ABSTRACT
When thinking about this talk on Charles Taylor, a passage from Hannah Arendt kept intruding itself. She wrote,
I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which, at least for ourselves, contain in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say. Thought itself—to the extent that is more than a technical, logical operation which electronic machines may be better equipped to perform than the human brain—arises out of the actuality of incidents, and incidents of living experience must remain its guideposts by which it takes its bearings if it is not to lose itself in the heights to which thinking soars, or in the depths to which it must descend.1
