Roundtable

SSRC Salutes Charles Taylor

2007 Templeton Prize Winner

The SSRC has long sought an interdisciplinary social science, a social science enriched by close relations with the humanities and other fields, and a more international social science. That would be reason enough for SSRC President Craig Calhoun to praise Charles Taylor. As Calhoun puts it, Taylor is "counted among the foremost humanists and the foremost social scientists in the world." But there's also a more personal dimension: Taylor is among the mentors who has had the biggest impact on Calhoun's own intellectual development.

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher, political scientist and public intellectual. Over nearly half a century, his work has had a major impact on theories of the self, the politics of recognition and identity, and the role of language in social life. In more than a dozen books and scores of essays, he has argued for the centrality of interpretation alongside objectivist understandings of social life, and sought to bridge the gap between normative and empirical theories. He has written influentially on the ways in which social life is shaped by culture, by religion, and by different images of what modernity can or should be. Most recently, he has written a major study of what it means to live in a secular era--including what it means for religious understandings of the world. Called A Secular Age, the book is due out in September from Harvard University Press.

It was Taylor's work on the relationship between religion and a secular world that recently led the John Templeton Foundation  to announce that it had bestowed on Taylor its yearly prize for "progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities."

The prize, the world's largest annual monetary award to an individual, was presented officially to the Canadian philosopher in May at a private ceremony held at Buckingham Palace. He was the first Canadian to receive it.

Talal Asad, distinguished professor of anthropology, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center

When did you first meet Charles Taylor, and what were your impressions of the man and his work?
I first met Charles Taylor when I was a student at Oxford and I attended a seminar he directed at All Souls College (where he was a fellow) on the philosophy of the social sciences. This was either in 1959-60 or 1960-61 -- I can't recall for sure, but it was before he had received his doctorate. This was for me a landmark: Taylor's seminar helped me to overcome my infatuation with positivism. I'm sure he doesn't remember me being there at the time. In any case, I was very shy and said very little. But I was struck then by his enormously subtle and wide-ranging mind, and very happy to find that he counted himself a man of the Left. Together with a number of other brilliant young scholars, he was associated with (perhaps he was an editor of, I'm not sure) the Universities and Left Review, a journal that many of us of similar leanings read eagerly. It was at once highly sophisticated and politically committed (it later dissolved into the New Left Review, which was a more pedantic organ, at least in its early years). Since those Oxford days, I tried to read as much of Taylor's work as possible, learning, without surprise, that he has become one of the most important academics of the English-speaking world.

Which are your favorite works of his and how have they informed your thinking?
The writings that I've read -- from Sources of the Self to the debate on multiculturalism to the more recent works on religion and secularism -- all contain valuable insights and deal suggestively with the most important questions of our time. They have certainly prompted me to think more carefully about these questions.

Looking at Taylor's oeuvre, what is the most impressive feature?
If I had to sum up the features of Taylor's work that have most impressed me over time I would say they are (1) the ease with which he carries his enormous learning and (2) his unusual intellectual generosity. By "intellectual generosity," I mean his striking lack of ego in dealing with the work of others and his ability to take seriously and treat challengingly the ideas of those he clearly thinks are profoundly mistaken.

Courtney Bender, associate professor of religion, Columbia University

Do you remember when you first started reading Taylor? What was it that drew you in and got you excited?
I encountered Taylor's work early on in graduate school when my advisor Bob Wuthnow suggested that I might write an essay on the social construction of contemporary religious selves. He pointed me toward Sources of the Self and Craig Calhoun's review article of the book. I never wrote the essay, but I read Sources carefully and it turned me toward crucial, important sources and ideas that I would not likely have encountered otherwise so early in my academic career. Looking again at the comments I wrote in the margins of my copy of the book, I am reminded of how I argued with and against Taylor -- and, eventually, with and against myself. How did these ideas matter to the social worlds I observed and analyzed? How could Taylor's narrative be engaged in empirical study? Where did these stories link to social worlds?

