Teleology as a Practical Postulate
Daniel John Sportiello
Doctoral Student, University of Notre Dame
25 July 2013
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The threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply the objective methods to
the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was
called man. Two kinds of analysis then came into being. There are those that operate within the
space of the body, and—by studying perception, sensorial mechanisms, neuro-motor diagrams,
and the articulation common to things and to the organism—function as a sort of transcendental
aesthetic; these led to the discovery that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it
is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within
it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a
nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that can at the same time be made
manifest to it in its own empirical contents. There were also analyses that—by studying
humanity’s more or less ancient, more or less easily vanquished illusions—functioned as a sort
of transcendental dialectic; by this means it was shown that knowledge had historical, social, or
economic conditions, that it was formed within the relations that are woven between men, and
that it was not independent of the particular form they might take here or there; in short, that
there was a history of human knowledge which could both be given to empirical knowledge and
prescribe its forms.
—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
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0. Reaction and Revolution.
Is Alasdair MacIntyre a reactionary—one who attacks political liberalism as manipulative, who
would replace its culture of individuals and rights with one of communities and virtues, and who
champions Thomism as the key to this transformation?
Or is Alasdair MacIntyre a revolutionary—one who attacks industrial capitalism as
exploitative, who would replace its culture of corporate greed with one of just generosity, and
who champions Marxism as the key to this transformation?
I ask this question not to answer it—since, obviously, it cannot be answered as asked—
but rather to suggest its similarity to another question.
Is Immanuel Kant a reactionary—one who would halt the Enlightenment in its tracks,
who would reveal the inevitable limits on our knowledge, and who would thereby defend
traditional morality and religion?
Or is Immanuel Kant a revolutionary—one who would bring the Enlightenment to its
fulfillment, who would reveal the freedom at the heart of the human condition, and who would
thereby defend a political order grounded in the equal dignity of all?
Occasionally, culture warriors invoke MacIntyre and Kant—seeking, perhaps, to
appropriate a legitimacy that their parties can no longer confer. The current fashion—a relatively
recent one—is for conservatives to invoke MacIntyre and liberals to invoke Kant. But such
invocations tend to be rather unconvincing. Perhaps this is because it is so easy to construct, for
every conservative reading of MacIntyre or liberal reading of Kant, and equally plausible—
because equally superficial—liberal reading of MacIntyre or conservative reading of Kant.
Indeed, the more sophisticated culture warriors realize as much: conservatives who actually read
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MacIntyre decry his “cultural relativism,” while liberals who actually read Kant decry his
“fideism”—as though the incommensurability of traditions and practical postulation were mere
excrescences on their respective theories.
One of the two theses of this essay is that each of those doctrines is the whole point of its
respective theory: MacIntyre hopes above all to show the incommensurability of traditions,
whereas Kant hopes above all to show the impossibility of knowledge of things in themselves.
Both hope to show, in other words, that there is a limit to the power of reason, a point after
which nothing is accomplished by yet more argument. But their point is not nearly as nihilistic as
it sounds: MacIntyre and Kant articulate the limits of argument only so that these limits might be
overcome by something other than argument. MacIntyre suggests that one may judge between
two incommensurable traditions if the first tradition solves the problems of the second better than
the second does itself—and the first can explain why this is; Kant suggests that one may affirm
certain propositions about things in themselves if one must do so in order to think and act at all.
But overcoming the limits of argument comes at a cost. The cost that Kant pays is more
obvious: just because I cannot think or act without assuming that I am free, for example, does not
mean at all that I am free—and so I am compelled to believe something that, it seems, I have
every reason to doubt. But MacIntyre also pays a cost—albeit one less obvious: there seems no
reason to believe, and every reason to doubt, that one tradition will ever vindicate itself in the
way that it must if it is to prove itself more than arbitrary—and yet it must do so if any judgment
made within it, even this one, is to be justified.
If these two costs seem similar, they should: they are the same cost, albeit expressed in
two very different vocabularies. That is the other thesis of this essay.
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1. The Critical Philosophy.
What is the Critical Philosophy?
There are any number of ways to answer this question: it is, for example, what shows the
constructive character of theory and ethics, the difference between phenomena and noumena, and
the necessity of taking ourselves to be free. But the best answer is one that implies all of those
while situating the Critical Philosophy in its historical context—that of the Renaissance and the
Scientific Revolution, Reformation, and Enlightenment that followed it: the Critical Philosophy
is the recognition of the implications of perspective.
