(continued from 6/1/09)
As little inclined as is Charles Taylor to connect the pre-ontological with the metaphysical, religious “experience” with cognitive assertions, he cannot finally avoid making certain claims about the way things are, or at least the way human things are:
We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be. (5)
This important passage is perhaps Taylor’s most fundamental account of the anthropological ground upon which all descriptions of “religious” experience and of its “secular” or “naturalistic” alternatives must draw. But Taylor soon notices that his anthropology, his account of the structure of fundamental human experiences, appears to be biased in favor of religious believers, to those oriented towards some extraordinary “fullness.” He does his best to redress this bias by acknowledging the case of “unbelievers” for whom ‘the middle condition’ [routinized quasi-fulfillment] is all there is.” (7) But do such unbelievers ignore the call of “fullness” that Taylor seems to hold to be constitutive of our humanity? Or do they pursue under other names or in other modes what believers are seeking when they speak of “God”? But if this is the case, then it seems we would be compelled to ask whether those who seek fullness by reference to God or to some divinity are more aware of what they are seeking and therefore of themselves, of their own souls, than those who practice one form or another of “naturalism.”
It is profoundly characteristic of Taylor’s approach that at this crucial juncture he does not wrestle with such a question, the fundamental question between believers and unbelievers, but sets it aside by re-affirming his move beyond truth claims and cognition to “a sense of the difference of lived experience.”(8) This move allows him to conclude (very liberally or ecumenically) “that power, fullness, exile, etc., can take different shapes.” (11)
“We have to be aware of how believers and unbelievers can experience their world very differently.” (14) To be sure. But is every articulation of an experience of the world equally adequate to that experience, or to the fullest human possibilities? Can Taylor’s account of humanity in “a secular age” avoid leaning towards one or another articulation of human fullness, or of the quest for it?
If Charles Taylor’s book has a unifying purpose, it can only be to explore the challenges facing fullness of life in the modern West and thus to contribute to possibilities of living fully in our “secular age.” But his task is greatly complicated if not finally made impossible by the fact that he both assumes and puts in question a certain Christian understanding of “fullness” as absolute transcendence, as well as the modern reaction against it in favor of an “immanence” defined in opposition to that very transcendence. He understands Christianity to be defined by service to a good “independent of human flourishing,” as “something other than human flourishing,” or as a “renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God…” (16, 17) And yet at the same time he understands that this Christian renunciation of flourishing might finally be bound up with “the restoration of a fuller flourishing.” (17)
By limiting himself to “a set of forms and changes which have arisen in one particular civilization, that of the modern West — or, in an earlier incarnation, Latin Christendom,” Taylor in fact accepts as if it were a natural fact what he takes to be the Western opposition between the “transcendent” and the “secular.” (He takes it as given that there is an “unbridgeable gulf between Christianity and Greek philosophy” (17), and therefore that the Western world can be understood on Christian and post-Christian categories understood as simply incommensurable with the inquiries of classical political philosophy.) Although he offers a wealth of evidence of the mutual implication of the extraordinary and the ordinary, the soul’s fullness and the city’s necessity, he adopts a conceptual framework that seems to absolve him from responsibility for articulating this relationship. He accepts at face value what he takes to be the Christian notion of “a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or ‘beyond’ human life” as well as the strictly correlate idea of “an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms,” the notion of “the immanent,” which “involved denying – or at least isolating and problematizing – any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, on one hand, and the ‘supernatural’ on the other.” (15-16) By this very, insufficiently critical acceptance of the category of “the secular,” Taylor has crippled himself in his “continuing polemic” against “subtraction stories.” For the very meaning of “secular” is nothing but what is left over when the “transcendent” is set aside.
In other words: Taylor’s whole book is about the interpenetration of ideas of fullness on the one hand and of religious and moral notions understood functionally in relation to political and social necessities, on the other hand. And yet his very definition of “the secular” simply assumes and carries forward a modern Western, that is, distinctively post-Christian claim according to which “human flourishing” can be defined in terms of the subtraction of “transcendence” and thus that there can be “a self-sufficing humanism,” that is, “a secular age … in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable.” This tension runs throughout Taylor’s book and renders the argument elusive or unstable at critical junctures: he seems throughout the book to be tracing the development of various expressions of “fullness” as they come to be articulated in politically authoritative forms, and yet his final framework of judgment seems to be determined by the assumption or the hope that the problem of authoritative articulations of fullness is now somehow obsolete, that we have somehow settled into a neutral, default consensus on just plain “human flourishing,” or else that the very question of the meaning of flourishing has become irrelevant to our political condition.
As so often happens in contemporary “moral” and “social” philosophy, a failure to confront the central questions of political philosophy proves profoundly crippling to Taylor’s efforts to defend the respectability of “transcendence” in “A Secular Age.”
June 14th, 2009 | 5:43 am
And yet his very definition of “the secular” simply assumes and carries forward a modern Western, that is, distinctively post-Christian claim according to which “human flourishing” can be defined in terms of the subtraction of “transcendence” and thus that there can be “a self-sufficing humanism,” that is, “a secular age … in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable.”
The modern inclination to hypostatize the transcendent has resulted in a being considerably less than human. The ‘secular age’ has generated any number of psycho-pneumopathologies that have rendered a significant portion of our population spiritually dead and politically incoherent. With the primary cause of derailment being the disruption of the tension of existence when the structures of consciousness, i.e. intentionality and mystery, are made opaque by the triumph of immanentism.
In considering Schelling’s insight on ‘freedom’ it is revealing that the philosopher notes that any understanding of, or existence in -including an immanentized existence-’freedom’ is in fact predicated on its origination in itself “but always going beyond what is its own”‘ in the act of revealing the “innermost spirit of spirit.”
Modenity, the secular age, in negating the concept that “Creation has its source in the movement of pure freedom,” simply chooses to annihilate itself.
June 14th, 2009 | 8:50 pm
Perhaps you or one of your readers can help me better understand your criticism of Professor Taylor. I tend to find him very insightful and would consider it an even greater gift to have some of his insights well critiqued. But I am either having difficulty following or I disagree with your reading of Taylor’s book.
You say:
“And yet his very definition of ‘the secular’ simply assumes and carries forward a modern Western, that is, distinctively post-Christian claim.”
I’ve been trying to suss out what about his definition might be especially post-Christian.
Now, Taylor actually offers three definitions of secularity: (1) the separation of spheres in public life, (2) the decrease in religious belief and practise, and (3) the social pressures that we all experience which make religious belief one option among many. I take it that Taylor finds these definitions useful as descriptors of phenomena in the modern West. And I do not see how making use of them assumes anything post-Christian at all. It is secularity (3) that Taylor is referring to in the following, which you quote (in part):
“a secular age is one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable; or better, it falls within the range of imaginable life for masses of people” (19).
But are you prepared to deny that such an eclipsing is conceivable? Not only is it conceivable but it is very often conceived. Surely you must have had some time in your life in which the theories of atheistic humanism were live options, which presented themselves to you in a way that meant you either had self-consciously to accept them or to reject them? I have not had to contend with the cult of Zeus or take it nearly so seriously as I have had to contend with atheistic humanism. To put it differently, we live in an age where someone writing Christian apologetics would have to speak to naturalists but would not have to speak to the Manichees. It has in other ages been just the other way around. The fact that Taylor doesn’t finally provide this apologetics is, so far as I can tell, no black mark against him.
Nor does his account seem to me to be just another version of the subtraction stories of secularity. Those subtraction stories claim that what has happened over these last five hundred years is a sloughing off of religious beliefs that served some ultimately non-religious purpose. They then attribute secularity (usually in the first or second sense) to the discovery of modern science or to the liberation of the people from the overbearing hand of the church, or something similar. Taylor tells a more complex story. Many of the modern secularizing ideas arose from distinctively theological arguments. What’s more, when God is removed from the equation, a deeper transformation takes place than simple subtraction. (A better analogy than subtraction might be something like matrix multiplication.)
Now, Taylor’s analysis probably cannot avoid leaning towards a Christian bias, but I do not see him as trying to apply some sort of egalitarian principle to every way of being in the world. Rather, he seems to be trying to present views with which he disagrees, with great care so as not to misrepresent them. A naturalist could read this book and recognize his own views represented well — not caricatured or supposedly “revealed” as nothing other than amoral nihilism.
