2.2 On the Evolution of Models
2.2.2 Social Imaginaries
Turning to Charles Taylor, we find clearer arguments that support a pre-theoretical and social origin of meaning. A Secular Age, contains a question near its beginning: Why was it nearly impossible to be an atheist prior to Descartes?10 Prior to the early modern period, Taylor says, God was necessary for how people collectively imagined reality to fit together. To unthink God would require them to rethink all of society. Since Descartes, belief in God has become increasingly hard to maintain because society has been progressively secularized. What I mean is that since modernity, Western persons have little trouble imagining reality fitting together
without God. Therefore, while God remains possible, God is also no longer necessary.
Taylor calls this pre-theoretical, collective imagination a social imaginary, which he understands as:
the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.11
Social imaginaries are rooted in ordinary people rather than in the theories of philosophers or economists or other experts. In this sense, there is something radically democratic and modern about the idea of social imaginaries that likely makes them unthinkable prior to these recent historical times. For instance, how could Plato possibly have held a theory of Forms consistently with a theory of social imaginaries of this sort? Taylor’s social imaginaries tell us the origin of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful every bit as much as Plato’s Forms, but Plato’s position is incompatible with Taylor’s. For Taylor, it is not theory or reason that bears the explanatory
10 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007): 25.
11 Taylor, Imaginaries, 23.
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weight of reality, but instead, “images, stories, and legends.”12 The reader can imagine Plato’s chagrine! Taylor’s is a narratival metaphysics. It is not how we theorize our world that matters, but how we imagine it or the stories we tell of it. Therefore, while it would be implausible to explain modern democratic societies based as they are on popular sovereignty using Plato’s Forms, Taylor’s social imaginaries can be read backwards to explain the origin of the Good, True, and Beautiful in ancient times, abandoning Plato in the process.
Importantly, Taylor is not saying that each of us is free to simply imagine the world the way we want it to be. However, Taylor’s position might explain the radical reshaping of political and social reality that happened through the Trump administration, with its declarations of ‘fake news’ and its assertion of ‘facts’ without appeal to evidence. The social qualifier in social
imaginaries becomes the key. Donald Trump exercised inordinate social influence. In fact, this is another reason that Taylor prefers imaginaries to theories. Theory is “often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society.”13 Because the social imaginary is deeply rooted in the populous itself, the social imaginary makes possible the common practices, values,
rationalities, and general sense of meaningfulness for a society. The social imaginary is the common understanding that establishes “a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”14 It establishes a basis for the justification of values and rationalities.15 We might extend Taylor’s position to argue that knowledge itself is a social function.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 While we might initially want to categorize Taylor’s position as a mode of epistemological coherence, the Trump example raises questions on this point. “Coherentists think that a belief is justified when it cohere withs, or fits
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In many ways, what Taylor describes as a social imaginary bears great similarity what to Thomas Kuhn has described as the paradigms that operate in times of normal science. Paradigms are regulating models that induct people into the community of scientific practitioners and assure the regularity of those communities.16 There are currently paradigms, for example, of Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics; Cartesian geometry and non-Cartesian geometry. In the past, there was a geocentric paradigm of the solar system. These paradigms have starting places, things that they take as foundational commitments, which allow the model as a whole to function. Metaphysical models are similar in function.
2.2. 3 Metaphysical Models
While I appreciate Taylor’s terminology of social imaginaries, my purpose is to make visible, analyze, and critically reflect upon what has been pretheoretically developed. In this project, I have, therefore, adopted the language of metaphysical models. Metaphysical models provide us a model of the structure of reality itself as well as the structures of meaning and rationality derived from that model. Notably, reality need not be fundamentally ontological. I also want to provide more specificity about the structures that stand behind Taylor’s “images, stories, and legends,” which forms the background legitimacy and that is given voice in
language. Taylor himself speaks approvingly of the philosophical notion of ‘the background’ as a
“largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation, within which
particular features of our world show up for us in the sense they have.”17 He uses this intuition as
together well with, one’s other beliefs.” Richard Feldman, Epistemology (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2003): 61. In the Trump example, truth becomes purely a mode of power, reminiscent of what we find in Foucault’s work.
