Charles Taylor's Nietzschean predicament: A dilemma more self-revealing than foreboding

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 27, Issue 6, 2001, Pages 81-106

  Redhead, Mark ^a  

^a OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Charles Taylor; genealogy; moral reasoning; Nietzsche; ontology; theism

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998103892     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370102700605     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. see Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers Volumes I & II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 517.
3. Michael Shapiro has also pointed out that Taylor has a ‘Nietzsche problem’. See Michael Shapiro, ‘Charles Taylor's Moral Subject: Philosophical Papers Volumes 1 and 2’, Political Theory (May 1986). The Nietzsche problem that Shapiro alludes to is Taylor's inability to come to terms with Nietzsche because Taylor is writing within ‘an enlightenment tradition that seeks ever more clarity about the subject and ties all of its discursive practices … to its narrative of a truth existing outside of those practices, toward which we are moving’. While this characterization of Taylor is a bit unfair — Taylor's quest is not to find ultimate truths but to discern sites for convergence between different cultures and/or what he calls alternative modernities by first developing a fine-grained understanding of ‘our’ modern identities — Shapiro is definitely on to something. Particularly so when he declares that it would ‘behoove Taylor to stop looking over his shoulder at Nietzsche and consider the gains for his kind of hermenutic analysis that could result from a critical confrontation with the genealogical perspective’. In many respects, this paper is an attempt to sketch out both how this critical confrontation can occur, as well as the gains that could result from it.
4. Sources of the Self, p. 453, p. 515, p. 517, p. 455, p. 34, p. 4, 13 bid., p. 14.
5. See Charles Taylor, ‘Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger’, in Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 325.
6. Sources of the Self, p. 35.
7. Charles Taylor, ‘Reply to Commentators’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March 1994), p. 208.
8. Charles Taylor, ‘Reply to Baybrooke and DeSousa’, Dialogue (Winter 1994), p. 126.
9. Sources of the Self, p. 495.
10. Charles Taylor, ‘Comments and Replies’, Inquiry (June 1991), p. 243.
11. Sources of the Self, p. 93.
12. ‘Reply to Baybrooke and DeSousa’, p. 130.
13. Sources of the Self, p. 311, p. x, p. 503, p. 393, p. 518.
14. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 40.
15. Sources of the Self, p. 519.
16. Jeremy Waldron, ‘How We Learn to be Good’, Times Literary Supplement (March 23–29, 1990), p. 326.
17. Sources of the Self, p. 520, p. 519, p. 521.
18. Charles Taylor, ‘A Catholic Modernity’, Marianist Award Lecture, 1996 (Dayton, OH: University of Dayton Press, 1996), p. 16.
19. Charles Taylor, ‘Concluding Reflections and Comments’, in James Heft (ed.), A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor's Marianist Award Lecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 109, p. 110.
20. See Michael L. Morgan, ‘Religion, History and Moral Discourse’, in James Tully (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 53 and 63. Yet Taylor's project in Sources of Self is to expose the moral sources such as the divine that we consult when engaging in processes of practical reasoning about moral or what he calls life goods like justice, so as to argue that the transcendent provides the most compelling basis for practical reasoning about moral concepts like justice.
21. ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ p. 18, p. 19.
22. Sources of the Self, p. 258, p. 520.
23. Charles Taylor, ‘Reply and Rearticulation’, in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 225.
24. ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ p. 31, 32, 34, 35.
25. David Miller, ‘What Holds Us Together?’ Times Literary Supplement (14 December, 1995), p. 26.
26. ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ p. 12.
27. Charles Taylor, ‘Modes of Secularism’, in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 48.
28. ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ p. 37, p. 10, p. 7, p. 8, p. 8.
29. Joel Anderson, ‘The Personal Lives of Strong Evaluators: Identity, Pluralism, and Ontology in Charles Taylor's Value Theory’, Constellations (April, 1996), p. 18.
30. for a masterful study of one facet of Taylor's modern identity that works through many of the voices missing from Sources of the Self, see J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
31. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Our Pasts, Ourselves’, The New Republic (9 April, 1990), p. 32.
32. Charles Taylor, ‘Preface’, in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. xii.
33. See also Charles Taylor, ‘A World Consensus on Human Rights’, Dissent (Summer 1996)
34. Charles Taylor, ‘Living with Difference’, in Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan Jr. (eds), Debating Democracy's Discontent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
35. Judith Shklar, ‘Review of Sources of the Self’, Political Theory (February, 1991), p. 108.
36. ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ p. 37.
37. ‘Reply to Baybrooke and DeSousa’, p. 131.
38. Real Robert Fillion, ‘Foucault contra Taylor: Whose Sources? Which Self?’ Dialogue (Fall, 1995), p. 671.
39. Alasdair Macintyre, ‘Critical Remarks on the Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (March, 1994), p. 189.
40. Quentin Skinner, ‘Who Are “We”? Ambiguities of the Modern Self’, Inquiry (June, 1991), p. 142, p. 143, p. 144, p. 145.
41. Quentin Skinner, ‘Modernity and Disenchantment: Some Historical Reflections’, in James Tully (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, p. 47.
42. Charles Taylor, ‘Reply and Rearticulation’, in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, p. 225, p. 226.
43. ‘Modernity and Disenchantment: Some Historical Reflections’, p. 48.
44. Bernard Williams, ‘Republican and Galilean’, New York Review of Books 8 November, 1990), p. 48.
45. ‘Republican and Galilean’, New York Review of Books
46. (1990), p. 48 A similar critique of Taylor on this point is made by J. B. Schneewind.
47. See J. B. Schneewind, ‘Review of Sources of the Self’, Journal of Philosophy (July, 1991), pp. 422–6.
48. ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ p. 29.
49. Sources of the Self, p. 99.
50. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887), translated by Francis Golffing (New York: Anchor Books, 1956), pt. 2 #12, p. 209.
51. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1874) in Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 123.
52. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human (1886), translated by Marion Faber (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), #249, p. 159 and #276, p. 168.
53. ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, p. 61.
54. Human All Too Human, p. 152.
55. ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, p. 95, p. 94, p. 63.
56. Human All Too Human, #241, p. 148.
57. Sources of the Self, p. 507, p. 520.
58. ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ p. 29, p. 15, p. 35.