Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
1
Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason:
Changing Paradigms in Frankfurt School Critical Theory
Abstract:
In Critique and Disclosure, Nikolas Kompridis argues that critical theory needs a
paradigm shift, one that includes his notion of disclosure and intimate critique.
Criticizing Habermas’ procedural rationality as inhuman and unable to renew everyday
practices, Kompridis uses Heidegger to rethink the role of disclosure in critique.
Disclosure requires agents to be receptive and to self-denter. In the process, he eschews
truth for meaning. I open up a lacuna in Kompridis’ account. His reliance on Marcuse’s
notion of phantasy and on MacIntyre’s notion of epistemological crisis actually needs
truth. Disclosure needs truth because the renewal of everyday practices requires a
response to human needs. The example of a pregnant Athena draws out the role of
truth in receptivity and self-decentering.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
2
Critical theory is undergoing an epistemological crisis as the amount of ink
recently spilled on the issue indicates. From its beginning, Frankfurt School critical
theory has opened up aporias and contradictions in modernity and the enlightenment;
yet, the theorists associated with it have kept hope in the promise Enlightenment and
modernity. One hope that I share is the development of individuality. I do not mean by
individuality some form of individualism. Like Max Horkheimer (2013), I associate
individuality with the complete development of a human being in her social self. I
believe that this concern for individuality captures the idea of the flourishing human
being defended by Aristotle; further, critical theory, in some form, provides the keys for
understanding society and the human person in a way that keeps open the promise of
that human flourishing that is necessary for people invested in the full and complete
development of each and every human beings—that is, Aristotelians, Thomists, and
Catholics, both activists and theorists.
In Critique and Disclosure (C&D), Nikolas Kompridis has moved significantly in a
direction that, not only highlights the nature of the crisis of critical theory, but points to
some resolution of the crisis. Kompridis wants us to think more critically about the
renewal of every day practices and agency. Twelve years before publishing C&D,
Kompridis made similar arguments about disclosure and truth relying on John Dewey.
Dewey's understanding of disclosure shows how truth is but one aspect of meanings.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
3
For Dewey as for Kompridis of 1994, world disclosure reveals truth by inviting
questioning. While Dewey remains important in C&D, along now with Stanley Cavell
and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kompridis has set aside the relationship between truth and
meaning in world disclosure as found in Dewey.
Today, Kompridis contends that Jürgen Habermas’ procedural rationality is
inadequate by itself and argues for an opening up to Martin Heidegger’s worlddisclosure. Whereas Habermas focuses on truth understood as reaching consensus in an
ideal speech situation, Heidegger focuses on the discovery of meaning through the
disclosure of the world. Where Habermas and Heidegger, then, make either truth or
meaning subordinate to the other, Kompridis argues for a recognition of the
interdependence of truth and meaning. In the process, he discloses how agency is tied
to receptivity and self decentering in light of history. For Kompridis, reflective
disclosure replaces revolution as the final answer of social and cultural change.
Kompridis is right that Habermas' procedural rationality cannot open up future
possibilities of agent-centered practices. Further, he rightly looks to disclosure as a
source for the renewal of everyday practices. However, Kompridis has not gone far
enough on his own terms. I shall show that Kompridis has missed his mark because he
keeps truth on the sidelines. While Kompridis is right that truth needs disclosure, he is
wrong to suspect that disclosure plays some role in which truth has no hand. In relation
to disclosure, truth highlights human needs and desires, which are the only basis for the
renewal of both everyday practices and human agency. Kompridis ventured close to
this conclusion in his earlier essay on Dewey because in that essay he asks important
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
4
questions about tradition, though he does not use that word. Ignoring tradition means
that we ignore the role of truth, for tradition reveals truth by disclosing for us, through
the use of standards of reason, our human needs—our persistent human desires.
I begin with a brief account of Kompridis’ argument. Central to my discussion is
Kompridis' motivation for moving beyond Habermas and his turn to Heidegger's
disclosure. My analysis draws out how truth is abandoned and where Kompridis'
account echoes some of MacIntyre's ideas. Second, I will argue that Kompridis' account
requires truth on two counts: first, Kompridis' use of Marcuse's notion of phantasy
relies on truth for its own power--truth grounded in human needs; second, Kompridis'
reliance on MacIntyre's notion of epistemological crises requires a discussion of truth
missing from his account. In the final section, I explore an example of pregnant Athena
which highlights the role of truth in disclosure grounded in the standards of reason of a
tradition--standards which guide the members of a tradition to truth, that is, to the
satisfaction of their human needs. This example demonstrates how one exercises her
own agency through the discovery of her intelligibility in her practices and tradition
and how practices and traditions are capable of renewal without revolution.
My reflections on Kompridis’ work focuses on where we agree—the renewal of
everyday practices and agency. Kompridis has provided a tremendous service in his
defense of disclosure as necessary for agency and practical reasoning. My arguments
will, I hope, convince critical theorists, including Kompridis, that we should at least
look more carefully at Marxist resources already at work in MacIntyre, if not convince
them to turn away fully from the failed procedural rationalism of Habermas and to
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
5
MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism (Knight. If my conclusions are correct, then
Kompridis and I already agree on the future tasks of critical theory: the renewal of
traditions through everyday practices to uncover their emancipatory potential.
Two notes about Kompridis' reliance on Heidegger. First, right or wrong in his
reading of Heidegger, Kompridis’ understanding of world disclosure, especially as it
relates to receptivity and self decentering, reveals how tradition is necessary for the
renewal of every day practices. I am interested, not in Heidegger, but in disclosure. The
discussion of disclosure allows us to see how truth and tradition ground each other.
Disclosure is possible only because of tradition and reveals truth because tradition is
always about human goods based on a specific understanding of human nature
(Nicholas 2012).
Second, Kelvin Knight (2007, 2008) has written on Heidegger and Hannah
Arendt in relation to MacIntyre. His focus has been on their reception of Aristotle and
their understanding of Western philosophy as “the tradition.” The Heideggerian notion
of tradition contrasts sharply with MacIntyre’s conception of tradition, which I discuss
later. Specifically, argument is central to MacIntyre’s notion of tradition and absent
from Heidegger’s. I suspect that Kompridis reads or understands "tradition" through
Heidegger's eyes, which is why he turned from Dewey to Heidegger, thus turning away
from the resources available in a more perspicuous understanding of tradition. I will
not investigate the truth of this suspicion, for it does not matter why, but only that,
Kompridis turned from tradition in his analysis. Nor need I discuss Knight's critique of
Heidegger and Arendt. My focus is on the notion of world disclosure, especially as a
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
6
resource for critique and critical theory. Knight does not address this concept in
Heidegger. In short, while Knight’s take on Heidegger is valuable, his analysis differs
too much from mine to contribute to the main objective of this paper.
I.
Nikolas Kompridis begins his argument by asking, how do we renew our
cultural traditions. This question in modernity takes on particular urgency because of
our “consciousness of crisis, of an awareness of things going, or having gone, terribly
wrong” (C&D 3). For Kompridis, Habermas is important because his central question
about the meaning of reason is entwined with the question of cultural renewal. For
Habermas, the renewal of culture and everyday practices can only legitimately occur
through intersubjective communication aimed at reaching consensus, or, more
specifically, aimed at justification.
Yet, according to Kompridis, because Habermas insists that critical theory focus
on procedural rationality, he makes critical theory more vulnerable to epistemological
crises while at the same time removing any sources of renewal for critical theory.
