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◆ 291 ◆ Chapter nine Understanding and Neighborliness F It should be clear by now that I am practicing a form of intellectual selfrestraint in these pages, one with roots in the phenomenological tradition of religious studies.1 By deferring global judgments of truth or superiority in favor of one or the other figure (although not eschewing specific criticisms and evaluative choices), I have built up detailed accounts of Xunzi’s and Augustine’s views of personal formation, articulated in relation to each other and to some modern ethical theory.The interpretations offered suggest that despite both their broad apparent similarities regarding the ethical dangers of human nature and the need for spiritual exercises, and their deep religious differences concerning the best way to live (following Christ or the Dao), they each provide accounts of personal formation that are powerful and suggestive, although with notable weaknesses as well as strengths. One rhetorical and philosophical challenge of comparative works of this sort is to balance competing needs for generality and specificity, in both audience and treatment. In this final chapter, I pull back from the careful analysis of our subjects’ prescriptions to address three broader implications of the current study.First,I argue that if any sort of chastened intellectualist view of human beings is correct, then in conditions of religious diversity we will need for the foreseeable future to operate with two-level theories of ethics and politics. Second, regarding “method” in religious ethics, I explore how the need for a certain sort of holism in interpretation complicates but does not ultimately undermine efforts at “retrieval” in studies of ancient ethics.And third, I outline a conception of “global neighborliness” as a regulative ideal for comparative studies. 292 UNdERSTANdiNG ANd NEiGHBORLiNESS the varietieS oF moraL agenCy I argued in the last chapter thatAugustine and Xunzi both exemplify a laudable general view of human moral psychology, which I called “chastened intellectualism.”Such a view suggests that“human nature,”in its various registers as a family of related concerns, is sufficiently flawed that we humans are not spontaneously ethical in any full-bodied sense.Furthermore,on this sort of view, personal change is not easy and therefore not trivial. Human beings need significant education and formation to become moral, and they need to willingly assent to such formation if it is to be effective. Such assent is necessary for the requisite level of striving, and it will only be possible in the pursuit of a compelling vision of human existence. All this implies that most people need the sort of fully worked out programs of character development provided by religious or quasi-religious traditions in order to cultivate dependable virtue, because we cannot simply “identify” with some of our desires or choose some new form of life, without real strain and likely failure.Trusted practices, articulate theories and justifications, socially recognized authorities, aesthetic and literary traditions, and communal and institutional support, especially when integrated together, all increase the possibility of successfully practicing spiritual exercises. In contrast, despite the undeniable value of the basic distinctions drawn by Frankfurt and Taylor, their general theories of personhood and agency are so abstract and thin that they are finally inert and unhelpful as actual guides to self-formation. Of course, this was hardly their intent in producing such accounts, but it is still worthwhile to reflect on the gap between what can be compellingly argued for on such strictly limited general premises and the richness and complexity in fully realized ways of life. Chastened intellectualism as I have articulated it here is in the end no different, except that it points beyond itself as a sort of general summary to the necessity of more fully specified versions of the approach (as, to be fair, doesTaylor). ButTaylor still seeks to provide an overarching synthesis of the “moral horizons” or “sources” of theWest, whereas my view does not require the preexistence of any such shared horizon. It makes a great deal of difference whether one regards oneself as a sick patient being healed of sinfulness by Christ, so that one might love God and neighbor rightly and eventually complete one’s journey to beatitude after death, or a person aspiring to nobility by following the sagacious tradition of the ConfucianWay, in hopes of properly harmonizing and ordering the human community and taking our appropriate place in the larger ecology of the cosmos.Although I think it is not outlandish to speak of these as vari- [3.22.70.9] Project...

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