It’s harder to be an optimist when times are uncertain than when they are relatively sunny. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, professor emeritus at McGill University, explains the sources of his optimism.

Since the 1960s Taylor has written about the humanities, sociology, political science, and the history of philosophy. Through his writing (16 books plus contributions to many others), teaching, and collaborations, Taylor has plumbed the mysteries of how we understand ourselves as well as how we may come to understand others who hold markedly different beliefs and values. In addition to his academic work, he has been involved in politics in Canada and has worked (via public dialogue) on the tricky issues of multiculturalism and cultural identity.

Taylor himself has also given his readers reason to be optimistic, as in this essay by James K.A. Smith about why his millennial students at a small Christian college love reading Taylor’s A Secular Age. “So this big philosophical tome ends up doing what David Foster Wallace used to say a good novel is supposed to do: give us a sense that we aren’t alone.”

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Multiculturalism has become a loaded word, with cities like Paris and Brussels becoming emblematic of the failure of the ideal of different cultures and religions living together. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor started working on the issues of diversity and multiculturalism in the 1980s and published an influential essay called “The Politics of Recognition” in 1992, which said that recognition is a “vital human need.” In 2007, when a controversy arose in his home province of Quebec over whether or not to accommodate immigrants from different religions and cultures, Taylor became a co-chair of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, which held meetings throughout the province and released the Bouchard-Taylor report in 2008 that recommended a set of guidelines for showing “openness and generosity of spirit” for minorities.

We asked Taylor which city in the world demonstrates that multiculturalism is working.

Indian political scientist Rajeev Bhargava and Taylor have spent decades exchanging ideas about many subjects, including diversity in their nations. In this essay, Bhargava tells the story of his 40-year friendship and intellectual collaboration with Taylor.

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His classes were like nothing I had encountered as an undergraduate at Oxford University, where old yellowing lecture notes found themselves on the lectern year after year, and questions were rare—if not seen as aberrant behavior. Taylor would stride in dressed in jeans and immediately ask the class, “Where are we?” Consulting one of the more diligent note takers, he would say, “Oh yes, yes,” and be off once more, developing his arguments along the lines of his own emerging thoughts.

It turned out that we were tackling some of philosophy’s great questions: What am I? What aspects and attributes of myself do I share with other people? How did this come to be? Does this concept of my “self” alter over time with the evolution of society?

I found Taylor’s seminars enlightening, refreshing, and a little bit frightening, especially when we were each asked to consider how some of the great thinkers (Descartes, John Locke, and in my case Nietzsche) had addressed these questions and contributed to the contemporary “sense of self.”

All too soon I completed my studies and had to find gainful employment. I returned to the U.K. and found myself in a large management consultancy working on more worldly issues such as: How many cars does Europe produce, who buys them, and why?

But even then, reflection on Taylor’s thought nagged at me. Some years into my career I became aware (in those pre-Amazon days) that Taylor had published a weighty book reflecting the ideas he’d addressed in class: Sources of the Self—The Making of the Modern Identity.

I bought the book and dove in, but I struggled with it. It wasn’t that the text was impenetrable or particularly difficult; it was more that reading Taylor’s account of the self made me want to seek out the original texts referred to and review them as well. This study could not be squashed into the hastily grabbed slices of time when I usually digested financial reports and office memos, the very early morning half hour before showering, and the tired journey home. These served me well enough in my consultancy work, but understanding Taylor’s argument, which had taken him the best part of a lifetime to develop, required much more—challenging my sense of who I was and what I was doing in the world.

Taylor’s argument in Sources of the Self runs counter to that of naturalism in the human sciences. Naturalism holds that the most significant feature of human beings is that we are entities in the natural world, and are best studied and understood using techniques similar to those of the physical sciences. (For example, measuring and understanding people’s economic decisions as rational choices. Or explaining people’s choice of mates as the result of evolutionary drives.)

However, according to Taylor, such techniques are not suitable to understanding human nature because of a range of uniquely human features, including our capacity for self-interpretation and our desire for fulfilment. “Our lives move,” he writes—toward or away from a sense of self-realization which is unique to each individual. What directs and orients this movement are rich moral sources that are inherent in our culture and that develop and are transformed over time.

Sources of the Self is an attempt to map and articulate these moral sources. He charts the gradual historical shift from ethical systems based in heroism to the more modern sense of the value of the ordinary life of work and production and fulfilment in family.

