Fellow travellers on different paths: A conversation with Charles Taylor

Professor Taylor, I want to ask you mainly about your concept of ‘reenchantment’, as you employed it in the papers ‘Disenchantment-Reenchantment’ (2011a) and ‘Recovering the Sacred’ (2011b). So, I’ll take these papers as a starting point. In ‘Disenchantment-Reenchantment’, you argue for reenchantment by elaborating on the concept of strong evaluation. I have been reading ‘Recovering the Sacred’ as a variation on the same theme, where you explain reenchantment in more theistic terms, as an aspiration to ‘save the sacred’. I think both approaches are intriguing and that there is a lot more to be said about them.

Now, as I understand your work as a whole, it can be seen in many ways as a project of reenchantment. One of your major efforts is to argue against reductionism in various fields, such as philosophical anthropology, ethics and ontology. Reenchantment, then, seems a fitting term to describe the positive tenet of your anti-reductionist project. Yet you have made it clear in various writings that disenchantment is an irreversible process, and that the aspiration to re-enchant cannot be understood in terms of a simple return to the enchanted world of spirits and moral forces. So before discussing what is involved in seeking reenchantment, I want to ask how you understand ‘disenchantment’ and the challenges it poses for us. Disenchantment is often seen as a sense that something is both gained and lost with the process of modernity. So my first question is: how do you understand these gains and losses?

Well, I think that disenchantment has at least two meanings, and a third one which is very invalid in a way. Weber a little bit mixes the three. One meaning is immediately suggested by the word ‘Entzauberung’, that is, a conception of the world as filled with magic forces which emanate from objects (some of them are very dangerous, some have a sense of vulnerability, etc.), which you see in our premodern ancestors in Europe and in lots of parts of the world, even today. Here, disenchantment means ‘demagification’, undoing magic. Or, in a certain sense, you could say that the Western concept of magic is a little bit formed from the practices that were expelled by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. So that’s one sense, and one that at least gives substance to to the idea that the world of particles which are ultimately explicable in terms of Newtonian mechanics succeeds it. The second level I think is very important to modern disenchantment is a conception that people had, now in the elites more than the masses, in the early modern period or before, of cosmic order. A cosmic order which reflects of moral stages or statuses in the universe about the highest of the universe, the meaning of eternity, and what’s lower, the meaning of lesser beings and so on, and very powerful notions of societies as somehow incrusted in that moral order. So, you get the notion of societies and orders (aristocracy, clergy and so on) as being rightfully there because they reflect the shape of the universe.

These are two understandings – more than just ‘ideas’ – two ways of understanding ourselves in terms of magical forces and cosmic order which I think have totally disappeared in what I call the ‘immanent frame’ we now live in, where the natural world is understood through today’s best natural science, and the human world is understood as created by human beings. No regime reflects the order of things: regimes are set-up by datable times and by identifiable people (fathers of the United States Constitution or whatever), and there is a human decision all the way down. So, I think there you have two meanings of disenchantment. A third meaning which Weber sometimes uses is a decline of religion, a decline of faith. This third meaning is – as Hans Joas is showing in his wonderful big book he just produced (Joas 2017) – is definitely not coordinate with the first two, because, in a certain sense, it’s changes in the religious faith which helped drive the first two meanings of disenchantment.

But now, my point is that ‘reenchantment’ is neither of those two conceptions of the world (magical and cosmic) coming back. [Laughing: ] So what is it? One way of putting the issue is: can we just look on the physical universe surrounding us as a lot of matter which has its own internal laws for their own sake, so that otherwise there is no claim on us, not something we need to be somehow in contact with? I think that there is a very strong set of intuitions that this is not the case, that there is something more than that. So, there are two places to look at this in order to get an idea of what could be involved. Number one, and this is something I am working on now, the post-Romantic poetics seems to me to be a departure, in which great nostalgia for the age when the notion of cosmic order was there and you could touch it, on one hand, but also a sense that you can’t go back to that. A good example is Hamann. He uses one of the conceptions of an order plugged into the universe, which is to think of it as a script, as a language, a language of God, and we can’t quite get that. So what we do instead is, we translate it into speech. I think of this line about ‘Reden is übersetzen’, and Walter Benjamin has built on this idea of ‘subtler language’, the notion that belief in these orders is no longer really available, so people are kind of inventing their orders, and he puts it in a much too subjectivist mode, I think, so that we invent them and live within them. Excellent examples are something like William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey, but you could also get very good examples from German romantics, Novalis and so on, and follow that through a whole lot of ways in which that is continued. What is being done here is that the sense of the importance of art is being expressed or realized, and these works of art, when we inhabit them, give us a very strong sense of connection with them. The conviction they carry is that there is some connection here; the conviction they fail to carry or couldn’t carry is that we have a right description of it. So there is a kind of distance, but there is something – we don’t know what, but there is a connection here.

The second great source of ideas about trying to get into this kind of reenchantment is probably premodern, even precivilizational, understandings about humans and the cosmos. You can go to any early society and you get some such idea which is central, the idea of certain places where humans can live because of some X, and then there is a long story told. Generally, in our disenchanted age, these understandings are considered as just some of the illusions, but I think that they are very interesting places to try to get a sense of the world we are living in. We are in a situation where we have all these different takes, the ones that are expressed by a piece of music or a poem or a painting, on the one hand, and those that you see worked out in earlier cultures, on the other hand, none of which we can consider as the last word, but perhaps we would begin to get an understanding of what our relation to the universe might be by considering them.

