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Chapter Five: Humanism and the Question of Fullness
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P I I I S M I D D L E D W E L L E R S C F Humanism and the Question of Fullness S Throughout his writings, Charles Taylor has insisted that any adequate account of human action and social relations must attend to the meanings that sustain and motivate human beings. Against the aspiration of some political thinkers to analyze social life on the model of the natural sciences , Taylor has resolutely and tirelessly advocated a hermeneutical turn in thought. Further, because of his commitment to moral and political reflection , he has argued, unlike some hermeneutical thinkers, that human “meanings” always entail evaluations, what he has called strong evaluations , by means of which human beings guide their lives. The question of the good is thereby properly basic in human life. We exist in some “moral space,” as he calls it, and thus understand and orient life within that context of evaluations.1 Granting these commitments, it is crucial, if one wants to understand the shifting patterns of human self-understanding and social existence, to examine the evaluations used by people, how they picture the moral space 127 128 W I L L I A M S C H W E I K E R of life, and how they believe they ought to orient existence. This threefold examination widens reflection to its most comprehensive moral and even religious scope. In A Secular Age—a book based on Taylor’s 1998–1999 Gifford Lectures entitled “Living in a Secular Age”—Taylor’s ideas about human beings as self-interpreting animals moved by strong evaluations come to focus on the question of fullness in human life and also the ways certain forms of secularism flatten life and threaten fullness. The idea of fullness and its relation, if any, to humanism is the subject of these reflections. I begin by indicating the purpose and standpoint of the inquiry. I outline of his thought just noted, it would appear on first blush that Taylor is a committed humanist of some form, since for him strong evaluations are linked to ideas about human flourishing or wholeness.Yet while obvious humanistic ideas about history, human action, flourishing, and self-understanding permeate Taylor’s work, he has in recent writings undertaken an attack on what he calls “exclusive humanism .” What is one to make of the attack on exclusive humanism by a thinker apparently committed to at least some features of a humanistic outlook ? Unless one imagines that Taylor has somehow abandoned ideas that underwrite his entire philosophical output, then two things seem at stake: (1) competing conceptions of human fullness relate to different types of humanism, and (2) the possibility of a properly nonexclusive type of humanism , even if Taylor has not himself articulated the position. The purpose of this essay is, on the one hand, to reconstruct Taylor’s argument by sorting through conceptions of the relation between types of humanism and ideas about fullness, and, on the other hand, to isolate and to identify a type of humanism that avoids the criticisms of exclusive humanism. The outlook advanced in the following pages is called“theological humanism” for reasons that will become clear later.2 What is at stake, I judge, is how to preserve a humanistic focus within religious life, and thus to put moral constraints on what the religions can rightly do to human beings, while at the same time avoiding the reductions of “exclusive humanism.” There is of course some irony in me as a theologian raising the question of humanism.The irony springs from standpoints of reflection.A philosopher and political thinker, Taylor has nevertheless long held religious commitments that are consistent with his overall framework of thought. These commitments have become more explicit in works such as A Secular Age and his Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, even while his criticism of secularism parallels worries about narrowly naturalistic accounts of human action.3 The prohibition of religion, as Gianni Vattimo has noted, is over.4 Social scientists, literary critics, political theorists , and even economists are exploring “religion.” Like many other contemporary philosophers, Taylor too is talking about religion. Some might consider him a Catholic thinker. The standpoint of this essay is admittedly theological. I am a Christian , Protestant theologian who holds that one must counter reductionist forms of secularism but also understand that one basic task of religious thinking is the criticism of religion. Religion is not merely some brute feeling...