Anti-Authoritative Metaphysics

Thrilling title, I know; what really is gripping though is Elizabeth Shakman Hurd's post on that topic at The Immanent Frame. She's right that Charles Taylor has the most trouble with people who have concluded that the 'fullness' promised by religion is without promise because 'fullness' itself is an impossible condition. Among these people are mystical postmodernists, metaphysicians of feeling and experience who eschew any concept of authority as 'moral command'. They go for a 'sense of fullness', comfortable with settling for the powerful but fleeting sensations that seem to transcend the everyday self but nonetheless refer back to the everyday self and ratify its pragmatic morality/immorality.

This posture is the greatest danger, I think, to what Taylor wants us to make of religion now, in no small part because it's so close to it. But funnily enough this posture is also a problem that Rorty was never able to adequately treat, either. Postmodern atheist bourgeois materialist liberalism cannot account for the absurd tendency of otherwise pragmatic moralists to continually import emotional mysticism into their ethical, social, personal, and sexual improvisations. It's possible that neither Taylor nor Rorty have been able to recognize this strange group of people as the pioneers of that third way of the therapeutic that wishes in every way to have its cake and eat it too.

Two other opponents -- Tocqueville and Nietzsche -- each suggested a fate for failed liberal democrats that we seem stubbornly inclined to resist. Tocqueville hinted at an ineffable return to the enduring habits of faith in God; Nietzsche to an inescapable plunge toward truth at any cost. Both of these ostensible fates are too costly. They take too much effort for not enough payoff. Our virtuosos of the self have adjusted their aspirations. Indeed, they are able to incorporate a sense of faith and a sense of truth into their moral pragmatism. Both senses join a general toolkit for loving people as they are, however they are, the basic pragmatic rule of thumb in a world where violence, God, condemnation, and the stationary self are all passe. Which mere mortals can resist the rise of this ethos -- if not to engulf the world, then at least to a position of privilege and dominance in the West?

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