69 SourCeS of THe oTHer The humanITIes and The arTs In Taylor’s crITIcIsm of modern IndIvIdualITy “The great challenge of the coming century, both for politics and for social science, is that of understanding the other.” (Taylor: Gadamer on the Human Sciences) 1. Introduction In his irst authoritative book, Sources of the Self (1989), Taylor tries to uncover the roots of the modern concept of the self. His analysis takes the form of a critical (but not fully pessimistic) history of modernity, a process leading up to the notion of what came to be called the modern self, or individualised personal identity. Modernity created individuality, a step in the history of humankind which made (social, economic and technical) progress possible, but humanity had to pay a price for it. This price is usually called alienation: that is, a radical break between a human person and her community, or to translate it to the language of modern phenomenology, between the self and the other. This paper proposes that the primary unit of Taylor’s investigations is not the self on its own, but one in dialogue with its binary opposite, the other. This latter is a term which Taylor does not use explicitly in Sources of the Self, but which emerged from critical discussions of the modern notion of the individual, irst in the writings of the classical German idealists (notably of Hegel and Fichte), and then was made more recognizable by a particular line of 20th century authors, connecting Bakhtin to Levinas and onwards. This paper tries to show that we can only appreciate the signiicance of Taylor’s thought on the human phenomenon correctly if we look at him as placed at the crossroad of (mainly, but not exclusively French) phenomenology and mostly German phi- 70 ferenc hörcher losophical anthropology – both of them relying on Aristotelian inspirations, and both widening up the discourse of liberal individuality, and facing the problem of the connection between the one and the many. In this respect the paper wants to argue that the arts and culture played a major role as the principle source of experiencing the other in modern society – and this way it had and still has a major function in sustaining democracy in the postmodern society of alienated individuals. But beside this cultural line of critique, I would like to emphasize one more element of his thought. His interest in the other is, as I shall try to demonstrate, a result of his search for truth as a loyal but not un(self)critical philosopher within the (not antimodernist) Catholic (i.e. Aristotelian and Catholic) philosophical tradition. In order to achieve these aims, I shall irst give an overview of Taylor’s account of the widely-held view of the modern asocial theory and practice of personal disengagement and atomism. I shall contrast this description to Taylor’s normative ideal of a dialogical self, with an Aristotelian, communal component to it based on the fundamental features of the human condition. I shall then focus on his view from – the perspective of the human sciences – of the human being as a culture-generating and a culture-constituted animal, and on the role language plays in general, and conversation in particular, in culture. Here language will not be understood as a simple technical equipment, acquired by the individual on its own to depict the world objectively, as it functions in modernist theories of language (Hobbes and Locke) and in science, but rather as a way to make sense of the human condition in the natural and social environment; and culture is not simply a set of objects created to express our self, but rather the objective but dynamically changing result of a common way of life. Finally, I shall argue for the possibility to read Taylor’s views on the human being in the context of what I call Christian Aristotelianism. It is in this context that I shall try to show the connection between practical wisdom and art in Taylor’s story, and through his interpretation of epiphany I shall end by referring to the acclaimed socio-religious dimensions of the effects of art. sources of the other 71 2. The human person Although the idea of the person is a Christian concept, which has been built on the root of the Latin word persona, it is taken as a modern notion by Taylor, and with good reasons. He claims that the moderns recreate the Christian concept in a new way, as a psychological being. His essay on “The person”1 questions the view of Marcel Mauss. He reconstructs an intellectual lineage from Descartes through Locke to Kant, in which human reason is presented as the sole and only truly human faculty, controlling human behaviour in any this-worldly situation. The lineage is directly challenging divine control over human life, and within a few generations separates the human being from her creator. Human reason has a special dignity of its own which cannot be negotiated, not even in the presence of a God. More precisely, the demand for an absolute autonomy of the human reason leads logically to what came to be called secularisation: a state of affairs when the denial of God’s existence is taken as the default case, because the idea is regarded to contradict human reason. Although taken from the Christian teaching, “The dignity of free, rational control came to seem genuine only free of submission to God.”2 Reason came to be interpreted as antagonistic with religious belief. Step by step, the European intellect learned to take itself so seriously, as to liberate itself from any divine control: “learning to be the disengaged subject of rational control, and eventually a punctual self.”3 The interesting point of Taylor’s analysis of the atomist model of the individual in Western modernity is not simply the theoretically substantiated contrast between the isolated subject, who is only supported by her own reasoning faculty, and a kind of community-based account of her, which was already present in the German tradition, in the conceptual distinction of Gesellschaft and 1 – Charles Taylor, “The person”, in (eds.) Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes, The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 257-301. 2 – Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), hereafter SoS, p. 315. 3 – SoS, p. 315. 