ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief critical reading of Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age, which it uses to explore the “mundane” as a philosophical and historical concept before going on to present the qualities of contemporary experience in terms opposed to Taylor’s own. A Secular Age is a monument of what might be called a religio-transcendental
turn in the postsocialist moment, a turn which both this and the next chapter examine. It is a remarkable achievement, an erudite, generous-minded, pathbreaking book. And it marks the culmination of a life’s work. As far as I’m aware, Charles Taylor’s argument first took shape in an essay he wrote forty years ago for the volume From Culture to Revolution (1968) as a member of the Catholic New Left. At the time he was committed to a non-Marxist “radical socialism,” deeply opposed to capitalism – a system he understood (à la Western Marxism) to cause alienation and pervasive instrumentalism. For Taylor, Marxism was an enlightened humanism that failed to understand that each human being must “reach beyond himself and renew contact with the non-human, and … the more than human” (Taylor 1968: 154). This means that alienation under capitalism cannot be annealed through any social movement that fails to understand that man and his works “can never have the transparency of pure project, thrown in front of him into the future” (ibid.) So the counter-capitalist restitution endorsed by Taylor was not a transcendentalizing resacralization as much as an acknowledgment that the world we inhabit is a gift from God. Such an acknowledgment can inspire forms of community based on receiving from and giving to others, that is, on Christian agape. From within Iris Murdoch’s “new house of theory”, community can be figured as a form of donation, of worship, and imitation of divine charity and love in terms that ground participatory socialism and a restored “public meaning.” A Secular Age is less politically engaged than this. Now Taylor argues that
the West has indeed undergone secularization, but not because science has disproved religion or because religious interests and institutions have been separated from politics and state government. Rather it’s because, over centuries, Latin Christianity, partly through its many internal reformist
movements, became committed to the Aristotelian project of general human flourishing. During the Enlightenment, central elements of the Christian faith were transformed into a humanism whose ethical and conceptual framework and purposes were fundamentally immanent. In the process a cultural “nova” appeared in which new knowledges, faiths, orientations, styles of life and identities proliferated. At the same time, governmental apparatuses enabled people to form autonomous and private “buffered selves,” capable of making choices between competing faiths and identities. For Taylor, there is no renouncing either the humanist focus on happiness
and health or Western modernity’s cultural nova. But what has been weakened through and in both is a “higher,” “fuller” orientation towards the sacred and transcendent based on tradition, although, admittedly, “tradition” is not a concept that Taylor emphasizes (but see Taylor 2007: 719). Actually, Taylor appears to offer two versions of the sacredness that modernity weakens: according to the first and stronger version what is in jeopardy is a “higher” perspective in which this world is ordinarily positioned in a (subordinate) relation to a divine order; the second, weaker version supposes just that fullness or depth is in jeopardy. We are threatened with the loss of what we might call hierarchized existentialist value through which some experiences and moments are fundamentally more meaningful and, so to say, more spiritually enriching than others. His argument’s sweeping ambit partly relies on its ambiguation of these two spiritual drives, an ambiguity which Taylor accepts, I suspect, because he assumes (in my view mistakenly) that the first entails the second as a matter of anthropological fact. At any rate, Taylor claims that what he calls “spiritual hunger” is integral
to human beings: it constitutes (to rephrase Simone Weil) a theoretical limit to acceptable social transformations (Taylor 2007: 679; Weil 2006: 53). In effect (and to repeat a point Jonathan Sheehan made in his post to the Immanent Frame blog), his argument is based on an existentialized/theophanized moral anthropology. It is as if it accepts David Hartley’s eighteenth-century argument that, even beginning from a Lockean, enlightened genetic psychology that refuses concepts like grace and innate ideas, it is possible to show that theophany is natural and essential to man. So, for Taylor, orientation to the transcendent may take secular as well as
religious forms, but either way it is occluded by modernity. (Of course, societies can also develop supernaturalisms that don’t bear any relation either to the transcendent as “higher” in Taylor’s sense, or to hierarchized existential value, but he is not concerned with these.) To restore the sacred he now looks not to participatory socialism but to a somewhat less collective “conversion into fullness” and “openness to transcendence” which takes practical form in concrete, individualized “itineraries towards faith” (Taylor 2007: 745). This individualization is important: for Taylor, following Ivan Illich, spiritual hunger is most purely felt personally. Its institutionalization always threatens to petrify it into norms, rules, and habits which, in turn, he contends,
