Soc (2009) 46:199203 DOI 10.

1007/s12115-008-9178-1

BOOK REVIEW

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Harvard University Press, 2007. 776 pp. $39.95. ISBN-10: 0674026764; ISBN-13: 978-0674026766
Collin May

Published online: 31 January 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

There are few events in history that have imposed themselves so forcefully on humankind as modern secularism. Tracing the development and the coming-to-be of the secular is the task noted Canadian philosopher and public intellectual, Charles Taylor, sets for himself in his recent work, A Secular Age. The core of Taylor s effort is to understand what secularism is, but even more precisely, to understand the secular as an age, as something that happened, that wasnt always part of the landscape. In his introduction, Taylor remarks that the secular represents a break with all previous human history. It also represents a break between the West and all other contemporary societies. It is both a regional and a temporal phenomenon. It distinguishes itself from what came before and from what is occurring outside the Western world. Many intellectual histories have been written about the modern and the secular. It is Taylor s specific goal to distinguish his approach from these other genealogies of our contemporary life. In doing so, he unearths numerous skeletons secularism would prefer to keep buried. He holds a mirror up to our modern pretensions, forcing us to consider whether many of our vaunted achievements are not quite what we have hoped and thought them to be. But ultimately, its not altogether clear that Taylor breaks sufficiently from the orthodox story to give us the full contour of the modern malaise that he recounts. Still, there are many gems in the book that make it very much worth the effort.

C. May (*) #210, 1030 South Park Street, Halifax, NS B3H 2W3, Canada e-mail: collin70@telus.net

Setting out on his historical journey, Taylor makes clear from the outset what he is not doing. He is not interested in the separation of church and state as an institutional doctrine. Similarly, he is not attempting to explain the sociological decline in church attendance across the Western world. What he is looking for is a possibility. The secularism Taylor examines involves the conditions by which westerners can simply go about their lives indifferent to the religious. This involves a contrast. As Taylor sets the scene, humans, in all places, throughout the world, were permeable, by which he means they were susceptible to numerous external influences ranging from the political to the cosmic to the spiritual. These influences could conflict, they could cancel each other out, but they were constantly active, defining humankind according to a number of exterior criteria. By contrast, the modern secular individual is the prime example of the buffered self. This new creature, increasingly a product of his or her own making, protects itself from forces external, be they demons or disease, marauding warriors or malevolent monarchs. And it does so through a studied indifference to such forces, rendering them irrelevant, relegating them to a historical past. Given Taylor s present interest, he focuses on the spiritual, which is to say, he considers how modern western individuals can be wholly indifferent to things transcendent. But Taylor is not merely suggesting that we no longer believe in ghosts, miracles and a divine force, especially since many in the western world still do. Rather, as far as religion is concerned, it appears that those traditional sources of authority, obligating us from outside, are now optional, even for someone who would be spiritual. We have created a buffered self, but that self may still attempt to formulate some sort of spiritual life or set of beliefs articulated through the new possibilities the secular opens up.

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Before arriving at this point, however, it is significant to note that Taylor sets his history up against another narrative, prevalent in much of the literature on secularism. Probably the most common theme in secularism theories is that of liberation. Modern secularism is seen as a breaking out from the old model of existence where those external forces, mostly mythical and oppressive in nature, kept human flourishing in check. Whether were talking about Aristotelian metaphysics, transubstantiation or feudal overlords, the great chain of being that once kept us all in our varied places has been broken. What was hidden and suppressed, but always there, is now free to express itself without the need for homage to a burdensome past. So runs the theme of liberation. Taylor contests this story and what he views as a version of negative liberation, of something sloughed off. Rather, he argues for a conception of secularism that brings something new into the mix, with its newly constructed self-understandings and related practices. Taylor does not accept the more or less orthodox view that modern secularism is simply letting lose what was suppressed. Instead, it is an active labor that produces, or at least attempts to produce a wholly new situation with new possibilities. His story will make this clear. The beginning of Taylor s tale is situated, oddly enough, in fundamentally the same site as those orthodox histories he is seeking to challenge: in the Reformation. What will be different is what he draws out of this beginning. The Reformation is commonly considered the impetus for a rationalized challenge to the panoply of Roman Catholic authority, corruption and mysticism. It is the movement that brought the teetering structure of late medieval Christianity tumbling down. The list of reforms is commonplace, but for Taylor s purposes, what stands out is the movement toward a more uniform practice, specifically moral practice, throughout all ranks of the Christian faithful. Whereas before, it was the religious orders, sequestered in their cells, who dedicated themselves to a strict moral regime of denial, the Reformation would now spread that moral impulse to the whole of Christendom, with all ranks of society engaging in a moral purgation. The irony of this is that one of the things Luther and Calvin so disliked about the Catholicism of their day was the orders with their moral discipline. It was against this moralism that Luther and Calvin advanced the cause of justification by faith alone and, eventually, predestination. And yet, it was the very effort of reform that tore down the series of orders, privileges and ranks and diffused a simpler, more moral regimen throughout the Protestant faithful. But then, much of what angered the reformers was the corruption they saw in the orders, where license alternated with hypocritical confession, producing ever more corruption. At the same time, the ground for the advancement of the moral impulse was already prepared by the intellectual

