Abstract
In this introductory chapter, such key concepts as “post-secular,” “self-transformation,” and “the essayist form of writing” for the book are introduced with a brief sketch of contemporary debates between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the status of religious language in the public domain in relation to secular language. This leads the reader to the main questions of the whole book: What is the nature of philosophical practice in a post-secular age to be and how is the essay-form as a philosophical practice to be developed as a pedagogical practice for self-transformation? The following chapters develop a set of answers to these questions not with a series of arguments but with a series of dialectical responses to critical questions posed by two main philosophical heroes of the author’s: George Lukács and Stanley Cavell.
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Notes
- 1.
An extreme view like “evolutionary epistemology” argues that all the questions can in principle be answered through empirical inquiry or be rejected as spurious (Critchley 2001, p. 5). For example, a philosopher like Daniel C. Dennett thinks that the question of the meaning of life can be answered causally or empirically through Darwinian evolutionary theory, reducing all philosophical questions to epistemological questions, and claiming that all such questions have to be answered with reference to evolutionary dispositions. Refer to his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (1996, New York: Touchstone). As the reader will discover, I do not accept this extreme view.
- 2.
This means that a post-secular society is a society where religious communities are given public recognition for their fundamental contribution to the reproduction of desirable motives and attitude for the liberal state, giving us a normative insight that political interaction between religious and nonreligious citizens can take each other’s contribution to controversial public debates seriously for cognitive reasons. Taylor also refers to this stage of the epistemic condition of our beliefs, whether religious or not, with the term “the secular in the third sense,” distinguishing it from two other senses of “the secular” (Taylor 2007, pp. 2–3). I think “the third sense of the secular” in Taylor refers to the same condition as what “the post-secular” refers to in Habermas.
- 3.
Habermas mentions how the translation of the theological doctrine of creation in God’s image into the idea of the equal and unconditional dignity of all human beings constitutes one such conserving translation. He also gives us an example of Walter Benjamin as someone who made the content of biblical concepts available to the general public of unbelievers and members of other faith beyond the boundaries of a particular religious community (2008, p. 110).
- 4.
“The buffered self” in Taylor’s terms depicts an image of the modern self as not open and vulnerable to the spirits and powers of the enchanted world. But it involves more than “disenchantment.” To be the buffered self, it is also necessary to have confidence in one’s own power of moral ordering with a new sense of her place in the cosmos, the power of taking a disengaged and disciplined stance toward the self and society. This stance, in Taylor’s view, leads to our drawing of boundaries between the self and the world as well as our withdrawal from certain modes of intimacies with the world, while allowing us a strong sense of self-possession or of a secure inner mental realm. See pp. 38, 262 and 300–307 of Taylor’s book (2007) for the detailed development of this concept.
- 5.
Here, Taylor claims that there could be many unexplored epistemological roads that can make belief in God and the scientific worldview compatible; this is a cognitive game that is not yet completely over as exclusive secular humanists tend to think (Taylor 2007, pp. 25–29). As discussed earlier, Habermas would also agree with this point of Taylor’s.
- 6.
Karl Lowith, the German intellectual historian, is a case in point. Lowith describes in his book Meaning in History (1949) the central modern phenomenon “Progress” as the products of secularization of Christian ideas. According to Robert Wallace in his introduction to the English version of Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of Modern Age (1983, pp. xiii–xv), it diminishes the importance of modernity in human intellectual history.
- 7.
Hans Blumenberg takes a similar stance to the modern process of secularization. Taylor’s emphasis on the modern construal of agency as part of the modern moral outlook looks similar to Blumenberg’s emphasis on “human self-assertion” as one of main features of modernity that legitimates the modern age (1983, p. xxii). See pp. 741–2 of the same book for detailed argument.
- 8.
It means that Taylor takes a middle path between orthodox religion on one hand and hard-line materialistic atheism on the other hand, accepting that even the moral version of the ‘death of God’ is more plausible or unavoidable in the modern world.
- 9.
Lukács’ work that I am concerned with in this book comes from before the time when he became a full-blown Marxist.
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Kwak, DJ. (2012). Introduction: Education as Self-transformation and the Essay Form of Writing: Education for a Post-secular Age. In: Education for Self-transformation. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2401-3_1
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