Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor - Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought. By Robert C. Sibley. A Review.

Published in 2008, Northern Spirits by Robert Sibley is an ambitious work that is unlikely to reach a broad audience – for good reasons, political philosophy aside.  The book deals with three Canadian thinkers John Watson (1847-1939), George Grant (1918-1988) and Charles Taylor (b. 1931) who all share a common inheritance in Hegel.  Sibley is not alone in suggesting that Canadians are “unconscious Hegelians,” and to add weight to his argument he points to the numerous Canadians who live in Hegel’s intellectual shadow.

Since beginning at the beginning can be a good idea, we find that one of the problems with Sibley’s book is that he fails at the start to contextualize the work of Hegel.  Frederick Beiser (once a student of Charles Taylor) has written an excellent introduction in Hegel (2005), and he clarifies a central issue: “contemporary Hegel scholars, especially those in the Anglophone tradition, have failed to individuate Hegel.  They assume that certain ideas are characteristic of Hegel that were really commonplace of an entire generation.”  In other words, one reason why Hegel might possibly have had a deep impact on Canadian intellectual culture is because we share a common debt to early German Romanticism.  And when referring to Hegel’s thought, Sibley identifies household names like Allen Wood, Ken Foldes, Robert Wallace, Vasanthi Srinivasan and, of course, Alexandre Kojève ... but no Hegel.  There are few, if any, textual references to any of Hegel’s writings, and Sibley seems to rely on English sources  when interpreting Hegel’s thought himself.

This derivative nature of the book is especially notable in the section on John Watson.  A number of these early chapters summarize, with a minimum of interpretation and imagination, Watson’s work The State in Peace and War (1919).  It is important to acknowledge that Watson was a student of the British Idealists (who were inspired by Hegel), in particular T.H. Green, but it is also important to elaborate how “religion plays a central role in Watson’s work.” (p. 43) Watson founded the United Church of Canada, but there is no discussion of how Idealism might have worked together with Christianity, except to say that Watson debated the topic with Josiah Royce at the University of California at Berkeley in 1897.

The section on George Grant is more interesting, possibly because he is more contemplative, or maybe simply because his Lament for a Nation created a national sensation when it was published in 1965.  Or maybe it’s because Grant is Michael Ignatieff’s uncle.  In any event, Grant had no free will, and he was an “unconscious Hegelian even before he encountered Hegel.” (p. 121)   George Grant’s grandfather was George Munro Grant, principal of Queen’s University at Kingston from 1877 to 1902.  It was the latter Grant’s close friendship with John Watson which filtered down over the generations, making George Grant a Hegelian, before anyone in Canada had ever heard of Alexandre Kojève, the dominant interpreter of Hegel in the twentieth century and early proponent of the European Union.  According to Sibley, George Grant was still a Hegelian, even though he later recanted, only to identify with Leo Strauss.

In a similar vein Trudeau is “arguably” considered Hegelian because he admired T.H. Green’s thinking and his defence of the individual (which one also finds in J.S.  Mill), giving him intellectual fodder for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  But Sibley does not offer much analysis here.  Do we have the Charter because of Trudeau’s rationalism, because of the Americanization of Canada’s political culture, because Trudeau came to admire the ideals of the French Revolution, or because of British variations on Idealism?  These issues need to be resolved – or better yet, Trudeau’s supposed Hegelianism could better be dropped.  Even Grant admits, and Sibley seems to forget this point, though he documents it, that Kojève is considered closer to Hegel’s originality than the British Idealists. (p. 172)   In other words, Trudeau’s British “Hegelianism” (that he read a book) is inferior to that of Charles Taylor, who studied and wrote books on Hegel, at length.

The section on Charles Taylor deals with the interrelationship between the individual and the community; it is a tug of war denoted by political scientists as the struggle between liberalism and communitarianism.  Frederick Beiser explains that the attempt to synthesize liberalism and communitarianism is not uniquely Hegelian - it is also Romantic.  Moreover, the central reason for Hegel’s alleged popularity in Canada is his “principle of reconciliation”, yet Sibley fails to articulate this aspect of thought in any detail.  Sibley has written a book on Hegel’s so-called influence, but his conclusions lead him far from Hegelianism.

