[lit-ideas] Re: Autonomical risk
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 08:43:06 -0700 (PDT)
--- Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm not sure whether Charles Taylor cares about the
> "autonomy" of the modern
> self,
*Apparently he is quite concerned with that. See:
http://members.aol.com/ThryWoman/CTCE.html
The general thrust of Turner's ideas are set against
the narrative of Western intellectual thought,
particularly concerning the ideas of Autonomy and
Morality. Modernist philosophers have placed Reason,
Autonomy and rule-governed/rights-based morality at
the center of what is considered to be a "good life."
What has been taken to issue by many theorists in the
19th and 20th Centuries is the harmful aspects of
these grand ideas. Reason was chipped away at by the
increasing bureaucratization and military
technologies/methods of killing, Autonomy considered
to be not only a bourgeois luxury but a naive
understanding of what the individual is in society,
and moralities based on rights and fundamentally,
rules, had been criticized for being anything but
moral by doing away with morality founded from (and
maintained) within individuals. It is at this
dissolution/disillusion that Taylor enters the scene.
Charles Taylor continues the effort to question the
authority of Reason and Autonomy. By this, I mean to
state that Reason and Autonomy have been given the the
authority to be the only goods in life and thus
ignoring the other facets of what Turner and
contemporaries would consider "the good life."
Fundamental to modernist thinking is the use of
dichotomies that arbitrarily polarizes fragments of
human existence and ways of knowing. Typical examples
can be thrown out easily (for we all know the game)
such as Reason/Intuition, Light/Dark, Male /Female,
Individual/Community, etc,. In the West, the dichotomy
was used as a way to regulate and steer society into a
"morality" and fetishization of laws based on Reason
and Autonomy. As many theorists have pointed out, the
belief in an existent/coherent notion of Reason and
Autonomy (that is privileged in the West) can exist
only against the categories of the Irrational and
Community (society). The standards (Reason, Autonomy,
and rights based on the two) are given the authority
to decide what does and does not matter. "Mattering",
especially for Taylor, is an important aspect of
ethics when considering what is "the good life."1 It
is in this consideration that Taylor begins to
re-evaluate the values that the have been the
foundation of Western thought and society.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
