Alasdair MacIntyre's subject is philosophical ethics, and he is best known for his critique of ethics understood as the application of general, universal principles. He has reintroduced the importance of virtue ethics, along with the role of narrative and community in defining the virtues. His focus on these things—narrative, community, virtue—combine to form an approach to enquiry which he calls ‘tradition enquiry.’[1]
MacIntyre characterises ethical thinking in the West in our day as ethics that has lost an understanding of the virtues, even if virtues like ‘justice’ are often under discussion. Greek philosophical ethics, and ethics through to the Enlightenment, focussed ethics on virtue and began with questions of character: 'Who should we be?', rather than questions of action, 'What shall we do?' Contemporary ethics has focused on the latter question alone, with the magisterial traditions of deontological ('What rules govern our actions?') and teleological ('What goals govern our actions?') ethics as examples. But surely an ethic of doing should be based on a moral vision of the sort of character we wish to uphold or become.
In his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, MacIntyre suggested that ethics of various sorts can be understood as three types of inquiry: encyclopaedia, genealogy, and tradition. None of these terms are in general use, and so some further explanation is required. By 'encyclopaedia', MacIntyre means primarily ethics since the Enlightenment as we find it in those authors who believe that clarity in moral quests might come through scientific application of principles and criteria. By 'genealogy' he means the criticism of all such constructions--a deconstruction of all systems, which might take place through an inquiry into the 'genealogy' of such constructions. This anti-foundationalism for ethics functions as a gadfly for any positive attempts to establish a morality. By 'tradition' MacIntyre means ethics pursued upon the presuppositions of a given tradition, not universally applicable but nevertheless foundational inasmuch as tradition offers a foundation for a people committed to it.
Encyclopaedia
MacIntyre’s prime example for the encyclopaedic version of moral enquiry is the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Thomas Spencer Baynes, the editor of the Ninth Edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1873), described the scientific method of encyclopaedic version of inquiry as follows: ‘The available facts of human history, collected over the widest areas, are carefully coordinated and grouped together, in the hope of ultimately evolving the laws of progress, moral and material, which underlie them, and which will help to connect and interpret the whole movement of the race’ (Vol. 1, p. vii).[2]
MacInyre further describes this encyclopaedic method of inquiry when he distinguishes between the culture of 19th century Great Britain (representing the assumptions of the encyclopaedic method) and today:
(1) ‘They assumed the
assent of all educated persons to a single substantive conception of
rationality; we inhabit a culture a central feature of which is the presence
of, and to some degree a debate between, conflicting, alternative conceptions
of rationality’;
(2) ‘They understood
the outcome of allegiance to the standards and methods of such a rationality to
be the elaboration of a comprehensive, rationally incontestable scientific
understanding of the whole, in which the architectonic of the sciences matched
that of the cosmos. We are confronted
with the multiplicity of types of enquiry and of interpretative claims on their
behalf, so that the very concept of an ordered whole, of a cosmos, has been put
radically in question’;
(3) ‘And finally they saw their whole mode of life, including their conceptions of rationality and of science, as part of a history of inevitable progress, judged by a standard of progress which had itself emerged from that history.’[3]
Rene Descartes’ method of beginning with doubt and admitting back to belief whatever could be proved beyond doubt—the Cartesian Method—also functions as a fine example of this Enlightenment version of moral inquiry. The Cartesian Method not only emphasises the role of reason; it also understands reason as capable of initiating inquiry from no perspective, only from first principles (‘I think, therefore I am’).[4]
Immanuel Kant argued that, although the Empiricist David Hume is correct in saying that empirical data cannot lead us to a priori truths, there is indeed a priori truth. Just as Copernicus produced a revolution in astronomy by overturning the assumption that the sun revolved around the earth, so too in epistemology one must see that it is not data gained from the senses which are imposed upon our minds to produce understanding but the mind imposing its categories upon what is observed that produces understanding. The mind is no clean slate written upon by sensory data. Rather, it imposes reason upon what we see and experience; we order the world around us through fundamental forms and categories of thought itself. Kant believed he could identify these categories: all minds work with two forms of perception (space and time) and twelve categories of understanding (e.g., cause and effect). These together form a grid through which all sensory data pass.