1.1. Perspective.
Men would not be free, Denis Diderot quipped, until the last king was strangled with the entrails
of the last priest.
In hindsight, this was an exaggeration.
In 1401, the Florentine Guild of Cloth Importers held a competition to determine who
would design the new east doors to the Baptistery. The two finalists were Filippo Brunelleschi
and Lorenzo Ghiberti, each of whom had submitted a single panel, cast in bronze, depicting the
Sacrifice of Isaac. Though the Guild pronounced the contest a tie and asked the two winners to
collaborate on the new doors, Brunelleschi was apparently furious at the suggestion that he was
merely equal to Ghiberti; giving up sculpture entirely, he left for Rome to study architecture.
Brunelleschi eventually returned to Florence and, in 1418, defeated Ghiberti in the
competition to design the dome—which would dwarf any before attempted—of the Basilica of
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Saint Mary of the Flower, the cathedral across the street from the Baptistery. In the meantime,
however, the Renaissance had begun.
The reason is as much philosophical as it is artistic. Despite its depth, Brunelleschi’s
bronze panel is designed as though it were flat: it shows Abraham, Isaac, and the angel as though
we were looking at them from the side—almost as though in the abstract. Ghiberti’s bronze
panel, on the other hand, shows the characters from the angles at which we would actually see
them if we looked at them in the concrete: it shows the angel flying toward us while Isaac, his
body twisted in space, looks back at it.
Regardless of the indecision of the Guild of Cloth Importers, Ghiberti saw something that
Brunelleschi did not. For the panel of Ghiberti, unlike that of Brunelleschi, employs
perspective—the recognition that the point from which we look at things determines how they
appear to us: we see things, he realized, not as they are in themselves but rather only as they are
conditioned by how we look at them. It was the same insight that, in the form of a newly
mathematized optics, revolutionized painting—and, in this, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi each
played his part.
In any case, this insight is not limited to art. Far from seeing the orbits of the planets as
they are in reality, Nicolaus Copernicus realized, we see them only as they appear from our
perspective here on Earth: the planets seem to circle Earth only because we are ourselves on
Earth. But Earth is not the center of things: we see things, as it were, from a funny angle—just as
Ghiberti shows Isaac and the angel from a funny angle.
In physics, of course, perspective is called relativity. Indeed, the Scientific Revolution
came into its own when Galileo Galilei asserted that what we see is not absolute motion but
rather only relative motion—motion, that is, toward or away from us, toward or away from our
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perspective. Galileo realized that there are neither absolute position nor absolute direction—just
as, three centuries later, Einstein realized that there are neither absolute distance nor absolute
duration: position and direction, distance and duration, are the products of our interaction with
the world, not aspects of the world itself.
This insight is not limited to theory. For once one realizes that how one experiences the
world is the product of what one brings to that experience, much that once seemed beyond
question suddenly seems to be no more than prejudice. No medieval could have faced the sort of
existential crisis that every modern risks: that men and women were meant for salvation was, in
that age, overwhelmingly obvious—was indeed so far below the threshold of doubt as to make it
difficult to even articulate the alternative. With perspective, however, came the worry—one that,
in time, drove the world mad—that the purposes that one sees in the world are not in the world at
all—that they are the product not of perception but rather of confusion.
Or, perhaps, of indoctrination. That men and women were meant for salvation—were
meant, that is, to play the roles in kingdom and congregation assigned to them—began to look
suspiciously like an invention of the kings and priests who assigned those roles. The
Enlightenment and Reformation were sparked, ultimately, by the conviction that neither kings
nor priests have a privileged perspective upon what is best for us—just as market capitalism
presupposes that there is no value to things beyond how much we happen to want them.
That kings still breathe and priests still digest should not fool us: we have freed
ourselves—paradoxically, by renouncing our hope to transcend the limitations of our
perspective. But this renunciation has left a yawning emptiness within us—one that has,
periodically, threatened to destroy us. For, after six centuries of desperate searching, it seems
clear that there is no one perspective that we all share. Indeed, this is the foundation of our
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political liberalism—but it is a foundation that forever threatens to undermine itself: if every
value is merely the expression of subjective preference, then toleration of opposing preferences
is no more objectively valuable than anything else.
More generally, if each of us is just a prisoner of his or her perspective, then none of our
words or deeds is anything more than a mask for power, a weapon in the war of all against all.
