How important is the imagination for the acquisition of knowledge? with Special Reference to Charles Taylor’s Notion of the Social Imaginary

Stevan Veljkovic October 28, 2015

Phenomenology and hermeneutics belong together. – charles taylor “History, Critique, Social Change and Democracy: An Interview with Charles Taylor,” by Ulf Bohmann and Darío Montero, Constellations 21, no. 1 (2014)

The philosopher Charles Taylor is not known for using a lot of jargon in his work, but in unguarded moments he may sometimes slip. In this essay I want to show that Taylor does indeed bring together hermeneutics and phenomenology in his notion of the “social imaginary”. This expression underpins the argument in his great work, A Secular Age.1 There it allows him to invoke the phenomenological idea of a “background”, while at the same time retaining an idiom of plainspokenness and leaving his epistemological premises mostly unarticulated. I want to further show that the accessibility of Taylor’s prose is not merely an accident of rhetoric, but rather a key element of what I will call his “hermeneutical minimalism”. The fact that social imaginary—and it is best described as an expression—can support this sort of hermeneutics indicates something of the great prominence that the idea of imagination continues to have in our shared self-understanding: and hence, its importance for one particular way that we acquire knowledge about ourselves. 1. Hereafter abbreviated as SA. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Veljkovic Sample I My argument in this essay runs more or less along the following lines. First, to really understand how the social imaginary works in SA it needs to be seen that Taylor developed the idea to meet certain criticisms of his previous magnum opus, Sources of the Self.2 Both works rely upon the same sort of geistesgeschichtlich grand narrative. But whereas the earlier book draws upon “history” in a somewhat disengaged, “view from no where” mode of historicism, the later work drops all reference to history as such. This is where phenomenology comes in. The social imaginary is a way of talking about the “background” of our common understanding. Taylor can then say that his task is to explicate the imaginary, which is quite different from laying out the nuts and bolts of a diachronic-causal history. In this sense, the social imaginary is historically conditioned, but altogether distinct from history per se. But what precisely is the social imaginary? It is first of all a phenomenological idea. The imaginary, used as a substantive noun, has been a standard entry in the lexicon of phenomenologists who look back, via different lineages, to Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sartre.3 Taylor numbers among this group; but he is a kind of hybrid-figure, whose work bridges the Continental (phenomenological-hermeneutic) and the Anglophone (analytical-linguistic) traditions.4 In fact, Taylor’s thought links back strongly to Heidegger, chiefly via Hans-Georg Gadamer, and his direct debt to Merleau-Ponty may be greater still.5 But, significantly, Taylor’s thought has also been shaped by Romantic expressivism. When I say that social imaginary as used by Taylor is best described as an expression, I am trying to get at some of the epistemology that he would prefer to leave mostly unarticulated. It is plain that the imaginary is how we access certain kinds of social knowledge; it comprises the “socially shared ways in which social spaces are imagined.” 6 This sounds simple enough (and the description is intended to sound this way) but it is easy to misunderstand what Taylor means by this. One might think, for instance, that social imaginary is merely designative, a shorthand for phenomena that could otherwise 2. Hereafter abbreviated as SS. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. See Kathleen Lennon, Imagination and Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–14. 4. Charles Taylor, “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Mark B. N. Hansen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26–49. 5. Nicholas Smith, “Taylor and the Hermeneutic Tradition,” in Charles Taylor, ed. Ruth Abbey, Contemporary Philosophy in Focus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–32; note also Taylor’s claim that he did not become interested in Hegel until reading Merleau-Ponty at Oxford, cited in Robert Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant and Charles Taylor (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 164. 6. Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 2011), 86; for the places where Taylor develops social imaginary most extensively see especially Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Public Planet Books (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); chapters 4 and 5 in Taylor, A Secular Age; and Taylor’s discussion of social imaginary in the Charles Taylor, “Apologia pro Libro suo,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2010), particularly 312–14.

