How does secularism crowd values out of our picture of the world?  If we accept a secularist metaphysics, then a necessary condition for the existence of values is that they can be accommodated by our best sciences. But our best sciences do not seem to have any room for values. Values make demands on human beings as actors—for instance, we ought to pursue the good, we ought to avoid the bad, and so on—but science describes no such free-standing “oughts.”

This view of value, however, is utterly counterintuitive. We all feel like there are values out there in the world, and that, at least, demands explanation. Bilgrami’s essay focuses on one such explanation of this phenomenon.  This explanation is, he suggests, both distinctive of and dominating the contemporary West. Here, I interrogate Bilgrami’s characterization and criticism of this contemporary, ‘disenchanted’ philosophical view of value. I conclude that while Bilgrami has put his finger on exactly the challenge that any metanormative theory faces, namely, explaining the role of the mind in the nature of value, his criticisms of what he takes to be the contemporary consensus are rather inadequate.

1. Disenchantment and the Mind-Dependence of the Moral

Bilgrami believes that today’s dominant understanding of morality derives from the sentimentalist accounts of value found in the work of David Hume and Adam Smith. But Bilgrami needn’t have focused on these two wonderful Scots, who were contemporaries and the dearest of friends, for he may as well have reached back a few generations to the work of Thomas Hobbes and Frances Hutcheson, who—well before Hume and Smith—argued for the kind of view that Bilgrami suggests is dominant today.

According to the sentimentalist view, values do not exist independently of human beings but in virtue of certain facts about our psychological make-up. As Bilgrami puts it:

“Sympathy, and moral sentiments generally, were merely human dispositions, just more causal tendencies in nature, our nature, and value had not other source but these tendencies, with which we were endowed… There was no other site of value but what resided in our own dispositions…”

The concept many contemporary philosophers who work on this question use is the concept of ‘mind-dependence,’ or the idea that values are products of the human mind, ‘mind’ being understood in the broadest psychological terms. Thus, we can understand Bilgrami as claiming that the dominant view amongst philosophers, and the West in general, is that value is mind-dependent.  According to this view, if some object, O, is valuable, O is valuable in virtue of the obtaining of certain human psychological states, and not because of any properties that O has independently of human psychological states. One way to characterize this is in terms of a counterfactual: if everything in the world—including all the intrinsic properties of O—were the same except that human beings had different psychological responses to O than they have in the actual world, then O would not be valuable (or would be valuable in a different way). Another way to cash out the view is as follows: a necessary condition for something to be valuable is that certain people—which people depends upon the specifics of the theory—have certain positive psychological attitudes directed at that thing. In short, on this view, man is the measure of all things.

The alternative view is that value is mind-independent. On this view, it is possible for something to be valuable regardless of any particular human psychological states obtaining. Consequently, something can be valuable even if no one desires it or believes it to be valuable, and so on.

For example, suppose that helping starving children is valuable (I presume that we all agree that it is!). On the view that value is mind-dependent, helping a starving child is valuable because people take it to be valuable. On the view that value is mind-independent, it doesn’t matter whether anyone takes helping starving children to be valuable; helping starving children just is valuable (or at least it is valuable in virtue of conditions that have nothing to do with someone taking it to be valuable).

Bilgrami then goes on to put the mind-dependence of value at the heart of disenchantment. In other words, a primary characteristic of disenchantment is the view that all values are dependent upon human psychology. This makes mind-dependence of value a distinctively modern doctrine. In fact, though, it is not a historically novel doctrine. In particular, as far back as the Euthyphro, one of Plato’s earliest and most famous dialogues, the following question is posed: Is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love something because it is pious? That is, is the pious mind-dependent or is the pious mind-independent? It is not obvious which side Plato comes down on in this early dialogue, although in his middle and later dialogues he quite clearly argues for the mind-independence of value. Aristotle, on the other hand, can conveniently be interpreted as defending the mind-dependence of value, or of virtue anyway: putting aside the formal condition of the doctrine of the mean, the substantive account of virtue depends entirely upon our psychological make-up. And so begins the written history of a millennia-long dispute.

2. Bilgrami’s Objection to the Mind-Dependence of Value

Bilgrami’s objection begins with his claim that intention always ‘crowds out’ prediction, by which he means that one cannot at the same time intend to do something and predict that one will do it. What Bilgrami must mean is that if one intends to do something, one is not tallying up psychological states and then, by applying some psychological law-like generalizations, concluding that one’s body will move in such-and-such a fashion. Rather, intention involves directly bringing about the action. That is not predicting the future but making the future. Predictors are passive with respect to the predicted event, whereas actors are active with respect to the same event.

Nonetheless, I cannot see how intention literally crowds out prediction. It seems possible to simultaneously intend to do something and predict that one will do it on the basis that one so intends. For example, suppose I intend to catch the 9:07 am train to New Haven. Someone asks me as I prepare to leave for the train station, “What do you predict you will be doing in the period immediately before 9:07 am?” A reasonable answer is: “Catching the 9:07 am train to New Haven.” If someone asks me why I am making this prediction, another reasonable answer is: “Because right now I intend to catch the 9:07 am train.” Presumably I am not speaking falsly.  I didn’t temporarily stop intending to catch this train just because someone asked me a question! So, intention doesn’t crowd out prediction, or, for that matter, vice versa. They are different mental states that one can hold simultaneously, and thus Bilgrami’s claim, at last on a literal reading, is pretty obviously false.

Bilgrami also says that an essential feature of agency is seeing value in the world. Every action, Bilgrami suggests, is focused on some desirable thing. This should be distinguished from merely desiring that thing. For, even if the desire for the thing is also in view, our desire presents itself as a response to what is desirable in the world. Thus, actions that flow from desires, even if understood as such in the midst of action (like the train-catching case described above), are actions performed with an eye towards something in the world, and not towards something in the head, as it were. That is, actions aim at values, i.e., desirable things, and not at valuings, i.e., desires. And, lest we enter into a vicious circle, values—the desirability of desired things—cannot themselves be desires.

For example, suppose I join the union organizing effort at my job. Someone might attempt to explain this action by saying, “Smith joined the union organizing effort to satisfy his desire to be a part of a union organizing effort.” But from my perspective as an actor, there are not just desires to b a part of a union organizing effort. From my perspective, rather, there is something else going on: I saw being a part of the union organizing effort itself as a good. My desire to join the union organizing effort is, in fact, not in view at all, unless, of course, someone asks me about it, or my joining is somehow thwarted and I feel the pang of a desire frustrated, or something else along those lines.  Otherwise, if I ask myself about whether I should join the union organizing effort, I will think about how union organizing is a good thing and leave my desires almost entirely out of the deliberation.

So, Bilgrami seems to hold that if we understand agency in terms congenial to the mind-dependence of value, agency drops out. We thereby lose the explanandum. But agency does exist, so mind-dependence cannot be the whole story. In schematic form, then, Bilgrami’s argument is this:

1. Seeing the world as filled with mind-independent value is an essential feature of agency.
2. Agency exists.
3. So, there are mind-independent values.

3. Experience or the Real Thing?

But this argument is not valid, so we should reject it outright. All the premises can show is that instances of seeing the world as filled with mind-independent value exist. The premises together do not entail that mind-independent values exist. Perhaps there is a suppressed premise along the following lines:

Seeing Is Believing (SIB): If X is an essential phenomenological component of some experience and a person has that experience, then X exists.

SIB is false, though. There are many essential phenomenological features of our experience that are not part of the ‘fabric of the world.’ Our perceptions are necessarily embodied and so necessarily constrained by the physical limitations of our sense apparatuses and our brains. For example, an essential feature of eyesight is that there is always something out of focus. If SIB were true, then parts of the world would, in fact, be out of focus. But that is obviously false. Bilgrami cannot rely on SIB for his criticism of ‘disenchanted’ ethics.

These arguments are familiar transcendental arguments for the existence of mind-independent value. But, as we have seen, Bilgrami is not formulating the initial premises in a way that generates the entailment he wants.  Let us rehearse the general form of transcendental arguments so that we can see where Bilgrami is erring:

1. X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y.
2. Y exists.
3. So, X exists.

The X Bilgrami wants to show exists is mind-independent value.  But, his focus on the experience of the mind-independence of value leads him to make that the focus of his argument.  What Bilgrami’s argument for the mind-independence of value should look like is something like this:

1. Mind-independent value is a necessary condition for the possibility of agency.
2. Agency exists.
3. So, mind-independent values exist.

But, Bilgrami’s says nothing at all to establish premise 1.  All he has shown is that the experience of mind-independent value is a necessary condition for the possibility of agency. So, Bilgrami lacks the raw material for the sort of argument he wants to give for the existence of mind-independent value.

Perhaps Bilgrami thinks that it is somehow obvious that the experience of mind-independent value cannot be explained except by appeal to the existence of mind-independent value. But, it isn’t, as he would realize if he only consulted his bête noires Hume and Smith, for whom the experience of mind-independent value was easily explained away without appeal to mind-independent value.

So, does Bilgrami think that there are non-obvious grounds supporting his principle that the experience of mind-independent value can only be explained by appeal to mind-independent value? Maybe Bilgrami is relying on the fact that no matter how much you know how the brain and body work when experiencing something, you still will never know what it is like to have that experience (unless you have that experience yourself)? Does he think that it follows from this ‘explanatory gap’ between physical explanation and phenomenology that the content of our experiences must exist independently of being experienced? That, though, is an unsupported inference.

Perhaps Bilgrami’s position comes down to this: because knowing the ‘physical’ explanations of what is going on when someone is having some experience cannot give the knower that very experience, the contents of that experience are metaphysically distinct from what is referred to in the physical explanation of that experience. Fair enough. But that would not pose a challenge to an account of value according to which it is mind-dependent, for those who argue for the mind-dependence of value assert that values are fixed by the mind, which is on the opposite side, metaphysically, from the physical explanation. Psychophysical dualism is entirely consistent with the mind-dependence of value.  In fact, Kant may have endorsed both of these positions.

I conclude that there is nothing in Bilgrami’s essay to warrant his conclusion that understanding agency requires positing the mind-independence of value. All he has shown is that our notions of agency are inextricably tied up with the experience of mind-independent of value. What explains that experience of value is another question entirely.

In sum, Bilgrami has done nothing to show that “disenchantment—the exclusion of all external callings [i.e., mind-independent values] that Taylor identifies in the new ethical construction of buffered selfhood and agency emerging from the early modern period—would have the effect of putting into doubt whether any notion of agency has been constructed at all.”

4. Consensus?

Bilgrami believes there is a consensus about the mind-dependence of value. Who is part of this consensus? Apparently Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are. But, who else? Christopher Hitchens? John Mackie? A.J. Ayer? There are very few leading contemporary philosophers who endorse Ayer’s or Mackie’s views. In fact, there are really only two or three. Do we have a consensus nonetheless? Doesn’t it take at least a minyan?

The fashionable position among philosophers who think about these questions is, in fact, the opposite of the view that so upsets Bilgrami. This position is called moral realism. It comes in many stripes—from the more mind-dependent to the less—but they all hold that there is value ‘out there’ to which we, as valuers, respond. If Bilgrami is okay with weak mind-dependence, then I recommend Peter Railton’s impressive arguments for ‘objective interests.’ If Bilgrami wants more robust mind-independence, he should consider the Russ Shafer-Landau’s defense of moral realism. If Bilgrami wants stark-raving mad mind independence, then he should look to David Enoch’s recent work. Contemporary philosophy is awash with defenses of moral realism, i.e., values to which an agent responds as opposed to values that flatly depend upon that agent’s occurrent sentiments.

Furthermore, Bilgrami’s argument bears similarities to recent defenses of a weak form of mind-independent value. This family of arguments goes by the name of constitutivism. According to constitutivist accounts of value – most famously defended by Christine Korsgaard of Harvard University and David Velleman of NYU – the objective authority of moral norms (and perhaps even value) can be grounded in norms or aims that are supposedly constitutive of human practical agency.

Finally, Bilgrami might also look to the many contemporary political philosophers who take the global human rights regime quite seriously. For, if there is a popular consensus among philosophers and non-philosophers, it’s that human rights are mind-independent. Indeed, human rights might be contemporary versions of religiously based transcendent values. God may be dead, in other words, but the Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn’t.

If we are to love the world ourselves, or at least understand the “calling and mode of inspiration” of someone who has been supposed to do so pre-eminently (Jesus), we should join the great German philosophers of the nineteenth century in their effort to revive this paradoxical logos. Not only Nietzsche, but also Hegel made this a goal: “There is no aphorism of Heraclitus,” he wrote, “that I have not adopted in my Logic.” Becoming God joins this effort, recounting how the clash between Heraclitus and Parmenides over the correct way to think about the world made its way into the dialogues of Plato, who decided in favor of Parmenides and his logic of consistency, thereby occluding Heraclitus and his superior logic of chiasmus. The early Christian theologians were primarily Platonists, however, and so the crosswise interpretation of Jesus available to the Heraclitean tradition was overshadowed by the logic of consistency that would strive but fail to understand a human god. This fourth post aims in the end to present this interpretation.

More immediately, its purpose is to show how evenly Heraclitus straddles the distinction between transcendence and immanence. Before adducing the relevant aphorisms, let us recall the necessary conditions of a philosophy that is as immanent as it is transcendent: (i) it must teach that the highest good is human flourishing, but also something transcending the human; (ii) it must teach that the natural and temporal world is all there is, but also that this world is transcended by the supernatural and eternal divine; and (iii) it must teach that we humans are mortal, but also somehow immortal. Two words for each of the three conditions will recall their contradictory concerns: for the first, these are virtue and the good; for the second, the cosmos and god; for the third, life and death. Accordingly, we shall organize a few of the Heraclitean aphorisms around these three concerns. But we shall take them in a different order, starting with the second about cosmos and god. Connecting this fundamental contradiction to the other two will be the self we discover whenever we go in search of ourselves.

First, then, the natural and temporal cosmos. That it is the ultimate reality—rather than being a product of an eternal realm, say of Platonic Forms, let alone some mythic time, such as Hesiod depicts—is the account of two aphorisms we considered in the previous post. One spoke explicitly of a world that “no god nor man has made,” adding that “it ever was and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures quenched.” Nothing superior to this temporal world could have created it, in fact, because for Heraclitus there is no vantage of eternity above time from which such a creation might occur. This is not to say that eternity does not exist for him—on the contrary, it does—but only that it holds no higher rank than time, the everliving fire, whose moments are simultaneously kindled and quenched. Nothing transcends fiery time, reports another aphorism we examined earlier, because “all things are a requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.”

