Malaises of Immanence Redux (JKAS notes on ch. 8)

We now transition to Part III of the book. 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). But this was only a condition of possibility, not inevitability. 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.

1 / Nova Effect from Cross-Pressures

Part III (“The Nova Effect”) considers the outcome of this turn in what Taylor calls “the nova effect” (300). By this he means a pluralization (300), fragilization (304), and fragmentation (299) of visions of the good life and human flourishing. 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 (302).

Taylor’s analysis of this point is deeply existential. As he puts it, while the world is disenchanted for “us moderns,” we nonetheless also experience a sense of loss and malaise in the wake of such disenchantment (302; cp. the fiction of DFW!). 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. One should note how much Taylor’s account here relies on an appeal to a “sense” that “we” have, an “feel” for this. “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). 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). 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.”

But what attends this explosion is also a malaise which is itself one of the consequences of a buffered identity. The same “buffering” of the self that protects us also encloses us and isolates us. “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). Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in its own stew of ennui. 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 sense that something may be occluded in the very closure which guarantees safety” (303).

2 / Reactions: The Malaises of Immanence

The nova effect is, in important ways, generated by the cross-pressures on the buffered self. However, there are other causal factors that contribution to this super-nova explosion of immanent spiritualities in our secular age. 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. Some of these negative reactions include Romanticism and Pietism.

a ) Theodicy and indictments of orthodoxy

But then there are also negative reactions to orthodox Christianity as well—“indictments against orthodox religion” (305). A central part of this indictment is fueled by theodicy, or lack thereof (305; cp. 232). In other words, we now have the rise of the evidential argument from evil. But this could only take hold within the modern moral order (MMO) and its epistemic confidence:

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. In Lisbon 1755, ti seems clearly not to have. So the immanent order ups the ante (306).

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). 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).

b) Reactions to the buffered self

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.” 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 sense in our culture that with the eclipse of the transcendent, something may have been lost” (307: the optative mood is intentional). It is this lack, loss and emptiness that—in and by its absence—presses on the immanence of exclusive humanism yielding what Taylor calls “the malaises of immanence” (309).

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 in immanence that generates the nova effect, looking for love/meaning/significance/transcendence within the immanent order.[1] One of the best expressions of this is the new book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. “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, "Champagne Supernova").

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[1] One could, of course, run an entire Augustinian analysis of this as the doomed project of loving some part of creation instead of the Creator (a la Bk IV of the Confessions and passim.). But Taylor doesn’t not invoke “idolatory” as a conceptual frame here, for obvious strategic reasons.

The Dark Abyss of Time: Modern Cosmic Imaginary

Nineteenth Century Unbelief:

• The story of the nineteenth century unbelief is distinct from eighteenth century unbelief

due to a “surge of piety” which took place between the two.

• This second turn to unbelief was wider and deeper than the first due to the shift in their

Cosmic Imaginary and the way “nature” figured in their moral and aesthetic

imagination.

“The unbelieving outlooks were more deeply anchored in the lifeworld and background

sense of nineteenth century people than the analogous views of their eighteenth century

predecessors.” 323

The Change-Over: The transformation of the Cosmic Imaginary

In our modern cosmic imaginary there is a sense that things “fail to touch bottom

anywhere” (p. 325). The defining sense of vastness and the unfathomable makes us unable to

relate to the previous cosmic imaginary defined which was defined by its limits.

“It is no longer usual to sense the universe immediately and unproblematically as

purposefully ordered, although reflection, meditation, spiritual development may lead

one to see it this way.” 325

Two Categories of change-over on the level of theory:

1. Increased dimensions of the old cosmos which was previously limited in space by

outer spheres and in time by Biblical story.

a. Wide and Deep: our idea of the universe expands to the degree that we view our

galaxy as merely one of countless others and our inner frontier becomes equally

as unknown as our universe through the discovery of micro-constitutions.

b. Time: the extension in view of time from a view of the cosmos being roughly 6,000

years old separates us from the “process of our genesis” which makes the past

dark and unfathomable.

2. Increased consciousness of the universe as dominated by the sense that things

evolve. Understand that the world has developed from an earlier state and that life

forms, particularly humans change and evolve.

How this change-over was possible:

(Not a story of one theory merely replacing another. “The science doesnʼt simply

determine what imaginary develops in the place of the earlier one.” 326)

Two necessary components:

1. The availability of alternative frameworks: these were already there through certain

views of Lucretius, Descartes and the beginnings of modern mechanistic physics.

2. The waning of the hold of the older cosmos idea on the imagination: through

disenchantment and breaking away from idea of higher times, faith was necessarily

weakened. There was now a “felt need” and people couldnʼt help but think this was

undermining their entire faith.

Responses:

• The 17th Century apologetics felt that they needed to prove Godʼs existence through

the design of things since enchantment was undermined by mechanism.

• Many held more rigidly to the Biblical details

• Mystery was no longer tolerable in the creation, that is, no intra-cosmic mystery,

although it was still tolerable in the designs of God. The mystery remained in Godʼs

will. This was a shared feeling on both sides of exclusive humanism and orthodoxy.

Key Figures in the Transformation:

“Not just our theories changed, but the spontaneous, unreflecting understanding which

provides the context for these beliefs has also altered.” 347

Burnet and Vico: Not simply on one side of the face-off

1. Burnet: Broke away from the fixed, unchanging world toward evolutionary history, but

came from an orthodox perspective.

a. A new sense of deep time that claims things are evolving. (Seen through ruins)

b. Nature as “sublime.”

i. The old cosmos imaginary viewed the wilderness as uncultivated and

demonic, while maintaining an idea that God could be met there, out of

confines.

ii. Disenchantment and the buffered self was able to transform the horror and

fear felt towards the wilderness into a pleasing horror.

Moral Meaning: Finds a higher purpose because buffered selves are in

danger of narrow self-absorption. Need something beyond ourselves.

Hence, wilderness can empower us to live better where we are. Within

context of the felt inadequacies of modern anthropocentrism.

2. Vico: pioneer in developing a theory of a pre-human, bestial stage, but also wrote

with orthodox intentions.

a. A new sense of deep time that claims leads us back into darkness, a “dark

genesis,” before the light of our current condition.

Within the context of the felt inadequacies of the shallowness of anthropocentrism, they

couldnʼt simply go back to a sense of depth in an eternity that was no longer felt. (343)

Question:

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.

Malaise of Immanence - the predicament of the buffered self

The Nova Effect:

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)

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.

Malaise of Immanence:

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.

“There is a generalized sense in our culture that with the eclipse of transcendent, something may have been lost.” (307)

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.

Forms of Malaise of Immanence:

Malaise of Immanence can typically be found in three forms: (309)

(1) The sense of fragility of meaning, the search for an over-arching significance:

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.

(2) The felt flatness of our attempts to solemnize the crucial moments of passage in our lives

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.

(3) The utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary

People, who live modern commercial, consumer society, commonly experience the feeling of emptiness about their surrounding environment, their culture and so on…

Discussion Questions:
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?