Jim Kleinhenz's List: Charles Taylor

• Soft Relativism And The Malaise Of Modernity

  • I haven't read all of this. It's a little cranky and sloppy in it's use of words--and neither trait is valuable in a work of philosophy. It porports to be a summary of Taylor ideas about modernity--but its not something I trust after a quick look through. Read it more carefully someday? Maybe.
• Taylor describes three interrelated malaises: one moral; one related to  instrumental reason; and one related to a loss of freedom.
• It is interesting when we scan our thinking on questions like these -- ranging  from the very personal to the broadly social -- how often we admit to two  conflicting responses: an inner sense of the right thing to do, and an external  answer dictated by instrumental reason.
• While Taylor attributes large parts of this malaise to things like instrumental  reason -- as I have just talked about, and soft despotism--a loss of freedoms,  the main problem is right here. It is in the mirror. It is us. We have embraced  a malevolent -- evil -- value, and, it is killing us.
  
• What is this evil "value?" Its kindest characterization is "individualism".
• Soft relativism--breeds evil. Okay. How?
  
  

  • nullindividualism -- 2008-04-19
    soft relativism is in effect no 'moral' stance at all, if you take morality to be involved in perscriptions about what to do/ or what to be. -- 2008-04-21
    
• Evil Number One: rejection of transcendent values. One: soft relativism  is used to reject anything and everything that transcends the self. And what  transcends the self? Just about everything. The past does, nature does,  citizenship does, religion or spirituality does, duties of solidarity do, the  environment does--to name a few.

  • yes, but these things are not values
• Evil number two: relationships. For a soft relativist a relationship is defined  in terms of self fulfillment. Any other relationship serves no useful purpose.

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• Taylor defends multicultural education as a moral imperative of one branch of  the liberal tradition, while Searle argues that a victory for multiculturalism  would mean the destruction of the Western intellectual heritage
• According to Rorty, objective truth understood as correspondence between our  knowledge and an independent reality is a notion without meaningful content. He  would prefer to describe objectivity as the search for "the widest possible  intersubjective agreement."
• Taylor treats multiculturalism as a historical and political issue rather than  an epistemological one. He distinguishes two traditions in liberal democratic  theory — on the one hand, the politics of equal dignity, based on the idea that  all humans are equally deserving of respect and equal rights; on the other hand,  the politics of difference, based on the need for recognition of the unique  identity of individuals and groups. These two perspectives appear to be  incompatible, because the former requires treating people in a difference-blind  manner, while the latter demands differential treatment, but Taylor maintains  that both are built on the notion of equal respect.

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