Taylorisation

‘Cosmos to universe’, says Charles Taylor in chapter 9 of A Secular Age , is how ‘the way the world is imagined changed.’ This change, which has taken place over the last half millennium in our civilization, has been immense. We move from an enchanted world, inhabited by spirits and forces, to a disenchanted one; but perhaps more important, we have moved from a world which is encompassed within certain bounds and static to one which is vast, feels infinite, and is in the midst of an evolution spread over aeons. The earlier world was limited and encompassed by certain notions of cosmos, world orders which imposed a boundary by attributing a shape to things. The Platonic-derived notion of the cosmos as a chain of being is one such: the cosmos in virtue of what Lovejoy called the “principle of plenitude” exhibits all the possible forms of being; it is as rich as it can be. But the number of these forms is finite, and they can be generated from a single basic set of principles. However

  This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Taylor’s chapter 8 ‘The Malaises of Modernity’—rather rambling and unfocused (my thoughts, I mean), but I don’t have time at the moment to wrench this into better shape. So I’m just jotting a few things down, pretty much at random. In this chapter CT advances his ‘nova’ argument: that secularity is a particular kind of newness coming into the world: that ‘multiple critiques aimed at orthodox religion, Deism and the new humanism’ muscle into social, conceptual and discursive spaces previously exclusively religious: ‘it’s as though the original duality, the positing of a viable humanist alternative, set in train a dynamic, something like a nova effect, spawning an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options, across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond’ [299]. That there has come into being what he calls ‘a fractured culture of the nova’. From here CT goes on to talk about theodicy. He thinks ‘orthodox religion’ (whatever th

  There has been, for reasons (as the phrase goes) outwith my control, a long hiatus on this blog. I might apologise for that—though I don’t know to whom my apology would be addressed, since nobody has been or will be reading this. At any rate, various work and other things having been sorted, cleared out of the way and so on, I return to Taylor’s big book. I have previously read Parts 1 and 2, some 300 pages of small-font, closely reasoned text. Here, with links, are my reactions, so far: 1. "A Secular Age": Introduction 2. Throughlessness 3. Modern Social Imaginaries 4. "For Ye Have The Porous Always With You ..." [on Taylor's 'Porous/Buffered' distinction] 5. On Legitimation [on Taylor’s Part 1 ‘The Work of Reform’] 6. Benevolence and the Jets [on the first part of Part 2: ‘Providential Deism’] 7. Ordered Impersonalities and Funky Gibbons [on the second part of Part 2: ‘The Impersonal Order’] [There's also this blog on Trilling'

  I had dipped into Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (1972) before, but in a desultory and superficial manner. Recently I sat down and actually read the whole thing. It’s a very remarkable book, I think. Indeed: I’m a little surprised it’s not better known, although I daresay part of the positivity of my reaction has to do with the happenstance that I read it whilst in the middle of a longer-term, (intermittent, but still ongoing) read of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age . This latter is taking a while, because Taylor’s book is … well: enormous, and complex. I’m halfway through it at the moment, and though I will finish it, that’ll take a while. Taylor’s core argument is that ‘we’, as human beings, have changed; that we no longer live in an ‘enchanted’ world but a secular one, that meaning and value are no longer predicated upon something exterior to reality (as in a divine cosmos) but interior to it—in us, our societies, our selves, our secular ‘modern moral order’; and that thi

  Onward. After ‘Providential Deism’, the first bit of A Secular Age ’s Part 2 (overarching title ‘The Turning Point’) we come to the second bit: ‘The Impersonal Order’—a brisker 25 pages that moves straightforwardly through its thesis, something of a relief after the much longer and rather more tangled ‘Providential Deism’ chapter.  Taylor’s aim in this chapter is straightforward enough: to map ‘a change in the understanding of God and is relation to the world’, a ‘drift away from orthodox Christian conceptions of God as an agent, interacting with humans and intervening in human history’ to ‘God as an architect of a universe operating by unchanging laws, which humans have to conform to or suffer the consquences’ [p.270]. Does Taylor mean unchanging laws of physics, or unchanging laws of physics and of morality ? I'm not sure. His main business here is to find a way of retelling this narrative that does not also entail what he has previously dubbed ‘the subtraction story’. That

Pressing on with A Secular Age , I’m into Part 2, ‘The Turning Point’. It comprises two sections, ‘Providential Deism’ and ‘The Impersonal Order’. This, in other words, is the hinge upon which we’ve turned, in the West, from a ‘religious’ to a ‘secular’ social logic: replacing the exterior-to-humankind anchor point of God (who sometimes called upon us to ‘detach ourselves from [our] own flourishing, to the point of the extinction of the self, or of renunciation of human fulfilment’ [p17]) with a ground located within the world, and therefore within ourselves. Two things, then: ‘Deism’ and ‘order’, the latter a shift from ‘orthodox Christian conceptions of God as an agent interacting with humans and intervening in human history’ to ‘God as an architect of a universe operating by unchanging laws’ [p.270]. Righty ho. I had trouble with Taylor’s use of ‘Deism’ in Part 1, since he seemed to be giving too much emphasis to a movement that was, whilst real, rather minor and elitist at the time