Taylor and Feuerbach on the problem of fullness: Must a meaningful life have a transcendent foundation?

Abstract

At first glance, there would appear to be no wider gulf than between persons who believe that life is meaningful and valuable only if oriented by some transcendent force or being and those who try to steer themselves by earthly signposts alone. Since at least the Enlightenment secular humanists have tried to construct what Charles Taylor has called purely “immanent” ethics. In Taylor's influential but controversial view, materialist humanist ethical theories, and accounts of the good for human beings can be internally consistent and satisfying to their adherents, but ultimately incomplete. Taylor's argument remains compelling more than a decade after the publication of A Secular Age because he does not argue that “exclusive” humanist doctrines are incomplete on the terms of believers in transcendent forces and beings, but incomplete on their own terms. All deep commitments to meaning, purpose, and value in life, he suggests provocatively, in fact contain a concealed longing for transcendence of the unrecoverable passage of time and the oblivion into which subjects will disappear if there is nothing more than the physical universe and the human social world.

This paper will treat Taylor's conclusions as a challenge to account for life-value within the confines of secular time and without making secret appeals to transcendent forces or beings.¹ I am not going to try to turn tables on Taylor and argue that all religious believers secretly interpret their sacred texts and principles with a view to earthly happiness, but I will argue that there are more overlapping concerns than dogmatists on either side believe. My argument will be critical of Taylor's conclusions, but it is also a response to his invitation for members of different faith, traditions, and secular humanists to engage in a “more frank exchange” that acknowledges the differences but is conducted “with the kind of respect that can only come from a sense that we have something to learn from each other” (Taylor, 2010a, p. 402). I will argue that the most important lesson that humanism teaches is that the desire for fullness, in earthly life or on some transcendent plane is not necessary and may even be a mistake. In contrast to fullness as the overarching goal of life, I will suggest that receptive openness to the world best accords with the known conditions of human existence. Since the receptively open person who accepts the finality of death does not demand fullness, they cannot be justly suspected of secretly steering their goals by transcendent principles.

The paper begins with a focused analysis of Taylor's argument that the emergence of natural scientific accounts of the elements and dynamics of the universe created a crisis of meaning. Exclusive humanisms are attempts to reconstruct the foundations of meaning within the confines of secular time, but no matter how rich the texture of their values, Taylor argues, they must always fall short of absolute fullness. Since, in Taylor's view, implicit in the experience of happiness, fulfillment, and joy—key markers of good human lives—is the demand that they continue forever, the exclusive humanist who delights in such experiences secretly pines for the eternal.

In the second section, I will turn to a focused examination of one aspect of Feuerbach's work. I look back to Feuerbach for two reasons, both of which connect Taylor directly and indirectly, to Feuerbach. First, Taylor himself, in a review essay of Marx Wartofsky's book on Feuerbach, came close to recognizing the value of Feuerbach as charting a course for a materialist humanism that escapes the problem of the physicalist elimination of meaning from life (Taylor, 1978, p. 417, 419; Wartofsky, 1977, p. 390). Second, in response to a roundtable discussion of his book, Taylor seems to open the door to just the sort of open receptive disposition towards nature, society, artifacts, and people that typifies Feuerbach's social philosophy. He does not reference Feuerbach here but acknowledges that his idea of the “porous self” (which he associates with the worldview of the European Middle Ages) “can be recovered” in the scientific world of the twenty-first century (Taylor, 2010b). Taylor himself has not recovered or developed a contemporary version. I believe that Feuerbach can help the recovery and development begin.² In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I will develop an account of materialist humanism rooted not in an abstract ontological commitment to the primacy of “matter” but an account of the self as sensuously and receptively open to the unfolding of the world on multiple levels. Shifting focus from the abstract elements of the real to its multilevel unfolding helps us understand why fullness is not a necessary condition for meaningful, valuable lives.

In the short concluding section, I will answer Taylor's claim that materialist humanists are secretly moved by a desire for eternity. They might be, if they, like the religious, demand fullness. However, if they accept the limitations that life in secular time imposes, they can enjoy, appreciate, and savor the complex experiences they do have and develop evaluative interpretations of life rich enough to support lives as meaningful as it is possible for us to lead.

A Secular Age follows a well-worn path of analysis of the passage from a world in which belief in God was mandatory to a world in which people default to natural scientific explanations and belief is a private decision. Despite the book's erudition and scope, Taylor has been criticized for concentrating exclusively on secularization in Europe. While that criticism is valid, I am not going to try to supplement his historical argument (Schweicker et. al., 2010, p. 389, 391; Gordon, 2008, p. 659). However, I believe that the argument that I will make has general significance to the human understanding of our relationship to the world and the sources of value. My conclusions would have to be adapted and modified in local contexts, but I do not think the general conclusions that I draw are valid only for a subset of human beings.

