The Shadow-gloom and Weight of the Sacred

I made this chart on the right because I thought it might help me visualize the discussion from the previous post, Interaction: Sources of the Self #3. I've gone ahead an updated that post so that is also has the chart. Upon describing the development of natural rights, Taylor then begins describing the three aspects concerning the modern understanding of respect: (1) autonomy, (2) avoiding suffering, and (3) affirmation of the ordinary life.


On autonomy, Taylor states:

To talk of universal, natural, or human rights is to connect respect for human life and integrity with the notion of autonomy. It is to conceive people as active cooperators in establishing and ensuring the respect with is due to them (12).

Autonomy is central to a person's respect. This has brought about issues for our society, such as when a person's individuality is offensive to culture norms (think the hippy, or perhaps the stereotypical flamboyant gay person). Yet, we continue to value autonomy and have difficulty thinking of impeding or censoring it, so whatever negative consequences it brings, we choose autonomy with its potential negativity over no autonomy.

The discussion on the importance Westerners place on avoiding suffering is one of the most interesting in the book so far. Channeling Foucault, Taylor addresses this aspect of respect through an examination of the death penalty. Our ancestor often committed horrible, torturous executions of condemned persons. This, Taylor states, is because people saw themselves as part of a cosmic moral order (a view which modern people have lost), thus the grueling executions of past was a ritual reversal of a terrible crime through a terrible punishment. In the absence of a larger cosmic moral order (at least in the view of modern people) the sensitivity of suffering, the avoidance of suffering, takes on a moral importance.

It's not that comparable horrors don't occur...[in the West today]. But they are now seen as shcoking aberrations, which have to be hidden. Even the "clean" legal executions, where the death penalty is still in force, are no longer carried out in public, but deep within prison walls (13).

Finally, Taylor turns to a description of the modern life. For Aristotle, "life" was simply a necessary background and support to "the good life" of contemplation. However, the Reformation altered this focus: ordinary life is the center of the good life. The crux of life was how it was led, either in fear of God or not. This initiated of shift of sorts, privileging the ordinary person over the elite. The ordinary life is one of the most powerful ideas in modern civilization; it powers Marxism and generally affects political issues such as welfare.

This sense of the importance of the everyday in human life, along with its corollary about the importance of sufferings, colours our whole understanding of what it is truly to t human life and integrity (14).