Charles Taylor's Doctrine of Strong Evaluation

Ethics and Ontology in a Scientific Age

Michiel Meijer

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786604026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

This book provides a comprehensive critical account of the philosophy of Charles Taylor. The author engages with the secondary literature on Taylor's work and suggests that some interpretations and criticisms have been based on misunderstandings of the ontological dimension of strong evaluation, while also developing a novel interpretation of Taylor's ontological thought. Meijer argues that a close examination of Taylor’s central concept of “strong evaluation” reveals both the potential of and the tensions in his entire thinking. The analysis pursues the development of Taylor’s thought from his very first philosophical papers (1958) until his most recent reflections in Retrieving Realism (2015) and The Language Animal (2016). It also examines in detail Taylor’s ambitious philosophical project: to connect arguments in philosophical anthropology, ethics, phenomenology, and ontology across the full range of his diverse writings. The book therefore specifically traces the links between Taylor’s arguments, with strong evaluation as their unifying leitmotif.

Chapter 1

The Doctrine of Strong Evaluation

This chapter pursues the development of Taylor’s employment of the concept of strong evaluation from his first philosophical papers until his most recent writings. The term “strong evaluation” first appears in “Responsibility for Self” (Taylor 1976), a paper that was revised and republished in Philosophical Papers as “What is Human Agency?” (1985e). This is the first and only text that is exclusively about strong evaluation. However, Taylor has constant recourse to the term in his key articles and books, and takes it up most recently in The Language Animal (2016, 63, 192, 199).¹ In Taylor’s most basic definition, “strong evaluation” depicts an ethical kind of reflection that involves “distinctions of worth” (1985b, 3). As noted in the Introduction, this term refers to the reality that human beings understand themselves not by simply having certain desires but by evaluating them in terms of worthiness, and so rank some of their desires, inclinations, and choices as higher or more important than others.

Although strong evaluation is introduced in Philosophical Papers, it occurs most frequently in part I of Sources of the Self, a section that, as Taylor explains, draws attention to the “relation between self and morals” by having recourse to “moral phenomenology,” and sets out to explore the “moral ontology” behind our moral and spiritual intuitions (1989, x, 8–10, 68, 74, 81). As will emerge, it is not just that strong evaluation straddles Taylor’s various approaches; more importantly, he uses this concept to connect his positions on topics that have been on his mind across the full range of his diverse writings: philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology.

This chapter begins with an overview of the different themes that revolve around strong evaluation, while also showing that Taylor’s earliest writings can be seen as an illuminating prologue to it (section 1.1). I then examine the genesis of strong evaluation in Philosophical Papers and Sources of the Self and the modifications in the original explanation of strong evaluation as Taylor employs it in more recent writings (section 1.2). I continue to discuss basic criticisms and misunderstandings that have resulted from certain changes of emphasis in Taylor’s employment of the concept of strong evaluation, and finally conclude by criticizing one interpretation that fundamentally misreads Taylor’s intentions (section 1.3).²

1.1 Prologue

1.1.1 Debunking Naturalism

Thematically, the following subjects revolve around strong evaluation: Taylor’s overall critique of reductionist modes of thinking, his philosophical anthropology, his moral phenomenology, and his views on ontology. The first component is an ongoing critique of (moral, social, epistemological, ontological) theories that, on Taylor’s reading, reduce, deny, suppress, or repudiate altogether the phenomenon of strong evaluation. It is not just that he is not satisfied with reductive approaches to human action and experience. Rather, Taylor is not even sure that his opponents see the issue that he is trying to delineate about strong evaluation. He has, therefore, invested a great deal of effort in developing two distinct—yet closely related—arguments against the reductionist outlook that he believes is thriving: a philosophical anthropology and a moral phenomenology.

Although these arguments lay separate claims, they are entangled in such a fundamental way that the two can hardly be separated. Taylor believes that selfhood and morality are “inextricably intertwined” themes, because “our notion of the self is inextricably connected with our understanding of our moral predicament and moral agency” (1989, 3; 1988, 298). From an argumentative viewpoint, the fusion of philosophical anthropology and ethics provides Taylor with an argument that poses a double challenge to reductionism. Reductionist theories have been wrong on both counts, Taylor maintains, arguing that they make sense neither of the ways in which human beings live their lives nor of moral experience. In this way, he argues that the imagined agents of utilitarian and naturalist theory would be an “impossibly shallow character” and a “monster,” respectively, whereas what we need to clarify in ethics is precisely how basic human lives are lived (1985e, 26; 1989, 32, 58). He also criticizes much modern and contemporary moral philosophy for having a “cramped” and “truncated” view of morality (1989, 3), unable to come to grips with the very ways in which people “think, reason, argue, and question ourselves about morality” (1989, 7).

