Perspectives on Charles Taylor's reconciled society: Community, difference and nature

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 347-376

  Lehman, Glen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA   (Australia)

Author keywords

communitarianism; ecology; interpretation; liberalism; post liberalism; public sphere; reconciliation

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847276190     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706063213     Document Type: Article

References (147)

1. J. Anderson, ‘The Personal Lives of Strong Evaluators: Identity, Pluralism and Ontology’, Constellations 3(1) (1996): 17–39.
2. J. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Constitutional Democratic State’, in A. Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 130–1.
3. C. Kukathas, ‘Against the Communitarian Republic’, Australian Quarterly 68(1) (1996): 67–76.
4. For a series of replies see R. Abbey, ‘More Perspectives on Communitarianism’, Australian Quarterly 69(2) (1997): 1–11;
5. R. Abbey, Charles Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
6. and R. Abbey, ‘Taylor as a Postliberal Theorist of Politics’, in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Charles Taylor, ed. Arto Laitinen and Nicholas H. Smith, vol. 71 (Helsinki: Acte Philosophica Fennica, 2002), pp. 149–65.
7. M. Patrick, ‘Liberalism, Rights and Recognition’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 26(5) (2000): 28–47.
8. P. Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
9. M. Redhead, ‘Charles Taylor's Nietzschean Predicament: a Dilemma More Revealing than Foreboding’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 27(6) (2001): 81–107
10. and M. Redhead, Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity (New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
11. See N. Porter, The Elusive Quest (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003). Porter's work is inspired by Gadamer's fusion of horizons and Taylor's interpretation of the possibilities provided through the common good. Porter applies the model to the politics of Northern Ireland.
12. See also S. O'Neill, ‘Are National Conflicts Reconciliable? Discourse Theory and Political Accommodation in Northern Ireland’, Constellations 10(1) (2003): 75–95.
13. A more useful label might be to refer to Taylor's work as an interpretative phenomenology, or post-liberalism. See especially Abbey's important classification in ‘Taylor as a Postliberal Theorist of Politics’, pp. 149–65.
14. Also A. MacIntyre, ‘The Spectre of Communitarianism’, Radical Philosophy 70(1995): 35.
15. C. Taylor (with R. Abbey), ‘“Communitarianism, Taylor-made” Interview with Ruth Abbey’, Australian Quarterly 68(1) (1996): 3–4.
16. C. Taylor, ‘Action as Expression’, in C. Diamond and J. Teichman (eds) Intention and Intentionality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 73–89.
17. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London, Allen & Unwin, 1965).
18. See also B. S. Turner, For Weber (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
19. C. Taylor, ‘The Significance of Significance: The Case of Cognitive Psychology’, in S. Mitchell and M. Rosen (eds) The Need for Interpretation: Contemporary Conceptions of the Philosopher's Task (London: Athlone Press, 1983), pp. 141–69;
20. C. Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. An Essay by Charles Taylor: with Commmentary by Amy Gutmann (editor), Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer and Susan Wolf, ed. A. Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992);
21. C. Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002);
22. C. Taylor, ‘Understanding the Other: a Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes’, in J. Malpas, U. Arnswald and Jens Kertshcer (eds) Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 290.
23. This also reflects Hegel's concern that Kantian ethics are too abstract and are devoid of empirical content. He states: ‘But the content of the maxim remains what it is, a specification or singularity, and the universality conferred on it by its reception into the form is thus a merely analytic unity. And when the unity conferred on it is expressed in a sentence purely as it is, that sentence is analytic and tautological.’ (G. Hegel, Natural Law, trans. T. M. Knox [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975], p. 76:
24. found initially in J. Habermas, ‘Morality and Ethical Life’, in J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen [Oxford: Polity Press, 1990], p. 212.)