So immanent is Heraclitean cosmology, in fact, that this requital and exchange of everything in the natural world is none other than “the god (theos): day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger.” The quoted list of nouns is the first half of the only aphorism that explicitly defines the Heraclitean god. As if its succession of natural states were not temporal enough, the second half says of this god that “it alters, as when mingled with perfumes it gets named according to the hēdonē (scent, pleasure) of each.” Approaching the altar fire of a god, Greek worshippers threw upon it various perfumes: myrrh, cyprus, rose, and so on. The names they gave this fire depended on the scents it consequently produced, just as the names worshippers gave the divine depended on the pleasures associated with it. Day and night, for example, are among the many gods named by Hesiod, as are others listed in the first half of this aphorism, no doubt because they affect human life, bringing us pleasures (and pains).

“The teacher of most is Hesiod,” Heraclitus wrote with scorn; “it is him they know as knowing most, who did not recognize day and night: they are one.” Naming according to superficial pleasures, or pains, Hesiod failed to recognize the concealed nature of the divine. The one god Heraclitus reveals may be defined by a list of these superficial names, but it is not any one of these pleasures or pains, nor all together in an indiscriminate mixture. Instead, it is the concealed structure of their values to mortals. Day and summer are safe, winter and night threaten; war and hunger are destructive, satiety and peace preserve. The chiastic pattern of mortal pleasures (+) and pains (-) in the first half of the aphorism is thus: + – - + | – + + – . This is another Heraclitean fugue, ingeniously weaving misunderstandings of the divine into a complex pattern that nevertheless reveals its concealed structure. This theo-logos, like so many other Heraclitean logoi, thereby exhibits what it reports—the divine logos itself.

“Crosswise logic” argued that this logos is chiasmus, an eternal cross in the midst of time. “All things come to pass in accordance with this logos,” Heraclitus writes, yet “this logos holds forever.” God may be the alternation of “day night, winter summer, war peace, hunger satiety,” but also divine is the eternal structure of that very alternation. Both immanent (as the natural world in time) and transcendent (as the eternal logos of that world), Heraclitean theology is thus contradictory. But inconsistency is not the vice for this logos that it would be for other theologies and philosophies. Indeed, this particular contradiction is its chief virtue. This is not to say that everything is permitted to it, recall, because the principle of non-contradiction and its correlative activity of analysis remain essential to its harmonic structure. Whenever it turns upon itself, however, to contemplate the divine order (kosmos), it surpasses the inadequate logic of consistency with the synthetic activity of its own chiastic principle.

“The wise is one,” writes Heraclitus, “knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all.” Several other aphorisms attest in this way to the transcendence of god, but of them all the most paradoxical and richest with hidden meaning is the following: “The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus.” Set apart from all things, alone, this god should not be called by the name even of the most powerful Greek divinity—so perfectly does it transcend all things. And yet this god is no less within all imperfect things, so that it may be called by the name of Zeus among other things more mundane: day night, summer winter, etc. Named according to the pleasure of each worshipper, furthermore, the divine acquires an infinite variety of forms according to the infinitely various anxieties brought to the altar of time, this vale of tears. The Heraclitean god may reveal itself to us in time through these anxieties, but to know it fully we must also recognize it as the concealed and eternal structure of that perpetual revelation.

This proves also to be the structure of the self that we discover whenever we contemplate ourselves. “I went in search of myself,” reported Heraclitus, as though simply describing the beginning of his own philosophical quest. But the apparent simplicity of this aphorism conceals a deep philosophical contradiction, one that resides likewise in the Delphic imperative to know thyself, not to mention the appropriation of this imperative by Plato to characterize the beginning of philosophy. Here in brief is the puzzle it generates: if I am to search for myself, I must somehow be absent from myself; for anything to be absent from itself, though, it must both be and not be itself. (Here is a fuller account of the puzzle, which Becoming God elaborates further.) Thanks to this contradiction, the self appears opposed to itself, not-whole, divergent, and dissonant. Whatever unity it may appear to have before we consider its inner conflict, in other words, the self now fragments into an inconsistent plurality. Yet this is only one half of its inquiry, for the lesson of this puzzle turns out to be the same one learned earlier from the paradox of fire and the temporal cosmos it symbolizes.

Self-inquiry may be contradictory at each moment, according to our quick analysis, but as with fire the momentary opposition of a self in search of itself is united through the flow of time and our emotional engagement with it. After all, turning our contemplation outward to the relation of our self with others—the hope and fear, anger and lust, love and hate we experience in community—we appear to others and ourselves rather whole, convergent, and consonant. Whatever plurality may have been revealed by our analysis of inner conflict now achieves a consistent unity. No sooner is this fragmentation and opposition overcome, however, than our new unity generates a fresh opposition for self-inquiry: between opposition and unity, whole and not-whole, convergence and divergence, consonance and dissonance. Once this new synthesis is analyzed, in other words, it produces a further contradiction (between analysis and synthesis), until this fresh conflict is in turn reconciled by time and a fresh emotional engagement with it. And so on.

Or so it goes for the consummately reflective self, sharing with the temporal cosmos its eternal structure: “wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” Chiasmus is therefore the logos of the self as much as it is the logos of time. When self-inquiry directs this principle inward rather than outward, therefore, it discovers the activity of chiasmus to be the self sought. This surprising discovery—that the self is not only one and many, but the active principle that makes such a contradiction intelligible—is required by the logic of self-knowledge. For in self-knowledge, properly speaking, the knowing subject must be the same as the object known, otherwise the knowledge would not be of self but of other. Seeking self-knowledge, accordingly, we reveal our self to be this very same chiasmus. Far from the purely intellectual feat of navel-gazing it might at first appear to be, this activity of genuine self-inquiry would be as affective as cognitive, as loving as rational, as much about the world and its god as about oneself. Practiced well, crosswise logic reveals the concealed structure of all three.

“Thinking well,” Heraclitus thus writes, “is the greatest excellence.” Thinking crosswise, that is, we perfect the divine in our selves. Although its logos is already ubiquitous, it is only imperfectly realized whenever we become preoccupied with an immanent world of time, or for that matter a transcendent and eternal heaven. The typical result of such preoccupations, as “Love and reason” argued, is resentment. If we wish to love more purely, therefore, we should cultivate an impure devotion both to the divine immanent world and to the god who nonetheless transcends it. Living in time, we already participate in its chiasmus, just as a fire must do to burn. But some fires grow weak, whether by excess need or satiety, whereas other fires grow thanks to their more perfect synthesis of this characteristic conflict. A later Heraclitean, Marcus Aurelius, makes this analogy explicit, twice comparing the virtuous self to “a bright fire that appropriates whatever you throw into it and from it produces flame and light.” Such a light would shine in the dark, and no darkness could ever extinguish it. Heraclitean ethics enjoins us to become such a light to the world.

The perfect realization of this light would be a self who incarnates a cross of immanence and transcendence. Both the good sought and the life lived by such a self would thus reveal it. With divine conflict, his highest good would be the immanent flourishing of human excellence, the cardinal virtues celebrated in naturalistic philosophies from antiquity to the present; but his highest good would also be the superhuman life of god, the theological virtues, now understood as the chiasmus of love and reason. Distinct from this perfect divine activity, as human, he would nonetheless be identical with it, as god. Here, for instance, is how his dual and contradictory nature would manifest itself. Emotionally, his all-too-human weeping over our mortal limits would reside alongside his supernatural confidence in our transcendence of these limits. Intellectually, his surprise over the peccadilloes of his friends would reside alongside his knowledge of every hair on their heads.

Living these contradictions, he would likewise die them, because such a self would have to be mortal insofar as he was immanent. Dying in time with bodily corruption, then, he would nevertheless have to be immortal as well, living in eternity with divine activity. Heraclitus unites these opposing demands in his masterpiece of form and content: “Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the other’s death, in the others’ life having died.” Presenting a semantic chiasmus in the first half, then a syntactic chiasmus in the second, this logos replicates and thus recalls the complex chiastic structure of the aphorism that defined god (+ – - + | – + + -). Whereas that theo-logos reported a natural world of time that was ultimate but transcended by god, this bio-logos (or thanato-logos) consigns us to an irrevocable death in time that is superseded by eternal life. In other words, the corruptible shall put on incorruption, and the mortal shall put on immortality, but death cannot be swallowed up in victory. Fortunately. For if ever it were, along with it would go meaningful life.

The self incarnated in this way would be both fully immanent and fully transcendent. Thinking so, living truth in the midst of conflict, he would be free to love the world perfectly. Not resenting the temporal world as an obstacle to an eternal paradise, he might reveal the kingdom of god to be within you. Not resenting time as an inexorable thief of our beloveds, he might say today you will be with me in paradise. This twin revelation, his crosswise logos, would communicate the love’s knowledge he would himself embody. Such a logos, or word of god, would be the Heraclitean Christ. Whoever confesses him would try to imitate him, living a Christian life, with most of the anxieties this paradoxical vocation has always provoked. Is this genuine prayer or sophisticated idolatry? Is this authentic meditation or simply self-help? Is this chastity or repression, courage or pride, charity or vanity? Heraclitean Christianity offers the anxious believer no special solace but one.

Since the first Pentecost, and no doubt before that, Christians have struggled with contradictions. All religions must, of course, but the religion that confesses a human god assumes a unique burden in this regard. Tertullian famously shrugged it off with these words: certum est, quia impossible; it is certain, the immortality of mortals, because it is impossible. Such fideism has always tempted Christians, and it is arguably more tempting now—in an age even more diffident about philosophical truth than it is about religious doctrine. Theologians who have put aside the Thomistic synthesis of faith and reason, ironically for good reasons, reach instead for Kierkegaard or some more recent iteration of the fideist position. Yet this choice, between consistent or irrational faith, preserves the false dichotomy that has bedeviled Christian theology from its earliest Platonic forms: either Christian doctrines can be rendered non-contradictory and thus acceptable to reason, or their irrationality must be admitted, sometimes with a smug contempt of reason.

Heraclitean Christianity escapes this false dichotomy by denying its implicit assumption that reason is consistency. If the highest form of reason is instead crosswise, as this series of posts has argued, then Christian confession would be reasonable despite its contradictions. Not every contradiction is allowed; this cannot be emphasized enough; only those required by careful meditation upon this world are permitted. But according to the Heraclitean meditation of these posts, these permissible contradictions are the three just canvassed—between time and eternity, nature and god, mortality and immortality. As it happens, moreover, these are the same three contradictions which the Christian confesses in one person: Jesus Christ. Far from irrational, confessing him would instead be the summit of reason.

Many Christians worry less about irrationality than they do about orthodoxy, so a few words are in order about the fidelity of this interpretation to Christian tradition. Is it heretical to confess Christ crosswise? Here a philosopher must hand the baton to theologians, but only after quickly acknowledging important differences between this Christ and the one so deeply indebted to Platonism and its logic of consistency. As already mentioned, neither his death nor ours is swallowed up in victory. On the contrary, death remains as invincible as the natural and temporal world it presupposes. As a result, no final resurrection will erase death forever, no pure eschaton will put an end to this impure world, nor will any future time witness the separation of wheat from tares. Yet this is already happening now, so to speak, in eternity. Here in time, following the crosswise confession, we foresee no ultimate reconciliation of all contradiction. Conflict is everliving, just as the cosmic fire.

Nevertheless—and this is the only solace crosswise logic offers the anxious Christian—there is truth in conflict. Heraclitean philosophy permits us to speak this truth intelligibly, to think it reasonably, and thereby to feel it most maturely. The crosswise Christian, in sum, could sing this Polish Christmas carol (Bóg się rodzi) with not only the lips, but also the mind as much as the heart:

God is born, great powers tremble,
Lord of Heaven lies forsaken.
Fire is frozen, splendor darkens,
feeble nature God has taken.
Lowly born, yet Lord to Praises,
Mortal yet the King of Ages.
Now indeed the Word made Flesh has
come on earth to dwell among us.

Heraclitean logic is the logos. This Greek word condenses many English translations, of which three give a sense of its wide range: ‘speech’ (language), ‘reason’ (thought), and ‘structure’ (world). Whenever he invokes the logos, Heraclitus exploits this range and alludes to all three domains. Indeed, holding in mind at once all three—world, thought, and language—is essential to the Heraclitean way of thinking. Thus, when he insists that “all things come to pass in accordance with this logos,” he means that everything coming to pass—in the temporal world, that is—shares the same structure. But he also means that accurate reasoning about this world shares this structure, just as accurate speech must too. This accurate speech is presumably his aphoristic style, so to understand it, its characteristic way of thinking, and the world it describes, we must understand this shared structure. It cannot be consistency, as “Truth in conflict” argued; instead, as this post argues, it is chiasmus.

Chiasmus is usually known as the literary figure in which elements are repeated but in crosswise order (A : B :: B : A). Here is an example from Shakespeare: “Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves.” A pleasant change of consonants adorns the reversal of meanings: strongly loving is doting; to suspect is to doubt. The elements reversed can also be syntactic, however, as in this example from Milton: “Love without end and without measure Grace.” Here, a noun and a prepositional phrase trade order.  Again, a substitution of words introduces some pleasant variety, though now it also adds layers of concealed meaning. By substituting ‘Grace’ for ‘Love,’ and thereby assimilating them, Milton suggests that divine love is freely given. By adding synonymous prepositional phrases, he suggests that the gift is eternal and boundless. For Christians like Milton, the sign of this love and grace is the cross. With this crosswise figure, then, he communicates a Christology—a logos, or account, of his God.

No figure could be more appropriate to the logos of Christ, for a cross has always symbolized this word, beginning as it does with a Greek letter that resembles one. Chi looks like our English X—so much like it, in fact, that we shorten “Christmas” to “Xmas,” usually without recognizing the Greek contribution to our abbreviation. The same letter appears more faithfully on the candles and vestments of Christian churches, where it joins the letter Rho to symbolize the Messiah. But before there were any Christian churches, the letter Chi symbolized the literary figure it names. Chiasmus comes from chiazō, which the Greek grammarians used to convey the crosswise pattern of its principal letter. The association between Christ and the pattern of chiasmus was thus natural enough, at least in the symbolic imagination of the Hellenistic world. The association is more substantial for Heraclitean philosophy, which reveals chiasmus as the concealed structure of the world, just as Christian revelation proclaims Christ as the truth of the world.

