One of the main arguments of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is that people, at least modern secular Westerners, have come routinely to think that the world as it is must be all there is. The contrast between immanence and transcendence is thus one of Taylor’s main organizing themes. Immanence locates both our sense of reality and our sense of the good within the world around us; transcendence gives us a sense of something beyond. Taylor develops this in conjunction with a notion of “fullness” to try to evoke what it means to live in more constant engagement with that which is beyond the immediately given, the spiritual which might infuse nature, for example, or the Divine which might lift morality above a notion of ethics as mere fairness.
But in trying to make clear the distinctively religious senses of transcendence, I think Taylor narrows the notion a bit. I think this actually obscures important aspects of religious experience as well as the possibilities for transcendence outside religion. Moreover, I think Taylor himself offers us tools for thinking about transcendence in this more multidimensional way.
In A Secular Age, and in much of his other work of recent decades, Taylor runs in effect three parallel and mutually informing arguments. One is about the narrowing of the self to a being of mere self-interest – or rather a narrowing of thinking about the self, since Taylor is at pains to point out that even while utilitarian theories have grown so have richer ideas of the person and human potential. A second is about the flattening of the notion of good, so that instead of having a strong idea of “the good” that gives order to our moral lives and aspirations – what Taylor calls a moral horizon or a higher good – we often think in terms simply of many goods, all in principle quantitatively comparable. And the third is about the importance of transcendence vs. immanence, of the difference between seeing “this world” as all there is, and of having a sense of something more.
By setting the three arguments alongside each other, and trying to integrate them more, we can enrich the idea of transcendence. Specifically, we can see that each evokes an idea of transcendence: transcending mere self-interest and more limited notions of the self is among other things an occasion for self-transformation. In other words, this is not simply thinking differently about a self that remains unchanged. We are actually able to change who we are – albeit not often radically – to make more of ourselves than what we find on initial self-examination. Similarly, commitment to a higher good necessarily includes a transcendence of mere goods.
Taylor himself articulates three senses of transcendence, three dimensions in which we go “beyond”: a good higher than human flourishing (such as love in the sense of agape), a higher power (such as God), and extension of life (or even “our lives”) beyond the “natural” scope between birth and death (summarized on p. 20). He is clearly concerned to bring out what is distinctive to a religious rather than a secular orientation. But let me suggest the value of seeing the transcendent as including what Taylor lists but not limiting our notion of “going beyond” to these senses.
The easiest to grasp, partly because Taylor has so wonderfully articulated it, is the notion of transcendence built into the idea of self-transformation. We can, as he put it in Sources of the Self, want to have better wants. In this phrase he captures both remaking the self and the importance of a notion of higher good. The higher good may or may not be backed by a higher power (and as discussions of Durkheim by Taylor and Bellah in this blog suggest, the higher power may or may not be Divine). It may not even transcend our selves in all senses – as the Aristotelian pursuit of excellence calls for transcending an initial state of the self in pursuit of a better one. The higher good may transcend human flourishing without transcending all senses of “nature” (as Taylor’s references to Gaia suggest). But – and this is crucial – many kinds of commitment to human flourishing already transcend the narrower sense of self which Taylor thinks has become more common in a secular age. To really order our lives by an ideal of improving the human condition is already to be oriented to transcending that condition as we found it.
This approaches a second sense of transcendence, the transcendence of the self embodied in commitment and connection to others. This may be love (which is already more than simply valuing fairness or most other notions of a merely ethical universalism). The Christian notion of agape situates this as participation in God’s love for humanity, but we need not understand love this way for it to be transcendent. Moreover, the transcendent aspect of social relations is not grasped simply by altruism. It is not necessarily an orientation to others rather than self, but includes the transformation of self that comes through opening ourselves to noninstrumental social relationships. We transcend the sense of ourselves as individually complete and necessarily who we already are not only in personal relationships but in larger groups, including movements which work for larger social transformation. To say that there is transcendence of self in relationships with and commitment to others, thus, may point to a more differentiated notion of society than the Durkheimian whole.
And this points us to the third sense of still-earthly transcendence, active participation in history. “The world as it is” is an ahistorical phrase. The world as we find it is inevitably subject to change, and we may shape that change in various smaller or larger ways. The sense of possibility this can open up invites a certain “fullness,” an orientation to a higher good, a sense of participation in something that will live beyond our natural lives. The history in which we participate is potentially, as Hannah Arendt stressed, world-making. It may involve revolutionary transformations and enduring institutions. But this orientation to history need not be either revolutionary or utopian to be transcendent. What is crucial is the capacity to envision history as more than mere change, as transformation in which we may participate.
So, there is transcendence in self-transformation, in relationships with others, and in the effort to make history. None of this negates the religious senses of transcendence Taylor describes – nor the extension of a “spiritual”, quasi-religious attitude in understanding nature itself as sacred. Indeed, these may coincide and reinforce each other. Faith in God may make faith in other people easier, may make the struggle for a better future more sustainable. Conversely, though, the transcendence of self in relationships with others may also help to sustain faith in God.
More generally, it seems important to be attentive to several dimensions in which it is possible to transcend resignation to ourselves and to the world as we find them.
