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The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.4 (2003) 323-325



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Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Charles Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. xi + 127 pp. $19.95 h.c., 0-674-00760-3.

This is a disappointing book: by Charles Taylor's usually high standards, and as the latest installment in the development of his thought, Varieties of Religion Today does not quite measure up. But that does not mean that it is a mediocre book overall.

Taylor's great work, Sources of the Self (1989), brilliantly traced how our conception of ourselves has been shaped and reshaped by the successive intellectual movements since the scientific revolution. In that book, Taylor walks a delicate line, welcoming much of what modernity has brought us in self-understanding, but insisting that, nonetheless, we have lost something important: our ability to feel ourselves in contact with sources of value external to and higher than ourselves. This way of thinking, he argues, leads to atomistic liberalism in the political realm and a crisis of confidence in our moral standards in the ethical realm. [End Page 323]

Sources of the Self ends on a cliff-hanger: when we get to the final chapter, we discover that Taylor—who has argued all along for the importance of articulacy about the sources of our own values—has been less than up front about the sources of his own value commitments, and in the last few pages he intimates that what we need to get us out of our current malaise is a return to theism. When I first saw Varieties of Religion Today, my hope was that Charles Taylor would finally make good the promissory note he left us at the end of Sources of the Self. I hoped that he would, finally, make clear how religious faith informs his approach to ethical philosophy and that he would, in his terms, attempt to articulate his vision of the moral life with its foundation in religion.

No such luck. But what we do have in Taylor's latest book is a subtle reflection on the place of religion in contemporary life, which takes up the themes of Taylor's critique of society and applies them to the realm of religion. Taylor advances his account of the place of religion in modern life through a meditation on William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. He treats William James respectfully and generously as a highly insightful theorist, who captures much of what is salient about contemporary religious experience, but whose analysis is vitiated precisely because he accepts relatively uncritically the focus of liberal atomism on the individual, to the detriment of the communal aspects of experience.

Varieties of Religion Today contains three essays: the first discusses James' conception of religion; the second, morbidity and the will to believe; and the third, religion today. In The Varieties, William James defines religion as "the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine" (James 1982, 31). Taylor argues that we can see this definition as having two main points: first that the real locus of religion is in individual experience rather than in communal life, and second that the real locus of religion is in experience and feeling, rather than the intellectual structures through which people "define, justify, rationalize their feeling" (Taylor 2002, 7). Taylor objects to both aspects of this definition: the first because it cannot find a place for a collective religious life, which is "not just the result of (individual) religious connections, but which in some way constitutes or is that connection" (24), and the second because we need some articulation of what religious faith is in if we are to make sense of the sort of thing religious faith is. As Taylor claims, "[t]he faith, the hope are in something" (26). Here, as elsewhere in the work, it is hard to avoid the feeling that Taylor's basic objection to William James's account of religion...

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