René Girard and Charles Taylor: Complementary Engagements with the Crisis of Modernity

Abstract

Girard distanced himself from philosophy so strongly most of the time that only a few philosophers engaged with his mimetic theory. Besides philosophers committed to mimetic theory and Gianni Vattimo, Charles Taylor is one of the few philosophers who has taken Girard’s work seriously. Girard and Taylor are among those contemporary thinkers who address the crisis of modernity without ending up in a fundamentalist antimodernism. Taylor is less apocalyptic, but also does not discount the crisis of modernity, as the original title (The Malaise of Modernity) of one of his books attests. He comes closest to Girard’s apocalyptic attitude when he follows Ivan Illich’s interpretation of modernity as a perversion of Christianity.