rationalization of the late medieval period. Taylor refers here to the theological and philosophic speculations of men like Scotus and Occam, often credited with setting the West on the path to instrumental reason via nominalism. In an effort to secure the free will of God against the imposition of reason, especially Greek reason and its attendant notion of immutable natures, these thinkers are credited with commencing the dissolution of all those external natures before an all-powerful God willing as He pleases. Some thinkers, such as Etienne Gilson, have traced this movement even further back to the influence of Avicenna and medieval Islamic thought whereby God was seen as pure will unfettered by reason or nature. Precisely how influential these thinkers were in this regard is uncertain and perhaps not all that important. What does emerge in Taylor s presentation is the progressive destruction of various external forces and ranks under the pressure of willful moral force. The vast array of players acting in the world, according to their natural dispositions, is dissolving. Over against this, the will, originally Gods will but soon to be that of the individual, will confront this meaningless nature with an all-encompassing moral project of reform; a project that is inclusive, democratic, egalitarian and relentlessly violent toward anything that would impede its progress. We see then that the subtraction theory of negative liberation, as Taylor calls it, is actually a moral project. Moreover, it is a moral project that tends to rationalism over against traditional philosophic reason, and to universal norms as opposed to more classical forms of ethical prudence. This is a moralism that issues in what Taylor calls the disciplinary society. Economic efficiency, modesty and utility become virtues, displacing honor, courage and liberality. From this point on, Taylor s story winds its way through the various incarnations of the modern with which we are so familiar. Moving outside the religious sphere, secularism gains a foothold with thinkers such as Grotius and Locke. Taylor focuses on these two individuals for their efforts to invoke a natural law shorn of divine foundations. The father of modern international law (a very moralistic beast if there ever was one) and the great defender of revolution in the name of property rights, are cast as the originators of a universal justification for the extension of economic discipline as the moral force in the world. With these thinkers, rights become the immediate possession of each individual, cast in stone in the state of nature and redeemable against all political, religious and social forces. But according to Taylor, the possibility for indifference to these external forces does not fully take hold with these thinkers, with these early secularists. While their thought, especially in the case of Locke, is clearly contrary to notions of revelation and religious authority, Taylor insists

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that the deist world they created was more a roadmap for an influential elite than a full-scale effort to imbed the possibility of disbelief throughout western Europe. Certainly, Locke did attempt to employ what he saw as useful in Christian morality, but it would seem that his project, his moral project, was intended to displace Christianity and previous ethical codes with his own brand of universal utility. In any case, Taylor is probably correct to argue that it is only with the French Revolution that the full force of secular moralism unleashes itself on Europe. But prior to the French Revolution, modernity itself encounters dissenters in its midst, and here, no other thinker is more important than Rousseau. It was his critique of the modern world, with its banal universal moralism, that would launch the West into some of its most violent and raucous upheavals. What distinguished Rousseau was his steadfast dedication to this modern world. Despite his attacks on the bourgeois individual, despite his romantic invocations of community and republicanism, he never wanted to return to the ethical diversity of pre-modern life. He was as much a moralist, if not more so, than the earlier modern philosophers he so forcefully criticized. This point is significant because it demonstrates the expansion of the moral imperialism that attended the birth of secularism. Rousseau is often viewed as the source of so many subsequent attacks on established authority. He often appears as opposed to the dominant bourgeois morality, which is true enough. But what emerges from Rousseau is an equally pervasive morality. As Taylor notes, Rousseaus thought tended to evoke a reaction against the modern individual obsessed with economic efficiency and industrial discipline. Against this were cast common bonds of sociality and community broken by modern economic utility. These bonds generally were articulated in two ways: morally and aesthetically. On the one hand, Rousseau inspired a higher sense of moral purpose, emanating from the individual but pointing to a universal duty. Kant is clearly the main proponent of this approach, but Hegel and Marx are also key here. On the other hand, the rebellion against the bourgeois could take the form of an aesthetic, almost spiritual force. This was often more elitist but could also morph quickly into a kind of moral code as was the case with European romanticism. Ultimately, this internal critique of modernity would find its last and best champion in Nietzsche. Taylor notes that with Nietzsche, the moralism of modern, secular Europe comes under full attack. The universal moral imperative of Kant and the historical finality of Marx are taken to task. Nietzsche wraps this critique in a genealogy that leads us from the rationalism of Plato up to our modern predicament with its denial of the Dionysian force itself. Taylor refers to this as the immanent counter-Enlightenment which will