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Veljkovic Sample I be described in materialist terms. But Taylor has always been opposed to this kind of naturalism in the humanities; and he is quite clear that the imaginary is not theory. He wants the social imaginary rather to be a source of knowledge that is in some sense immediately available to us. Therefore, as an expression, social imaginary is meant to resonate with and evoke a pre-ontological understanding that permeates a given society. This is what Taylor means about wanting to go beyond theory. If we accept this much, there is still the question of why Taylor leaves the epistemology unarticulated. Would it not strengthen his argument to make these matters plain? This is where hermeneutics comes in. SA is meant to be a certain kind of accessible and “uncontroversial” narrative. This is why a theoretical excursus about epistemology would rather detract from Taylor’s hermeneutical aims. Actually, SS incorporated Taylor’s epistemological ideas much more explicitly, but at the cost of complicating the narrative. Taylor stands in a tradition of hermeneutics that accepts that the perspective of human beings is situated and finite; he accepts the intrinsically revisable nature of self-understanding and the impossibility of arriving at any final language. He is not trying to formulate a theory of everything; his aim is rather that of giving a best account, similar to the Gadamerian aim of “coming to an understanding”. So the social imaginary allows Taylor to draw upon phenomenology in order to avoid the charge of facile historicizing; and at the same time it enables him to accomplish this without weighing down his narrative with a lot of prolix and technical discussion. He wants, rather, to retain the idiomaticity of his style in order to tell a story that can command broad assent. Now, what I refer to as Taylor’s hermeneutical minimalism is one way of talking about his “best account” principle. This is essentially an argument about practical reason, of appealing to intuited moral responses. “Because following the argument in favour of a theory in natural science requires that we neutralize our own anthropocentric reactions, we too easily conclude that arguments in the domain of practical reason ought not to rely on our spontaneous moral reactions.” 7 We should take the “best account” to be the one that moves us in a particular way, because being moved is part of what it means to understand something.8 Taylor’s SA wants to offer a full-bodied description of modern secularity in this kind of “best account”. The book is enormous, in various senses of the word, and there is not space here to offer more than a cursory treatment. But at the book’s core is the question that appears in the first line: “What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” 9 7. Taylor, Sources of the Self , 71. 8. For the “best account” principle see Taylor, Sources of the Self , 71– 74; for the connection to practical reason see the essay “Explanation and Practical Reason” in Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995), 34– 60; cf. Thomas Pfau’s notion of “responsible knowledge” in Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 508–509. 9. Taylor, A Secular Age, 1.

