[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:1 (September 2007).]
Why Charles Taylor Deserved This Year’s Templeton Prize
C. John Sommerville
You may know that the annual Templeton Prize, which carries more money than a Nobel Prize, is awarded for contributions in religion. Over the years it has become a notable cultural event. It has been awarded to Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, but is normally given to those working the border between science and religion, like Stanley Jaki and John Polkinghorne.
This year the prize went to Charles Taylor, which is a name that should mean more than it does. Taylor is a philosopher, who taught at Oxford and McGill (in Montreal), and he is notable for putting “personalism” on the philosophical agenda.
Why is that remarkable? Personalism is significant in that it brings religious questions back to the table in the discourse of meaning. The academic world is caught in a struggle between philosophical Naturalism and this other thing I’m calling Personalism. Philosophy departments aren’t necessarily debating this issue, being distracted by smaller-scale concerns. But the parts of the university that impinge on the “real world,” the sciences and all the professional schools, keep stumbling over issues of Naturalism and the human.
Naturalism is basically materialism. It seeks to “reduce” human values like justice, truth, responsibility, wealth, love, the human, to “physicalist” terms. You’ve been hearing about the neuroscientists’ efforts to explain religion and everything else (except their own science!) by tracking and measuring brain impulses. Before that, it was sociobiology that tried to explain the human away, in terms of evolutionary psychology. That didn’t get very far before getting stuck. But the naturalists will never give up, nor should they. Science has a duty to see how far naturalistic explanations and proofs will work. Unfortunately, scientists sometimes explain things before discovering them, promising answers before they’re available. This is often convincing to journalists, and is becoming imbedded in our culture.
Personalism takes the opposite approach. Basically, it takes those value terms (justice, responsibility, love, etc.) to be as real as anything in the universe. Philosophers define real as irreducible, and personal values have never been “explained” or reduced conceptually. There is no reason to think they ever will be, making them as real as gravity or space. Indeed, personalists argue that the most real things in our universe are the things that can act. Actors (persons) are more real than the things that are acted upon, such as our physical elements. So it is not only our bodies that are “real” but out intentions and character as well.
Since religion is more obviously part of the personal rather than the material, Taylor’s arguments bring religion back to the forefront of philosophy. In many academic departments, Naturalism is assumed to be self-evident. So while people may casually use human and even religious terms, we imagine them to be philosophically or scientifically second rate.
This is where Taylor made a breakthrough. He has forced academics to recognize the reality of the personal. The important thing for us is that is the conceptual language that religion is comfortable with. Partly, Taylor has done this by avoiding the term Personalism. It’s an old term that never captured the attention of philosophers. Taylor did capture their attention, especially with his Sources of the Self (Harvard, 1989). “Self” is the fashionable term for human concerns. It is a long and complex book, but it became an instant classic.
For whatever reason, Taylor doesn’t build his case by drawing on his personalist predecessors, like Martin Buber, John Macmurray, Michael Polanyi, Borden Parker Bowne, John Zizioulas, John Habgood. Fashion has passed them by. Rather, his big book engages the usual suspects: Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, the Encyclopedists, Hume, the Romantics, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault. In other words, he is forcing his way into the philosophical canon rather than pleading for a niche within the academy.
Though retired, Taylor is still very active. Being asked to give the Gifford Lectures in Scotland is as high an honor as philosophers or theologians get. Taylor gave his series in 1999 and is developing them into three books on the large subject of secularization. He is broadening that theme far beyond the discredited “secularization hypothesis” of Max Weber and others. The third volume, A Secular Age, is due out this year.
Note: A review of Sources of the Self appeared in Reconsiderations 2:3 (June, 2003).
A board member of the Christian Study Center, C. John Sommerville is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Florida. He is currently finishing a book on religious ideas for secular universities.