David Lebrun

• Doctoral defence: 6 March 2026 at 3 p.m.
• Stadscampus, Barokzaal (S.004), Lange Sint-Annastraat 7
• Supervisors: Guy Vanheeswijck and Walter Van Herck

Abstract

According to Taylor, identity has to do with a self that feels indebted to a framework that precedes the self, a framework that outlines what can offer fulfilment in life. This framework determines the experience of transcendence. According to Taylor, transcendence has everything to do with the way in which man experiences, lives through and attributes meaning to its existence. This happens from a moral-spiritual perspective in which the notion of fullness is leading. The theistic interpretation of this, which was self-evident until the 1500s, seems to have evaporated today. The Immanent Frame is a given. How is it that belief has gone from being self-evident to becoming a controversial option?

This question leads to the conditions of belief that form the backdrop against which modern identity could emerge. Reform is the key word here. What began as an effort to internalise Christian transcendence inadvertently gave rise to the emergence of modern identity. The appeal to personal responsibility was used to allow agapè to gain ground. What gained ground instead, however, was not agapè but the human capacity for order. Not a man transformed by God's love, but an autonomous human being who orders, reforms and thus constructs his own identity. The modern moral order, exclusive humanism and The Immanent Frame are the fruits of this. Do they fulfil human beings? New spiritual and moral perspectives are being born and multiplying. A permanent Reform in the search for transcendence seems to be the key to understanding man in its changing identity. Within that “open space”, all kinds of forces create vulnerability in man’s philosophical and religious sphere. In this case, immanence is often inadequate and transcendence is often suspect. Suspect, because it is all too often linked to exclusion and violence.

Here, Taylor meets Girard, who places violence at the centre of the interaction between identity and transcendence. In Girard, we do not encounter a man that organises and reforms, but one which imitates the other, including in their desires, and thus ends up in an atmosphere of competition, rivalry and violence. Girard places this fact in a broad cultural perspective, where it becomes clear how the scapegoat mechanism channels this violence. The transcendence and sacred order that are created in this process, contain the violence, but also remain indebted to it. Does a form of transcendence exist which owes nothing to violence and through which man can give shape to its identity in a new way?

In the second part, some examples are related to the central theme of this thesis. In the final part, identity and transcendence are explored on the basis of three questions.

1. How does modern identity relate to transcendence?
2. What kind of transcendence do Taylor and Girard discuss?
3. What kind of identity do both authors describe?