Charles Taylor, Psychological Selfhood, and Disenchantment

This essay is part of Public Discourse’s Who’s Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, Michael Oakeshott, Charles De Koninck, and Harry V. Jaffa and Allan Bloom.

Every year I teach a class on the collapse of Christianity in western society, asking the question why it was so easy to believe in God in the year 1500 and yet so difficult today. And in helping students to answer that question, my most useful guide has been Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Indeed, the question itself is drawn from one of his major works, A Secular Age.

Taylor is a remarkable philosopher. He has made significant contributions to studies of Hegel, the importance of language, and the nature of politics. He has also developed theories of selfhood, of which Sources of the Self and its successor, A Secular Age, form a stunning tour de force. In addition, Taylor has also been active politically, helping to found New Left Review and standing for election in Canada as a candidate of the New Democratic Party on three separate occasions. Even though he’s a man of the left, those of a more conservative bent have much to learn from him.

Given the wide-ranging nature of Taylor’s philosophical interests, an introductory essay such as this must be highly selective. Yet there is a theme that ties Taylor’s work together, from Hegel to his interest in language: philosophical anthropology. This subject investigates the question: what is it that makes human beings and their social existence distinctive? This question is central to his arguments in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age as he investigates how individuals imagine themselves.

The Failure of the Popular Narrative

Perhaps the most common explanation of religious decline in western society is that religious belief is now obsolete thanks to the growth of scientific knowledge. This account views religion as a means of control over nature that, in the wake of scientific and technological developments, has lost its importance. Thus, where once the farmer prayed for rain, now we have irrigation. Where once the villager at the foot of the volcano engaged in sacred rites to placate the volcano god, now we understand that seismology, not animal sacrifice, is a better predictor of eruption. Sometimes this is called the subtraction narrative: it accounts for the modern world by seeing it as what is left after religion has been removed or replaced by science.

This is in many ways the classic Enlightenment account of secularization, found variously in Kant’s notion of enlightenment as humanity reaching adulthood, Freud’s critique of religion as infantile, and Darwin’s proclamation of evolution. Taylor’s concern, however, is that it is too simplistic an account for it never asks a very important question: why does science come to have such authority that it is able to displace religion? The point is profound. Most people in the West do not believe in the authority of science because they are deeply read in scientific matters. Rather, they live in a world where science is intuitively plausible, just as five hundred years ago people lived in a world where religion was intuitively plausible. The question of the replacement of the latter with the former cannot therefore be answered simply with reference to science. The question of how and why science has been granted such authority is the real issue, and one that the standard narrative assumes rather than explains.

 

The Social Imaginary

In light of this, Taylor points to what he calls the social imaginary. The phrase is somewhat inelegant, using the adjective “imaginary” as a noun. Yet the concept is important. The social imaginary is the set of beliefs and practices that reflect and reinforce the intuitions of a given culture or society. Saluting the flag, celebrating July Fourth as a holiday, and believing in the wisdom embodied in the U.S. Constitution would be three examples of things that have traditionally informed the American social imaginary. Few people ask why they do or believe these things; they are simply intuitive to those who belong to the culture of the United States and provide the framework or the lens through which the nation and its relationship to its citizens and to other nations are understood. Families too have their ritual, rhythms, and assumptions that inform how their members understand themselves and relate to others.

Thus, for Taylor, the question of how religion moves from being the default intuition of the members of a society to being optional or even marginal is a question of how the social imaginary has been transformed. The shift to scientific supremacy is a matter of the imagination, not of the blunt facts of science intruding upon us.

The Disenchantment of the World

Central to this transformation is what Taylor (borrowing from Max Weber) calls disenchantment. While the medieval world was enchanted, the modern world in which we dwell is disenchanted. A naïve response to this might be that our world too is full of interest in the supernatural—not simply in terms of traditional religious commitments, where church, synagogue, temple, and mosque continue to find a place in the lives of many people—but also in the plethora of other spiritualities, from yoga to tarot cards. Do these things not prove that we still live in an enchanted age?

