A Conversation between Charles Taylor and Weiming Tu
Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences)
Vienna, Austria, June 11th, 2011
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3-ZnkCC0Jc&feature=related; accessed 9/26/11)
(Unauthorized, this interview was transcribed and lightly edited by Samuel C. Porter, Ph.D.)
Charles M. Taylor, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus, McGill University and an Institut für die Wissenschaften vom
Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences) Permanent Fellow.
Weiming Tu, Ph.D., (杜维明 教授) is Director of Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies and Lifetime Professor of Philosophy Peking University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Asia Center and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.
Weiming Tu: Why don’t I begin with a thought, which might very well be wishful thinking, that
there is – basically in the world of ideas but even in the so called profession of philosophy, I
wouldn’t call it a spiritual turn like linguistic or epistemological turns but – recognition of the
importance of religion broadly defined, especially spirituality.
My own experience is limited. But, as I’ve observed, even Derrida,1 when he was alive, talked
about [inaudible word; pardon?] back to the Jewish tradition. Your case is obvious. And Hilary
Putnam, before he retired, gave a course on four Jewish thinkers: Maimonides, Franz
Rosenswieg, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. He also offered a course on non-scientific
knowledge. I think even Gianni Vatimmo, who is a post-modern thinker, returned to Catholicism, though not to the Vatican version. So the kind of deconstruction, which Richard Rorty exemplifies, is only one of those possibilities, and maybe not even the most persuasive one.
Now your book, A Secular Age,2 seems to give a very strong argument that the secular age
should end somehow, even though people may not accept your idea about the re-emergence and
importance of transcendence. So I’d like to see your reaction to this.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, I think that – several things – that the changes you see I also see. People
now that used to dismiss religion, or even talking about religion or spirituality – a lot of those
people have shifted. Or they aren’t listened to as much anymore by other people. But it’s a very
specific kind of change in this sense: I think a lot of people who have no faith, particularly –
even don’t think necessarily very highly of people of faith – have come to the realization that if
you exclude thinking and talking about religion you exclude so much of human life, so many of
the sources of good and bad things. I mean morality but also the terrible things in human life.
Such people realize you’re crippled in your understanding of what human life is if you exclude
religion.
Weiming Tu: Diminished.
1
French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) founded a deep way of criticizing political institutions as well as
literary and philosophical texts. Also known as “deconstruction,” his kind of criticism attempts to re-conceive the
difference that divides self-reflection (or self-consciousness) and works toward preventing the worst violence and to
render justice (Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/; accessed 9/28/11).
2
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Harvard University Press, 2007.
2
Charles Taylor: Yeah, diminished. Very much so. Of course, when you think in terms of the
Western tradition – Dante’s Inferno and Bach’s Cantatas and so on – obviously you have something here which has nourished a faith tradition which has something very important to say to us.
So I think that those people got impatient with the hard-line secularists who said, “Let’s not talk
about religion, let’s marginalize it” and so on. Not necessarily that they are seeking a spiritual
path themselves. Some people may be. But because –
Weiming Tu: They’re concerned.
Charles Taylor: They’re concerned about the narrowing of our understanding of the human.
Weiming Tu: But even if you ask them whether you are religious they may say no. Many people
say, “I’m religious even though I don’t belong to an organization.”
Charles Taylor: Yeah, and some people say, “I’m spiritual but not religious” and some people
would even not say spiritual. But –
Weiming Tu: But have ultimate concerns.
Charles Taylor: Yeah. But I mean they just don’t think that it doesn’t have any interest for us to
look at religious traditions, what religious people have done, what religious people have thought.
Because, although they may interpret it differently, they think there is [something] very important about human life, which all this somehow explores and reveals.
And I think we’ve gone into a new period – well, we’re polarized because we, strangely enough,
this is exactly the same period as you have these very angry atheists in the West who really
would like to destroy, expunge religion totally. And that may be there for something in this
change. Maybe that finally produced a reaction where a lot of people say, “Okay, I agree with
them and religion may not be the right path but they are behaving in a ridiculous fashion – a
fashion of overkill which is going to impoverish our lives.” So they’re reacting against that. I
think that part of it they’ve helped to crystallize by their very aggressivity and narrowmindedness.
Weiming Tu: I was – while I probably didn’t deserve it – given a kind of life-long achievement
award by the American Association of Humanists. Maybe Ed Wilson proposed [inaudible word
or two] as a member of that [organization]. They also invited Salman Rushdie to give a talk. So
when I was giving my talk – [inaudible name] was there too – I said, look, Confucianism is a
form of humanism to be sure. But it’s definitely not a secular humanism. You can say it’s a comprehensive [inaudible word] humanism.
Nature – an Indian scholar by the name of – an Indian philosopher, maybe one of the leading
philosophers, by the name of [inaudible name; Para Subramanya (sp?)] in a paper he presented to
a conference I co-organized with [inaudible name] on Indian and Chinese philosophical perspectives on knowledge, wisdom and spirituality. The paper argues very persuasively – even to some
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of the people who consider Confucianism simply social ethics or a kind of social philosophy –
that we should characterize Confucianism as spiritual humanism. That to me is really quite remarkable.
So I think the kind of strong belief in materialism not in a Marxist sense. But like University of
Texas, Austin, Physics Professor Steven Weinberg, that the world has no meaning and it’s just a
kind of physicalism. Everything is reducible to the outward reality or to the high energy of physics.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, to what can be understood by physics.
Weiming Tu: You can touch it. You can quantify it. I think that position is no longer held by
some of the most brilliant scientists, especially in the instance of quantum mechanics, chaos theory and so forth.
So I think that the reason – or my conjecture is – you were rewarded with the Templeton Foundation Prize, which was originally focused on science and religion, and I think that … I’m sure
that your position is persuasive not only among people in the humanities and the social sciences
but elsewhere.
The first time I encountered your work on the sources of the self and, of course, authenticity, I
felt a very strong, spiritual or religious component there. But this is a personal question. I don’t
know. As a professional philosopher, I know most people want to make a clear distinction between my personal belief and also my philosophical work. In my case, I’ve always been committed to the Confucian tradition. So, obviously, the totally disinterested position is no longer available to me.
