Nigel
DeSouza teaches philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He and
Anik Waldow edited Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology (Oxford
University Press, 2017).
NIGEL
DESOUZA: Let’s begin at the beginning, and with Herder,
a thinker who has been important to your own work on philosophical
anthropology. How did you first discover him?
CHARLES
TAYLOR: Herder has indeed been a thinker who resonated with
me, but how I got into him was in a way by pure accident. There
was a series that Penguin put out on the philosophers in those
days, and I was asked by Freddie [A. J.] Ayer to do the book
on Hegel. So I took up the task and began by looking into the
whole background. What I found myself getting into was the German
cultural
thinking, philosophical thinking, of the 1790s. I naturally
came across a series of other figures, including Herder, because
the obsession of this particular generation was an anti-dualist
thrust, but of a very interesting kind. In other words, they
were deeply resistant to the way that European rationalism had
developed, in which reason and emotion are in entirely different
baskets, in which reason has to somehow control, take over.
And they had this passion for reuniting the human being, for
recovering the integrity of the human person in which reason
and emotion were somehow both working together.
A very
good expression of this is of course Schiller’s Letters
on the Aesthetic Education of Man, the idea that there
is always this distinction and potential tension between the
form drive and the content drive (Stofftrieb) and yet you could
somehow bring them together. And along with that goes this strange,
spiral theory of history in which we started off with the Greeks,
for whom there was great admiration, who had that kind of unity
between reason and feeling, and then it was broken apart, and
we gained a great deal from that split through the development
of reason. But this was developing in a self-alienating way,
and now the moment had come in which they could come together.
And this was partly inspired by the French Revolution, and partly
by the whole development of philosophy, but in any case reuniting
reason and feeling was the passion of that generation. So they
thought that we had gained something very important in this
period of alienation, particularly, we had gained an understanding
of freedom, of radical freedom, but now this had to be complemented
with a return to and a reabsorption or reunification of the
human person, body and spirit, reason and emotion, nature outside
as well as nature inside ourselves. Now the way I tried to define
it for the Hegelian oeuvre, the task was to reunite Spinoza
and Kant, or Goethe and Fichte, in other words the most radical
views of human freedom with the most profound views of the unity
of the human being, and the human being with the whole of nature.
Spinoza was read as the great philosopher of the Whole, although
not entirely correctly, by that generation.
So,
right away, one of the figures that strikes me in that whole
background is Herder, and clearly there is this strong anti-dualist
understanding in Herder, which I try to articulate with the
term expressivism. The idea was this—and this is central
to Hegel—that we know what we are about, what our important
goals are, what we are striving for, because we start striving,
we start acting and our action is an expression of this, and
then we come to a more refned understanding of this, being able
to put it into words, and being able ultimately to put it into
philosophical language. You know Hegel’s idea that all
these great expressions of the goals of humanity come out first
of all in art, and then in religion, which is still concerned
with narrative and picture-thinking, and then fnally, in philosophy,
which is purely conceptual. So the idea is that the relationship
of pure thinking to impulse is not that one separates itself
and controls the other, but that rather impulses are clari?ed
in a slow development and this development leads to a fulfilment
in which they are harmonious with each other or that theories
of ourselves and our impulses are perfectly harmonious. Now
I think that Herder was one of the great, maybe the best, articulator
of that particular facet of this general ambition of unifying
the human person, and it was clear to me that without Herder,
Hegel wouldn’t have taken off in exactly this direction.
So
in that way, Herder stands between Kant and Hegel. Herder was
very critical of Kant’s rationalism; Kant was very dismissive
of what he thought was Herder’s muddled philosophy; and
Hegel, there was some part of him that would agree with both
of them, but it is clear that he wanted to go beyond Kant but
only in this very rigorous medium which is philosophy. Now this
resonated with me because I had already had my own sort of philosophical
rebellion against the background philosophy of the Anglo-Saxon
world of that day, which was really sparked by Merleau-Ponty.
I recognized right away that Merleau-Ponty was a sort of distant
descendant from Herder via Hegel via Marx and so on, and so
that created a kind of bond. But my whole view of Herder was
developed in the process of trying to explain what the cultural
surroundings were in which Hegel operated and why he took up
these goals.
