tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84818081607299377992024-03-21T18:27:16.482-04:00A Secular Age: The Calvin SeminarBlog of PHIL 396, the spring 2011 senior seminar in philosophy at Calvin College.James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-46217714314747004052011-04-18T16:48:00.002-04:002011-04-20T08:59:27.721-04:00Taylor on CBC's "Ideas"Readers might be interested in the resource just posted to the CBC website, a 5-part series on and with Taylor. Check out "<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/04/11/the-malaise-of-modernity-part-1---5/">The Malaise of Modernity</a>" at the CBC website.<br /><br />HT: Kenneth SheppardJames K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-89437104556128763772011-03-29T08:57:00.005-04:002011-03-29T09:31:33.276-04:00Have Your Transcendence and Eat it Too<i><span class="Apple-style-span" >Apologies to our readers: I was unable to login to the group-blog to add my contribution, so my post here is a bit out of chronological order. These abridged notes cover chapter 10, section 1. </span></i><div>
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<br /></div><div><meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/Amy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Arial; panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} p.MsoHeader, li.MsoHeader, div.MsoHeader {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-link:"Header Char"; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; tab-stops:center 3.0in right 6.0in; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} span.HeaderChar {mso-style-name:"Header Char"; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-locked:yes; mso-style-link:Header; mso-ansi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:.8in .8in .8in .8in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} /* List Definitions */ @list l0 {mso-list-id:577712815; mso-list-type:hybrid; mso-list-template-ids:1704368614 1661508990 67698713 67698715 67698703 67698713 67698715 67698703 67698713 67698715;} @list l0:level1 {mso-level-text:"\(%1\)"; mso-level-tab-stop:none; mso-level-number-position:left; margin-left:.75in; text-indent:-.25in;} @list l0:level2 {mso-level-number-format:alpha-lower; mso-level-tab-stop:none; mso-level-number-position:left; margin-left:1.25in; text-indent:-.25in;} ol {margin-bottom:0in;} ul {margin-bottom:0in;} --> </style> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:center"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Have Your Transcendence and Eat it Too:</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:center"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial"></span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 17px; ">The Aesthetic Ethic of the Buffered Self</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; text-align:center"><span style="font-size:13.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Arial">
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<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“No-Man’s-Land”: The Modern Cosmic Imaginary</span></u></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><b><u>
<br /></u></b></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“…the salient feature of the modern cosmic imaginary is not that it has fostered materialism, or enabled people to recover a spiritual outlook beyond materialism, to return as it were to religion, though it has done both these things. But <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">the most important fact</b> about it which is relevant to our enquiry here is that it has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">opened a space</i> in which people can wander between and around all these options without having to land clearly and definitively in any one.” (p. 351, emphasis mine)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">What made this possible?</span></i><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial"> Shift in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">Romantic</b> period art from “imitation” to “creation.” (p. 352) <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial"><o:p><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> •Previously, artists drew upon and imitated the broader cosmic imaginary. With this shift to the modern cosmic imaginary, now artists had to create new meaning in a new cosmos.</o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; ">
<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial"><o:p></o:p></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">A New Lexicon: From "the Great Chain of Being" to “Subtler Language”</span></u></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“…where formerly poetic language could rely on certain publicly available orders of meaning… the decline of the old order with its established background of meanings made necessary the development of new poetic languages in the Romantic period. […] The Romantic poets and their successors have to articulate an original vision of the cosmos.” (353)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">Wasserman</span></b><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:Arial">: “Until the end of the eighteenth century there was sufficient intellectual homogeneity for [people] to share certain assumptions… By the nineteenth century these world-pictures had passed from consciousness.” (353)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">The Aesthetic “Unhooked” from the Ontic<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;"><b><u>
<br /></u></b></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“Art”</span></b><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial"> – appreciation of cultural practices without participation <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>// <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>the aesthetic without the ontic</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Two disembeddings</span></b><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:-.25in; mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">(1)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Prayers, mass, bardic songs, etc. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">taken out of context</i> – playing Masses in concerts.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:-.25in; mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">(2)<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“Absolute” music – Music abstracted from an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">ontic commitment</i><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“The music moves us very strongly…it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. But what at? What is the object? Is there an object?” (355)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“We have something like the essence of the response, without the story.” (355)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.75in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">“This leaves a residual mystery: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">why are we so moved?</i>” (356)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">Aesthetics as Ethics</span></u></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><u><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">New struggle to articulate new moral meaning in nature.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">“..the aesthetic was established as an ethical category, as a source of answers to the question, how should we live? what is our greatest goal or fulfillment? This gives a crucial place to art. Beauty is what will save us, complete us. …artistic creation comes to be the highest domain of human activity.” (359)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">Previously, art imitated God’s creation. Now, art moves us “without having to identify [its] ontic commitments.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This offers a “place to go for modern unbelief.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The aesthetic is “unhooked from the ordered cosmos and/or the divine.” It can me </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; ">immanentized, or simply left unspecified:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14px; ">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Arial;color:black">"...these languages function, have power, move us, but without having to identify their ontic commitments. "Absolute" music expresses being moved by what is powerful and deep, but does not need to identify where this is to be found, whether in heaven, or on earth, or in the depths of our own being--or even whether these alternatives are exclusive... Now to enter in this medium does not mean to deny God. On the contrary, many great modern artists--Eliot, Messiaen--have tried to make their medium a locus of epiphany. This is perfectly possible. But it is not necessary. The ontic commitments can be other, or they can remain largely unidentified." (p. 360)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify"><span class="Apple-style-span" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">
<br /></span></span></p> <!--EndFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">Discussion Questions:</span></i></b><span style="font-size:10.5pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial"> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">Is Taylor’s analysis of the Romantic period relevant today?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What is the contemporary role of aesthetics? Is “Mother Earth” the new “Father God"? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What are the “ontic commitments” of Mumford & Sons?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial">
<br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family: Arial"> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/Amy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Arial; 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mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Taylorific Words:</span></i><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> regicide, erstwhile, chthonic, assertoric</span><!--EndFragment--> </span></p> <!--EndFragment--></div>Aaron Rathbunhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13459403856670247938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-46881135262728973242011-03-21T09:40:00.001-04:002011-03-21T09:42:32.898-04:00The Age of Authenticity (ch. 13)<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Taylor closed chapter 12 by sketching two “ideal types” in his “outrageously simplified potty history” of the last 200 years: the Ancien Regime (AR) and the Age of Mobilization (AM).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Chapter 13 should be read as extending that analysis, so the next type/phase is the “Age of Authenticity” (AA).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">(a) The social imaginary of expressive individualism</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">What we get in this chapter is Taylor’s explication of “the social imaginary of expressive individualism” (486), that unique form of the modern, post-Romantic social imaginary that has exploded “in the last half century, perhaps even less, which has profoundly altered the conditions of belief in our societies” (473).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What’s at issue here is not so much the causes or mechanims [Taylor will consistently point to the consumer revolution and post-war affluence, 474, 490), but rather “the understandings of human life, agency, and the good” which emerge with this expansion of expressive individualism. (474).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">The SI of AA is crystallized in terms of <i>authenticity</i>, the understanding that “each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering conformity with a model imposed on us from outside” (475).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So the primary—yea, only—value in such a world is <i>choice</i>: “bare choice as a prime value, irrespective of what is a choice between, or in what domain” (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">478</b>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And tolerance is the last remaining virtue (484).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Taylor sees two temptations of evaluation re: AA (480): critics can too easily dismiss it as egoism; friends can too easily celebrate it as progress without cost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Taylor’s evaluation takes a different tack: on his reading, AA has changed our available options (480b)—it has changed not just the conditions of belief but the milieu of our everyday lived experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>To get at this, he homes in on <u>fashion</u> as a kind of case study.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What we see there is that while fashion is a medium of <i>expression</i> for my individuality, it is also something that is inescapably relational, almost parasitic: “The space of fashion is one in which we sustain a language together of signs and meanings, which is constantly changing, but which at any moment is the background needed to give our gestures the sense they have” (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">481</b>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is no longer a space of common actual but rather a space of <i>mutual display</i>—another way of “being-with” (481b) in which “a host of urban monads hover on the boundary between solipsism and communication” (482).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This breeds aa new kind of self-consciousness: “My loud remarks and gestures are overtly addressed only to my immediate companions, my family group is sedately walking, engaged in our own Sunday outing, but all the time we are aware of this common space that we are building, in which the messages that cross take their meaning” (482).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In other words, we all behave now like 13-year-old girls.<a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[1]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>It is these <i>spaces of mutual display</i>, Taylor argues, that are most prone to being colonized by consumer culture, so that “consumer culture, expressivism and spaces of mutual display connect in our world to produce their own kind of synergy” (483):</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">The language of self-definition is defined in the spaces of mutual display, which have now gone meta-topical; they relate us to prestigious centres of style-creation, usually in rich and powerful nations and milieux.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And this language is the object of constant attempted manipulation by large corporations” (483).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Indeed, this construction of a consumer identity—which has to <i>feel</i> like its chosen (483—the illusion of nonconformity, the suburban skater kid whose mom bought him the $150 board blazoned with “anarchy” symbols)—<i>trumps</i> other identities, especially collective identities like citizenship or religious affiliation (c. Kenda Creasy Dean, <i>Almost Christian</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">One could argue that for many young people today, certain styles, which they enjoy and display in their more immediate circle, but which are defined through the media, in relation to admired stars—or even products—occupy a bigger place in their sense of self, and that this has tended to displace in importance the sense of belonging to large scale collective agencies, like nations, not to speak of churches, political parties, agencies of advocacy, and the life (484).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>This expansion of expressive individualism does not unsettled the modern moral order; to the contrary, if anything it strengthens the order of mutual benefit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Indeed, the MMO is the “ethical base” for the soft relativism of the expressivist imaginary: do your own thing, who am I to judge?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The only sin is intolerance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><i>Here</i> is where Taylor locates the most significant shift in the post-60s West: while ideals of tolerance have always been present in the modern social imaginary, in earlier forms (Locke, the early American Republic, etc.) this value was contained and surrounded by other values which were a scaffolding of formation (e.g., the citizen ethic, 484).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What erodes in the last half century is precisely these limits on individual fulfillment (485).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">(b) The place of the sacred in our secular age</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">What is the “imagined place of the sacred” in a society governed by expressivist individualism (486)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Taylor has already hinted that such a society seems to forge its own “festive” rendition of the sacred—“moments of fusion in a common action/feeling, which both wrench us out of the everyday, and seem to put us in touch with something exceptional, beyond ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Which is why some have seen these moments as among the new forms of religion in our world” (482-483).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But while there might still be room for a kind of sacred, something has also clearly changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Taylor makes sense of this in terms of Durkheim’s categories:</span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"></p><ul><li><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol;mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">“Under the paleo-Durkheimian dispensation, my connection to the sacred entailed my belonging to the church” and the church (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican) is co-extensive with society such that there is “a link between adhering to God and belonging to the state” (486).</span></li><li><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol;mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">In a “neo-Durkheimian mode,” there has been some disembedding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Here we see the emergence of the “denominational imaginary” (450) and an emphasis on voluntary association, but when you join “the church of your choice,” you’re still connecting to something bigger--“the church” and its heritage, which still feeds and fuels the project of the nation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></li><li><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol;mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">But now in the post-Durkheimian context with its expressivist outlook we have a qualitative shift: “The religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice, but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this” (486).