What is the situation in your case? Very early on you were self-consciously trying to say I am a
Catholic.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, because – I mean this is how I see the situation in philosophy. I think we
have to present arguments in philosophy that could, in principle, convince anyone. So if I presented an argument that says, “It follows from the fact that God exists” and so on – that’s not a
philosophical argument because it’s not starting with something that someone else with some
other position can start from.
So, definitely, we have to speak to everybody even though we don’t convince everybody. But I
think it’s also true that there’s a much higher likelihood of one’s having certain intuitions if one
has one kind of position and of one’s having other kinds of intuitions if one has another kind of
position.
So, in a way, full disclosure is a very good thing in philosophy. It will give people a sense of
“Where I’m coming from. What’s one of the sources of the intuitions I’m coming up with? This
is what it is.” But that doesn’t mean that I’m not arguing with everybody. I’m not presenting
something that –
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Weiming Tu: It has to pass the test of rigorous analytical –
Charles Taylor: Yeah, I mean, in a sense, what we’re dealing with in these philosophical and
human questions is a question of interpretation. Who can make the most sense out of the text, out
of life, out of history? So you have one view and I have another. And I want to say to you,
“Well, you’re view is not bad on this but it’s too narrow on that. It can’t really understand that.
And I have a view that I think can encompass that.” It’s that kind of argument that goes back and
forth.
So I’ve got to try to convince you on the basis of, “Well, these kinds of things happened in history and how do you interpret them?”
But the fact that I have a certain take on this is just inseparable from my whole –
Weiming Tu: I totally agree.
Charles Taylor: So let’s be frank with one another. I’m coming from here. You’re coming from
there. [a few inaudible words.] But everyone knows where you’re coming from. But you’re not
presenting arguments that could, in principle, not convince everybody that this is a good way to
be, to operate and so on.
Weiming Tu: Let’s say in a more philosophical sense Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of preunderstanding and your bias and so forth.3 But in ordinary language my own personal experiences –
this only happened in the last three or four years – I tried to make a distinction between private
and personal.
Following John Stuart Mill, you have to develop a sense of privacy, which is absolutely critical.
If you don’t have that, like in China, then the freedom of expression and so forth will be compromised as well. So when I say this is my private matter, my diary and so forth, I don’t want to
share it with anyone.
But the word personal may have a totally different connotation. When I say this is my personal
view it may say this is subjective and private. But it also may mean I’m existentially committed.
If, say, in the latter sense, precisely because it is personal, I would like to argue with you and it’s
not only accountable and transparent. It can also be falsified. So my personal – this follows of
course this incredible discussion within the natural sciences, I guess, of Michael Polanyi’s notion
of “personal knowledge”4 –
Charles Taylor: Yes, that’s right.
Weiming Tu: So in that sense, earlier, a great Confucian thinker by the name of Tuang Chou Yi
[sp?], when he gave the inaugural lecture as the [inaudible word?] professor of philosophy at the
3
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition. New York: Crossroad, 1991 (1960), pp. 271285.
4
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, Corrected Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 (1958).
5
Chinese University of Hong Kong – and this of course in the ‘60s and ‘70s when analytical philosophy was quite overpowering. He said we really should develop a sense of awe, a sense of
respect, as philosophers, for what we read and for what we do. Right now it’s so sensible and
everybody accepts it. But at the time he was attacked, especially by some analytical philosophers
who said, “This guy is not philosophical enough.” If you say, “I have a sense of awe,” that means
you’re talking about religion. You know, the distinction between religion – when a philosopher,
at that time, says [to another philosopher], “You’re doing religion,” it’s a kiss of death, meaning
you don’t have an argument, the power of reasoning and so forth.
So my sense now is that fruitful discussion is sometimes not possible. But the more you’re aware
of what you do and the more that you’re willing to share your personal – not your private –
sense of “Why is it meaningful to me,” a position I took early on, you assume a kind of risk.
If I say, “I am a Confucian,” they say, “Okay, then your discussion of Confucianism is biased
because you love it.”
Actually, I was severely criticized by a noted, widely respected historian. He said, “The problem
with Weiming Tu is that he really loves it. What he’s doing now is making something which may
be outmoded and feudalistic into something beautiful, something to which people would be attracted. That’s why he got this reputation in the United States or in the English speaking world
because he seems to give the impression that it’s a great thing you should learn.”
I said, “No.” If you talk to a theologian, or if you talk to a Buddhist teacher, and the theologian is
of course immersed in Christian discourse and gives the best argument about something as basic
as, say, the resurrection or the trinity. That’s as true with the Buddhist idea of karma. Why, as a
Confucian, can’t I give an argument about something which I strongly believe such as humanity,
rightness or civility and so forth? I’ve had a lot of trouble with that.
Charles Taylor: I think that what your critics don’t see is that an important part of reason can be
articulating a new vision. In other words, it’s rather like Tom Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift.5
You don’t get anywhere in science if you just go over and over the evidence until somebody gets
a new paradigm idea which makes the evidence relevant in a new way. And then, wow, things
begin to fit together. So getting those insights can be tremendously important. But, you see, you
get insights about Confucianism because you love it.6
Weiming Tu: Right.
Charles Taylor: You wouldn’t get them if you didn’t love it. So, as being somebody creative
who can contribute to the debate – we’ve got to have somebody who loves something, right?
Otherwise they have nothing to tell us. I think this idea – as though all the issues were laid out
before hand and we don’t need any invention and we just have to rigorously test this or that and
so on – is a kind of old style positivist view.
5
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd Edition, 1996
(1962).
6
Cf. “What we have loved,/Others will love, and we will teach them how.” William Wordsworth, The Prelude. New
York: Norton, 1979 (1799, 1805, 1850).
6
Weiming Tu: And it’s still extremely powerful –
Charles Taylor: Extremely powerful.
Weiming Tu: – especially in China.
Charles Taylor: Really?
Weiming Tu: Yeah. China suffers, I think in general, a kind of scientism, an outmoded positivistic science. Even a very respected scholar of Chinese philosophy, David Nivison, who taught at
Stanford and trained more than one generation of outstanding scholars. Once he confided to me
and I was astounded because he’s one of the best interpreters of the Confucian tradition, especially virtue ethics. He said, “I’m moving out of philosophy. I want to do something very different.” I said, “What?” He said, “I’m going to do something like dating. I want to date – ”
Charles Taylor: Texts?