NIGEL
DESOUZA: How do you conceive of Herder’s philosophical
anthropology and what it has to say to us today?
CHARLES
TAYLOR: The first point is that he’s not a dualist at
all, he sees soul and body as interpenetrating, not separable.
But there’s something that is very import- ant that is
an entailment of that in a way which not everyone who is against
soul-body dualism recognizes. It’s what Isaiah Berlin
calls his expressionism, and I changed the word to expressivism
because I didn’t want to get mixed up with the German
word [for the aesthetic movement] and that is that it’s
not just that we have thoughts, that we have feelings, and that
we somehow articulate them and tell them to others, but something
much more non-dualistic and inseparable: that a lot of what
we think, we feel— the ideas, the attitudes, the sense
of morality that we experience—only get properly defined
through expression. So it’s not only meaning: that we
don’t exactly know what we want to say in many departments
before we actually say it, but something even more fundamental
than this, because it’s not just a matter of linguistic
expression, it’s a matter also of bodily expression. Now
the way this comes out in the twentieth century, in the 21st
century, is that there are a certain number of areas of life
where we have stances that we want to take, e.g., “This
is really ideal for me, this moral ideal” or “This
is really moving” and so on, as against “The metre
reads 5.3” or “That’s a red house” etc.,
where it’s a perfectly adequate expression—there
is no gap between the linguistic expression and the idea. But
here, it not only begins to get clearer—what we really
have as an ideal about, for instance, morality, when we start
to make it clearer in our verbal expressions, e.g., our sense
of the universality of the respect owed to humans comes out
in a doctrine of human rights—not only that, but we don’t
really get a hold on what an ethic is really about until we
see it, very often, enacted, to borrow a term from Evan Thompson.
So take something like Socrates, the Buddha, Christ, to take
very famous cases. Let’s take Socrates. If you just said,
“The unexamined life isn’t worth living,”
you wonder, “What do you mean?” What is meant is
what happens in those dialogues.
So
we wouldn’t have a very good idea of what the examined
life is without this recounting of the enactment. So these thoughts,
ideas, stances, moral commitments, or whatever, a lot of these
aren’t really fully clarified outside of not just verbal
expression but very often enactment, which means something else
immediately: that they’re never totally clarified, that
is, whenever we try to get grip on what it is to hold these
ideas, aspirations, and so on, we’re always tacking back
and forth between exemplars and attempts to capture the ideal
in verbal expressions. We’re always tacking back and forth
and this never reaches a final point where somebody can say,
“Well that’s it! There’s no further refinement
of action, of the characterization in words, which can give
us a better grip on this.”
Here
we are at the very heart of what people talk about when they
talk about hermeneutics, the necessity of hermeneutics. You
can see Ricoeur, Gadamer, and so on, they’re operating
out of this insight of Herder through several interposed stages
and with the idea that there are certain subjects that can only
be hermeneutically treated, and one important feature of this
is, you never really arrive at the final, definitive, description.
Now you can do that in certain departments of life, e.g., “The
house is painted exactly this shade of red,” there’s
nothing further to be said here, nothing further to make it
better, clearer, and so on. But in these other cases, particularly
as you progress morally, for instance, your way of acting it
out is going to be different and the attempts to characterize
this can also be corrected, objected to, and so on in various
ways. So we get these different areas of human thought, feeling,
and so on, where expressivism comes out in the sort of foundation
charter justifying the fact that in certain areas of human life
there’s something irremediably hermeneutic.
Now
these turn out to be very important areas of human life and
here we get to anthropology in the current sense of ethnography—and
that’s another thing that comes from Herder—it’s
plain that we’re never dealing here with just human beings
as such universally or with human morality as such universally
or with human culture as such universally. The extraordinary
thing about human beings is that they begin to develop along
somewhat different lines, so that we don’t immediately
know, just from knowing about human beings, what the Germans
are going to be like, what the Slavs are going to be like, and
so on, and that is where the theory of language comes in, that
to be able to speak French properly, to be able to speak German
properly, to be able to speak Latvian, and Slavic languages
properly, you have to get on to a whole sense of what the meaning
of the world, the meaning of human life, is for these people
and, remarkably, there’s a totally unhierarchical stance
to this that Herder takes.
