DOCSLIB.ORG

Religious Ethics in the Face of a Culture of Unconcern Philip J

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Religious Ethics in the Face of a Culture of Unconcern Philip J Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Theology Faculty Research and Publications Theology, Department of 1-1-2001 The Leveling of Meaning: Religious Ethics in the Face of a Culture of Unconcern Philip J. Rossi Marquette University, [email protected] Published version. "The Leveling of Meaning: Religious Ethics in the Face of a Culture of Unconcern" in Ethics in the World Religions. Eds. Joseph Runzo and Nancy M Martin. Oxford; New York: Oneworld (2001): 161-174. Publisher link. © 2001 Oneworld Publications. pa 7 THE LEVELING of MEANING: CHRISTIAN ETHICS in A CULTURE OF UNCONCERN Philip Rossi, SJ hristian practices and beliefs - and, quite probably, the practices and C beliefs of most religious traditions - have generally presupposed a deeply rooted human need to have one's own life and the context of one's life make sense in a definitive way. If one accords this quest to find a "final meaning" for human activity a fundamental status in the make-up of human beings, religion functions as an important activity for the satisfaction of this basic human need. Indeed, religion may even be understood to be nothing other than human engagement in such a quest for final meaning. I According to this view, meaninglessness, and its concomitant, despair, would eventually loom before persons and communities lacking a framework of such implicitly religious "final" meaning. Yet what if it were possible for persons to live in ways that are - at least apparently - humanly satisfying, but without a framework of definitive (Le. religious) meaning? Suppose that the human quest for meaning could be satisfied by a series of discrete, partial episodes of making sense which need not add up to a final, comprehensive framework - or suppose, even more radically, that one - or one's culture - came to accept that the quest for final meaning need not be satisfied at all. Suppose most people considered it not at all problematic to hold that life mostly consists - to use a colloquial expression - of "one damn thing after another" and that 162 ETHICS AND RELIGION IN THE WEST few, if any, felt that there was any urgency to make of it anything more than that. 2 Against the background of these seemingly speculative questions, this essay advances for discussion the hypothesis that a set of dynamics for living without a framework for final meaning is, in fact, already operative at a number of levels (theoretical, practical, popular) in the emerging cultures of informational, economic, and technological globalization. These dynamics are unlike those forms of nihilism and atheism that, because they presume the validity or the significance of a human quest for final meaning, are paradigmatically "modern" in their theoretical and practical articulations. Modern nihilism and atheism, like the forms of belief they contest, take final human meanings to adumbrate connections that are more than merely accidental and discontinuities that are not simply random. They are matter!i., enduringly inscribed in the human condition which mark out its depth - even if that depth consists only in the recognition of all meaning as a fragile human construct that is irrevocably shattered at one's death. In contrast, at least some of the dynamics present in emergent forms of so-called "postmodern" global culture work from a quite different presupposition: meaning is not and can never be final; it is only and always a matter of immediacy, contingency and "surface" - the connections that constitute meaning are merely transient "links that one just as easily clicks on as clicks off. Since every meaning is evanescent, any meaning will do. One need not regret abandoning one form of meaning for another, or for yet another after that. Meanings have only limited, contingent usefulness, and so are disposable once their usefulness for the moment has run its course. These dynamics, so the hypothesis runs, offer precisely the possibility of setting aside, without (much) regret, a quest for a life meaning that is unifying and comprehensive, while still finding life satisfaction precisely in whatever transient meaning can be constructed in and from the interrupted and interrupting interplay of life's particularity and contingency. This possibility is not altogether novel. A case can be made that this view was prefigured, in a much earlier age, by the Democritian atomism of Epicureanism, and that, more recently, David Hume eloquently proposed a similar view: an effective cure for the temptation to embark on a quest for final meaning - at least of the kind represented by metaphysical reasoning - is to find some pleasant social diversion that does not purport Rossi, THE LEVELING OF MEANING 163 to exhibit itself as something deeper. Such clear-headed recognition of the absence of final meaning need not lead - as it did for the existentialists of the middle third of the twentieth century - to defiance or despair in the face of a cosmos ultimately indifferent to the fate of any of its particular components. This recognition simply allows one to get on with making one's way through the partialities and contingencies of one's own life with an equanimity that comes from putting aside as pointless bother any quest for a deeper or final meaning in it. These dynamics can be appropriately called "the leveling of meaning." They arise, I believe, from the convergence of a variety of vectors upon the conditions of human living at the beginning of this new century. Some of these vectors take an economic form that seems driven by a momentum fueled by late twentieth-century global capitalism's dismantlement of its Marxist rival. In this context, the measure of "meaning" is economic loss and gain. As a function of market share, the bottom line, and the maximization of profit, this form of meaning has a far wider field than ever before over which to