To deny a people this is a great offense. These people often demand that liberals “recognize the equal value of different cultures” (64), not just the equal value of different people in those cultures. If, as they think, these “judgments are ultimately a question of the human will [i.e. “Because, for a sufficiently different culture, the very understanding of what it is to be of worth will be strange and unfamiliar to us.” What should happen is what Hans-Georg Gadamer has called a “fusion of horizons” in which we move to a broader horizon within which our owns standards of what is worth becomes merely one possibility among many. The charge, Taylor thinks is disturbing; but Taylor thinks this charge ought not to be an indictment of liberalism. Hegel and the Politics of Recognition. This is obvious at the personal level where the interaction with “significant others” is crucial in determining what we see our own selves as. This paper investigates the issue of intercultural tensions as it is portrayed in Charles Taylor's essay "The Politics of Recognition" and its representation in Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot and Amiri Baraka's Dutchman. Under this system, “all virtuous citizens are equally honored” (Ibid). We might massive subjective turn of modern culture, … This he uses to denounce a society where the ethic of pride and honour based on an inegalitarian (hierarchical) order saw precisely the concern for pride and honour as a noble value. The essay was quite interesting. Every man has a particular proportion [Maaß], a particular harmony as it were, between all his sensitive feelings, so that in extraordinary cases the most wonderful appearances frequently occur to show the state of an individual on this or that occasion. Now a society like Quebec which adopts collective goals violates the procedural commitment. Harry Stack Sullivan, “Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry,” Psychiatry 3, no. The demand that we start out with a presumption of value seems valid; but other demand that value be accorded as a matter of right, as a matter of final judgment, makes no sense. For the politics of difference, we ought to recognize and foster particularity. But let us take a step back. Canonically, “our status as rational agents” has been singled out, though there are problems with this justification. The powerful idea here — and this has come down to us — is the importance that we give to originality that arises out of a certain contact with our own self. “What is to be avoided at all costs is the existence of ‘first-class’ and ‘second-class’ citizens.” In what respects and concerning what goods — wealth? (emphasis added). The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience. “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 critique of pride on the basis of a principle of equality of dignity is what Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel takes up in his famous dialectic of the master and the slave where he argues against the hierarchical (i.e. Use the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. The politics of difference grows organically out of the politics of universal dignity through one of those shifts with which we are long familiar, where a new understanding of the human social condition imparts a radically new meaning to an old principle. Recognition has always been a central need. If you liked this episode, please leave us a review! “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.”. Such judgments from such intellectuals would be not only condescending but ethnocentric. ; 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. It will side with the former. To insist on the generation of an authentic self in this manner is to ignore an essential fact of the human condition: human life is fundamentally dialogical in character. What Rousseau achieves then is this. What about the models inspired by Kant which although they appeals to the principle of universal equality are neither tied to any unity of purpose nor lead to a vision of undifferentiated roles; models which abstract from any issue of the differentiation of roles. Berggruen Prize Winner Charles Taylor on the Big Questions; series of videos produced by the Berggruen Institute; Can Human Action Be Explained? The principle which I have suggested as basic to human social organization is that of communication involving participation in the other. And the society is not going to remain neutral between those who wish to adopt this good and those who don’t. … It may be answered in two fundamentally different ways. They advise us to step outside “this dimension of human life, in which reputations are sought, gained, and unmade”. When it has arisen we can think of a person in solitary confinement for the rest of his life, but who still has himself as a companion, and is able to think and to converse with himself as he had communicated with others. This discussion on recognition and identity that seem so familiar to us now would have been incomprehensible two centuries ago. Given this, those who argue in favour of provisions proposed for Quebec, those who argue in favour of collective goals or have substantive moral commitments, opt for a very different model of liberal society. What is it that all humans have that make them worthy of respect? That brings us to Hegel, who distinguished “two planes” of recognition (36). But, he thinks, there is an alternative form of liberalism which fares better. “The claim is that the supposedly neutral set of difference-blind principles of the politics of equal dignity is in fact a reflection of one hegemonic culture.” This claim is particularly disruptive and upsetting. That the colonial view of these groups were somehow narrow, insensitive, or, worse, that it actively sought to degrade. The result was the Meech Lake Accord, an agreement between the federal and provincial governments to amend the Constitution by strengthening provincial powers and declaring Québec a ‘distinct society’. 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. Rousseau, “articulate[ed] something that was in a sense already occurring in the culture” by presenting morality as “following a voice of nature within us” (29). In the former, it is with God that we must connect. But is this the only way in which such models — “the liberalisms of equal rights” — can be understood/interpreted? 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. This brings us back to the issue of recognition raised in the debates on multiculturalism; for in replying, “this is how we do things here”, a certain sense of superiority is already assumed. 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. Saul Tobias - 2006 - The Owl of Minerva 38 (1/2):101-126. The Stoics had argued that one should pay no heed to what others say of us. Here, he speaks about the difficulties of the modern state when it addresses the diversity of its citizenries. or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play, and enable it to grow and thrive? First, it enumerates a set of individual rights very similar to those found in other western (as well as non-western democracies). No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. How did we get here? Nothing external to us, nothing apart from ourselves and our own existence; as long as this state lasts we are self-sufficient like God. View all posts by jackofalltrades, Whereas, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation. 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. Therefore, say that what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the good. what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Making that claim is false, and demands for recognition based upon it need not be acknowledged. Dependence on men, since it is without order, engenders all the vices, and by it, master and slave are mutually corrupted. If withholding the presumption is tantamount to a denial of equality, and if important consequences flow for people’s identity from the absence of recognition, then a case can be made for insisting on the universalization of the presumption as a logical extension of the politics of dignity.”, Regardless, whether or not this presumption should be granted as a right is left to the side. These ideas greatly influenced, for instance, John Stuart Mill. Charles Taylor, Amy Gutmann (Editor)-Multiculturalism Examining the politics of recognition(1994) Download. These then are two incompatible variants of liberal society: procedural and subtantive. 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). Securing authentic contact with this voice will lead to moral salvation: he calls this state the “sentiment of existence [sentiment de l’existence]”. Charles Larmore, “Political Liberalism: Its Motivations and Goals”. A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. A liberal society accords, not a bare liberty right to its members, but a certain set of fundamental rights: e.g. The development of this notion owes to the idea that human beings possess a certain “moral sense, an intuitive feeling for what is right and wrong”. With liberty, wherever abundance reigns, well-being also reigns. [This form of liberalism is] willing to weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival, and [to] opt sometimes in favor of the latter.” (61). These laws (1) regulated  who can send their children to English-language schools (not francophones), and (2) required that businesses of over fifty be run in French. 25–73; 65. As a matter of fact, Quebeckers tended to put forward a different conception of liberalism. Taylor’s essay is a tour de force: intricate, historical and sensitive to many (if not all) of a family of difficult issues; even those inclined to disagree have much to learn from the text’s honest treatment of the issues. A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’. ( Log Out /  In Islam, for instance, such distinctions cannot arise, cannot make sense. Can this presumption be grounded? But now the source we intensified by the new understanding of individual identity have to connect with is deep within us.