That which interests me most in Taylor's argument is thus how he understands secularization through the lens of the self's experiential relationship with the world. “I want to talk about belief and unbelief not as rival theories, that is, the way people account for existence or morality … I want to focus attention on the different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding our life one way or the other” (Taylor, 2018, p. 5). Taylor argues that the secularization process has involved a change in the relationship between selves and their world. Modern selves have become more closed off to the forces and dynamics of the world and come to regard them as meaningless and purely instrumental to purposes imposed by their sovereign decisions. I will judge his argument on these terms. If it should turn out that selves who accept the finitude and materiality of the world are steered by a receptive openness to the world and not abstract instrumental reason, then it follows that they can be open to as wide a range of meanings as believers. The difference between materialist humanists and searchers after the transcendent would not, therefore, be their openness to external sources of value, but rather that the humanist accepts the impermanence of meaning and life-value. If that acceptance can be borne without their love of life being undermined, then Taylor is wrong to argue that humanists must secretly appeal to a transcendent source of value.

The key difference between presecular age and modern selves is that the self of the 1500s was, in Taylor's terms, “porous.” People did not see themselves as mirrors in which the world was reflected but membranes penetrated by a variety of natural and supernatural forces. Meaning and values were not products of subjective interpretation but objective realities that shaped both world and the experiencing subject (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). The porous self of the premodern world believed in angelic and demonic beings that bore these objective values. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even religious believers would discard these beliefs as superstitious. However, in the transition between superstition and natural science more was lost than belief in angels and demons. Both self and world were impoverished because the things and dynamics of the world were reduced to mechanical processes and meaning converted into a product of subjective interpretation. By contrast, for the porous self, “meanings are not exclusively in the mind” (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). The porous self can “fall under the spell, enter into the zone of exogenous meaning” (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). The porous self thus does not regard itself as a value-creator projecting meanings onto a meaningless world, but as a receptive member of a world that is imbued with meaning. Meanings “involve” or “penetrate” the porous self (Taylor, 2018, p. 35). Life is a complex series of relationships with objects that have their own integrity and value. Hence, the porous self is outwardly directed towards the multiple forms of value that the world itself makes available. Taylor believes that secularization sealed the pores through which these embodied meanings entered the self.

A Secular Age continues Taylor's career-long engagement with the consequences of rationalization on the quality of human relationships to the world. Taylor believes, in a Heideggarian vein, that the hegemony of natural science has impoverished the human sensorium and experience of the world. Rationalization increased the explanatory power of natural science but at the cost of pairing a one-dimensional world of things and processes to a correspondingly one-dimensional self that determines the value of things in relation to its instrumental goals. As Peter E. Gordon notes, “Taylor has grown ever bolder in his arguments against behavioralist and rational choice models of explanation, in so far as these presuppose what he calls a formalistic and culturally impoverished model of selfhood he calls ‘disengaged agency’” (Gordon, 2008, p. 649). In Sources of the Self, Taylor identified Locke as a key progenitor of disengaged agency. Locke's “punctual self” pushed disengagement from the world “much further, and has been induced to do so by the same mix of motivations: the search for control intertwined with a certain conception of knowledge” (Taylor, 1989, p. 161). The disengaged self brackets the “intentional dimension of experience … what makes it the experience of something” (Taylor, 1989, p. 161). Instead of experiencing the world, the disengaged self experiences only its own inner sensations.

In A Secular Age, Taylor renames the “disengaged self” the “buffered” self. Like Locke's punctual self, the buffered self relates to the world as an alien objectivity that must be known, mastered, and brought under its control. “To be a buffered subject, to have closed off the porous boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical) is partly a matter of living in a disenchanted world” (Taylor, 2018, p. 300). If the buffered self is experientially poorer than the porous self, that is not because it does not see fairies hiding behind every garden flower. As Taylor quite clearly demonstrates, natural science radicalized an antisuperstitious movement that began within an evolving Christian worldview. The problem with the disenchantment–disengagement nexus is not that it banished spiritual beings to the land of fiction, but that it reduced meaning to a function of subjective judgment. If the world is valueless in itself, then humans are under no obligation to the world of things. As a sympathetic reviewer noted, elaborating upon this point: if there is no God then there is only Badiou, according to whom “commitment to ideal human projects rests on pure decision” (Millbank, 2019, p. 92). In such a worldview, we are entitled to do with things as we will because their value or disvalue is a function of our subjective projections. On the surface, this power to create value appears to be a great gain for the richness of human life, but when we dig deeper, Taylor argues, it becomes apparent that the gains on the subjective side are illusory, or at best pyrrhic. While Taylor does not deny that materialist humanists feel that their lives are meaningful, he ultimately concludes that beneath the feelings that they acknowledge there is a gnawing absence of fullness that they cannot forever deny.

