Charles Taylor and the Hegelian Eden Tree: Canadian Compradorisim by Ron Dart

The fruit of
the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and
also desirable for gaining wisdom. Genesis 3:6 Canada

may produce more original work on Hegel than any other
nation.   
David MacGregor, Literary Review of Canada
(February 1994)

 

The fact that the well known Canadian philosopher, Charles
Taylor, won the enviable Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or
Discoveries About Spiritual Realities in 2007 has been noted and noticed by
many. There are few that have won this prestigious award, and fewer Canadians
have taken the trophy home.Taylor
did so, and did so in a way that has made many a Canadian proud of their native
born boy. But, philosophy is about asking critical questions, and critical
questions keep us from slipping into
hagiography. Why did Taylor win the Templeton Prize, what
questions need to be asked of Taylor, what intellectual agenda does he serve
and are there other Canadians of equal worth and merit that might have won the
Templeton Prize but did not?

Most Canadians that study philosophy in any serious way
often learn of Plato and Aristotle, if they are fortunate the Patristic
contemplative way (many know little of this), Medieval thought, the
fragmentation of thought in the Reformation, then the journey into the modern
and postmodern mood and ethos. I suspect, if most Canadians (or non-Canadians)
that study philosophy were asked about Canadian philosophy and philosophers a
blank and confused stare would come across their bewildered faces and baffled
minds. Surely, there is no such thing as a distinct Canadian philosophical
tradition and Canadian philosophers that embody such a tradition. Such is the
colonial mind. Nothing good can emerge from within the womb of Canada,
hence the turn most Canadians make to a variety of elsewhere communities (past
and present) in their study of philosophy.

Is there, though, a distinctive Canadian tradition of
philosophy, and, if so, what is it? And, if there is such a tradition, where
does Charles Taylor stand within such heritage, line and lineage? The answer to
these questions might assist us in understanding why Taylor won the Templeton Prize.

 There is little doubt that The Faces of Reason: Philosophy in English Canada, 1850-1950 (1981),
by Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, did much to highlight the obstinate fact
that there is a distinct philosophical tradition in English Canada.
Armour/Trott ignored French Canada, and this is a limitation in their approach,
but The Faces of Reason made it clear
that between 1850-1950 a distinct form and way of doing philosophy had emerged
in Canada.
Canadian philosophy and philosophers saw things differently and thought in a
different way, in a general sort of way, than those in the United Kingdom and the USA. Leslie Armour, more than any
Canadian philosopher, has walked the extra mile to highlight the fact that
there is a distinctive Canadian way of doing philosophy. Armour’s faithful and
conscientious work means that he has opened up a path for many to see. This is
why, and rightly so, a festschrift
was written and dedicated to Armour. Idealism,
Metaphysics and Community (2001) has many a fine essay dedicated to Armour,
and most of his publications are listed in a well pondered bibliography. But,
what has Armour to do with Taylor
other than the fact that both are Canadians and both are philosophers?

Taylor won the Templeton
Prize and Armour did not. Why linger much longer on the work of Leslie Armour?

 

The Faces of Reason
makes it most clear that the Canadian tradition of philosophy that is nearest
and dearest to the Canadian soul and psyche is a form of Hegelian idealism.
This fact, and its historic reality, was made even clearer in the recent book
on George Grant. There are three essays in Athens and Jerusalem:
George Grant’s Theology, Philosophy, and Politics that deal with Grant’s
questioning of the Hegelian tradition in both Hegel and the Canadian
appropriation of Hegel. ‘Grant, Hegel, and the Impossibility of Canada’ (Robert
C. Sibley), ‘Response to the Strauss-Kojeve Debate: Grant’s Turn from Hegel to
Christian Platonism’ (Alexander Duff) and ‘Freedom and the Tradition: George
Grant, James Doull, and the Character of Modernity’ (Neil Robertson) all tell,
in different ways and for different reasons, why Grant parted company with
Hegel and his modern disciples and followers in Canada. Interestingly enough,
in Athens and Jerusalem, there were
no articles on Grant and Taylor. This should noted given the fact that such an
essay would have brought the debate between the ancients and moderns, Grant and
Taylor into the Canadian context. Grant and Doull (a modern Canadian Hegelian)
squared off on the Classics-Modern debate, and there is no doubt Grant engaged
Canadian liberal Hegelianism in many forms in Canada, but the Grant-Taylor
differences was left untouched in Athens
and Jerusalem.

 What has been the nature of Charles Taylor’s journey, what
role has Hegel played in such a journey, why can Canadian Hegelianism be a form
of colonialism and compradorism and how can George Grant come as a distinct
critic of Hegel, Hegelianism, Taylor and the modern project? Let us begin with
Hegel, then move ever onward and forward to Hegel in Canada and Taylor’s
appropriation of Hegel. There is no doubt that Charles Taylor stands within a
certain philosophical tradition, and it is best to know what such a tradition
is and why.

