A Secular Age | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Belknap Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 7887
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 896
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.7 x 2
ISBN: 0674026764
Dewey Decimal Number: 211.6
EAN: 9780674026766
ASIN: 0674026764
Publication Date: September 20, 2007
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Product Description
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others. Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in "Western Christendom" of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today's secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion--although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined--but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations. What this means for the world--including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence--is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless. (20070909)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 A Tribute to Redundancy and Arcane Exposition January 1, 2009
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found this book one of the most convuluted ill written works I have ever read. The basic premise of the author could have been stated in 30 pages, but for reasons unknown the author leads the reader on another 600 pages of pedagogic rambling that reiterates his initial premises over and over to the point of exhaustion. I think William James did a much better job of articulating the nature of spiritual experience in contemporary society, and made it an enjoyable and enlightening process. Taylor's discussion is esoteric to the point of being unreadable, and the work is filled with bizarre references in the absence of any explanatory footnotes. His ability to create sentences that span half a page of text is remarkable--perhaps the best use of the book would be a source of material for diagraming sentences.
A Secular Quagmire September 27, 2008
11 out of 28 found this review helpful
I am struggling with how best to articulate my complete disappointment and utter frustration with this text. It is quite obvious that there are some readers who are very much in favor of this text's assertions, presuppositions, and somewhat bizarre method of rationale. Clearly, I am not one of them.
Perhaps then, given the peculiarly hostile nature of some reviewers (or review commentators), an articulation of what this book does NOT do is necessary. In the author's own words:
"What I am trying to describe here is not a theory. Rather my target is out contemporary lived understanding: that is, the way we naively take things to be. We might say: the construal we just live in, without ever being aware of it as a construal, or-for most of us-without ever even formulating it. This means that I am not taking on board the various philosophical theories which have been offered to explain and articulate the "mind" and its relation to the "body." I am not attributing to our lived understanding some kind of Cartesian dualism, or its monist materialist rivals, identity theory, or whatever; or even a more sophisticated and adequate theory of embodied agency. I am trying to capture the level of understanding prior to philosophical puzzlement. And while this modern understanding of the mind certainly opens itself to Cartesian type theories in a why that the earlier "enchanted" understanding does not, it isn't itself such a theory. Put another way, the modern idea of mind makes something like the "mind-body problem" conceivable, indeed, in a way inescapable, where on the earlier understanding it didn't really make sense. But by itself it doesn't offer an answer to that problem" (30).
Conversely, what the author is interested in is "the naive understanding, because my claim will be that a fundamental shift has occurred in naive understanding to move to the disenchantment" (30).
There are several immediately obvious problems in this passage, and these problems persist throughout the text. For the sake of time and space however, I will only briefly highlight a few of the most overt.
Perhaps most importantly, Taylor's argument is premised on the notion that there is in fact discontinuity between "the religious" and "the secular"; that these things are separate and irreconcilable. Simultaneously, Taylor tries to make the case that secularism has grown out of the religious, or what is his "enchanted" and "naive" version of the past. In this way, he presupposes a history that is both linear and progressive.
Taylor also attempts to append to the notion of secularism an ethical notion of "exclusive" humanism, asserting that it is one of many "alternative[s] to religion." He simultaneously undermines the viability of religion as an option in two ways. First, he asserts that three conditions for belief are necessary for the survival of the historically religious. Notwithstanding his questionable premise, Taylor states that those conditions no longer exist (vanished is one of the words he uses). He likewise asserts that naivete is no longer available to anyone, believer and unbeliever alike. Second, Taylor asserts that secularism (and again the absence of condition for belief) have put an end to "transcendence," a word Taylor designates to mean the naive religion of the past, concerned as it was beyond "human flourishing." Essentially (and ironically), Taylor is collapsing the religious into the secular, conveniently disposing of those conditions for belief that characterize his "enchanted" past. And all of this with shockingly little support....
If Taylor's arguments lack support, it should not be surprising. Taylor wants to argue "a fundamental shift" in "naive understanding" but likewise desires an abandonment of contemporary theory. Unfortunately, Taylor frequently attempts to utilize the authority of several European early modern and modern theoriticians, including Kant, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, Foucault, etc. The end result of which is masticated political theory, circular logic, and a self-defeating rationale. How can one after all, understand the "naive," if that is in fact what it is to be called, if it a) no longer exits and b) the theoretical basis that might allow for at least the conception of such a notion is rejected? Taylor is " trying to capture the level of understanding prior to philosophical puzzlement," as paradoxically articulated in this very modern and rational way. The attempt to balance the reality of this paradox only serves to further confound his own argument.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this text is that Taylor admits that his attempt to "understand" this shift will be constrained to the "modern West." Certainly, this is at least consistent with the theories upon which he unwillingly draws, but given the nature of his presuppositions, what does this say about those civilizations which may or may not conform to the "set of forms and changes" that characterize "Latin Christiendom" and which have, according to Taylor, produced the magnanimous "self-sufficient humanism"? What kind of moral (and political) absolutism does this imply?
I have no doubt that Taylor is a well-respected man in his profession, and that he has made important contributions to his professional community. This text however, is not one of them. It is more closely related to a bad memoir than a scholarly masterpiece.
 Landmark portrait of modernity June 24, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
An exhaustive, very learned string of reviews on Taylor's study can be found at "The Immanent Frame" ([...]), a blog maintained by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
After all that has been said, I will only add that Taylor's book is work of synthetic and imaginative genius. It offers very comprehensive insight into the condition and history of modernity without subscribing to a unilinear, "subtractionist" notion of secularization. This book will be permanently useful in many disciplines. It is worthy of comparison with Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, but with the huge added advantage that it canvases popular experience as well as the experience of the intellectual elite.
For more... June 24, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you'd like to see more of where Taylor is coming from in this book, check out his interview over at The Other Journal. It's a great read and is specifically relating to this book.
[..]
Can't review because not yet received April 27, 2008
0 out of 15 found this review helpful
I'd love to review this item, but I've not yet received it, though Amazon promised it by now. What's the holdup?
Robin
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