45 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 instead, at the end of his book, called for is ‘the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained’ (p. 263); therefore, he awaited nothing less than ‘another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict’ (p. 264). Taylor (1989) did not share MacIntyre’s profound pessimism. Indeed, in the introduction to his central work, Sources of the Self (1989), he stated that he did not want to ‘show a picture of decline, of loss, of forgetfulness’, like others. He characterised the modern age as a ‘unique combination of greatness and dangers, of grandeur et misère’ (Taylor, 1989, introduction). Nonetheless, in his concrete analysis of modernity, remarkable parallels with MacIntyre’s (2007) argument can be seen. Taylor (1989) spoke of ‘the momentous transformation of our culture and society over the last three or four decades’, leading not only to ‘a moral world of moderns’ that is ‘significantly different from that of previous civilizations’ but also to the ‘suppression of moral ontology’ (p. 10). By this, he meant that ‘the whole notion of a cosmic order (…) has faded for us’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 13), as we ‘no longer see human beings as playing a role in a larger cosmic or divine history’ (p. 13), while ‘frameworks today are problematic’ because ‘no framework is shared by everyone, can be taken as the framework tout court’ (p. 17). Ontology and a joint framework are necessary because, without them, people ‘fall into a life which is spiritually senseless’, ‘the fear of a terrifying emptiness’, ‘a fracturing of our world and body-space’ and sheer ‘meaninglessness’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 18). Frameworks provide the background to people’s moral judgments, intuitions and reactions. At this point, Taylor (1989) confirmed some of the same sense of loss as expressed by MacIntyre (2007): I want to defend the strong thesis that doing without frameworks is utterly impossible for us; otherwise put, that the horizons within which we live our lives and which makes sense of them have to include these strong qualitative discriminations. (p. 27) At the end of his book, he stated the same, albeit more strongly: We are now in an age in which a publicly accessible cosmic order of meanings is an impossibility. The only way we can explore the order in which we are set with an aim to defining moral sources is through (…) personal resonance. (Taylor, 1989, p. 512) Taylor (1989) referred to his argument as an essay of retrieval because he departed from the conviction that the loss of meaningful frameworks needs to be undone. This is a difficult task: ‘We have to fight uphill to rediscover
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw