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Taylor and Feuerbach on the problem of fullness: Must a meaningful life have a transcendent foundation?

2023; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-8675.12709

1467-8675

Jeff Noonan,

Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

At first glance, there would appear to be no wider gulf than between persons who believe that life is meaningful and valuable only if oriented by some transcendent force or being and those who try to steer themselves by earthly signposts alone. Since at least the Enlightenment secular humanists have tried to construct what Charles Taylor has called purely "immanent" ethics. In Taylor's influential but controversial view, materialist humanist ethical theories, and accounts of the good for human beings can be internally consistent and satisfying to their adherents, but ultimately incomplete. Taylor's argument remains compelling more than a decade after the publication of A Secular Age because he does not argue that "exclusive" humanist doctrines are incomplete on the terms of believers in transcendent forces and beings, but incomplete on their own terms. All deep commitments to meaning, purpose, and value in life, he suggests provocatively, in fact contain a concealed longing for transcendence of the unrecoverable passage of time and the oblivion into which subjects will disappear if there is nothing more than the physical universe and the human social world. This paper will treat Taylor's conclusions as a challenge to account for life-value within the confines of secular time and without making secret appeals to transcendent forces or beings.1 I am not going to try to turn tables on Taylor and argue that all religious believers secretly interpret their sacred texts and principles with a view to earthly happiness, but I will argue that there are more overlapping concerns than dogmatists on either side believe. My argument will be critical of Taylor's conclusions, but it is also a response to his invitation for members of different faith, traditions, and secular humanists to engage in a "more frank exchange" that acknowledges the differences but is conducted "with the kind of respect that can only come from a sense that we have something to learn from each other" (Taylor, 2010a, p. 402). I will argue that the most important lesson that humanism teaches is that the desire for fullness, in earthly life or on some transcendent plane is not necessary and may even be a mistake. In contrast to fullness as the overarching goal of life, I will suggest that receptive openness to the world best accords with the known conditions of human existence. Since the receptively open person who accepts the finality of death does not demand fullness, they cannot be justly suspected of secretly steering their goals by transcendent principles. The paper begins with a focused analysis of Taylor's argument that the emergence of natural scientific accounts of the elements and dynamics of the universe created a crisis of meaning. Exclusive humanisms are attempts to reconstruct the foundations of meaning within the confines of secular time, but no matter how rich the texture of their values, Taylor argues, they must always fall short of absolute fullness. Since, in Taylor's view, implicit in the experience of happiness, fulfillment, and joy—key markers of good human lives—is the demand that they continue forever, the exclusive humanist who delights in such experiences secretly pines for the eternal. In the second section, I will turn to a focused examination of one aspect of Feuerbach's work. I look back to Feuerbach for two reasons, both of which connect Taylor directly and indirectly, to Feuerbach. First, Taylor himself, in a review essay of Marx Wartofsky's book on Feuerbach, came close to recognizing the value of Feuerbach as charting a course for a materialist humanism that escapes the problem of the physicalist elimination of meaning from life (Taylor, 1978, p. 417, 419; Wartofsky, 1977, p. 390). Second, in response to a roundtable discussion of his book, Taylor seems to open the door to just the sort of open receptive disposition towards nature, society, artifacts, and people that typifies Feuerbach's social philosophy. He does not reference Feuerbach here but acknowledges that his idea of the "porous self" (which he associates with the worldview of the European Middle Ages) "can be recovered" in the scientific world of the twenty-first century (Taylor, 2010b). Taylor himself has not recovered or developed a contemporary version. I believe that Feuerbach can help the recovery and development begin.2 In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I will develop an account of materialist humanism rooted not in an abstract ontological commitment to the primacy of "matter" but an account of the self as sensuously and receptively open to the unfolding of the world on multiple levels. Shifting focus from the abstract elements of the real to its multilevel unfolding helps us understand why fullness is not a necessary condition for meaningful, valuable lives. In the short concluding section, I will answer Taylor's claim that materialist humanists are secretly moved by a desire for eternity. They might be, if they, like the religious, demand fullness. However, if they accept the limitations that life in secular time imposes, they can enjoy, appreciate, and savor the complex experiences they do have and develop evaluative interpretations of life rich enough to support lives as meaningful as it is possible for us to lead. A Secular Age follows a well-worn path of analysis of the passage from a world in which belief in God was mandatory to a world in which people default to natural scientific explanations and belief is a private decision. Despite the book's erudition and scope, Taylor has been criticized for concentrating exclusively on secularization in Europe. While that criticism is valid, I am not going to try to supplement his historical argument (Schweicker et. al., 2010, p. 389, 