First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

9 Responses

1. Michael Kowalewski says:

   January 30, 2008 at 8:49 pm

   I was disappointed that your very extensive interview with Charles Taylor missed what seems to me the main point. Taylor is that rare, perhaps extinct breed - a metaphysician. Having been treated as almost tantamount to child-murder by thinkers from Nietzsche, through Heidegger, Logical Positivism, Wittgenstein to Derrida this poor creature, metaphysics, still lives in Taylor. Metaphysics tries to think the whole of reality, even if reality appears impossibly distant from itself, and in that endeavour unites philosophy and religion. The interview ended up tiptoeing around the metaphysical core and discussing peripheral issues. An opportunity missed to peer a little beyond our Platonic cave.
2. Bashy Quraishy says:

   January 31, 2008 at 3:10 am

   Although, I have a great desire to comment on issues such as multiculturalism, ethnicity and nationalism which were raised with the help of some very misleading questions by David Goodhart and the simplified answers given by the highly respected Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his interview. But I would restrict myself to the off the cuff questions and answers about Islam and Pakistan.
   First of all, Tariq Ramadan has never advocated a European Version of Islam. What he have repeatedly said is that Muslims in Europe can develop an interpretation of the Quranic texts according to the present times and living conditions. There is a huge difference between Version and interpretation of Holy Scriptures. For any knowledgeable person with Muslim background, there is one Islam and one Quran but many different ways to practice it. All 72 sects understand Islam in their own way, depending upon, where one lives and which culture one belongs too. For example, Hinduism and Buddhism have influenced Islam in Pakistan, India, Bangla Desh and Sri Lanka.
   Pakistan was never meant to be a Muslim state but a state for oppressed Indian Muslims. The founder if Pakistan Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah time and again reminder Muslims in India that in Pakistan every one would be free to practice his or her own faith. His secularism did not start or end with drinking whiskey as CT claims but in his belief that state and religion should not be mixed. The same goes for Musharaf’s secularism. Both Jinnah and Musharaf believe in Islam and its tenants but on individual level. The concept of Islam as a united Ummah is more on a spiritual level and not so much as a wish to take over the world or dominate the West. Even an ego-centrist like Osama Bin Laden does not claim that. It is very irresponsible of CT to suggest that Pakistan army is infiltrated by THEM. Who are they? Pakistan army is one of the most professional outfit and religion as an all-encompassing ideology is of no significance to army personals. Pakistan military mirrors the society where some are religious, others are part practicing and according to a survey conducted by PEW from USA, and 85 percent Pakistanis are non-religious.
   So, please do express opinions and even criticize Pakistan and Islam but make sure that you know what you are talking about
3. Stuv says:

   February 1, 2008 at 9:58 pm

   Oh no - you just cannot be serious about CT being “the most important philosopher writing in English today”. On a ‘most prolific catholic apologist…’ list I grant you CT might vie for the top spot. But on the ‘most important philosopher…’ list, with Daniel Dennett undoubtedly at number one, CT would struggle to make it into the top twenty.
4. John says:

   February 2, 2008 at 5:50 am

   The trouble with Charles Taylor is that he never asks really fundamental questions re what we are as human beings and our relation to Reality and Truth altogether—-he accepts the usual entirely mortal meat-body model of Humankind, which is common to both scientism and exoteric religion, as the starting point for his speculations.

   A quote from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad: “It is from the other that fear arises”

   Meaning that the moment you presume or conceive the asana of separateness, everything “else” (or other) is your mortal enemy and that you always at war with the other.

   Taylor (and everyone else) accepts the three presumptions below as the given. But they dont even begin to understand the cultural consequences of these presumptions.

   1. God is the entirely other or the objectified “great relation”—which means that God is your enemy and that you are always at war with the Divine Reality.

   2. The world altogether is entirely objectified other–which means that the world is your enemy and that you are always at war with the world.

   3. All sentient beings, including humans, are entirely other and thus objectified—which means that everyone is your enemy and you are always at war with all other beings.

   Thus we have the politics and “culture” of fear being dramatised all over the planet.