It’s very interesting that in the present political situation in Canada, there is an attempt to make up for the appalling way in which we treated the Aboriginals, the original inhabitants; that is, to make up for the total rejection of their worldview. The really big problem is getting a sense of confidence that the Aboriginals can run their own show. And that really is tremendously held back, the elements of the traditional culture that these involve, a sense of the world around us. A lot of people are now studying these issues; mainstream Canadians working together with people from those communities. So, there is here a kind of ‘searching’ going on, which probably will never yield a kind of certainty about the nature of the cosmos which our ancestors enjoyed three or four centuries ago. It is going to be a continuing process of exploration, but the assumption underlying all this is that there is something here to explore. It’s not simply a case of subjective reactions.

I see your point about getting back to earlier sources and cultures, but I wonder how this relates to the fact that we read these texts and sources as ‘buffered selves’, as you call it. So, for example, even medieval subjectivity would be something quite different from our own. So how do we gain access to these texts and worlds?

Yes, well I think there is a human capacity which comes out at best in ethnography. It is an extraordinary human capacity when you think about it, if you really know that you don’t know or really understand that you don’t understand. Ethnographers are parachuted into some society where they just don’t really know how to go about it and how to relate to people, but they are unlike government house people saying, ‘Let’s make these data shape up in our way’. In order to do what they want to do, ethnographers have to really open themselves. Now, some of them have a reductive view about this. Ultimately, Malinowski (1884–1942, British anthropologist) must have had an idea that you could find a purely intrapsychic explanation for all this. But ethnographers are showing that you can overcome this view from totally outside, if you have the will to. However, the supposition I mentioned earlier, that there is something to explore here, has to precede that, but if it’s really there, and if you have this ethnographic capacity (which grows stronger and stronger as you have more and more contact and so on), it rapidly becomes clear, as I tried to say in A Secular Age, that you can’t say these are different beliefs. That doesn’t get to it. It really is a different sensibility. I mean, ‘buffered self’ is a fact of my sensibility, more than a belief I have.

To get back to the paper ‘Disenchantment-Reenchantment’ (2011a), you also write about this topic with regard to your doctrine of ‘strong evaluation’, which centres on the fact that we make qualitative distinctions between higher and lower worth. Could you explain some more how your account of strong evaluation relates to your idea of reenchantment? How does a proper understanding of strong evaluation help to show what’s wrong with total disenchantment?

Yes, so let’s look from another angle what this ‘exploration’ involves. This exploration always involves a certain personal search for a way of being, a way of being in contact. We could use a new sense of the word ‘spiritual’ which I am playing with – but of course that has some of the overtones that may lead to misunderstanding – but there is a kind of ‘path’ that people can be on in life, in which they think there is a ‘better’ way of being: more loving, more concerned, more etc. And they have a sense of that, and have a sense that, if I think through the thoughts, go through the meditations, go through certain disciplines, that I can ‘become’ that, or find a way to come closer to that. Now, this whole ‘sense’ (I was going to say ‘judgment’ at first) is powered by a sense of strong evaluation: there is a higher way of being. And it’s also something that can be confirmed or disconfirmed by what you, in the beginning, find as progress on this path or going farther on this path, or does not produce something which you now recognize as higher. Very generally, if you look at the great spiritual thinkers in the years of our history, they recognize ‘Well, I was partly motivated by being a striking figure for people and that was part of what was pushing me along before, and now I see that I have to set that aside’. So, it’s an interesting kind of strong evaluation, because the sense of moving forward on this path either confirms itself or doesn’t, and its shape therefore can change.

This whole kind of ‘path’ is not understandable without some kind of concept that I try to describe by the term ‘strong evaluation’. Moving in a certain direction is not ‘better’ in the sense that I think I will feel better; it is a better way to be. So, I think there is a kind of confirmation–disconfirmation here, which is utterly unlike what we have understood as empirical compositions. But there is a very powerful philosophical view – going back to the Vienna positivists but a lot of people hold this view today – which says that the only issues of truth of any interest at all are those of confirmation–disconfirmation of descriptive propositions, and there is a quite different logic to being on a search, and finding that you are becoming or not becoming a certain type of person.

Related to strong evaluation, you also write about disenchantment as a process of inwardness: meanings are no longer placed in things but in the human mind, which you call a ‘mind-centred’ or ‘human-centred’ view, where all value and meaning is projected onto a neutral world. You argue against this ontologically neutral stance especially when it comes to moral meanings. So, what are the challenges, in your view, for those who reject projectivism in pursuit of a reenchanted ethics? If you are right that many have the intuition that this view of the world as completely meaningless is wrong, what, then, can be retrieved of this enchanted sensibility when we have obviously left behind the enchanted world in the original sense?

I think everybody – and this is a very imperialistic claim – everybody has some sense of possibly being on a journey into a higher way of being, but they choose to misidentify. I mean, in moral philosophy, which is the area in which I have been cast simply by being in a philosophy department for a long time, one of the anti-positions to mine is one derived from Kantianism: the idea that reason alone can tell us that we ought to operate by universalizable maxims. In the views of Rawls, Habermas and Korsgaard, it’s reason which is dictating this, but I think that even that is a kind of misreading of Kant. If we recall Kant’s phrase ‘the starry sky above and the moral law within’, the resonance of these expressions just shows that there is something else, something drawing us, very strongly.

