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P    I I S O N T O L O G Y A N D P O L E M I C C       T     Transcendent Sources and the Dispossession of the Self        .         S While there is little doubt that the publication of A Secular Age has positioned Charles Taylor at the center of many recent important discussions in religion, ethics, and politics, those familiar with his body of work are well aware that his contribution to the study of religion does not begin with this most recent book, and that A Secular Age is not Taylor’s first project to emphasize religion. Indeed, A Secular Age represents the culmination of at least a decade’s worth of research exploring a wide range of religious themes, including Trinitarianism and Catholicity as possible foundations for a pluralist politics; agape as the grounds for ethics as benevolence; and transcendence as the underpinnings for an entire corner of the “modern moral order.” My focus here is largely on the last of these—the concept of transcendence as a moral source—but I will also gesture toward a relationship between transcendence, ethics, and politics in Taylor’s body of work. I begin with the uncontroversial claim that transcendence is a constitutive element of Taylor’s religious program. My approach here is to consider 73 74 C A R L O S D . C O L O R A D O the role that transcendence plays in his wider moral philosophy as it is fleshed out across numerous works, beginning with his work on Hegel and culminating finally in A Secular Age. One of my central claims is that Taylor ’s conception of transcendence is dispossessive or “kenotic”—a term derived from the Greek kénōsis, or “emptying,” which is employed most famously in Philippians 2:7.1 My argument is that such a kenotic conception of transcendence—which as an“emptying”and dispossession resists the pursuit of power—animates Taylor’s normative political vision and epistemology in ways that are attentive to the contemporary demands of pluralism. As a point of departure, it is helpful to consider Stephen K. White’s discussion of the basic shape of Taylor’s moral ontology. In his important book Sustaining Affirmation,White argues that Taylor’s philosophical program is best understood in terms of “weak ontology,” which is to say that it recognizes its own contestability and its own limits. White suggests that though weak ontologists recognize that their formulations about the self, the other, and the world must always be tentative, they also “sense that such conceptualizations are nevertheless necessary or unavoidable for an adequate reflective ethical and political life.” White contrasts these contestable weak ontologies with strong ontologies “that claim to show us ‘the way the world is,’or how God’s being stands to human being, or what human nature is.”According to the strong ontologist,“It is by reference to this external ground that ethical and political life gain their sense of what is right; moreover, this foundation’s validity is unchanging and of universal reach.”2 The ontological turn to weak articulations of both the kinds of realities that underwrite and the demands that animate our moral judgments and our conceptions of the good is significant on White’s account for at least two fundamental reasons. First, ontologically weak conceptions of the self, the other, and the world escape the serious foundationalist problems that can plague strong ontology. And second, unlike modern accounts of the subject that conceptualize it as disengaged from any background—thus leading White to describe it as the“Teflon subject”— the weak ontological turn acknowledges the inescapability of ontological claims, insofar as they are necessary for a deep, rich, textured account of selfhood, otherness, and the good.3 Unlike the Teflon subject, which strives for unimpeded “frictionless motion,” weak ontology offers an account of subjectivity that is ultimately “stickier,” wherein the self is inexorably shaped by a number of existential realities, including “language, mortality or finitude, natality or the capacity for radical novelty, and the articulation of some ultimate background source.”4 One could also include embodiment here as an inescapable feature of subjectivity, which as we will see below is significant for Taylor’s discussion of enfleshment in A Secular Age. White posits that what is critical for the weak ontological turn is a shift in the “how” rather than the “where” of ontological commitments. More fully, against the standard secularist line that establishes a spatial...

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