Chinese Journal of Sociology ›› 2017, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (5): 24-58.

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Authenticity and the Public Sphere:Charles Taylor's Notion of the Liberal Society

XU Bing   

  1. School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University
  • Online:2017-09-20 Published:2017-09-20

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Abstract:

Centering on Charles Taylor's two papers,"What's Wrong with the Negative Liberty","Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere",and the dialogue between him and Habermas in 2009,this paper interprets his revising of liberalism. "What's Wrong with the Negative Liberty" is the mark of his approach of authenticity in contemporary liberalism,which defends individual freedom on the base of moral psychology. It also argues that the next step will take a view of freedom,which sees freedom as (fully) realizable only within a certain form of society. The certain form of society is liberal society. "Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere" sums up his basic viewpoints of liberal society and his revising liberalism. Liberal society is the form of society which tries to realize the plural goals of the revised liberalism and seeks the balance between the goals,including at least individual freedom,collective self-rule,and a rule of right founded on equality. The political notion is the application of the moderate path with the resonance between the inner and the outer,which is shaped between psychological and moral philosophy and social theory. The main form the modern Western liberal society is civil society,and the two main forms of civil society are market economy and civil sphere. Both of them are bulwarks of freedom,but civil sphere is the central feature of the contemporary civil society to compete the centralization of power and the polarization between the rich and the poor. In the age when authenticity is the important notion of the self and social imaginary,the unitary model of the enlightenment civil sphere should be replaced by the multi-public spheres. The viewpoint of Taylor in the dialogue in 2009 is the extension "Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere". Revising the concept of secularity of Weber,"Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere" argues that secularity isn't just "not tied to religion". Its original sense was "of the age", closing to the sense of "temporal" in the opposition temporal/spiritual. In A Secular Age,Taylor argues that secularity doesn't mean vanishing religion,but,one of the meanings of secularity is that religion is one option among others. To compete with the closing tendency of authenticity and the collapse of the political and social solidarity,he argues that religion should be one of the multi-topics of the multi-public spheres. Based on the usual concept of secularity,Habermas insists on the priority of the secular language in the public sphere. But he recognizes that Taylor is a liberalist and the deep level of the dialogue involves Taylor's notion of the politics of identity.
Taylor's revised liberalism has inspiring value to the situation of China. In order to reverse the splits in Chinese intellectual life and political and social practice which are related to the binary oppositions between socialism and liberalism and between the narrow unitary modernity and the fossilized Chinese culture,constructing the multi-public spheres with the moderate mind is an indispensable historical task. In the preparation of the multi-public spheres,the traditional thoughts of "heart" could help to set up the belief in freedom and take part in the construction of the identity and social imaginary of authenticity.

Key words: authenticity, the moderate path, secularity, "meditational", epistemology, social imaginary, the public sphere