And this is so even if we only occasionally realize it:
Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their
way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will
discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to
predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of
bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social
movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which
Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor.1
Far from an aberration, then, Nazism was the very deepest expression of our political liberalism.
And, as such, it was the fruit of the Enlightenment and Reformation—of, indeed, the Scientific
Revolution. Even though it was not quite what Galileo had in mind.
1.2. Objectivity.
Nor was it what Kant had in mind. For he could not yet see what became obvious to later
generations: our a priori is, in the words of Michel Foucault, historical—and thus that it changes
over time and across cultures. Nonetheless, Kant is, in a way, the fulcrum of this story, the
1
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd edition (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2007), 114.
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moment when perspective turned back upon itself and saw that its power came at a price—even
if he could not yet see just how high this price would be.
Consider a deceptively simple example: a tree, you insist, has many hundreds of leaves,
while I insist that it has very few leaves indeed. Our argument grows more and more heated until
we realize, to our mutual embarrassment, that you saw the tree during the height of summer,
while I saw it during the depths of fall.
Consider a related example—one, if anything, even more absurd: the tree, you insist,
stands to the right of Old Man Gettier’s barn, while I insist that it stands to the left of that barn.
Our argument grows more and more heated until we realize, to our mutual embarrassment, that
you saw the tree from the north, while I saw it from the south.
It was Kant who realized that the simplicity of such examples is deceptive: why is it that
we take ourselves to disagree with one another? Why is it, in other words, that we are compelled
to argue until we explain and thus resolve our dispute? Why is it, in the Kantian vocabulary, that
we are compelled to move from subjectivity to objectivity?
For this is, Kant realized, exactly what happens: though you saw only the-tree-from-thenorth-during-the-summer and I saw only the-tree-from-the-south-during-the-fall, we are both
compelled to construct a representation of space and time not indexed to any particular point
within which an object, the tree, might exist as such. No point within our representation of space
and time is privileged over any other: any “here” or “now” is, we assume, just the product of
some subjective perspective—of the interaction of things with your or my peculiar position in
space and time.
Indeed, all knowledge is like this—is, in other words, the product of the interaction of
things with the peculiarities of some sensory and cognitive apparatus: we construct not only a
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representation of space and time not indexed to any particular point but also a representation of
things such that they fall into purely formal categories, such as that of causality. And ethics is not
so different from theory: we reorganize our intentions such that they are compatible with a
purely formal justice—what Kant calls the Categorical Imperative—and our motivations such
that they lead us to act on those intentions.
Why, Kant asked, are we compelled to do this? Well, abstraction from the peculiarities of
my subjective perspective is required if I—a theoretical and practical agent—am to exist at all: I
not only occupy a different subjective perspective than others do, I occupy a different subjective
perspective now than I did in the past or will in the future. If I am not to fragment across time, I
must be not he-who-sees-the-tree-from-the-north-during-the-summer and he-who-sees-the-treefrom-the-south-during-the-fall but rather I-who-knows-the-tree. Just so, I must be not he-whoacts-kindly-when-feeling-benevolent and he-who-acts-meanly-when-feeling-malicious but rather
I-who-acts-respectfully. If I am to exist, in short, I must become more than the sum of my
temporal parts.
My suspicion, for what it is worth, is that most contemporary ethicists who crusade
against Kant miss precisely this point: both his Transcendental Deduction and his Categorical
Imperative insist that I must construct myself—that I must reorganize my temporal stages such
that they are not at war with one another. That I find myself coming into agreement with others,
both theoretically and practically, is merely a side effect: the perspectives of others are relevant
to me because many of those others are me—are, that is, various temporal stages of me.
1.3. Phenomena and Noumena.
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Anyway, let us continue our example: the leaves of the tree, you insist, are red, while I insist that
they are green. The Scientific Revolution allowed us to see that there is a sense in which both of
us are right—precisely because there is another sense in which neither of us is right: the leaves
of the tree appear red to you, and appear green to me, because our eyes are structured differently
and so interact with the light reflected by the leaves in different ways.
The colloquial expression for this fact—namely, that one of us is “colorblind”—is
slightly misleading: each of us sees perfectly well, insofar as each of us sees exactly what he or
she is determined to see by the interaction of his or her eyes with the leaves. Our disagreement as
to the real color of the leaves is not settled so much as dissolved: the leaves are really such as to
reflect light of a certain wavelength, and the question of whether to call this reflective propensity
“red,” “green,” or something else is merely the question of which vocabulary is most convenient.
