How Much a Philosopher Can Do on a Secular Age by Fergus Kerr

HOW MUCH CAN APHILOSOPHER DO?moth_1610 321..336

FERGUS KERR, OP

How much can a philosopher do, in a secular age, to identify aspects of lifethat those of us who remain appreciative of the sacred would regard asworthwhile? Should philosophers do more than lay out the deep-seateddifferences that divide people, in a multicultural society, trying to do justiceto all sidesand leave it at that? One interesting line of criticism of CharlesTaylors work, from one corner in the philosophical world, is that his philo-sophical analysis is slanted regrettably in favour of Christian theism.

From Sources of the Self to A Secular Age

If perhaps not quite the book promised at the end of Sources of the Self, ASecular Age is clearly a sequel. In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argued thattheorists of personal identity, from Hobbes and Locke to John Rawls andRonald Dworkin, neglect to attend to the bonds by which the individual istied to others in community life. It comes to seem as if life choices are entirelyup to the individual, at least in ideal circumstances, and that mine are as goodas yours, all are equal in value, and vulnerable to the charge of being some-what arbitrary. Against this, Taylor makes a strong case for the presence inordinary everyday moral life of something like Platos idea of the Goodnotthat this is, or needs often to be, much acknowledged. A persons iden-tityso the argument runsis dened by the bonds that constitute thecontext within which one has to determine from case to case what is goodwhat, ideally, the good thing to do would be, and what, at any rate, would beintolerably evil.

A Secular Age carries the story further, beyond the sovereignty of the Goodto the role of the transcendent in constituting a persons identity. Given that

Fergus Kerr, OPUniversity Catholic Chaplaincy, 24 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, SCOTLAND/[email protected]

Modern Theology 26:3 July 2010ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

we in Western-style liberal-democratic societies inhabit a supposedlysecularpost-Christianculture, the rst thing is to reconstruct how wegot here. Accordingly, Taylor re-tells the story of secularization in themodern West: disenchantment of the medieval world that contained relicsand wood sprites; withdrawal of religious faith into the individuals heador heart at the Reformation; the advance of deism at the Enlightenment; andthe disappearance of this distant and increasingly pallid deity in the courseof nineteenth-century doubt and agnosticism.

Taylor, however, differs from the well-known sociological theorists ofsecularization, in that he does not accept, as they usually do, that thehuman aspiration to religion is gradually dying out. True enough, in asecular society, in contrast to medieval Christendom or a theocraticIslamic society today, we can engage fully in politics, for example, withoutencountering the sacred. Church and state are ofcially separate: the excep-tions, as in England and Scandinavia, are so low-key and undemanding asnot really to constitute exceptions. On the other hand, Taylor contends,while the panoply of the sacred has largely been expelled from the publicrealm, there is plenty of evidence on the ground of a lively desire torespond to some transcendent reality, however thinly conceived, and ofcourse independent of church-going.

Taylor strives to lay out what it takes to go on believing in God, inthe absence of any equivalent to the supportive cultural, imaginative andintellectual surroundings in which the effective presence of the sacred washitherto quietly embeddedour social imaginary, as he calls it. This issomething much deeper, murkier and more diffused than philosophicaltheories or even thought-out positions. There is, as he puts it, a largelyunstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, withinwhich particular features of our world show up for us in the sense that theyhave. When we turn our attention to things at this level we nd traces,vestiges, anticipations, and premonitions of what may fairly be regarded asthe sacred. People who have little or no explicit religious belief are moved toknow of dedicated believers, such as Mother Teresa, Pope John XXIII andPope John Paul II (Taylors examples). His repeated references to the effects ofPrincess Dianas death on (some) people in Britain suggest that he may givetoo much credence to media-generated gloss on certain personalities andevents. On the other hand, the witness of peoples lives (including that of aawed young woman) is a classic sign in Christian apologetics, ultimatelyperhaps even the only irrefutable proof, of the demands on us of the Goodby which we may measure our life choices.

And anyway are we as modern as we think we are? Taylor points tocertain moments of mass celebration which seem to take us out of theeverydayrock concerts but also centres of pilgrimage, which ariseout of apparitions of the Virgin: listing Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje.While he inveighs against the loss of human scale in much modern urban

322 Fergus Kerr, OP


architecture, he suggests that this is perhaps what motivates the massivemovement of people as tourists towards the still undamaged sites of earliercivilizations, with their temples, mosques, and cathedrals. Tourism, that isto say, could sometimes be an unconscious form of pilgrimage, a displacedlonging for silence, beauty and order. This need not be dismissed as merenostalgia. On the contrary, for Taylor nothing is ever lost, a phrase that hecites from the sociologist Robert Bellah.

