Comments on: Buffered and porous selves

By: Alexander Zarecki

Alexander Zarecki — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:12:30 +0000

Looking at this “process of disenchantment,” if we have lost certain beliefs, I’m curious as to what beliefs we’ve picked up. Are these “different things” that we are open to by traditional definition still beliefs?

While the answer is most likely a complex one, I think it’s worth considering the ways in which we’ve adjusted to a world that lacks belief, particularly “belief” in the sense that we somehow still anticipate it to exist. If this story of remaking can be articulated in academic circles, should it not be even now felt and varyingly (mis-)articulated throughout the wider public? I don’t mean this accusingly; I mean this earnestly! What does this – call it alternative, call it mourning, call it modernity-inspired “belief” – look like?

Further, I think examining the climactic King’s Cross scene at end of Rowling’s Harry Potter series is worth further discussion regarding modernity, religion, and the individual’s experience as these things exist in pop and youth cultures. [Details respectfully withheld to avoid spoilers.]

By: Andrew Sowle

Andrew Sowle — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 01:59:19 +0000

Postmodern theories in academia seem to push back against these firm boundaries between the self and other somewhat. They seek to examine and expose the ways in which we are not completely buffered. “One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other”. This is certainly true in the way we live our lives in the world today. It is interesting, though, that more recent academic trends have sought to expose the ways in which we are still porous. In most aspects of life we do try to focus on the ways that forces affect the mind without the mind being a part of these forces by examining chemicals and brain functions. It is interesting, though, that some are using a similarly modern methodology to examine the way experiences and historical context and location affect all aspects of an individual’s identity and mindset. This seems to be an attempt to break down the buffers we impose on ourselves. It attempts to deconstruct essentialist notions of identity that are based solely on biological and chemical understandings. Although this is certainly not a way to re-enchant the world, and does not usually affect the way we live our buffered lives, it is an interesting attempt to examine the ways in which we are still porous and connected to larger society and historical forces.

By: Jennifer Edgar

Jennifer Edgar — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:40:23 +0000

This boundary or buffer that you invoke is a fascinating metaphor to illuminate the change that has taken place over the last five hundred years, or specifically, the change in how we experience the world now. Rationality, as opposed to the dogmatism of divine sanction, is preferable, right? The Enlightenment ands residual affects continue to inform us, the West, that rationality is superior, but also, the ability to think or rationalize for oneself. The sheer idea of autonomy is a staggering insight. Now, five hundred years later, human are inextricable from autonomy. While this may inform our agency in a “better” way, is a buffered self the cost of that shift into modernity? Better yet, is modernity, or disenchantment, worth that cost? Even with rationality, what is not being explained by the mythology of modernity? With our buffered selves, we can distance ourselves from accountability for the injustices of the world. In the past, we may have had a fixed place in the cosmos, with divinely sanctioned hierarchies. Now, we have meritocracy to justify power over others, to legitimate power over an “other”. Yes, the grandeur of our ambition has left us disenchanted. But can there be a rekindling of enchantment under conditions of modernity? Is it modernity that is at odds with porous enchantment, or is it the West’s infatuation with freedom, autonomy, and the conceit that we can “continue to construct our own concept of magic?”

By: Laura Chrisinger

Laura Chrisinger — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:33:41 +0000

Recognizing that we’re nostalgic for this form of “porous” selves begins to shed let on our own discontentment with aspects of our “buffered selves”. I’ve shared Max Weber’s sentiments of longing for the organic cycle of man and acutely feel the disenchantment that defines our society. However, until reading your essays “Modern Social Imaginaries” and “The Malaises of Modernity” I couldn’t name what particular aspects of my life I felt “buffered” in. After reading about instrumental reasoning I recognized that I fall prey to the comforts of perfection and self-care in regards to my right and duty to vote. I’m buffered to the point that I’m not engaging even past the boundary of self to participate and contribute to my community so that I can have my own “autonomous order” in my life.

However, can we truly call this buffered, or is it merely apathetic? How much is our nostalgia for the porous self really a desire for an explanation for why we feel a disconnect in our lives? I believe this could go either way, it could truly be a buffered self-for within a porous self one wouldn’t be able to create such a strong desire and application of self-control to their lives, whereas within such a buffered self we’re able to create this bubble. Or perhaps it could be an explanation for our lack of agency in our lives, which I believe you address nicely in “Three Malaises”. In modernity one has to recognize what aspects of being a buffered self can hold us back from fully living. In “Three Malaises” you discuss how individualism, disenchantment, and political life in regards to instrumental reasoning make up the main malaises within modernity, which contribute to the state of being buffered. Your advice in navigating this buffered world is as follows, “There is in fact both much that is admirable and much that is debased and frightening in all the developments I have been describing, but to understand the relation between the two is to see that the issue is not how much of a price in bad consequences you have to pay for the positive fruits, but rather how to steer these developments towards their greatest promise and avoid the slide into the debased forms,”(Long, 5). Therefore I think every individual must examine for themselves what forms of the buffered selves give them the agency to act in modernity, and those that hold them back from acting on that agency.

By: Ruthie Thier

Ruthie Thier — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:10:11 +0000

The experience of self is undeniably different for the modern human than it was for the ancient human. Like Max Weber in his “Science as a Vocation,” Taylor refers to a dis-enchanted, intellectual modernity. Today, we do not live as “porous selves,” but as closed off, rational beings who use science to explain what we don’t understand. Taylor offers a slight alteration of Weber’s disenchantment theory, adding that we have not simply lost irrational feelings, but also “a certain sensibility that is really an impoverishment.”