391; Gordon, 2008, p. 659). However, I believe that the argument that I will make has general significance to the human understanding of our relationship to the world and the sources of value. My conclusions would have to be adapted and modified in local contexts, but I do not think the general conclusions that I draw are valid only for a subset of human beings. That which interests me most in Taylor's argument is thus how he understands secularization through the lens of the self's experiential relationship with the world. "I want to talk about belief and unbelief not as rival theories, that is, the way people account for existence or morality … I want to focus attention on the different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding our life one way or the other" (Taylor, 2018, p. 5). Taylor argues that the secularization process has involved a change in the relationship between selves and their world. Modern selves have become more closed off to the forces and dynamics of the world and come to regard them as meaningless and purely instrumental to purposes imposed by their sovereign decisions. I will judge his argument on these terms. If it should turn out that selves who accept the finitude and materiality of the world are steered by a receptive openness to the world and not abstract instrumental reason, then it follows that they can be open to as wide a range of meanings as believers. The difference between materialist humanists and searchers after the transcendent would not, therefore, be their openness to external sources of value, but rather that the humanist accepts the impermanence of meaning and life-value. If that acceptance can be borne without their love of life being undermined, then Taylor is wrong to argue that humanists must secretly appeal to a transcendent source of value. The key difference between presecular age and modern selves is that the self of the 1500s was, in Taylor's terms, "porous." People did not see themselves as mirrors in which the world was reflected but membranes penetrated by a variety of natural and supernatural forces. Meaning and values were not products of subjective interpretation but objective realities that shaped both world and the experiencing subject (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). The porous self of the premodern world believed in angelic and demonic beings that bore these objective values. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even religious believers would discard these beliefs as superstitious. However, in the transition between superstition and natural science more was lost than belief in angels and demons. Both self and world were impoverished because the things and dynamics of the world were reduced to mechanical processes and meaning converted into a product of subjective interpretation. By contrast, for the porous self, "meanings are not exclusively in the mind" (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). The porous self can "fall under the spell, enter into the zone of exogenous meaning" (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). The porous self thus does not regard itself as a value-creator projecting meanings onto a meaningless world, but as a receptive member of a world that is imbued with meaning. Meanings "involve" or "penetrate" the porous self (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). Life is a complex series of relationships with objects that have their own integrity and value. Hence, the porous self is outwardly directed towards the multiple forms of value that the world itself makes available. Taylor believes that secularization sealed the pores through which these embodied meanings entered the self. A Secular Age continues Taylor's career-long engagement with the consequences of rationalization on the quality of human relationships to the world. Taylor believes, in a Heideggarian vein, that the hegemony of natural science has impoverished the human sensorium and experience of the world. Rationalization increased the explanatory power of natural science but at the cost of pairing a one-dimensional world of things and processes to a correspondingly one-dimensional self that determines the value of things in relation to its instrumental goals. As Peter E. Gordon notes, "Taylor has grown ever bolder in his arguments against behavioralist and rational choice models of explanation, in so far as these presuppose what he calls a formalistic and culturally impoverished model of selfhood he calls 'disengaged agency'" (Gordon, 2008, p. 649). In Sources of the Self, Taylor identified Locke as a key progenitor of disengaged agency. Locke's "punctual self" pushed disengagement from the world "much further, and has been induced to do so by the same mix of motivations: the search for control intertwined with a certain conception of knowledge" (Taylor, 1989, p. 161). The disengaged self brackets the "intentional dimension of experience … what makes it the experience of something" (Taylor, 1989, p. 161). Instead of experiencing the world, the disengaged self experiences only its own inner sensations. In A Secular Age, Taylor renames the "disengaged self" the "buffered" self. Like Locke's punctual self, the buffered self relates to the world as an alien objectivity that must be known, mastered, and brought under its control. "To be a buffered subject, to have closed off the porous boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical) is partly a matter of living in a disenchanted world" (Taylor, 2018, p. 300). If the buffered self is experientially poorer than the porous self, that is not because it does not see fairies hiding behind every garden flower. As Taylor quite clearly demonstrates, natural science radicalized an antisuperstitious movement that began within an evolving Christian worldview. The problem with the disenchantment–disengagement nexus is not that it banished spiritual beings to the land of fiction, but that it reduced meaning to a function of subjective judgment. If the world is valueless in itself, then