inspire such later thinkers as Heidegger, Bataille and Foucault. What we encounter in Nietzsche is, in many ways, the ultimate irony of modern secularism. Nietzsche engages in a radical debunking of the results of the modern moral will in the name of the will itself. As Taylor points out, Nietzsche challenged modern morality with its privileging of equality, happiness, the reduction of suffering, but he propounded a new ethic, one in which the moral as defined in Western modernity had no place. And here is the problem. Nietzsche was very much an ethical thinker. In fact, he was primarily an ethical thinker because he saw the moral imperialism of modernity as the single greatest threat to those few humans who truly sought to thrive. But he would not return to the pre-modern world or its ethical diversity. This was the crab crawling backward into the sand. As such, he was confronted with the problem of overcoming the modern moral world on the basis of modern tools, especially modern science. He saw the dilemma he faced and sought to take it on by invoking the eternal return that would always guarantee a return to the Nietzschean moment of clarity regarding the ethical. But what Nietzsche clearly saw, most of his followers lost sight of. The result is that today we are faced, as Taylor notes, with a series of Nietzschean inspired critics of modern society who turn their critique into a moral universal. This is our current predicament as Taylor sees it: secular modernity cannot escape its own moral imperialism, its unrelenting drive to subsume everything before itpolitics, family, religion, work, sexto its moral intransigence. Critical theorists, feminists, communitarians, neo-Kantians, utilitarians, positivists, whatever their inclination, all inevitably end up mired in self-righteous moralism propounding abstract moral absolutes at the same time as they deride the oppressive relativity of any ethical standards that do not satisfy their ideological presuppositions. And it is this conundrum that, according to Taylor, the dominant subtraction theory of secularism cannot comprehend. Worse, this theory prevents understanding and perpetuates the misconceptions that reinforce the moral stubbornness of modern movements. But why such confusion? Taylor points us to a perennial problem that modernity sought to deal with, but appears to have made worse: the role of the body. From the beginning, the Protestant reformers railed against the religious orders with their strict denials of bodily pleasure, including the whole notion of celibacy. They did this in part because they found it foolish to deny pleasures granted by God, but also because the denials seemed to issue in even worse forms of moral degradation and corruptionan earlier version of contemporary psychological explanations. So they freed up the body and tended to dissolve the impediments on pleasure, but that act itself was bound up with an even more extensive and more democratic moral discipline.

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Looking over the history of modernity, this same affirmation of the body, of the practical, of the utilitarian, of the active life, leading ultimately to the indulgence of pure pleasure and self-destruction, has been a continual theme. Taylor notes that so much of modernity has in fact been a sort of rationalized effort to liberate the bodily, the material, from the strictures of those numerous constraints that society, family, religion, community has placed on it. But as Taylor is arguing, this is not simply a liberation, it is not simply a freeing up of the material or the bodily, it is fundamentally a moral project that re-imposes harsher and harsher moral disciplines. Materialism is necessarily a moralism. Moreover, these disciplines are unmediated by more traditional ethical standards. The modern disciplines demand immediate realization. Taylor remarks that: We find these words surfacing again and again, slogan terms like freedom, rights, respect, non-discrimination, and so on. As slogans, they impose themselves on all aspects of our modern life, and are often employed as argumentstopping universals, without any consideration of the where and how of their application. Indeed, modern Christianity has itself bought into the slogans, often more interested today in self-actualization than salvation. If Taylor is correct, and a strong argument can be made that he is, there is the question as to how the West has ended up in this odd self-deception, and what should be done to escape from it? As noted Taylor locates much of the problem in the effort to rescue bodily existence, and materiality in general, from a transcendent notion of human purposes. But the rescue was achieved by turning the body into a completely mutable property; essentially, by rationalizing it. As against the various traditional rules and regulations concerning the body, and bodies interactions on the social and political level, modernity isolated the body from reason to free it from the various conflicting obligations placed on it in society. Body turns into pure matter, lacking form, subject only to universal rules of natural science. By contrast, its now contrary opposite, reason, was transformed into a rationalizing moral force that would impose its will on a demythologized body. All modern movements follow this epistemic-moral pattern as Taylor calls it. This is our contemporary predicament: our secular age is the history of the attempt, with all its turns and counter-turns, to instantiate the possibility of the buffered self. This is the history of the autonomous will asserting itself against external claims. Above all, it is the effort to reclaim the integrity of the body against transcendence. And yet it is this very effort that repeatedly and without fail reasserts a rationalized form of universal moralism. Today, that moralism takes the form of the uncompromising and unmediated demands of international law, human rights, equality. These are the instruments of the