Moreover, the secular outlook in our society is sustained by fairly smallnumbers of people, an elite, in the media and academic life. Yet, as Taylorsays, so many of the works that motivate and move the same people in theirideals of humanity are the legacy of the Christian religious tradition: Bach,the Missa Solemnis, Dante, and Dostoevsky. Taylor also highlights certainpoets as bearers of transcendence: Robinson Jeffers, Charles Pguy, andGerard Manley Hopkins. Our sense of life may be deepened by experienceof the wild, as Hopkins reminds him (What would the world be, oncebereft/Of wet and wildness?). And so on.

Its a heterogeneous list: in this secular age, that is to say, there are count-less hints of something that transcends everyday life, however easy to deny,and impossible to accommodate within conventional religious institutions.Of course, as Taylor says, none of this can decide the issue between beliefand unbelief; he is only reminding us that, for all its secularity, our modernculture is restless at the barriers of the human sphere. Of course also, asTaylor is well aware, Western liberal-democratic culture contrasts very strik-ingly with most other societies across the globemany of which seem all tooreligious, to the Western Christian mind, liberal and fundamentalist (fordifferent reasons)! Then, since he does not explore in any detail the cultureof the United States of America, by far the most religious Western society,one may wonder if the secular age has yet reached much beyond theinhabitants of our best universities!

British Empiricisms Resistance to Marxism

How secular the British actually are, beyond the university-educated elite,would not be easy to determine. The United Kingdom of Great Britain andNorthern Ireland is often described as the most secular society in WesternEurope. Commentators of a Christian persuasion, especially from the UnitedStates, deplore this, some arguing that the decline of Christianity opens theway for the advance of Islam, by immigration and procreation, implying thatthe British will be under shariah law sooner than we might think. Somepundits regard Europe as on the brink of becoming Eurabia rather than theexemplar of a secular age.

Others, and certainly many ordinary folk, do not react so negatively toundeniable evidence of post-Christianity. There was always more at stakethan religion in the conict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern

How Much Can a Philosopher Do? 323


Ireland but one of the reasons, in England especially, for disillusionment withreligion, and a longing for its accelerated disappearance, is that, over threedecades of the Troubles, such appalling atrocities were committed by oneside or the other (more by self-professed Catholics) that religion came to beperceived as something that decent people could well do without. For theEnglish, Welsh and Scots, the sooner the much more church-going NorthernIrish abandoned their religion the better.

On the other hand, it would not raise eyebrows if we were to characterizeourselves as pragmatic, utilitarian, empiricist, and individualistic, generally,in our moral and epistemological assumptionsnot that many peoplewould label themselves so explicitly or ever need do so. If these labels wereexplained, however, most people would be happy enough to endorse them.Years ago, in an interesting attempt to explain why Marxism never took rootin British philosophy and culture, Charles Taylor contended that the persis-tence of empiricism simply made Marxism incredible.12 It is worth returningto this splendid essay (not reprinted in any of his collections) to ask whetherempiricism may not be the principal component of the secularism whichis characteristically British. One thing a philosopher might do, in short, isidentify the featuresin broad strokes of courseof the philosophical pre-suppositions that characterize a societys moral and political practices andcustoms.

As Taylor allowed, the great exception lay in the eld of history, in the workof Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, and others. It was not to his purposeto explain why a Marxist school of historiography ourished. Students ofpolitical thought read and many wrote about Marx and MarxismIsaiahBerlin, Karl Popper and others; but this was always studying Marxism fromthe outside, and sometimes little more than Cold War polemics. Students ofphilosophy in British universities never studied the thought of Karl Marx.Indeed, if a candidate included Marxist thought in his CV as somethingthat he could teach he would not have got the job in a British philosophydepartment.3

Given the dominance of Hegel and Hegelianism in the Scottish universitiesas well as at Oxford and Cambridge into the 1920s4 this failure of Marxismto make headway might seem surprising. According to Taylor, however, theHegelian revival was itself only an interlude in a long tradition of philo-sophical empiricism: when G.E. Moore and, following him, BertrandRussell, rejected the Hegelian metaphysics in which they were nurtured theyreturned to the indigenous philosophical tradition.

In effect, then, Marxism as a bastard version of Hegelianism, could not butseem alien, uncongenial and even to some extent ridiculous, to the Britishempiricist. Taylor lists four factors, which may be briey summarized asfollows.

First the notion of praxis: according to the Marxist account, forms of socialactivity determine our ways of looking at the world, forms of economic life,

324 Fergus Kerr, OP


of making and nding the means to life, incorporate different conceptualstructures, different ways of classifying the environment and human life. Forempiricist theories of knowledge, on the other hand, this line of thoughtis simply unintelligible: knowledge begins in the impressions received onthe individual mind from things in the outside world.