To appreciate the depth of this association, we must first understand how a literary figure could reveal the concealed structure of the world. Let us begin by recalling the polysemy of logos: in order to signify one chiasmus shared by world, reason, and speech, Heraclitus crafts aphorisms (logoi) that exhibit what they report. Here is an especially dramatic example of the technique: “All things are a requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.” In this faithful English translation, the complex chiasmus of meanings shines through (A : B :: B : A ::: C : D :: D : C). Below this semantic pattern, additionally, is a dazzling arrangement of nouns whose syntax cannot be rendered into English. Their cases (Nominative and Genitive) and their numbers (Singular and Plural) make the following pattern, GS : NP :: NS : GP ::: GS : NP :: GP : NS. In the first half of the sentence is a chiasmus according to case (G : N :: N : G). In the second half, one according to number (S : P :: P : S). This is a fugue in Greek, weaving linguistic opposition into a complex unity, but what is its philosophical significance?

“Truth and conflict” adduced Heraclitean fire not only to humble the principle of non-contradiction but also to herald its more catholic rival. Analyzing fire’s burning into moments, we found it to be an opposition of “need and satiety” at each one. This came as a surprise, no doubt, because when we do not deliberately analyze fire in this way—whenever we use it to warm our hands or cook a meal; whenever we fear it as the destroyer of homes and cities; whenever, that is, its burning affects us in time, entering into the narratives woven by our emotional engagement with the world—we contemplate something whose unity appears undisturbed by the opposites it synthesizes. Analysis may reveal a fire that is in conflict with itself at every moment, but through the continuity of time it synthesizes these opposites into a unity. Whenever we relax our analysis, returning to affective engagement with fire, we overlook its momentary dissonance and appreciate instead this synthetic unity. Correlatively, whenever we disengage emotionally from fire by activating consistent reason, we lose sight of its continuity and consonance, foregrounding instead its opposition and conflict.

Were we to select one perspective exclusively—whether purely consistent cognition or purely emotional engagement—our comprehension of fire would be limited by omission of the other. Neither by pure cognitive analysis nor by pure emotional synthesis can we comprehend fully anything temporal. Neither by a narrow focus on its instantaneous opposition nor by attending to its temporal unity alone can we understand it. Its concealed structure reveals itself only through an impure chiasmus of both. Beginning with a unified flame, accordingly, we analyzed its burning into moments of contradictory opposition. Synthesis and unity were thus conjoined with analysis and opposition. Stepping back from this conjunction, we now recognize its fresh contradiction: consistency forbids the simultaneity of unity and opposition, synthesis and analysis. And yet their harmony is nonetheless accomplished—just as fire accomplishes its own burning—through the continuity of time. Conjoined with this additional analysis into opposites, then, is another synthesis into unity. And so on, world without end.

All told, our comprehension of fire reveals the following pattern. Unity : opposition :: opposition : unity (U : O :: O : U). This particular set of terms, and the artless aphorism it informs, puts the emphasis on the object of our comprehension, the structure of fire itself. Putting the emphasis instead on the structure of our comprehension, as subjects, we may switch to the following set of terms. Synthesis : analysis :: analysis : synthesis (S : A :: A : S). Whichever set we choose—one focusing on the world, the other on our thought of it—we find the same crosswise pattern. This is of course chiasmus, and it can be iterated infinitely (SU : AO :: AO : SU ::: SU : AO :: AO : SU …). More than a complex literary figure, however, this very iteration is the crosswise logic of the temporal world. “Kosmos,” writes Heraclitus, “the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures quenched.” More than a mere figure of speech, in other words, chiasmus is the eternal structure of both our fiery temporal cosmos and the activity of comprehending it in thinking and speech.

Heraclitean philosophy is a meditation on this kosmos (Greek for ‘order’ or ‘structure’). Heraclitus consummates this meditation with a principle that has a more legitimate claim than non-contradiction to be the firmest of all: “wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one all things.” This principle describes a complex activity that is as synthetic as it is analytic. Wholes consonant and converging are synthesized into one from all things, while not-wholes dissonant and diverging are analyzed into all things from one. Exhibiting the structure of chiasmus it also reports, as Becoming God argues, this logos challenges the principle of non-contradiction. Indeed, this principle of chiasmus appears to have been the target of Parmenides and the Platonic tradition founded upon his rejection of it. Thus, if we defy this tradition, emboldened by its failure to think the temporal world, if we adopt Heraclitus’s more capacious mode of reasoning, bolstered by its chiasmus of consistent thought and passionate longing, if we assimilate ourselves to this cross—a task that is by no means easy, requiring a spiritual discipline of its own—we can reasonably confess a philosophy that is neither immanent nor transcendent, but both.

Lest this mode of impure reason seem too abstract, complex, or even impossible, here are two analogies that might make it seem less so. First, we can compare crosswise logic to looking at the duck-rabbit drawing popularized in philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Looked at in one way, the drawing appears to be of a duck; looked at in another, it appears as a rabbit. We alternate between seeing it one way and then another, back and forth, often quickly, and sometimes involuntarily. When we willfully contemplate not just the drawing but also these very alternations, we rise to a higher level of reflection, coming to see the drawing as duck-rabbit, a unity in opposition (or opposition in unity). Similar epiphanies occur, secondly, when we study contrapuntal music. Listening to a Bach fugue, for example, we can with disciplined effort discern not only one theme or its counter-point, nor only both in alternation, but both at once. Beyond this already difficult accomplishment, the highest comprehension of the fugue discerns the concealed structure of its harmonic conflict. To fully appreciate it, in other words, we must hear the unity in opposition as well as the opposition in unity that is Bach’s composition.

Music presents the best analogy to crosswise logic because it likewise touches our hearts as well as our minds. Whether listening to it attentively, performing it well, or composing it creatively, we must both think and feel deeply. To practice chiasmus, similarly, we must turn our emotion as well as our cognition toward the world of becoming. Engaging it emotionally, we affirm the continuity of time; cognizing it simultaneously, we affirm the conflict of its every moment. After recognizing the opposition between these activities, furthermore, crosswise logic unites them in chiasmus: a higher unity of the opposition between opposition and unity. And so on, ideally, although not all emotions will engage the world equally, nor is all cognition consistent.

Not everything should be permitted to reason. To think consistently, after all, we must practice the principle of non-contradiction, recognizing the conflict inherent in the temporal world. With this practice, notice, we show crosswise logic to be more generous than its rival. For although it dethrones non-contradiction, it installs it as the prince of all logical offices, second only to the king, namely, chiasmus itself.

Nor should every emotion be permitted to it. Resentment is forbidden because it disengages from the world that crosswise logic seeks to engage. For the goal of resentment is destruction. Anger and hatred seek to destroy, too, but for them destruction is always a means to preserve some other end, some thing considered good independent of the act of destruction. Resentment, by contrast, seeks the preservation of nothing but itself. In fact, according to Nietzsche, “nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” It destroys even the resentful self. Its ulterior motive, so rarely recognized by the soul being consumed by it, is destruction for its own sake, destruction of everything that opposes it, destruction ultimately of the whole world. Fortunately, as Connolly’s grid acknowledges, resentment is opposed by love, an emotion that engages more deeply with the world than any other because it is most open to its differences, least limited by defenses against its inevitable conflict, and most single-mindedly invested in the creation of independent good.

Requiring extraordinary strength of character, then, crosswise logic demands that we love the whole world of becoming while thinking consistently about it. Indeed, it is the supreme activity of loving and thinking together: Love without end and without measure Reason. This eternal cross thus manages to bind our deepest longings—which, Augustine rightly argued, cannot be satisfied by the temporal world—together with our intellectual powers—which cannot conceive a meaningful life in eternity without contradiction. Requiring a love so strong and pure that it remains undiminished in the midst of the world’s conflict, such an achievement would appear beyond any mere mortal. Confessing the immortal mortal, however, the Heraclitean tradition is uniquely “equipped to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.” Making this confession will be the aim of the next and final post.

Humble it, that is, but not reject it. For without it, as philosophers say, everything is permitted. Some recent ones have questioned it nonetheless, reviving the Liar Paradox of late antiquity: “This sentence is false.” It appears to be a normal declarative sentence, so it should be true or false. But which? If it were true, what it says must be the case, so it should be false. Yet if it be false, this is exactly what it says, so it should be true. Despite elaborate attempts to defuse it, this paradox persistently threatens an explosion, the logical equivalent of a nuclear detonation, destroying the principle of non-contradiction and thus the imperative to think consistently. But even those who champion the paradox recognize the incoherence of abandoning this principle altogether. Their goal is to humble it, not reject it. Similarly respectful of it, this post seeks only to demote it from the status Aristotle assigned it, namely “the firmest of all.”

Whether or not it can be saved from the Liar—which could perhaps be dismissed as an anomaly, radioactive uranium to be safely contained somehow, somewhere where it will not corrupt the rest of our thinking—the principle of non-contradiction exhibits a more serious flaw: it cannot accommodate anything in time, let alone time itself, where we live and breathe and have our being. Here, in brief, is the problem: this logical principle requires that everything temporal be consistent at a moment, although no moment is itself consistent. Aristotle formulates the principle this way: “The same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect.” He adds that we may supply other qualifications as needed, but the most important of all he has already mentioned: time. Yesterday, for example, was not contradictory if it was both cloudy and not-cloudy; it may have been cloudy in the morning and sunny in the afternoon; the attributes cloudy and not-cloudy belonged to yesterday at different times. If anything were to undermine the principle, then, it would have to do so at the same time—in other words, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.

Now, ironically, Aristotle himself observed that if time were a succession of moments, each one would have to perish, for only so could these moments yield to one another and produce the flow of time. When, however, could a particular moment perish? In which moment could it do so? Not in itself, for then it would both exist and not exist; nor could it perish in any other moment, for then it would be simultaneous with a different moment. Both options, in short, would violate the principle of non-contradiction. So too would the same options available to any moment that is supposed to be born. It could only be born in itself or in another moment, and both are equally contradictory. Indeed, the paradoxical options available to anyone who freezes time into moments resemble nothing so much as the dilemmas produced by a student of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea.

Zeno’s most beguiling paradox, the Flying Arrow, invites us to imagine the flight of an arrow frozen in a moment. Were we to freeze a flying arrow in a ‘now’—catching it on film with a high-speed camera, so to speak—it would occupy a space equal to itself. For if it should occupy a space longer than itself, it would be moving, not frozen. In our photographic analogy, it would be as if our shutter speed were too slow; rather than catching the flying arrow at a moment, we caught it over several moments, creating a blur. Catching it in a ‘now,’ we would find it occupying a space equal to itself, which is to say motionless. In every ‘now,’ at every moment, it must be motionless. Yet at each moment it must also be moving. After all, it is a flying arrow: if it never moves, it cannot fly. In sum, then, at every moment it must be both moving and still. The flying arrow would seem to violate the principle of non-contradiction.

According to Aristotle, however, such an absurd “result follows from the assumption that time is composed of moments: if this assumption is not granted, the conclusion will not follow.” In other words, if “time is not composed of indivisible nows,” but is instead infinitely divisible, there is no freezing the flying arrow in a moment. For if a motion happens over time that is infinitely divisible, every division of its duration should reveal it to be moving. While moving, it must always occupy a space longer than itself, only less so with each finer division. Because there is no final division, neither is there any moment at which the arrow turns out to be still. One solution to this paradox, therefore, is to claim that time is not composed of ‘nows’; instead, it is infinitely divisible, a flowing continuum rather than a particulate succession.

Is the same Aristotelian solution available to explain a related puzzle, the paradoxical change of everything in time? Consider an especially vivid instance of this change: fire. As a process, it is ever-changing, a sort of motion. Dividing the duration of its burning—where this burning is parallel to the arrow’s moving—we shall never reach a moment when it ceases to burn, anymore than we shall reach a moment when the arrow is still. The parallel is important to keep in mind, because the same photographic temptations arise for fire that arose for the flying arrow. We imagine capturing a fire on film, and with the image of such a fire before our minds, we are tempted to think that we have frozen it in exclusive satisfaction, the way we were tempted by Zeno to think of the arrow as perfectly still in a ‘now.’ But if time is infinitely divisible, however finely we divide the duration of the fire’s burning, it is no more static in this division of its duration than was the arrow perfectly still in its own. In every division, no matter how fine, the flying arrow is moving. Correlatively, in every division, no matter how fine, the fire is burning.

This burning is a satisfaction with fuel, lest it be extinguished, but it is also a need for fuel, lest it be static. Fire, wrote Heraclitus, is “need and satiety.” It cannot consistently burn in a moment, anymore than an arrow can fly in a moment, and so it should come as no surprise that any analysis that freezes it so creates a conflict. Thanks to the analyses of Aristotle and Zeno, though, we can say more precisely that the logical offense occurs only when we conceive of time as divisible into ‘nows.’ Yet there is a deep irony here that Aristotle himself does not seem to recognize: the principle of non-contradiction that he himself codified requires us to conceive time and change this way. It analyzes time into moments in order to insist, as a necessary condition of being and knowledge, that the attributes of everything so analyzed be consistent with one another.

Yesterday was both cloudy and not-cloudy, but this was no true conflict because its contradictory attributes belonged to it at different times. No such analysis is available when we use the principle to think fire, however, because its satisfaction and neediness remain forever intertwined in each moment. So likewise, it turns out, whenever we scrutinize anything else in time, which is itself both dying and being born, inextricably together, in every moment and forever. If the principle of non-contradiction really is a necessary condition of knowledge, as Aristotle claimed, knowing any object must require freezing it in a moment and finding it consistent then. But if everything in time—everything that undergoes process, change, and motion, albeit less visibly and dramatically than fire—must be inconsistent in each moment, nothing temporal can be known as such. Indeed, because Aristotle thinks that nothing contradictory can be, nothing temporal can ever exist as such.

Philosophers who revere the principle of non-contradiction thus require true existence to be unchanging, timeless, and eternal. Plato’s Forms are but the paradigms of this requirement, showing most clearly how devotion to consistent thinking favors transcendence by rendering the immanent world impossible, unknowable, and even an evil illusion. If the argument of “Love and reason” was accurate—that a purely transcendent philosophy inhibits love of the world—the emotion associated most often with this way of thinking should be resentment. This was Nietzsche’s abiding critique of philosophers, principally those in the Platonic tradition; this critique drove him and those indebted to him, especially Heidegger, to seek a way of thinking otherwise. Finding his alternative in the philosopher whom Parmenides attacked for his “crosswise” way of thinking, Nietzsche wrote that “the world forever needs the truth, hence the world forever needs Heraclitus.” The next post turns to him, attempting to reveal his concealed logic before using it in a final post to answer Connolly’s invitation “to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.”

