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74 - Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition |
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition
By Alasdair MacIntyre
Notre Dame, Notre Dame University Press, 1990. 241 Pp. $24.95.
Substantive, intellectual conflict is not usually a welcome visitor, let alone a permanent resident, in churches, seminaries, and universities of the United States. How refreshing, then, to read in the final chapter of Alasdair MacIntyre's latest book his vision of the university "as an arena of conflict in which the most fundamental type of moral and theological disagreement [would be] accorded recognition."
In my experience as a university and seminary professor, I found most faculty members to be highly allergic to discussing, defending, changing, and supporting their interpretations of the world in discussion and disputation with each other. The annual ritual exchanges at professional society meetings were less entertaining and less productive than annual ringing clashes of the heads of bighorn sheep. But even such semi-public discussion of academic papers was understood to be not a passionate and partisan sorting out toward truth, but rather a necessary, if increasingly tedious, impersonal, and allegedly objective walking of the fine line toward tenure. As Ambrose Bierce might have put it, tenure is the condition of being protected from the negative consequences of the controversy one is no longer interested in creating.
MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry is a further working of the Gifford Lectures he delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988. The first rival version of moral enquiry is exemplified in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, produced by congenial contemporaries of Adam Gifford in the last fifth of the nineteenth century and present today in the "liberal" university. The second rival is rooted in Nietzsche's subversion of this official academic view, receives its label from his Genealogy of Morals, and is present today especially in its deconstructionist descendents. The third rival is derived from Aquinas' "philosophical and theological synthesis" of Augustinianism and Aristotelianism, is named by MacIntyre the "rationality of tradition," and is present in this work and as the utopic vision of the university and the lecture projected in the last chapter. The irony of challenging the very idea of Gifford lectures while delivering them introduces and closes this work.
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75 - Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition |
The conflict that generates MacIntyre's intellectual attention is the "incommensurability" of the rival versions of moral enquiry. But the exclusion of philosophical and theological moral deliberation from the core of the university and the absence of alternative institutional sites for such deliberation leave (Western) societies without a means of addressing the "presently unresolvable disagreements and conflicts which stem from [this incommensurability]." In a series of chapters on each rival version and three on Aquinas's synthesis, MacIntyre re-forms the usual lament about moral relativism and projects a way to move beyond it.
He finds in Aquinas' reworking of Augustine and Aristotle an intellectual example that could serve to move the incommensurable rivals into what now seems by definition impossible conversation. Why would rivals who do not construe truth, the self, community, morality, or philosophy with similar terms even talk with each other? Because, says MacIntyre, there are flaws in each system that it is in the self-interest of proponents to correct. Further, the very existence of the university is challenged by this incommensurability. The self-interest is not only intellectual integrity but also, implicitly here, economic security.
Anyone interested in understanding more fully the historical roots of moral pluralism in western European derived societies would benefit from this study. Anyone interested in understanding the continuing exclusion of moral philosophy and theology from university curricula should read this book. Anyone concerned with the co-opting of moral discourse by one group of moralists should read this book. Anyone who wants a "fast read" resource for an upcoming sermon, lecture, or seminar should plan to read this book later, when slow and steady attention is possible.
The conflict for which MacIntyre calls is not unlimited. In order to have the possibility of conversation about morality, some precepts or concepts must be held in common. I wonder whether the tradition MacIntyre finds rational would be open to real diversity. I think, for example, of the very different ways in which selfhood and community are construed in Protestant seminaries and in the moral systems of native nations in the United States. Is it possible to find out whether there is enough in common to hold fruitful conflict without falling back into the imposition of European norms for deciding what constitutes "common"? Given the imminent anniversary of Christopher Columbus' navigational error, that is not an idle example.
MacIntyre refers on the second to the last page of the book to the "political dimension" of projected encounter between the rival types of moral enquiry. This dimension is the active resistance by "the structures of present society" to "being put in question by such systematic intellectual and moral enquiry." What if this is true not only
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of government, business, and the university, but also of church, synagogue, and seminary? If at the margins is where the passion for justice is alive and well, can these voices be heard "in the central forums of our cultural and social order"? Voices crying in the wilderness might only be co-opted if they move into the city. To MacIntyre's credit, he is not unaware of this danger.
ELIZABETH BETTENHAUSEN
Women's Theological Center
Boston, Massachusetts