Kompridis' critique is salient because it harkens back to Horkheimer and Adorno's
critique of formal rationality. Amy Allen (2014), for instance, misses this aspect of their
critique in her discussion of renewing critical theory; so does Habermas, however, in his
failed analysis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. One must go beyond the DOE to feel
the full force of this critique, which Horkheimer lays out in the Eclipse of Reason. For
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
7
Horkheimer, formal rationality cannot judge or evaluate individual or social ends any
more than instrumental rationality can. Thus, human beings cannot discover their own
agency because they cannot connect their true needs to their actions through formal, or
instrumental, rationality.
In C&D, Kompridis contends that Habermas’ formal rationality contends against
a different, historically-oriented reason in Habermas’ earlier writings and that we need
to recover this disclosing reason in order to renew our practices, particularly our
practices of critique. Throughout, Kompridis insists that Habermas’ procedural
rationality must be tempered by disclosure, which Kompridis rescues from a misreading of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy: “critique must be reconceived as a practice
of reflective disclosure” (C&D 238). Disclosure is necessary for critique because it allows
us to understand how the new arises. The new proves problematic in modernity for
modernity questions itself, always seeking the legitimacy of the new. Habermas locates
this legitimacy solely in procedures of justification, but Kompridis shows that such
legitimation relies, not on justification, but on the disclosure of possibility. Kompridis
aligns himself, then, with a form of critical theory that takes aim at the “ways in which
the conditions of modernity obscure or foreclose our possibilities” (C&D xi).
In contrast, Kompridis finds sources of renewal in Heidegger’s understanding of
disclosure. He argues that Habermas misinterprets Heidegger and misunderstands the
nature of disclosure. For one, Habermas, like many others, forcefully reads Heidegger’s
philosophy through Heidegger’s commitment to the Nazi party; Kompridis rightly
challenges such a biased reading. Second, Habermas claims that Heidegger and others,
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
8
including Charles Taylor, absolutizes disclosure, which, according to Habermas,
devalues reason, especially its problem-solving function. On Habermas’ account, world
disclosure is subordinate to truth or validity. Habermas, then, grounds the renewal of
practices in intersubjective communication based on procedural rationality. Again and
again, Habermas excludes art from the realm of validity, subordinating art and its form
of world disclosure to truth.
For Habermas, philosophy is the “‘guardian of rationality’” (C&D 150). He
rejects the idea that philosophy can answer existential questions about the meaning of
morality; it can only analyze the way in which arguments are made. Philosophy derives
its “authority from the authority of science” (C&D 154). Its major task is to protect
against skepticism and relativism through ensuring the universal conditions of
justification. It can also mediate between the validity claims of science and other expert
cultures with everyday practices. Philosophy, on this Habermassian account, fulfills its
role by guaranteeing the procedures through which claims to truth are made.
If, however, we follow Habermas’ subordination of world disclosure to truth, or
art to science, Kompridis shows that we end up with a peculiar and weak notion of
philosophy. If we limit the role of philosophy to guaranteeing the procedures for truth,
for instance, according to Kompridis, philosophy “has nothing of its own to contribute”
(C&D 165). Echoing Horkheimer's critique of formal rationality (which echoes Hegel's
critique of Kant), Kompridis argues that a merely formal rationality is empty. Further,
the emphasis on procedure distances philosophy from the world. In particular,
philosophy as procedure has no relation to time, and so it cannot respond to the
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
9
consciousness of crisis, which response is necessary for the renewal of practices and
traditions. Philosophy must, not merely guarantee procedures of truth, but provide for
the continuity to the past in the renewal of everyday practices. Without that continuity,
agents feel disconnected, both from the past and their agency.
Heidegger’s world disclosure, for Kompridis, provides the “greatest challenge”
to Habermas’ paradigm change and can transform the notions of reason, critique, and
philosophy in contemporary critical theory (C&D 31). According to Kompridis, in
Heidegger, world disclosure refers to the ontological pre-understanding of the world
(C&D 33). The world or being, if you will, constitutes the condition for the possibility of
understanding anything. The world is not the things “in it” that we study, but the
background or conditions that allow such study to happen. As an analogy, consider that
film makers use discolored circles in a film to show a bullet flying. We can only see the
bullet’s passing against the background of what it passes through, something to which
our eyes are not sensitive. By adding “clear” waves in a movie, filmmakers highlight for
the viewer, not the medium through which nor the bullet itself, but that the bullet
passes; its passage is disclosed against a background. Similarly, a fish in the deep ocean
cannot discover the ocean. Rather, it discovers things in the ocean or parts of the ocean
because the ocean discloses those things or parts to the fish.
This background, moreover, discloses, not only things and our relations to them,
but also our selves. It provides the conditions for our own intelligibility. “What is in
each case mine, then, is the field of disclosed and as yet undisclosed possibilities into
which I have been ‘thrown.’ The possibilities of self I inherit are, in this sense, the
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
10
consequences of a collision, not a decision” (C&D 63). The identities we construct from
these fields of disclosed and undisclosed possibility are projects for us.
Notably, Kompridis' point echoes MacIntyre’s notion of the narrative unity of
life. We find ourselves, according to MacIntyre, as someone’s son or daughter,
someone’s brother or sister, belonging to this or that community. MacIntyre adds to this
discussion the notion of the good. We are not simply “thrown;” we are, in fact, seeking
the good for ourselves in this thrown-ness. The world, in Heidegger’s sense, discloses
for us the possibilities for the good, both for ourselves and for humanity. This world,
however, is empty and meaningless unless it includes tradition, because the good is
tradition-bound (MacIntyre 1982, 1988; Nicholas 2012).
The relations to others that develop in disclosure, on Kompridis’ account, are
necessary for agency. Heidegger reveals how our freedom for self-determination “is
both dependent on and facilitated, not just impeded, by our relations to others” (C&D
49). The conditions for my freedom and the freedom of the other “are conditions that
must be cooperatively established, preserved, and enlarged.” We are responsible for
establishing these conditions. When we commit ourselves to cooperation, we commit to
a process that will change the way we “speak, think, and act.” In doing so, we make it
possible for the other to become “intelligible to herself” which is “essential to her ability
both to express and experience her own agency” (C&D 50). (Needless to say, in our
cooperation with the other, we also make ourselves intelligible to us, supporting our
own agency.) Cooperation, then, cannot be instrumental, for in mutual cooperation we
constitute conditions for transformation and agency. The renewal of everyday practices
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
11
is also a renewal of our agency—agency expressed through receptivity and self
decentering—because we become intelligible to ourselves. We discover our own
intelligibility through the transformation of our selves in light of tradition.
One central question arises in this analysis of disclosure through cooperatively
established conditions: how is one to know that one’s voice is one’s own? If one has
joined with others to determine the conditions for the discovery of his or her self, how
does one know that he or she is discovering him- or her-self and not someone else?