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The expressivist forges her own religion (“spirituality”), her own, personal Jesus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But what’s most significant is that the sacred is uncoupled from political allegiance (487). This begins to loosen up things more generally, in accord with expressivist individualism, such that it becomes less and less “rational” to accept any external contraints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So whereas Methodists and Pietists unleashed an emphasis on emotional encounters with God but kept this tethered to orthodoxy, it was only a matter of time “before the emphasis will shift more and more towards the strength and the genuineness of the feelings, rather than the nature of their object” (488).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And so a new spiritual injunction arises: “let everyone follow his/her own path of spiritual inspiration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Don’t’ be led off yours by the allegation that it doesn’t fit with some orthodoxy” (489).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></li></ul><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">What draws people away from traditional, institutional religion is largely just the success of consumer culture—the “stronger form of magic” found in the ever-new glow of consumer products (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">490</b>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As a result, the expressivist revolution (1) “undermined some of the large-scale religious forms of the Age of Mobilization” and (2) “undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order” (492).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In fact, “where the link between disciplines and civilizational order is broken, but that between Christian faith and the disciplines remains unchallenged, expressivism and the conjoined sexual revolution has alienated many people from the churches” (493).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <div style="mso-element:footnote-list"><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote">[1]</span></span></a> This analysis <i>has</i> to be compared to DFW’s account of our self-conscious age in [articles in <i>Journal of Contemporary Fiction</i>].<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>DFW is also analyzing the culture of those writers who grew up after the 60s revolution of expressive individualism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-62747181392804607732011-03-16T19:15:00.002-04:002011-03-16T19:18:59.241-04:00Mainstream Secularization TheoryThe Question<br /><br />We know how the elites were affected by the nova effect. But what about everyone else? How is it that “the predicament of the then upper strata has become that of whole societies”? (423)<br />· It’s more than mere “diffusion.”<br />· It’s “incredibly complicated.”<br /><br />Some Preliminary Concerns<br /><br />If we understand secularization as “some kind of decline in religion” (427), then we need to set some things straight.<br />· What is religion? Who are the religious? (427)<br />· Recognize the “issues of interpretation” and the “unthoughts” of secularization theory.<br />o “Everyone can see that there have been declines in practice and declared belief in many countries… But how to understand and interpret these changes may not be evident” (426).<br />o “… one’s own framework beliefs and values can constrict one’s theoretical imagination” (428).<br /><br />The “Unthoughts” of Secularization Theory<br /><br />Religion must decline because (428-9):<br />a) it is false (and we know this from science)<br />b) it is irrelevant (for we have other methods to serve the same function)<br />c) it is authoritarian (that is, it inhibits individual autonomy) <br /><br />Mainstream Secularization Theory<br /><br />Basically that “‘modernity’ (in some sense) tends to repress or reduce ‘religion’ (in some sense)” (429). Or, “modernity has led to a decline in the transformation perspective” (431).<br /><br />The Three-Storey Dwelling Metaphor:<br /><br />(Imagine a house with three floors: the ground floor holds the fact that religious belief and practice have diminished; the basement gives the historical explanations to why this is; the upper level consists of questions for religion today)<br /> <br />“Powerful Enframing Assumptions” (433)<br /><br />How can we claim that religion is not needed in modernity? Two assumptions are being made:<br /><br />1) The disappearance thesis – religion disappears with modernity<br />2) The epiphenomenal thesis – religion is secondary to a higher function<br /><br />Given these two assumptions, it is easy to think that, “when humans come to control their world and society, the religious impulse must atrophy” (434).<br /><br />The Future of Religion?<br /><br />If atheism and agnosticism don’t become default positions, some think that “the whole issue will fade” and “later generations will wonder what the fuss was all about” (434). <br /><br />Taylor thinks this atrophy isn’t plausible. He thinks we are already too deeply committed to the transformation perspective. Instead, religion has adapted, as we see in the creation of new denominations and institutional organization (435-6).<br /><br />“But the interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life” (437).<br /><br />Questions<br /><br />Taylor admits that his project is to explain secularization in the Western world (understandably). But is there anything we can draw from the stories of secularization – or lack of secularization – outside of Western society? Have non-Western societies demonstrated a commitment to the “transformation perspective” that might help us make a claim about human nature? Can they help us understand why we may not be approaching atrophy of the religious?CorrieLeighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06995840672953446399noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-84629603819142380172011-03-14T14:13:00.001-04:002011-03-14T14:15:26.741-04:00What's Wrong with Secularization Theory? (ch. 12, sect. 1)<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">With chapter 12 we move into Part IV of <i>A Secular Age</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In this section, Taylor takes up themes and issues generally treated under the rubric of “secularization,” giving an account of the decline of religious practice in the West. As he notes at the end of chapter 11, what he’s particularly interested in is how religion has been de-coupled from society and its institutions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>However, he is going to take up these issues in a way that contests the usual “secularization thesis,” and to do so he revisits his earlier distinction between secularity<sub>1, 2, and 3</sub>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Just as secularity cannot be adequately explained by a <i>subtraction</i> story, neither can it be accounted for with a <i>diffusion</i> story—as if secularization was just the trickle down effect of elite pluralism makes its way to the masses (424).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Nor can it be adequately explained by just hitching it to some wagon of modern development such as differentiation, privatization, urbanization, industrialization, or disenchantment because of the simple fact that these phenomena did not empirically entail a decline in religious practice; indeed, they often occasioned their own kind of religious response and revival (425-426).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>So to get at this issue, Taylor goes <i>meta</i>: that is, he steps back and starts asking more fundamental questions: For example, if secularization is taken to refer to some kind of “decline of religion,” then we need to figure out what we mean by “religion.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">If one identifies this with the great historic faiths, or even with explicit belief in supernatural beings, then it seems to have declined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But if you include a wide range of spiritual and semi-spiritual beliefs; or if you cast your net even wider and think of someone’s religion as the shape of their ultimate concern, then indeed, one can make a case that religion is as present as ever (427).<a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[1]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span>Furthermore, what’s the point of comparison?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>If secularization theory claims a decline in religious participation, “what is the past we are comparing ourselves with?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Even in ages of faith, everybody wasn’t really devout” (427).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>However, Taylor doesn’t really follow up on these questions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Instead he goes <i>hermeneutical meta</i>: that is, he begins to interrogate the background assumptions operative behind secularization theory—what he calls (following Foucault) the “<u>unthought</u>” which “underpins much secularization theory” (427).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In this respect, Taylor challenges the myth of neutrality in the social sciences (428), but <i>not</i> with the “post-modern” conclusion that “we are each imprisoned in our own outlook, and can do nothing to rationally convince each other” (428).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So this critique of neutrality and disclosure of presuppositions is not a license for retreating into our silos and choirs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Rather, Taylor remains confident that there can be dialogue and even persuasion <i>across</i> “unthoughts.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As he later puts it: though Taylor will come at secularity from a <i>different</i> unthought, “that doesn’t mean that we have simply a stand-off here, where we make declarations to each other from out of our respective ultimate premises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Presumably, one or other view about religious aspiration can allow us to make better sense of what has actually happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Being in one or other perspective makes it easier for some or other insights to come to you; but there is still the question of how these insights pan out in the actual account of history” (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">436</b>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For Taylor, the problem with secularization theory is that it doesn’t adequately account for the phenomena.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>So Taylor is pointing out that any account of secularization is inevitably informed by some “unthought,” some pretheoretical perspective that comes with a certain sensibility and orientation—what he’ll call “tempers” or “outlooks.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Taylor crystallizes this with a kind of case study: one can see these different tempers manifest in what you think about Francis of Assissi, “with his renunciation of his potential life as a merchant, his austerities, his stigmata”: “One can be deeply moved by this call to go beyond flourishing;” or “one can see him as a paradigm exemplar of what Hume calls ‘the monkish virtues,’ a practitioner of senseless self-denial and a threat to civil mutuality” (431).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Tell me what you think of St. Francis, Taylor suggests, and I’ll tell you what your “unthought” is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span>(a) Secularization theory’s unthought</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>So what is the secularization theorist’s “unthought,” their background assumptions that shape their account of secularity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is, Taylor suggests, “an outlook which holds that religion must decline either (a) because it is false, and science shows this to be so; or (b) because it is increasingly irrelevant now that we can cure ringworm by trenches [the “artificial-fertilizers-make-atheists” argument]; or (c) because religion is based on authority, and modern societies given an increasingly important place to individual autonomy; or some combination of the above” (428-429).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Some constellation of these assumptions is shared by academics even in countries like the United States where wider religious participation is very high—and it can’t help but influence the story such academics tell about secularization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The result is an inevitably reductionistic account of religion which fails to really imagine that religion could be a true <i>motivator</i> for human action<a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[2]</span></span></a> (433, 452-453).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It also tends to reduce religion to merely epiphenomenal beliefs about supernatural entities and such beliefs <i>disappear</i> in the conditions of modernity (430, 433-434).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>And if this is your unthought, you’ll tend to look at St. Francis with rather pitiful eyes: that poor, benighted, misguided, but sincere soul (er, brain).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">(b) Taylor’s unthought</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Taylor has already conceded that he has his own “unthought” (429).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>“I stand in another perspective,” he confesses: “I am moved by the life of Francis of Assisi, for instance; and that has something to do with why this [secularization thesis] picture of the disappearance of independent religious inspiration seems to me so implausible” (436).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Indeed, “my own view of ‘secularization,’” he freely admits, “has been shaped by my own perspective as a believer” (437).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>So what difference does Taylor’s (Catholic?) unthought make?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>How does his temper or outlook provide a different perspective?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Well, it entails two features: first, Taylor is willing to see religion as a genuine, independent, irreducible motivator for human action and social life (again, compare Christian Smith’s argument in <i>Moral, Believing Animals</i>)—not something that can just be explained away as the epiphenomena of economic or political or evolutionary factors (453).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Second, Taylor does not reduce religion to mere belief in supernatural entities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Instead, he will emphasize that a “transformation perspective” is essential to religion—“the perspective of a transformation of human beings which takes them beyond or outside of whatever is normally understood as human flourishing” (430).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And it is just this “transformation perspective” that impinges on the moral order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>What difference does this make in the account of secularization?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We should note that Taylor <i>does</i> affirm that there has indeed been a process of secularization; and he also recognizes that in much of the West, there has also been a decline in religious participation and identification.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So contesting “the secularization thesis” does not require rejecting those ‘facts’ on the ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Instead, it just means that Taylor offers a different story: “the heart of ‘secularization’” is precisely “a decline in the transformation perspective” (431).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So while there has certainly been a decline of religion, that’s not the most interesting story: “the interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life” (437).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is this new <i>placement</i> of religion which is constitutive of our “secular age.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span>Taylor locates his debate with the “mainstream secularization thesis” by likening it to a three-story building (431-433):</p> <div align="center"> <table class="MsoTableGrid" border="1" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="margin-left:171.9pt;border-collapse:collapse;border:none;mso-border-alt: solid black;mso-border-themecolor:text1;mso-border-alt:.5pt;mso-yfti-tbllook: 191;mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1;mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1"> <tbody><tr style="mso-yfti-irow:0;mso-yfti-firstrow:yes"> <td width="189" valign="top" style="width:189.0pt;border:solid black;mso-border-themecolor: text1;border:1.0pt;mso-border-alt:solid black;mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:.5pt;padding:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt"> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Upper flr: implications/evaluation<o:p></o:p></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style="mso-yfti-irow:1"> <td width="189" valign="top" style="width:189.0pt;border:solid black;mso-border-themecolor: text1;border:1.0pt;border-top:none;mso-border-top-alt:solid black;mso-border-top-themecolor: text1;mso-border-top-alt:.5pt;mso-border-alt:solid black;mso-border-themecolor: text1;mso-border-alt:.5pt;padding:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt"> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Ground floor: ‘facts’ on the ground<o:p></o:p></span></p> </td> </tr> <tr style="mso-yfti-irow:2;mso-yfti-lastrow:yes"> <td width="189" valign="top" style="width:189.0pt;border:solid black;mso-border-themecolor: text1;border:1.0pt;border-top:none;mso-border-top-alt:solid black;mso-border-top-themecolor: text1;mso-border-top-alt:.5pt;mso-border-alt:solid black;mso-border-themecolor: text1;mso-border-alt:.5pt;background:#E0E0E0;padding:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt"> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Basement: causes of secularization<o:p></o:p></span></p> </td> </tr> </tbody></table> </div> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; ">Taylor often agrees with mainstream secularization theory ‘on the ground floor,’ so to speak (432).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It’s in the diagnosis of causes and evaluations that he disagrees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And this is because “[i]t turns out that basement and higher floor are intimately linked; that is, the explanation one gives for the declines registered by ‘secularization’ relate closely to one’s picture of the place of religion today” (433).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Indeed, it is precisely on the upper floor that the “unthought” exerts its force, and insofar as the upper floor drives us to posit corresponding causes, the unthought also exerts influence on our attribution of causality.</span></p><div style="mso-element:footnote-list"><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote">[1]</span></span></a> I propose pretty much exactly the latter in my forthcoming chapter on post-secular sociology of religion (in a collection forthcoming from NYU Press).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But it should be noted that Taylor later seems to affirm a rather traditional and narrow definition of “religion” (429).</p> </div> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote">[2]</span></span></a> On this point, cp. Christian Smith’s argument in <i>What Is a Person?</i></p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-28068557310347664942011-03-11T12:41:00.000-05:002011-03-11T12:41:00.249-05:00Expanding Unbelief (ch. 10)<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">1 / From Mimesis to Creation: Artistic Creation of the Immanent Frame<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">Taylor ended ch. 9 by noting that the modern cosmic imaginary “opened a space in which people can wander between and around all these options without having to land clearly and definitively in any one” (351).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is a cross-pressured space, the space of the nova-effect, plural and complicated—unlike the supposedly secure and dogmatic zones one would expect if one believed the so-called “war” between belief and unbelief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Most of us, Taylor argues, do not live in the confident camps of such a war; rather, most of us live in this cross-pressured “no-man’s-land” between them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>What is unique in Taylor’s story is the significance he accords to both the Renaissance and Romanticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Philosophical accounts of modernity—and hence our present (or “postmodernity”)—tend have an epistemological fixation which seizes upon the Enlightenment as the center of the story (for an exception, consider Leithart, <i>Solomon Among the Postmoderns</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But Taylor’s account is much more nuanced, recognizing early and important shifts in the Renaissance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Even more importantly, Taylor accords a central role to Romanticism as a turning point—a kind of counter-modernity within modernity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is why “[w]e can see the Victorians as our contemporaries in a way which we cannot easily extend to the men of the Enlightenment” (369).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>This is why, in chapter 10, Taylor—in contrast to the “subtraction story” on science—considers the central role of <i>art</i> in creating this “open space” which characterizes our secular age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>One of the features of post-Romantic art, he suggests, is a fundamental shift from art as <i>mimesis</i> to art as <i>poeisis</i>—from art as <i>imitating</i> nature to art <i>making</i> its world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This was necessary precisely because the flattening of the world meant the loss of reference.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>We find ourselves in Baudelaire’s “forest of symbols” but without tether or hook, without any <i>given</i> to which the symbols/signs refer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Enclosed in the immanent frame which is now the home of the buffered self, the best we can do is “triangulate” meaning from our signs, through historical nostalgia, to our present (352-353).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So in poetry, for instance, “where formerly poetic language could rely on certain publicly available orders of meaning, it now has to consist in a language of articulated sensibility” (353).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The “poet must articulate his own world of references” (353); in other words, the poet has to create a/the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Taylor seems similar shifts in painting (353-354) and music (354).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Taylor describes this as yet another “disembedding” by which art now begins to emerge as an autonomous entity and institution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In earlier societies, the aesthetic was embroiled with the religious and the political—what we look back on as ancient “art objects” were, in fact and function, <i>liturgical</i> instruments, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What we see in modernity, however, is a shift whereby the aesthetic aspect is distilled and disclosed for its own sake and as the object of interest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And from this emerges “art” as a cultural phenomenon and an autonomous reality (355).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So now we go to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor in a concert hall to appreciate it as a work of art disembedded from its liturgical home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is a “desemanticisation and resemanticisation” whereby the art is decontextualized from its religious origions and then recontextualized <i>as</i> “art” (355).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Thus Taylor sees the emergence of “absolute music” as the culmination of this disembedding (ab-solute in the sense of music that is ab-solved of connection).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Whereas the music that accompanied the Mass or even the play was tethered to action and a story, engendering responses within a community of practice that knew the references, “with the new music, we have the response in some way captured, made real, there unfolding before us; but the object isn’t there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The music moves us very strongly, because it is moved, as it were; it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. (Think of Beethoven quartets.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But what at?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What is the object?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Is there an object?” (355).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Nevertheless, we can’t quite shake our feeling that “there must be an object.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And so, Taylor suggests, even this disembedded art “trades on resonances of the cosmic in us” (356).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>But how does this create the “open space” of the nova effect?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In what way do these artistic shifts make room for cross-pressured options and alternatives?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Well, these “subtler languages operating in the ‘absolute’ mode can offer a place to go for modern unbelief;” more specifically, they provide an outlet and breathing room for those who feel cross-pressured precisely by the Romantic critique of the Deism and anthropocentric shifts that have flattened the world, leaving no room for mystery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>For those who can’t tolerate that (and Taylor thinks our better nature will never tolerate that), this emergence of the arts provides another venue for a kind of immanent <i>mystery</i>, an anthropologized mystery within.<a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8481808160729937799#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[1]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The arts and the aesthetic become a way of working out “the feeling that there is something inadequate in our way of life, that we live by an order which represses what is really important” (358; see Schiller, <i>Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The result is an immanent space to try to satisfy a lost longing for transcendence: in short, this creates a “place to go for modern unbelief” without having to settled for the utterly flattened world of mechanism or utilitarianism or moralism. And so we get the new sacred spaces of modernity: the concert hall as temple; the museum as chapel; tourism as the new pilgrimage, etc. (360).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>[And again, Taylor’s reading is ambiguous here: on the one hand, this impulse could simply come from an older longing that we’ve outgrown—a <i>historical</i> pressure (361); on the other hand, it sometimes seems to suggest that this pressure comes from the now-ignored transcendent itself, “the solicitations of the spiritual” (360).]<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">2 / Why We <i>Don’t</i> Believe (or Don’t Believe Your Own Testimony)<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">[<u>Discussion</u>: The Reformation entails materialism?!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>See p. 362, top.]<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">This section is a fascinating little psychoanalysis of a convert—but of one (or a culture) that has converted from belief to unbelief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion: if someone tells you that they’ve converted to unbelief because of science, don’t believe them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Because what’s usually captured them is not scientific evidence <i>per se</i>, but the <i>form</i> of science: “Even where the conclusions of science seem to be doing the work of conversion, it is very often not the detailed findings so much as the form” (362).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Indeed, “the appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findngs as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as the stance of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality” (365).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But you can also understand how, on the retelling, the convert to unbelief will want to give the impression that it was the scientific evidence that was doing the work (365b).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Converts to unbelief always tell subtraction stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">And the belief that they’ve converted <i>from</i> has usually been an immature, Sunday-Schoolish faith that could be easily toppled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So while such converts to unbelief tell themselves stories about “growing up” and “facing reality”—and thus paint belief as essentially immature and childish—what it betrays is the simplistic shape of the faith they’ve abandoned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>“[I]f our faith has remained at the stage of the immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible” (365).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But in fact their conversion to unbelief was also a conversion to a new faith: “faith in science’s ability” (366).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">Such tales of maturity and “growing up” to “face reality” are stories of courage—the courage to face the fact that the universe is without meaning, without purpose, without significance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So the convert to unbelief has grown up because she can handle the truth that our disenchanted world is a cold, hard place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But at the same time, there can be something exhilarating in this loss of purpose and teleology, because if nothing matters, and we have the courage to face this, then we have a kind of Epicurean invulnerability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>While such a universe might have nothing to offer us by way of comfort, it’s also true that “[i]n such a universe, nothing is demanded of us” (367).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Now the loss of purpose is also a liberation: “<i>we</i> decide what goals to pursue.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">[One gets the sense, however, that Taylor thinks there are diminishing returns on this: that something in the universe is going to keep pushing back, and that something in ourselves is not going to allow us to be satisfied with what looks like “freedom.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>One might suggest that Jonathan Franzen’s <i>Freedom</i> gets at the same malaise.]<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">3 / Immanent Counter-Enlightenment: Revolt Against the “Secular Religion of Life”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal">In the point above re: the liberating nature of the loss of purpose, one can already see burgeoning hints of what’s coming: Nietzsche, and other “post-Schaupenhauerian” visions (369).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What we get here, according to Taylor, is an internal critique of modernity, the “immanent counter-Enlightenment” which turns against the values of the Enlightenment precisely insofar as those values were secular analogues of a Christian inheritance (think: <i>Geneaology of Morals</i>, which targets Kant <i>and</i> Jesus, Hegel <i>and</i> Paul).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What we get here is a critique of that strand of exclusive humanism which secularized agape, giving us the universalized “agape-analogue” (369-370; cp. 27).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What we get from this Enlightenment formalization or secularization of Christian sensibilities is “a secular religion of life” (371)—and it is <i>that</i> to which the post-Schaupenhauerian strains of counter-Enlightenment are reacting.<a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8481808160729937799#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[2]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>On their account, Kant is still immature; still blind to the harsh realities of our cold, cruel universe; and thus still captive to slave morality, unable to be a hero (373).</p><div style="mso-element:footnote-list"><br /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8481808160729937799#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote">[1]</span></span></a> Cp. Rorty on the new role of art in <i>Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">, pp. 4-5.</span></p> </div> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8481808160729937799#_ftnref" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote">[2]</span></span></a> [I wonder whether one could read Michael Chabon’s and Amy Chua’s critiques of modern parenting as a kind of cultural expression of a similar reaction to the politics of politeness that we get from a secular religion of life.]</p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-44256290082899947442011-03-10T09:55:00.000-05:002011-03-10T09:55:00.307-05:00An Imaginary-shift (ch. 9)<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">Taylor’s story leaps ahead a bit in this chapter: we are now plunked in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, famous for an explosion of unbelief (cp. Hempton, <i>Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But Taylor suggests that the unbelief of the 19<sup>th</sup> century is <i>not</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic"> just more of the same, the growth and steady accumulation of the nova effect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>No, he argues, “the turn to unbelief in the middle or later nieteenth century is in a way something new” (322).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Why?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Because it now reflects a shift in our <i>modern COSMIC imaginary</i>—the “shift from cosmos to universe” has now started to take root in our social imaginary (“social” in the sense of being shared by many; recall the dual nature of “social” in <i>social</i> imaginary).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In other words, there has now been a fundamental shift in how people <i>imagine</i> nature, their environment, and our cosmic context.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">I want to emphasize that I am talking about our <i>sense</i> of things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>I’m not talking about what people believe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Many still hold that the universe is created by God, that in some sense it is governed by his Providence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>What I am talking about is the way the universe is spontaneously imagined, and therefore experienced (325).</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>This is not about “how one <i>theory</i> displaced another,” Taylor emphasizes (325).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>When the story is confined to that theoretical level</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>But Taylor emphasizes that we’re not primarily talking about a change in <i>theory</i> because most people don’t theorize!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>However, we all do “spontaneously imagine” ourselves in a cosmic context, and it’s <i>that</i> which Taylor is after: “I’m interested,” he says, in “how our <u>sense</u> of things, our cosmic imaginary, in other words, our whole background understanding and <u>feel</u> of the world has been transformed” (325).</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">Taylor encapsulates this imaginary-shift as the move from a “cosmos” to a “universe”—the move of spontaneously imagining our cosmic environment as an ordered, layered, hierarchal, shepherded <i>place</i> to spontaneously imagining our cosmic environment as an infinite, cavernous, anonymous <i>space</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style:italic">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>While this shift might have been prompted and amplified by increasing empirical evidences (geological evidences pointing to an older earth; astronomical evidences pointing to an expanding universe, etc.), Taylor emphasizes the <i>existential</i> nature of this shift: First, there is a fundamental <i>extension</i> of the cosmic environment—in space and time—that is uncanny, <i>Unheimlich</i>, dis-placing, such that we no longer feel that we “fit” into a cosmos that is a cosmic home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Instead we see ourselves adrift and cast into an anonymous, cold “universe”: “Reality in all directions plunges its roots into the unknown and as yet unmappable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is this sense which defines the grasp of the world as ‘universe’ and not ‘cosmos’; and this is what I mean when I say that the universe outlook was ‘deep’ in a way the cosmos picture was not” (326).