By 1966, it is true, few philosophers defended sense data theories ofknowledge and suchlike, at least if these posited private showings in theconsciousness of the cognizing subject. More plausibly, the mind, or some-times the brain, is regarded as working on representations of the things andfeatures of things that we perceive or think about, on analogy now betweenthe mind and a computer, so that the mind or brain manipulates symbols,thought of as like the instructions in a machine programmesymbols whichare representations of aspects of the world.

Outside academic philosophy, it remainedand remainsan uncontestedassumption that knowledge of the world is built up from rsthand individualexperience obtained through the sensesreal knowledge, as distinct fromacceptable opinion. That how and what you know might be tied up withforms of economic activity and class structure, even grounded in and depen-dent on them, seems a barely intelligible idea.

Secondly, according to Taylors sketch, historical materialism as main-tained by Marxists supposedly explains and even predicts the course ofhistory on the basis of the interests and needs of classes and societies, ofhuman collectivities, conceived of in a holistic manner. In contrast, sinceempiricist epistemology is individualist and atomistic, it makes better senseto account for social, economic and political changes, and so on, in termsultimately of a coincidence or accumulation of individual decisions andprivate actions. For Marxists something like the Hegelian cunning ofhistory operates: the course of history is teleological; and as a natural kindhuman beings make progress, through conict and revolution, towards ever-greater freedom, control over nature, and so on. This all seems wildly implau-sible to people of an empiricist temper, for whom piecemeal evolution ispreferable to revolution, cautious pragmatism to radical reform, and so on.There is certainly no plan, or grand narrative, no Zeitgeist working itselfout in history.

Thirdly, for the Marxist, human nature is a social creation: the humanessence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it isthe ensemble of social relations according to Marxs Sixth Thesis on Feuer-bach. Whatever precisely this means, it goes much further than the truismthat we are social animals, needing one anothers help, liking one anotherscompany, and suchlike. As we learn to control our environment we ourselvesbecome differentchanges in the means of production bring changes insocial being and thus in self-consciousness, including sensibility and emo-tions. In this sense we make and re-make our nature. Human nature, wemight say, actually changes. For the empiricist, by contrast, that ones mind,



much less ones sensibility, owes so much to social circumstances seemsquite implausible. Human nature is always the same, human nature neverchanges.

Finally, Marxist values thus rest on certain facts about human nature andthe goals that we strive to realize in the course of history. One stage or formof society is higher than another because it involves a greater realization ofhuman goals. What will be is what ought to be. For empiricists, followingHume as it is generally supposed, what is the case offers no insight into whatshould be, no ought can be derived from an is. Its the naturalisticfallacy, as G.E. Moore called it, to think that morality is grounded in humannature.

In short, the empiricist cast of mind in British culture madeand makesthe naturalization of Marxism quite impossible. British culture is permeatedby empiricism.5 Of course the empiricism is connected, as Taylor says, tosocial realitieswe are all Marxist enough to see that! One can perhaps seein the popularity of empiricist modes of thinking the continued resilience ofthe British liberal tradition, its distrust of mystique, its utilitarian bent and itsemphasis on individualism. This account of why British philosophy nevertook Marxist thought seriously extends much further, into a positive charac-terization of what is still, after more than forty years, the dominant outlookthat a British university education inculcates, in the humanities and socialsciences, though perhaps no longer in philosophy itself.6

The Return to the Good7

Sources of the Self, published over twenty years later, seeks to expoundandexplicitly to defendan ontology of the human, in which the identity ofthe self is related (as Taylor says in the opening pages, referring us to IrisMurdoch) to the sovereignty of the good: the defending (to anticipate thecriticism) is as open as the expounding.

Politics, ethics and epistemology are interwoven, whatever the specialismsof philosophers might lead us to believe (think only of Plato and Aristotle).In recent philosophy, anyway, no one has done more than Charles Taylorto bring out the interconnections. The likes of Hobbes and Locke insist sostrongly on the primacy of individual interests or rights that we are encour-aged to overlook our obligations to sustain the community to which weowe our identity. What makes this liberal individualism plausible, Taylormaintains, is the hold exerted by what he calls atomismthe doctrine of theself-sufciency of the individual.8 The atomistic view sees society as com-posed of disconnected individuals, each with inalienable and privilegedrights, which it is the societys sole function to protect. It ts with the tradi-tion of empiricism, as expounded above.

The attraction of this viewthe main reason that Locke and othersespoused itis that it counters forms of tradition-bound conventionalism,

326 Fergus Kerr, OP


according to which what passes for knowledge, truth, etc., as well as ethicalideals and practices, appears to be no more than the agreed beliefs of aparticular, highly restricted and exclusivist community. At worst, thisimposes an intimidated conformism in closed societies that thwart all dissent,and in effect prepare the way for totalitarianism. On one side, Taylor distanceshimself from the empiricist-liberal tradition which locates foundations forknowledge, truth, etc., in individual experience, insisting on individual rightsand personal autonomy as what matters most in politics: ultra-liberalism.On the other hand, he refuses to endorse half-baked, neo-Nietzschean theo-ries, which he associates (however fairly!) with Michel Foucault and JacquesDerrida, according to which all judgements, whether moral, epistemologicalor political, are grounded on the interplay of sheer power.

