In seminal works ranging from Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles
Taylor has shown how we create possible ways of being, both as individuals and
as a society. In his new book setting forth decades of thought, he
demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. For
centuries, philosophers have been divided on the nature of language. Those in
the rational empiricist tradition―Hobbes, Locke, Condillac, and their
heirs―assert that language is a tool that human beings developed to encode and
communicate information. In The Language Animal, Taylor explains that this
view neglects the crucial role language plays in shaping the very thought it
purports to express. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning
and fundamentally shapes human experience. The human linguistic capacity is
not something we innately possess. We first learn language from others, and,
inducted into the shared practice of speech, our individual selves emerge out
of the conversation. Taylor expands the thinking of the German Romantics
Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt into a theory of linguistic holism. Language is
intellectual, but it is also enacted in artistic portrayals, gestures, tones
of voice, metaphors, and the shifts of emphasis and attitude that accompany
speech. Human language recognizes no boundary between mind and body. In
illuminating the full capacity of “the language animal,” Taylor sheds light on
the very question of what it is to be a human being. Read more