Cartesian Secularity: “Disengaged Reason,” the Passions, and the Public Sphere Beyond Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007)

Abstract

AbstractAlthough explicitly challenging overly simplistic dichotomies between secular reason and religious affect, Charles Taylor’s monumental genealogy A Secular Age (2007) downplays the role of the body in Descartes’s theory of agency and mistakenly projects this understanding of the “Cartesian” self upon the public sphere of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a careful reading of Descartes’s last work, Les Passions de l’Âme (1649), and drawing on existing work by Cottingham (2012), Kahn (2006), and Kirkebøen (2001), this article argues the Passions is better seen as an attempt to reinscribe politics in the body through Descartes’s theory of the habit. A focus on the latter yields a complex understanding of the emergence of the public sphere, not as a neutral space for the free exchange of rational speech acts, but as a power-driven environment shaped by the manipulation of habit-creating experiences. The article ends by considering some implications for the genealogy of our “secular age.”