So, I think what we have is a universal human experience, but which can be wrongly understood, in a distorted way. The issue here is hermeneutic, right? And the distorted way prevents it from growing in a certain fashion, which it can do if we look at it in the perspective of being on a path, a search, moving in this or that direction. And the confirmation from that perspective is, if you like, ‘hermeneutic:’ ‘I now understand better, I have thought about it and maybe I was totally wrong in this respect but right in that respect’ and so on. So, the ‘epistemological’ issue is: are there some human understandings and human changes arriving at more valid conclusions, which only can be captured with interpretations, where the issue is ‘Is this interpretation really correct or not?’ [Laughing:] This battle of interpretations is going to go on for a great deal of time. It’s impossible for us to knock them off their perch because they really have armoured themselves against that.

To focus on more meta-ethical issues concerning strong evaluation, you argue that strong evaluations ‘track some reality and can be criticized for misapprehending this reality;’ that ‘underlying strong evaluations there is supposed to be a truth to the matter;’ and that it lies in the nature of strong evaluations ‘to claim truth, reality or objective rightness’ (Taylor 2011a, 297–98). Now, these are claims that are quite familiar in recent meta-ethical discussions. However, concepts such as self-understanding and interpretation are completely absent from those discussions. In mainstream terms, your claims about strong evaluation suggest a kind of moral realism, but at the same time you seem to have been reluctant to describe your view in moral realist terms.

No, the thing is: I believe in moral realism but not in there being a ‘knockdown’ argument. If we disagreed on the nature of particles of physics, then ultimately, we would hope, there would be a point that you would show that I was wrong, and we would just agree. I could not hold out any longer, right? So, it’s a notion of moral realism without that kind of ‘clinching’ argument, whereas, to get back to our example earlier of the Kantian influence, there is a notion of moral correctness (cognitivism, whatever the word is) but it’s grounded on – and thought to be unthinkable unless grounded on – one of these supposedly totally tight arguments. Korsgaard argues that since everybody has a life plan, we are somehow logically bound that I respect your life plan and you respect mine, etc. and we get the notion of human rights deriving from this. Whereas I think that what is really powerful here is that this intuition of the universality of the human being, coming in development in the Axial period, becomes very, very powerful in human life, and people find an interpretation, a religious interpretation or a non-religious interpretation, which seems to them to move them forward.

So, it’s a moral realism without a kind of ‘clinching’ answer that this is the right view. And it does leave us in a little bit puzzling situation, because there are people with totally different spiritual traditions from my own (they are Christian or Buddhist, etc.), something very, very impressing but how that all fits together, I don’t know. So, there is a certain amount of agnosticism here, if we use the word in the right spirit. There is something here that escapes us – as opposed to there being some final, clear interpretation, which my Kantian friends think they have – something that will probably always escape us. I think this is a very common view today, though some of the people who hold this view might be talked into thinking that they are really subjectivists. This is because the meta-epistemology or meta-theory that they have been fed is so powerful, which leads them to believe that if you don’t agree with these meta-theories, then you must be subjectivist. But I think there is another path here, which is truer to the experience, but also, in a puzzling fashion, one that never reaches the point where we say ‘this is the way to do it’ and all these other ones are partial or wrong.

Related to this issue of realism is that you explicitly seek to retrieve a non-anthropocentric perspective on ethics by employing the concept of strong evaluation. You argue against projectivism and neo-Kantian views such as Korsgaard’s that value emanates not just from ourselves, but from the world. In this respect, you have often praised Iris Murdoch’s conception of the good beyond the self. How do you conceive of Murdoch’s ‘reenchanted’ ethics, and what it has to say to us today?

Murdoch is very interesting because she has in some ways combined very Christian reference points with having a more Buddhist type of position. So, she is one of these very interesting writers who is moving around in between two different perspectives. You get from her novels a very strong sense that there are paths that are really important, but a kind of looseness of fitting into these paths. In that respect, I think she reflects an important feature which is worth reflecting on, namely, that there is a new kind of ecumenicism growing.

When I was much younger and starting, the point was back then ‘let’s stop fighting each other, there is something to respect here; above all, let’s get together and be friends’. I think the ecumenicism which emerges from what I am trying to articulate as an outlook is stronger than that, because there is a notion that although you are very different from me, I have a sense that I can learn something from you. And also, that we can accompany each other, encourage each other in our paths, even though we are on quite different paths. The background assumption where all this makes sense is the kind of strange position I am trying to elaborate. In one sense, we can obviously go some serious distance on our different paths, but we can’t in the end clearly say which is best. We are a little bit in the dark about that, and out of that understanding arises the sense that maybe we can learn from each other and encourage each other, and that’s what I call ‘the ecumenicism of friendship’.