Weiming Tu: No, no, no. Not texts. He said, “I want simply to argue – a very ancient time, the
Zhou –which was the dynasty that Confucius loved – that the Zhou Dynasty, the conquest of the
Shang Dynasty by the Zhou happened in a certain year. According to my own work it’s probably
1045 B.C.E. And I want to – ” I said, “Why? This is not something philosophers are interested
in.”
He said, “I’ve been a philosopher for so long and with any argument I presented there would be
counter arguments and then there’d be more arguments and more counter arguments. I now want
to do something that is so factual that nobody else will be able to say, ‘No.’”
Charles Taylor: Conclusive.
Weiming Tu: Well, he spent 10 years on that problem. Obsessed with it. I was so astonished.
When one of his students – a very brilliant student – questioned his conclusion about 1045, or
1047, he disowned him and became totally violent. He sent me a letter denouncing his student.
Charles Taylor: Really?
Weiming Tu: He just became paranoid, or I don’t know. Anyway, that to me is very strange.
The idea to get it right. I have a very good friend who is a historian and his position is this: We
historians should present a Rankean,7 source-based accurate description of what happened and
we do not make any judgments. We become neutral, value neutral. We present all this material
for philosophers, intellectual historians and others to interpret. We just get the facts. I said, “God,
this guy is playing God.” He said, “We got it. This is the neutral ground.”
So the more I do it the more I feel that it is not only in philosophy and religion but also history
and sometimes even in science. Because, according to Kuhn, the scientific community – why the
7
German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) set standards for modern historical writing relying on primary
sources.
7
Copenhagen school? Why is this problem considered important? Why not the other problem? Or
that problem? It’s not just the sociology of knowledge. Within the structure of scientific inquiry
[there is] personal involvement. If you don’t love it, how can you be a first-rate scientist?
Charles Taylor: Absolutely. I think we totally agree on that and it’s just so evident today that I
can’t understand why there is this blockage.
Weiming Tu: But still you are a minority.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, but I can see that the hold of positivism is very, very strong. It’s gotten to
be for many people synonymous with reason and they just can’t deviate from it. They feel very
uncomfortable if you ask them – I mean, also you just know when you look at them that they do
love certain things. They love certain principles.
Weiming Tu: Sure.
Charles Taylor: So they’ve got a kind of unconsciousness of their own modus operandi.
Weiming Tu: One thing you just mentioned, that it’s probably a deviation from reason, but my
own sense is the complexity of the question of rationality itself. You have instrumental rationality in Weber’s sense. But the questions about the limits of rationality – they have to be addressed.
There are so many areas where rationality is either irrelevant or it doesn’t matter. For example,
our common sense ideas. Sometimes you don’t have a good reason but it’s done. So, I don’t
know.
What is your take on the limits of rationality?
Charles Taylor: Well, I think you need more self-consciousness about reason. For instance, as
Aristotle said, there are certain subjects where you can’t – you’ll never – get it exactly right; and
others where you can. You don’t ask from a rhetorician or an orator the same degree of exactitude as you do from a mathematician. It’s just a different kind of subject. So, when you’re talking about common sense you’re talking about the kind of thing where there are so many reasons,
in a certain sense, you couldn’t begin to enumerate them.
We’re sitting here talking together and someone says, “Prove it.” What do you mean, “prove it”?
You have to get a context of somebody doubting it. So, that’s one thing you have to do. You
have to have this self-consciousness about the different issues.
Then the other thing is what I was saying earlier: the process of reasoning often requires that
somebody introduce new language, new articulation which can really allow us to see things in a
new way that then may turn out to be the best way. So that’s also part of reasoning.
Weiming Tu: Extending our horizons.
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Charles Taylor: So you can’t make reason simply a matter of correct deduction, avoiding contradiction, the acceptance of obviously established facts, which a lot of people would like to restrict reason to.
If we did restrict reason to that we would never have thought anything interesting at all. No advances. We wouldn’t have had Newton. We wouldn’t have had Galileo and so on. So we have
this terribly narrow understanding of reason. It’s kind of like a disease we have to explain.
Weiming Tu: We have to cure ourselves.
Charles Taylor: No. We have to explain why this ideology has become so normative because
it’s so counter to certain obvious facts about the human condition.
Weiming Tu: I think, again, from the Confucian position, that reasonableness may not be an expression of rigorous rationality. But that it is a kind of lived reality. It’s not at all a kind of pseudo rationalistic thinking, [inaudible prefix]-logical thinking for example.
People often worry about ambiguity. In your books, especially the recent one, there’s a great
deal. But, Benjamin Schwartz, a noted Sinologist but also a great Jewish thinker, thinks that
fruitful ambiguity is characteristic of Chinese philosophy. Because there’s a deliberate attempt –
it’s not a failed attempt – not to get involved in this reductionist model. If you define something
and then try to stick to that definition you get into deductive logic. What you need to do is to
have a [dialectic?] view, which is necessarily ambivalent and there’s a lot of ambiguity. But the
reason is you don’t want to tie up loose ends prematurely. It’s deliberate. You want to move
ahead.
I really admire your style of writing, the particular way you express yourself. Because English is
not my native language, sometimes I feel I need to read it out loud. It’s really terrific and it’s not
just the readability. Your personal sense of what’s going is there. And yet there’s no question
about the rigor of the reasoning and so forth.
Normally, if someone is very personal then you get autobiography. The problem with cultural
anthropology is that even some post-doctoral fellows tend to write something which is autobiographic. I mean who wants to know anything about your autobiography? This is also a disease.
That’s true with say postmodernism. Sometimes the language itself is so opaque. I don’t know
the term they use – [idiolect?] – a group of people that develop a certain terminology.
Charles Taylor: You wonder if they really know what they’re trying to say.
Weiming Tu: I don’t know whether you know about this rather embarrassing incident for postmodernists. A scientist, with no knowledge of postmodernism, put several things together and
published an article.
Charles Taylor: I remember that.
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Weiming Tu: [The article produced] many commentaries from devoted postmodernists. Then
the scientist said, “Well, I did it. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Charles Taylor: He was making a parody.
Weiming Tu: Absolutely a parody. I don’t know. I don’t want to say anything nasty about my
esteemed colleagues but one of them actually got the prize for the worst writer.
