MacIntyre and stories

Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

...man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' We enter human society, that is, with one of more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they ae in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be constured. It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kinds, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the dram into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. After Virtue, p. 216

This is even more so of being a follower of Christ, yes?

Jeffrey Stout asks three good questions

It's been a hard couple of weeks!

Stout challenges MacIntyre, Hauerwas and Milbank - who have harboured such resentment against modern secular democracy. He asks three good questions (Democracy and Tradition, p. 104):

is it not possible to discern the workings of the Holy Spirit, and thus some reflections of God's redemptive activity, in modern democratic aspirations?

is there nothing in the political life of modern democracies, or in the lives of those who are struggling for just and decent arrangements within them, that a loving God would bless?

if the plenitude of God's triune inner life shones forth in all of creation, cannot theology discren some such light in democratic political community?

Well indeed. I would add a fourth question: is it not the case that modern democratic community is the child of Christendom, even if it is somewhat of a prodigal?

Jeffrey Stout and Piety

Jeffrey Stout is a very interesting figure in the American political philosophy and ethics scene. For one, he is a liberal who takes theologians and theology seriously. In particular, he addresses the work of Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre as 'new traditionalists', and even adds to this company John Milbank. Stout is a finder of common ground, a man who mediates between seemingly intractable positions.

In his 2004 book Democracy and Tradition, Stout traces some interesting themes. Often, democracy is accused of 'impiety' by traditionalists: it emphasises self-reliance rather than observance of the conventions of the community and the spirit of place. Yet, in his reading of Emerson and Whitman, Stout finds that piety is in fact reconfigured rather than abandoned. He would contend then, that democracy is spiritual and pious, if not religious.

More on this anon.

Alasdair MacIntyre on 'morality'

MacIntyre makes a great critique of what we call 'ethics' or 'morality': which these days seems to be shunted off into committees, of all things...

...there is no word correctly translated by our moder word 'morality' in any ancient or medieval language. And this lack of a word is a symptom of the different way s in which different forms and aspects of social life were classified in the societies in which those languages were spken and written.... [ he notes that this is true of 'art' as well...] ... so when later modern historians of ethics...have extracted from the writings of ancient or medieval authors that which, according to the modern conception, belongs to ethics, we have too often projected back on to the past categories alien to that past with two highly misleading results. p. 191

In sum:

1 - we detach arbitrarily parts from wholes without which they become distorted, and;

2 - we obscure that moment when 'morality' becomes a distinct category from ourselves.

MacIntyre and the failure of Culture

Every culture is characterised in part by what it conceals and obscures from view, by what its habits of mind prevent it from ackonwledging and appropriating. We err therefore in so largely, sometimes exclusively writing the history of ideas, of science, of art, of culture in general in terms of positive achievement. Culture is present also in failure and it can in crucial respects blind the educated to what needs to be seen. So it was with the failure to understand the work of Aquinas in the late Middle Ages. So perhaps it may be with us... . p. 169

This is a rather a gloomy - characteristically grumpy we might say - assessment of the state of intellectual enquiry! MacIntyre characterises the reception of Aquinas' grand synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine as a rank failure, with the usual suspects - Occam and Scotus - taking a beating on this. And in Meister Eckhart's sermons, the business of theological thinking becomes (for MacIntyre) separated from rational thinking: preaching becomes a matter of rhetorical effect, a 'mere rationalization of the preacher's processes'. This effect MacIntyre sees very much in evidence today.

Martyrdom as communicative act

Sydney's St Andrew's Cathedral.

I have been reading in MacIntyre about different, indeed rival, rationalities. In particular, he wants to show how incommensurate different rationalities are: how it is nigh impossible to understand one from the point of view of the other without translating it into terms that limit and distort it.

Now, what attracted me to martyrdom as a subject was partly the huge dissonance it revealed between two different 'rationalities' (or perhaps 'world views'): that is to say, for the secular liberal, Christian martyrdom can only be understood as a life-denying, futile and possibly violence-perpetuation act. For the Christian, we cannot really see what the secularists concern is. And, it is worth asking at this point whether martyrdom becomes the ultimate 'no' to further communication with the other point of view - 'I am ready to accept death rather than accept your terms of conversation, or to concede anything' seems to be the attitude, or it could be read as that I guess. It is a defiance of rational discussion, apparently. Is martyrdom then merely a point at which the two world-views are shown to be irreconcilable, and that's that? Is it merely a gesture of defiance against the alternate order of power?

