The Human Subject and the Foundation of Human Rights

A few days ago, Michael Perry posted the following quote from philosopher Charles Taylor:

"[M]odern culture, in breaking with the structures and beliefs of Christendom, also carried certain facets of Christian life further than they ever were taken or could have been taken within Christendom.  In relation to the earlier forms of Christian culture, we have to face the humbling realization that the breakout was a necessary condition of the development."

I don’t know whether the “breakout was a necessary condition of the development” (I need to study the argument and evidence further to make an informed judgment), but I have no doubt that, in the development of human rights, modernity has made some positive contributions and that those contributions ought to be humbly recognized by all, including those within the Church.  My focus in this thread does not contradict Taylor’s thesis.  Instead, I have suggested, here and here, that the beginnings of modern human rights thinking occur within Christian Europe pre-Enlightenment.

I have also suggested that for whatever its contributions, modern secular culture has too thin of a conception of the human person to sustain and support the human rights project in the long term. On that score, I ran across this passage this morning:

“The problem of the subjectivity of the human being is a problem of paramount philosophical importance today. … The philosophy of consciousness [a product of modern culture, no?] would have us believe that it first discovered the human subject.  The philosophy of being [rooted in an older pre-Enlightenment tradition, no?] is prepared to demonstrate that quite the opposite is true, that in fact an analysis of pure consciousness leads inevitably to an annihilation of the subject.”

Karol Wojtyla, The Person:  Subject and Community, in Catholic Thought from Lublin:  Person and Community 219-220 (1993).