communitarianism
September 19, 2006
It would seem judicious after my avowal of the politicising nature of executive education to back this claim up with a small-to-median ‘p’ political stance. So the following is an attempt by executivezen to try on a political label, that of communitarianism.
According to the Wikipedia article on communitarianism, philosophically, communitarianism emphasizes the role of the community in defining and shaping individuals. Ideologically, communitarianism emphasises the community and is sometimes marked by leftism on economic issues and conservatism on social issues. Communitarian philosophers are primarily concerned with ontological and epistemological issues, as distinct from policy issues; they have recently been distinguished by their dissatisfaction with the image Rawls presents of humans as atomistic individuals. Executivezen likes this disaffection whilst at the same time aknowledging that s/he feels disconnected with, or should that be, from a specific community. Does that make me an existential communitarian?
Communitarians claim values and beliefs exist in public space, in which debate takes place. They argue that becoming an individual means taking a stance on the issues that circulate in the public space. For instance, Charles Taylor rejects naturalism, mediational epistemologies, and what, following Bakhtin, he calls “monological consciousness” (or the intellectualist’s perspective). Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that we are inherently cut off from the world and our understanding of it essentially mediated by representations. This ties nicely into Rorty’s assertion that the world is not re-presented via language.
October 2, 2006 at 9:58 pm
[...] Ok, so what is this destabilising? And what possible benefit does this anarchic sounding practice have for executive education? Firstly, before you can destabilise you have to acknowledge that which is stable, why it is stable and what stability means. Not only that, you have to have a reason for questioning the stability of your chosen cannon, orthodoxy and acepted knowledge (in executivezen’s case, executive education) if your (political, or dare I say, communitarian) actions are not to be deemed as gratuitous epistemic vandalism. Executivezen’s understanding of Derrida is that his deconstructive acts do not simply rubbish the texts he examines, just for the sake of it. Very often he sides with the author (Husserl, Rousseau, Heidegger) he is deconstructing and his intentions are to aid in the intent of the text – his revealing of metaphysical ambiguities hidden within texts is a constructive (not destructive) action. [...]