Diverse Methods for Diverse Ideas: Philosophical Anthropology of Tacit Beliefs

• In Event: Empirical Origins of Political Ideas

Abstract

“We don’t really get a hold on what an ethic is really about,” the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, “until we see it, very often, enacted.” What might it mean to enact an idea and what might political theory and research gain by studying how ideas are enacted? I draw from empirical research I conducted on political dialogue sessions between secular liberal university students, who in 2016 voted for Hillary Clinton, and conservative Christian university students who voted for Donald Trump, as an endeavor in what Taylor refers to as “philosophical anthropology.” While this term often refers to philosophical inquiry into the nature of the person, Taylor also uses it to denote its ethnographic meaning. In order to understand a concept fully, Taylor argues, it is helpful to investigate the particular ways in which people live with and in response to a concept. Such inquiry into how concepts are lived provides clarity and nuance to understanding of the concept as well as insight into the implications of ideas for political life.

Drawing on this philosophical-anthropological approach, this paper reveals how tensions between resistance and receptivity during structured political dialogue sessions are rooted partly in interlocuters’ tacit ideas about what is true and good, particularly in regard to the role of human agency in social change. These beliefs and assumptions, or “social imaginaries,” enable and constrain political dialogue in ways that may be surprising. The secular liberal sense that individuals are responsible for bringing about a just society can undermine the willingness to learn from opponents at times when one’s principles are most directly threatened, while an evangelical Christian belief that God enacts change in the world can nourish the capacity to learn from others in dialogue.

The empirical portion of the paper is based on in-depth interviews with 21 university students who attended structured political dialogue sessions in Philadelphia in 2017. I interviewed these students in the weeks following their attendance at the dialogue sessions and interviewed many of them again three years later, in Fall 2020.
The methodology of the inquiry is based on four of Taylor’s conceptions of philosophy and of the person. First, Taylor suggests that philosophy should be grounded in investigation of lived experience. Empirical research on how concepts are lived can help clarify both the meaning of particular ideals as well as their implications for the people who strive to realize them. In the current inquiry, how politically opposed students enact their beliefs about human agency reveals much about the nature of evangelical and secular conceptions of the world and the implications of these conceptions for political dialogue.

Second, Taylor argues that a person cannot help but evaluate her life in terms of her conceptions of what is good, for “to know who you are is to be oriented in moral space.” Moral identity is central to a person’s sense of self, he argues, even if the person strives to live against what she sees as conventional morality. A closely related third argument of Taylor’s is that a person’s sense of the good, as well as beliefs about what is true and possible, are at least partially tacit. Fourth, Taylor argues that this tacit imaginary guides actions by making certain practices seem possible and desirable and others impossible or bad. In other words, social imaginaries form the horizons within which we act. I explore how this constellation of assumptions and commitments can constrain or support politically opposed university students’ receptivity in political dialogue.

The paper makes three contributions through the integration of philosophical and qualitative empirical work. First, this inquiry helps to illuminate the nature and meaning of secular and evangelical philosophical commitments and the wider imaginaries on which they are premised by examining how they are lived by contemporary university students. Second, the study complicates assumptions about the implications of these beliefs for political dialogue, by investigating how these beliefs shape in often surprising ways whether and from whom students aspire to learn during dialogue. Finally, the inquiry suggests that non-instrumental engagement is important for successful political dialogue, but that it is not a straightforward or unfettered good.


de Souza, “An Interview with Charles Taylor”, p. 16. Italics in original.
de Souza, Nigel. “An Interview with Charles Taylor” pp. 13-29 in Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology, eds. Anik Waldow and Nigel DeSouza, (Oxford University Press, 2017).
de Souza, “An Interview with Charles Taylor”, p. 16.
de Souza, p. 17.
Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self, (Harvard University Press, 1989), 28.
Taylor, Secular Age, 8; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
Taylor, Sources of the Self, 58.

Author

• Rachel Lee Wahl, University of Virginia