humans are under no obligation to the world of things. As a sympathetic reviewer noted, elaborating upon this point: if there is no God then there is only Badiou, according to whom "commitment to ideal human projects rests on pure decision" (Millbank, 2019, p. 92). In such a worldview, we are entitled to do with things as we will because their value or disvalue is a function of our subjective projections. On the surface, this power to create value appears to be a great gain for the richness of human life, but when we dig deeper, Taylor argues, it becomes apparent that the gains on the subjective side are illusory, or at best pyrrhic. While Taylor does not deny that materialist humanists feel that their lives are meaningful, he ultimately concludes that beneath the feelings that they acknowledge there is a gnawing absence of fullness that they cannot forever deny. Taylor thus rests his argument on the inability of materialist humanists to experience the fullness they seek on the disengagement from the world as a texture of meaningful forces. While there is no doubt that Taylor has insightfully explained the social and scientific forces that make an instrumental attitude towards the world possible, one might question whether, in using his critique of the philosophical foundations of a "buffered self" as a premise to support the conclusion that actual selves cannot find the fulfillment they are looking for, Taylor oversteps. As Karl Smith argues, Taylor runs the risk of conflating the "Western ideal concept of the individual … with a literal description of what we are and what we are capable of" (Smith, 2012, p. 60). Arguing from an anthropological perspective, Smith contends that if we attend to the actual lived experience of real people, we will discover that "porosity" is an element of our "ontological condition" (Smith, 2012, p. 61). He does not dispute that the philosophical positions criticized by Taylor prioritize forms of subjective experience which try to seal the pores but rejoins that those pores cannot be sealed in real life because all thought and action, in all cultures, depends upon openness to and meaningful engagement with at least some parts of the natural and social world. I will return to this general argument in the next two sections. Taylor, focusing on philosophical constructions and not the mundane complexity of real life experience and social interaction concludes that the changes imposed on the nature of the self by natural scientific development and the growing hegemony of mechanistic physics unleashed a pervasive axiological crisis. "A wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world," spread across Europe. The growing belief that the clockwork universe, even if God designed the gears and wound the springs, was "flat, empty." This malaise drove people towards a "multiform search for something within, or beyond it, which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence" (Taylor, 2018, p. 302). While materialist humanists tried to recapture a sense of meaning and value within the confines of secular space and time, Taylor contends that the fact that the experience of secular time is an experience of time running out for the finite individual means that, like Tantalus, the exclusive humanist will always be reaching for something that they cannot grasp. Taylor's argument thus depends in large part on the connection he establishes between mechanism, the buffered self, and the fact that, judged from the standpoint of the finite individual, secular time runs out. The axiological crisis that concerns him follows from the fact that from a scientific-materialist perspective the world is very different from the textures of qualitative experience required to generate meaningful connections. I agree that a reductive materialism would indeed generate a pervasive crisis of meaning, but, to cite only one example, the fact that even the physicists most responsible for the reductionist picture of the world acknowledge that one must take a two-leveled approach to the world shows that struct reductionism is impossible from the standpoint of lived practice.3 All of this might be, from the standpoint of quantum mechanics, buzzing fields of energy, but the physicists who work out the equations that explain these energy fields sign their name to their papers, lest a Noble Prize might be in the offing. They care for their families, friends, and pets; they have political commitments that can be achieved (or not) in finite time and do not trouble themselves about the ultimate ending of things. What these facts show is not that the axiological crisis that worries Taylor is not real, but rather that, as in the case of the porosity of real selves, he is too closed to alternative possibilities for meaningful living within the framework of a secular-scientific worldview. Whether reductionism is true or not, one does not have to—indeed, one cannot live in accordance with—reductionist conclusions. The modern age has led us more and more to understand … ourselves exclusively in secular time … This has partly come about … by the legacy of the drive for order which has become part of what we understand by civilization. This has made us take a stand towards time as an instrument, or as a resource to be managed and hence measured, cut up, regulated. (Taylor, 2018, p. 714) Like every resource, the modern self tries to use time as efficiently as possible: to extract the most meaning from the smallest increment of time so that our finite life is as full of valuable activity as possible. Yet, the modern self also knows that, like petroleum, its time is going to run out eventually. We see the same problem reappear here as we saw emerge with regard to the nature of modern selves. Taylor sketches one possible set of implications of secularization and then concludes that all attempts to recover or create meaning within secular time either fail or secretly point towards the truth of transcendent principles. As Marin Jay argues, Taylor is guilty, despite his own cautions