Charles Taylor on the reality of values

"What is real is what you have to deal with, what won't go away just because it doesn't fit with your prejudices. By this token, what you can't help having recourse to in life is real, or as near to reality as you can get a grasp of at present. Your general metaphysical picture of "values" and their place in "reality" ought to be based on what you find real in this way. It couldn't conceivably be the basis of an objection to its reality." 

[...] 

"If we cannot deliberate effectively, or understand and explain people's action illuminatingly, without such terms as 'courage' or 'generosity', then these are real features of our world."

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), 59, 69

Liberalismens dilemma

[In Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self] he contends that the ethical-political pronouncements of our modern liberal selves involve quite high, universal standards of justice and benevolence, but that our disengaged understanding of human agency leaves us with no moral sources adequate to sustain the robust enactment of those standards. In short, “high standards need strong sources”.

Stephen K. White, “Weak Ontology: Genealogy and Critical Issues,” Hedgehog Review 7, no. 2 (2005): 24.

Taylor om Dawkins syn på tro och vetenskap

Charles Taylor skriver träffande i en fotnot till A Secular Age:

Dawkins’ reasons for believing that science can sideline religion hardly inspire confidence. They draw heavily on an oversimple distinction between “faith” and “science”. “A case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.” As for science, it “is free of the main vice of religion, which is faith.” But to hold that there are no assumptions in a scientist’s work which aren’t already based on evidence is surely a reflection of a blind faith, one that can’t even feel the occasional tremor of doubt. Few religious believers are this untroubled. 

Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Belknap, 2007. s. 835 not 27

Taylor om likheten mellan fundamentalisters och materialisters världsbild

The mechanical outlook which splits nature from supernature voids all this mystery. This split generates the modern concept of the “miracle”; a kind of punctual hole blown in the regular order of things from outside, that is, from the transcendent. Whatever is higher must thus come about through the holes pierced in the regular, natural order, within whose normal operation there is no mystery. This is curiously enough, a view of things shared between materialists and Christian Fundamentalists. Only for these, it provides proof of “miracles”, because certain things are unexplained by the normal course of natural causation. For the materialist, it is a proof that anything transcendent is excluded by “science”.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, s. 547

Rosenberg om det postsekulära samhället

Jag tror att Taylor här rör vid själva kärnan i det som vi kan kalla det postsekulära tillståndet. Här är det inte längre bara religiösa övertygelser och opinioner som kan sägas emanera ur ”irrationella” trosföreställningar. Också det sekulära förnuftet tvingas här rannsaka och begrunda de trosbaserade (utompolitiska) fundamenten för sin egen ”rationalitet”. I det postsekulära samhället är det offentliga förnuftet produkten av en fortlöpande kommunikation mellan såväl ”religiösa” som ”sekulära” trosuppfattningar. 

I varje fall har det blivit allt mera uppenbart att ett samhälles politiska och moraliska grundprinciper inte kan härledas ur politiken själv, än mindre ur vetenskapen eller logiken. Lika lite som de två kanske mest inflytelserika icke-religiösa moralsystemen i västerlandet, kantianismen (pliktmoralen) och utilitarismen (nyttomoralen) nödvändigtvis förmår övertyga också fullt sansade och klartänkande människor om sin inneboende ”rationalitet”. 

Vad både Habermas och Taylor i sista hand söker svaret på är hur de moraliska grundvalarna för demokratin och politiken ska kunna skapas och upprätthållas i ett samhälle präglat av såväl religiös som sekulär mångfald. Vad som skiljer de två filosoferna åt är gränsdragningen mellan Religion och Politik. Vad som förenar dem är övertygelsen om den potentiella fruktbarheten i mötet mellan de båda.

Göran Rosenberg ger i dagens SvD en liten grundkurs i begreppet "det postsekulära samhället". För en fortsättningskurs rekommenderas oblygt denna uppsats.

Taylor om religion och akademi

“I am not arguing some “post-modern” thesis that we are each imprisoned in our own outlook, and can do nothing to rationally convince each other. On the contrary, I think we can marshal arguments to induce others to modify their judgments and (what is closely connected) to widen their sympathies. But this task is very difficult, and what is more important, it is never complete. We don’t just decide once and for all when we enter sociology class to leave our “values” at the door. They don’t just enter as conscious premises which we can discount. They continue to shape our thought at a much deeper level, and it is only a continuing open exchange with those of different standpoints which will help us to correct some of the distortions they engender.

