Erik Hammar

Here is a quotation from Chapter 1 of Charles Taylor’s seminal work Hegel (1975):

In other terms [Herder and other German romantics argued], words do not just refer, they are also precipitates of an activity in which the human form of consciousness comes to be. So they not only describe a world, they also express a mode of consciousness, in the double sense outlined above, that is, they realize it, and they make determinate the mode it is.
This is one of Herder’s great seminal ideas. If man is a being who is to be understood under the category of expression, if what is characteristic of him is a certain form of consciousness, Besonnenheit, and if this is only realized in speech, then thought, reflection, the distinctively human activity is not something which can be carried on in a disembodied element. It can only exist in a medium. Language is essential to thought. And if thought or the characteristically human activity can only be in the medium of language, then the different natural languages express each the uniquely characteristic way in which a people realizes the human essence. A people’s language is the privileged mirror or expression of its humanity. The study of language is the central and indispensable road to the understanding of human variety.

I subscribe to the view that much of the “politics of identity” in the late 20th and 21st century, in its worst as well as its more useful forms, stems from the thinking of the counter-Enlightenment German romantics (Herder, Hegel, Schiller, etc.) in the 18th and 19th century. This is in no way an original point, of course. It is not surprising that it is made regularly by people like myself who don’t, in general, think that the politics of identity, in the modern form it has taken as partially constitutive of the “New Left”, offers a positive contribution to our politics. The point about the German traditionalist roots of today’s radicals is ironic in a rhetorically effective way.

Yet criticising the excesses of identity politics is comparatively easy, and in some senses less meaningful, than trying to take seriously the increasingly relevant challenge posed to modernity by the romantic counter-movement and its successors. Personally, over the last years my views have been shaped to a large extent by the pressure to accommodate three distinct stances within a single, coherent, political and ethical outlook. These stances or positions can roughly be summarised as follows: 1) My rejection of the bulk of the arguments of the identity-political left; 2) My slow realisation of the powerful critique of certain aspects of, roughly, liberal Enlightenment modernity (especially the political and ethical modes it realises); 3) My original adherence to much of the traditional defences of Western liberalism, and more specifically the principles and institutions by which it suggests we regulate our societies.

There is considerable tension between these three positions, all of which I have felt myself increasingly keen to hold. A less schematic and more psychological description of what I have been grappling with, would be as follows. Coming to university I encountered the arguments of the identity political student movement. I think, but won’t repeat the tedious argument here, that this is largely a movement characterised by a deplorable rejection of reason for emotion in political argument, and which focuses on fringe cultural and linguistic issues over issues of inequality and class in the globalised economy, issues in need of thoughtful progressive voices. I instinctively felt, and got increasingly convinced, that the arguments produced embodied the death throes of an intellectually exhausted European/North American left. However, engaging with the various strains of the radical student movement, and contemplating the rejection of many liberal/Enlightenment ideals their views typically entailed (though I don’t know how aware of this fact many on the student left were), made me more acutely aware of how a different, much more potent critique of modern liberalism lurked in the background. To simplify and summarise, I think the conclusions offered by the New Left were either outrageous or incoherent. However, the ideas underlying them, did indeed challenge many of the liberal dogmas I had perhaps rather thoughtlessly adhered to before.

These doubts, or realisations about the weaker pillars of of the edifice of liberal modernity, concerned many things. Let me just give one obvious example. Behind many of the student left’s arguments were important notions of the centrality of cultural affinity to ethical life and the necessity of community and shared moral frameworks. For the student and much of the new left, these potentially deep points of criticism of culturally pluralist, purportedly value-neutral liberal states, unfortunately resulted mainly in ideas ranging from the farcical (“cultural appropriation”) to the deeply uncomfortable (the keenness to silence dissenting views). Yet here were points to be taken seriously. It is not enough to reject a poor argument, if you can see that the resources on which the argument draws could be put to much more effective use against your own position. Political expediency aside, if you want to think honestly about difficult political and ethical questions, then you must try to be your own world view’s most persistent critic.

This is, then, where I find myself grappling at present. My concerns are the greater because of certain metaethical views I have come to hold about the nature of normative truth, which are connected to, but developed in a slightly different literature from, what I have described above. How do we sustain the achievements of liberal institutions and governance, whilst taking seriously the counter-Enlightenment arguments about community, identity, and their constitutive role in our ethical and political consciousness? Modern Western societies are culturally pluralist. Their institutions tend to strive for procedural justice, value-neutrality, for the lowest common ethical denominator across a diverse demos. “Thin” ethical concepts guide its institutions, to use Bernard Williams term. How do we square this, to return to the quotation I started with, with arguments like the one that “different natural languages [which are determined by and interlinked with broader culture] express each the uniquely characteristic way in which a people realizes the human essence”? That, I think, is the question.