Sounds kind of painful, doesn't it? But this is the way Charles Taylor describes the difference between the outlook of the individual of 1500 and the contemporary person.
The pre-modern self is 'porous' because it thought of itself as deeply situated in an enchanted world and open to being influenced and signified by forces emanating from that world.
The 'buffered' self of modernity considers its purposes and meanings as arising not from without but from within.
Take emotions for example: a depressed porous self may consider himself prey to cosmic realities that can affect us. Suffering from melancholy, he may cite the presence of black bile which is not the cause of melancholy: it IS melancholy. The depression is part of being embedded in a universe redolent with meanings. He is in the grip of the real thing.
The depressed buffered self on the other hand will be able to take a step of disengagement from his feelings by saying 'it is just my body chemistry' - and take a pill. The chemistry doesn't have the meaning - it just feels that way.
How did this change in perspective come about? Well, I do think the Reformation had more than a little to do with it. That is, there was a specifically theological change of tack that led to the disenchantment of the universe. I wonder if Taylor shares this thought...
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Tell us more about what the Reformation has to do with it. What was the theological change of tack?
Foucault shares your thought.
"It seems to me that in the religious crisis of the sixteenth century - the great rejection of the Catholic confessional practices - new modes of relationship to the self were being developed." - M. Foucault.
MF suggests the rejection of the Catholic confession meant that the self no longer looked inside itself for a hidden truth but was concern with what one can and can not do with freedom - a return to Stoicism.
I don't know a lot about the reformation, but it seems to be a major skeleton in the closet of Western thought.
Well Byron, Taylor cites the thrust for Reform rather than the Reformation per se. I'll comment further as I read more!
Interesting. The depression/melancholy example is problematic though, as the black bile hypothesis was still well-and-truly alive in the late nineteenth century.
Ah, but we are our biology. Far more than most people realise. Modern man is in this case closer to the truth more often than not, even if he got there via drug company marketing. I realise this is a sidepoint, but go with me..
I strongly disliked the pharma push for depression to be labeled as a "chemical imbalance" because it was (a) inane and incomplete (is love just a chemical imbalance?) and (b) it smacked of 'a pill for ills' marketing, which it was.
That said, further investigation on a different tangent has swayed me right back into the biological camp, but it's quite different to anything that's commonly suggested. Our brain's select, weight for importance (!) and deliver information to our conscious mind *before* we've even think about it consciously. That's incredibly powerful. The meaning we lay on top of that selected, weighted & delivered information is quite a ways down stream in the processing river.
So, to bring this back to your point, meaning as something consciously considered in the mind is only constructed well down the line, which has been steered by hidden factors to quite a significant degree.
So who was more perceptive out of pre-modern man & modern man? Despite the romanticism of the pre-modern man's outlook, surely modern man's realization of his own biology is closer to the truth, though he does risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Realising your emotional state & perspective are, in large parts, outworkings of meaningless biology has to lead to some degree of disenchantment...
What theology has to do with this I don't know, but I wouldn't imagine it was a lot. Surely it has been scientific inquiry that has torn down a lot of so-called meaning and reduced it to chemicals and neurons and basic physiology. The scary thing is not that this has become widespread, the scary thing is that (for the secular man) it may well be true..
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