For this reason we have to be aware of the ways in which an “unthought” of secularization, as well as various modes of religious belief, can bedevil the debate. There is, indeed, a powerful such unthought operative: an outlook which holds that religion must decline either (a) because it is false, and science shows this to be so; or (b) because it is increasingly irrelevant now that we can cure ringworm by drenches; or (c) because religion is based on authority, and modern societies give an increasingly important place to individual autonomy; or some combination of the above. This is strong not so much because it is widely supported in the population at large—how widely seems to vary from society to society—but because it is very strong among intellectuals and academics, even in countries like the U.S.A. where general religious practice is very high. Indeed, the exclusion/irrelevance of religion is often part of the unnoticed background of social science, history, philosophy, psychology. In fact, even unbelieving sociologists of religion often remark how their colleagues in other parts of the discipline express surprise at the attention devoted to such a marginal phenomenon. In this kind of climate, distortive judgments unconsciously engendered out of this outlook can often thrive unchallenged.”


- Charles Taylor. A Secular Age, s. 428-429

The hydra of modernity

" ... I attempt a direct attack on the Hydra whose serpentine heads wreak havoc throughout the intellectual culture of modernity - in science, in criticism, in ethics, in political, in political thinking, almost anywhere you look. I call the Hydra "epistemology," which sounds rather unfair, because that´s the name of a problem area, and what I have in my sights must be something in the nature of a doctrine. But the name is deserved, in the sense that the philosophical assumption it designates gives epistemology pride of place. These are the assumptions that Decartes gave articulation to; central is the view that we can somehow come to grips with the problem of knowledge, and then later proceed to determine what we can legitemately say about other things: about God, or the world, or human life. From Descartes´s standpoint, this seems not only a possible way to proceed, but the only defensible way. Because, after all, whatever we say about God or the world represents a knowledge claim. So first we need to be clear about the nature of knowledge, and about what it is to make a defensible claim To deny this would be irresponsible.

I believe this to be a terrible and fateful illusion. It assumes wrongly that we can get to the bottom of what knowledge is, without drawing on our never-fully-articulate understanding of human life and experience. There is temptation here to a kind of self-possessing clarity, to which our modern culture has been almost endlessly susceptible. So much so that most of the enemies of Descartes, who think they are overcoming his standpoint, are still givining primacy of place to epistemology. Their doctrine about knowledge is different, even radically critical of Descartes, but they are still practicing the structural idealism of the epistemological age, defining their ontology, their views of what is, on the basis of a prior doctrine of what we can know."

- Charles Taylor. Philosophical arguments. Harward University Press, 1995. s. vii

Inget på TV?

För den som är sugen på välgjorda artiklar, intervjuer och radiodokumentärer med världens främsta teologer, religionsvetare och filosofer, rekommenderas ABC Radios sida om Religion & Ethics, och i synnerhet deras program Encounter.

Eller vad sägs om ett program om Augustinus och hans storverk Guds stad med bland andra John Milbank och Charles Mathewes? Skulle man inte vara sugen på kyrkofäder kan man istället välja en lång intervju med Charles Taylor om hans bok A Secular Age. Sidan uppdateras dagligen med nya artiklar och radioinslag.
Happy listening!!

Om immanens och transcendens

Alltid intressanta Cruciform Phronesis tipsade nyligen om att senaste numret av Modern Theology (26:3) innehåller flera artiklar som diskuterar Charles Taylors monumentala A Secular Age. Av det jag hunnit läsa hittills fastnade jag särskilt för Stanley Hauerwas och Romand Coles artikel, med dess synpunkter på Taylors användning av begreppsparet immenens/ transcendens:

We share Taylor's judgement that when the Christian faith is identified with a civilizational order, Christians loose sight of the full transformation to which Christians should be committed.
...
We worry however that Taylor's use of the immanent/trancendent duality may reproduce the habits of a Christianity that still longs to be a civilizational order. It does so just to the extent such a scheme can tempt us, Christian and non-Christian alike, to think that our primary concern is maintaining a place for trancendence. But that is to make immanence and trancendence free-standing concepts lacking Christological discipline. For Christians immanence first and foremost names that God became man that we might participate in the very life of God. So nothing can be more immanent than God with us. Trancendence, moreover, is not simply another name for William James' "more," but rather the other side of God's immanence. For Christians transcendens first and foremost is the acknowledgement that death could not hold him.

