Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World

Hans Alma, Guido Vanheeswijck, Hans Alma, Guido Vanheeswijck

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110434156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

How to study the contemporary dynamics between the religious, the nonreligious and the secular in a globalizing world? Obviously, their relationship is not an empirical datum, liable to the procedures of verification or of logical deduction. We are in need of alternative conceptual and methodological tools. This volume argues that the concept of 'social imaginary' as it is used by Charles Taylor, is of utmost importance as a methodological tool to understand these dynamics. The first section is dedicated to the conceptual clarification of Taylor's notion of social imaginaries both through a historical study of their genealogy and through conceptual analysis. In the second section, we clarify the relation of 'social imaginaries' to the concept of (religious) worldviewing, understood as a process of truth seeking. Furthermore, we discuss the practical usefulness of the concept of social imaginaries for cultural scientists, by focusing on the concept of human rights as a secular social imaginary. In the third and final section, we relate Taylor's view on the role of social imaginaries and the new paths it opens up for religious studies to other analyses of the secular-religious divide, as they nowadays mainly come to the fore in the debates on what is coined as the 'post-secular.'

Hans Alma and Guido Vanheeswijck

Introduction to Social Imaginaries in a Globalizing World

1 Background

How to study the contemporary dynamics between the religious, the nonreligious and the secular in a globalizing world? Obviously, their relationship is not only an empirical datum, liable to the procedures of verification, let alone to those of logical deduction. In order to study the dynamics between the religious and the secular in depth, we are in need of alternative conceptual and methodological tools which are complementary to sheer empirically verified research. In this volume, we will argue that the concept of social imaginary is of utmost importance as a heuristic tool to understand these dynamics.

This concept can be traced back to the writings of Benedict Anderson (1983), Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) and Charles Taylor (2004, 2007). From different perspectives, they seek to understand (late) modern societies. In our volume we will focus on the way Charles Taylor uses the concept. His A Secular Age (2007), which is widely recognized as a seminal work in the field of secularization theories and in the long tradition of genealogies of secularization, not only elaborates on the notion of social imaginary, it is also an original application of this notion’s influence on the social dynamics between the religious and the secular in a changing world.

This volume is one of the results of research conducted in the context of the international and interdisciplinary consortium SIMAGINE, dedicated to the study of social imaginaries between secularity and religion in a globalizing world.1 The central research question of the consortium is: What can the concept of social imaginaries contribute to the analysis – in current cultural theory, religious studies and globalization theory – of societies that are interculturally super-diverse and display complex blends of existential frameworks, with both secular and religious features? Starting from this question the consortium will develop its research along theoretical and empirical lines. The present volume clarifies our use of the concept social imaginaries and its promise as an analytic tool for understanding central issues in contemporary (Western) societies.

2 Social Imaginaries: A Complex Term

Today, many people are struggling to find an appropriate language to understand what a modern western culture consists of. According to a widespread understanding, modern western culture has drastically transformed its ‘traditional’ cultural predecessors thanks to the rise of modern science and the overall use of scientific rationality. In his introduction to the volume of essays, Philosophical Arguments (1995), Charles Taylor concedes that this might be the case on a superficial level, but that on a deeper level this understanding is at least biased and only gives a very partial explanation. He holds that modern society could not have developed into its contemporary shape without the occurrence of other, often neglected, changes:

The intuition behind this [view] is that modern society is different from those of preceding ages not just in the novel institutions and practices of representative democracy, the market economy, institutionalized scientific discovery, and steady technological advance; it is different not just in moral and political principles, in authenticity, rights, democratic legitimacy, equality, non-discrimination. The notion is that alongside these changes, connected with these and in a relationship of mutual support, is an asset of changes in the way we have come to imagine society. That is, the repertory of means available to understand how we relate to others in society has altered in a fundamental way. (Taylor 1995, x)