NIGEL
DESOUZA: To play devil’s advocate here, what about the
response to this that would say, “That’s all very
well, but that is not philosophy, that’s anthropology,
that’s sociology, that’s literature—those
are all things that Kant would have dealt with in his anthropology
lectures, but that’s not philosophy.”
CHARLES
TAYLOR: Well then, the question becomes, “What is philosophy?”
And I think that philosophy in a certain sense doesn’t
exist; I know that’s a very polemical way of putting it.
But there isn’t really a clearly cordoned-off area where
you can say, “That is what philosophy is all about,”
as you can say, “Physics is this, chemistry is that, sociology
is that, political science is that”—even though
that is also not totally clear. But to the extent that you can
make segregations in these other departments, you can’t
do that with philosophy. We have philosophy of law, philosophy
of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of history.
And we’re dealing with the philosophical issues that arise,
in the departmental sense, within anthropology, sociology, political
science, etc. I learnt this because for years I was in a political
science department and we had these massive fights about what
political science was all about. One month a very big issue
came down to the place of hermeneutics; some people thought,
“Well, we can do comparative politics,” where you
get law-like propositions about the reasons people vote, e.g.,
in America, in Nigeria, and we put them together cross-culturally,
so it wasn’t in a sense comparative politics, it was universal
laws and I always argued, very Herderianly, “That’s
nonsense, different cultures are so different that you can’t
say ‘How democracy works in India is the same as how democracy
works in America.’” On the contrary, there are these
profoundly different cultures; democracy is rule by the people,
yes, but, what is this? The Sanskrit distinction between lokniti
and rajniti—the realm of the people vs. the realm
of power—is totally different from our notion of governors
and governed. So you have to get deeply into this. So here is
the question, “Is that philosophy or is that political
science?” Well, philosophy, really, is the ensemble of
these really fundamental questions which, if you want to do
political science, or sociology, or whatever, you have to face
at some point—and that’s why we often have difficulty
uniting philosophy departments. Philosophy itself is the ensemble
of these issues.
NIGEL
DESOUZA: So even this could be responded to by saying, “That’s
all fine and well, these different departments and areas of
knowledge and experience, but there is a more basic way of understanding
philosophy, and that is on the level of the metaphysical and
epistemological claims we implicitly make when we make knowledge
claims and so philosophy is in a way the study of our conceptual
framework that we, as human beings, possess.” This is
along the lines of Kant’s response to Locke that the extraordinary
tracing he makes in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding
is nothing but a “physiology of the human understanding.”
So philosophy is really about exploring this conceptual framework,
and this is truly philosophical, and it’s not anthropology.
CHARLES
TAYLOR: Well, here you can see how Herder and Hamann, in their
relation to Kant, already blew that up. Because you’ve
got to assume, if you’re Kant, as your starting point,
that there’s this input, intuition, and there’s
a framework of concepts, so intuitions without concepts are
empty— that’s how it divides up! Well is that really
how it divides up? How do we get these terms? Well we get them
through changing philosophical traditions where we had interacting
“faculties”: sensibility, understanding, and there
are all these different de?nitions of these differences. But
what tells us that that’s how things divide up just naturally
for everybody, as though we just need to introspect and see
that there is intuition, concepts, etc.? Hamann and Herder make
great play with this, they both wrote meta-critiques of Kant’s
Critique arguing that Kant had simply taken a whole
language off a shelf, as it were. Hamann, like Herder, says
it’s all very much rooted in the body, so we’re
getting something there that will come with Merleau-Ponty and
others in the last century, which really puts in question fundamental
concepts which are supposed to be universally applicable in
epistemology, and which introduces new concepts, like motor
intentionality.
So
the supposed universality, the supposed rock-bottom clarity
of this conceptual carve-up, is challenged as historically changing,
that it’s very much related to language, in this case
to philosophical language that evolves over time and that is
challengeable. You can’t ignore the different issues raised
about different modes of explanation, different modes of thinking;
they’re imbricated in each other. So when somebody says
“That’s a philosophical question, and that’s
a factual question, that’s an empirical question, and
so on,” I immediately think, “Well, something is
being elided here, some very important set of issues is being
quietly sidestepped here.”