As these claims indicate, the context in which Taylor introduces strong evaluation is first and foremost a polemical one. Strong evaluation may therefore best be understood by contrasting it with what it denies. In a reflection on his major writings, Taylor summarizes Philosophical Papers as a collection of “mostly critiques of mechanistic, and/or reductive, and/or atomistic approaches to human sciences” that depend on “faulty philosophical thinking and/or obviously over-simplified views of human life” in their attempts to model human on natural science (2007a). In particular, as he explains in the introduction to Philosophical Papers, Taylor’s target is the commitment to “naturalism” that in his view is shared by all reductive theories (1985b, 2). The attack on naturalism is a central motivation of Taylor’s thought. Like the argument against psychological behaviorism in The Explanation of Behaviour (1964), it can generally be seen as a critique of a certain type of understanding of human agency. Strong evaluation comes in at the heart of this critique as a positive, counterthesis about the self. Taylor calls his rival account “philosophical anthropology”—perhaps because of, rather than despite, his impression that this term seems to make English-speaking philosophers “uneasy” (1985b, 1).

Taylor has been quite consistent in his multiple descriptions of naturalism. His most basic definition depicts naturalism as a particular view about “science and human nature” (1989, 531, note 47), that is, the view that human nature is to be understood “according to the canons which emerged in the seventeenth-century revolution in natural science” (1985b, 2). After Philosophical Papers, naturalism is described as “the belief that we ought to understand human beings in terms continuous with the sciences of extrahuman nature” (1989, 80) and as “the belief that humans as part of nature are in the end best understood by sciences continuous in their methods and ontology with modern natural science” (1995b, 137). In a more recent paper, Taylor adds the notion of “ethical” naturalism, that is, “the view that arises among thinkers for whom seeing humans as part of nature means seeing their behavior and life form as ultimately explicable in terms that are consonant with modern natural science” (2003, 306). In another recent work, he also writes about “scientific” naturalism, which aims to “account for the actions, feelings, intentions, etc. of persons from the ‘objective, third-personal perspective’ that natural scientists adopt” (2013, 88, note 15; 2015, 15, note 16).

Refuting all these naturalisms, Taylor’s main concern is that crucial features of human life precisely disappear by adopting a scientific stance. Yet he sees a broader “naturalist temper” not just in the outlooks of “many students of the sciences of human behavior” but in our Western culture as such, “stopping short frequently of explicit espousal of full-blooded naturalism, but tending to be suspicious of the things that naturalism cannot accommodate” (1964, 3; 1995b, 137). This observation—that most people are reluctant to fully embrace naturalism and yet remain highly skeptical of all things that do not fit the naturalist model—I want to argue, is the underlying theme of Taylor’s doctrine of strong evaluation.

Taylor’s distinctive brand of morality can be considered as the entry point through which his thinking moves from philosophical anthropology to ethics. Yet it also provides access to another branch of his thoughts on strong evaluation: ontology. Moving beyond mere philosophical-anthropological and moral-phenomenological claims, Taylor has been developing a third counterargument to naturalism. Compared with his philosophical anthropology and moral phenomenology, what is striking about Taylor’s ontological perspective is that it challenges his opponents, as it were, from the opposite direction. That is, rather than argue (both anthropologically and phenomenologically) that naturalist theories paint a false picture of human subjectivity in general and moral experience in particular, he now criticizes them for neglecting the objectivity of the good over the moral agent. In this respect, Taylor warns us that moral thinking can easily slide into a “celebration of our creative powers,” whereas ethics “at its best” is precisely an attempt to “surmount subjectivism” (1989, 510). The explicit nonanthropocentric nature of Taylor’s ontological thought seems to indicate a different line of argumentation, allowing it to be discussed on top of his anthropological and phenomenological arguments. As these points suggest, his arguments stop neither at philosophical-anthropological levels nor at moral-phenomenological ones, as Taylor’s distinctive nonanthropocentric viewpoint steers a middle course between a Platonic type of moral realism and ethical subjectivism.

