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TAYLOR, CHARLES

Department of Sociology

University of Maryland

College Park, MD 20783

jstepnisky@socy.umd.edu

wc: 1350

TAYLOR, CHARLES (b. 1931) Canadian social theorist and philosopher of modernity, Taylor is an advocate of a hermeneutic approach to social scientific research, and author of the highly regarded Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989). Educated at McGill and Oxford, Taylor combines Anglo-American and Continental philosophies to address problems across the social and human sciences. Most notably Taylor has offered a sustained critique of the naturalist and reductionist accounts of human behavior that have predominated in modern philosophy and social science. More recently, this critique has addressed the nihilistic implications of postmodern and poststructuralist philosophies. As an alternative for the social sciences, Taylor develops a hermeneutic understanding of human behavior that valorizes the integrity and agency of persons. Human beings are self-interpreting animals who struggle to articulate their position within culturally constituted frameworks of meaning and moral worth. In elaborating this perspective, Taylor has written on issues of broad concern to the social sciences including epistemology, ethics, language, the self, multiculturalism, the liberal-communitarian debate in political philosophy, and most recently religion. Taylor has called his project a philosophical anthropology, indicating his interest in tracing the history of the changing conceptions of human nature in western philosophy and culture. Though this philosophical anthropology is most clearly exemplified in Sources of the Self (1989), its influence on Taylor’s method of research and style of argument is also apparent in shorter essays such as his often cited “The Politics of Recognition” (1994). Taylor is also recognized as an interpreter of Hegel, and a commentator on Canadian politics, especially on the question of French sovereignty within Canada.

Taylor’s critique of reductionist social science extends as far back as his first book, The Explanation of Behavior (1964), in which he criticizes behaviorist psychology for its efforts to explain human behavior through the law-like statements exemplified in the natural sciences. In the 1970s and the 1980s he extended this critique to cognitive psychological and neurophysiological explanations of behavior. Similarly, in one of his most influential essays “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” (1971), Taylor finds fault in the kind of political science scholarship that reduces the shared meanings contained in political cultures to the interests of atomistic individuals. Common to these social sciences is the expectation that reductive theories provide explanations of human behavior that can be verified against empirical evidence. This hope, Taylor claims, is dangerously misplaced, as it leads to the elaboration of sciences that cannot help us to understand important aspects of human life. In this respect Taylor shares much in common with postmodern and poststructuralist authors who aim to deconstruct the scientistic, foundationalist, and individualistic bias of western thought. However, even as he sympathizes with authors such as Foucault and Derrida, Taylor argues that post-structuralism reproduces the epistemological errors of western philosophy by ignoring the integrity of lived personal experience. As such, Taylor advocates a hermeneutic epistemology in which the self-possessed interpretive capacities of human beings assume center stage. Human beings are self-interpreting animals who understand and reflect upon the meaning of their lives and their relations to other people. This kind of self-interpretive activity is not based on a priori epistemological principles, but on practical knowledge and everyday encounters with cultural frameworks. Furthermore, Taylor marks himself as a philosopher of morality by arguing that interpretation necessarily involves evaluations of moral worth. Human beings are not simply self-interpreters, but they are the kind of interpreters for whom things matter. Precisely what matters is worked out as individuals articulate their position within the moral spaces constituted by historical communities.

Taylor’s hermeneutic project is supported by a philosophy of language that makes appearances throughout his writings, but is most thoroughly developed in the essays contained in the first volume of his philosophical papers, Human Agency and Language (1985). Here, 20^th century philosophy is characterized by its concern with language and the relation between language and meaning. Two conceptions of language have vied for superiority in 20^th century thought. Taylor traces the first of these conceptions to Enlightenment scholarship, and in particular, to the influence of Locke. On this “designative” view, language serves the utilitarian purpose of accurately picturing or representing a pre-existent reality. In contrast, the Romantic counter-Enlightenment, as represented in the work of Herder and Rousseau, provides a “constitutive” or “expressive” conception of language. On this view, language does not represent a pre-existing reality but gives expression to unarticulated sensibilities and feelings. The act of articulation clarifies the meaning of these feelings and constitutes new forms of human understanding. Insofar as they are constituted in language, these newly articulated understandings are communal possessions that deepen self-awareness. While 20^th century social science has been committed to the designative view of language, Taylor argues that language is most properly an expressive medium in which meaning is realized.

Many of these philosophical arguments come together in Taylor’s history of the modern self, Sources of the Self (1989). In this book, Taylor argues that selfhood and morality are inextricably intertwined and he sets out to describe the history of the relation between the self and the good. Taylor is particularly critical of the strand of modernism that seeks to objectify and naturalize all accounts of human selfhood. He deems these incapable of providing an account of the self that captures the depth of personal experience. Nevertheless, Taylor argues that there are elements of modernity that potentially provide for a rich account of the self. Taylor’s task, then, is not to reject the modern project, but to recover those elements of the project that revivify the idea of authentic selfhood. These arguments overlap with Taylor’s work in political philosophy. Like his project on the self, Taylor views his work in political philosophy as an effort to define the political culture of modernity. In this capacity, Taylor has written on the liberal-communitarian debate, defending the communitarian position against the atomism and methodological individualism of political liberalism. As a Canadian in Quebec, Taylor has written on the topic of French-English relations in Canada, and has also been called on by parliamentary commissions to address the viability of a continuing Canadian federalism. In these capacities, Taylor has passionately argued for a renewed federalism in which cultural diversity is deepened and sustained through ongoing efforts at cross-cultural communication and mutual understanding. Here, Taylor has also addressed broader issues of nationalism, multiculturalism and ethnocentricity. He argues that debates about multiculturalism and ethnocentricity emerge out of the modern concern with a demand for recognition. While the liberal perspective employs a procedural mechanism to ensure that all cultures are granted equal opportunity for recognition, Taylor adopts a communitarian stance to argue that cross-cultural encounters should involve conversations about the relative worth of cultures and their valued goods. Recently, Taylor has begun to explore the religious dimension of modern life. Consistent with his earlier writing on modernity, Taylor examines the private and public dimensions of religious life as well as the relations between religion, political culture, and the state.

JEFFREY STEPNISKY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK