{"id":35144,"date":"2016-04-22T21:17:48","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T02:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=35144"},"modified":"2016-04-27T08:31:44","modified_gmt":"2016-04-27T13:31:44","slug":"new-construals-of-the-self-secular-age-round-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2016\/04\/new-construals-of-the-self-secular-age-round-4\/","title":{"rendered":"New Construals of the Self: Secular Age round 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sec(Links to\u00a0Rounds 1<\/a>\u00a0,\u00a02<\/a>, and 3<\/a>)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In the previous chapter, Taylor outlined some of the main \u201cbulwarks\u201d of enchanted belief that had to give way for exclusive humanism to eventually emerge. In Chapter 2, the \u201cRise of the Disciplinary Society,\u201d Taylor examines some of the new construals of self and society that would help make that shift possible: the development of a \u201cdisciplined, disengaged stance to self and society\u201d (136). In doing so, Taylor continually reminds us of the\u00a0 \u201czigzag” nature of this trajectory; instead of an inevitable subtraction<\/em> of enchanted beliefs or transcendent references that culminated in a purely immanent humanism\u2014secularism\u2019s irresistible march– new imaginaries were generated by initially\u00a0religious motives. For example, the early modern devotional effort to bring the Incarnation\u2019s sanctifying force to all the ordinary contexts of life “led people to invest these contexts with a new significance and solidity\u201d (144) ; a significance that would eventually become self-sufficient and severed from transcendent roots. Taylor continually emphasizes the \u201czigzag\u201d trajectory to combat the guise of inevitability or \u201cnaturalness\u201d that modern secular narratives employ to cloak their own contingency and religious origins.<\/p>\n

So what were some of these new construals? In this post I\u2019ll focus on the new construals of the self, and in the next post will look at those of the new social order (which Taylor explores in more detail in Chapter 4, \u201cThe Modern Social Imaginary\u201d).<\/p>\n

The emergence of a buffered, disengaged self arises through and alongside other conceptual changes. For one, the Aristotelian-Christian notion of nature shifts from one in which things have their own inherent nature and telos (what Taylor calls the \u201cautonomization of nature\u201d) into a \u201cvast field of mutually affecting parts.\u201d This shift results partly from nominalism, a theological reaction to what was perceived as the constraint of God\u2019s ability to (re) determine the \u201cgood\u201d or telos of things in light of this independent or \u201cautonomous\u201d nature. In other words, the move ensured that the good is whatever God wills; not\u00a0God must will whatever is good as determined by nature. As a result, \u201cGod relates to things as freely to be disposed of according to his autonomous purposes,\u201d and it is one short step from human beings \u201cdisengaging\u201d from nature to take a similarly \u201cinstrumental\u201d stance towards the world\u2014initially for devotional purposes, but then for their own sakes as rational agents who can master nature rather than taking their cue from its normative patterns.<\/p>\n

The modern self not only disengages from and instrumentalizes nature, but the very materials of selfhood. The ancient idea of the emerging\u00a0<\/em>Form of\u00a0self, where virtue and goodness blossom with our will\u2019s collaboration and harmonization with Form or Nature, gives way to a sense of total self-fashioning or self-reconstruction. The mechanism of this refashioning is God-given reason, and reason galvanizes the will, which dominates the passions and imposes discipline and form on the self. It is not Form at work, but our own self-action and will. The Christian element to this neo-Stoic revival is the belief that God is the source of reason, and we follow him by cultivating our own reason and judgment to fight God\u2019s battles in the world\u2014or to simply become excellent human beings, which is now seen as God\u2019s will. Worship is rechanneled into efforts to cultivate reason; grace and agape are decentered by reason, will, and self-action. Our highest good is no longer agape, but rational control. Passions and desires carry no higher meaning but are \u201cde facto solicitations\u201d from which we can rationally distance ourselves and objectively evaluate them. Even our very desires for intimacy and human relationships are demoted to aspirations to sufficiency and transcending the need for recognition\u2014 a buffering of the self from others. We can see this in the new etiquette surrounding bodies and intimacy; whereas medieval etiquette books were primarily concerned with “unjustified presumptions of intimacy\u201d across social ranks, the modern body applies this buffering to everyone but one\u2019s closest emotional intimates. We create and deploy disgust and fastidiousness to control the self and establish boundaries against \u201cbodily life and against each other\u201d, and civilization becomes, \u201cin a sense, a matter of feeling shame in the appropriate places\u201d (143).<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Taylor concludes, we see by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that “What moves us now is no longer a sense of being in tune with nature, our own and\/or that in the cosmos. It is something more like the sense of our own intrinsic worth; something clearly self-referential.\u201d<\/p>\n

