Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition

by Alasdair MacIntyre

Nietzsche thus presents his own narrative in Zur Genealogie der Moral as superior to those of the academic historians precisely in that it enabled him to identify limitations and defects in their writing of which they themselves were unable to become aware.

Nietzsche, as a genealogist, takes there to be a multiplicity of perspectives within each of which truth-from-a-point-of-view may be asserted, but no truth-as-such, an empty notion, about the world, an equally empty notion.

Make of the genealogist’s self nothing but what genealogy makes of it, and that self is dissolved to the point at which there is no longer a continuous genealogical project. Or so I am suggesting.

Hence once again it seems to be the case that the 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 allegianc...

agree first of all to a remarkable extent, if not entirely, in the way in which they conceive of the history of philosophy from Socrates up to the nineteenth century.

Where the encyclopaedist sees a unified history of progress, the genealogist sees a unified history of distorting and repressing function.

So where both encyclopaedists and genealogists had portrayed continuity, Kleutgen portrayed rupture.

Jesuit,

Descartes symbolized for the nineteenth-century encyclopaedist a declaration of independence

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.

one should already possess and recognize certain moral

virtues without which the cooperative progress of dialectic will be impossible, something further acknowledged by Plato in the Republic in his identification of those virtues the practice of which must precede initiation into philosophical community and by Aristotle in his account of the inseparability of the moral and the intellectual virtues in both political and philosophical community.

Hence also derived Nietzsche’s wholehearted hostility to

Plato and his preference for the sophists.

It is that which is involved in making oneself into an apprentice to a craft, the craft in this case of philosophical enquiry.

technē,

The first is the distinction between what in particular situations it really is good to do and what only seems good to do to this particular apprentice but is not in fact so.

teachers

the identification of the defects and limitations of this particular person, as he or she is here and now, with respect to the achievement of that telos:

So we are threatened by an apparent paradox in the understanding of moral enquiry as a type of craft: only insofar as we have already arrived at certain conclusions are we able to become the sort of person able to engage in such enquiry so as to reach sound conclusions.

teacher

Conceptions are different from practice? Is this accurate?

Those successive partial and imperfect versions of that science or sciences, which are elaborated at different stages in the history of the craft, provide frameworks within which claimants to truth succeed or fail by finding or failing to find a place in those deductive schemes.

better than any rival competitors so

Rationality, like truth, is independent of time, place, and historical circumstances.

What that view entails is an exclusion of tradition as a guide to truth,

successive reformulations, past and yet to come.

Compare with Asad? And what are the reformulations? Who decides?

What sapientia is is there explained in terms of the hierarchy of crafts.

Philosophy is thus the master-craft of master-crafts.

the character of its realism.

Antonio Rosmini Serbati (1797–1855).

But because his central enterprise was to vindicate theology against its Kantian critics, he absorbed into his own system a good deal of Kant and thereby, seemingly unwittingly, distorted those older positions by reworking them in Kantian terms.

All ideas, except for the idea of being, are formed by abstraction, either in reflecting upon sensation or in second-order reflection upon first-order reflection.

which is not so much that he was guilty of pantheism but that his central theses about the relationship of God to the human mind are susceptible of more than one interpretation and that insofar as they are interpreted so as to secure his theistic orthodoxy, they render his philosophical position incoherent.

Kantian reading of theology false as theology and as philosophy - as theology God ceases to be unique?

Leo XIII’s intention was to complete the work of Liberatore, Sordi, Taparelli, his brother Guiseppe, and so many others in reestablishing Thomism; what he succeeded in generating were a number of different and rival Thomisms. Why?

In so doing Aquinas summarizes the outcome of that enquiry so far, advances it one stage further, and leaves the way open for the proponents of yet further considerations to continue beyond that point.

For Suarez the mind in apprehending necessary truths about possible essences apprehends what may, but need not, exist.

Focus on epistemology in Kant etc

Yet those who responded to Aeterni Patris all too often followed Kleutgen in making epistemological concerns central to their Thomism.

For on Aquinas’s 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.

Diffference between human rights and rights given by god

only in respect of those theses understood in their relationship to each overall specific mode of enquiry, that the true nature of the conflict between Thomism and these modern standpoints can be adequately explored.

The narrative structure of the encyclopaedia is one dictated by belief in the progress of reason.

So the narrative of the encyclopaedist issues in a denigration of the past and an appeal to principles purportedly timeless.

So the 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.

This reappropriation of the past in a way which directs the present towards a particular–and yet eternal–future takes place at two interrelated levels, that of theoretical enquiry and that of the practical embodiment of such enquiry.

Hence in theoretical enquiry the readers of Aquinas, like his original hearers, both enact the narrative of their own enquiry and make that narrative a continuing part of a larger narrative of enquiry in which they are only the latest actors, who also understand that what they are able to contribute will lead on beyond them.