“For Taylor,” writes John Patrick Diggins in The New York Times Book Review, “belief is not what science finds but what religion hopes for. Yet, in the larger perspective of intellectual history, the validity of belief may turn less on the clash of science and religion than on a concept of a deity in all its paradoxes….But Taylor seems uninterested in explaining the ways of God, and he argues that religion needs no justification on the basis of its good works while secularization, which some thinkers argue is necessary for tolerance, endangers the religious values that may save us from the temptations of our selfish desires.”
“To see the sacred within the profane,” Diggins concludes, “to derive God from the sentiments of society, does little to relieve us of Weber’s secularized world where politics is no longer an ethical calling and religion no longer an ascetic ideal. Taylor may locate the drama of the soul in society, but the meaning and mystery of God remain as elusive as the enigma of existence and religious morality becomes little more than social convention. There are many reasons to read the profound meditations in A Secular Age, but waiting for God to show up is not one of them.”
Read the entire review.
I must admit that I had a hard time understanding this review. In fact, I feel as if Harvard University Press must have sent John Patrick Diggins a different version of the book than they sent to me.
To begin with, Diggins writes as if Taylor’s book is a polemic—that Taylor takes sides (sides with which Diggins clearly disagrees). And yet my own occasional frustration with A Secular Age has been the exact opposite, namely that the argumentative thread gets lost amidst the wealth of information and commentary. Is Taylor arguing against “secularism” (a word, by the way, that Diggins elides with secularization)? I don’t think so—according to the book itself, arguing against the secular age would be like arguing against oxygen. We—all of us—live in a secular age, like it or not; the intellectual task is figuring out what this means, not bemoaning it.
Likewise, I read Taylor’s argument against subtraction stories somewhat differently than Diggins does. He writes, for example, that “Jefferson subscribed to the subtraction theory of history that Taylor denies.” Well, sure. Lots of people—including most enlightenment-era intellectuals like Jefferson and most sociologists of religion until quite recently—have subscribed to that theory. But that fact alone doesn’t count for or against Taylor’s argument that subtraction stories miss the contours of secularization precisely because they define religion in advance in a historically particular way.
Diggins also seems bothered by the fact that the book is not theological enough—“Taylor seems uninterested in explaining the ways of God,” he writes at one point—which seems like a weird complaint given that he also apparently thinks that the book is driven too much by Taylor’s own theology.
And throughout, Diggins seems to have mis-read Taylor’s tone. Arguments that are specific to the particular outlook that Taylor is describing are ascribed to Taylor himself, for example in the discussions of design. Granted, again, that Taylor’s tone can be a bit difficult to track, and that it changes across the book, I still have a hard time seeing how a careful reader could miss Taylor’s basic, historicist, intellectual effort to come to terms with modernity on its own terms, from the inside. That means offering a first-person view—but that is different from Taylor’s view. To miss this is like confusing a novelist with her main character.
I found Diggins’ review rambling and inconclusive. I am not sure he has caught Taylor’s point, which is not really a very new one. As a religion of Incarnation, Christianity has always located the mystery of God “in, with and under” (Luther’s words I think) the elements of this world, of ordinary life if you will. The universe itself is a sacrament.
Of course philosophy cannot lead us to God, nor can theology for that matter. Jesus’ parables are a good example of where to look for God, mystery and transcendence: in family tensions, acts of generosity, reversals of expectation. Jesus directed his listeners’ attention to this world around them (the “secular world”).
Taylor does us a great service by including the erotic as well as the moral dimensions of life as vehicles of God, something that—alas—Christianity has often forgotten. And when Diggins complains that after reading Taylor, “…the meaning and mystery of God remain as elusive as the mystery of existence,” well of course. May they always remain elusive.
Why I wonder does Diggins call “classical republicanism” a “dubious historical source.” Just what is dubious about it?
As the author, 42 years ago, of a book called The Secular City in which I said God was not dead but present in the “saeculum,” I think that what we are living through is not best understood as “secularization” but as a massive transformation of religiousness, in which what Robert Bellah once called “the cognitive fallacy” is fading fast, and the ethical/ political and aesthetic become—once again—the best windows onto transcendence/God. Taylor hints at this once or twice. I had hoped in 874 pages he might have said a bit more.
John Patrick Diggins’ review managed to make Taylor’s heavy, plodding prose seem positively sprightly and crystalline by comparison. In addition to his hackneyed style and hop-scotch organization, the review is rife with oddities such the claim that Descartes was a Calvinist (someone should have told Pascal) or that Taylor consorts with “postmodernist thinkers” (apparently CUNY is still haunted). Rather than reviewing Taylor, Diggins is actually peddling his own forthcoming book, because little of what he says sounds like the “Secular Age” that I read. Instead, Diggins has created Taylor in his own image.