Taylor thus rests his argument on the inability of materialist humanists to experience the fullness they seek on the disengagement from the world as a texture of meaningful forces. While there is no doubt that Taylor has insightfully explained the social and scientific forces that make an instrumental attitude towards the world possible, one might question whether, in using his critique of the philosophical foundations of a “buffered self” as a premise to support the conclusion that actual selves cannot find the fulfillment they are looking for, Taylor oversteps. As Karl Smith argues, Taylor runs the risk of conflating the “Western ideal concept of the individual … with a literal description of what we are and what we are capable of” (Smith, 2012, p. 60). Arguing from an anthropological perspective, Smith contends that if we attend to the actual lived experience of real people, we will discover that “porosity” is an element of our “ontological condition” (Smith, 2012, p. 61). He does not dispute that the philosophical positions criticized by Taylor prioritize forms of subjective experience which try to seal the pores but rejoins that those pores cannot be sealed in real life because all thought and action, in all cultures, depends upon openness to and meaningful engagement with at least some parts of the natural and social world. I will return to this general argument in the next two sections.

Taylor, focusing on philosophical constructions and not the mundane complexity of real life experience and social interaction concludes that the changes imposed on the nature of the self by natural scientific development and the growing hegemony of mechanistic physics unleashed a pervasive axiological crisis. “A wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world,” spread across Europe. The growing belief that the clockwork universe, even if God designed the gears and wound the springs, was “flat, empty.” This malaise drove people towards a “multiform search for something within, or beyond it, which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence” (Taylor, 2018, p. 302). While materialist humanists tried to recapture a sense of meaning and value within the confines of secular space and time, Taylor contends that the fact that the experience of secular time is an experience of time running out for the finite individual means that, like Tantalus, the exclusive humanist will always be reaching for something that they cannot grasp.

Taylor's argument thus depends in large part on the connection he establishes between mechanism, the buffered self, and the fact that, judged from the standpoint of the finite individual, secular time runs out. The axiological crisis that concerns him follows from the fact that from a scientific-materialist perspective the world is very different from the textures of qualitative experience required to generate meaningful connections. I agree that a reductive materialism would indeed generate a pervasive crisis of meaning, but, to cite only one example, the fact that even the physicists most responsible for the reductionist picture of the world acknowledge that one must take a two-leveled approach to the world shows that struct reductionism is impossible from the standpoint of lived practice.³ All of this might be, from the standpoint of quantum mechanics, buzzing fields of energy, but the physicists who work out the equations that explain these energy fields sign their name to their papers, lest a Noble Prize might be in the offing. They care for their families, friends, and pets; they have political commitments that can be achieved (or not) in finite time and do not trouble themselves about the ultimate ending of things. What these facts show is not that the axiological crisis that worries Taylor is not real, but rather that, as in the case of the porosity of real selves, he is too closed to alternative possibilities for meaningful living within the framework of a secular-scientific worldview. Whether reductionism is true or not, one does not have to—indeed, one cannot live in accordance with—reductionist conclusions.

Like every resource, the modern self tries to use time as efficiently as possible: to extract the most meaning from the smallest increment of time so that our finite life is as full of valuable activity as possible. Yet, the modern self also knows that, like petroleum, its time is going to run out eventually.

We see the same problem reappear here as we saw emerge with regard to the nature of modern selves. Taylor sketches one possible set of implications of secularization and then concludes that all attempts to recover or create meaning within secular time either fail or secretly point towards the truth of transcendent principles. As Marin Jay argues, Taylor is guilty, despite his own cautions and concerns, of “brushing past his own warnings signs” against unwarranted generalizations when he concludes that secularization is a unique threat to meaningful lives (Jay, 2009, p. 83). That those who look to transcendent sources of meaning think that without a divine principle life is meaningless does not entail the conclusion that life is or must be meaningless if there is no transcendent horizon to aspire towards.

Taylor acknowledges that materialists try to live meaningful lives. One of the main strengths of A Secular Age is the deep argumentative respect that Taylor practices towards his opponents. “The driving forces behind materialism,” he argues, “are ethical and moral” (Taylor, 2018, p. 596). The materialist humanist can be deeply loving towards others and all creation, while the religious believer can collapse their world into the narrowest confines of sectarian bigotry. However, what the materialist humanist cannot do, according to Taylor, is to make sense of our existence in way that can reconcile their drive for meaning with (what they must believe is) the ultimate meaninglessness of existence in a purposeless universe. No matter how long our individual life spans might be lengthened, changes to the sun's energy output will make the earth uninhabitable in two or three billion years. Perhaps we will have spread to other planets and galaxies by then. But every star is fated to burn itself out and at some point all usable energy will be exhausted and the universe will be nothing but absolute cold and dark. There will be no trace of our ever having been; all record of our crimes and creations will be gone. People do not often mediate on that terrifying (but also, in a deep and dark way), beautiful thought. Why not, especially if they believe that the physicists speak the truth?

