Introduction
It is simply inconceivable that Charles Taylor could write a book on language without emphatically addressing the narrative dimension. First and foremost, his approach rests principally and all too thoroughly on adopting the practice of narration when it comes to making his key arguments, as can be seen in his magna opera, Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. Or, to put it another way, if Taylor has a signature move, it is the telling of a story, the historical account of ‘how it all came about,’ in order both to show the emergence of a certain predicament and to convince his addressees of his specific approach and stance (as on modernity or secularism). Footnote 1 Almost equally important, throughout the broad scope of his oeuvre, Taylor repeatedly and insistently employs claims about the inalienability of the narrative dimension for philosophy when dealing with social life. Now, in The Language Animal he aims at making those features explicit on a very general level—at showing “How Narrative Makes Meaning,” the title he gives to his Chapter 8. Footnote 2 He thus enlarges the scope of the enquiry by looking “at units of discourse bigger than the sentence” and by exploring “what larger texts can show us about language and its powers,” Footnote 3 an approach that has not been necessary up to this point in his book. Taylor’s central (and quite bold) claim is that stories are not only one way among others to give us an understanding of social life and the whole gamut of ‘human affairs’ (such as causes, values, habits, motivations, identities, life courses, etc.), but that narrative is essentially unsubstitutable for this endeavour: Valid insights cannot be gained by trying to do without stories or by converting them into timeless generalizations. Footnote 4 While I am, by and large, convinced by Taylor’s account, I want to shed light on a small number of selected points and draw attention to a difficulty in the argumentation, to a consequence thereof that the author may not like in the end, and to a suggestion of how to understand (and perhaps sharpen) his specific grasp. In this short assessment of Taylor’s latest examination of narrative, I shall proceed in these three consecutive steps by problematizing his distinction of laws and stories (I), by addressing the range of the blurring of histories and stories (II), and by briefly suggesting that his approach amounts to a particular form of critical genealogy (III).
I. Laws and Stories
Taylor’s claim may look rather modest at first glance: “A novel, as a work of art, doesn’t assert anything about life. It is made up of assertions, but these are about the world of the novel”; thus, it provides a “nonassertive portrayal of human life, of its choices, issues, travails, fulfillments; and this can open new horizons for the reader.” Footnote 5 While this seems quite harmless, Taylor’s goal here is not primarily to provide a cogent analysis of the narrative features of language. Rather, he situates himself within a theoretical dispute and defends his position against a presumably dominant outlook in modern social science and philosophy. He does so by challenging the general “suspicion of narrative, which is strong in our philosophical culture.” Footnote 6 He traces this suspicion back to the Humean belief that causal attributions depend on general rules, “a powerful prejudice of modern natural science-influenced culture” Footnote 7 that also applies to “much contemporary (analytic) philosophical thought.” Footnote 8 This resting, Taylor concedes, may well be perfectly sufficient for natural science but is plainly wrong when dealing with human affairs. Footnote 9 In the latter domain, stories are not an expedient extra that can simply be stripped away to uncover the actual rules in social life but, rather, are a constitutive feature of the respective epistemology. This holds both for the (more or less factual) stories we tell ourselves as individuals or as a society, as well as the (fictional) stories we find in the realm of literature. So, when we seek to gain insights about ‘human affairs’—from social change to biographical transitions—we need narratives, consisting mainly of the two elements of ‘episode’ (diachronic unfolding) and ‘background’ (providing overall sense and meaning, explaining the impact of the episode). Footnote 10 Taylor’s main focus lies here on magnificent pieces of literature, from which he takes the bulk of his examples (such as, to name but two beautiful specimens, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils). Taylor’s thoroughly romantic conviction is: we must relive those stories in order to properly or even fully understand the intentions, emotions, values or inner conflicts of the portrayed characters. Footnote 11 The experience we might acquire from this is constitutively framed in a narrative form, as it is
inextricably diachronic: deeply colored by the sense I might have that the movement from earlier to later amounted to some gain in comprehension—or perhaps loss, or was just in the end a step sideways. This reading can be upset by later experience, or reflection (as Mann hints in the case of Hans Castorp), and my conclusion may be altered. But what I conclude at the moment is shaped by this experience. Footnote 12
So the fallacy is clear: We must not detach the conclusion from a diachronic story. Footnote 13 This applies both to literature, where any moral will be incomprehensible without telling the story, and to real life, when we tell ourselves what biographical choices we have made or how our social behaviour is to be accounted for.