Now, of course, in all the established bodies of religious doctrine and practice, there are people who are horrified by that and want to close the ranks, not allowing any change. So, there is a fight within these different religious/spiritual communities between people who respond to the new ecumenicism and people who think of it as a moral danger. And that is a very troubling situation. I think it’s becoming hard, our Western spiritual situation. It’s the more troubling sometimes because the mainstream very often gets into old kinds of religious war mentalities like Christianity and Islam today, right? I get on very well with certain people from West-Africa; we really have that kind of experience of the ecumenicism of friendship when we talk. But the ‘Muslim’ world and the so-called ‘Christian’ or ex-Christian world, these are forces that kind of drive us into jihad, on that side, and fighting against Islamism, on the other side. For example, in The Netherlands, with Geert Wilders and people like that, and we have (not quite as bad but) people of that kind in Québec. So, it’s a very strange situation that you have these very different understandings of what it is to exist and coexist, different spiritual paths, and that a lot rides on who wins out in each civilization.

When it comes to defending this extra-human or non-anthropocentric perspective, there is another fundamental issue; the issue of what kind of ontology is needed for reenchantment. And as I have been reading your work, one of your major inspirations here seems to be Heidegger. So how do you see the importance of Heidegger for understanding strong evaluation and strong value, especially with regard to this ontological question?

Well, the more I read Rilke, the more I think that Heidegger took a great deal from him. I mean, even the word ‘things’. When you read Rilke’s use of the word ‘das Ding’, it is obvious that Heidegger drew on that. Now, I think what Heidegger is pointing to in this respect, is the way in which, outside our being able to grasp certain things, to use objects and instrumentalize them, there is our ‘repressed’ sense of them as having meaning for us. And I think he is on to something here, but I think that you could go much farther than he does in trying to find it if you go to Rilke, with the proviso that Rilke is not giving us a definitive story about the meaning things have for us, whereas Heidegger still seems to be writing as a philosopher. That is, he is giving us a definitive story (which is interesting because it’s different from the story of Sein and Zeit) but I don’t think he has thought out enough the pluralism that belongs to his discovery, that there is not a kind of definitive way of characterizing it. The question about technology shows that there are important consequences for how we act, but again, the point is that the horizon of meaning around these objects that we are using, which takes us beyond a technological sense, is plural. And it’s that which is troubling to philosophers. So, the hints are there in Heidegger (‘dichten’ and ‘denken’ are really closely intertwined with each other), but I think there is a further step to take.

As you said earlier about the limitations of meta-theory, do you also think that Heidegger’s commitment to philosophy is holding him captive in a way that does not affect Rilke’s poems?

Yes, that’s right. Heidegger is right to argue that there is another way of living in the world than living with these objects or what Rilke calls ‘things’, but there is a plurality of ways of living in the world, beyond this technological stance. There are other ways. In this regard, I think there is a little bit of a self-generated mystique in Heidegger (‘nur ein Gott kan uns retten…’), which is, well, [laughing] a bit irritating.

So, in your view, what is it exactly about philosophical practice that resists or takes us away from the phenomena that we are trying to understand about strong evaluation?

The practice that resists our sense of strong evaluation is the practice of seeing the world as a set of objects that we can get objective knowledge of (which is useful for using them) and that that is all there is. This is a kind of epistemological blockage. ‘Epistemological blockage’ of course, itself has ethical bases: what is admired is the disenchanted human being who can control his own environment and can stand up and remake the world and do a lot of good. It is that kind of satisfied sense of the power that human beings have, which I think underlies the whole Cartesian view, which is a kind of ethic, a way of being involved in the world.

But then it is only a particular kind of philosophical practice that is keeping us away from understanding strong evaluation.

Yes, exactly. The whole hermeneutic dimension is considered to be taboo; I mean, it’s seen as muffling around, only a way of feeling. [Laughing:] ‘Get that out of the Philosophy Department and send it off to the Literature Department and we can get on with more serious stuff’.

Are there any other philosophical exemplars that should be mentioned here, which have inspired your views on strong evaluation?

Yes, Paul Ricoeur has been a very important figure for me over the years. What I really admire about him is that he didn’t have one of these views that is so common either in Paris or in New York, where the one view rejects the other for saying totally useless things. He took the trouble to read all this stuff, and he moved back and forth between Chicago and Paris. He was somebody who defended in a very interesting way this kind of hermeneutic view, and he said some interesting things about the symbol which connects up with my view on the use of that term in German Romanticism.

I want to turn now to your own ontological vocabulary. I think it is interesting that in your work, as part of your effort of reenchantment, you have employed the concept of ontology as an attack on a disenchanted, naturalist-inspired metaphysics. For example, in your paper ‘Ethics and Ontology’, you ask what we are committed to ‘ontologically’ by our ethical views and in A Secular Age you repeat this question of what ‘ontology’ can underpin our moral commitments (Taylor 2003, 305; 2007, 607). Now, part of your answer is that we should respond at least to the following challenge: either we correct our naturalist ontology or we must revise our moral phenomenology, that is, our understanding of moral experience in terms of strong value and higher worth. Your conclusion in ‘Ethics and Ontology’ is that we must suffer one of two things: the pain of ‘resisting the phenomenology’ or the pain of ‘challenging the ontology’ (2003, 310, 312). So, with regard to this tension between moral phenomenology and naturalist ontology: do you think there is a way of overcoming this tension? And if not, how should we deal with it; that is, in an increasingly naturalizing climate?

Well, I think it’s always going to be a running against this dream of a naturalizing project, to the extent that I don’t see any near end of this very powerful naturalistic climate, which really means that the methods of natural science are the ultimate way of understanding the world and human beings. So, it will always be running upstream, against that idea.