25. Contemporary Kantians such as Christine Korsgaard attempt to solve this problem by identifying in Kant's construction of the categorical imperative moments of moral development. A different perspective is that provided by Terry Pinkard who argues that Kant offers only an atomistic conception of the self who must submit to the moral law as soon as the imperative of duty supervenes. He quotes Kant's political writing: ‘man is not thereby expected to renounce his natural aim of attaining happiness as soon as the question of following his duty arises; for like any finite rational being, he simply cannot do so. Instead, he must completely abstract from such consideration as soon as the duty of imperative supervenes, and must on no account make them a condition of his “obeying the law prescribed to him by reason”.’ (I. Kant, ‘This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice’, in I. Kant, Kant's Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], p. 64.
26. See T. Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], p. 238.)
27. C. Taylor, ‘Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes’, in Malpas, Arnswald and Kertshcer (eds) Gadamer's Century, p. 290.
28. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Constitutional Democratic State’, pp. 130–1
29. and C. Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition: Charles Taylor, K. Anthony Appiah, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf, Amy Gutmann (Editor), ed. A. Gutmann, an expanded edn of Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, 1992 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
30. P. Levy, ‘Charles Taylor on Overcoming Incommensurability’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 26(5) (2000): 47–62.
31. Anderson, ‘The Personal Lives of Strong Evaluators’, pp. 17–39.
32. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Constitutional Democratic State’, p. 130.
33. B. Barry, Culture and Equality (Oxford: Polity Press, 2001).
34. Anderson, ‘The Personal Lives of Strong Evaluators’, pp. 17–39.
35. Redhead, ‘Charles Taylor's Nietzschean Predicament’, pp. 81–107.
36. Pettit, Republicanism, pp. 23–7.
37. C. Taylor, ‘On Disclosing New Worlds’, Inquiry 38(1/2) (1995): 119–23
38. and C. Taylor, ‘The Importance of Herder’, in E. Margalit and A. Margalit (eds) Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 40–64
39. (reprinted in C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995], pp. 79–100).
40. See also M. N. Forster, ‘Herder's Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation: Three Fundamental Principles’, The Review of Metaphysics LVI(2) (2002): 323–54.
41. See J. Habermas, ‘A Reply’, in A. Honneth and H. Joas (eds) Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 216–17.
42. See C. Taylor, ‘Language and Society’, in Honneth and Joas (eds) Communicative Action, pp. 23–36.
43. Also, C. Lafont, Heidegger, Language and World Disclosure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 11, 35.
44. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Constitutional Democratic State’, pp. 130–1.
45. Taylor has also argued that the vision of a procedural world assumes that the natural environment simply stands in wait for people to use and manipulate. C. Taylor, ‘Heidegger, Language, and Ecology’, in H. L. Dreyfus and H. Hall (eds) Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 247–69
46. (reprinted in C. Taylor, ‘Heidegger, Language and Ecology’, in C. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995], pp. 100–26).
47. C. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
48. For Taylor's comments on Habermas' procedural modus vivendi see C. Taylor, ‘Ethics and Ontology’, Journal of Philosophy C(6) (2003): 305.
49. C. Taylor, ‘Civil Society in the Western Tradition’, in E. Groffier and M. Paradis (eds) The Notion of Tolerance and Human Rights (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991).
50. C. Taylor, ‘Alternative Futures: Legitimacy, Identity and Alienation in Late-Twentieth Century Canada’, in A. Cairns and C. Williams, Constitutionalism, Citizenship and Society in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 183–229
51. (reprinted in C. Taylor, ‘Alternative Futures’, in C. Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes, ed. G. Laforest [McGill: Queen's University Press, 1993], pp. 59–120).
52. C. Taylor, ‘A Tension in Modern Democracy’, in A. Botwinick and W. E. Connolly (eds) Democracy and Vision (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 79–99.
53. C. Taylor, ‘What's Wrong with Foundationalism? Knowledge, Agency and World’, in M. A. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds) Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), pp. 115–34.
54. Taylor, ‘On Disclosing New Worlds’, pp. 119–23.
55. C. Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
56. Habermas, ‘A Reply’, pp. 216–17.
57. See Taylor, ‘Ethics and Ontology’, pp. 305–20.
58. J. Habermas, Justification and Application (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 56–7 where he states that ‘we presuppose a dialogical situation that satisfies ideal conditions in a number of respects, including … freedom of access, equal rights to participate, truthfulness on the part of participants, absence of coercion in taking positions, and so forth’ (p. 56).