June 15th, 2009 | 9:03 am
There really is so much going on in ASA that it’s hard to see what ISN’T going on. One thing you won’t find in the index, for example, is Taylor’s subtle complement to “fullness”, namely “wholeness.” We could postulate an opposition between the ‘full experience of individuality’ as a moral ideal and the ‘whole individual’. Taylor wants to argue that the experience of individual fullness requires a rehabilitation of the praiseworthiness of ‘the body’ and ‘desire’, elements of ‘the self’ which, left out in a secular age, prevent the individual from experiencing wholeness. (See e.g. 609, 613-618.) This extremely delayed discussion (foreshadowed up until then by only ONE PHRASE on 5!) leads directly into the main passage on Nussbaum, who not only ‘rescues’ the individual body and individual desire from Platonic/Straussian eternity but from eternal Christian interdicts, too — a thrust Taylor hints will put good liberal Nussbaum against Nietzsche in a battle she can’t win. But Taylor’s own stance pits him in a battle against Nussbaum he may be unable to win. The trouble hinges on Taylor’s inability or unwillingness to play fair with his terms. ‘Wholeness’, as Taylor wants us to understand it, is inextricably implicated in the overweening longing for FULLNESS he wants to pin contemporary life upon. We are left to notice for ourselves (or not) that this a particular KIND of wholeness, that there are other ways of understanding, e.g., what it is that must be made and kept whole. The wholeness appurtenant to Taylorian fullness is the wholeness of the SELF, NOT the wholeness of the individual. To preserve the whole individual from dissolution is to refrain from certain experiences — that is, to learn how to properly refrain from the ‘full experience of individuality’. There is virtually no experience that seems to subtract from the SELF’S wholeness when viewed from the aspirational standpoint of fullness. But of course we can think of all sorts of experiences of fullness in ‘individuality’ that do subtract from the wholeness of the individual — that fragment the individual or reduce the individual into a mere self. To recognize the whole individual is to recognize that the individual is not a construct or servant of the self. Precisely this critical point slips through the cracks of Taylor’s massive surface. Abstracted away from the whole individual, our visions of ‘wholeness’ and ‘individuality’ send us astray in especially errant imitation of adjectives and adverbs — supposedly richer than nouns, but more sterile because disembodied, unreal.
June 15th, 2009 | 5:26 pm
Given how humans are compared to the known universe:
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/2706/spaceb.jpg
It’s the height of arrogance to assume that man can ever even approach some measure of self sufficiency or understanding of even an insignificant amount of knowledge of all there is. If there is no God, then we’re less than a speck of dust in a city — the universe wouldn’t notice us if were to disappear tomorrow and all of humanity’s greatest accomplishments could be summed up in the first line of Ecclesiastes.
If there is no transcendence, even an impersonal pantheistic one, then there is no goal in life and one end is as good as another. So defining a goal for secularism is completely arbitrary, since words such as “fullness”, “richness”, “deeper”, “worth while”, “admirable”, “more what it should be” are equally arbitrary. More than what? Richer for whom? Deeper in what? What *should* life be like and *who* has the “right” to define it, whatever “right” means. A mass murderer who went out in a courageous blaze of glory can claim these adjectives as much as a tireless suffering saint. Ivan Karamazov was correct.
The “naked public square” is a meaningless idea for secularism. The Greek idea of the “passionate public square” where all new ideas are welcomed and debated fiercely certainly has it’s faults. But failing to acknowledge that the transcendent is crucial to living one’s life (let along a good life) isn’t one of them.
June 17th, 2009 | 1:07 pm
I found an excellent, extremely detailed, 6,500-word review of Taylor’s work by Michael Morgan of Indiana University published here:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13905
Here’s a sample:
“Taylor argues that the salient feature of Western societies is not a decline in religious belief and practice; it is rather the plurality of forms of belief and unbelief and their fragile or transitory status. We live in a world of what he calls “cross pressures” where the old beliefs and views are destabilized and new ones have formed and especially where middle positions take shape or are transformed (595). Novel forms of spiritual life take shape between orthodox religiosity and atheistic materialism and as a result of these cross pressures. The latter give rise to various dilemmas which we face in various ways. The realities to which I refer above are a cluster that forms one side of these cross pressures and one pole of such dilemmas (see especially Chapters 17 and 18). Often Christianity has gone through stages or taken up views that involve what Taylor calls “excarnation,” a shift from taking seriously the bodily, the sexual, the physical, and such to giving priority of place to what lies in the head, e.g., reason or psychological well-being or spiritual transformation. But at critical moments there emerged forms of belief and unbelief that sought to recover the sense of the bodily and its importance; Taylor frequently cites the case of Schiller and his notion of “play” as well as more extreme figures from the Romantics and Nietzsche to Bataille (see 609-617). There are a host of more traditional forms of belief and unbelief, moreover, that also seek to cope with these realities.”
The idea that a very learned Christian philosopher takes our many and varied religious and non-religious responses to our rapidly changing scientific and technological civilization that seriously is exciting.
Normally, Christians huff and puff about it, or brush it off. You know the types. To them, nothing very important has happened since the writing of the Bible.
It makes me want to run right out and get that book.
October 22nd, 2009 | 6:45 pm
While the election may very well have been rigged, there is little solid evidence it was. ,
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