Abstract
The idea of equal mutual recognition (referencing Hegel's notoriously obscure dialectic of self-consciousness) is sometimes thought to provide the key to understanding multiculturalism in both theory and practice, that is, to be the most important and most revealing of all multicultural values. It has been said by one authority to provide "the moral foundations of minority rights." A close examination of Charles Taylor's treatment of this theme in an influential publication reveals that the recognition he is promoting would need to be neither equal nor mutual and that it would resolve the rivalry between different cultural groups only on the condition that it was accompanied by a mutual assimilation to a new "horizon" of meaning as yet undefined.
A strange fellow here
Writes me, that man, how dearly ever parted,
How much in having, or without or in,
Cannot make boast to have that which he hath,
Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection,
As, when his virtues shining upon others
Heat them, and they retort that heat again
To the first giver.
Shakespeare’s Ulysses
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- 1.
Michael Adams, Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism (Toronto: Viking, 2007), 84.
- 2.
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), which includes Taylor’s essay and responses to it by Gutmann, Susan Wolf, Steven C. Rockefeller, and Michael Walzer. A second edition of his book was published in 1994, with additional responses from Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Appiah. Subsequent references to this source will be parenthetical using the abbreviation PR. The essay is also available in Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Harvard University Press, 1995), 225–256.
- 3.
He was born in Montreal in 1931 to a French Canadian mother and an English Canadian father and was brought up a Catholic. He had a brilliant academic record as an undergraduate in history at McGill, and in 1952 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, where his interests turned to philosophy. In 1961 he received a D.Phil from Oxford, with a thesis supervised by Isaiah Berlin. His first book, based on the thesis, was a detailed philosophical critique of the assumptions underlying the form of “learning theory” that then dominated experimental psychology. Starting in 1961, he taught political science and philosophy for many years at McGill and the Université de Montréal. In 1976 he was appointed Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, succeeding Isaiah Berlin, and continued in that position until 1981, when he returned to Montreal and McGill. Already as a student in the 1950s, he was a leading representative of the undogmatic New Left which was then struggling to free itself from the discredited doctrines of Marxism-Leninism. In the 1960s, he served as vice-president of the New Democratic Party (NDP) and stood four times as a sacrificial lamb for the party in Montreal ridings. (In 1963 he was supported by Trudeau, and in 1965 he was beaten by him.) In the late 1960s, he was sometimes touted as a possible leader of the NDP, after Tommy Douglas’s retirement. Since 1971 he has dedicated himself above all to his philosophical writing. His professional publications span a very wide range, covering almost the full spectrum of philosophical topics—epistemology, theology, ontology, axiology, language, religion, literature, and ethics. He has developed his own views in dialectical engagements with thinkers of the highest rank, such as Hamann, Herder, Hegel, Heidegger, Habermas, and Wittgenstein. He has twice delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology, in 1999 and in 2009. If there were a Nobel Prize for philosophy, Taylor would be a contender for it. In fact, in 2007 he was awarded the Templeton Prize (actually more lucrative than the Nobel) “for progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities.” The following year he was awarded the Kyoto Prize, often called the Japanese Nobel, in the arts and philosophy category; in 2014, it was the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from the American Academy of Religion; in 2015, the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity awarded by the Library of Congress; and in 2016, the first Berggruen Prize, worth a million US dollars, for “ideas [that] are of broad significance for shaping human self-understanding and the advancement of humanity.” Among professional philosophers, Taylor is known for his leading role in overcoming the scandalous division between the Anglo-American “analytic” way of doing philosophy and the various “continental” alternatives to it. In political science, he is known as a non-conforming communitarian, that is, as someone who challenges the individualistic assumptions of most liberals, but without dissenting (as some communitarians do) from the practical conclusions these liberals draw from their questionable premises, thinking that they follow logically from them. Among well-informed Canadians, Taylor is remembered for his involvement with the NDP in the 1960s and 1970s, then later as a Massey lecturer on the CBC in 1991, and more recently as the co-chair of the consultative commission on the accommodation of ethnic minorities in Quebec appointed in 2007 (the CCPARDC). Finally, it may be worth noting here that there are other famous Charles Taylors, including the son of the financier E. P. Taylor, who was a journalist and author who wrote about Canadian politics (his Radical Tories is a revealing study of Canadian conservatism) and who is sometimes confused with Charles Taylor, the political scientist and philosopher.
- 4.
