Taylorisation

  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’ (whateve...

  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...