How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

by James K.A. Smith

The first, and most significant, is an eclipse of what he calls a “further purpose” or a good that “transcends human flourishing.”1 In the premodern, enchanted social imaginary, there was an end for humans that transcended “mundane” flourishing “in this world,” so to speak. As he puts it elsewhere, “For Christians, God wills human flourishing, but ‘thy will be done’ doesn’t reduce to ‘let human beings flourish.’ ”2 In short, both agents and social institutions lived with a sense of a telos that was eternal — a final judgment, the beatific vision, etc. And on Taylor’s accounting, this “higher good” was in some tension with mundane concerns about flourishing (recall his earlier point concerning equilibrium). This entailed a sense of obligation “beyond” human flourishing. In other words, this life is not “all there is” — and recognizing that means one lives this life differently. It will engender certain ascetic constraints, for example: we can’t just eat, drink, and be merry because, while tomorrow we may die, that’s not the end. After that comes the judgment. And so our merriment might be curtailed by this “further purpose,” as Taylor describes it.