Taylor looks at the conflict between two important sources of moral thought. There is the 18th century suggestion that our true identity and fulfilment can only be found by reflection and understanding of the voice of nature within us. This contrasts with Enlightenment thinkers who believed that only through reason can we sweep aside the claims of religion, national culture, common prejudice and view ourselves rationally and in the light of truth.

Taylor feels in some instances our culture has allowed our relationship to these sources to become debased and distorted, meaning aspects of our culture which we intuitively feel are shallow are in fact versions of attempts to achieve a goal far more worthwhile.

Consider the whole genre of self-help, self-improvement, or New Age philosophies, which can seem superficial. To Taylor they are all manifestations of attempts to realize the deeper moral source of the voice of nature, examining and contemplating the inner self in order to uncover the unique life which we both come to know and help bring into being.

The danger Taylor highlights is that such ‘self-work’ can become isolated and self-obsessive. One particular sentence in the book resonated with me: “Nothing would count as a fulfilment in a world in which literally nothing is important but self-fulfillment.” Taylor is saying here that beyond any goal I recognize as worthy of achievement in my life there must be a greater imperative beyond me, one which I share with other people.

Soon it became clear my reading and study was not simply an amusing hobby designed to evoke some happy memories from college days; it might actually lead me to challenge some aspects of what up to that point had been a fairly successful career. If it is the responsibility of individuals to both realize and articulate the strong moral goals that characterize our modern identity, then it could be argued it is the role of our institutions to encourage this, and to aid in the understanding of the way the best of our culture is expressed. If I took Taylor seriously it would be my duty to help others to articulate a moral source in their own lives.

The consultancy work I was undertaking appeared to me a far cry from this. We were called on to develop a solution to a particular problem, often to be found in the thoughts and words of those already employed by our client, just lacking a bit of juggling and finesse and the stamp of our corporate logo.

One comment by a younger colleague summed up the dilemma faced by many of us, and I suspect shared by others. She asked, “Where are the mentors in this organization? Who are the more senior people who can help me to see what I am doing right and doing wrong in a wider context, and how my vocation can grow and develop to better meet the needs of this world?”

Meanwhile, I was grappling with Taylor’s criticism of modernity as betraying not only the best of our culture, but the best of our individual potential.

There was a related and uncomfortable question haunting the hours I was putting into my philosophical reading. Was Taylor right? Could he be wrong? Not just wrong here and there and in part, but wrong altogether?

My assistant unwittingly articulated my reservations succinctly one day when she came to chase down my input on a piece of work well past deadline only to find me deep in contemplation with a copy of Sources of the Self shelved in my work cubicle. “The Self?!” she said, “well, you don’t want to mess with that …”

The problem is that in Taylor’s view, contemporary culture has messed with the self, so much so that the more depressingly shallow aspects of our culture have become for many the norm. A perfectly gym-toned physique and a very large number of friends on our social media format of choice have been determined to be the best we can hope to achieve. Taylor sees his work as “an essay in retrieval,” an attempt to rephrase the intuitive unease we have regarding a culture that appears to offer us both so much and so little at the same time.

I decided to take a study break to escape from my work and perhaps from this same culture, too. By sheer good luck my time off coincided with a six-month course examining Taylor’s work at the local community college, the City Literary Institute. Here I was able to read, study, and reflect on Taylor and his original sources, and discuss my impressions with a whole classroom of people. When the course ended I deferred my return to corporate life.

I never went back. Two years later I replaced the teacher at the community college, and took on the challenge of explaining Taylor’s work to those from all walks of life who were also drawn to his writing. By then I had developed my own set of lecture notes to begin the process of yellowing …

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As I finished my first draft, lousy from start to finish, I learned that Charles Taylor—a professor whose name I’d learned two years before, when I overheard Bernard Williams tell a friend that he was among the more exciting philosophers of his generation—had written a masterly book on Hegel. I soon met Taylor and nervously asked him if he would have a quick look at my very patchy tract, which ridiculously didn’t even mention him. He showed such compassion and balance of judgment that I was instantly drawn both to the man and the scholar. I later read the first chapter of his 1975 book Hegel, in my view one of the best ever in the history of philosophical ideas. It changed my life. I knew I had found my guru.

