We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater
There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead
Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater
The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller
The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller
According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater
Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater
Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger
Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton
I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon
Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII
Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut
Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest
We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater
People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon
Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater
An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater
Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann
Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner
“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton
The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon
The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul
The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah
If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon
Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson
We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord
Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater
To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement
Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma
It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater
God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater
In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall
Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater
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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater
In 2007 he and Gérard Bouchard were appointed to head a one-year commission of inquiry into what would constitute reasonable accommodation for minority cultures in his home province of Quebec.[66]
In June 2008, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the arts and philosophy category. The Kyoto Prize is sometimes referred to as the Japanese Nobel.[67] In 2015, he was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, a prize he shared with philosopher Jürgen Habermas.[68] In 2016, he was awarded the inaugural $1-million Berggruen Prize for being "a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity".[69]
Views
Despite his extensive and diverse philosophical oeuvre,[70] Taylor famously calls himself a "monomaniac",[71] concerned with only one fundamental aspiration: to develop a convincing philosophical anthropology.
In his essay "To Follow a Rule", Taylor explores why people can fail to follow rules, and what kind of knowledge it is that allows a person to successfully follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign. The intellectualist tradition presupposes that to follow directions, we must know a set of propositions and premises about how to follow directions.[73]
Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background. This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life". More specifically, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our bodies in the form of habits, dispositions, and tendencies.[73]
Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our understanding of the world is primarily mediated by representations. It is only against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us. On occasion we do follow rules by explicitly representing them to ourselves, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of their own application: application requires that we draw on an unarticulated understanding or "sense of things"—the background.[73]
Taylor's critique of naturalism
Taylor defines naturalism as a family of various, often quite diverse theories that all hold "the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences".[74] Philosophically, naturalism was largely popularized and defended by the unity of science movement that was advanced by logical positivist philosophy. In many ways, Taylor's early philosophy springs from a critical reaction against the logical positivism and naturalism that was ascendant in Oxford while he was a student.
Initially, much of Taylor's philosophical work consisted of careful conceptual critiques of various naturalist research programs. This began with his 1964 dissertation The Explanation of Behaviour, which was a detailed and systematic criticism of the behaviourist psychology of B. F. Skinner[75] that was highly influential at mid-century.
From there, Taylor also spread his critique to other disciplines. The essay "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man" was published in 1972 as a critique of the political science of the behavioural revolution advanced by giants of the field like David Easton, Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, and Sydney Verba.[76] In an essay entitled "The Significance of Significance: The Case for Cognitive Psychology", Taylor criticized the naturalism he saw distorting the major research program that had replaced B. F. Skinner's behaviourism.[77]
But Taylor also detected naturalism in fields where it was not immediately apparent. For example, in 1978's "Language and Human Nature" he found naturalist distortions in various modern "designative" theories of language,[78] while in Sources of the Self (1989) he found both naturalist error and the deep moral, motivational sources for this outlook in various individualist and utilitarian conceptions of selfhood.
Taylor and hermeneutics
Taylor in 2012
Concurrent to Taylor's critique of naturalism was his development of an alternative. Indeed, Taylor's mature philosophy begins when as a doctoral student at Oxford he turned away, disappointed, from analytic philosophy in search of other philosophical resources which he found in French and German modern hermeneutics and phenomenology.[79]
The hermeneutic tradition develops a view of human understanding and cognition as centred on the decipherment of meanings (as opposed to, say, foundational theories of brute verification or an apodictic rationalism). Taylor's own philosophical outlook can broadly and fairly be characterized as hermeneutic and has been called engaged hermeneutics.[11] This is clear in his championing of the works of major figures within the hermeneutic tradition such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer.[80] It is also evident in his own original contributions to hermeneutic and interpretive theory.[80]
Communitarian critique of liberalism
Taylor (as well as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, and Michael Sandel) is associated with a communitarian critique of liberal theory's understanding of the "self". Communitarians emphasize the importance of social institutions in the development of individual meaning and identity.
In his 1991 Massey LectureThe Malaise of Modernity, Taylor argued that political theorists—from John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin—have neglected the way in which individuals arise within the context supplied by societies. A more realistic understanding of the "self" recognizes the social background against which life choices gain importance and meaning.
Taylor's later work has turned to the philosophy of religion, as evident in several pieces, including the lecture "A Catholic Modernity" and the short monograph "Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited".[81]
Taylor's most significant contribution in this field to date is his book A Secular Age which argues against the secularization thesis of Max Weber, Steve Bruce, and others.[82] In rough form, the secularization thesis holds that as modernity (a bundle of phenomena including science, technology, and rational forms of authority) progresses, religion gradually diminishes in influence. Taylor begins from the fact that the modern world has not seen the disappearance of religion but rather its diversification and in many places its growth.[83] He then develops a complex alternative notion of what secularization actually means given that the secularization thesis has not been borne out. In the process, Taylor also greatly deepens his account of moral, political, and spiritual modernity that he had begun in Sources of the Self.