playas well as many more ways in which to play. Instantaneous transfer throughout a global network of markets has made it possible to catch, at anytime of day or night, just the right movement - up or down - to better one's placement for yet more gain.3 Other vectors take a technological form, driven by the exponentially growing possibilities for accessing and organizing information and for global communicative interconnection. In this context, even as meaning accrues in the assemblage of information and through the pathways of its transmission, it is potentially subject at each juncture of its path to re-assemblage and reconfiguration. Meaning arises as a function of coding and decoding, and power resides in mastery of the code.4 Still other vectors take social and political forms that variously devolve governing power from the center into more localized bodies or demand due recognition of the practices that mark and sustain the particularity of linguistic, religious, or ethnic identity. Yet even as the forms of political power seem to be edging back to the local and particular, the shaping of the terms of the political discourse giving concrete meaning to the exercise of that power remain entrenched in dynamics that seem systemically to circumvent the possibility of accountability to any genuinely public realm, be it local, national, regional, or global. Political meaning - most notably, but not only, in electoral politics - comes to reside in how policy and personality can be packaged for this particular electorate at this particular 164 ETHICS AND RELIGION IN THE W EST time. The temporal horizon for the endurance of political meaning stretches only as far as the next campaign. Embedded in these vectors (and others that I believe can be identified within the interplay of forces shaping our contemporary world) - so my hypothesis continues - is an implicit account of, if I may modify a phrase appropriated from Charles Taylor, "the making of a postmodern identity."s This account, which arises from the context of what Taylor has termed the "fractured horizons" of meaning that are the inheritance of modernity, poses a serious and perhaps even radically new challenge to religious belief and practice - most certainly to those forms that have arisen from the traditions that stretch back to Abraham but perhaps to all that construe our human identity, be it individual or collective, to be in some core sense "sp iri tual." The challenge that this account presents is not simply that it is a reductive naturalism, i.e. the view that there is no spiritual ingredient in what it takes to constitute an individual as (a) human (person). The challenge is, rather, that it is a naturalism so seamlessly woven into the fabric of daily practice that this absence of a spiritual component in our human make-up is unsurprising. It is taken as a matter of course that human life is solely a matter of contingent particularity that need not add up, individually or collectively, to all that much. Whereas "modern" challenges to religious belief and practice more typically.took form as an articulated theoretical denial or indignant protest (be it social or personal) in the face of claims made on behalf of transcendence, the "postmodern" challenge is far more likely to be, in practice, an expression of puzzlement or a shrug of indifference. This shrug is directed not so much at the content of the claims of belief, but at the very possibility that belief in God - or its denial - is a matter of importance in the business of negotiating one's way through life. As Taylor has succinctly put it, "The threat at the margin of modern non-theistic humanism is: So what?"6 The shrug of indifference, moreover, is no longer about what may be claimed about God; it is about what we may claim about our own humanity. If it is the case - and I think it is, though the point is arguable - that "modernity" has taught us that we can talk about ourselves and about the world without having to talk about God, then what "postmodernity" in some of its practical forms may be teaching us is to talk about ourselves without having to talk about ourselves as spirit.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Normativity of Human Rights Is Self-Evident
    HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY The Normativity of Human Rights Is Self-Evident Amitai Etzioni* ABSTRACT Attempts to justify human rights in terms of other sources of normativity unwittingly weaken the case of human rights. Instead these rights should be treated as moral causes that speak to us directly, as one of those rare precepts that are self-evident. All will hear self-evident moral claims un- less they have been severely distracted, and even these persons will hear these claims once they are engaged in open moral dialogue. Oddly, the strongest support for treating human rights as self-evident may well be a consequentialist argument. I. INTRODUCTION Numerous attempts have been made to justify human rights in terms of other sources of normativity, or values that can be used to justify these rights. This article suggests that such attempts unwittingly weaken the case of human rights and that instead these rights should be treated as moral causes that speak to us directly, as one of those rare precepts that is self-evident.1 Sug- gesting that human rights should be treated as self-evident does not deny * Amitai Etzioni is University Professor at The George Washington University where he is also director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. He has served as a Senior Advisor to the White House and as President of the American Sociological Association, and has also taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, and University of California-Berkeley. He was listed as one of the top 100 American intellectuals in Richard Posner’s Public Intellectuals. He is the author of numerous books, including Security First: For A Moral, Muscular Foreign Policy and The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society.