Ethics, however, is different from the scientific world. It does not deal with the world of phenomena or things but with the world of noumena or thoughts. The latter can be known to exist but only by thought, and so ethics is not something to be grounded on observation. One would not, for instance, ground ethics in an observation about what the greatest good would be for a certain action (utilitarian ethics). Yet Kant found the same rationality at work in both the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Ethics begins with a certain sense of right and wrong and can be further analysed according to a principle, the ‘categorical imperative’: what is right to do must be universally right to do. If it is wrong for me to lie in this situation, then it must be so in all situations for everyone. If a person should be treated as an end and not as a means to an end, then this must always be the case.
In the nineteenth century, we find an ongoing belief in the encyclopaedic approach. G. W. F. Hegel followed Kant’s proposal of an objective rationality which we all share by speaking of a cosmic rationalism: ‘What is real is reasonable and what is reasonable real.’[5] One way in which Hegel saw this cosmic reason operating was in his view of history: every event had its logical place in a grand, linear progression towards a certain end. This grand design, as Johann Fichte had previously argued, often worked through a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Nineteenth century views of society and history followed this idea that history was progressing positively according to some rationality. Hegel argued that history could be divided into three main phases: the Asiatic, with its absolute monarchy, the Graeco-Roman, with its individual freedom, and the Germanic-European, which fused the earlier two in a political theory of freedom within a strong state. Similar analyses of history were offered by Auguste Compte and Karl Marx. Comte saw history in terms of a dialectic of modes of thought: the theological (itself developing from fetishism to polytheism to monotheism), the metaphysical, and the ‘positive’ or scientific. Marx saw history as a technological-economic dialectic progressing from primitive communism to ancient slave society to feudalism to capitalism to communism. For Hegel, Compte and Marx, underlying the often surprising events in history, is a logic which fits the pieces together in some grand scheme.
Another major ethical perspective in the 19th century was utilitarianism, a form of consequentialist ethic which argued that the outcomes of various action could be calculated and weighed according to a principle of their utility, such as seeking to do the greatest good to the greatest number of people (so John Stuart Mill). While utilitarianism, as a consequentialist ethic, seems to be directly opposed to an ethic holding to absolute rights and wrongs, it in fact assumes a prior commitment to some definable and incontestable good. Thus, Mill's utilitarianism and Kant's deontological ethic are both examples of an encyclopaedic method of moral enquiry.
Enlightenment ethics entailed the pursuit of right principles which could be applied rightly and reasonably, once the situation was fully understood. Hence ethics begins with an accumulation of data so that the situation might be rightly assessed; it then proceeds to the application of the right principles to determine the right course of action. Whether following the epistemological arguments of Descartes or Kant, or the ethics of Kant and Mill, an 'encyclopaedist' method is in view, an approach seeking to construct something upon certainties which cannot be doubted and which are logically or scientifically verifiable apart from any perspective.
Genealogy
The key spokesperson for the antithesis to the encyclopaedic approach came towards the end of the 19th century in the person of Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a quite idle hypothesis…,’ averred Nietzsche (Der Wille zur Macht, 560). In this he agrees with Kant. But Nietzsche lacked Kant’s belief in the rationality of mind, whether for science or religion. He preferred S`ren Kierkegaard’s (b. 1813) rejection of the Enlightenment belief in objective reason: the individual chooses his or her own moral precepts. Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Genesis 22, Abraham’s binding and near sacrifice of his son Isaac, explains this rejection of objective reason. One can see in Abraham’s obedience to God, in his being willing to sacrifice his son when told to do so, that moral choice is not a matter of rational argument but of choice prior to logic. The result of this sort of speculation is an increase of the role of the will over against rational argument.
