Charles Taylor and the Modern Immanent Frame
Review essay. Crux 55/1 (2019): 14–18.
Abstract
This past Christmas I finally got around to reading the tome that is Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It had long been staring at me from the bookshelf above my desk—I think ever since it was published just over ten years ago. But the 874 pages had always been too daunting, and other, more immediate and less formidable challenges kept jumping the queue. I nonetheless finally managed, and so I now have a clearer sense of what people mean when they bandy about terms such as “social imaginary,” “immanent frame,” and “buffered self.”
It is no doubt true that the immanent frame (or exclusive humanism) has its own, positive constituent elements. But we should not overplay its originality. Modern liberal democracies are, positively, based on “justice, equality, liberty, and even solidarity,” as Taylor suggests (577). But these are not notions originating in modernity. The contemporary, often aberrant, takes on these notions originate from within the Christian tradition.