Taylor served as a vice president of the federal NDP (beginning c. 1965)[61] and was president of its Quebec section.[85]
In 2010, Taylor said multiculturalism was a work in progress that faced challenges. He identified tackling Islamophobia in Canada as the next challenge.[86]
In his 2020 book Reconstructing Democracy he, together with Patrizia Nanz and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor, uses local examples to describe how democracies in transformations might be revitalized by involving citizenship.[87]
The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press. 1991.[b]
The Ethics of Authenticity. Harvard University Press. 1991.
Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition". Edited by Gutmann, Amy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1992.[c]
Rapprocher les solitudes: écrits sur le fédéralisme et le nationalisme au Canada [Reconciling the Solitudes: Writings on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism] (in French). Edited by Laforest, Guy. Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval. 1992.
English translation: Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism. Edited by Laforest, Guy. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 1993.
Road to Democracy: Human Rights and Human Development in Thailand. With Muntarbhorn, Vitit. Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development. 1994.
Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1995.
Identitet, Frihet och Gemenskap: Politisk-Filosofiska Texter (in Swedish). Edited by Grimen, Harald. Gothenburg, Sweden: Daidalos. 1995.
De politieke Cultuur van de Moderniteit (in Dutch). The Hague, Netherlands: Kok Agora. 1996.
La liberté des modernes (in French). Translated by de Lara, Philippe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1997.
A Catholic Modernity? Edited by Heft, James L. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999.
Prizivanje gradjanskog drustva [Invoking Civil Society] (in Serbo-Croatian). Edited by Savic, Obrad.
Wieviel Gemeinschaft braucht die Demokratie? Aufsätze zur politische Philosophie (in German). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 2002.
Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2002.
Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2004.
A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2007.
Laïcité et liberté de conscience (in French). With Maclure, Jocelyn. Montreal: Boréal. 2010.
English translation: Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. With Maclure, Jocelyn. Translated by Todd, Jane Marie. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2011.
Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2011.
Democracia Republicana / Republican Democracy. Edited by Cristi, Renato; Tranjan, J. Ricardo. Santiago: LOM Ediciones. 2012.
Boundaries of Toleration. Edited with Stepan, Alfred C. New York: Columbia University Press. 2014.
Incanto e Disincanto. Secolarità e Laicità in Occidente (in Italian). Edited and translated by Costa, Paolo. Bologna, Italy: EDB. 2014.
La Democrazia e i Suoi Dilemmi (in Italian). Edited and translated by Costa, Paolo. Parma, Italy: Diabasis. 2014.
Les avenues de la foi : Entretiens avec Jonathan Guilbault (in French). Montreal: Novalis. 2015.
English translation: Avenues of Faith: Conversations with Jonathan Guilbault. Translated by Shalter, Yanette. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. 2020.
Retrieving Realism. With Dreyfus, Hubert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2015.
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2016.
Reconstructing Democracy. How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up. With Nanz, Patrizia; Beaubien Taylor, Madeleine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2020
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.
What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.
Books By Charles Taylor (and many more than is shown here!) - click here
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Charles Taylor on "Democracy and its Crisis" Walter-Benjamin-Lectures 2019 (Day 3)
When I announced in 2011 that my senior undergraduate seminar would be devoted to wading through Charles Taylor’s mammoth 900-page tome, A Secular Age, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Taylor is one of the world’s most celebrated thinkers, but I had my doubts that my students at Calvin College, a Christian liberal arts college of about 4,000 students, would want to wrestle with the work of this notoriously difficult Canadian philosopher. When the seminar table filled, I was intrigued. Either these students were gluttons for punishment, or Taylor’s questions about belief and unbelief in the 21st century had struck a nerve.
We began working through Taylor’s dense argument, and I worried that we’d soon lose each other in the dark forest of his prose. Reading Taylor requires that, like Hansel and Gretel, you bring breadcrumbs to trace an argument that has you bouncing from late medieval monasticism to German philosophy to lyrics from torch singer Peggy Lee.
But to my students’ astonishment (and mine), as they made their way through the book, lights went on for them, illuminating the world they live in in a new way. “It’s like he’s reading our mail,” one student said. If you’ve grown up in post-1960s North America, A Secular Age, which was published in 2007, is like an episode of “This is Your Life” or “Finding Your Roots”: It’s the backstory to the fractured world in which we find ourselves. For people who have strong beliefs, as many of my students do, living in a world that is secular is to experience belief haunted by doubt, almost daily. And then that doubt is itself haunted by an enduring longing for something more—what Taylor, a practicing Roman Catholic, calls a “fullness,” a sense of significance that has the punch of transcendence about it, even if we believe this world is all we’ve got.