Nietzsche, however, not only rejected objective moral precepts guiding choices but also followed Arthur Schopenhauer in supposing that life is irrationality. He spoke of a cosmic Will (rather than Reason) which was in fact one’s predetermined character and basic human motives. Schopenhauer argued that these basic human motives are self-interest, malice, and compassion, but Nietzsche excluded compassion and spoke of a single motive which might include self-interest and malice: the will to power. A rational argument, averred Nietzsche, amounts to nothing more than the dressing up of one’s will to power in rational garb:
Truth is ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, a sum, in short, of human relationships which, rhetorically and poetically, intensified, ornamented and transformed, come to be thought of, after long usage by a people, as fixed, binding, and canonical. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, worn-out metaphors now impotent to stir the senses, coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than currency’ (U(e)ber Wahrheit und Lu(e)ge im Aussermoralischen Sinn I).[6]
The term ‘Genealogy’ applied to this line of thought derives from Nietzsche’s own use of the term in Der Genealogie der Moral. In this work Nietzsche sets himself the task of exhibiting ‘the historical genesis of the psychological deformation involved in the morality of the late nineteenth century and the philosophy and theology which sustained it….’[7] This study of origins uncovers the will to power behind the pretence of a will to truth as well as the substitution of the aristocratic nobility of ancient heroes with a priestly set of values concerned with purity and impurity but which really had to do with malice and hate.[8] Here we have not only an opposition to the place of reason in philosophy and ethics but also a hermeneutic of suspicion arising from a fundamental belief in the exercise of will.
In literary theory, the term ‘deconstructionism’ is used. For me, it is more descriptive than ‘genealogy’ in that it expresses both the study of the ‘construction’ of different systems and then pokes around here and there to find weak spots in such constructions in order to bring them toppling down. Whatever term we use, we are speaking about a paradigm with does not believe that any construction of reality holds. The reason for this is best expressed by existentialists as due to the fact, so it is maintained, that existence precedes essence rather than the other way around. If so, whatever existence is asserted remains arbitrary and indefensible, even if we still do act somewhat parasitically with appeals to this or that logical construction. But all activity, no matter the construction we offer to explain our acts, is only a matter of exerting our will to power.[9]
Genealogy replaces the encyclopaedic belief in an overarching, rational interpretation of the world with the irrational will to power and a hermeneutic of suspicion; it replaces the study of being (ontology) with the study of metaphor; it replaces the method and object of study as science with the study of self; it replaces the belief in a single perspective with a multiplicity of perspectives; it replaces a notion of the objectivity of truth with that of ‘truth-from-a-point-of-view’; it replaces the expectation that the audience will agree with the learned lecturer with the expectation that the audience will reject a speaker's logic; it replaces the postulating of a theory with deconstructing and abandoning theories; it replaces the encyclopaedist’s concepts of duty, obligation, the right, and what is good with their ‘pre-Enlightenment predecessors’.[10]
There is a natural progression from the encyclopaedic to the genealogical approach: (1) the proliferation of knowledge in the encyclopaedic method can result in (2) a specialisation within fields, (3) a demise of linkages with other, even related, fields, (4) a fragmentation of unifying theories (of history, society, beliefs, etc.); (5) a de facto challenge to attempts to do so in previous decades; (6) an increasing gulf between the average person and the expert in a field, the former unable to pursue the latter’s thought and the latter disinterested in the exertion necessary to enlighten the former. The result is that one could take an agnostic stance still sympathetic to the encyclopaedic method of inquiry by deciding that we will henceforth be less assertive about how to put it all together until we gain more knowledge. Or the result could lead to a shift toward the genealogical method, in which one disallows the possibility of putting it all together and opposes the programme outright as an attempt by seeming experts to control everyone else. Knowledge is no longer the subject of inquiry; the will to power is. Already in 1975, Roland Stromberg saw this progression in the West:
The Western intellectual tradition is doubtless the most complex ever known. It is now an old rouJ of civilization, which has experienced everything and seen through all myths. It now finds it difficult to believe in anything; it tries, but it is too self-conscious, it knows that its faith will be a myth. But the specialist has taken over at the expense of a general culture, and amid a wealth of specialized techniques for unearthing scientific, factual knowledge, modern man has the greatest difficulties finding values.[11]
The advance in electronic technology is not only an achievement for science. It is an achievement for the individual. While the knowledge necessary to achieve this technology could produce an argument for the notion of progress through knowledge, the use of this technology by individuals represents an achievement for the genealogical interpretation of life. Now the individual is empowered to gain access to knowledge and put it together apart from how others, particularly those who have controlled the access to and interpretation of knowledge in the past, put it together with peer review.