16 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012): 11.
17 Taylor, Imaginaries, 25.
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a rationale for talking about an imaginary rather than a theory. As an originating mechanism, I certainly appreciate the pre-theoretical imaginary. However, there is no reason that philosophers or theologians should not theorize based upon the pre-reflective imaginaries of a society. After all, what is a narrative but a means of articulating an imaginary, and what is a model other than a story we tell about the world?
In the early twenty-first century, the use of models is ubiquitous across fields and disciplines. The language of weather models, polling models, customer acquisition models, revenue models, and so forth are nearly household terms. In theology, Sally McFague looked at models of God, while Avery Dulles looked at ecclesial models: the church as institution,
mystical communion, sacrament, herald, or servant.18 Models, in all of their various modes, are functionally pragmatic. They help us to make and to test predictions. In so doing, they gain coherence and establish confidence. Dulles provides us with an operating definition: “When an image is employed reflectively and critically to deepen one’s theoretical understanding of a reality it becomes what is today called a ‘model.’”19
In our context, what happens when we use an image to deepen our understanding of
‘reality’ itself? What image would deepen our theoretical understanding of reality? I suggest that classically the metaphysical model was a hierarchical participatory ontology while in modernity the model is of a liberal economic network.
The metaphysical models that I am interested in are not ones proposed by particular scholars, such as Plato or Kant, but rather those that function within times or epochs in ways that allow entire societies and cultures to make sense of the world in which they live. Therefore, I am
18 See Dulles, Models.
19 Ibid., 21.
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not interested in Plato’s Forms, per se, but the background assumptions that made it possible for Plato to conceive of reality in the context of Forms. As Louis Dupré would say, there is a
“pattern of meaning” imposed on an entire time that “transform[s] the nature of reality itself.”20 These metaphysical models function at a level that allows them to integrate the perceptions of reality shared by divergent groups across whole societies and cultures. They orient our faith, beliefs, prayers, and aspirations. They provide the context that gives sense to language itself such that even what it might mean for a ‘concept’ to ‘formally indicate’ takes on meaning and
significance from the context of the prevalent metaphysical model. The important insight comes from Dulles: We cannot “begin to speak the new language without already committing
[ourselves] to a whole new set of values . . .”21 Language, at least the ability to speak it, requires a moral commitment, which is what Taylor’s imaginaries and my metaphysical models provide.
There are many ways that scholars have attempted to get at the same idea. For example, the idea of a metaphysical model that I am using is similar to how Dulles described symbols, which:
transform the horizon of man’s life, integrate his perception of reality, alter his scale of values, reorient his loyalties, attachments, and aspirations in a manner far exceeding the powers of abstract conceptual thought. Religious images, as used in the Bible and Christian preaching, focus our experience in a new way. They have an aesthetic appeal, and are apprehended not simply by the mind but by the imagination, the heart, or, more properly, the whole man.22
That said, particular symbols attain both their rationality and their authority through the
metaphysical model of the age – or through a rival metaphysical model. Symbols are also more
20 Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 10.
21 Dulles, Models, 29.
22 Ibid., 18.
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local, isolated, and temporary than metaphysical models. The concept of a metaphysical model therefore helps to aggregate, clarify, and categorize the intuitions of social imaginaries, language games, paradigms, symbols, and the ‘background’ each of which entail a functional as well as a cognitive dimension.
Importantly, each model “brings with it its own favorite set of images, its own rhetoric, its own values, certitudes, commitments, and priorities. It even brings with it a particular set of preferred problems.”23 It is humbling to recognize that our most vaunted penetrating insights clarify only the way we model reality. We are not penetrating to being itself, nor do our models or language encompass the infinite. Ideally, by this recognition of our dependence on models, we would perhaps protect our most cherished intellectual commitments from becoming idols to us.
On the other hand, it raises the specter that our most cherished intellectual and theological commitments – perhaps the authority of the scriptures or of human flourishing – may be
reflections of our own social imaginations. There is a certain epistemic humility at work here in that we must recognize the tentative, fragile, and ultimately temporary status of our evolving
‘knowledge.’ We hold our theological and intellectual commitments with open hands.