In the quote above, it was the very first time that Taylor stresses the complementary and even indispensable function of imagining the world, alongside theorizing it, in terms which announce his later use of social imaginaries. Obviously, his use of the term ‘imagining’ and later of the term social imaginaries still shows the traces of Cornelius Castoriadis’s coinage of the concept “as an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents” (Gaonkar 2002, 1). Taylor defines social imaginaries as incorporating “a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice.” (Taylor 2007, 172)

To clarify the importance of social imaginaries in understanding our contemporary culture and the differences with other cultures, he often relates the meaning of imaginaries to that of a picture. Explicitly referring to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s critique of Cartesian epistemology, Taylor wishes to underline with the use of the word picture that the way we imagine our world is something utterly different and much deeper than a theory:

It is a largely unreflected-upon background understanding which provides the context for, and thus influences all our theorizing in this area. The claim could be interpreted as saying that mainline epistemological thinking, which descends from Descartes, has been contained within and hence shaped by this not fully explicit picture; that this has been a kind of captivity, because it has prevented us from seeing what is wrong with the whole line of thought. At certain points, we are unable to think ‘outside the box,’ because the picture seems so obvious, so commonsensical, so unchallengeable. (Taylor and Dreyfus 2015, 1 – 2)

Precisely because imaginaries and pictures are situated at the paradigmatic level, underlying and presupposing theoretical constructs, they have such a deep, albeit often surreptitious and tacit influence. Due to that precarious status, the ramifications of this specific use of the concept social imaginaries are manifold and complex. By way of introduction, we focus on four of them.

First, the concept social imaginaries functions as a collective noun which contains – among others – secular, religious, political and economical imaginaries. In application to our topic of the contemporary dynamics between the religious, the nonreligious and the secular in a globalizing world, it is to be noted that secular imaginaries inherent to our contemporary society relate to what Taylor defines as the immanent frame we are currently living in. At the same time, they make that immanent frame possible, which means that traditional sources of transcendence have been eclipsed or even dispelled from our views on man and nature. So, the social imaginary of an immanent frame has become “a picture that holds us captive”, as Taylor rephrases Wittgenstein (Taylor 2007, 549). Moreover, this immanent frame is not related to one single social imaginary, but can only be understood by reference to social imaginaries in the plural, since contemporary Western culture showcases a super-diversity which does not allow for one single picture or social imaginary.

Second, social imaginaries are characterized by a high level of inarticulacy: they escape full theoretical articulation, and since they cover a wider grasp that has no clear limits their range is somewhat indefinite or even undefinable. Therefore, whereas social imaginaries are primarily background understandings that enable certain practices, they only become real in and manifest themselves through these practices. Consequently, social imaginaries are as it were as much lived as they are understood. They are enshrined in the use of ‘expressivist’ words, gestures and practices.

Third, in his latest book, The Language Animal, Taylor borrows from Bourdieu and Calhoun the distinction between orthodoxy and doxa to elucidate the complex status of social imaginaries as distinguished from theories and beliefs. Whereas orthodoxy is related to beliefs that we maintain to be correct in the awareness that others may have different views, doxa is interwoven with felt reality: “the operations of selecting and shaping new entrants (rites of passage, examinations, etc.) are such as to obtain from them that undisputed, pre-reflexive, naïve, native compliance with the fundamental presuppositions of the field which is the very definition of doxa. (…) All these feed together into what I have called elsewhere the ‘social imaginary’ of a given society.” (Taylor 2016, 273)

Fourth, contrary to adherents of Cartesian (and naturalist) epistemology, Taylor considers full transparency out of reach with regard to social imaginaries. Here, he is parting ways with Hegel, in whose synthesis “the unclear consciousness of the beginning is itself made part of the chain of conceptual necessity. The unclear and inarticulate, just as the external and contingent, is itself shown to have a necessary existence. The approximate and incompletely formed is itself derived in exact, articulate concepts.” (Taylor 1975, 569) Taylor, instead, follows the line of Herder and his descendants, “for whom the unreflective experience of our situation can never be fully explicated” (Taylor 1975, 569). Sti...