Taylor argues that they do not because they know that if this is the truth then the value of all their mundane commitments would collapse. The fact that people do not give them up is thus a sign, Taylor believes, that deep beneath their humanist courage in the face of the abyss is a religious hope for eternity. The hope for eternity is not hope merely for personal salvation, but hope for something more profound: access to the metaphysical condition in which the best that we strive towards in our ethical lives attains a real and permanent objectivity. Taylor says simply: “There has to be more to life than what our current definitions of social and individual success define for us” (Taylor, 2018, p. 507). Commenting on Ivan Illich, Taylor insists that “all joy strives for eternity, because it loses some of its sense if it doesn't last” (Taylor, 2018, p. 721). Joy is not mere happiness. Joy is the experience of freedom from the tension of existence as a finite subject, the absolute unity of subject and object. In secular time, the joy of pure unity is temporary, but the temporary reality of the experience points us towards the reality of the transcendent eternity which—if Illich and Taylor are correct—makes even earthly joy possible.

If Taylor is correct, then the fact that materialist humanism has an ethical and moral core proves the reality of the transcendent world. The fool says in their mind that there is no God, but knows (or secretly feels) in their heart that a divine eternity exists.

I will defend a different conclusion. I agree that if materialism must operate with a reductionist ontology then the ethical commitments of materialist humanists are difficult if not impossible to ground.⁴ Moreover, if a meaningful life must be “full” in some strong, positive sense of complete realization of some set of essential goals, then Taylor might be correct to argue that they secretly rely upon a transcendent principle. Fortunately, neither reductionist physicalism nor strong, positive conceptions of fullness are necessary for meaningful, good human lives. Instead, grounding our account of meaningful lives in the experiences of selves struggling to satisfy their needs and express their capacities, we will discover that it is possible to be satisfied with partial and open experiences. Living life well does not depend upon being committed to one overarching ontology as opposed to another. Materialist humanism is not an inference from a systematic ontology but derives from the experience of being a finite subject with needs, senses, an intellect, abilities to build, create, and relate and an honest admission that each person's time on earth runs out before they can do everything it would be valuable to do. Hence, my countersupposition to Taylor's is that the values defended by materialist humanism are not responses to a felt need for eternity, but responses to the things, creatures, and people of the world borne from different forms of need, from different forms of “porosity” open to the world as it presents itself to us in experience. Human subjects can never experience fullness as absolute wholeness, but we can create the social conditions in which everyone is enabled to develop their capacities in an open-ended unfolding of experience and activity that continues up to the point where death closes the circle of our lives.

My defense of a materialist humanist alternative to Taylor's argument about the need for transcendence begins from a point of agreement. Taylor is correct to suggest that both sides in the debate between materialist humanism and religious faith need to approach each other “with a good deal of humility” (Taylor, 2018, p. 675). One-dimensional scientism can be as dogmatic as religious fundamentalism and strongly reductionist arguments make a mockery of the lived contours of ethical and aesthetic values.⁵ Nevertheless, one does not need to appeal to any transcendent plane to understand the origin of ethical or aesthetic values: they are products of the sensuous encounter between human beings and the multiple dimensions of the natural and social worlds we inhabit and create

I find Feuerbach a productive starting point for my humble intervention in this debate precisely because his materialist humanism begins from sensuous receptivity and not general, abstract ontological principles. I will not focus on his most famous and influential argument: God is the reified projection of human powers abstracted from the limitations of finite human expressions (Feuerbach, 1957, p. 12). Feuerbach did not make this argument because he wanted to demolish religious belief.⁶ As Taylor appreciates in his review of Wartofsky's study, Feuerbach sought out the essence of Christian belief in human nature the better to realize the humanist value of universal love. “Being human,” Taylor wrote, “is something that man can achieve on his own” (Taylor, 1978, p. 419). Feuerbach wanted to make reciprocity and mutual care self-subsistent values in the earthly community of human beings. That aspect of Feuerbach is also well known, most especially because it was the practical reason that Marx ultimately dismissed his political philosophy as too abstract. For Marx, the earthly reality of love is social revolution. In a class-divided and violent world, Feuerbach's platitudes leave everything as it is. However, I am not interested in the political shortcomings of Feuerbach's project here.⁷ I am after a more basic element of Feuerbach's materialist humanism.