But the point is that those very ideas—“going beyond” in your various senses—themselves have a history in which these various senses of “going beyond” are linked together in various ways, starting with many of the dissident groups persecuted by the Church in the 13th century (Waldensians and others), through the Franciscan Spirituals with their doctrine of personal self-abnegation and historical development, the Lollards and their continental cousins, and via Hegel (see his early work “On the Positivity of the Christian Religion”), down through various types of Marxists and beyond. And this is precisely the pattern of ideas that Taylor systematically leaves out of his story, with important implications.
(His asides about the dissidents are sometimes amusing, for instance when he lists Marx between Wagner and Berlioz as one of the great prophetic figures of the 19th century; sometimes almost contemptuous, as when he tells us four different times that the Fourth Lateran Council required annual auricular confession, but fails to mention even once its role in promoting the extermination of dissidents within Europe—“Catholics who have girded themselves with the cross for the extermination of the heretics shall enjoy the indulgences and privileges that are granted to those who go in defence of the Holy Land”—as if this was something beneath notice, compared to administrative reform).
It is bad enough that, as Wendy Brown noted, Taylor completely leaves out of his story “every stripe of outsider to Latin Christendom…” an omission that she notes has “consequential politics” relating for instance to “its imagined opposite in Islamic theocracy”. My additional point is that Taylor’s “story” also leaves out of serious consideration the ideas of the major internal dissident groups, and their heirs in the modern world, and needless to say, this also has “consequential politics”. And not only consequential politics, but a deadening effect on thought.
Because how does Taylor suggest we imagine working together in society? The story, to tell it in less than 880 pages, seems to go like this: He thinks the structured medieval cosmos has been flattened out so that the structure now has a uniformly instrumental sense, helping perhaps to explain the “hidden hand” of neoliberalism; that a fragment of the doctrine of charity has been flattened out so that it is now this fitful requirement of “universal benevolence”; that medieval agape was divided into reason and feeling, a division against which the Romantics and the students of 1968 have protested. And so on. In essence what Taylor sees are the scattered body-parts of his exploded christian culture, preserved and processed piecemeal, as it were, within the institutions of the pre-modern and modern state, and he shows how taking them as they lie is flat and unsatisfactory in so many ways, calling out as they do (for him) for the something of “transcendence”, for whatever that may mean to him.
But there was another body of ideas in Latin christendom that made its way to the secular age, although not with any kind of help from constituted authority: It was based originally on ideas of self-abnegation and the rejection of devotion to external goods and practices (the latter a particularly important point in the world-view of the victims of Lateran IV). And very importantly, many adherents of this culture thought of themselves as working hand in hand with history (initially providential history, later economic history) for a better world. So that history and collective moral commitment weren’t really two different things, but two aspects of the same thing.
I think, for example, the proponents of fundamental changes in our attitudes to consumption and the natural environment today are in some ways inheritors of this line of thinking, and this generates an entirely different picture of how we could or should be working together in society—possibly along some of the lines that Craig Calhoun indicates.
But I think if someone were to write the anti-Taylor version of A Secular Age, it would be pretty clear that the crucial distinction generally turns out to be not between religion and not-religion (or some wonderfully ambiguous “transcendence”), but rather between that which is generally amenable to currently constituted authority, and what is not.
Moreover, it seems to me that the dissident tradition, with its origins in self-abnegation, and its later “dialectic” character, offers room for some kind of dialogue with traditions of other cultures, in contrast to Taylor’s obscurantist “itineraries to the Faith” (see his chapter called “Conversions”) which clearly offers none. A big and difficult issue, but surely worth mentioning.
Of course it is possible this is the whole idea: namely development of a reactionary, inward-looking ideology dressed up in a way suitable for eventual use in the defence of the West against its enemies in the rest of the world. I’m sure it isn’t that, but then again, why else would you put up Lateran IV, the PATRIOT Act of 1215, as a model of “reform” in the 21st century without mentioning a word about the victims, Islamic or domestic ?
If we periodise the ‘modern’ world as starting from the late (not early) renaissance, as Stephen Toulmin does, then we can see that this narrow and artificial refuge from the cosmos breeding as it did ‘intellectualism’ and gradually an unfolding but hardening ‘scientism’, then we can, thankfully with hindsight though painfully see that this, supposedly ‘universal’ world, not only is not the world ‘as it is’ but is a stifling and necrophilic prison that we have locked ourselves into for 300 years. The triumphalist cry of the technocrats and modernizers is absurd when we look at the destruction of humanity, virtue and cosmos that it has left in its wake. Leaving Modernity behind is, truly, a huge transformation of life quite markedly unlike the last 300 years of history, but people will find it difficult to eschew the habits and assumptions of so long a ‘civilisation’. Religion itself will be transformed as well, though there will be continuities too. Perhaps the greatest constraint will be making our way back inside nature and humility, and out of the false transcendental of secular salvation through science, technology and domination!
