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Chapter Seven: The Authentic Individual in the Network of Agape
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P I V S E T H I C S A N D E M B O D I M E N T C S The Authentic Individual in the Network of Agape . S One of the most valuable aspects of Charles Taylor’s work has been the way in which it articulates the complementary character of authentic individuality and genuine community. Throughout his career, Taylor has offered perceptive critiques of the excesses of strong social constructionism and antimodern traditionalism, while seeking to reconcile the ideal of authenticity with both an affirmation of the social formation of the self and an openness to transcendence. The theological vision that has fueled this endeavor finally becomes transparent in A Secular Age. A Secular Age develops a vital corrective for a certain kind of bad faith to which contemporary religious adherents are prone and offers a compelling vision of a communion of disparate itineraries toward God, linked in an everexpanding network of agape. We see fully for the first time that Taylor’s compelling appeal is rooted not in a vague Romantic aestheticism,but in an endless love of the broken neighbor who stands“among others in the stream of love which is that facet of God’s life we try to grasp, very inadequately, 191 192 J E N N I F E R A . H E R D T in speaking of the Trinity.”1 Taylor seizes this postsecular moment as one opportune for his own public confession, displaying his location within the space he identifies for an open reading of the immanent frame. The appeal of this confession lies equally in its passionate conviction and in its confession of its own inadequate and tentative character. Even those suspicious of Taylor’s talk of transcendence may find themselves drawn by his insistence that we recognize that our codes and institutions are not all there is. And this will in itself be a victory for Taylor, a confession, in his eyes, of the pull of transcendence, a crack in the immanent frame. C I: L B Taylor has often been dubbed a communitarian, though, like most other prominent so-called communitarians (the list often includes Jean Bethke Elshtain,Amitai Etzioni,Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer), he has not claimed the name for himself. Communitarianism emerged in the context of political debates about the tasks of government and the significance of civil society and, more specifically, in response to the political theory of John Rawls.2 The primary focus of critique was Rawls’s “original position,” according to which those social arrangements are just that could be agreed upon by individuals acting from behind a “veil of ignorance” with respect to their own social identity and location. Communitarians argued that the notion that individuals stripped of their concrete identities would be capable of intelligible agency was fundamentally flawed. One cannot identify a fair social arrangement, they insisted, without an understanding of what is “fair,” and this is itself impossible without an encompassing induction into a comprehensive moral vocabulary , together with the practices in which that vocabulary is at home. Rawls’s theory, in their view, reflected an atomistic individualism that fundamentally misrepresents the character of human moral agency. Human beings are socially constituted,coming to awareness of themselves as agents within a world of objective obligations, not individuals who pursue freely chosen life plans. This misrepresentation is particularly dangerous because it both emerges out of and threatens to feed one of the key ills of modern society—a possessive individualism that seeks simply to maximize the satisfaction of one’s own desires and regards society as merely instrumental to this satisfaction. Even if Rawls was concerned with securing a meaningful equality for the most disadvantaged in society, and even if he insisted that the original position was a theoretical construct that in no way implied ethical egoism as the basic motivation of real social actors, his theory was nevertheless seen by communitarians as fostering egoism.3 Communitarians encouraged a more robust, perfectionist understanding of the tasks of government. Laws and policies, they argued, must be carefully designed so as not to favor individual life-projects over communal enterprises. They should seek to foster the institutions of civil society, which play an important role in social formation and facilitate the pursuit of common goods. Within this discussion, religion came to the foreground because it was seen as a vital locus for the formation of moral character and identity and...