Tradition
MacIntyre finds two features in common between the encyclopaedist’s and the genealogist’s approaches. (1) Both form a unified view of the history of philosophy, whether of the progress of reason or of how reason disguises everything. (2) Both separate reason from ‘the particular bonds of any particular moral and religious community’.[12] In place of these two approaches, MacIntyre proposes a third version for moral inquiry: tradition. He defines ‘tradition’ as a ‘historically extended, socially embodied argument,’[13] or ‘an argument extended over time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict’—that inside and that outside the tradition.[14] Over against the modernist understanding of reason of thinking without and against perspectives so that it can be universal and impersonal, MacIntyre avers that
…reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested,… [and] 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.[15]
The history of this approach to moral inquiry stretches from Socrates to Thomas Aquinas. I will enumerate some of MacIntyre's points which define this approach based on several chapters in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.
(1) First, philosophical enquiry was perceived as requiring a prior commitment to a certain perspective. This was phrased in terms of making oneself an apprentice to a craft (techne), and so philosophy involved the practice (ergon) of a craft to achieve what is good—the good for me at my stage of learning as opposed to what is good without qualification, and the good for this craft as opposed to what appears good.[16] Furthermore, one entering a craft becomes part of the history of that craft. In saying so, MacIntyre argues that one within a tradition is part of its dynamic flow. Indeed, successful inquiry itself can only be written retrospectively and is therefore open to review at a later date.[17] Encyclopaedists, by contrast, believe in a neutral history: the past is waiting to be discovered independent of characteristics from some particular point of view.[18] Tradition, however, recognises that history is always written from a point of view.
(2) Tradition has a narrative view of history. MacIntyre speaks of a narrative structure to different theories of history, entailing different views on how actions and transactions of actual social life are embodied. The encyclopaedist believes that the narrative structure involves the progression of reason. This denigrates the past and appeals to timeless principles separate from the traditions which shaped them. Tradition is to be sifted by our standards, and there is no need for a prior commitment to religious belief or tradition to understand these principles. Genealogy, on the other hand, seeks to disclose what the encyclopaedic narrative has concealed by undermining that narrative and offering its own version of history. Tradition seeks to learn from the past by identifying and moving toward a telos more adequately through identifying the questions which the tradition of inquiry poses, such as the following: What is the telos of human beings? What is right action towards the telos? What are the virtues which issue in right action? What are the laws which order human relationships so that we may possess these virtues?[19] Tradition also recognises the political (i.e., roles and social life) dimensions to tradition.
MacIntyre says that
‘modern moral
philosophy has in general been blind to the complementary character of
narrative and theory both in moral enquiry and in the moral life itself. In moral enquiry we are always concerned with
the question: what type of enacted
narrative would be the embodiment, in the actions and transactions of actual
social life, of this particular theory?…the encyclopaedic, the genealogical,
and the Thomistic tradition-constituted standpoints confront one another not
only as rival moral theories but also as projects for constructing rival forms
of moral narrative.’[20]
Lucian, the second century satirist, saw this clearly: in depicting the various views of current philosophies as slaves to be sold in the market, he required each to describe the type of life (enacted narrative) which accompanies his understanding of the world (Philosophies for Sale).
(3) Tradition locates authority in (a) a given community (e.g., Thomistic scholarship), (b) in authoritative texts (e.g., Scripture), and (c) in a tradition of interpretation of these texts by the community through history.[21] The encyclopaedist’s version of moral inquiry entails a separation of the individual, reasoning subject from authority, while the genealogist’s version resists all authority. Tradition, on the other hand, requires thinking in community—apprenticing and practising one’s craft in the guild. Tradition also appreciates the temporal reference of reasoning: the encyclopaedist seeks timeless, universal and objective truths, whereas tradition understands truth with respect to its history so far:
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.’[22]
Thus, one must become committed to a certain community with its unique tradition rather than work by means of reasoning from first principles, and one will find that the subject for investigation is not simply our tradition but ourselves.
In making this case for the nature of tradition as a means of enquiry, MacIntyre examines the Augustinian tradition through to Thomas Aquinas’ combination of this tradition with the Aristotelian tradition. Some further points helping to describe Tradition emerge from this survey.
(4) Tradition appreciates the roles of the reader and teachers in interpretation. Interpretation of these texts requires ‘a prerational reordering of the self …before the reader can have an adequate standard by which to judge what is a good reason and what is not’.[23] This argument stems from Augustine’s understanding of the will as perverted, over against Aristotle’s trust that the mind will seek out the good and, having discovered it, do it. But for Augustine, a transformation of the reader needs to take place in order to read with understanding.