leads to spiritual elitism and conformism and ultimately to the dangerous identification of faith with civilization (Taylor 2007: 737-44). This surprisingly Protestant account of faith exists in a certain tension to Taylor’s impeccably Catholic/sociological insistence that individual consciousnesses are formed through larger social imaginaries. But what is in effect a Protestant methodological individualism would seem to be required if the openness to the transcendental is to be saved from its modern wreckage just because modern Western society contains no institutions capable of collectivizing “conversion into fullness” on a grand scale. One of A Secular Age’s most distinctive features is its genre. Taylor is the
only intellectual I know who hearkened to the New Left call for theory by revivifying a genre known in the eighteenth century as “philosophical” or “conjectural” history. (“Conjectural” because it did not depend on known facts.) Speculative books like Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and John Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) and their heirs, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy (1830) were monuments of emergent secularism, even if recent scholarship (like Taylor’s, indeed) asks us to consider their connection to what Gerald Radner has called “Christian reform,” namely those modes of Christian practice that found soteriological promise in civil engagement and improvement (Radner 1959). The philosophical historians’ stadial theory, along with their capacity to classify historical formations and tendencies into units and moments which instantiate discrete abstract categories were important in generating the command over the past required by progressivism and were also important in reconciling readers to the historical record by sidelining conflict and violence. Ironically, if A Secular Age has forebears, those are they. Taylor himself, I suspect, comes to the genre through his engagement with Hegel, and in particular in the wake of his historicization of The Phenomenology of Spirit’s deployment of immanent critique in his influential first book on Hegel (Taylor 2007: 218, 347; also see Milbank 2006: 157). Taylor too uses stadial theory and a historiography reliant upon more or
less discrete categorical classifications. Like his forebears, Taylor has a liking for dividing history into the triplets that Barthold Niebuhr in his 1811 History of Rome (a devastating critique of philosophic history and a milestone in biblical criticism) thought characteristic of mythic narration. However, where the secularizing philosophic historians looked to a progressive extension of liberty and rationality able to retain civic humanist virtues (courage, independence, manliness, and so on), Taylor, of course, tentatively hopes for the containment of Aristotelian humanist flourishing (i.e., eudaimonia) whose merely worldly norms have come to marginalize and disperse a sense of the sacred. Despite its capacity to claim mastery over the past, philosophic history is
rarely written these days, in part because it can’t well account for historical causality. Ultimately it is interested not in historical cause but in telos. And
it seems that Taylor neglects important underlying material causes (most obviously capitalism and urbanization), not so much because the channels through which such causes operate in all their materiality remain largely hidden from us, but because he believes that to engage such causes is to risk embracing a reductive form of immanence, namely materialism. It has to be said, however, that if Taylor believes that the secular world
has lost a fullness available only through the transcendent, the secularist may feel an equivalent emptiness in Taylor’s own analysis, since its attempts to explain how history happened, and how it happened differently in different places in the way that it did, are so abstracted and distanced from the events to which they ultimately refer. Admittedly Taylor has a complex account of how “social imaginaries” change: piecemeal shifts in social practices gradually come to require holistic ideological transformations in which the intelligibility and value of social phenomena may themselves be radically altered. (This is rather reminiscent of Tawney’s description of the collapse of the medieval Catholic world view in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 1926.) In this way, in Taylor, history’s paths and circles are simplified into an ultimately unaccounted-for displacement of a transcendental orientation by the pursuit of merely worldly well-being. Why, given Taylor’s commitment to an existentialized/theophanized moral anthropology, did this displacement happen? Why did modern man betray his own integral nature? At this point, there exists an absence at the centre of Taylor’s narrative: it is not as if he can simply accept as natural that, to put it very crudely, so many Europeans came to prefer security, reason, and money to God. But if we regard the various forms of spiritual hunger and their satisfaction not as givens but as contingent social functions, then, like it or not, we can concede that societies may successfully do without them, and there is no particular historiographical problem about their loss. Taylor is, in effect, and despite himself, writing a philosophic history
