Abstract
Charles Taylor’s philosophical thought can be characterised as a thorough-going search for and permanent interest in a well-founded philosophical anthropology. From early on in his career, Taylor sought to elaborate a picture of human existence that is neither ignorant of scientific developments, nor neglectful of fundamental human experiences. As part of this project, his conception of man as self-interpreting animal integrates various trends of European philosophy, particularly Heidegger’s theory of Dasein. The many-faceted image of the self-interpreting animal accentuates that being human is not grounded in having a substance. Rather, it is based in the process of interpreting oneself. With regard to this conception, this paper mainly focuses on distinctively human traits and the human being’s unique linguistic capacity as opposed to animal skills and abilities. Furthermore, I shall investigate both Taylor’s relation to the hermeneutic tradition, more specifically to Heidegger and Gadamer, and to the narrative theory of personal identity. The last part of the argument follows Taylor’s recent undertaking in his Language animal (2016), where he elaborated his theory of how and to what extent the human being is embedded and intertwined with language.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The “constitutive” theory of language “gives us a picture as making possible new purposes, new levels of behavior, new meanings, and hence as not explicable within a framework picture of human life conceived without language.” (Taylor 2016: 4).
- 2.
It must be remarked that Taylor here bypasses a problem that makes a fundamental difference between the hermeneutic conception of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Gadamer: while for Schleiermacher the object of understanding is constituted by what the author wants to say, it is for Gadamer the meaning incorporated in the artwork or the text what understanding tries to grasp. See on this point Olay (2014).
- 3.
Charles Guignon clearly gives a variation of “self-interpreting animals”, when talking about “self-making or self-fashioning beings” (2004: 66).
- 4.
Taylor (1985c: 75). “Human beings have selves, they are self-interpreting animals, or “identity-forming animals” [reference to “Self-interpreting animals]. They pose and answer questions like “Who am I really? When am I really myself?”. Self-interpretations or self-definitions depend on what we identify with, and these self-relations are constitutive of our feelings and actions. (Laitinen 2008: 134).
- 5.
Abbey makes important clarifications regarding self-interpretation (Abbey 2001: 59–60). She emphasizes, first, the dialogical character of the process, and secondly, that intention is not yet realization.
- 6.
See Thurnher (2005) on implicit and pre-linguistic knowledge in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein.
- 7.
Pogonyi observes a Hegelian background behind Frankfurt (Pogonyi 2012: 19), although it would be curious, if one of the best Anglo-Saxon scholar on Hegel could have not recognized his conceptual indebtedness to Hegel.
- 8.
For a detailed discussion of “strong evaluation” in Taylor’s sense see Laitinen (2008). “The core idea is simple: “peculiarly human” emotions, volitions, cognitions, actions, relations, institutions are what distinguish us from other animals. This peculiarly human layer of meanings is constituted by strong value through and through. The crucial point is that to lose the framework of strong evaluations would be to lose what is peculiarly human in agency, subjecthood, personhood, and selfhood. To be a strong evaluator, and to lose the framework is a painful, crippling, paralyzing experience.” (Laitinen 2008: 104) See also Jung’s critical comments on Taylor’s concept of action (Jung 2009: 344–345).
- 9.
- 10.
This is a highly contested claim the discussion of which cannot be undertaken here. Dieter Henrich and Jürgen Habermas, among others, have contributed to this debate (see Thomä 2010: 40–44). Reese-Schäfer criticizes Taylor’s use of “we,” for he thinks the reference of the term is not clear enough (Reese-Schäfer 1996: 621).
- 11.
“So I can only learn what anger, love, anxiety, the aspiration to wholeness, etc., are through my and other’s experience of these being objects for us, in some common space. […] Later, I may innovate. […] But the innovation can only take from the base in our common language.” (Taylor 1989: 35–36).
- 12.
