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P    V S O U T L I E R S C       N    Recovery of Meaning? A Critique of Charles Taylor’s Account of Modernity         S Modernity—its nature, critique, and possibility—is Charles Taylor’s abiding theme. Modernity has altered the basic relation of religion to society and therefore the experience of meaning in modern society. In Taylor’s version of the secularization thesis, the contrast is between“the world that we have lost, one in which the social was grounded in the sacred and secular time in higher times, a society moreover in which the play of structure and anti-structure was held in equilibrium; and this human drama unfolded within the cosmos. All this has been dismantled and replaced by something quite different in the transformation we often roughly call disenchantment .”1 But, unlike Weber’s melancholy acceptance of life within the iron cage, Taylor has persistently sought a recovery of meaning without rejecting the modern age. Modern society produces both a crisis of meaning and the possibility for its recovery, but the condition for this recovery is that“the link with God passes more through our endorsing contested interpretations—for instance, of our political identity as religiously 243 244 I A N A N G U S defined, or of God as the authority and moral source underpinning our ethical life.”2 Religion in modernity is thus oriented toward the recovery of meaning in ordinary life. Recovery of meaning is a central task of the critique of modernity. T R S  S P Taylor’s thinking on modernity finds its beginning in the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, not least because modernity was the central organizing idea of Hegel’s philosophy. The principle of particular subjectivity, manifested in different ways by the figures of Socrates and Jesus, becomes the foundation of modern society. “Secular life is the positive and definite embodiment of the spiritual kingdom—the kingdom of the will manifesting itself in outward existence.”3 Spirit, Geist, comes into its own in the modern world by ceasing to occupy a heaven, or a world of ideas separate from ordinary reality, and by becoming the principle or organization of that reality itself. Philosophy, in Hegel’s view, is centered on the concept, which is the foundation for speculative reason. Unlike ancient philosophy, which had to create the very basis of conceptual knowledge through abstraction,modern philosophy must bring reason from abstraction to concrete reality. “Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance, that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart it to spiritual life.”4 The meaning of the modern world is precisely a reconciliation of reason and reality. As Hegel pointed out in his Aesthetics, the ideal of chivalry, of righting wrong through the action of a noble knight, is gone, and we are left with “the prose of life” in which “art is mastery in the portrayal of all the secrets of this ever profounder pure appearance of external realities.”5 Taylor has similarly affirmed that the modern moral order consists in “the affirmation of ordinary life”where“the full human life is now defined in terms of labor and production, on the one hand, and marriage and family life, on the other. At the same time, the previous ‘higher’ activities come under vigorous criticism.”6 For Taylor as for Hegel, the affirmation of ordinary life is rooted in the Reformation, in which the externality of the Church institution and its corruption is overcome by belief, which is referred back to the individual spiritual will.7 Philosophy completes itself in modern reality insofar as modern reality completes itself in philosophy. While this project of reconciliation of reason with reality permeates all the differentiated spheres of modern existence, it pertains most centrally to political philosophy, where the social existence of humans demands a rational form that recognizes each subject’s autonomy.“Plato in his Republic makes everything depend on the government, and makes disposition the principle of the state; on which account he lays the chief stress on education. The modern theory is diametrically opposed to this, referring everything to the individual will. But here we have no guarantee that the will in question has that right...

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