Modern Theology 26:3 July 2010

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

HOW MUCH CAN A

PHILOSOPHER DO?

moth_1610

321..336

FERGUS KERR, OP
How much can a philosopher do, in a secular age, to identify aspects of life
that those of us who remain appreciative of the sacred would regard as
worthwhile? Should philosophers do more than lay out the deep-seated
differences that divide people, in a multicultural society, trying to do justice
to all sidesand leave it at that? One interesting line of criticism of Charles
Taylors work, from one corner in the philosophical world, is that his philosophical analysis is slanted regrettably in favour of Christian theism.
From Sources of the Self to A Secular Age
If perhaps not quite the book promised at the end of Sources of the Self, A
Secular Age is clearly a sequel. In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argued that
theorists of personal identity, from Hobbes and Locke to John Rawls and
Ronald Dworkin, neglect to attend to the bonds by which the individual is
tied to others in community life. It comes to seem as if life choices are entirely
up to the individual, at least in ideal circumstances, and that mine are as good
as yours, all are equal in value, and vulnerable to the charge of being somewhat arbitrary. Against this, Taylor makes a strong case for the presence in
ordinary everyday moral life of something like Platos idea of the Goodnot
that this is, or needs often to be, much acknowledged. A persons identityso the argument runsis dened by the bonds that constitute the
context within which one has to determine from case to case what is good
what, ideally, the good thing to do would be, and what, at any rate, would be
intolerably evil.
A Secular Age carries the story further, beyond the sovereignty of the Good
to the role of the transcendent in constituting a persons identity. Given that
Fergus Kerr, OP
University Catholic Chaplaincy, 24 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, SCOTLAND/UK
fergus.kerr@english.op.org
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322 Fergus Kerr, OP