One with a taste for the Kantian vocabulary might say that, compared to the “empirically real”
reflective propensity of the leaf, the colors of red and green are “empirically ideal.” In any case,
it seems that it was René Descartes who first realized that explaining disagreements
mechanistically—as products of differences in perspective—dissolved questions about nature
into questions about vocabulary:
A sick man is no less one of God’s creatures than a healthy one, and it seems no
less a contradiction to suppose that he has received from God a nature which
deceives him. Yet a clock constructed with wheels and weights observes all the
laws of its nature just as closely when it is badly made and tells the wrong time as
when it completely fulfills the wishes of the clockmaker. In the same way, I might
consider the body of a man as a kind of machine equipped with and made up of
bones, nerves, muscles, veins, blood and skin… I can easily see that if such a
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body suffers from dropsy, for example, and is affected by the dryness of the throat
which normally produces in the mind the sensation of thirst, the resulting
condition of the nerves and other parts will dispose the body to take a drink, with
the result that the disease will be aggravated. Yet this is just as natural as the
body’s being simulated by a similar dryness of the throat to take a drink when
there is no such illness and the drink is beneficial. Admittedly, when I consider
the purpose of the clock, I may say that it is departing from its nature when it does
not tell the right time; and similarly when I consider the mechanism of the human
body, I may think that, in relation to the movements which normally occur in it, it
too is deviating from its nature if the throat is dry at a time when drinking is not
beneficial to its continued health. But I am well aware that “nature” as I have just
used it has a very different significance from “nature” in the other sense.2
A “broken” clock is merely a clock that tells “broken” time—and tells it with perfect precision.
Just so, a “colorblind” individual is merely one who sees the kinship of red and green—and sees
it with perfect precision. For my understanding of things is always precisely the product of the
interaction of those things with my sensory and cognitive apparatus—with, that is, the
peculiarities of my subjective perspective.
And this is a good thing: if things did not interact with my sensory and cognitive
apparatus, I would have no understanding of them, no experience of anything at all. It is only
because I am part of nature that I can understand nature. But a problem immediately looms:
while I can only have an understanding of the world because the world interacts with my sensory
and cognitive apparatus, this very fact implies that my understanding will always be of things as
2
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Revised Edition, ed. and trans. John
Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), VI.84–85.
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they interact with me, not as they are in themselves. We began with a question: what color are
the leaves? We have already seen how this question dissolves into another: how do the leaves
interact with my eyes such that I experience them as green and with your eyes such that you
experience them as red? But every question about the leaves thus dissolves. Yea, every question
about everything thus dissolves.
The Scientific Revolution promised that it would teach us to see things as they really
are—no longer as kings and priests would have us see them. There is, obviously, a sense in
which the Scientific Revolution delivered on its promise—our knowledge of the world has
grown exponentially and without interruption since Galileo—but there is also a sense in which
the Scientific Revolution was doomed to fail: the source of its power, its commitment to a
mechanistic explanation of everything, implies that we will have understanding of things only
insofar as they interact with us—for we are but parts of the mechanism.
Kant seems to have been the first to understand this problem—or, at any rate, the first to
take it seriously. But it was by being the first to understand a second problem—in a way, the
answer to the first problem—that he secured his legacy.
1.4. Practical Postulation.
Pace the more superficial of our neoscholastic and postmodern intellectuals, we are still very
much within the mechanistic paradigm of the Scientific Revolution. The intricacies of quantum
physics aside, the implications of this paradigm are clear: all things are as they are because of the
interplay of power—because, in other words, of the various forces that things bear upon one
another. The world cannot be otherwise than these forces determine it to be.
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What Kant realized is that this is also true of us, since we are but components within the
mechanism of the world: we believe and act the way we do because our biology and our culture
teach us to believe and act that way. Of course, we can reorder this inheritance—but even the
way in which we reorder it is determined by the canons that we have inherited. We are thus
chained to the experience of countless generations—indeed, are forged in their desires and fears.
We must, then, take ourselves to be thoroughly determined. But we must also, Kant
realized, take ourselves to be thoroughly normative: our theoretical reason indicates not what we
are caused to believe but rather what we should believe, whereas our practical reason indicates
not how we are caused to act but rather how we should act. To suppose otherwise is immediately
to trap ourselves in contradiction: if we suppose that we think and act as we do merely because
we are determined to think and act in that way, then we should no more believe that this is true
than that it is false—for it is merely what we are determined to think. Thus are all questions as to
what we should believe or do rendered irrelevant.