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Veljkovic Sample I His answer is couched in a narrative hermeneutics similar to the “genealogy” associated with Nietzsche or Foucault, and it boils down to some basic features of our contemporary life: “great variety, great movement, and a great potential to be deeply shaken by other positions.” 10 It is important that Taylor wants the observations he adduces from history to be as uncontroversial as possible.11 This is party because both history and hermeneutics are secondary to Taylor’s primary aim. The complications which might threaten to derail Taylor’s narrative are instead wrapped up in the notion of social imaginary. To be sure, the idea is not merely a hollow instrument; and a complete account of how it works in SA would also need to describe, for instance, what Taylor means by the “Axial Age” and the idea of “Axial religion” 12 But it is clear that Taylor developed the social imaginary at least in part to address certain criticisms that were levelled at SS.13 Taylor uses the same kind of genealogy in both SA and SS, but there is a crucial difference between them in how history is characterized. In the prior work, Taylor invokes history rather directly, describing SS as “an attempt to articulate and write a history of the modern identity.” 14 By contrast, of SA Taylor says only that he is “telling a story, that of what we usually call ‘secularization’ in the modern West.” 15 Or again in the preface to SS Taylor talks about philosophy and history as two distinct and separate discoures: “Those who are utterly bored by modern philosophy might want to skip Part I. Those who are bored by history, if by some mistake they find this work in their hands, should read nothing else”.16 Compare this to SA, where the introduction never mentions “history” as such; nor does the rest of the book contain any discussion of history as a distinct discipline. So how does the social imaginary make Taylor’s account better? In both books Taylor’s narrative looks to well-known theorists, for instance Hugo Grotius or John Locke, as sources of our modern self-understanding. The problem then becomes: is it really plausible to trace a direct line back to this sort of high-level theory 10. Quoted in Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 4n3. 11. For an explicit connection to Nietzsche and the relation of genealogy to Taylor’s “best account principle” see Taylor, Sources of the Self , 72– 74; at one point Taylor describes what he’s doing as “Entstehungsgeschichte” Taylor, A Secular Age, 26. 12. The idea comes from Karl Jaspers, Vom Urpsung und Ziel der Geschichte (München: Piper, 1949); Peter Gordon’s article contains a good discussion of how social imaginary works with the Axial Age hypothesis (though I disagree with the overall slant of Gordon’s article, which mischaracterizes Taylor’s programme as a kind of crypto- theology): Peter E. Gordon, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (October 2008): 658ff. 13. See for instance Quentin Skinner, “Who are ‘we’ ? Ambiguities of the modern self,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (2 1991): 133–153; similar complaints were made against SA, but required a much more sophisticated argumentation: see, Jonathan Sheehan, “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” in Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, particularly 227. 14. Taylor, Sources of the Self , ix. 15. Taylor, A Secular Age, ix. 16. Taylor, Sources of the Self , x.

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Veljkovic Sample I from the quotidian practices of our contemporary life? To minimize the opening for this criticism against SA Taylor simply avoids invoking history in the abstract, disengaged manner of SS. This is where the phenomenological background comes in. In Taylor’s view the “background” is shaped by history but, being an immediate feature of present experience, is not itself historical. It is the distinction between Geschichte, the narrative of broad patterns, and a more narrow Historie concerned with the chronological description of causes. Thus, by dropping the reference to history and instead claiming his task to be the explication of a “social imaginary” he can address the above-stated criticisms of SS. Primarily he can say that the social imaginary has been infused, over time, by the thought of influential theorists of the sort of he is keen to cite. What I tried to do in A Secular Age was sketch the changeover, the process in which the modern theory of moral order gradually infiltrated and transformed the social imaginary. In this process, what is originally just an idealization grows into a complex imaginary by being taken up and associated with social practices, in part traditional ones, though it is often transformed by the contact.17 In other words the social imaginary provides a way of describing continuity and change not on the level of historical positivism but on the idealist one.18 Of course invoking the “background” in this way hardly solves the problems of historicism. The distinction between history and a background that is historically conditioned might be regarded as an empty one.19 And Taylor has expressed a somewhat chastened attitude on this point: The historiography I’m trying to draw on here, admittedly as an incompetent amateur consumer rather than a professional producer, is akin to that of mentalités and focuses on social imaginaries. This awakens insuperable skepticism in the breast of many historians. There is an important warning here, which I don’t want to ignore, not to overplay the hand. But I don’t think it ought to stop a mapper of social imaginaries altogether in her tracks.20 17. The italics are mine. Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 312. 18. Vanheeswijk describes the social imaginary as a species of transcendental deduction: Guido Vanheeswijck, “Does History Matter? Charles Taylor on the Transcendental Validity of Social Imaginaries,” History and Theory 54 (1 2015); also see Carlos D. Colorado and Justin D. Klassen, eds., Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). 19. For a useful discussion of the background in this context, see Paul D. Janz, “Transcendence, ‘Spin,’ and the Jamesian Open Space,” in Colorado and Klassen, Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor , 53–59. 20. Taylor, “Apologia pro Libro suo,” 314.