72 ferenc hörcher Gemeinschaft.4 Rather, the interesting part of it is that he offers a radically different picture of the human being, not as a homo sapiens, but as an “interpreting animal.” Interpretation starts of course here with a representation of the external world, but does not stop there, but also includes an awareness of one’s self as well. This means that she is able to distance herself from her own position and can give a (kind of external) description of her very position as well. But this is not the end of the story for Taylor: he also adds that the self-interpreting move is not something additional to the person, not a function of an otherwise already fully competent, autonomous agent. On the contrary, he claims that without this phase of self-interpretation the human being would not be a human being – the concept of humanness necessarily includes a notion of self-interpretation: “A fully competent human agent not only has some understanding (… or … misunderstanding) of himself, but is partly constituted by this understanding.”5 There is a dynamic element in all this. Human identity is conceptualised here as a constant process of learning – the world, which includes her own self, embedded in the context of that world. And the dynamism does not simply involve temporal change. It also means a continuing dialogue – a never ending exchange with the other. This is a point which is directly connected to the main topic of the present paper. Taylor claims that in order to ix one’s own identity what one is required to do is to communicate with the not-self, which is a vague notion, covered supericially by the term of the other. Yet the appearance of the idea (although not always the word) of the other in Taylor’s thought proves his sensitivity to the hermeneutic turn in philosophy which had indeed a lasting impact on Taylor’s thought. Certainly, it could be traced back to his in-depth readings of Hegel, who himself gave a compelling analysis of the relationship between the Self and the other in his phenomenologically-tuned description of the “master-sla4 – Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1887). 5 – Charles Taylor, “Introduction” in Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences. Philosophical Papers 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), hereafter PP2, pp. 1-12, p. 3. sources of the other 73 ve” relationship.6 Yet, Taylor is certainly aware of the French phenomenological tradition as well in this connection, and of the central role the other plays in those phenomenological discussions of the self, like in Ricoeur.7 Taylor’s contribution in this respect is twofold. First, that he does not simply mean the Other in the singular, but broadens the concept in order to let it include the whole community as well. He asserts that “[a] human being alone is an impossibility… Outside of the continuing conversation of a community…”8 This communitarian element is rather important for us, as it looks like an Aristotelian element in Taylor’s account of the human phenomenon. By conceptualising an abstract public space he is also able to show how far individuals rely on the wisdom of their community – here the main point is going to be language, to which we shall return below. But irst, let me name the second step in Taylor’s elaboration of the concept of the other: he broadens its reference so as to mean by this interpersonal relationship a conversation with God. Beyond the homo sapiens, also beyond the zoon politicon, he claims that the human being is also a homo religiosus. In his lecture on Catholic Modernity he puts this claim in the following format: “Human beings have an ineradicable bent to respond to something beyond life.”9 Man’s relationship to God is here presented as another dialogue, another opening up towards the other, although this other is beyond human reach in any other way. While the “exclusive humanity” of modernity lets people admit that they are unable to reach God, there remains here a transcendent window open, which leaves communication with that far-away other undisturbed even if this communication cannot be controlled by human reason. 6 – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: “B. Selbstbewusstsein. IV. Die Wahrheit der Gewißheit seiner selbst. A. Selbständigkeit und Unselbständigkeit des Selbstbewußtseins; Herrschaft und Knechtschaft” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 145. Taylor’s work on Hegel was published in a huge monography (Hegel, 1975) and a shortened version entitled Hegel and Modern Society (1979). 7 – See the published version of Paul Ricoeur’s Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990, Eng. tr. 1992). 8 – PP2, p. 8. 9 – Charles Taylor: A Catholic Modernity? Marianist Award Lecture, 1996, (Dayton: The University of Dayton, 1996), p. 24. 74 ferenc hörcher 3. What are the human sciences like and for? Taylor, well versed as he is in post-Hegelian German philosophy is fully aware of the methodological problems (Methodenstreit) brought up by the effort to provide a reliable description of the human being, as soon as we do not ind satisfactory a simply physicalist-naturalist account of it. He is a strong supporter of the distinction between (although not of a separation of) a natural scientiic account of the human phenomenon and one taken from the perspective of the humanities. The distinction was irst hinted at by Aristotle, introduced in German philosophy by the 19th century and then taken over by C. P. Snow in his famous lecture on two cultures. According to Taylor “the ambition to model the study of man on the natural sciences” – as it was done by Hume, Kant and a number of others – is futile and it can “lead to very bad science.”10 Why? Because the nature of the object of this study does not allow the same sort of precision that is required in natural scientiic investigations. His sort of epistemological skepticism in humanistic researches on man is called hermeneutics in the German philosophical tradition. That is why he labels his own position as that of “a critic of naturalism from a hermeneutical standpoint.”11 This hermeneutic criticism is based on the assumption that the sort of generalisations required in “proper” sciences which deal with the natural world does not promise to lead too far in the case of the humanities, as the “material” investigated is not simply material there. The hermeneutic tradition, which grew out from the debates about the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, was itself closely connected in the German context to what came to be called the distinction between Verstehen (understanding) and Erklären (explanation), as it was introduced by Droysen, and elaborated into a systematic distinction by Dilthey and Weber.12 While Droysen himself only aimed at defending the particularity 10 – PP2, p. 1. 