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And so we find ourselves now in the “dark abyss of time”: “Humans are no longer charter members of the cosmos, but occupy merely a narrow band of recent time,” for example (327).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">Second, there is the increasingly sense that things <i>evolve</i> (327)—a sense that precedes Darwin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In such a pictures we lose the cosmos’ forms and essences—the order created by design.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This might also explain the new design-fixation as a response in this era: “What makes for the heat at this nevralgic point is that there is a strong <u>sense</u> of deficit in a world where people used to feel a presence here, and were accustomed to this support; often couldn’t help feeling the lack of this support as undermining their whole faith; and very much needed to be reassured that it oughtn’t to” [329]. Such design fixation is also already a sign of waning devotional practice: “once people come to live more and more in purely secular time, when God’s eternity and the attendant span of creation becomes merely a <i>belief</i>, however well backed up with reasons, the imagination can easily be nudged towards other ways of accounting for the awkward facts” [328].<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> What’s the result of such a shift?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Well, even the believers end up defending a theistic <i>universe</i> rather than the biblical <i>cosmos</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Eliminating mystery as a consequence of Protestant critiques of allegorization (330; cp. Harrison), even believers end up reading the Bible as if it were a treatise on such a universe; in short, you get the emergence of young earth creationism (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">330</b>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Indeed, we only get the so-called war between science and religion once the modern cosmic imaginary has seeped into both believers and unbelievers: at that point, “these defenders of the faith share a temper with its most implacable enemies” (331).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In other words, no one is more modern than a fundamentalist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is why the “face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’” has a “strangely intra-mural quality” (331).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But this supposed “pure face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ is a chimaera, or rather, an ideological construct.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In reality, there is a struggle between thinkers with complex, many-levelled agendas” (332).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span><!--EndFragment-->James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-48470503071423899402011-03-09T12:34:00.000-05:002011-03-09T12:38:53.818-05:00Malaises of Immanence Redux (JKAS notes on ch. 8)<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal">We now transition to Part III of the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Part I (“The Work of Reform”) considered the late medieval and early modern reform movements which began to shift the plausibility conditions of the West that made exclusive humanism a possibility (especially via disenchantment and the newly buffered self).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But this was only a condition of possibility, not inevitability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Part II (“The Turning Point”) considered the positive shift that really made exclusive humanism a “live option”: a theological shift that gave us the impersonal god of Deism coupled with the intellectual & cultural Pelagianism which found the resources for an “agape-analogue” within immanence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">1 / Nova Effect from Cross-Pressures</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Part III (“The Nova Effect”) considers the outcome of this turn in what Taylor calls “the nova effect” (300).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>By this he means a pluralization (300), fragilization (304), and fragmentation (299) of visions of the good life and human flourishing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>This is a “nova” effect because it issues, not just in a binary choice between two options, but in an array of options that almost metastasize because of the multiple “cross-pressures” of this pluralized situation (<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal">302</b>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Taylor’s analysis of this point is deeply existential.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>As he puts it, while the world is disenchanted for “us moderns,” we nonetheless also experience a sense of <i>loss</i> and <i>malaise</i> in the wake of such disenchantment (302; cp. the fiction of DFW!).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And so all sorts of people feel themselves caught in these “cross-pressures”—pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence from another side, even if it might be a lost transcendence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>One should note how much Taylor’s account here relies on an appeal to a “sense” that “we” have, an “feel” for this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>“My point,” he emphasizes, “is not that everybody feels this, but rather, first, that many people do, and far beyond the ranks of card-carrying theists” (302).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>All sorts of people feel themselves caught: “in the face of the opposition between orthodoxy and unbelief, many, and among them the best and most sensitive minds, were cross-pressured, looking for a third way” (302).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>And it is the intensity of these cross-pressures that causes the explosion, the nova effect, which is effectively an explosion of all sorts of “third ways.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>But what attends this explosion is also a malaise which is itself one of the consequences of a buffered identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The same “buffering” of the self that protects us also encloses us and isolates us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>“This malaise is specific to a buffered identity, whose very invulnerability opens it to the danger that not just evil spirits, cosmic forces or gods won’t ‘get to’ it, but that nothing significant will stand out for us” (303).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in its own stew of ennui.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is just this sealing-off that generates the pressure: the self’s “relative invulnerability to anything beyond the human world” also leads to “a <u>sense</u> that something may be occluded in the very closure which guarantees safety” (303).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">2 / Reactions: The Malaises of Immanence </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The nova effect is, in important ways, generated by the cross-pressures on the buffered self.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>However, there are other causal factors that contribution to this super-nova explosion of immanent spiritualities in our secular age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The pluralization is also caused by negative reactions to this “package” of modernity (“buffered identity, with its disengaged subjectivity, with its supporting disciplines, all sustaining an order of freedom and mutual benefit” [304-305]) or different parts of the package.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Some of these negative reactions include Romanticism and Pietism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">a ) Theodicy and indictments of orthodoxy</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in">But then there are also negative reactions to orthodox Christianity as well—“indictments against orthodox religion” (305).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>A central part of this indictment is fueled by <u>theodicy</u>, or lack thereof (305; cp. 232).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In other words, we now have the rise of the evidential argument from evil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But this could only take hold within the modern moral order (MMO) and its epistemic confidence:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:.5in;margin-bottom:.0001pt">Once we claim to understand the universe, and how it works; once we even try to explain how it works by invoking its being created for our benefit, then this explanation is open to clear challenge: we know how things go, and we know why they were set up, and we can judge whether the first meets the purpose defined in the second.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>In Lisbon 1755, ti seems clearly not to have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>So the immanent order ups the ante (306).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>But we have to appreciate what has changed here: precisely the emergence of the disengaged, “World Picture” confidence in our powers of exhaustive surveillance (cp. 232).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Prior to this stance, the conditions would have yielded lament, not theodicy: “If one is in a profoundly believing/practicing way of life, then this hanging in to trust in God may seem the obvious way, and is made easier by the fact that everyone is with you in this” (306).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">b) Reactions to the buffered self</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Taylor then returns to consider the negative reactions to disenchantment and the buffered self—recalling that these reactions increase the pressure in the “cross-pressures.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>While he’s going to provide a taxonomy of these different sorts of reactions, he suggest that all of them hinge on a common “axis”: the “generalized <u>sense</u> in our culture that with the eclipse of the transcendent, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">something may have been lost</i>” (307: the optative mood is intentional).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>It is this lack, loss and emptiness that—in and by its absence—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">presses</i> on the immanence of exclusive humanism yielding what Taylor calls “the malaises of immanence” (309).</p>Now, as he rightly notes, “it doesn’t follow that the only cure for them is a return to transcendence” (309); indeed, it is precisely looking for a cure <i>in immanence</i> that generates the nova effect, looking for love/meaning/significance/transcendence <i>within</i> the immanent order.<a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8481808160729937799#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[1]</span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>One of the best expressions of this is the new book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416596151/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=jameskasmithc-20">All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age</a></i>. “They too seek solutions, or ways of filling the lack, but within immanence; and thus the gamut of new positions multiplies” (310)—hence supernova (cue Oasis, "<a href="http://www.google.com/url?url=http://ilike.myspacecdn.com/play%23Oasis:Champagne%2BSupernova:14205:s30268918.8672414.10816270.0.2.144%252Cstd_3cddbda264474df09614a04d09ddcb85&rct=j&sa=X&ei=wrp3TeiPAZH2swOU2uC-BA&ved=0CC8Q0wQwAw&q=oasis+champagne+supernova&usg=AFQjCNFaWL5bDaVUGqB7jNLMYkFq9AjswQ&cad=rjt">Champagne Supernova</a>").<p></p><div style="mso-element:footnote-list"><br /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8481808160729937799#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote">[1]</span></span></a> One could, of course, run an entire Augustinian analysis of this as the doomed project of loving some part of creation <i>instead of</i> the Creator (a la Bk IV of the <i>Confessions</i> and <i>passim.</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>But Taylor doesn’t not invoke “idolatory” as a conceptual frame here, for obvious strategic reasons.</p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-3355858024819969782011-03-05T14:49:00.000-05:002011-03-05T14:53:53.906-05:00The Dark Abyss of Time: Modern Cosmic Imaginary<meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5Cach24%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5Cach24%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5Cach24%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> 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mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b style="">Nineteenth Century Unbelief:</b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /><b style=""><o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">• The story of the nineteenth century unbelief is distinct from eighteenth century unbelief</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">due to a “surge of piety” which took place between the two.</p>
<br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">• This second turn to unbelief was wider and deeper than the first due to the shift in their</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Cosmic Imaginary and the way “nature” figured in their moral and aesthetic</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">imagination.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">“The unbelieving outlooks were more deeply anchored in the lifeworld and background</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">sense of nineteenth century people than the analogous views of their eighteenth century</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">predecessors.” 323</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b style="">The Change-Over: The transformation of the Cosmic Imaginary<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">In our modern cosmic imaginary there is a sense that things “fail to touch bottom</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">anywhere” (p. 325). The defining sense of vastness and the unfathomable makes us unable to</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">relate to the previous cosmic imaginary defined which was defined by its limits.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">“It is no longer usual to sense the universe immediately and unproblematically as</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">purposefully ordered, although reflection, meditation, spiritual development may lead</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">one to see it this way.” 325</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>Two Categories of change-over on the level of theory:<o:p></o:p></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">1. Increased dimensions of the old cosmos which was previously limited in space by</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>outer spheres and in time by Biblical story.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">a. Wide and Deep: our idea of the universe expands to the degree that we view our</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>galaxy as merely one of countless others and our inner frontier becomes equally</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>as unknown as our universe through the discovery of micro-constitutions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">b. Time: the extension in view of time from a view of the cosmos being roughly 6,000</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>years old separates us from the “process of our genesis” which makes the past</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>dark and unfathomable.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">2. Increased consciousness of the universe as dominated by the sense that things</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>evolve. Understand that the world has developed from an earlier state and that life</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>forms, particularly humans change and evolve.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b style="">How this change-over was possible:<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">(Not a story of one theory merely replacing another. “The science doesnʼt simply</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">determine what imaginary develops in the place of the earlier one.” 326)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>Two necessary components:<o:p></o:p></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">1. The availability of alternative frameworks: these were already there through certain</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"> views of Lucretius, Descartes and the beginnings of modern mechanistic physics.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">2. The waning of the hold of the older cosmos idea on the imagination: through </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>disenchantment and breaking away from idea of higher times, faith was necessarily</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"> weakened. There was now a “felt need” and people couldnʼt help but think this was</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>undermining their entire faith.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>Responses:<o:p></o:p></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">• The 17th Century apologetics felt that they needed to prove Godʼs existence through</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">the design of things since enchantment was undermined by mechanism.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">• Many held more rigidly to the Biblical details</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">• Mystery was no longer tolerable in the creation, that is, no intra-cosmic mystery,</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">although it was still tolerable in the designs of God. The mystery remained in Godʼs</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">will. This was a shared feeling on both sides of exclusive humanism and orthodoxy.