In a half-dozen class-rooms they gather – to follow the love-song of Dido, to listen to the tale of Troy divine; to wander among the stars, to wander among men and nations. … Nothing new, no time-saving devices – simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is today laid before the freedmen’s sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will have one goal – not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes. The vision of life that has in it nothing mean or selfish; [that has] an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination to realize the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best.
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), The Soul of Black Folk (1903)
As a blog devoted primarily to culture, I view culture as the moral repository from which all politics and economics are derived. But culture, in itself, cannot be understood without accounting for the historical situation that develops and produces the arts, philosophies, and values that constitute a civilization. This includes assimilating a background of assumptions and beliefs about Nature, God, and Man; otherwise, neither culture, nor economics, nor politics will make any sense unless history is taken into account. If you have read any of my previous postings, you may conclude that I cover a lot of history; but to a large degree, I have covered the ancients and medieval scholastics of Europe, with a reference to non-western sources thrown into the mix. In this post, I am jumping to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to discuss the merits of one of the most important and vital thinkers of our time, the Scottish-born American moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929-Living).
EARLY YEARS
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born on January 12, 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland into a family of physicians. (Both his mother and father were physicians.) He was raised in a nominal (i.e., conventional) Presbyterian household, before going to London to attend Queen Mary College, London. He continued his education, earning Master of Arts degree from both the University of Manchester and from the University of Oxford.
MARXISM
He began his teaching career in 1951 at Manchester University. He developed an interest in Marxism, (not surprising for a city that was a longtime historical hotbed of socialist thought), which culminated in his first published work, Marxism, An Interpretation (1953), when he was just 24 years old. Coming from a nominal Christian background, he had an expectation that Marxism, unlike Christianity, had the internal resources and external applicability where people can situate themselves in an historical context, and then transcend that situation through the dialectic of history.*
*The use of the dialectic in reasoning has a long, historical track-record in reconciling opposites to produce a new synthesized idea that reconciles contrary concepts. Christianity has employed the material/spiritual and the Christ/Antichrist antitheses in the various traditions in which Christianity has put down roots. Marxist dialectic of capital/labor, and in its cultural manifestations of identity politics have taken root within nations and across national boundaries.
Believing strongly that Marxism had answers to societal problems that could not be answered by Christianity, he continued his affiliation with Marxism as a member of the Communist Party, followed for a brief time in the Socialist Labour League. It was during this time that ‘cracks’ began to appear in the international façade of Marxist Communism. Josef Stalin had died in 1953. By 1956, it became known that the former Soviet leader had committed outrageous crimes in his rule of terror. 1956 was also a year in which a war of liberation was unleashed in Hungary, only to be crushed by a wave of Soviet tanks, for which Marxist apologists had neither the moral nor intellectual resources to offer answers and rebuff their critics. What was Marxism lacking that enfeebled its defenders from offering cogent responses to account for these failures in communist practice?
Being that Marxism itself is an ideology that critiques morality itself, Macintyre asked this pointed question: without moral presuppositions, how can anyone respond to crime and injustice without having a moral or ethical foundation to respond to criticism? The only resource that can then be drawn upon is who has power, and the will to use that power, to attain ends.
Using moral language, he began to ask: what is the Marxist ideal of human flourishing? Is there any room for accounting for the possession of character, virtue, or other non-material goods in a Marxist framework? In deciding to adopt an intellectual position on Marxism, MacIntyre considered this question in the case of Marxist “failures”: how can one adequately respond to criticism, especially when no moral epistemology is available as a resource within the tradition?
EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS
MacIntyre refers to this phenomenon as an “epistemological crisis” – the inability to respond to criticisms about practices that cannot be defended, based on the terminology found in one’s own tradition of inquiry.**
**Macintyre distinguishes tradition (what is handed down) from traditions of inquiry: a “large-scale viewpoint”, for example, in evaluating a societal practice, such as Marxism. Marxism, like any other “tradition”, is developed over time. In other words, one looks to the history of its development. Marxism, according to MacIntyre, lacks the language, concepts, and internal resources, to address shortcomings or failures in practice. When an ideology ‘declines’ to answer its critics, its supporters double down—stay determined on persisting to insist that socialism is the wave of the future, despite repeated failure time after time. It would be asking too much to give up something so central to one’s being or identity.