Unfortunately, according to Kompridis, Heidegger locates this identification in a
resoluteness achieved before cooperation. This resoluteness becomes stiff and removes
possibilities for change. In contrast, Kompridis rightly asserts that we cannot become
resolute in ourselves because we have not yet formed ourselves. The formation of self
happens in relation to others under the conditions of cooperation. Recognizing one’s
speech as one’s own requires a “relation of reciprocal recognition between oneself and
others” (C&D 55). One must experience the call of conscience to go outside oneself
leaving oneself vulnerable. One can never get rid of the feeling that one’s voice is not
one’s own because the conditions we establish through mutual cooperation are the very
conditions that make us feel voiceless (C&D 57). The conditions of freedom—the
cooperation we establish—are never fixed in stone and can always be revisited. “Thus
despite all of its deficiencies Heidegger’s ethics expresses an ideal of freedom that can
only be realized (once again, contrary to Heidegger’s own self-understanding) under
conditions of a nonviolent, non-coercive, cooperative form of life” (C&D 68).
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
12
Given this positive interpretation of Heidegger, which Kompridis recognizes
does not fit well even with Heidegger’s understanding of his project, Kompridis rejects
the mainstream reading of Heidegger’s analysis of Das Mann. Heidegger, for
Kompridis, aims his analysis of disclosure to reveal, not just the sociological, but the
ontological conditions of intelligibility of our language. The analysis of Das Mann
shows a concern "with how everyday practices constrain what can show up as
significant and relevant, how they can obstruct or mislead our interpretive efforts, how
they can discretely colonize the logical space of possibility” (C&D 74). Disclosure is
necessary for critical theory because it allows us to recognize constraints on our
everyday lives. Disclosure allows us to recognize aspects of our tradition and everyday
practices hidden from us as well as opens up heretofore unforeseen possibilities during
a crisis. How do we go on from here? How do we move past this crisis?
Disclosure involves two aspects, as Kompridis outlines it: receptivity and self decentering. According to Kompridis, Heidegger shows how our reception of history
conditions how human beings make history. “The self-conscious transformation of our
inherited historical conditions might depend ... on how we recognize our dependence
on, rather than on how we assert our independence from, our history” (C&D 200). We
receive from our history particular understandings of reason, truth, knowledge,
freedom, and the way we receive those understandings has consequences for how we
go on, how we in fact achieve agency. We exercise agency, on this account, by
determining how we cooperatively begin anew.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
13
Kompridis elucidates this point with the following example: one day, one wakes
up and answers to the word “daddy” or “mommy," answering to expectations and
demands one had not known before” (C&D 206). One must be willing to answer to
those demands of identity, which requires an agency of receptivity to a call not known
before. Such receptivity depends on self de-centering. Self-decentering is a learning
process by which we take on the role of the other. Self decentering, then, entails both an
“impartial or objective view of things” and “an openness to experience” (C&D 213). It
leads to insight, “a point of departure” from something that “had deceived us and held
us captive” (C&D 213). On Kompridis’ Gadamerian account, self-decentering challenges
the total person cognitively and affectively. It, thus, requires risk and vulnerability, and
it does so because it connects us to possibility.
For a second time, one finds unacknowledged echoes of MacIntyre’s notions of
practice and of the narrative unity of life. In learning a practice we must be receptive to
the history of that practice, a history which reveals, not only the standards of excellence
and the internal goods, but the standards of reason of the practice. We develop our
agency in this or that practice by learning those aspects that define the practice. We also
develop our agency in our larger lives. For MacIntyre, each person seeks the good, of
which his or her practices are a part. When we seek the good, we are on a quest that
involves various dangers, threats, and distractions. These dangers, threats, and
distractions can lead to epistemological crises in which I must come to tell the story of
my life in a new way. In the quest, I discover something new about myself, become
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
14
intelligible to myself, just as the "daddy" in Kompridis' example. We must be
decentered to be open to the experiences of the quest.
Self-decentering and receptivity lead to the renewal of practices in the face of
epistemological crises. Receptivity to the history of our practice combined with selfdecentering in the practice opens us to ways in which we might continue the past with a
new understanding of ourselves, our relationships to others, and our practices.
On Kompridis' account, then, disclosure serves a particular role during an
epistemological crisis that procedural rationality cannot serve. Kompridis takes the
notion of epistemological crisis from MacIntyre and defines it as a breakdown,
specifically a breakdown in identity between past and future. Through this definition,
Kompridis links his concern with the renewal of tradition (particularly of the tradition
of critical theory) and practices with the notion of time and the awareness of things
having gone very bad. In an epistemological crisis, our understanding of truth,
intelligibility, and rationality are put into question. Yet, Kompridis notes,
epistemological crises, on MacIntyre’s account, are also always crises in human
relationships. We understand ourselves always only in relationship with others, and so
a crisis in our identity is a crisis in our relationships with others. Disclosure, then,
allows us to ask questions of meaning by disclosing our reality.
According to Kompridis, procedural rationality, focused on justification and
truth cannot do that, for it concerns only the process, not the end result. In fact, for
Kompridis, Habermas' procedural rationality makes critical theory particularly
vulnerable to epistemological crises. The tradition of critical theory—which really
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
15
means, as I shall show below, the people of that tradition—encounter "various
unanticipated normative and historical challenges" that "will require a combination of
problem solving and self-renewal" (C&D 21). The members of critical theory, then, must
find a new paradigm, which "can successfully integrate the old and the new."
Yet, Kompridis resists the pull to truth in the resolution of epistemological crises.
Habermas' procedural rationality requires that those in the ideal speech situation be
able to take a Yes/No position to truth-conditional claims. Yet, in a time of crisis, such
Yes/No positions prove impossible. What is in question cannot, according to
Kompridis, be determined, and so one cannot simply say yes or no to it. Thus,
Kompridis insists that Habermas' understanding of truth as validity is too strong. What
is at issue during an epistemological crisis is "possible truth-candidates whose
intelligibility and possibility depends on the emergence of 'new styles of reasoning'"
(C&D 136). Kompridis does not disclose what these new styles of reasoning are, but he
does intimate at points that what he is looking for is a new understanding of rationality.
We are left, then, in the middle of such crises with a need for a new vocabulary.
This need for a new vocabulary has nothing to do with truth-candidacy on
Kompridis' account. Disclosure opens up possibilities for a new vocabulary, but the
"fixation on truth draws attention away from the role of disclosure" (C&D 137).
Disclosure "can facilitate revaluations of what is good, what is worthy, of what is higher
and lower, and of what it means to be a human being. It can also awaken new social
hopes and new normative expectations" (C&D 137). These aspects of disclosure entail,
for Kompridis, learning. This learning, however, concerns, not some domain of
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
16
knowledge, but learning about the self and the possibilities of our future. Thus, critical
theory "must eschew the goal of truth" (C&D 273).
And so the general problem I have repeatedly thematized throughout this
book remains unsolved: how to grasp as learning—which is to say, as an
activity of reason—those accomplishments through which we acquire new
tongues with which to say what cannot be said and new ears with which
to hear what cannot be heard, accomplishments through which we
overcome epistemological crises, and partial, one-sided interpretations of
ourselves and others and accomplishments through which we are able to
'go on' learning from our interaction with one another and our interaction
with the 'world' (C&D 236).
II.
In the first section, I examined Kompridis' account of disclosure in relation to
Habermas' procedural rationality. Procedural rationality cannot deal with questions of
meaning which are central to the resolution of epistemological crises. The resolution of
such crises is one arena in which an agent becomes intelligible to herself so that she can
direct her own actions. This freedom she discovers by establishing with others their
conditions for mutual understanding. Disclosure aids this discovery by opening up new
meanings and new resources for reasoning from her world. An epistemological crisis is
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
17
a breakdown in meaning and a breakdown in our intelligibility. In the discussion, I
pointed to two places in which Kompridis’ echoes MacIntyre, though in an
unacknowledged way. That is, I have already made slight suggestions to why
MacIntyre's philosophy might be important in ways Kompridis does not recognize to
his project.
