Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry by Alasdair MacIntyre.

In a series of lectures presented at Edinburgh University in 1988, Alasdair MacIntyre divided modern philosophical thought into two opposing sides, and offered a third as a solution to them both. Entitled Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, the collection of lectures begins with MacIntyre’s definitions: encyclopaedists, whose thought dominated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, saw rationality as objective. Beginning with Descartes and Kant, the encyclopaedists assumed that every human being could access rationality on his or her own, that all could, working with systematic reasoning, eventually reach the same conclusions. All of history and all the disciplines were moving in the same direction, and all would eventually be impartially definable and categorizable, which is the implicit assumption behind the creation of the encyclopedia.

Genealogists, however, sharply dissented. Beginning with Nietzsche, the genealogists saw the assertion of rationality merely as the wielding of power; whoever held the power was the one who got to determine what was rational, right, or true. This meant that objective standards were actually temporally and culturally determined. Nothing could be universalized; the encyclopaedists were simply projecting their white-male Western ideals upon a world that could not relate to this limited perspective.

While few openly adhere to the tenets of the encyclopaedists within academia anymore, the view’s presuppositions underlie much of higher education. “The encyclopaedic mode of enquiry has become one more fideism and a fideism which increasingly flies in the face of contemporary realities” (p. 56).

The genealogists retain all the problems of relativism.

[T]he intelligibility of genealogy requires beliefs and allegiances of a kind precluded by the genealogical stance. Foucault’s carrying forward of Nietzsche’s enterprise has thus forced upon us two questions: Can the genealogical narrative find any place within itself for the genealogist? And can genealogy, as a systematic project, be made intelligible to the genealogist, as well as others, without some at least tacit recognition being accorded to just those standards and allegiances which is it avowed aim to disrupt and subvert? (p. 55).

Though it appears that the genealogists’ project has been little more than “progressive impoverishment” (p. 55), their accusations have been incisive enough to permanently disable the encyclopaedists. And so MacIntyre introduces his own theory: tradition-based Thomism.

The genealogists and encyclopaedists disagree markedly in regard to reason.

Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representation of particular interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness. What this alternative conceals from view is a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry (p. 59-60).

For MacIntyre, through Aristotle, conceives all areas of study, including philosophy, as a skill or craft. If “true reasoning . . . requires both intellectual and moral virtues,” then “the enquirer has to learn how to make him or herself into a particular kind of person if he or she is to move towards a knowledge of the truth about his or her good and about the human good” (p. 60-61). Such training allows one to develop “orexis or prohairesis, felt desire alone or guided by reason” (p. 62) to determine what is the good and right.

So to know what is good, we must be good. To escape this paradox, MacIntyre says, we must at first submit to authority to give us the preliminary skills for making this determination. "[W]e shall have to learn from that teacher and initially accept on the basis of his or her authority within the community of the craft precisely what intellectual and moral habits it is which we must cultivate and acquire if we are to become effective self-moved participants in such enquiry” (p. 63). This is antithetical to both the objective individualist rationality of the encyclopaedists and the mistrust of power of the genealogists.

MacIntyre’s Thomism, a tradition-based conception of rationality tracing back to Aquinas, bears features of both of the frameworks that he has judged incomplete, while carrying the idea of craft further. “To share in the rationality of a craft requires sharing in the contingencies of its history, understanding its story as one’s own, and finding a place for oneself as a character in the enacted dramatic narrative which is that story so far” (p. 65). In the “master-craft of master-crafts,” philosophy, the “embodied mind actualizes its potentialities,” and “failure in learning what one should come to know is always rooted in defect in respect of the virtues” (p. 68).

Viewing the three rival versions as narratives exhibits their fundamental differences.

[T]he encyclopaedists’ narrative reduces the past to a mere prologue to the rational present, while the genealogist struggles in the construction of his or her narrative against the past, including that of the past which is perceived as hidden within the alleged rationality of the present. The Thomists’ narrative, by contrast with both of these, treats the past as neither as mere prologue not as something to be struggled against, but as that from which we have to learn if we are to identify and move towards our telos more adequately (p. 79).

