Abstract
According to modernity, it is by eschewing full participation in norm governed institutional settings like rituals, I am able to take back my life and make it my own. However, this chapter argues that participation in the very norm-governed practices eschewed by the fans of authenticity increases the repertoire of actions open to us and facilitates our ability to perform many important actions and to inculcate appropriate moral attitudes and virtues in our fellows. Many in contemporary culture would find it inconceivable that by subjecting ourselves to the authority of rituals and other norm-governed social practices, that we can actually gain in power and in the range of actions open to us. That this is the case seems to follow from a careful examination of the nature of ritual and its relation to human action.
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Notes
- 1.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953, pp. 30–31
- 2.
It is difficult, I think, to overestimate the importance of rituals associated with practices in enriching the possibilities of human life. Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of the significance of practices in Ch. 14 of After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) explores more fully than any other recent work the range and significance of practices for allowing human beings to extend their powers and capacities in pursuing what he calls the goods internal to practices. He also argues that it is only in the context of practices that the full significance of the virtues for successful human life can be appreciated. I cannot here pursue his discussion of these matters in detail, but any adequate discussion of the role of ritual in expanding the range of human actions must take MacIntyre’s views on these matters into account.
- 3.
The crucial text is at 1105b5 of the Nicomachean Ethics (Ross translation) where Aristotle says, “Actions, then, are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good.” If this same section of the NE, Aristotle heaps scorn on those who believe that one can acquire virtue by mere intellectual means. He says, for example, “But most people . . . take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.”
- 4.
This is not universally true, of course. In particular, the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe has been especially attentive to the social involvement of their theories of the virtues.
- 5.
The history of the liturgical reforms in the Roman Catholic Church in the last four decades is complex and controversial. I offer this paragraph as the mere result of close observation of these changes at one of the centers of American Catholicism over the last forty years. Others will no doubt disagree with my characterization.
- 6.
Taylor has discussed these issues in a number of places, but his most important discussions are found in the following three books. The Sources of the Self, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Modern Social Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2004).
- 7.
The Ethics of Authenticity, p, 29.
- 8.
Ibid, p. 29.
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Solomon, D. (2012). Cultural and Philosophical Resistance to Ritual in Contemporary Culture. In: Solomon, D., Fan, R., Lo, Pc. (eds) Ritual and the Moral Life. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2756-4_10
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