In this section, I want to motivate a further look at MacIntyre by examining two
aspects of Kompridis' account. Briefly, in his discussion of disclosure in art, Kompridis
draws on Herbert Marcuse's notion of phantasy. In doing so, however, he ignores
Marcuse's own discussion of the role of truth in phantasy. Second, in his use of
MacIntyre's notion of epistemological crises, Kompridis either ignores or glosses over
the central role of truth in the resolution of those crises. On both accounts, I will argue
that truth is important because it ties our search for meaning to the discovery of human
needs. Truth comes from a tradition's search for truth in the satisfaction of their needs.
Once I have made these brief arguments, I will turn, in the next section, to an example
that draws out these conclusions more forcefully.
In his analysis of Habermas, Kompridis poses six problems that need
overcoming. One of these problems is Habermas' supposed neutrality concerning the
good. While Habermas contends that we must refrain from evaluating forms of life or
culture, he in fact critically evaluates and ranks them, “[o]therwise, he could not engage
in his defense of modernity and the Enlightenment project” (C&D 27). This criticism is
the familiar one that Charles Taylor makes against Habermas. Critical theory, according
to Kompridis, needs ideas about the good in order to “articulat[e] more persuasively,
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
18
and illuminat[e] more powerfully the goods which motivate and underwrite our critical
activity” (C&D 27). Thus, he turns to Heidegger’s world-disclosure to uncover these
ideas of the goods. Notably, he warns against “universalistic criteria” of justice; yet,
what MacIntyre’s reason of tradition demonstrates is that no such universalistic criteria
are warranted or needed for critique. The more important question is, then, to what
extent can Heidegger’s intersubjectivity through world disclosure point toward any set
of ideas of the good for articulating and illuminating our critical activity—for renewing
everyday practices and agency.
The discussion of these ideas of the good, however, is relatively lacking in C&D.
Instead, they become tied up with the concern, one I share, that in modernity/postmodernity we have exhausted our utopian energies. The prevalence of zombies and
vampires on the screen and in our books is only one testament to this exhaustion, while
the preponderance of dystopian futures in children’s literature is perhaps its most
telling testament. Yet, what should we expect in a world that embraces both
instrumental and formal rationalities? When, as Horkheimer (2013) diagnoses, the
principle of self-preservation becomes the only goal worth pursuing in modernity, then
the idea of a utopia which goes beyond mere self-preservation becomes anathema.
Driven by a concern with the exhaustion of utopian energies, Kompridis looks
for these energies through Heideggerian world disclosure. In doing so, however,
Kompridis follows Habermas and Heidegger in separating truth from disclosure and,
thus, displaces truth from utopian energies. “The only ‘criteria’ of successful disclosure
that we can offer are as follows: (1) that it be capable of enlarging the cultural conditions
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
19
of meaning, through which (2) it facilitates the resolution of epistemological crises, by
which, (3) it can open up the future and potentially revitalize modernity’s relation to
time” (C&D 144).
While Kompridis is right about the ends of disclosure, he misses the role truth
plays in these ends. This miss results from associating, as Habermas does, truth with
validity.1 As noted above, Kompridis rejects Habermas’ arguments about the
subordination of art to other truth-validating practices. Surprisingly, however, he does
not reject, as I think one should, Habermas’ acceptance of the differentiation of
rationality spheres. Accepting that modernist disintegration of rationality spheres leads
one, not simply into the quagmire of communicative rationality, but into a false
dichotomy where world disclosure and truth-validation are distinct operations in
culture. When one asks about what a particular piece of art reveals about the world, one
cannot help asking about the truth of that reveal. Meaning and truth are separate, of
course: I understand and appreciate the meaning of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrug, but to say
that Rand did not seek to reveal some truth about the world in her work
misunderstands the novelist. Significantly, part of the truth involves revealing her ideas
about the good.
Kompridis glosses over, unfortunately, a passage from Marcuse that relates truth
to art. “The activity of mind by which ordinary concepts are transformed into
1
At the ISME 2014 meeting, Kompridis told me that he does not define truth as “validity.” I do not find
any other notion of truth in C&D, however, and am writing specifically about how truth is handled in
that text.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
20
anticipatory concepts possessing both world-disclosing power and normative force is
akin to what Marcuse called ‘phantasy’” (C&D 266). For Kompridis, Marcuse’s concept
of “phantasy” is a form of reflective disclosure. In a passage Kompridis cites from
Negations, Marcuse writes “Phantasy does not relate to the other cognitive faculties as
illusion to truth” (C&D 266). Missing from the passage Kompridis quotes, however, is
Marcuse’s comment about the relation of phantasy to truth:
If phantasy were set free to answer, with precise reference to already
existing technical material, the fundamental philosophical questions asked
by Kant, all of sociology would be terrified at the utopian character of its
answers. And yet the answers that phantasy could provide would be very
close to the truth, certainly closer than those yielded by the rigorous
conceptual analyses of philosophical anthropology. For it would
determine what man is on the basis of what he really can be tomorrow. In
replying to the question, ‘What may I hope?’, it would point less to eternal
bliss and inner freedom than to the already possible unfolding and
fulfillment of needs and wants (1969, 155).
Like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (2011), Marcuse (1974) believes art
discloses truth. Its emancipatory potential lies, not simply in releasing our desires, but
in connecting those desires to the real fulfillment in the future. Phantasy connects the
future to the past because it fulfills the missed and forgotten promises of the past. Those
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
21
promises were promises about the satisfaction of human needs. The connection
between past and future must lie in the truth of the phantasy. We must ask, does that
phantasy fulfill our past desires. And, if so, then we must further ask, to what extent are
those past desires still our desires.
For Kompridis, phantasy, as an activity of philosophy, "reconfigures the
normative relationship between past, present, and future.” What is the meaning of this
normative relationship? For Kompridis, philosophy "maintains its link to the 'real
history of humankind'" (267). It must articulate possibilities that "respond to the needs
of humanity." So, I take it that Kompridis agrees that what true philosophy does is
orient our future responsibilities in accordance to our past needs. It does so by
providing concepts that "generate, not just register experience." If concepts are to
generate experience and, by so doing, connect the past to the future via an
understanding of human needs, what it must do, then, is generate concepts that give us
the experience of satisfying our needs. Yet, these needs are the connection between
phantasy and truth. That is, if we disconnect phantasy—one form of disclosure—from
truth, then we cannot respond to needs because needs are either true or false. The
answers phantasy gives us are “very close to the truth” because phantasy, for Marcuse,
is grounded in the “already possible unfolding and fulfillment of needs and wants.”
Truth is truth only as it discloses the needs and wants of human beings against the
material conditions of history. That is, truth is the revelation of human nature.
From a Marxist-MacIntyrean orientation, one persistent human need is the need
for others. Thus, phantasy primarily discloses the need and desire for the
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
22
transformation of our relationships with each other, a rejection of alienation as false and
solidarity as truth. Philosophy, as future oriented, must, then, provide concepts that
help us generate experiences of solidarity. It does so through a reflection on the past,
that is through a reflection on tradition. If tradition is an argument about our
fundamental agreements, some of those arguments will be about our human needs.