Eurocentrism – already in the ‘60s, Robert Bellah (I was one of his first students when he was an
assistant professor) made the remark that for the next generation the real outstanding philosophical minds in the West – Europe and North America – would know something about the world
outside. It’s not possible to become a world philosopher, a world thinker, without that sense of
self-awareness.
But unfortunately, already 30 years past, some of the most important people who have a shaping
influence on philosophical discourse, not only in the West but also in China, can be very, I would
say, parochial or at least Euro-centered. Foucault, actually, is one of them. Certainly Derrida.
Sometimes he can be arrogant and say there is no Chinese philosophy or something like that. So
there’s a debate in China about whether there is Chinese philosophy or only philosophy in China.
And certainly Habermas.
Charles Taylor: I think he may be improving.
Weiming Tu: No. He visited Korea and China. Improving, well, after his whole system was already completed.
But I think you represent a very different way. Maybe because you’re Canadian. I’m not sure.
Charles Taylor: Well, I’m from Quebec. You see, we we’re brought up with two languages and
we saw these two [inaudible word] where lots of people thought the world was just as their language portrayed it. So the others must be mixed up. And if you’re brought up in a family like
that you’re seeing that they’re just passing each other by. First of all, you feel that you’ve got to
explain them to each other. So that’s where I got in that habit. But then I also became aware that
there are some different ways of looking at the world. When you start to think that the other people are crazy it’s probably because you’re not seeing something. So you better learn their language. So, in a certain sense, I got to an outlook where learning other languages – other ways of
thinking – was crucial for my work. I’m way behind because you can’t master all languages. But
I definitely felt this kind of orientation.
Weiming Tu: I think your philosophy must be one of the most important sources of inspiration
or influence for the American and Canadian approaches to multiculturalism. The city of Toronto,
for example, very early on, deliberately embraced multiculturalism as something for celebration.
So the first China town and then the second China town, the Italian town and now I’m sure the
Indian town and so forth, using Hindi.
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But in America multiculturalism has become powerful, not inadvertently, through struggle. It’s a
contestation. You have to almost like confrontation. You win through confrontation to be accepted. Otherwise you’re not a member of the club, or something of that nature. That to me is – and I
would say you as a philosopher and Robert Bellah as a thinker – the new vision. In other words,
from now on it’s not possible for the younger generation of philosophers – either in North America or in Europe – to be able to claim some kind of global vision. They will not be recognized
either by themselves or by people outside. I think pluralism is emerging. In this conference, for
instance, we realized that the Indian scholars and the East Asian scholars began to be very assertive.
So one thing I detect – I don’t know, this may be a minor criticism, when you talk about the importance of God in the medieval period – is that everything is connected with the centrality of
faith. I think it’s basically the Judaic, Christian, and probably the Islamic mono-theistic position.
Charles Taylor: Yeah.
Weiming Tu: Because, as I noted, in China, it’s not even a rejected possibility because the question never got asked. Many people just believe that Materishi [sp?] was accommodationist. He
spent 13 years learning Chinese and appeared almost like a Confucian literatus. He converted a
few outstanding scholars and then he got into trouble because the Franciscans and the Dominicans didn’t accept his idea of allowing the Chinese to have the ancestral veneration or ancestral
worship. Once the Vatican decided that the Jesuits were wrong the Chinese people became angry
and that’s the controversy of the great rite.
But a few years ago one of my Ph.D. students, Juang Ching [sp?], got a degree in the History of
Science. She mastered Latin together with John Murdoch and examined Materishi’s letter to the
Vatican. It’s very revealing. He really wanted to convert. So modern colonization was very powerful. That provoked me into thinking about Materishi’s strategy. I think the strategy is now quite
apparent to me. But it may not be widely accepted. He wanted to deconstruct the Confucianism
of his age. We call it neo-Confucianism. I call it second epoch Confucianism. He wanted to delegitimize it to say you have to go back to the source. So you have to go back to Confucius or
even pre-Confucius. The idea of heaven by then had moved to a very different kind of discourse.
The ultimate source of inspiration is not a personalized heaven but what we call principle or pattern. So he did something dramatic to deconstruct the Confucianism of the time to return to a
source of inspiration.
Well, this is difficult to say but if you want to revise it, would you consider the idea of Godcentered transcendence as one version of going out of the secular age – there are other versions?
Charles Taylor: Yes, I can very much relate to that. I mean the way I would put it would be this:
there are a tremendous number of deep insights into human life and a lot of them are – I mean
they all are in a certain sense – distributed around in very different views, including [what] the
atheists use. They do bring out something that we haven’t thought of before.
We need to enter a new era where we’re all aware of that; and that we all will have – I mean ideally – a real desire to learn about these other positions and to learn about them in the following
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sense. This is where the issue of love comes in. To find out about another position, what really
interests me, is to learn why people love it?
So just giving me a list of theological [points] or dry-as-dust Confucius thought this and this and
this – no. I’d like to get insight into why people are moved by that. I’m convinced that each one
of us would be enriched by grasping that. It might change our own way of living our faith or it
might not. But we would have some better understanding of the tremendous scope of human life
and of human spirituality and so on. That is something – to step back into my own faith – I think
we’re called on to do.
Weiming Tu: A kind of self-reflexity and also self-criticism.
Charles Taylor: Well, that’s part of the fruit of it but the really great thing is – I’ll put it in
Christian terms – the communion. In other words, you can really get – there’s a kind of friendship that can grow up between people who are learning this kind of thing from each other and
deeply, therefore, respect each other. There’s a kind of connection that occurs there.
Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, all these kinds of dismissive, “They’re all
wrong” or “They’re all….” – which is what you get with Islamophobia in the West –
Weiming Tu: Islamophobia. I like that part.
Charles Taylor: All that kind of totally dismissive stuff disappears if you have this kind of exchange. I mean imagine some of my Islamophobic friends really sitting down with Bashir
[Bashir sp?]. Calm down. Just listen to Bashir. You can see that – unless they’re really totally
attached to this – kind of hostility and hatred would just kind of melt because there’s something
really, obviously [there]. In the same way you present Confucianism, you really get it across to
people – that’s why I say – because you love it you can do this. What it means to you –
Weiming Tu: But to love it is –
Charles Taylor: But you didn’t love it so –
Weiming Tu: not a sufficient condition, though it may be necessary.
