Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor (born November 5, 1931, Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a Canadian philosopher known for his examination of the modern self. He produced a large body of work that is remarkable for its range—both for the number of areas and issues it addresses as well as for the breadth of scholarship it draws upon. His writings have been translated into a host of Western and non-Western languages.

Taylor was raised in a bilingual bicultural family with an English-speaking Protestant father and a Francophone Roman Catholic mother. After completing an undergraduate degree in history (1952) at McGill University in his native Montreal, Taylor earned a second bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics (1955) at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He was awarded a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford in 1961. Most of Taylor’s academic career was spent at McGill and Oxford; at the latter institution he held the Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory.

The modern self

Taylor’s first major work, Hegel (1975), was a large study of the 19th-century German philosopher that emphasized the ways in which Hegel’s philosophy continues to be relevant to contemporary political and social theory. In 1989 Taylor published Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, which explored the multiplicity of the self, or the human subject, in the modern Western world. Taking a historical perspective, Taylor showed that several strands and sources have gone into making the modern identity. A distinctly modern conception of selfhood thus encompasses a being who values freedom, who possesses inner depths that are deserving of exploration, who sees nature as a source of goodness and contact with it as renewing, who prizes authenticity and individuality, who affirms ordinary life, and who feels the pull of benevolence toward the suffering of others. These strands of Taylor’s modern self are sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory: the ideal of freedom, for example, has historically been associated with technological control over the natural world, which puts it at odds with the more Romantic view of nature as a source of goodness and renewal.

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Meaning and morality

It is hard to situate Taylor squarely within any particular philosophical school. Indeed, he is often described as bridging the gap between analytic (or Anglo-American) and Continental styles of philosophy. Influenced by the 20th-century German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Taylor took a hermeneutical approach to the study of society, insisting that the meanings that humans give to their actions must be taken into acount by the social sciences. Thus, one cannot explain voting behaviour, for example, simply by reference to the self-interested calculations of individuals. One must also consider that for many people voting is an important expression of their involvement in a democratic community. Taylor has been dubbed a communitarian for emphasizing the social nature of selfhood and the obligations that individuals have to the communities in which they live.

Taylor’s insistence on the importance of meanings creates a powerful awareness of the way meanings change over time and differ across cultures. Yet this variation does not lead him to deny the idea of a universal and unchanging human nature. He holds that certain features necessarily accompany being human and thus transcend differences of time, place, culture, and language. Among them are: being self-interpreting (the way in which human beings understand themselves forms a significant part of their identity); being language animals (language mediates their relations to others, to the environment, and to themselves); and having identities that are constituted through dialogue. Taylor maintains that a person’s sense of self is not something that can be achieved alone: it depends on recognition from others for its realization. Conversely, the failure to have one’s identity accurately acknowledged by others can distort or damage a person’s sense of who he is. Other features that all human beings share include: having purposes that play an important part in their sense of who they are; being located within a moral framework that orients individuals toward the things they most value and provides a sense of whether their lives are moving closer to or further from those goods; and being what Taylor called “strong evaluators.” With the concept of strong evaluation, Taylor posits that individuals rank some of their desires, or the goods that they desire, as qualitatively higher than others; some are seen to be more worthy, valuable, meaningful, or important than others. The fact of strong evaluation means that humans are not simply weighers of preferences. Instead, in some of their choices, they make qualitative distinctions among the things they value or seek.

Religion and secularity

In his later work Taylor became more overt about the ways in which being a practicing Roman Catholic shaped his intellectual agenda and approach. Some hints about his religious views were dropped at the end of Sources of the Self, but after the publication of that work his remarks on this topic became more frequent and more explicit. Taylor, for example, injected himself into 21st-century debates about the role of religion in modern Western societies with his massive work A Secular Age, published in 2007. A Secular Age tracks some of the major changes in Christian belief in Western societies during the last five centuries, examining how it has come to be that modern individuals can understand themselves, their society, and the natural world in a purely secular way, devoid of any reference to the divine or to a transcendent realm of any sort. What Taylor calls the “modern social imaginary” stands in direct contrast to the condition that obtained in 1500, when God was implicated in all areas of social and political life. Yet, despite the shifts in religion’s content and its social location over time, Taylor seems to suggest that humans necessarily have some orientation toward what he calls “transcendence”—some yearning for meaning that goes above and beyond the merely human.

In addition to his major works, Taylor published a large number of shorter works on topics as varied as freedom, democracy, nationalism, human rights, philosophical anthropology, cross-cultural understanding, moral theory, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology (theory of knowledge). In one of his well-known essays, “The Politics of Recognition” (1992), Taylor tried to provide a deeper philosophical explanation of why groups within Western societies were increasingly making claims for public acknowledgment of their particular identities, be this on the basis of gender, race, or ethnicity.

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Taylor’s distinguished academic career was interlaced with political participation. He was active in the Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP), which promotes a social democratic platform, and ran a number of times (unsuccessfully) as one of its candidates for federal Parliament. He served on the Quebec government’s French Language Council and in 2007–08 cochaired a public inquiry into the future of cultural and religious differences in that province. He was appointed a member of the Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honour, in 1996. He was also a winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities (2007), the Kyoto Prize for significant contributions to the scientific, cultural, or spiritual betterment of humankind (2008), and the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity (2015).