But how could our thoughts and actions be explained both as what we are determined to
think and do and as what we should think and do? If this is not a hopeless contradiction, how we
are and how we should be must somehow converge. But why should we expect this? Why should
we expect, in other words, that the vast mechanism of which we are a part somehow leaves us
free to think what is true and do what is right?
To use Kant’s own vocabulary, we cannot demonstrate that we are free theoretically—by,
that is, proving it from indubitable premises. On the contrary, we can demonstrate that we are
free only practically—only, that is, by noting that, if we conclude that we are not free, we
undermine our own conclusion. But such a proof guarantees not at all that we are in fact free: it
guarantees only that, if we do not assume that we are free, we will go mad.
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In the end, freedom is a matter of faith.
2. Revolutionary Aristotelianism.
But what does any of this have to do with MacIntyre? Everything, as it turns out.
2.1. Practices.
According to MacIntyre, we engage in practices—that is, activities established by communities
and defined by whatever standards are particular to each. Such standards define the achievement
of internal goods—that is, goods that can only be achieved by participating in a practice: to take
an example close to home, one can achieve philosophical insight only through study and
argument that meet the standards established by the philosophical community—whereas one can
achieve publication or tenure in many ways, such as by plagiarism or blackmail.
Publication and tenure are examples of external goods—that is, goods that can be
achieved outside of any particular practice. While internal goods are defined by standards,
external goods define standards: if one’s sole goal is the achievement of tenure, for example,
then the right way to act is just whatever way makes it most likely, in some particular case, that
one will achieve tenure. If one’s sole goal is the achievement of philosophical insight, on the
other hand, then the right way to act is defined by the practice of philosophy—even if, in some
particular case, the achievement of philosophical insight prevents one from achieving tenure—
because, say, of some intellectual fad. It is definitive of the philosopher, presumably, that he or
she would prefer to achieve philosophical insight even at the cost of tenure than to achieve tenure
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by conforming to some intellectual fad—just as it is definitive of the athlete is that he or she
would prefer to lose a competition well played than to win by cheating.
2.2. Narratives.
Inevitably, our practices come into conflict with one another. To continue our example, one
cannot live a life utterly devoted both to philosophy and to athleticism: sooner or later, one will
be forced to choose between, for example, writing a dissertation and training for a marathon.
After all, there are only so many hours in a day and days in a year.
But why, one might ask, should one choose between these practices? Why not live as a
profoundly mediocre philosopher and a profoundly mediocre athlete? Well, MacIntyre suggests,
this would prevent one from achieving narrative unity—that is, the kind of unity in terms of
which particular actions can be rendered intelligible: one writes a dissertation, for example, so
that one might earn a doctorate, and one earns a doctorate in order to graduate to a life of study
and teaching. Narrative unity is that which is shared by stories and human lives—those, anyway,
that make sense: they are those that, instead of becoming lost to absurdity or fragmentation,
move toward some conclusion, broadly speaking.
If this sounds familiar, it should: one who is both the author and the protagonist of a
narrative is just one who is autonomous—who can, in Kant’s words, give oneself the law. The
reasoning in both cases is the same: one is compelled to forge one’s life into a narrative unity
insofar as one would render oneself intelligible to oneself—who would become, in other words,
an intelligible being, something more than the flesh and blood of one’s various temporal stages.
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2.3. Traditions.
Not all conflicts among practices are so benign as that between philosophy and athleticism: the
practice of gladiatorial combat—though it might teach the virtue of courage as well as
anything—was utterly incompatible with the practice of Christianity. And the practice of
Christianity was, in turn, utterly incompatible with the New Science—or so it seemed at the time.
The conflict was initially resolved by some through the reinterpretation of Christianity—through,
that is, the Reformation:
Reason can supply, so these new theologies assert, no genuine comprehension of
man’s true end; that power of reason was destroyed by the fall of man… The
Protestant-cum-Jansenist conception of reason is in important respects at one with
the conception of reason at home in the most innovative seventeenth-century
philosophy and science. Reason does not comprehend essences or transitions from
potentiality to act; these concepts belong to the despised conceptual scheme of
scholasticism. Hence anti-Aristotelian science sets strict boundaries to the power
of reason. Reason is calculative; it can assess truths of fact and mathematical
relations but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of
means. About ends it must be silent.3
This was not, of course, the last word. For the conflict between Reformation and CounterReformation became so physically and intellectually violent that it birthed an even larger conflict
into which it was ultimately subsumed—that between liberalism and authoritarianism. (If the
latter term seems unfair, it is an indication only of which side won.)