11 – PP2, p. 4. 12 – See Droysen’s Historik: Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der Geschichte (Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, [1858] 1977), p. 22, 150f., Grundriss der Historik, Berlin 1862, 4 ff. and Grundriss der Historik, Verlag von Veit & Comp., 1868, 11: §14. sources of the other 75 of historical knowledge, Dilthey already connected the problem to that of making sense of an old text in general in the hermeneutic tradition.13 However, it was Max Weber and Georg Simmel, who in their writings established what was to be labelled as interpretative sociology, and who talked about Verstehen in the context of making sense of the culture of the other.14 But this German tradition of which Taylor is well aware is not the original starting point of the assumption that the human being is not an easy prey for human understanding. The whole idea is very clearly stated in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. The philosopher does not embark on the investigation before he clearly states what he regards as the distance between the way statements are proven in mathematics and in rhetoric: “it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientiic proofs.”15 The difference is due, he argues, to the difference of the subject matter. For different subject matters require (and allow) different levels of precision in the enquiry aimed at their description: “Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts.”16 Things connected to the human being – like his ethics and politics – do not allow much precision. Aristotle’s explanation is that in these spheres we produce “ine and just actions,” and these varieties do not allow exact and overall generalizations. To realize this, we need to have enough experience (for experience reveals the varieties of our actions), and to be self-disciplined, not to throw away the practical lessons one can draw from the inquiry.17 Also, one 13 – See Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 14 – See Max Weber’s The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation (1947), and his Essays on Sociology, (1946), and Georg Simmel’s Die probleme der Gechichtsphilosophie. Eine erkentnistheoretische Studie (1920). 15 – NE, I.3. translated by W. D. Ross, The Internet classics, http://classics. mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html 16 – Ibid. 17 – See Sarah Broadie’s explanation of this paragraph in: Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Christopher Rowe, philosophical introduction 76 ferenc hörcher needs to be educated to look for the right scale of precision which its the subject matter one enquires into.18 However, we should be sure that Aristotle does not want to admit a kind of subjectivism or even relativism with this methodological precautions. On the contrary, he claims that even in these enquiries we need to look for truth – even if the pursuit of truth in this sphere might even damage some people, or things that are undeniably good in themselves, for example wealth or courage, might turn out to be harmful for some. Aristotle’s well known cautionary remarks are important for us here because they make it evident that the human sciences are very speciic for one single reason: because here the human being is looking at the human being. The humanities are in this sense an exercise of looking into the mirror. It is an exercise therefore which requires self-knowledge (which means knowledge of the self both from the internal and the external point of view). One can refer here to developmental psychologies of the mirror stage in order to see the signiicance of this way of self-analysis. By letting us look at our self as the other, self-knowledge requires a familiarisation with the other – by turning our self into the other we learn to see the other as ourselves. The way our knowledge of ourselves is combined in the humanities with knowledge of the other is nicely explained in Taylor’s analysis of Gadamer’s notion of dialogue in his Gadamer on the human sciences.19 He reconstructs Gadamer’s point the following way. The human sciences can only be practiced successfully if one fulills the following two conditions: 1.) A knowledge of our own past is required, and 2.) a knowledge of the other is also required. It is worth noting that knowledge here does not mean the hanand commentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 265. 18 – “…it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits”. (1094b25). 19 – Charles Taylor, “Gadamer on the Human Sciences,” in (ed.) Robert J. Dostal, The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), hereafter Gadamer, pp. 126-142. Republished as “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes” in Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 24-38. sources of the other 77 dling or processing of simple empirical data. Rather, both these forms of knowledge are to be acquired with a certain historical awareness. What is more, Taylor’s Gadamer keeps emphasizing that this sort of knowledge is only to be acquired if “understood on the ‘conversation’ model.”20 Now the question arises what is meant by the idea of the “‘conversation’ model.” Certainly, Gadamer has a nicely elaborated idea of it, which seems to be quite appealing to Taylor. But most certainly he is also aware here of the French context of the idea, and if we try to reconnect it to our earlier problem ield, it will soon lead us to ideas like Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, where it simply refers to the intersubjective or dialogic dimensions of agency – to Taylor’s acclaimed communitarian agenda. Conversation in this context is based on the shared knowledge of certain words and rules of application by the members of a language community. But the lingusticity of the conversation model