The result of Connolly’s division of traditions according to both belief and emotion is a four-point grid that neatly categorizes both traditions and the individuals who inhabit them. A horizontal axis stretches from immanence in the world on the left to transcendence of it on the right. The vertical axis descends from love of the world at the top to resentment of it at the bottom. In the top-right corner, therefore, are those who affirm a god that transcends a world they nonetheless love, whereas in the top-left are those who believe nothing transcends the world they love no less. In the bottom-right corner are those who resent the world transcended by their god, whereas in the bottom-left corner are those who resent the merely immanent world they profess.

Connolly recognizes that between these abstract cases are the infinite varieties of lived philosophy and religion. Few are pure, either cognitively or affectively. Yet the extreme corners of his grid reveal two insights. First of all, clashes of worldview—say, between fundamentalist preachers and the new atheists—become bitter less because their beliefs are in conflict than because their proponents share an affect: resentment. Secondly, diverse philosophical traditions—say Platonism and Freudianism, one teaching transcendence, the other immanence, but both aiming to promote love—begin to appear more as allies than as rivals in the history of ideas, so long as they seek to cultivate the same affect. With the varieties of lived philosophy and religion in between the extremes, Connolly’s grid helps us to see more clearly their unique combinations of cognition and emotion.

But can emotions and beliefs be mixed and matched so easily, or is there a tighter relationship between them? Are some beliefs more likely to produce love; others, resentment? To be sure, there are individuals who manage to love the world no matter what they believe, just as there are others who would climb any mountain to punch a shadow. Through chance and willpower, individuals seem to manage every possible combination of belief and emotion. Rather than focus on individuals, we should investigate whether divergent traditions constituted by rival beliefs about the nature of the world are more or less likely to foster love of it. Correlatively, are traditions of one sort more inclined than traditions of the other to foster resentment?

Augustine and Nietzsche thought so, although they disagreed about which was which. Augustine’s restless heart could not love constantly until he believed in a god transcending the limits of temporal goods. Only such a god, he argued, could satisfy the human longings for joy and peace, forgiveness and redemption. No longer frustrated by the imperfection of this world, Augustine’s love could at last see the world for what it truly was: the creation of a perfect god. Without God, however, he declared that this “life is a misery.” For his part, Nietzsche found devotion to this same god fraught with sadism and masochism, not true love. To love this world, according to his Zarathustra, we must forswear the hinterworldly fantasies that prompt us to despise it and everything in it, including ourselves. “No longer bury your head in the sand of heavenly things,” he preached, “but bear it freely instead, an earthly head that creates a meaning for the earth.” Despite their disagreements, then, both Augustine and Nietzsche agreed that the way we think about the world affects, for better or worse, the way we feel about it.

In their agreement, they were correct: the way we think about the world does affect how we feel about it. Or, at the very least, it should. On one hand, if you think this vale of tears is but a prelude to paradise, should you not resent the delay? Purely transcendent religions may prescribe practices of patience, especially prayer, but the longings for secure beauty, goodness, and communion cannot be postponed. Prayer may temper frustration, but it cannot eradicate it. Resentment becomes likely. (One of my earlier posts made this argument in more detail.) On the other hand, if you think this same world of brutality, ugliness, and death is all there is, should you not resent it for perpetually disappointing the same inexorable longings? Purely immanent worldviews may seek to silence these longings with spiritual practices, especially meditation, but their success (if possible) comes at too high a cost: dissolution of self. (The Buddhist teaching of anatta, or not-self, is a paradigm of this strategy.) Here, too, resentment becomes likely. (Another of my earlier posts was more hopeful.)

In an odd way, Augustine and Nietzsche were collectively correct in the midst of their critical disagreement: love is fostered neither by purely immanent worldviews (Augustine) nor by purely transcendent ones (Nietzsche). The common quest for purity produces instead resentment. Thus, for example, if Plotinus and Epicurus were in fact lovers of the world, they were so not because of their beliefs but despite them. In other words, if any worldview successfully promotes love, rather than resentment, it must be impure: it must be as transcendent as it is immanent. Whatever can this mean? To make this demand more clear, let us recall Taylor’s distinction between transcendence and immanence, helped by the editors of this volume. Speaking of transcendence, they outline its three dimensions as follows: “a good higher than human flourishing (such as love in the sense of agape), a higher power (such as God), and extension of life (or even ‘our lives’) beyond the ‘natural’ scope between birth and death.” Immanence is naturally the contrary of all three: a good of merely human flourishing, no power beyond the cosmos, and the finality of bodily death.

A philosophy that is as transcendent as it is immanent, therefore, must present the following, paradoxical profile: (i) it must teach that the highest good is human flourishing, but also something transcending the human; (ii) it must teach that the natural and temporal world is all there is, but also that it is transcended by the eternal divine; (iii) it must teach that we humans are mortal, but also somehow immortal. Mere mention of such contradictions should exasperate anyone who must render a philosophy consistent in order to find it intelligible. This will include most philosophers nowadays, and indeed most Western philosophers since Greek antiquity. But their persistent demand for consistency above all has not been universally shared; revealing the early history of this demand—as I have tried to do in my forthcoming book, Becoming God—helps expose its weaknesses.

To codify consistent thought, Aristotle famously proposed a principle of non-contradiction, calling it “the firmest principle of all things,” and argued that anyone who tried to deny it would in fact assert it (implicitly), or become “like a plant.” Not entirely joking, he believed that anyone who failed to respect the supremacy of this principle would surrender reason and mimic the life of a non-rational organism. Although Aristotle gets the credit for this principle, it is already explicit in Plato; more primitively, it is present in the extant fragments of Parmenides. “Equally deaf and blind,” he called those who refused to think consistently, adding that they are “hordes without judgment, for whom both to be and not to be are judged the same and not the same, and the path of all is crosswise (palintropos).”

Exercising this ancient principle, we cannot accept the philosophy whose paradoxical combination of tenets—immanent and transcendent—is required to promote love of the world. Not without risking planthood. The supreme demand of this principle upon our minds opposes the satisfying promises of this philosophy to our heart. Were we forced to choose between them, then, our choice would be between thinking well and feeling well, between consistent cognition about the world and loving affection toward it. Must we choose? If we wish both to think well and to feel well, should we not consider another way of reasoning, even if it be crosswise? That will be the goal of my next two posts. The fourth and final post will use this Heraclitean way of reasoning “to honor Jesus by offering a distinctive interpretation of his calling and mode of inspiration.”

Taylor’s sense of the material world is not unrelated to his not always implicit commitment to (or perhaps nostalgia for) the ideals of a self that flourishes, unfolds, and, at the end of the day, can be sufficiently liberated from history so as to be able to take the measure of itself—in concert, of course, with others, as they liberate themselves sufficiently from those very same forces.

In “The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor and Karl Marx,” Brown takes Taylor’s reading of Marx to the genealogical mat. Taylor, argues Brown, practices a kind of materialist analysis that replaces a focus on the processes by which historical conditions are generated with explanations of what psychologically animates human action. Consequently, in Taylor’s story the focus on motives and aims leave little room for forces that do, in fact, exist, yet are “beyond our control, and even our cognition.”

So, as I sit here, in my comfortable chair, latte in hand, a Chocolate Mini Sparkle Doughnut by my side, I wonder whether such forces are simply too much to bear. I look to the copy on my cup for guidance: “Everything we do, you do. Buy our coffee and good things happen.”

Brown homes in on what I see as a significant detail of A Secular Age—the presentation of human intentions without sufficient attribution to the vibrancy of the environmental forces that conditioned them. To be sure, there are tragic limitations at the heart of Taylor’s story. But, as Brown argues, Taylor gives lip but little service to what Brown, via Marx, calls “historical forces conditioning and contouring secularism that do not take shape primarily as ideas or explicit human aims.”

Capitalism, to take but the most pertinent example, does not exist in essence yet possesses an agency of its own. “The movement of capital,” writes Brown, “violates both the creation of man (species being) and human capacity and creativity (making what we will of ourselves)—it violates holiness and humanism at once. Capital’s profaning power blasphemes human divinity and inverts the proper order of things, reducing us to its effects.” Capitalism is religious (and not simply like religion) precisely because of this unlocatable agency. Transgression follows in its wake, the only mark of its existence, portending a general state of enchantment. Capitalism disrupts all manner of binaries, profaning both human being and potential, transforming the best of Enlightened intentions into all manner of benevolent stasis and bloodless alienation.

Taylor, of course, is not alone in his failure to follow through on the more radical implications of Marx’s argument. Marx didn’t either, positing a heroic, ultimately expressive consciousness as the inheritance of a redeemed humanity that would make its way across a threshold of false consciousness, beyond capitalism.

But whither redemption when it has become all but impossible to come to terms—any terms whatsoever, mind you—with “forces” that are “humanly generated but not apprehended as such and not humanly controlled”? This is not any garden-variety illusion, but rather a particular kind of hallucination that is endemic to the secular age. This hallucination, moreover, is bound up with capitalism but cannot be reduced to mere economics. For it thrives in any space that entertains the outrageous perspective that opacity and enchantment can, with epistemic diligence (and a politics that promotes such diligence), be overcome.

Indeed, it would take someone like Walter Benjamin, stoned observer of modernity’s ambiguous core, witness to both the beauty and violence of capitalistic structures, to begin to take seriously the ontology of self-organizing economic and political systems. And it is this genealogical move that Taylor’s narrative refuses. In rendering enchantment as a pre-existing but unnecessary condition (and transparency as a kind of ideal), Taylor misses something definitive about the secular age whose story he is telling.

Summarizing (by way of a Benjaminian lineage of critique that addresses the phantasmic elements of modernity) what might be called the genealogical insight of Marx, Brown writes that humans are “extraordinary creatures, capable of endowing our mental and physical productions with autonomy, generativity, even sovereignty.” Once such sovereignty is entertained, the line of questioning posed by Taylor calls for a different kind of explanatory response. It requires a more meticulous, yet vaguer, documentation. It demands a history of modernity that does not simply jettison naïve theories of secularization (as Taylor’s admirably does), but that also gestures toward the norms of enchantment and opacity. Regrettably, such states are often assumed to be exceptional, existing only to prove other rules. This point, I think, is at the heart of Jane Bennett’s subtle critique of Akeel Bilgrami’s discussion of enchantment vis-à-vis Taylor’s use of it in A Secular Age.

Brown’s story of the secular age would begin with a different premise. The questions would be genealogical rather than analytic: How is the “secular subject to be grasped and articulated,” asks Brown, given that each one of our decisions may be our own even though the range of available choices has nothing, whatsoever, to do with us?  “How is its history to be traced, what are the most relevant conditions of its emergence, and what kind of consciousness is secular religious consciousness?”

Such questions inevitably turn the narrative logic of A Secular Age against itself, for they necessarily call attention to what is embedded deep within the structures of Taylor’s argument—namely, the communicative promise of liberalism, its imagined harmony of differences, and of course, a tolerant embrace of “alternative” notions and lifestyles.

In opening her essay with a discussion of the Obama campaign and the resurgence of a “spiritual left” in 2008, Brown positions Taylor’s work as partaking in a similar project of hope—of affirming “belief in belief.”  And who amongst us was not just a little hopeful when envivsioning an Obama administration? But what, exactly, was that hope about? Perhaps the same as that which gives A Secular Age its sense of welcome gravitas.

We have here, in two sites, the presence of a vague yet generative epistemics that serves, not to legitimate this or that doctrine, but to secure the kind of self who could assent to a doctrine if he or she only chose to do so.

For at the end of the day, Taylor’s story of the nova effect of choice vis-à-vis the concept of religion is premised upon a self that has the potential to fulfill such promises and fuel such harmonic processes in and through its inherent sovereignty and its capacity for immediate access to itself and the world around.

Brown broaches a question that confirms the deeply romantic genre in which Taylor tells his tale. The question is not whether Taylor’s is a great work. Nor, really, is the question about whether Taylor is right or wrong. It is, rather, a question of narrative effects. For, as the image on the cover conveys, an iron bridge of Whitmanic expanse is displacing the more dystopic iron cage.

The question—for me, at least—is to what extent the fragments of Taylor’s argument constitute a strategy of defense, shored against the ruins of history and society itself? A strategy of immunization? Of disenchantment in its classic Weberian formulation? A fixing of the distinction between subject and nature? A desire to immobilize nature, chance, and secrecy? A product, in other words, of the secular age it promises to describe?

*  *  *

Brown’s essay points to how, within Taylor’s narrative, enchantment and opacity exist for the purpose of being transcended—spectral forces ultimately succumbing to diligence and intention.

Another text, from Marx’s scene of writing, also speaks to this kind of relationship between reason and enchantment: On Hallucinations: A History and Explanation of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism (1845), by A. Brière de Boismont, M.D. This founding text in the history of psychology was translated into English in 1860, when it, like numerous other scientific exposes of occult phenomena, was nevertheless embraced by burgeoning metaphysical movements on both sides of the Atlantic. (But that is another story.)

What concerns me here is de Boismont’s claim that hallucinations may “coexist with the due exercise of the reason.” Images, ghosts, specters (ethereal powers not unlike Marx’s commodities) were “creations of the mind.” And because they were “the result of things that have passed,” they were “visible to the external senses.” Yet despite their empirical veracity, hallucinations were ultimately harmless. For even when they were “looked upon as the effects of a supernatural power,” hallucinations did not pose a vital threat. De Boismont’s translated voice was emphatic, drawing on Honoré Aubanel’s Essai sur les Hallucinations (1839): hallucinations could “exist in man without the intellect being distorted.”

Hallucinations, in other words, did not necessarily constitute mental distortion. Such imbalance, on the contrary, was the effect of an overbearing reason. When reason was excessively present, the “mind” became an “obedient slave.” Consciousness lost perspective upon its own shaky ground. Reason forgot that it, too, was born of feverish dreams, that it, too, was historically conditioned—born of physical sensations, ideological vectors, and lingering emotional streams.

More reason would not necessarily solve the problem (and could, perhaps, even exacerbate it). De Boismont’s concern, then, was how one lived with hallucinations, how one disciplined oneself in light of them. Reason was to be continually sharpened through willed distortion.

The ideal, according to de Boismont, was someone like Newton who could produce hallucinations “at his pleasure.” Newton, it was said, learnt such discipline when he spent “some time” looking at “an image of the sun in a looking-glass” and then “direct[ed] his eyes towards the dark part of the room, to see a specter of the sun reproduced bit by bit until it shone with all the vividness and all the colors of the real object.” Newton’s was a project of auto-enchantment whose discipline was a matter of separating oneself from the hallucinations one had generated for oneself—like becoming an addict in order to kick the habit. An act of both self-deception and honest truth-seeking.

