1. Taylor’s Non-Anthropocentric Ontologizing

In Philosophical Papers, Taylor generally employs the concept of ontology in what I will call an ‘anthropological’ sense; that is, he uses it to discuss certain (implicit) beliefs about what a human being is and what human agency consists in. This can be illustrated by briefly looking at the papers “How is Mechanism Conceivable?” and “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.” In the former paper, Taylor criticizes the ‘ontological’ argument of mechanism. That is, he criticizes the thesis that human behaviour must be ultimately explicable in terms of body chemistry and neurophysiology because “human beings are after all physical objects.” ^{Footnote 12} Similarly, in the latter paper, he makes the case that we cannot come to understand important dimensions of human life within the bounds set by the “ontological” belief that “reality must be susceptible to understanding and explanation by science so understood.” ^{Footnote 13}

Taylor pursues another, in this case ‘political,’ type of ontological inquiry in “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in which he explores the difference between “ontological issues” and “advocacy issues” in social theory. ^{Footnote 14} Advocacy issues involve “the moral stand or policy one adopts,” whereas ontological issues concern “what you recognize as the factors you will invoke to account for social life”; that is, “they concern the terms you accept as ultimate in the order of explanation.” ^{Footnote 15} From this starting point, though, Taylor largely continues his anthropological use of the concept of ontology by invoking issues of self-understanding. In this way, he characterizes Michael Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice as an “ontological” book in that it shows how different political proposals are “linked with different understandings of self and identity.” ^{Footnote 16}

Taylor also develops a familiar type of ontological critique in elaborating on the liberal-communitarian debate, namely, that there is a great deal of motivated suppression of social ontology among liberalists. He generally argues that the issues of advocacy and ontology have been inadequately appreciated. In Taylor’s view, it is not just that the distinction between ontological and advocacy questions remains largely unarticulated, but also that many commentators misperceive the impact of the ontological by neglecting the reality that taking an ontological position helps to “define the options it is meaningful to support by advocacy.” ^{Footnote 17} Following a line of thinking drawn largely from Sources of the Self, Taylor ultimately argues that “the confusion of issues has contributed to a kind of eclipse of ontological thinking in social theory,” convincing his readers that the debate can only be opened “if we can clarify the ontological issues, and allow the debate between liberals and communitarians to be the complex, many-levelled affair that it really is.” ^{Footnote 18}

As these observations make clear, Taylor uses the terms ‘philosophical anthropology’ and ‘ontology’ interchangeably. It is also clear that Taylor does not see contradiction in synchronizing some of his concerns. As he says in a reflection on White’s Sustaining Affirmation:

Taylor’s explicit remark that he sees ‘philosophical anthropology’ and ‘ontology’ as interchangeable notions has incited some of his readers to conclude that the central focus of Taylor’s work has been “the formulation of a philosophical anthropology.” ^{Footnote 20} Yet one of the limitations of this characterization is that it leaves no room for the important observation that Taylor also “wants to open up a non-anthropocentric perspective on the good, to allow us to see the ‘sovereignty of good’ over the moral agent.” ^{Footnote 21} It would seem Kerr is on to something important here, because some of Taylor’s more recent writings similarly make room for non-human sources of value. As it turns out, the later Taylor goes beyond a mere anthropological use of ontology in the above sense, in a crucial attempt to transcend anthropocentrism in moral thinking. Counting Iris Murdoch and John McDowell as close relatives of this type of effort, Taylor’s focus now is to explore the questions of what we are “committed to ontologically by our ethical views and commitments,” and “what ontology can underpin our moral commitments.” ^{Footnote 22} However, Taylor’s very endorsement of this Murdochian conception of a good beyond the self gets lost from view by synchronizing his ‘anthropocentric’ philosophical anthropology and his ‘non-anthropocentric’ ontology—an inconsistency with which, as we have seen above, Taylor himself has no difficulty.

