After purification
Christian Moderns:
After purification
posted by Philip Gorski
Keane is of course well aware of ... the incompleteness of his account. But he seems less aware of the crucial blind-spot: the existence and persistence of competing semiotic ideologies and rival visions of moral agency within the Euro-American tradition. For MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Elshtain, Milbank and Taylor critique modern liberal secularism not from without, but from within, by drawing variously on Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas. Amongst many other things, they argue that moral agency is necessarily embodied via the cultivation of virtue; that tradition is not the opposite of rationality; and that worldly sovereignty must not be monopolized by the secular state. In other words, they dispute the central tropes of modern, liberal secularism. Keane, by contrast, eschews critique of this sort, preferring instead to raise the semiotic ideology of Euro-American culture to greater self-consciousness. To that degree, however, he remains a captive to the very ideology he wishes to critique, since increased self-consciousness as an end in itself is, after all, one of the governing tropes of moral agency in the West.