In my view, the one Canadian thinker who best reconciles liberalism and communitarianism, in Hegelian terms, is Charles Taylor, this nation’s leading expert on Hegel and author of a major study in 1975, but Sibely attacks him as “illiberal”.  In essence, Sibley attacks Quebec’s language laws (Bill 101), the fact that French is the official language of the province and, of course, the failed Meech Lake Accord.  In other words, Sibley prefers the supposed “Hegelianism” of Trudeau’s Charter to the Hegelianism of Taylor’s early “two-nation” approach for Canada. According to Sibley: “English-speaking Canada is supposed to sacrifice English-speaking culture in order to accommodate Quebec?” (p. 203)   Because Charles Taylor supports the distinctiveness of Quebec, Sibley sees a “downgrading of personal choice” (p. 265) and “results that can oppress the individual” (p. 283).  And Sibley writes “when push comes to shove, Taylor is unable to defend liberalism” (p. 249), but what he means by “liberalism” is really liberal individualism. Sibley even goes so far as to question the validity of the Quebec “we”, and here he resonates with Margaret Thatcher, who once declared famously “there is no such thing as society.”

Neither France nor Germany had a John Locke; hence liberal traditions outside of the Anglophone world appear in different guises (as less individualistic), and this is a point Sibley misses, who muses about its “civilisational foundations.” (p. 247)   French liberalism is known to be paradoxically anti-individualistic, certainly in the nineteenth century, if one considers the work of Lucien Jaume.[1]  This peculiarity might also help to explain the difference between Anglo Canada’s “procedural liberalism” (difference-blind liberalism) and French Canada’s “substantive liberalism” (culturally-specific liberalism).  Moreover, liberalism, especially liberal individualism is not without its flaws, again something Sibley does not entertain.  Colin Bird concludes his work The Myth of Liberal Individualism (1999) in a fashion that is well in tune with Charles Taylor’s position on Quebec: “the problem with liberalism is that by emphasizing the importance of choice, it condemns citizens to a perpetual restlessness about their social identity, and so undermines the stability of genuine community on which authentic self-discovery depends.” (pp.  206,207)  Even Hegel seems to criticize notions of “freedom of choice” in liberalism when he explains in Philosophy of Right (1821): “When we hear it said that freedom in general consists in being able to do as one pleases, such an idea can only be taken to indicate a complete lack of intellectual culture.”  In other words,  Sibley’s free-choice theorizing drifts far from Hegel’s project of reconciliation.

Sibley offers a curious book which pays lip service to Hegel’s “principle of reconciliation” but ends up a doctrinaire text on liberal individualism.  He also seems to suggest that Hegel’s principle is “not clearly detected by any previous thinker” (p. 89), but Sibley is not familiar enough with the thought of Augustine.  He refers to Augustine by way of Grant (p. 143) and Taylor (pp. 193,194), but apparently has not read City of God or the Confessions on his own.  As I have indicated in my earlier review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, Augustine plays a major role in Hegel’s thought, as well as on Calvin and Descartes. Augustine thinks of man (over and over again) as an “intermediate being ... intermediate between beasts and angels” and he describes Christ as the “Mediator between God and man ... we must look for a mediator who is not only human but also divine.”  Augustine also offers a form of personal reflexivity which is at one root of Western society’s critical culture.  We can find his ‘middle path’ sentiments expressed in the twentieth century when looking at the thought of Simone Weil, who writes in Waiting for God (1951): “The Incarnation of Christianity implies harmonious solution of the problem of the relations between the individual and collective.  Harmony in the Pythagorean sense; the just balance of contraries.”   In other words, Christianity offers the “intersection” of both arms of the Cross, a point Weil notes.

If we look to the moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre (who also wrote on Hegel) and his penetrating Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (2003), we see a history of an Augustinian tradition lasting well into the Scottish Enlightenment, which is possibly how early notions of reconciliation (and Augustine’s other ideas, notably the notion of “will”) made their way into North America – via religion.  In other words, there exist old moral traditions, “voices of tradition outside liberalism”, that are not readily considered by secular university institutions (and maybe their students) aspiring (in Macintyre’s words) to “fictitious objectivity.”