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Veljkovic Sample I So arguably his programme is most vulnerable at precisely this point. But the move to social imaginary certainly changes the focus in a way that makes Taylor’s hermeneutics more persuasive than it was when he claimed to be merely writing history. Now, as I alluded to earlier, it might be easy to read Taylor as saying that the social imaginary is a shorthand for collective phenomena that are ultimately reducible in material terms. By such an interpretation what we call a society, for instance, is just an aggregate of human minds that could, in theory, be mapped to biochemistry or neuroscience or whatever. This kind of foundationalism is behind the opinion that [the] scholarly tool of the social imaginary is fundamentally different from most of the standard investigative paradigms of contemporary academic examination. Conventional scholarly inquiries into the social forms of modernity take individualisms or bureaucracies or nation-states to be modernity’s fundamental building blocks.21 But a materialist reading of this kind could not be further from Taylor’s meaning.22 Throughout his career Taylor has criticized “the confused inarticulacy of modern naturalism” which for him derives from “a deep reticence in talking about foundations and an inability to determine how to talk about them.” 23 In fact, Taylor should be classed with those contemporary philosophers who reject “the modern epistemological tradition”, which begins with Descartes, and the “powerful picture of mind-in-the-world” which is its essence. 24 Hubert Dreyfus describes Taylor’s position on epistemology as “pluralistic robust realism”.25 For Taylor the defining characteristic of the modern epistemological tradition is adherence to some “mediation” theory or another.26 The quintessential recognition that we are stuck in a broken mediationalism 21. Jeremy S Neill, “Review essay: Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 215 pp,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 5 (June 2008): 575–580. 22. It is important to note however that Taylor does not reject all materialist explanation, nor is he necessarily hostile to the modern science. Cf. “I’m suspicious of any formalism, and idealism versus materialism is a totally bankrupt discussion. You’re closer to the truth when you’re saying that it takes both—as if just a single formula could do it all.” “History, Critique, Social Change and Democracy: An Interview with Charles Taylor,” 11; see also Ch. 5, “The Spectre of Idealism” in Taylor, A Secular Age, 212– 218; Ch. 3, “The Spectre of Idealism” in Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 49– 68; Ch. 12, “A Digression on Historical Explanation” in Taylor, Sources of the Self , 199-207. 23. Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, 12. 24. Taylor has written a volume with Hubert Dreyfus detailing his proposed alternative to the predominant mediational epistemology, but it is still in press as this essay is being written. See Taylor and Dreyfus, Retrieving Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); presumably some sense of the forthcoming book can be found in this recent chapter by Taylor of the same title: Taylor, “Retrieving Realism,” in Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Drefus Debate, ed. Joseph K. Schear (London: Routledge, 2011), 61 25. Abbey, Charles Taylor , 79. 26. Taylor identifies four features that define a mediationalist position: 1) an “only through” structure, whether based on Cartesian ideas, Kantian categories, etc., 2) the theoretical possibility of generating a complete catalogue of our knowledge in discrete units, 3) the impossibility of going beyond (or below)

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Veljkovic Sample I comes from Wittgenstein: “Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen.” 27 Taylor describes his alternative proposal as a “contact theory” of epistemology. Where a mediation theory seeks knowledge as arising through some mediational element, so that we have contact with the real in knowledge only through some intermediary, depiction or category, contact theories give an account of knowledge as our attaining unmediated contact with the reality known.28 By this view there is a great deal of knowledge about the world that is available to human beings in some sense immediately. This is what Taylor means when he says he wishes to go beyond theory: if the phenomenological background is something immediately known to us, then it therefore does not require a theory to be explicated. “For contact theories, truth is self-authenticating. When you’re there, you know you’re there.” 29 So Taylor privileges practical reason, but this is not merely a reprise of the naturalistic fallacy; nor is it a species of subjectivism, because Taylor’s realism means that our immediate moral reactions are in some sense true and not merely private experience.30 But why does this all seem so submerged? Would it not strengthen Taylor’s position in SA if he had laid this all on the table, so to speak? This is where hermeneutics comes in. By a mediationalist view there is, in theory, no limit to what we can know through representations of the world out there. What distinguishes Taylor both from any sort of mediationalist position, as well as from other anti-epistemologists like Richard Rorty, is a certain acknowledgement of limited aims for human understanding. This sensitivity to human finitude is a facet of Taylor’s thought that owes much to Hans-Georg Gadamer. And Taylor has observed his anti-epistemological interlocutors making the same kind of overreaching mistake that they claim to be critiquing. Taylor cites Derrida as one example of this tendency: In [Derrida’s] view the fundamental error, in which Descartes participates, is even more deeply rooted. It is the whole western metaphysical tradition which accords illusory privilege to “Presence”, to a kind of unmediated epistemic contract with reality. Derrida’s response to this is a high-level, abstract, a priori argument to the impossibility of Presence, so defined; on which he then draws to make all sorts of affirmations about thought, lan-

