Charles Taylor’s ‘Sexuated’ Subjects
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Two Evaluations, Two Selfs...
After concisely stating his thesis, that the notion of responsibility is intimately bound up with our notion of the subject, in the opening lines of his essay ‘Responsibility for Self,’ Taylor immediately introduces two similar ideas of Harry Frankfurt and Martin Heidegger, references to whom frequent Taylor’s work. Frankfurt makes a distinction between ‘first-order desires,’ which presumably take some external, empirical entity as its object (or indicates the desire for a direct consummation with that object)4 and ‘second-order desires’ whose object is the very possession of particular first-order desires. According to this idea, we are not just simple creatures who have immediate desires. As Taylor notes, even animals ‘desire’ in this manner. Rather, what distinguishes man from animals is his engagement in a deliberation which involves deciding upon which of our de facto desires should be instituted as (sufficient) cause to move us to action. (Taylor 1976: 281) A couple of examples from cinema should suffice to make clear what is involved here. In the film noir universe, for instance, many of the male characters desire (a consummation with) the femme fatale, but often can been seen as not wanting this desire, since they know she will destroy them in the end. It could concisely be said that they ‘hate to love’ her. The opposite case is equally imaginable. We often find ourselves irresistibly drawn toward vile, despicable characters such as Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lector of the Thomas Harris series of novels – here, we ‘love to hate’ such figures. Although Taylor does not indicate as much in the two articles of his we are examining, we should note that philosophy and subjectivity have already met on this terrain long ago, a terrain that was precisely opened up by this very movement of double-reflection. Two decades prior to Frankfurt, for instance, French philosophers were articulating this exact dialectic of desire. Certainly Lacan’s oft-repeated formula ‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ conveys the same kind of reflective redoubling of the subject’s will and desire that Taylor attempts to convey. (Lacan 1998: 235) And, of course, Lacan himself develops this notion from Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave in the latter’s early 19th century work Phenomenology of Spirit.5 As for Taylor’s second main philosophical reference, he notes that this same ‘reflective doubling’ is implicit in Heidegger’s Dasein, which Taylor uses to indicate that the being of the subject ‘is such that the question arises inescapably, which kind of being he is going to realize.’ (Taylor 1976: 281)
After introducing this concept of doubly-reflected desire through these two philosophers, Taylor summarizes his overall basic argument: since the human subject has the capacity for (self-)evaluation and to the extent that it can self-constitute based on such evaluation, it follows that the subject has responsibility for its self. We can thus conclude that responsibility is inseparable from the notion of selfhood. (Taylor 1976: 282) The remainder of his two articles (and his entire philosophy for that matter), could be seen as a detailed fleshing-out of this framework. The first step toward this project is an elaboration of what is meant by ‘evaluation’. In order to facilitate the discussion, we could imagine a graphical representation as in Figure 1, whereby two different types of vectors emanate from the ‘Self’:
a ‘desire’ vector that aims outward, away from the self and an ‘evaluation’ vector that crosses the desire vector and returns to the Self. It should be obvious from the graphical representation of his model that it is the subject’s capacity for evaluation that does the key work. Its ‘object’ is the subject’s very possession of these desires, indicated by the point of intersection of the two vectors. Moreover, and of critical importance for his argument, the evaluation vector has a ‘return-orbit’ that aims back at the center point of self, thus indicating Taylor’s idea that the self is (at least) partially constituted by such evaluations, which then in turn, of course, impact future desires and future evaluations of those desires, again repeating the cycle ad infinitum. We see that Taylor’s subject seems to be one whose being is in perpetual anticipation of its self, constituted in any moment by the subject’s very questioning of his own potential to realize his (future) being. This highly Heideggerian-influenced model of the self informs Taylor’s thoughts on the proper stance which must taken by the modern subject to counter the increasing denigration of traditional values, but before we can draw and examine these conclusions, we must first turn to his distinction between the two types of evaluation, and then to the two corresponding notions of the self he draws from these two types. Again, to reiterate his thesis, his thoughts on the deficiency of modern ethicality are inseparable from his thoughts on the constitution of the self, so by developing a ‘proper’ notion of the self, he is at the same time developing a ‘proper’ ethical stance to take in our unfortunate times.
