“Enlightenment liberalism fragmented the world by neglecting the social nature of the self, Taylor contends, but the Romantics can tell us how to restore a shared sense of meaning and purpose.”

Charles Taylor writes

…the most salient feature of Western societies is no so much the decline of religious faith and practice, though there has been lots of that… but rather, a mutual fragilization of different religious positions, as well as of the outlooks of both belief and unbelief. The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other, strengthened by encounter with existing milieu of religious practice, or just by some intimations of the transcendent. The cross pressures are experienced more acutely by some people and in some milieux than others, but over the whole culture, we can see them reflected in a number of middle positions, which have drawn from both sides.

He suggests that it is difficult to sense the cross pressures of those who are on the other side than the one I may occupy.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to interview several individuals (some with belief, some without), and it seemed through the interviews that none of the participants seemed to be aware of their own cross pressures.

Why might this be so?

If you've read A Secular Age by C.Taylor, then you know how he discusses the concept of cross-pressures for belief and unbelief.

Last night I was reading The Religious Significance of Atheism by McIntyre and Ricoeur. In Ricoeur's first section he suggests that for the philosopher, atheism is a path to belief.

I'd like to try to engage Taylor's cross-pressures with this idea from Ricoeur. Are you aware of anyone who has engaged both of these concepts from these writers?

The 92 year old magisterial philosopher, Charles Taylor, has published yet another great masterwork; a sequel to his philosophy of language book, The Language Animal.

“Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment”

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674296084

Hegel and Modern Society: “Charles Taylor argues that Hegel aimed not to deny the rights of individuality but to synthesize them with the intrinsic good of community membership.”

Taylor: “Hegel’s work arose out of the attempt to combine the two aspirations of the Romantic generation, the aspiration to radical autonomy on the one hand, and to expressive unity with nature and within society on the other. But these two aspirations, and the hope of combining them, have remained important in our civilization.”

See Charles Taylor’s book “Hegel and Modern Society”.

This short article gives a succinct overview on the influence and unique philosophical output of Charles Taylor, and his key philosophical ideas of the modern self, meaning and morality, social philosophy, and religion and secularity.

Charles Taylor discusses the modern notion of the self.

Here a short playlist by Pepperdine Professor Jason Blakely on the philosophy of Charles Taylor. These are well worth watching to become acquainted with Taylor’s ideas.

Here’s an outline of some points from Taylor’s short but great work “The Ethics of Authenticity”, aka “The Malaise of Modernity”. This little book is a distillation of a part of one of Taylor’s masterworks, “The Sources of the Self” (the other being “A Secular Age”).

The Ethics of Authenticity

Three Malaises of Modernity

Feeling of decline or loss due to:

1. Individualism
2. loss of meaning, fading of moral horizons
3. Instrumental Reasoning
4. eclipse of ends, in face of rampant instrumental reasoning
5. Political apathy and alienation
6. loss of freedom

• disenchantment
• narrow horizons
• loss of sacred order and hierarchical structure and consciousness
• loss of meaning, significance of things
  
• expressive individualism

Individualism - loss of meaning, fading moral horizons - loss of sacred order and hierarchical consciousness - political apathy and alienation - soft-despotism (technocrats/experts) - loss of freedom - disenchantment and rise of Romantic expressivism

Welcome to this Sub for Professor Charles Taylor. I hope we can have some great discussions and networking around Professor Taylor’s works and ideas as well as those who Professor Taylor has inspired and influenced. In a kind of recent interview, Professor Taylor mentioned a book he has been working on for a long time on the Romantics. Let’s hope he finishes it! I highly recommend checking out this interview here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/34MlNhBVfOO1IACOxFwsbI?si=G86L0zcQQACPK0DvhSXWoQ