[Alasdair MacIntyre seems to be having a moment, and if you want a succinct overview of his thought, David Brooks’s piece today in The Atlantic is pretty good. I’m going to get into the MacIntyre weeds later this summer as part of my longer term Utopian Thinking project. The problem with conservatives like Brooks is that they understand the problem, but have no real solutions. And there are lots of other things wrong with Brooks as well, but he gives MacIntyre his due here. Before turning to a MacIntyre deep dive, I wanted to continue the dialog I begun last week, which is MacIntyrean in its inspiration]
Q: Last time you were making the case that something like Kohlberg’s stages of moral development are helpful for understanding what moral maturity might look like. But it sounds like bogus social science to me.
A: I’m no defender of social science. Most social science seems to be about finding some way to statistically ex post facto confirm what seem to be in most cases common sense observations or to use data to debunk beliefs that social scientists don’t believe in to begin with. What gives Kohlberg’s stages legitimacy for me is the way it maps to other thinkers who themselves led lives that could never be statistically accounted for. The most interesting humans are the ones that don’t fit a statistical model because statistics are mostly a quantitative tool, and can’t deal effectively with qualitative evaluation.
Q: Who are you talking about?
A: Well, people like Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Shakespeare, etc. What social science model accounts for them—or could predict their emerging when they did and how they did?
Q: But how does this relate to Kohlberg?
A: Add to this list people like Schiller, Goethe, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. in the Cathedral lectures spent some time talking about Friedrich Schiller’s three stages of development—the savage, the barbarian, and the beautiful soul. These map pretty clearly to what Kohlberg is doing. Then some decades later came Kierkegaard’s Aethetic, Ethical, and Religious, and then some decades after that Nietzsche’s Lion, Camel, and Child. There are differences of emphasis, but they all seem to be drinking from the same archetypal well, the well from which Aristotle drank in his pointing to eudaemonia as the goal of a human life lived well. And what’s interesting to me about it is that they all end up with a ‘telos’ that might be described as the recovery something childlike and spontaneous. This echoes what Jesus said when he told his listeners that they could not enter the kingdom of heaven unless they became like a child.
Q: Becoming a child? Sounds rather hippy-dippy. It reminds me of Harold Skimpole, the Dickens’ character in Bleak House,. He presents himself as a free-spirited, beautiful child, a being, like the flowers of the field who neither toil nor fear—but who depends on the generosity of his adult friends to pay his bills and bail him out of trouble.
A: I don’t think a Harold Skimpole is what Schiller had in mind. Skimpole is a parody of it. His friend Goethe was closer to the idea. Harold Skimpole was infantile. There’s a difference between regressing toward primal narcissism and advancing toward the kind of integrity and sense of communion with the world that Schiller was talking about, and that Goethe exemplified to him. Becoming childlike is an achievement, not something you can just pretend to have without making a complete nuisance of yourself to everyone around you.
Q: What can that possible mean in real life for the rest of us non-literary geniuses?
A: Well, as MacIntyre points out, eudaemonia was for Aristotle only possible for those who had leisure enough to pursue it. Not possible for the lower ranks. MacIntyre and others have argued that among other things, Christianity was a movement that democratized eudaemonia. The early Church fathers called it ‘theosis’. They said that God became human so that humans could become God-like. Wasn’t the human being created in the image and likeness of God? Well then, the Christian project for everyone was to become that which they were created to be. This was a work of grace, but also a life-long work.
Q: That’s not what I learned in Sunday School. I learned that I better follow the rules—particularly the ones about sex—or I was going to hell.
A: I am not here to defend what is worst in the Christian tradition, but to talk about this broader understanding of eudaemonia, which meshes with, and is deepened by, Christianity at its best. I avoid using Christian language because I know for so many it has such a negative charge, and one that’s understandable because of the bad name too many prominent Christians have given to their religion, especially since the 90s. What’s important to understand for now is that there was among the most mature Christians until the Reformation an embrace of the eudaemonic archetype. We see it pop up again with Schiller, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kohlberg. But it’s there in Jung and Maslow, too. And I think it pops up in pop culture, in counterfeit ways as well as in good ones. I think movie like Good Will Hunting is pretty solidly eudaemonic.1
Q: What changed during the Reformation?
