Questions from Patreon Part 19 - Maybe Just Don't Watch This One (Patreon)

Questions from Patreon Part 19 - Maybe Just Don't Watch This One

You can send in questions by messaging my on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/SebastianSB/ Josha Heirbaut: As pointed out by Robert Bellah and his co-authors. Americans have built on the earlier Puritan traditions of "leaving home". In early Connecticut, for instance, all young persons had to go through their own, individual conversion, had to establish their own relation to God, to be allowed full memebership in the church. And this has grown into the American tradition of leaving home: the young person has to go out, to leave the parental background, to make his or her own way in the world. In contemporary conditions, this can transpose even into abandoning the political or religious convictions of the parents. And yet we can talk without paradox of an American 'tradition' of leaving home. The young person learns the independent stance, but this stance is also something expected of him or her. Moreover, what an independent stance involves is defined by the culture, in a continuing conversation into which that young person is inducted (and in which the meaning of independence can also alter with time). Nothing illustrates better the transcendental embedding of independence in interlocution. Each young person may take up a stance which is authentically his or her own; but the very possibility of this is enframed in a social understanding of great temporal depth, in fact, in a "tradition". What do you think about this? (Excerpt from Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Page 39.)