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Chapter Ten: Transcendence and Immanence in a Subtler Language
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C T Transcendence and Immanence in a Subtler Language The Presence of Dostoevsky in Charles Taylor’s Account of Secularity . S Why speak of Fyodor Dostoevsky in relation to Charles Taylor’s magisterial analysis of modern secularity? At first sight there might seem little in common between the irenic, carefully measured, scholarly argumentation of the Canadian philosopher and the sometimes wild, often unnerving visionary genius of the Russian novelist. But this first impression underestimates the profoundly existential nature of Taylor’s account of our secularity , as it also underestimates the argumentative care and philosophical insight with which Dostoevsky composed his great novels. I will now outline the case for bringing Taylor and Dostoevsky together. I begin with three significant correspondences, which are closely related , between Dostoevsky’s work and Taylor’s account of secularity. The first has to do with what Taylor finds most important in modern secularity. 262 In his introduction to A Secular Age, he defines secularity in three senses, noting that his account will focus on secularity not as the privatization of religion, nor as a decline in religious belief and practice (the first two secularities ), but as the modern situation of doubt, or“fragilization,”characterizing all forms of belief and also unbelief. This “Secularity 3” is the inescapable awareness of religious believers and unbelievers alike that our views are not held by other intelligent people of reasonably good will in our midst—the inescapable sense of looking sideways, which casts doubt on our own construal of reality.This condition of reflexive doubt as a modern destiny is prime Dostoevskian territory. As Kirilov says of Stavrogin in the novel Demons, “If Stavrogin believes, he does not believe he believes. And if he does not believe, he does not believe he does not believe.”Indeed, Dostoevsky said of himself that his own faith was “tried in the crucible of doubt” and that for him, as a child of the modern age, the doubt would always be there, right up to“the moment they close the lid of my coffin.”1 The second correspondence has to do with Taylor’s mapping of the fragilized ideological terrain of modern secularity as a three-cornered struggle involving not only Enlightenment secular humanists and religious believers, but also neo-Nietzschean antihumanists (whom he identifies, for instance, with Foucault and Derrida). Such a three-way struggle for the heart and mind of modernity constitutes the basic argumentative pattern of Dostoevsky’s great dialogic novels of faith and atheism,in which the dialogue between secular liberal and Christian voices is always shadowed by the presence of a third, the nihilist. To be specific, one might say that while Dostoevsky always had Rousseau and Hegel in his sights, from Notes from Underground through The Brothers Karamazov, he also anticipated Nietzsche—and, moreover, saw clearly the extent to which progressive humanism provokes and also anticipates Nietzschean nihilism.2 The third correspondence between Taylor and Dostoevsky involves the development and deployment of “subtler languages.” Taylor is concerned with creating a space for meaningful dialogue between secularists and believers instead of the usual fruitless polemic, and in furthering this possibility he places the onus particularly on people of religious faith, whom he divides between those who are merely nostalgic for the past and those who are willing to defend transcendence in a “subtler language.” He includes himself among the latter. Here the correspondence with Transcendence and Immanence in a Subtler Language 263 Dostoevsky needs no justification, since Taylor himself, in response to the question—What is it to speak transcendence in a subtler language?— points directly to Dostoevsky as among the foremost pioneers in Western modernity of “new itineraries” or “paradigm shifts” out of the immanent frame toward God.3 It is worth noting that these pioneers are often literary artists; one of the chief characteristics of Taylor’s philosophical writing is the impressive range and depth of reference to literature, not merely as a source of concrete illustration for philosophical or theological concepts , but also as an independent source of new cognitive insight. A more direct case can also be made for discussing the relationship between Taylor and Dostoevsky. There is, for instance, Taylor’s remarkable but little-known essay on Dostoevsky published several years ago in a small Canadian journal.4 Much of Taylor’s reading of Dostoevsky in this piece finds its way into the two major works that have propelled him into the forefront of English-speaking philosophy: Sources of the Self and...