A: It’s complicated, and it actually goes back to developments in the 1300s that rejected the great Christian synthesis with the classical tradition effected by the early Church Father through Aquinas and others. That tradition, and the use of of Reason, was rejected by Luther for whom Faith alone was necessary—Reason is a whore, he said.2 And by Calvin, who thought that Reason was no longer a usable human faculty after Original Sin, which had utterly destroyed the human capacity to use it to make sense of things. All we depraved humans could do was hope for the capricious mercy of God.
Catholics are not innocent here: a movement of Calvinist wannabes developed France called Jansenism. If you grew up Irish Catholic, that’s the Catholicism you got because Irish priests were trained in Jansenist seminaries in Northern France during the Counter-Reformation period. You know the famous fire-and-brimstone sermon in Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist?—that’s Jansenist through and through. The Jansenists all but quashed everything that was wholesome and beautiful in Celtic Christianity as the Calvinists did in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Reactionary Catholicism in the U.S. today wreaks of that Jansenist hyper-Augustinian nuttiness.
But my goal is not to focus on what went wrong, but on how we might work to make things right again. But in order to do that, you have to understand where our ancestors took the wrong turn that led us into our current dead end.
Q: Wait a minute. Aren’t you being a little too hard on the Calvinists? Weren’t Calvinists the beating heart of the Scottish Enlightenment that gave us David Hume and Adam Smith? Wasn’t the Geneva-born Rousseau one of the most progressive voices of the Enlightenment? Weren’t Calvinists from Boston among the most eloquent exponents of Liberty and democratic self rule? Weren’t Calvinist and other Protestants among the most energetic exponents of literacy, the development of conscience, and thinking for oneself? Weren’t the Lutherans in Germany the ones who gave us Kant, and Herder, and the German Romantics and German Idealism?
A: Yes. That’s all true.
Q: So why are you so negative?
A: Look around you. We live in the world that those Northern Europeans built. The problem is not with the good that is in all the things that you just laid out, but in the good that they left out, and the imbalance that has resulted is now pushing us toward civilizational collapse.
Q: So what is this good that they left out?
A: It’s what the classical tradition affirmed—especially regarding a participatory ontology and epistemology.
Q: Why do you keep using those technical words that nobody understands?
A: Ontology simply means your idea about what the metaphysical foundation for Reality is; epistemology is your theory of knowledge, how how you know and judge what’s true or not. The two are interdependent. We live in a materialistic consensus reality whose ontology is non-participative; it’s all about subjects over here and objects over there, and the epistemological problem is how to explain how subjects separated from objects as they are can know them, and the method developed to do that was to make it as impersonal and analytic as possible. In other words, you had to be objective as possible, which means you had to leave your subjectivity out of it.
Q: Well what’s wrong with that. It got us to the moon, didn’t it? It got us modern medicine and airplanes, air conditioning, and self-driving cars, right?
A: Yes it did, but again, it’s about what it left out, which is the subjective participative element in all perception and knowing. Since Phenomenology became a thing in the early 20th century, philosophy has gradually come accept that there’s no such thing as pure objectivity. Americans and English in the analytical tradition were slow to get on board, but they’re coming around. MacIntyre, writing in the 80s, is interesting as a transitional figure.
Q: Phenomenology?
A: We can’t get into it here. It’s enough to say that it blew up the subject-object epistemological paradigm that dominated wester thought since the early 1600s and opened up a more participatory understanding about how knowledge happens and in doing so opens up a way of recovering the classical tradition, and its participatory ontology and epistemology.
Q: But if everything is subjective, doesn’t that lead into relativism? Isn’t everybody’s subjective opinion the equal of anybody else’s. Don’t objective facts matter?
A: Yes, of course they do. And you’re right Phenomenology on its own doesn’t get us where we need to go. Heidegger’s moral obtuseness is proof of that. But as I laid out in “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins”, there’s no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. And so the job of philosophy is not simply to think about facts, but about the adequacy of the interpretive frame that shapes our understanding of them. Some interpretations are clearly better and some worse, but by what standard to you judge better and worse? The whole game changes if “objectivity” is no longer the standard for truth, but rather one’s subjective capacity to get a deeper, richer grip on reality.