Taylor’s non-anthropocentrism comes to the fore in his more recent writings, in which he argues that we must respond to the following challenge: either we correct our (implicit) naturalist ontology, or we must revise the most striking features of our moral experience. The attack on naturalism is a central motivation of Taylor’s thought. It can generally be seen as a critique of a certain type of understanding of human agency. Taylor initially calls his rival account “philosophical anthropology”—perhaps because of, rather than despite, his impression that “this term seems to make English-speaking philosophers uneasy.” ^{Footnote 23} Taylor’s most basic definition depicts naturalism as “a particular view about science and human nature.” ^{Footnote 24} More particularly, he describes it as “the belief that we ought to understand human beings in terms continuous with the sciences of extrahuman nature.” ^{Footnote 25} 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 behaviour and life form as ultimately explicable in terms that are consonant with modern natural science.” ^{Footnote 26} Refuting this approach, Taylor’s main concern is that crucial features of human life just disappear by adopting a scientific stance. Moreover, as Taylor understands it, naturalism is more than a mere philosophical doctrine. He sees a broader “naturalist temper” 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.” ^{Footnote 27} This observation—that most people are reluctant to fully embrace naturalism and yet remain highly sceptical of all things that do not fit the naturalist model—I want to argue, is the underlying theme of Taylor’s “single rather tightly related agenda.” ^{Footnote 28}

Against the naturalist trend in contemporary thought, Taylor proposes a view that stresses the difference between human nature and mere physical nature. His critique is that a naturalist ontology cannot accommodate (what he sees as) the most striking features of human reality. As he says, there is a lack of fit between ordinary moral experience and “the ontology we allow ourselves as post-Galilean naturalists:”

Taylor elaborates on this in Retrieving Realism by separating what he calls “life meanings, which we share as biological creatures” from “human meanings,” that is, “meanings on a moral, or an ethical, or a spiritual level, having to do with what are seen as the highest goals or the best way of life.” ^{Footnote 30} Against this background, Taylor makes two claims: a positive yet hesitant one, and a negative yet confident one. The positive claim states that the attribution of human meanings is not arbitrary, but “in response to something.” ^{Footnote 31} However, Taylor emphasizes, we can see this only when we abandon post-Galilean models and reflect on human life on its own terms, since moral meanings are essentially understood to be higher than, or incommensurable with, ordinary natural desires. ^{Footnote 32} The negative claim, then, argues that the attempt to reduce human meanings to basic life meanings in an all-inclusive scientific theory seems an “unpromising strategy” since “the basis of our science is the discovery of a universe whose causal laws take no account of us and our human meanings.” ^{Footnote 33} In this respect, Taylor has moved from a modest view to a bolder one. Whereas he leaves open the possibility of such a superseding theory in “Ethics and Ontology” by concluding that the “hoped-for-reconciliation” between moral phenomenology and naturalist ontology is “somewhat premature,” ^{Footnote 34} he later suggests that the studies of physical and human nature invoke incompatible ontological realities:

Seen in this light, it is clear that Taylor’s late non-anthropocentrism deviates from the initial philosophical-anthropological question of what characterizes a human agent. Regrettably, Taylor himself does not remark on his change of course, but I want to venture that this explicit rejection of “post-Galilean” metaphysics makes a much bolder claim than his critique of the motivated suppression of social ontology among liberalists. As will emerge in the following sections, it is precisely this non-anthropocentric attack on naturalist ontology that gets obscured from view in White’s weak-ontological interpretation of Taylor. In fact, this issue of terminology is crucial, because Taylor will have to be honest about his own metaphysical view in criticizing naturalist ontologies, for these cannot be rejected without reaching out to some ontological contraposition beyond philosophical anthropology or social ontology. Following Kerr, I therefore suspect that this concern revolves neither around philosophical anthropology nor around social ontology, but around a non-anthropocentric perspective on the good. In this regard, Taylor’s positions in philosophical anthropology and political theory have eclipsed his attempt to encourage non-anthropocentric thinking in ethics.

