Can Philosophy Ever Escape Genealogy

The Imaginative Conservative: The End of Modernity by Thaddeus Kozinski

Modernity, by God’s grace, may be the site of a new synthesis, the transcending of stale categories of thought and practice, in which a new Christendom can emerge, one in which the reign of God in His glory and love emerges side-by-side with the full dignity and flourishing of man…

Michael Gillespie wrote another hit piece against nominalism, tracing all of the problems of the Western world to 14th ce Franciscans like Ockham: The Theological Origins of Modernity.

Whence This Change?

Alasdair MacIntyre: From Socratic Subverter to Supporter of the State by Thaddeus Kozinski

While I disagree with Kozinski regarding the American founding and the tenets of the Anglo-American political tradition, the centralization of political and economic power has transformed the original federal republic or federation of states into a unitary nation-state, more or less. The power of the Federal government (and that of many of the states arguably) is problematic, to say the least.

According to Kozinski's summary, MacIntyre was not talking about the legitimacy of the use of coercive power in an abstract manner (that is, a discussion of the state's authority proper to the exposition of the practical science of politics) but making claims about the responsibilities of the modern nation-state. (I haven't watched the lecture yet and probably won't be able to do so for a while.) Maybe this change isn't so surprising since MacIntyre did support the American with Disabilities Act and necessarily the power of the Federal Government (in Dependent Rational Animals, I believe).



Someone should write a sustained critique of Charles Taylor on modernity and liberal democracy (as philosophy or as intellectual history)?
Charles Taylor on Secular Democracy

Charles Taylor and Roger Scruton discuss the Sacred and the Secular

More from the conference.

Dale M. Coulter Responds to Charles Taylor

First Things: Wrestling with Charles Taylor by Dale M. Coulter
Is our world really so disenchanted?



A Secular Age



Related:

Rod Dreher: Modernity and seeing through a glass, darkly

In the passage I read last night, Taylor discusses the fundamental psychological shift that occurred with modernity, and how it orients us toward questions of religion (remember that the mission Taylor sets for himself in the book is to discuss how and why secularism rose in the West, and its implications for us today). In the pre-modern world, he writes, people saw the material world as charged with spiritual energy, and personality. Pagans saw spirits, and spiritual power, inhering in Nature, and in particular places. Christians retained many of those beliefs, though transferring much of that way of seeing the world to saints and relics, while still believing in evil spirits as actual entities which could bring harm to one. For the individual, Taylor writes, the boundary between a person and this spiritualized world was porous; absent God, the self had little protection from the spiritual forces in the world that threatened the self's integrity and well-being. For pre-moderns, says Taylor, to reject God would not mean to reject the reality of these spiritual forces; rather, it would mean rejecting the only hope one had that Good would ultimately triumph over the forces of chaos and evil.

This is a critically important point: to reject God did not mean rejecting the supernatural; it meant rejecting the best hope the individual had of protecting oneself from it. So most people found this literally unthinkable.

Human consciousness became modern, he writes, when the natural world became "disenchanted" -- that is, when man began to think of the world outside his own mind as spiritually inert, and having only the meaning we impute to it with our own minds. This, says Taylor, "buffers" the mind, putting a layer of protection between the individual and the outside world. It becomes less terrifying. It's the equivalent of saying, "There's no such thing as ghosts" -- and believing it as the truth. The disenchantment of the world ushered in Protestantism, and in turn secularism. You can see the logic. Closing the Taylor book and turning my lamp off last night, I thought that there really is no way to reconcile the African Anglicans with their UK and American counterparts; both live on completely opposite sides of the divide between modernity and pre-modernity.

The thing is, all of us in the West, believers included, live on one side of that divide, whether we want to or not. What I mean to say is that even though I, as an Orthodox Christian, plainly espouse a pre-modern belief system, the psychological and cultural environment that shaped me, and in which I live and breathe is modern and secular. As Taylor points out, this comes so natural to all us Westerners that it's hard to grasp how unusual this is in human experience, and how constructed it is.

Assuming that this is an accurate representation of Taylor, does Taylor sufficiently distinguish Faith from superstition from folk ignorance of nature? Can we really divide history into premodern and modern based on this one point? Atheism did not affect culture and science until relatively late. But more importantly, how can we talk about premodern and modern consciousness, when the difference is between the mind of a believer and an unbeliever? Perhaps even Christians are not so different from their non-believing peers in how they perceive the world -- but then again, many Western Christians are lukewarm in their faith. They pay no attention to the necessity of spiritual warfare everyday, and make no progress in their spiritual life.

Did the medievals have a stronger Faith? Maybe they did -- but Taylor's seeming reduction of Faith to just one more mental state or opinion about the world probably results in the wrong diagnosis of the problem and a wrong solution. (Dreher seems to fall in the same error, especially when he uses as support the philosophically naive account given by Daniel Everett of the Pirahã. A Christian wshould more critical in accepting someone else's word about human interaction with spirits (discernment of spirits!). The big problem is with the word "see" -- which is not being used univocally. Is the power of sight the same for all human beings? Yes. The power of imagination? Yes. But is it the case that the imagination is always made active through light striking natural objects and reflecting into the eye? No. (Otherwise, how could one accept the occurrence of supernatural "visions"?) An objective scientist would be looking for an explanation of the phenomena in other than seeing (unless he admits there is something wrong with his vision), rather than doing away with the nature of human sight. There is something other than natural seeing at work in this Pirahã incident, both from a Christian point of view and the perspective of a natural scientist/philosopher.

