Edited by Amy Gutmann. Alan Thomas's blog focused on ethics and political philosophy, Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made, Japa Pallikkathayil, “The Possibility of Choice: Three Accounts of the Problem with Coercion”, Holly Lawford-Smith, “Ideal Theory—A Reply to Valentini”, Laura Valentini, “On the Apparent Paradox of Ideal Theory”, Ingrid Robeyns, “Ideal Theory in Theory and Practice”. Harry Stack Sullivan, “Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry,”, Reason thus refers every maxim of the will as universally legislative to every other will and also to every action toward itself, and this not for the sake of any other practical motive or future advantage, but from, And precisely in this lies the paradox that merely the dignity of humanity as rational nature, without any other end or advantage to be attained through it, hence the respect for a mere idea, ought nevertheless to serve as an unremitting precept of the will, and that the sublimity of the maxim consists in just its independence of all incentives, and, A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’. As a matter of fact, Quebeckers tended to put forward a different conception of liberalism. Do not waste what remains of your life in forming impressions about others, unless you are doing so with reference to the common good. A Historical Step Back. Remember that these summaries are made by a clueless student. Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition. Is political recognition of ethnicity or gender essential to a person's dignity? The idea of a universal dignity and the ideal of authenticity combined overturns the patterns of recognition which are based on honour where recognition is necessarily limited to a few and honour is in turn based on social goods such as wealth, birth, position, etc. First, Rousseau. An important influence in bringing about this change has been Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth where he “argued that the major weapon of the colonizers was the imposition of their image of the colonized on the subjugated people. He borrows the denunciation of the concern for pride and honour from the Stoics. In Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, our eyes are opened to the issues of our world today, and how they are being swept under the rug. But even if individual rights were not violated, the adoption of collective goals on behalf of a national group will always discriminate against those, even if only few, people who do not belong or do not wish to belong to that group. From nationalist movements to demands behalf of minority or subaltern groups in feminism and multiculturalism, the invocation of recognition is a mainstay of politics discourse. T. Churchill [1800] (Random Shack, 2016), Book 7, Section 1; Book 8, Section 1. “One might say (though Rousseau didn’t) that in these ideal republican contexts, everyone did depend on everyone else, but all did so equally.”, Rousseau’s underlying, unstated argument would seem to be this: A perfectly balanced reciprocity takes the sting out of our dependence on opinion, and makes it compatible with liberty. — this universalism or equality shall be established is of course an open question and has been applied variously. The issue arose, in discussions of the Charter, about how to balance these aims with the claims of distinctness put forward by Quebeckers and aboriginal peoples. This is a limitation of the theme I am using and despite this irritating lack, I am in no mood to change it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundationsof Inequality Among Mankind [1755], in The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, Edited and with an introduction by Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), Second Part, p. 127. So that, if a person or group is recognised by other persons or groups as inferior in some way — as the colonised were recognised by the colonial masters — their sense of identity can suffer “real damage, real distortion”. “The claim seems to be that a proper respect for equality requires more than a presumption that further study will make us see things this way, but actual judgments of equal worth applied to the customs and creations of these different cultures.”. Some arguments are thus made to justify the politics of difference on the basis of dignity. It will side with the former. There is a universalism here inasmuch as everyone must be recognised for his/her own individuality and originality. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. But for Rousseau, this esteem is inherently a positional good tied to the traditional system of honour that ties respect, recognition and dignity to positions in the social order. Liberalism is no neutral ground. Put differently, for equality of esteem in the way Rousseau and Hegel think to be possible, it has to be the case that everyone endorses, at the absolute least, this particular equal and reciprocal idea of esteem along with the idea that the purpose of human life, of our deeds, is to realise precisely this idea of esteem. To the extent that this idea appeals to something to which we must connect in order to determine right and wrong, it is not new. Because of this, it would take a great deal of effort, and probably many wrenching break-ups, to prevent our identity’s being formed by the people we love. This is a confusion. Well, it would take a supreme arrogance to discount to reject this presumption. Political support for the Accord later unravelled, and it was never put into effect.”. Second, connected with the development of identity has come a “politics of difference” which emphasizes that everyone is owed “recognition of the unique identity” of each individual or group (38). Taylor acknowledges that it can seem narrow, shallow and too focused on instrumental self-interest. Certainly, there are models of equality of rights which are not receptive to cultural distinctness, models which find it unacceptable that, for instance, certain schedules of rights might be applicable in some cultures but not in others. To deny a people this is a great offense. Taylor thinks we can distinguish “two changes” that have made preoccupation with these ideas “inevitable”. Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, Edited by Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1978), 127. And the worrying thought is that this bias might not just be a contingent weakness of all hitherto proposed theories, that the very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal. “Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, which is something only I can articulate and discover. A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’. “A society with strong collective goals can be liberal, on this view, provided it is also capable of respecting diversity, especially when dealing with those who do not share its common goals; and provided it can offer adequate safeguards for fundamental rights.”. These arguments should be familiar – for example, the claim that affirmative action policies for African Americans are justified “as a temporary measure that will eventually level the playing field and allow the old ‘blind’ rules to come back into force in a way that doesn’t disadvantage anyone”—and Taylor thinks the work “up to a point” (40). The question had to arise how to relate this schedule to the claims for distinctness put forward by French Canadians, and particularly Quebeckers, on the one hand, and aboriginal peoples on the other. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Such is the story told by certain feminists who argue that “women in patriarchal societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory image of themselves. Second, it guarantees equal treatment of citizens in a variety of respects, or, put differently, it prohibits discrimination against citizens on irrelevant grounds such as race or sex. These ideas greatly influenced, for instance, John Stuart Mill. So recognition, in a way, couldn’t fail. Let us call what emerges the politics of difference. But “original identity” –the kind a person or a Volk generate—doesn’t enjoy this recognition so easily. These are quite common features of entrenched schedules of rights in western democracies. Now, and this is the second change, the understanding of recognition — in the previous pararaph, we were concerned with recognition: when someone is honoured, this is done in recognition of his services, achievements, or, in the past, his pedigree, wealth, etc. On the social plane “the understanding that identities are formed in open dialogue…has made the politics of equal recognition more central and stressful” (36). We will return to this distinction later. Examining why this was opposed would help better understand the connection between the liberalism of rights and diversity. But, Taylor thinks “there is another way of formulating the charge that is harder to rebut” (61). That is, it demands that whatever a cultural produces, it ought to be accorded equal value. “The issue came to the fore because of the adoption in 1982 of the Canadian Charter of Rights, which aligned our political system in this regard with the American one in having a schedule of rights offering a basis for judicial review of legislation at all levels of government. Rather, he thinks “esteem” – when placed in circumstances of reciprocity, plays an important role in his thought. But, for all that, we are not obligated to make the stronger judgment that all actual cultures—and all the ideas in each—are of equal worth. With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. Such a charge is made against/denies arguments that claim that a liberalism that is blind to differences can serve as a neutral ground on which people of all cultures can meet and coexist. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals [1797], Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale Unversity Press, 2002), pp. And given the fact that substantial numbers of people who live in the west (the Islamic diaspora) will sympathise with those who level this charge, it is a little awkward to say in defence of Rushdie, “This is how we do here in the west” meaning we take freedom of speech very seriously. It wants to confine it as much as possible to the genesis. This requires the appearance of the other in the self, the identification of the other with the self, the reaching of self-consciousness through the other. It is him who first begins to assert the importance of equal respect and its indispensability for freedom. The second supposes that government cannot be neutral on that question, because it cannot treat its citizens as equal human beings without a theory of what human beings ought to be. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Charles Taylor on the Politics of Multiculturalism Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher concerned with the politics of recognition and identity. The Politics of Recognition CHARLES TAYLOR I A NUMBER of strands in contemporary politics turn on the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition. Let us call this the politics of dignity. But what is new in the 18th century development is that this “something” to which we must connect is not God or the Good, but “is deep within us”, and that it is not something else other than our own selves. First, a “collapse of social hierarchies”, which used to be the basis for “honor” (26-7). A short summary of this paper. It is the poems of Homer recited to the Greeks solemnly assembled, not in boxes, on stages and cash in hand, but in the open air and as a body of the nation; it is the tragedies of Aeschylus, of Sophocles, and of Euripides, often represented before them, it is the prizes with which, to the acclamations of all of Greece, the victors in their games were crowned which continuously set them aflame with emulation and glory, brought their courage and their virtues to that degree of energy of which nothing today gives us any idea, and which the moderns cannot even believe. Rousseau was concerned about individual’s “other-dependence” because he thought it made people “slaves to ‘opinion’” (45). These then are two incompatible variants of liberal society: procedural and subtantive. This clash with the Charter was what prompted many to oppose the amendment. Given the diversity of substantive norms in modern society, anything more than the procedural norms might be thought to favor one group over another and thus be unfair. Taylor himself does not discuss them in any detail.]