we in Western-style liberal-democratic societies inhabit a supposedly
secularpost-Christianculture, the rst thing is to reconstruct how we
got here. Accordingly, Taylor re-tells the story of secularization in the
modern West: disenchantment of the medieval world that contained relics
and wood sprites; withdrawal of religious faith into the individuals head
or heart at the Reformation; the advance of deism at the Enlightenment; and
the disappearance of this distant and increasingly pallid deity in the course
of nineteenth-century doubt and agnosticism.
Taylor, however, differs from the well-known sociological theorists of
secularization, in that he does not accept, as they usually do, that the
human aspiration to religion is gradually dying out. True enough, in a
secular society, in contrast to medieval Christendom or a theocratic
Islamic society today, we can engage fully in politics, for example, without
encountering the sacred. Church and state are ofcially separate: the exceptions, as in England and Scandinavia, are so low-key and undemanding as
not really to constitute exceptions. On the other hand, Taylor contends,
while the panoply of the sacred has largely been expelled from the public
realm, there is plenty of evidence on the ground of a lively desire to
respond to some transcendent reality, however thinly conceived, and of
course independent of church-going.
Taylor strives to lay out what it takes to go on believing in God, in
the absence of any equivalent to the supportive cultural, imaginative and
intellectual surroundings in which the effective presence of the sacred was
hitherto quietly embeddedour social imaginary, as he calls it. This is
something much deeper, murkier and more diffused than philosophical
theories or even thought-out positions. There is, as he puts it, a largely
unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within
which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense that they
have. When we turn our attention to things at this level we nd traces,
vestiges, anticipations, and premonitions of what may fairly be regarded as
the sacred. People who have little or no explicit religious belief are moved to
know of dedicated believers, such as Mother Teresa, Pope John XXIII and
Pope John Paul II (Taylors examples). His repeated references to the effects of
Princess Dianas death on (some) people in Britain suggest that he may give
too much credence to media-generated gloss on certain personalities and
events. On the other hand, the witness of peoples lives (including that of a
awed young woman) is a classic sign in Christian apologetics, ultimately
perhaps even the only irrefutable proof, of the demands on us of the Good
by which we may measure our life choices.
And anyway are we as modern as we think we are? Taylor points to
certain moments of mass celebration which seem to take us out of the
everydayrock concerts but also centres of pilgrimage, which arise
out of apparitions of the Virgin: listing Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje.
While he inveighs against the loss of human scale in much modern urban
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architecture, he suggests that this is perhaps what motivates the massive
movement of people as tourists towards the still undamaged sites of earlier
civilizations, with their temples, mosques, and cathedrals. Tourism, that is
to say, could sometimes be an unconscious form of pilgrimage, a displaced
longing for silence, beauty and order. This need not be dismissed as mere
nostalgia. On the contrary, for Taylor nothing is ever lost, a phrase that he
cites from the sociologist Robert Bellah.
Moreover, the secular outlook in our society is sustained by fairly small
numbers of people, an elite, in the media and academic life. Yet, as Taylor
says, so many of the works that motivate and move the same people in their
ideals of humanity are the legacy of the Christian religious tradition: Bach,
the Missa Solemnis, Dante, and Dostoevsky. Taylor also highlights certain
poets as bearers of transcendence: Robinson Jeffers, Charles Pguy, and
Gerard Manley Hopkins. Our sense of life may be deepened by experience
of the wild, as Hopkins reminds him (What would the world be, once
bereft/Of wet and wildness?). And so on.
Its a heterogeneous list: in this secular age, that is to say, there are countless hints of something that transcends everyday life, however easy to deny,
and impossible to accommodate within conventional religious institutions.
Of course, as Taylor says, none of this can decide the issue between belief
and unbelief; he is only reminding us that, for all its secularity, our modern
culture is restless at the barriers of the human sphere. Of course also, as
Taylor is well aware, Western liberal-democratic culture contrasts very strikingly with most other societies across the globemany of which seem all too
religious, to the Western Christian mind, liberal and fundamentalist (for
different reasons)! Then, since he does not explore in any detail the culture
of the United States of America, by far the most religious Western society,
one may wonder if the secular age has yet reached much beyond the
inhabitants of our best universities!
British Empiricisms Resistance to Marxism
How secular the British actually are, beyond the university-educated elite,
would not be easy to determine. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland is often described as the most secular society in Western
Europe. Commentators of a Christian persuasion, especially from the United
States, deplore this, some arguing that the decline of Christianity opens the
way for the advance of Islam, by immigration and procreation, implying that
the British will be under shariah law sooner than we might think. Some
pundits regard Europe as on the brink of becoming Eurabia rather than the
exemplar of a secular age.
Others, and certainly many ordinary folk, do not react so negatively to
undeniable evidence of post-Christianity. There was always more at stake
than religion in the conict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern
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Ireland but one of the reasons, in England especially, for disillusionment with
religion, and a longing for its accelerated disappearance, is that, over three
decades of the Troubles, such appalling atrocities were committed by one
side or the other (more by self-professed Catholics) that religion came to be
perceived as something that decent people could well do without. For the
English, Welsh and Scots, the sooner the much more church-going Northern
Irish abandoned their religion the better.
On the other hand, it would not raise eyebrows if we were to characterize
ourselves as pragmatic, utilitarian, empiricist, and individualistic, generally,
in our moral and epistemological assumptionsnot that many people
would label themselves so explicitly or ever need do so. If these labels were
explained, however, most people would be happy enough to endorse them.
Years ago, in an interesting attempt to explain why Marxism never took root
in British philosophy and culture, Charles Taylor contended that the persistence of empiricism simply made Marxism incredible.12 It is worth returning
to this splendid essay (not reprinted in any of his collections) to ask whether
empiricism may not be the principal component of the secularism which
is characteristically British. One thing a philosopher might do, in short, is
identify the featuresin broad strokes of courseof the philosophical presuppositions that characterize a societys moral and political practices and
customs.
As Taylor allowed, the great exception lay in the eld of history, in the work
of Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, and others. It was not to his purpose
to explain why a Marxist school of historiography ourished. Students of
political thought read and many wrote about Marx and MarxismIsaiah
Berlin, Karl Popper and others; but this was always studying Marxism from
the outside, and sometimes little more than Cold War polemics. Students of
philosophy in British universities never studied the thought of Karl Marx.
Indeed, if a candidate included Marxist thought in his CV as something
that he could teach he would not have got the job in a British philosophy
department.3
Given the dominance of Hegel and Hegelianism in the Scottish universities
as well as at Oxford and Cambridge into the 1920s4 this failure of Marxism
to make headway might seem surprising. According to Taylor, however, the