3
MacIntyre, 53–54.
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In any case, the effort to resolve conflicts among practices means that cultures do not stay
the same over time—even between one generation and the next: those in a culture reorder their
practices generation after generation, resolving old conflicts—but inevitably, it seems,
generating new ones. Thus does each culture have a tradition—that is, a history of reordering its
practices according to some method, some “rationality.” The ways in which a given culture
changes are therefore not arbitrary: the conflicts that trouble a culture are indeed solved, at least
to some degree, each time that it reorders itself in this way.
But any progress implied by such reordering is an illusion. For there is no one way of
reordering practices: different cultures have different rationalities that are not just incompatible
but are indeed incommensurable with one another. The evidence for this burdens those who are,
like us, prisoners to a history become aware of itself: the pretensions of certain culture warriors
notwithstanding, we can no longer pretend that ours is the only rationality worthy of the name.
With so many options from which to choose, a given culture can always abandon its
method of reordering and take up another. One might expect each culture to judge its own
method of reordering practices superior to all others—since, after all, it is that method of
reordering practices that is doing the judging, and one may expect a given method of reordering
practices to always preserve itself, whatever else it reorders. But this expectation is, MacIntyre
suggests, too cynical: a given method of reordering practices may find that it cannot resolve the
conflicts among them nearly so well—if it can resolve those conflicts at all—as another method
of reordering practices can.
A culture, MacIntyre suggests, may find itself beset by a conflict that it cannot seem to
solve. The persistence of such a conflict can lead to a crisis: faced with the insufficiency of the
resources of its own tradition, the culture may turn to the resources of another tradition—or,
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indeed, launch a new tradition entirely. Such a move will be fully successful, MacIntyre insists,
only if the new tradition not only solves the conflict that the old tradition could not solve but also
explains just why it was that the old tradition could not solve that conflict: mechanistic physics
replaced Aristotelian physics, for example, because mechanistic physics not only yielded
accurate predictions of the motions of objects but also explained why Aristotelian physics, with
its foundational assumption of natural place, could never have done so.
Mechanistic physics, of course, was ultimately beset by conflicts all its own—conflicts
that stemmed from its foundational assumptions that distance and duration are absolute and that
position and momentum are determinate; these conflicts led to the replacement of mechanistic
physics by relativistic and quantum physics. And, despite a century of work, this physics has not
been able to resolve the fairly obvious conflicts between its relativistic and quantum aspects—
which will no doubt lead to its replacement in turn.
2.4. Teleology.
For all of the problems that beset it, our physics is comparatively healthy: though the conflict
between its relativistic and quantum aspects has not yet been solved, there is at least some
agreement as to what standard a solution would have to meet—and how to approach that
standard. But this is not true of many of the conflicts that beset our culture—including many of
the most serious.
Some of us look at ourselves and see what Feynman, Watson, and Darwin saw: we are
but shifting regions of quantum indeterminacy—are but chemical reactions sufficiently complex
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to sustain themselves—are but inheritors of, and conscripts into, the primeval war of all against
all.
Others of us look at ourselves and see what Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche saw: we are but
bourgeoisie and proletariat fighting over the means of production—are but primal lust
sublimated into art and music, into cities and empires—are but the Will to Power turned back
upon itself and become the Will to Truth.
Yet others of us look at ourselves and see what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle saw: we are
but broken gods in desperate need of redemption—are but wayfarers with our science and our
laws to a divinity we have almost forgotten—are but acolytes, though few of us realize it, of the
Unmoved Mover.
As they stand, these traditions are in deep conflict with one another. How is this conflict
to be resolved? Because each tradition is defined by a different rationality, each tradition has a
different answer to this question. The first tradition—call it Encyclopedia—sees in the other two
mere pseudoscience and superstition. The second tradition—call it Genealogy—sees in the other
two mere delusions born of our exploitation of one another and of ourselves. The third
tradition—call it, well, Tradition—sees in the other two mere denial of our brokenness, a denial
itself born of that brokenness.
