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

by Alasdair MacIntyre

What is the telos of human beings? What is right action directed towards the telos? What are the virtues which issue in right action? What are the laws which order human relationships so that men and women may possess those virtues? And so on.

So the moral life is the life of embodied moral enquiry and those individuals who live out the moral life as farmers, or fishermen, or

furniture makers embody more or less adequately in those lives, devoted in key part to their own crafts, what may often not be recognized as a theory, the product of the theorist’s very different craft, but which nevertheless is one.

what type of enacted narrative would be the embodiment, in the actions and transactions of actual social life, of this particular theory?

Hence differences between rival moral theories are always in key part differences in the corresponding narrative.

Chapter on what makes a ethical discourse rooted in practice, acceptance methods, virtues and practice- focused on reality nd not on epistemology. But what about dissent? And what about the epistemological challenge of science? Cannot ignore. Also, there is a tradition of modernity that Nietzsche identified in his criticism. M takes the moderns at face and not how they have achieved dominance, as Asad had shown.

What the reader, as thus interpreted by the texts, has to learn about

him or herself is that it is only the self as transformed through and by the reading of the texts which will be capable of reading the texts aright.

a teacher and an obedient trust

tradition of interpretative commentary

The reader thus discovers him or herself inside the Scriptures.

initiation

The mind thus has to find within itself that which points it towards a source of intelligibility beyond itself, one which will provide what ostension by itself cannot;

guided

The intellect and the desires do not naturally move towards that good which is at once the foundation for knowledge and that from which lesser goods flow.

Hence faith in authority has to precede rational understanding. And

So certain issues emerged as quaestiones, the formulation and discussion of which became in time incorporated into the methods of formal teaching, supplementing exegetical exposition by affording opportunity for

what became increasingly stylized forms of disputation.

Such units are understood as uttered by someone to an audience which shares with the utterer a stock of fundamental beliefs, a stock of linguistic meanings, articulated in terms of a shared view of the universe, and a stock of proper names, applied to the same persons, places, and objects by means of agreement in the use of a set of definite descriptions.

In this way the doctrine of the multiple senses of Scripture has an essential integrative function in Hugh of St. Victor’s overall scheme of enquiry.

What saved the twelfth century from such eclecticism was the existence of an overall framework of belief within which the different uses of different parts of ancient philosophy had to be put to work and in terms of which they had in the end to be justified. But the existence of such a framework did not preclude radical disagreement.

Disagreement when classics incorporated

This possibility became apparent to his contemporaries in the style, methods, and conclusions of Abelard.

but he did so in the course of putting twelfth-century Platonism in its due place within an Augustinian framework and so ensuring that the Platonism served the Augustinianism rather than vice versa.

mind of God. The perfecting of the mind’s understanding is a movement

and influential

Abelard does not in fact seem to have held heretical views. It is all the more striking that he obediently accepted his condemnation, agreeing with Bernard in his understanding of the limits imposed upon the life of enquiry by the need for such condemnations. What Bernard and Abelard agreed upon, and no consistent Augustinian could have held otherwise, was that the integrity of the life of enquiry requires such interventions by authority.

had affirmed, that it is only through the transformation of the will from a state of pride to one of humility that the intelligence can be rightly directed.

So it is the underlying epistemology of Augustinian enquiry which requires the condemnation of heresy, since heresy is always a sign of pride in choosing to elevate one’s own judgment above that of genuine authority.

Testimony is to be received in a way very different from reports providing evidence.

On this view any enquiry concerned with truth which examines the subject matter of which some particular text speaks independently of that text will discover a lack of correspondence between text and subject matter. So Tolstoy argued in one way, so Sartre in another.

“For the whole perceptible world,” wrote Hugh of St. Victor, “is indeed as if a book written by the finger of God”

What such rival epistemologies share is a conception of the objects to be apprehended by the human mind as intelligible as such, prior to

any particular human mind apprehending them.

theoretical enquiry and practical enquiry were so closely interrelated.

The importance of the outcome of that debate in Paris is best understood by considering the significance of the contrast between what emerged as a university at Paris and what emerged at Bologna.

The teaching at Bologna was designed to serve the purposes of the students, purposes determined prior to and independently of anything learned from that teaching. The teaching at Paris was designed to reeducate students into a more adequate knowledge of ends and purposes, so that the desires with which they came to study might be corrected. Education at Bologna was designed to be useful in terms of a standard of utility established in the realm of political power, whether secular or ecclesiastical.

a debate over educational ideals

Paris was thus in origin an Augustinian university,

fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” What Nietzsche meant by belief in grammar was belief that the structure of language somehow mirrors and presupposes belief in an order of things, in virtue of which one mode of conceptualizing

reality can be more adequate to that reality than another.

And in so asserting Nietzsche simply inverted the Augustinian standpoint: without God there is no genuine objectivity of interpretation or conceptualization.

a semiformal a priori linguistics independent of ontology.

For each specific Augustinian thesis stands or falls, from the Augustinian standpoint, as part of the overall scheme of belief. Abstract

The uneducated understand themselves through the images of scriptural narrative which the educated interpret to them.

Modernity asks for arguments. And the Augustinian responds that in this area there can be no shared premises unless and until the word of the scriptural preacher is heard as authoritative. Yet

If to understand any particular is to understand it in its relationship to a form or universal in the light of which alone that particular can be made intelligible, what is the nature of that relationship?

Key questions to Augustine

Hence all understanding requires divine illumination

So that there is an apparent contradiction at the heart of the Augustinian account of knowledge.

Thirdly, Augustine and the Augustinians both present human defection from the good as a matter of the perversity of the will.

What would it be for the intellect to be rightly ordered according to its own nature?