But: martyrdom is a remarkably successful form of communication to the non-church world. We cannot forget: the martyrs of Jesus Christ overthrew a mighty empire from within! The note that Christian martyrdom strikes is dissonant to the extent that it exposes the futility of opposition to God. It testifies to the non-ultimacy of human political power - and it testifies to that power itself. Sometimes, it seems, even the rulers and the soldiers get the message. Remember the centurion 'when he saw how Jesus died' said 'surely this was the Son of God'...'The blood of the martyrs' as Tertullian said 'is the seed of the church'. Which is to say, the blood of the martyrs convinces outsiders of the need to become insiders, to say 'I'll have what he's/she's having'.

Question is: what is it about martyrdom that communicates so well? This question asks at a deeper level: what is it in martyrdom coming as it does out of a precisely Christian understanding of the world that is able to be meaningful enough in any world-view?
Is it an exhibition of remarkable courage, or endurance, or some virtue that is found nowhere else in these proportions? Or is the meaning - the story - that the martyrs and their brethren attach to their deaths?

Alasdair MacIntyre continues...

Well, I shoulda read the next chapter before posting! As MacIntyre tells it, Thomas Aquinas was uniquely able to reconcile Augustinianism and Aristotelianism in his thought. This was because he didn't imagine that he was translating one into the terms of the other - MacIntyre thinks this never works. What he was able to do was to inhabit both worlds of though in true bilingual fashion, and so produce a synthesis which was native to both.

MacIntyre doesn't give much detail as yet as to how this actually works out in Thomas' thought. How can he hold together a strong view of original sin and its noetic effects AND also have an Aristotelian rationality?

Alasdair MacIntyre on Augustinianism and its flaws

MacIntyre's analysis of the history of moral enquiry reaches charts the rise of the Augustinian tradition in the middle ages. Augustinianism, as he outlines it, on the one hand, has a strong centre: all knowledge coheres around the divine. Knowledge is only gained from giving oneself over, by an act of faith, to an authority. It is confessional. But (and it is a big but) knowing in human terms is deeply affected by sin's distorting and disrupting effects. Pure knowledge is not possible because of sin.

This might seem contradictory: it is certainly a tension in the heart of Augustinianism, and one that Calvinism (and for that matter Lutheranism) has struggled to resolve. Certainly, that is why Calvin and others give accounts of divine illumination being necessary for even basic knowledge of the world.

BUT: a huge challenge comes with the adoption of Aristotelianism into the Augustinian way of thinking, or the attempted adoption at least. Aristotelianism denies that there is a need for this fideistic first step: it has no account of the genesis of knowledge as an externally given thing. Augustinianism, after all, is Platonistic.

Can the two be reconciled? I await MacIntyre's further analysis: but in the meantime, let me just say this -

it is interesting that Aristotelianism was adapted in so wholesale a fashion by the 17th century Protestants when the roots of their movement were so markedly Augustinian. Could they really make this adaptation without betraying the true genius of Protestantism (as a particularly concentrated form of Augustinianism)?

'Too many Thomisms?' Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre introduces the 'third way' in his Gifford lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: not encylopeadia or genealogy, but Thomism... The sample text is the Aeterni Patris of 1879, an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII.

How does this 'Thomism' differ? Well, it recognises that philosophy is a virtue-guided craft, in which the business of being a teacher and an apprentice is integral:

...there emerges a conception of rational teaching authority internal to the practice of the craft of moral enquiry, as indeed such conceptions emerge in such other crafts as furniture making and fishing, where, just as in moral enquiry, they partially define the relationship of master-craftsman to apprentice. p. 63

Partly what is interesting and helpful about this version of Thomism is that it ignores questions of epistemology which are ultimately so, well, boring...

