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Title: A Secular Age
ISBN: 0674026764
Author:
Charles Taylor
Publicate Date: 2007-09-20
Publish: 2007-09-20
List Price: $39.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $24.98
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1: A Secular Quagmire
I am struggling with how best to articulate my complete disappointment and utter frustration with this text. It is quite obvious that there are some readers who are very much in favor of this text's assertions, presuppositions, and somewhat bizarre method of rationale. Clearly, I am not one of them.
Perhaps then, given the peculiarly hostile nature of some reviewers (or review commentators), an articulation of what this book does NOT do is necessary. In the author's own words:
"What I am trying to describe here is not a theory. Rather my target is out contemporary lived understanding: that is, the way we naively take things to be. We might say: the construal we just live in, without ever being aware of it as a construal, or-for most of us-without ever even formulating it. This means that I am not taking on board the various philosophical theories which have been offered to explain and articulate the "mind" and its relation to the "body." I am not attributing to our lived understanding some kind of Cartesian dualism, or its monist materialist rivals, identity theory, or whatever; or even a more sophisticated and adequate theory of embodied agency. I am trying to capture the level of understanding prior to philosophical puzzlement. And while this modern understanding of the mind certainly opens itself to Cartesian type theories in a why that the earlier "enchanted" understanding does not, it isn't itself such a theory. Put another way, the modern idea of mind makes something like the "mind-body problem" conceivable, indeed, in a way inescapable, where on the earlier understanding it didn't really make sense. But by itself it doesn't offer an answer to that problem" (30).
Conversely, what the author is interested in is "the naive understanding, because my claim will be that a fundamental shift has occurred in naive understanding to move to the disenchantment" (30).
There are several immediately obvious problems in this passage, and these problems persist throughout the text. For the sake of time and space however, I will only briefly highlight a few of the most overt.
Perhaps most importantly, Taylor's argument is premised on the notion that there is in fact discontinuity between "the religious" and "the secular"; that these things are separate and irreconcilable. Simultaneously, Taylor tries to make the case that secularism has grown out of the religious, or what is his "enchanted" and "naive" version of the past. In this way, he presupposes a history that is both linear and progressive.
Taylor also attempts to append to the notion of secularism an ethical notion of "exclusive" humanism, asserting that it is one of many "alternative[s] to religion." He simultaneously undermines the viability of religion as an option in two ways. First, he asserts that three conditions for belief are necessary for the survival of the historically religious. Notwithstanding his questionable premise, Taylor states that those conditions no longer exist (vanished is one of the words he uses). He likewise asserts that naivete is no longer available to anyone, believer and unbeliever alike. Second, Taylor asserts that secularism (and again the absence of condition for belief) have put an end to "transcendence," a word Taylor designates to mean the naive religion of the past, concerned as it was beyond "human flourishing." Essentially (and ironically), Taylor is collapsing the religious into the secular, conveniently disposing of those conditions for belief that characterize his "enchanted" past. And all of this with shockingly little support....
If Taylor's arguments lack support, it should not be surprising. Taylor wants to argue "a fundamental shift" in "naive understanding" but likewise desires an abandonment of contemporary theory. Unfortunately, Taylor frequently attempts to utilize the authority of several European early modern and modern theoriticians, including Kant, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc. The end result of which is masticated political theory, circular logic, and a self-defeating rationale. How can one after all, understand the "naive," if that is in fact what it is to be called, if it a) no longer exits and b) the theoretical basis that might allow for at least the conception of such a notion is rejected? Taylor is " trying to capture the level of understanding prior to philosophical puzzlement," as paradoxically articulated in this very modern and rational way. The attempt to balance the reality of this paradox only serves to further confound his own argument.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this text is that Taylor admits that his attempt to "understand" this shift will be constrained to the "modern West." Certainly, this is at least consistent with the theories upon which he unwillingly draws, but given the nature of his presuppositions, what does this say about those civilizations which may or may not conform to the "set of forms and changes" that characterize "Latin Christiendom" and which have, according to Taylor, produced the magnanimous "self-sufficient humanism"? What kind of moral (and political) absolutism does this imply?
I have no doubt that Taylor is a well-respected man in his profession, and that he has made important contributions to his professional community. This text however, is not one of them. It is more closely related to a bad memoir than a scholarly masterpiece.
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2: Landmark portrait of modernity
An exhaustive, very learned string of reviews on Taylor's study can be found at "The Immanent Frame" ([...]), a blog maintained by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
After all that has been said, I will only add that Taylor's book is work of synthetic and imaginative genius. It offers very comprehensive insight into the condition and history of modernity without subscribing to a unilinear, "subtractionist" notion of secularization. This book will be permanently useful in many disciplines. It is worthy of comparison with Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, but with the huge added advantage that it canvases popular experience as well as the experience of the intellectual elite.
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3: For more...
If you'd like to see more of where Taylor is coming from in this book, check out his interview over at The Other Journal. It's a great read and is specifically relating to this book.
[..]
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4: Can't review because not yet received
I'd love to review this item, but I've not yet received it, though Amazon promised it by now. What's the holdup?
Robin
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5: A great title for a poor book
This is a wonderful 200 page book. The problem is that it takes Taylor many more hundreds of pages of repetition to finish it. I normally read a couple of books each week, but i had to put this down many times over several months to get to the end. There are some brilliant observations in this haystack, like needles, but you are so exhausted in reading the same observations so many times that it becomes a tiresome book.
I can see why there was no editor for this book since a real editor would have spent years getting him to realize that a compendium of lectures (which is what this book is according to Taylor) does not lend itself to a good book.
If you want to spend a lot of time getting to how we live in a "Secular Age" which of course we do not if looking at the world as a whole, you may find a few nuggets in here, but you won't find a vein of gold that makes the effort worthwhile. Sadly this book could have been great. Sadly, it is an example of what a poor writer can do with an interesting topic.
I pity any of his students who had to suffer through these lectures without the benefit of lots of caffeine. I am sure Taylor is a very smart and engaging man, as long as you don't have to spend more time with him than the usual checkout line takes at the grocery store.
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