The above discussion raises the following question: how should we understand Taylor’s interwoven mode of argumentation between philosophical anthropology, political theory, ethics, and ontology? In this regard, several interpreters acknowledge Taylor’s tendency to link philosophical issues together. ^{Footnote 36} Rather than to insist on traditional categorical distinctions, these commentators adhere to Taylor’s characteristic language in elaborating his views. At least two reasons support this approach. First, anyone who attempts to distinguish Taylor’s various concerns is in fact “trying to sever themes that resist separation,” because Taylor not only combines ethics with ontology, as we have seen, but also has a way of entwining anthropological, political, and phenomenological reflections with his ontology. ^{Footnote 37} Second, we also saw that Taylor himself does not see the need to separate his claims, since all these claims are relevant for his central attack on naturalism. Although these considerations suggest that segregating Taylor’s views can only be distorting, I think that doing so will not only clarify Taylor’s different modes of ontologizing, but also, as will emerge in the following sections, highlight the difficulties in White’s picture of Taylor as a weak ontologist.

2. White’s Characterization of Taylor’s Weak Ontologizing

We can illustrate these issues by looking once more at Taylor’s ambivalent use of the notion of ontology. As has been noted, Taylor employs a broad or ‘relaxed’ notion of ontology, as he uses the terms ‘philosophical anthropology’ and ‘ontology’ interchangeably. White approves of this routine when he assures that his own concept of “weak ontology” is “largely appropriate for the kind and level of philosophical reflection [Taylor] has in mind,” because Taylor speaks, for example, of “the ‘ontology of human life: what kinds of things can you invoke in talking about human beings in the different ways we do: describing, deliberating, judging, etc.?’” ^{Footnote 38} In the introduction of this paper, it was noted that weak ontologies, as White understands them, stress the importance of constructing foundations for ethical and political life in the full knowledge of the contestable character of this very foundational enterprise. According to White, Taylor fits well into this picture. In line with this, Paul Saurette suggests that “Taylor follows Kant in avoiding strong ontological claims about the nature of the world, instead making only weaker transcendental claims about the nature of our embodied subjectivity.” ^{Footnote 39}

Against the background of Saurette’s distinction between Taylor’s “weak” transcendental-anthropological claims and the “strong” ontological claims that he allegedly has avoided, it is particularly interesting to examine White’s reading of Taylor in more detail. I will therefore first reconstruct White’s conception of weak ontology and then discuss his interpretation of Taylor in the light of this conception.

What is weak ontology? White endorses this notion mainly to stress the importance of an ontological vision to morality in a way that understands ontology as “prefiguring,” rather than dictating, ethical-political perception and judgment. ^{Footnote 40} His key concept of weak ontology is meant to express the contrast with “strong” ontologies that gain their “sense of what is right” in ethical and political life by reference to “‘the way the world is,’ or how God’s being stands to human being, or what human nature is.” ^{Footnote 41} Since such traditional ontologies generally “involve too much ‘metaphysics,’” White continues, it is striking of weak ontologies that they do not bear “clear substantive directions for practical life” and yet “these ontologies do provide a figuration of the world that appears to promise at least some orientation or passage to moral-political reflection.” ^{Footnote 42} A crucial feature of such weak figurations—besides their non-metaphysical nature—is that they signal their own limits; that is, they incorporate a sense of their own “contestability, fallibility, or partiality.” ^{Footnote 43} Taylor’s relevance to this contestable yet foundational enterprise, then, is not only that “the way he describes the idea of ‘articulating’ our ‘background pictures’ or ‘frameworks’ is highly instructive,” but also that “no thinker today has done more to press broad ontological questions than Charles Taylor.” ^{Footnote 44}

