We do genuinely desire usefulness, even while we never quite seem to ask what makes usefulness a desirable thing. Where MacIntyre sees the incommensurability of differing systems of ethical reasoning, Taylor insists that modernity has bequeathed us a surprisingly comprehensive consensus: on the instrumentality of nature, yes, but also on human rights, the reduction of suffering, self-determination, freedom and equality.
What we lack, however, is something whose absence threatens the existence of these common goods, for we do not share any account of why they are good. We have been beaten down by modernity so systematically that we refuse, like a badly broken horse, the least suggestion of a source for morality. That allows people like Dawkins to ride us around the show ring for a while, but once all the reasons to be moral have finally been debunked, there will come a day — call it Peter Singer Day — when people start noticing that morality itself has become as illusory as they believed the sources of morality to be.
Throughout Taylor's work there have been certain constants. His rejection of the naturalism of the scientific revolution as a reasonable metaphysics, a coherent account of the world, for example. So, too, his insistence, manifest most clearly in his 1992 The Ethics of Authenticity, that selves are formed in community, even when the community has somehow decided, communally, that we each carry around our own unique, non-communal selves.
Taylor is the very model of a post-analytic philosopher, using the precise tools of arid British philosophy to dig in the rich but sloppy soil of Continental thought. He's also something of a postmodern, or perhaps post-postmodern, as when, in A Secular Age, he historicises and deconstructs Nietzsche's historicising and deconstructing of belief in God. Most of all, he's a devout Catholic — that great escape, as Chesterton once put it, from the terrible burden of being a child of one's time — and he has always seen the ways that God, the true source of morality, keeps slipping through the attempts to squeeze Him out of human life and human culture.
No wonder such books as Sources of the Self and A Secular Age sprawl across their pages. Charles Taylor is a tall man — tall tall, as they say — and perhaps we're not used to looking up enough to see how far he's reached. But surely we could raise our eyes, just a little more.