these formulated elements, and 4) and finally some kind of mental/physical dualism (which in most cases will not be literal but remains operative at an abstract level.) Taylor, “Retrieving Realism,” 68–69. 27. “A picture keeps us imprisoned.” Taylor quotes this in multiple places, for instance: Taylor, “Retrieving Realism,” 11; and Taylor, “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture,” 26. 28. Taylor, “Retrieving Realism,” 72. 29. Ibid., 74. 30. See Smith, “Taylor and the Hermeneutic Tradition,” 40.

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Veljkovic Sample I guage, history, power relations, ethics, politics, and so on. But this is only to repeat the epistemological démarche in the negative mode.31 Taylor is trying to stake out a position where he can avoid this kind of error. This is how the minimalism of his hermeneutics should be understood. We can compare Taylor on this point with Cornelius Castoriadis, whose essay on social imaginary from 1974 is bold and vigorous but as a text somewhat confused due to its admixture of epistemology, dialectics, phenomenology, not to mention polemic.32 Ultimately Castoriadis, writing as he does from the tradition of dialectical materialism, wants to say something about ontology, and wants to spell out explicitly a synthesis of the phenomenology of imagination together with epistemology and ontology. This is—in contrast to Taylor’s minimalism—a position of maximalism which derives from the totalizing instinct that Taylor wants to resist.33 To cultivate “immediate” knowledge, without the epistemological overhead of a mediating theory, sounds like a good approach—but it means accepting certain limits. This is the dimension of fallibilism implied by the “pluralistic, robust” qualification of Taylor’s realism. He expresses this elsewhere when he says “coming to an understanding may require that I give some ground in my objectives”. At work here is a powerful, anti-nomothetic principle of charity.34 Though in latter part of Taylor’s corpus all of this tends to be integrated into a certain kind of idiom, his earlier work brings it out explicitly. The paradigmatic statement of Taylor’s hermeneutics is his essay “Self-Interpreting Animals”.35 Here his debt to Gadamer shows most clearly, insofar as he holds that problems in the humanities—the German Geisteswissenschaften—are not to be solved by the methodology of the natural sciences. This is the old distinction between the nomothetic, law-bound sciences and those of an idiographic, descriptive character.36 Taylor’s hermeneutical minimal31. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, viii; for a similar sort of critique of Rorty’s anti-epistemology see Charles Taylor, “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition,” in Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 32. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Taylor has been criticized for not acknowledging his debt to Castoriadis in regards to social imaginary. See Suzi Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 225n30; for another perspective on Taylor’s debt to Castoriadis see Karl E. Smith, Meaning, Subjectivity, Society: Making Sense of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 3. 33. See Karl Smith’s comparison of Castoriadis and Taylor, which favors Castoriadis for having “a more explicitly formulated political project”: Smith, Meaning, Subjectivity, Society: Making Sense of Modernity, 1–2. 34. Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, 25. 35. Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1975), vol. i, pp. 45– 76. 36. For the influence of Gadamer on Taylor see for instance the chapter “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes” in Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, 25–38.

