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

by Alasdair MacIntyre

The multiplication of texts from the ancient world had already raised questions about that claim; but the recovery of Aristotelian science, as expounded by the Islamic commentators, did more than raise questions. For it provided as part of its corpus a set of natural scientific texts which assigned to the natural sciences both a content and an importance quite alien to Augustinianism as hitherto formulated.

Augustinian tradition based on authority, teachers, discussion of fundamental questions and clear boundaries. Authority was always possible and thus heresy accepted even by those condemned eg. Abelard, Hallam? Becoming and learning were inseparable. Introduction of classical texts and Islamic science - what to do? Reality outside the text which mirrored the world. Knowledge possible outside the authority of the church? Uses Nietzsche’s critique of modern philosophy that without God, no grammar, no standard,etc, Comparable to Muslims clash with these Greek traditions? Who decided on read g them? What happens in the modern academy? A sea of free spirits following a method? The goals are open But then there are patterns, significant questions and also leasing theoreticians. You did not have to join them but then you must make your own way? But all in a modern critical way which is immanentist whether ordered or chaotic

Averroes and Maimonedes had to reconcile truth with revelation, but the question of the revelation lay within was not a philosophical question. Misrepresentation? But the Christians had it otherwise - working with a Augustinian tradition with its particular rationality.

That which most easily and recurrently drew the attention of ecclesiastical and theological authority concerned central Christian doctrines.

types of encounter both made possible in part and also delayed by the extraordinary degree of tact and prudence shown in the first half of the thirteenth century by ecclesiastical authority in the various warnings and prohibitions which it issued on the subject of the reading and teaching of Aristotle.

different works were read in independence of each other and valued for different kinds of reason.

Islamic approach

So even before 1240 it was beginning to become clear that it was the established organization and structure of enquiry that was being put in question and, more particularly, the relationship of theology to the other disciplines within that organization and structure, and not just this or that particular thesis. This then was a second level at which Augustinianism came to be challenged, increasingly after 1240, by Aristotle and his interpreters.

M seems to make this an epistemological question - a modernist framework that he is rejecting

Yet for Augustinian theology it is the inadequacy of the mind

the face of what it encounters–primarily God, but also created objects insofar as they are what they were created to be–and the mind’s discovery of its inabilities and incapacities which are essential to its progress.

Aristotle responding with a conception of coming to know as the actualization of what is already present in potentiality in the intellect, Augustine appealing to that divine illumination which affords comprehension to a mind otherwise impotent.

‘Veritas,’ a noun naming a substance, is a more fundamental expression than ‘verum,’ an attribute of things, and the truth or falsity of statements is a tertiary matter.

Augustine locates it in the source of the relationship of finite objects to that truth which is God.

So the Augustinian, especially in theological and moral enquiry, is always apt to suppose that all intellectual error is rooted in moral defect, as Bernard did with Abelard.

Adequacy in so determining does indeed require the exercise of the intellectual virtues, the most important of which is phronēsis and the possession of phronēsis requires moral virtue.

Aristotle, like every other ancient pre-Christian author, had no concept of the will and there is no conceptual space in his scheme for such an alien notion in the explanations of defect and error.

Aquinas

The projects of translation

M thinks that translations not possible

It was just such suspicion and misunderstanding that Aquinas incurred both from some Augustinians and from some Latin Averroist Aristotelians, and he incurred it precisely because he was just such a person.

Only Aquinas seems to have immersed himself in both the Aristotelianism and the Augustinianism so as to make a central problem, not only of his intellectual enquiries, but of his existence, that of how what he took, or at least was to come to take, to

be the truth in each could be reconciled with that of the other.

And so Feyerabend was able to argue with at least some appearance of plausibility that Galileo secured his victory over his Aristotelian opponents, not by meeting the standards required by some relevant type of rational argument, but by deceptive rhetorical manipulation

But Feyerabend’s assumptions about the rational resources which can be provided in such cases are defective in three ways.

but those who inhabit and indeed have themselves constructed the latter system, perhaps because like Galileo they have themselves been inhabitants and at one time protagonists of the former system, may be able to include within that system an adequate representation of its predecessor.