Hegelian revival was itself only an interlude in a long tradition of philosophical empiricism: when G.E. Moore and, following him, Bertrand
Russell, rejected the Hegelian metaphysics in which they were nurtured they
returned to the indigenous philosophical tradition.
In effect, then, Marxism as a bastard version of Hegelianism, could not but
seem alien, uncongenial and even to some extent ridiculous, to the British
empiricist. Taylor lists four factors, which may be briey summarized as
follows.
First the notion of praxis: according to the Marxist account, forms of social
activity determine our ways of looking at the world, forms of economic life,
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of making and nding the means to life, incorporate different conceptual
structures, different ways of classifying the environment and human life. For
empiricist theories of knowledge, on the other hand, this line of thought
is simply unintelligible: knowledge begins in the impressions received on
the individual mind from things in the outside world.
By 1966, it is true, few philosophers defended sense data theories of
knowledge and suchlike, at least if these posited private showings in the
consciousness of the cognizing subject. More plausibly, the mind, or sometimes the brain, is regarded as working on representations of the things and
features of things that we perceive or think about, on analogy now between
the mind and a computer, so that the mind or brain manipulates symbols,
thought of as like the instructions in a machine programmesymbols which
are representations of aspects of the world.
Outside academic philosophy, it remainedand remainsan uncontested
assumption that knowledge of the world is built up from rsthand individual
experience obtained through the sensesreal knowledge, as distinct from
acceptable opinion. That how and what you know might be tied up with
forms of economic activity and class structure, even grounded in and dependent on them, seems a barely intelligible idea.
Secondly, according to Taylors sketch, historical materialism as maintained by Marxists supposedly explains and even predicts the course of
history on the basis of the interests and needs of classes and societies, of
human collectivities, conceived of in a holistic manner. In contrast, since
empiricist epistemology is individualist and atomistic, it makes better sense
to account for social, economic and political changes, and so on, in terms
ultimately of a coincidence or accumulation of individual decisions and
private actions. For Marxists something like the Hegelian cunning of
history operates: the course of history is teleological; and as a natural kind
human beings make progress, through conict and revolution, towards evergreater freedom, control over nature, and so on. This all seems wildly implausible to people of an empiricist temper, for whom piecemeal evolution is
preferable to revolution, cautious pragmatism to radical reform, and so on.
There is certainly no plan, or grand narrative, no Zeitgeist working itself
out in history.
Thirdly, for the Marxist, human nature is a social creation: the human
essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is
the ensemble of social relations according to Marxs Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach. Whatever precisely this means, it goes much further than the truism
that we are social animals, needing one anothers help, liking one anothers
company, and suchlike. As we learn to control our environment we ourselves
become differentchanges in the means of production bring changes in
social being and thus in self-consciousness, including sensibility and emotions. In this sense we make and re-make our nature. Human nature, we
might say, actually changes. For the empiricist, by contrast, that ones mind,
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much less ones sensibility, owes so much to social circumstances seems
quite implausible. Human nature is always the same, human nature never
changes.
Finally, Marxist values thus rest on certain facts about human nature and
the goals that we strive to realize in the course of history. One stage or form
of society is higher than another because it involves a greater realization of
human goals. What will be is what ought to be. For empiricists, following
Hume as it is generally supposed, what is the case offers no insight into what
should be, no ought can be derived from an is. Its the naturalistic
fallacy, as G.E. Moore called it, to think that morality is grounded in human
nature.
In short, the empiricist cast of mind in British culture madeand makes
the naturalization of Marxism quite impossible. British culture is permeated
by empiricism.5 Of course the empiricism is connected, as Taylor says, to
social realitieswe are all Marxist enough to see that! One can perhaps see
in the popularity of empiricist modes of thinking the continued resilience of
the British liberal tradition, its distrust of mystique, its utilitarian bent and its
emphasis on individualism. This account of why British philosophy never
took Marxist thought seriously extends much further, into a positive characterization of what is still, after more than forty years, the dominant outlook
that a British university education inculcates, in the humanities and social
sciences, though perhaps no longer in philosophy itself.6
The Return to the Good7
Sources of the Self, published over twenty years later, seeks to expoundand
explicitly to defendan ontology of the human, in which the identity of
the self is related (as Taylor says in the opening pages, referring us to Iris
Murdoch) to the sovereignty of the good: the defending (to anticipate the
criticism) is as open as the expounding.
Politics, ethics and epistemology are interwoven, whatever the specialisms
of philosophers might lead us to believe (think only of Plato and Aristotle).
In recent philosophy, anyway, no one has done more than Charles Taylor
to bring out the interconnections. The likes of Hobbes and Locke insist so
strongly on the primacy of individual interests or rights that we are encouraged to overlook our obligations to sustain the community to which we
owe our identity. What makes this liberal individualism plausible, Taylor
maintains, is the hold exerted by what he calls atomismthe doctrine of the
self-sufciency of the individual.8 The atomistic view sees society as composed of disconnected individuals, each with inalienable and privileged
rights, which it is the societys sole function to protect. It ts with the tradition of empiricism, as expounded above.
The attraction of this viewthe main reason that Locke and others
espoused itis that it counters forms of tradition-bound conventionalism,
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according to which what passes for knowledge, truth, etc., as well as ethical
ideals and practices, appears to be no more than the agreed beliefs of a
particular, highly restricted and exclusivist community. At worst, this
imposes an intimidated conformism in closed societies that thwart all dissent,
and in effect prepare the way for totalitarianism. On one side, Taylor distances
himself from the empiricist-liberal tradition which locates foundations for
knowledge, truth, etc., in individual experience, insisting on individual rights
and personal autonomy as what matters most in politics: ultra-liberalism.
On the other hand, he refuses to endorse half-baked, neo-Nietzschean theories, which he associates (however fairly!) with Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida, according to which all judgements, whether moral, epistemological
or political, are grounded on the interplay of sheer power.
In Sources of the Self, Taylor starts by noting that modern moral philosophy
has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than what it is good to be, on
dening the demands of obligation rather than the nature of the good lifeno
space is left, conceptually, for an idea of the good as the object of love. Like
Murdoch, Taylor argues that we are free to stop thinking of emotivism,
projectivism and other forms of liberal-individualist empiricism as the only
alternative, in an intellectual environment in which belief in a divinelycreated world with divinely-instituted moral law has gone, or is going, and in
which we thus seem to be left with nothing but our own minds and wills to
generate ethical ideals and moral practices. Taylors purpose, in Sources of the
Self, is to locate moral sources outside the subjectbut doing so, not in terms
of submission to some cosmic order of meanings and goals, as in traditional
Christian religion, but through languages which resonate within him or her,