This is something that the classical tradition understood. Some people are just wiser than others because they have a deeper grip on reality than others. And they promoted practices—virtues—that were all about becoming wiser. The classical tradition understood that a deeper grip on reality is a progressive, teleological process. That’s why old people were honored in traditional societies, and aren’t in consumer capitallist societies. Wisdom just isn’t a thing that we honor anymore, so we don’t produce wise old people, and even if one way or another some rando actually achieves a degree of wisdom, it’s not recognized. It can’t be until some kind of sapiential tradition becomes established.
Q: Sapiential tradition?
A: Rabbinic midrash is an example, if that means anything to you.
Q: It doesn’t.
A: Well, what it might mean in the future will be more complicated, so let’s save that for another time.
But here’s the point I want to close on. We have paid a heavy spiritual price for the many material advantages that these Northern Europeans gave us: it has given us a consensus reality that breeds a profound sense of alienation, of being cut off from one another, the natural world, and the spiritual world. A participatory ontology is one that grows out of an experience of deep connection with one another, the natural world, and the spiritual world. A participatory epistemology is one that understands truth as something that comes not from objective observation, but by a sense of deepening, intimate connection. You can only truly know what you truly love. That idea of truth was rejected by the Northern European intelligentsia starting in the late medieval period, and if we’re to save our collective necks, if not our collective souls, our contemporary intelligentsia better find a way of recovering it.
Q: Do you think that’s possible?
A: Yes I do. There are many signs, not as fringey as you might think, of the culture shifting to it, even if it’s not covered in the MSM. The MSM and Liberals in general, btw, still think there’s such a thing as an objective fact—they know what it is, and they report on it, and that should be enough. Their philosophical naiveté is a big part of what prevents them from meeting the current crisis moment. Bad stories win if they don’t have a better story to tell, and they just don’t.
One of the important future tasks that lies with the intelligentsia is to develop a way of discerning the crackpot from the truly vital. That requires of them that they develop a consensus about the interpretive frame that they embrace as most adequate.3 This will require a broader understanding about what Reason is and how it functions. That’s a task for philosophy—whether in the academy or elsewhere. There are signs of a shift in this direction, and a big part of what I’m trying to do in this newsletter is to report on it, so to say, or perhaps more accurately, to curate what in my judgment is important and what’s not.
1. Ok. Sunday night I was tired and the Mariners had played early and there’s was nothing mindlessly, non-nihilistically entertaining to end the day, so I watched The Life List on Netflix. Connie Britton was in it. She has been for me since her role as the Mom in Friday Night Lights (Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!) my ideal of American womanly menschiness. I’ll watch anything she’s in. But this movie, if you can get beyond the Rom Com cliches, is all about how, as in Good Will Hunting, this eudaemonic ideal still struggles to find a place in our popular culture. It uses dream language and other Rom-Com tropes in a way I found cringey, but the Connie Britton character is great in the way she plays the Robin Williams role for her talented but spiritually stagnating daughter in a way some readers here might find makes all this Aristotelean eudaemonic talk more relatable. This is not a critics’ movie, but there are a lot worse movies about confused millennials than this one.
2. I think that the fideism and pietism that follow from Sola Fide is a perfectly legitimate way to live, but it’s not something you can build a civilization on. You need reason for that, and one of the consequences of the Reformation’s abandonment of reason was how it cleared the field for the materialists to dominate civilization-shaping public discourse. You want to be Christian? Fine. Believe whatever you want, but don’t bring your beliefs into to the public square where Reason is the coin of the realm. Same for you, Jews and Muslims.
But the problem was that the scope of Reason was restricted to considerations of material practicality, and bringing any kind of ethical considerations—including the ethical dimension of public policy—became what MacIntyre correctly calls “emotivist”, having nothing to do with reason. It’s either Yay or Yuk, and never the twain shall meet. And whoever has the most power and money to get more Yays for their side wins. Finding a way to meet is the job of Reason, but reason understood more in the way Aristotle and the classical traditionunderstood it, not in the way Comte and Bentham did.
3. My suggested criteria of Scope, Coherence, Richness, and Adaptability for such an evaluation of the adequacy of such an interpretive frame is an attempt to at least begin the conversation about what such an adequate interpretive frame might look like. If not that, something along these lines that works on both the horizontal and vertical axes is called for. See “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins”.
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