The next time I met Taylor was in India in 1981. He had come to deliver a set of three lectures on social theory as practice, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. The Centre had long been a critic of western modernity. Some fellows there searched for an alternative “Indian” modernity. Taylor was excited and challenged by the atmosphere and his lectures were brilliant, original, and delivered with mastery.

At that time, I was at the other end of the political spectrum, teaching Taylor’s Hegel in Jawaharlal Nehru University, home to every shade of left group, vehemently critical of capitalism but deep in the throes of the western modernist project of Marx. At JNU the name of CSDS was unmentionable; the scholars there were denounced as “reactionary” for using Indian cultural traditions for the study of Indian politics and society.

I took Taylor away to teach Hegel to my students, subconsciously hoping I was also disconnecting him from the ‘conservative’ CSDS. But, ironically, his very presence at the Centre lifted it in my eyes (and perhaps eventually led me to quit JNU and join the CSDS decades later).

At the same time, the Centre revived Taylor’s interest in India. Over the years India’s rich diversity tremendously impacted him, and quite definitely shaped his appreciation of diversity, and that in turn had an enormous impact on Indian scholars like myself.

In order to understand this story of trans-hemispheric intellectual exchange, you have to go back quite a long ways. In the 1940s, a Marxist named Wilfred Cantwell Smith lived in Aligarh and Lahore studying Islam but also throwing himself wide open to the world of ancient Hindu traditions with their mind-boggling diversity. Cantwell Smith found that ordinary Hindus do not aspire to unity and are content to cherish their diversity as it is. Himself a Protestant, Cantwell Smith perfected the art of looking at religious traditions from the perspective of those who lived them, from the inside. Years later in the mid-1990s, when I was studying the ways that Indian secularism differs from European and American secularism, I was stunned by the insights of Cantwell Smith’s masterpiece, The Meaning and End of Religion. I was even more stunned when I excitedly began telling Charles Taylor about my discovery. Not only did he know the book well, but Cantwell Smith had been one of his more influential teachers.

This discovery came amidst decades of discussion of the issue of secularism in India beginning in the late 1980s. I published two long pieces on the subject in 1990-1991. After that, Taylor and I began discussing it regularly. Around 1994, we met with sociologist Nilüfer Göle and a little later the religion sociologist José Casanova to discuss the issue in other countries and contexts. In 1997, I edited and published a collection of essays called Secularism and Its Critics, which was when Taylor wrote on secularism for the first time in an essay called “Modes of Secularism.” At that time, the issue of secularism was important predominantly in India and Turkey, but after 9/11 its importance elsewhere shot through the roof. In 2007, Taylor published A Secular Age, which completely transformed the terms of the debate by taking us to an altogether different level of secularity, one presupposed by western secularization and political secularism.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith at Harvard University.

It took a true exchange of ideas between scholars and traditions to move this important philosophical conversation forward. Taylor always generously claims that his understanding of political secularism is influenced by my work on the diversity-oriented Indian secularism. But without Taylor’s theoretical work, a conception of distinctive Indian secularism as, among other things, a response to religious diversity rather than as born out of battles with the church could not have emerged. All of these ideas came into play when I wrote The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy in 2010.

So how did this happen? I think that India’s rich diversity originally had an impact on Taylor via Cantwell Smith. And he in turn has influenced innumerable people like myself in understanding the meaning and significance of diversity. What Smith received from India, he passed on to Taylor, and what Taylor received from Smith, he passed on to Indians like me. And so on. These intellectual circles are much larger than we imagine!

Our exchange was also deeply personal. For some Indians, like myself, intimacy and learning are closely related. If we had only exchanged ideas, I would have learned less than half of what I have from Taylor. He has given me a framework with which to think, shaped my most foundational ideas, and taught me how to understand human beings. None of this would have been possible, I have to say, if we were not close personal friends.

I think our experience has been typical of the way that Taylor works, as a philosopher and a friend. He is committed to deep pluralism, always marked by a lack of finality. He is suspicious of doctrines driven by a single principle. And, very importantly, he reaches out not only to the specialist, to people in his own philosophical circles, but to the wider public. His thoughts are constantly evolving, and he always manages to change the terms of debates in which he intervenes. Taylor is Catholic in his own way. He understands that profound divergences of religious beliefs and practices coexist with equally profound similarities in faiths. To have a particular faith, for him, is to be simultaneously open to other faiths, including faith in the human spirit and human reason. And finally, particularly at least in the last two decades, he has constantly attempted to escape Eurocentricity, not by superficial leaping toward other cultures but by slowly shrinking the centrality and significance of his own, by putting his own world in its place.