the grasping of an order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision9.
Instead of trying to refute liberal-individualist empiricism by argument,
Taylor concentrates, in Sources of the Self, on telling the long story of how the
conception of the Good has developed since the end of the Middle Ages. At
one level, this is the history of the construction of the modern western notion
of what it is to be a moral agent, a person, a self, with less and less agreement
about what the good we might desire actually is. On another level, however,
Taylor is not just telling us a story; he wants the story to persuade us into
considering whether we know who we are, or what we are to do in this or
that situation or with our lives as a whole, unless we have some idea of the
nature of the good life. In short, we need have no embarrassment about
regarding moral philosophy as primarily to do with exploring the nature of
the good life for a human being. That means, as Taylor puts it, that we have
to make room, or (rather) nd the already existing place, in our workaday
conceptual system, for the sovereignty of the concept of the goodthe
good that opens our moral world, thereby disclosing the possibilities of our
identity.
There are two moves here, both of which, as Taylor notes, are anticipated
by Murdoch. The rst is the move beyond the question of what we ought to
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do, to the question of what it is good for human beings to be. The second
move is to go beyond the question of what a good life for human beings
might be, to the consideration of a good which would be beyond life, in the
sense that its goodness cannot be entirely or exhaustively explained in terms
of its contributing to a fuller, better, richer, more satisfying human life.
Taylor devotes most attention to identifying and elucidating the ordinariness
and indispensability of moral perceptions and ways of moral thought that
modern philosophical theorizings have made to seem problematic and even
illusory. Reductive philosophies have theorized away so much, he contends,
that we are either embarrassed to appeal to what we all secretly know to be
the case, or sometimes have actually even forgotten. If we are inclined to
focus on doing what is right, and rapidly move into calculating the consequences, it is because philosophical theory, since Hume and the like, has
discouraged us from wanting to identify the good, which supposedly challenges and measures our moral choices. Deciding the right course of action
to take in particular circumstances seems a great deal more manageable, to
the pragmatic mind, than delving into metaphysical questions about the
good. What Taylor wants to show is that, for all the centuries of philosophical
pressure to suppress metaphysical questions about the good, we remain
unreconstructed partisans of moral realism in everyday life.
Over against empiricist assumptions, for example, indeed in their midst,
we need only recall the range of discriminations between right and wrong,
better and worse, etc., which are not sourced in or validated by our individual
personal desires, inclinations or choices, but which stand independently of
these and indeed offer standards by which these can be judged. For a start,
there are the demands that we recognize as moral which have to do with
respect for the life of other human beings. In this or that society, admittedly,
it may not include all human beings; in some societies it may extend even to
some nonhuman animals. Of course there is variation. Yet, Taylor thinks, this
does not subvert the truth that, for the most part, and cross-culturally, human
beings have certain moral intuitions, rooted in our nature, which contrast
with other moral reactions indeed inculcated by upbringing and thus
perhaps quite different or even absent in a different culture from ours.
Reluctance to inict death or injury on our own kind, and the inclination to
come to the help of the injured or endangered, seem to cut across all cultural
differences. Mensane menneed special training before they become
comfortable with the idea of killing other humans. No doubt, we often pass
by on the other side; but not without a twinge of shame or some excuse.
These reactions seem natural, and such as we expect in any culture, ancient
or modern, religious or secular. There is nothing contentious about this,
Taylor thinks.
Of course, one culture might have a grand narrative, explaining why we do
not eat one another. It may be held, to take Taylors examples, that human
beings have immortal souls (Aquinas perhaps), or that they are rational
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agents with a dignity that transcends any other animal (Kant), which would
explain why cannibalism is wrong. Playing with such possibilities, Taylor
encourages us to look again at the range and depth of our moral reactions.
Some of the reactions which constitute the moral life, he wants to say, are
natural, physical and animal, not unlike vomiting with disgust, or fainting
with fear. Such reactions can be modied, up to a point: we can be trained to
deal with nausea; you might be determined enough to go in for bungee
jumping. But some reactions at this level are ineradicableleaving aside
highly exceptional physical or mental conditions. Whatever the cultural and
individual differences, some things smell bad to everyone; some scenes
distress everyone; love making, birth and death, evoke reactions of joy, grief,
and so on, intelligible to and thus shareable by human beings anywhere
and at any periodwhatever the forms specic to local cultures, and the
like. Certain moral reactions, then, display something fundamental about
the nature of human life. Certain reactions turn out, as Taylor puts it, to be
afrmations of an ontology of the human.
True, this appeal to the naturalness of our basic moral reactions has been
built into certain ideologies, which may well be distrusted. Claims that this
or that sort of conduct is not naturalnot in accordance with our natural
moral reactionshave justied excluding, sometimes even imprisoning or
killing people. For Taylor, however, the most intractable problem is that the
very idea of a moral ontology grounded in our natural moral reactions lies, as
he says, under a great epistemological cloud10.
This is not just empiricism but what we might call scientism: all across
Western culture, educated people, inspired by the success of modern natural
science, follow empiricist or rationalist theories of knowledge, for the
most part quite unwittingly, which tempt us into resting content with the fact
that we have such reactions (if and when we do) but considering the ontology which gives rational articulation to them to be, as he puts it, so much
froth, nonsense from a bygone age.
The main problem, Taylor thinks, lies in a conception of practical reasoning
according to which the various ontological accounts that attribute predicates
to human beingssuch as being Gods creatures, emanations of divine re,
agents of rational choice (his examples)are regarded as analogous to theoretical predicates in natural science. It looks as if ontological or metaphysical
accounts about ourselves are analogous to our physical explanations. We
think we have to start from the factsidentied independently of our
reactions to themand then try to show that one underlying explanation
would be better than others. But as soon as we make this move we have gone
wrongwe have lost from view what were arguing about. Ontological
accounts articulate the claims implicit in our [moral] reactions: We can no
longer argue about them at all once we assume a neutral stance and try to
describe the facts as they are independent of these reactionsas we have
done in natural science since the seventeenth century.
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This is largely a re-run of Taylors critique of behaviourism in psychology.11
Of course there is such a thing as moral objectivity. Moral argument,
however, takes place within a world shaped by our natural reactions, which
include moral responses. The ideal in natural science is to get at the world in
as impartial a way as possible, eliminating fears, desires, etc. It is, however,
just a mistake to discuss morals as if we had a neutral perspective on
ourselves as beings with moral reactions. If you want to discriminate more
nely what it is about human beings that makes them worthy of respect, you
have to call to mind what it is to feel the claim of human suffering, or what
is repugnant about injustice, or the awe you feel at the fact of human life.