Cf. Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford, 1958), 40–42: “The lack of freedom about which a man or a nation complains amounts, as often as not, to the lack of proper recognition…. What I may seek to avoid is simply being ignored, or patronized, or despised, or being taken too much for granted—in short, not being treated as an individual, having my uniqueness insufficiently recognized, being classed as a member of some featureless amalgam, a statistical unit without identifiable, specifically human features and purposes of my own.” This desire to be treated “as a responsible agent” Berlin calls “a hankering after status and recognition,” and he says that it is consistent with accepting that one will be “attacked and persecuted” for being what one is or choosing as one does. “I desire to be understood and recognized, even if this means to be unpopular and disliked. And the only persons who can so recognize me … are the member of the society to which, historically, morally, economically, and perhaps ethnically, I feel that I belong. My individual self is not something which I can detach from my relationship with others, or from those attributes of myself which consist in their attitude towards me. Consequently … what I demand is an alteration of the attitude towards me of those whose opinions and behaviour help to determine my own image of myself…. What [the oppressed] want, as often as not, is simply recognition (of their class or nation, or colour or race) as an independent source of human activity, as an entity with a will of its own … and not to be ruled, educated, guided, with however light a hand, as being not quite fully human, and therefore not quite fully free.” Berlin repeatedly equates this desire for recognition with a desire for status. See also Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Harvard University Press, 2001), 266: “The claim that all human beings are entitled to equal respect is an assertion of fundamental equality that lies at the heart of egalitarian liberalism.” Barry distinguishes “human beings” as the recipients of equal respect from their cultures, which are the objects of equal respect, he suggests, for Taylor.
- 5.
Cf. Barry, Culture and Equality, 270: “Unless discriminations are made, ascribing value to something ceases to have any point. It is true that a state could decide to treat all paintings as if they were of equal value and buy them indiscriminately by the square foot. The Dutch government did for a time have exactly such a policy … in accordance with the Dodo’s dictum: ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’”
- 6.
“Our ancestors of more than a couple of centuries ago,” Taylor observes, “would have stared at us uncomprehendingly if we had used these terms [recognition and identity] in their current sense. How did we get started on this? Hegel comes to mind right off … but we need to go a little farther back to see how [his famous dialectic of the master and the slave] came to have the sense it did” (PR 26). German scholars often point to the writings of J. G. Fichte, one of Hegel’s immediate predecessors, as the main source of the dialectic of recognition in his Philosophy of Spirit (B, IV, A), but Taylor seems to be thinking of Rousseau. Cf. Xenophon, Hiero, VII.6: “Services from those under fear are not honours.”
- 7.
Gérard Bouchard (b. 1943), a sociologist and historian by training, has taught at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi since 1971. He is the author of many influential and widely read novels, monographs, and scholarly papers about Quebec, its people, and their history, which have earned him many prizes—the Prix du Québec, the Prix Lionel-Groulx, the Prix François-Xavier-Garneau, the Prix John A. Macdonald, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Prix Gérard Parizeau—as well as his appointment as a Knight of the Legion of Honour. In the 1970s he began the development of BALSAC, a comprehensive population database for Quebec, based on church and government records of births, marriages, and deaths, going back to the seventeenth century. More recently, he has done pioneering work on the comparative historical study of new societies. In 2002 he was appointed to a Canada Research Chair in Comparative Study of Collective Imaginaries. His brother Lucien Bouchard (b. 1938) was the most effective spokesman for the Yes side in the 1995 sovereignty referendum and served as Prime Minister of Quebec from 1996 to 2001. For a perceptive account of Bouchard’s historical writing, see Mathieu Bock-Côté, La dénationalisation tranquille (Boréal, 2007), Chap. 2 (“Le problème du multiculturalisme dans l’historiographie québécoise contemporaine: Gérard Bouchard et le remodelage pluraliste de la conscience historique franco-québécoise”).
- 8.
Quebec has much more “factual” diversity than several other Canadian provinces and has made as much or more “actual” provision for private religious schools, heritage language classes, human rights tribunals, and the like. Nonetheless, Quebec has a long-standing reputation in English Canada for being a closed, intolerant society. The contrast between its cold and fearful exclusion of “others” and the open, friendly, generous, relaxed, accommodating attitude of English Canadians was dramatized at the time by the contrast between Hérouxville, Quebec, and Mercy, Saskatchewan, home of CBC’s sitcom hit, “Little Mosque on the Prairie.”
- 9.
Similarly, Alan Patten, Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights (Princeton University Press, 2014), seems to be recommending equal recognition as an imperative norm of multicultural policy-making within a modern liberal proceduralist constitutional framework. Patient readers of Patten’s lengthy, very lawyerly discussion will eventually see, however, that the proposed norm is being hedged in by so many qualifications and “pro-tanto considerations” that it is almost meaningless. As Patten concedes at one point, “the pro-tanto considerations supporting equal recognition might be systematically outweighed by competing reasons [which] would render the justification of equal recognition technically valid but uninteresting from a policy- or action-guiding perspective” (171). In short, it might have been better, from the standpoint of strengthening the moral props supporting the political scaffolding around the multicultural work in progress, to stick with mutual recognition as a fundamental principle of moral epistemology in the more smoothly abstract Hegelian style of Charles Taylor.