The “impoverishment” of today’s world might be here to stay, it would take something extraordinary to pave over this irrevocable “sensibility” that Taylor mentions. He suggests that the Romantic Movement was an effort to “re-enchant” the world and bring back the “experience of porous selves.” Aside from the Romantic Movement, however, there have been, and continue to be “attempts to re-enchant” the world. These “attempts” may be just that, an attempt, because the entire world paradigm has become so disenchanted that there may perhaps be no way to be “re-enchant.”

There may be, however, new kinds of “enchantment,” that technological advancements offer. As Taylor points out, an attempt to “re-enchant” that is too “fragile” won’t suffice. In order to feel the enchantment that our ancestors experienced, it will take a powerful, all-encompassing “attempt,” and a new age of technological innovation may be “engaged in such a project.” The experience of self is changed so drastically by technological innovation that the word “enchantment” may mean something entirely different now. Communication (video, the cellphone, social networking), introverted experience (videogames, virtual worlds), and the workplace are flipped upside as a result of technological equipment and innovation. The human mind is capable of extraordinary things, and what is inside of the mind is now out in the world, changing every aspect of society. Perhaps this “clear boundary between mind and world” is not as prominent as it appears at first. Is technological innovation a way for the imagination to exist out in the world? Perhaps technology is a way for the emotional, moral life to be “porous” yet again.

Technological innovation, however, could also be a way to further contain the moral, emotional meanings and prevent them to manifest into something “enchanting.” Perhaps it is yet another way for humans to replace religious experience. Is a human further distanced from his feelings by technological innovation? He is given more options, more varieties in which to feel distanced from his own feelings. Technological innovations are a ways to widen and strengthen the “buffer” of the modern man. It is a way to further seal the pores of the ancient, enchanted man and strengthen the “thick emotional boundary between us and the cosmos.”

By: Madeleine S. Murray

Madeleine S. Murray — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:44:45 +0000

Taylor writes that the boundaries between the mind and world or between the self and other are porous in the enchanted world. This made me think on what porosity of mind, world, and body in this dis-eased and dis-enchanted world would look like and feel like. Knowing that invisible and consuming forces, like diseases or disorders, can take up residence in your body or mind, become part of you, control you, and kill you from the inside is terrifying. What is more terrifying however, is learning that you cannot build an effective buffer against these forces, that you will remain at risk , regardless of the thickness of your skin, the walls of your house.

Even today, despite our many attempts to be impermeable to infection of any kind, certain contagious and deadly diseases render human minds and bodies helpless and porous. Invisible viruses, which can seep through pores, like cells through membranes, are more terrifying today than they might have been in earlier times, in part because we have come to rely so much on our ability to control, block out, and protect ourselves against those things which we do not wish to accept or be at the mercy of.

Perhaps we compensate for and distract ourselves from this vulnerability or porosity by further removing and distancing ourselves from those things we feel we can guard against—dutifully buffering our minds and bodies is perhaps a ritual we’ve developed to help dissipate our own gnawing anxieties, which have the capacity to make the porous boundaries we cannot reinforce all the weaker.

By: Ezequiel Mota Moreira da Silva

Ezequiel Mota Moreira da Silva — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:32:15 +0000

Dear Robin Leslie,

My comment did not address the questions you address in your comment and, as such, is completely redundant.

What I argued is that the experience of enchantment is not confined to an historical experience or epoch. I do agree with Prof. Taylor’s interpretations of previous historical modes of enchantment but it seems nonsensical to argue that enchantment has vanished from human experience.

By: The Belated Jester

The Belated Jester — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:15:15 +0000

I realize that I am quite late; that said, this concise version of Taylor’s take is really interesting. The porous v. buffered self of the pre-modern and modern self is indeed quite a paradigm shift. It reminds me of the different kind of theaters that we have employed in the past. The Aristotelian theater espouses catharsis or transference of emotion, whereas the Brechtian theater—responding in some fashion to the cool established cathartic emotion—blended, or made fuzzy, the transference of emotion. Now, suddenly the stage and audience were made integral, and the stage play isn’t acting unilaterally in a one-way discourse.

I will say that Taylor, like many philosophers, tends to use jargon and unusual syntax arrangements which stunts the reader’s movement. Further, he has a very scientific or generic way of using language, whereby the symbolism of language is held fast at bay. Philosophy and the “mundane-poetic” has been separated for too long; philosophers ought to talk more like people in the street rather than people in labs.

By: Robin Leslie

Robin Leslie — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:53:42 +0000

Postmodernism evades the moral problem of the Common life and the Common Good, the dimension that situates the longings for immortality as exposed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. Taylor tries to avoid the extremes of Modernism and Postmodernism, and his ontology of the self goes some way to addressing the trap of the Cartesian self-enclosed consciousness that continues to lock us out of Paradise or any shared hopes of it! I found Taylor's A Secular Age indispensable in continuing the unlocking of rationalism, but there is much further to go!

By: Peter Morgan

Peter Morgan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:18:59 +0000

Modernity distanced us from immediacy of our experience? Does not the post-modern critique distance us from immediacy of our certainty?

There are gaps in the world again. Post-modernism is flawed in being non-constructive, except that it releases us. Yes, the release is exaggerated, but the post-modern critique has enough force that we cannot return to Positivist certainty.

Very nice article, until the diagnosis of the present.