Charles Taylor’s ‘Sexuated’ Subjects
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Language and Morality: The Context
Before turning to Taylor’s specific argument in these two papers, we should first briefly address Taylor’s overall philosophical disposition – discernable in all his writing – to provide the appropriate backdrop to his work. We here identify three presuppositions that inform his work, the first two explicitly taken up and examined by Taylor, namely, our linguistic and moral ‘natures,’ while the third presupposition – the notion of a ‘deep’ substantial self – remains largely unexamined as such. Since this paper as a whole endeavors to bring such a concept of self into a critical light, we only introduce it in this section as potentially problematic.
Even a cursory glance at Taylor’s thoughts on our moral history reveals what could be deemed a ‘lament over a certain loss’ that has incurred with the advent of modernity. That loss is of what he calls the traditional ‘warrior ethic’ in which self-mastery was embraced in the quest for a ‘higher life’ which included dying for honor. (Taylor 1989: 20) The values that underscored this ‘noble time,’ Taylor tells us, were first attacked by Plato’s philosophy and have been steadily demoted ever since. Indeed, today many now falsely claim to have no ethically-informed motivating force behind their acts. We seem to have achieved a certain blissful ignorance of the existence of those inescapable, morally defined ‘frameworks’ we always-already possess. (Taylor 1989: 21) To give some indication of what he feels has been lost, consider the following quotes2, with which he would most certainly be in agreement. The first century roman satirist, Juvenal, wrote: ‘Count it the greatest of all sins to prefer life to honor, and to lose, for the sake of living, all that makes life worth living.’ Twentieth century versions offer much the same sentiment. The poet Paul Claudel penned: ‘Sadder than to lose one’s life is it to lose one’s reason for living;’ while Jacques Lacan offered his own psychoanalytic version: ‘Desire, what is called desire, suffices to make life have no sense in playing the coward.’ In stark contrast, modernity, it seems, can only offer the feeble ethical maxim: ‘The worst thing one can lose is one’s own life.’
This loss of deep meaning to our modern lives, as opposed to the supposed ‘higher life’ achieved by the ancient Greeks due to their recognition and pursuit of a certain something in excess of life itself, is precisely what Taylor rails against. He describes his own work as an ‘essay in retrieval,’ almost a need to somehow find a way to return to these ancient times where a Cause greater than life itself prevailed. (Taylor 1989: 10) What should strike us immediately, however, is that despite such a loss, we can still take note today of these possible ‘higher’ alternatives to our deficient modern morality. That is to say, we must assume that Taylor is reflectively aware of the fact that this loss of a ‘deeper’ sense of life is not entirely lost to us since his philosophy broadly construed is, after all, wagering on the possibility of a return to these values. Accordingly, we find him pointing to the discernable traces this loss has left on the modern subject, which has usually taken the form of a polemical stance towards the warrior ethic. This stance, one may suppose, has been the driving force of our continued reformation of ethicality down through the ages, a process that is now culminating into an unfortunate ‘affirmation of ordinary life.’ (Taylor 1989: 23) There is certainly a Nietzschean tone underscoring his project. However, he tends to articulate such insight by elevating ‘moral intuitions’ into trans-historical ‘uncommonly deep, powerful, and universal… instincts’, overlooking his own constitutive position as a reflecting subject on these matters. (Taylor 1989: 4–5) Whether we ultimately agree with him that such values once ‘objectively’ existed during the time before Plato when our ‘instinctual selves’ presumably had a greater freedom of expression; or whether we opt for a Žižekian-inspired alternative reading of those values, now positively lost to us, as precisely constituted as ‘lost’ through the retroactive, positing act of our failed reflection on that ancient time3; we can perhaps all agree that the consequences of this ‘loss’ can be felt today, although in a repressed form. A surviving, though diminished, form of the ‘warrior ethic’ would certainly account for our horrified fascination with certain ‘extremists’ and ‘fanatics’, such as suicide bombers, who apparently want nothing but to die for their Cause. Whether it is possible to return to such a time (or even whether there is something to return to) is beyond the scope of our discussion, but without question aiming at such a specification of the good forms an important trajectory for Taylor’s notion of the self.
A second important feature of Taylor’s understanding of the self is explicit in the title of his collected papers: Human Agency and Language. Human beings are ‘linguistic animals’ and so ‘embedded in webs of interlocution’ that there is even a ‘dependence of our thought on language’ (Taylor 1985: 36; 1989: 38–9) As we shall see, articulation of one’s thought using signifiers, which ultimately fail to convey the full sense of the self’s intention, is a crucial notion for Taylor. However, we will argue that this failure must be conceived against the background of the third important feature of Taylor’s notion of self, a self that is ultimately conceived of by Taylor as having a substantial noumenal status. At the zero-level, contrary to his explicit statements, his subject is a ‘something’ rather than a ‘nothing,’ a positive horizon which provides a sort of grounded guarantee to prevent a confrontation with the trauma of a subject qua ‘nothing.’ Throughout this paper, we will be reading Taylor against himself, endeavoring to explicate Taylor’s philosophy in the very terms he provides us. More specifically, we will explicate his own two notions of the subject at their logical level, to show that it is far from the case that we are dealing with the reality of the one over the other, as he implicitly claims. Rather, not only is the nonexistence of the latter the necessary presupposition of the former, but of these two, the dismissed alternative is actually more appropriate in representing a proper notion of human subjectivity. While we must laud Taylor in identifying the link between the constitution of the subject and ethicality, we do engage in a critical analysis of how his failure to recognize the logical co-dependence of his two notions of self is symptomatic of his retreat from the traumatic void of subjectivity and the corresponding conception of a truly radical (ethical) act that must follow from such a notion of the subject.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