This lacuna in the whole Marxist theoretical superstructure caused him to reject Marxism for digging in its heels, refusing to engage criticism of its moral imperatives, (or lack of them). When their defenders are unable to answer and vindicate their viewpoints, they fail in their claim to scientific rationality, i.e., to be taken seriously, because they are unable to bring insights from ethics to support their claims.
To successfully pass through an epistemological crisis that threatens to derail a whole train of thought, Marxism, to remain viable, needs to open itself to criticism from without – to ‘outside’ traditions, borrowing and applying “the other’s” terminologies and categories of thought. MacIntyre argues that there are cases of encounter in which one must come to admit the superiority of a different ideology. This occurs under circumstances where “foreign” concepts better explain why the crisis occurred in one’s own ‘culture’, but not in the outsider’s culture. Further progress would require, for example, accepting moral, ethical, teleological, and other non-material considerations from another tradition.
It is not only unnecessary, but also insufficient to rely on one’s own terminologies and categories of thought to resolve an epistemological crisis. “Vindication” through the use of one’s internal but limited terminology of one’s own tradition is itself insufficient to answer the question, “what went wrong?” When people reach a point where their own traditions are in crisis, in which the tinkering of reform within one’s framework fails to resolve a crisis, further progress may not be feasible. To remain viable, a society may decide that reform is wellnigh impossible that needs to be thrown out with the bathwater.***
Having reached a ‘dead end’ on hoping that Marxism could go any further into developing internal resources to answer its critics, he turned towards an “inner analysis” of mind, largely in an effort to overcome his doubts and skepticism of belief, and growing disenchantment with Marxism’s extravagant claims to calling itself “the final end of history” in which no further development was possible – having reached its ultimate pinnacle as material socialist paradise – a divine kingdom not in heaven, but here on earth. Words like exploitation (how?); class struggle (for what end?); corruption (of what?), and consciousness raising (to what?) necessitate ethical considerations and ends-in-view (teleology) to justify success and note failure. To justify means, in part, to defend; but not if justify is used to rationalize, excuse, overlook, or tolerate criminal behavior that is never addressed.
PHILOSOPHER WAYFARER
After Marxism, he turned to nonpolitical topics such as psychology (The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, 1958); theism (Difficulties in Christian Belief, 1959); historicism (Secularization and Moral Change, 1967); nonbelief (The Religious Significance of Atheism, 1969); linguistics (Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic, 1970); and logical positivism (Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, 1970). Rather than becoming grounded in a new way of being or belief, he became a skeptic to all truth claims. To break out of these “paper bag” constraints of collectivist accounts of society, he turned against large-scale ideological claims, to a more “personal” ethics on the scale of individual being and one’s role – or roles – in civil society.
Rather than becoming a thoroughgoing skeptic, having turned away from theoretical conjectures of macro grand-scale ideologies, he turned to enlightenment philosophers, who shared a skepticism of assumed first principles that had informed the West since the times of Plato and Aristotle. Starting with Descartes’ cogito, to be enlightened was to scrap first principles from one’s own tradition, in order to become rational, that is, to develop one’s own first principles in light of one’s own independent reflections. This subjectivism would turn out to become a tougher paper bag than the Marxist constraints that he had discovered and broke free of from his student and early teaching years.
HUME’S EMPIRICISM
In “starting over”, he “returned home” to his own nation’s tradition of inquiry, investigating the rational claims of the eighteenth-century philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially as reflected in the empiricism of David Hume. Empiricism tries to account for the reality found in the mind to determine if the mind matches the data of experience. His empiricism furnished a rich perspective of understanding experience, finding much that is consistent, or regular, in connecting ‘events’, but lacked the certainty of causation hoped for by Descartes and his Enlightenment successors. Hume’s theory of causation in his schema of practical reason relies on inferences. Such inferences constitute almost every field that endeavors to explain data and draw conclusions. Such “drawing” to arrive at conclusions lack necessity; such reason purporting to a necessary conclusion is a leap in logic, which is governed more by passion than by reason as such – an instrumental rationality concerning which means to employ to achieve a predetermined, given end. This, however, denies reason a source of direction regarding which ends to follow.