and concerns, of "brushing past his own warnings signs" against unwarranted generalizations when he concludes that secularization is a unique threat to meaningful lives (Jay, 2009, p. 83). That those who look to transcendent sources of meaning think that without a divine principle life is meaningless does not entail the conclusion that life is or must be meaningless if there is no transcendent horizon to aspire towards. Taylor acknowledges that materialists try to live meaningful lives. One of the main strengths of A Secular Age is the deep argumentative respect that Taylor practices towards his opponents. "The driving forces behind materialism," he argues, "are ethical and moral" (Taylor, 2018, p. 596). The materialist humanist can be deeply loving towards others and all creation, while the religious believer can collapse their world into the narrowest confines of sectarian bigotry. However, what the materialist humanist cannot do, according to Taylor, is to make sense of our existence in way that can reconcile their drive for meaning with (what they must believe is) the ultimate meaninglessness of existence in a purposeless universe. No matter how long our individual life spans might be lengthened, changes to the sun's energy output will make the earth uninhabitable in two or three billion years. Perhaps we will have spread to other planets and galaxies by then. But every star is fated to burn itself out and at some point all usable energy will be exhausted and the universe will be nothing but absolute cold and dark. There will be no trace of our ever having been; all record of our crimes and creations will be gone. People do not often mediate on that terrifying (but also, in a deep and dark way), beautiful thought. Why not, especially if they believe that the physicists speak the truth? Taylor argues that they do not because they know that if this is the truth then the value of all their mundane commitments would collapse. The fact that people do not give them up is thus a sign, Taylor believes, that deep beneath their humanist courage in the face of the abyss is a religious hope for eternity. The hope for eternity is not hope merely for personal salvation, but hope for something more profound: access to the metaphysical condition in which the best that we strive towards in our ethical lives attains a real and permanent objectivity. Taylor says simply: "There has to be more to life than what our current definitions of social and individual success define for us" (Taylor, 2018, p. 507). Commenting on Ivan Illich, Taylor insists that "all joy strives for eternity, because it loses some of its sense if it doesn't last" (Taylor, 2018, p. 721). Joy is not mere happiness. Joy is the experience of freedom from the tension of existence as a finite subject, the absolute unity of subject and object. In secular time, the joy of pure unity is temporary, but the temporary reality of the experience points us towards the reality of the transcendent eternity which—if Illich and Taylor are correct—makes even earthly joy possible. The basic supposition here is that religious, transcendent views are erroneous, or at least have no plausible grounds … I foresee another future, based on another supposition. This is the opposite of the mainstream view. In our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality. We all have some sense of this, which emerges in our identifying and recognizing some mode of what we have called fullness, and seeking to attain it. Modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are therefore responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it. (Taylor, 2018, p. 768) If Taylor is correct, then the fact that materialist humanism has an ethical and moral core proves the reality of the transcendent world. The fool says in their mind that there is no God, but knows (or secretly feels) in their heart that a divine eternity exists. I will defend a different conclusion. I agree that if materialism must operate with a reductionist ontology then the ethical commitments of materialist humanists are difficult if not impossible to ground.4 Moreover, if a meaningful life must be "full" in some strong, positive sense of complete realization of some set of essential goals, then Taylor might be correct to argue that they secretly rely upon a transcendent principle. Fortunately, neither reductionist physicalism nor strong, positive conceptions of fullness are necessary for meaningful, good human lives. Instead, grounding our account of meaningful lives in the experiences of selves struggling to satisfy their needs and express their capacities, we will discover that it is possible to be satisfied with partial and open experiences. Living life well does not depend upon being committed to one overarching ontology as opposed to another. Materialist humanism is not an inference from a systematic ontology but derives from the experience of being a finite subject with needs, senses, an intellect, abilities to build, create, and relate and an honest admission that each person's time on earth runs out before they can do everything it would be valuable to do. Hence, my countersupposition to Taylor's is that the values defended by materialist humanism are not responses to a felt need for eternity, but responses to the things, creatures, and people of the world borne from different forms of need, from different forms of "porosity" open to the world as it presents itself to us in experience. Human subjects can never experience fullness as absolute wholeness, but we can create the social conditions in which everyone is enabled to develop their capacities in an open-ended unfolding of experience and activity that continues up to the point where death closes the circle of our lives. My defense of a materialist humanist alternative to Taylor's argument about the need for transcendence begins from a point of agreement. Taylor is correct to suggest that both sides in the debate between materialist humanism and religious faith need to approach each other "with a good deal