Alienation

The self who knows in the way Engberg-Pedersen wants to know is the self who emerged after Descartes and especially Locke, the “disengaged subject.” The “key to this figure,” as Charles Taylor puts it, “is that it gains control through disengagernent.” Not only does the “disengaged self” create a domain that cannot touch him—placing his object of scholarly attention within a framework of objects to be investigated without prior normative commitrnent—he also “takes a stance” toward himself that “takes him out of his normal way of experiencing the world and ourselves.” We posit a self that is beyond the experience of the world that we ourselves have, and imagine the existence of its ability to think. Our disengagement presumes, that is, an objectification of the mind—a thing capable of reasoning quite by itself—that simultaneously alienates us from ourselves. “Modern disengagement,” Taylor rightly notes, “calls us to a separation from ourselves through self-objectification.”—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 196

<idle musing>
He's still deconstructing! Not that he isn't correct, but how much more destruction do we need to lay the edifice low?
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