The materialism in which Feuerbach embeds his humanism is not defined by a vacuous abstraction (the universe is matter in motion) but is defined by the dispositions of a needy, living being to its sustaining environment. Human beings must be attentively responsive to the solidity and particularity of the things to which experience connects us because we need different sorts of things and relationships in order to live. As Wartofsky noted, Feuerbach argued that our idea of matter “as some universal, undifferentiated stuff” was a “human abstraction, a chimera” (Wartofsky, 1977, p. 400). This argument is directed against Hegel's critique of materialism. Hegel maintained that “matter” was not an object of experience but an abstraction. Hence, the truth of materialism, according to Hegel, was the idea, not the sensuous reality, of matter (Hegel, 1987, pp. 351–352). Feuerbach turns Hegel's reversal against itself. Materialism is not an inference from the idea of matter but built up from our ordinary experiences of needing to connect with the objects of concrete, sensuous experience.

Wartofsky explains that for Feuerbach, our senses are that through which “the active, external, real object or quality acts” (Wartofsky, 1977, p. 363). To be sure, such claims give rise to a host of epistemological problems. I am not concerned with the cogency of Feuerbach's epistemology, but rather with the ethical significance of the sensuous, receptive connection between subject and object. One may doubt whether complete knowledge of nature can be inferred from raw sense experience. One may nevertheless accept that our sense of what is valuable in life begins with sensuous openness to the external world. Feuerbach's sensualism helps us understand materialist humanism as developing from an ethical disposition of attunement to the multiple dimensions of worldly value. As such, materialism attends to the value of things in the different relationships in which they stand to needy human beings.

This interpretation of attuned experience as the source of materialist humanism has an important connection with the recent work of Hartmut Rosa. I agree with Rosa that values derive from “the affirmation of strong evaluations, occurring when and where subjects come into contact with something in the world that constitutes for them an independent source of value” (Rosa, 2022, p. 170). The key to the connection between the strong evaluations (a term that he borrows from Taylor) and Feuerbach's understanding of materialist humanism (which he does not discuss) is the idea of experience as a response to the world as a source of independent values.⁸ Whether we call the experiential sources of values “resonant” or not, the crucial idea, which Feuerbach so effectively draws our attention to, is that the self must be open and responsive to the world for it to be anything at all to them. In other words, Feuerbach's materialism shows us why needy selves must be porous.

Despite Taylor's familiarity with Feuerbach and his admission that the porous self can be further developed, he portrays materialism as entailing a reductionist and scientistic ontology, one of whose ironic consequences is the “excarnation” of the human being. As we have seen, the early modern interpretation of experience treats it as internal to the experiencing subject, placing the world at one remove. Instead of a porous, embodied self-interacting with the world it needs, the punctual and buffered self treats itself as a calculating machine, determining its goals and choosing the best means of realizing them. Although it might sound surprising to accuse scientistic materialism of contributing to downplaying the significance of embodiment in human experience, Taylor exposes a generally unremarked danger of conflating materialism with reductionism. This danger is poignantly illustrated by Bob Cutillo, a religious physician who reminds his fellow practitioners of the need to stay focused on the ill, suffering embodied person. Cutillo, developing Taylor's critique of excarnation, argues that when medical knowledge “is severed from experience, we allow our bodies to be managed as abstract pieces and parts that should predictably obey the statistical rules of disembodied populations” (Cutillo, 2017, p. 129). While this danger is real, it is not a necessary consequence of materialist humanism as such.

Excarnation might follow from an understanding of the universe as governed by statistical regularities; it does not follow from a materialism that begins from the experience of a needy subject attuned to its worlds by the requirements of ongoing life. Feuerbach offers another possibility which rejects the tendency of ‘the excarnation of our age to “minimize the weakness and vulnerability of our bodies” (Cutillo, 2017, p. 131). Vulnerability, neediness, and the openness these impose upon a living body are the starting point of Feuerbach's materialism. The composition of the material universe is a problem for physics. Materialist humanism concerns the equally challenging problem of accounting for the existence of values in a universe that is built from elements that, considered strictly as physical structures and systems, have no value. Values enter the picture only once we consider these structures and systems in relation to a living, experiencing, acting being. Values originate in the relationships we establish to the world to which we are drawn. “Our feeling, sensory, willing, thinking, being is … human … [and as such] not self-sufficient, but dependent … upon … external nature and other beings” (Wartofsky, 1977, p. 365). The multiple forms of value: ethical, aesthetic, and so forth are neither given facts nor excarnated creatures of the human mind but products of sensuous, felt encounters between human subjects and objects. Ethical and aesthetic values are responses to objects that satisfy different sorts of needs. They are no more exclusively in the head than the nutritional value of an apple.