Reading Taylor’s impressive body of work, culminating in his immensely thought-provoking A Secular Age, I too am prompted to explore ways in which our understandings of transcendence might be broadened. Like Craig Calhoun I am convinced that “Taylor himself offers us tools for thinking about transcendence in this more multidimensional way”, one which not only reveals “important aspects of religious experience [but also] the possibilities for transcendence outside religion”. While Calhoun is interested in the implications of the transformative possibilities of both self and world as forms of (non-divine) transcendence, I want to point in a rather different direction, one which would involve a re-evaluation of earlier – and frequently discredited – ideas about what might be called transcendent mind.
Discussing some of the earlier sections of Taylor’s book with a group of colleagues well versed in modern social, philosophical and anthropological work on the dialogical and intersubjective negotiation or construction of meaning and modern personhood, I was nonetheless struck by the ways in which for many of us the sticking point in Taylor’s arguments had much less to do with his somewhat difficult to maintain radical distinction between buffered and porous selves, and much more to do, at least for the secular humanists among us, with our resistance to the idea that there might be something, even something non-divine, which genuinely transcends our individual minds. We all pointed to an overwhelming sense that, buffered or porous, the mind – if not isolated within the skull (we are after all non-Cartesians these days) – is confined within our individually embodied, organic selves (bounded by our skins as it were). In some absolutely basic, almost instinctual way, we all baulked at the contention that our own cognition, thoughts, emotions, consciousness and the ways in which we experience the world, however much they may be influenced by social experience, could ever be anything but private, unique and interior to our own selves. After all, it is a basic presupposition of even the most meaning-oriented student of modern cultural anthropology, a presupposition I note that is shared by many neuroscientists, that we can never really ‘know’ what’s in someone else’s mind, we can never truly experience someone else’s consciousness. So much for Jonathan Edwards! Even posing this intense private experience of selfhood as a problem in need of explanation was seen as unproductive. It is one of those things that “just is”.
Taylor’s book, of course, represents a particularly sophisticated response to precisely this question, locating as it does the emergence of this intensely private form of selfhood in the religious and cultural transformations associated with the rise of what might be called post-Protestant modernity (although in my own case it may have more to do developments in modern secular Judaism). And at least some anthropologists are convinced that radically different forms of personhood still prevail in other cultures. These are important arguments. They may clarify for example why it may be easier for people who live in small, relatively stable, face-to-face communities to think of them selves as part of something larger than it is for those who live in deterritorialised, highly differentiated ‘communities’ where spatial mobility is the order of the day (perhaps mind reading is less of a circus trick among the former). And yet long experience of research among at least some contemporary Southeast Asian peoples makes me skeptical about the radical dichotomization of modern and non-modern or western and non-western selfhood that these narratives seem to take for granted.
And yet I remain convinced that it makes as much sense to speak of such properties of mind as cognition, emotion and even consciousness as transcending the boundary between an inner and an outer self as it does to fall back on the atomistic primacy of some supposedly private, inner experience of selfhood, an assumption be it said that pervades even such notions as ‘intersubjectivity’, which still give priority to pre-formed individual subjects who only subsequently become involved in social interaction. Aware of some of the obvious problems with notions like the spirit of history, ‘primitive’ or ‘group’ minds, or even conscience collective (which Durkheim was forced to abandon in favour of the far more innocuous-sounding collective representation), I am encouraged to continue arguing for the resurrection of some sort of notion of transcendent mind not because of divine revelation (although the work of people like Taylor makes me far more appreciative than I have ever been of the importance of religion for the majority of the world’s people) but rather because of developments in disciplines ranging from psychology to linguistic philosophy and philosophy of mind to modern neuroscience and even to some extent to post-Einsteinian theoretical physics.
The argument against any notion of a group mind which transcends singular persons which at least I always found the most persuasive was that it seemed impossible for it to have any physical or material basis. This is what permitted us for example to dismiss Durkheim’s ‘conscience collective’ as ‘reification’. An expert in none of the disciplines mentioned above, I have nonetheless found in such things as Wittgenstein’s critique of private language, in the writing of deconstructive philosophers like Vattimo as well as the philosophical ‘externalist’ accounts of cognition and even consciousness, in the discovery by some neuroscientists of both the amazing plasticity of the brain and its emergent rather than its genetically or otherwise predetermined qualities (as well as their failure at least so far to find the site of consciousness in individual brains, and hence their failure to demonstrate at all convincingly Crick’s famous assertion that the mind is nothing but a collection of flesh and electrical impulses), and in the almost total deconstruction of Newtonian understandings of absolute space, locality and of abstract, homogeneous and one directional time (such notions of space and time being for Taylor the other two central components of the experience of secular humanism) by 20th century physicists more than enough to counter the supposedly materialist or naturalist critiques of notions such as “collective consciousness” that I have heard from teachers and colleagues over the years.
Unfortunately it seems social scientists, philosophers, and natural scientists interested in such problems of mind rarely seem able to talk to eachother. The nearest thing to such a conversation that I am aware of takes place on Jonah Lehrer’s excellent weblog, The Frontal Cortex. But here cultural anthropology and sociology, and hence issues such as culture and intersubjectivity, are notably underrepresented. If Taylor’s work were to stimulate this kind of cross-disciplinary discussion it would, I think, be a true tribute to the collective power of his thinking.