As White understands him, Taylor—while at first portraying him as “a border runner between strong and weak ontology”—is in the end best understood as being “squarely within the terrain of weak ontology.” ^{Footnote 45} He therefore defends Taylor against critics who wrongly assume that he is offering a return to strong ontology, that is, “some foundationalist, determinate truth about the shape and direction of self and world.” ^{Footnote 46} White does so, first, by emphasizing the weak-ontological character of Taylor’s philosophical-anthropological and moral-phenomenological views; second, by interpreting Taylor’s categorization of theistic, naturalist, and expressivist moral sources in a weak-ontological fashion; and, third, by clarifying that Taylor integrates elements of Romantic expressivism with theism in a way that broadly supports the idea of weak ontology. As I will make clear in the present section, White strategically appeals to these three aspects of Taylor’s thought in a way that presents him as firmly rooted in weak ontology. Although White generally explains Taylor’s arguments in an illuminating way, I will argue in the next section that his weak-ontological interpretation of Taylor suffers from serious weaknesses by drawing attention to a Taylor left out of White’s Taylor.

White’s discussion begins by invoking Taylor’s claim that there exists “‘a kind of eclipse of ontological thinking’ in contemporary moral and political theory” and that we need to “rethink the self as part of a ‘richer ontology’” to undo this suppression. ^{Footnote 47} In White’s interpretation, Taylor’s “richer ontology” emerges at the background of his philosophical anthropology, that is, Taylor’s “internal account of ‘what it is to be an agent’” and the claims that “the self is always already engaged, embedded, or situated” and that “human agency is partially, but deeply, constituted by this engagement with the world.” ^{Footnote 48} Invoking Taylor’s “phenomenological account of identity” and the notion of “what is of ‘incomparable’ importance to us,” White further explains Taylor’s view that “the peculiar force of the experience of attachment is distinctive to human being.” ^{Footnote 49} Stepping back from what White calls this “ontological sketch of agency,” he then poses the question of how we should understand the “exact philosophical status” of Taylor’s view on agency to set the stage for his central claim that Taylor is best understood as a weak ontologist. ^{Footnote 50} In answering this question, he first argues that “Taylor deploys an argument of conceptual necessity,” while noting some pages later that it also has “something of the sense of a transcendental claim.” ^{Footnote 51} White hastens to add, however, that “Taylor speaks only of ‘transcendental conditions,’ being careful to insert scare quotes.” ^{Footnote 52} Furthermore, White continues, even if Taylor maintains that the picture of agency defended by his opponents is that of a monster, “Taylor is nevertheless aware that he has no philosophical means of establishing an absolutely incontestable boundary for us/monsters. Accordingly, he admits that his appeal to conceptual necessity is in reality always open to contest.” ^{Footnote 53}

There seems little doubt, then, that the cautious way in which Taylor crafts his arguments about agency put him “squarely within the terrain of weak ontology,” ^{Footnote 54} as Taylor is fully aware that his view on human agency does not establish metaphysical truths. As White concludes this point, since Taylor is operating “from within the perspective of engaged, embodied agency,” he cannot at the same time claim “to have discovered a level of metaphysical bedrock.” ^{Footnote 55} In White’s view, then, these points testify to the weak-ontological—that is, non-metaphysical—character of Taylor’s philosophical-anthropological and phenomenological views.

White sees a second example of Taylor’s weak-ontological aspiration in the historical narrative laid out in Sources of the Self. He first draws the larger background from which Taylor’s narrative must be understood: “One of the characteristics of a felicitous weak ontology is the persuasiveness with which an array of specific concepts of self, other, and world are located within a broad historical narrative.” ^{Footnote 56} He then depicts Taylor’s contribution in Sources of the Self as a leading example of such a historical narrative by describing it as “one of the grandest portraits of the modern West that has appeared in recent decades.” ^{Footnote 57} This portrait, White explains, consists of three basic “ontological constellations”: the “original theistic one,” the “naturalism of disengaged reason,” and the constellation that “emerges out of romanticism.” ^{Footnote 58} Without getting into the details, it is a crucial point in White’s analysis to show how Taylor’s narrative “does indeed affirm a certain openness to ontological diversity” ^{Footnote 59} to highlight the weak-ontological thrust of Taylor’s view. In this way, White argues that Taylor again takes a non-metaphysical stance in developing his historical narrative as he “guarantees that his ontological insights, whether relating to templates or full constellations, signal their own limits, contain their own sense of contestedness; in short, they offer themselves as ‘weak’ in my sense.” ^{Footnote 60}

White’s third example of the weak-ontological nature of Taylor’s position concerns what he calls Taylor’s “aesthetic-expressive theism.” ^{Footnote 61} In this regard, White convincingly shows how Taylor’s theism crucially depends on his view that God, as any moral source, is now “inextricably entangled with subjective articulation,” referring to Taylor’s complex “interweaving of the subjective and the transcendent” and his idea that “theology is ‘indexed’ to ‘languages of personal resonance.’” ^{Footnote 62} At this point, White’s conclusion that Taylor’s brand of theism “broadly supports the idea of weak ontology” should no longer surprise us. ^{Footnote 63}

3. A Taylor Left Out of White’s Taylor

White’s interpretation raises a fundamental question: even if there are certain weak-ontological elements in Taylor’s views, does that necessarily mean that he is a weak ontologist through and through? Reflecting on this question, it is clear that White’s approach is far more fruitful than attempts that rest on the destructive logic that, as Ruth Abbey aptly puts it, “one is either a Platonic moral realist or a projectivist.” ^{Footnote 64} However, it is doubtful whether White’s reading can accommodate the full scope of Taylor’s ontology. For example, to what extent is Taylor’s claim in his paper “Ethics and Ontology” (which White does not discuss) that we are best advised to revise naturalist ontology in favour of moral phenomenology still consonant with the basic weak-ontological assumption that all fundamental conceptualizations are inherently contestable? Make no mistake: Taylor’s point is that his moral phenomenology rules out naturalist ontology. How does this full-out attack on naturalist-inspired metaphysics relate to weak ontology’s self-declared non-metaphysical stance and its “fallibility” and “partiality”? ^{Footnote 65} In this respect, it is worth noting that Taylor heightens the tension by insisting that we must suffer one of two things: the pain of “resisting the phenomenology” or the pain of “challenging the ontology.” ^{Footnote 66} More than anything else, however, this question is metaphysical.

There is, moreover, the concern that White’s “ontological sketch” results in a too limited account of Taylor’s arguments about agency. Many commentators point out that his philosophical anthropology and his moral phenomenology insist on universal—rather than contestable—features of both selfhood and morality. As a philosophical anthropologist, Taylor defines “those timeless features of human agency that hold across cultures whenever we try to define the historically specific sense of self of a given age.” ^{Footnote 67} As a moral philosopher, he delineates structural features of moral experience that exist in “every culture.” ^{Footnote 68} As a metaphysical thinker, he argues that moral reactions are best understood as “responses to some reality,” as it lies in their nature to claim “truth, reality, or objective rightness.” ^{Footnote 69} Furthermore, as Abbey emphasizes, Taylor’s doctrine of strong evaluation shows that relativist and subjectivist moral theories are not merely partial but utterly mistaken. ^{Footnote 70} For this reason, Taylor does not stop at simply drawing a picture of selfhood in terms of “strong evaluation,” that is, “the recognition that certain goals or ends make a claim on us, are incommensurable with our other desires and purposes.” ^{Footnote 71} Taylor’s next step is to argue that “strong evaluation is something inescapable in our conception of the agent and his experience,” that strong evaluations are “inseparable from ourselves as agents,” and that “shorn of these we would lose the very possibility of being an agent who evaluates.” ^{Footnote 72}