In a series of follow-up essays to A Secular Age, Taylor argues that a consistent materialist cannot interpret their sensuous responses in these rich, meaningful ways, but must treat all their experiences as programmed organismic functions. On a strict materialist view, he argues “our responses can be explained by the functions things have for us as organisms” (Taylor, 2011, p. 289). However, any coherent materialism, strict or not, must account for the concrete differences between organisms. The difference between human beings and other organisms is that our responses, as Rosa argued, are always interpreted and sensuously felt. Human beings, considered as material beings, still have brains and still use language. Language and interpretation are every bit as human and material as livers or bones. To abstract from our interpretive responses to the world would be to abstract from human beings altogether.

One could say that Feuerbach's materialism, like Adorno's negative dialectics, starts from the preponderance of the object. For both, the preponderance of the object means that knowledge arises from attention to things as given.⁹ The preponderance of the object does not mean, as Taylor maintains, that all responses to the world are “within us” as mechanical functions of “how we have been ‘programmed’ or ‘wired up’ inside” (Taylor, 2011, p. 289). On the contrary, the preponderance of the object means that our response follows from what the object means to us. The categories that are essential for organizing experience never subsume the external world completely, but the external world is not independent of our human interests. As Smith argued and I noted above, Taylor has a tendency to conflate actual experience with philosophical constructions of human experience. These ideal types do help illuminate historical turning points, but our flesh-and-blood relationship to the world persists regardless of what philosophical constructions thematize. The object is always preponderant because without objects we cannot continue to live, but human living cannot be reduced to basic biological functions. Feuerbach does not reduce the nature of things to forms that the human mind imposes or that these forms are pure programmed functions of evolutionary forces. Instead, he argues that the living things are shaped by the objects to which they are attuned by their needs: “the object to which a being is related is nothing but its own manifest being” (Feuerbach, 2013, p. 11). Marx is thus wrong to believe that Feuerbach thought of the “essence” of human being as an abstraction inherent in each individual (Marx, 1976, p. 4).¹⁰ The “essence” of a being is the relationships that it must establish to an object-field in order to survive. Herbivores are herbivores because they consume plants; human beings are universal beings because we relate ourselves to the totality of the object-field in multiple dimensions. Do these examples not prove Taylor's point? They do not, because while human beings eat, we also evaluate and judge, and these are interpretive capacities which no other life form possesses. These meaningful responses to the object-world are not purely internal but always related to a world that is neither a pure machine nor an arbitrary creature of our mind.

Our thinking is elicited by the world of things to which we are compelled to respond. Feuerbach's materialism differs from Hegel's idealism in that for Feuerbach substance never fully becomes subject (Hegel, 1987, p. 11). The world exists independently of human beings and summons our attention because we need it. “If there were no matter, reason would have no substance, no material” (Feuerbach, 2013, p. 28). Idealism converts the sensuous particularity of things and people into abstractions; materialism relates to each thing as it presents itself in the multiple dimensions of its reality. “Being is not a general concept that can be separated from things. It is one with what is” (Feuerbach, 2013, p. 46). Idealist categories negate the specificity of things and locate truth in the abstractions of human thought-forms. Feuerbach's materialism locates the truth of things in the concrete reality of things themselves. Human beings are of course a more complex case than herbivores or carnivores because we relate ourselves universally to nature and human beings. We can relate ourselves to shovels as tools to remove snow, but we can also relate ourselves to shovels as works of art if they are hung in a gallery. Nevertheless, whether treated as tool or art object, the shovel must be an object that summons our thinking and interpretation. It is never a pure category of mind but always a thing to which we relate and conform our behavior. Duchamp imposed the idea of “artwork” on ordinary things, but he did not hang the idea in the gallery, but the real thing.

The scientist, the artist, and the worker relate to the same thing in different ways. The scientist seeks out basic elements and forces that shape the physical world. The artist explores the metaphorical evocations that artifacts stir up. The worker treats objects as inputs into a constructive process. No dimension is more or less real, although the physical is the most basic because it is the presupposition of the object's entering into any relations at all. Reality is as complex as the field of relationships between subjects and objects. Subjective needs animate the field of objective being, but they do not create it. A thing is food for a human because its nature satisfies our need for some nutritional value or other. One's need for food does not cause the food to appear, one's needing the food attunes the person to their environment in search of the required inputs. “I owe my existence not to the verbal or logical bread … but only to this bread, the non-verbal. Being, grounded as it is in such non-verbalities, is, therefore, itself non-verbal … where words cease, life begins and reveals its secrets” (Feuerbach, 2013, p. 48). That I must search the environment for food does not mean that the world is subsumed under a subjective category: our whole life is an attunement to the world as universal need-satisfying object. The poet no less than the predator must be likewise attuned. The metaphorical resonances from which poems are composed are not pure products of the poet's mind but first take shape in the careful attention the poet must pay to the world.