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Veljkovic Sample I ism is indebted to Gadamer’s idea that “coming to an understanding” is intrinsically conversational, takes the participation of two parties, is constituted of a speaker and a listener. Taylor follows this conversational model by interspersing into his argument in SA a range of contrasting but familiar voices. Taylor is alluding to this when he explains: What I tried to do in [A Secular Age] . . . is to lay out a picture of the scene in which we are all involved, a scene that people could agree on even if they are coming from different positions. . . . I think everyone who is really open and honest will acknowledge that this is our scene, or our common situation.37 This is a hermeneutics informed by Taylor’s philosophical anthropology, along with its principle of “beginning where one is at”.38 So Taylor wants to establish a hermeneutics on the basis of a radical epistemology and he is under no illusions about how radical it is: “But at least I hope I have shown that contact theories have been propounded in our philosophical tradition, and that they are not necessarily irremediably weird”.39 This is why it would emphatically not aid Taylor’s argumentative aims in SA to have related his epistemology in an explicit way. Taylor is not trying to formulate a final language (something he does not believe to be possible.) Therefore he needs to invoke this idea of the background, in order to move away from the problems of a bald historicism, but at the same time he needs to do this in a way that will not require an excursus on phenomenology or epistemology. The expression that allows him to achieve this is social imaginary. And it is at this point that we see clearly Taylor’s debt to Herderian conception of language’s constitutive force. “It is crucial to the Romantic theory that it stresses the constitutive nature of language. This is not seen primarily as an instrument whereby we order the things in our world, but as what allows us to have the world that we have.” 40 To put the point simply, words are not simply equivalences for a final language that corresponds with things out there, but in themselves determine what we are talking about. As Nicholas Smith says “[according] to Taylor’s hermeneutic theory of meaning, literal truth and plainspoken prose domesticate, without ever eliminating, primordial expressive powers.” 41 This is the sense in which social imaginary is best described as an expression: “To express something is to make it manifest in a given medium.” 42 Why is this expression able to work in just this way? The answer must say something about the continuing vitality of the imagination in our culture. It has to do with 37. Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, quoted in 4n3; on the problem of Taylor’s ventriloquism having been misread as earnest assertion, see Taylor, “Apologia pro Libro suo,” 318. 38. For Taylor on philosophical anthropology see the introduction to Taylor, Philosophical Papers. 39. Taylor and Dreyfus, Retrieving Realism, 73. 40. Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, ix. 41. Smith, “Taylor and the Hermeneutic Tradition,” 40. 42. Taylor, Sources of the Self , 374.

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Veljkovic Sample I what John Sallis, alluding to the inheritance from Romanticism, describes as imagination’s “extreme, if virtually empty, valorization.” 43 It suggests that the imagination has a tremendous importance in the self-understanding we share about how we acquire knowledge. If the argument of SA makes sense to us it is because we already understand ourselves as beings who navigate our social world through imagination, and for whom it is more or less self-evident that there are certain “socially shared ways in which social spaces are imagined”.44 Indeed, it is to the Romantic inheritance that we should look for the origin of the imagination’s continuing vitality as a source of knowledge. This is an argument pursued by Taylor in Sources of the Self and followed in a notable way by Douglas Hedley, who finds in Taylor an assurance that “Romanticism was not obliterated by modernism (or even post-modernism) but its impact and influence is ubiquitous in contemporary thought”.45 In light of this it is not surprising that Taylor’s work can be linked back to the critiques of the Enlightenment made by various Romantic thinkers, and here the influence of Taylor’s erstwhile mentor Isaiah Berlin shows clearly.46 It might also be noted that the sort of “contact theory” Taylor would propose as an alternative to modern epistemology has origins in the Romantic critique of mediationalism. For instance, we still feel via various pathways the influence of Hamann’s critique of Kant. And this is also where epistemology intersects with politics. It is, for instance on the basis of his anti-epistemology that Taylor parts ways with Berlin on the viability of negative liberty.47 More importantly, it is that connection to the Romantic inheritance that shows social imaginary as something more than just a provisional idea, some kind of philosophical “found object” that Taylor picked up from whatever source. It is the enduring force of the Romantic inheritance that makes imagination persuasive, and allows social imaginary to stand in for something either foundational, or mediational—while in fact not needing to have either characteristic. So this discussion must end on an aporatic note. To the question of whether imagination is important for the acquisition of knowledge, for Taylor the answer must depend: does the question imply that imagination is a sort of aperture “only through” which we can complete a mediational picture? Then, for Taylor, the answer would be an em43. John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 16. 44. Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays, 86. 45. Douglas Hedley, Living Forms of the Imagination (London; New York: T. & T. Clark, 2008). 46. Cf. his remarks in the Warner volume: “And in this context, let me say to Colin Jager, I plead guilty as charged: I’m a hopeless German romantic of the 1790s. I resonate with Herder’s idea of humanity as the orchestra, in which all the differences between human beings could ultimately sound together in harmony.” Taylor, “Apologia pro Libro suo,” 320. 47. Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty,” in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit, Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); see also the useful analysis in Meynell, Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant and Charles Taylor .