Nothing can take us from a neutral stance towards the world to insight into
moral ontologybut that does not mean that moral ontology and its insights
are pure ction: Rather we should treat our deepest moral instincts, our
ineradicable sense that human life is to be respected, as our mode of access to
the world in which ontological claims are discernible and can be rationally
argued about and sifted.
Taylor insists on the emphasis we nowadays, in our culture, put on avoiding human suffering. This does not mean that we have ceased to inict pain
on one another, in everyday life, let alone at the level of the state: prisoners
are tortured, whole populations are degraded in order to punish their rulers,
and so on. This emphasis on minimizing human suffering, so Taylor thinks,
has a source in the New Testament. Indeed, it is one of the themes of Christian spirituality.
Thus, in Sources of the Self, Taylor appeals to Christian spirituality, just as in
A Secular Age his examples of admirable people and sacred places are almost
always Catholic. Yet, in Sources of the Self, he also develops a distinctly nonChristian ethico-religious account of transcendence out of the later work
of Heidegger. His understanding of what it is to be human as ultimately
the gift of something non-human offers the basis for an ecological politics. If
the rain forests are simply standing reserve for timber production that is one
approach and that is already annihilation. Of course there is exploration as
well as exploitation. We can identify the species and geological forms that
the wilderness contains, retaining and indeed deepening our sense of the
inexhaustibility of their wilderness surroundings: Our goals here are xed
by something which we should properly see ourselves as servingSo a
proper understanding of our purposes has to take us beyond ourselves. To
put it in a nutshell, the shepherd of Being can never practise scientistic
rationalism; learning to dwell poetically among things may amount
literally to rescuing the earth: At this moment when we need all the
insight we can muster into our relations to the cosmos in order to deect our
disastrous course, Heidegger may have opened a vitally important new
line of thinking.12
In short, in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, Taylor seeks to
identify non-anthropocentric ethico-religious sources in a culture which is
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pragmatic-utilitarian at the everyday level, as the British empiricism essay
shows, and which is increasingly under the spell of a certain scientism at a
more sophisticated level, as he shows in The Explanation of Behaviour. Bringing all his work together (not to mention many of his essays), it becomes
clear that he was never out just to identify phenomena; he always wanted to
show us how to expose and resist certain tendencies, in particular certain
philosophical theorizings, that obscure and distort the possibilities of our
being as fully human as we might be.
Hermeneutics of Retrieval
The intention of Sources of the Self, Taylor says, was one of retrieval, an
attempt to uncover buried goods through rearticulationand thereby to
make these sources again empower, to bring the air back again into
the half-collapsed lungs of the spirit13. In the end, seeking some nonanthropocentric ethic as the corrective to the prevailing bad meta-ethic
which excludes the search for sources of morality that would restore depth,
richness and meaning to life, Taylor appeals to Judaeo-Christian theism.14
Yet he gives much more space to the Heideggerian ecological politics, which
may well be more persuasive to some readers.
At all events, Taylor declares his hope in the biblical promise of a divine
afrmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided.
By this point he is plainly speaking in the rst person, going beyond narrative
reconstruction of the history of the modern self, let alone philosophical
analysis. Citing the careers of Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier, and granting
that he is not neutral in these matters, he contends that, as regards extending help to the mentally handicapped, those dying without dignity, foetuses
with genetic defects, the prevailing naturalist humanism is less than satisfactory: great as the power of naturalist sources might be, the potential of
a certain theistic perspective is incomparably greater. Dostoyevsky has
framed this perspective better than I ever could here.15
Does this mean, then, that Sources of the Self is apologetics on behalf of
a Christian theistic view of the world? To what extent is A Secular Age not
just a phenomenology of the decline of the social imaginary of the sacred
but a lamentation and a follow-up retrieval?
In one of the few really interesting critical engagements with Sources of
the Self, Stephen Mulhall accused Taylor, in effect, of speaking in his own
religious voice without quite admitting itits being something to admit
when your personal views peep through your philosophical work: Sources of
the Self oscillates between being an impassioned articulation of a personal
moral perspective and a dispassionate delineating of history, conceptual
geography and the skeleton of a moral trajectory that is objectively compulsory for Western culture and its members.16 Mulhall concludes his by
no means unsympathetic critique by suggesting that the book should be
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rewritten in a form which makes it clearer that it always already was a
personal moral manifesto.17
This prompted Peter Winch, another ne philosopher, and subsequently
D.Z. Phillips, to accuse Taylor of failing to do justice to other views than his
own.18 Inadmissibly allowing ones personal ethico-religious convictions to
peep through is of course a quite different charge from giving an unfair
picture of alternative or opposing views. For Mulhall, the Christian theism
permeates Sources of the Self to such an extent that the work almost belongs to
the genre of Christian apologetics rather than of straight philosophy. (In fact,
as just noted, the wholly non-Christian Heideggerian case against anthropocentric ethics is far more prominent.) Commissioned to respond to Mulhalls
critique, Winch virtually admits that he had not read Sources of the Selfhe
concentrates his re almost entirely on Mulhall.19 According to Winch, both
Mulhall and Taylor (he assumes from what Mulhall reports) are one-sidedly
inattentive to views other than their own. His claim goes as follows:
Now there does exist a philosophical tradition which has concerned
itself precisely with the problem of how to present moral or religious
world-views in such a way that the passion behind them, which has to be
evident if one is to recognize them for what they are, is clearly in view,
along with the conception of the good that they embody, while at
the same time equal justice is done to alternative and even hostile
conceptions.
This is of course far removed from anything like the would-be scientic
objectivity which Taylor accuses some philosophers of trying to practise on
human beings. Yet it is a certain stance of neutrality that Winch detects
in Mulhalls paper. The main thing that is wrong with the paper, Winch
contends, is that Mulhall speaks of differing moral and religious outlooks
as so many perspectives that refract a common realityTell that to
the heretic tied to the stake and the Inquisitor ordering the re to be lit!
Mulhalls terminology, thus angrily denounced by Winch, effectively denies
the reality of conicting and incommensurable beliefs.20 Mulhalls language
suggests that he underestimates or even completely fails to see how deep
differences go. Doing justice to radically different views from ones own
is immensely difcult, Winch immediately allows. He offers Simone Weil,
particularly in her admiration for Homers Iliad, as a model of a philosopher
who demonstrates the possibility of doing justice to ethico-religious views
totally at variance from her own. Winch then instances Plato, Kierkegaard
and Wittgenstein as three philosophers who most directly and successfully
address the problems involved in doing justice to conicting viewsPlato
by writing in dialogue form, Kierkegaard by representing conicting
viewpoints pseudonymously, and Wittgenstein by interweaving conicting
voices. This list is, obviously, not unproblematic: Socrates (one might suggest)
is mostly in conversation with people who are simply confused, with no
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How Much Can a Philosopher Do? 333