This brings us to the fundamental problem with Sibley’s book.  It looks at Hegel’s political thought yet ignores dimensions of Hegel’s religious thinking and that (as I repeat myself) of John Watson.  In his Philosophy of History (delivered as lectures first in 1822-23) Hegel the Lutheran literally transcends the Christian religion but makes a very specific point about its ongoing importance to civilization despite academic disciplines: “I have been unwilling to leave out of sight the connection between our thesis -  the Reason governs and has governed the World – and the question of the possibility of a knowledge of God, chiefly that I might not lose the opportunity of mentioning the imputation against Philosophy of being shy of  noticing religious truths, or of having occasion to be so.”  The reason why religion is so important to Hegel is that the figure of Christ represents, in his view, a “world historical” first – “consciousness of freedom” among all believers in God, a notion to which at least some post-religious disciplines in university academies might at some levels seem impervious, their dawn being the Enlightenment. Put another way: are Canadians “unconscious Hegelians” – or have we really just masked our Christianity in the name of secularism? Do Canadians have an early spirit of reconciliation because of assumed, historic religious traditions, English and French, each with varying Augustinian strains?  Have some Canadian intellectuals flocked to Hegel thinking he provides a political “dialectic” when, in fact, as Frederick Beiser suggests, he may have offered “a new religion”?

Unfortunately Northern Spirits does not consider these questions, but it covers just about everything else. The book tries to be a comprehensive overview but it fails to distinguish some salient points succinctly and originally (regarding Hegel). The topic is an excuse to write much about what people wrote in Canada – and nothing very meaningful on Hegel – or his so-called “influence”.   It mentions Hegel’s principle of reconciliation but does not express it in any structured way, possibly because (if we look to his difference- blind liberal individualism) Sibley does not want (or no longer know how) to reconcile, given also his own unusually intense concerns over the future of the English language, apparently swamped by mass migrations, globalism and multiculturalism.

To conclude parenthetically, we note that up until the advent of Stephen Harper Canadians admired reconciliation, because they recognized the need to compromise.  Like Hegel’s Germany, divided into many principalities, Canadians are fraught with divisions over space and cultural time.  A point Sibley misses is that Hegel’s Germany is a lot like Machiavelli’s Italy which explains Hegel’s interest in realpolitik.  Perhaps we can make an intuitive leap from Florentine Italy to the true potentialities of today’s Canada ... just witness our present-day Cesare Borgia, otherwise known (by some) as Mr. Prime Minister, also a Hegelian (if you recall the realpolitik of Hegel).  In other words, everyone can be considered a Hegelian in Canada - even the ones who are not.

[1] Lucien Jaume, L’individu efface, ou le paradoxe du libéralisme française (Fayard, 1997).

Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor - Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought

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Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" - A Review

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007), hereafter noted as SA, with almost 800 pages of written text, is an ambitious undertaking for any intrepid reviewer, or author, but my task here is not only to convey some understanding to a broader audience, but also to contextualize the author and argument – and to offer possible critique where some may be missing. Anyone wanting to read Taylor in the original, without attempting his magnum opus should consider purchasing (at about the same cost, mind you) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard, 2010), hereafter referred to as VSSA, a series of articles edited by Warner, Vanantwerpen and Calhoun. With a titular turning on William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, VSSA critiques and expands on dimensions of A Secular Age and concludes with Taylor’s own significantly succinct Afterword “Apologia pro Libro Suo,” a worthwhile summary and the best around, counting at about 21 pages.

While A Secular Age has a strong philosophical and historical bent, it is largely written in colloquial English, but the numerous and widespread intellectual references and ideas could make the work a difficult read for a general audience, plus the book is not as concise as it could be. This loquaciousness puts sometimes him the same league as fellow Canadians John Ralston Saul and Donald Savoie, only Taylor almost always has something stimulating to say, and for this reader, at least, there were many pleasant cranial explosions along the way, all gratefully received.

Taylor outlines his thesis in A Secular Age on page 3: “the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even among the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.” Taylor slowly travels through each century, beginning around 1500, explaining the development of secularism as an historical phase, and this composes the first half of the book, amounting to a fascinating intellectual history of growing European “disenchantment”, a central theme and term borrowed from the German sociologist, Max Weber.