So what happens when reason is recognized as, in part, hallucinatory? What happens when you stop fooling yourself that spectral forces do not exist because they should not exist, that false consciousness is only a possibility precisely because it is false—at the end of the day, a state that is anathema to the better part of human nature? What happens, in other words, when enchantment is considered the norm? When claims of disenchantment are considered forms of wishful, perhaps even animistic, thinking?

So what, exactly, is the payoff of Brown’s critique of Taylor, besides getting a sense of Marx’s scene of writing, the topic of reasonable hallucinations, and the subtleties of false consciousness? What might we learn about the secular age if we were to resist the sense of intentionality that Taylor harbors? And, finally, why has it been relatively difficult to maintain a sense of refusal when assessing whatever it is we are talking about when we talk about the secular age?

I don’t doubt that this interesting focus is quite different from mine, though I think it would be wrong to represent my view as being focused on the theological. In my analysis, the theological had only a central genealogical role to play in the process of “disenchantment.” But, I had argued that the fallout of the theological—once the theological transformations were exploited in alliances forged between established religious interests, commercial interests, and the mandarin interests of organized scientific bodies (such as the Royal Society)—was impressively diverse, ranging from transformations in political economy to political governance and, further yet, to the mentalities of human culture in its relation to the natural world. So the focus, if any, on the theological was intended wholly to emphasize that, unlike purely materialist accounts, I was following more refined Marxists like Christopher Hill, who had written of the importance of the conflict of religious ideas in shaping the period of history in which I had invested my genealogical efforts.

I may have misled Bennett with the remark she quotes in her comment: “The point is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” One theme in my essay was to ask the question: “When and how did we transform the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources?” But, having raised the question, I had worried that it may seem to some that my interest in raising it was a narrow, ecological one. Because I didn’t want to ghettoize the question of nature into just this narrow self-standing concern, I wanted it to relate the “natural” with larger issues of politics, history and culture, and the quoted remark was only intended to convey that broader interest. The idea was not to deny—indeed, it was to assert—that material nature was suffused with value properties that made normative and affective demands on one. It’s just that nature was not to be seen as merely the value-laden material elements among the “actants” that Bennett describes, but also the relations between the actants and human actors and a tradition and history of those relations.  The idea was never to say that the latter in some way canceled the possibility of the former.

I think if there is disagreement between us, it is not about the relevance of the material elements and their normative status but about whether the fact of this circulatory mood that she describes as central to her idea of enchantment can support her claim that there was no loss of enchantment in the modern period. She says: “There is thus no need (contra Bilgrami) to  ‘re-enchant’ the secular world, though there remains the task of becoming more sensitized to the enchantments, the callings, already at work.”  But, in my view, there can be no understanding of the fact of our having become desensitized to enchantments without conceding what she doesn’t want to concede to me, which is that the world is viewed by us in ways that are properly described as disenchanted in just the way I had expounded.

Disenchantment, in my understanding of that process, was a result (a fallout, as I said above) of our having (among other things) over-intellectualized our relations to the world (including nature) as a result of having come to see it in a certain way: as not containing the properties that would make normative demands on us. Because of theological changes that led to viewing the world (including nature) as desacralized, one fundamental source of seeing the world as containing the value properties (good or bad, hostile or benign) that make normative demands on us was removed from our conception of the world. And this played a central role in seeing the world as alien to our sensibilities of practical engagement, something which became for us something either to be studied in a detached way or, when practically engaged with, to be engaged with as something alien, to be mastered, conquered, and controlled for our utility and gain, as in the extractive economies that were systematically generated first in that period.

I’ve italicized “conception” and “for us” in order to make clear that disenchantment cannot be understood as a process without understanding the desensitization that Bennett opposes when she says she wants us to be more “sensitized.”  She can’t have what she wants here without also opposing “disenchantment,” as I understand the term and, therefore, equally proposing “re-enchantment,” as I understand the term.

I would diagnose this misunderstanding of “disenchantment” on her part as perhaps reflecting a rather deep philosophical disagreement between us on how to conceive of nature and matter, when we conceive of it in the non-mechanized way that we both wish to do. My stress on “conception” and “for us” are meant to convey something like the following conception of nature and matter. When one views nature and matter as not merely mechanized, as not merely something that we study in the natural sciences, i.e., with relative detachment, one views it as essentially containing properties that can’t be understood correctly unless one sees our capacity for responsiveness to them with our practical agency (that is what the “for us” was doing in my use of it above, stressing the relevance of this responsiveness) as built-into the kind of properties they are. They are not properties that are anyway there, independent of the kind of sensibility (our sensibility for practical normative engagement) that we, as agents, have. This does not mean that we mentally construct and project these properties onto the world, which in itself is brutely material (in the sense that “mechanized” is supposed to convey). It is a non-sequitur to say that, just because a certain property (value properties) in the world can only be viewed by a certain kind of sensibility (the one that subjects or creatures possessed of a certain self-conscious agency possess), the subjects who possess that sensibility must be constructing these properties and projecting them onto the world. That is what Hume and others influenced by him think to this day, and they were first systematically encouraged to do so by the transformations that I was calling “disenchantment” that began in the late seventeenth century. In my view, the properties are really properties of nature and matter, they are not constructed by us. But they are properties in some sense “for us,” since those who do not possess the kind of self-conscious agency that is moved by normative demands would see darkness in the world where we might see it as containing values making those normative demands.

If her “actants” are not conceived this way, then what she means by “actants” is not what I would have meant by them, had I used that word.  In fact, I would have thought one has not gotten past mechanization, if one didn’t think of nature and matter as containing properties of the kind I am suggesting, over and above the properties studied by natural science.

Thus, when Bennett says we should be more sensitized to the participatory role of material “actants” (that is, to what I, in my terminology, call the normative demands of the value properties in nature and matter), she is precisely saying what I, in my terminology, mean when I say that our angle on the world should be less detached and more responsive to its normative demands. But this predominance of detachment was exactly what was generated by the process of disenchantment, as I understand that process. Hence, there is no avoiding “re-enchantment” if ‘sensitization’ is what you seek.

There may also be something to sort out between us (a possible disagreement, I mean) on the subject of agency, though I rather think it may be more verbal than substantial. Bennett says: “There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency. The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective. Bilgrami himself makes a gesture toward the distributive quality of agency in his notion of an external calling from tradition and history, two complex assemblages formed by many different agents at work over different times and places. But these assemblages are not ones in which nonhumans qualify as real participants.”

I am going to put aside what I have already clarified, viz., I am not emphasizing history and tradition with a view to denying that material and non-human elements of nature can make normative demands on us.

Nor do I want to deny that there may be collective and distributed agency of various sorts. So, I don’t think that is the issue between us either, if there is one at all.

I gave an argument in my essay for saying that we wouldn’t be agents if there were not such things as “actants,” as I would use that term. In other words, we would not be agents if there were not normative demands being made on our agency by value properties in matter and nature, that is, value properties in the world that we inhabit. And when I say that these value properties and actants make demands on us, I suppose that I am asserting that they are “real participants,” to use her expression. But there are ways to be “participants” in “assemblages” (these are all her and Latour’s terms, not mine, but I am using them in a way that I find plausible, which may not be what is intended by them) without possessing the kind of self-conscious agency we possess. I would deny that value properties in nature and matter that make normative demands on us are themselves agents in this self-conscious sense. So their demands on us are not intentional demands. They do not intend to make those demands since they don’t have any intentions.

She might even grant this and say that intentional agency of a kind that implies the capacity for self-consciousness of the sort we possess, is not the only kind of agency that there is. I would have no objection to that, so long as one keeps different uses of the word agency apart and makes clear which one is in play. But, in the passage I have just cited, Bennett denies that we (human beings) have “real” agency. Well, in that case, she and I must mean different things by agency. And it is not credible to me that she is denying that we possess something that has been called “agency” for centuries by philosophers, and not just philosophers. So she must be stipulating a use of the term agency (let’s use her term for it, “real agency”) that is different from this. It is supposed to be something that has a more distributed locus than being located in either us, human actors, or in non-human “actants.” I think the interest of that stipulated use of the word agent (“real agent”) would depend on what systematic philosophical use it was put to. Bennett, in a short blog, doesn’t say enough for me to assess that. But, however that assessment may turn out, what we would be assessing can’t be something that stands in disagreement with me—if disagreement means that she says something that I deny or vice versa. I have not said that no one can find any form of agency in the world other than of the sort that I am discussing with the term agency.  And since it is not credible that she is denying that there is something of the sort I mean by the term agency, which human beings posses but pharmaceuticals or bacteria (to take just two examples of the “actants” that “participate” in her “assemblages”) don’t possess, we can resolve all these issues amicably in the word, by disambiguating the term agency in these ways. The disambiguation, it would appear, goes three ways. There is the kind of agency we possess. There is the kind of agency that “actants” possess. (If we see them, as I do with my metaphor, as “making normative demands” on us, or if we see them, as Bennett does, as “participants,” I suppose they must be allowed some “agency,” even if not ours).  And then there is the distributed agency that Bennett calls “real agency,” which is neither of the above. I look forward to reading her book, which, judging from the hints given in this blog, brings the third of these to centre-stage. But with this disambiguation in place, I cannot see that I have to withdraw anything I said on the basis of anything that is allowed in allowing this third notion of agency.

One final point of what seems like a more substantial disagreement. Bennett ends her blog with the following comment on my notion of enchantment: “But it [her idea of enchantment] seems also more attentive than Bilgrami is to the fact that an emergent and generative universe is not pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness, is not fully predictable, and does not necessarily tend toward equilibrium. Thus Bilgrami’s quest for ‘a life of harmony between the demands of an external source and our dispositional responses to its demands’ seems not quite right.   A certain disharmony is built into the world at large and also into the mood of enchantment, which includes discomfort in the face of forms of material agency that one can neither master nor ignore. Thus it is that I find ethical utility in the experience of alienation, whereas Bilgrami seeks ways for secular moderns to live an ‘unalienated life.’”

I think this is a rather basic misunderstanding of my view. Indeed I think there is a straightforward and unnoticed double movement with which the words “harmony” and “unalienated” are used in this passage that leads directly to this misunderstanding.

There is one sense or use of the term harmony in which I was not suggesting that a world that was enchanted would induce an unalienated or harmonious life within it. Suppose we saw the world as enchanted, in my sense of the term. To do so is to see it as, not merely mechanized, but containing value properties that make normative demands on us. Let’s work with a simple example, simpler than the ones that involve her more complicated “actants,” though nothing that I will have to say is such that it can’t be extended to more complicated examples. Let’s say that there is a meteorological perturbation off the coast of Bangladesh. Now, if there is to be enchantment of the sort I have in mind, that fragment of the world (nature, matter) is to be described, not just in that detached way (“meteorological perturbation”), as natural science would, but also as a fragment of the world which contains a “threat.”  Threats are value properties in nature. They are not constructions of our vulnerability, which are then projected onto nature, as the disenchanted worldview would have it. But even though they are in nature, the natural sciences don’t study threats. Threats make normative demands on our practical agency, not demands for detached explanatory study, as meteorological perturbations do. Notice, however, that this particular value property off the coast of Bangladesh is certainly not harmony-inducing (in this first sense or use of the term, “harmony”) to the Bangladeshi fisherman living in a thatched dwelling on the coast, seeing it come in his direction. It is a threat, after all. It is, if you like, just what Bennett describes with her term “hostile.” It is a hostile part of the enchanted world. So, no harmony in one sense or use of the word “harmony,” despite enchantment.

Even so, it might be that that value property in that fragment of the world makes a normative demand, let’s say on the municipality of that Bangladeshi locality to do one or another thing to remove the threat to the fisherman and his hut. If there were a suitable agentive responsiveness on the part of those on whom the normative demand was made, that would be a small and, as I said, very simple example of human agency being in sync with the normative demands of appropriate properties of matter and nature. When there is such responsiveness to such demands, there is “harmony” in a second, quite different sense and use of the word than the sense I mentioned above. And this harmony is a harmony between human agency and non-human properties of matter and nature.

It seems apparent, then, that there need not be any disagreement between Bennett and me on any of this. I have accommodated what she means by hostility and disharmony in the relations in her “assemblages,” and I have shown how it is quite compatible with what I had in mind by talking of harmony generated by seeing the world as containing value properties (threats over and above meteorological perturbations) and our suitable agentive responses to them. All we need to do is avoid a conflation of two different uses of words like harmony and alienation.  Let there be all the hostility and disharmony she finds in these relations. It does nothing whatsoever to register disagreement with my points about a quite different notion of an unalienated life.

My notion of alienation is, if I understand her views, probably very close to a state of affairs that results from a too great “desensitization” to the elements of enchantment that she finds in the world. By this criterion of what is and is not alienated, one partly (though not wholly) overcomes alienation by even so much as recognizing (becoming “sensitized” to) the enchanted elements in the material environment, including what she describes as the “hostile” elements. To move from this partial to a more complete overcoming of alienation would require being responsive with our agency in the way I was describing above to the normative demands of the enchanted elements, including the hostile ones. The value properties in an enchanted world, as I said earlier, are defined upon our capacity to recognize them, but they are not defined upon our actually recognizing them and certainly not defined upon our being responsive to their normative demands in our practical agency. So she is very wide of the mark when she describes my view as being committed to something “pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness.” I dare say, it is no more pre-designed to do so than her notion of enchantment.

She is right, however, to point out that I do stress the moral, perhaps measurably more than she does. That is already evident in the fact that my rhetoric is the rhetoric of value-properties (some of which are bound to include normative moral demands on us) whereas her rhetoric is restricted to talk of circulating “moods and affects.”  My view derives from an Aristotelian picture of morals (if some recent interpretations of Aristotle, owing to John McDowell, are correct in their interpretations), where values in the world prompt our moral agency, rather than moral agency emanating entirely from a self-standing psychology, as in Hume and the very widespread Humean legacy of contemporary Ethics, which sees the world beyond our subjectivity as evacuated of anything that is not within the purview of natural science. It looks to me as if Bennett has no interest in seeing enchantment as, in this way, being part a wider metaphysics in which the metaphysics of morals is one embedded element. I detect only phenomena such as mood, affect, and the political implications of seeing enchantment along those lines, in what she has to say.