Such an objection carries some weight with those who wish to read “disenchanted” as connoting the wholesale rejection of religion or mystery, but it does not really address what Taylor is pointing to. A disenchanted age is not necessarily characterized by complete repudiation of the supernatural. Rather, it is characterized by a fundamental shift in the function of the supernatural. And a world where we now have a choice of enchantments, so to speak, is a world that is differently enchanted—and arguably disenchanted—because the supernatural no longer stands in the same relation to the world as it once did.

A couple of examples help clarify Taylor’s point. Take a traditional Catholic who believes in the ecumenical creeds. In so doing, he believes the same thing that Christians committed to those creeds have believed throughout the centuries. But there is a difference: today’s Catholic cannot believe them in the same way as, say, a Catholic in 1500. This is because today’s Catholic chooses to believe them, and that in the face of a cultural default that does not do so. The Catholic in 1500 really had no choice and, in believing, reflected the cultural intuitions and dispositions of his day. On this level, such faith represents something different today.

 

As a second example, imagine being a Christian believer in 1500 and waking up one morning to find that one does not believe in God any more. Everything fundamentally changes at that point. Up until then, you believed that the only thing keeping the universe in order, the only thing that guaranteed that the sun would rise each morning, was the existence of God. To cease believing in him is therefore virtually impossible and, if done, requires a fundamental rethinking of everything.

Today, doubt among religious believers and even complete loss of faith are rarely accompanied by a deep existential crisis about the entire universe, even if they precipitate a certain localized angst about relationships or personal mortality. This is because even religious believers are accustomed to living in a world that seems to operate effectively for believer and unbeliever alike. For example, experience teaches that antibiotics are a more reliable form of medical treatment than prayer alone. One can, of course, see antibiotics as a gift of God and an answer to prayer, but one does not need to do so. Nor does their efficacy depend on that belief. Our world is thus at least much less enchanted than that of 1500, even if individual groups maintain certain supernatural beliefs.

The Buffered Self

At the heart of this disenchantment for Taylor is not the traditional science-versus-religion narrative we noted at the start. Rather, he sees the key as being a transformation in the way in which the self is understood. By self he understands not merely the awareness individuals might have of themselves as individual self-consciousnesses. For Taylor, selfhood is how people understand themselves as individuals in connection to the world around them, and what they see as the nature of being a human person. The contrast between the Middle Ages and today is one that Taylor characterizes as between the porous self and the buffered self.

The porous self is one that does not draw a sharp boundary between the inner and the outer, between the psychological and the material, between the physical world and the spiritual. The buffered self is the self that does make a clear distinction between these things. And it is the rise of the latter that connects to the disenchantment of our current age.

The distinction is important but also complex. Indeed, both Sources of the Self and A Secular Age spend significant time exploring the distinction, and any summary runs the risk of oversimplification. Nonetheless, a couple of examples can again illuminate Taylor’s argument.

One example he uses himself is that of depression. In medieval times, depression—or melancholy as it was called—was connected to the notion of black bile. Today, we connect it to physiological issues such as a hormonal imbalance. One might be tempted to say that the difference between the two is thus simply one of depth of scientific knowledge: we now know that black bile does not exist, but both medievals and moderns see that a physiological cause for psychological dysfunction is in play. But this would be to misunderstand the difference between the two. While we moderns see hormonal imbalance as causing depression, the medieval mind sees black bile as being itself the melancholy. In other words, we distinguish the self—a psychological entity—from the physical, which acts on the real “us” as an external force; the medieval sees the self as in the grip of the physical and inseparable from it or, better still, permeable by it.

 

A second example is that of the relationship between the supernatural and the natural world. For the medieval mind, the spiritual or supernatural boundary was a physical presence in the natural world: religious relics possessed an intrinsic power, for instance. Thus, when the king touched the one suffering from scrofula, the power of the physical touch healed the illness because the king, by virtue of his status as king, possessed supernatural healing powers. Likewise, when a fragment of the true cross was adored, the pilgrim was blessed. On the negative side, goblins, demons, and even the devil himself were physical realities within the material word. The physical world carried a powerful authority that extended to the spiritual and determined the nature of the self. But we moderns do not live in such a world. Ours is a world of immanence, not transcendence, explicable in terms of itself and where the supernatural does not plausibly blend with the natural. Even Christians who may well believe in a personal devil will typically not imagine him as a discrete physical presence in a particular place, but rather as a supernatural influence that cannot be specifically localized.

