We are ‘denizens of the void’.Footnote ⁵ We owe this bleak observation to Ferdinand Bardamu, the anti-hero, in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novel, Journey to the End of the Night. Bardamu is a mess. He tells us that he feels ‘empty’ and bewildered'.Footnote ⁶ But while disturbed by the thought that ‘life has no meaning’, he grumbles about being ‘harried by the infinite’.Footnote ⁷ From time to time his emotions overwhelm him and he makes splenetic outbursts: ‘[t]he world, I assure you, is only a vast device for sending the world to hell!’ As he struggles with ‘the calamity of existence’, Bardamu becomes an object of unfathomable sympathy.Footnote ⁸ The condition in which we find him is one on which the Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, throws light. In A Secular Age, Taylor argues that ‘we all share, believers and unbelievers alike, a ‘search for fullness’ (p 19). He adds that this search reveals a human need or, at least, désir d'éternité (pp 720 and 723). But the context in which this search proceeds is quite different from that which existed in earlier epochs. For ‘[w]e have moved from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or “beyond” human life’ (p 15). We now search for fullness in a ‘conflicted’ context where the idea of a ‘beyond’ is ‘challenged’ by those who hope to find fulfilment ‘within’ human life (p 15). Clearly, A Secular Age is, like Taylor's earlier Sources of the Self, a book in which he wrestles with a very large topic.Footnote ⁹ But he also throws light on more practical concerns that will be of interest to lawyers. They include the impact of secularism on politico-legal frameworks in ‘the West, or the North Atlantic world’ (pp 21 and 543). Likewise, they include the nature of the ‘moral order’ that finds expression in these frameworks (ch 4). But perhaps the most arresting feature of Taylor's book is his ‘pencil-sketch of a phenomenology of moral/spiritual experience’ in the secular context he surveys (p 780, n 10).

Taylor argues that the politico-legal frameworks within which Westerners live approximate a model of human association that he styles ‘a self-sufficient immanent order’ (p 543 and p 832, n 7). Those who live in such a context can, but do not necessarily have to, ‘slough off the transcendent’ (p 543). By this he means that they can find within these frameworks non-metaphysical justifications for their political and legal institutions (most obviously, freedom and mutual benefit). Moreover, the habitués of these frameworks can live a life of faith or no faith. When we think, for example, of the US constitutional order, Taylor's description captures relevant realities. We find a body of law that gives expression to secular humanist assumptions while, at the same time, guaranteeing the free exercise of religion.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, we find in the USA a form of life that provides much of the inspiration for John Rawls's account of ‘political liberalism’. This is a political philosophy that seeks to establish a distributively just ‘basic structure’ without appealing to religious (or political or moral) ‘comprehensive doctrines’.Footnote ¹¹ But alongside political liberalism, we also find (in the USA and the other secular contexts analysed by Taylor), manifestations of ‘ennui’ and ‘spleen’ among those who struggle to invest their lives with meaning (p 719 (drawing on Baudelaire)).

The manifestations of ‘ennui’ and ‘spleen’ described by Taylor are, on his analysis, anything but surprising. He explains them by reference to the emergence of a ‘modern moral order’ in which humanist commitments to freedom and mutual benefit find expression (ch 4 and p 299). This is a moral order on which we can place a positive interpretation. For it underwrites an egalitarian philosophy of government that informs, for example, US constitutional law. Likewise, it fosters ‘a generalised culture of “authenticity”, or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own way, discover their own fulfilment, “do their own thing”’ (p 299).Footnote ¹² This places an onerous burden of self-authorship on individuals. They may decide to give specific shape to the inchoate impulses they find within themselves. But what shape? This is a question that is, on Taylor's account, becoming increasingly difficult to answer. For the context in which individuals find themselves is ‘spawning an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options’ (p 299). This leads Taylor to talk of a ‘nova effect’ (Part III). By this he means ‘a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane’ (p 299). Little wonder, then, that we find individuals who experience disorientation (or nausea in Sartre's sense) or succumb to ‘ennui’ and ‘spleen’ rather than assuming the burdens of self-authorship.Footnote ¹³

Taylor tells us that these burdens weigh heavily on those who live in the secular context he describes. This point applies to individuals who practise a faith just as much as it does to those who experience disorientation, spleen, or ennui (p 6 and p 308). For ‘the shift to secularity’ has ushered into existence societies where those who believe in God do not find in their faith a perdurable ontology but, rather, ‘one option among others’ (p 3). As a result ‘our actions, goals, achievements, and the like, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance’ (p 307).Footnote ¹⁴ The upshot is ‘a fragility of meaning’.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, this fragility of meaning throws light on the ‘phenomenology of moral/spiritual experience’ in secular society (p 780, n 10). Thus we find that those in a ‘middle condition’ between faith and nausée, ennui, or spleen, endure nagging doubts about the soundness of their beliefs (pp 6–8). Taylor develops this point by noting that people in the ‘middle condition’ find meaning in, for example, ‘a narrative of human self-realisation, variously understood as the story of Progress, or Reason and Freedom, or Civilisation or Decency or Human Rights’ (p 716). But, having embraced these sources of meaning, they may (like many since the eighteenth century) entertain the thought that their ideals promise nothing more than ‘flatness’ or insipidity' (p 717).Footnote ¹⁶

This brief review cannot do justice to Taylor's analysis of the age in which we live. But it does provide the basis for at least one concluding point. Lawyers regularly invoke human rights, human dignity, self-determination, and autonomy. They are ‘values’ (or sources of meaning) for the ‘Godless age’ in which we live.Footnote ¹⁷ But the champions of autonomy say little about the burdens of self-authorship. They say even less concerning those afflicted by disorientation, ennui, or spleen. But contemporary novelists follow Céline's lead and go some way towards making good these oversights. The characters (students at a liberal arts college) who populate Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction repeatedly pose the question ‘What's going on?’Footnote ¹⁸ Unable to find an answer, they become ‘radically stoned’ or make their preparations for a ‘Dressed to get Screwed party’.Footnote ¹⁹ In Less than Zero, Easton Ellis's characters are ‘wired on coke’ and disturbed by the thought that nothing makes them happy.Footnote ²⁰ These vignettes are certainly evocative.Footnote ²¹ They go some way towards capturing an emptiness ‘coiled at the heart of [secular] Being, like a worm’.Footnote ²² But for those who want to investigate the age in which we live more thoroughly, Taylor's book provides a good starting place. Even readers in the grip of the same spirit-sapping emotions as Ferdinand Bardamu will find reasons to keep turning the pages as they make the journey to the end of A Secular Age.