Human Flourishing and Transcendence. Charles Taylor: Between Radical Orthodoxy and Exclusive Secularism

This research explores the relation of human flourishing and transcendence in three prominent narratives of secularization: the secularization narrative of exclusive humanism, the genealogical counternarrative of Radical Orthodoxy, and the alternative Reform Master Narrative (RMN) of Charles Taylor. On the one hand, the exclusive humanists tend to consider the entire life-world as sufficiently self-referential on a totally immanent plane; any reference to transcendent realities, therefore, in their estimation, must be eschewed as self-deception and wilful blindness to the facticity of human reality. This camp bases itself on the enlightenment assumption of human autonomy freed from all kinds of transcendent sovereignties. On the other hand, a significant group of intellectuals, widely known as the Radical Orthodoxy (RO) movement (headed by John Milbank), claim to offer a powerful reaffirmation of transcendence over against all claims to an entirely self-contained autonomy. Often expressing themselves bluntly, they propose that a return to the orthodox Christian tradition of creation is the way forward to overcome the games of power and violence they find at the core of modernity. While both these tendencies have a common concern, namely human flourishing, their approaches diverge on the issue of a (religious) transcendence that is more than human. Basing myself on the intuition that both exclusive secularists and the main proponents of Radical Orthodoxy have not addressed the relation between human flourishing and transcendence in a sufficiently integral manner, I propose the following question for my meta-theoretical research: Can Taylor's concept of "human fullness" help us develop a credible account of human flourishing in a context characterized by a critical tension between immanent self-referentiality (as presupposed by exclusive secularists) and extraneous referentiality to transcendence (as seemingly presupposed by the Radical Orthodoxy group)? Two key questions run through the chapters. First, is modernity a totally new phenomenon, or is it indebted to its religious roots? Second, how have changes in ideas about God, especially the loss of transcendence, affected conceptions of integral human flourishing.status: publishe