The displacement of the porous self with the buffered self is a long story, but with the crisis of the papacy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with the Reformation of the sixteenth, the nature and stability of external authority started to become more and more equivocal. Add to this changes in technology, above all the printing press (with the correlative rise in literacy and then private reading), and economies (with the move from dependence on the land and the seasons to production and trade).

These changes meant the old external framework for identity and a sense of self started to weaken and then plunge into constant flux. The material world became less authoritative. The result was that there was an inward move, so that identity and security came to be found more in the individual psychological sphere than in the given external world. Montaigne gave a literary focus to the first person as Descartes did the same from a philosophical perspective.

The exploration of the inner space became critical. And as this happened, so the porous self gave way to the buffered self. Such a self will tilt toward finding science, for example, an increasingly plausible way of understanding the universe, not because it understands the elaborate arguments, but because the scientific way of looking at the world—as material that in itself possesses no intrinsic spiritual significance—resonates with the intuitions of the buffered self. The really important things for the individual are psychological. The material world is a separate sphere.

There is far more to Taylor’s philosophical analysis of modernity than can ever be covered in the space of this article. But above all is the central key to his thinking: to understand our world, we need to understand how human beings intuitively relate to that world. That requires understanding the changes in the notion of selfhood that have taken place over the last five hundred years. Only then will we come to a better understanding of why religion and religious people find themselves in such a highly contested position in our culture.

Image credit: Makhanets – Own work. Previously published here.

Leo Strauss and the Possibility of Political Wisdom

This essay is part of Public Discourse’s Who’s Who series, which introduces and critically engages with important thinkers who are often referenced in political and cultural debates, but whose ideas might not be widely known or understood. The series previously considered the life and work of Hannah Arendt, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Maritain, Michael Oakeshott, Charles De Koninck, and Harry V. Jaffa and Allan Bloom.

Readers of this series should take special interest in the thought of Leo Strauss. Whereas most political thinkers devote themselves to developing a set of political theories, Strauss took the radical turn of investigating the possibility of political knowledge or political science generally, and whether such knowledge could ever rise to wisdom.

Situating these questions along the path of his thinking over his whole life is an important task, to which, unfortunately, we cannot possibly do justice here. We can nevertheless offer a shorter path that might guide those who seek political knowledge, perhaps even political wisdom, out of a concern for our current political situation. Such readers—curious but skeptical, worried yet hopeful—will find in Strauss surer guidance for these sentiments than anywhere else.

Positivism and Historicism

Strauss often accused his discipline, political science, of a serious dereliction of duty, a failure to address the spiritual crisis the West faced from within and the political crisis it faced from Communism in the East. Notoriously, Strauss charged the new political science with “fiddl[ing] while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.”

The basis of this accusation was Strauss’s assessment of the predominant approach in political science, positivism. Positivism attempted to model the social sciences on the natural sciences, which had enjoyed in modernity an uncanny advancement that had meanwhile eluded the study of political things. The primary concept the social sciences borrowed from the natural sciences was the distinction between facts and values. In taking his bearings solely from facts, and refusing to the best of his ability to make judgments of value, the social science positivist eschewed his basic task. Herein lies the fiddling, and the ignorance thereof: to busy oneself with surveys and the like while calling oneself a political scientist, a knower of the things pertaining to our communal life, is to fiddle; but since this accusation of fiddling is itself a value judgment, the political scientist cannot possibly know that he fiddles, nor can he know that he does so as Rome burns. The risk, Strauss shows us, is that the very discipline tasked with guiding the community will busy itself with trifles instead.

 

As a matter of fact, however, social scientists who subscribe to positivism tend to be advocates of liberal democracy, at least in Strauss’s time and in the West. But Strauss showed that their devotion to liberalism, decent as it may be, is unscientific according to their own standard, just one value among many. Herein lies a still greater risk. If we assert with the positivists that our values do not admit of scientific or even intelligent assessment, then from where will we receive our opinions about good and bad, noble and base, just and unjust? What determines “the direction of interests … which supplies the fundamental concepts” in the social sciences? Strauss concluded that the answer came to be something like fate or history, “a fateful dispensation.”