Thus, you might have Roman Catholics debating whether priests ought to be allowed to
marry—what needs are being responded to here? Or you might have Marxists debating
the proper means to the communist state. Of course, everyday people renew their
everyday practices and traditions much more locally, and so you might have a small
community debating the place of a Blockbuster store in their community. This truth
underwrites the pedagogy that Paolo Freire (2000) and Augosto Boal (1993) give to
critical theorists, for in the discovery of meaning of culture and text we discover
together a truth. This mutual discovery has little to do with validity derived from an
ideal speech situation.
These debates lead us to the second point where Kompridis' analysis calls for
more discussion of truth—his use of MacIntyre's notion of epistemological crises.
Kompridis uses this term in his text to highlight the way world disclosure resolves
crises through the discovery of meaning. I have already noted that, for Kompridis,
critical theory must eschew truth as a final goal. He goes further, however, to claim that
the learning that occurs through disclosure during an epistemological crisis "outruns
rational evaluation." Given two of his main sources, MacIntyre and Taylor, I think
Kompridis would be hard pressed to maintain this claim. Further, the inability to
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
23
rationally evaluate our learning contradicts his concern for maintaining some continuity
between past and present. Third, critical theory relies on some possibility for rational
evaluation; this last point is a main contention between critical theorists like Marcuse
and those like Foucault. Finally, as I shall show in the next section, and as argued
elsewhere (Nicholas 2012) learning from is amenable to rational evaluation.
On MacIntyre’s account, a tradition is a historically and socially embedded
argument about fundamental agreements, especially the good, with insiders and
outsiders. Traditions encounter, on a variety of occasions, epistemological crises that
bring into question some of those fundamental agreements. The resolution of an
epistemological crisis is reasonable if it is either continuous with the standards of reason
in the tradition undergoing crisis or participants discover another tradition the
standards of reason of which explain both the crisis within their original tradition and
point toward a resolution for that crisis. The first path out of an epistemological crisis
leaves the participants still members of their original tradition, while the second path
means that they have changed traditions, but both paths are guided by the standards of
reason of one or the other tradition. Both paths are paths to truth because both reveal
something about the world and especially about how we can live in the world.
MacIntyre (1994) holds that the agents of each tradition make claims to truth.
Truth is “the perfected understanding in which enquiry terminates” (8). That is, truth
implies some ability to say how things really are in the world. Truth entails that what
an agent claims is true regardless of the particular standpoint from which she makes
that claim. The resolution of epistemological crises, then, depend on truth. This truth,
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
24
however, arises, not from an ideal speech situation, but from a crisis, a crisis of
meaning, as Kompridis rightly notes. This difference between MacIntyre and Habermas
over truth shows that Habermas remains mired in a non-human philosophy of
consciousness by another name. When we understand critique as the renewal of
everyday practices, then we have left the realm of ideal speech situations and entered
into the lives of everyday human beings here and now. In fact, one wonders to what
extent Habermas has taken to heart Marx’s criticism of Hegel as being too abstract.
Moreover, traditions and their standards of reason are the basis upon which we are able
to maintain the balance of continuity and discontinuity that motivates Kompridis’
analysis of crisis and time in modernity.
Charles Taylor supplements MacIntyre's account of epistemological crises. In
particular, Taylor wants to provide ways in which we rationally move from one moral
belief to another. He discusses what he calls “ad hominem arguments” as ways in
which we might argue with others that can cause a break. All of these ad hominem
arguments, however, are rational on his account. For example, Taylor says that when
we first walk into a room, we might think we see something, but then we blink, rub our
eyes, and take another look. We discover that what we thought we saw was not in fact
what we saw. We consider this change a rational change; we occupy a better
epistemological condition after we have blinked and rubbed our eyes. Likewise,
according to Taylor, we no longer consider human sacrifice a rational practice. The
change is a result of learning, learning from our past. Thus, Taylor has in mind exactly
the kind of learning that Kompridis takes aim at; yet, Taylor claims that this learning is
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
25
amenable to rational evaluation. Why? Because we now occupy a standpoint from
which we can evaluate our past beliefs in light of our present beliefs and find them
wanting. This claim is identical to MacIntyre's claim that a tradition progresses when
members of that tradition can evaluate their past beliefs according to their standards of
reason—standards that have proven to be the best so far.
In short, MacIntyre (1977) discusses epistemological crisis exactly because he is
seeking a means out of relativism. He argues that we can make rational changes within
traditions and between traditions even though we cannot occupy any standpoint
outside of a tradition. That is, we can reach truth even if we do not occupy a God's-eye
view of the world. What prevents Kompridis from making this realization is his
acceptance of Habermas' understanding of truth.
Kompridis writes, “truth (conceived as consensus or as a convergence or as a
final unmasking) should not (indeed cannot) be the goal of critique” (C&D 255). Of
course, he is right. This mis-understanding of truth opposes critique because it opposes
tradition. During times of normal science, scientists will have a convergence on ideas,
but that convergence is not itself a sign of truth. Rather, truth is discovered when our
ideas, however contentious they might be, prove more adequate to living in the world.
Thus, truth is always something towards which we can progress.
The goal of critique must be liberation, but liberation grounded in truth. What
would liberation be if it were false, if it were based on false needs and a false sense of
reality? Disclosure reveals, as Kompridis argues, the hidden meanings of our
ontological presuppositions, but that revelation by itself, divorced from truth, that is
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
26
liberation, can only cause anxiety. Thus, Heidegger's existential analysis leaves us
wanting more. Yet, truth under my account does not result from consensus or
convergence or some final unmasking.
The analysis of this section opens up a lacuna in Kompridis’ stellar work. On the
one hand, he shows the inadequacy of Habermas' procedural rationality; on the other
hand, he ties himself to a deformed understanding of disclosure. The attempt to
synthesize Habermas with Heidegger leaves him reliant on the role of truth that he
cannot recognize because he accepts a deformed conception of truth. We, then, have a
need, not only for disclosure, but for an account of truth that can make disclosure
relevant for critique. That is, we have ample reason for turning to MacIntyre's
understanding of tradition and practice as an alternative to the Habermas-Heidegger
synthesis that proves inadequate. In the next section, I will draw out how critique and
the renewal of everyday practices and traditions work through disclosure.
III.
Even today, few critical theorists would question the early Marcuse’s
idealist claim: ‘Reason is the fundamental category of philosophical
thought, the one by means of which it has bound itself to human destiny’
... ‘the concept of reason contains the concept of freedom’ (C&D 240).
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
27
Kompridis is especially concerned with the renewal of everyday practices for the
renewal of agency, through the renewal of the tradition of critical theory. He brings in
world disclosure because practices can inhibit agency when they constrain what shows
up as relevant. I share all of these concerns with Kompridis. Elsewhere, I have defended
a turn to MacIntyre as a resource for critical theory, and I have developed his concept of
a reason of tradition in relation to conceptions of the good and human nature in a
tradition. In addition, I have argued that practices and traditions comprise arenas in
which practioners argue over the good and other fundamental agreements. Here, I will
discuss my renewal of critical theory as a way to resolve the lacuna I have found in
Kompridis' work by looking at how reason works to renew traditions and everyday
practices in relation to the search for truth. Again, I emphasize that I agree with the
direction that Kompridis has taken and find it much more engaging and powerful than
that of Habermas. What Kompridis has done is question the limited paradigm of the
philosophy of intersubjectivity. I am arguing that we critical theorists must go further to
a philosophy of tradition, not only because it satisfies the criteria of critical theory more
fully than does Habermas' intersubjective communication, but also because it provides
the resources to renew everyday practices, traditions, and the tradition of critical theory.