If the reader needs a prerational reordering of the self in order to read rightly, what one needs is a trusted teacher to guide one during initial readings. Humility, then, is a required virtue of the reader of texts and of education. Contrast a Nietzschean opposition to such humility before tradition: what Nietzsche called for was a ‘nobility of instinct’.
(5) Tradition has a different understanding of reasoning. It uses dialectic, arguing towards 1st principles. Reasoning is ‘on the way’, it is exploratory, representing the state of the craft at this time in its history. Encyclopaedia, on the contrary, argues from 1st principles and concerns itself with methods and principles. These methods and principles are thought to be without influence from the interpreter's perspective, and the means of communication in education is therefore the lecture, a rather straight-forward presentation of facts which the student must learn. Questions and answers in such lectures are for clarification, not for probing the argument through dialectic inquiry. MacIntyre writes that now the genealogist view of the lecture often holds: it is seen as only an episode in a narrative of conflicts. But tradition sees the lecturer and his or her audience as interpreters of texts to be dialectically explored because both agree on an authority beyond themselves—the Divinely revealed, authoritative Scriptures.[24]
If reasoning is 'on the
way', then tradition is incorrectly understood when it is thought to be an
encrustation of the past. MacIntyre
insists that tradition is dynamic: it
develops as any 'craft' facing its own questions arising out of its past
history.
[1] Three Rival Versions of Moral
Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IL:
University of Notre Dame, 1990),
[2] As quoted by MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 19.
MacIntyre also gives the purpose behind the Gifford Lectures as an
example of the encyclopaedic method.
[3] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 23f.
[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, ch. 3 (‘Too Many Thomisms?’). MacIntyre
argues that the encyclopaedic method begins prior to Descartes: post-Aquinas
systematising of Aquinas’ philosophy represents the beginning of the move away
from tradition toward an encyclopaedic approach.
[5] Cf. Roland N. Stromberg, European
Intellectual History Since 1789, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 78.
[6] As quoted by Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 35.
[7] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 39.
[8] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 39f.
Cf. the role of malice in Schopenhauer’s description of human motives.
[9] MacIntyre primarily discusses Michel Foucault as the heir to
Nietzsche, although in Biblical hermeneutics we usually turn to Roland Barthes
and Jacques Derrida. MacIntyre notes
that Nietzsche has an early predecessor in Meister Eckhart of the Univ. of
Paris in the 14th century.
Yet, if we wish to reach back into history for beginnings, the alternative between encyclopaedia and
genealogy is one form of the philosophical alternative expressed at the
beginning of (written) Western thought: can one step into the same river
twice? If we see the river as static
(being--so Heraclitus) or dynamic (becoming--so Parmenides), we answer the
question differently. But Nietzsche's
argument poses the true alternative to an encyclopaedic method of moral
inquiry.
[10] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 42.
[11] Roland Stromberg, European
Intellectual History Since 1789, p. 306.
[12] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 58f.
[13] Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1984), p. 222.
[14] Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose
Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 12.
[15] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 59f.
[16] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, pp. 61f.
[17] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 150.
[18] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival
Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 152.
[19] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 80.
[20] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 80.
[21] In medieval religious education, tradition developed as questiones related to the text. These questions were first written in the
margins of the Biblical text and, over time, were expanded into accompanying
texts. Questions arising from commentary
on the text pertained to the three or four senses a text of Scripture was
thought to have: the plain historical, the moral or tropological, the
allegorical or mystical, and (sometimes added) the anagogical or spiritually
educative sense (MacIntyre, p. 85).
Abbot Hugh of St. Victor (1125-1141) developed this Medieval approach to
the text by emphasising the importance of the plain historical text and
unifying the senses through encouraging a curriculum covering all three: the
plain historical meaning calls for exegesis based on a knowledge of history and
geography, the moral sense calls for a study of moral theology, the allegorical
calls for a study of theological doctrine, and the tropological calls for a
study of what work we have to do in the natural world and an understanding of
the natural world so that we can do our work in the world well.
[22] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 65.
[23] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, p. 82.
[24] MacIntyre notes that medieval theology also made use of
distinctions (distinctiones) in types
of sense, a method which made radical intellectual dissent possible, as in the
case of Abelard. This point overlaps
with the history of Roman Catholic tradition after Abelard in Aquinas’
combining two distinct traditions in his Summa
Theologica.
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