Emil Angehrn underlines this point in the following passage: “Es ist wichtig, beide Merkmale, die sich überlagern, im Konzept des Selbst als Selbstverständigung zur Geltung zu bringen: die unvertretbare Singularität und die radikale Reflexivität. Es geht für den Menschen nicht einfach darum zu wissen, worin die Bestimmung des Menschseins besteht, was wahres Erkennen, richtiges Handeln, gutes Leben an sich sind. Er will sich nicht darüber, was der Mensch sei, sondern über sich selbst verständigen: Er will ein Verständnis erlangen, das ihn in seinem Menschsein und in seiner konkreten Einzelheit betrifft; un er will ein Verständnis erlangen, das nur er selbst, nicht ein anderer an seiner Stelle, suchen, erarbeiten und besitzen kann.” (Angehrn 2010: 356).
- 13.
Taylor (1989: 35). Taylor’s later considerations on the “politics of recognition” rest on this insight into the fundamentally dialogical character the self. Human beings are constantly dependent on “recognition given or withheld by significant others” (Taylor 1994: 36). Taylor draws consequences from this process of self-interpretation also for the analysis of the political and public sphere.
- 14.
“Authentizität kann dann aufgefaßt werden als Übereinstimmung zwischen dem so verstandenen ‘Wesen’ eines Menschen und seiner Interpretation der zweiten Ebene, d.h. seinem reflexiven Selbstbild, das seine Handlungsentwürfe und sein explizites Selbstverständnis leitet, wobei die beiden Deutungsebenen als interdependent zu verstehen sind.” (Rosa 1998: 197).
- 15.
See Schechtmann (2013), Tengelyi (2004), and Zahavi (2007). Marya Schechtman summarizes the two basic claims of the narrative approach as follows: “There are usually two elements of this claim. One is that our sense of self must be narrative, the other that the lives of selves are narrative in structure. These two elements are not considered to be completely distinct, but seen rather as two sides of the same coin. Selves, on this view, are beings who lead their lives rather than merely having a history, and leading the life of a self is taken inherently to involve understanding one's life as a narrative and enacting the narrative one sees as one's life” (Schechtman 2013: 395).
- 16.
As Ruth Abbey stresses, the idea of narrative personal identity was not the invention of Taylor, since he refers to McIntyre, Ricoeur, Bruner, and others (Abbey 2001: 37).
- 17.
“Taylor is not saying here that the self has a substantive unity, as if the self were some kind of entity that endures through time. And he is not offering a criterion of ‘personal identity’ as that notion is commonly understood amongst philosophers. On the contrary, he is highly critical of the philosophical discourse that takes its departure from the question: ‘in virtue of what property am I the same person now as I was before or will be in the future?’. For that discourse puts in play a highly stylized and truncated conception of the self” (Smith 2002: 97–98).
- 18.
The double aspect of being the teller of the story and what is told by it is nicely captured in Charles Guignon’s formula: “we are not just tellers of a story, nor are we something told. We are a telling” (Guignon 2004: 65). We cannot follow here the multi-faceted discussions on the narrative theories of the self. See an overview in Schechtman (2013), Gallagher and Zahavi (2008), and also Thomas Metzinger’s extreme skeptical “no-self alternative” (Metzinger 2013).
- 19.
- 20.
For a fuller characterization of the Hobbes-Locke-Condillac theory see chapter 3 of The Language Animal.
- 21.
A weak point of the expressive theory should be remarked. As Rosa already observed, the question of what it is that is expressed in what Taylor views as primary expressions arises. (Rosa 1998: 151) There are basically two possibilities to understand the process of expressions: either manifestation (‘bringing to light’) or creation/production (‘bringing about’). But Taylor’s work doesn’t give a clear answer.
- 22.
“[I]n language we formulate things. Through language we can bring to explicit awareness what we formerly had only an implicit sense of. Through formulating some matter, we bring it to fuller and clearer consciousness” (Taylor 1985f: 256–257).
- 23.
The similarities to Hannah Arendt’s theory of public space are striking: “language serves to place some matter out in the open between interlocutors. One might say that language enables us to put things in public space. That something emerges into what I want to call public space means that it is no longer just a matter for me, or for you, or for both of us severally, but it is now something for us, that is for us together” (Taylor 1985f: 259).
- 24.