Now, one of the weaknesses of a naturalist ontology is that it can’t say in very clear terms what is involved in strong evaluation, because it involves a very complex story: people on different moral/spiritual paths who are getting a powerful sense of confirmation–disconfirmation as they move on this path. So, what are the ‘things’ involved here, if you like, in an ‘ontology of things?’ Well, they are not ‘things’, exactly, but certainly ‘stages’ in the development of life, where really something is very worthwhile and you get there or you don’t get there. These issues are so weird from the standpoint of the other (naturalist) ontology. Yet the other ontology is so powerful because it belongs to the whole world of technological control (which, of course, has a downside to it we are now learning about) but it seems to me just inevitable that the power and importance of the technological stance is such that it will always generate people who are really into it and think that technology is what it’s all about. And so, there will always be tremendous resistance to this alternative ontology. All you can do here is act hermeneutically, that is, to try to give an account of what’s going on when you follow the other path, which is something that hits people, and certain people say ‘Yes, there is something there; there is something going on like what is being described’. What happens is that some just respond to this and some don’t.

On this particular topic, many are quite sceptical about the possibility of drawing any ontological conclusions from an account of moral experience. What are your views on this matter? How do you conceive of the scope of moral phenomenology, since your account of moral experience clearly has an ontological purpose? In other words, what are we committed to ontologically by the phenomenology of strong evaluation?

Well, there are two phases to answer that. It could just be the minimal thing that there is a real distinction between what I am now and being what I could become or already started to become. There is something really valid here, something important, and this is not just because it suits my taste (or whatever). Now, when we ask what underlies that, then you get almost inevitably these different stories (Buddha stories, Christian stories, etc.), which will not ever succeed in establishing one as against the other. But obviously, there is a deeper ontology somewhere that makes this the case. That is something further to be explored, and as each of us goes on his or her path, sometimes we can get really much closer to understanding what this ‘path’ is all about.

In this account, how would you define ‘ontology’?

Well, ontology is whatever there is, and ‘what there is’, interestingly enough, is this dimension of movement for human beings, different from simply how they feel, different from ordinary happiness and so on, and this is not just a projection.

To add another aspect of your work, most commentators understand your account of strong evaluation as the formulation of a philosophical anthropology. However, one central tenet of your views on strong evaluation is that you seek to make room for non-human sources of value. We already spoke about Murdoch, Heidegger and Rilke in this respect. It seems to me that your effort to transcend subjectivism or anthropocentrism in moral thinking reaches beyond ‘mere’ philosophical anthropology. For example, in a reply to some critics of Sources of the Self (Taylor 1989), you explain that not just naturalism but ‘any anthropocentrism pays a terrible price’, as you put it, by suppressing its underlying ontology (Taylor 1994, 213). By contrast, you explain that your own view is close to those of ‘deep ecologists’ and ‘theists’. In this regard, do you see yourself as moving beyond anthropological concerns, so that, on top of the question of the nature of human agency, you add an extra question, a more metaphysical question, about the nature of the world that typically inspires human agency?

Yes, but I wouldn’t say it’s a different ‘anthropology’ that human beings are in the universe in a way which calls on them to relate to it. So yes, a different anthropology is bound up with this different ontology, and that is what the argument is about all the time: is there anything beyond either what we feel or what our reason tells us we have to do? And I am saying ‘Yes, there is’ but, once again, it’s only something that can be retrieved hermeneutically, by the way we move through life and change our view about where we are going.

In this respect, I think it’s worth noting that many commentators who accept or even praise your moral phenomenology and philosophical anthropology seem to lose track of what you are trying to achieve ontologically. For example, there is Bernard Williams, who, in his review of Sources of the Self, argues: ‘From a strong base in experience, Taylor very rapidly moves uphill, metaphysically speaking’ (1990, 48), too rapidly, for Williams’s taste. So, what about that response?

Now, I quite understand that. I mean, Bernard was a very close friend of mine, so I know what the difference was about, but there is another point here that I want to take up, about metaphysics. There is an absolute muddle about the use of the word ‘metaphysics’. For example, Habermas keeps talking about ‘post-metaphysical’, asking ‘When did that happen?’ But when you go back to Aristotle, what metaphysics is doing, is saying ‘well, look at all these individual sciences (physica, ethica, politica and so on); how does it all fit together?’ In his Metaphysics, he is trying to make an overarching view. Now, I think there is never going to be a post-metaphysical era, in the sense that there is never going to be a moment when we don’t ask that question. It’s just that if you have a totally reductive view, then metaphysics collapses into physics, right? Everything that we face (thinking, human emotions, all that) can be explained by the sort of movement of these particles etc. and then it all collapses. So, when people say ‘post-metaphysical’ they might mean ‘Well, people still think that you can answer all these questions out of physics’, in which case they would not be there. But Habermas doesn’t think that either. He is not a reductivist in that sense. [Laughing:] So I don’t know what he thinks.

So, you can see that the meaning of metaphysics necessarily is sliding around, because there is this minimal sense of what it’s doing for us (it’s putting it all together) and there is a maximal sense where we say that the way we put it all together involves invoking things which aren’t dealt with in any existing modern terms of physics (psychology, sociology, etc.). So, there could be the notion that you have to have recourse to something, and, of course, in the modern philosophy tradition, someone like Leibniz, it’s all this spooky non-physical stuff, which is definitely holding it all together, right? So maybe Habermas means that, but it’s difficult to see what we are even arguing about here. There is a kind of muddle about that, in the sense that people haven’t thought through the different senses in which the word ‘metaphysics’ can be used.

