The Affirmation of Ordinary Life: This term is probably not really a Taylorean invention, but it features very prominently in his account of the history of ideas. As he says, the affirmation of ordinary life 'has become one of the most powerful ideas in modern civilisation' (Sources of the Self , p. 14). Though it has avowedly secular variants (such as utilitarianism), it is a term associated with the theological shift in the Reformation period away from the spirituality of the elite and towards the sanctification of the everyday. 'With the Reformation, we find a modern, Christian-inspired sense that ordinary life was..the very centre of the good life.' (p. 13). You could, with Luther, praise God while changing a baby's nappy. You could labour in your dead-end job and still possess the dignity and spirituality of a monk.
The fruit of this affirmation of the ordinary include a protest against needless suffering and an emphasis on human welfare and dignity. And it underlies much of political self-understanding in the West even today.
4 comments:
I’ve enjoyed the posts on Taylor.
I disagree with Taylor’s high evaluation of the “subtraction story,” because I feel it’s just a high-brow rant against modernism disguised by neatly tailored feel-good poetry about “liberation” - that doesn’t really mean anything except high-sounding vagaries; but, I equally greatly liked Taylor’s affirmations of the ordinary, because by the time you get to changing “baby’s nappy,” you’ve got something concrete, maybe even liquid and colloidal stuff too, to do some “practical” theology. Now, we’re getting real. Theology isn’t worth much until your nose is in “baby’s nappy.”
I have mixed responses to the third section, namely, to the value of social imagination, or imagination in our relations with each other (however you valence imagination).
On the one hand, imagination (contrast: authoritarian dictatorship) is necessary to the free play of creative and loving relationships. Ala Ricoeur on imagination trumping blind obedience in textual interpretation.
On the other hand, imagination becomes a fanciful romanticized reserve of feel-good revelatory insights, a process unto itself, beyond criticism, beyond testing, and beyond judgment because the god-of-plurality reigns supreme. Say anything. Whatever.
Baby's nappys holds a clue.
Sheer imagination at the deepest liminal state emerged unbidden and in full imaginal expression in the dream (literal dream) of Friedrich von Kekule, but, from imagination and dream to practical fruit to bless others took hundreds, if not thousands, of patient, rational, boring ratiocinative (scientific) tests, defeats, more tests, more defeats ... all the inglorious boring work of trial and error required to take an imagination (Kekule’s dream) from a dream-state of glorious imagination into a practical, workable, and factual implementation (factual: the benzene ring), that got organic chemistry off to the races, with corresponding cascades of blessings for all of us, in grounding organic chemistry in modern medical science.
There’s an unspeakable ton of hard work between imagination and realization.
It's the distance between high-sounding stories of liberation in “subtraction theory” versus subtracting the real substance out of “baby’s nappy.”
Jim
"Affirmation of Ordinary Life" strikes me as a very Catholic, pre-Reformation thing that was disrupted by the Reformation (trapped as it was by late-Mediaeval corruptions that it similtaneously rebelled against and embodied). It is an insight that is at the heart of monastic life, especially the Benedictine.
That's a curious spin on history, WJ... I don't see how it could be disrupted by the Reformation. Of course, Taylor is going to make a quasi-Weberian thesis about Calvinism and capitalism too..
jp - I think I haven't been clear: Taylor uses this terms as descriptions rather than things he endorses. He has rather a low view of subtraction stories: he is polemicising against them...
Michael - thanks! Got it.
I probably overreacted anyway to the “subtraction story” stuff.
It’s not that I’m persistently theory-impatient. But, sometimes. Even to theological/philosophical abstractions that really annoy me, I’m greatly indebted. Derrida made me re-think and integrate violence as a partial component of legal foundations, and partly so, also into theology. And that slippery fish Ricouer (I think Ricouer is crypto-Ricouerean!) really helped me elevate imagination into otherwise excessively burdened technical-legal analysis, in certain modes of hyper-rational legal practice; less-so into theological reasoning. I guess with the frequencies of recurrence of themes (like Taylor’s) across other disciplines, I could have gotten these kinds of corrections anywhere else; but, Derrida and Ricouer did the trick, in their respective bailiwicks.
So, thanks for the correction to Taylor. Back to patience. I’m enjoying your musings on Taylor.
Jim
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