I once picked it up a copy of A Secular Age at B&N or Borders, and wasn't impressed by his attempt at intellectual history, so I decided it wasn't worthy buying. Now that I'm no longer thinking of becoming an academic, I don't know I'd buy Sources of the Self either.

However, I am now curious to read his characterization of the problem and the solution. (Is it anything more than a liberal account dressed with the trappings of Christianity?)

ForaTV: The Future of the Secular (lecture by Charles Taylor)

Time: Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes
Language Log: The Straight Ones: Dan Everett on the Pirahã
Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living without Numbers or Time

Rod Dreher reports on a lecture by Charles Taylor: Faith, reason and paradigm shifts.

Charles Taylor is popular with Candians, liberals, and egalitarians. Isn't that sufficient reason to be suspicious of his writings? One cannot equate "the kind of revelations that come via flashes of insight and intuition" with Divine Revelation. What sort of Catholic intellectual is he? His is the sort of apologetic that tries to accomodate scientific triumphalism and yet make room for faith, but in the process puts forth a flawed understanding of human reasoning and reinforces a bad judgment about the epistemic value of scientific discourse.

Do scientists have some sort of faith before they do their own work? Yes, because it is impossible for them to start from the very beginning and not only "verify" the work that has been done in the past, but to have, from the accumulated experience of their predecessors, a cumulative grasp of the natures upon which they are experimenting. They must have working assumptions that they themselves do not know, but only believe based on the authority of those who have imparted the assumptions to them or the authority of the scientific endeavor of which they are a part. Does this make it true science? Only if one calls science whatever happens in the minds of experts and those who are working in laboratories, and is "confirmed" by their peers. But this is really just probable reasoning -- it's not really science in the strict sense as it is laid out by Aristotle.

Would "paradigm shifts" be possible if scientists were not working from presuppositions instead of true understanding?

Grant Havers takes on Charles Taylor: A Heretical Contradiction.

Logic, unfortunately, is not his strong point. In an essay on multiculturalism and the “politics of recognition,” Taylor credits Christianity with advancing the separation of church and state in the modern West. Correctly in my view, Taylor spies an historic relation between this faith and the liberalism of the Enlightenment. Both traditions at their best teach a healthy suspicion of attempts to centralize power into the hands of frail and sinful human beings who are all too easily tempted to abuse their authority when it comes to regulating matters of the heart. He also teaches (again, correctly in my view) that Christianity is unique among faiths in insisting on this separation; in theological terms, the realm of Caesar must not become idolatrously confused with that of Christ. Yet this admirable defense of western Christianity’s historic particularity does not deter Taylor from calling on all peoples of the West to universalize tolerance, that is, to promote “recognition” of all peoples, Christian or not: “we [must] all recognize the equal value of different cultures; we [must] not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth,” he intones. In practice, that means the enshrinement of group rights for anybody who doesn’t belong to the majority Christian culture. (These rights range from affirmative action to separate criminal justice systems all the way to self-government.)

It is beyond my mental powers to reconcile these two beliefs of Taylor. If Christianity alone is unique in teaching the separation of church and state, then is it wise to recognize the equal value of cultures that do not? Should tolerance extend to the intolerant?

The end of the political community is not the same as man's ultimate end, and thus the secular authority is not to be identified with the authority of Christ or of His representatives. But is one subordinate to the other? And is it permissible for this to be the status quo in Christian polities? What is meant by the "separation of Church and State" in an authentic Christian polity (where the authority of the Church is recognized, even if it is not "established") is unlike the current liberal dogma.

Is Mr. Havers's characterization of Lincoln correct, though?

This guilt-ridden theology would have astonished tough-minded Christian realists like St. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, or Lincoln, none of whom identified “charity for all” with either surrender or suicide.

That is a bit much, to lump Lincoln in with St. Augustine. As for Luther and Calvin, well, perhaps it is somewhat appropriate, if we consider their politics (Calvin believed in separation of Church and State?), but how much of a Christian was Lincoln, really?

Charles Taylor interviews

Templeton Prize Winner Taylor Talks About Spirituality in Modern Society (mp3)

The New Atheism and the Spiritual Landscape of the West: A Conversation with Charles Taylor (Part One of Three) by Ronald A. Kuipers (Parts two and three.)

CBC interview (from 2007)

Charles Taylor Resources

It's supposed to feel over 100 today, with actual temps in the mid-90s plus high humidity. I'm waiting at O'Neill for the CTRC to open (not until 3 P.M.), so I should be reading, but I'll finish some drafts for posts instead.

Charles Taylor is the author of Ethics of Authenticity, and Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. He is known as a communitarian, and his works do address the questions of individualism versus corporatism as well as altruism versus egoism. I have not really read either, though Ethics of Authenticity was used in several sections of Philosophy of the Person.
Is there such a thing as modernity, traceable to certain philosophical and ideological roots? Or are we just seeing the results of Original Sin? More and more I am leaning towards the latter. Ideas have consequences, but original sin + lack of proper legislation by the government can also have the same consequences, with a proper ideological foundation not being necessary to explain what is going on in a particular society or its development (or more appropriately, its decline).

Charles Taylor resources
Bibliography
wikipedia entry
"The Multifaceted Charles Taylor"
Faculty page at McGill University

I suppose his books are on my reading list, but not a priority. I'd prefer to read a more Aristotelian analysis.

It will be interesting to see the kind of papers that will be presented at the Center for Ethics and Culture conference in November, though I am not sure I will be in attendance.