of self-knowledge is closely connected to another one through habitus: and this is the concept of culture. For indeed in one sense language is only one dimension of a shared culture of a culture-producing community: it is the externalised output of a common practice of the members of a group after a certain length of time. In what follows I therefore tend to interpret Taylor’s ideas of the dialogicity in the human sciences in the dual context of language and culture. This approach of mine is based on the approach to Taylor’s philosophy by literary critics, for whom his ideas of the narrative dimension become all important. This approach is nicely represented by Mette Hjort, in her essay on Taylor. In this text she writes: “It is important, then, to recognise that shared entities, such as language and culture, provide the enabling conditions of individual agency, and that our ability to think and act in large part is a function of our early and continued interaction with other agents.”21 In what follows we are looking at Taylor’s contribution to this understanding of the linguistic and cultural preconditions of human agency and at his 20 – Gadamer, p. 127. 21 – Mette Hjort: “Literature: Romantic expression or strategic interaction” in (eds.) James Tully and Daniel M. Weinstock, Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 121-135, p. 127. 78 ferenc hörcher view of the human sciences as both centred on and determined by language and culture. 4. Language and culture If we want to make sense of Taylor’s interest in the interconnections between the spheres of language and culture, we have to realize that his position is quite close to what is called the narrative concept of the self. This idea was popularised by psychologists like Jerome Bruner who claimed that we “create” ourselves” through the process of telling narratives about ourselves.22 This psychological constructivism, itself built on earlier philosophical roots, when refurbished by philosophy can become a rather radical claim: “eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very ‘events’ of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives.” In Taylor’s case, however, it is not the psychological theory that serves as the foundation of the narrative idea. Rather, it is his Catholic way of thinking that explains why he applies the concept without much hesitance and reservation. He describes the human predicament in a way that is echoing the Christian idea of the quest of Everyman: “because we cannot but orient ourselves to the good, and thus determine our place relative to it and hence determine the direction of our lives, we must inescapably understand our lives in narrative form, as a ‘quest’.”23 That this connection between Taylor’s narrativism and Christian earthly pilgrimage is there is indirectly reafirmed by MacIntyre’s thoughts on narrative quest in his After Virtue (1981), which slightly preceded Taylor’s opus magnum. And MacIntyre makes clear the Christian origins of his idea of the quest: “In the high medieval scheme a central genre is the tale of a quest or journey. Man is essentially 22 – Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative”, Social Research Vol 71: N° 3: Fall 2004, pp. 691-710. Available at: http://ewasteschools.pbworks.com/f/ Bruner_J_LifeAsNarrative.pdf (January, 2013) 23 – SoS, pp. 51-2. sources of the other 79 ‘in via’. The end which he seeks is something which if gained can redeem all that was wrong with his life up to that point.”24 But MacIntyre himself was not alone initiating this project on the philosophical level: another contemporary interested in the concept is Ricoeur, in his Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88). Interestingly, all the three of them – Taylor, MacIntyre and Ricoeur – in one way or another recycle Christian-Heideggerian ideas. Let us have a short look at how MacIntyre relates to the problem. He famously writes: “We place the agent's intentions, I have suggested, in causal and temporal order with reference to their role in his or her history; and we also place them with reference to their role in the history of the setting or settings to which they belong. (…) Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.”25 And certainly one of the key features of narratives – as opposed to never ending lines of episodes – is that they present human actions in a goal-oriented framework, which serves as an overarching interpretative structure which helps to evaluate particular human actions. But this goal is not something alien, or external, added to the story afterwards. On the contrary. MacIntyre’s human life-story is called quest because all the individual’s actions it into this overarching programme, the meaning of the story, i.e. the good that it is aimed at, can be understood in the very process of the quest, from the details of it: “It is in looking for a conception of the good which will enable us to order other goods … It is in the course of the quest and only through encountering and coping with the various particular harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which provide any quest with its episodes and incidents that the goal of the quest is inally to be understood.”26 If we return to Taylor, his philosophical analysis in this regard has two directions. He certainly realizes that talking about the narrative unity of our lives we are still philosophizing about lan24 – Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), hereafter AV, p. 174. 25 – AV, p. 208. 26 – AV, p. 219. 