Is Sources of the Self your favorite work of Taylor's?
Actually, if I had to pick a favorite, it might be a book I've just re-read: his slender Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. It is not his most complex work, and there is much in it that I take issue with. Nonetheless, I was captivated once more by the conversation that unfolds between Taylor and James, two social scientifically minded philosophers standing "on the cusp" of their respective centuries and religious-secular epochs.

Has reading Taylor changed the way you view your own work?
I greatly admire Taylor's uses of poetry, particularly in the closing chapters of Sources and A Secular Age. There are few modern scholarly works (outside of literary studies, of course) that invite us with such openness to read and think with forms of language that extend beyond the treatise, the essay, the review. I've been encouraged by Taylor's examples to find ways of writing to scholarly audiences that resonate as well as analyze, and that draw upon language's multiple capacities to convey meaning.

What do you think his latest work on the secular age will contribute?
Taylor covers territory in A Secular Age that many will find familiar, but my guess is that most readers will be surprised and provoked by the twists and spins that he gives to the landscape. Taylor's central interests in narrating the changing conditions of belief in the transcendent presents an invitation to social scientists to become more attentive to how the practices of belief change, and how religious and secular ideologies imagine and confront immanence and transcendence. Taylor's arguments demand to be confronted, challenged, and argued with on a number of levels -- but perhaps particularly in the realm of social science, where concerns about belief, meaning, and transcendence in particular have been eclipsed of late by other concerns. I look forward to seeing how social scientists collectively work to answer and pursue the questions and narratives he suggests, to refine or critique them, or to develop them further. In so doing, A Secular Age could well shape a new generation of social scientific analyses into the social locations and living practices of secularism.

Rajeev Bhargava, professor of political theory and Indian political thought, University of Delhi

Do you remember when you first met Charles Taylor? Can you re-create for us what that was like?
I met Charles Taylor 30 years ago in Oxford. I had heard about him only weeks earlier when a friend, a student of Bernard Williams, told me that in Williams' opinion, there was one contemporary philosopher who was breaking new ground -- Charles Taylor. I wanted Taylor to glance through a draft of my B.Phil. thesis on Hegel. Taylor commented generously on it, not in the least offended by the temerity of the thesis, for its "outstanding" feature was the startling omission of the best recent book on the subject. It was foolhardy of me to ignore this book not only because no thesis at any level could possibly be written without reference to Taylor's magisterial Hegel but also because only a little later this work was to have a major impact on my thinking. So a common admiration for Hegel brought Taylor and me together.

I subsequently read more of Taylor -- in particular, The Explanation of Behaviour, which I used in teaching the philosophy of social science in Jawaharlal Nehru University. This work had striking affinity with Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I had known the French philosopher's work since my college days in Delhi when I bunked classes in economics to find "meaning in my life." Merleau-Ponty's pull was magnetic not because of what he wrote -- I wonder if I understood him then? -- but because of the sheer magic of his name. Its very sonorous sound lent him a certain aura. He seemed even more lustrous when, driven by the dry, self-consciously anti-literary style of analytical philosophy, I left Oxford for a month to visit exotic book shops in America and discovered some of the best-looking books ever! Merleau-Ponty's books, as published by Northwestern University Press, dazzled me. But it was Taylor's books that made me understand them years later. So Merleau-Ponty, too, drew me to Taylor. What kept me drawn to Taylor was the world created by his books -- every single one of them. And for me personally, Taylor's combination of simplicity, generosity, and -- if I might use the term -- nobility was irresistible.

Can you pick a favorite?
That's difficult. For a start, Taylor's range of concerns takes one's breath away. Cutting across specialist boundaries, he has written illuminatingly about a wide spectrum of philosophical topics -- moral theory, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and aesthetics and political theory -- as well as on the history of ideas and the history of political and social thought. He draws upon and speaks insightfully on a wide variety of philosophical traditions. His persistent and quite definitive critique of positivism is accompanied by a careful construal of a philosophical anthropology that underpins his own understanding of social science. His vision of human beings is compelling. For Taylor, human beings are deeply social and historical, self-interpreting, strongly evaluating, ethical animals who are at once necessarily embodied, almost always expressive in pre-reflective and reflective media, and prone to ever-richer articulations of their own condition. But I cannot single out any one book that spells all this out. Still, the first chapter of Hegel, entitled "Aims of a new epoch" always takes my breath away. It is one of the most complex, enriching and fascinating first chapters in the history of Western ideas.