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b style="">Key Figures in the Transformation:<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">“Not just our theories changed, but the spontaneous, unreflecting understanding which</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">provides the context for these beliefs has also altered.” 347</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>Burnet and Vico:</u> Not simply on one side of the face-off</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">1. Burnet: Broke away from the fixed, unchanging world toward evolutionary history, but</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>came from an orthodox perspective.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">a. A new sense of deep time that claims things are evolving. (Seen through ruins)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">b. Nature as “sublime.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">i. The old cosmos imaginary viewed the wilderness as uncultivated and</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>demonic, while maintaining an idea that God could be met there, out of</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>confines.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">ii. Disenchantment and the buffered self was able to transform the horror and</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>fear felt towards the wilderness into a pleasing horror.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">Moral Meaning: Finds a higher purpose because buffered selves are in</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">danger of narrow self-absorption. Need something beyond ourselves.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">Hence, wilderness can empower us to live better where we are. Within</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">context of the felt inadequacies of modern anthropocentrism.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">2. Vico: pioneer in developing a theory of a pre-human, bestial stage, but also wrote</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>with orthodox intentions.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">a. A new sense of deep time that claims leads us back into darkness, a “dark</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>genesis,” before the light of our current condition.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Within the context of the felt inadequacies of the shallowness of anthropocentrism, they</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">couldnʼt simply go back to a sense of depth in an eternity that was no longer felt. (343)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><b style="">Question:<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Taylor makes a distinction between sense and belief by claiming that all people sense that the world is defined by its vastness and being unfathomable, but people can still believe that the universe was created by God which is not according to this sense. Is this sense really as deep as he claims it is? People live according to their beliefs, but it seems odd that these beliefs would be in opposition to how they sense the world to be. It seems almost as if the vast and unfathomable world is a scientific belief, and not a sense. </p> Ally Kornelishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06879977560987369682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-83966496773200658042011-03-01T15:37:00.000-05:002011-03-01T15:41:02.431-05:00Malaise of Immanence - the predicament of the buffered self<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> 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mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The Nova Effect:</span></u></b></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Following Taylor’s explanation of how exclusive humanism becomes a live option, this chapter begins part III of the book, in which he focuses on the three phases of the nova effect, “an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options.” (299)</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">This nova effect is the explosive multiplicity of faiths which originally happened in the elites, and reached down to society as a whole by the beginning of twentieth century. This effect, says Taylor, is largely driven by various reactions to the malaise of immanence. </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Malaise of Immanence:</span></u></b></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The buffered self, as previously characterized by Taylor, has closed itself off from the danger of mysteries. This phenomenon results in the rise of rationality and a sense of invulnerability. However, the negative side of this buffered identity is the cross-pressure from the previous order, a sense in which something beyond the human world is lost.<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">“There is a generalized sense in our culture that with the eclipse of transcendent, something may have been lost.” (307)</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The buffered self, with the power of rationality, suffers from the malaise of modernity, the sense of emptiness, a lack of meaning within the immanent social order. Dissatisfied with the human world of freedom and mutual benefits, the buffered self is pushed to begin the search for meaning within the immanence.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Forms of Malaise of Immanence:</span></u></b></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Malaise of Immanence can typically be found in three forms: (309)</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="">(1)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The sense of fragility of meaning, the search for an over-arching significance: </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Fragility, according to Taylor, is the sense that all of the significances of life are fragile, uncertain; hence the search for “one thing needful”, the meaning which will gives sense to all the lower ones.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="">(2)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The felt flatness of our attempts to solemnize the crucial moments of passage in our lives</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The attempt to solemnize certain moments of our lives is to associate them to something beyond the immanent. With the loss of transcendence, we are left with a hole that cannot be filled within the bound of immanent order.</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="">(3)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;">The utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary</span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">People, who live modern commercial, consumer society, commonly experience the feeling of emptiness about their surrounding environment, their culture and so on… </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b style=""><u><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Discussion Questions:<br /></span></u></b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">Is Taylor fair in using the term “malaise of modernity”? How does his sympathy for the pre-modern ages come into play in this chapter? Is his analysis of malaise of immanence suggestive of a recovery to transcendence? </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; color: black;"> </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style=";font-size:11pt;color:black;" > </span></p> <p style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style=";font-size:11pt;color:black;" > </span></p>Tu Danhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04102343247323282116noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-39006849907238884992011-02-24T19:07:00.000-05:002011-02-24T19:29:15.806-05:00The Impersonal Order: on the Excarnate God<div align="center"><strong><em>Student Presentation by Matt Dodrill</em></strong></div><u></u><br /><u>Subtraction Stories as Inadequate</u><br /><br />• The process of determinative negation (or subtraction stories) does not adequately explain the ways in which the modern self-understanding has been constructed throughout history.<br />o Deism is not merely the “next layer” on the continuum of subtraction stories. The temptation for an “impersonal order” was present during the Patristic era. However the Patristics were able to tame Greek philosophy and bring it into harmony with Christian orthodoxy.<br /><br /><u>Strands of Deism</u><br /><br />• 1. Disenchantment -- the mother of “causal laws”: Disenchantment leads to perceiving the world as mechanization. Aristotelian teleology is replaced by the causal explanations of science. Spirits and demons are no longer extracted from matter.<br />• 2. The disappearance of legend and the homogenizing of “profane time”: History excludes the stories of heroes and legends. Time is homogenized into profanity.<br />o Hence moral therapeutic deism (a term borrowed from Christian Smith)<br />o Hence the loss of the liturgy and sacred time (and watching Charles Stanley on television instead).<br />o Biblical criticism: if heroes and legends are excluded from history, how shall we read Scripture? This strand subjects Scripture to Cartesian (and Lockean) epistemology.<br /><br /><u>Plausibility Conditions: a Reminder<br /></u><br />• Taylor reminds us that deism never sees the world as it is "given" to us.<br />o 274: “That their paradigm of ‘religion’ is a negative one is not the result of empirical discovery, but of their pre-existing framework.”<br />o 275: “…their stance is not forced on them by the ‘facts’, but flows from a certain interpretive grid.”<br /><br /><u>Some Pre-Modern Points of Tension in the Patristic Church<br /></u><br />• 1. Platonic subordination of the body<br />• 2. The re-entry of the body and a new significance of history<br />• 3. Gathered stories and individuation<br />• 4. New significance of contingency<br />• 5. The emotions<br />• 6. God as a personal and communal being<br />o This (6) is the context in which 1-5 are set. Modern deism integrated 1-5, but not 6. Thus, the deistic grid is pretty different. What is missing in the deistic account is a personal God/personal order.<br /><br /><u>What Made the Deistic Grid so Powerful?<br /><br /></u><em>Latitudinarians and Categorical Societies<br /></em><br />• Latitudinarians are an affinity to disenchantment and “authoritative” causal laws.<br />o 282: …”Latitudinarian clergy deployed a public version of Isaac Newton to promote a separation of creation from its Creator in order the better to ensure that rationality ruled both the natural and the social universes.”<br /> This contrasts with communion and agape, which are not based on by the “rules” or “codes” that categorical societies are bound by.<br />• Autonomous reason and dignity vs. subjection and mercy: Even the "boundary" ethics of modern societies was birthed out of autonomous reason. The law constraints of the categorical societies are based on what humans want, not on demands imposed from without. Thus, humans are not constrained by authority. Law is self-imposed -- it's <em>impersonal</em>. By contrast, Christians see their highest mode of being arising out of relation that is <em>not</em> equal. There is a hierarchical authority retained. We need grace, and grace trumps the "supremecy of a high code" (p. 283).<br /><br /><em>Disengagement and Objectification<br /></em><br />• 283: “Disengagement is correlative to what I have called ‘objectification’. To objectify a given domain is to deprive it of normative force for us, or at least to bracket the meanings it has for us in our lives. If we take a domain of being in which hitherto the way things are has defined meanings or set standards for us, and we now take a new stance towards it as neutral, without meaning or normative force, we can speak of objectifying it.”<br />• Mechanization neutralizes the whole domain.<br /><br /><u>Excarnation and “Embodiment within the Bounds of Reason”</u><br /><br />• Deism excarnates the Scripture narrative. That is, the tensions described above are explained in terms of reason (disembodied minds, in contrast to incarnation).<br />o Two consequences:<br /> 1. Factor out embodied feeling (Kant)<br /> 2. Base morality on emotions (Hume)<br /><br /><u>Modern Reflections of Deism<br /></u><br />• Commercial society’s rejection of communion-defined Christianity.<br />• Unitarianism<br />• Christianity as “right belief”; theology as “correct description.”<br /><br />What’s next? Unbelief? (See La Mettrie’s quote, p. 293).<br /><br /><u>Questions </u><br /><br />• What role would Taylor say science should play? He has shown how the scientific revolution helped drive the excessive emphasis on causal law, but what is a corrective?<br />• We do not want our apologetic approach to (perhaps unwittingly) carry deistic assumptions. However, how should we defend against the charge of fideism?Matt Dodrillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11823921097148546708noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-33196791932221745812011-02-24T14:43:00.001-05:002011-02-24T16:20:45.217-05:00Excursus on Apologetics<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal">In this context, Taylor offers an analysis that is very germane to our work as Christian philosophers.<span style=""> </span>In trying to assess just how the modern social imaginary came to permeate a wider culture, Taylor focuses on Christian responses <i>to</i> this emerging humanism and the “eclipses” we’ve just noted.<span style=""> </span>And what he finds is that <u>the responses themselves have already conceded the game</u>; that is, the responses to this diminishment of transcendence already accede to it in important ways (Taylor will later call it “pre-shrunk religion” [226]).<span style=""> </span>As he notes:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;">the great apologetic effort called forth by this disaffection itself narrowed its focus so drastically.<span style=""> </span>It barely invoked the saving action of Christ, nor did it dwell on the life of devotion and prayer, although the seventeenth century was rich in this.<span style=""> </span>The arguments turned exclusively on demonstrating God as Creator, and showing his Providence (<b style="">225</b>).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">What we get in the name of “Christian” defenses of transcendence, then, is “a less theologically elaborate faith” which, ironically, paves the way for exclusive humanism.<span style=""> </span>God is reduced to a Creator and religion is reduced to morality (225).<span style=""> </span>The particularities of specifically <i>Christian</i> belief are diminished, as is any attention to religion in terms of <i>worship</i> (<b style="">cp. 117</b>).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">In other ways, this mode of “Christian” apologetics bought the spectatorish “World-picture” of the new modern order.<span style=""> </span>Rather than seeing ourselves positioned within a hierarchy of forms (in which case we wouldn’t be surprised if “higher levels” are mysterious and inscrutable), we now adopt a God-like, dispassionate “gaze” that surveys the whole.<span style=""> </span>In this mode, the universe appears “as a system before our gaze, whereby we can grasp the whole in a kind of tableau” (232).<span style=""> </span>And it is precisely in this context, when we adopt a “disengaged stance,” that the project of <i>theodicy</i> ramps up.<span style=""> </span>But this is taken up in a way that is completely consistent with the “buffered self” (228): While earlier the terrors and burdens of evil and disaster would have cast us upon the help of a Savior,<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;">[n]ow that we think we see how it all works, the argument gets displaced.<span style=""> </span>People in coffee-houses and salons [and philosophy classes?] begin to express their disaffection in reflections on divine justice, and the theologians begin to feel that this is the challenge they must meet to fight back the coming wave of unbelief.<span style=""> </span>The burning concern with theodicy is enframed by the new imagined epistemic predicament (<b style="">233</b>).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">It’s very difficult for me to resist recognizing how much of the “industry” of Christian philosophy and apologetics today remains the outcome of these shifts.<span style=""> </span>Just compare Christian responses to the “new atheists” which, in a similar way, have already conceded the game to exclusive humanism by playing on their turf.<span style=""> </span>Or consider how much “Christian” philosophy is content to be “theistic” philosophy.<br /><br />Here’s where Taylor’s “irony” comes into play: What’s left of/for God after this deistic shift?<span style=""> </span>Well, “God remains the Creator, and hence our benefactor…but this Providence remains exclusively general: particular providences, and miracles, are out” (233).<span style=""> </span>In other words, God plays a function within a system that generally runs without him (cp. Heidegger on “ontotheology”).<span style=""> </span>“But having got this far,” Taylor concludes, “it is not clear why something of the same inspiring power cannot come from the contemplation of the order of nature itself, without reference to a Creator” (234).<span style=""> </span>In other words, once God’s role is diminished to a Deistic agent, the gig is pretty much up: “And so exclusive humanism could take hold, as more than atheory held by a tiny minority, but as a more and more viable spiritual outlook. […] The points at which God had seemed an indispensable source for this ordering power were the ones which began to fade and become invisible.<span style=""> </span>The hitherto unthought became thinkable” (234).<span style=""> </span></p>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-63502469381351999872011-02-23T23:42:00.000-05:002011-02-24T11:01:24.860-05:00The Spectre of Deism: On the Way to Exclusive Humanism (ch. 6)<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal">Taylor’s quarry is still to discern just how exclusive humanism became a “live option” in modernity (222), resisting typical subtraction stories which posit that “once religious and metaphysical beliefs fall away, we are left with ordinary human desires, and these are the basis of our modern humanism” (253).<span style=""> </span>This is an important point, and we won’t understand Taylor’s critique of subtraction stories without appreciating it: on the subtraction-story account, modern exclusive humanism is just the natural telos of human life.<span style=""> </span>We are released to be the exclusive humanists we’re meant to be when we escape the traps of superstition and the yoke of transcendence.<span style=""> </span>So exclusive humanism is “natural.”