To continue on this uncertainty about metaphysics, you raise the issue of how ethics and ontology are related in all of your major publications, but there is always something tentative in the way you raise this topic. You often insist that it is not all that clear how we should go about answering these ontological questions. Is this because you believe that ontological issues can only be treated hermeneutically, as you said, in the sense that we never really arrive at a final or complete description of the background ontology that makes sense of our actions? What is the place of hermeneutics with regard to this ontological issue?

Yes, well I think hermeneutics properly understood is that you can never end it, as when we get this ‘theory of everything’ where the physicists want to get to, an ultimate view of what the constituents of matter are and how they all relate. Probably we will never do that, but it’s a conceivable point. But when you get to hermeneutics, there is always the possibility open saying ‘Well, there are various accounts of a lot of what’s going on here, but there are things that we haven’t really captured. So, let’s just improve our interpretation’.

Your views in Retrieving Realism (2015) either suggest a different approach or can be seen as a variation of the same idea. In this book, you argue with Hubert Dreyfus that we are best advised to be ‘pluralistically realist’ about ontological differences. You allow the possibility of multiple descriptions of reality, all of which may be true. I am curious whether your pluralistic robust realism is a shift in emphasis or maybe a change of mind as compared to your view that naturalist ontology must be rejected, or at least revised, in favour of moral phenomenology? To me, this last claim seems more critical, or more radical, than adopting a pluralistic view.

Well, a pluralistic view is itself adopted very tentatively. It’s saying ‘Well, we don’t see how it fits together, really’. For example, the relation between mind and physics, we are still very uncertain about that. And you can’t say that we are bound to get to a final account here. It may be. But the metaphysical search for something uniting it all may be ultimately frustrated. Who can say? Perhaps Dreyfus signed it with a little more belief that that’s the way it is than I did. Because for me it’s a possibility that you just can’t rule out.

Well, at the same time you suggest that one superior approach (in this case, moral phenomenology, the phenomenology of strong evaluation) can be used to show the inadequacy of other views (in this case, a naturalist ontology). Is that a way of trying to salvage our different languages of self-understanding, perhaps at the expense of pluralistic realism?

No, we don’t do away with physics. We just do away with the idea that physics can explain human life and issues of strong evaluation. Nobody is (yet) challenging physics in its own domain. So, what we are ideally looking to do in metaphysics is to have a way of taking that knowledge and this knowledge and putting it all together in a way which can be coherently understood. But maybe that’s going to elude us. Who can say? Nobody can say it’s guaranteed.

I want to ask you more about a central claim of Retrieving Realism, namely, that our grasp of the world is not simply a representation within us but resides rather in our dealing with reality or our being ‘in contact’ with it. I wonder how this ‘contact theory’ relates to specifically moral understanding. You and Dreyfus write about ‘getting in sync with the demands of the universe’ and about ‘balancing ourselves’ in view of these demands (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 135–37). At the end of the book (2015, 166), you suggest that Samuel Todes’s ‘phenomenology of balance’ might be a model for understanding value, the way we relate to a moral reality. Now, there is a moral theory in analytic philosophy that can be seen as reenchanting in this way, under the name of ‘robust realist non-naturalism’. This position rejects scientific naturalism for being reductive, etc. and locates moral facts and properties in the world, as existing independently of human sensibility, and that our judgments seek to represent. I wonder what you think about this anti-naturalist representational approach to ethics as an effort of reenchantment? In one way, this view is clearly anti-naturalist, but in another way, it builds on the model of natural science by positing these objective moral facts and properties in the world as existing independently of human beings. I am not sure whether this position comes close to your own view or that you see it rather as symptomatic of the mediational epistemology that you reject? I think there is room for both interpretations of your work.

Yes, that’s because there is truth in both interpretations. Of course, everything I am saying could be redescribed in the language of properties. It is a kind of ‘property’ of human life that it has these possible stages forward, but I don’t find that helpful, because people say ‘What are these properties? How do you yield them?’ or some such. I think, therefore, that you get closer to showing what the alternative to naturalism is if you try to explain what it is to make steps forward and what the experience is. So, rather than focusing on this idea of properties and the question ‘What exactly are they?’ I am focusing on the paths that you can be following. So, it’s experiential all the way along, whereas the other procedure gives you a kind of puzzlement: ‘How do we experience this?’

Yes, that explains. But then the question arises what your specific approach in terms of following a certain moral/spiritual path and experiential stages in moral development clarifies about the nature of strong values themselves. Strong values as you describe them are not rendered valid by our own desires but stand independent of these and offer standards that are normative for desire. So, what is the nature of the strong values implicit in our evaluations if they cannot be traced back to contingent desire? This seems to suggest an independent reality of some sort, which enables us to judge our own desires in terms of higher and lower value. This idea of an independent reality seems also in line with your view in The Language Animal (Taylor 2016), in which you argue that human meanings (or ‘metabiological’ meanings, as you call them) have ‘their own kind of independent reality’, as against the biological meanings we share with non-human animals (2016, 262).

