secularism - varieties of secularism in a secular age Flashcards
what is Taylor’s main argument
o ‘Taylor’s book is more accurately seen as a brief against the idea that we have entered a ‘post-secular’ age’ (6)
o ‘belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith’ (SA, 3)
3 types of secularity - Taylor
♣ secularity
• retreat from religion in various spheres e.g. politics
♣ secularity 2
• more personal
• declining religious belief
o secularity 3 = where religion becomes an option amongst others. Not simply unchallenged anymore
♣ ‘secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place’ (SA, 3)
Taylor - wants to change the way we think about religion
♣ evokes subjective experience = ‘fullness’
♣ the world full of beauty and meaning
♣ it is a subjective experience understood objectively
♣ fullness is harder to achieve but can be achieved in interesting ways
Taylor - immanent frame
♣ immanent frame = not a set of beliefs but rather rooted in context
♣ reworks weber’s ‘disenchantment’
♣ disenchantment does not mean the end of religion
♣ there is an aspiration to transcendence
Taylor - history of secularism
o west = shaped by idea of natural order, divine creation etc.
o late 17th – 18th cent
♣ spread of providential deism
♣ exclusive humanism
♣ secular perspective
o transcendent can be grasped in other religions
o views secularity as a ‘product of the long history of reform movements within Western Christianity’ (15)
Taylor - history of reform and purity
o reform originally was to produce purity – cleansing. Development of impersonal natural order
o ‘the possibility of a fully secular society is an unanticipated result of reformers’ efforts to police the properly spiritual’ (16)
o ‘A Secular Age displaces the commonsense opposition between the religious and the secular with a new understanding in which this opposition appears only as a late and retrospective misrecognition’ (17)
o Secularism introduced idea that spirit was radically other. Xianity is trying to separate itself from the flesh
o Sceptical about labels e.g. postmodern
Taylor criticism of subtraction theories
o Criticises subtraction stories – ‘secular societies are not just mankind minus the religion’ (24-5)
♣ Secularisation is a ‘cumulatively and dialectically achieved condition, and one of its dimensions is the manifestation of religion as an option axis of mobilisation and belief’ (25)
♣ Shares same view as Asad that the secular is a ‘set of conditions in which modern ideas of religion are constructed’ (25)
♣ Emphasis on genealogy of society
2, milbank - view of Taylor
- If Taylor’s thesis ‘is that secularisation is finally attributable to the self-undoing of Latin Christendom thorugh over obessession with ‘reform’, then this is also a thesis whose very succinctness paradoxically allows for no very clear identification of heroes and villains’ (54)
2, milbank - Taylor non-sociological approach
- Taylor does not look at secularism sociologically – it is not inevitable
o Does not conform with Durkheim (idea that religion fulfils social solidarity) or Weber (idea that religion vanishes in the face of rationalised) or reformed Weberian ideas that religion has ‘simply mutated to a more private and expressivist form’ (55)
o Recovery of xian themes vs. rejection of Enlightenment rationality
o Does not deny secularisation altogether but recognises that religion can change
‘secularisation is a reality, but it is merely an event or a series of events, no an inexorable human destiny’ (56) not a necessary, subtractive process
2, milbank - there are aspects of old favouring of religious belief that have been removed
o belief in experience of ‘acts of God’
o view that religion and politics cannot be separated
o belief that the world is full of magic – enchanted universe
- crucial factor = ‘the favouring of discipline over festivity and the abstract considerations of both life and death over relational embodiment’ (61)
2, milbank - Taylor on disenchantment
- significant emphasis of Taylor is idea that disappearance of enchantment does not have to mean decline of religion
o e.g. Wahabism – removed etherialism from Islam
o however, Taylor recognises that ‘such phenomena in the end encourage secularisation’ (62) - in the end, he argues that disenchantment is linked to secularisation
- religion combines strange paradox of moral order and ‘wild Dionysiac energies…often linked with sex and violence’ (63)
o link between religion and ethics
o ‘religion…begins in the mystical but ends up by engendering some sort of ethical practice’ (64)
o in focusing on love etc. religion has delivered the mix message of sex/desire etc.
4, during - why secularism has occurred
- Secularism has resulted ‘because over centuries, Latin Christianity, through its many internal reformist movements, became committed to the Aristotelian project of general human flourishing. During the Enlightenment, central elements of the Christian faith were transformed into a humanism whose ethical and conceptual framework and purposes were fundamentally immanent’ (106)
4, during - how might the secularist feel re. Taylor
- ‘if Taylor believes that the secular world has lost a fullness available only through the transcendent, the secularist may feel an equivalent emptiness in Taylor’s own analysis, since its attempts to explain how history happened… are so abstracted and distanced from the events to which they ultimately refer’ (109)
- ‘what about those who neither feel the spiritual emptiness of modernity nor embrace secular reformism’s promise?’ (113)
4, during - assumptions in Taylor work
- assumptions in Taylor’s work
o richness requires the transcendent
o disposition towards richness is integral to moral anthropology
6, bilgrami - 2 main parts of Taylor’s work
o ‘we have come not just to have secular doctrinal commitments and secular political arrangements… but to live in a secular age, by which is meant that we live in an age that possesses the conceptual preconditions that make possible such changes in doctrine… by making merely optional the belief in God and religion and its relevance to public life’
o these conditions did not come about through mere subtraction, but rather through ‘philosophical construction of a new set of interconnected ideas about the nature of the human subject and agency’ (145)