In Sources of the Self, Taylor starts by noting that modern moral philosophyhas tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than what it is good to be, ondening the demands of obligation rather than the nature of the good lifenospace is left, conceptually, for an idea of the good as the object of love. LikeMurdoch, Taylor argues that we are free to stop thinking of emotivism,projectivism and other forms of liberal-individualist empiricism as the onlyalternative, in an intellectual environment in which belief in a divinely-created world with divinely-instituted moral law has gone, or is going, and inwhich we thus seem to be left with nothing but our own minds and wills togenerate ethical ideals and moral practices. Taylors purpose, in Sources of theSelf, is to locate moral sources outside the subjectbut doing so, not in termsof submission to some cosmic order of meanings and goals, as in traditionalChristian religion, but through languages which resonate within him or her,the grasping of an order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision9.

Instead of trying to refute liberal-individualist empiricism by argument,Taylor concentrates, in Sources of the Self, on telling the long story of how theconception of the Good has developed since the end of the Middle Ages. Atone level, this is the history of the construction of the modern western notionof what it is to be a moral agent, a person, a self, with less and less agreementabout what the good we might desire actually is. On another level, however,Taylor is not just telling us a story; he wants the story to persuade us intoconsidering whether we know who we are, or what we are to do in this orthat situation or with our lives as a whole, unless we have some idea of thenature of the good life. In short, we need have no embarrassment aboutregarding moral philosophy as primarily to do with exploring the nature ofthe good life for a human being. That means, as Taylor puts it, that we haveto make room, or (rather) nd the already existing place, in our workadayconceptual system, for the sovereignty of the concept of the goodthegood that opens our moral world, thereby disclosing the possibilities of ouridentity.

There are two moves here, both of which, as Taylor notes, are anticipatedby Murdoch. The rst is the move beyond the question of what we ought to



do, to the question of what it is good for human beings to be. The secondmove is to go beyond the question of what a good life for human beingsmight be, to the consideration of a good which would be beyond life, in thesense that its goodness cannot be entirely or exhaustively explained in termsof its contributing to a fuller, better, richer, more satisfying human life.Taylor devotes most attention to identifying and elucidating the ordinarinessand indispensability of moral perceptions and ways of moral thought thatmodern philosophical theorizings have made to seem problematic and evenillusory. Reductive philosophies have theorized away so much, he contends,that we are either embarrassed to appeal to what we all secretly know to bethe case, or sometimes have actually even forgotten. If we are inclined tofocus on doing what is right, and rapidly move into calculating the conse-quences, it is because philosophical theory, since Hume and the like, hasdiscouraged us from wanting to identify the good, which supposedly chal-lenges and measures our moral choices. Deciding the right course of actionto take in particular circumstances seems a great deal more manageable, tothe pragmatic mind, than delving into metaphysical questions about thegood. What Taylor wants to show is that, for all the centuries of philosophicalpressure to suppress metaphysical questions about the good, we remainunreconstructed partisans of moral realism in everyday life.

Over against empiricist assumptions, for example, indeed in their midst,we need only recall the range of discriminations between right and wrong,better and worse, etc., which are not sourced in or validated by our individualpersonal desires, inclinations or choices, but which stand independently ofthese and indeed offer standards by which these can be judged. For a start,there are the demands that we recognize as moral which have to do withrespect for the life of other human beings. In this or that society, admittedly,it may not include all human beings; in some societies it may extend even tosome nonhuman animals. Of course there is variation. Yet, Taylor thinks, thisdoes not subvert the truth that, for the most part, and cross-culturally, humanbeings have certain moral intuitions, rooted in our nature, which contrastwith other moral reactions indeed inculcated by upbringing and thusperhaps quite different or even absent in a different culture from ours.Reluctance to inict death or injury on our own kind, and the inclination tocome to the help of the injured or endangered, seem to cut across all culturaldifferences. Mensane menneed special training before they becomecomfortable with the idea of killing other humans. No doubt, we often passby on the other side; but not without a twinge of shame or some excuse.These reactions seem natural, and such as we expect in any culture, ancientor modern, religious or secular. There is nothing contentious about this,Taylor thinks.

