The multi-faceted Charles Taylor (Page 2)

As a visiting scholar at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study this past academic year, Abbey was constantly reminded just how broadly read Taylor is among philosophers and social scientists. When colleagues found out she was writing a book on Taylor, their response invariably depended on their own frame of reference. Ah, Taylor the communitarian, one said. Taylor the cultural respect advocate, said another. Or Taylor the Hegel scholar, Taylor the philosopher of language, Taylor the religious moral theorist (he's a devout Catholic). Whatever the specialization of scholars Abbey encountered, Taylor had something relevant to say to them, and he expresses himself with enough depth of knowledge to be taken seriously as an expert. In many cases his readers have no idea of all the other work he has done.

Of course, neither did many of the students Taylor taught during his four decades of teaching at McGill, from 1961 to 1997. That's to be expected. First-year students in Political Science 231D, McGill's whirlwind, pack-'em-in introduction to political theory, couldn't possibly have appreciated the scope of resources from which Taylor drew. Several senior professors taught the course together. On the much-anticipated days when lectures gave way to full-blown debate, they never tried to hide their differences. In front of a packed hall in the Leacock Building, sporting his trademark running shoes, corduroys and either tattered turtleneck or rumpled cotton golf shirt, Taylor would jump from Plato to Hobbes to 18th- century European romantics to contemporary Canadian politics at a moment's notice, making connections and tracing centuries-old lineages with ease. "When he disagreed completely with somebody, he would say, 'I defer to you 99% of the time,'" Tully recalled in fond memory, his voice ever-so-slightly assuming Taylor's quirky, uneven pacing. "And then he'd say, 'But this time I just feel I can't.' And then off he'd go."

But no one ever said philosophy was going to be easy, least of all Taylor. He argues that tracing the development of Western thought and its impact on modern lives cannot be done in a single linear path.

Abbey writes that his characteristic impulse is to "complicate rather than simplify or streamline problems." He is constantly moved to uncover the sources of competing claims that divide us. He extols the value of diversity and the importance of allowing individuals to pursue lives as they see fit, yet he is not prepared to accept the moral relativist position that no qualitative distinctions or mutual understandings can be forged. He allows for the validity of individual rights claims, yet also argues that communities give a kind of moral strength of purpose that rights-based theorists mistakenly refuse to acknowledge.

Montreal and McGill have a lot to do with all that. Taylor says he concluded early in his career that standard debates about modernity "greatly, falsely and somewhat shallowly dramatized into absolute good and absolute evil. And that just wasn't anywhere near the reality that people actually lived, including the people that dramatized it...It's that complexity that I guess I've been trying to work on."

Although Abbey cautions against overstating the role Taylor's biography played in the development of his thought, the above description could very easily be a Taylorian account of extreme positions in the Quebec debate, the sort his upbringing led him to regard with suspicion.

Taylor was born in Montreal to a francophone mother and anglophone father and grew up thoroughly bilingual. His comfortable immersion in both cultures convinced him that one-sided representations from either of Canada's two solitudes were inaccurate and harmful. During a public forum on Quebec in the early 1990s, Taylor rebuffed a particularly belligerent adversary's hard-line position with the caustic yet respectful retort: "I see only two things wrong with your argument: its premises and its conclusion." They were the most aggressive words Abbey has ever heard him speak.