In sum, Feuerbach presents a picture of the self as embodied and responsive to the rich multiform textures of the world: a materialist, humanist. porous self. “An object is given to me only if a being is given to me in a way that affects me, only if my own activity … expresses the activity of another being as a limit” (Feuerbach, 2013, p. 56). The materialist self thus knows itself to be porous because the power of things impinges on and shapes its goals and activities. That which makes the self porous is not the belief in a field of spiritual forces but the reality of our needs for things outside of us. “The god of limitation stands guard at the entrance to the world. Self-limitation is the condition of entry. Whatever becomes real becomes so as something determined” (Feuerbach, 2012a, p. 57). Limitation and not fullness is the driving force of life. So long as we are alive we are incomplete, but because we are incomplete we relate ourselves to an object field that is the source of the experiences that make life valuable. Other people are the possibility for ethical, political, social, and sexual relations. The existence of natural things and human creations is the possibility for aesthetic experiences. No one of these experiences or any given number taken together is ever full. Human life is condemned to be future oriented and never complete until the moment of death. The fact that the subject is not everything means that it is open and alive to all that it is not: the immense complexity and beauty of the world of which it is but a part. “The passivity of the ego is the activity of the object” (Feuerbach, 2012b, p. 142)

Susan E. Babbitt, in her excellent Embodiment and Humanism, notes that porousness is not a function of historical eras but dispositions towards the world. Porousness is not an abstract ontological principle but the capacity to be sensuously moved by the world. She gives the example of the Cuban poet and nationalist Jose Marti. “Marti wrote that ‘a tree knows more than a book … Marti was not against books …. His point was that if someone wants to learn from books …. She or he should, most importantly, sensibility, a capacity to respond” (Babbitt, 2015, pp. 127–128). The key point is that neither the religious nor the materialist porous self takes itself to be the sole origin of values. Thus, rather than a point that divides the materialist humanist from the religious believer, the preponderance of the object over subjective thought can be the basis for a conversation about whether and to what extent the materialist is closed off to sources of value that only the believer can access or, on the other hand, whether the believer's need for transcendence impedes them from fully valuing the things and relationships that exist in secular time. Both eat the actual bread, but only the Catholic believer thinks that the Eucharist is the body of Christ. While the materialist humanist will not accept the literal truth of transubstantiation, they can understand its value as a symbolic binding force that ties together the community of believers. They have not dogmatically reduced the symbolic dimension of the bread to its physical–nutritional function as the sole truth.¹¹ If they understand and accept the value of religious community as one form of human community, and community as essential to human life, have they missed anything essential?

The religious believer will respond that the materialist has indeed missed the most essential thing: the fact that the religious community, as a community of faith, is really bound together by its belief in eternity. But if the value of eternity is to give substance and binding force to values that must also be lived, is the materialist not within their rights to argue that what really matters, to both the believer and nonbeliever, is the way in which we live together right now? But that question can be asked of the secular believer in fullness as well. The danger for both the person who steers their life by a transcendent principle and the materialist humanist directed towards a future which will make overall sense and provide grounds for feelings of a final fullness is that the multiform values present in each moment get lost. When we treat the future as some fixed thing towards which our lives are tending, the destination that will justify our efforts, we ignore day-to-day and the multiform values it makes possible here and now. I do not mean that we should “live in the moment.” Since the future is constantly engendered from the present, our experience is a flow and not a series of staccato moments. Nevertheless, we can project ourselves so far into the future that we fail to experience the values present right now. Those values are always fleeting, relatively speaking, and never absolutely fulfilling. To conclude, I will now argue that the impossibility of fullness does not create the sort of axiological crisis that worries Taylor. The materialist humanist can live ethically, responsibly, can commit themselves to the well-being of others now and, in the future, can create and respond to beauty, can accept the value of other creatures, can be tolerant, and can marvel at the intricacies and majesty of the universe and, when death approaches, let it all go but not resent that, in the words of Peggy Lee, quoted by Taylor, “that is all there is.”

Life contains disappointments, but it does not have to be disappointing. The collapse into despair or nihilism is arrested by accepting the necessary limits that our finitude imposes on experience and activity and not demanding more. All there is for me is not all there is for you. Everyone experiences only a small subset of the sum of possibilities. The main problem for a materialist humanist would therefore not to be to find fullness in this partial set but to accept its partiality and value it as such. Materialist humanism that takes its orientation from our openness to the world that we need thus opens us to the world as a multiform field of values, of which we can only even experience a subset.