These points illustrate that, while it is true in general that Taylor urges caution in developing his narrative about the modern self in terms of human universals, he is quite determined when it comes to defending the transcendental necessity of strong evaluation. Far from “prefiguring,” Taylor’s position is that any conception of human nature that resists strong evaluation is not just incomplete but is just wrong, and cannot but be so after considering his arguments. All this indicates a fairly strong stand (realist, essentialist, or some sort), at least on what human nature and morality consist in, but maybe even on the issue of “the way the world is,” to put it in strong ontological terms. However, because Taylor also believes that “what we are as human agents is profoundly interpretation-dependent,” ^{Footnote 73} and, moreover, because his arguments steer a course between political theory, philosophical anthropology, ethics, phenomenology, ontology, and metaphysics, it remains to be argued in more detail why Taylor does not fit well into White’s picture of weak ontology. In the next section, I will therefore try to capture the source of the difficulty by shining a spotlight on White’s habit of equating philosophical anthropology with ontology, while also showing how this habit prevents him from recognizing the full scope of Taylor’s non-anthropocentric and interwoven modes of argumentation.

4. The Limits of Weak Ontology

At the beginning of his analysis of Taylor’s views, White makes a quick point about terminology (albeit only in a footnote):

As noted in Section 1, Taylor himself has made it clear in a reflection on White’s Sustaining Affirmation that he is thinking along the same lines as is White about issues that he labels both as ‘philosophical-anthropological’ and ‘ontological.’ However, one major disadvantage of equating ontology with philosophical anthropology is that it reduces ontological inquiry in general and makes invisible Taylor’s non-anthropocentric metaphysical view in particular. Moreover, White’s holistic approach of clustering philosophical-anthropological, moral-phenomenological, transcendental, descriptive, normative, and theistic claims all under the label of “Taylor’s richer ontology” blurs the distinctions between Taylor’s different philosophical strategies and, in so doing, obscures the precise nature of their entanglement.

In this respect, the tension between moral experience and naturalist ontology could neither be articulated nor discussed from within White’s weak ontology, because it is a deliberate strategy of this approach not to make the crucial distinction between ethics and ontology that allows for the meta-perspective from which their relationship can be assessed. White explains his holistic view in terms of his key notion of a “stickier” subject. ^{Footnote 75} He generally employs this term to oppose what Taylor has called the “ideal of the disengaged self.” ^{Footnote 76} White explains the difference as follows: whereas the modern disengaged subject (also the “Teflon” subject) “generates distance from its background (tradition, embodiment) and foreground (external nature, other subjects),” it is essential to the late modern sticky subject that it “cannot be divorced from the practical embeddedness of reflection, and thus must be approached through an interpretive-existential mode of thought.” ^{Footnote 77} It is precisely because of this “stickiness,” White explains, that ontological reflection can no longer be seen as an “exclusively cognitive matter, as it was traditionally, and still is for much of analytic philosophy.” ^{Footnote 78} He elaborates:

The conception of a stickier subject is an inventive way of making sense of Taylor’s tendency to straddle philosophical domains in developing an interwoven type of argument. That is, White has fully grasped Taylor’s interwoven strategy by emphasizing the problem that “at this deepest level many familiar analytical categories and operations become blurred or exhibit torsional effects.” ^{Footnote 80} He explains:

This point is well taken when we consider the problem that having recourse to a more conventional vocabulary does not help to clarify Taylor’s interwoven claims but, on the contrary, cuts us off from his “sticky” type of inquiry. White’s sticky subject even anticipates Taylor’s recent contact theory in Retrieving Realism, which argues that our “original” way of being in the world reflects a kind of understanding that generally resists distinctions between “explicit, analytical elements,” such as those between “subject and object,” “fact and value,” and “belief and reality.” ^{Footnote 82}

As these points suggest, White’s approach makes a strong case for the claim that differentiating between Taylor’s various concerns distorts rather than clarifies his ontology. In my view, however, we must look into the relationships between Taylor’s various concerns only after having set the boundaries that separate them, and that doing so uncovers a non-anthropocentric metaphysical viewpoint that would otherwise remain invisible. White attacks this approach at its core by insisting on the practical embeddedness of reflection. From his perspective, our current argumentative situation requires not demarcation but an “interpretive-existential” approach that accounts for the ways in which philosophical categories “entangle themselves.” ^{Footnote 83}