NIGEL
DESOUZA: So is the question then the relationship between philosophy
as a study of concepts, on the one hand, and the genesis of
our conceptual capacities, on the other, and that the genesis
is crucial to it and affects what concepts are worked out?
CHARLES
TAYLOR: Let’s take the point of expressivism I made earlier,
that when you get this fine-grained phenomenological understanding
of what it is to have a world opened for you and to be able
to grasp things and so on, it breaks the simple scheme: form/conceptual
filling, it breaks open that kind of clear distinction. And
then theories that try to have clarity by linguistic formulations,
so this is clearly a linguistic formulation of a factual statement,
or a values statement, or a linguistic statement—all these
get very challenged. For instance, you can’t just take
for granted that the statement—unless it’s in a
certain area that allows for this—that the statement cannot
be further elucidated by knowing how it’s embodied, how
it’s acted out, e.g., in the case of a moral view, you
can’t just take it for granted that that’s an absolutely
clear statement as you can in certain departments. All these
errors of thinking that you don’t need phenomenology,
that you don’t need hermeneutics, arise from focusing
on certain areas of human inquiry, natural scienti?c areas in
particular, which have been deliberately devised to allow us
to get to agreed conclusions and very clear conclusions because
that’s been very useful in these areas.
But
can you apply this to understanding why there’s a certain
view about honour in Japan and another conception of honour
in Arab countries, and the question you always ask as an anthropologist
in the ethnographic sense is “Is translating ‘honour’
into Arabic really just the same as translating ‘horse’?”
Or, do you have to do what a lot of ethnographers do, which
is keep the word in the original—taboo, manna, and so
on—and then try a lot of interpretive glossing to give
a feel for how that fits? All these are issues that arise between
this phenomenological, hermeneutical tradition, which owes so
much to Herder, on the one hand, and the tradition coming from
Locke, going through hard-nosed analytic philosophy, on the
other, which thinks you can bypass all these issues, such that
there is such a thing as a simple, philosophical question. Now
when you get something like logic or philosophy of logic—how
does modus ponens work? — you can answer that question
very clearly, but with languages of “thick description”
you can’t do that.
A typical
example is [John] Rawls’s Theory of Justice.
It’s wonderful in its own kind, but it’s purely
normative; it’s not political philosophy in the way de
Tocqueville gives you political philosophy. Tocqueville not
only has a normative dimension—he’s really in favour
of the development of what he calls “democracy,”
this equal society, and so on—but he’s also trying
to tell how that works out in this particular, peculiar form
that he finds on the west of the Atlantic in this crazy new
republic. And what you need to do theory of democracy is not
simply the normativity, but how that normativity works out in
this very peculiar kind of institutional structure, which is
a modern, democratic society with the inevitable kind of nationalism
gluing it together. Also important are the very great dangers
and deviations that it can produce by the very fact that it
is glued together by some kind of national identity that can
easily turn toxic and say, “You guys aren’t really
like us” etc. The tyranny of the majority looms here.
And
you have to understand how all that works if you’re going
to realize this in history, but if you don’t do that,
you end up saying empty things like, “Nationalism is so
bad and dangerous, let’s all be cosmopolitans.”
Immediately, without some kind of patriotic solidarity, democratic
societies crumble, that’s the problem. “Why should
I share taxes with people living in Nanaimo [British Columbia]?”
“Well, we’re Canadians, that’s why!”
And we wouldn’t even get off the ground as a modern democracy
without this. So Rawls, [Ronald] Dworkin, and [Bruce] Ackerman,
they all get in on this act, and what they are doing is very
interesting: “Let’s be purely normative and let’s
see where we get,” that’s fine, but it’s a
very incomplete kind of political theory.
NIGEL
DESOUZA: But on this particular topic, are there different levels
of discourse here? One is the philosophical anthropological
discourse that says, “Let’s have a rich understanding
of where our languages come from, what these terms mean for
us in our particular historical framework,” and that’s
a certain type of philosophy that’s important. And then
there’s the theoretical-practical one, which could be
what Rawls’s response would be, which says, “These
are the terms that we have for our particular culture and now
we’re talking about these particular concepts at a certain
level of abstraction to get clear on them for ourselves.”