80 ferenc hörcher guage. But as mentioned, we do not look at language as an external device which helps us depict the particular elements of the external world, as was conceptualized in the theories of the early modern philosophical tradition of Hobbes and Locke. Rather, we rely on what he regards as the expressive function of it. This is a view of language which regards it as constitutive of our lives – the way we tell our stories, form our character, and shape our intersubjective relations as well. Opposed to the empirical and objectivist nature of the British tradition here Taylor refers to the model of the German late-Enlightenment and Romanticism, more particularly to the linguistic ideas of Herder and Humboldt. He regards them as representatives of a very emphatic trend in early modern thought: of the need for self-expression. Now what these German thinkers pointed out was that language is not a simple tool which helps to express something which is already there, i.e. the self, but rather the self is constituted by way of articulating its own aspirations, desires and will. The dialectical nature of the connection between language and self is perhaps one of the most important philosophical insights attributed by Taylor to the German classical philosophical tradition – one should not forget here again about his in-depth researches into Hegel. But the ontogenesis of this philosophical position is much richer in Taylor’s historically minded philosophical meta-narrative. In the twentieth century this German tradition was “aufgehoben” (overcome and yet preserved) by Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics. But the point about the self-creative potential of language is preserved with him as well, and it is enriched by the philosophical problem of the other. Language is a kind of common good in Taylor’s interpretation of Heidegger, one that can only make sense when shared. And this sharing predisposes a certain commonality of the life world: “Heidegger shows how Dasein’s world is deined by the related purposes of a certain way of life shared with others.”27 In other words, the fate, and even more importantly, the habituated culture of the body politic is as important for our 27 – Charles Taylor: “Overcoming epistemology”, in Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), hereafter OE, pp. 1-19, p. 12. sources of the other 81 own individual history, as our own private thoughts, feelings and other reactions to the events of the external world. Taylor’s deeply rooted education and pervasive interest in Continental thought is not one-sided. He has got an equally deep interest in 20th century French thought, and in the criticism of the epistemological tradition his French hero is Merleau-Ponty. But while in Heidegger’s case the widening up of the punctual self is linked to the common culture of the community, in Taylor’s Merleau-Ponty the other is experienced by the lived body of the individual. In other words, while Heidegger’s individual agent is covered by the concept of the Dasein, “Merleau-Ponty shows how our agency is essentially embodied and how this lived body is the locus of directions of action and desire that we never fully grasp or control by personal decision.”28 When we provide an account of the consequences of our personal decisions, as the sources of our life narratives, we have to be aware of the fact that this history is not written by a universal ego, but by one for which the bodily existence is all important, even if bodily sense-experiences are not always conceptualisable for her. In fact, here we arrive back to the expressive functions of human natural language. When the Herder-Humboldt line focused on the expressive function of human language, they also had in mind the way language works for example in poetry: its use is not (and should never be) conventional or conceptual in an abstract manner – what poetic language is after is to articulate in a communicable manner the experiences of the body which sometimes has sensations without direct mindcontrol over them.29 The dificulty involved in these linguistic accounts is to “translate” direct and personal experience into the preconditioned framework of a common language. The question is whether pre-linguistic experience can be shared with others or not. Taylor does not deny the legitimacy of modernity’s search for the novel, the unprecedented, the fresh use of language. In this sense he is not backward-looking or anachronistic or nostal28 – OE, pp. 12-13. 29 – Interestingly, Heidegger also focuses on this innovative and creative way of language-use. However, this he attributes exclusively to artistic creation, and not to the ordinary talk of Dasein. One should note here the fact that Taylor also takes Wittgenstein as example of those 20th century thinkers for whom philosophy seemed to be a repertoire of linguistic problems. 82 ferenc hörcher gic. But he convincingly argues in favour of the idea that even in the context of modernity to be able to communicate with others presupposes some shared experiences – or to put it in a stronger form, in fact a shared way of life. Both Heidegger’s suggestion about the Dasein’s shared form of life, and Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a lived body as the core of our identity point to this direction, as both of them emphasize that language acquisition and use is not a solitary intellectual exercise but something that is done in company and it is born as an unintended consequence of our daily activity. In an Aristotelian fashion Taylor emphasizes the signiicance of imitation (of the other, through bodily exercises) in the individual’s Bildung. Language is a map of a community’s cultural repertoire, an archive of its relected and unrelected wisdom. As Taylor puts it: “Children are inducted into a culture, are taught the meaning which constitute it, partly through inculcating the appropriate habitus. We learn how to hold ourselves, how to defer to others, how to be a presence for others, all largely through taking on different styles of bodily comportment.”30 The concept of habitus was made central in the social sciences by Bourdieu,31 or earlier by Marcel Mauss,32 but of course it can be traced back again as far as to the ancient, Aristotelian roots. The original Greek concept of hexis got translated into the Latin idea of habitus. And certainly it was connected to the moral virtues in the Greek philosophers’ scheme as well. The concept of habitus was taken over by Aquinas,33 and again in the context of Christian moral theology in discussions of the virtues, so it became that way part and parcel of what came to be called Catholic philosophical tradition. When we talk about language acquisition in the context of getting habituated into a culture – we are here referring to the the Gadamerean discussion of Bildung in his Truth and Method (1960) –, we are provided with a strong argument in favour of the huma30 – Charles Taylor, “To follow a rule”, in Charles Taylor: Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), hereafter PA, pp. 165180., p. 178. 