   The notion of God as the entirely other “great relation” was/is a device for reducing the Divine to the human scale only. And of thus controlling god, and using god to justify all the usual horrors done by the tribe with the approval of the ecclesiastical “authorities”.

   Historically it was only a matter of time before even this limited (half-baked) notion of god was found to be unnecessary, and hence thrown away. This process began with the rise of scientism and its “religious” twin Protestantism—meat-body man became the entire focus of Western “culture”.

   Everything became thoroughly secularised.

   You can see the resultant “culture” by turning on your TV set. That is all the “culture” that we have.

   Despite it being necessary at the time, and despite some of the very real gains for many people in terms of real freedoms from various tyrannies, the so called “enlightenment” was really a process wherein the Divine Light was shut down from the Western “cultural” landscape. And the possibility of a Divine Life too. There have been no IllUMINATED Saints in the West for a very long time.

   How profound then can a philosophy, or a theology, and a culture possibly be if it is generated from the point of view of a fear saturated meat body?

   Charles Taylor (and everyone else) cant even begin to describe what a truly Divine Life, or even a truly religious culture, might look like.
5. John says:

   February 2, 2008 at 6:22 am

   Some more comments re the limitations of Charles Taylor’s mis-understandings.

   Both exoteric religion and secular scientific materialism are magic paranoid (and, altogether, anti-ecstatic) traditions, rooted in fear of the magical power potential of the individual human.

   Both have, for many centuries been actively instructing (or propagandistically coercing) humankind to disbelieve and to dissociate from all modes of association with magical, and metaphysical, and even Spiritual, and, in general, ecstasy-producing ideas and activities.

   The process of negative indoctrination to which humankind has long been subjected by its sacred and secular “authorities” has, actually, been a magic-paranoid political, social, economic, and cultural effort to enforce a gross “realist”, or thoroughly “materialist”—and, altogether, anti-ecstatic, anti-magical, anti-metaphysical, and anti-spiritual—model of human life upon all individuals and all collectives.

   Taylor is effectively one of the gate-keepers who (unwittingly, and despite his best intentions) enforces this anti-ecstatic magic-paranoid cultural program.
6. Salvatore says:

   February 10, 2008 at 7:19 pm

   Hello! I am Italian and did not quite understand these two passages between **:

   I’ve been ** absent from, let’s say, the “Oxford DPhil syllabus philosophy of religion,” because nobody who has any interest in anything would buy that ** .

   So sometimes, instead of speaking softly and ** carrying a big moneybag—Teddy Roosevelt didn’t quite say that—we carry few pennies ** and we give them huge sermons about integration: “We’ve let you guys in here and we let you do what you want to do, now look what’s happening.”

   May you explain to me what is their meaning?

   Best,

   Salvatore
7. Ross Cameron says:

   March 3, 2008 at 11:04 am

   Metaphysicians a “rare, perhaps extinct” breed? That comes as a bit of a shock to those of us like me who get paid to do metaphysics for a living. Metaphysics was certainly largely unpopular amongst philosophers in the English speaking world for a period of about 50 years in the early 20th century; but reports of its death were, happily, exaggerated, and metaphysics as a discipline is currently flourishing. Of course, there remain philosophers who are sceptical of the whole discipline. That’s good – it keeps us on our toes. But as a glance at the current activity in philosophy journals and conferences will confirm, there are plenty of us who aim to discover how the world is in and of itself – who aim to peer beyond Plato’s cave.
8. Stephen Billing’s Blog » Interdependence says:

   September 18, 2008 at 10:18 pm

   [...] actually quite an egocentric view of the world with the individual at the centre. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes this way of seeing the world as ‘individualism’, and is the basis of much of [...]
9. Dr. David Heinimann says:

   April 10, 2009 at 5:05 pm

   I once did a seminar with CT. After reading “Secular Age”, I proposed to him that man invented god and that god, as ur-symbol, represents perfection. He was curtly dismissive, which is typical of the religious: their incapacity to engage this fundamental construction of the imagination is mixed with their infinite capacity to spin it out (cf. the heft of “SA”) when feeling the divine. Against their romanticism, I recommend the pragmatism of Richard Rorty.