Well, for starters, he helped explain why their generation considers “authenticity” the predominant virtue. In Taylor’s telling, the way humans see and imagine the world—what he calls our “social imaginary”—shifted in modernity from being religious and largely Christian to become “the modern moral order.” Rather than being obligated to God or “higher” eternal norms, today our obligations are for the mutual benefit of society. My moral obligations are to my neighbor, and everyone is my neighbor—so my obligations are universal. While we might no longer be haunted by God or eternity, in a sense the stakes are raised even higher: I’m responsible for everyone, all the time. There is no end to my obligation, no parameters for my responsibility. *In a sense, we have to fill the vacuum left by God’s death. Those are big shoes to fill.[*this last phrase reminds me of "radical theology's" premise that God has died in some sense and we are all that are left to take God's place. - re slater]
But there is a flip side to this: If we’re all we’ve got, Taylor says, it means we’re always “on” not only because we are always responsible but also because everybody’s watching. So we live in what Taylor calls an age of “mutual display” in which we show our individualism and virtue by making sure others see it. If God is dead, the only audience left to confirm our virtue is one another. David Foster Wallace got at this dynamic in a famous essay on television that is only more true in our internet age. What television did to us, Wallace argued, was turn us into watchers who expected to be watched. He, too, told a philosophical story about this, asking readers to imagine a “universe in which God is Nielsen.” Today, as my students explained, everyone is Nielsen, rating you.
A Paralyzing Self-Conscious Society
Taylor helped them make sense of the almost paralyzing self-consciousness that has descended upon them with the constant display/watch dynamic that attends social media. They know the exhaustion of what it means to always be “on,” and they are well aware of the judgmentalism they experience when they don’t “display” the right things in the right way. And they start to wonder if the all-seeing God might not have been a little more forgiving than the non-stop monitoring of Snapchat and Instagram.
An Age to Doubt
But Taylor also helped them understand a spiritual dynamic they experience. What makes ours a “secular” age, writes Taylor, is not that it is defined by unbelief but rather that belief is contestable and contested. Belief of every sort is “fragilized,” as Taylor puts it, destabilized by rival accounts and doubts. For more traditional “believers,” this means their faith is attended by doubt as a constant companion. “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24) is a prayer they understand well.
But Taylor explains that it’s not only believers who suffer from doubt. In our secular age the unbeliever can find herself tempted to believe. She may take up yoga, or sacrificially devote herself to causes of justice, or find herself strangely attracted to the Dominican nuns down the street who keep inviting her to spiritual retreats. The doubter’s doubt is faith. (As the novelist Julian Barnes admitted in his memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”)
Unlike the world described to my students by religious fundamentalists, this is a world that they recognize. Taylor did justice to the complexity of their experience and the messiness of their spiritual lives, giving voice to their doubts, to be sure, but also giving them permission to admit they also still wanted to believe something more. There is a kind of sincerity about Taylor’s philosophical analysis that allowed them to step out of the cage of ironic cynicism.
Better to pray in the ruins than settle for disenchantment
Taylor is the first to admit that A Secular Age is an heir to Romanticism: He is trying to offer a philosophy that gives due attention to what it feels like to live in the world—a theoretical account that acknowledges the importance of our affections, our embodiment, all the visceral ways that we grope through the dizzying existence of our late modern world.
My students found in Taylor’s work a kind of “hitchhiker’s guide” to a secular age. But not everyone has the luxury of spending four months working through it. Which is why I decided, after that semester, to write a book about a book in an attempt at bringing Taylor’s insights to a wider audience. The response has been quite overwhelming—people from all sorts of walks of life have told me that Taylor’s analysis gave them their bearings in the confusion of a secular age. Some religious believers told me it gave them permission to voice their doubts, to be honest about how hard it is to believe. Skeptics and atheists tell me Taylor puts a finger on the rumbling spirituality they can’t shake. So this big philosophical tome ends up doing what David Foster Wallace used to say a good novel is supposed to do: Give us a sense that we aren’t alone. Someone understands us and has given names to the landscape we live in.
Taylor’s book makes me think of an image by the Romantic German painter Caspar David Friedrich called Monastery Graveyard in the Snow. Stark, skeleton-like trees frame the ruins of a cloistered community. You can feel the chill of north winds blowing across the scene like the gales of enlightened disbelief blowing across Europe. The gravestones point to the dead who used to believe. (Fittingly, all we have is a black-and-white image of the painting, which was destroyed during World War II.)
But then, when I look closer at this image, I notice that amidst those grave markers is a tiny band of monks, obstinate but haunted, still looking for something. Is it force of habit that propels them? Or has the enlightenment they were promised proven unfulfilling? Better to pray in the ruins than settle for disenchantment. Charles Taylor suggests that many of us are like this band of seekers: We see the ruins, we know the world has changed, we know there’s no going back. But we also can’t shake a hunger, a longing, a haunting that we welcome.
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JAMES K.A. SMITH is professor of philosophy at Calvin College and the author of a number of books including How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor and, most recently, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. He is editor-in-chief of Comment magazine.
Re-Imagining Society, by Charles Taylor | Neville Elder Via Getty Images
This Philosopher Has Reimagined Identity and Morality for a Secular Age
10/13/2016 10:03 am ET Updated Nov 27, 2016
Charles Taylor, winner of the first $1 million Berggruen Prize for philosophy,
has helped reshape debates on what it is to be human.
Charles Taylor will receive the $1 million Berggruen Prize
on Dec. 1 at the New York Public Library.
One of the world’s most respected philosophers has just won the Berggruen Prize. Is this news you can use?
Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. The prize has been given to Charles Taylor, an exceptional thinker whose work can be of value both personally and in public life. In his native Canada, Taylor was a founder of the New Democratic Party, shaped debates and policy on immigration and ethnic politics, and played an important role in keeping Quebec part of Canada but with special status recognizing its distinctive culture. Taylor is of global influence as a Catholic thinker, a leader on the social democratic left and a spokesperson for combining rather than opposing liberalism and defense of community. His publications will reward readers with very different interests from personal identity to the challenges of modern democracy to religion in a secular age.
This guide is far from comprehensive. It points to some good places to start engaging with one of our era’s greatest thinkers. Perhaps most notably, in connection to the Berggruen Prize, Taylor has helped reshape debates on what it is to be human and how culture and politics matter in human existence.
The Self
A lot of criticisms are leveled at modern Western individualism. Taylor acknowledges that it can seem narrow, shallow and too focused on instrumental self-interest. Still, he refuses simple negativity. The modern idea of self brought new richness and freedoms to human life. It not only built on foundations like St. Augustine’s articulation of a sense of interior space and the importance of memory. It also added distinctive dimensions that opened it to embrace equality in ways ancient thought had not. That we struggle for meaning and purpose in our lives is an indication of the potential opened for us.
Taylor’s “Sources of the Self” traces the development of this modern understanding of what it means to be a person and explores its positive contributions and possibilities as well as its limits and potential weaknesses. The story proceeds in several phases. The era of the Protestant Reformation (and the Catholic response, which was never simply resistance) played an important role. So did Enlightenment celebration of reason, applied to self-knowledge and linked to the idea of self-mastery.
But Taylor places a special emphasis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Romantics. These built on earlier traditions like romantic love and integrated emotions and aesthetics into their accounts of the human self and embraced nature in newly positive ways. Rousseau helped make living in accord with nature into an ideal (in place of mastering nature and escaping from “baser” instincts or fallen character). Johann Gottfried Herder argued that human nature is not a determining force but a range of possibilities and capacities demanding expression. So basic is the notion of self-expression that moderns can hardly think of the self without it. This transformed the Christian idea of vocation or calling and underpinned a new idea of equality based on recognition of difference.
Language was a crucial medium for this expression, along with art, religion, action and ethical relationships. Humanity expressed itself differently in different cultures and even person by person. This diversity was not determined by a fixed human nature; it was made available by the natural capacities of human beings. Working out its implications is a basic task for human beings, both at the level of cultural differences and in individual life. So is reconciling what might be called the Enlightenment and Romantic sides of the modern self: the pursuit of both self-knowledge and self-mastery and distinctive self-expression and authenticity.
“Sources” is an intellectual history, but with broader intent. All of Taylor’s major books embed arguments in histories because he wants to show human beings as a process of becoming, not simply determined by nature. We face new circumstances and also face recurrent dilemmas, enriched by a growing range of intellectual and moral resources. Through tracing how modern thinking about the self developed, Taylor demonstrates both how powerfully ideas can shape our lives and that there are always multiple possibilities for how they can be put to use.
For example, individualism and a focus on the self became associated with secularism. But it was advanced by 17th century religious thinkers as part of a more personal relationship with God, manifested in individual prayer and supported by autonomous interpretation of the Bible. Religious devotion both influenced the development of the modern self and was transformed by it.
Likewise, individualism is often linked with greed and self-interest. Homo economicus is a modern conception. Relatedly, a prominent line of development in the modern self cast it as “punctual” as though each of us is a finite and bounded unit and like the points of geometry, a member of various sets like nations or humanity as a whole. Taylor doesn’t deny this but shows that among the sources of the modern self was also a moral revolution in which “ordinary happiness” in this material world was given a positive value not simply opposed to otherworldly spiritualism. This was linked to recognizing lay professions as comparably important to the priesthood, valuing the family more and with it, recognizing and extending childhood as a stage of human development. Neither families nor professions are simply sets of altogether discrete individuals. So we have also resources for recovering more relational, socially embedded understandings of the self.
As part of telling this story, Taylor offers important lessons on how ideas change, emphasizing how seldom they simply move from right to wrong but rather tend to resolve certain weaknesses, as well as introduce other potential issues. This can result in overall movement from worse to better, but there are always different possible paths as the meaning of ideas evolves and escapes their originators’ intentions. We face choices. We can limit individualism to notions of self-interest and necessity, but we don’t have to. After all, it also shaped development of the notion of human rights. How we judge this or other ideas will reflect our “horizons of evaluation” including both what we think is possible and what we think is good. Our strongest commitments put other preferences into perspective.
Charles Taylor - How To Struggle with Big Questions
The theme of what it means to be a person, a human being, runs through Taylor’s life’s work. It is enormously important in an era of great transformations. Definitions of the human and the self are challenged today by technological innovations from artificial intelligence to gene editing. They are also important to figuring out what ethics and policies should guide those new technologies. And not least, we live in a world where projects of personal identity are as influential as economic self-interest or old ideologies in shaping politics. This is true in “progressive” forms like the transformation of gender and sexual identities and claims to equal rights. And it is true in “conservative” forms like the claims to national and communal identities defended today by populist movements.