That’s the same issue in another language: ‘metabiological’ is a way of touching on these issues of human meaning. So, once again, there is this experience of searching, finding and changing as one discovers what the direction is, which confirms or disconfirms. But the confirmation is in the experience itself. You could say: ‘Why should I trust that?’ Well, if there is really some truth to this, you are just throwing your life into the ash can if you aren’t following this logic. And no one really does. People have a sense of what is a meaningful life for them by saying things like: ‘Doctors who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars and so on, is not a meaningful life for me; I’d rather go to the Congo with Médecins sans Frontières’. If you just replied to this by saying ‘Well, that’s like you prefer red wine to rosé’ that would make no sense.

About this universal feature that people are on a path and aim to climb to a higher way of life: it would seem that there are a lot of people who do not recognize themselves in this kind of formulation. What would you say to them?

I think there are two phases to this. First of all, they recognize themselves in another formulation which has a close relation to this. Donald Trump is an example. He has the same set of judgments, standards or levels, except that he thinks that he has attained them all and can look down on everyone else. What he calls ‘the art of the deal’, being clever, being able to draw people to you and so on. Obviously, he gets a tremendous kick out of that. [Laughing:] This is the same ontology as I would be thinking of myself as being Saint Francis, right? It’s the same set of cheers; not much objectively better but I think I’ve got there. But when you look at Trump, you wonder whether there is not almost inevitably, in this kind of complacence – not in there being no ladder because there is a ladder – but in this kind of complacence, is there not a high degree of delusion? [Laughing:] And the answer is clearly ‘yes’.

To take this picture of ‘getting in sync with reality’ elsewhere, I am also wondering what you think of the positions of John McDowell and Akeel Bilgrami. They also seek a kind of reenchantment by defending a view of values as emanating from the world rather than just from ourselves. McDowell’s moral phenomenology has much in common with your own, but he sees ontological questions as neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding value. In the same way, Bilgrami speaks of the ‘external calling’ of value from the world, but he avoids the term ‘ontology’ or ‘metaphysics’ when discussing the source of value. Perhaps their views can be seen as theories of strong evaluation without moral sources. How does your view relate to those kinds of positions?

Well, I think we probably are partly divided by just purely semantic questions. If this is connecting up to your question earlier about people who think that there are these ‘facts’ in the world; I don’t mind that, but I prefer my way of putting it. McDowell and Bilgrami do mind that, somehow, they are worried about that, and I think they are wrong to be worried about that. The way to dispel that kind of worry is a closer understanding of what it is to live a human life and pass through these different phases and so on. This is the best way you can put it. To get to the whole issue we keep circling around, this kind of ostensive relation to the world, getting into sync with it, there is something that answers to something very deep in us, fulfils a very deep drive or aspiration in us, and that some aspirations are deeper than others, etc. etc. Even for Trump. So that way of trying to understand it, I think, is the best you can do.

And you see McDowell and Bilgrami as companions in this respect?

Yes.

Well, an obvious difference with Bilgrami’s enchantment is that he explicitly presents himself as being an atheist. In this respect, commentators such as Owen Flanagan and Quentin Skinner have accused you of trying to sneak in the Christian God in your account of strong evaluation by pressing ontological questions and by developing this non-anthropocentric perspective. What is your response to that charge? In what sense have religious concerns motivated your views on strong evaluation? Or, to what extent are strong evaluations in need of a theistic framework?

I don’t think that they are in need of a theistic framework. But I think, as I said, there is a plurality of paths, and mine takes a theistic form; that is, a kind of openness, love, generosity, whatever you want to call it, makes sense to me. ‘Receiving’ as well as ‘giving’, makes sense to me. Now, I understand that other people have the same structural understanding of paths – of really getting somewhere, as against just thinking you’re getting somewhere – and that the nature of their path is not defined in those terms, which I find very interesting and I’d like to learn about it. However, critics such as Flanagan and Skinner seem to think that there is some insight to be gained by saying that the theistic way does not work at all, which I don’t feel reciprocally.

Another aspect of your work that seems relevant here is the way in which you connect ontological concerns with issues of moral motivation. You do not bring in theism only to debate abstract ontological problems, but also to open up a more practical question, a question about what we need, on a more political level, to accomplish what morality demands of us. In Sources of the Self (1989, 317), you argue that an increasingly secularizing culture might be aiming higher than its moral sources can sustain, and in “A Catholic Modernity?” (Taylor 2011c, 182), you continue to discuss the high demands for solidarity and benevolence in the Western world. You explain that such ‘high standards need strong sources’ (1989, 516) and you talk about the doubt that can arise about the adequacy of a non-theistic viewpoint for ethics in a way that does not arise for theism. How do you think about these claims today? Do you perhaps see social tendencies that make sense of your analysis, for example, the moral inability (or, perhaps, moral indifference) of Europe to respond properly to the influx of refugees?

Yes, I would now less be making discriminations, because I think there are stronger and weaker atheistic or non-theistic forms of commitment. But the point is that there is a real danger of the demands of solidarity (which are part of our political system) in the sense that, whatever their sources and potential, they are held in a weak enough fashion that we easily break off from that ideal. I think the present populist way is a clear example of that. It’s just a minority; it’s not everybody who is breaking away from the demands of solidarity, but the going gets slightly tough. So I withdraw any particular claim about one type of source being better than another type of source, but I think the issue of – as I use the term in my Sources-book – moral sources and the moral demands being out of phase with each other is a real problem, a real danger which we live in.