There is little doubt that Hegel is the grand magus of the
modern liberal ethos. He has, more than most, articulated why liberalism is and
should be the reigning ideology of our age, and why it is foolish to resist and
oppose such an intellectual system. Hegel argued that all of human history
(guided by the Weltgeist-world
spirit) is about our increasing consciousness of the meaning of liberty and
freedom. The seeds of such a way of being were planted in the Classical past,
emerged with some maturity in the Roman Catholic civilization of Patristic and
Medieval Europe, bore yet greater fruit in the Protestant forms of
Christianity, found a certain beauty and fragrance on various religions of the
world, and in the Enlightenment bore abundant fruit. Each generation, in such
an organic unfolding, in a dialectical way, builds on the previous generation.

Liberty and freedom is
the key to such a fuller awakening, and to oppose or question such a
fundamental reality is to dare to question to spirit of the age that ever seeks
to stir and enliven on and all, souls and civilizations with an ever more
profound alertness to the meaning of liberty. Those who are out of step with
such movement of history are out of touch with the meaning and forward march of
history. There are left wing Hegelians (Marx and clan) centrist Hegelians (social
democrats and democratic socialists) and right wing Hegelians (liberty loving
Americans), but each all (left, centre and right) hold high the flag of
liberty. The differences within the Hegelian clan are not about liberty and
freedom (this is the creed and what the high council has decreed), but about
how such a reality can be best delivered. This is why there are those that have
argued that we have come to the end of history. Most now agree that liberty is
the foundation that none can doubt or question. The debates, as I mentioned
above, are more about how liberty and freedom can be best.

The modern world is, in essence, Hegelian, and it is
virtually impossible, in the liberal modern ethos to questions such a position
and perspective. Where does Charles Taylor fit into such a tradition?

Taylor studied at McGill from
1948-1952, then he was off to England
to do graduate and doctoral studies. When Taylor
was in England,
he was a founder of Universities and New
Left Review that became, in time, New
Left Review.

Taylor also headed the World
University Services in Vienna.
It does not take to much reflection to realize where Taylor tipped his intellectual and political
hat. Taylor returned to Canada in 1961, and he began
teaching at McGill. The 1960s were an interesting period of time for Taylor. He taught, but he
was also at the centre of NDP activism, also.Taylor  ran four times as an NDP candidate at
a federal level, and he ran against Pierre Trudeau in the 1965 election.
Trudeau had supported Taylor 
in the 1963 federal election. We could say that Taylor was a soft left Hegelian in the 1960s,
although his writings on Hegel were minimal.

Taylor’s more committed NDP activism began to
wane in the 1970s, but before such a turn occurred, he published The Pattern of Politics (1970). This is
a small book, and a tract for the times just like Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965). The interesting thing to note, though,
in The Pattern of Politics is that
Grant’s intense nationalism is missing, but there is no doubt that Taylor is
attempting, within a Canadian context, to determine how freedom and liberty can
best be accomplished for each and all.

Taylor is
certainly aware, in The Pattern of
Politics, that the USA and corporate wealth inhibit a fuller liberty for Canadians, and he warns
Canadians of being ‘a miniature replica’ of the USA and being mired in the ‘quick
sands of dependence’. It is important to note, though, that Taylor’s concerns with the colonization of
Canadian culture and economics never brought him to the point of being as
committed to nationalism and socialism as was the Waffle movement in the late
1960s-early 1970s in the NDP. The goal is liberty, but liberty for Canadians
must not be pushed too hard or too far. It is not easy to reconcile Canadian nationalism and American imperialism.  The means is a left of centre approach, but a
left of centre approach that was cautious and wary of offending at a certain
level of discourse and action. George Grant and Robin Mathews would have their
doubts about Taylor’s
rather assimilationist Hegelianism in The
Pattern of Politics. Hegel is the silent sage through the 1960s for Taylor, though.

It was just a matter of time before the silent sage would
move from his hidden throne room and be summoned forth to appear. Taylor had to recognize
his master. It was in the 1970s that Hegel, the magus, appeared on the stage
for all to see. Taylor
did the introductions well. Hegel (1975)
and Hegel and Modern Society (1977)
established Taylor as a leading Hegelian
scholar, and such an explicit doffing of the intellectual and political cap
placed Taylor
in the mainstream and establishment tradition of Canadian Hegelianism. Much of Taylor’s
work since the 1970s has been merely a fleshing out, within the Canadian
context and beyond, of the essential rightness of Hegel (past, present,
future).

