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Introduction
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Introduction S The publication in 2007 of A Secular Age reconfirmed Charles Taylor’s uniquely comprehensive acumen about the character, promise, and pitfalls of the modern age. As he did in Sources of the Self—which surprised both knockers and boosters of modernity with its capacity to give voice to all of their concerns at once, and to disinter their sometimes common root impulses—so again in A Secular Age has Taylor cast a new and surprising light on the stage upon which we undertake our most fundamental debates. Diverse interlocutors on the question of the modern experience of secularity will recognize themselves in Taylor’s book, but will find themselves situated differently, often with a new and more expansive set of concerns and a view to unexpected paths forward. The scope of Taylor’s insight into modern secularity has been ably recognized by his fellow social theorists and philosophers. The present volume aims to ensure that Taylor’s insights do not escape the notice, or indeed the scrutiny, of those thinkers more explicitly concerned with questions of religious experience in the modern era. Thus, Aspiring to Fullness in a Secular Age sets out to consider and assess Taylor’s broad analysis of the limits and potentialities of the present age in regard to human fullness or fulfillment. The crucial subsets of this consideration include questions 1 about the function and significance of religious accounts of transcendence in Taylor’s broader philosophical project, the critical purchase and limitations of Taylor’s assessment of the centrality of codes and institutions in modern political ethics, the possibilities inherent in Taylor’s brand of postNietzschean theism, the significance and meaning of Taylor’s ambivalence about the modern destiny (openness or weakness),the possibility of a practical application of his insights among particular contemporary religious communities, and Taylor’s reticence to embrace apocalyptic or exilic voices in the contemporary debate about aspirations to fullness.A Secular Age contains the most explicitly theistic formulations in Taylor’s thought thus far, and while some commentators have therefore taken to speaking of a religious “turn”in Taylor’s recent work, the chapters in the present volume examine the ways in which transcendence functions, both explicitly and implicitly , in Taylor’s philosophical project as a whole. Special attention is also paid to his recent contributions to the study of secularization. In A Secular Age, Taylor offers a lengthy consideration of processes of secularization that in certain respects have come to determine the character of the “North Atlantic world,” meaning they have come to determine how inhabitants of that world experience their proximity to and assuredness of fulfillment. For Taylor, the meaning of secularity is most distinguishable when we see it as “coterminous with the rise of a society [such as ours] in which for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option.”The wide availability of this particular option is therefore a necessary component of what Taylor means by secularity. Taylor describes how this novel situation came about, but he does not only describe. As he tells us, his expansive genealogy of the advent of this variety of secularity is meant to function also as a polemic against “stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” Much is implied in this claim. First, we can venture that the process of secularization and its connection to the appearance of the “exclusive humanist” option is surely contingent upon the collapse of an epistemology that Taylor least of all wants to reinstate. In other words, because we can no longer claim to“know”those teloi beyond the“immanent frame” of human flourishing, or at least cannot claim to know them in ways previously available—i.e., naïvely—it makes sense that the possi2 A S P I R I N G T O F U L L N E S S I N A S E C U L A R A G E bility of abandoning one’s commitment to those ends has arisen. Taylor is then of striking interest because he wants to polemicize not necessarily against“exclusive humanism”as such, but against the notion that such humanism is the destiny of a perfected humanity.Yet he wants to do this without reinvoking within his polemic the possibility of a...