Of course, one culture might have a grand narrative, explaining why we donot eat one another. It may be held, to take Taylors examples, that humanbeings have immortal souls (Aquinas perhaps), or that they are rational

328 Fergus Kerr, OP


agents with a dignity that transcends any other animal (Kant), which wouldexplain why cannibalism is wrong. Playing with such possibilities, Taylorencourages us to look again at the range and depth of our moral reactions.Some of the reactions which constitute the moral life, he wants to say, arenatural, physical and animal, not unlike vomiting with disgust, or faintingwith fear. Such reactions can be modied, up to a point: we can be trained todeal with nausea; you might be determined enough to go in for bungeejumping. But some reactions at this level are ineradicableleaving asidehighly exceptional physical or mental conditions. Whatever the cultural andindividual differences, some things smell bad to everyone; some scenesdistress everyone; love making, birth and death, evoke reactions of joy, grief,and so on, intelligible to and thus shareable by human beings anywhereand at any periodwhatever the forms specic to local cultures, and thelike. Certain moral reactions, then, display something fundamental aboutthe nature of human life. Certain reactions turn out, as Taylor puts it, to beafrmations of an ontology of the human.

True, this appeal to the naturalness of our basic moral reactions has beenbuilt into certain ideologies, which may well be distrusted. Claims that thisor that sort of conduct is not naturalnot in accordance with our naturalmoral reactionshave justied excluding, sometimes even imprisoning orkilling people. For Taylor, however, the most intractable problem is that thevery idea of a moral ontology grounded in our natural moral reactions lies, ashe says, under a great epistemological cloud10.

This is not just empiricism but what we might call scientism: all acrossWestern culture, educated people, inspired by the success of modern naturalscience, follow empiricist or rationalist theories of knowledge, for themost part quite unwittingly, which tempt us into resting content with the factthat we have such reactions (if and when we do) but considering the ontol-ogy which gives rational articulation to them to be, as he puts it, so muchfroth, nonsense from a bygone age.

The main problem, Taylor thinks, lies in a conception of practical reasoningaccording to which the various ontological accounts that attribute predicatesto human beingssuch as being Gods creatures, emanations of divine re,agents of rational choice (his examples)are regarded as analogous to theo-retical predicates in natural science. It looks as if ontological or metaphysicalaccounts about ourselves are analogous to our physical explanations. Wethink we have to start from the factsidentied independently of ourreactions to themand then try to show that one underlying explanationwould be better than others. But as soon as we make this move we have gonewrongwe have lost from view what were arguing about. Ontologicalaccounts articulate the claims implicit in our [moral] reactions: We can nolonger argue about them at all once we assume a neutral stance and try todescribe the facts as they are independent of these reactionsas we havedone in natural science since the seventeenth century.



This is largely a re-run of Taylors critique of behaviourism in psychology.11

Of course there is such a thing as moral objectivity. Moral argument,however, takes place within a world shaped by our natural reactions, whichinclude moral responses. The ideal in natural science is to get at the world inas impartial a way as possible, eliminating fears, desires, etc. It is, however,just a mistake to discuss morals as if we had a neutral perspective onourselves as beings with moral reactions. If you want to discriminate morenely what it is about human beings that makes them worthy of respect, youhave to call to mind what it is to feel the claim of human suffering, or whatis repugnant about injustice, or the awe you feel at the fact of human life.Nothing can take us from a neutral stance towards the world to insight intomoral ontologybut that does not mean that moral ontology and its insightsare pure ction: Rather we should treat our deepest moral instincts, ourineradicable sense that human life is to be respected, as our mode of access tothe world in which ontological claims are discernible and can be rationallyargued about and sifted.

Taylor insists on the emphasis we nowadays, in our culture, put on avoid-ing human suffering. This does not mean that we have ceased to inict painon one another, in everyday life, let alone at the level of the state: prisonersare tortured, whole populations are degraded in order to punish their rulers,and so on. This emphasis on minimizing human suffering, so Taylor thinks,has a source in the New Testament. Indeed, it is one of the themes of Chris-tian spirituality.

Thus, in Sources of the Self, Taylor appeals to Christian spirituality, just as inA Secular Age his examples of admirable people and sacred places are almostalways Catholic. Yet, in Sources of the Self, he also develops a distinctly non-Christian ethico-religious account of transcendence out of the later workof Heidegger. His understanding of what it is to be human as ultimatelythe gift of something non-human offers the basis for an ecological politics. Ifthe rain forests are simply standing reserve for timber production that is oneapproach and that is already annihilation. Of course there is exploration aswell as exploitation. We can identify the species and geological forms thatthe wilderness contains, retaining and indeed deepening our sense of theinexhaustibility of their wilderness surroundings: Our goals here are xedby something which we should properly see ourselves as servingSo aproper understanding of our purposes has to take us beyond ourselves. Toput it in a nutshell, the shepherd of Being can never practise scientisticrationalism; learning to dwell poetically among things may amountliterally to rescuing the earth: At this moment when we need all theinsight we can muster into our relations to the cosmos in order to deect ourdisastrous course, Heidegger may have opened a vitally important newline of thinking.12

In short, in Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, Taylor seeks toidentify non-anthropocentric ethico-religious sources in a culture which is

330 Fergus Kerr, OP


pragmatic-utilitarian at the everyday level, as the British empiricism essayshows, and which is increasingly under the spell of a certain scientism at amore sophisticated level, as he shows in The Explanation of Behaviour. Bring-ing all his work together (not to mention many of his essays), it becomesclear that he was never out just to identify phenomena; he always wanted toshow us how to expose and resist certain tendencies, in particular certainphilosophical theorizings, that obscure and distort the possibilities of ourbeing as fully human as we might be.