Consider our friend, Athena, who opens her practice just after graduating from
obstetrics school. One day she meets Anastasia who is a midwife. They begin to have
lunch together, and in the process, discuss their work. Athena finds Anastasia's trust in
nature unnerving (Cohen 2011, Muhlhahn 2009, van Teijlingen 2005, Zwelling 2008) and
cringes when she hears Anastasia talk about sleeping while the mother is in labor
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
28
(Muhlhahn 2009). She also finds it strange that Anastasia must miss their lunch one day
because she has to visit a patient in the patient's home (Cohen 2011, Muhlhahn 2009).
Everything about Anastasia's work seems risky.
Then, one day, Athena wakes up to discover she is pregnant. She knows how it
happened, both practically and scientifically, and, despite the morning sickness she is
thrilled to be carrying life within her. In fact, she is so thrilled that she finds some
contentment in her pregnancy, even though she knows she should be filled with fear,
worried about all the things she knows could go wrong with the pregnancy, knowing
the relatively high rates of infant and maternal mortality in the United States where she
lives (Hermer 2003, CIA 2014, Kliff 2013). She shares these fears with Anastasia who
listens with such intensity it shocks her, but she finds such encouraging words in her
friend's words and experiences that she relaxes. And yet, she is unsure of herself.
Athena is undergoing two different epistemological crises: a personal crisis and a
professional crisis. Neither is new, though they are new to Athena. As she begins to
read about midwifery, what her friend Anastasia does, she comes to some startling
realizations.
First, when she was in medical school, and before that in a biology program in
the university, she was taught that scientists had to observe the world objectively. In
particular, they had to let the data determine their conclusions. She discovers, however,
after looking at the data on midwifery, that many obstetricians have failed to be
objective and to let the data drive their understanding of their scientific practice. She
discovers both that midwifery has better results for pregnancy and birth than obstetrics
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
29
(Budin 2007, Dhempsey 2006, Hermer 2003, Pitcock and Clark 2002) and that, when
obstetricians are shown this data, most of them either ignore it or explain it away. To
them, to obstetricians, pregnancy is pathological, a disease to be controlled as efficiently
as possible (Hayden 259-260; see also Wertz & Wertz 1989 and Peizer 1986). Athena
realizes that, until she was pregnant, she had accepted this same view of pregnancy.
Second, she begins to see her pregnancy differently. When the baby burps, she
understands that this is natural and laughs at it. When she sees that the fetus is turned
around in her womb, she does not worry, despite what her own obstetrician says. She
has heard Anastasia talk about how babies turn. Through these changes, she begins to
think of her previous fears about pregnancy as a little silly and her beliefs about
pregnancy as unreasonable. She holds her former beliefs as so silly that one day she
surprises herself by asking Anastasia to attend her at the birth of her child; she will not
have an obstetrician with her.
Athena has come to a new understanding of herself, one in which she becomes
intelligible to herself. In doing so, she has indeed experienced a break—a break with her
past self and a break within her dominant tradition of natural science and practice of
obstetrics. After the baby is born, she commits herself to challenging the prejudices of
other obstetricians. She begins, first, by changing her own practice. Importantly, she
does not abandon either her practice or her tradition. Rather, she begins to see her role
as an obstetrician as an aid to midwifes, and she works with Anastasia to be a partner
with other midwives in the area. When a woman comes to her for services, she directs
them to midwifery and explains how she will be there to assist in any situation. Her
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
30
everyday practice has changed, and she uses her newfound freedom to help fight for
change within the larger practice of obstetrics and within the tradition of science. Thus,
third, Athena understands her needs differently. She discovers concepts which help her
generate new ways of being in her practice and in her tradition. One of these concepts
might be "scientism," the name of the ideology in which people believe what an
unquestioned science tells them (Nicholas 2008). Another concept might be "trust
nature," which allows her to step back from her everyday activities and make new ones.
The way I have described Athena's situation may be unusual for Europeans, but
for people in the United States, it is a phantasy. In 1848, doctors first used analgesics in
a birth (Pitcock and Clark 1992; Zwelling 2008). That event marked a revolution in the
way that human beings do birth and how they view birth. This revolution was starkest
in the United States (Litoff 1978; Rooks 1997)). Unlike non-US countries in which they
had established traditions of midwifery and in which they opened midwifery training
schools, in the US midwives, because themselves immigrants, shared no traditions
(Rooks 1997, 17-30). Obstetricians and other physicians, rightly worried by the high
rates of infant and maternal mortality, fought to bring "medicine" into the birthing
room. Tied to legitimate concerns about health, though, were concerns about dollars
and prestige (Pitcock and Clark 1992). Thus, once the American Medical Association
formed, physicians through the AMA began a pogrom against midwives labeling them
as uneducated and dirty. By 1940, 50% of births occurred in the hospital (Pitcock and
Clark 1992, 584). After the war, hospital births jumped to 79% and grew to 99% of all
births. Today, about 95% of births occur in the hospital despite the fact that 95% of
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
31
women could deliver safely at home (Davis-Floyd 1992, 89; Mathews and Zadak 1991,
41). Even today in the US, obstetricians control birth in the US, and women practicing
midwifery can be sued, in many states, for practicing medicine without a license, even
though none of them see themselves as practicing medicine (Hermer 2003, Peizer 1986).
Athena's case highlights this situation in the US. She comes to her pregnancy in a
world that is already interpreted. She has inherited ontologies—learned ontologies—
with cultural meanings and ontological presuppositions. Rather than seeing these
inherited ontologies as a resource for renewal, Kompridis worries about them. “Is it
really to succumb to fatalism, if we say that within our inherited ontologies are
deposited cultural meanings and ontological presuppositions that ‘govern’ what we say
and do?” (202). Of course, the answer is no.
For Kompridis, the answer is “no” because Heidegger shows that receptivity is
an activity. We must allow ourselves to be open to—to receive—the world, which
includes the insights we might gain from the inherited ontologies. Athena experiences
an epistemological crisis—she must come to a new understanding of herself and her
world. She needs to rewrite parts of her narrative, in the process trying to understand
the truth about the meaning of her life. For Kompridis, we/she evaluate her world
disclosure—her new narrative—according to whether that narrative enlarges cultural
meanings, resolves her crisis, and, opens up the future. As I have argued, these
evaluations occur through a tradition.
Let me rephrase MacIntyre's definition of tradition to highlight Athena's agency
and search for truth in the example. Tradition is a community of people, extended in
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
32
space-time, arguing over their fundamental agreements, especially about the human
good and human nature, amongst themselves and with others. My rephrasing brings
out the fact that people are the ones who constitute the tradition by arguing. They
renew their traditions through putting to question “inherited ontologies,” “cultural
meanings,” and “ontological presuppositions.” Such questioning may, and often does,
begin with a transformative experience, like Athena's pregnancy or Kompridis' example
of the "daddy." These transformations, however, do not “outrun rational evaluation.”
Athena sees herself as making a reasonable change to her personal life and fighting for a
reasonable change in her practice of obstetrics and her tradition of science.