At this early stage, though, all this remains to be argued out by examining in more detail the specific ways in which Taylor connects strong evaluation with issues of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and ontology. For now, it suffices to note that (1) strong evaluation is rooted in a critique of naturalist approaches to human agency; (2) it informs both Taylor’s philosophical-anthropological counterthesis about the self and his phenomenological approach to ethics; and (3) the issue further raises questions of ontology that reach beyond philosophical anthropology and moral phenomenology.

1.1.2 The Early Writings

The polemical thrust of strong evaluation can be traced back a bit further. In this respect, Nicholas Smith points out that Taylor is skeptical of reductive analysis already at the beginning of his academic career, inspired by the linguistic philosophy that flourished at Oxford in the 1950s.³³ Yet, Taylor also emphasizes the limits of linguistic analysis when he asserts that “most philosophical problems can’t be solved simply by the study of ordinary language,” arising as they do in “such bodies of doctrine as theology, metaphysics or science or on the borderline between these and ordinary fact” (1959b, 107). In fact, he explains in another early paper that some issues are better understood as “ontological” rather than as “linguistic” in that some strata of our language “presuppose a ‘world’ in which the things and happenings we speak about in the other strata cannot find a place” (1959a, 136). What is both intriguing and extremely puzzling about this text is that Taylor at once connects naturalism, philosophical anthropology, language, and ontology when he says:

The problems are posed by the advance of science, or at least by a greater awareness of the nature of the world around us. Once we begin to talk about nature in terms that are not animistic, we begin to wonder about persons, for they, after all, are parts of nature, are material objects also. But we want to say that they are something “more” as well. (1959a, 138)

This brings us back to the above observation that despite the inclination to make sense of our world in naturalist terms, we are equally inclined to think that human behavior is in some way fundamentally different from the processes studied by natural scientists. It is this problem, it would seem, that has led the young Taylor to the terrain of philosophical anthropology, the opening theme of his doctoral dissertation, published as The Explanation of Behaviour (1964). As will emerge, it is in this philosophical-anthropological context that he initiates his concept of strong evaluation.

There is, however, a third early text in which Taylor explores an additional philosophical area. Evoked perhaps by the drawbacks of linguistic philosophy, the young Taylor also shows an interest in Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to describe the “pre-objective” world preceding the (limited) world of reductive, scientific discourse.⁴ Yet, on Taylor’s reading, the method of phenomenological reduction that is supposed to open up the content of “original” experience and to make possible a “pure” description simply cannot succeed. As he says, suspending one concept for reexamination fundamentally requires that “others are taken for granted in order to carry out this examination,” which shows that reflection on our concepts is “much too sophisticated an activity to be undertaken without the use of concepts” (1959b, 102–103). In this respect, Taylor adds elsewhere, “the very attempt to describe the pre-predicative seems to destroy it. This confusion in method is nowhere clarified by Merleau-Ponty” (1958, 113).

I will not discuss Taylor’s engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology here.⁵ For present purposes, it suffices to illustrate how Taylor’s attack on naturalism and his early writings set the stage for his “official” account of strong evaluation. Three points can be made here. First, Taylor’s thought is triggered by a kind of frustration or dissatisfaction with views that were dominant at the beginning of his career, both with naturalist types of understanding of human agency and with the philosophical methods of linguistic analysis and phenomenology. He chides naturalism for having an oversimplified view of human action, criticizes linguistic philosophers for their conviction that “all philosophical problems arise from mistakes about language,” and rejects Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology because of its underlying notion that “we can do without our concepts” (1959b, 109). Second, Taylor seems to be convinced right at the outset that all naturalist explanations are necessarily reductive, and that all reductive explanations of human behavior are insufficient.⁶ Third, although the young Taylor’s multiple investigations of linguistic philosophy, ontology, and phenomenology ultimately orient him around philosophical anthropology, he does not want to stick to the principles of a specific philosophical method in approaching these issues. Nonetheless, the seemingly unrelated early writings raise a central question about the nature of agency to which Taylor’s more mature answer is, as we will see, strong evaluation. I will examine this question in more detail in the next section by discussing the most informative text about strong evaluation: “What is Human Agency?”

1.2 Genesis and Dev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Ethics and Ontology in a Scientific Age
• 1 The Doctrine of Strong Evaluation
• 2 Interwoven Arguments
• 3 Philosophical Anthropology of Strong Evaluation
• 4 Ethics of Strong Evaluation
• 5 Ontology of Strong Evaluation
• Conclusion Ethics With or Without Ontology?
• About the Author
• Index