Hermeneutics of Retrieval

The intention of Sources of the Self, Taylor says, was one of retrieval, anattempt to uncover buried goods through rearticulationand thereby tomake these sources again empower, to bring the air back again intothe half-collapsed lungs of the spirit13. In the end, seeking some non-anthropocentric ethic as the corrective to the prevailing bad meta-ethicwhich excludes the search for sources of morality that would restore depth,richness and meaning to life, Taylor appeals to Judaeo-Christian theism.14

Yet he gives much more space to the Heideggerian ecological politics, whichmay well be more persuasive to some readers.

At all events, Taylor declares his hope in the biblical promise of a divineafrmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided.By this point he is plainly speaking in the rst person, going beyond narrativereconstruction of the history of the modern self, let alone philosophicalanalysis. Citing the careers of Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier, and grantingthat he is not neutral in these matters, he contends that, as regards extend-ing help to the mentally handicapped, those dying without dignity, foetuseswith genetic defects, the prevailing naturalist humanism is less than satis-factory: great as the power of naturalist sources might be, the potential ofa certain theistic perspective is incomparably greater. Dostoyevsky hasframed this perspective better than I ever could here.15

Does this mean, then, that Sources of the Self is apologetics on behalf ofa Christian theistic view of the world? To what extent is A Secular Age notjust a phenomenology of the decline of the social imaginary of the sacredbut a lamentation and a follow-up retrieval?

In one of the few really interesting critical engagements with Sources ofthe Self, Stephen Mulhall accused Taylor, in effect, of speaking in his ownreligious voice without quite admitting itits being something to admitwhen your personal views peep through your philosophical work: Sources ofthe Self oscillates between being an impassioned articulation of a personalmoral perspective and a dispassionate delineating of history, conceptualgeography and the skeleton of a moral trajectory that is objectively compul-sory for Western culture and its members.16 Mulhall concludes his byno means unsympathetic critique by suggesting that the book should be



rewritten in a form which makes it clearer that it always already was apersonal moral manifesto.17

This prompted Peter Winch, another ne philosopher, and subsequentlyD.Z. Phillips, to accuse Taylor of failing to do justice to other views than hisown.18 Inadmissibly allowing ones personal ethico-religious convictions topeep through is of course a quite different charge from giving an unfairpicture of alternative or opposing views. For Mulhall, the Christian theismpermeates Sources of the Self to such an extent that the work almost belongs tothe genre of Christian apologetics rather than of straight philosophy. (In fact,as just noted, the wholly non-Christian Heideggerian case against anthropo-centric ethics is far more prominent.) Commissioned to respond to Mulhallscritique, Winch virtually admits that he had not read Sources of the Selfheconcentrates his re almost entirely on Mulhall.19 According to Winch, bothMulhall and Taylor (he assumes from what Mulhall reports) are one-sidedlyinattentive to views other than their own. His claim goes as follows:

Now there does exist a philosophical tradition which has concerneditself precisely with the problem of how to present moral or religiousworld-views in such a way that the passion behind them, which has to beevident if one is to recognize them for what they are, is clearly in view,along with the conception of the good that they embody, while atthe same time equal justice is done to alternative and even hostileconceptions.

This is of course far removed from anything like the would-be scienticobjectivity which Taylor accuses some philosophers of trying to practise onhuman beings. Yet it is a certain stance of neutrality that Winch detectsin Mulhalls paper. The main thing that is wrong with the paper, Winchcontends, is that Mulhall speaks of differing moral and religious outlooksas so many perspectives that refract a common realityTell that tothe heretic tied to the stake and the Inquisitor ordering the re to be lit!Mulhalls terminology, thus angrily denounced by Winch, effectively deniesthe reality of conicting and incommensurable beliefs.20 Mulhalls languagesuggests that he underestimates or even completely fails to see how deepdifferences go. Doing justice to radically different views from ones ownis immensely difcult, Winch immediately allows. He offers Simone Weil,particularly in her admiration for Homers Iliad, as a model of a philosopherwho demonstrates the possibility of doing justice to ethico-religious viewstotally at variance from her own. Winch then instances Plato, Kierkegaardand Wittgenstein as three philosophers who most directly and successfullyaddress the problems involved in doing justice to conicting viewsPlatoby writing in dialogue form, Kierkegaard by representing conictingviewpoints pseudonymously, and Wittgenstein by interweaving conictingvoices. This list is, obviously, not unproblematic: Socrates (one might suggest)is mostly in conversation with people who are simply confused, with no

332 Fergus Kerr, OP


coherently thought-out views which he might represent fairly or otherwise;it is not often difcult to see which pseudonym speaks for Kierkegaardhimself; and the interlocutors in Philosophical Investigations never come nearethico-religious issues involving charges of heresy. It is nevertheless an inter-esting proposal: the philosophers task is to lay out conicting views as fairlyas possible, without taking sides.

