Charles Taylor is a Canadian thinker whose thought spans a vast array of subjects within the humanities and social sciences, but who is best known for his work on the modern self. Beginning with Hegel in his early years after his studies at Oxford, he later focused on moral theory and selfhood. His milestone work on selfhood was his treatment of the subject in his work Sources of the Self, which is a vast attempt to trace changing notions of identity in the modern Western world. A practicing Roman Catholic, his latter writings concentrate more on religion and secularism, the latter of which he argues characterizes many of todays modern western societies. Along with his political writings, which treat issues such as federalism, multiculturalism, and nationalism in Canada, Taylor has also held a variety of roles in public councils and public inquiries, and has made several unsuccessful attempts as a parliamentary candidate in Canada.

Hegel and the Early Years

Charles Taylor’s first major work in 1975, Hegel, was a painstaking and comprehensive treatment of Hegel and his relevance today. He analyzed the Hegelian vision work by work across his entire corpus and how Hegel’s ideas treated some of the principle problems of modernity. Influence in this work by twentieth century British ideas of the importance of  “contextualizing” even the thought of the greatest thinkers, Taylor analyzes the climate of opinion in which Hegelian philosophy developed. He hoped to provide, in this work, an account of “what was living and what was dead” in Hegel’s thoughts. Four year later, in 1979, Taylor published Hegel and Modern Society, which summarizes much of his previous work with a focus on contemporary issues, such as how “radical freedom” and “expressivism” are reconciled. Much of Taylor’s communitarian ideas that he developed later on were inspired by this Hegelian beginning, which reclaimed Hegel as a critic of liberalism and stressed his divergence from universalism, individualism, and a narrow rationalism. In this respect, Taylor has also continued a strong Hegelian tradition in Canada, along with other earlier and notable Canadian Hegel scholars such as HS Harris and Emile Fackenheim.

Moral Theory and Selfhood

Taylor’s work initially focused on his critique of naturalism, which was a popular school of thought during his days at Oxford. His thesis in 1964, The Explanation of Behaviour, was a criticism of behaviorist psychology, which was followed up most notably by his essay “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” in 1972. He adopted instead a hermeneutical approach to his study of society, which emphasizes the meanings that humans attribute to their actions. However, Taylor’s milestone work on moral theory and selfhood was Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, published in 1989, which uses this framework in order to provide a wide history of the changing notions of identity in the modern Western world.

Taylor begins Part I of Sources of the Self by focusing on four issues: our notions of the good, our understanding of the self, the narratives we use to make sense of our lives, and conceptions of society. Part II maps the historical development of “inwardness”, which spans from Plato to Augustine to Descartes. He also treats Locke and the Enlightenment notions of inwardness, which he observes presents a shift from communal notions of inwardness to more atomistic ones. Part III treats what Taylor calls the “Affirmation of ordinary life”, which represents a shift from former hierarchical conceptions embodied in that of the warrior or aristocrat, for example, to that of the daily life of production and being a family member. He traces this shift through monumental moments in history such as the scientific revolution exemplified in the work of Copernicus and Newton, the Protestant revolution, and the Enlightenment.  Part IV presents nature as a source of the self, beginning with Rousseau and Kant, as a response to Deism. Taylor views especially Rousseau as a starting point to radical autonomy in modernity. He goes on to treat “expressive individuation”, and how it became a cornerstone in modern society through an analysis of writers such as Wordsworth, Hegel and Herder. Part V, titled “Subtler Language”, divides the sources of modern Western qualitative evaluations of moral value into three principle categories: Augustinian Theism, scientific naturalism, and Rousseauean Romanticism. He argues that we navigate our moral lives along these three divides, and decide on life’s goods along these three moral axes.

While Taylor identifies the sweeping change in the formation of the modern self versus the ancient self in Sources of the Self, he ultimately rejects liberal individualist notions of society in favor of the importance of social institutions and community, which places him firmly in the communitarian school along with thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer. In order to affirm the importance of community, Taylor resists the idea that modern identity is explained by subjectivism and denies pure relativist theory, which he replaces in favor of what he calls pluralism. However, there remains a fine line between moral pluralism and relativism in his work, which some critics argue is not fully resolved in his attempt at solving this issue through what he calls “strong evaluation”. A similar tension is found in Taylors principle notions of selfhood, historicist and ontological, which critics argue he cannot fully reconciled (Olafson 1994: 192-3).

