What about Freeden's 'morphological' approach? Your account, which I'm trying to familiarize myself with, seems to have much in common with his (e.g. ideology as pervasive attempts to 'decontest' constellations of essentially contested concepts such as 'freedom' & 'sovereignty').
Freeden gets a lot right (I quote him in the book). But big difference is he still has empiricist / naturalist tendencies. For example he often presents his account as just descriptive / neutral. But mine is an openly and clearly critical and non-neutral. His notion of cores is also not a good fit with his avowed anti-essentialism. He's also not sensitive enough to worldmaking
Love Professor Charles Taylor. Thank you.❤ Meister Eichkart, Catholic friar of Germany, region of the Rhine was heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas & philosopher Maimondes and Christian Mystism, a professor in Paris , Cologne.
This reminds me of a quotation from Aldo Leopold: "The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientists adventuring in the South Seas."
He's not entirely breaking from Plato, since you can find similar thought in Polemarchus (even Socrates' opponents spawned their own philosophical traditions through Plato's books). Furthermore, polar Forms aren't in unison in-themselves, they are in unison in-another, i.e., in the greater Form in which both participate. It's entirely possible to read Schmitt in compatibility with Plato.
I agree with this. I’ve never liked Burke because he always seemed like a disaffected liberal rather than a true alternative. To me to defeat the ghost of the French Revolution we need people to actually believe in an alternative and to answer their criticisms. Yes Chestertons fence is a good rule of thumb and the “hermeneutics of suspicion” are bad, but simply stopping there seems to beg the question, why? Simply saying oh Christendom worked well for a thousand years is some evidence but it’s sort of begging the question a bit. Need to dig way deeper and criticize the philosophical underpinnings of the so called “Enlightenment” to show why rationalism/empiricism/kantianism are all wrong
How appropriate. I was just reading Leslie Mitchell's intro to the OUP edition of Reflections on the Revolution in France today. That led me to reading Thomas Paine, and then to watching a historical lecture on Paine. I really need to get back to editing my completely unrelated dissertation. But the fact that this video popped up in my feed just now is almost eerie.
The Jefferson's bible is fascinating. Also fascinating that Tolstoy did the same thing independently with "The Gospel in Brief". Wittgenstein carried it around in the trenches in WWI.
Seems like Bloom is saying this culture of self worship is a rejection of the previous religious culture while Taylor is saying it’s just the logical end of Protestantism which created modernity in the first place
This is an old interview, though it just popped into my feed. Bloom wrote in the late 80s. Fascinating that the interviewer was saying that young people were without moral passion. We're doomed! Of course, in 2024, students are blamed for being entirely TOO moral and passionate and going around attacking others for not being politically correct. Taylor is articulating a different view, and a wiser one.
It is very strange that one can take you inner self as so important. That you can see a moral imperative in being true to yourself. Yet there is not question about where the inner self comes from. How do we know it is worth pursuing? Who is the author of myself? If I am going to spend my life finding myself I should want to know there is something designed into me that is good. How do I know that without asking who made me?
Fair question... And yet if you have musical tastes that are not dictated to you, a sense of what you feel comfortable wearing, a desire to find someone you love outside formally determined arrangements of class by your parents, a sense of finding a job you find fulfilling to your unique personality etc etc then you live post this massive shift. I recommend the book if you want fuller answer...
@@jasonwblakely in a sense these inner preferences do seem to be dictated to us, though, by nature if not by God or God through nature. The problem with an ethic of authenticity seems to be that, as @RandyTheGrit mentioned, we don't seem to be able to know something is worth pursuing just because it's something we seem to prefer, nor do we seem to have any way to reconcile it with the preferences of others. Yet it's more complicated than that, because it seems like even the decision whether to believe in a conception of an externally-derived ethic, as in religion, comes down to whether one is ultimately personally inclined to believe, e.g., based on one's knowledge and impressions of the religious narrative. This would suggest that we do know something is worth pursuing just because it's something we seem to prefer, and yet that this inner standard is just what often leads us to believe in external standards. So perhaps the question is whether this inner standard is performing better when it leads to belief in external standards for some normative phenomena such as morals, and worse when it accords an entirely interior, individualistic scope to virtually everything. Since this non-uniformity between phenomena seems kind of arbitrary, it might be that absolute belief in external standards which accord considerable scope and significance to inner inclinations (perhaps interpreting them as direct intuitions of the spirit of the external standard, e.g., God's will), while also affirming a sphere of normativity in which mutual reconciliation and humility is emphasized over individuality, is best for humanity.
"How do I know that without asking who made me?" That's a meaningless question, because we will and cannot know. We can only deal with what we know and that is ourselves. That you have to drink the Cool-Aid to know anything is just nonsense.
