Charles Taylor’s Ecological Conversations Glen Lehman Politics, Commonalities and the Natural Environment Charles Taylor’s Ecological Conversations Charles Taylor’s Ecological Conversations Politics, Commonalities and the Natural Environment Glen Lehman Associate Professor, University of South Australia © Glen Lehman 2015 Reprint of the original edition 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-55559-8 ISBN 978-1-137-52478-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137524782 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lehman, Glen, 1961– Charles Taylor’s ecological conversations : politics, commonalities and the natural environment / Glen Lehman (associate professor, University of South Australia). pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–1–137–52477–5 1. Environmentalism – Philosophy. 2. Environmentalism – Political aspects. 3. Taylor, Charles, 1931– – Political and social views. 4. Nature – Effect of human beings on – Philosophy. 5. Deep ecology – Philosophy. 6. Common good. 7. Democracy – Philosophy. 8. Authenticity (Philosophy) 9. Expressivism (Ethics) 10. Environmental ethics. I. Title. GE195.L425 2015 304.201—dc23 2015005427 The book is also dedicated to the late Professor Bill Brugger and Dr. Suzanne Brugger. Contents Acknowledgements viii Part I 1 I ntroduction 3 2 B asic Issues in Taylor’s Philosophy 6 3 T aylor’s Interpretivism, Knowledge and the Natural Environment 1 9 4 T aylor’s Interpretivism, Social Imaginaries and the Natural Environment 3 0 5 T aylor’s Metaphysics, Merleau-Ponty and the Natural Environment 4 2 Part II 6 T aylor’s Environmentalism and Critique of Utilitarianism and Instrumental Reason 5 7 7 T aylor’s Critique of Instrumentalism, Liberalism and Procedure in Politics 7 3 8 I nterpretation, Language and Environmental Values: The Habermas and Taylor Debate 9 0 9 C ritical Perspectives: The Taylor–Rorty Debate 1 13 10 T aylor and Deep Ecology 1 33 11 T aylor’s Evaluative Framework and Critical Perspectives 145 12 C onclusion 1 60 Notes 167 Index 197 vii Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my parents, Douglas and Patricia, for providing a supportive environment which has enabled the production of this book. My nieces, Andrea and Renee, have also read chapters to improve the book’s readability. I would also like to thank my research assistants, Andrea Brunt, Sophie Henscke and Jessie Whalen, who have spent many hours assembling Charles Taylor’s bibliographic mate- rial and other tasks during the production of this book. Together with Professor Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes, Dr. Norman Porter and Dr. Michael Sullivan they supervised the project for many years. viii Part I 1 Introduction Aims and objectives The interpretivist work of Charles Taylor is used in this book to explore the natural environment as a shared ecological and social commonality. The key focus is on the supposition that the natural world possesses intrinsic value and new political structures are needed. My preliminary thinking for this book began in response to important environmental manifestos such as T he Brundtland Report 1 on sustainability and T he Helsham Report in Australia about how to preserve threatened rainforests and tracts of native land. 2 One of the most contentious points concerned the economic viability of the Lemonthyme area in Southern Tasmania. The Helsham Report’ s economic reasoning was criticised from many quar- ters because it submerged discussions about the political implications of the dilemma into the debate between development and conservation. In adopting an essentially economic methodology for environmental management, the report perpetuated the modernist assumption that nature stands in wait of humanity. It soon became apparent that these environmental reports were shallow, and it became clear that a broad philosophical investigation was required, involving a range of metaphysical and theoretical ques- tions that these reports did not address. These questions concerned humanity’s impact on nature and required consideration of issues such as skirmishes over territorial waters, climate change, declining stocks of indigenous species, different rates of adaptation, despoliation of beaches and debates concerning population limits. 3 This book endeavours to offer a different way to think about these questions by examining environmental and political concepts emanating from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment through to the current 3 4 Charles Taylor’s Ecological Conversations environmental thinking of Charles Taylor. Taylor has stated: ‘It seems to me that every anthropocentrism pays a terrible price in impoverishment in this regard. Deep Ecologists4 tend to concur from one point of view, theists from another. And I am driven to this position from both.’ 5 In this summary statement, Taylor acknowledges that he uses ideas from Deep Ecology and theism to rethink humanity’s place in the natural environment. Implicit in the statement is his quest to understand how modern approaches to environmental and social relationships have been understood in Western political theory. 6 By way of introduction, this book on Taylor’s relevance to environ- mental politics canvasses liberal frameworks concerning nature and objections from the perspective of Deep Ecology, far-from-equilibrium systems theory and postmodernism. It then examines those liberal frame- works in line with Taylor’s counter-posing authenticity to liberal proce- duralism. It goes on to explore and utilise Taylor’s alternative, noting that his moral framework takes us from a purely human-centred view of ecology to a theistic social imaginary that guides A Secular Age. While in S ources of the Self, Taylor explains that he aims to reveal the environ- mental and social impacts of two dominant traditions of thought that shape modern political discourse.7 The first picture suggests a concep- tion of the subject as a disengaged agent who is ‘free and rational to the extent that he has fully distinguished himself from the natural and social worlds’. 8 The second picture that Taylor develops involves decon- structing the assumptions that underpin this disengaged approach to human agency. His deconstruction of classical political thought criti- cises modern epistemological premises and replaces them with a picture of the human agent as actively engaged in the natural environment.9 He explains that these critiques of epistemology often turn on this inter- penetration of the scientific and the moral sphere. I will argue that Taylor explains how his critique of epistemology develops ideas from Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein. These extremely important thinkers offer a shift away from purely disengaged pictures of the human agent. He states that there is a certain interpretivist continuity between Kant and Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. This engagement points toward a metaphysical analysis to further challenge modern political disengaged approaches to human agency.1 0 It is then a relatively simple extension to explain how our conception of human agency impinges adversely on the natural environment. That is, our political systems become infatuated with economic growth at the expense of creating improved relation- ships with other communities, nation-states and other entities living in