In post-war Britain academic philosophers did not talk about the meaning of life. Analytic philosophy dominated British philosophy, and this kind of philosophy was dominated in turn by philosophy of language and by epistemology. Moral philosophy, along with aesthetics, mostly hid in a corner.

 

But in 1976 a distinguished analytic philosopher, David Wiggins, delivered a paper called “Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life”:

 

Even now, in an age not given much to mysticism, there are people who ask “What is the meaning of life?” Not a few of them make the simple “un-philosophical” assumption that there is something to be known here. (One might say they are “cognitivists” with regard to this sort of question.) And most of these same people make the equally unguarded assumption that the whole issue of life’s meaning presupposes some positive answer to the question whether it can be plainly and straightforwardly true that this or that thing or activity or pursuit is good, or has value, or is worth something. Finally, something even harder, they suppose that questions like that of life’s meaning must be among the central questions of moral philosophy.

 

The question of life’s having a meaning and the question of truth are not at the centre of moral philosophy as we now have it.

 

Not at the centre of moral philosophy – and nowhere near the centre of philosophy in general. Not in 1976. Not in Britain. And while it is true that in Continental Europe philosophy was being done in ways that were at least more congenial to raising the question, still, there too, generally speaking, such ambitious efforts were rare.

 

They are still rare, but not so rare today and I know of a number of professional philosophers who are grateful that they can now write about the deepest questions of human life without embarrassment. Why has this happened at this time? Why has it become possible to discuss this kind of theme again?

 

Let us begin by asking why it might be that discussion about the meaning of life went off the radar in philosophy during the twentieth century – and also off the radar beyond academia too, off the radar in the West during the last hundred years or so.

 

At the risk of gross simplification, I want to suggest that the background to this state of affairs can be framed in terms of the acceptance by European intellectuals of what has been called “the secularisation thesis”. This thesis was developed by different thinkers in different ways, but social theorists like Weber, Durkheim and, in his own fashion, Marx, led the way in thinking we could describe the historical movement of modernity in Europe in terms of a transition from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one with a cognitively superior outlook in which these things are disclosed as illusions and delusions which we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science.

 

This story belonged with an even more long-run picture: one which conceived the movement of the whole history of the world in terms of a transition from an origin that was primitive, barbarian, savage – and basically animal – moving slowly and in stages through developments in human society towards a modern, rational and scientific end. There is here the idea of History as Progress towards an ideal End of Man and towards an ideally civilised form of social life. The secularisation thesis dovetails with that wider discourse of modernity: it is the idea that the movement into a rational and scientific age is one which is likely to see primitive and traditional conceptions not only of the world but also of the significance of our lives increasingly give way to rational and scientific ones. The old illusions will, in all likelihood, wither away, and in the future, soon, we will have finally emancipated ourselves from myth, superstition and religion. We will have finally learned how to live.

 

The secularisation thesis became increasingly matter of course for European intellectuals in the late 19th and 20th centuries. So when people were writing at that time – in philosophy, in history, in politics and in sociology – there was this unquestioned background that, while there were still some foolish believers around, the proper methods were finally making their way; and the methods with a future were rational and scientific, and would have nothing to do with religion at all.

 

Before I explore this thesis – a thesis which concerns nothing less than the becoming-secular of the world – we should pause to acknowledge that for many people the claimed changeover in our thinking and believing that the secularisation thesis presents was a cause for considerable anxiety. For many, though they may have kept quiet about it, the sense of loss of a religiously articulated understanding of the significance of our lives was not the loss of an illusion or delusion at all, but rather the loss of a way, perhaps finally the only intelligible way, through which we could make sense of the idea that there is something to be known in this most important of domains. What seemed to be disappearing was the most profound, rich and satisfying (“cognitivist”) discourse through which we might hope to come to know what is to be known about the meaning of life. And when religion falls away or is eclipsed then all you are left with is an utterly mundane life in which it is totally unclear why, ultimately, we should think that there is anything more to life than shopping.

 

Of course, many of the proponents of the secularisation thesis thought there was a promised land ahead too; an end of history to come which would be some kind of ultimate realisation of human flourishing without illusion. So they wouldn’t have thought at all that the disappearance of religion was leading towards a life without the means to grasp the meaning of life. But for many people the apparent eclipse of religion was a profoundly worrying event for Western humanity; they felt that secularisation would leave us with a life deprived and devoid of meaning: a nihilistic post-modern condition, where “anything goes”.

 

Today, however, something else is swimming into view. Today, the question is not whether there is anything left to value in an increasingly secular world, but whether we should regard the secularisation thesis, independently of any optimistic conception of an end to come it may harbour for some, as in any sense worth giving credence to any more.

 

I mean: religion, religiosity, a sense of spirituality, has simply not gone away.

 

Nietzsche, looking at his fellow Europeans in the late nineteenth century, found in the self-professed atheism he increasingly saw around him nothing but a retreat from the idea of God as the “father” or the “judge”. That apart, the religious instinct seemed to him still vigorously alive and well. And this was in Europe, not in parts of the world where religion in various forms was more obviously still thriving and not withering.

 

I do not think that there have been any fundamental changes since Nietzsche was observing Europeans. It is becoming evident that in reality there has been little or no weakening in religiosity, even if there is a weakening of a certain difficult idea of God. The weakening of that difficult idea is leading, no doubt, to some weakening of ties to those ecclesiastical authorities which carry it. And as a result we see a decline in religious practices of certain kinds (church going, for example). But this is a decline in certain religious practices without a parallel decline in religiosity.