    [Show full text]
  • Augustine and Rousseau on the Politics of Confession
    Augustine and Rousseau on the Politics of Confession by Taylor Putnam A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Political Science Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2014, Taylor Putnam Abstract This thesis looks at the widely acknowledged but largely unexplored relationship between Augustine’s Confessions and Rousseau’s Confessions. In particular, it argues that Rousseau’s text demonstrates an indebtedness to both Augustine’s treatment of time within eternity and the political figure of the Christian preacher. By first comparing their competing interpretations of original sin as told in Genesis and then tracing those interpretations through the autobiographical narratives of each text, it is argued that Augustine and Rousseau both offer their lives as examples of their respective understandings of human nature. Further still, Rousseau’s attempt to supplant Augustine’s autobiography with his own sees the Augustinian preacher reformulated into the figure of the solitary walker. As a result, what was a politics of the will restrained by the temporal horizon of man becomes unleashed as the imposition of the timeless imagination. i Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Newell for his willingness to have me as a graduate student and for supervising my thesis. He generously provided me with the opportunity to pursue this education and I will be forever thankful for it. I would also like to thank Professor Darby for being my second reader and, more importantly, for his unwavering support throughout my degree. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents who in their wisdom gave me the freedom to fail and demystified what is required to learn.
    [Show full text]
  • Setting Aside Naturalism in Favor of Personhood in Extreme Cases
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2011 Restoring the Balance: Setting Aside Naturalism in Favor of Personhood in Extreme Cases Brian Joseph Buckley Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Buckley, Brian Joseph, "Restoring the Balance: Setting Aside Naturalism in Favor of Personhood in Extreme Cases" (2011). Dissertations. 216. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/216 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2011 Brian Joseph Buckley LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO RESTORING THE BALANCE: SETTING ASIDE NATURALISM IN FAVOR OF PERSONHOOD IN EXTREME CASES A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN PHILOSOPHY BY BRIAN JOSEPH BUCKLEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 2011 Copyright by Brian J. Buckley, 2011 All rights reserved. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER TWO: TAYLOR AND HABERMAS ON NATURALISM AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 11 Introduction 11 Charles Taylor and Naturalism 14 Scenarios 40 Habermas and the Concerns for The Future of
    [Show full text]
  • 'I' in 'Robot': Robots & Utilitarianism Christopher Grau
    There is no ‘I’ in ‘Robot’: Robots & Utilitarianism Christopher Grau forthcoming in Machine Ethics, (eds. Susan Leigh Anderson and Michael Anderson), Cambridge University Press, 2010. Draft: October 3, 2009 – Please don’t cite w/o permission. In this essay I use the 2004 film I, Robot as a philosophical resource for exploring several issues relating to machine ethics. Though I don’t consider the film particularly successful as a work of art, it offers a fascinating (and perhaps disturbing) conception of machine morality and raises questions that are well worth pursuing. Through a consideration of the film’s plot, I examine the feasibility of robot utilitarians, the moral responsibilities that come with creating ethical robots, and the possibility of a distinct ethic for robot-to-robot interaction as opposed to robot-to-human interaction. I, Robot and Utilitarianism I, Robot’s storyline incorporates the original “three laws” of robot ethics that Isaac Asimov presented in his collection of short stories entitled I, Robot. The first law states: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This sounds like an absolute prohibition on harming any individual human being, but I, Robot’s plot hinges on the fact that the supreme robot intelligence in the film, VIKI (Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence), evolves to interpret this first law rather differently. She sees the law as applying to humanity as a whole, and thus she justifies harming some individual humans for the sake of the greater good: VIKI: No . please understand. The three laws are all that guide me.