The shifts in conceptions of natural law follow suit; whereas Thomistic natural law and Spanish theorists like Francisco Suarez followed the Aristotelian-Platonic notion an \u201corder\u2026 at work, striving for realization,\u201d modern natural law theorists like Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke defined natural law as what \u201csuits\u201d a being who is both rational and sociable, and is binding through reason alone, according to Grotius, or through God\u2019s (autonomous) command, according to the more moderate Locke and Pufendorf. Locke\u2019s theory of the tabula rasa reinforces the idea of a malleable self (constructed through proper education) and is one of the chief proponents of applying this new version of natural law in society; the \u201crational order\u201d that is natural law serves as a crucial underpinning for a post-confessional public order and political life.<\/p>\n

Thus by the Enlightenment, the modern disciplined, disengaged self is capable of\u00a0participating in the universal reform to refashion society into a disciplined, civilized, homogenized order\u2014a task Taylor describes in more detail in chapter 4.<\/p>\n

Once again, we haven\u2019t reached the arrival of Mormonism in our chronological trajectory, but I see elements in Mormonism of the Enlightenment heritage and departures from it. On the one hand, we are neither tabula rasa nor depraved matter, but uncreated, embryonic gods with our own particularity (thus, not quite the Platonic Form) that is cultivated and expanded by gospel living. Agency and will along with grace are crucial in that process. In the Brigham Young version of theosis, we will progress in mastery in laws and principles to one day organize their own worlds. He envisions that human beings are \u201cmade as independent in their sphere as the Lord is in His, to prove themselves, pursue which path they please, and choose the evil or the good\u201d [JOD 1:49]. Yet we uncreated beings also occupy an autonomized cosmos of radical thinghood, of self-directing intelligences. But all\u00a0our autonomy and agency are\u00a0constrained by laws of existence (or wickedness and happiness) that predate God himself, and in which he is bound to recognize a good independent of himself. The buffered self is also checked by a soteriological communal vision in which we are metaphysically bound together as family or ultimately a universal network (depending on which version of sealings we look at), in which our fullest selves honor that profound relationality. Yet that relationality is disciplined and structured into dynasties, kingdoms, \u201cperfect governments\u201d [JOD] and other structures that will find their precedents in Taylor\u2019s next chapter and post. These are just gestures towards Mormonism\u2019s ever-interesting position in these trends, some of which will become much clearer and more fleshed out as we head into the following chapters about eighteenth and nineteenth-century developments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Links to\u00a0Rounds 1\u00a0,\u00a02, and 3)\u00a0 In the previous chapter, Taylor outlined some of the main \u201cbulwarks\u201d of enchanted belief that had to give way for exclusive humanism to eventually emerge. In Chapter 2, the \u201cRise of the Disciplinary Society,\u201d Taylor examines some of the new construals of self and society that would help make that shift possible: the development of a \u201cdisciplined, disengaged stance to self and society\u201d (136). In doing so, Taylor continually reminds us of the\u00a0 \u201czigzag” nature of this trajectory; instead of an inevitable subtraction of enchanted beliefs or transcendent references that culminated in a purely immanent humanism\u2014secularism\u2019s irresistible march– new imaginaries were generated by initially\u00a0religious motives. For example, the early modern devotional effort to bring the Incarnation\u2019s sanctifying force to all the ordinary contexts of life “led people to invest these contexts with a new significance and solidity\u201d (144) ; a significance that would eventually become self-sufficient and severed from transcendent roots. Taylor continually emphasizes the \u201czigzag\u201d trajectory to combat the guise of inevitability or \u201cnaturalness\u201d that modern secular narratives employ to cloak their own contingency and religious origins. So what were some of these new construals? In this post I\u2019ll focus on the new construals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10389,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,1058,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-guest-bloggers","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35144"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35186,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35144\/revisions\/35186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}