I can’t myself see a way to a politics that flows from questions of enchantment without also seeing morals as flowing from it. Politics, in my view, can’t be in an orbit entirely of its own, independent of considerations of moral and other values. There is nothing moralistic in claiming this. It is not as if, in saying that the politics generated by recognizing such things as “actants” must be related to the normative moral demands that those things make on us, one is identifying the “politics of things” with those normative moral demands. Still, relating them together may put some theoretical constraints on how we are to understand the “politics of things.”  I don’t know if Bennett would want to impose such constraints on the politics she would want to embed in a notion of enchantment. Her rhetoric in general and her criticism of me in particular (the criticism that, unlike her, I stress the moral) doesn’t make it obvious how she would permit such a constraint. But I say all this with some hesitation. I would need to read more of her work in detail to be able to say anything more confidently.

This, of course, is not the only way to understand enchantment and disenchantment, which could also be figured in the first instance as a mood or affect circulating between human bodies and the animal, vegetable, and mineral forces they encounter. This is the approach I took in The Enchantment of Modern Life (and developed in Vibrant Matter), where enchantment is associated with the feeling of being simultaneously fascinated and unnerved in the presence of something truly wild or Other. The point here is that enchantment is not so much a belief as it is an energetic current produced by the encounter between two sets of active materialities, one set congealed into a “self” and one into what is often called the “objects of experience” but is better described, I think, as a set of nonhuman “actants.” Following Bruno Latour, I say actants rather than objects in order to acknowledge the extent to which these external bodies are lively and active forces rather than passive or brute matter. These vibrant animals, plants, viruses, hurricanes, storms, pharmaceuticals, and other technological artifacts vie with, make demands upon, and impede and enable human agency. They make their presence known to us, or, to extend Bilgrami’s use of the term, make “calls” to which we are continually responding.

Bilgrami too seeks to displace the idea that the world is brute matter, but the ultimate source of its calling-capacity is for him cultural (and, as I will discuss later on, moral) to a more exclusive degree. “The point,” he writes, “is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” In contrast, the (nonmechanistic) materialism I endorse and invite Bilgrami to consider presents modernity as “enchanted” with with multiple modes and degrees of material (and not only human or cultural) agency. Absorbing and alienating encounters with electronic, pathogenetic, bacteriological, climatological, and other forms of nonhuman agency abound today, and thus the mood of enchantment most definitely survives the demise of the (premodern, European, Christian) experience of nature as directly inscribed with divine purpose. There is thus no need (contra Bilgrami) to “re-enchant” the secular world, though there remains the task of becoming more sensitized to the enchantments, the callings, already at work.

What, more explicitly, are the implications for ethics of the mood of enchantment? In the wake of Schiller’s critique of Kantian morality as too disembodied (echoed in Foucault’s work on ethical ascesis), I understand ethics as requiring both principled beliefs (and duties) and also a set of moods, sensibilities, and bodily comportments hospitable to carrying them out. My contention is that the intensity of the compound mood of enchantment (wonder/disturbance) could serve as one impetus to ethical action, insofar as it contributes the energy or motive force needed to render human bodies capable of jumping the gap between mere conviction that a course of action is good and the actual doing of the deed. What Spinoza called the “joyful” affects are needed to energize a body called upon—by habit, sympathy, or reason—to love, forgive, treat with compassion or minimized harm to (an ontologically diverse range of) others. In short, I think that, under the right circumstances, the mood of enchantment, which entails the experience of the outside as making a call, can be an important part of ethics.

Bilgrami, too, is interested in the ethical implications of enchantment. He begins with the intriguing claim that the call from outside serves as the very condition of possibility of human will and therefore agency: to desire to have or to do something is to experience that thing or activity as “desirable rather than as desired,” as, in other words, a response to an external call. What is more, the very experience of ourselves as moral subjects depends upon this experience of a world of outside objects: “in the very moment and act of perceiving values without, we also perceive ourselves within, as subjects rather than as objects. The experience of value without and agency within are not two different and independent experiences.” In short, “it is only because the world itself contains desirabilities (or values) that we perceive that our agency really gets triggered or activated. The very possibility of agency therefore assumes an evaluatively enchanted world.”

Based as it is upon an assertion of the constitutive interdependence of the notions of subject and object, this argument makes good sense. But it also reveals the extent to which Bilgrami and I have different views of human agency—what composes it, how it is activated and sustained. I think that human agency is best conceived as the effect of a perspicuous configuration of human and nonhuman forces. When humans act, they do not exercise exclusively human powers, but express and inflect the powers of a variety of “foreign” bodies internal to them, including bacteria in the human gut, heavy metals absorbed into flesh, words and sounds from human and nonhuman cultures, etc. There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency. The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective.

Bilgrami himself makes a gesture toward the distributive quality of agency in his notion of an external calling from tradition and history, two complex assemblages formed by many different agents at work over different times and places. But these assemblages are not ones in which nonhumans qualify as real participants, though I imagine that Bilgrami would easily grant that climate, architecture, animals, vegetables, and minerals do serve as negative constraints or enabling contexts or environments for human action. Bilgrami steers clear of the kind of neo-animism I court: recall that “the point is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” This claim understates, I think, the degree of exteriority or “independence” at work in the call: the call of culture, while surely not as parochial as the “sympathies and moral sentiments” with which Bilgrami contrasts it, is not all that external. Bilgrami hints at, but does not explore, the possibility of nonhuman agency.

Another difference between us arises around the question of whether secular enchantment entails a world laden with “value.” Bilgrami clearly distinguishes his appeal to an external ethical source of value from Taylor’s position, which involves a transcendent source. I share Bilgrami’s nontheism, but the raucous world of vibrant matter I envision is somewhat at odds with the idea of intrinsic moral value. My “enchanted” materialism does council presumptive efforts to align ourselves with the complex, open system-quality of the universe. But it seems also more attentive than Bilgrami is to the fact that an emergent and generative universe is is not pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness, is not fully predictable, and does not necessarily tend toward equilibrium. Thus Bilgrami’s quest for “a life of harmony between the demands of an external source and our dispositional responses to its demands” seems not quite right. A certain disharmony is built into the world at large and also into the mood of enchantment, which includes discomfort in the face of forms of material agency that one can neither master nor ignore. Thus it is that I find ethical utility in the experience of alienation, whereas Bilgrami seeks ways for secular moderns to live an “unalienated life.”

To summarize, then: Bilgrami figures the outside as a supra-individual field of human language, norms, customs—as, in short, a culture that precedes and exceeds us, and I conceive of the outside and its callings and threats as having a less exclusively human provenance, as the expression of material agency or what I’ve elsewhere described as “thing-power.” For me, these calls are what we actually can hear of the clamor of swarms of vibrant materialities, of technological and natural bodies in possession of what Spinoza described as the power to affect and be affected. I agree with Bilgrami that secular modernity is not a world of brute matter, that it is quite possible to speak of external calls without invoking or implying a transcendent, creator-God, and that learning how to discern, acknowledge, and appreciate such calls is an important part of ethics. But we have different understandings of what the call is and does.

Taylor’s book and its commentaries situate themselves in a contemporary debate loosely staged under the term secularism and which includes a range of voices from diverse disciplines, geographic regions, and social and political perspectives. The term is by no means limited to work in the study of religion, although it has a special frisson there, as scholars of religion have come to see that the secular is just as much their conceptual quarry as its seemingly more identifiable partner. It is as if the increasing sophistication of thinking about religion has tended to displace religion itself, not only because, as some theorists would have it, religion has merely heuristic existence, but also because discourses of religion so clearly have to be separated out from a teeming background of other conceptual generics (e.g., politics, economics, power, gender, rite, law), and it is valuable to try to identify some of these along the way. The term secular might be deployed as a name for this background, enabling scholars to retain the right of refusal—there is no religion separate from the discursive marks it chews into a cacophonous, plural space—while also investigating the contexts and effects of religion’s enunciation. But, as the essays in Varieties make clear, this use of secularity as a blanket descriptor is inadequate both to the specific formation the secular engenders and to its role in rendering all specificity invisible. Books as diverse as Marcel Gauchet’s Désenchantment du monde (1985), Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1987), Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular (2003), and Tracy Fessenden’s Culture and Redemption (2007) have probed the literary, philosophical, and political texture of the secular while raising questions about its identity and its boundaries. These works show that if religion is resistant to the effort to conceive its non-religious conditions, the secular is resistant to the effort to conceive its religious or religio-cultural specificity, a state of affairs ripe for investigative hermeneutics.

Taylor’s book thus enters debates well underway, and in which he has long been a participant. The fruit of a life’s work on modernity and the modern self, A Secular Age nevertheless reads as a little impervious to the state of current thinking. This is evident in the decision to set the story in Latin Christendom, a move that might have seemed a strategic admission of the inevitability of location and the division of labor, but which has given rise to predictable criticisms of myopia and cultural irrelevance. The moniker Latin Christendom has the flavor of an attempt to be responsibly specific—thus engendering specific quibbles—while also denoting a landscape very large and vague. Something even vaguer, like “the West,” might have served as a better location, precisely because it is hard to say what the West is, and this seems as it should be as we (Latin Christians, seculars, and others) ponder not only how we got here but what and where and why is here. This roomier choice might have empowered Taylor to head off two of the critiques in Varieties: that he carves out his historical Christianity blind to its porous, often violent actualities (Saba Mahmood, Nilüfer Göle), and, by the same logic, that his Christianity is only mock-historic (Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan). (It would be gorgeous to connect these two critiques, but, alas, readers will not find this connection in Varieties.) But, like his use of the word secular, he seems at once to solicit these critiques and to sidestep them, late to a conversation he is not quite having. Taylor’s story—from Latin to license—is first and foremost about God and belief, and this puts it at some degrees of remove from the debates into which it is somewhat awkwardly interjected. He shares with Asad a critique of, in Taylor’s words, “subtraction stories,” which make the secular a neutral baseline rather than a specific formation of its own. But the ensuing debates have tended to foreground, as Taylor does not, the flaming ideological stakes involved in histories of God in the West, and the impossibility of considering their hold, or lack thereof, without the mediation of a cultural critique borne precisely in normative contestation with the Christendom Taylor takes as descriptive. Many of the contributors to Varieties—and certainly the editors—treat Taylor as a player with a horse in this race, but the ones who settle into the most attentive readings of him sideline the secular for the sake of the book’s real obsessions: God, history, the age.

The first of three such readings is by the theologian John Milbank. It says something about Taylor’s place in contemporary debates about the secular that his most intimate interlocutor here is Milbank—a brilliant, often embattled critic of secularity, and co-founder of the theological revival known as Radical Orthodoxy. One senses (or perhaps one hopes) that at this stage Radical Orthodoxy is only slightly more pleasing a descriptor to Milbank than deconstruction was to mid-career Derrida, being by now more a short-hand for hostile, or at least ignorant, outsiders to caricature what is in practice a complex multi-headed project. Still, Milbank throws his hat cheerfully into the ring, embracing the delicious ambiguity of his presence at this table with his usual combination of intellectual brio and studied cluelessness. On the one hand, who else could better comment on Taylor’s contention that it is a spirit of reform buried deep in the shadows of the Christian ethos that gives rise to the overturning of a pan-Christian norm? Who else could better relate to the relish with which Taylor depicts an enchanted Christianity and its haunting semblance in the wake of its reformation? Gauchet, whom Taylor might seem to resemble, felt he was doing a fair job of depicting the metaphysics and historicity of the Christian worldview in arguing that it contains its secular at its origins. But for Milbank and Taylor alike, this “whiggish” notion is to be firmly set aside, as we conceive a Christianity that might have been, and might still be, otherwise (though Milbank, rewriting Gauchet, wants to record, too, “the history of the failure to live up to the radicalism of ‘incarnation’ from the very outset”). Milbank and Taylor disagree on the details of this otherwise. But of all the contributors in Varieties, Milbank is by far the most able and willing to enter into the project of historical and theological reconstruction that Taylor attempts, and his solidarity with Taylor’s work provides a tighter angle on the Christian question (whither, wherefore) that they share.

On the other hand—and here Milbank’s imagined cluelessness is transferred elsewhere—on what principle of bland inclusivity did the editors imagine a conversation in which Milbank has something meaningful to say to, e.g., Wendy Brown or Jonathan Sheehan or Jon Butler or Saba Mahmood or José Casanova? This is not to scapegoat Milbank. Indeed, his essay is among the liveliest in the volume. Nor is it to suggest that the others mentioned here are in unproblematic conversation with each other, or with William Connolly, Nilüfer Göle, Akeel Bilgrami, Robert Bellah, Simon During, or Colin Jager. It is simply that, if the editors imagined some meaty encounter between those deeply invested in the Christian story in and of modernity and those invested in quite other projects, many in significant opposition to the Christian one, they should have staged this debate, or said something telling or pointing or otherwise helpful about it. Instead, we get in the introduction a long excursus on the importance of Taylor’s book, which, as one gets into the substance of Varieties, comes to seem increasingly absurd. If Taylor is not quite at the forefront of debates on the secular, neither is he front and center, as Milbank is, on debates concerning the Christian. Perhaps this is the curse of liberal theology. It wants its redemption from too many sources in too many ways; it genuinely desires and/or is reconciled to modernity and the secular, and can then only gesture weakly towards real desire for real Gods, while stronger voices make the point more robustly. A Secular Age does reveal Taylor as the theological contestant he has perhaps always been, but his unedited habits of speech and his wide-angle lens undermine the force and persuasiveness—not to mention the clarity and cogency—of his vision. A cruel reading would have Gauchet and Milbank debate entirely over Taylor’s head, the one arguing that Christianity is secular, the other arguing that they are in contingent, temporary struggle. This, at least, is the debate on God and history that Taylor enters, and it is not at all clear that the editors have accurately assessed his centrality to it. Which could make Varieties a kind of obscene joke, I suppose, or, as it seemed to me at moments, an act of celebrity self-congratulation and (what is the same) self-delusion.