According to Jon Butler in VSSA this section attracted little attention from early reviewers: “A Secular Age glosses so many different and possible explanations for secularity so discursively that it would be nearly impossible to say that Taylor has missed something important, though his reader may have.” [VSSA, 197] Butler goes on to say, and here I agree, “Taylor is at enormous pains to dissect the complicated nature of both belief and unbelief before and after 1500.” [VSSA, 199] Indeed, this very early section of A Secular Age is extremely laboured, even painful, especially when Taylor goes to great lengths to discuss changing conceptions of death [SA 61-84, approximately], but there is clearly no mention of anything like the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death, which ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. Estimates vary, but up to 20 million people, approximately one third of Europe’s population, perished. Given that no one knew why so many were dying en masse, and that even priests were running away from admitting last rites, there is no wonder we see an early weakening of religion. So we see the dangers of philosophy literally glossing over history, but otherwise Taylor (true to his Oxford mentor, Sir Isaiah Berlin) does succeed in the “historicity of our contemporary options, about the sedimentation of the past in the present.” [SA 268]

Taylor’s omission of the Black Death helps explain his use and development of the concept of the “buffered self” as “the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces.” [SA 135] It is a “disengaged, disciplined stance to self and society” which one finds in the development of manners, for example, and it is central to modernity and secularity. [SA 136] In turn it has the reverse effect of allowing for “the greater intensity of intimate relations” within for example the family.[SA 140] “But in general, we relate to the world as more disembodied beings than our ancestors” [SA 141] Briefly speaking, it contributes to the “great disembedding” (to coin a term, perhaps) of us from the “social sacred” – especially by Christianity, for “God so loved the world.” (John 3.16) [SA 157,158] This can be found in our “social imaginaries” which speak of freedom and mutual benefit (Locke, especially), and the rise of "humanism” which can be considered rather typical of Enlightenment thinkers, bordering on paganism (Diderot and Kant, perhaps, and before them Bayle and Spinoza). Christianity is sanitized “but it doesn’t quite know what to do with suffering”; aristocratic heroism wanes, and all (referring to not just a few, but “all”) we may do is wrestle with the tattered remains of a (secular) honour code. In any event Taylor reveals a sense of Romanticism, resonating with Herder’s central notion of “humanity as the orchestra.” [SA 318; VSSA 320]

The second half of A Secular Age is less historical, more analytical. Of particular interest is his treatment of the “Age of Authenticity”: I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority. [SA 475] Taylor makes an interesting connection between this expressivism, the rise of “choice” and the growth of consumer culture where “commodities become vehicles of individual expression, even the self-definition of identity.” [SA 483] Not because of the scientific "facts" themselves, but because of autonomous and geometric reason (starting with Hobbes and Descartes) pushed by science, our materialism has united with a moral perspective that results in "exclusive humanism" which is atheistic. [SA 569]

In his Chapter “Religion Today” Taylor writes with delicious irony: “Some great realizations of collective life are lost, but other facets of our predicament in our relation to God come to the fore; for instance what Isaiah meant when he talked of a “hidden God”. In the seventeenth century you had to be Pascal to appreciate that. Now we live it daily.” [SA 531,532] Here we also see that A Secular Age is primarily concerned with (as one reviewer called it) "elite discourse" (when I thought it was philosophy). [VSSA 187] Nonetheless, there are only a few nods to social historians, notably Natalie Zemon Davis, probably the only female writer mentioned in the book, author of The Return of Martin Guerre.

But Taylor is not alone in arguing that secularism belongs to a general period of “modern” history, that we now belong in a post-secular age. The eminent German thinker Habermas, long the exponent of Enlightenment rationalism, has recently given up on “methodological atheism” [VSSA 50]. Taylor also offers sacrificial crumbs for George Bush (the lesser) and his “crusade” in Afghanistan, along with identifying with Obama’s message of “Hope” [VSSA 84]. More importantly, Taylor resembles a modern-day St. Augustine whose own classic City of God was written after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410 - a shock to the Roman Empire and its classical consciousness. It is worth pointing out that Taylor makes explicit references to Augustine and what he calls “the hyper-Augustinian juridical-penal framework,” in other words the Christian notions of original sin and atonement [SA 651]. Broadly speaking A Secular Age can be seen as a cathartic and “spirited” response following the attack on New York’s World Trade Towers on 11 September 2001, or even as an answer to the relative decline of the West. Today Augustine, too, is very much in fashion, especially as the world’s economy shifts toward the engine of China, where (the Jewish thinker) Spinoza’s groundbreaking “atheism” and secularism go well with so-called neo-Confucianism, a topic Taylor ignores or does not anticipate.