<span style=""> </span>But Taylor’s point in this chapter is to show that we had to <i>learn</i> how to be exclusively humanist: it is a second nature, not a first.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>So what made that possible?</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">1 / The Anthropological Shift</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Taylor sees a <i>theological</i> shift in how we come to understand Providence; but this gets reflected in an <i>anthropological</i> (or even anthropocentric) shift in four movements.<span style=""> </span>We might also describe this as a fourfold “immanentization” (anticipating how Taylor will speak of this below):</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">i) An eclipse of “further purpose” or a good that transcends “human flourishing”</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">This is a theme that Taylor has broached before (151, 152) and I think it deserves some reflection and discussion.<span style=""> </span>The point is this: in the premodern, enchanted social imaginary, there was an end for humans that transcended “mundane” flourishing ‘in this world,’ so to speak.<span style=""> </span>In short, both agents and social institutions lived with a sense of a telos that was eternal—a final judgment, the beatific vision, etc.<span style=""> </span>And on Taylor’s accounting, this “higher good” was in some tension with mundane concerns about flourishing (recall his earlier point re: equilibrium). This entailed a sense of obligation “beyond” human flourishing.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style=""> </span>What happens in the “new Providence,” according to Taylor, is a kind of “shrinking” of God’s purposes, an “economizing” of God’s own interests: “God’s goals for us shrink to the single end of our encompassing this order of mutual benefit he has designed for us” (221).<span style=""> </span>So even our theism becomes humanized, immanentized, and the <i>telos</i> of God’s providential concern is circumscribed within immanence—even for “orthodox” folk: “even people who held to orthodox beliefs were influenced by this humanizing trend; frequently the transcendent dimension of their faith became less central” (222).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><u>Discussion</u>: I think this is a very germane point for us, located here at John Calvin’s college which is so influenced by the Kuyperian tradition.<span style=""> </span>Indeed, one could see a strain of Kuyperianism as a confirmation of just this point; one might even posit that evangelicalism is just beginning to go through this shift (which is probably what motivated my friend Hans Boersma to write his new book, <i style="">Heavenly Participation: Weaving a Sacramental Tapestry</i>).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style=""> </span>However, one might also ask whether Taylor’s formulation of this is also problematic: does orthodox Christian thought really posit the sort of tension between human flourishing and transcendent glory that Taylor suggests?<span style=""> </span>Or is this Taylor’s own imposition of a dichotomy onto a frame that really posits a fundamental continuity between them?<span style=""> </span>(There are some complicated issues of description vs. prescription also at issue here.)</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">ii) The eclipse of grace</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Taylor describes the second aspect of this anthropological shift as the “eclipse of grace” (222).<span style=""> </span>Since God’s providential concern for order is reduced to an “economic” ordering of creation to our mutual benefit, and since that order and design is discernible by reason, then “[b]y reason and discipline, humans could rise to the challenge and realize it” (222).<span style=""> </span>The result is a kind of intellectual Pelagianism: we can figure this out without assistance. Oh, God still plays a role—as either the watchmaker who got the ball rolling, or as the judge who will evaluate how well we did—but in the long middle God plays no discernible role or function, and is uninvolved (222-223).<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">iii) The eclipse of mystery</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Since what matters is immanent, and since we can figure it out, it’s not surprising that “the sense of mystery fades” (223).<span style=""> </span>God’s providence is no longer inscrutable: it’s an open book, “perspicuous” (cp. Harrison, <i style="">The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science</i>).</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">iv) The eclipse of <i>theiosis</i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><i><br /></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Finally, and as an outcome, we lose any “idea that God was planning a transformation of human beings which would take them beyond the limitations which inhere in their present condition” (224).<span style=""> </span>We lose a sense that humanity’s end transcends its current configurations—and thus lose a sense of “participation” in God’s nature or “deification” as the <i>telos</i> for humanity.<span style=""> </span>[Cf. Billings on <i>theiosis</i> in John Calvin.]]</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">But what underlay these shifts?<span style=""> </span>Again, Taylor emphasizes the new focus on economic-centric <i>harmony</i> as the new focus and ideal: “The spreading doctrines of the harmony of interests reflect the shift in the idea of natural order which we described in the previous part, in which the economic dimension takes on greater and greater importance, and ‘economic’ (that is, ordered, peaceful, productive) activity is more and more the model for human behaviour” (229).<span style=""> </span></p>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-29020209318919514282011-02-21T13:33:00.000-05:002011-02-21T13:38:30.196-05:00“Social Imaginaries”: Broader, Deeper, Wider, Stronger<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> <w:dontbreakconstrainedforcedtables/> 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mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">Lander Hultin, Starter Presentation from 17. February, 2011<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;">“In talking of our self-understanding, I am particularly concerned with what I will call our “social imaginary”, that is, <i style="">the way we collectively imagine, even pre-theoretically, our social life . . .”</i><span style=""> </span>(146)</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: right; line-height: normal;" align="right"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>Methodological Relevance: The “more than” principle</u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>the social imaginary is a non-reductive counter to the temptation of subtraction stories</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>if the social imaginary is more than can be theoretically articulated (173) then subtraction stories as <i style="">explicit theories</i> telling a straight-shot story cannot be sustained and are glaringly insufficient</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 1.25in; line-height: normal;">173: “It is in fact that largely <b style="">unstructured</b> and <b style="">inarticulate</b> understanding of our whole situation . . . It can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines, because of its very unlimited and indefinite nature.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>Difference between “social <i style="">imaginary</i>” and “social <i style="">theory</i>”: Power to the (ordinary) people!</u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""><span style="">(1)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><b style="">Ordinarily expressed:</b> ‘Imaginary’ because ordinary people do not usually imagine their social surroundings in theoretical terms; rather this imaginary is carried, loaded into and unloaded out of, images, stories, legends, and so on.</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""><span style="">(2)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><b style="">Sufficiently social:</b> ‘Theory’ is insufficiently social – typically theory is held by a small minority rather than the ‘imaginary’ that is shared by large groups of people </p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""><span style="">(3)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><b style="">A Better Possibility</b><u>:</u> Consequently, an ‘imaginary’ better accounts for common practice and the correlate sense of shared legitimacy—‘social imaginary’ is a more adequate condition of possibility </p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>Complexity: both factual and “normative”</u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><b style="">Factual:</b> a sense of how things <i style="">usually</i> go</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><b style="">Normative:</b> but also an idea of how things <i style="">ought</i> to go </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span>Our normative understanding also shows us “what would constitute a foul”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u>More than Heidegger: Not just one-sided</u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;">172: “the social imaginary extends beyond the immediate background understanding which makes sense of our particular practices”</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: Symbol;"><span style="">·<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>In short this is because our practices also inform our background understandings, not just the other way around</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 1.25in; text-indent: -0.25in; line-height: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="">o<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>In other words, the understanding carries the practice and the practice carries the understanding. Both serve as possibility conditions for each other. In fact in having “no clear limits” the “wider grasp” of a social imaginary, it seems, complicates the very idea of the conditions of possibility. It is, as Taylor often repeats, much more than that.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;">173: “If the understanding makes the practice possible, it is also true that it is the practice which largely carries the understanding.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center; line-height: normal;" align="center"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Understanding</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center; line-height: normal;" align="center"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">↑↓↑↓</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center; line-height: normal;" align="center"><b style=""><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Practice</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center; line-height: normal;" align="center"><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Understood Practice,</span><span style="font-size: 22pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 18pt;">Practiced understanding</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center; line-height: normal;" align="center"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center; line-height: normal;" align="center"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u><span style="">The “repertory” inherent: our implicit “map” of social space:</span></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style="">This “repertory” is the collection of common actions that we, as a social group, know how to perform. Again, this “know how” is pre-theoretical and in some sense, it seems, Taylor again pushes past Heidegger’s practical “know how” to show that this environmental familiarity cannot be explicated. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u><span style="">Webbed in Imagination: The Wider World</span></u><span style=""></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style="">174: The social imaginary doesn’t include everything in our world—it isn’t <i style="">total.</i> But at the same time the features which make things make sense cannot be encompassed or “circumscribed” and consequently the social imaginary <i style="">draws</i> on our whole world. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style="">In other words, we may not include every social aspect of every society, but there is a sense in which each society is webbed together such that the social imaginary of one society will tug at or pull on every other. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><u><span style="">Meta-philosophical Question: How Do We Now Do Philosophy?</span></u><span style=""></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; line-height: normal;"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; line-height: normal;"><span style="">Is Taylor’s <i style="">A Secular Age</i> a work of philosophy? Does his (sometimes frustrating) story-telling better uncover the structures of human life? Is the point of philosophy to “uncover” in the first place? Is there a philosophy of the unsayable? If so, what’s the point of still saying something?</span></p>Landerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08754993624811837050noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-59858261017368152772011-02-18T13:36:00.000-05:002011-02-18T13:38:40.292-05:00The Great Disembedding (ch. 3)<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.MsoFootnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }span.FootnoteTextChar { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal">In chapter 3, Taylor further considers the emergence of the super-buffered individual (here we’re on the terrain of his earlier work, <i>The Sources of the Self</i>).<span style=""> </span>And let’s keep in mind—anticipating chapter 4—that his concern is how such an individualism becomes sedimented in a <i>social imaginary</i>, not just part of a social “theory.”<span style=""> </span>What emerges, then, is “a new self-understanding of our social existence, one which gave an unprecedented primacy to the individual” (146).<span style=""> </span>We’ll see in a moment that his use of the term “understanding” here is significant because of its Heideggerian echoes.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Taylor now describes this shift—in which society will come to be seen as a collection of individuals (146)—as “the great disembedding.”<span style=""> </span>But we can only make sense of this claim about <i style="">dis</i>embedding if we appreciate the <i style="">em</i>bedding that it’s dissing, so to speak. Most germane to understanding the point of this chapter is appreciating what Taylor calls the “triple embedding” of premodern societies, a configuration of society which goes along with what he’s been calling enchantment: “Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine” (<b style="">152</b>).<a style="" href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a><span style=""> </span>The <i>dis</i>-embedding, then, happens gradually by targeting different facets of this triple embedding (e.g., disenchantment targets the 3<sup>rd</sup> aspect; social contract theory targets the second aspect, etc.).<span style=""> </span></p> <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style=""> </span>In a somewhat strange way, Taylor tells this story in a way reminiscent of a “history of religions” approach, or in a way that calls to mind Karl Jaspers’ grand stories about human cultural development.<span style=""> </span>So you’ll note that Taylor keeps speaking about a shift from tribal, “smaller-scale” societies (147) to the emergence of the “Axial” religions in the first millennium B.C.—the emergence of Judaism, Confucianism, Greek religion, etc. from the more primal religions of tribal societies.<span style=""> </span>It seems that Taylor’s point is that the Axial religions are already on the way to disembedding the individual.<span style=""> </span>So if there is an “irony” that, say, Christianity unleashes forces that will lead to exclusive humanism, he seems to be noting an earlier irony here.<span style=""> </span>This tension comes back at the end of the chapter in his discussion, following Ivan Illich, of the “corruption” of Christianity (<b style="">158</b>): while on the one hand Christianity was a driver of disembedding, on the other hand such a configuration of Christianity was already a corruption, one that failed to appreciate that Christianity envisioned not <i>dis</i>embedding but an <i>alternative</i> embedding—a “network of agape” which transcended tribal identities but still saw the individual embedded in the <i>polis</i> and the <i>polis</i> embedded in the divine life (a “participatory” ontology).<span style=""> </span>But instead this Christian impetus became “the disciplined society” (158).</span> <div style=""><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a> Note how he suggests <i>creation ex nihilo</i> already breaks this chain (152).<span style=""> </span></p> </div> </div>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-68877948180927783202011-02-16T08:12:00.000-05:002011-02-16T08:14:52.743-05:00Creation, Nature, and Incarnation (early sections of chapter 2)<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoFootnoteText, li.MsoFootnoteText, div.MsoFootnoteText { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in; font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.MsoFootnoteReference { vertical-align: super; }span.FootnoteTextChar { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal">(a) Incarnational investment in “nature”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Taylor’s case-in-point w/r/t his <a href="http://asecularage.blogspot.com/2011/02/methodology-redux-straight-shots-vs.html">"zig-zag" approach</a> is a shift to a new interest in “nature,” or more specifically nature “for its own sake” (90).<span style=""> </span>Now, from the vantage of point of secular humanism, this new interest in nature can look like the next logical step on the way to pure immanence: first distinguish God/nature, then disenchant, then be happy and content with just nature and hence affirm the autonomy and sufficiency of nature.<a style="" href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a><span style=""> </span>Such a story about the “autonomization” of nature posits a contrast or dichotomy between belief in God and interest in “nature-for-itself” (91).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>The only problem with such a story is that it fails to account for two important historical realities: (1) it was precisely <i>Christians</i> who were exhibiting a new interest in creation/nature <i>for theological reasons</i>; and (2) this interest was clearly not mutually exclusive with belief in God and an affirmation of transcendence.