31 – Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 32 – Marcel Mauss, “Les Techniques du corps”, Journal de Psychologie, 32, 1934 (3-4). Reprinted in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris, PUF, 1936). 33 – Summa Theologica, I-II q. 49-54. Treatise on Habits. sources of the other 83 nities as the suitable means to make sense of the human condition. For Gadamer and Ricoeur, hermeneutics played a major role in their philosophical efforts to build up their own theories of the existential situation of a human being. Taylor, who wrote an important essay on Gadamer and the human sciences in The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, and whose second volume of philosophical papers is entitled Philosophy and the Human Sciences, still seems to be committed to this humanist ideal, even if he is a modernist in many ways. For him as well, the humanities represent something more than simply philology – it is part of our culture, and that way an important building block of our identity. It is through the human sciences that we can reach out to make sense even of the irreversible plurality of our postmodern societies. 5. Christian aristotelianism and modern art In order to see how he manages to keep the two things – a humanistic pledge and a (post)modernist agenda – together, I shall inally deal with Taylor’s own version of an updated Christian Aristotelian poetics. As a starting point I shall show his loyalty to a kind of updated (but not anti-modernist) civic humanism.34 I want to show that civic humanism is not a Spartan model (as for example, it is, in many ways, in Arendt’s writings), but much more an Athenian one, where the virtues and the arts do not exclude each other, but in fact lie very close to each other. And I shall try to defend a strong thesis according to which an Aristotelian theory of poetry based on catharsis (as an existential experience) is recast in the modernist concept of epiphany in literature. My main object here will be to show that the early novel of James Joyce is not simply Thomistic in its spiritual aspirations, but leads naturally to the Greek mythological focus of the Ulysses. What is more I will also show that as the Aristotelian poetics of catharsis so the modernist poetics of epiphany had a moral and religious aspect to them, and all in all both serve a social function as well. 34 – I believe there is a natural connection between Taylor’s critique of atomist individuality on the one hand and his politics of the civic humanist tradition on the other, as the works of a number of writers, from Humboldt to Arendt, testify. However, Taylor is definitely not an anti-modernist, as some of the cultural critics are. 84 ferenc hörcher But irst I turn to the Aristotelian element in Taylor’s humanistic account of art. As we have seen he looks at language itself as part of culture, because once we start communicating with another language-user, we become players in a cultural “game”. For language is not simply vocabulary and grammar put together – rather it is realised in the form of dialogues in real life situations, where actors (agents with lived bodies) play certain roles, and their language is part of, and to a large extent determined by that special role. And therefore we cannot give generalised rules to follow in order to deine how to speak “properly”. For propriety is very much situation-dependent in a dialogue – which means that a lot depends on the particularities of the given situation. And we will not be able to take care of all these particularities in a generalised formula, or we shall lose the general grip of our rule.35 If we want to tune our judgements in a ine way in order to cope with the particulars, we will not be able to give the criteria of the right choice in an abstract, prescriptive manner. Does that mean that we lose the normative dimension, and choices will be made simply subjective? In order to avoid this option, Taylor turns to the Aristotelian tradition of practical wisdom. If the right choice is not something the algorithm of which could be given a-priori, then normativity is going to be embodied – in the way virtues were meant as embodied norms in the classical tradition. Taylor refers back to the basic Aristotelian virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom,36 meant as both an intellectual and a moral virtue by the philosopher. Phronesis means a certain intellectual-moral tone, a kind of readiness, a certain embodied knowledge that helps the individual to make a choice without simply following the black lines. It is personal experience turned into the ability to make judgments without relying on a simpliied application-model, where choices are made as simple applications, quasi-logical deductions of general norms to individual cases. 35 – “Determining what a norm amounts to in any given situation can take a high degree of insightful understanding. Just being able to formulate rules will not be enough.” (PA, p. 177). 36 – This is the Latin-Christian virtue of prudentia, translated by Gadamer into German as “praktisches Wissen”. sources of the other 85 Now one can ask how Taylor came to his views on phronesis, or practical knowledge. There is the German line, which kicks off with the German popular philosophy of the 18th century, transmitted by Hegel in his concept of Sitten, and most famously formulated by the best known Heidegger student’s, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. But we also have to take into account the Oxford philosophical milieu, where Aristotelian moral ideas were widely discussed in the early days of Taylor’s career in the English university town, for example among the Catholic philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband, Peter Geach. In this context perhaps one should also refer to Iris Murdoch, a contemporary of Taylor, and one, whose inluence he publicly admitted: “Anyone who has read Murdoch’s book will see the extent of my debt to her in what I have written here.”37 At this locus Murdoch – who was not a Catholic believer, by the way – is referred to as an interpreter of Plato, and not Aristotle.38 But undoubtedly, her book on The Soverignty of Good (1970) had a huge impact on the revival of virtue ethics in Oxford. And even more importantly for us here, her views on the intersection between morality and art (literature), expressed in books like Existentialists and Mystics,39 had an impact not only on contemporary literary praxis – because Murdoch achieved quite a popularity as a writer as well – but also on contemporary theories of art. I am sure that Murdoch’s “mystical” views of the effects of literature did not leave Taylor untouched. Aristotle and Murdoch – as two sources of philosophical inspiration – had an important common point, which proved to be all important for Taylor: they both talked about morality and art 37 – SoS, 534, n.4. See also Charles Taylor’s essay on the same author: “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy” in (eds.) Maria Antonaccio, William Schweiker, Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 3-28. 