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Disordered Thoughts on "The Malaises of Modernity"

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  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
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The Nova Effect

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  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'
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Trilling's "Sincerity and Authenticity" (1972)

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  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
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Ordered Impersonalities and Funky Gibbons

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  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
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Benevolence and the Jets

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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
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On Legitimation

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Reading Taylor’s Part 1 ‘The Work of Reform’, and following his account of how modern, secular society—how the modern, secular state—emerged out of earlier, religiously framed social structures, I started to wonder if something was missing. I say so tentatively, since this is an area in which I am not an expert. But neither am I complete noob, so …you know. So: Taylor talks in terms of ‘the rise of the disciplinary society’ (it’s the title of his chapter 2). He diagnoses a change in the way ‘people’ thought of the world around them: a ‘series of shifts’ that ‘cumulatively take the master description of the world as ens creatum in a radically different direction’, towards a situation in which ‘all intrinsic purpose having been expelled, final causation drops out and efficient causation alone remains.’ (p.97-98). This, says Taylor, entails a ‘mechanisation of the world picture’; ‘we trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything has a meaning, for a silent but beneficent mac
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"For Ye Have The Porous Always With You ..."

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  My first encounter with Taylor’s Secular Age book was via my friend Alan Jacobs' article ‘ Fantasy and the Buffered Self ’ [ New Atlantis , Winter 2014], which I commend to you. It’s gratuitous of me to summarise that article, when the link is right there, and the piece itself so elegantly written and compelling, but I’m going to do so anyway, as a way-in to thinking about Taylor’s distinction between ‘porous’ and ‘buffered’ sensibilities. Here's how it starts: When asked by the editors of the website The Immanent Frame to summarize the key concerns of his vastly ambitious book A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor wrote: “Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less ‘enchanted’ world. We might think of this as our having ‘lost’ a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the
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