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phatic no. But if instead we allow that this particular expression, “social imaginary” may provide a “best account” of how we experience our own embeddedness in a world that we actually know, in some sense, immediately, then the matter is altogether different. The trajectory of Taylor’s work suggests that we feel the necessity for some way of framing—or of expressing—this experience of social embeddedness. In this sense we ascertain something to be necessary as a matter of self-interpretation. And it is by virtue of our common Romantic inheritance that we tend to share a self-interpretation that lends tremendous warrant to the imagination as a source of knowledge about ourselves.

References Abbey, Ruth, ed. Charles Taylor. Contemporary Philosophy in Focus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Adams, Suzi. Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Castoriadis Reader. Edited and translated by David Ames Curtis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Colorado, Carlos D., and Justin D. Klassen, eds. Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor. University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. “History, Critique, Social Change and Democracy: An Interview with Charles Taylor” by Ulf Bohmann and Darío Montero. Constellations 21, no. 1 (2014). Gordon, Peter E. “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age.’” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (October 2008): 647–673. Hedley, Douglas. Living Forms of the Imagination. London; New York: T. & T. Clark, 2008. Janz, Paul D. “Transcendence, ‘Spin,’ and the Jamesian Open Space.” In Colorado and Klassen, Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age: Essays on Religion and Theology in the Work of Charles Taylor , 39–70. Lennon, Kathleen. Imagination and Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2015. Meynell, Robert. Canadian Idealism and the Philosophy of Freedom: C.B. Macpherson, George Grant and Charles Taylor. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Neill, Jeremy S. “Review essay: Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 215 pp.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 5 (June 2008): 575–580.

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References

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Pfau, Thomas. Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Sallis, John. Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Sheehan, Jonathan. “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age.” In Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Skinner, Quentin. “Who are ‘we’ ? Ambiguities of the modern self.” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (2 1991): 133–153. Smith, Karl E. Meaning, Subjectivity, Society: Making Sense of Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Smith, Nicholas. “Taylor and the Hermeneutic Tradition.” In Abbey, Charles Taylor , 29–51. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. . “Apologia pro Libro suo.” In Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 300–321. . Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 2011. . “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, edited by Mark B. N. Hansen, 26–49. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. . Modern Social Imaginaries. Public Planet Books. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. . Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995. . Philosophical Papers. 2 vols. Cambridge: The University Press, 1975. . “Retrieving Realism.” In Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowellDrefus Debate, edited by Joseph K. Schear, 61–90. London: Routledge, 2011. . “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition.” In Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, edited by Alan R. Malachowski. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. . Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

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References

Veljkovic Sample I

Taylor, Charles. “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty.” In Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit. Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Vanheeswijck, Guido. “Does History Matter? Charles Taylor on the Transcendental Validity of Social Imaginaries.” History and Theory 54 (1 2015). Warner, Michael, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2010.

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