ABSTRACT
How can such a virtuoso essay have such a vague conclusion? The explanation, I contend, is that Taylor complicates the issue of recognition and simplifies the issue of culture. With the two
mistakes reinforcing each other, the philosopher is reduced, at the end, to agonizing about an impossible blanket recognition for a nonexistent object. Let me start with the first point of critique. Taylor complicates the issue of recognition. The philosophical idea to equate multiculturalism with “the politics of recognition “was cautiously printed in quotation marks in the first edition of his essay; in the second edition, when the treatise was turned into a book, multiculturalism became “the” problem of the politics of recognition. Into this one term recognition, however, the philosopher has packed a truly staggering range of meanings: awareness, appreciation, respect or merely due respect, acceptance, and even admiration. With so many attitudes all conflated into one word of the author’s own choice, the multicultural riddle has been complicated to a degree not hitherto known. It is no wonder that in the end, multiculturalism is “perhaps after all a moral issue” (1994, 73). This may be true, but if it is, then we must face two altogether different questions: Whose morals, and what do we mean by recognition?