D.Z. Phillips, in what turned out to be the nal phase in a remarkablecareer, argued even more explicitly for a contemplative way of doingphilosophy.21 He liked to cite Wittgensteins remark: My ideal is a certaincoolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddlingwith thema remark which refers not unambiguously to his philosophicalideals.22 This allowed Phillips to contend that the later Wittgenstein estab-lished a cool way of doing philosophy, contemplating the world withoutmeddling in it.23 In this book Phillips examines the work of Richard Rorty,Stanley Cavell, Annette Baier and Martha Craven Nussbaum, each of whomhe admires (some more than others!)all of whom, however, demonstratehow extremely difcult it is not to go beyond a contemplative conception ofphilosophy (my italics). Philosophers nd it hard to refrain from slantingtheir accounts of differing views, to the extent even of offering guidance fora better life.

More recently still, partly prompted by the exchange between Winch andMulhall over Sources of the Self, Phillips strove to establish the distinctionbetween speaking for oneself about moral or religious questions and makingphilosophical observations about such questionsthis latter, of course, withthe right kind of disinterestedness.24 Phillips distinguishes three philosophi-cal practices: hermeneutics of suspicion, of recollection, and of contempla-tion. We should be able to understand religion, without being either for oragainst it. What blocks such understanding, he claims, are certain method-ological assumptions about what enquiry into religion must be. Beginningwith Bernard Williams on Greek gods, proceeding through the work ofHume, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, Lvy-Bruhl, Berger and Winch (to whose memory the book is dedicated), Phillipstries to show how none of them comes out with an account of religious beliefwithout either advocating personal commitment to, or (more often in thesecases) expressing utter contempt for, religion. Hard as it may be to restrainones temperamental reactions to the subject, one shouldas a philoso-pherseek to set things out as dispassionately as possiblecontempla-tively, that is to say, rather than dismissively or nostalgically. Phillips is ofcourse borrowing Paul Ricoeurs well-known distinction between two differ-ent modes of interpreting religion in religious studies: the hermeneutics ofsuspicion and the hermeneutics of recollection.

There is not much sign that Phillips, any more than Winch, ever actuallyread Sources of the Self; he contents himself with reecting on the Winch/Mulhall exchange. He too dissents from Mulhalls thesis, assuming it to be



that Taylor confuses stage setting with stage strutting (Mulhalls terms):Taylor fails to differentiate between philosophical analysis and speaking inhis own voice. The failure is still more serious, at any rate quite differentPhillips sides with Winch, taking him to mean that Mulhall forgets thatcoming forward to speak in ones own voice is not the only or even the mostobvious use of the stage: One also stages dramas in which a diversity ofcharacters speaking in different voices are portrayed . . . One need only thinkof Shakespeare, for instance . . ..25

The hermeneutics of suspicion, in regard to religious and of course manyother matters, characteristically exposes and explodes superstitions of onekind or another, and rightly so, Phillips agreesonly we should not movefrom exposing confusions to concluding that the phenomenon under discus-sion has no sense whatsoever (as too often happens with religion, Phillipswould say). The hermeneutics of recollection, on the other hand, in its effortsto get justice for religionto retrieve faith in face of criticismtends notto allow opposing values to be themselves. Both those who are suspiciousof religion and those who want to retrieve it are clouded by their apologeticresolve, so Phillips claims. In contrast, the contemplative practice, thehermeneutics of contemplation, strives against this temptationIts inspi-ration comes from wonder at the world in all is varieties, and the constantstruggle to give a just account of it.26

Of course if Platos dialogues, let alone Shakespeares plays, are the para-digm of this hermeneutics of contemplation we shall need very differentbooks from Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. Philosophers (like theolo-gians!) are quick to refute the arguments of those with whom they disagree,without always taking care to represent these arguments at their strongestor most plausible. The later Wittgenstein, if over a relatively narrow range ofdisputable questions, certainly shows, by interweaving conicting voices,that there is little hope of persuading anyone to shift his or her positionunless one portrays it as temptingly as possible. On the other hand, when onereads A Secular Age in the context of Sources of the Self, and remembers TheExplanation of Behaviour and the essay on British empiricism, one may beginto appreciate how much Charles Taylor has in fact achievedeven to theextent of giving the Devil his due, in Winchs phrase, by offering carefulanalysis (by no means unsympathetic) both of workaday British empiri-cism and of more sophisticated behaviourist psychologies, which suppliesthe background, and erects a platform, from which to investigatetoretrievethe evidences in our secular age of the sovereignty of the Goodand the continued presence of the Sacredhowever fragmentary and con-testable. That this is the work of a lifetime, probably not foreseen at the outset,may remove some of the force of Winchs critique: the works have to be readin conjunction with one another, not in isolation. Much more justice is doneto what Taylor regards as tendencies to be resisted than Winch and Phillipswould probably concedeBritish empiricism, after all, is neither embraced