of humility" (Taylor, 2018, p. 675). One-dimensional scientism can be as dogmatic as religious fundamentalism and strongly reductionist arguments make a mockery of the lived contours of ethical and aesthetic values.5 Nevertheless, one does not need to appeal to any transcendent plane to understand the origin of ethical or aesthetic values: they are products of the sensuous encounter between human beings and the multiple dimensions of the natural and social worlds we inhabit and create I find Feuerbach a productive starting point for my humble intervention in this debate precisely because his materialist humanism begins from sensuous receptivity and not general, abstract ontological principles. I will not focus on his most famous and influential argument: God is the reified projection of human powers abstracted from the limitations of finite human expressions (Feuerbach, 1957, p. 12). Feuerbach did not make this argument because he wanted to demolish religious belief.6 As Taylor appreciates in his review of Wartofsky's study, Feuerbach sought out the essence of Christian belief in human nature the better to realize the humanist value of universal love. "Being human," Taylor wrote, "is something that man can achieve on his own" (Taylor, 1978, p. 419). Feuerbach wanted to make reciprocity and mutual care self-subsistent values in the earthly community of human beings. That aspect of Feuerbach is also well known, most especially because it was the practical reason that Marx ultimately dismissed his political philosophy as too abstract. For Marx, the earthly reality of love is social revolution. In a class-divided and violent world, Feuerbach's platitudes leave everything as it is. However, I am not interested in the political shortcomings of Feuerbach's project here.7 I am after a more basic element of Feuerbach's materialist humanism. The materialism in which Feuerbach embeds his humanism is not defined by a vacuous abstraction (the universe is matter in motion) but is defined by the dispositions of a needy, living being to its sustaining environment. Human beings must be attentively responsive to the solidity and particularity of the things to which experience connects us because we need different sorts of things and relationships in order to live. As Wartofsky noted, Feuerbach argued that our idea of matter "as some universal, undifferentiated stuff" was a "human abstraction, a chimera" (Wartofsky, 1977, p. 400). This argument is directed against Hegel's critique of materialism. Hegel maintained that "matter" was not an object of experience but an abstraction. Hence, the truth of materialism, according to Hegel, was the idea, not the sensuous reality, of matter (Hegel, 1987, pp. 351–352). Feuerbach turns Hegel's reversal against itself. Materialism is not an inference from the idea of matter but built up from our ordinary experiences of needing to connect with the objects of concrete, sensuous experience. Wartofsky explains that for Feuerbach, our senses are that through which "the active, external, real object or quality acts" (Wartofsky, 1977, p. 363). To be sure, such claims give rise to a host of epistemological problems. I am not concerned with the cogency of Feuerbach's epistemology, but rather with the ethical significance of the sensuous, receptive connection between subject and object. One may doubt whether complete knowledge of nature can be inferred from raw sense experience. One may nevertheless accept that our sense of what is valuable in life begins with sensuous openness to the external world. Feuerbach's sensualism helps us understand materialist humanism as developing from an ethical disposition of attunement to the multiple dimensions of worldly value. As such, materialism attends to the value of things in the different relationships in which they stand to needy human beings. This interpretation of attuned experience as the source of materialist humanism has an important connection with the recent work of Hartmut Rosa. I agree with Rosa that values derive from "the affirmation of strong evaluations, occurring when and where subjects come into contact with something in the world that constitutes for them an independent source of value" (Rosa, 2022, p. 170). The key to the connection between the strong evaluations (a term that he borrows from Taylor) and Feuerbach's understanding of materialist humanism (which he does not discuss) is the idea of experience as a response to the world as a source of independent values.8 Whether we call the experiential sources of values "resonant" or not, the crucial idea, which Feuerbach so effectively draws our attention to, is that the self must be open and responsive to the world for it to be anything at all to them. In other words, Feuerbach's materialism shows us why needy selves must be porous. Despite Taylor's familiarity with Feuerbach and his admission that the porous self can be further developed, he portrays materialism as entailing a reductionist and scientistic ontology, one of whose ironic consequences is the "excarnation" of the human being. As we have seen, the early modern interpretation of experience treats it as internal to the experiencing subject, placing the world at one remove. Instead of a porous, embodied self-interacting with the world it needs, the punctual and buffered self treats itself as a calculating machine, determining its goals and choosing the best means of realizing them. Although it might sound surprising to accuse scientistic materialism of contributing to downplaying the significance of embodiment in human experience, Taylor exposes a generally unremarked danger of conflating materialism with reductionism. This danger is poignantly illustrated by Bob Cutillo, a religious physician who reminds his fellow practitioners of the need to stay focused on the ill, suffering embodied person. Cutillo, developing Taylor's critique of excarnation, argues that when medical knowledge "is severed from experience, we allow our bodies to be managed as abstract pieces and parts that should predictab