<span style=""> </span>In particular, the late medieval and Renaissance<a style="" href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="">[2]</span></span></a> investment in nature/embodiment/particularity is rooted in a new Incarnational spirituality (93ff.).<span style=""> </span>This was very much an “evangelical” development, concerned with bringing Christ to the world, and thus recognizing God’s own “incarnational” move in that regard—meeting humanity where it is, in bodies, history, etc.<span style=""> </span>“So it is not altogether surprising that this attempt to bring Christ to the world, the lay world, the previously unhallowed world, should inspire a new focus on this world” (94).<span style=""> </span>This can be seen in art during this period as well (96).<span style=""> </span>So this was primarily a revolution in devotion, not metaphysics.<span style=""> </span>Thus “the new interest in nature was not a step outside of a religious outlook, even partially; it was a mutation [?] within this outlook” (95).<span style=""> </span>While this shift might, from a later vantage point, <i>look</i> like the first step toward exclusive humanism and pure immanence, it was not at the beginning—and <i>could</i> have gone otherwise.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">(b) Complications: the nominalist revolution</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">True to his zig-zag account of causal complexity, Taylor notes another development, roughly parallel to the incarnational emphasis: the rise of nominalism which <i>is</i> a metaphysical thesis.<span style=""> </span>Now, Taylor notes that nominalism was not a proto-secularism precisely because the motives behind nominalism were fundamentally theological.<span style=""> </span>In particular, nominalism arose as a way of metaphysically honoring a radical sense of God’s sovereignty and power.<span style=""> </span>The issue is this: Aristotelian notions of a human “nature” saw the good of the human being determined by the <i>nature</i> or <i>telos</i> of the human being: so there was a defined way to be good.<span style=""> </span>Now while God the Creator might have created this telos or nature, once created it would seem to actually put a constraint on God, since enabling humans to achieve their (good) end would require that God sort of “conform” to this good/telos.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>“But this seemed to some thinkers an unacceptable attempt to limit God’s sovereignty.<span style=""> </span>God must always remain free to determine what is good” (97).<span style=""> </span><b style="">DISCUSS</b>.<span style=""> </span>So if one was going to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty, one would have to do away with “essences,” with independent “natures.”<span style=""> </span>And the result is a metaphysical picture called “nominalism” where things are only what they are <i>named</i> (nom-ed, 97).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>“But if this is right,” Taylor comments, “then we, the dependent, created agents, have also to relate to things not in terms of the normative patterns they reveal, but in terms of the autonomous super-purposes of our creator [which can’t be known <i>a priori</i>].<span style=""> </span>The purposes things serve are extrinsic to them.<span style=""> </span>They stance is fundamentally one of instrumental reason” (97).<span style=""> </span>Part of the fall-out of such a metaphysical shift is the loss of final causality, the eclipsing of any teleology for things/nature.<span style=""> </span>Understanding something is no longer a matter of understanding its “essence” and hence telos; rather, it requires a “mechanistic” concern with <i>efficient</i> causality that can only be discerned by empirical observation: hence, the scientific method, etc.<span style=""> </span>The result is nothing short of “a new understanding of being, according to which, all intrinsic purposes having been expelled, final causation drops out, and efficient causation alone remains” (98).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>But keep in mind Taylor’s zig-zag point: the incarnational interest in nature was not necessarily a step on the way to the autonomization of nature; rather, only when it is “mixed” with another development, nominalism, does it seem to head in that direction.<span style=""> </span>But <i>it could have been otherwise</i>, and without the triumph of nominalism we might have had a very different concern with nature for its own sake.</p> <div style=""><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a> [It is fascinating (at least to me) to consider how much such a story informed Francis Schaefer’s “big story” about the West.<span style=""> </span>But Schaefer saw the Frankensteinish catalyst for this in Aquinas’ distinction between nature and grace and then tended to see the Reformers as resisting this; whereas Taylor sees Aquinas’ working with still a fundamentally “enchanted” ontology and sees the real shift in the Reformers.]</p> </div> <div style="" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="" href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="">[2]</span></span></a> Recall Ruskin’s “two Renaissances.”</p> </div> </div>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-46339229358952982352011-02-15T19:33:00.000-05:002011-02-15T19:34:44.149-05:00The Changing of the Natural World<!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align: left;margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; "><u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The Old Order of Nature</span></u></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The Forms</span></u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">: The Old Order believed all of nature was comprised of ‘forms-at-work’ (132). All of nature is comprised of certain instantiations of forms (we have the form Human Being) and these forms <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">impose</i> order upon things. For example, a ‘bouncy ball’ without form is just a heap of matter, the form of bouncy ball orders that matter (in an Aristotelian-Thomist understanding). The form gives the bouncy ball its bounciness, shape, etc. (potentiality/actuality distinction). There is also a notion of teleology present in things. Things bear their own teleology; it is not imposed on things from ‘outside.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom: .0001pt;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">This notion is also applied to human beings. The form human being imposes order on a person (including the will) (130-131). There is a way human beings should be that is imposed on them and must be actualized. This order is not something outside of things, but something already existent within things. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom: .0001pt;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Our passions are signposts pointing to an end. Our experiences of limited happiness point forward to true happiness.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom: .0001pt;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">What is important to Taylor about this view is that there is an order and purpose within all things (130).<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom: .0001pt;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The Four Causes<a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character:footnote">[1]</span></span></a></span></u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:1.0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level2 lfo1"><span style="font-family:"Courier New";mso-fareast-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Material: the underlying stuff of things.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:1.0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level2 lfo1"><span style="font-family:"Courier New";mso-fareast-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Formal: the form of a thing.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:1.0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level2 lfo1"><span style="font-family:"Courier New";mso-fareast-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Efficient: ‘that which actualizes a potency and brings something into being.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:1.0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level2 lfo1"><span style="font-family:"Courier New";mso-fareast-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Final: the end or purpose of a thing.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The New Order of Nature</span></u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">: Taylor believes there is a remarkably different picture of things and nature beginning around the 1500’s that leads to the ‘buffered-self.’<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">These differences are seen especially well in Descartes and are as follows:<u><o:p></o:p></u></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">A person imposes order upon nature. Our will imposes form on the world (leading to a mechanistic view of teleology – the will imposes purpose) (130-131). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>The only cause left is a ‘type’ of efficient causation.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:1.0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level2 lfo1"><span style="font-family:"Courier New";mso-fareast-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The separation of the mind and the body. The mind gives ‘life’ to the outside world (131). This is the buffered-self, there is no form ordering a person’s life (whether from oneself or from the world). Nature is not in any way realizing a form; human beings/minds are imposing form upon things (instead of actualizing the latent potentialities already within things). <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom: .0001pt;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The passions are not potentialities pointing to an end or purpose. They are instruments that must be controlled by reason (131, 135-136). Passion corrupt a person’s rationality.*<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:1.0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level2 lfo1"><span style="font-family:"Courier New";mso-fareast-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Purpose in life is no longer about being ‘in tune with nature, our own and/or that in the cosmos. It is something more like the sense of our own intrinsic worth; something clearly self-referential’ (134). <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1"><span style="font-family:Symbol;mso-fareast-font-family:Symbol;mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">A new Natural Law theory that believes there are ways things fit together rationally, which is the binding norm (126). A mechanistic view, like how a clock ‘fits’ together to work (the ‘world-machine’). <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman""><o:p><span style="text-decoration:none"> </span></o:p></span></u></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Questions</span></u><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.25in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">1.<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">How widespread was this notion of forms (Platonic or Aristotelian-Thomist) in the medieval world and before? Was this understanding as common as Taylor seems to portray it to be? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.25in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">2.<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">How much is the ‘Old Order of Nature’ dependent on Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics? Can it in any way be separated from them? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:0in;margin-left:.25in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;mso-add-space:auto; text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo2"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">3.<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Is Taylor too harsh on natural law theory and does he paint it more negatively than it is? Were there other natural law theories during this time that took a less mechanistic view of the world?<o:p></o:p></span></p> <div style="mso-element:footnote-list"><br /> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%"> <div style="mso-element:footnote" id="ftn"> <p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a style="mso-footnote-id:ftn" href="#_ftnref" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote">[1]</span></span></a> See Edward Feser, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Aquinas</i>, (Oneworld Publications, 2009), pg. 16-23</p> </div> </div> <!--EndFragment-->Noahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08923532770848222260noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-35613603254387050572011-02-15T09:39:00.000-05:002011-02-15T09:41:46.169-05:00Methodology Redux: Straight Shots vs. Zigs & Zags<a href="http://asecularage.blogspot.com/2011/02/taylors-method.html">I've noted earlier</a> that Taylor sees "story" as inherent to his project in a significant sense, precisely because it's a <span style="font-style: italic;">story</span> about secularization that he's contesting.<br /><br />In chapter 2 Taylor re-emphasizes an important point: the path from 1500 to 2000 is not a straight shot; that is, as he’s said before, this is not just a “subtraction” story of “progress.”<span style=""> </span>Subtraction stories are straight-shot accounts which assumes the truth and goodness of the terminus, and thus simply read developments as steps on the way to that end (90).<span style=""> </span>In contrast, recognizing the complexity of causes and the contingency of different developments, Taylor offers a “zig-zag account” which recognizes a contingent sort of pinball effect.<span style=""> </span>The point is that developments which <i>from our (modern, secularist) perspective</i> might seem to be “advances” toward our secular accomplishment “in other circumstances might never have come to have the meaning that it bears for unbelievers today” (95).<span style=""> </span>Our anachronistic hindsight tends to impose a secularist trajectory on earlier shifts whereas, in fact, they might have been “pointed” in a very different direction.James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-87341118868278091382011-02-11T14:38:00.000-05:002011-02-11T14:38:00.062-05:00"Reform"While there are many “causes” for the shift just documented, Taylor appeals to something like a meta-cause—or perhaps better, an umbrella name for these multiple causes: “Reform” (with a capital-R).<span style=""> </span>This rubric names a range of movements already underway in the late medieval period (61). <span style=""> </span>This desire for Reform finds expression in a constellation of movements and developments.<span style=""> </span>In particular, Taylor argues, was “a profound dissatisfaction with the hierarchical equilibrium between lay life and the renunciative vocations” (61)—a rejection of “two-tiered religion” (63) or the “multi-speed system” (66).<span style=""> </span>In other words, this Reform targets element (iii) above.<span style=""> </span>And while there were internally Roman Catholic expressions of this, one can see why Taylor makes the Protestant Reformation a central, if not pivotal (p. <b style="">77</b>), expression of Reform which turns into “a drive to make over the whole society to higher standards” (63) as well as the motivating conviction that “God is sanctifying us everywhere” (79).<span style=""> </span>Together these commitments begin to propel a kind of perfectionism about society that wouldn’t have been imagined earlier.<span style=""> </span><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">1. Leveling </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>This development, then, targets the prior “equilibrium” noted earlier (change iii).<span style=""> </span>Rejecting the “multi-speed” models, Reform ratchets up our expectation: <i>all</i> our expected to live all of their lives <i>coram Deo</i>.<span style=""> </span>The flipside is a sanctification of “ordinary life.”<span style=""> </span>The result is that “for the ordinary householder” this will “require something paradoxical: living in all the practices and institutions of flourishing, but at the same time not fully in them.<span style=""> </span>Being in them but not of them; being in them, but yet at a distance, ready to lose them.<span style=""> </span>Augustine put it: use the things of this world, but don’t enjoy them; uti, not frui.<span style=""> </span>Or do it all for the glory of God, in the Loyola-Calvin formulation” (<b style="">81</b>).<span style=""> </span>We Protestants so take this burdensome dynamic for granted that it’s difficult to imagine it being otherwise.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>There are a couple of ways that this finds expression: on the one hand, ordinary, domestic life is taken up and sanctified; on the other hand, renunciation is built into ordinary life (81b).<span style=""> </span>So the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker are affirmed in their “worldly” stations as also called to serve God, just as the priest; on the other hand, the domestic laborer does this with something of a mendicant asceticism.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">2. Disenchantment</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Coupled with this was the Reformation’s “radical simplification,” as Taylor describes it (77).<span style=""> </span>The Reformers “all see the reigning equilibrium as a bad compromise”—a Pelagian assumption of human powers and thus an inadequate appreciation for the radical grace of God—for God’s action in salvation.<span style=""> </span>If anything of salvation is under our control, then God’s sovereignty and grace are compromised.<span style=""> </span>This leads Reformers like Calvin to reject the “localization” of grace in things and rituals, changing the “centre of gravity of the religious life” (79).<span style=""> </span>Taylor consider John Calvin as a case study: in emphasizing the priority of God’s action and grace, Taylor notes, “what he can’t admit is that God could have released something of his saving efficacy out there into the world, at the mercy of human action, because that is the cost of really sanctifying creatures like us which are bodily, social, historical” (<b style="">79</b>).<span style=""> </span>One can see how this entails a kind of <i>dis</i>enchantment: “we reject the sacramentals; all the elements of ‘magic’ in the old religion” (79).<span style=""> </span>If the church no longer has “good” magic, “then all magic must be black” (<b style="">80</b>): all enchantment must be blasphemous, idolatrous, even demonic (Salem is yet to come).