Now, when it comes to any kind of causal explanation, the opponent becomes quite clear: The attempt to translate a story into a timeless truth or law about human life. Footnote 14 And we may well be convinced by Taylor’s general argument. However, at least three interrelated problems or open questions remain.
(1) While Taylor may be completely right in asserting that a story, about, say, a choice I made as to how to lead my life, can convey a perfectly good explanation for why I did what I did, being both emotionally comprehensible and rationally intelligible, he may in the end bark up the wrong tree when it comes to the actual opponent: are there really any laws regarding social life in the social sciences, humanities, philosophy? Frankly, I can’t think of any convincing examples. There are, of course, empirical probabilities, well-established hypotheses, and statistical generalizations but that is the point Taylor himself makes against laws (and rightly so). Footnote 15 Taylor’s point is an epistemological one—we should not try to derive laws from narratives by detaching a timeless conclusion from the diachronic story—yet the argument in this form does not touch the existence of laws in social life. So, in the end, the fiercest opponent, against whom Taylor scores some good hits, might be nothing more than a strawman.
(2) Even if we assume that there actually are laws in the human affairs, the crucial question remains: how exactly can we make a distinction between a law and a narrative? This question is not raised directly in the text, perhaps because it seems so intuitively evident. One might presume that laws and narratives are structured completely differently—either compelling, clear, and ordered, or somehow arbitrary, unsystematic, and open to interpretation. Yet, this is not Taylor’s argument. Rather, he gives us two reasons that narratives are superior to laws: they “bring together a heterogeneous bundle of factors” Footnote 16 and different kinds of causal links, as opposed to the illusion of a single coherent direct conclusion; and, even more importantly, they enable us to come to a nuanced “overall judgment,” as opposed to the propensity of a context-free proposition. Footnote 17 Still, we may infer that those two advantages essentially involve the feature of ordering. Thus, concerning the distinction, an educated guess might be that it lies in the way or degree of ordering provided by either laws or narratives—not if ordering takes place, but maybe how one-dimensionally, strictly and unequivocally it is done. This remains an open question in the text.
(3) To go one small step further (and beyond Taylor): It might be scientifically unsatisfying but plausible for us to assume that, in most cases, when we try to examine a single event, transition, etc., in social life, there can never be a truly proper judgement, there can never be a fully cogent explanation—even if we follow Taylor in employing narrative as a means of providing such things. There is a whole gamut, or even endless list, of factors relevant to the human affairs and many or most of these factors are likely to be opaque and unintelligible to us. This is especially true—and Taylor clandestinely shifts the focus within this chapter of The Language Animal—when it comes to history.
II. Histories and Stories
As the comprehensibility of transitions is a—if not the—crucial feature of narrative, a very close connection to history is all too obvious. Footnote 18 It is thus not surprising that narrative historical accounts are essential tools for Taylor, both in theory Footnote 19 and in practice, Footnote 20 and are explicitly classified that way in his self-reflections. Footnote 21 The shift within the argumentation of The Language Animal from typical narrative towards historical accounts is correspondingly smooth. Interpreting Taylor, we might conceive of this pervasive narrative as a progression of sophistication in steps, from events with minimal human action up to complex history. To illustrate this in a longer quote:
[W]e have a crucial feature of stories, that they bring together a heterogeneous bundle of factors: different kinds of events and states, and causal links. And in the human case, this is so in spades. A story, whether fictional or historical, will also involve human motivations, actions, interactions, differences of character, longer-term conditions, things good and bad that happen to people—in short, the vicissitudes of fortune, mutual sympathy, antipathy, and a whole gamut of attitudes to others. And more.
