Secularization

An Essay in Normative Metaphysics

Ulrich Steinvorth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319638706
• eBook ISBN: 9783319638713
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

This book answers questions about secularization: Does it dissolve religion, or transform it into faith in a universally valid value? Is it restricted to the west or can it occur everywhere? Using ideas of Max Weber, the book conceives secularization as a process comparable to the rational development of science and production.

What is the value secularization propagates? Sifting historical texts, Steinvorth argues the value is authenticity, to be understood as being true to one's talents developed in activities that are done for their own sake and provide life with meaning, and as unconditionally commanded.How can a value be unconditionally demanded? This question leads to an investigation of the self that combines Kant's ideas on the conditions of the possibility of experience with modern brain science, and to the metaphysical deliberation whether to prefer a world with creatures able to do both good and evil to one without them.It is not enough, however, to point to facts. We rather need to understand what secularization, religion and their possible rationality consist in. Max Weber's sociology of religion has provided us with the conceptual means to do so, which this book develops. Secularization is rediscovered as the same progress of rationality in the sphere of religion that we find in the development of the spheres of science, art, the economy and politics or public affairs. It proves to be the perfection rather than the dissolution of religion – a perfection that consists in recognizing authenticity as the successor of the absolute of religion.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Part I Introduction
• 1 Three Theses
• 2 Comparable Interpretations of Secularization
• Part II A New Secularization Thesis
• 3 Intrinsic Goals and Sphere-Immanent Rationalities
• 4 Religion and the Absolute
• 5 Moral and Metaphysical Norms
• 6 Authenticity in Ancient China, Rome, the Renaissance, and Marx
• 7 Montaigne’s Authenticity
• 8 Mortality and Montaignean Authenticity
• 9 A Naturalistic Proof of the Validity of the Authenticity Command
• 10 Three Comments on the Proof
• 11 Thesis and Sub-theses
• Part III Objections
• 12 Religion Cannot Be Perfected, Least of All by Authenticity
• 13 Claims on the Absolute Must Be Infallible
• 14 Weberian Rationalization Is a Hegelian Red Herring
• 15 Kierkegaard—But not Rational Metaphysics—Can Relate Us to the Absolute
• 16 Secular Societies Can Do Without Anything Absolute
• 17 Authenticity Is Asocial
• 18 Secularization Is a Western Affair
• Part IV Epilog: Liberals’ Absolute
• 19 The Ambivalence of Secularization and of Nature
• 20 Rorty and the Enlightened Secular Faith
• References
• Index