If we imagine the realistic case of a self faced with many desires to choose from, how is the subject to decide amongst the array of potential courses of action to take for their consummation? In what manner should he evaluate that multitude of desire vectors emanating from its self? Taylor theorizes and contrasts between two types of evaluation, a strong and a weak type, which he also refers to as qualitative and non-qualitative reflection, respectively. (Taylor 1976: 282) Already at the terminological level we can see which version he will ultimately dismiss. Weak evaluation suffers from a number of deficiencies, which includes the fact that such an evaluation does not examine the worth of the underlying motivation of the desires, since there ‘is “nothing to choose” between the motivations here.’ (Taylor 1985: 16) That is to say, a given field of desired actions is merely weakly evaluated with each other based on some utility function that may or may not be reduced to a quantitative measure. In contrast, a qualitative reflection evaluates desired actions in a strong sense, that is, they are evaluated in themselves. In such reflection, desired actions are considered on their own merits. The decision is based on some qualitative measuring of these merits and the motivations that lead to these desires, without necessarily regarding the contingent circumstances of the field of alternatives. A simple example6 from economics should make this clear. If a subject who evaluates weakly has a choice of purchasing only one of three commodities that have the following values: A = 5, B = 2, C = 4 (expressed in ‘utils’), all else equal, he would purchase the commodity that would give the highest units of satisfaction, or A. However, if circumstances were such that only two purchases were possible and purchasing A forecloses the options of B and C, our rational economic agent would, of course, forego A and purchase B and C. The point here is that for weak evaluations, alternatives are set aside based on contingent incompatibility, while in strong evaluation, this is not necessarily the case. We could easily imagine that a subject who evaluates strongly would, in every contingent case and despite the quantitative values remaining as above, never chose A because it is deemed to be a ‘cowardly’ purchase (eg., for a firearm). Thus, the incompatibility here is not with the circumstantial set of other possible purchases, but because of an incompatibility with what Taylor calls that subject’s ‘mode of life’ which would dictate him to lead a courageous life (eg., without reliance on a false sense of safety the possession of a firearm might provide). (Taylor 1976: 283) So the mere fact that something is desired does not necessarily make it good in strong evaluation. While for weak evaluation, the mere fact that something is desired makes it good and we would expect consummation to follow if it is not contingently incompatible with other desires. (Taylor 1985: 18)
On the face of it, we are tempted to agree with Taylor when he writes that there is a ‘utilitarian strand in our civilization [which] would induce us to abandon the language of qualitative contrast… [and] our strong evaluative languages.’ (Taylor 1985: 21) It does seem that we are urged to evaluate our desired courses of action with each other rather than assigning contrastive values of ‘good/bad’ or ‘courageous/cowardly’, etc, especially when we reflect on the increasingly bureaucratic nature of our society. It does in fact seem that our lives are largely administered through some cost/benefit analysis where alternatives are weighed against each other. Courses of action undertaken at the public sector level and other large scale corporate projects that affect us all are usually decided via some accounting of dollars and cents, while the ever growing number of new ethical committees, put in place to deal with the excesses generated by the sciences (eg, genetic research), largely distribute the good by a similar weighing of alternatives. What we should note here is the analogy to Taylor’s thinking. Weak evaluation is to modernity as strong evaluation is to traditional civilization. Thus, if we can problematize his ultimate rejection of weak evaluation and its corresponding notion of self, it severely puts in question his nostalgic longing for a return to traditional ways, a matrix that could be said to form the fantasmatic background to his entire philosophy. Let us more closely look at the two notions of self he extrapolates from his two versions of evaluation.
As already implied above, strong evaluation involves a self that envisages alternatives through a rich language. The idea here is that a strong evaluator is in possession of a ‘vocabulary of worth’ so that he can accomplish a qualitative assignment of values to the underlying motivations of each vector of desire, independently of the others. So when faced with incommensurable alternatives where a preference does not immediately make itself known, at the very least the subject can articulate the incommensurability as such. Lacking such a vocabulary, by contrast, the ‘simple weigher’ of weak evaluation simply weighs alternatives against one another, which involves mere utilitarian calculations of possible outcomes. Incommensurable alternatives are ‘inarticulable’ for lack of possession of a contrastive language. (Taylor 1976: 287–8) Such a self presumably would face a severe crisis at the level of selfhood. Such weak evaluation is a (self-)reflection in a minimal sense7, structured by the de facto field of desires, while the strong evaluator is deeply reflective of one’s own ‘mode of life’ and there is a genuine concern for the being of agency as the source of its own field of desires. The strong evaluator’s overall focus is shifted back to the subject, as we see in Figure 1. In fact, that graph should only be taken as a representation of the strong evaluator. Since a strong evaluator is concerned with evaluations that aim at the core of the self, such a self has a depth of character. Issues that express a real quality of life are taken up and presumably at a deeper level each time around: yesterday’s strong evaluations, which partially constituted the self, would make themselves felt in today’s expression of selfhood through its current desires and evaluations. By sharp contrast, Taylor’s characterization of the simple weigher as shallow, insensitive and unconcerned with such deep issues would need a few modifications to that graph, as in Figure 2. Here, the evaluation vector is widened, and its return glances off the outer shell of the self, indicating that the overall focus is shifted away from a critical self-examination. An apt metaphor might be to imagine a meteorite in orbit that takes on a collision course with the earth, but not having enough mass to penetrate the atmosphere, thus burning off with a flash. And if this is always the case, such a self would certainly be a hollow shell, devoid of any dense core. In Taylor’s own words, the weak evaluator ‘lives on the surface’ and is a ‘shallow character’ concerned with ‘the glamour of his life or how it will appear, rather than the (to us) real issues of the quality of life.’ (Taylor 1976: 288)
The immediate question that arises at this point is, who exactly are these unfortunates? Do they truly exist? All indications point to a negative answer from Taylor. As he writes, ‘in fact the human beings we are and live with are all strong evaluators’ and further implies that failing to have the capacity for such evaluation would essentially exclude such a subject from humanity. (Taylor 1985: 28) So if the simple weigher does not exist, why bring it up? While he does not explicitly address this question, we could speculate that it is for demonstrative purposes, to better contrast the representative example of the human subject as being a strong evaluator, of which the simple weigher provides a possible ‘negative test case.’ This is certainly reasonable to assume, yet he does not state as much. Alternatively, perhaps it would have been better to explicitly develop the thought that each human subject harbors the capacity to evaluate in both the strong and weak sense, alternatively doing so as occasions warrant throughout our lives.8 Or even that with each evaluation we do make, we somehow do so using both methods. Certainly these speculations would provide an additional richness to human subjectivity that he is so concerned with providing. But he does not in any way indicate that a single subject has both these types of self and he certainly does not develop things in this manner. In fact, he does his very best to keep them distinct, so much so that this very strategy of rigorously distinguishing the subject’s formal structure from its positive ‘deep’ content throws up a flag for us. In a psychoanalytic reading, this strict approach becomes the unfailing index of a violent repression of some traumatic content. Accordingly, we begin to suspect that there might be something of a dialectical relation between Taylor’s two notions of self, one of which he mysteriously develops only to summarily dismiss as not belonging to the genus ‘human.’ Our thesis here is that it is this very ‘non-existent’9 simple weigher that holds the key to Taylor’s notion of the (strong evaluating) human subject.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