If all life-experience is partial but open (until the moment of our death), then the most important effort is not to make sense of it all, but to pay attention and savor. The preponderance of the object means explaining phenomena in terms adequate to the properties the objects themselves reveal. From attention follows wonder, delight, and joy. These are all dispositions which arise from our attunement to the objective, natural and social worlds in which we live. Contrary to the adage, wonders do cease, but they are no less wonderful because they come to an end for everyone's finite subject. A meal is no less delicious just because it comes to an end. We experience delight because our senses and interpretive capacities are stimulated by the appearances of things; we feel elevated in their presence. That particular joys become tedious if prolonged too long does not refute the joyousness of the experience. The cure is not eternity but shifting our focus to some new charged engagement. When we experience joy, we are fully reconciled to that particular moment of time and perhaps want it to last forever (even though we know that it cannot). A porous self must accept—as Illich and Taylor cannot—that the feeling of joyous, absolute unity of subject and object cannot last. Time moves on and takes us with it.¹²

The fact that joy does not last because secular time marches on means that no joy will ever be absolute. However, if the impermanence of joy is necessary, built into the flow of secular time, are we not more respectful of the actual joys we are capable of experiencing if we are honest about their temporally limited duration? Might we not turn Taylor's argument against itself and argue that those who believe that earthly joys and earthly responsibilities require an eternal foundation are less joyous and (potentially) less responsible than those who accept the limits of experience in secular time? I am going to leave these concerns as questions because I do not have an answer that would prove ultimately acceptable to those who claim to need the transcendent plane to reconcile themselves to life. I want to stay true to the spirit of humility that Taylor recommends. I have no intention of trying to prove that god does not exist or that the need for eternity is a vain hope. Instead, I want to conclude with a brief positive unpacking of the way in which a materialist, disposed towards the rich, multivalent realities of the natural and social world, can fully value life without secretly smuggling in (as Taylor suspected humanists of doing) a transcendent foundation.

Recall the emphasis that Feuerbach placed on limitation. The nature of things was determined by their specific limitations. “Where there is no limit, no time, and no need” (Feuerbach, 2012d, p. 163). But limitations are always concrete and determinate. Limitation is not a category but a structural property of things. The wall is one color and not another, a person is a mathematician and not a poet, a duck is an aquatic bird and not a land mammal. But also, colors can be arranged into pleasing forms on a surface to create a painting, the mathematician can enjoy poetry in the evening, and children can playfully feed ducks and delight in this affirmative connection across species. There is no one basic set of limitations (structural properties) to which all the others must be reduced. Basic elements and forces shape nature as a physical system. Natural science tries to model these forces. Human beings must keep themselves alive before they can judge artworks, but beauty is no less materially real (an object of human experience and judgment to which we respond) than gluons or the strong nuclear force. Without gluons and the strong nuclear force material things would literally not hold together. However, they hold together in many different ways: as physical structures resisting entropy, as objects that satisfy the needs of living things for food, as objects of aesthetic judgment, as fellow living things whose well-being we concern ourselves with and for whom we care.

This last point is most important to the development of an understanding of the value of social relationships. Scientistic materialists have taken to their pens to try to reduce ethical relationships to quantifiable empirical dispositions produced by evolution (see Wilson, 2014). While evolution might explain sexual reproduction and care for one's own offspring, ethical relationships are oriented not by the goal of survival, but by the good. Whatever content different ethical theories might assign to the good, it requires evaluation of life in normative terms: better and worse, legitimate and illegitimate, beautiful and ugly, worth living and not worth living. These terms cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of evolution: they are norms basic to social life. But the values that structure social life (or that criticize forms of social life found to be deficient) are not just ideas that we arbitrarily make up. As Feuerbach argues, “before you think quality, you feel quality. Suffering precedes thinking” (Feuerbach, 2012d, p. 160). Suffering in this context means “undergoing,” responding in an involuntary way to objective realities outside of our mind. Ethical values are responses to suffering: other people compel our attention and modulate our behavior.

If that claim is true, then ethical values are not just creatures of the mind: they are functions of the objective relationships that needy, porous selves must establish to each other as social beings who care about the quality of our time on earth. Both the religious and the irreligious person can care about the quality of their time on earth. The materialist humanist who understands the implications of temporal existence will not value life in terms of its fullness. Time runs out for every person, but from the standpoint of the species it is open-ended. As Taylor himself notes, there is no contradiction between being a materialist humanist and working to make the world better, not just for oneself, but for everyone, now and in the open-ended future. The justifications and goals of political struggle are a different story. All I conclude at present is that materialist humanists should be taken at their word: they do not feel the pull of the eternal, they do not secretly ground their commitments in a transcendent reality, and they are as contented as mortals can be with their life under the sun and stars, brief as it might be. “Duty commands enjoyment,” Feuerbach concludes (Feuerbach, 2012c, p. 227). That all enjoyment is time-limited does not negate its being enjoyable.