 

Europe, the supposed vanguard of world secularisation, is, we should now accept, simply not the exception in the world, not the vanguard of secular reason surrounded by great swathes of humanity still going on in its infantile ways as if nothing has happened. No, Europe, like everywhere else, has remained solidly religiously committed. Indeed, even in traditional terms the picture is not the one we might have been led to believe: self-identifying as a religious believer of some kind is still incredibly high among Europeans. In Britain in 2002, for example, over 70% of those responding to the census declared they were Christians – with about 45% or so still saying they believe in the more difficult idea of God too.

 

Instead of increasing atheism, we should perhaps talk instead of changes to patterns of religiosity in Europe. Rather than being part of a congregation or seeing oneself as being bound to a given ecclesiastical authority, we now have dominant  models of the pilgrim, who is on a personal religious search, and the convert who rather late in life comes to see their life in religious terms or in some kind of a spiritual light. What one “finds” along the way may or may not be construed a matter of finding God. Nevertheless, for most Europeans or those whose life is saturated with the European heritage, it is most likely that one finds oneself to be a Christian of sorts.

 

For me, then, the secularisation thesis has simply been blown away – and blown away both by the facts about continuing religiosity and by its own utterly dismal understanding of what religiosity actually is (namely, as akin to a belief in the existence of fairies). People today have turned around to see that this religion thing which was meant to be going away has not gone away at all, and it is not, in any case, what we thought it was.

 

On the other hand, there has been a change. It is a change that the secularisation thesis was an attempt to come to terms with and to which it itself belonged; a movement or mutation within the Christian world in Europe that it was itself within.

 

What we need now is a new way of thinking about the change that has taken place in Europe during the last two or three hundred years. Three hundred years ago God and God’s plan for man was at the centre of the self-understanding usual among Europeans; at the centre of the European understanding of the world and the significance of our lives. We now live in a time when that is no longer true. The secularisation thesis was one way of trying to grasp that change. But it was inadequate. I think David Wiggins began a helpful kind of re-writing of that inadequate idea in his essay on the meaning of life when, in the heat of the Cold War, and writing now of our time as a time after Darwin, he said this:

 

Unless we are Marxists, we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit. It is not that we have lost interest in emancipation or progress themselves. But whether temporarily or permanently, we have more or less abandoned the idea that the importance of emancipation or progress (or a correct conception of spiritual advance) is that these are marks by which our minute speck in the universe can distinguish itself as the spiritual focus of the cosmos.

 

That’s a big ‘shift’, as he says. But the crucial point, it seems to me, is Wiggins’ insistence that we should not interpret this shift as a loss of interest in emancipation or progress – or indeed of spiritual advance. In short, whatever changes we are looking at in Europe in the last three hundred years, the mistake is to interpret these changes either along the lines of post-modern nihilism or along the lines of the classic secularisation thesis. For my own part, what I would propose is that we conceive the becoming-secular of Europe not as a movement of the becoming-atheist of humanity (a movement towards our becoming, one and all, rational humanists) but as a moment within the long run event of the becoming-Christian of the world: it is a mutation within that movement, an alteration within an event that we can call the Christianization of the world.

 

On this view one has to see the movement of becoming-secular of the world not as a movement away from Christianity but a movement within the unfolding history of the centuries of Christianity in the West. Secular norms of judgement and reasoning did not fall from the sky as some kind of ready-made alternative to a Christian world view – nor did they arrive from outside the West as an import of sorts. They grew from a Western cultural tree, which is Christian.

 

The missionary ambitions and messianic vision held within the outlook of the secularisation thesis are equally Christian. The picture of the long run of history that I introduced at the beginning – the discourse of modernity that tells of a transition from a primitive distant past, through ages which were given to magic, myths, superstition, and religion, breaking finally into an age which is not – that story runs profoundly parallel to the idea of providential history that belongs squarely within the Christian tradition. All the terrible things that we see going on in the world today and everyday – for the Christian we are to understand that there is compensation for all this, compensation for past and present suffering, in the idea that there is a redemptive end to come, that this is all part of God’s plan for man, and that there will be some final end of things in which believers find their just reward. If we can only spread this good news we can all learn, finally, how to live. That Christian religious idea of providence can be translated very rapidly into the sort of conception of history in which “modern” Europeans belong to an advance guard in the emancipation of the rational subject or the emancipation of the working subject, a revolutionary movement that will lead towards some triumphantly final end of history where all the terrible things that have happened will have worked themselves out. These are secularisations of Christian, distinctively Christian conceptions of providence.

 

So I think one of the most important points we need to learn today is quite how fundamentally Christian is this secular world in general – and its secularisation thesis in particular.

 

Indeed, Christianity carries within itself the decisive conceptual resources for the idea of a distribution between the secular and the sacred that we find everywhere in the West today. In the Bible we read, for example, Jesus saying “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark, 12:17). That idea of the possibility of some form of “separation of Church and State” – what one might also call the death of God in the world – is already inside the Christian understanding of the world and the significance of our lives.

 

We should not understand the secularity of Western society that we see today as a kind of external imposition onto a Christian conception which is basically alien to it. Again, the deep flaw in the secularization thesis is to conceive the movement of recent history – a movement in which, it is quite true, Christian ecclesiastical power has been waning – as a break from a religious and especially Christian epoch. On the contrary, it belongs to the movement of the Christian world…in deconstruction.

 

Copyright © 2010 Simon Glendinning

 

This is an edited transcript of some of Simon Glendinning’s contribution to a Forum for European Philosophy Dialogue with Edward Skidelsky on “Modernity and the Meaning of Life” held at the LSE on 18th January 2010. A more formal presentation of some of Glendinning’s claims can be found in his essay “Japheth’s World: The Rise of Secularism and the Revival of Religion Today” in The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp 409-426, 2009.