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