which has turned conservative in what remains, just, a recognizably Burkean mode.1 In summary terms, Burke’s own most lasting contribution to theory was to join Western religious orthodoxy to Adam Smith’s political economy in the face of the French Revolution’s threat to oligarchic mixed government and church property. But, for Burke, orthodoxy and its institutions (the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches) had produced a secular, gentlemanly culture bound to classical learning, chivalry, and honor (a version of which we encountered in the first chapter). Without the churches and the social hierarchy that they underpinned, the new theories being disseminated by the philosophes, harnessed to the professional bourgeoisie’s resentful drive to power, would lead not just to the chaos of democracy but to a collapse of, as Burke famously put it, “conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation” (Burke 2003: 48). For all its efforts to avoid conservative melancholy and to resist appeals for
the reanimation of past social forms, Taylor’s argument is based on nostalgia
for a lost fullness and coherence. This means that it is Burkean in structure if not in content. Unlike Burke, Taylor has, as we have seen, accepted the ideals of democracy, liberty, and equality, and unlike Burke he has little faith that a worldly alliance between orthodoxy, tradition and secular dignity might resist materialism and immanence. Only personalized spiritual practices, here detached from ecclesiology, can do that. In this regard, Taylor stands closer to another romantic conservative: the Jena school’s Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), who, arguably, inaugurates the application of a transcendental-immanent distinction to counter-revolution in Burkean terms. That is to say, Novalis attempts to buttress social organicism against rationalism by a religio-metaphysical concept (transcendence) inaugurated by Clement of Alexandria in the second century and whose great vehicle, in the West, became the pre-Reformation church. For Novalis the modernity that the revolution inaugurates threatens not just Christian faith and church power but more sweepingly our sense of an ontological otherness, hedged by mystery, in which the poetry of the ideal takes form. But it is only right to receive a book as rich as A Secular Age on its own
terms. And if, for me, it is not finally persuasive, that’s not simply because of its genre or its echoes of religio-Burkean conservatism but because of a series of interlinked problems, many of which have been rehearsed by its commentators, and of which I will mention three, relevant to my purpose. First, it is important to Taylor’s argument that he discounts the fact that
Christianity is a revealed religion most of whose central claims are, under modern truth regimes, false, unverifiable, or unproven. After all, although his concepts of the sacred and fullness extend beyond any particular religion, his central historical case remains limited to Latin Christendom. But believing or not believing Christian doctrine is not a choice for those living “in the true” of rational, probabilistic knowledge, nor is it necessarily an expression of a preference for organized eudaimonia. It is impelled upon them in approximately the same way that they are impelled to know that George W. Bush is (at the time of writing) President of the United States. Of course, when Christianity stops being true in fact – a “true truth” – it may still be true as feeling, as morality, as tradition, as a disposition, as myth – an “untrue truth”. I will return to this. As to my second point, it is clear that Taylor can elide the question of
Christian revelation’s untruth just because his final interest seems to be in an ontological distinction between the transcendent and the immanent rather than in religion as such. But as soon as you deontologize transcendence and immanence, you don’t have to choose between them and can find other ways of avoiding Taylor’s narrative of enchantment’s loss. Taylor himself often points to forms of “immanent transcendence,” thinking mainly of the existential spiritualizing of death as “a gathering point for life” which he believes continues the old spiritual hunger on new terms (Taylor 2007: 726). However, more flexible forms of (post-Spinozist) immanent transcendence
that allow history and imagination to play a more complex role than they do in existentialism also become available. Let me offer a rather obscure literary example. In his Epicurean 1861
country-house satire, Gryll Grange, Thomas Love Peacock describes a Mr Falconer, who, although irreligious, surrounds himself with the iconography of the famous fourth-century martyr and patron saint of philosophers and theologians, St Catherine of Alexandria. A friend warns Falconer against “becoming the dupe of your own mystification” (1947: 58), to which he replies:
I have no fear of that. I think I can clearly distinguish devotion to ideal beauty from superstitious belief. I feel the necessity of some such devotion to fill up the void which the world, as it is, leaves in my mind. I wish to believe in the presence of some local spiritual influence; genius or nymph; linking us by a medium of something like human feeling, but more pure and more exalted, to the all-pervading, creative, and preservative spirit of the universe; but I cannot realize it from things as they are. Everything is too deeply tinged with sordid vulgarity. … the intellectual life of the material world is dead. Imagination cannot replace it. But the intercession of saints still forms a link between the visible and invisible. In their symbols I can imagine their presence. Each in the recess of our own thought we may preserve their symbols from the intrusion of the world. And the saint whom I have chosen presents to my mind the most perfect ideality of physical, moral, and intellectual beauty.