38 – From a virtue ethical perspective, Plato is not so far away from Aristotle. Gadamer, for example, held the view that Plato and Aristotle were less philosophically distant as some latter day philosophical commentators would like to see them. 39 – The book was published with the following subtitle: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 1998 (originally published in 1997). 86 ferenc hörcher in the very same idiom. Aristotle’s Nichomachian Ethics is not at all far away from his Poetics, and his analysis of the way a work of art impresses the audience is usually interpreted to have been kept in a moral frame of reference. While his description of the way a theatrical performance can dislodge the inner kernel of our soul remains cryptic in the surviving form of the Poetics (and even more in the short note on it in the Politics), perhaps the most frequent interpretational strategy aims at making sense of it in a moral philosophical context. Although Taylor did not explicitly refer to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis in his opus magnum, his story of the birth of the modern identity makes use of an understanding of art which takes art as being in an important sense “existentially” oriented. While we certainly do not have adequate resources to take sides in the Aristotelian debate, it is enough for us here to relate to two important aspects of the concept of catharsis. First, that catharsis presupposes an elevated story.40 And second, that its impact is (at least partially) moral. I would like to argue that Charles Taylor’s understanding of modern art is not so far away from this understanding of tragic catharsis: modern art is deined by him “as the locus of a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something which is otherwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral signiicance.”41 Now obviously Romanticism served as the starting point for Taylor’s understanding of modern art. But as we know German Romanticism had a very strong (and certainly idealized) Greek reminiscence, which does not exclude the idea that I want to defend here, that Taylor’s modern art-concept is much inluenced by this (romanticized) picture of Greek tragedy. Beside the high moral ground that we saw above there is a further element which is worth considering here: i.e. the spiritual, quasireligious momentum of this sort of art: “There is a kind of piety which still surrounds art and artists in our time, which comes from the sense that what they reveal has great moral and spiritual signiicance; that in it lies the key to a certain depth, or fullness, 40 – “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…” Aristotle: Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher, Internet Classics, http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html 41 – SoS, p. 419. sources of the other 87 or seriousness, or intensity of life, or to a certain wholeness.”42 We know that the performances of Greek tragedies (for example, in Athens) were organised like religious festivals, and one would not exaggerate to suggest that the effects of the plays on the audience might have been similar to the experiences one could gather at those religious festivities. In an unpublished essay on Greek tragedy and religion Alasdair MacIntyre came to interpret ancient Greek tragedy in the light of what we know of ancient Greek religious practices.43 He leaves little doubt that the theatrical performances had, beside political and moral-educational functions, religious overtones as well. After all, the role of the Gods in the plays are perhaps indirect but very visible (just think about the technique of deus-ex-machina), and the mass attendance must have made the occasions really spectacular and exceptional. And of course, the idea of the kinship between art and religion is quite obvious in the thought of German classical philosophy as well, e.g. in Hegel. Both art and religion represent for him forms in which the spirit (i.e. humanity) can manifest itself in an authentic form. Authenticity – a key term for Taylor as well – depends on freedom. However, this freedom is not simply the individual’s freedom from social (and natural) control. On the contrary,it is the freedom of the community, and the connection between the two (i.e between individual’s and collective freedom) is that the irst depends on the existence of the second. Taylor takes over some of the strong claims of Hegel, the cultural critic, without accepting much of his politics. The general line of his argument is that through practices of art, of culture and of religion humans become able to further the common good, without giving up their individual identity. Humans have to learn something important through these practices: the almost unconditional acceptance of the other as the default case. The other here can be of course another individual, a divine other or the represeantation of the whole community as such. What is provided in objects of religious worship and in works of art is 42 – SoS, p. 422. 