How to define what holds us together, while abstracting from any religious affiliation, but also from any over-arching “lay” philosophy

Secularism, A Secular Age:
What inspires us & what holds us together posted by Charles Taylor
Having escaped for a few seconds from the Commission, I had a chance to read many of the very interesting posts to the blog. With many I agree, others not. But there are two points where I obviously failed to communicate what I wanted to say (possibly because that is incoherent, though I hope not).

Elizabeth Hurd headed off a series of entries with “The slipstream of disenchantment and the place of fullness”. “Fullness” is a term which is probably attempting the impossible. My thesis is that every possible position on what life is really about secretes its own sense of what can inspire us, cause us to rejoice, give us a sense of liberation, lift us, etcetera. The problem is that, as this short list of examples illustrates, these are terribly different, and no single term will sound entirely right to holders of all positions. In that sense, “fullness” may seem to load the dice in favour of religious views, but it wasn’t meant to. (Anybody who can suggest a better generic term for any future writings on this subject is earnestly enjoined to do so.)

It in particular wasn’t my intention to say that positions belonging to what I called “the immanent counter-enlightenment” don’t have their own forms. This was at least part of the point in a couple of Nietzsche citations; especially the one which makes up the last entry in the posthumously published Will to Power, ending with “der Wille zur Macht, und nichts ausserdem!” Anyone who doesn’t feel the inspiration, the sense of power and oneness with the vast universe, hasn’t taken Nietzsche’s meaning. I could go on, but it seems too that Deleuze’s “nomadism” is also one of these powerful and inspiring ideas. Etc.

The very idea that one could adopt a position that involves no danger of such dérapage seems to be profoundly deluded.

The second point I’d like to comment on is Bob Bellah’s questioning of my category of “post-Durkheimian”. Here again, I feel that I left things in somewhat of a muddle. I don’t think it’s possible to have a successful, modern democratic society without some strong sense of what unites us as citizens. But this doesn’t have to be organically linked with what, if anything, unites us religiously. Both paleo- and neo-Durkhemian societies do have such an organic link, but of a rather different kind. I wanted (somewhat confusingly) to extend the latter term to cover societies which have a lay philosophy as such a unifying bond, such as Jacobin France. Which indeed, opens the possibility of a struggle between two rival neo-D identities, such as we saw in France for a century and a half, and such as we see today, I believe in the USA. And there are other cases, such as Wilhelmine Germany where the hegemonic view was Protestant, but this made for a struggle between pious conservatives and “Kulturprotestanten”, like Weber; and it also set the scene for a bruising battle between both these forces together against the Catholic majority, which was seen as somehow anti-national.

Now in this understanding a post-D dispensation would be one in which there might be lots of religious belief and belonging, but the central pole of allegiance of the state would not be related to this. This does not mean a society without cohesion. Many modern states, including the two to which I belong (Quebec and Canada) simultaneously, are self-consciously faced with this challenge: How to define what holds us together, while specifically abstracting from any particular religious affiliation, but also from any over-arching “lay” philosophy. The Jacobin republicans among us (I mean here Quebec) have solved their problem, but this involves a neo-D solution borrowed from French “republicans”. The majority of Quebeckers don’t want this. Another minority pines for a semi-return to our wall-to-wall clerical past (without the tears, agony and repression). Neither of these solutions is viable. Still others dream of making nationalism a virtual state religion (some of these are independentists, but it would be a mistake to see all independentists in this light).

We need another solution. Will we make it? Stay tuned for the next installment. This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Secularism, A Secular Age. RSS