Anyone who recognizes the real as reasonable and the reasonable as real thinks Hegelian, simply has good nerves, little empathy or a rather strange sense of humor. And yet there is some evidence that saying what is is actually a sensible act. Admittedly, this may sound like too much concession to given structures and a questionable status quo, which trying to preserve extends existing injustice or leads to its ruin. Where is the sense of possibility in that? Instead of giving another interpretation of the world, it should practically be about immediately changing, improving words and deeds.
But you could also try differently. To say what is then meant much more than just emphasizing the status quo. Rather, it meant paying attention to the contradiction in reality, which allows thinking and acting to be better oriented; it meant the attention to movement tendencies in reality, which both promote and inhibit our thinking and acting; the status quo becomes a process. It meant the historical sense of what has become in the present – both as a learning process and mandate and as a history of loss or decay. It meant the sense of the linguistic-symbolic form of what really is as social reality. Above all, however, it meant to penetrate through the small and large self-misunderstandings and deceptive facades that hide what is. Every investigative journalist knows about the potential for enlightenment and self-harm that lies in saying what is.
One can only escape the great self-image of a time with the greatest effort
In this broad sense, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who will turn 90 today, November 5th, is a thinker of what is; a philosopher who records time in his mind and is particularly attentive to its contradictions and (great) self-misunderstandings. And he is a thinker with a profound historical education in order to understand how it came to be in the history of ideas. No reader of his books would like to believe that the time of great stories is over.
Understanding is an art, misunderstanding comes naturally, and the great self-conceptions of a time can only be escaped with great difficulty. That is the price we have to pay as social self-interpreting beings. And it is quite paradoxical that a Hegelian communitarian like Taylor, who has made the social, cultural and linguistic embedding of the human being a leitmotif of his thinking, tracks down the extensive delusions of the time everywhere.
The big errors in the framework of our culture are Taylor’s themes: In his book “The Sources of the Self”, published in 1989, he asked about the origin of modern individualism. How could a self-misunderstanding of such scope arise as the isolated, “disengaged” subject of modernity is that has become the cause of all kinds of uneasiness in modernity. In other words, we do not succeed in understanding the world and developing a feeling for moral distinctions as a mere observant ego withdrawing from the world and social relationships in order to become objective. Rather, understanding is the achievement of a committed actor. In his second major work “A Secular Age” in 2007 he finally followed the emergence of the secularist self-misunderstanding of liberal societies and their ideology of so-called exclusionary humanism, within which there is no room for forms of religious life in the present.
In an epistemological work on regaining realism, written together with Hubert Dreyfus, he stated: “A huge error is at work in our culture.” Namely the mistake that we misunderstand cognition as something that is mediated and dependent on representations. But our mind is not a data-processing perception apparatus. Instead, according to Taylor, we are embodied in contact with the world, for example by being mindful of its “offer”, and dealing with it as socially embedded actors.
A word he wrote 30 years ago sounds like it is spoken in our present
Not only the size of his books – the intellectual battles that are fought in them are epic in format. For a long time they are written in a melancholy tone of philosophical stories of decline, from which Taylor only laboriously elicits the sound of open possibilities. He succeeds in doing this, for example, as a philosopher of political freedom. Even in the technical and bureaucratic housing of the modern world of instrumental rationality, as Max Weber described it, Taylor tracks down opportunities for political agency.
In his 1991 publication “Das Unbehagen an der Moderne” (Uneasiness an der Moderne), he initially starts from the feeling of powerlessness of a fragmented public that arises when the commitment to a piece of the environment is experienced as politically hopeless. But – and his word, written 30 years ago, sounds like it is spoken today: As soon as “a climate of consent is generated in the environment of the environmental threat, the situation changes. (…) The mechanisms of inevitability only work if the People are divided and fragmented. The distressed situation changes as soon as a common consciousness arises. “
Taylor gives the isolated, disengaged subject of modern times a body again. Incorporated in this way, he puts it into a world that challenges you to get along with it, but which also offers meaning and “resonance” – a concept that the German sociologist and Taylor expert Hartmut Rosa made his big topic . Taylor emphasizes that the understanding of the world has always been shared, linguistically and culturally divided. And as a political philosopher, he sees people as citizens who see themselves as appreciative and recognized parts of a historically and culturally interpreted political community in order to realize political freedom – with the possibility of leading a religious life. In recognition of his tireless educational work against our self-inflicted intellectual disorientation, Charles Taylor was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize in 2008. If a high honor meets such merit, then that is really sensible.