See Taylor (1985f: 228–229). In his recent Language animal Taylor adds that Herder, like Condillac, didn’t solve the problem of the origin of language (Taylor 2016: 51–52). Furthermore, Taylor regards Herder to be a forerunner of a conception of language embedded in a form of life, anticipating ideas of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Taylor 2016: 16).
References
Abbey, Ruth. 2001. Charles Taylor. Teddington: Acumen.
Angehrn, Emil. 2010. Sinn und Nicht-Sinn. Das Verstehen des Menschen. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Bronstein, Michael. 2010. Conceptuality and Practical Action: A Critique of Charles Taylor’s Verstehen Social Theory. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 40(I): 59–83.
Dreyfus, Hubert, and Charles Taylor. 2014. Retrieving Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gallagher, Shawn, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge.
Guignon, Charles. 2004. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge.
Jung, Matthias. 2009. Der bewusste Ausdruck. Anthropologie der Artikulation. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Laitinen, Arto. 2008. Strong Evaluation without Moral Sources. On Charles Taylor’s Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Metzinger, Thomas. 2013. The no-self alternative. In The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shawn Gallagher, 279–288. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Olay, Csaba. 2007. Hans-Georg Gadamer – Phänomenologie der ungegenständlichen Zusammenhänge. Würzburg: Königshausen&Neumann.
Olay, Csaba. 2014. Interpretation in Gadamer and Taylor. In Charles Taylor—Interpretation, modernity, and identity. Charles Taylor—Interprétation, modernité et identité, eds. Jean-Claude Gens and Csaba Olay. 93–108. Argenteuil: Le Cercle herméneutique.
Pogonyi, Szabolcs. 2012. Közösségelvűség és politikai liberalizmus. Charles Taylor liberalizmuskritikája. [Communitarianism and Political Liberalism: Charles Taylor’s Critique of Liberalism] Budapest: L’Harmattan.
Reese-Schäfer, Walter. 1996. Nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg. Einige kritische Bemerkungen zu Charles Taylors Ontologie der Moralität und des modernen Selbst. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 44(4): 621–634.
Rosa, Hartmut. 1998. Identität und kulturelle Praxis. Politische Philosophie nach Charles Taylor. Frankfurt/M., New York: Campus Verlag.
Schechtman, Marya. 2013. The narrative self. In The Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. Shawn Gallagher, 394–416. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Nicholas H. 2002. Charles Taylor. Meaning, Moral and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Taylor, Charles. 1985a. The diversity of goods. In Philosophy and the Human Sciences, ed. Charles Taylor, 230–247. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985b. Interpretation and the sciences of man. In Philosophy and the Human Sciences, ed. Charles Taylor, 15–57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985c. Self-interpreting animals. In Human Agency and Language, ed. Charles Taylor, 45–76. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985d. Cognitive psychology. In Human Agency and Language, ed. Charles Taylor, 187–212. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985e. The concept of a person. In Human Agency and Language, ed. Charles Taylor, 97–114. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985f. Theories of meaning. In Human Agency and Language, ed. Charles Taylor, 248–292. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1985g. Language and human nature. In Human Agency and Language, ed. Charles Taylor, 215–247. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. The Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Malaise of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, Charles. 2016. The Language animal. The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tengelyi, László. 2004. The Wild Region in Life-History. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Thomä, Dieter. 2010. German philosophy after 1980: themes out of school. In The History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 7, ed. Alan D. Schrift, 33–54. Schrift. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thurnher, Rainer. 2005. Momente und Strukturen impliziten Wissens im menschlichen Existenz-vollzug. In Weisheit—Wissen—Information, eds. Karen Gloy and Rudolf zur Lippe, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck. 83–102.
Zahavi, Dan. 2007. Self and Other: The Limits of Narrative Understanding. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto, 179–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgements
I have integrated parts of my earlier paper “Gadamer and Taylor on interpretation” into the argumentation. This paper was supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA K 120375 and OTKA K 129261).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Olay, C. (2020). Self-interpreting Language Animal: Charles Taylor’s Anthropology. In: Kulcsár-Szabó, Z., Lénárt, T., Simon, A., Végső, R. (eds) Life After Literature. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33737-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33738-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)