The world is not enough. Charles Taylor on secularism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26806/fd.v3i2.37Keywords:
taylor, sekularizmusAbstract
The essay examines Charles Taylor’s latest book The Secular Age (2007) by unveiling its Hegelian roots together with its debt to other critics of modernity and by considering some objections as well as Taylor’s answers.
Taylor sketches two types of contemporary ethical projects. On the one hand he considers exclusive humanism, on the other the immanent antihumanism. The moral of Taylor’s story of modern secularism comes to his claim that the anti-humanism is enabled by humanism and humanism again by religiosity. According to him this comes to indispensability of religion: namely, some notion of transcendence is necessary for coherence of any set of values available to western man. Actually the originality inspiring its following is what he understands as the key element that is shared by the central claim of Christianity embodied in the notion of love (agape) overcoming the rigorism of explicit rules on the one hand and modern art as Ersatzreligion.
(Not only) this aspect of Taylor’s recent work is rooted in his lifelong interest in Hegel, who looked for such pairing of the ethics of authenticity with a sense for community that could overcome the limits of reflective rationality. We can interpret Taylor’s amendement to Hegel as a substitution of „support for differentiation in unity“ (or simply „culture“) for „love for neighbour“.
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