Finally, as we shall see in our proceeding treatment of Taylor on religion, Taylor treats secularism as characteristic of modern societies, which he argues exacerbates our “moral challenges”. However, critics argue that Taylor’s claim that secularism cannot cope with “moral challenges” the way religion can is fraught with problems- as various episodes in western European history have proved, such as the crusades (Skinner, 1994: 37-48). In fact, while writing that the “scale of affirmation of humanity by God must be placed higher than humans rejecting God” Taylor admits “But I am far from having proof” (Taylor, 1994: 226)

Religion

A practicing Roman Catholic, Taylor hints at his religious views at the end of Sources of the Self. However, it is especially in his most recent works that he fully reveals the influence of religion, and particularly Catholicism, on his overall corpus. For example, in Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Taylor revises a series of lectures he was invited to give at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in the spring of 2000. He returns to William James’ celebrated lectures “The Varieties of Religious Experience” and aims to show ways in which James speaks to our religious predicament today. However, it is his more voluminous 874-page work “A Secular Age”, published in 2007, that made his mark in this debate and won him significant public recognition. The same year as the publication of this book, Taylor joined Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, among others, as a winner of the $1.5 million Templeton prize for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities. In this work, Taylor tries to account for our “move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among many” by tracing Western Christian beliefs over the past five centuries. The principle aim, he writes, is to understand how modern society has arrived at the point where individuals can now understand themselves, their society and the world around them in largely secular terms.

While Taylor does occasionally admit multifarious forms of religion in some parts of the world have grown, as he traces the evolution of religion (and primarily Christianity) over the past five centuries, he does not develop this important exception to his theory, and critics such as Jon Butler in his essay “Disquieted History in A Secular Age” argue that he focuses too much on the West and the wealthy world while neglecting the undeniable and rapid rise of religion in Africa, Latin America and the Arab world (Warner, 2010). Butler also objects to Taylor’s characterization of the Reformation, which Taylor used to support his argument that this was a type of turning between “enchantment and disenchantment” in the 1500’s. Butler argues that Taylor ignores the differences among Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabaptist movements, and even more so the unbelievers, apostates, and heretics of the period. For Butler, along with other critics such as Jonathan Sheehan in his essay “When was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” Taylor constructs a kind of usable or mythological past to serve his philosophical arguments.

Politics

While Taylor has made several unsuccessful attempts as a Canadian parliamentary candidate, most notably against future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1965, he has also earned important roles in the Canadian New Democratic Party, the Quebec government’s French Language council, and a public inquiry into the future of religious and cultural differences. One of Taylor’s primary challenges is his attempt to find a compromise between nationalism and multiculturalism. For example, as he states, while “the basis for Canadian society has got to be a social contract that everyone can freely and willingly accept” (1998: 40), he notes that Canada also contains groups such as the French Quebeckers and Aboriginals who interpret this social contract differently. A staunch defender of Canadian federalism, he has coined a concept called “deep diversity”, which he seeks to implement in order to resolve this tension. “Deep diversity” is meant to promote multiple “forms of belonging” to a federated state, as he writes. While abstract in its practical implications, one perceivable one may be Taylor’s push to advance a view that Quebec and English Canada should be restructured into three or four regional governments, while dividing certain powers to the regions and others to the federal government. The three main public policies for this new structure to respect in order for it to hold, according to Taylor, are the recognition of the specificity of Quebec and granting of powers to maintain its uniqueness (1994a: 153), the adoption of Trudeau’s cornerstone of a just society, official bilingualism (1994a: 152) and the fostering of new powers of self rule to Aboriginal communities (1998: 37-38).

However, critics argue that the theoretical foundation of “deep diversity” becomes less grounded when the unavoidable issues of human rights and distributive justice truly emerge among these minorities (Susan Wolf: 1994: 79). Similarly, they note that a “politics of recognition” and “deep diversity” may not be taken lightly by ultra nationalist Quebecois, who some critics argue Taylor fails to address except through unrealistic convictions towards “sharing identity space” (Barry: 1999: 92).

Despite his critics, Taylors political views have been prolifically expressed during his various roles which have been discussed, and through several books and shorter essays which treat issues such as freedom, democracy, nationalism, multiculturalism, and human rights. His positions on federalism were published, most notably, in Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism in 1993. Similarly, another well known essay, “The Politics of Recognition” later became a book: Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition in 1994, which focuses more precisely on the issue of multiculturalism and its role in the liberal state which he treats alongside essays by other well known thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas. This rare combination of the practical and theoretical is what has lead Taylor to be often dubbed a “philosopher/statesman”, although his critics infer that he in fact neither.

For thematic studies of Taylors work, see:

Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor, 2000 and Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, 2000). More critical treatments may be found in Mark Redhead, Charles Taylor, Thinking and Living Deep Diversity, (2002) and Ian Fraser, Dialectics of the Self: Transcending Charles Taylor (2007).