This posture is the greatest danger, I think, to what Taylor wants us to make of religion now, in no small part because it’s so close to it. But funnily enough this posture is also a problem that Rorty was never able to adequately treat, either. Postmodern atheist bourgeois materialist liberalism cannot account for the absurd tendency of otherwise pragmatic moralists to continually import emotional mysticism into their ethical, social, personal, and sexual improvisations. It’s possible that neither Taylor nor Rorty have been able to recognize this strange group of people as the pioneers of that third way of the therapeutic that wishes in every way to have its cake and eat it too.

Two other opponents — Tocqueville and Nietzsche — each suggested a fate for failed liberal democrats that we seem stubbornly inclined to resist. Tocqueville hinted at an ineffable return to the enduring habits of faith in God; Nietzsche to an inescapable plunge toward truth at any cost. Both of these ostensible fates are too costly. They take too much effort for not enough payoff. Our virtuosos of the self have adjusted their aspirations. Indeed, they are able to incorporate a sense of faith and a sense of truth into their moral pragmatism. Both senses join a general toolkit for loving people as they are, however they are, the basic pragmatic rule of thumb in a world where violence, God, condemnation, and the stationary self are all passe. Which mere mortals can resist the rise of this ethos — if not to engulf the world, then at least to a position of privilege and dominance in the West?

Regarding Rossello’s comment above, it’s also notable in this context that it’s only when Alasdair MacIntyre moves toward lowering the human-animal divide, and raising our awareness of our common fragility, that he opens the door to the organic development of Rortyesque pragmatic morality. Again this suggests (a) how a Hellenic spirituality of love and limits creates certain possibilities that a Hebraic divinity of fear and interdicts forecloses and (b) the shared way that Taylor and Rorty both downplay the affinity between therapeutic moral pragmatism and experiences of transcendence. Faith has always remained useful after Freud.

Hurd’s review also underlines the peculiar relation that exclusive humanism has with Christianity. According to Taylor, exclusive humanism, the modern and agnostic version of humanism, still carries the signs of providence. Since this type of humanism favors the development of the highest human faculties (freedom, art, reason, etc.), Taylor’s appreciation is not difficult to understand. However, Hurd introduces Deleuze as positing problems for Taylor’s mapping of Christianity and exclusive humanism in our secular age. Hurd argues that Deleuze is a non-Christian metaphysician who is consciously avoiding Christianity and exclusive humanism at the same time, by taking transcendence to be something beyond the empirical rather than the place in which fullness is achieved or sought after. In this context, as Hurd also notes, Nietzsche is also a problem for Taylor’s project because he is a critic of the Judeo-Christian tradition as well as of enlightened humanism.

I would like to follow up on Hurd’s articulation of the critical project of Deleuze. Since Taylor takes modern humanism to be the legitimate heir of Christianity, the works of Agamben and the late Derrida on the animal and the human-animal divide should be understood as carving out a space beyond the providential exclusive humanism proposed by Taylor. In other words, thinking the human as a human-animal today may challenge the exclusivity of a metaphysical humanism marked by its continuity with Christianity. This metaphysical humanism placed the human at the top of the great chain of being and therefore acted as (implicit or explicit) justification for numerous forms of violence against forms of life coded as less than human. Thus, thinking the human as a human-animal may add another language game hard to accommodate in the vast literary universe so cogently discussed by Taylor.