. ".Charles Taylor , Amy Gutmann . … The facilitations and deprivations by the parents and significant others are the source of the material which is built into the self dynamism. In “The Politics of Recognition” (available in full here and here), Taylor explores these strands, and tries to make sense of their historical emergence and relation to liberalism, in part through an incisive look at their emergence in the Canadian context. But now the source we intensified by the new understanding of individual identity have to connect with is deep within us. 6 Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition”, p. 26. With his general approach to the concept of recognition Taylor has found widespread resonance. Thus, if Rousseau’s model doesn’t work, we might ask whether the Kantian model fares better. In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. The Charter gives the basis for judicial review on two basic grounds. Rousseau speaks of morality as “following a voice of nature within us”. The struggle to be recognised by an other and then to confirm our selves is the course of recognition in the relationship between self and others, the encounters of the self with the nurturing others (Benjamin, 1988: 12). Make for the place where the light of reason is kindled. Where they don’t work is when measures are put in place to “maintain and cherish distinctness” (say, of some cultural minority) “not just now but forever” (40). He produced a large body of work that is remarkable for its range—both for the number of areas and issues it addresses as well as for the breadth of scholarship it draws upon. The standards we have, however, are those of North Atlantic civilization.”. Under the aegis of the general will, all virtuous citizens are to be equally honored. “Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human: each person has his or her own ‘measure [Maaß]’.”. And precisely in this lies the paradox that merely the dignity of humanity as rational nature, without any other end or advantage to be attained through it, hence the respect for a mere idea, ought nevertheless to serve as an unremitting precept of the will, and that the sublimity of the maxim consists in just its independence of all incentives, and the dignity of every rational subject consists in being a legislative member in the realm of ends; for otherwise it would have to be represented as subject only to the natural law of its needs. Because, once we have an ideal of authenticity, recognition is no longer based on categories that are given and taken for granted as was the case in the time before the ideal of authenticity came to be articulated, when recognition was based on social positions and other categories that everyone took for granted; these were categories that were not questioned, categories that were, we might say, not problematised. Then the question is no more one of respect, but of taking sides, of solidarity”. This not merely because the exclusion of women and non-Western authors might adversely affect the understanding of students, but importantly in oder not to demean the excluded groups an exclusive curriculum that makes it appear as though “all creativity and worth inhered in males of European provenance”. Canonically, “our status as rational agents” has been singled out, though there are problems with this justification. Peter France, (London: Penguin Books, 2004), Fifth Walk. ; similarly, when it is asserted that all humans have dignity, what is being recognised is the universality of dignity — was being modified and intensified by the end of the 18th century by the development of an understanding of identity that emphasised authenticity. (emphasis added). Dependence on things, since it has no morality, is in no way detrimental to freedom and engenders no vices. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? But, if this is true, what sort of reply should liberals make to non-liberal citizens living in liberal polities? But then, their lives do not become a life unto itself without any dialogicality: in the former, the other is God and in the latter, the other is “the work itself is addressed to a future audience, perhaps still to be created by the work”. READ PAPER. He links the contemporary demand for public recognition of minority cultures with the modern concern for identity and authenticity, ideas he discusses at greater length in his recent book, The Ethics of Authenticity. This is because if you use the latter two, you'll get walls of texts showing the full articles instead of the brief excerpts/summaries of those articles. How did we get here? For instance, the distinction between what is public and what is private, or between politics and religion that liberalism cannot do without is the political expression of one range of cultures — those of the West — and quite incompatible with other ranges. The hermeneutic task consists in not covering up this tension by attempting a naive assimilation of the two but in consciously bringing it out. The idea that drives arguments in favour of minority identities is that it is precisely this distinctness which has been denied, insulted, effaced or otherwise assimilated into a majority identity. Authenticity develops by “displacing” the “moral accent” in this idea”: being in touch with our feelings or true selves takes on independent (moral) significance. Such judgments from such intellectuals would be not only condescending but ethnocentric. Protip: If you wish to navigate the site, use the search function instead of the menu or the tag cloud. The need for recognition, however, is not new. Charles Taylor, Amy Gutmann (Editor)-Multiculturalism Examining the politics of recognition(1994) Download. Pluralism in Practice: The Political Thought of Charles Taylor. A liberal society accords, not a bare liberty right to its members, but a certain set of fundamental rights: e.g. First, it enumerates a set of individual rights very similar to those found in other western (as well as non-western democracies). Our own identity is not something we define once and for all and after which we make whatever use of it. Rather, it is “the political expression of one range of cultures” –certain Western ones, and perhaps many others—but it is “incompatible with other ranges”—certain Muslin societies and cultures, perhaps. His story begins with the thought that “human beings are endowed with a moral sense, an intuitive feeling” for right and wrong (28). Download Full PDF Package. and this is given credence by an ideal of authenticity which insists on the moral worth of the each and everyone insofar as they are their own selves disregarding anything that is external, i.e. Charles Taylor. A person whose desires and impulses are his own — are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture — is said to have a character. I hope I have offered strong evidence in favor of the claim that no one before Augustine conceived of the self as a private inner space, by demonstrating that this concept arose as the solution to a quite specific problem that no one before Augustine is likely to have had. Why such a society does not commit itself to particular views of the good life is that given the diversity of modern societies, the adoption of any particular view of the good life would unfailingly go against the views of at least some members of the society. Charles Taylor’s ‘Politics of Recognition’, that are based on a macro-micro circle by which we are situated into social context. Now a society like Quebec which adopts collective goals violates the procedural commitment. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Ruth Abbey - 2002 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 5 (3):98-123. groups that seek distinction, for that necessarily involves some collective goal which will also require that laws be applied differentially in different cultural contexts. Instead of honor, we now “have the modern notion of dignity”, which is “universalist and egalitarian”: the underlying premise is that everyone shares it. This idea is present in Christianity and goes back to Plato. ( Log Out / While the idea is expressed in many ways, Dworkin encapsulates it a way that is relevant to this discussion in his paper “Liberalism” where he distinguishes between two types of moral commitment: a substantive commitment about the ends of life, about what constitutes a good life, which we and others ought to strive for and a procedural commitment to deal fairly and equally with each other, regardless of how we conceive our ends. Download PDF. Honour not as something which everybody can have as when the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights says that “no one shall be subjected to … attacks upon his honour and reputation”; but honour as something only some people can have as when somebody is honoured with, say, the Légion d’Honneur in France, or made a Duke in the UK: clearly, if everybody has it, it is no longer an honour. This could be seen as a limitation from which one should free oneself. A lot of criticisms are leveled at modern Western individualism. But is this the only way in which such models — “the liberalisms of equal rights” — can be understood/interpreted? Second, and this in contrast to the previous, the rise of the ideal of authenticity has given rise not to a politics of equality of recognition based on the idea of a universal dignity but of a politics of difference based on the idea of the distinctness and worth of every group. [W]hoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free; for such is the condition which, uniting every citizen to the fatherland, protects him from all personal dependency, a condition that ensures the control and working of the political machine, and alone renders legitimate civil engagements, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and subject to the most enormous abuses. Reading these summaries or, more accurately, paraphrases is not a substitute for reading the actual texts. In Islam, for instance, such distinctions cannot arise, cannot make sense. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition [1992],” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Edited and Introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–75. They usually appeal to “other factors, like inequality, exploitation, and injustice, as their motives”. The feeling of existence [sentiment de l’existence] unmixed with any other emotion is in itself a precious feeling of peace and contentment which would be enough to make this mode of being loved and cherished by anyone who could guard against all the earthly and sensual influences that are constantly distracting us from it in this life and troubling the joy it could give us. And the demand is that equal respect be accorded to “actually evolved cultures”. WORDS 463. For it amounts to the claim that the very idea of the principle of equality is nothing more than a specific cultural idea that cannot be applied to all cultures. After a self has arisen, it in a certain sense provides for itself its social experiences, and so we can conceive of an absolutely solitary self. Without equality of esteem and unity of purpose, men shall forever remain enslaved (dependent on others). This being the case, it then becomes impossible to distinguish between declaring the worth of a certain culture and declaring that one likes/supports/endorses that culture.
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