Philosophical arguments

331 Pages·1995·14.67 MB·English

by  Charles Taylor

Philosophical
Arguments
CHARLES TAYLOR
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Copyright © 1995 by Charles Taylor
All rights reserved
Printed in the Ut~ited States ofA merica
SECOND PRINTING, 1995
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding matcrialf! have been chosen for
strength and durability.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Taylor, Charles, 1931-
Philosophical arguments I Charles Taylor.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-674-66476-0 (alk. paper)
1. Philosophy, Canadian-20th century. 2. Philosophical
anthropology. 3. Lanbruage and languages-Philosophy. 4. Philosophy
and social sciences. I. Title.
B995.T3P47 1995 94-36548
191-dc20 CIP
Contents
1 Overcoming EpistemoJogy 1
2 The Validity of Transcendental Argun1ents 20
3 Explanation and Practical Reason 34
4 Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and
Wittgenstcin 61
5 The ln1portance of Herder 79
6 Heidegger, Language, and Ecology 100
7 Irreducibly Social Goods 127
8 Comparison, History, Truth 146
9 To Follow a Rule 165
10 Cross-PUJ}')Oses: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate 181
11 Invoking Civil Society 204
12 The Politics of Recognition 225
13 Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere 257
Notes 289
Credits 311
Index 313