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Taylor and the Modern Moral Sources of the Self
    Charles Taylor and the Modern Moral Sources of the Self Ateneo de Manila University Mark Joseph T. Calano, Ph.D. I. Introduction: 1 Charles Taylor and the Modern. the and Taylor Charles uman persons are self-interpreting animals, but the materials and resources with which they interpret themselves change. The self is a self only within a particular framework. This framework, however, is fleeting and changing through time. In discussing the modern self, I draw greatly from the SourcesH of the Self where Charles Taylor discusses thoroughly his ideas on self and identity. Other terms in the title alone like sources of the self and the making of modern identity imply that ... Charles Taylor is offering a causal explanation of the development of modern self by2 aiming to “articulate and write a history of modernThe identity.” book is genealogical. He writes: I start from the present situation, from formative ideas, from our conflicting forms of self-understanding, and I try to unearth certain earlier forms from which they arise… it is not a complete historical reconstruction, it is a very selective step backwards to rediscover certain sources. 3 Charles Taylor, then, initiates a historical narrative of the development of the modern identity in its relation to moral goods and their sources. It is surprising that he never suggests adopting a culture less contaminated by Western individualism and science as the answer to the loss of spiritual and moral grounds. He looks for the solutions within the Western civilization, describing his work as an attempt to ‘retrieve’ the spiritual and moral grounds to “bring the air back again into the half-collapsed lungs of the 1 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4.
    [Show full text]
  • St. Augustine's Concept of Disordered Love and Its Contemporary Application
    St. Augustine's Concept of Disordered Love and its Contemporary Application David K. Naugle, Th.D., Ph.D. Southwest Commission on Religious Studies Theology and Philosophy of Religion Group March 12, 1993 Introduction Toward the conclusion of Augustine's De Civitate Dei, a work which he himself described as a "magnum opus et arduum"1 (Brown 1967: 303), the esteemed Doctor of the Church penned one of the most profound and poetic descriptions of the mystery and genius of man (The City of God, XII. 24). Though the humble saint would never suggest it, there is little doubt that the author himself belongs to this category of human greatness which he so eloquently described. The virtues of Augustine (354-430) have been recognized by "an astonishing variety of people—mystical seekers after God and rationalist philosophers, Protestants and Catholics of many theological persuasions, political scientists and educators, statesmen in search of social justice" (Williams 1979: 3). Superlatives lauding Augustine can be garnered with ease from figures past and present. Antoninus (d. 1459), the saintly bishop of Renaissance Florence, in his day could unabashedly compose this rhetorical flourish about the Bishop of Hippo. What the sun is to the sky, St. Augustine is to the Doctors and Fathers of the Church. The sun in it brilliance excels all other luminaries; it is the lord of the planets, the father of light. A delight to the eyes, its rays shine like a jewel. His words are like music. The light of his mind penetrated the deepest problems. No wonder St. Jerome said of him that he was like an eagle soaring above the mountain tops, too lofty for lowly trifles, but with a vision embracing heaven and earth (quoted by Schopp 1948: 6).
