Two theories of modernity

Public Culture

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 153-174

  Taylor, Charles ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033410359     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-11-1-153     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, ed. Jonathan Middlebrook (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1970), 21-28.
2. Of course, for a certain vulgar Marxism, the negative answer is quite explicit. Ideas are the product of economic changes. But much non-Marxist social science operates implicitly on similar premises, and this in spite of the orientation of some of the great founders of social science, like Weber, who recognized the crucial role of moral and religious ideas in history.
3. Individualism has in fact been used in two quite different senses. In one it is a moral ideal, one facet of which I have been discussing. In another, it is an amoral phenomenon, something like what we mean by egoism. The rise of individualism in this sense is usually a phenomenon of breakdown, where the loss of a traditional horizon leaves mere anomie in its wake, and people tend for themselves. It is, of course, catastrophic to confuse these two kinds of individualism, which have utterly different causes and consequences. Which is why de Tocqueville carefully distinguishes individualism from egoism.
4. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self; The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
5. Oral communication to the seminar on alternative modernities held by the Center for Transcultural Studies, Delhi, December 1997.
6. See Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).
7. I have been defining successful adaptation here in terms of a functional challenge - how to meet the demands of economic growth and military power. But we can also look at these solutions in another perspective. For many of us, modernity may also carry normative force, centering around such goods as freedom, equality, and the respect of human rights. From this point of view, functionally successful adaptations may be bad. Pinochet's Chile was a stunning economic success, for a while anyway. There is some evidence that the most horrendous regimes - Nazism. Bolshevism -end up being maladaptive or even self-destructing. But it is hard to believe that this will always be the case. Even the best regimes on earth incorporate injustices and modes of exclusion. One can envisage another kind of search for an alternative modernity, one that would realize its normative promise more fully. This is an important issue - indeed, one of the great issues - of our time. But the two questions are distinct: Can we create a normatively superior alternative modernity? Can there be a plurality of culturally different alternative modernities? We should add that the attempt to realize new positive answers to the second question should be subject to the normative conditions that the first raises. Not every mode of cultural distinctness is thereby justified and good.
8. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1958); John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper, 1979).
9. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1958); John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper, 1979).
10. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1958); John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper, 1979).
11. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1958); John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper, 1979).
12. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1958); John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper, 1979).
13. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953); Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1958); John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (New York: Harper, 1979).
14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), par. 260 and forward.
15. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1980). "On pourrait, déformant le mot de Proust, dire que les jambes, les bras sont pleins d'impératifs engourdis. Et l'on n'en finirait pas d'énumérer les valeurs faites corps, par la transsubstantiation qu'opère la persuasion clandestibe d'une pédagogie implicite, capable d'inculquer toute une cosmologie, une éthique, une métaphysique, une politique, à travers des injonctions aussi insignifiantes que 'tiens-toi droit' ou 'ne tiens pas ton couteau de la main gauche' et d'inscire dans les détails en apparence les plus insignifiants de la tenue, du maintien ou des manières corporelles et verbales les principes fondamentaux de l'arbitraire culturel, ainsi placés hors des prises de la conscience et de l'explicitation" (Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, 117).
16. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1980). "On pourrait, déformant le mot de Proust, dire que les jambes, les bras sont pleins d'impératifs engourdis. Et l'on n'en finirait pas d'énumérer les valeurs faites corps, par la transsubstantiation qu'opère la persuasion clandestibe d'une pédagogie implicite, capable d'inculquer toute une cosmologie, une éthique, une métaphysique, une politique, à travers des injonctions aussi insignifiantes que 'tiens-toi droit' ou 'ne tiens pas ton couteau de la main gauche' et d'inscire dans les détails en apparence les plus insignifiants de la tenue, du maintien ou des manières corporelles et verbales les principes fondamentaux de l'arbitraire culturel, ainsi placés hors des prises de la conscience et de l'explicitation" (Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, 117).
17. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1980). "On pourrait, déformant le mot de Proust, dire que les jambes, les bras sont pleins d'impératifs engourdis. Et l'on n'en finirait pas d'énumérer les valeurs faites corps, par la transsubstantiation qu'opère la persuasion clandestibe d'une pédagogie implicite, capable d'inculquer toute une cosmologie, une éthique, une métaphysique, une politique, à travers des injonctions aussi insignifiantes que 'tiens-toi droit' ou 'ne tiens pas ton couteau de la main gauche' et d'inscire dans les détails en apparence les plus insignifiants de la tenue, du maintien ou des manières corporelles et verbales les principes fondamentaux de l'arbitraire culturel, ainsi placés hors des prises de la conscience et de l'explicitation" (Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, 117).
18. There is an interesting discussion of this in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 28-31.
19. This development of instrumental rationality is what is frequently described as secularization. See, for instance, Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966). "A village chief in a tribal society operates largely with a given set of goals and a given set of means of attaining these goals which have grown up and been hallowed by custom. The secularization of culture is the processes whereby traditional orientations and attitudes give way to more dynamic decision-making processes involving the gathering of information, the evaluation of information, the laying out of alternative courses of action, the selection of a given action from among those possible courses, and the means whereby one tests whether or not a given course of action is producing the consequences which were intended" (24-25). And later: "The emergence of a pragmatic, empirical orientation is one component of the secularization process" (58).
20. Even Ernest Gellner, who is light years of sophistication away from the crudities of Almond and Powell, puts himself in the acultural camp, for all his interesting insights into modernity as a new constellation. He does this by linking what I am calling the supposed kernel truths with what he calls cognitive advance in a single package. The modern constellation unchained science, and that in his view seems to confer the same epistemic status on the entire package. "Specialization, atomization, instrumental rationality, independence of fact and value, growth and provisionality of knowledge are all linked with each other." See Plough, Sword and Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 122.
21. Thus Gellner includes "independence of fact and value" in his package, along with "growth and provisionality of knowledge" (Plough, Sword and Book, 122).
22. I have tried to argue this point at greater length in Sources of the Self, chaps, 1-4.
23. I have discussed the nature of this modern epistemology and its suppression of the background at greater length in "Overcoming Epistemology" in After Philosophy: End or Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) and "Lichtung oder Lebensform," Der Löwe spricht . . . und wir können ihn nicht verstehen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991).
24. I have discussed the nature of this modern epistemology and its suppression of the background at greater length in "Overcoming Epistemology" in After Philosophy: End or Transformation? ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) and "Lichtung oder Lebensform," Der Löwe spricht . . . und wir können ihn nicht verstehen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991).