MacIntyre accesses Augustine for his conception of moral enquiry.

The will which directs [the intellect and the desires] is initially perverse and needs a kind of redirection which will enable it to trust obediently in a teacher who will guide the mind towards the discovery both of its own resources and of what lies outside the mind, both in nature and in God. Hence faith in authority has to precede rational understanding. And hence the acquisition of that virtue which the will requires to be so guided, humility, is the necessary first step in education or in self-education. In learning therefore we move towards and not from first principles, and we discover truth only insofar as we discover the conformity of particulars to the form in relation to which those particulars become intelligible, a relationship apprehended only by the mind illuminated by God. Rational justification is thus essentially retrospective (p. 84).

MacIntyre agrees with Aquinas’ assertion that perfect virtue must have its source outside of the soul. “[T]he ultimate good must lie in the relationship of the soul to something outside itself . . . in no state available in this created world can the type of good in question be found. There are indeed a variety of imperfect happinesses to be found in this world, but neither separately or in conjunction can they constitute the human end” (p. 137). Without such a conception of the ideal, “the soul would find itself directed beyond all finite goods, unsatisfiable by those goods, and yet able to find nothing beyond them to satisfy it” (p. 138).

The relationship between reason and the passions is a critical element of making moral determinations. “What has to be discovered is how to order the passions so that they may serve and not distract reason in its pursuit of the specific end, the good” (p. 139). There is a universally “rooted tendency to disobedience in the will and distraction by passion, which causes the obscuring of the reason and on occasion systematic cultural deformation. . . . The acknowledgment by oneself of radical defect is a necessary condition for one’s reception of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity” (p. 140).

In sharp contrast to Descartes, Aquinas insists on the necessity of the embodiment of the mind and its encounters with objects. “For Aquinas a human being is not a soul plus a body but a body which has a soul. Human experience is bodily experience, and the soul knows and knows about singulars only on the basis of that experience as mediated by imagination—itself a bodily phenomenon—and structured in terms of form by intellect. The human mind is thus not self-sufficient, on Aquinas’ view; it is rather . . . incomplete without that encounter with the objects of sense from which it moves to the actuality of knowledge” (p. 153). That was the most exciting passage in the entire book—it dovetails remarkably well with the physiological account of the human articulated by Damasio.

Personal identity within the Thomistic framework takes on a specific form unlike the disembodied mind of the encyclopaedists or the shifting impermanence of the genealogists. Under Thomism, we are bodies, members of a community engaging with one another and liable for the actions perpetuated by our bodies. As “teleologically ordered unit[ies],” we are responsible for discovering the ends of our lives according to the narrative that they assume, from birth until death. “[E]very particular life as a whole exists in its particular parts, in that range of particular actions, transactions, and projects which are the enacted narrative of that life, and as the life of that one particular body” (p. 197).

The community that MacIntyre envisions provides a functional forum for disagreement because it can occur upon the foundation of a shared set of beliefs and values.

It is only insofar as someone satisfies the conditions for rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical refutation that the person can come to know whether and what he or she knows. It is only by belonging to a community systematically engaged in a dialectical enterprise in which the standards are sovereign over the contending parties that one can begin to learn the truth, by first learning the truth about one’s error, not error from this or that point of view but error as such, the shadow cast by truth as such: contradiction in respect of utterance about the virtues (p. 200).

A shared framework allows the members of a community to hold one another accountable as they pursue their ends together.

In a community which shares this conception of accountability in enquiry, education is first of all an initiation into the practices within which dialectical and confessional interrogation and self-interrogation are institutionalized. And that initiation has to take the form of a reappropriation by each individual of the history of the formation and transformations of belief through those practices, so that the history of thought and practice is reenacted and the novice learns from that reenactment not only what the best theses, arguments, and doctrines to emerge so far have been, but also how to rescrutinize them so that they become genuinely his or hers and how to extend them further in ways which will expose him or her further to those interrogations through which accountability is realized (p. 201).