 

What is the genius of Hegel and why has Taylor drawn so deeply from the well of
Hegel? Hegel highlighted that the Enlightenment tradition was superior to the
Classical tradition, but the Enlightenment had a tendency to fragment to three
directions. There was the rationalist wing of the Enlightenment that turned to
science, reason and the empirical way as the yellow brick road into the future.
There were the romantics that dared to differ with the rationalists, and the
romantics held high the way of poetry, the arts and intuition. Then, there were
the humanists. It was the humanists that attempted to see the best in the
romantics and rationalists yet question their limited approaches to knowing and
being. It was the humanists within the Enlightenment that attempted to
synthesize the best of the rationalist and romantic traditions and raise both
to a higher level through such a synthesis.

Charles Taylor, like Hegel, stands very much within the
humanist wing of the Enlightenment. Both see the Classical past as limited and
partial, and both see the notion of liberty and freedom as best expressed in
the humanist vision of the Enlightenment. Poetry and science need not be
enemies. Religion and reason need not oppose one another. Individualism and
community need not butt horns. There is
a place for a higher synthesis of the best elements of both approaches to life
and society. Both the soul and civilizations falter and weaken when any extreme
dominates the day. The goal of both Hegel and Taylor is the reconciliation,
through struggle and opposition, to an ever higher level of the liberal goal of
the consciousness of freedom.

There are those, of course, that would disagree with Hegel’s
four epochs of human history (Oriental, Greek, Roman and Christian Germanic),
Hegel’s underlying thesis of liberty lives on. The modern and postmodern
carries the tale of freedom ever forward. It is at this point, though, where Taylor breaks with the
postmodern. He argues that postmodernity has broken the dialectic.

Individualism has run rampant to the exclusion of
marginalization of community and the state. Hegel vision of the humanist
liberal vision was that the freedom of each could only be actualized within the
whole, and the public was as important (if not more so) than the private and
the individual.

There are right wing Hegelians that insist that the liberty
of the individual trumps the good of the community, there are centrist
Hegelians that hold the freedom of community-state-nation-individual in
tensions, then there are committed leftist Hegelians that insist that the freedom of
the state takes precedent over the freedom of nation, community and individual.

Taylor very
much stands within the centrist social democratic stream of Hegelianism within
the Canadian context.The larger philosophic and political questions beg a deeper
question. What does it mean to be human? If an ideological leftist theory held Taylor in the 1950s, and Taylor’s leftist activism preoccupied him in
the 1960s, a turn occurred in the 1970s.

Taylor
began to take his theory deeper. Taylor’s
two books in the 1970s on Hegel placed in on front stage in the world of
Hegelian scholarship. The 1980s nudged Taylor
to greater depths on the questions of human nature and the self. Sources of the Self: The Making of the
Modern Identity (1989). The ideology of the 50s had waned, the activism of
the 60s thinned out, Hegel had been probed in the 70s. The time had come to
examine the roots and sources of the self. Sources
of the Self is an exquisite and compelling apologia for the modern notion
of the self, the sources of such a self and the conflicts within the modern
liberal project.

Taylor
tends, as ever, to caricature or ignore the classical tradition when he needs
to dive deeper. But, this is part of his commitment to Hegelian liberalism. The
past is merely a preparation for the present as the present is an unfolding
preparation, of ever increasing goodness, for the future. The cunning of reason
will make it so. Reason will even use the slaughter board of history to bring about an ever higher end. All, in the
end, is about progress to a higher understanding of liberty.

The larger issues of political theory and activism had given
way to questions of the self in the 1980s for Taylor. Sources
of the Self was such a convincing and compelling defence of modern liberalism
that Taylor was
asked to do the CBC  Massey
lectures. The Malaise of Modernity
(1991) is a reader’s digest version of Sources
of the Self. Those who have followed Taylor’s
journey from the 1950s to the 1990s cannot help but sense that political theory
and political activism have lost their luster by the 1980s, and Taylor’s project through
the 1980s-1990s is a defence of Hegelian liberalism. This means much work must
be done on unpacking the sources of the self and the varied ways of defining
identity. Pluralism and multiculturalism becomes the buzz words, and dialogue
and dialectic ever continues. The more substantive questions of Canadian
nationalism and American imperialism simply don’t exist, in a serious way, for Taylor
. He has become, in many ways, the
quintessential bourgeois and humanist liberal, defending the liberal status
quo.