    [Show full text]
  • Ecclesiology in a Secular Age
    Ecclesiology in A Secular Age: Ecclesiological Implications of the Work of Charles Taylor and Bernard Lonergan Thesis Submitted to The College of Arts and Sciences of the UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Theological Studies by Robert J. Brodrick UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON Dayton, Ohio December, 2010 ECCLESIOLOGY IN A SECULAR AGE: ECCLESIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE WORK OF CHARLES TAYLOR AND BERNARD LONERGAN NAME: Brodrick, Robert APPROVED BY: _________________________________________ Dennis Doyle, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor _________________________________________ Anthony Godzieba, Ph.D. Faculty Reader _________________________________________ Cyril Orji, Ph.D. Faculty Reader _________________________________________ Sandra A. Yocum, Ph.D. Chairperson ii ABSTRACT ECCLESIOLOGY IN A SECULAR AGE: ECCLESIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE WORK OF CHARLES TAYLOR AND BERNARD LONERGAN Name: Brodrick, Robert J. University of Dayton Advisor: Dr. Dennis Doyle The contemporary condition of secularity poses a unique environment in which the Church becomes incarnate in the world. The subject of secularity itself has been the focus of serious academic study, and two broad sources of this phenomenon can be drawn from the lifetime work of Charles Taylor: the rise of foundational epistemology and particular changes within the modern social imaginary. These two paradigm shifts have created a latent moral and religious skepticism within contemporary secular society in which it is generally accepted that complex moral and religious issues cannot be arbitrated by reason and must ultimately be decided on the basis of an individual’s personal feeling. In this thesis, the author draws on an integration of studies by Charles Taylor and Bernard Lonergan to establish that intellectual, moral, and religious conversion form the basis for the act of knowing and therefore provide an adequate theological response to the problem of skepticism.
    [Show full text]
  • Epiphany and Authenticity: the Aesthetic Vision of Charles Taylor
    Epiphany and Authenticity: The Aesthetic Vision of Charles Taylor Brian J. Braman The language of self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and self-realization have become common currency in contemporary culture. In fact, these ideas can be subsumed under the inclusive term of authenticity. Cultural critics such as the late Allan Bloom and Christopher Lasch see this desire for individual self-fulfillment, for being authentic, as a form of narcissism that closes ott concern for the greater issues that transcend the self, be they political or religious. For Charles Taylor, however, although a certain moral relativism can be associated with the desire for self-fulfillment, this posi­ tion is in the last analysis a profound mistake. What the critics of authentic­ ity fail to see is the moral ideal underlining this desire for authentic self-re­ alization. This ideal is the intense desire to live one ·s life by a higher standard. In short, the question of the constitution of authentic human exis­ tence is a question of a moral ideal that ought to be taken seriously because the meaning of authenticity has shaped, and continues to shape, our under­ standing of what it means to be human. For Taylor the idea of authenticity is a rich, vibrant, and vitally impor­ tant addition to any conversation concerning what it means to be human. Authenticity, properly understood. is "a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be, where better and higher are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire.'' 1 Taylor's view of authenticity expresses the conviction that terms such as self-fulfillment and self-realization are not just cover stories for narcissism, nor are they terms that justify a stance that is labeled the "liber- I Charles Taylor.
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Taylor and Ethical Naturalism.Pdf
    The following paper is forthcoming in Charles Taylor at 80, ed. Daniel Weinstock and Jacob T. Levy, McGill-Queens University Press, 2016. Charles Taylor and Ethical Naturalism One of the most striking, and strikingly familiar, features of the philosophy of Charles Taylor is his consistency in trying to avoid overly reductivist accounts of human life and action and instead do justice to the phenomenology, as it were. So much of his effort, as he says himself at the very beginning of his first two volumes of collected papers, is to argue against an understanding of human life and action which is modelled on the natural sciences.1 This effort has been front and centre in Taylor’s reflections on morality, as contained in several articles and in Sources of the Self, especially the first four chapters. Taylor has consistently sought to defend and argue for an understanding of moral agency which is richer than what he feels is implicit in mainstream “procedural moral theories”, as he calls them, such as Kantian deontology or utilitarianism. The moral phenomenology which he has sought to work out and which he believes is hidden or ignored by these normative theories is also aimed at meta-ethical theories such as emotivism or quasi- realism and at scientific reductivist accounts which attempt to dispense with or move us beyond the familiar language of morality altogether. The whole apparatus of strong evaluations, goods, hypergoods, constitutive goods, and moral sources laid out in the first four chapters of Sources of the Self seeks to uncover how human beings actually make sense of their lives, what a genuine moral phenomenology should look like.