That’s important. We don’t always have to be mired
in the thick language all the time, we also have to theoretically
act, as it were, and operate on this level.
CHARLES
TAYLOR: But then it’s kind of hanging in the air, because
you’ve got something like a very attractive principle
such as, “any differences of income have to be justified
as being better for the worst off ” (a very simple statement
of Rawls’s “difference principle”). Now, how
do you actually apply this? So what is the original ground of
justice as fairness?
The
original, first book (A Theory of Justice), argued
on completely a priori grounds; the second book (Political
Liberalism) says, yes, this actually is what Westerners
have come to believe, that’s very good, and there’s
something attractive about these principles. But you can see
that in relation to political theory done à la Tocqueville,
done out of modern democratic theory, that it’s truncated
because you don’t really see what the issues are of realizing
them.
NIGEL
DESOUZA: Whereas you see somehow that a de Tocquevillian political
philosophy as presented in Democracy in America is
somehow more practically realizable? I mean it’s giving
us the connections, but does it somehow facilitate discursive
re?ection on these issues?
CHARLES
TAYLOR: I think a better way of putting it is that he’s
describing democracy, which of course means two things to him,
not just this rule by the people, but it means very often “equal
society,” what he called a “democratic social condition,”
by which he means where people have a way of relating to each
other that is founded on this idea of “I’m a man
like you,” that is, I’m working for you, but everyone
calls each other Mister, it’s very different from Europe.
What he sees is not just a set of principles, but a set of principles
embodied in a certain way. And then he asks the question, “Well,
it’s going to be hard to do this in France, but let’s
think how you could maybe transpose it into France. And let’s
think of what maybe we’ve done wrong in France, how we’ve
built this monster, through the top-down, unified monarchy,
and then the republic taking over and doing the same thing more.”
We think of the things we’ve been doing that are obstacles
to the attempt to do something analogous to America in Europe,
and with that reflection, we know what to do: we know, in this
case, to join the 1848 Revolution in spite of the fact that
he was not all that far left as a deputy under Louis-Philippe,
we know that we have to abandon our original legitimist perspective,
which we know he had and we have to go over to the Orléanists
after 1830, and then we have to go beyond that, etc. See it’s
a very different thing. It’s not that you have this thing
up here and you’re looking around for where to apply it;
you actually get the idea of this democracy from a particular
embodiment of it and you have to understand it on both levels—its
principles and its embodiment—and then the practical issue
that faces you if you’re attracted to this is, “How
can we do this in France?”
NIGEL
DESOUZA: How is that different from something like a distinction
between Moralität and Sittlichkeit or,
to jump forward, the justi?cation of values at a certain level
of discourse as in Habermas and then their mere application
to the lifeworld, so that what Tocqueville is doing is that
he’s seeing how these norms, which are the true object
of philosophy, are realized in their historical manifestations,
but he is still, at some level, extracting out, at the level
of Moralität maybe, the norms or values that are
important here and just reinserting them into a life-world and
yet being aware that we are not just creatures of pure spirit,
that we are embodied, that we have culture, and all that.
CHARLES
TAYLOR: Well, here we get the whole importance of hermeneutically
describable differences as against those that are not. So the
principle, I want to lift this house up for some reason, how
are we going to do that? Well there’s one way: you can
bring hundreds of levers in, as people did in Chicago in the
nineteenth century. We’re thinking at this level where
you get a very clear description of what has to happen: the
house has to go up, you have to put something underneath it,
etc. The description of what you want is unambiguously clear.
But then you say, “I want an equal society,” but
what is an equal society? What is part of an equal society?
What Trump would call an equal society, what Lenin would call
an equal society, what I as a social democrat would call an
equal society? So when you’re talking there about implementing
a principle, it’s something very different from implementing
an instrumentally realizable goal. And that’s where all
these different languages come in. So you actually find that—back
in the situation of a Frenchman going to America—what
it would mean to realize democracy in India is going to be something
really quite different, so that just saying “equality”
does not entirely capture it.
END OF PART
I
