In an effort to trace the development of Charles Taylor's thought, we read a collection of his earlier essays in philosophy class. It wasn't the most enthralling work, but I found a lot of valuable points in it.
On the myth of individualism that underlies the modern conception of identity and the nation-state:
“The community is not simply an aggregation of individuals; nor is there simply a causal interaction between the two. The community is also constitutive of the individual, in the sense that the self-interpretations which define him are drawn from the interchange which the community carries on. A human being alone is an impossibility[.] . . . Outside of the continuing conversation of a community, which provides the language by which we draw our background distinctions, human agency of the kind I describe above would be not just impossible, but inconceivable. As organisms we are separate from society—although it may be hard in fact to survive as a lone being; but as humans the separation is unthinkable. On our own, as Aristotle says, we would be either beasts or Gods” (8).
Taylor argues that our biological impulses are socially channeled into mitigated forms of expression, a very freeing thought. On this view, we are not controlled by our biology; rather, we have raw biological experiences that can be shaped and ordered according to the communities in which we exist:
“Thus I believe that there are links between the rather groping remarks about identity in this paper and the much more fully developed notion of a ‘cohesive self’ that Kohut and Ernest Wolf have introduced. . . . [S]exual libido is not seen as a constant factor, but rather sexual desire and excitability have a very different impact on a cohesive self than on one which has lost its cohesion” (44).
Our feelings are not opposed to reason; they are intertwined and causally involved with reason, an essential component of what constitutes humanity:
“If we think of this reflexive sense of what matters to us as subjects as being distinctively human—and it is clearly central to our notion of ourselves that we are such reflexive beings; this is what underlies the traditional definition of man as a rational animal—we could say that our subject-referring feelings incorporate a sense of what it is to be human, that is, of what matters to us as human subjects” (60).
Emotion, as with all biological impulses, is again socially ordered and constructed, meaningless without the meaning that is created through culture:
“There is no human emotion which is not embodied in an interpretive language; and yet all interpretations can be judged as more or less adequate, more or less distortive. What a given human life is an interpretation of cannot exist uninterpreted; for human emotion is only what it is refracted as in human language” (75).
Thinking is an embodied phenomenon, not the disembodied experience purported by Cartesian Enlightenment thought:
“[T]he ‘principle of embodiment.’ This is the principle that the subject and all his functions, however ‘spiritual’ they may appear, are inescapably embodied. The embodiment is in two related dimensions: first, as a ‘rational animal,’ that is, as a living being who thinks; and secondly, as an expressive being, that is, a being whose thinking is always and necessarily in a medium” (85).
Art and religion carry truths that are later articulated by philosophy:
“Philosophy does not only build on its own past. For in earlier ages, the truth is more adequately presented in religion (e.g., the early ages of Christianity), or art-religion (at the height of the Greek polis). In coming to its adequate form, philosophy as it were catches up. True speculative philosophy has to say clearly what has been there already in the images of Christian theology” (92).
The heresy of gnosticism is possibly a direct antecedent and certainly an analogous form of the Cartesian disembodiment and modern individualism:
“In both its Greek and Christian roots (albeit a deviation in this latter stream), this has included an aspiration to rise above the merely human, to step outside the prison of the peculiarly human emotions, and to be free of the cares and the demands they make on us. This is of course an aspiration which also has analogous forms in Indian culture, and perhaps, indeed, in all human cultures. My claim is that the ideal of the modern free subject, capable of objectifying the world, and reasoning about it in a detached, instrumental way, is a novel variant of this very old aspiration to spiritual freedom” (113-114).
Our perception of the world is wholly contingent on our biological context. The Cartesian ideal of perception is ultimately impossible:
“In showing the development of intelligence, from its most primitive forms to its most advanced, genetic psychology leads almost inexorably into an attempt to show the link between intelligence and biological function in general. . . . And related with this is a view of mature consciousness as evolved out of lower life forms and out of the processes of life. . . . The mature form is the product of a series of transformations on more primitive forms, and cannot be fully understood without a grasp of these primitive forms. . . . If we see our perception of objects, space, causality, and so on, as skills which we have to acquire, and which we acquire in part through our commerce with objects, as being capable of manipulating things and being affected by them, then the very idea of a basic building block of perception makes no sense. . . . What is immediately seen can no longer be distinguished as something separable from the interpretation a subject brings with him because of his knowledge, understanding, and culture” (145).
The development of language is a continual process of transcendence:
“[T]he potentiality for this kind of transcendence is implicit in linguistic capacity in this sense; it is the fundamental ability to disengage our awareness of things which, whatever the concepts which mediate this disengagement in the first case, allows us to examine these things in such a way that we discover new more adequate modes of description. . . . Something of the same relation that holds between languages, or between ordinary and specialist terminology, also holds between different stages of a child’s vocabulary and conceptual and reasoning capacities as he grows up. Transcendence is, in this sense, a commonplace” (152-153).
Language constitutes community:
“Language creates what one might call a public space, or a common vantage point from which we survey the world together” (259).
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