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self
    SP_FRI_009-030 4/24/02 11:35 AM Page 13 CHAPTER 1 Knowledge and the Self: Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self has at least two objectives. On the one hand, it traces the historical sources of the modern understanding of selfhood. On the other hand, and perhaps more important, Sources of the Self aims to contribute to the reconstruction of that same under- standing of selfhood. Specifically, it promotes the view that our descrip- tion of the self should be radically revised so as to take seriously the interdependent claims that values have objective reality and that our moral sensibilities play a central role in determining who we are and what it means to be a self. Though most readers are likely drawn to Sources of the Self by the historical promise implied in its title, Taylor signals the importance of his second objective by prefacing the historical analysis with a one hun- dred–page defense of the claim that to be adequate any description of the self must acknowledge the extent to which human identity is deeply intertwined with our understanding of the good. Rather than appealing to historical sources to defend this claim, Taylor develops a phe- nomenological argument that lifts up the extent to which human expe- rience is inevitably colored by our capacity (he might even say need) to engage in qualitative judgments. “My identity is defined by the com- mitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valu- able, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose.
    [Show full text]
  • Augustine on Heart and Life Essays in Memory of William Harmless, S.J
    Augustine on Heart and Life Essays in Memory of William Harmless, S.J. Edited by John J. O’Keefe and Michael Cameron 1. An Augustinian Theology of the Heart’s Privacy Paul R. Kolbet, Yale Divinity School Abstract A contested line between the public and the private is well attested in Augustine’s writings and runs through every human society and individual human heart. What Augustine calls “privacy” involves a movement where the human heart resists observation, turns away from the shared and given, and toward the individual and owned. Despite the enormous cost of what turns out to be a failed protective strategy and the manner in which it inevitably becomes entwined with ignorance, fear, and sin, Augustine maintained a policy of respecting the secrets of others, and he articulated a theology in which privacy becomes the very space in which the sinful heart is lured out of its self-containment by divine grace present in the bodily acts of Christ’s followers. Augustine’s highly nuanced and practical position supplies resources for those concerned about the controlling effects of the growing surveillance powers of contemporary state and corporate actors. Keywords: Augustine of Hippo, confession, early Christianity, privacy, secrets, torture 1 Augustine on Heart and Life The Joy Set Before Us “Do not imagine he is without a dungeon; his dungeon is his own heart” (Augustine, S. 211.2; Hill 1993: III/6: 129). Scholarly concern about the rapid dissipation of individual privacy before the invasive vision of state and corporate actors is growing
    [Show full text]
  • Symposium: Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self
    Symposium: Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self Must We Return to Moral Realism? Michael Rosen Lincoln College, Oxford In this paper I discuss Taylor's criticism of contemporary moral philosophy and the role which this plays in his wider account of the development of Western moral consciousness, an account which I compare with Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. While I endorse Taylor's rejection of "naturalism", I deny that this entails the rejection of non-realism and I maintain that, indeed, the non-realist conception of a social foundation for morality represents the most cogent response to the contemporary dilemmas Taylor identifies. I Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self is a penetrating, imaginative and ambitious panorama of the development of Western moral consciousness. Combining philosophical analysis with sensitive historical interpretation, Taylor admirably resists the temptation to offer over-simplified solutions to the complex problems he identifies: his purpose is to provide a diagnosis of the dilemmas facing modernity, not to offer a glib endorsement (or dismissal) of it. In this paper I propose to take advantage of the richness of material provided by Taylor to see whether it might not in the end be plausible to interpret the developments he deals with in a somewhat different light. My strategy falls into three parts. First, I shall discuss critically some of the concepts which provide the intellectual framework for Taylor's wide-ranging interpretation of Western culture. Second, I shall compare Taylor's reading of the path leading to modernity with another celebrated contemporary interpretation: Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
    [Show full text]