Charles Taylor, A Secular Age: Introduction

Charles Taylor's extensive work, A Secular Age, is one of the most influencial books attempting to understand secularism in the last few centuries. There have been books written based on Taylor's work attempting to massage through some of his main ideas (How (Not) to be Secular by James Smith), Andrew Root's take on incorporating Ministry in a Secular Age). Here, I'll post main quotes in each chapter of his work, starting with his Introduction.

Page 1: Religion or its absence is largely a private matter. The political society is seen as that of believers (of all stripes) and non-believers alike. 

• Page 2: Before: “In those societies, you couldn’t engage in any kind of public activity without “encountering God” in the above sense. 

Page 3: The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.

So what I want to do is examine our society as secular in this third sense, which I could perhaps encapsulate in this way: the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer is one human possibility among others.

Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. These are alternatives. And this will also likelhy mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century. 

Page 5: We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lies, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be. 

ONE END: FULLNESS

Page 5: AWE - story of seemingly hearing birds for the first time. (Charles defines as “fullness”)

• Page 8: The big obvious contrast here is that for believers, the account of the place of fullness requires reference to God, that is, to something beyond human life and/or nature; where for unbelievers this is not the case; they rather will leave any account open, or understand fullness in terms of a potentiality of human beings understood naturalistically.”

Fullness contrast:

• Page 8: For believers, often or typically, the sense is that fullness comes to them, that it is something they receive; moreover, receive in something like a personal relation, from another being capable of love and giving; approaching fullness involves among other things, practices of devotion and prayer (as well as charity, giving); and they are aware of being very far from the condition of full devotion and giving; they are aware of being self-enclosed, bound to lesser things and goals, not able to open themselves and receive/give as they would at the place of fullness.

• For modern unbelievers, the predicament is quite different. The power to reach fullness is within. There are different variations of this. One is that which centres on our nature as rational beings. The Kantian** variant is the most upfront form of this. We have the power as rational agency to make the laws by which we live. This is something so greatly superior to the force of mere nature in us, in the form of desire, tht when we contemplate it without distortion, we cannot but feel reverence (Achtung) for this power. 

• *the power of law-giving: “We have a feeling of receptivity, when with our full sense of our own fragility and pathos as desiring beings, we look up to the power of law-giving with admiration and awe. But this doesn’t in the end mean that there is any reception from outside; the power is within; and the more we realize this power, the more we become aware that it is within, that morality must be autonomous and not heteronomous. 

• Feuerbach: Later in Feuerbachian theory of alienation can be added to this: we project God because of our early sense of this awesome power which we mistakenly place outside us; we need to re-appropriate it for human beings. But Kant didn’t take this step)

  
  

OTHER END: EXILE (ENNUI)

Page 6: Exile - “absence of power; a confusion, or worse, the condition often described in the tradition as melancholy, ennui (the “spleen” of Baudelaire).

“What is terrible in this latter condition (exile) is that we lose a sense of where the place of fullness is, even of what fullness could consist in; we feel we’ve forgotten what it would look like, or cannot believe in it any more. But the misery of absence, of loss, is still there, indeed, it is in some ways even more acute.”

IN THE MIDDLE: STABILIZED MIDDLE CONDITION (“exile at bay through routine”)

Thirdly: “there is a kind of stabilized middle condition” to which we often aspire. This is one where we have found a way to escape the forms of negation, exile, emptiness, without having reached fullness. We come to terms with the middle position, often through some stable, even routine order in life, in which we are doing things which have some meaning for us; for instance, which contribute to our ordinary happiness, or which are fulfilling in various ways, or which contribute to what we conceive of as the good. 

• Page 7: “But it is essential to this middle condition, first that the routine, the order, the regular contact with meaning in our daily activities, somehow conjures, and keeps at bay the exile, or the ennui, or captivity in the monstrous; and second that we have some sense of continuing contact with the place of fullness; and of slow movement toward it over the years. 

  
  

Kant’s thought* Page 9: Kant’s belief in radical freedom of the moral agent, immortality, God – the three postulates of practical reason. 

• Within this kind of naturalism, we often find an admiration for the power of cool, disengaged reason, capable of contemplating the world and human life without illusion, and of acting lucidly for the best in the interest of human flourishing. 

• “The nearest thing to fullness lies in this power of reason, and it is entirely ours, developed if it is through our own, often heroic action. (And here the giants of modern “scientific” reason are often named: Copernicus, Darwin, Freud)

  
  

Page 10: Third category of outlook - “They are as determined to undermine and deny Romantic notions of solace in feeling, or in recovered unity, as they are to attack the Enlightenment dream of  pure thinking; and they seem often even more eager to underscore their atheist convictions.”

What does it mean to say that for me fullness comes from a power which is beyond me, that I have to receive it, etc.?

That is, in my own experience, in prayer, in moments of fullness, in experiences of exile overcome, in what I seem to observe around me in other people’s lives – lives of exceptional spiritual fullness, or lives of maximum self-enclosedness, lives of demonic evil, etc. – this seems to be the picture which emerges. But I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection – by some experience which won’t fit, som elives which exhibit fullness on another basis, some alternative mode of fullness wich sometimes draws me, etc. 

Theories to explain religious belief (Pages 11 and 12), “people are afraid of uncertainty, the unknown; they’re weak in the head, crippled by guilt, etc. 

Page 14: How did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naïvely within a theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which everyone’s construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbelief has become for many the major default option? This is the transformation that I want to describe, and perhaps also (very partially) explain in the following chapters. 

Naïve framework vs. Reflective framework

• Differences of experience and sensibility

  
  

Page 15: Three modes of secularity:

Secular One: establishment of secular, public spaces - John Milbank (“once there was no secular” - there used to always be a religous space - not this)

• Not public school with prayer, secular meaning 

Secular Two: secularism - declining religious participation

• Most famously, the “nones” - people checking no religious participation

• Post christian (sigmund freud, the future of an illusion - atheist manifesto - illusion is god = what is the future of this illusion)

• Bonhoeffer (come of age, prison letters) 

• Freud - march into secular future. Step away from these mythological ideas to secular “godlessness” 

Secular Three: change in the conditions of belief - how did it become possible for people to move forward out of transcendent realm

• Exclusive humanism, loss of transcendent - how was it even possible?

• What happened culturally/psychologically that this is just one way of living?

  
  

“We have moved from a world in which th eplace of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or “beyond” human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it (in a wide range of different ways) “within” human life.”

Page 16: Every person, and every society, lives with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: what constitutes a fulfilled life? What makes life really worth living? What would we most admire people for? We can’t help asking these and related questions in our lives. And our struggles to answer them define the view or views that we try to live by, or between which we haver.

Another way of getting at something like the issue raised above in terms of within/without is to ask: does the highest, the best life involve our seeking, or acknowledging, or serving a good which is beyond, in the sense of independent human flourishing? In which case, the highest, most real, authentic or adequate human flourishing could include our aiming (also) in our range of final goals at something other than human flourishing. 

Page 20: perhaps there is “the sense that there is some good higher than, beyond human flourishing. Int he Christian case, we could think of this as agape, the love which God has for us, and which we can partake of through his power. In other words, a possibility of transformation is offered which takes us beyond merely human perfection. But of course, this notion of a higher good as attainable by us could only make sense in the context of belief in a higher power, the transcendent God of faith which appears in most definitions of religion. But then thirdly, the Chrisstian story of our potential transformation by agape requires that we see our life as going beyond the bounds of its “natural” scope between birth and death; our lives extend beyond “this life.”

So secularity 3, which is my interest here, as against 1 (secularized public spaces), and 2 (the decline of belief and practice), consists of new conditions of belief; it consists in a new shape to the experience which prompts to and is defined by belief; in a new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and spiritual must proceed.