Positivism thus devolved into historicism, according to which there are no absolute or transcendent truths, certainly not as regards the ends of our actions, or morality and the good; all values, all goals, indeed every thought is historically determined. The decent and earnest liberal positivists populating political science departments in American universities turned out to be professionally and intellectually ill-equipped to counter the most illiberal thinkers of late modernity, even susceptible to them, including some of Strauss’s most notorious contemporaries, like Heidegger and Schmitt.

Historicism, in turn, threatened to exploit the value-neutrality of social science positivism and infiltrate the American academy. Once there, both liberal inclinations and even positivism itself would be seen as just one value among many, since there were no longer any accepted standards for determining the good in truth. Those newly at the university’s helm could thus exploit the void positivism created and steer the “direction of interests” away from liberal ends. Positivism, Strauss effectively showed, had the same weakness as the Weimar Republic; what awaited was the academic equivalent of the Enabling Act, which surrendered the republic to Hitler’s dictatorship.

The History of Political Philosophy

Confronted with these crises, Strauss engaged in a thoroughgoing reappraisal of the history of political philosophy. As one might expect, that reappraisal came with no small measure of controversy; for it involved abandoning contemporary paths and reopening old questions long deemed settled by the leading lights of academic political science. Early in his career Strauss wanted to revive two such questions. First, through his study of the roots of liberalism in Hobbes, he saw that the quarrel between the ancients and moderns—apparently concluded some centuries before the triumph of the moderns—had not been settled adequately and had to be reopened. Second, amid the Jews’ hopes in liberal tolerance being dashed, culminating eventually in the Weimar Republic’s falling to Hitler’s Reich, Strauss was led to study the author of these hopes, Spinoza. Strauss ultimately found Spinoza’s critique of orthodoxy inadequate, so that his advocacy of liberal democracy, with its religious and philosophic tolerance, failed to counter the very premodern views he sought to overcome. Strauss thus made his way back behind the moderns, most decisively in his labyrinthine study of Machiavelli, to what he called “the secret vitality of the West,” Jerusalem and Athens. These cities represented the dilemma that had preoccupied premodern man: the question whether the good life is lived in obedience to divine revelation or lived by unaided human reason. Thanks to Strauss, this dilemma stood before modern man once again.

Strauss saw early on that a critique of our Enlightenment hopes entailed a reevaluation of the relationship between science and society or between the philosopher and the political community. The locus of this relationship is the act of communication, typically in writing; he focused, therefore, on how philosophers of the past communicated, including many modern philosophers, and what they sought to achieve by that communication. This might appear to be “a merely literary question.” Strauss maintained, however, that the question of communication constitutes “an important part of the study of what philosophy is.” It is on this point that Strauss has stirred up the greatest controversy: he suggested that the philosophers of the past have, so to speak, written between the lines to hide their true thought behind publicly salutary teachings. At a minimum, their surface-level teachings need to be restated in light of circumstances surrounding their writings; at a maximum, such philosophers might not have meaningfully held those teachings at all.

 

The implications of this thesis generated the controversy. It exposed nearly the whole of academic historiography as fundamentally inadequate in its interpretive approach to philosophical texts. It required that most, if not all, prior scholarship be heavily qualified, some of it even rejected entirely. And it therefore demanded, finally, that the historiographer see his work more humbly than he might like, as he was asked to bow anew before thinkers whose doctrines had until then been easily digested and thereafter disposed of.

Needless to say, the academy has been slow to warm, even hostile, to Strauss’s Copernican revolution in the study of the history of philosophy. But Strauss was also quite modest in his expectations. In a rare personal statement regarding nothing less than his own happiness, Strauss remarked, “I would be happy if there were suspicion of crime where up to now there has only been implicit faith in perfect innocence.”