- 10.
But note that the passage continues in a more hypothetical vein: the refusal of equal recognition inflicts damage, Taylor says, “according to a widespread modern view,” which is not necessarily his own, since “we may debate whether this factor [the damage caused by the withholding of recognition] has been exaggerated.” As suggested earlier, the uncertainty of Taylor’s meaning is increased by his hesitation in drawing attention to the difference between a cognitive norm (everyone should be correctly classified) and an evaluative one (everyone should be declared equally meritorious), as if every correctly graded student essay must have the same grade, presumably an A.
- 11.
Even today, in our more enlightened democratic age, after the collapse of the old social hierarchies, should one not be taken aback by the suggestion that idiots, brutes, petty thieves, murderers, and fundamentalists deserve as much recognition (honour, esteem, respect, etc.) as, say, full professors of philosophy or political science at major universities? The objections that occur to me are similar to the standard objections to the radical equalization of incomes: think of the anger of the losers. Or if their anger is the desired result, think of the incentive effects. What else, apart from inequalities of income and status, can be used to motivate our pilots and brain surgeons and a lot of other important people, like professors, to keep their minds on their jobs? This last objection, without ever being clearly acknowledged by the advocates of equal recognition, is generally shunted aside by silently invoking a taken-for-granted restriction, namely, that only “identifiable groups,” such as racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities, are to be the beneficiaries of the progressive efforts to equalize recognition. Only an idiot, it is assumed, would fail to see this, so it doesn’t need to be stated. No one but an idiot would suppose that idiots and philosophers are to be given equal honour and respect, because these groups are not really identifiable.
- 12.
Addressing an audience of students and professors, Taylor explains at length why equal merit (and recognition, that is, places in the literary canon or in the Comparative Literature department) as a political or ethical principle enforced by the political and judicial authorities (rather than as a possible outcome of a genuine evaluation by qualified senior faculty) makes no sense. He does not deny, of course, that the necessary evaluations can be distorted by ethnocentric biases of the kind illustrated by the remark attributed to Saul Bellow, “When the Zulus produce a Tolstoy we will read him.” Such an insensitive remark betrays a troubling Eurocentric cultural arrogance, Taylor concedes, but he does not claim that it is simply a mistake. Forcing students to read a Zulu novelist or awarding him or her a Nobel Prize for literature because it was time for the Zulus to have something to celebrate, would be demeaning, he explains, and an even more deeply humiliating denial of their difference than simple ethnocentric rejection. Similarly, one may infer, awarding a freshly minted Zulu PhD a position on the faculty of Princeton University because the Zulu proportion there was below their proportion in the population of New Jersey, would be just as demeaning and unacceptable.
- 13.
Taylor uses Quebec’s Bill 101 and the Meech Lake Accord to illustrate his meaning. Bill 101, adopted by the Parti Québécois government of Quebec in 1977, defined the language rights of the citizens of Quebec in such a way as to promote the use of French. Among other provisions, it denied some parents (francophones and immigrants, including anglophone immigrants from other provinces of Canada) their earlier right to send their children to English-language schools. It also required that businesses with more than 50 employees be run in French and it outlawed commercial signage in any language but French. As Taylor says, “restrictions have been placed on Quebeckers by their government, in the name of their collective goal of survival, which in other Canadian communities might easily be disallowed by virtue of the Charter” (53). The Meech Lake Accord was a package of constitutional amendments unanimously accepted by representatives of the federal and provincial governments in 1987, but which, after encountering widespread popular opposition, failed to be formally adopted within the three-year time limit allowed for such amendments. The most contentious element of the package was an interpretive clause that would have been added to the constitution to recognize Quebec as a “distinct society” and to require judges in constitutional cases to take its distinctiveness into account when interpreting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As Taylor observes, “this seemed to open up the possibility for variation in its interpretation in different parts of the country. For many, such variation was fundamentally unacceptable” (PR 53).
- 14.
In 1989, at the height of the controversy about Salman Rushdie and his Satanic Verses, Taylor wrote that it is not the responsibility of theorists like himself to lay down general rules for the handling of practical problems of identity and recognition. Instead, the public must trust the “inspired adhoccery” of their political leaders to come up with the necessary measures. Taylor, “The Rushdie Controversy,” Public Culture, 2 (1989), 121. In short, practical politics is not a seminar discussion. Perhaps, only after the practitioners have constructed the future society will the theorists, looking back, be able to see its contours correctly. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”
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Forbes, H.D. (2019). Cultural Recognition. In: Multiculturalism in Canada. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19835-0_6
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