43 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 more negative and dismal about the topic, whereas Taylor (1989) particularly emphasised the irreversibility of historical developments and the subsequent need to apply classical notions of moral thinking to today's reality, albeit with respect to their assessment of general historical dynamics, there is a widely recognised overlap between the two. Laitinen (2014) distinguished five closely intertwined aspects: their fundamental philosophical anthropology, their views on explanation and understanding in relation to the human sciences, their analysis of modernity and the nature of contemporary late-modern Western cultures and ethics, and the question of rationally comparing and assessing rival traditions of cultures. This overlap can be partly explained through a comparison of their biographies. As Laitinen (2014) summed up: both were educated at British universities and famous for their teaching in North America, both had an early interest in Marxism and left-wing politics, both came from Christian backgrounds that revived as the years of their scientific contributions went by—and became more strongly connected to their moral philosophies— and both finally committed to Catholicism and its strong emphasis on communitarianism. For this study, it is particularly interesting that they both identified Protestantism (where MacIntyre had his roots, while for Taylor, just with regard to his father) as part of the problem of modern fragmentation. There are, therefore, at least two convincing reasons to take their shared view of modernity as a starting point for describing the challenges of a modern, fragmented society in relation to Reformed Christian teacher training: their diagnostic of modern society as deeply fragmented, on the one hand, and their assessment of Protestantism as—at least—an accelerant of this dynamic of fragmentation, on the other hand. 1.1.1 A diagnostic of fragmentation As indicated in the introduction to this dissertation, the predicate fragmented, which has been chosen to describe the state of the modern world and society, comes from the work of MacIntyre (2007). The Scottish philosopher started After Virtue 40 years ago with the ‘disquieting suggestion’ that ‘the Enlightenment project’ has left the world in a chaos (MacIntyre, 2007). What is left of the original ‘conceptual scheme’ of classical thinking are only ‘parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived’ (MacIntyre, 2007, p. 2)—that is, ‘fragments left behind from tradition’ (p. 59). Substantial ethical precepts that, for ages, were formative for moral thinking and behaving, and that were ‘at home in an earlier context of social practices’ (Laitinen, 2014, p. 208), were lost in a kind of philosophical scientific revolution; a ‘catastrophe’. For contemporary scholars, it is very difficult—if not impossible—to piece
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