Secularization: An Essay in Normative Metaphysics

✍ Scribed by Ulrich Steinvorth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 219
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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

Front Matter ....Pages i-vi
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Three Theses (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 3-8
Comparable Interpretations of Secularization (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 9-18
Front Matter ....Pages 19-19
Intrinsic Goals and Sphere-Immanent Rationalities (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 21-29
Religion and the Absolute (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 31-43
Moral and Metaphysical Norms (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 45-54
Authenticity in Ancient China, Rome, the Renaissance, and Marx (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 55-64
Montaigne’s Authenticity (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 65-74
Mortality and Montaignean Authenticity (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 75-80
A Naturalistic Proof of the Validity of the Authenticity Command (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 81-92
Three Comments on the Proof (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 93-105
Thesis and Sub-theses (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 107-109
Front Matter ....Pages 111-111
Religion Cannot Be Perfected, Least of All by Authenticity (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 113-120
Claims on the Absolute Must Be Infallible (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 121-128
Weberian Rationalization Is a Hegelian Red Herring (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 129-137
Kierkegaard—But not Rational Metaphysics—Can Relate Us to the Absolute (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 139-150
Secular Societies Can Do Without Anything Absolute (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 151-162
Authenticity Is Asocial (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 163-172
Secularization Is a Western Affair (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 173-184
Front Matter ....Pages 185-185
The Ambivalence of Secularization and of Nature (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 187-192
Rorty and the Enlightened Secular Faith (Ulrich Steinvorth)....Pages 193-204
Back Matter ....Pages 205-223

✦ Subjects

Ethics & Morality;Philosophy;Politics & Social Sciences;Metaphysics;Philosophy;Politics & Social Sciences;Religious;Philosophy;Politics & Social Sciences;Social Philosophy;Philosophy;Politics & Social Sciences