Athena is both receptive to her tradition and the practice of midwifery. She
opens up to the possible cultural meanings of birth and pregnancy. She is also
decentered. She takes an objective view of the state of obstetrics and opens herself to
new experiences. The reasonableness of her transformation rests on her use of the
standards of reason available to her in her tradition of science and practice of obstetrics
and the new standards she discovers in the practice of midwifery. A standard of reason
is a process or criteria that members of a tradition or practice have used in the past to
arrive at the truth. For scientists, one such standard of reason is "let the data determine
your conclusions."
In her transformation, Athena comes to see that members of her practice have
failed to use this standard of reason. Midwifery helps to explain this failure, by offering
an alternative ontology: birth is, not pathological, but natural. Athena, further, sees that
her tradition has adopted an ontology and approach to nature that in fact is
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
33
unreasonable. They do not trust nature, but see nature as something to fear, and to be
controlled. Why does Athena judge that her tradition is unreasonable in this respect?
The reason Athena sees some of the standards of reason within her tradition and
practice as unreasonable is because she sees that, rather than satisfying human needs,
they inhibit their satisfaction. "Normal"2 birth through obstetrics and science leads to
higher rates of infant and maternal mortality; further, medicalized birth leads to
incidences of depression and other poor health for both mother and child (Zwelling
2008). Athena recognizes that two human needs are health and life. In fact, she became
an obstetrician to support life and health. Yet, she discovers that her practice has failed
to support health and life. So she undergoes a transformation—in our example, a
transformation that is both personal and practice-oriented.
In this phantasy, Athena, though an obstetrician, proves receptive to the world.
Yet, most obstetricians fail to be receptive. Over a century of medical science has served
to make pregnancy a pathology and birth an unnatural event filled with risk. The
learned ontology that pregnancy is a pathology constrains obstetricians' analyses as
well as their agency. Kompridis is right, then, to highlight the need for a person to be
receptive. Yet, my analysis shows that receptivity is not enough
2
Of course, we can and should engage Michel Foucault's and, before him, Charles Canguilheim's
analysis of medicine, sickness, and insanity—but that discussion is for a fuller analysis of birth
and midwifery, though it does show how close a MacIntyrean analysis comes to a Foucaultian
analysis. The singular difference would be, as MacIntyre insists in, for example, “Relativism,
Power, and Philosophy,” truth! For a Foucaultian analysis of midwifery, see Lay 2000.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
34
Thus, MacIntyre, according to Knight: "[T]raditions represent not just inherited
theories but also practical struggles over the control and direction of human activity.
Therefore, ‘debate and conflict as to the best forms of practice have to be debate and
conflict between rival institutions and not merely between rival theories’” (Knight 2008
16; citing MacIntyre 1990b, 360). Medical science, through the institution of the
American Medical Association, has struggled with midwifery over, not just the control
of birth, but also the control of the activity of the midwife herself. Athena, in her
pregnancy, becomes either a pawn or an agent in this struggle. She becomes a pawn by
simply accepting the tradition of medical science without question or she becomes an
agent by trying to come to an understanding of medical science and of midwifery. She
must choose between the institutions of medicine and those of midwifery, and often the
state can dictate what her choice is.
Kompridis rightly asks whether this reliance on her tradition opens up cultural
meanings and her future, and, most importantly resolves her crisis. We might return to
the central question of his book in thinking through this criteria: how do we
understanding learning as reasonable? For Habermas, such learning is reasonable only
insofar as it occurs under the paradigm of procedural rationality aimed at truth
understood as achieving some form of consensus. Kompridis, rejecting this approach,
accepts the separation of learning from truth as consensus.
Athena, however, does not arrive at her truth by reaching some consensus
through procedural rationality. Members of a tradition constitute—renew—their
history in the stories they choose to tell and the ways they choose to tell them. When
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
35
Athena opens herself to the cultural meanings of birth and pregnancy and to the
ontological presuppositions surrounding pregnancy and birth, she is trying to
understand what her needs are. She is, in essence, trying to discover her desires.
This discovery is not something she can do on her own. Importantly, Athena's
transformation begins in friendship. Through dialogue with her friend, Athena
discovers her needs. Athena seeks the truth about herself. As Kompridis argues, she
suffers from an epistemological crisis that involves her own identity and, so, she seeks
to discover her own voice in this dialogue with others. She is in relationship with both
her midwife friend and her baby and presumably a partner. This situation is no ideal
speech situation. Anastasia, as well as Athena, comes to the table with a variety of
inherited ontologies. Yet, the engagement with her friend allows Athena to open up the
cultural meanings of birth, open up possibilities for her future, and resolves her crisis.
Her friend belongs to a different tradition, but one that helps Athena to
understand her own tradition better. Needs are always interpreted; they are revealed in
tradition—thus, the intersubjectivity. Yet, reason itself constitutes and is constituted by
tradition, and our agency rests in how we actively engage in that tradition; that is, in
how we come together with others and argue over the good. One study shows that,
whereas midwives will inform pregnant women of a variety of birthing options, for the
most part obstetricians will withhold information (Reime 2004). As Kompridis
contends, however, for Athena to become intelligible to herself, she must recognize her
voice in the cooperation she establishes with others. This recognition of her own voice,
however entails that self choice occurs “only within a horizon of value and significance”
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
36
(C&D 61). It is surprising, then, that Kompridis does not make more use of the concept
of tradition in his analysis.
Athena's resolution of her crisis—her discovery of her agency and identity—are
reasonable only to the extent that she uses the standards of reason of her tradition or of
a tradition that seems reasonable according to those standards but which succeed in
some way that her own tradition fails. The only criteria she has in determining that
reasonableness, the success of this or that tradition, is the truth she discovers about her
desires, that is, about her needs. I repeat Marcuse's insight: "In replying to the question,
'What may I hope?' [phantasy] would point less to eternal bliss and inner freedom than
to the already unfolding and fulfillment of needs and wants." Phantasy belongs to
world disclosure and world disclosure belongs to agency and freedom to the extent that
either connects us to human needs.
How is she to know, however, whether this new narrative resolves her crisis? For
MacIntyre, the resolution of the crisis must bring us closer to the truth. So, Athena must
understand her new narrative as true, that her resolution brings her closer to the truth.
That truth, on my understanding, is discovered through the use of standards of reason
through which we discover our needs and satisfy them. Athena's resolution of her crisis
rests on the satisfaction of her needs through the application of standards of reason,
standards found within traditions and practices.
CONCLUSION
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
37
The conditions of modernity surrounding birth obscure and foreclose certain
possibilities for us. Modeled after scientific rationality, Habermas' procedural
rationality cannot disclose the truth about birth--that is, cannot disclose our desires
regarding pregnancy, birth, family, medicine, and midwifery. Through our receptivity
and self decentering, the world discloses to us our identity.
Like Kompridis, we can appreciate how Heidegger points out that everyday
practices "constrain what can show up as significant." In the case of obstetrics, current
practice alienates us from nature and our own desires. Yet, this disclosure requires
some relationship to truth. World disclosure that reveals meanings without truth leads
to nihilism and emotivism. Phantasy reveals the possibilities before us, but these
possibilities must be grounded, as Marcuse shows, in human need. That need is
revealed in tradition. These needs give rise to the "goods that motivate and underwrite
our critical activity." The medical tradition and the practices of obstetrics reveal a
variety of goods, a variety of needs that each satisfy. Their renewal depends on our
willingness to argue over these goods and coming to discover with others are desires.