Milbank is not oblivious to all of this, but he has the good sense to ignore it, though he does spend rather more time on Gauchet, whom the editors dismiss in a single line. For Milbank, Taylor’s is “nothing less than a new diagnosis of both Western triumphs and a Western malaise,” and this encomium seems genuine in his case because, again, he shares with Taylor, over against Gauchet, a commitment to the claim that “secularization is not whiggishly on the agenda of history, but is fundamentally the result of a self-distortion of Christianity.” This is a fight Milbank has had, is having, and will continue to have, and there is consequently a kind of believable freshness to his respect for Taylor as an ally and kindred spirit. After all, to argue, as Milbank does, that “a festive Christianity […] could still in the future stake its claim to be the true enlightenment and the true romance” is either crazy or simply crazily impassioned, calling all allies to the ready. Milbank is no fundamentalist. His is an encounter with both the beauties (mystical, embodied, sexual, moral, convivial) and the ugliness (puritanical, lawful, morbid) of his tradition. In Milbank’s Christianity, for example, the shame is not in the erotic or ecstatic nature of existence, but in a cramped overemphasis on sin as sexual rather than spiritual or relational. Compared to Taylor, who concludes his paean to enchantment with a donnish reminder that “we have to understand religious/spiritual life today in all its different thrusts, resistances, and reactions,” and compared to a religious thinker like William Connolly, who strangely urges that “deep pluralism cannot gain a secure foothold in predominantly Christian states until confession of Jesus by Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and immanent naturalists are allowed to compete legitimately with Christian confessions of him as a divine savior,” Milbank’s forward-looking Christian messianism is energizing in its clarity and courage. Connolly worries at one point that his (meandering) reflections on Jesus, SUVs, capitalism, Fox News, Bergson, globalism, and DNA is “risky.” But, in light of the varieties of secularism in the intellectual worlds of the thinkers in this volume, I can think of nothing more risky than continuing to find new ways to claim that Christianity is simply and categorically—if wildly and astonishingly—right. The only person in this volume still talking to Milbank at that moment is Taylor, and even he took over 800 pages to say much less than that.

Taylor’s location between Milbank and some of the other contributors might seem one of the great virtues of his work—a bilingual manifesto for the seculars and the critics alike. Taylor certainly seems to desire it this way. He will not, pace Milbank, simply be pulled into the position of Christian supremacy. He will not simply be satisfied with secular pluralism. What most of the contributors reveal, however, is that this desire is unfulfilled. The most provocative in this regard are the essays of Sheehan and Jager, each of whom encounters a vivid core of A Secular Age at the same time as they anatomize its failure. But failure is indeed the flavor of the day in Varieties, even if its writers are diplomatic to a fault. Here is Wendy Brown providing a tutorial on Feuerbach and Marx as relief from Taylorian treacle on a straw materialism, followed by Simon During wondering whether it is all not rather much ado, giving us Alan Hollinghurst and his darkly exquisite mundane instead of the clunky philosophical history of the secular. There is Jon Butler counseling Taylor that his preference for philosophical paradigms and his neglect of ordinary people does not fit “the historical problem,” either of countervailing cases of belief and unbelief or, even more, of the indifference that is, for Butler, a significant feature of the modern American landscape. Here are Nilüfer Göle and José Casanova cautioning a historicization of the sources of the secular, the first urging the introduction of Islam into the picture of European secularity, the second making globalization the frame for decentering this secularity altogether. There is Saba Mahmood wondering whether Taylor has not misidentified his “very object,” and concluding that, “by delineating an account of Christian secularism that remains blind to the normative assumptions and power of Western Christianity, Taylor’s invitation to interreligious dialogue sidesteps the greatest challenge of our time.”

With the possible exceptions of Mahmood and Butler, the authors in Varieties would not judge their commentaries expositions of the failure of Charles Taylor. Bilgrami and Bellah, fundamentally sympathetic, make minor adjustments to Taylor’s program; Connolly embraces the challenge to propound one of his own. I stress the angle of failure because to read through the essays in Varieties is to perceive in them—or perhaps simply to experience—a kind of fatigue with the terms Taylor lays out, and an appetite to get beyond them. One cannot deliver a review of Varieties without marking the oddity of this fact, the strain of the enterprise, the mismatch of the voices, even without the outlier Milbank holding up the fortress of Christian conviviality. This mood of fatigue is why Milbank can seem both so impressive and so clueless in this bunch. He is so manifestly not fatigued, so ready to engage, so prepared, so present. The same cannot be said for many of the contributors to Varieties insofar as they are commenting on Taylor, and, indeed, the same cannot be said for Taylor himself, who uses his afterword to restate his argument, touching only barely on questions that put any pressure on the project. If the contributors to Varieties are too polite to say so, and its editors too concerned to defend Taylor from the jabs of some his earliest reviewers, it should nevertheless be said in this Immanent Frame that Varieties has the feel of aristocratic poverty, gamely putting on a good show of something that is withering at its center.

But enough such observations. Let me turn finally to the essays by Jager and Sheehan. With Milbank and a few others, both do Taylor the honor of seriously entertaining his position, providing through close readings alternative accounts of Taylor’s issues and constituting thus a kind of shadow secular age. Jager and Sheehan are both committed to working out the problem of history in Taylor. Unlike Sheehan, however, who uses the concept of history to liberate Taylor from its more prosaic strictures, Jager follows Taylor into his historical labyrinth to explore what can be seen if we don’t struggle so hard to get out. He begins by granting Taylor’s investment in historical detail, giving us, without judgment, the Taylor who writes: “It is a crucial fact of our present spiritual predicament that it is historical; that is, our understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition. [...] In other words, our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by a story of how we got there.” This avowal of the historical forms the crux of a significant swath of criticism of Taylor, but Jager breezes by this temptation to focus on what he hears with especial force in this statement—predicament, understanding of ourselves, and above all, story. For Jager, Taylor’s commitment to story—“thick and messy rather than thin and sterile”—suggests his roots in a Romantic quest to understand experience (one’s own or another’s) from the inside. Along with Bilgrami, Jager thus fastens on Taylor’s interest in the double aspect of reflexivity in modernity: not only that I can “adopt a third-person perspective” on my commitments, but that “my own experience [can] become my object.” If the first signals modernity as irony, along with a concomitant sense of threat to any deeply encompassing worldview, the second marks a quite different standpoint: the will to penetrate experience as such, to undergo experience, as it were, while being self-conscious of doing so. Taylor calls this “radical reflexivity” as opposed to the reflexivity of the third person. But it is not clear that it is aptly named. For the issue, as Jager shows, is the heightened sense of presence that stories empower in us. While radical reflexivity suggests a distancing afflicted by acute self-consciousness, what Taylor is identifying is a mode of closing the gap between self and self or between self and world. Simply put, he is identifying a feature of, or access to, the modern self that is just as all-encompassing, just as absorbing and world-enchanting as religion.

It is this feature of Taylor’s project that Jager foregrounds, rooting it in a diversely romantic sensibility and genealogy that makes literary expression not only a substitute for religion in the modern age but also a key dimension of the way Taylor’s writing is framed, structured, and narrated. In this way, Jager allows the clumsier historical scheme of A Secular Age to drop out, giving us a Taylor in metaphysical kinship to Wordsworth, Herder, and the Hegel who has been a touchstone of his career. “When Taylor says he has a story to tell,” Jager writes, “he means that his account must be undergone, not simply paraphrased or glossed,” a fitting commentary on a thinker intimate to the core with The Phenomenology of Spirit.

This appraisal of Taylor in a romantic register is not all Jager is doing. In fact, he uses romantic imagery, sources, and genealogies to explore what he thinks of as the key ambivalences of the book. “Simply by virtue of living in the secular age,” Taylor holds, “we find ourselves feeling our way deeply into peoples and places that are not our own.” A Secular Age, then, itself reflects this nova, becoming a “working-through at the methodological level of the secular reflexivity whose historical genesis the book narrates.” At the same time, this secular reflexivity, in its first-person call to undergo experience, is not so obviously secular. Indeed, Taylor seems to “tilt” the “playing field in favor of Christianity,” making the only phenomenology he is truly interested in the one of the Christian, “who must live with the knowledge that his or her faith is an option.” Jager roots the primacy of the Christian to the first-person in Taylor’s allegiance to romantic sources, which would seem to justify his right to tell the story as his story. Even more, it has always been clear that Taylor’s reading of the romantic is an unabashedly religious one. The paradox is that, if the effort to get inside experience is the sign of modernity, Christianity is “the best response to the secular age,” an “unresolved tension,” says Jager, in a book more interested in expressing this tension than resolving it.

Jager ferrets out further intriguing paradoxes in the project, but they are all rooted in his argument that “the romantic method of A Secular Age both narrates the arrival of a modern ‘formation of the secular’ and, read properly, provides the tools for its genealogical critique.” Enlarging and refining the conception of story throughout, Jager allows Taylor the right to a history written with the desire not only to tell it but also to change it, while reminding him of principles which Taylor himself seems not quite to believe. In Jager’s conception of Taylor’s principles, ”telling the proper story, here, doesn’t mean telling a more accurate story; it means finding the essential thing that got lost or sidetracked the first time and highlighting that, and thereby telling a different story, with a different ending.” In this project, Taylor desperately needs readers like Jager, readers and critics who will save him from his sentimentalism, from his cruder historicism, and from his own faltering in the face of conviction. “Secretly,” writes Jager, “Taylor is looking for readers willing to undergo modernity with him, looking for readers who will experience the book as a form of poetic thinking, a story that needs to be retold properly.” Then we might “catch a glimpse of a different world […] in which things had somehow turned out otherwise.” He is looking, in short, for readers like Jager and Milbank, who have the fleet-footedness to see him at least that far.

Sheehan’s essay forms a brilliant counterpoint to Jager’s. If Jager enlarges the power of Taylor’s histories, Sheehan disciplines them, confronting not simply failures of stamina, execution, sources, or editing, but—like Jager and Milbank—the measure of the entire colossus on its own terms. On the one hand, Sheehan depicts himself as a kind of mild-mannered historical everyman, too plain thinking for the rich philosophical stew Taylor sometimes serves up, and punctilious in upholding the principles and guidelines of his “guild.” On the other hand, Sheehan launches the one truly devastating question to Taylor in the entire volume: “When was disenchantment?” To be sure, there are other hard-hitting moments in Varieties. Mahmood, who has become of late something of the go-to scholar for post-secular, post-colonial critique, digs into Taylor’s blindness and omissions with gusto. During compares Taylor to Edmund Burke with his revaluing of tradition, and goes on to wonder why Taylor fails to notice that most of the claims of Christianity are, under “modern truth regimes,” “false, unverifiable, or unproven.” Butler drives by the over-refinement of Taylor’s categories—seculars 1, 2, and 3—to ask why Taylor insists on ignoring the number of bums in the pews. And Casanova serenely witnesses to Taylor’s obsolescence.

Yet none of these criticisms do what Sheehan’s question does: illuminate a query of central importance to Taylor while raising the specter of the incoherence of his reply. If Jager gives Taylor an assist over some of the awkward moments in his argument, Sheehan lunges toward the abyss. It begins benignly enough: what kind of a thing is A Secular Age, this secular age? Is it a history? A philosophy? A theology? An anthropology? Sheehan has no stomach for Jager’s suspension of the historical question. But he is prepared, as Butler, for example, is not, to grant that Taylor has written some other kind of thing, some other—dare we entertain it—kind of history. So let us ask, says Sheehan, what kind?

To some degree, all of the essays in Varieties are asking a version of this question—the question of genre, of beast, of fish or fowl. Of the candidates proffered (existential history, phenomenological history, literature), both During and Sheehan come up with the old category of “conjectural history.” In During’s account, this term is interchangeable with philosophical history more generally, and is rooted in works like Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), John Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy (1830), and, of course, the ur-text of philosophical history, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). As During writes, with humorous understatement, “philosophic history is rarely written these days, in part because it can’t well account for [and is not interested in] historical causality.” Sheehan puts it more bluntly, quoting Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) as a way of comprehending the negative ambition of conjectural history: “Let us therefore begin by setting aside all facts.” It is Sheehan, however, not During, who pursues the notion of conjectural history as a real response to the problem of genre, beginning with a re-reading of this Rousseauian sound bite. It is not, Sheehan instructs, that Rousseau “really did set aside all facts […] But these facts do philosophical rather than historical work.”

What is it, then, to write a conjectural history of fact in a philosophical vein? Sheehan strives mightily to work out the conditions of this possibility. If the article begins in kinship with Butler, pointing out what kinds of argument and evidence real historians work with, and what kinds they must, of necessity, put aside, it goes on to the further task of delineating what Taylor is doing instead. Sheehan likes the notion of conjectural history because, like Jager, he wants to take Taylor at his word that he is actually writing a history of how we got here, and, also like Jager, he seems intrigued by the challenge to locate Taylor’s work somewhere other than the obsolescence to which many of his other readers seem implicitly to relegate it (“philosophic history is rarely written these days…”). Unlike Jager, Sheehan wants to hold Taylor’s feet to the historical fire while also excusing him from what Sheehan characterizes as the less glamorous work of building historical cases. What follows is a colorful excursus into Herodotus, Genesis, Kant, Catholics, and Vico, with short stops on milking cows, eating lunch, the pervasiveness of theology, and the simple life in which yearnings for “fullness” are gustatory, not spiritual. Sheehan comes up with the idea of “apologetics” as that project at once to understand the past and to show its inevitable claim over the present. Taylor cannot have done with history, Sheehan argues, because he wants what the past has to offer. But he also cannot do history proper, because he wants to reserve the right to tell things differently, to imagine the story and the present otherwise. This is similar to Jager’s notion of changing the outcome as I relate the events. But in Sheehan, the work of apologetics is significantly more equivocal than Jager portrays story-telling. Sheehan’s ostensible solution to the emplacement of Taylor’s work comes in his section on Vico, whom he lauds precisely for avoiding apologetics, for attempting the first modern, secular history of the ages unimpeded by visions of redemption and the methodological uniformity that undergirds them.

So, when was disenchantment? Sheehan seems to want us to think that he thinks Taylor can answer this question. As long as we realize that Taylor is dealing with hinges and not chronologies, with before and after, then and now, not when and which, we can go some distance into Taylor’s genealogy of the secular age. But Sheehan cannot ultimately pull this off. At the most trivial level, Sheehan cannot hide his own basic conviction that the facts cannot ever really be set aside. If conjectural history is indeed, as During depicts it, that history which, unconcerned with fact, proceeds to tell stories irrespective of causality, then a historian like Sheehan—a historian as Sheehan depicts himself—cannot admit its legitimacy as anything other than fiction. The move to apologetics and the valorization of Vico are not the only things that give Sheehan away. It is also more simply that Sheehan does not give any good reasons why facts would ever be displaceable, other than those pressed by a history he himself does not, and would never, practice.