Charles Taylor: Oh, yeah. It’s absolutely necessary because what we want to find out is why
people, with any given position, why they really love it, why they hold it. What excites them? I
mean you could get a dry-as-dust text book – Confucius says [this, this, this, and this.] But you
don’t often get it because people didn’t understand it? That gets me nowhere. When you get passionately worked up sometimes, then I’m beginning to grasp this.
Weiming Tu: There’s one caveat when people say, “You are a propagandist. You are a preacher” or something of that nature. This is a denouncement because there’s such a difference between a theologian and a preacher; and I want to be a theologian or a philosopher reflecting on it
experientially. I don’t want simply to publicize it.
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Charles Taylor: But I mean this is a different kind of activity, a different kind of relation where
we sit down and we say, “Let’s really try to understand,” which I’ve done to a certain extent with
the Dalai Lama and other people and found it tremendously –
I mean I suppose outside of the Abrahamic or three monotheistic faiths, a lot of which I find very
easy to jump over the boundary because it’s very close, I think perhaps Buddhism is the other
view that I have been most excited by, attracted to, deeply moved by and so on. I find that it’s
something that is a tremendous human gain. It’s a tremendous human gain for each individual
who engages in this. If we had a world where there was more of that we’d have less of this kind
of battling.
Thirdly, I see it, as a Christian, as something that I’m sort of called on to do. It’s creating these
links of communion. That is what it’s all about from a Christian point of view, I think.
But I mean if you start to say, “I’m only going to do communion with people who think exactly
[like me],” then you – that’s not the way Jesus behaved in the Gospel. He didn’t say, “I want you
to pass an orthodoxy test and now I’m going to deal with you.” He just reaches out.
So, you see, it relates in a complex way to my own faith. It’s hard to give a simple account of
this. I feel pushed in this direction, although it is a direction that involves lifting some of the very
narrow exclusivist claims that have usually been associated with [the Christian tradition].
I mean it is very interesting that after Vatican II this kind of understanding began to filter
through. Then it produces moments of reaction like the present Pope, who I admire in many
ways. He’s a great thinker and a great theologian. But I think he’s sometimes very narrow. He
wrote this [Verbum Domini?] – I’ve forgotten what’s it’s called but it tries to call people back
from – I think and I feel, I mean it was like, “Let’s not go too far, guys.”
Weiming Tu: Was it defensive?
Charles Taylor: Well, there was a sense that maybe all these people who were engaged in these
kinds of ecumenical dialogues, like me, are kind of selling the farm and losing the center –
Weiming Tu: The core values.
Charles Taylor: The core values of the faith. But that’s my feeling that maybe that’s what he
felt. What we need is a new understanding of how this actually –
Weiming Tu: Would you consider Hans Kung?
Charles Taylor: Yes. What’s interesting is that Kung and he get along, strangely. Kung and
Benedict get on very well.
Weiming Tu: You know him personally?
Charles Taylor: Yeah, I think you were mentioning this.
13
Weiming Tu: I mentioned it.
Charles Taylor: Originally, Kung was his teacher. And in spite of the fact that Kung was called
on the carpet by the Holy Office and so on, and Benedict was there, you’d think he’d be flaming
with –
Weiming Tu: He’s not allowed to teach theology.
Charles Taylor: Yeah.
Weiming Tu: That’s ridiculous.
Charles Taylor: Nevertheless, there’s something very interesting about this Ratzinger guy. I
mean he’s more complex than people allow for.
Weiming Tu: Yes, a good scholar.
Charles Taylor: And a good scholar.
But, you see, I don’t see eye-to-eye with him. I think we’re in a world in which we have to find
the core of our own faith commitment in and through this kind of exchange. I speak from a
Christian standpoint. I see this as part of the very core of my faith commitment. It’s not a departure from it. It’s what it demands in our age particularly.
Weiming Tu: At an East-West philosophers’ conference a long time ago I was asked to moderate a panel with Hans-Georg Gadamer on one hand and then Richard Rorty. It’s quite –
Charles Taylor: They are very good friends.
Weiming Tu: Yeah, they are good friends. But I want your take on this. Richard Rorty must be a
good friend of yours.
Charles Taylor: Yes, we were good friends.
Weiming Tu: I just sometimes couldn’t stand him. His political view is really extremely conservative – an arrogant sort of American chauvinism.
Charles Taylor: Yeah.
Weiming Tu: He said, “China and Confucianism: they’re not democratic” and “There isn’t anything we can learn from them.” Or something of that nature. He added, “Fifty years from now,
all the cultural distinctions and identities will be gone.” What’s the term he used? “Hybridity.”
Everything is mixed up. Before he visited China he said 50 years from now there’ll be only one
language that matters. After he visited China he said maybe two.
14
He’s probably something of a gadfly, very thought provoking. Edifying conversation is good but
it seems, at least from my point of view, not serious enough. I don’t know what his own commitment is.
Charles Taylor: I can see his own commitment. But I think he has or had a great disadvantage,
which comes from being an American. I don’t mean this in terms of being dismissive. But Americans do tend to become unilingual.
Weiming Tu: Absolutely.
Charles Taylor: They’re not trained or asked to learn other languages and if you get into a unilingual bubble then you can think things like “We’ll all be speaking English” or “What the hell
do they have to say in China” and so on. You get it all – whatever you get you get in translation
anyway. So you don’t [have to learn other languages].
Weiming Tu: Just like tourists who visit Italy and say, “Well, this is not progressive because
they don’t even speak English.”
Charles Taylor: Yeah, that’s right.
Weiming Tu: Or, if someone knows two languages they’re bi-lingual. If they know a few languages they’re multilingual. If the person knows one language he or she must be an American.
Charles Taylor: So I think the effect of really meeting something different – which at once perplexes you but also impresses you as having something – is a necessary experience to progress in
the world of thought and I guess maybe Dick never had that.
Weiming Tu: Did you know Clifford Geertz?
Charles Taylor: Oh yeah, very well.
Weiming Tu: This whole question about a liberating experience from confronting radical otherness – I think it’s precisely –
Charles Taylor: That’s why we got on tremendously well because –
Weiming Tu: When I was at Berkeley in the ‘70s there was a meeting held in Berlin at which I
presented a paper and he was my commentator. I was just astonished. Because he is of course a
brilliant mind but he never really studied China.
He said, “Yeah, Weiming is confronted with three problems.

One is that he’s a Confucian and trying to explain Confucianism to outsiders.

He is modern and involved in classical studies but wants to present the Confucian tradition to the modern world.
15

In terms of discipline, he’s more in the philosophical tradition and now wants to talk to us
social scientists and so forth.
It is just a very sympathetic understanding. I almost sort of realized the complexity.
Then he offered something. I was really happily surprised. He said, “That’s why his language is
always, “It’s not that, it’s not that, it’s not that,” in order to avoid – it’s almost like the fear of –
being misunderstood. So, eventually, Philosophy East and West published these two pieces.
The question I have now is concerned with how you put your own idea into practice. You spent
three months in India. Have you done that before?
Charles Taylor: No.
Weiming Tu: There must be a very strong philosophical reason.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, I’m more and more involved with Rajeev Bhargava and Salipto [sp?] and
so on. And also Shihib [sp?] but also Neshpesch Charbobachi [sp?]. So this is a whole gang of
people that are trying to find the language to revivify the political theoretical tradition of India.
And they’re willing to reach back quite far because it didn’t express itself in exactly the same
way. It’s a little bit like what Fred Dallmayr was saying about the Islamic.
Weiming Tu: I was a bit astonished.
Charles Taylor: He sharply but I think correctly responded to that – “You’re looking in the
wrong place.” Because [inaudible name] who was also another Indian that was part of this. So I
have been very interested in that. I was invited to the Center 30 years ago to give a talk.
Weiming Tu: You mean the Center for –
Charles Taylor: – the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi.8 At that point it was Rajni Kothari who was head of the Center.
They were and are dedicated to finding an adequate language to understand Indian democracy,
Indian society and Indian caste. They’re very dissatisfied with just what they’re handed from
Western social science. But they don’t have the alternative stuff. They’re looking for it.
So partly there was an affinity. They read some of my stuff and they invited me there and I recognized right away that this is one of the things that I really believe in. I mean I thought that a lot
of Western political science doesn’t reveal much about Western society either. So you’ve got to
renew the language. But this idea of renewing a language and this idea of their really finding
their language really excited me. So I’ve been sort of involved in this.
Weiming Tu: You mean 30 years ago you first connected with this Center?
The Center for the Study of Developing Societies (http://www.csds.in/index.php). One of this center’s research
fields involves, for example, “philosophical inquiries into the sources of civilizational discourses.”
8
16
Charles Taylor: Thirty years ago, yeah. Rajeev I knew already. But I did meet Shaheed [sp?]
there and others. I got to know Rajeev better too.
But this really excites me that somehow this entire world, which has not developed yet enough
language for you to have come to grips with it, is actually beginning to get somewhere on this.
And 30 years later I see that this center has really made progress there. People like Yogendra
Yadav –
Weiming Tu: Ashis Nandy?
Charles Taylor: Ashis Nandy was there. Yeah. Ashis I met for the first time.
Weiming Tu: Ashis Nandy you met for the first time 30 years ago?
Charles Taylor: Yes, because he was the central figure. He’s retired now but he’s still around.
Weiming Tu: How old is he? I thought he was rather young. Is he in his 70s already?
Charles Taylor: Maybe. Ask Rajeev but I’m pretty sure he’s in his 70s. So he was there and so
was Rajni Kothari and so on.
But I’m just very excited by this. Because what is it going to mean? It’s going to mean a new
voice there that can not only help themselves to deal with their own problems but can also explain to dummies like me. Because I mean in order to get clear they have to situate themselves in
relation to this Western language that they find inadequate.
Weiming Tu: That’s a major challenge.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, a major challenge and we’re going to have tremendous insights into this
society that now baffles us.
So we kind of got into this relationship where I was like the external kibitzer and presenting
views of what the Western world –
Weiming Tu: I’m sure it will be a source of inspiration for a long time.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, a great source of inspiration for me. So, finally, Rajeev said come and be
our Rajni Kothari Visiting Professor – because Rajni has now become canonized – for a few
months. And I said, yeah, I’d love to do that.
Weiming Tu: That’s really terrific. Ashis Nandy and I hit it off very well even though we don’t
know each other that well. [We’ve met] just a few times. He told me an observation. He was invited to Harvard quite regularly. He said he didn’t feel comfortable. If you just imagine your
conversation partner – of course, in America, maybe monolingual – who thinks your present is
our remote past
17
Charles Taylor: Yeah, that’s right.
Weiming Tu: And our present is your distant future. How can the conversation begin? I said
“That’s right. That’s a big problem.”
I’ve been involved in this dialogue among civilizations.9 I think it’s not ironic but paradoxical
that, in 1998, Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami first proposed to the U.N. that the year 2001
should be the year of the dialogue among civilizations, which probably was a deliberate response
to Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations.”10
Charles Taylor: But also a response to his own hardliners. I mean he really wanted to move Iran
out of this –
Weiming Tu: Oh yes, in another direction.
Charles Taylor: And they’d go –
Weiming Tu: Right. That’s why I reacted so negatively to Bernard Lewis.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, incomprehensible to me. Incomprehensible that somebody with that
scholarly depth –
Weiming Tu: Yeah.
Charles Taylor: – can – I feel we were stabbed in the back. Because I have a very strong, adversarial relationship to Islamophobia.
Weiming Tu: Do you know him personally?
Charles Taylor: Yes. But I’d have trouble meeting him again because I’m not an aggressive
person and I don’t want –
Weiming Tu: I think his article published in the Atlantic Monthly on the rage of Islam11 really
provoked – almost provided the ammunition needed by Huntington to write the “Clash of Civilizations.”
Charles Taylor: Yeah.
9
See http://www.un.org/Dialogue/ and http://www.un.org/Dialogue/eminentpersons.html.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993. Samuel P. Huntington, The
Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Updated Edition. New York: Simon and Schuster,
2011 (1996). Note: the question mark in the article’s title is missing in the book’s title.
11
Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/4643/
10
18
Weiming Tu: The demonization of Islam is so obvious. Sam Huntington – we have been good
friends. I attended many of his seminars. Actually, especially his wife is not only friendly but
also very supportive and encouraging.