Which tradition is right? MacIntyre favors the third, of course, but what he seems less
than eager to admit is that the Marxist interpretation of religion as tool of oppression, the
Freudian interpretation of religion as compensatory fantasy, and the Nietzschean interpretation of
religion as psychological weapon of the enslaved—and, for that matter, the Darwinian
interpretation of religion as adaptation for group selection—are each profoundly compelling,
even if they are not compatible with one another. Are we to see them, then, as aspects of some
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larger synthesis? Certainly Traditionalists would have to see its competitors that way—as views,
however partial, of the divine—but those Traditionalists have no such synthesis on hand.
The problem, then, is this: we encounter not one tradition that can solve the problems of
its competitors better that those competitors can themselves—and can explain why this is—but
three traditions, each of which claims to be able to do this. Now that this conflict stretches into
its second century, there seems no reason to think, and every reason to doubt, that one tradition
will vindicate itself over its competitors.
Let us remind ourselves of why this is a problem. Why is it that we take our beliefs and
desires to be justified? Well, they are derived from, or at least compatible with, our fundamental
commitments—the basic presuppositions of our tradition. But why is our tradition justified? If it
is not justified dialectically—that is, by proving itself able to meet the objections of competing
traditions better than competing traditions can meet its objections—then it is not justified at all:
we would believe and act as we do not because we should believe and act that way but rather
because we have inherited an arbitrary set of presuppositions that causes us to believe and act in
that way.
If this problem sounds familiar, it should: it is precisely the problem that inspired Kant to
construct the Critical Philosophy. At the risk of anachronism, we can say that the Critical
Philosophy is an attempt to reconcile the tradition of Encyclopedia with the much older tradition
of Tradition. Ironically, it led to the birth of Genealogy: the Kantian insight that all
understanding of reality is the product of the interaction of reality with our sensory and cognitive
apparatus led to the realization—one of the intellectual insights that defined the nineteenth
century—that our cognitive apparatus has changed radically through history. Nietzsche, Marx,
and Freud concluded that we are are all born prisoners to, respectively, race, class, and gender.
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Genealogy is lucky: it takes its ultimate arbitrariness, its lack of ultimate justification, as
its confirmation. It revels in the paradox that defines it. In a way, Encyclopedia is also lucky: it is
either content to ignore its ultimate justification or, if not, apparently content to implode into
Genealogy. Tradition is not so lucky: if it cannot vindicate itself, it compels itself to surrender.
MacIntyre’s account of how one might adjudicate rationally among incompatible and
incommensurable traditions is therefore very much the account of a Traditionalist.
Traditionalists must work in the faith that the seemingly arbitrary presuppositions that
they have inherited are not, in fact, arbitrary after all—that they are, rather, precisely such as to
lead them to the beliefs that they should espouse and the actions that they should perform. Kant
calls such a faith the practical postulation of freedom; MacIntyre would, one suspects, call such a
faith the practical postulation of teleology—our tendency to converge upon truth and justice,
upon an ordering of practices that is not beset by interminable conflict.
3. Two Responses.
Two responses to such practical postulation are possible. To live is to choose one of them.
3.1. The Love of Fate.
That we must have faith in freedom does not mean, unfortunately, that we do not delude
ourselves. While our faith in our freedom may well be practically necessary, it may still be that
we are not free: it may be, in other words, that our rationality inevitably undermines itself.
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It seems that this is Nietzsche’s worry: faith in our freedom, he admits, is inevitable—as
is the realization that we are not free. Indeed, he suggests, it is the faith in our freedom to believe
and act as we should that drives us to realize—irony of ironies—that we have no such freedom:
our devotion to the truth, Nietzsche argues, has compelled us to follow wherever it led, even to
the realization that there is no truth—that, in other words, no perspective transcends our
inheritance.
Reason is thus at war with itself: though we can work to transcend our inheritance, doing
so requires that we lie to ourselves—that, in other words, we fracture ourselves into theoretical
and practical. For understanding ourselves such that we can ask ourselves how we should believe
and act forces us to have a faith in our freedom that understanding the world forbids. And the
harder that one works to resolve this tension, the more fully one becomes one for whom there are
no reasons at all—becomes, that is, the nihilist whom Nietzsche calls the Last Man.
Our only option, Nietzsche suggests, is to move beyond reason—to somehow transcend,
in other words, transcendence itself. Instead of pretending that we are gods, we should celebrate
that we are mere animals—chained to a mechanistic world. Nietzsche calls this the Love of
Fate—the only means by which one can preserve one’s sanity.