334 Fergus Kerr, OP


nor debunked. To what extent the hermeneutics of contemplation, asdescribed by Phillips, could ever be put into practice, in matters as centralto the possibilities of human ourishing as Charles Taylor considers, is aquestion that we must leave to another day.

NOTES

1 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press 1989).

2 Charles Taylor, Marxism and Empiricism, in Bernard Williams and Alan Monteore,editors, British Analytical Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1966), pp. 227246; agood collection, intended for an Italian readership, containing essays by David Pears, JohnSearle, Anthony Quinton, E.J. Lemmon, Rom Harr, Anthony Kenny, Hid Ishiguro, AlanMonteore, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Wollheim, Patrick Gardiner, R.W. Hepburn andIstvn Mzros as well as Charles Taylorenough to test, if not to refute, four decadesof dismissal of analytical philosophy as talk about talk.

3 According to Isaiah Berlin, J.L. Austin, who by the time of his premature death in 1959 wasregarded as the archetypal linguistic philosopher, returned from a visit as a tourist to theSoviet Union, in 1936, impressed enough to ask Berlin what Marxist philosophy he mightread, though went off contentedly with a new book by C.I. Lewis instead; see Isaiah Berlin,Personal Impressions (London: Hogarth Press 1980), p. 108.

4 T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet (d. 1923), F.H. Bradley (d.1924), J.E. McTaggart (d.1925) et al.5 See, for example, Godfrey N.A. Vesey (ed.) Impressions of Empiricism (London: Macmillan,

1976); R.F. Holland, Against Empiricism: On Education, Epistemology and Value (Oxford: Black-well, 1980); and a neglected but splendid book by A.D. Nuttall, A Common Sky: Philosophyand the Literary Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974), who nds psychologisticempiricism in Wordsworth and the romantic, post-Humian epistemology of aestheticskepticism in Hopkins.

6 Where cutting edge philosophy in the UK lies may be measured in The Philosophy ofPhilosophy by Timothy Williamson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2007).

7 Some of this recycles my essay The Self and the Good: Taylors Moral Ontology, in RuthAbbey (ed.), Charles Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), pp. 64104.

8 See Charles Taylors classic essay Atomism in Philosophy and the Human Sciences:Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985).

9 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 510.10 Ibid. p. 5.11 Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1964).12 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 126.13 Ibid. p. 520.14 Ibid. p. 495.15 Ibid. p. 518.16 Stephen Mulhall, Sources of the Self s Senses of Itself: A Theistic Reading of Modernity, in

D.Z. Phillips (ed.) Can Religion be Explained Away? (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press 1996), pp.131160; citing p. 160.

17 Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2005), the result of lectures at the Catholic University of Leuven, shows that Stephen Mulhallis himself a Christian.

18 The corner of the philosophical world to which Winch and Phillips belonged is discussedby John Edelman, Wittgenstein, Sense and Reality: The Swansea School (Swansea: University ofWales Press 2009).

19 Peter Winch, Doing Justice or Giving the Devil his Due, in Can Religion be Explained Away?pp. 161173.

20 Winch allows that he spoke like this himself in his paper Moral integrity, in Peter Winch,Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).

21 D.Z. Phillips, Philosophys Cool Place (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1999).



22 Peter Winch, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains (Oxford: BlackwellPublishing, 1998), p. 4a remark dated to late summer 1929, shortly after Wittgensteinsattendance at the Annual Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Associationwhere he delivered a completely different paper from the worthless one printed in theProceedingsprobably the most philosophically disturbed months in his whole life.

23 Philosophy famously leaves everything as it is, etc.; see Ludwig Wittgenstein, PhilosophicalInvestigations 124.

24 D.Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001).

25 Of course Shakespeare has returned to philosophical attention: see Colin McGinn,Shakespeares Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays (New York, NY: Harper-Collins, 2006) and especially A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2007), which reads the plays as dispassionately presenting conictingviewpoints, much as Winch desiderates.

26 Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, p. 325.

336 Fergus Kerr, OP


Copyright of Modern Theology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied oremailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

How Much a Philosopher Can Do on a Secular Age by Fergus Kerr

Documents

Transcript of How Much a Philosopher Can Do on a Secular Age by Fergus Kerr