Preface
This collection of essays may appear rather disparate. In some ways it is,
since the principle of selection was partly temporal: most of what appears
here was written in the last ten years. llut there are nevertheless some basic
themes that recur-not surprisingly, because they raise issues that go on
worrying me, where I never feel I have said, fully and satisfactorily, what I
want to say.
These themes have been bothering me for decades, but some appeared
earlier then others in my published writing. The oldest theme in this sense
is the one I deal with head on in the very first essay, "Overcoming Episte
mology." I say "head on" because I attempt a direct attack on the Hydra
whose serpentine heads wreak havoc throughout the intellectual culture of
modernity-in science, in criticism, in ethics, in political thinking, almost
anywhere you look.
I call the Hydra "epistemology,'' which sounds rather unfair, because
that's the name of a problem area, and what I have in my sights must be
something in the nature of a doctrine. llut the name is deserved, in the sense
that the philosophical assumptions it designates give epistemology pride of
place. These are the assumptions Descartes gave articulation to; central is
the view that we can somehow come to grips with the problem of knowl
edge, and then later proceed to determine what we can legitimately say
about other things: about God, or the world, or human life. From Des
cartes's standpoint, this seems not only a possible way to proceed, but the
only difensible way. Because, after all. whatever we say about God or the
world represents a knowledge claim. So first we ought to be clear about
the nature of knowledge, and about what it is to make a defensible claim.
To deny this would be irresponsible.
I believe this to be a terrible and fateful illusion. It assumes wrongly that
we can get to the bottom of what knowledge is, without drawing on our
VII
PREFACE
Vlll
never-fully-articulable understanding of human life and experience. There
is a temptation here to a kind of self-possessing clarity, to which our modern
culture has been almost endlessly susceptible. So much so that most of the
enemies of Descartes, who think they are overcoming his standpoint, arc
still giving primacy of place to epistemology. Their doctrirze about knowledge
is different, even radically critical of Descartes, but they are still practicing
the structural idealism of the epistemological age, defining their ontology,
their view of what is, on the basis of a prior doctrine of what we can know.
Figures as different, and as mutually hostile, as Quine and Derrida continue
to function in this post-Cartesian universe, which in my view is a kind of
"upside-down world," to borrow Hegel's £1rnous expression.
If I am right about this, then loud denunciations of Descartes are not of
themselves a sign of a writer's having escaped Descartes's baleful influence.
Contemporary doctrines, smnetirnes called "postrnodern," an: a good ex
ample of this. I mentioned Derrida above. In his view the fundamental
error, in which Descartes participates, is even more deeply rooted. It is the
whole western metaphysical tradition which accords illusory privilege to
"Presence," to a kind of unmediated epistem.ic contract with reality. Der
rida 's response to this is a high-level, abstract, a priori argument to the im
possibility ofPresence, so defined; on which he then draws to make all sorts
of affirmations about thought, language, history, power relations, ethics,
politics, and so on. But this is only to repeat the epistemological demarche
in the negative mode.
There is a challenge that this kind of philosophical argument has yet to
meet. Can you establish the possibility or impossibility of Presence? Can
you even satisfY yourself that it's a useful term, without a rnore careful exam
ination of how we actually think, judge, or feel? I believe that epistemologi
cal thinking is unable to meet this test.
This raises a number of questions about the nature and scope of a priori
argument, and in particular about what have been called since Kant "tran
scendental arguments." This is an issue I tackle in the second chapter. I give
an account of transcendental arguments which tries to do justice both to
their compelling nature and to their revisability. In virtue of the latter, they
are not really a priori in the full Leibniz-Kant sense. But, then, no interest
ing philosophical argument is. The belief that this could be so was another
product of the epistemological illusion.
Various other papers in the volume follow out of ramifications of this
l'nEt'ACE
lX
debate with epistemology, such as Chapters 4, 6, 8, and 9. But here we
come to the point of overlap with a second theme that has concerned me
over the years: the nature of language.
There has always been a tendency, at least in the western tradition, to
define human beings as language animals. That, in any case, can be a permis
sible translation of Aristotle's expression in Ethics 1. 7, zoion ekhmz logon,
which was usually rendered "rational animal." But since the Renaissance,
the understanding of human beings through the crucial trait oflanguage has
taken on a new meaning-in fact, two new meanings, in two stages. There
is the seventeenth-century preoccupation, visible in Locke, with language
as the prime instrument for the construction of our picture of the world,
the concern with its proper use and, very anxiously, with its potential abuse.
Then there is the expressivist understanding oflanguage and art in the Ro
mantic period, which sharply criticizes the Lockean view and proposes a
quite different notion of creativity. Herder is in some ways the key figure
in this.
It is not hard to see how someone obsessed with the epistemological issue
would become concerned with this one too. They are closely interwoven.
The place oflanguage for Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac was circumscribed
by their theory of knowledge. Language was the crucial instrument of
knowledge. And it is just this instrumentality of language which the Ro
mantic generation criticized. The proponents and developers of the Ro
mantic theory have been among the most passionate critics of the epistemo
logical tradition, from Hamann's review of Kant's Critique cif Pure Reason to
the writings in our century of Heidegger, of the later Wittgenstein, and of
certain postmodernists.
This is, indeed, one of the ways in which the epistemological issue colors
and shapes our philosophical anthropology: perhaps the most fateful of all,
considering the importance of language for a definition of what human
beings are. The language debate itself reverberates through a number of
hotly debated questions in aesthetics, poetics, literary criticism, philosophy,
human sciences.
The debate itself has become more than two-sided. It is cnteial to the
Romantic theory that it stresses the constitutive nature of language. This is
not seen primarily as an instrument whereby we order the things in our
world, but as what allows us to have the world that we have. Language
makes possible the disclosure of the human world. There is a combination
PREFACE
X
here of creation and discovery, which is not easy to define. Quite naturally,
descendants of the Hamann-Herder revolution have differed on this defini
tion, and in particular on how to relate the element of creation to that of
discovery. Some have come dose to giving exclusive stress on the first. The
human world becomes something constructed, something we have made
and can remake at will. Others (such as the later Heidegger) have protested
against this "subjectivism." Those who remain within the Lockean perspec
tive, even as renewed and transfonned by Frege, find these intramural de
bates incomprehensible and perplexing.
1 am interested in both debates, both that which opposes the two main
traditions and that which is taking place within the second. I am very much
a proponent of the "Romantic" view. I try to state something of what I
think is at stake here in Chapter 5. But the main language debate between
the two traditions also echoes through Chapters 6, 7, and 9. On the intra
mural debate there is not much in this collection; it is evoked in Chapter 6
but not extensively explored anywhere. This is something I am now work
mg on.
My third main theme is explored in the last four chapters. It can perhaps
be summed up as an attempt to define the political culture of modernity.
The intuition behind this is that modern society is different from those of
preceding ages not just in the novel institutions and practices of representa
tive democracy, the market economy, institutionalized scientific discovery,
and steady technological advance; it is different not just in moral and politi
cal principles, in authenticity, rights, democratic legitimacy, equality, non
discrimination. The notion is that alongside these changes, connected with
them and in a relationship of mutual support, is a set of changes in the way
we have come to imagine society. That is, the repertory of means available
to understand how we relate to others in society has altered in a fundamental
way. We see ourselves as linked, for instance, in an "economy," global or
national, which is at least notionally distinct from the tics that bind us into
nation-states. We see ourselves participating in public spheres, exchanging
and (sometimes) reaching consensus with people we have never met and
will most likely never meet. We think there is something called "society"
distinct from and sometimes in opposition to the state. And we have this
peculiar modern understanding of the state, which we tend falsely to attri
bute to our ancestors and to other civilizations. But the most powerful mode
of solidarity that people in our age have felt is independent of the state; it is
that of the "nation," an imagined community which is peculiarly modern.
PREFACE
XI
How to understand these new forms? What, if anything, links them to
gether? What had to change in our culture, in our understanding of society,
time, religion, or the cosmos, to make them possible? These are the ques
tions I am trying to answer, and have explored in a fragmentary and rudi
mentary way in the last chapters. I am partly drawn to this by the desire,
widely shared, to understand just what makes up this new age we are living
in. So these explorations of our public culture are like additional chapters
to my Sources of tlte Sc[( But these questions press themselves in on us for
another reason: it is impossible to deal sensibly with the issues of contempo
rary politics without some understanding of the modern fom1s.
Recently the press and the public in the North Atlantic world have
turned their attention again to nationalism-as though some ugly ghost of
the past, thought to be long laid to rest, had reemerged from its grave. The
events that triggered this change of focus are obvious and distressing
enough. llut what is also evident was the confusion and lack of understand
ing of what nationalism is, of its various forms and what drives them. What
you think of this makes a big difference for the policies you are tempted to
adopt. Of course living where I do, in Montreal, I haven't been allowed
to forget that nationalism exists. But this has advantages when you come to
think about it. And thinking about it brings you to the whole range of issues
I gather under the name of the political culture of modernity. Some of the
same issues are relevant to the politics of multiculturalism, which I discuss
in Chapter 12.
There is still another reason. Like most people today, I am struggling to
find a language to understand and mediate cultural difference. The theoreti
cal problems and puzzlements in this domain tum out to be of more and
more urgent practical importance. But here's where our view of modernity
can lead us astray. According to a widespread understanding, modernization
is transforming "traditional" cultures, making societies everywhere more
alike. This is the understanding behind such fashionable notions as "the end
of history."
Now on a superficial level this may seem right: societies arc converging
on such structural features as the bureaucratic state and the market economy,
for instance. On a deeper level, however, it's dead wrong. Traditional cul
tures are being transformed, but it doesn't follow that they will converge.
No society can develop a modern state and a market economy without
some important change. And what comes out depends partly on what went
into the change. From this point ofview, we should speak instead of"alter-