A history which tries to explain, say, the outbreak of the First World War, or the French Revolution, or the condition of contemporary Western democracy, will draw together all of the above, with particular emphasis on long-term conditions, economic and demographic trends, cultural differences, mentalités, which will have to be integrated with the shorter-term events, and interactions and mutual attitudes among the actors involved in the change. Footnote 22
What might be inferred is that there is a fluid passage from simple stories to complex histories without categorically changing the features of narrative. What thus becomes visible is a blurring of the distinction of ‘story’ and ‘history’ and, again, Taylor’s argument seems compelling when taken as a whole (although, to be sure, the open questions of the section above also apply here). For instance, when it comes to history, the anti-detachment principle explicitly still holds. It would be a grave fallacy to assume that we can forget about all earlier worldviews, and that new conclusions can be detached from the preceding history. Footnote 23 According to Taylor, this is the classic mistake of the “shallower strands of the Enlightenment.” Footnote 24 Encapsulated in this brief remark is nothing less than the resurfacing of a defining rivalry in Taylor’s historic-philosophical approach. First and foremost, his Sources of the Self speaks volumes about his diagnosis of the deeply rooted conflict between the two moral sources of modernity: Enlightenment and Romanticism. The ‘naturalism’ of Enlightenment may thus be correlated with the aforementioned law-abiding post-Humean anti-narrativists; the romantic ‘expressivism’ on the other hand not only corresponds to the requirement to relive a story, but is even more closely tied to Taylor’s preeminent demand in his oeuvre for (individual and collective) articulation of our (strong) evaluations. Footnote 25 This demand both applies to our personal identities and to our social lives in political communities, and seeks to revive our moral sources through making us recall what really matters to us (note that this is a thoroughly narrative-based concept, too). Once again, and thus also in the realm of the philosophy of language, Taylor’s characteristic Romanticism prevails.
The blurring of stories and histories raises yet another bundle of questions and leads to implied consequences. I will deal with two interconnected issues.
(1) What is the relationship between historical narrative and truth? As indicated above, trying to translate a story into a timeless truth is a major fallacy for Taylor. Now, timelessness and a decidedly historical approach taken seriously are mutually exclusive. However, there might be, interpreting Taylor, something like a continually evolving provisional truth in our self-understanding and social lives. Regarding history, he claims elsewhere that “we understand what we now see as a truth as a result of an error-correction in relation to an earlier view … this idea is what I would call a ‘transitional understanding.’ … I’m understanding myself in opposition to a supposed past. There is an inescapable narrative dimension to this.” Footnote 26 Still, this aforementioned provisional truth does not fully account for the precise way in which a historical narrative is ‘true.’ When it comes to our self-understanding, a (hi)story might be true subjectively if it properly captures our ‘real’ motivations, etc.; yet, it might also be true objectively if it correctly captures ‘how it really was.’ In The Language Animal, Taylor distinguishes between fictional or historical, fictional or factual, Footnote 27 but in the overall claim about narrative there is no strict categorical difference as, in both cases, the same logic, the same features apply. “There is some analogy between writing history and writing a novel. However, this doesn’t mean that we’re doing something different from trying to adjudicate truth”; in histories, “a lot of things open up and you can see causal dependency that you didn’t see before, which you can track and thus get closer to the truth.” Footnote 28 Thus, a more detailed history (e.g., on the French Revolution, to use Taylor’s example) is actually superior. Still, here we deal with provisional truths that are very much open to interpretation and depend on their plausibility for us and their impact on our lives. Both fictional and factual (hi)stories entail a creative and constitutive power, Footnote 29 as they open up “new categories to understand life, a new sense of human possibility.” Footnote 30 Yet, if historical fact and fiction have more or less the same features, and both are essentially about new possibilities through new creative descriptions, Taylor would be much closer to his esteemed long-term adversaries Hayden White (on history) Footnote 31 and Richard Rorty (on philosophy), Footnote 32 the former being more radical on the non-neutral and literature-related emplotment of any history, the latter being more radical in his consequential claim to refrain from philosophy and to practice literature with an actual impact instead. Both thinkers are appreciated by Taylor. However, in his view, a clear opposition to their thoroughly relativistic positions remains. But does it really? In the end, all three of them might buy into a concept like the Thomas Theorem after all: the truth lies in the ‘true effects’ in real life, no matter how fictional a narrative is.