Prospective reasoning in this kind of case cannot but be dialectical,

exploratory, inventive, and provisional, formulating hypotheses as it moves towards a new set of first principles and fundamental conceptions.

this reasoning could only be available to those already committed to the later standpoint.

epistemological crisis.

metaphysics of being, of esse, over and above whatever can be said about particular entia in the light of particular concepts.

It would of course be grossly anachronistic to portray Aquinas’s understanding of his own early development, as he confronted two rival and incommensurable schemes of belief and enquiry, in the terms in which I have used.

Indeed it is anachronistic.

But it is from the derivative that we have to begin.

each of which relies on a principle or principles without which the objects of enquiry, theoretical or practical, cannot be rendered intelligible.

It was into the common framework furnished by this conception, thus spelled out analogically, causally, and practically that Aquinas integrated both rival schemes of concepts and beliefs in such a way as both to correct in each that which he took by its own standards could be shown to be defective or unsound and to remove from each, in a way justified by that correction, that which barred them from reconciliation.

Aristotle’s account of the rational world became recognizably the prologue required for an Augustinian theology.

Aquinas was able to show how the will, conceived in Augustinian fashion, could both serve and yet mislead the mind, as conceived in Aristotelian fashion. And all this was achieved in a way not merely concordant with but supporting and illuminating the specific Christian dogmas.

But when Aquinas has reached his conclusion, the method always leaves open the possibility of a return to that question with some new argument.

Except for the finality of Scripture and dogmatic tradition, there is and can be no finality.

We move in our intellectual constructions from a beginning in which we are concerned with what is initially evident to us here now towards a projected end in which rational justification will be by demonstration from first principles which are evident per se.

And since it is with the specifically moral claims of encyclopaedia, of genealogy, and of Thomistic tradition that I am concerned in these lectures, what is now required is first to specify more precisely how both moral enquiry and the form of the moral life are to be understood

within the Thomistic scheme and what the relationship of that understanding to the claims of encyclopaedia and genealogy has turned out to be.

This chapter concerned about how to decide between apparently incompatible and incommensurable conceptions of the world. McIntyre poses that question in such a way that it is very difficult to argue or to develop a system to judge a tradition from the outside. He opens first with a strong claim of incommensurability. But then uses some modern philosophy of science (Feyerabed, Kuhn,etc) to suggest that there is some possibility of going beyond the particular standpoint or rather to find oneself in the middle of two standpoints and then developing a justification of the new on the basis of problems of the old. So he finds Aquinas as a student and then as a teacher to be the ideal person taking up this challenge. He claims to have done this by taking seriously the Aristotelian position of the human from his or her position in the world. But then retains the Augustinian goal for the framework to which the student must aspire - enlist in a new-platonic ideal.

A craft in good order has to be embodied in a tradition in good order. And to be adequately initiated into a craft is to be adequately initiated into a tradition.

What is the good specific to human beings? Each individual has to enquire: What is my good as a human being?

“connaturality”

The history of the moral life and the history of moral enquiry are aspects of a single, albeit complex, history. And to be initiated into the moral life is to be initiated into the tradition whose history is that complex history.

So there was an increasing tendency for those disciplines to proceed with a de facto autonomy in respect of their relationships both to theology and to each other, so that the curriculum lost any real unity.

Evaluative judgments are a species of factual judgment concerning the final and formal causes of activity of members of a particular species.

that the ultimate good must lie in the relationship of the soul to something outside itself and, secondly, that 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 nor in conjunction ...

So Aristotle was invoked against Aristotle in the interests of Scripture and of Augustine, not because Aquinas was rejecting Aristotelianism, but because he was tryi...