Yet it is questionable whether White’s highlighting of stickiness really enables us to explore Taylor’s multifaceted ontology in an illuminating way. This brings us to some more fundamental concerns about weak ontology. In the end, two major problems press on White’s account. First, it imposes on us a political model for ontological reflection, stifling all the others. Second, because of this, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to accommodate Taylor’s latest question of how to align our ethical-political affirmations with an adequate ontology. This last claim may seem startling, given White’s overall objective of sustaining ontological affirmation in the face of what we might call a ‘postmodern climate.’ Let me flesh this out.

White’s implicit critique of employing familiar analytical distinctions (subject-object, fact-value, belief-reality, etc.) is that this does not fully acknowledge that we live in late modern times. As he says, “the sense of living in late modernity implies a greater awareness of the conventionality of much of what has been taken for certain in the modern West.” ^{Footnote 84} As we have just seen, “at issue is the assertive, disengaged self” as the incorporation of the “dominant ontological investments of modernity.” ^{Footnote 85} For present purposes, this means that the attempt to separate philosophical categories and domains is somewhat dated in the sense that a strict division between subject and object, man and world, philosophical anthropology and metaphysics, ethics and ontology, etc., partakes of the (strong) ontology of the disengaged modern self rather than the (weak) ontology of the stickier late modern subject.

However, it is worth noting that, although the emphasis has changed in the passage to late modernity—from a focus on the things ‘in themselves’ to a focus on the human subject—the central question has remained the same: how does the human being relate to his or her world? It is precisely the attempt to explore both the subjective and the objective elements of our human way of being in the world that defines Taylor’s concern for the ontological preconditions of human subjectivity. The problem with White’s analysis, then, is that even if it is true that all philosophical problems relate to the wider (weak-ontological) question of what it is to be human, it is too quick to conclude that all ontological questions can be discussed under the labels of ‘human nature,’ ‘philosophical anthropology,’ or ‘weak ontology.’ Yet, as we have seen in the above discussions, this is precisely the objective of White’s approach, namely, to consider “too metaphysical” approaches to ontology to be excessive, originating from a bygone age. This is where the limits of weak ontology come to the fore.

The explicit non-metaphysical thrust of White’s approach re-raises the suspicion (first expressed in Section 1) that equating philosophical anthropology and ontology blocks out Taylor’s most recent question of what we are committed to ontologically by our moral beliefs. That is, if it has become impossible in late modern times to accord either ethics or ontology or philosophical anthropology “clear primacy” because these domains appear as “mutually constitutive” rather than as distinct analytical categories, then how do we account for the conflict between moral phenomenology and naturalist ontology? ^{Footnote 86} Put differently, if ontological commitments have become entangled with questions of identity and history to such an extent that we can no longer “cleanly separate self and foundation,” then there is no more space left to investigate the metaphysical reality behind this identity and history either. ^{Footnote 87} Confusingly, this is nonetheless one of the central points of White’s weak ontology, which after all “demands from us the affirmative gesture of constructing foundations,” albeit in a late modern, non-metaphysical fashion. ^{Footnote 88}

As the present analysis demonstrates, it is precisely by differentiating between various existential realities (anthropological, social, phenomenological, ethical, and ontological) that the tension between moral experience and naturalist ontology becomes accessible. In this respect, what is striking about Taylor’s ontology is that it neither deduces ontological givens from the social existence of values nor locates the source of ethics in a “strong” Platonic human-independent reality. White’s non-metaphysical perspective, on the other hand, seems to hold that what Taylor identifies as the metaphysical reality behind our strong values does not exist. Here we come up against the boundaries of White’s account, for his distinction between strong and weak ontologies leaves room neither for the tension between ethics and ontology in a naturalist climate nor for the way in which Taylor defines his unique ontological position within this climate. That is, whereas White insists that “the cogency of weak ontology is not traceable to a sky hook or metaphysical anchor,” ^{Footnote 89} Taylor’s concern is precisely the opposite: namely, to trace the metaphysical source that makes best sense of our moral experience. This, I believe, is what Taylor is gesturing at when invoking “the contrary ethical and metaphysical passions of the modern age.” ^{Footnote 90}

