Charles Taylor’s ‘Sexuated’ Subjects
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Responsibility for Evaluations: Choice
For now, let us consider his examination of Sartre’s radical choice, for it is in the guise of his discussion of Sartre’s famous ethical dilemma of a hypothetical young Frenchman that we can discern Taylor confronting and immediately dismissing the radical abyss of subjectivity which he himself opens up through his characterization of the simple weigher. What is inconceivable for Taylor is that such a choice – between remaining with one’s ailing mother or going off to join the Resistance – be groundless. As he repeatedly questions, ‘[a] choice made without regard to anything… is this still choice?’ (Taylor 1976: 293) And further, he claims that such dilemmas could not even occur if they were a result of choice, since ‘the young man could do away with the dilemma at any moment by simply declaring one of the rival claims as dead and inoperative.’ (Taylor 1976: 291) This indicates that for Taylor, the only choice he is considering throughout his discussion is the one that the young man must take when temporally faced with such a choice of two alternatives. Or if he does consider, as Sartre does, that there is an a priori choice made a-temporally in which the subject chooses its own fundamental project, Taylor still expresses the dilemma in ‘here and now’ terms that quite confuse the true dilemma faced by the young man. This can only be if Taylor resorts to a substantialized, trans-historical set of values which somehow exist quite independently of the subject’s activity.13 As such, they would form that part of the subject’s evaluation of the desired alternatives, which, when considered, would indicate that the subject is evaluating ‘deeply.’ In other words, he clearly rejects the line taken by Nietzsche that values themselves are our creations. (Taylor 1976: 289) Nor does he seem to entertain the (Kantian) possibility that the external, independent existence of values nevertheless become ‘ours’ through what we might call a gesture of subjective ‘endorsement.’ Because our own activity is thus needed, these would thus be our responsibility as well. In contrast, for Taylor, the ethical dilemma faced by the young man is one that could be said to be faced by many other young men, quite independent from the relation of their own contingent subjective positions to that ethical field of choices.
We can, however, propose an alternative reading. We could say that if the young man has found himself faced with such a choice, he must have chosen this very choice itself. And further, one of the alternatives must then be said to ‘re-mark’ this choice of the choice itself, re-presenting the fact that the very field of the two alternatives has already been chosen. Once this is understood, the true dilemma faced here is between a marked and an unmarked term. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Sartre’s example is obviously a form of the dilemma (traditionally) faced by all young adult males when reaching that age in which it is time to leave one’s family. The question arises, do I remain loyal to mother/family or do answer the call of civic duty? The psychoanalytic solution, of course, is that one’s familial loyalty is the proper choice, but this can only be expressed symbolically, through dutifully carrying the family name into society. We could say, in a very abstract way, that ‘mother qua life’ is always already chosen. It is a forced choice, like Lacan’s famous ‘Your money or your life’: the very fact that you are now faced with such a choice means that you have already chosen life. At the most fundamental level, the subject is not simply split evenly between two incommensurable choices. The actual situation is much worse: the subject is split between some ‘pathological’ element (in the Kantian sense) and the choice itself. Thus, the subject emerges as a pure difference in relation to its own being. Every true ethical dilemma has this movement, of a transcendental choice of the choice itself and this is what Taylor refuses. For him, such groundless choices are ‘deeply incoherent.’ (Taylor 1976: 293) He simply views all choices, even transcendental ones, as necessarily being grounded, for if they are not, they are simply ‘by definition’ not choices. Further, such choices are grounded in the deep, noumenal self of the strong evaluator. As he himself concludes, radical choice must ‘surreptitiously [assume] strong evaluation beyond the reach of radical choice.’ (Taylor 1976: 293) He believes that thinking otherwise is to escape responsibility for oneself ‘at the expense of lying to oneself, of a deep self-duplicity.’ (Taylor 1976: 294) He further writes that it is possible to engage oneself in a ‘lucid state’ in which choices can be chosen ‘honestly and courageously’ and that addresses the ‘moral predicament of man.’ We will shortly examine this last point, as it is part of his overall recommendation for the proper stance the subject must take today in our morally deficient times.