How has Taylor influenced the development of your own work?

In four main ways:

• Taylor's insistence that moral reasoning is a form of practical reason. He aims to establish not that some position is correct absolutely but rather that it is superior to some other plausible position within a certain context.
• Taylor's own distinctive brand of deep pluralism -- his commitment to the idea that any plausible conception of human flourishing is so rich and complex that it can never be fully embodied in one life, one society, one culture, or one civilization. For Taylor, the sources of the values of even one society or one civilization are too varied and diverse to be captured by doctrines driven by single principles or values. Like Berlin, he accepts that many of these values generate conflict. However, unlike Berlin he believes that we can struggle towards their eventual resolution or reconciliation. This makes him a decidedly progressive thinker in the old-fashioned sense of the word without committing him to the idea that there is an eventual blissful state where all conflicts are resolved and overcome.
• Taylor's continuous struggle against a narrowness of vision bred by an unreflexive attachment to styles, approaches, methods or even particular philosophical schools, academic disciplines, political ideologies, and even civilizational outlooks.
• Taylor's remarkable readiness to be open to other outlooks and civilizational resources -- even though he has complex religious as well as secular roots and is steeped inescapably in Western civilization.

What do you think has been Charles Taylor's most important contribution as a public intellectual?
To show that one can be a public intellectual without losing nuance, that one can be public and yet be immune to any categorical classification and that one need not reduce complex thoughts to formulas. There are few ideas that Taylor completely rejects or wholly embraces. He is able to do so because though he stands on one side, he helps us to imagine what it's like to be on the other side. What he says about the pragmatist philosopher William James, is equally true of Taylor himself and his entire philosophical outlook.

Commenting on James' view on the struggle between belief and unbelief in modern Western culture, Taylor says: "James is our great philosopher of the Cusp. He tells us more than anyone else what it's like to stand in that open space and feel the winds pulling you now here, now there. It needed someone who had been through a searing experience of morbidity and had come out the other side. But it also needed someone of wide sympathy and extraordinary powers of phenomenological description and one who could feel and articulate the continuing ambivalence in himself." Likewise, Taylor forces us to catch both horns of a dilemma while acknowledging all along that no one has a knock-down argument to compel us to let go of any one theory. He may come down on one side of the argument but not without leaving us bereft of the force of the other side.

What do you think is his most important contribution to the understanding of secularism?
I'd prefer to say something about a small part of secularism rather than the concept in general. Taylor has shown that political secularism is not an "optional extra." It is always flattering to hear him speak glowingly about my conception of secularism based on "principled distance." But really the idea is his own because the philosophical and intellectual conditions that made it possible stem entirely from his writings and outlook.

Craig Calhoun, president, Social Science Research Council

When did you first meet Charles Taylor, and what were your impressions?
I first met Charles Taylor at Oxford, where as a student of Marxist leanings I sought enrichment of my perspective in a seminar on Hegel. The enrichment was, as sometimes happens, transformative. Not only did Taylor's Hegel change my Marx; more importantly, Taylor's immense learning changed my sense of what one ought to know. At first this was intimidating: I wasn't prepared for all the reconsiderations of the original texts on which Hegel drew, often conducted in the original languages. But still a third teaching was even more important: one could wear immense learning lightly; deep knowledge didn't preclude a democratic spirit and the ability to invite questions from even the most naïve students; and even when knowing an enormous amount, one could be eager to learn more. So, knowing a less than enormous amount, I was especially encouraged to learn more.

