The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

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Taylor has divided moral intuition into three axes: (1) the sense that human life is to be respected (the conversation up to this point has focused on this axis), (2) our understandings of what makes a life full, and (3) the range of notions concerning dignity.

The second axis is one that stands out significantly for the current era when compared to eras of the past. A person in a warrior society might ponder if his courageous deeds lives up to the promise of is lineage, or someone in a religious culture might ask if conventional piety is sufficient or if he or she is called to a purer path of life. However, the frameworks in place in these examples, by which such people judged their lives, were unquestioned. In the first example, it is the space of fame in the memory or the song of the tribe. In the second example, it is the call of God as made clear in revelation. These frameworks by which a person measured his or her fullness or emptiness are unquestioned by him or her. For the modern person, the framework is problematic.

The framework of revealed religion is very much in place, but it is intensely scrutinized. The framework of fame has been discredited or downgraded to personal preference. Here, Taylor references Weber's use of "disenchantment", that is the dissipation of our sense of the cosmos as a meaningful order, which has destroyed the horizons in which people previously lived their spiritual lives (17). Taylor uses this phrase "frameworks are problematic" to described the open disjunction of attitudes.

What is common to them all is the sense that no framework is shared by everyone, can be taken for granted as the framework tout court, can sink to the phenomenological status of unquestioned fact (17).

While this basic understanding my manifest differently in the stances people take, people tend to be tentative in their stances and see themselves as seeking. What Aslasdair MacIntyre calls a "quest".


Click for Larger ImageModerns embrace traditional frameworks with uncertainty and reservations. In addition to this, they develop their own interpretations of them, or idiosyncratic combinations of them, or borrowings from them, or semi-inventions within them. This provides context for which the question of meaning has its place. "Not to have a framework is to fall into a life which is spiritually senseless. The quest is thus always a quest for sense" (18).

The alternative--the unquestionable framework--makes demands we fear being unable to meet. Perhaps the result is exile, damnation, or being relegated to a lower order in future lives. The form of fear here is quite different from what threatens the modern seeker: "the world loses altogether its spiritual contour, nothing is worth doing, the fear is of a terrifying emptiness, a kind of vertigo, or even a fracturing of our world and body-space " (18). The former still exists for many people today, but the fear of meaningless is, perhaps, defining for our age.