coherently thought-out views which he might represent fairly or otherwise;
it is not often difcult to see which pseudonym speaks for Kierkegaard
himself; and the interlocutors in Philosophical Investigations never come near
ethico-religious issues involving charges of heresy. It is nevertheless an interesting proposal: the philosophers task is to lay out conicting views as fairly
as possible, without taking sides.
D.Z. Phillips, in what turned out to be the nal phase in a remarkable
career, argued even more explicitly for a contemplative way of doing
philosophy.21 He liked to cite Wittgensteins remark: My ideal is a certain
coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling
with thema remark which refers not unambiguously to his philosophical
ideals.22 This allowed Phillips to contend that the later Wittgenstein established a cool way of doing philosophy, contemplating the world without
meddling in it.23 In this book Phillips examines the work of Richard Rorty,
Stanley Cavell, Annette Baier and Martha Craven Nussbaum, each of whom
he admires (some more than others!)all of whom, however, demonstrate
how extremely difcult it is not to go beyond a contemplative conception of
philosophy (my italics). Philosophers nd it hard to refrain from slanting
their accounts of differing views, to the extent even of offering guidance for
a better life.
More recently still, partly prompted by the exchange between Winch and
Mulhall over Sources of the Self, Phillips strove to establish the distinction
between speaking for oneself about moral or religious questions and making
philosophical observations about such questionsthis latter, of course, with
the right kind of disinterestedness.24 Phillips distinguishes three philosophical practices: hermeneutics of suspicion, of recollection, and of contemplation. We should be able to understand religion, without being either for or
against it. What blocks such understanding, he claims, are certain methodological assumptions about what enquiry into religion must be. Beginning
with Bernard Williams on Greek gods, proceeding through the work of
Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, LvyBruhl, Berger and Winch (to whose memory the book is dedicated), Phillips
tries to show how none of them comes out with an account of religious belief
without either advocating personal commitment to, or (more often in these
cases) expressing utter contempt for, religion. Hard as it may be to restrain
ones temperamental reactions to the subject, one shouldas a philosopherseek to set things out as dispassionately as possiblecontemplatively, that is to say, rather than dismissively or nostalgically. Phillips is of
course borrowing Paul Ricoeurs well-known distinction between two different modes of interpreting religion in religious studies: the hermeneutics of
suspicion and the hermeneutics of recollection.
There is not much sign that Phillips, any more than Winch, ever actually
read Sources of the Self; he contents himself with reecting on the Winch/
Mulhall exchange. He too dissents from Mulhalls thesis, assuming it to be
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334 Fergus Kerr, OP