GERMAN IDEALISM
Upon moving to the United States in 1970, he was not just leaving a country he had for forty years called home, but leaving behind the dead ends of Hume’s skepticism and Enlightenment sole ratione, (rationalism alone), i.e., rationalism independent of history and tradition. Before fully turning to nonideological – but teleological ‘virtue ethics’ and moral philosophy, he revisited both secular and religious thought to look for new foundations to build a workable philosophy that should not lead into the Scylla and Charybdis dead-ends of totalization ideologies (i.e., Marxism), nor the individualistic solipsism found in the ideologies arising out of the Cartesian doubting of everything, except for the certainty of the self. Starting with Homer in Greece’s Heroic Age, proceeding through St. Augustine and his contributions to Thomism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and finally to Hume, MacIntyre concluded, along with Augustine, that Hume’s conclusion about the passions and reason is that passion begets reason, i.e., that passion is the ruler of reason, no matter how much self-control and detachment that the observer is careful to make in monitoring one’s own intentions to phenomena under investigation. Taking a page from German idealism, MacIntyre traced Kant’s deontological ethics of “duty for right–ness sake”, to Schopenhauer’s notions of a world operating like clockwork as though it had an autonomous and independent will, giving flight to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit of the historical juggernaut of freedom. Still, none of these philosophs could furnish a philosophy of ethics as practical reason. Friedrich Nietzsche, a classical scholar as well as a philosopher, in his epigrammatic and literary criticisms, would take the deontological will and World Spirit of the German idealists and develop them to their logical conclusions: that one does not reason into truth, but rather determines, a priori, whether there is value in the truth of an idea. This is not detached reason, but a free act of a passionate will. Whether we call it freedom of the will, it is governed by passion – the deeper the passion, the stronger the will. It is the value of an idea, coupled with a strong passion, that drives the will to power. This will to power was the true underpinning of the Hegelian dialectic of history, not the juggernaut World Spirit of Hegel’s Logic and philosophy of history. Two more cul-de-sacs on MacInytre’s philosophic journey are thus manifested: first, Hume’s empirical “inferential skepticism”; and second, German Idealism’s practical reason as a ‘cover’ for the will to power.
In finding virtually all “liberal or modernist” (i.e., Enlightenment) philosophers wanting in their treatment of ends-in-view (i.e., teleology), he considered revisiting both Christianity and Marxism. It was Marx’s promise of salvation in this world, and Christianity’s promise of salvation in an eternal world outside of time that had stirred his original interest in philosophy, due, in large part, in their teleological truth claims. He rejected Marx for his turn to positivism, as practiced in the social sciences, because positivism lacks the substance of human flourishing in its disdainful ignoring of personal character and the practical wisdom of possessing virtue. MacIntyre, likewise, did not fully embrace the claims of Christianity. He prescinded from its ‘teachings’ that he viewed as a long screed of scholastic nitpicking, replete with dogmatic assertions, fixed and frozen**** in time, with a tendency to seek salvation in quietism, rather than the hard work of building the divine kingdom to come, “on earth, as it is in heaven.” *****
**** MacIntyre was apparently unfamiliar with John Henry Cardinal Newman’s treatment of dogmas and doctrines as not ‘fixed and frozen’, but that they ‘develop’ and ‘unfold’ over time. Dogmas, like ‘peoples’, develop over time, that is, they are historical in nature. For both, development consists of the unfolding of internal potentialities already present in their constitution, that are activated, in time, in order to actuate, i.e., to realize, the potential within. ‘Unfolding’ is a gradual process, tested over time; it is not limited to the making of progress seen through the prism of a historicist framework. In fact, the Saturn of time will likely “contra-develop”, i.e., regress through the periodic sloughing of worn-out worldviews, in favor of new generative ideas, of new ways of conceiving the world. Here lies the unquestioned assumption that ‘generative ideas’ are considered ‘progressive’, because “the worth of an idea is measured by the enthusiasm it generates” – whether good or bad. After all, National Socialism in Germany had many enthusiasts.
Newman did not share enthusiasm in greeting the works published by his contemporaries known as the Neologians. Neologism designates the systems of nineteenth century German theologians who retained traditional theological language, while radically altering its meaning, to exclude supernatural agency. They professed Christianity, then proceeded to subvert church teaching from within – a tenet of theological liberalism. Newman saw theological liberalism as the systematic subversion of revelation, which assumes an authoritative point of reference in the world independent of the individual mind.
