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The Paradoxes of Modernity - Creating Belief through Art, Community, and Ritual (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2022)
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The Paradoxes of Modernity - Creating Belief through Art, Community, and Ritual (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2022)
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A paradox lies at the heart of modernity: the simultaneous demand
to create ideas to make us better humans and communities, along
with the contrary imperative that we criticize all ideals,
especially the ones we have created. In philosophy we see this
paradox most acutely in figures like Immanuel Kant, who states that
we cannot know the essence of things and yet we must retain old
ideas - God, freedom, and the soul - in order to become better and
more ethical humans. Or in Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal
recurrence, a self-created myth whose sole purpose is to get us to
see the value in the everyday. This basic scheme - belief and
un-belief - is one of the fundamental elements of modernity,
manifesting itself in the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and
Michel Foucault, along with the theologies of Blaise Pascal, C.S.
Lewis, William James, Sallie McFague, and Philip Clayton. How do we
live out the values we know to be constructions? This question
holds captive our ability to solve public goods problems and make
our lives more meaningful. Instead of seeing this paradox of
modernity as self-deception or bad faith, Zachary Simpson employs
cognitive and social scientific research to explain how best to
realize values that we know to be false: through art, community,
and ritual. In Simpson's account, the values we construct must
conform to narrative, be reinforced through community, and
habituated through ritual. And yet modernity has also undermined
collectivity and ritual. Thus arises the second paradox of
modernity: the best tools we have for realizing values are those
which devalue the individual modern subject.The last part of the
book attempts to make three normative points regarding modernity.
First, the modern, individualist subject is insufficient to realize
the very values and aspirations of modernity. We must recognize
that humans are collective and communal. Second, we cannot simply
create values - they must arise in communities and be realized
through narrative and ritual. And, third, if we are to live
meaningful lives as contemporary meta-ethicists and positive
psychologists argue, then such lives must include art, community,
and ritual as a way to affirm and reinforce one's values.Let's
Pretend is a statement about one of the dilemmas of the
contemporary western world and how that dilemma is, and might be,
resolved. How do we believe in the values that we know will make a
better world, even if they are of our own making? We must do so, in
part, by becoming less modern, by engaging with one another and
imagining more.The book should serve as both an essay in the
history of Western thought as well as a constructive argument about
the nature of the modern epoch and what resources we have to
realize the central aspirations of modernity. It aims to fill a
critical lacuna in theoretical and philosophical approaches to
modernity. While most texts focus on either the need for created
values or the need to remedy modern subjectivity, few, if any, link
the two problems together. Moreover, they do not ground their
analyses in the social sciences and contemporary findings regarding
the efficacy of narrative, communal action, and rituals.The book is
unique, then, because it asks a central question - how do we
believe in what we know to be false? - and because it answers this
question using interdisciplinary methods that allow us to see the
faultlines and paradoxes of our age.
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