59. Found initially in Porter, The Elusive Quest, pp. 150–60.
60. Taylor, ‘Language and Society’, pp. 23–5.
61. Habermas, ‘A Reply’, pp. 216–17.
62. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Constitutional Democratic State’, pp. 130–1.
63. J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalisation of Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press and Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1984).
64. Habermas, Justification and Application, pp. 48–52.
65. Habermas, ‘A Reply’, p. 215, 217.
66. Taylor, ‘Language and Society’, pp. 23–36.
67. See Taylor, ‘Ethics and Ontology’, pp. 305–10. In this article Taylor explores the work of John McDowell, with whom he concurs in the supposition that there exists a need to move beyond the restrictive phenomenology of ‘bald naturalism’. Taylor states, ‘McDowell seems to have done the trick, and to have reconciled the deliverances of phenomenology (we really discern ethical differences in human life, and these have to be understood as involving incommensurable, higher values), and the basic concerns of a naturalistic ontology, which cannot allow such values into the furniture of the universe’ (p. 315).
68. C. Taylor, ‘A Catholic Modernity’, in J. L. Heft (ed.) A Catholic Modernity?: Charles Taylor's Marianist Award Lecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999a)
69. and C. Taylor, ‘Comment on Jürgen Habermas' “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again”’, European Journal of Philosophy 7(2) (1999): 158–60.
70. See, for example, J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)
71. and for Taylor's critique of Rawls' lexical approach to reconciliation see Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 45.
72. Taylor, Sources, p. 45.
73. Habermas, ‘A Reply’, p. 217.
74. I. Kant, Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals (originally The Moral Law), trans. H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson [now Harper & Row], 1949).
75. J. Habermas, ‘Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight’, in J. Bohman and M. L. Lutz-Bachmann (eds) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (London: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 113–55.
76. Taylor, ‘Comment on Jurgen Habermas' “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again”’, p. 161.
77. C. Taylor, ‘Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer Distinction’, in N. H. Smith, Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 106–21.
78. Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860, p. 227.
79. See especially J. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1990 and Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 211.
80. Habermas, ‘A Reply’, p. 216.
81. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, p. 211.
82. See Porter, The Elusive Quest, pp. 154–5.
83. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 5th repro., trans. Garrett Barden and John Cummings (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975).
84. C. Taylor, ‘Engaged Agency and Background to Heidegger’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. C. Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 317–37.
85. Habermas, ‘A Reply’, pp. 216–17
86. and J. Habermas, ‘From Kant to Hegel and Back Again — The Moves Toward Detranscendentalization’, The European Journal of Philosophy 7(2) (1999): 129–57.
87. And for Taylor's response see Taylor, ‘Comment on Jürgen Habermas' “From Kant to Hegel and Back Again”’, pp. 158–60.
88. J. G. Herder, ‘On the Origin of Language’, in F. M. Barnard, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. and trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)
89. and W. Von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. P. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
90. Taylor, ‘The Importance of Herder’, pp. 79–100.
91. Taylor, ‘Language and Society’, p. 31.
92. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 108–9.
93. Taylor, Sources, pp. 85–8.
94. See also J. H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and The Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
95. C. Taylor, ‘To Follow a Rule …’, in C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma and M. Postone (eds) Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 35–45
96. and Taylor, ‘Engaged Agency and Background to Heidegger’, pp. 317–37.
97. C. Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
98. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 45.
99. C. Taylor, ‘The Dialogical Self’, in D. R. Hiley, J. F. Bohman and R. Shusterman (eds) The Interpretive Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 304–15.