that Taylor confuses stage setting with stage strutting (Mulhalls terms):
Taylor fails to differentiate between philosophical analysis and speaking in
his own voice. The failure is still more serious, at any rate quite different
Phillips sides with Winch, taking him to mean that Mulhall forgets that
coming forward to speak in ones own voice is not the only or even the most
obvious use of the stage: One also stages dramas in which a diversity of
characters speaking in different voices are portrayed . . . One need only think
of Shakespeare, for instance . . ..25
The hermeneutics of suspicion, in regard to religious and of course many
other matters, characteristically exposes and explodes superstitions of one
kind or another, and rightly so, Phillips agreesonly we should not move
from exposing confusions to concluding that the phenomenon under discussion has no sense whatsoever (as too often happens with religion, Phillips
would say). The hermeneutics of recollection, on the other hand, in its efforts
to get justice for religionto retrieve faith in face of criticismtends not
to allow opposing values to be themselves. Both those who are suspicious
of religion and those who want to retrieve it are clouded by their apologetic
resolve, so Phillips claims. In contrast, the contemplative practice, the
hermeneutics of contemplation, strives against this temptationIts inspiration comes from wonder at the world in all is varieties, and the constant
struggle to give a just account of it.26
Of course if Platos dialogues, let alone Shakespeares plays, are the paradigm of this hermeneutics of contemplation we shall need very different
books from Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. Philosophers (like theologians!) are quick to refute the arguments of those with whom they disagree,
without always taking care to represent these arguments at their strongest
or most plausible. The later Wittgenstein, if over a relatively narrow range of
disputable questions, certainly shows, by interweaving conicting voices,
that there is little hope of persuading anyone to shift his or her position
unless one portrays it as temptingly as possible. On the other hand, when one
reads A Secular Age in the context of Sources of the Self, and remembers The
Explanation of Behaviour and the essay on British empiricism, one may begin
to appreciate how much Charles Taylor has in fact achievedeven to the
extent of giving the Devil his due, in Winchs phrase, by offering careful
analysis (by no means unsympathetic) both of workaday British empiricism and of more sophisticated behaviourist psychologies, which supplies
the background, and erects a platform, from which to investigateto
retrievethe evidences in our secular age of the sovereignty of the Good
and the continued presence of the Sacredhowever fragmentary and contestable. That this is the work of a lifetime, probably not foreseen at the outset,
may remove some of the force of Winchs critique: the works have to be read
in conjunction with one another, not in isolation. Much more justice is done
to what Taylor regards as tendencies to be resisted than Winch and Phillips
would probably concedeBritish empiricism, after all, is neither embraced
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How Much Can a Philosopher Do? 335

