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“The Vision Thing”: Charles Taylor Against Inarticulacy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

John E. Becker
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Abstract

In response to Charles Taylor's book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Becker defends the Western view of ethical conceptions based on our unique identity, reasoning, and historical heritage. Taylor presents a vision of transcultural universal ethical principles that cannot be grounded on cultural idiosyncrasies, and he criticizes Western cultural convictions of beliefs and values leading to unequivocally individualistic and personalized perceptions of ethics. Becker notes the uniqueness of the person and the “awesomeness of human life,” which are directly linked with our respect for rational evaluation of ethics and the crucial importance of the ability of the individual to search for his/her human identity. Our “moral vision” is precisely based on “the good life in terms of respect for humanity and all its diversity,” therefore establishing ethics on personal selfhood and individuality. The author concedes that Taylor's motivations for the belief in creating a vision of the common good are plausible, but criticizes him for failing to account for the historical context of our values.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 5 , March 1991 , pp. 53 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1991

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References

2 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Necessary Amorality of Foreign Affairs,”Harper's, August 1971.

3 Cited in David Remnick, “The Struggle for Light,”The New York Review of Books, August 19,1990, p. 4. Such moments are not easy, as Remnick goes on to note: “Sakharov was a reluctant warrior. From the moment of those first thermonuclear tests in the mid-1950s, Sakharov had lost the paradise of his own science. He would have to trade a life in miracles he could understand for one fighting injustices he could not bear.”

4 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. See Martha Nussbaum's review, “Our Pasts, Ourselves,”The New Republic (April 9,1990) pp. 27–34; also, Gilbert Meilander, “Being Modem,”FirstThings (August/September, 1990), pp. 63–66.

5 Some contemporary thinkers, concerned for the exclusion of animals, attack the whole notion of a special human dignity: “According to James Rachels, the idea of human dignity—which underlies our whole morality, including the concept of human rights—is a relic of pre-Darwinian thought, the ‘moral effluvium of a discredited metaphysics.’” Robert Wright, “Our Animals, Our Selves,” review of James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism, in The New York Times Book Review, July 29, 1990, p. 27.

6 See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New Yoil.: Norton, 1981).

7 The phrases are contained in one of the letters Franklin included at the end of the first part of The Autobiography. See Benjamin Franklin: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1987), p. 1377.

8 See for example, Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) p. 420.“For Hegel. man is never clear what he is doing at the time; for the agency is not simply man. We are all caught up as agents in a drama we do not really understand. Only when we have played it out do we understand what has been afoot all the time.”

9 This has long been the message of the Carnegie Council: that since all human action always has ethical content, implicit if not explicit, the first responsibility of the ethician of international affairs is to discern and articulate the ethic beneath the apparent objectivity of pure power. The falsity of the argument for pure power can be brought to light by setting it beside the argument for pure impulse in that other problematic area of human behavior: sex. See, for instance, Mary Catherine Bateson and Richard Goldsby, Thinking AIDS: The Social Response to the Biological Theory (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1989):

10 Edward Harrison, Masks of the Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 221.

11 Taylor, Hegel, pp. 85–86.

12 Richard Lanham, in Literacy and the Survival of Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), discussing expression in terms of the teaching of writing, suggests that we must abandon classic thinking about ethics. Behavior, he says, despite Plato's success in convincing us otherwise, is not simply purposive. Most human behavior is playful, rooted in drives of which we are unaware. Purpose is only an occasional dimension of activity. More basic, he says, is the spontaneous wish to join in the human conversation. Communication is the assertion of a personal style in playful action, that is, “action for the hell of it.” Though Taylor sees the whole expressive process as shot through with purpose, moving toward the ultimate emergence of reason, Lanham's emphasis on the unconscious fits Taylor's Hegelian sense that rationality is never there ahead of us, that it awaits expression before it can be seen. We are never quite sure we are right, and we are never quite sure who we are.

13 An educational aside: though professors may not advert to the moral dimension of their work, may even hide from it by claiming professional objectivity, the struggle of students to cultivate rationality is ultimately an ethical struggle through competing moral visions.

14 Does objectivity really open one's eyes to the infinite variety of human ways? Western ethnography, for instance, proposes to describe cultures objectively; sympathetically, of course, but objectively. But when one reads Oscar Lewis's Five Families, for instance, the picture is often squalid, sometimes even gross, and the reader begins to feel uncomfortable with his own parochial sense of repulsion. And yet reading a novel about these same people changes everything. Novels may present the same phenomena as ethnography, but to tell a story the novelist has to create human beings engaged in meaningful activity. People have purposes; they do what they do for their own ends; and the business of story-telling is to examine the happy or tragic working-out of purposes. The novel, treating human beings as subjects of their own desires rather than as objects of description, transforms the process from observation to communication, and in spite of cultural differences, we recognize a common humanity in the perception of purpose. One wonders if we would not all do better to give over describing one another and listen, instead, to one another's stories.

15 Mark R. Schwehn, “Religion and the Life of Learning,”First Things (August/September 1990), p. 37

16 Ibid., p. 37.

17 Philip Slater, “I Only Work Here,”The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 1–28.

18 Francis Parkman, France and England in North America (2 volumes; New York: Library of America, 1983). Parkman excoriates the French Jesuit missionaries for trying to convert the Indians of North America while accepting and preserving their culture. The Jesuits were to have “civilized” them.

19 See Robert E. Proctor, Education's Great Amnesia: Reconsidering the Humanities from Petrarch to Freud (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988):

We are obsessed with techniques and pan quickly from one methodological fad to another. We tend to judge scholarship by brilliance of insight, mental acuity, and the mastery of technique, regardless of content. In fact, it no longer matters much whether one writes about comic books or Shakespeare's sonnets, so long as what he or she says about them is new and clever. Like their medieval counterparts, too many scholars, and too many of their graduate students, are intent on proving what good minds they have. (pp. 146–47)

20 Northrop Frye, The Great Code (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

21 Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

22 The “Neo-Nietzscheans” (Taylor's term for deconstructionists) attack purelyprocedural ethics for its implicit moral inspirations, as does Taylor. But they confine themselves to unmasking the pretensions of modern moral philosophy and see no value in articulating another moral vision. No position, to them, is more or less justified, since all are based on arbitrary fiat. Taylor's response is simple: it is self-delusion for a human being to think that he or she can avoid speaking from a moral orientation which is taken to be right. This is a fact of existence, a condition of being a functioning self, not something we can choose. Contemporary deconstruction has made us aware of how visions of the good may be connected to forms of domination, but it is a confusion to insist that all visions of the good are arbitrary enterprises of domination (p. 99).

23 Loren Eiseley, “The Slit,” from The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage, 1959), pp. 4–5.

24 Washington Irving, from “The Author's Account of Himself,”The SketchBook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in Washington Irving: History, Tales and Sketches (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 744.