CONCEPT
The Immanent Frame (Taylor)
Taylor's name for the background framework within which modern Western experience unfolds — a framework bounded by the natural order within which all experience, including spiritual experience, is interpreted without reference to the transcendent.
The immanent frame is the condition in which meaning is something human beings construct rather than something they discover in the order of things; purpose is chosen rather than received; and the question of ultimate significance can only be answered within the humanly constructed. Taylor develops the concept in A Secular Age (2007) not as a description of atheism but of the shared background within which both believers and unbelievers now operate. Within the immanent frame, every claim of transcendence is contestable, every assertion of irreducible human significance is met with the suspicion that it is a projection, and the culture provides no consensus framework within which such claims can be evaluated. The frame produces the specific cross-pressures of modern spiritual life — the felt pull between the closed perspective that meaning is entirely humanly made and the open perspective that experience intimates something beyond.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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