@@joshuabloom6344 "it might be that absolute belief in external standards which accord considerable scope and significance to inner inclinations (perhaps interpreting them as direct intuitions of the spirit of the external standard, e.g., God's will), while also affirming a sphere of normativity in which mutual reconciliation and humility is emphasized over individuality, is best for humanity." Again, meaningless. People haven't stopped believing in gods out of spite, but because people no longer find them believable. Also, I don't buy your premise. I would argue that the most religious countries are the most immoral. Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, United States, as examples. I know it's not that simple. The Western world is raping Africa to this day and few cares. It seems we have two sets of values. One for our own and one for those beneath us. I just committed a major faux pas. We are not supposed to talk about the real world. Issues of morality should be limited to meaningless abstractions. We don't ask whether the rape and torture at Guantanamo Bay was moral or not. We shouldn't be talking about it at all. Morality is somehow above the mundane.
@@grisflyt I don't disagree that people have stopped believing in religious conceptions largely because they no longer find them believable. I think part of their disbelief is because they find religious conceptions to contain many incoherences, and another part is that they find them to contain many objectionable propositions. I think what you've said about religious countries being more immoral may indicate that this latter reason is partly implicated in your own position on how believable they are. I also don't disagree that religions have caused a lot of immorality. And I don't think we can avoid acknowledging that and talking about it. However, what I meant to get at with my comment is the possibility that some kind of metaphysical conception, including perhaps a new and yet unknown one, may be necessary to sustain a viable conception of morality.
Check out Canguilhem, Aron, Cavailles, Bachelard, and Bourdieu -- They're good doxographers, engaging in philosophizing and historicizing of concepts. Cassirer too. They and some of their successors are really good on contextualizing theorizations as practices within (latently) politicized environments
It's hard to keep the ego activated when alone in nature. The absolute love that humans have the capacity for is more available. The issue is attributing that love and returning it only to nature when it is actually the natural state of humans. Imagine if it could also inform all of our humanity and day to day lives?
Yes. And Robert Paull Wolff, whose work is inspired by Kant in many ways, has also talked about how he wakes up early and goes on a long walk in the morning.
Considering the fact that computers are modeled on, not even human minds but on a few things that human minds do, to use them as a model for the minds they are modeled on strikes me as one of the most profoundly foolish ideas in all of modernistic thought.
I like Prof. Taylor - and watching him slap Pinker, Dennett and Dawkings is even better! (to be honest, I don't know who Dennett is ... but for some reason I believe he deserves it).
The short answer: it's WHEN you're MORE than ideologically captured, it's WHEN you're in a cult BUT don't yet realize it, AND it's WHEN you've become a danger to the rest of society or the outside world, and EVEN to yourself.
_"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."_ Taylor seems to be leaning heavily on some inexorable dogma interpretation when this is simply not the case. In fact, the alternative path is posited immediately in the opening of the Communist Manifesto, _"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles._ _Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes._ The whole conception of "dialectical materialism" is as a continuous process between the subjective/ideological and the objective/material (existence _precedes_ essence, as Sartre succinctly put it), which Taylor captures well initially but then asserts that that foundational _material_ organization of reality which defines a "mode of production" via one's relationship to property in terms of ownership/control is somehow an unbreakable law rather than the material overdetermination that defines class. If that makes sense.
Very good. The quote that comes to mind is "secularism is a name Christianity gave itself when it invented religion, when it named its other or others as religions" Gil Anidjar, from a 2006 article called "Secularism."
Isn’t the biggest problem here that so-called “relativism” isn’t always absolutely relative in nature, that is, its adherents are operating from a particular point of view?
I'm here from a tweet you wrote on the tendency for academics to become silo'ed and narrow in their reading and became an instant fan. Now as I scroll through your Yt content I'm happy to see this is all up my alley. A rare W for the internet today.
Taylor's critique is materialistic theories may wish to wed themselves with christian based western culture, (after the Christ has been abstracted of course) but its logical arc of evolution is towards some variant of marxism...... In relation to Dawkin's recent 'cultural christian' remarks.....'>.....
@@lzzrdgrrl7379 I understand your position and for sure Prof. Taylor is a very good philosopher. I have most of his books, including his excellent Hegel book. Philosophical attempts using Christianity as a foundational base fails every time.
@@johnmaisonneuve9057 Not even challenging whether such an attempt is possible, but noting that the implications of such a failure isn't much appreciated from the secular and scientific angle....'>...
The most interesting aspects of Fascist theory and totalitarian theory in general - Soviet or Maoist Marxism - is how many of its precepts and practices have been incorporated into our modern governing structures in the West. In this sense, othering Fascism simply serves to blind us to our faults while scapegoating others. There is nothing quite as fascist as an anti fascist street gang or NGO for example. But inquiry in this direction is deemed to be antisocial.
