Juan Manuel Cincunegui

This article explores homologies between the spheres of theology, epistemology, and politics from a dialectical perspective. The starting point is the recognition that the “reification” or “objectification” of totality is expressed as the negation of otherness. In the theological sphere, structure is defined in terms of “immanence-transcendence”. In this realm, the immanent frame may be closed in on itself, as in the case of physicalist naturalism, which presents itself as “the totality (the physical universe) containing all totalities,” or it may remain open to its exteriority or transcendence. In the epistemological sphere, the circle of representations that constitutes the subject-object correlation, the mind-world relation, the interior-exterior topology, can be interpreted as a primitive and insurmountable totality, the so-called “correlational circle,” or it can remain open to its background. In the political sphere, capitalist modernity, as a historical totality, can present itself as the “end of history” and express itself as the negation of its exteriorities —the excluded populations, non-human nature, and future generations— or it can submit to the verdict of injustice of its victims and take responsibility for the unintended effects produced by its blindness. These structures reveal a transhistorical question concerning the problem of the objectivity of the world that arises from our finite condition. But they also pose a historical question concerning the self-understanding of modernity, the intrinsic logic of the capitalist order, and the horizons of the post-secular era.

Hegel(1975), Sources of the Self(1989) and A Secular Age(2007) are central milestones in an ambitious intellectual project in which the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has insisted, in response to the question about the conditions of the present that the understanding of it should be articulated philosophically and historically. In Hegel, he stressed the distinction between interpretive and ontological dialectics. In Sources of the Self, he articulated a Philosophical Anthropology rooted in history that in a similar vein used a dual approach: (1) ontological o transcendental, in order to shed light on the constituent aspects of the anthropos, and (2) a Philosophical History, in order to account for the different ways of being a person, a subject or a human agent that have been make over time and the variety of geographies. In A Secular Age, Taylor returns to confront the issue in a renew perspective (the conditions of belief and unbelief in the societies of the North Atlantic in the 21stcentury) and he stress the need to implement this dual perspective.

The hermeneutic accounts of identity defended by authors such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Paul Ricoeur confront (1) other hermeneutic approaches, such as that of Richard Rorty, which adhere to a notion of radical contingency; and (2) certain reductionist conceptions within the analytic tradition, such as those defended by Derek Parfit, which seek to explain human identity exclusively on the basis of impersonal events. Despite the points of convergence between Rorty’s and Parfit’s positions in their opposition to positive ontologies, their views are not equivalent. From the notion of the radical contingency of human identity, Rorty aims to draw ethical consequences for determining the status of agents. Parfit, by contrast, uses his “discovery” to radically sever the supposed connection between identity and morality. The Oxford philosopher’s attempt to establish parallels between his utilitarian version grounded in the indeterminacy and emptiness of our identity and the Buddhist notion of “no-self” compels us to undertake a critical examination of both the reductionist and non-reductionist positions within that tradition.

In his work devoted to the study of Hegel (1975), the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor establishes a close relationship between the modes of argumentation and the aims of the philosopher from Jena and of contemporary thinkers such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty. According to Taylor, the works of these philosophers are crucial for escaping the spell imposed by modern epistemology. Despite the similarities, this convergence is limited by the rationalist expressivism of Hegelian metaphysics, which is irreconcilable with the anti-epistemological critique that characterizes these other authors.

In A Secular Age the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor offered an analytical description and a genealogy of the current conditions of belief and unbelief in the North Atlantic contemporary societies. He encouraged as well a set of similar investigations in other cultural settings that are affected by the processes of modernization. He argues about the existence of ‘alternative modernities’ each one of them facing critically the univocal sociological theories of modernity and secularization that interpreted as universal the process of disenchantment occurred in the West and the setbacks with regard to the presence of religion in the public sphere and religious practice in some contemporary Western societies.

This article is framed within the current debate between representatives of the disciplines of philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences, on the one hand, and phenomenologists, on the other, regarding the status of consciousness and the nature of action. Drawing on the critical work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who in The Explanation of Behaviour (1964) challenged the assumptions of psychological behaviorism—assumptions that, in modified form, still largely persist in cognitivist doctrines—this article offers arguments: (1) against the reductionist claim to explain the human solely in terms of the non-human, without thereby minimizing the importance of mechanistic research, while remaining attentive to the inescapably teleological character of action; and (2) against the persistent neglect regarding the status of non-human animals, and in favor of recognizing the need for a more fluid demarcation between human, non-human animal, and inanimate existence.