43 – I am grateful to Professor MacIntyre for making the paper available for me. 88 ferenc hörcher the actual appearance of the other, in a sensible, almost touchable form. The unexplained and unexplainable appearance of the (divine) other is called in the arts of the Romantic tradition epiphany. The word itself again comes from ancient Greece.44 It signiied the “unexpected manifestation of the divine,” like in the stories (and on the stage) of ancient tragedies. For Christianity the word had a less direct, and a more symbolic meaning: epiphany there means “revelation of the spiritual in the actual”. As we see the term has a wide range of denotations from the context of the arts and culture on the one hand, to religion and metaphysics on the other. It is not surprising therefore, that it resurfaces in the modern novel. Taylor claims that high modernity takes over the formula of art as religion straight from Romanticism, where “aesthetic excellence doesn’t just amount to spiritual or moral depth, for instance. But the two cannot be neatly dissociated either, in my view.”45 For us the important point is how epiphany exercises inluence on the reader of the modern novel. It provides an experience that is wholly alien to the recipient, and through the shocking experience of meeting the metaphysical other one can learn the appropriate reaction one is required to give in real life situations confronting the social other. The mechanism is similar to the one we described in connection with catharsis. Epiphany, like catharsis provides experimental context for the individual to acquire attitudes required in the ordinary context of the social world of the polis. The idea of the connection of art and morals (and religion), as we see, was present in ancient theories of art. Due to the early modern interest in antiquity – beside a short Kantian interval – the idea returned in Romantic poetry and in the novels of high modernity. One of the obvious key examples of Taylor is of course James Joyce, who traces back the idea of epiphany to Thomis44 – In the etymological explanation I rely on the following source: Vicki Mahaffey, “Joyce’s shorter works” in (ed.) Derek Attridge, The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 185211. 45 – Charles Taylor, “Reply and re-articulation” in (eds.) James Tully and Daniel M. Weinstock, Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). sources of the other 89 tic-scholastic sources in his early semi-autobiographical novel,46 where his hero is called Dedalus, and then returns to the greatest myth of the Homeric age, in his Ulysses (1922). Taylor is quite explicit when he explains his interest in Joyce – he takes him as an example of the modern artist who takes his art as nothing less than epiphany: “What remains central is the notion of the work of art as issuing from and realizing an “epiphany,” to use one of Joyce’s words in a somewhat wider sense than his.”47 In the text of Joyce’s Stephen Hero he gives a description of the mission of the artist which is almost a kind of ars poetica. An artist is deined by an ability to catch the moments of epiphany in ordinary life: “By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.”48 It is this understanding of art that is important for Taylor in Joyce’s oeuvre. What I want to argue for is this: when Taylor presents epiphany as the core of the modern art work, he tries to show that art (as religion) has a transcendent nature; it leads the observer through the artistic experience to something other than the ordinary, to a world which is unknown to the individual, in other words, to the “other” of the self. In a work of art “the aim is not just to portray but to transigure through the representation, to render the object ‘translucent’. And so here too, the epiphany can only be brought about through the work, which remains a ‘symbol’ in the Romantic sense of that term.”49 This other is not out there, but in the work of art. It opens up a world for the individual, by way of showing how far personal identity is anchored in the other. He claims, that “Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake explores a level of expe46 – James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). This book was based on an original manuscript form called Stephen Hero, which was based on Joyce’s collection of epiphanies in his daily life. 47 – SoS, p. 419. 48 – James Joyce, Stephen Hero in (eds.) T. Spencer, J. Slocum and H. Cahoon (New York: New Directions, 1963), pp. 211-213. 49 – SoS, p. 420. 90 ferenc hörcher rience in which the boundaries of personality become luid.”50 This overcoming of the isolation of the individual through the epiphany of the creative act is the main reason of hope for Taylor in the very centre of modernity. Here Taylor connects modernist art with the philosophical critique of modernism by authors like Heidegger, whom he interprets as inding in epiphany “the way to overcome subjectivism.”51 And again, he uses a theological vocabulary here, talking about transiguration. “Transiguration,” he writes, “is a task laid on us by the world.” And he quotes Rilke, as the poet-reference point of Heidegger. The point which Taylor inds relevant in Rilke in this respect is the recognition that epiphany is “a transaction between ourselves and the world.”52 Summary This paper wanted to show that some important themes in Taylor’s philosophical programme can be regarded as ChristianAristotelian in their nature. These were the following ones: 1. That the human person – in spite of the modern ideal of atomistic individuality – does not make sense when cut away from the community into which it was born, and in which it has been brought up. 2. That if we want to appreciate this communal element of human nature, we can only rely on the human sciences which allow for the rich variety of particularities each and every individual acquires while socially conditioned to a way of life. 3. Only the human sciences can pay due attention to what is called the life story of the individual, partly as a result of the insights of social embeddedness, the narrative theory of the self, the embodied self and of a culture-based theory of language. 4. These insights of the human sciences call our attention to the importance of the other for the self. 50 – SoS, p. 463. 51 – SoS, pp. 481-2. 52 – SoS. p. 482. sources of the other 91 5. The interplay between the self and the other is safeguarded in religion and in art works, that have the potential – earlier called catharsis – to bring the audience to compassion and sympathy. 6. The equivalent of the role of catharsis in ancient tragedies is played by epiphany in modernist art. Epiphany helps to transfigure individuality and opens up the transaction between the atomised individual and the world. Ferenc Hörcher