that he preferred the adjective Gadamerian in this context. At the time I thought he was expressing a philosophical preference, but given that Hobbes lived to 90 while Gadamer lived to 102, I conclude by also wishing Charles Taylor a life of Gadamerian duration!