There is the Nobel Prize for various great achievements, and now there is the Berggruen Prize for philosophy. The first award, which comes with $1 million, was given to Charles Taylor.
Taylor, a Canadian thinker, is one of the most interesting, helpful, and Christian-friendly of all contemporary philosophers. (See this Cranach post.) A Catholic, though not of the Reformation-despising kind, Taylor has written provocative and insightful explorations of the self, identity, language, and morality. One of his biggest subjects, though, is the phenomenon of secularism, which he shows is not as simple as many of its adherents assume and which, far from doing away with religion, may drive people to try to find it again.
From Craig Calhoun, This Philosopher Has Reimagined Identity and Morality for a Secular Age | Huffington Post:
An enframing perspective neglects not only the constitutive role of language but also the power of imagination in shaping human life. This enables us to reach beyond what is immediately evident to our senses. We are able, for example, to form and act on aspirations for the future. Imagination, like language, also gives shape to the world. Much of “reality” exists in the way it does partly because of how it is imagined. This is not just a free-for-all of individual creativity; wishing does not make things so. But there are socially organized ways of imagining the world. Taylor describes several such “imaginaries” that help produce and reproduce the modern world: the idea of a generalized market is one of the most powerful. So is the idea of “the people” critical to democracy and also to legitimacy in other political systems. Business corporations and nations exist partially through the ways they are imagined.
Imagining modernity as a secular age is equally fundamental. This commonly involves what Taylor terms a “subtraction story.” Religion used to be a bigger part of human life and culture, but in the modern era, there has been progressive disenchantment; fewer people declare themselves believers; religion loses most of its public role; science replaces religion as the basis for authoritative knowledge. Taylor acknowledges these changes, but insists they can’t be well understood simply as subtractions that don’t entail transformation of culture more generally. Religion’s role changes as people reimagine what the world, human life and knowledge are like. How moderns understand personhood, moral obligations or the place of material well-being in a good life are all changed; religion is not simply subtracted from them.
One of the most dramatic changes is the rise of what Taylor calls “the immanent frame.” This is the notion that everything in the world is part of a natural order understandable without reference to anything outside itself and simply as a matter of causal relationships. This isn’t simply a truth modern people discovered; neither is it false. It is part of a secular social imaginary. It is one way of understanding and giving form to the world and human life. Within the immanent frame, ideas about transcendence are either errors or simply unnecessary to achieving empirically verifiable knowledge. This understanding of the world has proved enormously productive in the rise of modern science. It has been limiting in spiritual life. It has also shaped an approach to the environment as simply a matter of cost, effect, resources and use ― at odds with a notion of more transcendent value.
Indeed, within this immanent frame, values themselves tend to be understood simply as more or less arbitrary subjective states of individuals. Nature doesn’thave a value ― we either value it, or we don’t. Similarly, we may value human life more or less, but as a matter of cause-and-effect relationships, human beings don’t have intrinsic value. We see quickly that the immanent frame thus shaped not only the successes of modern science but also some of its dangerous moments. These may have been deviations from a more moral scientific ethos that includes ideas like not doing harm but these moral ideas generally come from outside the immanent frame. Today, the immanent frame is also challenged by the notion that human beings are radically transforming what seemed to be an entirely natural order ― whether through climate change or gene editing.
These are among the reasons why the secular age wasn’t simply the end of history so far as religion and spiritual life were concerned. Many people feel a need for a more spiritual compass to organize their personal lives and navigate the great transformations of our era. Some turn to renewal of older religions. Others become seekers exploring new forms of spiritual and moral engagement. There are so many, headed in so many different directions, that Taylor describes a “supernova.”