Amen!

Charles Taylor jämnar spelplanen ...

Dagens postsekulära text:

"Before proceeding farther, I should just say that this distinction in rational credibility between religious and non-religious discourse, supposed by (a) + (b), seems to me utterly without foundation. It may turn out at the end of the day that religion is founded on an illusion, and hence that what is derived from it less credible. But until we actually reach that place, there is no a priori reason for greater suspicion being directed at it. The credibility of this distinction depends on the view that some quite “this-worldly” argument suffices to establish certain moral-political conclusions. I mean “satisfy” in the sense of (a): it should legitimately be convincing to any honest, unconfused thinker. There are propositions of this kind, ranging from “2+2=4″ all the way to some of the better-founded deliverances of modern natural science. But the key beliefs we need, for instance, to establish our basic political morality are not among them.

The two most widespread this-worldly philosophies in our contemporary world, utilitarian and Kantianism, in their different versions, all have points at which they fail to convince honest and unconfused people. If we take key statements of our contemporary political morality, such as those attributing rights to human beings as such, say the right to life, I cannot see how the fact that we are desiring/enjoying/suffering beings, or the perception that we are rational agents, should be any surer basis for this right than the fact that we are made in the image of God."

Läs hela inlägget här!

Charles Taylor reder ut begreppen ...

"The state can be neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish; but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist, nor Kantian, nor Utilitarian. Of course, the democratic state will end up voting laws which (in the best case) reflect the actual convictions of its citizens, which will be either Christian, or Muslim, etc, through the whole gamut of views held in a modern society. But the decisions can’t be framed in a way which gives special recognition to one of these views. This is not easy to do; the lines are hard to draw; and they must always be drawn anew. But such is the nature of the enterprise which is the modern secular state. And what better alternative is there for diverse democracies?"
(...)
Before proceeding farther, I should just say that this distinction in rational credibility between religious and non-religious discourse, supposed by (a) + (b), seems to me utterly without foundation.
(...)
If we take key statements of our contemporary political morality, such as those attributing rights to human beings as such, say the right to life, I cannot see how the fact that we are desiring/enjoying/suffering beings, or the perception that we are rational agents, should be any surer basis for this right than the fact that we are made in the image of God. Of course, our being capable of suffering is one of those basic unchallengeable propositions, in the sense of (a), as our being creatures of God is not, but what is less sure is what follows normatively from the first claim."

Charles Taylor - Secularism and Critique

Habermas vs. Charles Taylor

Missa inte tillfället att lyssna till en högaktuell debatt mellan två av vår tids kanske största filosofer. Jürgen Habermas och Charles Taylor diskuterar religion och sekularitet här.

Charlers Taylor om sekularism

“We think that secularism (or laïcité) has to do with the relation of the state and religion; whereas in fact it has to do with the (correct) response of the democratic state to diversity." An argument justified by reference to Marx or Kant, he suggested, is no more universal than one justified by reference to scripture.

- Charles Taylor (från anförande vid konferensen Rethinking Secularism: The Power of Religion in the Public Square

Obildad Bard

- De kristna värderingar som fortfarande finns i delar av lagstiftningen ska ersättas av de universella värderingarna, säger Alexander Bard.

Jaha, suckar jag och undrar: Universella värderingar, vad katten skulle det för något egentligen? Värderingar som alla är överens om? Värdingar som inte har sina rötter i någon specifik tradition? Oavsett, så önskar jag lycka till i det fortsatta sökandet!

För övrigt borde upplysningsfundamentalister som Bard läsa lite Charles Taylor:

"The state can be neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish; but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist, nor Kantian, nor Utilitarian. Of course, the democratic state will end up voting laws which (in the best case) reflect the actual convictions of its citizens, which will be either Christian, or Muslim, etc, through the whole gamut of views held in a modern society. But the decisions can’t be framed in a way which gives special recognition to one of these views. This is not easy to do; the lines are hard to draw; and they must always be drawn anew. But such is the nature of the enterprise which is the modern secular state. And what better alternative is there for diverse democracies?"