Taylor has been one of the most influential shapers of our understanding of such “politics of identity.” These reflect, he argued, a human need for recognition. We don’t simply exist and have identities, each sufficient in ourselves. We develop identities in social contexts, and we seek recognition of the legitimacy of our identities from others. As Taylor wrote in 1994, “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others ― our parents, for instance ―and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.”
This makes questions of identity personally significant and refusals of acceptance and respect deeply challenging. This extends to identities that can also be politically mobilized like nationality, race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. “Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need. To treat people with dignity and respect, we need to take full account of their varied social situations. This is especially important vis-a-vis those whose identities have been systematically degraded and whose rights to be treated as equals have been neglected.”
The politics of identity and recognition are reinforced by another central theme in modern culture: a value of “authenticity.” A strong horizon of evaluation for many moderns is to be “true to themselves.” This is linked to imaging ― we each have an inner essence, recasting the older idea of individual soul. People often think of this as their “nature,” and it can be problematic when it encourages people to regard relationships as disposable or to imagine that being true to themselves demands being inflexible. But for Taylor, these are debased versions of an idea with much positive ethical potential. Our deepest selves are constituted by our strongest values and commitments and are shaped by the most significant relationships of our lives. We can approach authenticity as an orienting ideal, aware both that we don’t always fully understand our own deepest commitments and that we often fail to live up to them. Moreover, recognizing that everyone has their own way of being human facilitates respect for individuals, but also for different cultures.
The effort to be an authentic person gives modern people a propensity to be “seekers.” The idea of trying to “find yourself” wouldn’t have made as much sense in many other eras. It is closely related to freedom from restrictions and the material availability of options, for example in the choice of occupations, politics or social movements. Taylor uses the term “seekers” to describe the large number of people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual but not committed to any one organized religion. This suggests something of an ambivalence with which he thinks moderns live, which can be troubling but is also ethically liberating and often creative. We often seek identification with existing communities and cultures, but we also, to an unprecedented degree, think of ourselves as choosing among them. And we change them. What happened to the “politics of identity” reflects this. Early usage often suggested that identities were malleable, and there was fluidity in how they were to be valued, inhabited, combined. But often, the politics of identity became a more rigid demand for respect for supposedly fixed and essential identities.
Quebec is never far from Taylor’s mind when he thinks of the politics of identity and recognition. He grew up with a Francophone mother and an Anglophone father. From early in life, he was committed to a multicultural vision for the province and for Canada, convinced that instead of being “two solitudes,” Canada’s major linguistic and cultural communities could enrich each other. When he was named to Oxford’s prestigious Chichele professorship in 1975, he decided he would only stay five years, at least partly because he wanted to return to Montreal and make sure his daughters had the chance to grow up bilingual. He helped to articulate the rationale for Quebec’s special status in Canada. But he also campaigned to keep Quebec part of Canada, arguing that with proper care and mutual respect, pluralist societies could be richer and stronger than those seeking an integriste conformity.
Taylor extends this point more generally. To be true to yourself need not mean either standing apart or trying to share a singular identity only with others just like you. It can and usually should mean recognizing diverse interests and commitments in yourself, being open to a sense of possibility and guided by strong (though corrigible) convictions. One of Taylor’s most important points is that we don’t just “have” selves ― we have the potential and usually the desire to be better selves.
Language and the Human Sciences
Like almost every other path of engagement with Taylor’s work, the politics of recognition and the ethics of authenticity bring us back to what it means to be human. Language is core to that. Taylor isn’t interesting simply in distinguishing humans from other animals by the capacity for language (and of course we know, as 17th and 18th century thinkers didn’t, the extent to which other animals are capable of language). Taylor’s concerns, rather, are the extent to which language makes us who we are, the fact that we have language only by sharing it and that we use language expressively, not just instrumentally.
Language, for Taylor, is constitutive of human being; we are language animals. Taylor expands on the famous Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, showing how basic language and culture are to the ways in which we know other human beings and indeed the material world. This is one reason why cross-cultural understanding requires mutual learning, not just translation. It is also among the reasons why interpretation is basic to the human sciences.
Important currents in behavioral and social science have been driven by a desire to achieve “objectivity” by disengaging from interpretation. Of course, knowledge of humans includes many “objective” elements from physiology to demography. But it cannot be complete ― or wise ― on these bases alone. Humans are not altogether objective and transparent even to themselves. Take voting. One may objectively observe people raising hands or shouting “aye” and “nay” in a meeting, but one can’t make sense of this as voting without knowing more about a linguistically constituted practice and the background of a culture in which it is pervasive. Within that culture, researchers can take the background for granted, but the need for interpretation becomes evident as soon as they step outside that basis for consensus interpretations. Cultures vary and no analyst’s knowledge escapes culture. Like other human practices, moreover, voting often expresses meanings that go beyond manifest, instrumental decisions.
Language enables us to reflect and plan and engage in agency, not only reactive behavior. This was a key point in Taylor’s first major work, where he showed why deterministic explanations of behavior (like B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism) must be inadequate to human action. Speaking is an example. It draws on a background resource ― language ― available to us only because we are not completely discrete individuals. But speaking is an action or more precisely, a practice.