Did you get to know him better subsequently?
Several years after leaving Oxford, I re-met Taylor through what was then the Chicago-based Center for Psychosocial Studies and is now the thoroughly de-centered Center for Transcultural Studies. A group of mostly younger fellows was reading classical and contemporary theory in search of an intellectual orientation that could survive the backlash against the sixties, dramatic advances in some fields of knowledge, and the intensification of what now is commonly called globalization. We invited Taylor in for a seminar -- and we were charmed, informed, and perhaps above all encouraged. He became increasingly central not only to our thought and discussions but to the group itself. I think Charles found us at a moment in the 1980s when he was focusing his attention anew on several “big questions" that confounded the boundaries between philosophy and contemporary politics. We provided connections to several other disciplines, occasionally original insights of our own, and an attentive but argumentative reception for his explorations of a politics of recognition, multiple modernities, social imaginaries, the self, and secularism. He provided us with a role model, focal point, and friend. Charles raised the standards for each of us, and the group as a whole elevated the work of all its members.

Which is your favorite work of his and why?
Sources of the Self is very important to me. Here, Taylor wrote on the intellectual of history of the idea of self and the different forms of understanding that shape the modern practical as well as the intellectual understanding of the human person. The book -- to which I devoted an entire article a dozen years ago -- is a superb history and a deep and insightful work of theory.

How would you assess Taylor's role as public intellectual?
Throughout his career, Taylor has been concerned not only with abstract intellectual issues but also with the importance of key intellectual problems for the better understanding of public concerns and practical issues in a democratic society. I do not refer simply to the fact that he has been a committed political actor in Canada -- though he has been, and remains, an important one (he was recently named the co-chair of a commission to examine the need to accommodate cultural and religious differences in the public life of his native Quebec). I refer, rather, to Taylor's effort to write clearly and accessibly, even when discussing difficult matters. And I refer to his efforts to connect the most fundamental intellectual concerns to contemporary cultural and political concerns in helpful and engaging ways. He has done this repeatedly on a variety of different themes. His writings have been most influential, perhaps, on the intersection of problems of multiculturalism and expressive individualism. The series of lectures published as The Malaise of Modernity (which outside of Canada is titled The Ethics of Authenticity) is a major example. It has helped to inform discussion in Canada, in North America more generally, in Europe and throughout the world. Still more influential is Taylor's famous extended article on Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (published in a collection edited by Amy Gutman with discussions by a range of leading thinkers including Anthony Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Walzer and others). This was perhaps the single most influential serious scholarly work on questions of identity politics and multiculturalism that was written in the explosion of discussions of this theme in the late 20th century.

What would you say has been his most significant contribution?
Charles Taylor is one of the very few thinkers who could be considered among the foremost humanists and the foremost social scientists in the world. He is a leader in philosophy, in interdisciplinary social theory, in transnational cultural studies, and in religious thought. His work has profoundly informed our contemporary understanding of individual persons, culture, and society. To this day, his books and other writings are actively read and discussed throughout the world -- by social scientists and humanists of different disciplines and by educated intellectuals more broadly.

William E. Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower professor of political science, Johns Hopkins University

Do you remember when you first started reading Taylor? What was it that drew you in and got you excited?
I started reading him in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I appreciated him then as a critic of both empiricism and rationalism in their most hubristic modes. An essay he wrote called "Neutrality in Political Science" blew up the "fact-value dichotomy" which then prevailed. Another essay introduced a linguistically complex mode of hermeneutics or interpretation to an audience of young scholars looking for an alternative to the stale traditions then offered to them.

Which is your favorite work of his and why?
I have several favorites, but Sources of the Self is probably at the top of the list. In it Taylor delineates the idea of a moral "source," which exceeds established linguistically mediated ideas and inspirations, which must be altered as it becomes infused in this way or that into an intersubjective network, and which alters that network to some degree as it is folded in. This pregnant idea put tremendous pressure on the neo-Kantianism and proceduralism of the day. It spoke to the God that inspires Taylor, but it could also be drawn upon by nontheists whose philosophy of immanence focuses on that fugitive, pregnant juncture between that which already exists and that which is flowing into being in a world of becoming.