Nonetheless Taylor is well prepared. His own doctoral research was on Hegel (fixed as he was on the “world historical” figure of Napoleon) who in turn had strong affiliations with Augustine’s thinking. Both Hegel and Augustine rely on theories of mediation. (See also Religion, Politics and Law (Brill, 2008), 71-96 – or just read City of God). For Augustine, the Church mediates between “the city of man” and “the city of God,” and so knowledge of God brings mediation, as Augustine “Christianizes” Cicero and the classical tradition of the middle and the balanced sense of virtue, or Horace’s “golden mean.” (John Ralston Saul please take note). [cf. VSSA 275]

Moreover, Augustine talks of the value of “the opposition of contraries” and the “antithesis” which feed well into Hegel’s own Trinitarian doctrine of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Augustine begins this Trinitarianism (with Hebraic antecedents) where God is considered the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and we find it reproduced throughout history in the West: for example, Montesquieu’s tri-fold division of government as the legislative, executive and judicial in The Spirit of the Laws (1748); the American “life, liberty, and happiness”; the French Revolution’s “liberty, equality, fraternity” (mindful of the constitution of 1789 which was more conservative and liberal than that of 1793); and Canada’s “peace, order and good government.” We also find it in Auguste Comte’s positivism and his “law of three stages,” his spiritual calling on Industrialists, perhaps a French complement to Hegel in the mid-nineteenth century.

Trinitarianism lends itself to ”middle way” thinking – and is at the root of much Western self-reflective, or even self-critical, culture, also expressed by Augustine’s Confessions, a work which in turn was anticipated by Greek classical thinking and Socrates’ dictum: “Know thyself”. In other words, there are reasons for the appearance of democracy first in the Judeo-Christian West, and we can find it expressed in Canada (“a country nourished on self-doubt,” according to Al Purdy) but it is also in Augustine, who made his way into our secular political culture with the Constitution Act of 1867. So while our culture is either secular or post-secular, it could be argued that (Judeo) Christianity’s greatest offspring is democracy, and Taylor himself raises the point when he identifies the “welfare state” as implicitly Christian. The question is, however, as we move away from the welfare state ... whither Christianity? And whither our democracy?

But there is another reason why Taylor refers to Augustine. He asks the profound question in his Confessions: “What, then, is time?” (Book XI, 14) It is actually the French (Protestant) philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in Volume One of his magisterial three-part series Time and Narrative (Chicago, 1984), who dissects Augustine’s notions of time. Ricoeur translates Augustine as: “How can time exist if the past is no longer, if the future is not yet, and if the present is not always?” (Time and Narrative, 7) Ricoeur’s thesis is that Augustine holds to a “threefold present” – the trinity of the past, present and future live in the present. Perhaps I digress, and here it is best to consult Augustine directly in order to gain an understanding of Taylor’s own thinking:

Nevertheless, O Lord, we are aware of periods of time. We compare them one with another and say that some are longer and others shorter, and the result of our calculations tells us that it is twice or three times the length of the one which we take as the unit of measurement, or that two are of equal duration. If we measure them by our own awareness of time, we must do so while it is passing, for no one can measure it when it is past and no longer exists, or when it is future and does not yet exist – that is, unless he is bold enough to claim that what does not exist can be measured. The conclusion is that we can be aware of time and measure it only while it is passing. Once it has passed it no longer is, and therefore cannot be measured. (Confessions XI,16)

Augustine’s conclusion is: ”we can only be aware of time and measure it only while it is passing,” and it is this deep sense of something passing that seems to have moved Taylor to write A Secular Age. In other words, time is not homogenous. It cannot be secularized (despite the best attempts of the French Revolutionaries, who resorted to Terror). At the end of the nineteenth century three figures – Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust (a little later) – all tried to come to terms with the passage of time, its “inner” and “outer” duration (and here I simplify for the sake of brevity). Things are “never still.” Ever since Huysmans “decadent” novel A Rebours [Against Nature] (1884) the general public’s reading of Cicero (who had a significant influence on Augustine) went into steep decline, putting an end to the classical tradition of moderation, paving the way for twentieth-century extremism (and the revenge of Caesars, so-to-speak). By invoking Augustine at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Taylor is not only reliving an apparent loss of hegemony, but summoning the rather athletic memory of the Christian tradition, along with it an exceptional conversion experience and its great soul seeking – and the Trinitarian legacy of mediation. The past is no guarantee for the future, but in promoting the memory of Augustine’s thought Taylor offers us some continuity - and perhaps guidance.