Taylor is a remarkable thinker not least because there are few ideas that he completely rejects or for that matter wholly embraces. He is able to do so because though he stands on one side, he helps us to imagine what it is like to be on the other. Taylor almost always helps us to see from both sides of the fence.

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Philosophy has a reputation for being abstract and analytical, somewhat apart from the world. So we asked Charles Taylor if philosophers have an obligation to the world we live in. After this segment he continued talking about the idea of how our modern selves cope with change and can adapt to new and previously unthinkable concepts. “In the world we’re living in you re-gestalt the way you see things and become a different person,” he said. “It can be done.”

Taylor’s most recent book is The Language Animal, which revisits an old argument between continental and analytical philosophers about the function of language. UCLA historian Anthony Pagden writes in this essay about how The Language Animal addresses the ongoing conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, offering hope that there is a language-driven process for resolving some of our most intractable modern tensions.

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Philosopher Charles Taylor has had a life in politics as well as academia. During the 1950s, when he was studying philosophy at Oxford, he wrote and edited Universities and Left Review, which later became New Left Review, a political and intellectual journal. When he returned to Canada in the early 1960s, while teaching political science, he ran for Parliament unsuccessfully three times, including against future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. But he stayed involved in political conversation, and in 2007 co-chaired Quebec’s Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences. In that capacity, he studied and made recommendations on cultural integration, collective identity, church-state relations, and how to handle cultural and religious harmonization requests.

Taylor taught Canadians to talk to each other via theory and example, explains Taylor’s long-time colleague, political scientist James Tully, in this essay. In doing so, he also helped the nation move toward embracing a kind of deep multiculturalism.

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In 1798, poet William Wordsworth and his sister took a walk in the Welsh countryside. The poem he wrote about that walk—“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”—moved readers deeply. Wordsworth was one of the leading poets of the Romantic era, and he called poetry “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

What is it about humans and our relationship to language that allows us to be so moved by poetry? In this interview philosopher Charles Taylor talks about his next book, which contemplates the change in Romantic poetry, and what it is that poetry proves about being human.

Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf is one scientist studying the big puzzle of how the brain reads. She explains in this essay how Taylor’s arguments about language as a fundamentally human endeavor add to that debate.

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The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor takes part in these debates at a meta level. He does not use the term “cosmopolitanism” and only very occasionally “nationalist.” But his ultimate objective in his latest book, The Language Animal, is to demonstrate how we can all live in a more tolerant “flexible” (his word) world—if we can learn how to make the most of the resources, above all the resources for communication, we all share. This is a continuation of the ideas he has been working on throughout his astonishingly long and productive career.

Taylor writes in a compelling, congenial way that enables him to encompass seeming contradictions. The Language Animal begins with a 17th and 18th century debate about the origins of language, specifically whether language created society or society created language. On the one hand, early philosophers Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac (whom Taylor dubs HLC), believed that language was what Taylor calls “enframing,” or tool-like. Words are applied as signs to things in the external world. HLC insisted that language can only be of value if it offers a precise way of describing the world. Everything else—“metaphor and tropes,” in Taylor’s terms—are all very well, but in the end they add up to “mere metaphysics.” This works well for creating specialist scientific languages, but as Taylor says, it is “unable to capture human language as it exists in nature.”

Another group of early philosophers were the German Romantics Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt, (or HHH). They believed that languages were the creature of what Johann Gottfried Herder called “reflection”—a key term for Taylor—which meant that language was the product of society, or of the “communion” between individuals of which society is composed. To simplify a very complex argument: For HHH, language is in a constant process of expansion and is far more than mere words. It is not only all those things HLC dismissed—poetry, the novel—but also the visual arts and music, gestures and “body language.” Such things compose our social world.

This second argument about language has clear moral and ethical implications in Taylor’s telling. If language is in a sense alive, then our ability to communicate, to connect, to create “communion” is inherently “flexible,” which means that we can come to understand and embrace new concepts and morals.