contemporary willof the secularin what Taylor refers to as the age of authenticity. Having maneuvered through the economic disciplines of Locke, the moral reactions of Rousseau and the condemnations of Nietzsche, the contemporary West is left with the flat terrain of constricted intellectual materialism and the moral universalism of banal egalitarianism. But this is not ultimately supportable, and would certainly not satisfy many of the great thinkers of the modern age. So Taylor proposes something of a counter to this immanent obsession; his own proposal for dealing with this immanent moral fetishism. His source for an alternative begins, not surprisingly, with a thinker who remains the model of ethical prudence: Aristotle. Against the moral absolutes and extremes of modernity, Aristotle always appears as a sober, restrained and varied thinker, attuned to the subtleties of human existence that modern life seeks to submerge beneath abstractions. Taylor credits Aristotle with recognizing that events are unforeseeably various, and that there is more than one good. As against the modern propensity for universalism, Taylor suggests the common sense and subtlety of Aristotelian ethics, an ethics not mired in self-righteous preening and intellectual selfdeception. Still, Taylor does not follow out this Aristotelian inspiration. Instead, he returns to the modern complaint: that the body has not been given its due. His solution to this is not to stick with Aristotle or Greek philosophy generally, but to turn to Christianity and the Incarnation. In this ancient Christian doctrine, Taylor finds a notion of transcendence that can confront immanent moralism without destroying the bodily. But does this approach work? When we look closely at Taylor s version of the Incarnation we see one that is not unlike something we might find in an Hegelian inspired view of the Christian doctrine. Transposed from its origins in Christian revelation, the Incarnation becomes a tool for reconciling the transcendent with the bodily but without much of the baggage of historical Christianity. That Taylor has doubts about this history can be seen from his rather unfortunate dismissal of Augustine as a juridical thinker, a view inspired more by modern misinterpretations of Augustine than by the great man himself. Perhaps a figure closer to Taylor s heart would be the rather idealistic Origen. In any case, the Incarnation now becomes a source of transcendence not bound by materialist moralism. But it remains unclear exactly how it should fulfill this function apart from a rather abstract source of reconciliation for humankind. Ultimately, Taylor seems to feel this somewhat generalized Incarnation will satisfy the moderns: Locke, Rousseau and Nietzsche. It gives credence to the material, makes room for something beyond economic utility, while avoiding the violence we find in Nietzsche. And yet its doubtful

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that this would satisfy any of these great modern figures, not to mention orthodox Christians. It suffers from the very extremes it will try to overcome: in its effort to accommodate the bodily, it becomes too abstract from the everyday, whether it be the Lockean shopkeeper, the Christian devotee, the Rousseauean aesthete or the Nietzschean objector. This is a solution only a professor could love. Taylor s work did not have to take this turn, however. He himself suggested a broader approach through his reference to Aristotle. Aristotelian ethics provides an alternative to modern secularism precisely because it takes account of all the conflicting demands on human beings. It does not attempt to push them aside through abstractions, like the will, but takes them into account, reflecting them in the various political constitutions. And yet Taylor does not seem to follow up his insight on Aristotle, turning instead to a somewhat toothless Incarnation. Why he does so seems to become clear when we consider a problem we noted from the beginning. Taylor starts his history in a rather orthodox place with some orthodox presumptions, regardless of how innovative his use of these sources may be. For example, the dominant figures of the late medieval period and the Reformation are Scotus, Occam, Luther and Calvin. But what about a Dante or Marsilius? Where do Latin Averroists like Siger de Brabant fit into the picture? Similarly, can we really say that the ancient world was full of thinkers wedded to the great chain of being? The Platonic dialogues are shot through with intended contra-

dictions to meet the varied needs of the interlocutors. Similarly, the Aristotelian world is not one of natures simply realizing themselves, but a place where nature rarely, especially in the case of humans, obtains its ends; where things are short-circuited and common sense routinely serves as a better guide than universal propositions. In fact, this epistemic observation is the basis for the variation and diversity in Aristotelian ethics and politics. If any complaint can be made against this otherwise excellent book, it is that Taylor himself tacks too closely to the conventional version of events when it comes to the medieval and ancient periods. While he supplies us with innumerable insights and important challenges as regards modernity, his account tends to accept too much of the academic clichs about the pre-moderns. As a result, his attempt to counter the uniform moralism of modernity can itself read like a species of that uniformity. Still, Taylor has done impressive work dispelling some of the most cherished self-delusions of modern secularism, of moralism wearing the garb of liberation. And for that, this book is a welcome effort.

Collin May, a graduate of Harvard and the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), is currently completing his law degree at Dalhousie University. He has written numerous book reviews and serves on the editorial board of the Canadian online political magazine C2Cjournal.ca.