 There is, in short, some serious shifts and alterations in
thought and action between the younger Taylor and the elder Taylor. These
shifts have been aptly noted and painstakingly probed in Ronald Beiner’s
article, ‘Hermeneutical Generosity and Social Criticism’ in Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit: Essays
on Contemporary Theory (1997). Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit,
like Beiner’s earlier book, What’s the
Matter with Liberalism? (1994), dares to interrogate the ideology of liberalism.
‘Hermeneutical Generosity and Social Criticism’ points out that Taylor cannot have it both
ways. It’s impossible to have a foot on the dock and another foot on the boat
as the boat is leaving the dock. Those who turn more and more to a generous
interpretive approach to the self, society and politics find it increasingly
difficult to raise hard critical questions about politics, society and the self
for the simple reason that positions and perspectives, dialogue, process and
dialectic is the new ideology. Procedural liberalism winds the day. But, when
social criticism comes to the fore, notions such as right and wrong, good,
better and best, bad, worse and worst take front stage. There is no doubt that Taylor has tended, in the last two decades to marginalize
social criticism (the younger Taylor )
while holding high hermeneutical generosity.

The feet of the soul need to be either on the dock or the
boat. A thinker or activist cannot have it both ways. Hermeneutical generosity
tends to lead to a paralysis of action on substantive issues while social
critics tend to be weak on accepting the equal truth claims and insights of
most perspectives.

There is no doubt that Charles Taylor is one of the most
important defenders of the modern liberal project. He does not summon forth its
deeper premises and question them. He accepts them as the best for this ethos
that we live in.

Taylor
is quite willing to question some of the aberrations of liberalism but not the
core and centre of liberalism. The Classical and the Postmodern will not do for Taylor. It is
the Hegelian liberal project, for good or ill, that must be defended. It is
such a project, in a distorted way, exists in the USA, and, in a deeper more
leftist form, exists in Canada. The fact that Taylor has turned more to
questions of the self and hermeneutical generosity in the last two decades
means he has less and less to say on larger questions of Canadian nationalism
and American imperialism. Taylor has, increasingly so, become preoccupied with
the liberal agenda of pluralism, deeper diversity, French nationhood,
recognition and some of the dilemmas the modernity raises for those committed
to it as the reigning ideology of the age.

A problem exists when we marginalize the larger questions
and become preoccupied with the secondary questions. This has happened, I fear,
with Taylor.
This is a more subtle way of being colonized. We just don’t discuss the large
issues. We become overly concerned with the self and community.The meaning of nationhood gets lost in the shuffle. We
accept the status quo. The New Romans win not by might or force, arms or tanks
but by the simple fact that important philosophers just don’t ask the questions
about imperialism (and its consequences for many on this fragile earth our
island home). This is, perhaps, why Taylor
won the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About
Spiritual Realities. Taylor
has given himself to progress as defined by Hegel and accepted by the power
elite and ruling mandarin class in Canada. Just as Hegel thought the
spirit of the age had settled best and in most mature way in his culture, so Taylor has accepted and
defended the dominant ideology of our age. Religion must genuflect, also, to
modernity if it expects to be heard and have a voice. Taylor knows this, his understanding or
religion, like all else, plays into the liberal agenda of pluralism, hence the
Templeton Prize. Grant once said, ‘pluralism is the monism of our time’. Taylor could learn much
from Grant.

It does seem rather odd that, on the one hand, philosophy is
supposed to be about critical thinking, yet, on the other hand, a philosopher
like Charles Taylor, is not very critical of the reigning ideology of his day.
It is a rather sad day when a liberal lacks the ability to critique
liberalism. But, to question liberalism
would be to question the air breathed by most intellectuals. The New Romans
would not be pleased; neither would the senators that insist that liberalism is
the only way to think.

Taylor  has seen, taken and
tasted from the Hegelian liberal Eden
tree. Such a tree is good to see, better to taste and offers a sort of
pleasing wisdom. But, as Taylor himself rightly notices, there is a malaise
within modernity that is produced by modernity. It is the toxins coming from
the core alerting us to the fact that something is not right in Denmark.
George Grant often spoke about the ‘intimations of deprival’ that the most
sensitive feel that have tasted the fruit from the Hegelian Eden tree. It is
such symptoms, felt and articulated, by the best and brightest, that short warn
us about the deeper problems at the heart and core of the liberal project. Most
of the battles in the culture wars are more about the type and form of
liberalism to be defended rather than a questioning of the foundations of
liberalism itself.

The political and cultural left, centre and right merely tap
into various aspects of Hegelian liberalism. There are few that have summoned
forth the magus from his hidden chambers and dared to both challenge and break
the spell of such a centuries old wizard. George Grant was one of the few in Canada
to do this. Charles Taylor does not, and he is dutiful and faithful servant of
the magus. The future of Canada and our attitude to the New Romans hinges on who we hear and why.

Ron Dart