For example, consider the idea of “equality as a norm” expressed in the ancient Greek sense of freedom of speech (isegoria). We begin with a sense (itself created out of a collective experience) of equality of rights or law (what the Greeks called isonomia). If equality were taken away from us, we would grope around for another word with which to describe what it was we were being denied. In the process, we would inevitably give shape and form to another concept—aka freedom of speech—through which we could then express the idea of equality. As we grope around to describe what we are experiencing, we also create other words, or give new and different meanings to old ones—adopting the word “tyrant,” for example, to describe the person who would deprive of us of this right. And so the process goes on, with the shaping of words giving birth to new words and ideas. “Articulation,” as Taylor puts it, “contributes to shape its object.”

Now if language is, in this way, the product of communion with others then this living, “flexible” language allows us all to move outward from the norms and values of our own particular society until we are able to embrace the whole world—past and present. It is this process which has allowed us (Western liberal democrats) to come up with the concept of “human rights”—which since 1948 has been transformed into the benchmark of a just and humane society. This is even more striking in the case of gay and LGBTQ rights. Forty years ago, gay rights were not seen as rights or norms at all. In a remarkably short period of time we have developed the language to speak about them, so we have shaped the meaning of rights so as to give it an entirely new set of meanings and implications.

If we take Taylor’s view of the ever-evolving shape of language, we can understand how things which would have been unintelligible until very recently now make perfect sense. As the world transcends its cultural borders, languages and culture change together, and we will begin to talk about human rights as shared ideals. We can see how simply talking about rights could eventually create them, and this would seem to offer the possibility of a hopeful “universalism.”

But not everyone agrees that this is a desirable thing. It is often argued that these norms, and rights are the creation of specific, in this case Western societies, and of the languages that are spoken in them, and in them alone. If “gay rights” are the creation of Western notions of “non-discrimination”—which they undeniably are—surely they can only apply to those societies in which such a notion already exists. Therefore, we cannot fault Nigerians (or Russians) for persecuting gays because they would—and do—argue that no such things as gay rights exist.

Taylor is not this kind of moral relativist. He knows that language can also be put to perverse—he uses the word “evil” more than once—ends. And in a brief and powerful passage toward the end of The Language Animal, he makes the point that we—who believe in gay rights, women’s rights, human rights, etc.—can appreciate Chinese music without, at the same time, disparaging Beethoven or Chopin. But we cannot endorse slave societies or societies of castes or societies where women are utterly subordinate without renouncing our own.

If one takes Taylor’s work on the flexibility of language as a hopeful view of humanity’s evolving capacity to live with one another, one has to reckon with the question of how we know that our values are shared by others. To me this is the wrinkle in Taylor’s thesis, because there can really be only two broad answers. One is religious (or quasi-religious): Our core values come from “beyond.” If the divine explanation doesn’t work, we are left with some form of utilitarianism. That is: Do the values and norms we have developed over time through our use of language make us better off, happier etc., than the norms and values that have developed in those slave-owning, women-oppressing caste societies? And from what standpoint can we judge whether they are better off or not, or indeed what “better-off” might mean for them? The only way to answer with the resounding “yes” that Taylor is calling for would seem to be to invoke the “Golden Rule”: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Taylor’s view of language allows us to hope that improvement and values can be brought about through language and the “communion” it both creates and is created by. In time these hypothetical (and in many places real) societies of oppressors and the oppressed may perhaps be brought to change the norms and values on which their current behavior is based. The only way to do this, Taylor believes, “lies through mutual understanding and exchange,” and that, of course can only be achieved through language. To change the world, we have to keep talking.

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Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor is the 2016 recipient of the Berggruen Philosophy Prize for ideas that shape the world. His work has crossed disciplines from philosophy to political science, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, poetry, and music. We asked him what the future of philosophy should look like.

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Work in cognitive neuroscience depicts what the brain does as we read Flaubert and Taylor, and indeed almost anyone: decode, integrate, infer, analyze the meaning of their content, and sometimes, if we are very lucky, use their thoughts to germinate our own. It would seem that there are two disconnected stories here: one scientific and one philosophical. Yet when Taylor’s understanding of the purpose of language is connected to current studies of the reading brain, we can better grasp how the simple decoding of visual symbols can become the basis for the most sophisticated of human thought processes.