Of course, as Thomism was received in Catholic teaching following the encyclical, this was not the case. So, in Jacques Maritain and others there is a much more epistemologically driven version of Thomism, one that doesn't reckon with Thomas's own dependence on divine revelation. As MacIntyre writes:

What Maritain wished to affirm was a modern version of Aquinas's thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural knowledge of divien law and hence of what every human being owes to every other human being. The plain prephilosophical person is always a person of sufficient moral capacities. But what Maritain failed to reckon with adequately was the fact that in many cultures and notably in that of modernity plain persons are misled into giving moral expression to those capacities thourgh assent to false philosophical theories. So it has been since the 18th century with assent to a conception of rights alien to and absent from Aquinas' thought. For on Aquinas' view the rights which are normative for human relationships are derived from and warranted only by divine law, apprehended by those without the resources afforded by God's self-revelation as the natural law. Law is primary, rights are secondary. But for Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modernity, human rights provide a standard prior to all law. p. 76

I find this fascinating, as I have heard Thomists crowing about the emergence of human rights as if this was proof of the obviousness of their reading of Thomism. Evidently, not.

Alasdair MacIntyre: encyclopaedia and geneaology

Simon and a French goat. They seem pretty much the same as other goats.

MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry begins with a narrative about the creation of the Gifford lectures themselves - which is a brilliant, almost funny, self-referential move. The conceit is 'should these lectures really be given'? - which of course, MacIntyre undoes by, well, giving them.

The 19th C. Scottish academics with whom MacIntyre begins are exemplars of the 'encyclopedic' view of truth and knowledge. The genre that represents what they assumed best is the encyclopedia article - comprehensive, conclusive, prolix, 'scientific', based on facts, authoritative, 'expert'. This was not a discussion of authoritative texts, but rather was its own authoritative text.

The geneaologist on the other hand, of whom Nietzche is the supreme example, repudiated the very structures of knowledge and the institutions that produced it - and furthermore, the genres that represent it. So, Nietzche's personal journey led him away from the academy and into the Alps. His writing became prophetic, allusive, even self-contradictory, proverbial and with the appearance of incompleteness.

As MacIntyre points out: the geneaologist has (in his book) won a decisive victory over the encyclopedist in exposing his/her assumptions and pretensions. However, it is not clear how the geneaologist has escaped the charge that he has levelled at his opponent. Foucault, for example, undoubtedly a neo-Nietzchean, became more an icon of academic authority as his career went on, and did not dissuade his very deferential interviewers from their sycophancy, nor shatter his own idol once it had been built.

I have yet to read about the third rival version, namely 'tradition'. However, it strikes me that Kierkegaard could be an interesting mediating figure here, though perhaps on the geneaological side. It further strikes me that in Christian theology there remain those who take an encyclopedic approach and those who take a more 'geneaological' approach. They are as apparently incommensurate in this context as they are in philosophy...

Alasdair MacIntyre on disagreement

Simon and Sacha at Nantes Chateau, where the Edict of Nantes was signed (so they say).

Alasdair MacIntyre's Gifford Lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry begins with an observation about the experience of delivering the lectures themselves: that the debate elicited responses that varied according to the rational systems deployed by the participants. As he notes:

...nothing is more striking in the contemporary university than the extent of the apparently ineliminable continuing divisions and conflicts within all humanistic enquiry ... p. 6

What we really experience I guess is more like a 'multi-versity', where the clash of theoretical commitments rings out accross the campus. Or, perhaps, as MacIntyre suspects, the only engagements that occur are between people who already share the same rational commitments. This might be accross disciplines - and the disagreements may run through individual disciplines. MacIntyre goes on:

Hence debate between fundamentally opposed standpoints does occur; but it is inevitably inconclusive. Each warring position characteristically appears irrefutable to its own adherents; indeed in its own terms and by its own standards of argument it IS in practice irrefutable. But each warring position equally seems to its opponents to be insufficiently warranted by rational argument.

And then, the interesting bit:

It is ironic that the wholly secular humanistic disciplines of the late twentieth century should thus reproduce that very same condition which led their nineteenth century secularizing predecessors to dismiss the claim of theology to be worthy of the status of an academic discipline. p. 7

This attack on theology still goes on of course...and yet, is political philosophy any different (for example)?