In fact, Diggins misses the core argument of the book. As I see it, Taylor is actually articulating a new secularization thesis that also functions as a criticism of tired, triumphalistic versions that confidently predicted the steady withering of religion in our “modern” world. On Taylor’s account, secularity or secularization should not be merely identified with a diminishment in religious belief or the decline of religious observance. Rather, a “secular” age is one in which belief in God is no longer axiomatic. The shift that gave rise to secular modernity was a shift in the plausibility conditions of society such that even religious believers recognize the contestability of religious belief. In this respect, Europe (with little public religious observance) and the United States (rife with public religiosity and high religious participation) are both secular insofar as religious belief is considered one option among others. This shift in plausibility conditions makes possible the emergence of an “exclusive humanism” that, for the first time, imagines human flourishing without reference to transcendence. And whereas Taylor is critical, it seems to me, of this “exclusive humanism,” Diggins wants to suggest that Taylor hails it as the new religion. Again, I think this review gives us Diggins, not Taylor.
Because of its hideous prose and its failure to track the core argument of the book, readers of Diggins’ review might miss the fact that Taylor’s book is, in fact, essential reading. I find myself baffled as to how someone like Diggins—whose prose is about as winsome as barbed wire, and whose analysis holds about as much water as said barbed wire—could end up reviewing one of the most important books of a generation in one of the most significant forums of public discussion. The Times can do much better.
This is a very minor point, but I’d be interested to hear more about what James K.A. Smith finds ‘heavy’ or ‘plodding’ in Taylor’s prose; he’s long been one of my favorite philosophical writers. While Bernard Williams set the standard for me in terms of elegance of writing and argument, I would describe Taylor’s writing as quite straightforward. Moreover, his tone is conversational and engaging rather than stentorian or overly portentous (this should not be underrated as a writerly achievement, given the subject matter)—‘spritely’ seems quite an apt description of the Taylorian style, whether in comparison to Diggins or straight up.
Granted, just this week I took part in a reading group (it included posters and readers of this blog) in which we puzzled over an inexplicable number of copyediting errors and argumentative hiccups; nonetheless, longtime readers of Taylor’s work will encounter in this newest work a ‘voice’ that is familiar in its engagement and generosity.
Jay: I agree that Taylor is much more readable than most philosophers! His style tends to be almost conversational and is not dominated by specialist jargon and shop talk. My point was perhaps more literary: I think _A Secular Age_ is just a tad indulgent, as if Taylor’s editor was a little too “wow”-ed by Taylor’s erudition and thus hesitant to come down with a heavy editorial hand. Of course I still think it’s a landmark book, but I do find myself wondering what it would have looked like it it was about 250 pages shorter. (This might be because I was so taken with _Modern Social Imaginaries_, which I now regularly use in my teaching.)
As Colin Jager already covered the main point about Diggins’s review that I’d have wanted to pursue, I am left with little more to add. Jager notes that Diggins lodges a “weird complaint” in simultaneously suggesting that there isn’t enough god in A Secular Age and yet, at the end of his review, mentions with disapproval Taylor’s own fairly thick (Christian) theology. Would that it were the case that, as Diggins puts it, Taylor had left more “knowledge of God . . . off the menu.” I wonder if perhaps the inconsistency in Diggins’s review between his saying that there isn’t enough god and yet there is too much (of the wrong kind) might point to an inconsistency in Taylor’s account.
Much of the focus of the Diggins review, as others have already pointed out, is on secularization rather than secularism. Diggins asserts that Taylor’s quarrel is with the latter, but Diggins seems to describe the former. As I understand it, one of Taylor’s primary intentions is to displace the emphasis on the retreat of god and to examine instead how the conditions of possibility for religious belief have necessarily changed in secular late modernity.
If the conditions of possibility for faith have in fact changed so drastically with the advent of the secular age, then, for me, Taylor’s inconsistency is that he does not apply this drastic reconditioning to his own knowledge of god. Considering how different is the secular age from the world of 1500 CE, I wonder why Taylor’s own thick Christian theology doesn’t show itself to have been necessarily and dramatically marked by the very conditions he describes.
And so I want to turn the review’s last sentence upside down. Diggins ends with the following: “There are many reasons to read the profound meditations in ‘A Secular Age,’ but waiting for God to show up is not one of them.” Diggins means, of course, that we ought to have been waiting for God to show up, and therefore Taylor’s nearly godless book (according to him) will have disappointed us. I think, however, that there is a good deal of waiting for god in Taylor’s book—too much. En attendant God: but the waiting is more eager, optimistic, and expectant than I find palatable. (I take my cue instead from Samuel Beckett: the kind of waiting in “En attendant Godot” tarries with the possibility of being deceived.)
So, as it turns out, there are indeed many reasons to read A Secular Age, and waiting—undeceived—for God to show up really is one of them.
James K. A. Smith writes:
“This shift in plausibility conditions makes possible the emergence of an “exclusive humanism” that, for the first time, imagines human flourishing without reference to transcendence.”
As I think about how to jump into this fascinating discussion, and Taylor’s sizable new book, I want to ask a question: by what criteria is this vision of humanism without transcendence really new? It seems to me that it is perhaps the only version of humanism we currently possess. It is there in Derrida and in the later texts of existentialism (Sartre and Camus), but it also there much earlier in Nietzsche. Still earlier versions of this same idea are detectable in Sade. Right now may be the most obvious historical moment for the popular advent of existence without transcendence, but the idea itself has a venerable tradition, and I worry that Taylor is trying to arrogate it for himself.