Philosophy Forums
Forums Links Articles Gallery
Style:
Language:


Calendar Quick Links open HelpRegister
Philosophy Forums » Social Sciences » Subjectivism and modern life » Subjectivism and modern life

Subjectivism and modern life

printPrint


Subjectivism and modern life
nosos
skeptical
Avatar

Usergroup: Administrators
Joined: Jul 24, 2004
Location: Coventry, UK
Total Topics: 147
Total Posts: 2258
Posted 03/21/08 - 04:28 AM:
Subject: Subjectivism and modern life 		quote post
#1
More than ever, we are free to choose what we do and how we live our lives. Yet because the freedom is defended on the grounds of individual choice we lose any sense of our actions as grounded in anything outside of ourselves. Likewise we have an unprecedented freedom to believe what we like. The idea of a right to our own viewpoint carries massive weight in modern life. Yet this is defended on the grounds of moral conscience. Each person is seen to have a right to come to their own conclusions about the world. We’re free to believe what we want but by reducing those conclusions to what each individual is disposed to believe, those beliefs are treated simply as a matter of personal preference.

These changes have opened up the scope of choices available to us but have, at the same time, flattened our experiences of the choices we make. I'm not for a second denying that the freedoms afforded by the decline of tradition are a bad thing: rather that they are a good thing with some bad consequences. They entail an understanding of ourselves, of our capacity to choose, as the source of all meaning and significance. Does this hold true in our day-to-day lives? Are the standards we feel imposing on us things we have chosen? Are the values we’re moved to live by things we have chosen? Are the aesthetic tastes that stimulate us things we have chosen? Obviously you can ask: if humans didn’t exist, wouldn’t these things cease to exist? Leaving that aside though (I think it’s a bad question but a topic for another thread) we should consider our immediate lived experience of these things. How frequently do we actively choose? If meaning and significance aren’t a product of such active choice, how do they arise? How should we treat them? If we increasingly understand ourselves as the ground of meaning and significance (the measure of all things) what consequences does this hold for us?

I think it leads to atomization: in the sense that we come to understand ourselves as individuals with “inner depths” (which we have an obligation to explore and so “find ourselves”) and thus we are, at a basic level, separate from the world and from others. It turns our moral focus inwards and consequently away from social externalities. It also leads to subjectivism: if moral values are a matter of individual preference then what weight could any values hold in determining individual conduct? It also breaks down processes of self-narrative. To maintain a coherent sense of self over time, we articulate (and rearticulate) the relationships between otherwise discrete events in our lives so as to form an ongoing narrative. A crucial part of the self-narrative process is orientating ourselves in terms of an over-arching context. If meaning and significance are reduced to wholly subjectivist terms then this serves to strip away a range of possible contexts available to us.

_____________________
"The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss? - Max Stirner

"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." - JS Mill

"I'd rather be a crying little pussy than a faggy Goth kid." - Butters
Download thread as


You don't have permission to post.

Please login or register.

Contact the Administration

25 total queries
This page was created in 1.12 seconds
Memory used: 6161664 bytes
Server Status: time since last reboot is 47 days, 5:07, load average: 1.33, 1.75, 1.61