We can certainly commend Taylor for his resistance to the solipsistic tendency of ‘post-modern’ ethics to reduce the ultimate horizon of the ethical to one’s own life. But we find that he moves too fast in the other direction, far too quickly theorizing that the only other legitimate option to consider is the interplay to be had at the level of a substantial, deep self informed by a trans-historical horizon of values. However, we do see the ‘third’ option of subjectivity that this paper is endeavoring to articulate – that of the subject qua void – continuing to haunt his text. Apparently, the philosophical exorcism he performs does not always satisfy even him, and he is compelled to address this excess directly, indicating to us his acknowledgment of its ‘ex-sistence,’ though, of course, in dismissive terms. The following passage is worth quoting in full:
The notion of identity refers us to certain evaluations which are essential because they are the indispensable horizon or foundation out of which we reflect and evaluate as persons. To lose this horizon, or not to have found it, is indeed a terrifying experience of disaggregation and loss. This is why we can speak of an ‘identity-crisis’ when we have lost our grip on who we are. A self decides and acts out of certain fundamental evaluations.
This is what is impossible in the theory of radical choice. The agent of radical choice would at the moment of choice have ex hypothesi no horizon of evaluation. He would be utterly without identity. He would be a kind of extensionless point, a pure leap into the void. But such a thing is an impossibility, or rather could only be the description of the most terrible mental alienation. The subject of radical choice is another avatar of that recurrent figure which our civilization aspires to realize, the disembodied ego, the subject who can objectify all being, including his own, and choose in radical freedom. But this promised total self-possession would in fact be the most total self-loss. (Taylor 1985:35)
Here, the very notion of subjectivity we have been endeavoring to elaborate, as an alternative to Taylor’s notion of a strong evaluator with its deep self component, is identified in quite accurate terms as an ‘impossibility,’ and an ‘extensionless point, a pure leap into a void.’ However, we are not so quick to reject this alternative notion of subjectivity as Taylor is when we consider the possibility of how this grounded, deep self could actually be considered a ‘substantialized’ version of the Freudian unconscious. This follows from the above argumentation of the noumenal status of a deep self, in as much as the unconscious is something that is not directly accessible to the subject. That is, if we can directly grasp conscious, phenomenal appearances of the self, there still remains what Freud called the unconscious, or what Kant called the Gesinnung (the disposition of the subject) that is forever out of reach.14 Taylor is certainly aware of the ‘very exciting prospect[s] indeed’ of remaining open to ‘the prospect of psychoanalytic theory which could give an adequate account of the genesis of full human responsibility’ but his account of psychoanalysis is rudimentary, to say the least. (Taylor 1985: 44) He brutally reduces, for instance, the psychoanalytic drive to instinctual natural forces. (Taylor 1985: 45) This is simply not necessary since his two notions of self adequately convey the topology needed to understand how it is possible that the unconscious deep self is itself chosen and not something at the prey of the forces of ‘natural instincts,’ nor some pre-existing substance. This is exactly as Freud had it when he theorized that the subject must be see as free in choosing his neurosis (between obsessional or hysteric) or even how the choice of neurosis as such is possible – the subject must be considered himself to have chosen his own disposition over others, much like Sartre’s radical choice of one’s own fundamental project. (Zupančič 2000: 35) After all, the psychotic subject bares witness to the fact that the subject can indeed make a radically other type of choice in regards to its own relation to the Otherness of language.
If the deep self is itself chosen, this must mean two things: one, that since it is the ‘ultimate foundation’ of selfhood, as Taylor might put it, if we are to conceive it as itself chosen, this choice must be from a void; and two, if this is true, this must mean that its ‘ultimate foundational status’ must really be characterized as fantasmatic. Here, everything hinges on the feminine logic of the simple weigher. What must be experienced is how the void is strictly consubstantial with the very movement of its concealment, the movement to conceal the fact of the lacking exemption. This is indicated graphically in Figure 2 by the ‘orbiting’ evaluation vector that always misses articulating the void of the shallow subject. Yet that very orbit in a way delimits the outer shell of the self, giving it ‘contour’ which we subsequently fill in with a narrative. This process provides a negative representation or misleading indication that there must, indeed, have been a fundamental something there from the onset. We could say that the castrating Utilitarian function is always ‘successful’ in its cutting off the subject from its deep self, but only inasmuch as we understand that it is that very movement that generates the illusion of this deep self in the first place.15 Thus, what seems to be there prior to our activity of evaluation must be experienced as retroactive posited as such by that very activity. There is a strict tautological, radical self-reflective gesture here that, for all his worthwhile emphasis on self-reflection and self-examination of ‘deep’ motivations, is overlooked in Taylor’s philosophy. And he precisely misses this because, in a sense, his philosophy is ‘too deep.’ He starts out from a hidden presupposition of a noumenal ‘something’ of self, thereby missing how that something is actually a phantasmatic substantialization of a ‘nothing.’ In more precise language, it is the very failure of deep reflection to completely grasp the deep self that retroactively posits that which eludes it. This is an effect of the very logic of signifiers.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