Thomas Aquinas’ ‘teaching’ of dogma was not teaching as such, but reasoned-out responses to ‘disputed questions’ from students, colleagues, and ecclesial officials of university and magisterium. Some conclusions were soundly reasoned; others, less so. Every conclusion that was ‘sound’ did not add to the deposit of faith. That would take time. The immediate status of his conclusions can be described as the best articulation or answer reached to date, but by no means conclusory as a statement of dogma. Thomas’ responses to disputed questions cannot but be no more than, the best answer reached so far. They are not collections of unassailable final conclusions that close debate.
***** The Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – all profess to doing, obeying, or submitting, first, to the Will of God; and second, to do God’s Will, mentioned in the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel of Matthew: Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:9-13). None of the Abrahamic faiths emphasize a spiritual life grounded in Quietism. They hold the view that men and women, on their own, cannot achieve perfection in a passive state, nor be idle in the face of injustice, so that the Messiah or God can act in history. Practitioners of Quietism weaken their own interior life, rather than deepen it. They experience the need to quiet the soul, by excluding all definite thought and all interior action. Quietism has been discerned in several religious movements, both Christian and non-Christian: Quakerism’s sudden (creed-less) call to express an ‘inner light’; Mahayana Buddhism overcoming the illusional world to achieve Nirvana; Zen Buddhism’s awaiting satori; Centering Prayer in contemporary Christianity.
FACT-VALUE DISTINCTION AND THE ROLE OF AUTHORITY
Central to Macintyre’s rejection of the “Modernist Enlightenment” and all its cynosures – Descartes, Hume, Marx, German Idealism, Positivism, Liberalism – and now Postmodernism, is their treatment of facts.***** *
***** * I am not referring to facts in their common collocations such as fact or fiction; or fact vs. opinion. “Facts” such as actions, deeds, events, or occasions, are mediated, by an observer, through description and reaching conclusions from the processing of impressions, and the manufacturing and production of information from data.
What they were all missing in their ‘facts’, is a teleological outlook. This is reflected in the age-old dilemma of predicating a fact in order to arrive at a value – better known to moral philosophers as the is-ought distinction. Is-statements, which concern facts about the natural world, do not imply ought–statements, which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. What is needed to complete the gap between the subject “I”,and the predicated ought, is the presence of authority. And he concluded that the Kantian deontological ethics of duty (doing the right thing, doing what is right) fails to predicate a linkage from an is to an ought. What is missing is an observer needed to mediate what William James refers to as the ‘bare facts’ of experience. For example, it can be expressed in the form of a syllogism.
- (major premise): having a zeal for knowledge and learning is good
- (minor premise): none
- (conclusion): everyone knows that a zeal for knowledge and learning is good
All that remains in the above syllogism is a tautology: the subject predicates itself; or the subject predicates nothing. It is a form of circular reasoning.
In making the logical ‘leap’ from fact to value, you can interpose as a minor premise an authority or a description:
- (major premise): having a zeal for knowledge and learning is good;
- (minor premise): According to St. Augustine (authority), a zeal for knowledge and learning is concupiscence of the mind, which masquerades as a zeal for knowledge and learning, in which a disciplined approach is missing (description);
- (conclusion): a zeal for knowledge and learning is not an unalloyed good, unless it is disciplined.
In the latter syllogism, there is no gap between the fact statement (the major premise); and the value statement (the evaluated conclusion).
ARISTOTLE AND AUGUSTINE – THE MISSING LINKS
MacIntyre, after much reflection, concluded in his more mature works, After Virtue (1981); and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) arrived at the conclusion that the virtue ethics of Aristotle still offers a well-thought-out prescription for living the good life, that is, the best possible life in a polis. While concluding that Aristotle still possesses the best virtue ethics upon which to live a life worth living, his model of the ‘magnanimous man’ – the epitome of arete (excellence) does not account for the nature of sin, in its many manifestations: as pride, arrogance, conceit, smugness, injustice, inequity, bias, partiality, or favoritism; nor does he offer a philosophy for the eschatology of the four final things of man: death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
Aristotle’s description of moral excellence is not limited to a particular, historical practice in ancient Greece. His virtue ethics have continued on through the decline and fall of the Roman civilization of Augustine’s time, lost, rediscovered, and continued in the scholastic synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, begetting the Thomist tradition that stands up to modern critiques posed by Luther’s justification, Hume’s empiricism, and modern liberal and relativistic challenges. Aristotle, through Thomism, has become a universal quality of those who understand that good judgment emanates from good character.