(2) Now, if (narrative) truth is provisional even in history and always a question of never-ending hermeneutics (which might be the case), the role of rhetoric—of convincing an audience—trumps futile attempts to prove or verify in a strict sense. Again, Taylor’s refutation of natural science laws in human affairs comes to mind. Certainly, he makes sure that “a novel, as a work of art, doesn’t assert anything about life.” But he continues: “Nevertheless there emerges what I called a nonassertive portrayal of life.” Footnote 33 Again, with a glance towards François Furet, who “challenged the mainstream historiography of the French Revolution (often influenced by Marxism),” Taylor states that it is wrong to assume that the “new conclusions can be ‘detached’ from the history which preceded them.” Footnote 34 But what makes a (hi)story actually cogent? Taylor does not provide us with many criteria here; a historical-hermeneutical stance seems to be the crucial point for him. In The Language Animal, Taylor only reminds us that in (hi)stories of transitions, our prior understanding must be treated fairly, as it would be shallow to offer “only a caricatural picture of … earlier outlooks,” Footnote 35 and that a more detailed history is (usually?) superior. Footnote 36 But it is overall a question of hermeneutics; so what, if anything, may be said about a boundary or at least gradual steps to differentiate ‘true’ (hi)stories and ‘mere’ rhetoric? If there isn’t any, it comes down to the superior “convincing power” Footnote 37 of any narrative.
So the question rather is not (again with some parallels to White): ‘what is the true (hi)story, freed from all partiality, emplotment and rhetorical tricks?,’ but rather: ‘which kind of story is told, which style of rhetoric is used?’ In Taylor’s outlook, there is not an explicit assessment of the use and abuse of a rhetorical dimension, and it would not be easy to give a generally appropriate and satisfying answer anyway. However, for Taylor, there are definitely (hi)stories that are in their content and/or in their form either good or bad. In the field of social and political philosophy, Taylor frequently criticizes what he evaluates as pretentious accounts of ‘pure reason,’ as typically found in (neo-)Kantian outlooks and their “single principle doctrine.” Footnote 38 Usually, those accounts entail universal arguments about reason and morality that are, by definition, ahistorical. But even if they entertain historical accounts—such as an Enlightenment-driven passage from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’—they seem to be a case of misguided and illusive (hi)stories. As he writes elsewhere:
But like any mirage, it can look very solid from the distance …. It lives more by the suggestive force of narratives … which have been spun around its three key motifs: (1) Cartesian foundationalism and its attendant rationalism, (2) the coming of post-Galilean science, and (3) the Grotian reconstruction of social theory …. And then the narrative locks in, which can carry us to the delicious illusions of a self-sufficient reason (blosse Vernunft). Footnote 39
Thus, even rather sophisticated (hi)stories can not only criticize and debunk illusions but can produce comforting self-delusions—which makes it an open struggle of opposing stories.
In his A Secular Age, he is quite forthright in stating that he “will be making a continuing polemic against what I call ‘subtraction stories.’ Concisely put, I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” He continues: “And just because we describe where we are in relating the journey, we can misdescribe it grievously by misidentifying the itinerary. This is what ‘subtraction’ accounts of modernity have in fact done. To get straight where we are, we have to go back and tell the story properly.” Footnote 40 This means at least three things: first, as mentioned before, the richer, more detailed account is superior for Taylor, independent of any other features; second, a narrative is not only an exercise in ordering, but also an argument in itself, as Meili Steele rightly points out; Footnote 41 and third, there are not only old and new (hi)stories but contemporary accounts that are struggling for (political) predominance—which brings us back to the diverging convincing power of narratives, and the key criterion of impact, as purported by Rorty. Do we thus have to recognize that most of the socially relevant histories today are, in the end, just political interventions?