<span style=""> </span>And one the world is de-charged, we are then free to re-order it as seems best (80).<span style=""> </span>In other words, the Reformers’ rejection of sacramentalism is the beginning of naturalism.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><u>>Discussion</u>: note Taylor’s counterfactual reflections—that things could have gone differently with respect to the Reformation, 75, 76, 78-79. But this would have required both different sensibilities on the part of the Reformers as well as a different stance on the part of Rome.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <span style=";font-family:";font-size:12pt;" ><span style=""> </span>It was this “rage for order,” Taylor suggests, that unwittingly contributes to the disenchantment of the world: “This, plus the inherent drive of the religious reformations, made them work towards the disenchantment of the world, and the abolition of society based on hierarchical equilibrium, what that of elite and mass, or that we find reflected in the Carnival, and the ‘world turned upside down’” (87).<span style=""> </span>Both religious and secular Reform share this concern. </span>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-86549541023635776962011-02-10T14:35:00.000-05:002011-02-10T14:36:04.449-05:00Five Contrasts: or, Removing Obstacles to UnbeliefNote Taylor’s qualifier and emphasis: “What I am trying to describe here is not a theory.<span style=""> </span>Rather my target is our contemporary lived understanding; that is, the way we naively take things to be.<span style=""> </span>We might say: the construal we live in, without ever being aware of it as a construal, or—for most of us—without ever even formulating it” (30). The reason it’s important to note this is because it is at this “level” that the shift has occurred: it is a shift in our naïve understanding, in what we take for granted (30-31).<span style=""> </span><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">i) Disenchantment and the “Buffered” Modern Self</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">This first element address the <i>third</i> “obstacle to unbelief.”<span style=""> </span>Note what characterizes disenchantment for Taylor: it is the shift in the <i>location</i> of meaning from “the world” <i>into</i> “the mind” (30, 31).<span style=""> </span>And minds are “bounded,” <i>inward</i> spaces.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">But we need to appreciate how this differs from the “enchanted” understanding where all kinds of non-human things <i>mean</i>—are loaded and charged with meaning (32).<span style=""> </span>And because of this, <i>power</i> resided in things (32, re: relics).<span style=""> </span>As a result, “in the enchanted world, the line between personal agency and impersonal force was not at all clearly drawn” (32).<span style=""> </span>There is a kind of blurring of boundaries so that it is not only personal agents that have causal power (35).<span style=""> </span>This leads Taylor to describe such as <b style="">porous</b> (35).<span style=""> </span>Just as premodern nature is always already intermixed with its beyond, and just as things are intermixed with mind, so the premodern self’s <i>porosity</i> means the self is essential <i>vulnerable</i> (and hence also “healable”)—we are essentially <i>open</i> to an outside (whether benevolent or malevolent).<span style=""> </span>“<u>This sense of vulnerability</u>,” Taylor concludes, “<u>is one of the principal features which have gone with disenchantment</u>” (36).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">So the <b style="">modern</b> self, in contrast to this “porous” premodern self, is a “buffered” self, insulated and isolated in its interiority (37), “giving its own autonomous order to its life” (38-39).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">OK, so what does this have to do with our overarching question?<span style=""> </span>Why would this make unbelief so hard in a premodern world?<span style=""> </span>Taylor’s insight here is fascinating: in such an enchanted, porous world of vulnerable selves, “the prospect of rejecting God does not involve retiring to the safe redoubt of the buffered self, but rather chancing ourselves in the field of forces without him.<span style=""> </span>[…] In general, going against God is not an option in the enchanted world.<span style=""> </span>That is one way the change <i>to</i> the buffered self has impinged” (41).<span style=""> </span>In other words, it wasn’t enough to simply divest the worlds of spirits and demons; it was also necessary that the self be buffered and protected.<span style=""> </span>Not until that positive shift came about does atheism/exclusive humanism become more “thinkable.”<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">ii) Communitarianism</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">“[L]iving in the enchanted, porous world of our ancestors was inherently <b style="">living socially</b>” (42).<span style=""> </span>The good of a common weal is a <i>collective</i> good, dependent upon the social rituals of the community.<span style=""> </span>“So we’re all in this together.”<span style=""> </span>As a result, a premium is placed on <i>consensus</i> and “[t]urning ‘heretic’” is “<i style="">not</i> just a personal matter.”<span style=""> </span>That is, there is no room for these matters to be ones of “private” preference.<span style=""> </span>“This is something we constantly tend to forget,” Taylor notes, “when we look back condescendingly on the intolerance of earlier ages.<span style=""> </span>As long as the common weal is bound up in collectives rites, devotions, allegiances, it couldn’t be seen just as an individual’s own business that he break ranks, even less that he blaspheme or try to desecrate the rite.<span style=""> </span>There was immense common motivation to bring him back into line” (<b style="">42</b>).<span style=""> </span>As a consequence, the social bond is sacred (43).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">iii) An equilibrium b/w self-transcendence and human flourishing*</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Taylor identifies, especially in Christendom, a unique tension between what he calls “self-transcendence”—a “turning of life towards something <i>beyond</i> ordinary human flourishing”—and the mundane concerns of human flourishing.<span style=""> </span>This equates to a tension between “the demands of the total transformation which the faith calls to” and “the requirements of ordinary ongoing human life” (<b style="">44</b>). Society creates <i>rituals</i> to deal with this tension, in order to foster equilibrium: for example, <b style="">Carnival</b> (45ff.).<span style=""> </span>I think it’s important to note that society deals with this tension dynamically, over time, not statically by simply carving up a division of labor.<span style=""> </span>What society recognized was a need for ritualized “anti-structure” (50).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style=""> </span>This gives us a lens to note a difference in modernity: our secular age still has its public rituals.<span style=""> </span>But these “secular feasts” are not anti-structure, but rather <i>hyper</i>-structure: the intensify the structure rather than offering a means of finding equilibrium for the tension.<span style=""> </span>Instead, anti-structure gets pushed to the newly forged “private” realm (52-53).<span style=""> </span>Publicly what we get is utopian revolution: “the anti-structure to end all anti-structure” (53).<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">iv) Time</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">There is a significantly different time-consciousness in this pre-modern understanding.<span style=""> </span>Because “mundane” or “secular” time is transcended by “higher” time, there is an accounting of time that is not merely linear or chronological.<span style=""> </span>Higher times “introduce ‘warps’ and seeming inconsistencies in profane time-ordering.<span style=""> </span>Events that were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely linked” (55).<span style=""> </span>This is somewhat akin to Kierkegaard’s account of “contemporaneity” in <i>Philosophical Fragments</i>: “Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997” (55).<span style=""> </span>Our “encasing” in secular time has changed this, and so we take our experience of time to be “natural” (i.e., <i>not</i> a construal): “We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done” (59).</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">v) From cosmos to universe</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">The final aspect of the shift involves our view of the natural world: in the premodern imaginary, we live in a <i>cosmos</i>, an ordered whole where the “natural” world hangs within its beyond (60).<span style=""> </span>In contrast to this, the modern imaginary finds us in a “universe,” which has its own kind of order, but it is an immanent order of natural laws rather than any sort of hierarchy of being (60).<span style=""> </span>This theme is expanded significantly on pp. 322-351.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">So in this section Taylor has aimed to show how shifts in modernity targeted, or at least chipped away at, the obstacles to unbelief that made atheism difficult before 1500.<span style=""> </span>However, he still hasn’t identified any <i>causal</i> factors in this story yet.<span style=""> </span>That begins in the next section.</p>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-88261348440362504512011-02-10T08:53:00.000-05:002011-02-10T08:54:16.799-05:00More than Subtraction: Premodern "Obstacles to Unbelief"<style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0in; }ul { margin-bottom: 0in; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal">So the question is: how did we get here from there?<span style=""> </span>How did we go from a situation in which atheism was unthinkable (1500) to one in which it is the “default” position for many (2000)?<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Taylor begins by noting three features of the medieval “world” that significantly contributed to the plausibility in conditions in 1500 and thus “made the presence of God seemingly undeniable” (25).<span style=""> </span>He later describes these as “<u>obstacles to unbelief</u>” (29): </p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">1)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>The <b style="">natural world</b> was constituted as a <b style="">cosmos</b> which functioned semiotically to point to what was <i>more</i> than nature;</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">2)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><b style="">Society</b> itself was understood as something grounded in a higher reality: earthly kingdoms were grounded in a heavenly kingdom;</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">3)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>In sum, people lived in an <b style="">enchanted world.</b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">It’s not that these features guarantee that all medieval inhabitants “believe in God;” but it does mean that, in a world so constituted, “[a]theism comes close to being inconceivable” (26).<span style=""> </span>So some part of the answer to his overarching question is that “these three features have vanished.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>But while that is clearly a necessary part of the story, it is not a <i>sufficient</i> answer to the question: “the rise of modernity isn’t just a story of loss, of subtraction” (26).<span style=""> </span>It’s not just that God is lost in a disenchanted world; it’s also that God is <i>replaced</i> by “<u>exclusive humanism</u>” (26). And if “Man” comes to replace “God,” then “modern humanism…had to produce some substitute for agape” (27).<span style=""> </span></p> <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style=""> </span>So the “story” of the shift from medievalism to our “secular age” is not just a story of <i>dis</i>-enchantment but also a story about the <i>emergence of</i> “exclusive humanism” as an alternative option (28). </span>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-12522882053831918372011-02-09T10:33:00.000-05:002011-02-09T10:35:49.600-05:00Taylor's MethodI think it’s important to recognize the centrality of <i>story</i> in Taylor’s method.<span style=""> </span>“Why tell a story?,” he asks (<b style="">28-29</b>)<span style="">. </span>In part this is necessary because he is countering “subtraction stories” (26-27) which simply see modernity as the sloughing off of superstition and enchantment. Because those are inadequate, Taylor needs to offer a rival <span style="font-style: italic;">story</span>. <span style=""> <br /><br /></span>But ultimately, akin to MacIntyre, Taylor seems to recognize that we are “narrative animals”: that we define who we are, and what we ought to do, on the basis of what story we see ourselves in.<span style=""> </span>While we might have all kinds of syllogistic criticisms of secularism or the new atheism or “exclusive humanism,” Taylor suggests that one could really only counter them if you have an equally cogent <i>story</i> to tell.James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-76980239836000066722011-02-08T10:12:00.000-05:002011-02-08T10:15:24.015-05:00Taylor's Taxonomy of the Secular<style>@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0in; }ul { margin-bottom: 0in; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal">Taylor’s <a href="http://asecularage.blogspot.com/2011/02/taylors-question.html">question</a> puts him on the terrain of “secularization” theory.<span style=""> </span>But he introduces an important nuance by means of a three-fold taxonomy of “secular.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">1)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>(pp. 1-2) In classical or medieval accounts, the “secular” amounted to something like “the temporal”—the realm of “earthly” politics or of “mundane” vocations.<span style=""> </span>This is the “secular” of the purported sacred/secular divide.<span style=""> </span>The priest, for instance, pursues a “sacred” vocation, while the butcher, baker and candlestick maker are engaged in “secular” pursuits. Following Taylor, let’s call this <b style="">secular<sub>1</sub></b>.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">2)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>(pp. 2-3) In modernity, “secular” refers to a non-sectarian, neutral, and <i style="">a</i>-religious space or standpoint.<span style=""> </span>We’ll refer to this as <b style="">secular<sub>2</sub></b>.<span style=""> </span>It is this notion of secular<sub>2</sub> that is assumed both by the secularization thesis and normative secularism.<span style=""> </span>According to secularization theory, as cultures experienced modernization and technological advancement, the (divisive) forces of religious belief and participation would wither in the face of modernity’s disenchantment of the world.<span style=""> </span>According to secularism, political spaces (and the constitutions that create them) should carve out a realm purified of the contingency, particularity, and irrationality of religious belief and instead be governed by universal, neutral rationality.<span style=""> </span>Secular<i style="">ism</i> is always secularism<sub>2</sub>.</p> <p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left: 0.75in; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style=""><span style="">3)<span style="font: 7pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span>But Taylor helpfully articulates a third sense of the secular (secular<sub>3</sub>): a society is “<b style="">secular<sub>3</sub></b>” insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested). At issue here is a shift in “the conditions of belief,” or what Peter Berger would call the “plausibility structures” of a society (detailing this “shift” is the focus of chapter 1). As Taylor notes, the shift to secularity “in this sense” indicates “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” (SA 3). It is in this sense that we live in a “secular age” even if religious participation might be visible and fervent.<span style=""> </span>And it is in this sense that we could still entertain a certain “secularization<sub>3</sub> thesis.”<span style=""> </span>But this would be an account, not of how religion will wither in late modern societies, but rather of how and why the plausibility structures of such societies will make religion contestable (and contested). <span style=""> </span>It will also make possible the emergence of “<u>exclusive humanism</u>” (p. 19).</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-56880183981110594322011-02-05T18:55:00.000-05:002011-02-05T18:59:24.135-05:00Taylor's QuestionOne of the biggest challenges in reading a big book like <span style="font-style: italic;">A Secular Age</span> is keeping track of the argument through the thickets and rabbit trails of such a sprawling account. One way to keep in task, then, is to keep in mind Taylor's quarry--his concern and project. The project is to answer a <span style="font-style: italic;">question</span> that is formulated in a couple of different ways early in the book:<br /><br /> <style>@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoBodyText, li.MsoBodyText, div.MsoBodyText { margin: 0in 0in 6pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }span.BodyTextChar { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }</style> <p class="MsoBodyText"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoBodyText">“<b style="">How</b> did we move from a condition where, in Christendom, people lived naively 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?” (p. 14)</p> <p class="MsoBodyText">“<b style="">Why</b> was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (p. 25)</p></blockquote><p class="MsoBodyText"></p>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8481808160729937799.post-3083684337756819972011-01-28T16:04:00.000-05:002011-01-28T16:05:15.970-05:00Charles Taylor Lecture: "Master Narratives of Secularization"This lecture by Charles Taylor provides something of a preview or overview of his argument in <span style="font-style: italic;">A Secular Age</span>.<br /><br /><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" height="264" width="400"><param name="flashvars" value="webhost=fora.tv&clipid=1004&cliptype=clip"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="movie" value="http://fora.tv/embedded_player"><embed flashvars="webhost=fora.tv&clipid=1004&cliptype=clip" src="http://fora.tv/embedded_player" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="264" width="400"></embed></object>James K.A. Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17350174909340549949noreply@blogger.com0