Modern liberal thinkers imagine themselves to be independent, but MacIntyre charges that from an Aristotelian point of view, they have refused to learn that “one cannot think for oneself if one thinks entirely by oneself,” and that it is only by participation in rational practice‑based community that one becomes rational. And that place is the polis, where political life ‘practices’ rationality. The focus of Aristotelian political life is subsidiaric: family, neighborhood, workplace, parish, school, clinic, or communities which feed the hungry and shelter the homeless – those communities in harmony with the divine order.
Liberalism, on the other hand, expresses no modern notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance, nor precepts for living the best possible life. Modernist precepts offer a plenitude of choices, which enlarges a range of legitimate ‘options’. But options for what? Modern Liberalism and postmodernism are unwilling to contemplate and assess the nature of goodness and the existence of evil. Liberals are willing to engage opponents in debate, subject to, and necessarily consists of, identifying common ground, as opposed to the common good. For liberals and postmodernists, goodness is neither intrinsic in itself, nor is it a property inherent in some idea, person, place, thing or situation. What is good consists of our ‘relation’ to some ‘phenomena’ in which we judge ‘it’ based on what appears to or seems to us to be agreeable, suitable, or valuable. In this sense, nothing is ‘really’ good.
Aristotle’s lucubrations on the magnanimous man has the ring of Pelagianism, the absence of sin and the need for grace to overcome the besetting sins of men of power, wealth, and status. St. Augustine noted this gap in Aristotle’s ethics: that he does not account for man’s sinful nature. According to St. Augustine, evil is not just an absence or deprivation of the good, but is something that must exist for goodness to exist, because one must have an idea of both good and evil as premises for any moral judgment. If the soul was originally created as good, then it must have been corrupted by something (bad or evil) that is real, even if it starts as nothing more than carelessness, frivolity, or indifference. However, to say that evil is merely a bad use of ‘goods’, or a result of erroneous decisions made by the will, does not account for ‘victims’ of violence, swindling, slander, etc., from the evil dispositions of others. To gloss over these real evils lulls one into a sense of false security.
Augustine concludes that the Christian life requires eternal vigilance to not let verities decay or drift into entropy. Eternal vigilance is not fighting for ‘the past’, but for what ‘stands alive’ today. It surpasses time, and is, in essence, beyond time. Augustine’s philosophy of time brings the past, present, future together, as memory, sight, expectation. Time is eternal, not in progressive movement, but as ‘always’ being present today, which tends men to aspire to God, in his love for the past, ‘hope’ for the future, and faith through work – that can be built on today. The eschatology of Augustine is not a future time, but an eternal war between the Christ and the anti-Christ. The theological virtue of hope – for Jesus’ Second Coming – is what ‘defeats’ the Anti-Christ. Defeat mingles with triumph; decay fosters renewal. Thus, all that is heaven and earth is sub specie aeternitatis – under the aspect of eternity.
MacIntyre uses Aquinas to illustrate the revolutionary potential of traditional enquiry. Thomas was educated in Augustinian theology and Aristotelian philosophy, and through this education he began to see not only the contradictions between the two traditions, but also the strengths and weaknesses that each tradition revealed in the other. His education also helped him to discover a host of questions and problems that had to be answered and solved.
MacIntyre concludes that Thomistic synthesis of Augustinian and Aristotelian thought has been confirmed in its encounter with other traditions. His analysis supports traditional thought against secular liberal scientism prevailing in the West. Christianity, as manifested in Thomistic philosophy, has shown itself time and time again, as rationally sound, against opposing viewpoints, through an intellectual tradition that can explain both successes and failures in the conclusions of its rivals.
If the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the upheavals of Europe’s previous dark ages, we need not be resigned to accepting a fated civilization that seems ‘destined’ to commit suicide, like a moth inextricably drawn to the flame. We are now living in very different times. The barbarians are among us, as a dangerous Fifth Column that has been governing us for quite some time, moving culture closer to the Abolition of Man. To arrest Man’s Abolition, what matters is construction of local forms of community – a new monasticism, a new Benedictine rule on living in a community of inquirers – where civility and intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the abyss of a new dark age, which is already upon us. We are not without grounds for hope.
