ubcgcu

The Recovery of Positive Ethical Dialogue

Many people today are discouraged and confused by the moral drift in Western society and wonder if they can have any voice or influence in a world with such a strong emphasis on individual choice, subjectivist approach to values, aesthetic taste ethics and radical, self-defining (self-justifying) concepts of freedom. Freedom currently in the West is often claimed as an ontological position, a reality within which one can justifiably choose one’s own moral parameters and construct or re-invent the self. In his Sources of the Self (1989) and followed by A Secular Age (2007) Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor attempts to track and understand the moral soul of early and late Western modernity. The narrative is a complex one, but vital to comprehend if we are to truly understand ourselves. There are many ideological forces at work and many experiments in promoting an ethics of happiness, or consequence, or situation, one of pleasure or principle. The focus of ethics can be radically different.

Religious people today can feel powerless and a bit odd, even guilty, for holding any moral convictions besides a consumeristic will that follows its desires. On this important topic, visiting Notre Dame Early Modern European History scholar Brad S. Gregory has a most profound Chapter 4. “Subjectivizing Morality” in his 2012 publication The Unintended Reformation. Many today feel themselves caving in or abandoning their inherited standards of behaviour under the weight of the cultural slippage–towards nihilistic relativism and radical individualism. Where can they turn for assistance, discernment and wisdom?

McGill University, Montreal where Taylor taught philosophy for several years

Read More…

Critique of Foucault’s Aesthetic Self: the Danger of Narcissism

Higher forms of authenticity, in Taylor’s language, means a self that is connected to a moral horizon larger than that entailed by radical self-determination. The higher form is more concerned for its recognition by, and resonance with, other people, including external accountability  and social interdependence. Foucault seems to lack a concept or structure of non-oppressive mutual accountability and life-promoting communal interdependent moral dialogue. By overplaying his hand on the aesthetic and the creative in his ethics, he has stripped morality down to the minimalist free self-articulation of the individual.

He has reduced morality to a single component, its beauty. In speaking of Foucault’s emphasis on the aesthetic, Taylor (1991) writes:

The notion that each of us has an original way of being human entails that each of us has to discover what it is to be ourselves. But the discovery can’t be made by consulting pre-existing models, by hypothesis. So it can be made only by articulating it afresh. We discover what we have it in us to be by becoming that mode of life, by giving expression in our speech and action to what is original in us. The idea that revelation comes through expression is what I want to capture in speaking of the “expressivism” of the modern notion of the individual. (Taylor, 1991, p. 61)

Discovery of self happens through self-making (projection of a creative self onto the screen of life). The individual self must hold itself in existence: “I am what I am because of what I make of me.” Thus the aesthetic self is in danger of simply evaporating into nothingness. Ironically, nihilism is the perfect philosophical environment for aesthetic self-creation. Is this why Foucault saw self-creation as a continual process, an ongoing labour, a struggle of creation and recreation, a necessary yet treacherous deconstruction and reconstruction process? Read More…