Taylor illustrates this point by building on Wittgenstein’s famous account of following a rule. To follow a rule depends not just on knowing the rule itself in some objective sense (as a matter of premises and propositions, to use the technical philosophical terms). It depends also on a tacit background of knowledge that is never rendered entirely explicit. To use Wittgenstein’s term, rules and the capacity to follow them are embedded in “forms of life” ― or, loosely, cultures. But here it is crucial to understand cultures as something more than themselves catalogs of rules or formal structures. Starting with language, they are webs of meaning that people do not merely decode but inhabit and enact. One does not speak French merely by mastering the rules of French grammar (and of course, few Frenchmen can state those rules in much detail). To speak French is a practice, and competency is achieved by habituation, internalization, making it part of oneself. Likewise, to follow a rule is a practice that both depends on culture and expresses it ― whether it is as seemingly simple as traffic rules or as complex as the injunction to treat other human beings as ends rather than means.
This argument is pitched against narrow Cartesianism, with its starting point of a solipsistic “I think therefore I am,” and the whole related project of epistemology as a matter of abstract reason. Taylor elaborates it now partly because advances in computational technology have encouraged the spread of new mechanistic, entirely instrumental explanations of human thought and action. These reflect what Taylor (following Heidegger) calls an “enframing” approach – treating language simply as a tool for communication and as external to the reality it names or describes. Such views encourage reductionism toward human beings as well as language.
Social Imaginaries and a Secular Age
An enframing perspective neglects not only the constitutive role of language but also the power of imagination in shaping human life. This enables us to reach beyond what is immediately evident to our senses. We are able, for example, to form and act on aspirations for the future. Imagination, like language, also gives shape to the world. Much of “reality” exists in the way it does partly because of how it is imagined. This is not just a free-for-all of individual creativity; wishing does not make things so. But there are socially organized ways of imagining the world. Taylor describes several such “imaginaries” that help produce and reproduce the modern world: the idea of a generalized market is one of the most powerful. So is the idea of “the people” critical to democracy and also to legitimacy in other political systems. Business corporations and nations exist partially through the ways they are imagined.
Imagining modernity as a secular age is equally fundamental. This commonly involves what Taylor terms a “subtraction story.” Religion used to be a bigger part of human life and culture, but in the modern era, there has been progressive disenchantment; fewer people declare themselves believers; religion loses most of its public role; science replaces religion as the basis for authoritative knowledge. Taylor acknowledges these changes, but insists they can’t be well understood simply as subtractions that don’t entail transformation of culture more generally. Religion’s role changes as people reimagine what the world, human life and knowledge are like. How moderns understand personhood, moral obligations or the place of material well-being in a good life are all changed; religion is not simply subtracted from them.
One of the most dramatic changes is the rise of what Taylor calls “the immanent frame.” This is the notion that everything in the world is part of a natural order understandable without reference to anything outside itself and simply as a matter of causal relationships. This isn’t simply a truth modern people discovered; neither is it false. It is part of a secular social imaginary. It is one way of understanding and giving form to the world and human life. Within the immanent frame, ideas about transcendence are either errors or simply unnecessary to achieving empirically verifiable knowledge. This understanding of the world has proved enormously productive in the rise of modern science. It has been limiting in spiritual life. It has also shaped an approach to the environment as simply a matter of cost, effect, resources and use ― at odds with a notion of more transcendent value.
Indeed, within this immanent frame, values themselves tend to be understood simply as more or less arbitrary subjective states of individuals. Nature doesn’t have a value ― we either value it, or we don’t. Similarly, we may value human life more or less, but as a matter of cause-and-effect relationships, human beings don’t have intrinsic value. We see quickly that the immanent frame thus shaped not only the successes of modern science but also some of its dangerous moments. These may have been deviations from a more moral scientific ethos that includes ideas like not doing harm but these moral ideas generally come from outside the immanent frame. Today, the immanent frame is also challenged by the notion that human beings are radically transforming what seemed to be an entirely natural order ― whether through climate change or gene editing.
These are among the reasons why the secular age wasn’t simply the end of history so far as religion and spiritual life were concerned. Many people feel a need for a more spiritual compass to organize their personal lives and navigate the great transformations of our era. Some turn to renewal of older religions. Others become seekers exploring new forms of spiritual and moral engagement. There are so many, headed in so many different directions, that Taylor describes a “supernova.”
Once again, Taylor narrates an intellectual history in which there are gains, losses and possibilities for recovering what at some points appeared as paths closed off. A secular perspective grew first among religious people, for most of whom it was part of a deepening and more explicit religious faith ― notably in the 16th and 17th centuries. As modern science and states offered more control over matters in the material world, religion was called on as a guide. But in time, more and more thinkers distinguished questions of value on which religion could offer guidance from questions of fact and explanation. Many had a sense that to face the great transformations of a new era, religious innovation was required. Those who made the innovations didn’t imagine that for others, they would become part of a path away from religion ― any more than creators of modern technologies imagined that living in a world that felt technologically overpowered would lead many to seek a renewed spirituality.
