Abbey, Ruth. Charles Taylor.

Simpson, Peter

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. vi + 250 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper $16.95--To write a book summarizing and explaining the thought of a wide-ranging and complex philosopher is a hard task, and even more so when the philosopher in question is still writing. Still, it is usually a worthy and often a necessary task. That is certainly so in this case. Charles Taylor is one of the few contemporary philosophers both to be at the forefront of a major philosophical movement (that of communitarianism) and to have comfortably and ably straddled the great divide between analytic and continental philosophy. He is also a philosopher who has had, and continues to have, a significant impact in the difficult and very different world of active politics, namely in his native Quebec.

Ruth Abbey brings to this worthy and necessary task both wide knowledge and eager enthusiasm. She is a sympathetic, though not uncritical, exponent of her subject. She carefully and informatively takes us through the several moments that she singles out of Taylor's thought. She admits that there is something a bit artificial about this. Taylor's thought is more of a continuum than a whole of clearly articulated parts. To divide the continuum into discrete moments discretely examined runs the risk of distorting that thought. There is, however, no alternative. Perhaps indeed the fault is in the thinker that his thought is not easily articulated, and perhaps it is a service to the thinker for another to do the articulating for him. If so, then Taylor could hardly ask for a more sympathetic articulator than Abbey.

She divides her book into five main chapters: (1) "Explaining Morality"; (2) "Interpreting Selfhood'; (3) "Theorizing Politics"; (4) "Understanding Knowledge"; (5) "Conclusion: Sources of Secularity." She adds that the absence of a chapter on Taylor on language is in part an indication of the general problem: Taylor's views on language are discussed in every chapter because of the difficulty of separating them out from his views on other matters. It would have perhaps been interesting trying the same approach with the other themes that Abbey does pick out, but then it would have been hard to find a principle of organization other than that of chronology (which has its own problems). Abbey's approach is probably as good as one can expect with a subject like Taylor.

But let us turn now to the content of the book. Here our interest is in seeing how well Abbey has introduced her readers into her subject's thought and enabled them to see the good and the bad. One should note, therefore, at the outset that Abbey has been expressly serf-denying in avoiding criticism except in the notes and in occasional concluding remarks at the end of chapters. This seems the right approach to take given her overall aim, but it also has the additional advantage of allowing the reader freely to form his own judgments as he goes along. Speaking for myself, then, as such a reader, I found my ideas about Taylor (as about others in his rough communitarian line of thinking, as MacIntyre) more or less confirmed. Taylor is good in criticism of others' views and in his more concrete or immediately practical thinking (as on politics and secularity), but unconvincing in his grand historical overviews of human thought. I personally think that such overviews are impossible to achieve and anyway not necessary for understanding. Certainly the particular views of particular others can be helpful in our own search for truth, but that is all we need concern ourselves with. Whether there is also some sort of story to tell about past thought, or several stories, is matter for diversion perhaps but not a key to understanding the questions at issue.

I also found myself confirmed in my views that historicist and fallibilist approaches to knowledge, such as we also find in MacIntyre, and which Taylor picks up in part from Gadamer, are incoherent. What is interesting about such ideas is not whether they are true--they are not--but why so many otherwise clever thinkers are attracted to them. The best answer I have so far come up with--and Abbey's discussion of Taylor has only confirmed me in this--is that it is the natural place to go in reaction to the false objectivism or ahistoricism of much analytic philosophy. Human thought necessarily begins in time and proceeds through time and is inevitably colored thereby. Yet it need not stay bound by time or it need not end in time: it can transcend time and reach the eternal. The best analogy I know of this is Plato's cave. We all necessarily start in some cave or other--the cave of our particular time and place and culture--but there is a path from every cave to the universal and eternal truth outside (and above all to the truth about caves). We cannot, unlike some strains in analytic philosophy, ignore the historicity of our present context (and above all the historicity of analytic philosophy). However, we should not think, unlike strains in continental philosophy, that we can never transcend historicity to eternal truth.

Without making this anywhere her theme, Abbey, in her careful and faithful presentation of the many parts and phases of Taylor's thought, helps us to see it as the chief lesson we can learn from Taylor. For that reason, as for the several others already briefly noted, we have much reason to be grateful to her for this book.--Peter Simpson, City University of New York.