III. Critical Genealogy
(Hi)storytelling is one of the most important tools throughout Taylor’s magnificent oeuvre. As a conclusion, I would like to suggest that there is a likely candidate to sum up Taylor’s decidedly historical approach as a critical intervention into contemporary moral, social, and political life by using a narrative form: the concept of ‘genealogy.’ Footnote 42
This labelling is not an altogether self-evident interpretation, as the term is closely associated with an infamous philosopher. Besides White and Rorty, who are from Taylor’s perspective philosophically rather ‘disagreeable secret allies,’ a new interlocutor enters the stage: Friedrich Nietzsche. Footnote 43 Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to the dark origins of our morality is similar in the focus on transitions and their critical impact, yet more intentionally destructive than Taylor’s ambivalent aim of simultaneously undermining certain contemporary normative conditions (such as ‘shallow’ Enlightenment naturalism) while reaffirming other sources of morality (such as expressive Romanticism). Taylor himself writes:
When Nietzsche wants to launch his out and out attack on morality, he does this by offering an account of the transition to it, the rise of slave morality. ‘Genealogy’ is the name for this kind of probing. No one can fail to recognize that, if true, Nietzsche’s genealogies are devastating. That is because genealogy goes to the heart of the logic of practical reasoning. Footnote 44
Such a genealogy is critical in at least two ways: first, it challenges contemporary conditions by showing or implying their flaws; and second, it is not only critical in its intentions but, interestingly, also in its very (narrative-like) form. Taylor gives us a brief description of what is the formal quintessence of social critique in his perspective and it is all about transitions: “Effective critique has to identify what you can build on in the present situation, and what needs to be overcome. … It’s really of how you get from here to there.” Footnote 45 While not explicitly mentioned, both features are compatible with Taylor’s assessment of narrative in The Language Animal, and the second characteristic in particular is very close to the descriptions and arguments used in Chapter 8.
A critical genealogy thus describes transitions but does not have the power to prove anything—it must convince, just as does any narrative. That applies to Taylor’s approach, as well as to the ‘classic’ genealogies, yet with different emphases: while Nietzsche’s rhetoric is forceful, exaggerated, and polemical, looking for the ‘better’ story, the (as Taylor would say) ‘neo-Nietzschean’ Michel Foucault, Footnote 46 who is almost equally famous regarding critical genealogies, works with more historical sophistication and erudition, providing him with the strategical advantage of not being all too easily disproven or marked as ‘not true.’ Taylor deploys a similar form, albeit with a different aim: to recover the value of morality in an affirmative way, not to undermine it. As has already been acknowledged by interpreters such as Ruth Abbey: “In this regard, his genealogy of morals differs markedly from that of Nietzsche.” Footnote 47 Yet fruitful connections have been noted several times. Possibly the first scholar to note possible connections regarding genealogy was Michael Shapiro, who suggests: “It would therefore behoove Taylor to stop looking over his shoulder at Nietzsche and consider the gains for his kind of hermeneutic analysis that could result from a critical confrontation with the genealogical perspective.” Footnote 48 While being rather sceptical for some time, Taylor himself seems increasingly willing to accept the label. When asked if he makes use of a critical genealogy, he approves: “I agree. It can be a very powerful form of critique, and it can have an affirmative side as well. I don’t take genealogy as necessarily always debunking, although it very often has such debunking elements. So the question we might ask is: ‘is it always worth it?’ And I think that it’s always worth it.” Footnote 49 He also concurs that he makes use of genealogical elements in his quarrel with ‘subtraction stories,’ as he is not simply claiming that they are wrong but trying to show it through a counter-history of the emergence of contemporary secularity. Footnote 50 Taylor does not explicitly discuss his rather obvious genealogical ambitions when it comes to the narrative dimension in The Language Animal. Still, this seems to be the appropriate way to describe his take on the amalgamation of narrative and history with critical intentions. As a final conclusion, one might even venture one step further. In Taylor’s genealogical approach, we can assume the following equation: narrative equals history equals critique.