Religion, thus, isn’t simply a matter of holding different abstract intellectual commitments from others, believing in the factuality of different propositions. It is participating in a different way of imagining the world. This can include achievements of modernity and the cause-and-effect systems in which they are embedded but isn’t limited to that. Reaching beyond might be based on belief in a higher power like God. It might also be based on commitment to a good higher-than-mere-instrumental human flourishing, like love (especially in the sense of agape). We have moved “from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” But even if religion becomes in some sense harder, it doesn’t vanish and religious experience may even gain new dimensions.
Taylor’s monumental “A Secular Age” is perhaps the single most influential work ever published on the phenomena of secularity (as well as the ideology of secularism). Ranging from the poetic to the social scientific to the deeply philosophical, it mobilized Taylor’s astonishing historical learning to advance understanding of what it means to live in a modern world. It has rightly transformed discussions in fields from sociology to history, anthropology and religious studies.
Charles Taylor’s approach to philosophy is always shaped by deep ethical commitments and public concerns. He addresses technical intellectual problems, but he is never interested in them only as technical problems. He writes accessibly. He travels widely, not simply to speak to audiences about arguments he regards as conclusively settled but to engage in discussions that are always potential occasions for intellectual advancement ― and he listens patiently to the most naïve questions, treating each as though it might contain an important new idea. Taylor’s approach also brings philosophy into the full range of human sciences and brings the more empirical humanities and social science into philosophy. It must be so, he seems to suggest, if the study of philosophy is truly to pursue wisdom.
The founders of the Berggruen Prize describe it as “awarded annually to a thinker whose ideas are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and advancement.” It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate first recipient than Charles Taylor.
See more videos of Charles Taylor here; these videos were produced by the Berggruen Institute and Zocalo Public Square.
Editor’s note: The WorldPost is a partnership between the Berggruen Institute and The Huffington Post.
What has the global pandemic brought to us? Firstly, if not significantly, there is a large societal breakdown in trust with each other and with institutions in general. As we continue to vaccinate it seems more and more unlikely that herd immunity can be reached due to a significant grouping of non-vaccinators. This means that a recovery back to a sense of "normalcy" most likely will be diminished for many years.
Similar to a PTSD psychiatric injury, social wellness will require rebuilding trust. For those who seek to help during this period of pronounced uncertainty one might imagine wading through wave after wave of misinformation, refusal to comply to help one another, and skepticism about the SARS-CoVid-19 vaccines themselves.
Both the good and the bad of information will require greater discernment with the distinct ability to find and develop determined sources of integrity including thosee good-willed promise keepers attempting to reconcile communities back to one another.
Personally, as a forward-looking entrepreneurial spirit, I sense this period of mistrust and unknowing can be importantly helpful in re-establishing better ontologic and epistemologic societal foundations than the ones we had relied on over the past centuries. Those which can no longer serve today's contemporary societies in the face of global knowledge, resourcing, and dialogue.
Foundationally restructuring our social mores will require:
(i) Properly expanding America's civil democracies to be persistently driven by equality and justice for all.
Other forms of structural redress might include:
(ii) Letting go of unhealthy eco-blinded industrialization, commercialism, and consumption.
(iii) Learning to work, listen, and build cooperative socio-economic partnerships across localities, regions, nations, and internationally while learning to let go of our trigger finger aimed at resource stealing, post-colonial expansionism, national sovereignty popularism, and ethnic cultural warfares.
(iv) And, on the religious side of things, to discern just how bad some Christian teachings have been when promoting fear, distrust, uncertainty (FUD), warfare, self-rights, and self-preservation. Mixing unhealthy beliefs with unhealthy politicking is just bad business for any community or nation.
That discriminatory and inhumane religious beliefs must be dropped by Christians from their Christian faith so that better religious teachings emphasizing an attitude of servanthood, personal sacrifice, service to others, and unbiased stewardship in all things such as non-profits, social aide, education, basic humanitarianism, love, peace and goodwill have much more to offer.
Yes, these present times of upheaval are the very best times to enact a better, more cohesive course for humanity and ecological restoration of the earth. Call it solidarity with one another, social justice, a healthy revisioning of humanity's future. Whatever. But deem this time and all our present efforts as a form of deeply personal and societal uplift. As forms of redemptive restoration of the human spirit re-learning to walk softly with our fellow neighbors throughout the cosmo-spheres of our existential and phenomenological existence.
R.E. Slater
April 13, 2021
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Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by AntonioGuillem/iStock/Getty Images Plus,Prostock-Studio/iStock/Getty Images Plus and Thinkstock.
“I Do Not Trust People in the Same Way and I Don’t Think I Ever Will Again”
Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
As COVID-19 vaccinations continue to run ahead of schedule, many workplaces that went fully remote last year are starting to set timelines for bringing people back to the office—and their employees are not happy.
As reopening initiatives gather steam, I’ve been flooded with letters from people viewing these plans with deep suspicion. Many of them are wondering whether they should even tell their employers once they’re vaccinated, since they fear that knowledge will be used to compel their return to work.