nor debunked. To what extent the hermeneutics of contemplation, as
described by Phillips, could ever be put into practice, in matters as central
to the possibilities of human ourishing as Charles Taylor considers, is a
question that we must leave to another day.

NOTES
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2

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5

6
7
8
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11
12
13
14
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17
18
19
20
21

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 1989).
Charles Taylor, Marxism and Empiricism, in Bernard Williams and Alan Monteore,
editors, British Analytical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1966), pp. 227246; a
good collection, intended for an Italian readership, containing essays by David Pears, John
Searle, Anthony Quinton, E.J. Lemmon, Rom Harr, Anthony Kenny, Hid Ishiguro, Alan
Monteore, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Wollheim, Patrick Gardiner, R.W. Hepburn and
Istvn Mzros as well as Charles Taylorenough to test, if not to refute, four decades
of dismissal of analytical philosophy as talk about talk.
According to Isaiah Berlin, J.L. Austin, who by the time of his premature death in 1959 was
regarded as the archetypal linguistic philosopher, returned from a visit as a tourist to the
Soviet Union, in 1936, impressed enough to ask Berlin what Marxist philosophy he might
read, though went off contentedly with a new book by C.I. Lewis instead; see Isaiah Berlin,
Personal Impressions (London: Hogarth Press 1980), p. 108.
T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet (d. 1923), F.H. Bradley (d.1924), J.E. McTaggart (d.1925) et al.
See, for example, Godfrey N.A. Vesey (ed.) Impressions of Empiricism (London: Macmillan,
1976); R.F. Holland, Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); and a neglected but splendid book by A.D. Nuttall, A Common Sky: Philosophy
and the Literary Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), who nds psychologistic
empiricism in Wordsworth and the romantic, post-Humian epistemology of aesthetic
skepticism in Hopkins.
Where cutting edge philosophy in the UK lies may be measured in The Philosophy of
Philosophy by Timothy Williamson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2007).
Some of this recycles my essay The Self and the Good: Taylors Moral Ontology, in Ruth
Abbey (ed.), Charles Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), pp. 64104.
See Charles Taylors classic essay Atomism in Philosophy and the Human Sciences:
Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985).
Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 510.
Ibid. p. 5.
Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1964).
Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 126.
Ibid. p. 520.
Ibid. p. 495.
Ibid. p. 518.
Stephen Mulhall, Sources of the Self s Senses of Itself: A Theistic Reading of Modernity, in
D.Z. Phillips (ed.) Can Religion be Explained Away? (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press 1996), pp.
131160; citing p. 160.
Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2005), the result of lectures at the Catholic University of Leuven, shows that Stephen Mulhall
is himself a Christian.
The corner of the philosophical world to which Winch and Phillips belonged is discussed
by John Edelman, Wittgenstein, Sense and Reality: The Swansea School (Swansea: University of
Wales Press 2009).
Peter Winch, Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due, in Can Religion be Explained Away?
pp. 161173.
Winch allows that he spoke like this himself in his paper Moral integrity, in Peter Winch,
Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
D.Z. Phillips, Philosophys Cool Place (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1999).

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336 Fergus Kerr, OP

Peter Winch, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 1998), p. 4a remark dated to late summer 1929, shortly after Wittgensteins
attendance at the Annual Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association
where he delivered a completely different paper from the worthless one printed in the
Proceedingsprobably the most philosophically disturbed months in his whole life.
23 Philosophy famously leaves everything as it is, etc.; see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations 124.
24 D.Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
25 Of course Shakespeare has returned to philosophical attention: see Colin McGinn,
Shakespeares Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2006) and especially A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2007), which reads the plays as dispassionately presenting conicting
viewpoints, much as Winch desiderates.
26 Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 325.
22

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