Modernity

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February 26th, 2021
The critical argument of 📙 After Virtue is that we now generally suffer from a disrupted ability to make sense of our lives as coherent stories within larger common stories. In some way Modernity has lost the plot.
March 26th, 2021
The critical argument of 📙 After Virtue is that we now generally suffer from a disrupted ability to make sense of our lives as coherent stories within larger common stories. In some way Modernity has lost the plot. *
March 29th, 2021
Of course I can't read this without thinking immediately about 📙 After Virtue, and it gives richness and salience to Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of Modernity. Lewis goes on:
March 3rd, 2021
Now, since whenever this damned Modernity began, we are, as MacIntyre writes, "almost intolerably conscious of rival moral alternatives." The cultures we grow up in have tendencies towards non-culture. From 📙 Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue:
He finds the people of late Modernity shifting toward a non-culture—a collection of competing individuals, who lack any shared conception of their goals as human beings. *
In 📙 All Things Shining, this kind of structureless choice is part of the Phenomenology of Modernity.
📰 Book Review: After Virtue
Virtue Ethics, as far as I can tell, just gives you a knowing look and says “The very fact that you interpret morality in terms of moral dilemmas is a symptom of the disease of liberal Modernity.” This is useful for sounding deeply wise, but little else.
📰 MacIntyre on Money - Prospect Magazine
The imposition of unjust debt is a symptom of the “moral condition of the economic system of advanced Modernity, and is in its most basic forms an expression of the vices of intemperateness, and injustice, and imprudence.”
📙 A Rumor of Angels
The Catholic situation is different, at least in part because Catholicism has viewed the modern world with much more suspicion from the beginning and, as a result, has managed to keep up its cognitive defenses against Modernity more effectively and until a much more recent date.
📙 After Virtue
The social obstacles derive from the way in which Modernity partitions each human life into a variety of segments, each with its own norms and modes of behavior.
The attractiveness of Nietzche’s position lay in its apparent honesty. When I was setting out the case in favor of an amended and restated emotivism, it appeared to be a consequence of accepting the truth of emotivism that an honest man would no longer want to go on using most, at least, of the language of past morality because of its misleading character. And Nietzsche was the only major philosopher who had not flinched from this conclusion. Since moreover the language of modern morality is burdened with pseudo-concepts such as those of utility and of natural rights, it appeared that Nietzsche’s resoluteness alone would rescue us from entanglement by such concepts; but it is now clear that the price to be paid for this liberation is entanglement in another set of mistakes. The concept of the Nietzschean ‘great man’ is also a pseudo-concept, although not always perhaps—unhappily—what I earlier called a fiction. It represents individualism’s final attempt to escape from its own consequences. And the Nietzschean stance turns out not to be a mode of escape from or an alternative to the conceptual scheme of liberal individualist Modernity, but rather one more representative moment in its internal unfolding. And we may therefore expect liberal individualist societies to breed ‘great men’ from time to time. Alas!
If I am right then, Stoicism is a response to one particular type of social and moral development, a type of development which strikingly anticipates some aspects of Modernity. Hence we should expect, and we do in fact find, recurrences of Stoicism.
📙 Hyperobjects
There we were, trolling along in the age of industry, capitalism, and technology, and all of a sudden we received information from aliens, information that even the most hardheaded could not ignore, because the form in which the information was delivered was precisely the instrumental and mathematical formulas of Modernity itself.
Presentism also manifests in the injunction to stop thinking and do something, the paradoxical form taken by the contemporary beautiful soul, a defining, overarching subject position of Modernity that has been with us since the late eighteenth century. All too often the siren song of the beautiful soul these days comes in the form of a call to act, now!
Indeed, the vague sludge is precisely the problem of pollution. Process relationism is simply the last philosophical reflex of the Modernity that creates the sludge. We need a philosophy of sparkling unicities; quantized units that are irreducible to their parts or to some larger whole; sharp, specific units that are not dependent on an observer to make them real.
Modernity is like the dinosaur, rendered extinct by some planet-scale cataclysm. Small, weak mammals crawled out from the wreckage.
📙 Learning From MacIntyre
In conditions of Modernity, as MacIntyre diagnoses the situation, this Aristotelian set-up for ethical education is all but ruled out—except, perhaps, for a fortunate few. We are, from MacIntyre’s point of view, born into a culture that inducts us into false images and inevitably misshapes our souls to some extent.
As MacIntyre tells us, in conditions of Modernity even the conception of rationality is disfigured.
What I want to propose is a psychoanalytical complement to MacIntyre’s teaching. I think it—or something like it—is needed; especially if we want to take seriously the psychic efficacy of ethical teaching in the context of Modernity’s conflicts.
The psychoanalytic conversation is a way of intervening in the badly habituated ways that the non-rational soul has been functioning. It is able to undo some of those habits and at the same time promote healthier forms of communication between non-rational and rational parts of the soul. Also, importantly, it does so through the efficacy of increasing self-conscious understanding. In this way, it promotes Aristotle’s project in the context of Modernity.
📙 Marxism, Ethics and Politics
It is in the complex and wide-ranging analysis and critique of liberal Modernity, its moral philosophy and its institutions that MacIntyre highlights why we need not only Marx , but Aristotle, to develop the kind of resistance to the contemporary order that Marxists strive for.
📙 Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
MacIntyre finds late Modernity to be populated by individuals who have learned to understand themselves not in terms of their social backgrounds, relationships, or commitments, but in isolation from all of these.
MacIntyre’s Critique of Modernity has two main points: The first is that Modernity has lost its capacity to understand the real practical wisdom of its traditional morality, and has formulated an approach to moral thinking that is unintelligible, unjustifiable, and ultimately arbitrary. The second is that morality, formulated in this modern fashion, can be used, and has been used, as a tool for social manipulation
Where the classical tradition saw imperfect people seeking human excellence through moral development, Modernity sees imperfect people who must obey the rules of morality—period (p. 55). The task of modern moral philosophy was to find a rational basis for the rules of morality without directing those rules to any purpose beyond “morality.”
Any movement from is to ought presupposes a “functional concept” which is defined “in terms of the purpose or function which . . . [it is] characteristically expected to serve” (p. 58). MacIntyre presents the examples of a watch and a farmer; the watch is good if it keeps time accurately and the farmer is good if he farms well. But the modern concept of the human Person is not a functional concept, because Modernity abstracts the Person from all roles, relationships, and responsibilities (p.
He finds the people of late Modernity shifting toward a non-culture—a collection of competing individuals, who lack any shared conception of their goals as human beings.
Without the “background concepts” of Teleology and the Common Good that make it intellectually coherent, the tradition of the virtues became an empty shell in the dominant culture of Modernity. Yet, the language of virtue has remained a central part of the Western moral vocabulary, and this has led to several redefinitions of virtue over the past few centuries.
Where the tradition had defined the virtues as habits of transformed desire that enable people to seek the Common Good, Modernity sees the virtues either as good natural desires or as dispositions to serve the public good against one’s own desires.