On the one hand, the rejection of freedom would be liberating: no longer striving in vain
to prove ourselves godlike in our wisdom and our righteousness, we could finally become who
we are—nothing more than parts of a mechanism. On the other hand, the rejection of freedom
would be crippling: to believe without asking ourselves what is true, to act without asking
ourselves what is right, is not a task for men and women. Would it not take godlike strength to
render ourselves beasts in this way?
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3.2. The End of History.
There is a second way to interpret the practical postulate of freedom: in believing it, we make it
true. Such was, it seems, the position articulated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: inspired by
our faith in our freedom—by our faith, that is, that the world is such that its mechanisms are,
ultimately, compatible with our transcending the rationality that we have inherited—we build a
society in which we have indeed transcended that rationality, have forged a tradition that can
resolve the problems of any competitor and is not beset by any irresolvable problems of its own.
The disadvantage of proving the soundness of faith by fulfilling—by achieving what
Hegel called the End of History—it is that, until we actually fulfill that faith, it is open to the
Nietzschean charge that it is a delusion. To prove the inevitability of a tradition in which
freedom is made manifest is just to design such a tradition—and, once that it is done, it is all but
built:
One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be.
Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it… It is only
when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that
the ideal grasps this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into
the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then
has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be
rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with
the falling of dusk.4
4
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Stephen Houlgate,
trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16.
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Unfortunately, we are not yet at this point: no one seems to know how to build a tradition in that
has overcome interminable conflict. Indeed, every time we try to build it, we find that we have
substituted tyranny for convergence—that we have built not the Kingdom of God but rather yet
another hell on earth. To one degree or another, anyway.
4. These Alone Remain.
Kant and MacIntyre are so easy for culture warriors to appropriate, and so difficult for culture
warriors to appropriate convincingly, because each seems simultaneously conservative and
liberal—seems indeed more conservative than the conservatives and more liberal than the
liberals who appropriate him. Which is just to say, of course, that neither of them is either
conservative or liberal: both occupy a position outside our political spectrum. For both
acknowledge something that our politics apparently cannot.
The human condition is one of limits: every liberation from one thing is a submission to
something else. But this means that every submission is also a liberation: once we acknowledge
certain limits, they empower us—and, in a way, require us—to free ourselves from all others.
For example, we have the power to stand apart from ourselves—specifically, to reflect
upon, and thus remake, our desires and fears. This power, if we decide to take it up, liberates us
from slavery to our subjective perspective—but only if we submit to an objective standard, the
moral law, by which to evaluate it. And this submission requires us to acknowledge that the
subjective perspectives of our fellow men and women are as legitimate as our own. If we are not
to despair, we must trust that we have the power to transcend our subjectivity: we must have
faith in something like freedom.
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Again, we have the power to stand apart from ourselves—specifically, to reflect upon,
and thus remake, our world. This power, if we decide to take it up, liberates us from slavery to
nature—but only if we submit to the objective order, the natural laws, that govern it. And this
submission requires us to acknowledge that we too are bound by these laws. If we are not to
despair, we must trust that these laws will not destroy us: we must have faith in something like
divine providence.
Again, we have the power to stand apart from ourselves—specifically, to reflect upon,
and thus see beyond, the hour of our death. This power, if we decide to take it up, liberates us
from slavery to our own mortality—but only if we identify with, and thus submit to, some cause
larger than ourselves. And this submission requires us to acknowledge that this cause is
ultimately in the hands of others. If we are not to despair, we must trust that those others will not
fail us: we must have faith in something like our immortality.
These are, of course, the three Kantian practical postulates; they are, Kant makes clear,
three facets of the same faith. It is a faith that MacIntyre, I have argued, is compelled to share;
perhaps this is the reason that, shortly after his conversion to Tradition, he converted to
Catholicism. Though this is, of course, merely speculation.
In any case, the differences between Kant and MacIntyre are too obvious to miss—and
are, in the end, irrelevant. For what Kant and MacIntyre share is their deepest conviction—one
that, in its subtlety, most of their readers miss entirely: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice
rest on a foundation of faith, hope, and love—three virtues that reach beyond the strictly rational.
Whatever dignity philosophy has derives from this—its orientation toward something forever
beyond it.
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Works Cited
Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy, Revised Edition. Edited and translated by
John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Vintage Books, 1994.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Stephen
Houlgate. Translated by T. M. Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Third edition. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2007.