For all the interesting parallels between Taylor’s interwoven strategy and White’s perspective of stickiness, it is clear that the challenges facing the late modern sticky subject cannot be made intelligible without ‘un-sticking’ the different realities to which this subject belongs. Yet this result—that we first need to disentangle our various commitments in order to appreciate the nature of their entanglement—is more troublesome for White’s argument than for the present analysis since it is crucial for weak ontology to take these entangled commitments as they are and to hold at bay all metaphysical anchors that could help alleviate them.

Perhaps the best way to move this important issue forward is through the following question: which approach ultimately carries most explanatory force, one that insist on the stickiness and multiplicity of our commitments or one that explores their boundaries by confronting them with one another? From Taylor’s perspective, the central phenomenon to be explained is human agency. The issue, then, is this: does weak ontologizing promote reflective self-understanding of the ways of life that are constituted by our ethical-political views? In other words, can we explain in weak-ontological terms what we ourselves are doing as moral and political agents? Put differently, what are we forced to recognize the existence of by the way we understand our own actions and deal with the things and people around us?

5. Why Taylor is Not a Weak Ontologist

Difficulties start to emerge for White’s weak ontology when we press on this issue of hermeneutic explanation. Although stressing the historical, cultural, and contestable character of weak-ontological commitments might add to the plausibility of entwining ontological reflection with political affirmation, the issue is just how much this explains. Ultimately, White’s view is that weak ontologies are “fundamental” conceptualizations despite their contestability because they are “nevertheless necessary or unavoidable for an adequately reflective ethical and political life.” ^{Footnote 91} As he explains, “fundamental conceptualization here thus means acknowledging that gaining access to something universal about human being and world is always also a construction that cannot rid itself of a historical dimension.” ^{Footnote 92}

At first glance, White here simply follows Taylor’s view that we should be wary not to mix up “human universals” and “historical constellations.” ^{Footnote 93} Yet there is also a decisive difference. What White’s explanation of the contestability of weak ontology does not discuss is Taylor’s belief that we essentially understand self, other, and world in terms of strong evaluations that generally refuse to be treated as contestable. The later Taylor makes this very clear:

This means that, even if our experiences and beliefs are contestable and radically undermined in their meanings, the background that makes sense of them is not. Taylor explains: “These contrasts point up the fact that underlying strong evaluations there is supposed to be a truth of the matter. … Put simply, our moral reactions suppose that they are responses to some reality, and can be criticized for misapprehension of this reality.” ^{Footnote 95} In my reading, this is the metaphysical concern underlying Taylor’s more politically sensitive claim that “high standards need strong sources.” ^{Footnote 96} Put simply, this shows that Taylor’s ontology is not merely concerned with political theory, but also with metaphysics.

This point also explains why Taylor ultimately moves away from his original anthropological perspective in “Ethics and Ontology,” A Secular Age, and “Disenchantment-Reenchantment”: because adopting a non-anthropocentric view breaks open the issue of how to align our most lucid anthropocentric descriptions—either moral-phenomenological or philosophical-anthropological or weak-ontological—with an adequate metaphysics. It is therefore precisely the move beyond a mere weak-ontological perspective that enables Taylor to focus on the metaphysical reality behind social theory.

For the weak ontologist, however, this move is “too metaphysical.” As a result, White’s conception can include neither Taylor’s view that the source of value lies beyond human control nor that his ontology freely crosses the boundaries between strong and weak ontologies in White’s sense. Since he does not elaborate on this, I find it difficult to see what kind of balance White thinks he has struck by identifying Taylor’s fundamental ethical-political orientation, on the one hand, and the recognition of the deeply contestable character of this foundation, on the other.