This person and her co-workers got vaccinated back in January but still fears returning:
My grandboss mentioned us going back a few weeks ago and I could almost immediately feel my panic response. I realized I haven’t been around anyone for more than two hours at a time in a year (except for three short occasions), I’m dreading having to wear a mask for multiple hours at work, I’m nervous to be back in spaces with lots of other people (even though I know our spaces are immaculately clean, we’ve still had a few positive cases). I don’t feel like me being there will do any good vs keeping my germs at home and away from people who are immunocompromised. It’s all so fraught and anxiety-inducing.
But bringing people back once they’re vaccinated has been the plan all along, as this manager points out:
I have felt like I am the one taking crazy pills the way some of our staff has reacted to my three-month warning that we will be reopening the office at the start of June. I am impressed we have held it together this long, but it has been a LOT of work and we just can’t afford to keep paying fees for missing things and losing time for development/training.
Part of the problem is one of timing. It’s one thing to plan on reopening in the late summer—Labor Day has been a popular target—but employers talking about bringing everyone back in May or June are ignoring that it’s unlikely we’ll have reached herd immunity by then (and kids definitely won’t be vaccinated yet, which is a concern for many parents).
Workers have also seen over the past year that even when employers claim they’ll implement safety measures, the reality is often very different. Social distancing requirements often go unenforced, and many people report colleagues going unmasked without any consequences. So employees are primed to be incredulous.
Plus, some people just prefer working from home and would rather not give it up. They’re quite happy to have no commute, a more flexible schedule, pets lounging nearby, more casual dress, and easy access to their own kitchen. A lot of us have even found we’re more productive at home, without the interruptions of chatty colleagues.
But the real problem, I suspect, is that in the past year, we’ve experienced a massive loss of trust in our institutions and in one another. After watching the government mislead and fail us on such a massive scale, with hundreds of thousands of people dying as a result of those failures, of course people are skeptical now. We’ve spent the past year not being protected by the institutions that were supposed to protect us and learning that we’d have to protect ourselves. So even at companies that have acted responsibly throughout the pandemic, employees are naturally anxious. When you’ve spent months watching businesses reopen while case numbers rose and governors giving that their blessing, as unsurprising new waves of infections followed, it’s pretty understandable to feel apprehensive of any new timelines for a return to “normalcy.”
This person who wrote me speaks for a lot of others:
I do not trust people or institutions in the same way and I don’t think I ever will again. Even as we “go back to normal” (and since much of the world is not vaccinated, it is not even close to over yet) I will not forget how our societies treated vulnerable people and essential workers as expendable, minorities as scapegoats, facts and public health as suggestions or lies.
Even when things are as safe as possible, there’s a sense that we’ve been torn apart.
Maybe I was naive, but I always assumed in a crisis, we’d come together as a society and have each other’s back. It’s been over a year of being proven wrong about that over and over again. Knowing that the people I serve at work and the ones I run into in my life may or may not be willing to throw me overboard for their own personal benefit and comfort makes it hard to be around people.
I feel differently about how I view the world and how much I want to interact with it. And I need to work on that, but I think the impact of this will linger.
All of this is true despite the very good news around us—like the rapidly increasing vaccine supply and new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing vaccinated people are unlikely to carry or spread the virus to others. For many people, that doesn’t change the reality that the past year has been a trauma, one that’s still unfolding. You can’t just turn that off when your office says it’s time to come back. (I also want to acknowledge the millions of people who won’t be “returning” to work because they’ve been working on site all along or have lost jobs that might not be coming back. In some ways, this anxiety about returning is the province of the privileged.)
So what can employers do? First and foremost, when possible, plan your reopening for further out than May or June. Think late summer or early fall. Give people plenty of notice, so they have time to get used to the idea, line up child care, and make any other arrangements. And consider a phased-in return: Rather than expecting workers to resume full-time on-site work overnight, bring people back for one or two days a week at first and then gradually increase that if it’s necessary. (It may not be! Many people have concluded that their jobs could be done most effectively with a hybrid setup, working from home some days and in the office others.) This person describes a system that worked well for her employer:
My facility has been closed to the public for basically a year. We did WFH for a while, then a mostly-WFH hybrid for the whole workforce, and then back into the still-closed-to-the-public office since the new year. We are just now opening up for limited programming, which I’ve had some surprising anxieties about even though I just got my second shot. Being able to ease back into things, and having things like mask guidelines, plexi barriers, and sanitizers everywhere has helped.
Coming back online a little bit at a time has allowed people to readjust. And it has given people with health concerns the flexibility to continue working from home, while letting those of us who feel able take care of the physical stuff that has to get done. I can’t imagine doing a year (or months) of WFH then returning to what is basically my pre-pandemic normal, just with masks on. If there is any way to make this a gentle transition, I think that would be the right call for everyone.
But employers should also recognize the significant break in trust between individuals and institutions, and know that won’t be repaired overnight. That doesn’t mean employers can’t bring people back when it’s truly safe to do so, but there’s going to be anxiety in their ranks for a long time—and the more they can be sensitive to and patient with that, the better reopenings are likely to go.
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