But this Cold War mentality is so difficult to get rid of. In his original conception, the idea of the
West and the rest looms very large in his mind. He looks at the geo-politics of the world in terms
of major or potential adversaries. So Islamic countries loom large because [they’re perceived as
an] imminent threat.
The distant horizon is the Confucian cultural world of China. He more or less did not pay attention to India because India is not a threat. He totally ignored Africa. He said Africa is a negative
example.
This mentality is so powerful in Washington, and later of course is enacted in the national policy
of unilateralism – Bush and so forth. Even now I don’t think Obama is able to rise above it.
Charles Taylor: Well, I think Obama is personally. But I think he is terribly boxed in.
Weiming Tu: Incredible.
Charles Taylor: Yeah. To me, how shall I say, it’s the most dysfunctional political system in the
democratic world.
Weiming Tu: The American system?
Charles Taylor: Yeah, the American one. I mean, first of all, the checks and balances have gotten totally out of control. Then they have this ridiculous senatorial rule about needing 60 Senators. It’s just so – in particular, with reference to the backlash that caused the House to become
Republican, I really see him as being totally boxed in.
I have a feeling that here is somebody that does understand you have to get outside.
Weiming Tu: Yes. I think in some of his speeches, for example, the one delivered at –
Charles Taylor: Cairo.
Weiming Tu: Cairo. Bob Bellah called me and said, “What a glorious day. For the first time we
have this….” This, of course, is against the background of when Jimmy Carter was sure that he
was going to lose. He asked Bob Bellah and a few others for advice as to “What would be my
message to the American people?”12 So they persuaded him you have to say that America is in
See Daniel Horowitz, Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s: The “Crisis of Confidence” Speech of
July 15, 1979: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: Robert Bellah, “Human
Conditions for a Good Society,” March 25, 1979 (pp. 73-77) and Robert Bellah, “A Night at Camp David,” July 27,
1979 (pp. 152-157); and, Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture,
1939-1979. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004: chapter 7, “The Energy Crisis and the Quest to Contain Consumption: Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Robert Bellah”; and chapter 8, “Three Intellectuals and a
President: Jimmy Carter, ‘Energy and the Crisis of Confidence.’”
12
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terrible shape. There are so many things that are wrong. He was convinced and Rosalynn was
also present and was also convinced. So they gave him a draft and so for the first time an American president would be self-critical not only of his own presidency but also of America. So they
waited only about a week or so before – this is what I heard – his TV appearance. But when he
appeared on American TV he said, “America is as good as the American people. The American
people are terrific,” and totally ignored what they agreed on. He’s certainly a decent man –
Charles Taylor: Yeah, I bet his advisors got to him, I’m sure.
Weiming Tu: No, no, no. Not just his advisors. PR people and especially the people from the
Democratic Party. They did a survey and said, “You’ll go down the drain but you’ll drag your
whole party. If you make that speech we’re done with.”
So recently I did get a chance to ask a question [of former Vice-President Walter] Mondale. I
consider him not only decent but also a really very powerful statesman. I said, “When can America, and how can America, rise above national self-interest?” He’s so eloquent normally. But he
paused in the meeting for about 10 seconds – a long, long 10 seconds. He said, “National selfinterest is good.” In other words, he could not even imagine the possibility that American leadership could move beyond national self-interest. Therefore they don’t consider the U.N. a very important forum and they always send a second-rate ambassador [to the U.N.].
Charles Taylor: Yeah, well, I mean there is such a thing as self-interest well understood. And
America is not doing anything about global warming and that’s not in their long-term selfinterest. Their stoking up Netanyahu is not in their long-term self-interest. It’s not in Israel’s
long-term self-interest either.
Weiming Tu: Yeah, their survivability is in question.
Charles Taylor: Yeah. So I think what you need is not to say, “Forget self-interest my fellow
citizens.” But say, “Look, let’s look at what we’re really facing and if we don’t do something
about this we’re all going down the tube, including us.” You have to shift the parameters.
Weiming Tu: There was a New Yorker cartoon with a boat capsized with some of the people –
Americans of course – on top saying, “Wow, fortunately, we’re not like them.”
This is something to me that is very discouraging.
Charles Taylor: If anybody could lead America beyond the narrowest it would have to be
Obama. Come on, we’re never going to get a guy that intelligent, that reflective. The last time we
had someone like that in the White House – I shouldn’t say this. I must be pessimistic.
Weiming Tu: For a few Chinese scholars, especially those in the Confucian tradition, one of the
foundational texts of the Four Books,13 the shortest Chinese classic, is the Great Learning. The
13
The other three of the Four Books are the Doctrine of the Mean, the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius all
four of which were written before 221 B.C.E.
20
Great Learning has a statement about the self-cultivation that will lead to regulation of the family that will lead to governance of the state and world peace and peace in heaven.
So in my interpretive approach, my modern interpretive stand is that one of the basic Confucian
commitments is a commitment to human flourishing. It is a complicated process by which one
transcends the self’s egoistic incidences by realizing the self; one transcends nepotistic elements
by harmonizing the family; one transcends chauvinistic nationalism by routing out patriotism;
and one transcends anthropocentricism to develop – a term I use somewhat awkwardly – a kind
of ethico-cosmic vision.
So this process – to live it concretely – means you have to be embodied in your context. But then
you have to move out of that context in order to move to a larger context. So that, to me, is a
very rich resource. That’s why I called it “spiritual humanism.”
Now in the 11th Century C.E., a great Confucian thinker, Song Tzi [sp?], in a Western inscription, in the very beginning, in a very short paragraph, says,
Heaven is my father. Earth is my mother. Even such a small creature finds intimacy in their midst. Things that fill the universe are my body and the direction of the
universe is my nature. So all people are my brothers and sisters and all things are
my companions.
And this led to another – I don’t think romantic – assertion. It’s a very well argued position of a
true human that forms one body would have [a few inaudible words].
Then, later, Yang-ming, my hero. I did my dissertation14 on him. He said, “Look at this interplay
between differentiation and communion or union. In China, when we see a child about to fall into the well we have a sense of commiseration. So my heart is linked to that child. Some people
will say, “Look, you belong to the same species.”
There’s also another statement in the book of Mencius about a king who is moved by the suffering of a cow. That shows some kind of sympathetic relation between a person and an animal.