But even if one believes that Sheehan believes that his question is not fatal to Taylor, his question is fatal to Taylor, for reasons Sheehan gestures at but does not plumb. Although Sheehan probes the meanings of conjectural history in more detail than does During, he does not isolate its most important dimension. At one point, Sheehan’s attempt to save Taylor leads him to withdraw his question. If there is “no reliable way to apprehend the reality of the prior state [enchantment, the traditional past...] the facticity of ‘enchantment’ takes on philosophical rather than historical import. In that case, though, our opening question—when was reform?—does not matter.” In other words, Taylor is telling the kind of history in which it does not matter when, or even whether, there was disenchantment. Like Rousseau’s “spirit of Society” that “changes and corrupts all our natural inclinations,” Taylor’s categories “float free of historical empiricities and instead become a generalized logic embedded in the very structure of modern human existence.” Where is Milbank to bail Taylor out of this whiggery? Where is Taylor to protest that, in giving him permission to float free of the empirical, Sheehan’s putative defense leaves him considerably worse off than the most hostile criticism? Where is Gauchet to observe with irony that the historian’s historian Jonathan Sheehan ends up sounding a lot like metaphysical him? Shouldn’t Sheehan be the first voice to reason that no one gets to float free from the empirical?

If he did so reason, he would find himself in the company of Immanuel Kant, whose “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History” Sheehan might profitably have reviewed for his piece. In Kant’s account, conjectural history is not deployed to solve problems history could also solve. It is not another name for “philosophical history,” conceived as a parallel kind of history with its own ends. In Kant’s paradigm, there is no such thing as philosophical history. There is history, and there is its concept (conjecture). The project of history involves us in philosophy only in that history is a concept. Simply put, we are limited to the thing (history) but we require its conditions (concept).

It is not hard to imagine how this all gets out of control—how the very language of conjecture could be used to authorize interpretive license. But as Sheehan’s reading of Rousseau intimates, the liberation from fact is constrained and conditional. For Kant, while a historical account might have gaps in the record, which conjecture could temporarily fill, “to base a historical account solely on conjectures would seem little better than drawing up a plan for a novel.” Jager’s argument is thus implicitly imagined by Kant, although while Jager finds real value in this endeavor, Kant worries that it will lead to confusion. There is only one case, says Kant, in which what “may be presumptuous to introduce in the course of a history of human action may well be permissible.” The case is what he calls the first beginning of history, or a history of “the first development of freedom.” Sheehan alludes to such a case at the beginning of his essay in evoking the notion of a golden age—that age, in other words, which comes before our own but has no actual historical validity. One could call it transcendental, perhaps, or structural—fictive in the way the state of nature was fictive for Rousseau and Hobbes, but telling nevertheless with respect to the conditions of knowledge and existence in the present. Conjectural. But whereas Kant rigidly maintains the extreme narrowness of this exception, Sheehan goes on to try the term on Taylor, who is not dealing with the first development of freedom at all, but rather with what Kant calls “the history of its subsequent course,” a history which Kant, if not Sheehan, insists “must be based exclusively on historical records.” Taylor may be dealing with beginnings of a kind—the beginning of modernity, the beginning of the secular, the beginning of disenchantment. But Sheehan’s initial question got it right: without an account of when, without a true fidelity to historical record, not only in Butler’s sense of considering the actual doings of ordinary people, but also in Kant’s sense of ensuring that all our ideas are properly historical—even the idea of history itself, which must needs ground in conjecture the very thing it also expresses in record—we are not doing anything but fiction. It is not clear that even Jager can save Taylor from the weight of this responsibility. At the least, Taylor would need a Kantian reader to find his real exit, his real redemption. It is not clear such a reader could succeed. Still, Sheehan and Taylor, along with the others, leave me hoping that such things could be taken on—that we philosophers and we historians could again (since Kant) meet to talk real business together over a book or two.

Ubuntu, the Zulu term for an ethic of interdependence, which informs social structures and ethical practices throughout southern Africa, has been called the motivating principle, or zeitgeist, of communitarian village life for Bantu-speaking peoples, for whom muntu, or mutu, is a common word for person. The connotations of ubuntu are commonly expressed by invoking a Zulu maxim in which its cognates predominate: “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” or, to use the proverb of Tutu’s Xhosa heritage, “ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu,” (“a person is a person through other persons”). Ubuntu’s untranslatability is central to both theoretical and popular articulations: nearly all writing on the subject takes this claim as axiomatic, and nearly all such texts (my own included) cite the transliterated Zulu maxim. Untranslatability asserts cultural difference; the lack of an equivalent concept in European languages and cultures, where the concepts of individuality are more deeply sedimented, is thus marshaled as evidence of otherness. In the 1960s and ‘70s, ubuntu was claimed by négritude thinkers, like Senegalese president Léopold Senghor and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, as the unique cultural inheritance of Black Africa. The term anchored both the norms of an idealized precolonial condition and rehabilitated cultural forms that had been marginalized by colonial domination. If for Senghor, Biko, and others fighting against colonialism and apartheid, ubuntu symbolized opposition to Western practices of domination and served as their dialectical antithesis, its status as a guiding principle of the new South Africa and its strategic use by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu catapulted ubuntu into national and global circulation as a rival normative framework to Western ideas about sovereignty, utility, and individual autonomy. At the same time, ubuntu was called upon to translate these very norms—and the attendant discourses of human rights and civil society—into African vernaculars. Ubuntu can thus be seen as a threshold, or site of intensity, in global networks of cultural exchange.

The clearest example of the way ubuntu served as a site of mediation can be found in the “National Unity and Reconciliation” chapter of South Africa’s 1994 Interim Constitution (the section cited as the mandate for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which dominated media and politics in South Africa from 1996 to 1998). Proleptically affirming the possibility of reconciliation on the basis of a community yet to come, the constitution asserts that apartheid’s “gross violations of human rights . . . can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.”  In its very enunciation, the term ubuntu begins the process of reparation that it both embodies and desires, in this case by making the argument, both pragmatically and philosophically, for moral and linguistic reeducation. By asserting the importance of an untranslated Zulu word, the interim constitution makes good on a principle that would be formalized in Article 6.2 of South Africa’s 1996 Constitution: “Recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages.”

Part of my point, however, is that ubuntu can be meaningfully described as “indigenous” to southern Africa only in a historical sense relating to its origins. Indeed, YouTube videos featuring Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu pitch ubuntu as a platform for public claim-making that rejects subject-centered models of citizenship and agency. While Jimmy Klausen, in his recent post on the subject of indigenous religions, uses the category of indigeneity to shed light on Taylor’s “politics of recognition,” the assumptions about cultural purity that freight indigeneity reflect neither the global iterations of ubuntu as a product in the global marketplace of ideas nor its history of mediating colonial and missionary encounters.  Instead, various claims to ubuntu’s indigenousness—its status as an “indigenous African philosophy,” as it has been described both by members of the Black Consciousness movement and by academic anthropologists—is an obvious part of its cultural currency. It would be more accurate to read the discourse of ubuntu as a part of the phenomenon of religious pluralization that Taylor calls the “nova effect,” in which the “malaise of modernity” and a deep history of religious improvisation combine to power our “spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane.” This image helps to make sense of the rampant commercialization of ubuntu showcased by phenomena as diverse as the Ubuntu computer programming language, the 2009 “Ubuntu Diplomacy” initiative of the U.S. Department of State, and the Cape Town “Ubuntu Festival.” Much of this is merely multiculturalist kitsch, and indeed it is on the very basis of ubuntu’s status as “an African product” that it is marketed as a valuable cultural resource and has become a buzzword in corporate management discourse. There, ubuntu management symbolizes leveraging less hierarchical business models to attain greater employee satisfaction and corporate profit in an explicit bid to bridge global capitalism and local folkways.

In No Future Without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu, the most systematic and cogent advocate of ubuntu in recent decades, puts it this way:

[Ubuntu] speaks to the very essence of being human [. . .] it is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’  We belong to a bundle of life. We say, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ It is not, ‘I think therefore I am.’  It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong. I participate, I share [. . .] Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum—the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague.

If for Taylor, Christianity is all about reconciliation, for Tutu, Christianity is all about ubuntu. As Michael Battle, a scholar of what he calls Tutu’s “ubuntu theology,” argues, ubuntu inflects Tutu’s deepest sense of Christianity, affecting his understanding of agape, the imago dei, and the church as a community. Several caveats are in order: I am bracketing questions about whether descriptions of ubuntu should be taken as empirical claims about actually existing social norms or are, rather, better seen as utopian longings. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of sub-Saharan Africa—not to mention the differences between precolonial village life and, for instance, life in the slums of Soweto—renders suspect any claims about a singular African culture. I am also not, for the purposes of this discussion, concerned with whether ubuntu’s communalism underwrites the suppression of dissent, though Tutu’s claim that anything detrimental to social harmony should be “avoided like the plague” has a chilling tone.

Instead, I want to linger on the ways that ubuntu, in all of its guises, challenges the basic assumptions about selfhood that subtend Taylor’s work, from Sources of the Self through A Secular Age, while its contemporary mediation and global circulation—as well as its status as a translation zone between Christian missionaries and African converts—confound attempts to see ubuntu as wholly other to Latin Christianity. The evidence of European influences are particularly conspicuous: from the centrality of Christianity to the echo of Kant’s categorical imperative, Tutu’s rhetoric seamlessly integrates the Christian imagery of brotherhood and the dignity shared by all those made in God’s image with ubuntu’s communalism. Indeed, at least since Christian missionaries from Anglican denominations began evangelical work among Zulu and Xhosa communities in the early nineteenth century, both missionaries and converts have come to see ubuntu as the particular language through which the Gospel would most successfully reach its target audience.

For Taylor, the modern self begins with the inward gaze of Cartesian reason; it is no accident that Tutu stages ubuntu as an explicit critique of the Enlightenment in his deft juxtaposition of ubuntu with Cartesian subjectivity, Humean utility, and Smith’s market economics. Developed as an ideology that locates human flourishing in the enrichment of connections between people, ubuntu offers an ontological antidote to apartheid’s logic of separation. As a political theology, ubuntu radicalizes familiar Christian injunctions toward forgiveness, hospitality, reconciliation, and social justice with the aim of drastically reconfiguring the political and cultural landscape of South Africa and, ultimately, the world. In Taylor’s terms, ubuntu insists that we are not buffered selves; the remediation of ubuntu in South African jurisprudence and in its global circulation suggests a normative indictment of firm boundaries between self and other.

It would be easy—and profoundly misleading—to argue that people who inhabit communities governed by a sense of the self as porous, interconnected, and vulnerable to the world are “outside” Taylor’s immanent frame and the history he expertly tells. Ubuntu articulates a strong sense of immanence that manifests itself in its very lexicon: there is a profound horizontality—and a striking absence of vertical appeals to transcendence and the higher power of divinity—in the repetition of cognates for “person” in the proverbs umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu and ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu. In his discussion of the mundane, Simon During questions Taylor’s assertion that spiritual hunger is integral to human nature; in a different way, the notions of fullness implicit in ubuntu allow us to see the verticality of Taylor’s argument as distinctly contingent; from another angle, ubuntu’s concept of personhood suggests that the buffered self is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of immanence. At the same time, ubuntu is not immanent in a materialist sense: the network of personhood implicit in ubuntu includes ancestors and spiritual energies, for which ancestors serve as mediators. Ubuntu operates in an enchanted world—one sees this vividly in the phantasmagoric realism of Nigerian-British novelist Ben Okri’s Famished Road trilogy, in which the spirit world is coterminous with the megacity of Lagos—but not necessarily in one governed by a transcendent/immanent dialectic.

What does Taylor mean when he claims, apropos of Christianity, “It’s all about reconciliation”?  While rhetorically straightforward, Taylor’s choice of terms invokes, only to complicate, common theological contexts in which the term implies a specific predicate: reconciliation is transacted between individuals and God (or the Church). The term bears witness to this history etymologically: “reconciliation, from reconsiliaciun, the Anglo-Norman term for reunion with the Church” (OED). In Taylor’s hands, reconciliation is overdetermined by its counterintuitive roles as at once a properly Christian concept internal to Christian self-fashioning and the threshold upon which Christianity opens toward difference as such. There is something similar going on with ubuntu, which is at once uniquely African and universally human. Taylor’s closing turns of phrase are either arrestingly direct or oddly multilayered, particularly given the divergence between his normative embrace of reconciliation as a project and the descriptive account of the reformist energies within Christianity that he elaborates in A Secular Age. As Taylor tells it there, reform and reconciliation are by no means parallel trajectories.

Taylor’s sympathies with Tutu’s vision of Christianity are especially apparent in his references to South African theology and politics at two important moments in A Secular Age. Taylor cites the dismantling of apartheid as an example of the kind of conflicts and ethical dilemmas facing the world today, and of their possible transcendence. For Taylor, apartheid is not an ethical dilemma; rather, the dilemma inheres in the enacting of solutions to apartheid’s obvious injustice in which the difficulty of adjudicating victimhood, communicative justice, reparation, and a plurality of competing goods exposes the inadequacy of modern ethical theory’s fetish for norm and rule. On the one hand, the spectacular failure of neoliberal globalization to translate economic growth into worldwide peace and harmony suggests that “we need a stronger ethic, a firmer identification with the common good,” and on the other, Taylor is convinced that legal and ethical codes can never provide for the ethical energy necessary to sustain flourishing societies. Instead, Taylor looks to recent cases of transitional justice, like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as examples of the way reconciliatory frameworks can shatter the zero-sum nature of award and judgment by enabling a “vertical” shift to ethical planes that permit “a win-win move.” Taylor writes:

The basic idea behind this kind of procedure was to get the ex-victims to accept that they could have a maximum of one kind of closure (the truth about what happened) at the cost of renouncing a lot that they could quite legitimately claim of another kind: punishment of the perpetrators, an eye for an eye. The aim was to find an ‘award’ which allowed also for a reconciliation, and therefore living together on a new footing.

While very different sets of practical and discursive demands come to bear on the term reconciliation when it is uttered by Desmond Tutu and Charles Taylor, it is no surprise that one can hear echoes of Mandela and Tutu in Taylor’s “It’s all about reconciliation.” Tracking the relationship between ubuntu and Christian concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness is a potent reminder of how intertwined Christianity is with geographies, histories, and cultures distant from Taylor’s focal point, and it is with this goal in mind that I take inspiration from the essays in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age by Nilüfer Göle, José Casanova, and Saba Mahmood, who each seek to pluralize and decenter Taylor’s account of Latin Christianity in the North Atlantic world. It is a testament to the strength of Taylor’s work that his project fosters a framework for comparative analysis despite his focus on the internal history of Latin Christianity. By examining the way that ubuntu has altered—through theology, corporate management culture, ethical theory, and state politics—what Taylor might call the “South African social imaginary,” we begin to see intimations that the self is not as buffered as Taylor might take it to be.