71 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 1.2.4 Engaging with subjectivity: A conclusion On each of the three levels on which the layered problem of fragmentation was described, the term subjectification appeared among the suggested approaches to addressing this fragmentation. On the micro-level of the person, it emerged from the application of Levinas’ (1969) philosophy of the importance of otherness; on the meso-level of society, it was related to Nussbaum’s (2010) ‘education for democracy’; and on the macro-level of the world, is was connected to Biesta’s (2022) plea for a more critical form of citizenship education than the current, mainly socialising, approach. However, as the fragmentation thesis presented above is derived from MacIntyre’s (2007) and Taylor’s (1989) critiques of modernity, a question arises concerning how subjectification as a means to face modernity coheres with their critical treatment of both subjectivity and subjectivism. This sub-section will clarify how a plea for subjectification—‘subjectifying education’, as Biesta (2022, pp. 49–50) termed it—matches the fragmentation thesis built on the work of both MacIntyre (2007) and Taylor (1989). Modernity is described as a ‘turn to the subject’, which indicates ‘the emphasis in certain strands of philosophy of the last few centuries on the interior, first-person, or subjective perspective, as opposed to an exterior or third-person perspective’ (Spencer, 2016). It is this turn to the subject that preoccupied MacIntyre (2007), as it destroys the ‘narrative unity of life’ and leads to a fragmentation that begins with moral accounts but immediately impacts social cohesion. When MacIntyre (2007) characterised modern culture as an emotivist one, this predicate was interchangeable with subjectivist. Emotivist accounts are, for MacIntyre (2007, p. 21), subjectivist accounts, while emotivist analyses of judgment are subjectivist analyses of judgment. For Taylor (1989), the modern turn to the subject leads, in the end, to disengaged subjectivity and highly expressivist ideologies of personal fulfilment that ‘tend toward emptiness’ because ‘nothing would count as a fulfilment in a world in which literally nothing was important but self-fulfilment’ (p. 507). Taylor (1989) used subjectivity many times in negative connotations such as ‘the danger of a regression to subjectivism’ (p. 510), ‘the subjectivist bias’ (p. 513) and ‘the slide towards subjectivism in modern culture’ (p. 526). This raises the question of how MacIntyre and Taylor would, from their critical perspective, evaluate the intended approach of subjectification, as suggested by Biesta (2022) and others. To answer this question, it is important to draw a clear distinction between subjectivism and (inter)subjectification. While subjectivism stands for a turn to the subject that can be seen as disengaging, atomising and polarising—and thus causes fragmentation—
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