Has reading Taylor changed the way you view your own work?
In several ways. He introduced me to the importance of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He helped me to see the importance of language and the limits of designative theories of language. Most importantly, he has set a model of how to proceed in one's own work when exploring the loose but real relations between the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political registers of reflection. Taylor is not only unusually proficient at each of these levels, but he also constantly explores how his reflections at one level can inform those at others.

What do you think has been Taylor's most important contribution as a public intellectual?
Taylor is a model of what a public intellectual should be. His reworking of the communitarian tradition to maintain its depth while making room within it for what might be called a deep pluralism is to me his most important contribution as a public intellectual. Another would be the agonistic respect he displays to traditions that he subjects to critical reflection.

What about his contribution to the understanding of secularism in the modern age?
I have not read his forthcoming book on the topic. But from recent things I have read, I imagine he will appreciate the contribution secularism has made to modern life, even as he corrects its untenable divisions between public and private life, its own tendencies to closure, and its hesitancy to appreciate the role that faith plays in nontheistic as well as theistic traditions.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, assistant professor of political science, Northwestern University

Do you remember when you first started reading Taylor? What was it that drew you in and got you excited?
I started reading Taylor as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, when I was writing my dissertation on the politics of secularism in international relations. I came across his essay "Modes of Secularism" in Rajeev Bhargava's edited volume and couldn't put it down. I was fascinated by the historical insight that he brought to bear upon modern formations of secularism. He writes with a unique and appealing combination of authority, vivacity and clarity that works across conventional disciplinary boundaries without disregarding their significance.

Which is your favorite work of his and why?
His about-to-be-published book, A Secular Age. It is phenomenal.

Has reading Taylor changed the way you view your own work -- and if so, can you give an example?
Taylor is a mentor and a role model for me because he is a successful academic, a valued public intellectual and -- perhaps most importantly -- a remarkably kind person, a great listener who has a certain calming presence in the room. He has also been a source of encouragement in insisting that the kind of work that I do, which involves the secular and the religious in the context of international relations, will find a place in my discipline as well as an audience beyond it.

What has been Charles Taylor's most important contribution as a public intellectual?
To help us understand the history of contemporary modern Western habits and ways of thinking, knowing and organizing ourselves socially, politically and, now, secularly/religiously. There is nothing more valuable than a philosophically and spiritually rich history of the present, which is what Taylor offers. He is also an eloquent and unassuming speaker who is able to communicate his views clearly to a wide audience.

You mentioned Taylor's forthcoming work on secularism. What do you think its most important contribution will be?
This latest book will demonstrate that the secular-religious binary that we know and live is not obvious, natural and given but is instead the contingent product of a massive and complex sociological, theological and historical transformation that began in Latin Christendom and continues to evolve today. I expect that the book will accomplish what many of us academics aspire to: the feat of allowing the reader to see what appears to be immediate and given in our world in an entirely different light and thereby opening avenues for new and unforeseen thinking, research and practice. No one does this quite like Charles Taylor.

Saba Mahmood, associate professor of social cultural anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

When did you first read Charles Taylor, and can you recall your initial impressions?
I first read Charles Taylor's work in graduate school when I was just beginning to think about different conceptions of freedom in liberal thought and concomitant models of self and personhood. I began with Charles Taylor's Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2, which opened up a pathway for me into his remarkable work, Sources of the Self.

When you met Taylor in person, did any of your impressions change?
I first met Charles when I started teaching at the University of Chicago (in the late 1990s). I participated with him in a small working/reading group convened under the auspices of the Center for Transcultural Studies. The group met for three years to read and discuss the question of secularism within different historical and national contexts, with a particular focus on how to theorize about the relationship between liberalism and secularism.

One of the most enduring impressions I have of Charles from these meetings is not simply his erudition (which won't be a surprise to anyone who has read his books), but his ability to listen, engage, and reflect upon ideas and criticisms offered by others. I know of very few intellectuals of Charles' caliber who have the capacity to think about a problem collectively with others, to teach as much as to learn from this process of engagement, and, in the end, to produce work that is remarkably synthetic but also true to his own long term projects and goals. These qualities are a testimony to Charles' remarkable humanity and intellect, one that in its copiousness and precision has provoked us to think about some of the most difficult issues of our times.

What do you think has been Taylor's most important contribution as a public intellectual?
Charles Taylor remains one of the most important philosophers of our times first and foremost in his refusal to step back from the task of thinking through some of the most challenging questions confronting the global community today. His recent work -- including Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited and the about-to-be-published A Secular Age -- succeeds in unsettling many of society's dearly held beliefs and commonplace assumptions about religion, violence, and secularism.

Daniel Philpott, associate professor of political science, University of Notre Dame

Do you remember when you first read Taylor -- what were your impressions?
I discovered and was encouraged by Taylor's writings during the early years of my graduate study in political science and international relations at Harvard University in the early 1990s. My undergraduate studies of government and foreign affairs focused on Kant, Thucydides, and the ethical dilemmas of war and human rights. By the time I reached graduate school, I encountered a field that had moved in a sharply positivist direction, stressing scientific research design, hypothesis testing -- and neutrality. Taylor's philosophical essays showed me that political scientists were not neutral after all but rather "secreted" their value judgments deep into their empirical analyses. If that were true, then the enterprise of ethics could be just as important as the development of social science theory, despite the fact that the two remain worlds apart in the field of international relations. Taylor's essays should be mandatory reading for every graduate student in the social sciences.

What is your favorite work of Taylor's?
Though it is not easy to select a favorite, I would have to settle on Sources of the Self. Drawing on a breathtaking array of works in Western philosophy, Taylor takes on modernity by redescribing modernity. Not only is the modern self informed by autonomy, choice, and the rational calculation of ends and means, but also by communal ties, aesthetic expression, and spiritual longing. Taylor displays in this book one of the characteristics I like most about him: his ability to criticize modernity without denying what is best about it. Human rights, freedom, and equality are great achievements, he argues, but themselves require thick conceptions of the good in order to be sustained -- conceptions like those offered by religious traditions, for instance.

How has reading Taylor changed the way you view your own work?
Along with convincing me that positive and normative analyses belong side by side, Taylor has also inspired me to write about religion and in a way that doesn't become a "conversation stopper" -- as another brilliant and prominent public intellectual, the late Richard Rorty, an avowed atheist, once called it. Taylor has written about religion both boldly and charitably, commending what it offers to contemporary morality and politics yet cautioning against its easy alliance with the nation or the state. In so doing, he beckons and keeps non-believers in the conversation. Though Taylor, like other public philosophers and theologians, shares an emphasis on narrative and community, he avoids counselling withdrawal or a retreat to an internal conversation.

What do you think has been Taylor's most important contribution as a public intellectual?
Taylor is a true public intellectual according to the definition of Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals -- not just an author of articles read by wide audiences but also an academic who first made a major mark on a field and then has spoken out publicly on that basis. He is one of the few exemplars of "bigthink" -- alongside Alasdair MacIntyre, Jürgen Habermas, and perhaps one or two others. At the same time, he has the uncanny ability to make ideas accessible without watering down their content. To answer the question, his most importance contribution as a public intellectual has been his invitation to Western audiences to reconsider the importance of religion, nation, ethnicity and community, yet without denying the importance of minority rights, tolerance, or the dignity of the individual.

What would you say is his most important contribution to the understanding of secularism in the modern age?
Perhaps my favorite of his essays on secularism so far has been his "Modes of Secularism." Here, he argues for an approach to pluralism that rejects the demand that religious people make their language and arguments conform to a set of "public reasons," as John Rawls and others have held. Taylor seeks, rather, a convergence on individual rights, democracy, and respect for community among a plurality of religious perspectives, each of which brings its own set of distinctive reasons to the table. The great promise of Taylor's vision is that it allows religious communities to contribute their best resources to democratic politics, as they did in the abolitionist movements and civil rights movements in America, but always in a context of respect for fundamental liberal freedoms -- thereby avoiding the fates of Sudan, Bosnia, and Gujarat.