100. J. Dryzek, ‘Green Reason: Communicative Ethics for the Biosphere’, Environmental Ethics 12(3) (1988): 210.
101. Anderson, ‘The Personal Lives of Strong Evaluators’, p. 33.
102. M. Ancelovici and F. Dupuis-Déri, ‘Interview with Professor Charles Taylor’, Citizenship Studies 2(2) (1998): 251.
103. Taylor, ‘Understanding the Other’, p. 290.
104. M. Walzer, ‘Comment’, in Taylor, Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann, p. 99.
105. R. Abbey, ‘Interpreting Taylor Rightly’, Ethnicities 31(1) (2003): 123.
106. Patrick, ‘Liberalism, Rights and Recognition’, p. 37.
107. C. Taylor, ‘Dialektik heute, oder: Strukturen der Selbstnegation’, in D. Henrich, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik: Formation und Rekonstruktion, trans. by the Flinders University of South Australia's Department of Language (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986), pp. 141–53, 141.
108. Taylor, Hegel, p. 550.
109. Taylor, ‘Understanding the Other’, p. 290.
110. C. Taylor, ‘Politics of the Steady State’, New Universities Quarterly 32(2) (1978): 157–84.
111. C. Taylor, ‘Explanation and Practical Reason’, in M. Nussbaum and A. Sen (eds) The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 209.
112. C. Taylor, ‘Neutrality in Political Science’, in A. Ryan (ed.) The Philosophy of Social Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 139–71.
113. See also R. Hittinger, ‘Charles Taylor: Sources of the Self’, Review of Metaphysics XLIV(1) (1990): 111–30.
114. Redhead, Charles Taylor, p. 203.
115. Redhead, ‘Charles Taylor's Nietzschean predicament’, p. 100, 98.
116. R. Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 18.
117. Taylor, ‘Understanding the Other’, pp. 279–99.
118. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 306–7, 374–5.
119. S. K. White, Sustaining Affirmation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 68.
120. Taylor, ‘Heidegger, Language and Ecology’, pp. 247–69, p. 258.
121. In this sense, Taylor's interpretation extends Gadamer's argument that it is through language that people's moral sources can also be given expression to satisfy people's need for recognition. For the purposes of ecological politics, as an example, it explores that ground where nature's value can be revealed as it shapes the development of freedom. See Taylor, ‘Understanding the Other’, p. 290.
122. Taylor, ‘A Tension in Modern Democracy’, pp. 79–99.
123. C. Taylor, ‘Cross-purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, in N. Rosenblum (ed.) Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 159–82.
124. Patrick, ‘Liberalism, Rights and Recognition’, pp. 28–47.
125. Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes’, pp. 159–82.
126. Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Gutmann, p. 25.
127. Abbey, Nietzsche's Middle Period, pp. 8–12.
128. M. Walzer, ‘The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism’, Political Theory 18(1) (1990): 6–23, 6.
129. P. Pettit, ‘Liberalism and Republicanism’, Australian Journal of Political Science 28 (special issue) (1993): 162–89.
130. Taylor, ‘Cross-purposes’, pp. 159–82.
131. Pettit, ‘Liberalism and Republicanism’, p. 182.
132. Taylor, Sources, p. 63.
133. C. Taylor, ‘Pluralism of Goods’, in R. Dworkin, M. Lilla and B. Silvers (eds) The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), pp. 113–21.
134. Taylor, ‘Alternative Futures … in Late-Twentieth Century Canada’, pp. 59–120.
135. B. Brugger, Republican Theory in Political Thought: Virtuous or Virtual (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1999), p. 2.
136. At one end of this spectrum is the neo-Roman conception of freedom which can be taken to be a form of participatory and positive freedom. Here, Graham Maddox perspicuously suggests that this conception of freedom is associated with a tradition which had its origins in Rome and is associated with Cicero and actually moves toward a variant of libertarianism. At the other end of this spectrum we would have modern liberalism which is associated with negative freedom. See G. Maddox, ‘The Limits of Neo-Roman Liberty’, History of Political Thought XXIII(3) (2002): 418–31.
137. Taylor, ‘Cross-purposes’, pp. 159–63.
138. Taylor, ‘On Disclosing New Worlds’, pp. 119–23.
139. Kukathas, ‘Against the Communitarian Republic’, p. 67.
140. Taylor, ‘Cross-purposes’, pp. 159–82.
141. Abbey, ‘More Perspectives on Communitarianism’, pp. 1–11.
142. C. Taylor, ‘Can Liberalism Be Communitarian?’, Critical Review 8(2) (1994): 257–63.
143. M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
144. See M. Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
145. Taylor, ‘On Disclosing New Worlds’, pp. 119–23.
146. Taylor, Hegel, p. 19.
147. H. Dreyfus, ‘Responses’, in M. A. Wrathall and J. Malpas (eds) Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed. M. Wrathall and J. Malpas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 344.