After two decades of research on the reading brain, an insight came to me. Human beings were never born to read; we invented it. It is a remarkable biocultural caveat. Unlike other inventions—wheels and various physical tools—this invention quickly reshaped the biologically driven neuronal networks in our brain. Reading necessitated the creation of totally new connections among some of the brain structures underlying language, perception, cognition, and gradually, even our emotions.

And this changed our species. A reading brain circuit emerged which enabled ever more elaborate connections, giving literate humans a platform for the development of new thought. My own work on what is called deep reading explores the full panoply of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that we gradually learn to deploy when we read. With these processes, we furnish what we read with imagery and background knowledge, we analyze it critically, we empathize or search for its perspective, and finally we use generative processes that lead to insight and novel thought.

Deep reading represents what Proust called that “fertile miracle of communication.” It’s what happens when readers use all their linguistic capacities to go beyond what is written on the page to generate their own best thoughts—sometimes new to them, sometimes new to the whole of humankind. Put another way, reading has altered the brain of each literate individual, propelled the intellectual development of the species, and given us a history of past knowledge as a readily available foundation for our future growth.

The field of cognitive neuroscience asks how this can happen—cognitively, linguistically, and physiologically: How can the human brain learn a new cognitive function that has neither a genetically prewired program nor a prescribed set of dedicated structures (like the visual cortex)?

From this view, the study of the reading brain helps us to understand how the brain learns anything new. We now know, for example, that the brain’s plasticity allows it to rearrange or make new connections among its older structures (like those used for language, cognition, and perception) and to recycle and repurpose neuronal groups within those structures to help us learn to read. Quite literally, neuronal working groups in the visual cortex that were originally dedicated to recognizing faces and objects have been repurposed to identify letters and letter patterns.

Charles Taylor’s work on language in his new book The Language Animal forces us to address a deeper set of questions about written language. He wants to move us “from a narrow view of the functions of language as encoding information … (to a view which) escalates into wider questions about the shape, scope, and uses of language.”

Taylor’s work is particularly helpful for understanding how our brains have insights while we’re deep reading. Understanding the processes behind these elusive insights makes cognitive neuroscientists throw up their hands in exasperation. They’ve tried to capture a glimpse of these processes with existing brain imaging methods. But in a meta review that hoped to identify the “neural signature of insight,” neuroscientists Arne Dietrich and Riam Kanso wrote: “An insight is so capricious, such a slippery thing to catch in flagrante, that it appears almost deliberately designed to defy empirical inquiry. To most neuroscientists, the prospect of looking for creativity in the brain must seem like trying to nail jelly to the wall.”

It is here that Taylor provides a wholly different view of the evanescent dimension at the heart of language, both oral and written. Going back to 18th and 19th century German thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Georg Hamann, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Taylor pushes us to consider the protean dimension within language that propels us to give ever more refined, precise word-based flesh and sinew to our thoughts.

Humboldt wrote, evocatively, that within language there is always a “feeling that there is something which the language does not directly contain, but which the mind/soul, spurred on by language must supply; and the drive, in turn, to couple everything felt by the soul with a sound.” Taylor builds on that to say that “possessing a language is to be continuously involved in trying to extend its powers of articulation.” This constant yearning to articulate more and to find and express greater meanings is key to Taylor’s argument that language is a deeply human project.

Taylor’s life-long efforts to articulate this ineffable, protean dimension at the heart of language have changed my own view of written language. In the past I struggled unsuccessfully to describe how our inferential and analytical processes prepare the reader for insight. Now, however, I interpret the entirety of the deep reading processes as part of the intrinsically human drive toward meaning: its discovery and its articulation.

I think history bears this out. Over 50 years ago, before neuroscience was an established field, the first surgeons conducting split-brain research asked a linguist to help them ask the right questions as they studied the language structures of the human brain. Then, as now, our understanding of language and the brain can only progress when we are able to ask the right questions.

In this moment, when the neurosciences are adding to an increasingly precise topography of language in the brain almost daily, we need the questions that Charles Taylor raises about the “shape, scope, and uses of language” to really understand what is going on. And, as Taylor describes and Gustave Flaubert’s “cracked kettle” metaphor exemplifies, whatever we find out will not be our last iteration of these processes. For, however narrowed by all our efforts, it is the gap, the crack, between language and human aspiration that drives us forward and gives our lives their unquenchable desire for meaning.

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