As a result of his historical inquiries, Strauss was successful in reopening the question of an evaluative social science, a more robust or fuller alternative to the value-neutral positivism of his day. It would be a mistake, however, to understand his thought through this narrow lens alone. Strauss was not a simple moralist, driven by disgust with the present state of the social sciences to a wholesale endorsement of, say, Aristotle’s Politics. Though he exposed positivist social science as theoretically untenable and spiritually impoverished, he did so while also transforming the study of the history of political philosophy from the moribund old man of political science into an open frontier that awaited young and intrepid pioneers. Strauss succeeded in bringing the fundamental questions of the tradition back to life, against the dogmatism that would deem them already answered and the skepticism that would deny that they even exist.

Classic Natural Right and Socrates

We see, then, that Strauss sought to recover classical philosophy as a still viable alternative, and that this move had a twofold goal: one philosophical and the other moral or political. The moral or political goal involved demonstrating the possibility that human beings have access to trans-historical standards of justice, to natural right. But that goal can be achieved only if one demonstrates first that human beings have access to nature—that is, that philosophy is possible at all. Historicism denies the latter claim, which is more fundamental. Strauss rightly saw this denial as a philosophic and political crisis, especially for the United States, whose founding relied on an appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Yet he also saw this crisis as a philosophic opportunity. Historicism, especially in its most radical form, was a welcome ally in the fight against philosophic dogmatism in any form. Though he was suspicious that historicism was merely the contemporary form of dogmatism, he also anticipated that engaging the historicist position, as a peculiarly anti-dogmatic dogmatism, would help “to legitimize philosophy in its original, Socratic sense.”

Historicism benefited the philosopher by exposing the limitations of all philosophic positions or systems. It argued that the apparently linear progress in the history of philosophy actually involves only a development in one area at the cost of regress in another. It thus compelled defenders of natural right to do so on a fundamentally non-dogmatic basis, prior to any particular philosophic position or system yet still properly philosophic. Strauss argued that, prior to arriving at any position, the philosopher had first to grasp the problem—the fundamental problem, as Strauss often put it—to which that position purported to be a solution. The radical historicist, Strauss surmised, would respond with a denial that there even are fundamental problems; he would assert, instead, that the whole the philosopher seeks to understand is always changing, that there is nothing stable about it that would be true for all times.

Strauss responded that the historicist has not adequately understood the history of philosophy, nor even historicism’s own history. He therefore lacks clarity about the fundamental problems with which prior philosophers concerned themselves, what Strauss referred to as “genuine understanding of the thought of the past.” He thus called for a rereading of the history of philosophy outside of the lens of historicism, as well as a critical history of the origins of historicism. Strauss’s historical inquiries were intended in part to answer this call.

A more pressing question for readers, however, is whether the recovery of Socratic philosophy does or does not culminate in the recovery of the classic natural right teaching. Strauss devoted the last decade of his life to an investigation of Socratic philosophy, an investigation he died before completing. Readers should not be surprised, then, if we do little more here than sketch the problem.

 

Demonstrating the possibility of philosophy would seem to open the door to natural right; yet Strauss defended the philosophic life on grounds in tension with all philosophic positions, natural right included. Socratic knowledge of ignorance culminates in knowledge of the fundamental problems, among them the problem of justice. Knowledge of the problem of justice is, in Strauss’s account, knowledge that justice rests on mutually exclusive principles. To know the problem of justice is to know its insolubility. From this vantage point, any solution to the problem of justice, including natural right, seems to be untenable.

One suspects that Strauss’s attack on historicism in defense of classic natural right was intended to divert our attention from Socratic philosophy’s more formidable critique of natural right. Strauss created enemies and allies as suited his purposes. But we should approach this suspicion with due sensitivity. Knowledge of ignorance, of the mutual exclusivity of principles, does not mean that there is no objective way to discern which principles apply in particular situations and how. That discernment constitutes the prudence or practical wisdom of the philosopher.

Strauss lived the philosophic life as had all philosophers before him: with one eye on the demands of necessity and the other on the full scope of the questions. His continual emphasis on this twofold character of philosophic writing has the twofold benefit of cultivating both theoretical and practical humility, humility about what can be known and what can be done. By separating these domains, Strauss restored the ancient understanding of the relationship between science and society, philosophy and the city, thereby injecting both with a much-needed dose of moderation. It is this lesson, both urgent and profound, that Strauss offers his concerned and thoughtful readers.