Some last questions about your paper ‘Recovering the Sacred’ (2011b), in which you stress the importance of theism for projects of reenchantment. In that paper, you argue that moral demands are not just ‘our doing’ nor are they inscribed in the universe independently of us, to mark the contrast with the enchanted world in the original sense, which was inhabited by forces that impinged on human beings independently (2011b, 117–18). But at the same time, you seek to make room for what you call the ‘the inescapable place for the anchored’ (2011b, 119) or the idea of an ‘anchored reality’, which I understand as the background ontology that can make sense of our responses. In this context, you appeal to the notion of an ‘anchored reality’ as opposed to what you call the ‘interstitial’ realm that arises in the interface between humans and world. Could you explain some more why it is important to make this distinction between ‘anchored’ and ‘interstitial’ for understanding reenchantment?

This distinction is important, because (and I think this is another way of talking about it) it puts forward the issue whether there is a very strong sense of the sources that can give you this power to act up, whatever the accepted social ethic is. There is a way of living in the world where you are not concerned with developing those sources, whatever that means. I think for all of it, it means to some degree getting another relation with the universe surrounding us. Those who think that we can live in the world in a way that we’re not concerned with strengthening those sources, they become very much part of the problem. That is, when we have a civilizational structure of a universal human rights democracy, plus a sense of what we owe to human beings outside our society that we count as refugees – when we have all that – and we are living in a way which is not nourishing our sources, then we are going to fail to live up to the demands of solidarity, with all these terrible consequences.

In your essay, you also argue that a revised notion of an anchored reality (that is, one that is different from the originally enchanted one) ‘can be affirmed’ in the interface, for those who are open to it (2011b, 118). But this seems to suggest a possibility, not so much a necessity. How does that relate to your claim that there is an inescapable place for the anchored (2011b, 119), in your view?

We are circling around another point earlier to that. I think that the account I am giving of human experience, which permits of these degrees of approach, is actually everybody’s experience. And I think that the interpretation of our world which screens that strong evaluative experience out, is a misinterpretation. Possibly, there could be a connection between that misinterpretation and not rising to the occasion of strengthening the sources enough. There could be such a connection, but not necessarily. But there certainly is a possibility that this kind of relationship with something deeper is not at all recognized, where people think that it all comes from inside. If you respond to the Kantian phrase of ‘the starry sky above and the moral law within’, then there is some relation to the cosmos, but it’s mediated by a sense of awe within. This goes along with the sense that reason in me is infinitely higher than the rest in me. By invoking the notion of an ‘anchored’ reality, I want to make a claim that the sense of everything being inside of us (purity, reason) is an inadequate self-understanding.

To round up this topic, how does your pluralistic stance on these issues of anchored/interstitial relate to the revisionary stance of the Axial revolutions and their proposed paths of hope, self-transformation and salvation? What becomes of those if they are among lots of other kinds of strong evaluations that people make as post-Axial agents? That is, in a context in which the necessity of these paths of hope and salvation is undermined.

I guess there are two things that I am trying to say here. First, there is the self-understood notion or understanding of what it is to move up or down. And then there is a recognition that that is what is going on; that there is a moving up and down going on which is somehow anchored in reality. You have post-Kantians today who do not recognize this. When you listen to their rhetoric, you can see that there is a sense of higher and lower which is operating, but they are not accepting that at all because it belongs to what they consider as a very bad alternative (where they often also have religion under). So OK, I’ll use Hegel-language, ‘an sich’ and ‘für sich’. With my notion of being on a ‘path’ I mean everybody ‘an sich’, but some people are in a sense obfuscating that by dressing it up as something else. Or, utilitarians used to think that what’s right is just a matter of adding up the utilities. But what makes you committed to maximizing utilities for everybody? Hume talks of ‘sympathy’. And he starts off seeing this as an explanatory concept. But what starts off as a kind of explanatory force that underpins the development, turns out to be actually a value. There is a deep confusion here.

So, there is the fact that everybody is doing it, and there is the fact that some people don’t understand clearly what they are doing. But they can still participate in the development of a social ethic and maybe even in various ways rise to the occasion by doing that. I mean, one of the big differences between those inarticulate moral theories and various religious outlooks is that they are operating on a sense of the dignity of the person. They would feel a lower kind of person if they were not living up to this, right? Whereas something like the Christian notion of agape takes you in another kind of direction. So that makes a real difference, but on another level, there is a difference about the way we understand this, where I want to make a very strong, brutal claim that they are wrong and I am right. But that is not the same difference as that between people who don’t really have a very strong source and people who do have a strong source. It’s another issue.

Final question, on reenchantment in your current work. Am I right to assume that you are now working on the second part of The Language Animal (2016)? Can you give a sense of what your line of argument is in this work and how it relates to reenchantment?

Yes, that’s right. As I was saying earlier about that, there is a new kind of stance towards reenchantment in the notion that a work of art gives you a very powerful sense without claiming that this is the final account of the world, such that we have this relation to it. This sense is maybe best expressed in Hamann’s idea of translating. From our human point of view, we restate that there is something there, which we can’t get to in its own terms. This is a little bit a Kantian ‘Ding-an-sich versus phenomena’ type of distinction, but I don’t want to push that too far.

Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it.

OK, thank you.