Whereas Kompridis supplements and must supplement Habermas’ procedural
rationality with Heideggerrian disclosure, my take on tradition-constituted and
constitutive reason shows how MacIntyre’s original formulation already includes
disclosure. The singular advantage to this position rests in the relationship between
truth and disclosure: whereas on Kompridis’ take disclosure and truth are distinct, on
my account, disclosure is necessary for the discovery of truth.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
38
If critical theorists wish to emerge from their epistemological crisis, it will take
more from us than disclosure of meaning. It requires the discovery of shared standards
of reason. These standards result, not from some ideal speech situation, but from our
common quest for the truth of human life. That is, these standards of reason disclose
and are disclosed by human needs; the closer we are to satisfying human needs—
persistent human desires—the more reasonable we are. Marx rejects Hegel's dictum
that "the real is the rational" because reality revealed that material needs had not been
met. On this understanding, the concept of reason contains the concept of freedom
because freedom requires the satisfaction of basic, persistent human desires--what
Marcuse called "vital interests." One such desire is the desire for freedom; that is, for
agency. This agency, as Kompridis rightly points out, taking his lead from passages in
Heidegger, is what MacIntyre has sought to renew since his earliest writings. Agency is
our coming together in solidarity to discover our desires in common.
For MacIntyre as for myself, we realize our agency through tradition and
practices. Each requires that we actively renew our standards of reason and other
ontological inheritances, but only through personal questioning of those ontological
inheritances. For example, in modern science, we must seeking to understand the limits
of our own formal and instrumental rationalities as we carry on our day to day lives. In
family or midwifery, we discover needs heretofore hidden from us by contemporary
institutions. We are called to be receptive to a history which can decenter us by opening
up new possibilities of the future. That is, we are called to phantasy.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
39
My fantasy, like that of Kompridis, is to renew the tradition of critical theory.
The arguments I have made here should at least give us critical theorists pause in our
understanding and relation to MacIntyre. It should, further, I hope convince us to look
at the history of his work from his early Marxist writings to his current Thomist
writings to see what they disclose. This disclosure means that we too must be receptive
to MacIntyre's work and decenter ourselves toward the future.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
40
Bibliography
Allen, Amy (2014) “Reason, Power, and history: Re-Reading the Dialectic of
Enlightenment,” Thesis Eleven 120(1): 10-25.
Boal, Augusto (1993) Theater of the Oppressed trans. Charles McBride. NY: Theater
Communications Group.
Budin, W. C. (Spring 2007) “The Cultural Warping of Childbirth Revisited,”
Journal of Perinatal Education 16 (2): 1-3.
Cahill, H. (2001) “Male Appropriation and Medicalization of Childbirth: An
Historical Analysis,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 33(3): 334-342.
CIA, The World Factbook: Infant Morality Rate
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world
factbook/rankorder/2091rank.html
Cohen, J. (2011 йил 19-June). Interview: Jill Cohen. (J. Nicholas, Interviewer)
Davis, B. M. (2008). How Authoritative Texts Reinforce the Medical Model of
Birth. British Journal of Midwifery , 16 (4), 212-217.
Davis-Floyd (1992) Robbie E. “The Technocratic Body and the Organic Body:
Cultural Models for Women’s Birth Choices,” Knowledge and Society: The Anthropoogy of
Science and Technology 9, 59-93.
DeVries, R. et. al. (2001) Birth By Design: Pregnancy, Maternity Care and
Midwifery in North America and Europe London: Routledge.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
41
Dhempsey, K. R. (2006). Performing Birth in a Culture of Fear: An Embodied
Crisis of Late modernity. Health Sociology Review , 15, 364-373.
Freire, Paulo (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Trans.
Myra Bergman Ramos. NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
Haire, D. (June 1973) “The Cultural Warping of Childbirth,” Environmental Child
Health Special Report, 171-191.
Hayden, Sara K (2004) “The Business of Birth: Obstacles Facing Low-Income
Women in Choosing Midwifery Care After the Licensed Midwifery Practice Act of
1993,” Berkeley Journal of Gender, Justice, and Law 19(1): 257-269.
Hermer, L. D. (2003). Midwifery: Strategies on the Road to Universal
Legalization. Journal of Law-Medicine , 13, 325-269.
Horkheimer, Max (2013/1947) Eclipse of Reason. NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno (2011) Towards a New Manifesto NY:
Verso.
Kliff, Sara (2013, 9 January) “Graph of the Day: The United States has a really
high infant mortality rate,” The Washington Post, wonkblog:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/09/graph-of-theday-the-united-states-has-a-really-high-infant-mortality-rate/
Knight, Kelvin (2008) “After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and
Marx,” Analyse and Kritik 30: 33-52.
Knight, Kelvin (2007) Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to
MacIntyre Cambridge: Polity.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
42
Knight, Kelvin (2011) “Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” in Virtue and Politics:
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism eds. Blackledge, Paul and Kelvin
Knight. Notre Dame, IN: UNDP, 20-35.
Kompridis, Nikolas (2011) Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and
Future (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Kompridis, Nikolas (1994) “On World Disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas, and
Dewey,” Thesis Eleven 37: 29-45.
Lay, Mary M (2000) The Rhetoric of Midwifery: Gender, Knowledge, and Power new
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Litoff (1978) Judy Barrett. American Midwives: 1860 to the Present. Westport,
Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1977) “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narratives, and the
Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60(4): 453-472.
MacIntyre, Alasdair (1994) “Moral Relativism, Truth, and Justification,” in Moral
truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honor of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe Blackrock
C. Dublin: Four Courts Press, pp. 6-24
Marcuse, Herbert (1974) Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud
NY: Beacon Press.
Marcuse, Herbert (1991) One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced
Industrial Society NY: Beacon Press.
Muhlhahn, C. (2009). Labor of Love: A Midwife's Memoir. New York City, NY,
USA: Kaplan Publishing.
Nicholas/Disclosure, Tradition, and Substantive Reason
43
Peizer, D. <. (1986). A Social and Legal Analysis of the Independent Practice of
Midwifery:Vicarious Liability of the Collaborating Physician and Judicial Means of
Addressing Denial of Hospital Priveleges. Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice , 2.
Pitcock, CDH and R. B. Clark (1992) “From Fanny to Fernard: The Development
of Consumerism in Pain Control During the Birth Process,” The American Journal of
Obstetrics and Gynecology 167: 581-587.
Reime, Birgit, et. al. (2004) “Do Materinity Care Provider Groups Have Different
Attitudes towards Birth?” British Journal of Gynecology 111(12): 1388-1393.
Rooks, Judith Pence (1997) Midwifery and Childbirth in America. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Teijlingen, E. van. (2005) “A critical analysis of the medical model as used in the
study of pregnancy and childbirth,” Sociological Research Online 10 (2) Web address:
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/2/teijlingen.html
Tjaden, G. (1987). Midwifery in Colorado: A Case Study in the Politics of
Professionalization. Qualitative Sociology , 10 (1), 29-45.
Wertz, R. W., & Wertz, D. C. (1989). Lying-In: A history of Childbirth in America
(Expanded edition ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Zwelling, E. “The Emergence of High-Tech Birthing,” Journal of Obstetric,
Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing 37: 2008, 85-93.