Online Vol. 03.2007 

Charles Taylor, Gentle Philosophical Giant

Templeton Prize Laureate, 2007

by David Martin

What is so remarkable about Charles Taylor is the range of his achievement, rooted as it is in three great traditions, English-speaking, French and German. The first two came naturally to him, being brought up bi-lingual in French Canada, but German came by adoption, presumably through his engagement with Hegel. At that time Hegel was at the margins of the English and French philosophical horizon, and Charles Taylor's magisterial study restored him as a partner in contemporary philosophical conversation. It was also appropriate that someone who was himself to integrate disparate disciplines should set himself to master and unravel the very complicated texts of an earlier thinker who produced one of the great philosophical syntheses.

Although Charles Taylor has taken particular positions on some of the major divides of modern thought, he has always built bridges in a way that displays an empathetic understanding of why people take up contrary positions. He has, for example, spanned the divide in the philosophy of science between the naturalistic and the hermeneutic traditions (based respectively on observational techniques and on the understanding of signs), while at the same time criticising the behaviouristic approach from the viewpoint of the English analytic school and of the school of continental phenomenology. In particular he argued that valuations were unavoidable within the great explanatory frameworks of the social sciences, and probed why scientific naturalism exercised such a hold on social science when its fruits had proved relatively so meagre.

Another great divide which he successfully bestrode was between the individualism increasingly taken for granted in western society and those forms of social interaction that are irreducibly beyond the individual. His Sources of the Self has been his most influential book so far, and it altered our intellectual landscape, considered both as a masterly overview of the history of philosophy, and of the genealogies of modern individualism, together with the ills that undoubtedly follow from it.

Though his theistic convictions have lain in the background of his thinking they come a little closer to the surface in Sources of the Self. Indeed, that book could be seen as a subtle defence of theism. In a parallel way his Catholicism became marginally more explicit in his analysis of William James as a psychologist in the Protestant tradition, who treated personal religious experience as primary at the expense of ritual action, and of our embeddedness in an ethical and sacramental community. In Charles Taylor's view, James' The Varieties of Religious Experience was the curtain opener for our contemporary focus on the self and on experience to the detriment of other dimensions. Perhaps not everyone knows that Charles Taylor's comprehensive understanding of the individual and the communal has been given practical expression in major contributions to contemporary debates in Canada.

Another divide where Charles Taylor has provided essential mediation is between sociology, especially the sociology of religion, and the history of ideas. Many of the distortions now embraced in sociology derive from seeing the trajectory of religion since the advent of modernity, in terms of mega-trends, such as rationalisation. Equally worrying distortions derive from the way some historians and philosophers render an account of these trends solely from the viewpoint of the history of ideas, in particular scientific ideas. Clearly the twin distortions were incompatible with each another. It seemed at one time that sociological approaches to the data about secularising trends in religion simply resisted any attempt to include the history of ideas, and that the same was true vice versa. Charles Taylor's achievement here is unique in that he has possessed and been able to deploy the intellectual resources needed to integrate approaches otherwise disparate and disconnected.

All these varied strands of his work have now been brought together by him in what is a summation, indeed a Summa, entitled The Secular Age. In this book, soon to be published, he analyses the whole field of
secular-religious interaction historically, before discussing the fragility and precariousness of all kinds of belief and non-belief in the contemporary situation. There is no such comprehensive and sympathetic mapping of all the overlapping possible positions anywhere. He empathises with every viable position, and for that very reason strengthens his own case. To commandeer a phrase of Oscar Wilde, he is a "Gentle Giant."

These wide sympathies, and his pursuit of integration rather than polarisation, leave him puzzled by the dogmatic positions taken up by distinguished people, particularly some in the natural and biological sciences. As someone who is "religiously musical," in Max Weber's sense, he deplores the adamant deafness displayed by some social scientists and historians as well as natural and biological scientists. As he himself says, many previous recipients of the Templeton Prize have been distinguished natural scientists, sometimes cosmologists, who have questioned why there should be such a principled rejection of what might be called "the data of the Spirit." In his response to receiving the Prize, Charles Taylor refers in particular to what he calls "the Weinberg principle" (from its adumbration by Steven Weinberg), which is so framed as to be tautologically true since whatever induces decent people to engage in indiscriminate murder for a cause is defined as religion. This move expresses precisely an illusion about one's own purity and the purity of one's own position from which we need to waken.

This kind of dogmatism is as much a sleep of reason (and of empirical observation) as any dogmatic slumbers engaged in earlier centuries by partisans of "conventional" religion. The Templeton Foundation has offered its generous Prize in order to reward progress in "spiritual information." Charles Taylor has gone beyond information in his uniquely wide ranging synthesis, leaving us, in a profound sense, spiritually informed. Insofar as anyone has pushed the boundaries of philosophy and the social sciences with respect to history and the future, and the dynamics and manifestations of the Spirit of God and man, Charles Taylor is pre-eminent.

David Martin, a sociologist of religion known for his critique of secularization as a theory of social process and his pioneering work on Pentecostalism in Latin America, is professor emeritus of sociology at the London School of Economics.

Marby Sparkman, Editor
milestoneseditor@templeton.org

Pamela Thompson, Vice President of Communications
pthompson@templeton.org

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