Some say, “Animals are animals.” “But when you see trees are being destroyed in the forest, you
feel regret.” “Well,” [they say], “these are living things.” But even mountains.
So the notion is that we are interconnected to the whole universe and yet differentiated. So then
the question about humanity is often understood not as universal love but as graded love. But
graded is not a self-imposed limitation.
For example, when the question is asked Confucius, “What is your idea about repaying maliciousness with kindness?” Confucius asks, “How are you going to repay kindness?” So his suggestion is, “Repay kindness with kindness. Repay maliciousness with justice.”
The Quest of Self-Realization: A Study of Wang Yang-ming’s Formative Years. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University,
1968. See also, Weiming Tu, Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung, Monograph of the Society for
Asian and Comparative Philosophy, no. 3, Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1976.
14
21
So it’s differentiated and yet the connectedness is there.
So then, later, I think a friend of mine elaborated this idea in a whole philosophical system: the
unity of principle and the multiplicity of its manifestation. And that can negotiate diversity with
harmony and so forth. So that’s why I say when you look at a humanistic project you really have
to take into consideration these four dimensions: the question of the self, nature, community, and
heaven.
When you look at the Habermasian project, which is a continuation of the Enlightenment project,
or Rawls for that matter, it really [is about fixing] the relation between the individual and the
community or the state. And Richard Rorty’s to me rather dichotomous thinking – you have to
make a choice: self-realization or social service. So his notion of self-realization is quite restricted, almost like a quest for your inner spirituality in a very selfish way.
But in the Confucian tradition a person is always understood as a center of relationships. As a
center you have the dignity and the autonomy of the person. But in terms of relationships you
just cannot be an isolated individual.
I’m reading your book on William James.15 Again, it’s so beautifully constructed. There’s a motto in William James Hall at Harvard. I never managed to trace [its origins]. Maybe Talcott Parsons or someone [like him] selected [it]:
Without the impulse of the individual, the community stagnates. But without the
sympathy of the community, individual impulses fade away.
So this is also an interplay. I think that is – not to mention someone like Emerson, a transcendentalist – common sense. If you want to do that kind of exclusive dichotomy, then the Confucian
self-cultivation philosophy becomes a very selfish act. And social service would become very
superficial. I don’t know.
My sense – from your books, Sources of the Self (1989) and The Ethics of Authenticity (1992) –
is that you also – you don’t want to be called a communitarian, right?
Charles Taylor: Well, no, because it has two quite separate meanings. So I always have to explain. You see, with Amatai Etzioni I’m entirely in agreement. That’s a kind of civic humanism,
really.
Weiming Tu: How about MacIntyre?
Charles Taylor: Well, there is another totally different issue, which is whether – I also agree
with Alasdair – but it’s a wholly different issue, which is whether you can understand human beings outside their traditions, their histories and so on. There’s another kind of individualism – an
analytical individualism – which he’s fighting against. I also agree with him.
15
Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003.
22
It’s just that there’s many – then there’s an issue where people talk about communitarianism as
stressing the importance of different cultural communities within a republic. And that’s a very
interesting issue too and I have a nuanced view on that, etc.16
But just when somebody says, “Are you a communitarian without realizing that there are –
Weiming Tu: Variations.
Charles Taylor: Well, totally different issues here. The word has been bandied and slapped
around.
Weiming Tu: But MacIntyre, in recent years, is fascinated by Confucianism. One of his colleagues, in fact, was instrumental in getting him to Duke, David Wong, a Chinese American.
Even though he’s not seasoned in classical Chinese studies, his insight into the Confucian project
is tremendous.
But one thing about MacIntyre is that – I don’t know. Maybe I’m judging the case. He’s somewhat restless. He never stays in one place for much more than a few years.
Charles Taylor: That’s right. He’s gone back to Notre Dame and I think he’ll probably stay
there.
Weiming Tu: His friend told me this will be he’s seventh year and he’s probably ready to move
again.
How about Michael Sandel? You know him well, don’t you?
Charles Taylor: Oh yes, I’ve known him for years. He was a student of mine at Oxford. Yeah,
many, many years ago.
Weiming Tu: At Oxford?
Charles Taylor: Yeah.
Weiming Tu: And his position is very compatible with yours?
Charles Taylor: Oh yes.
Weiming Tu: But he would not mind being characterized as a communitarian because of his
critical reflection on John Rawls.17
Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1992. See also Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor’s report of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, Quebec, Canada, 2008. http://www.accommodements.qc.ca/indexen.html.
17
Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Second Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998 (1982). John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999 (1971).
16
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Charles Taylor: Yeah, that’s right. I mean he’s on the second dimension: Can you really understand a human being as being totally outside of their community? We agree on the negative to
that question.
Weiming Tu: He’s really a public intellectual in the best sense of that term.
Charles Taylor: Yeah, and a very committed intellectual – I mean in public terms.
Weiming Tu: Do you know his impact on China now?
Charles Taylor: No.
Weiming Tu: A friend of mine invited him to China. Then, in this most recent time, there was
an attempt, almost like an international attempt – you know about his successful course on justice at Harvard,18 right? –
Charles Taylor: Yeah.
Weiming Tu: – to turn that into teaching material for universities in China.
Charles Taylor: Oh great.
Weiming Tu: And he went. Right now it is almost impossible to find any [Chinese] college student who doesn’t know Sandel.
Charles Taylor: Ah, well, I’m so pleased to hear that.
Weiming Tu: I’m sure that they’ll know you now if you say he was your student.
But, anyway, I’ve become very close friends with him. What happened was that NHK, the Japanese television network, wants to do a documentary using his teaching. I don’t know whether it’s
translated into Chinese or not but his reception [in China] is tremendous. So I now invited him –
because everything is on TV – and he’s accepted – to go to Peking University. It’s got a hall with
not necessarily a thousand but quite a few hundred [seats]. And he will give a talk, a lecture, and
then begin a conversation with the students.
Now you should rest.
Recorded at the Institut für die Wissenschaft vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences)
Spittalauer Lände 3, 1090 Vienna/Austria
Ai Bei, Camera, Photography, Marek C. Jeziorek, marekjez@gmail.com, Camera, Editing
© 2011 a.b.normal productions LCC, All Rights Reserved
http://www.justiceharvard.org/. See also, Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
18