Third Counter-Argument:
MacIntyre
leaves the door open for Relativistic Historicism while
advocating a particular tradition of ethical thought.
“Hence this kind
of historicism, unlike Hegel's, involves a form of fallibilism; it is a kind of
historicism which excludes all
claims to absolute knowledge.”-(AV., p. 270).
“I’d Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me, Than to
Have a
Frontal Lobotomy.”-Rhyme
The bottle is Kantian anti-realism, and Hegelian anti-realist historical teleology; these are the two necessary ingredients that After Virtue must have to achieve its goals of defining virtue, and establishing an absolute foundation for MacIntyre’s normative ethics and realist epistemology. However, what if virtue is not an object as assumed by a naturalistic object-oriented ontology while history shows no necessity, but rather is the realm of pure accidental contingency? Unfortunately, the useful concepts of Kantian anti-realism, and Hegelian historical-ontological teleology have been rejected by MacIntyre as not universal (WJWR, p. 11). These occult concepts of the active subject, ought/is, and historical teleology are rebuffed only to be smuggled through the back door again bearing new aliases. In After-Virtue (Chapter 7, Fact, Explanation and Expertise) Kuhnian anti-realism masks Kantian idealism, and Hegelian historicism is introduced under the pseudonyms of “tradition,” “context,” “telos,” and “narrative.” In his book, “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” the term “tradition” is used 225 times—it means history. In After Virtue the term “telos,” is used 32 times: “context,” 63 times; and, “narrative,” 59 times: all concepts which embody a weak non-universalizable historicism. His version of historicism in After Virtue (“…my historicism,” AV, p. 269) seems to have not developed endogenously (internally), but exogenously as if it fell out of the sky.
Let’s look at an example of this retranslation of concepts. MacIntyre rejects the ought/is distinction, but he is still able to retain an imperative it in the form of “telos,” meaning “goal,” or “end.” The end “goal” is now the imperative ought; the same Moorean ought/is distinction MacIntyre rejected earlier (AV. p. 57). The concept of teleology also creates a paradigmatic narrative for the moral agent that gives meaning and purpose to beliefs, actions, and worldviews. But what telos should we seek? To answer this question MacIntyre must find ethical necessity in the history of ethical traditions to validate Aristotelian realism; which is why he needed Kuhn’s anti-realist paradigmatic model of scientific progress.
On the other hand, when it comes to Kuhn’s relative paradigms and the history of scientific progress; MacIntyre, with the help of philosopher of science Imre Laktos, lobotomizes the Kuhnian concept of scientific progress to only mean an “internalist” approach to paradigm shifts. MacIntyre reduces Kuhn’s anti-realist paradigm of science to exactly the kind of science he criticized postmodern empiricist instrumentalism of becoming: just pragmatic manipulation of means and ends. MacIntyre denies there are “transcendental properties as truth or apodictic certainty." And according to critic Dr. R. Stern, MacIntyre believes,
“…the realist is wrong in thinking that any theory can have validity sub specie aeternitatis, from the standpoint of timeless truth, the progressive (or regressive) character of any conceptual change can only be judged by reference to the historical problematic of which it is part; for the issue as to whether or not it represents an advance on this predecessors requires that we have an understanding of the historical tradition in which it has a place (After MacIntyre: critical perspectives on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus in “MacIntyre and historicism” by Robert Stern (1994), p.153)(pdf.)(Abbreviated as ‘Stern’).”
Inconsistently, at the very beginning of After Virtue, the image presented was of realist science with an essence, or sub specie aeternitatis of which we only have fragments of a whole, and only needing re-construction. MacIntyre tells a parable describing the destruction of all scientific knowledge in some catastrophe where laboratories, books, scientific instruments are destroyed and physicists murdered by an anti-science cult (kind of prophetic), then there is a change of heart and people what to recover scientific knowledge:
"…enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology (AV., p. 1).”
In the book, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), MacIntyre breaks down ethics into three versions of morality: Encyclopedical (Enlightenment Instrumental Rationalism), Genealogy (Nietzschean Nihilism), and Traditional (Thomism). His viewpoint is that natural science and the science of morality are commensurable: "The modern contrast between the sphere of morality on the one hand and the sphere of the human sciences on the other is quite alien to Aristotelianism because, as we have already seen, the modern fact-value distinction is also alien to it (AV.,p. 82)." Again, he wrote, “The philosophy of physical science is dependent on the history of physical science. But the case is no different with morality ...(AV., p. 266)." Is the study of normative ethics commensurate to methodological empirical science? Socrates’ experimental test asking Meno’s slave questions of geometry suggests ethical knowledge is not commensurable with science, but with a priori intuition which MacIntyre absolutely rejects (AV., p. 69).” How is the necessity of ethical imperatives to be founded on historical contingency? And again,”...one theory rationally superior to another is no different from our situation in regard to scientific theories or to moralities-and-moral philosophies.(AV, p. 270).” However, there is a reversal that takes place since the publication of After-Virtue: not only is science relative to paradigm, but morality is also relative to history. Critic Dr. R. Stern writes, “...like [Larry] Laudan MacIntyre abandons any talk of such transcendental properties as universal validity or timeless truth for ethical systems, arguing that there is no Archimedean point in practical reason that could give ethical thought the necessary absolute foundation (Stern, p. 152).” This narrative sounds like postmodernism to me! It is not that MacIntyre happily chooses this modernist relativist position, but his own reasoning forces him into pluralist conclusions—and this shift really should not be turned into an Anytus political ad hominem attack against him; rather, it is aporia. And this is my view of MacIntyre’s critique of postmodernist relativism.
The Historicist Nemesis
"What
is true is precisely what is made"—G. Vico
A
main argument of postmodern criticism is historicist interpretation of past
events undermines traditional beliefs in morality opening the door to
epistemological and moral relativism which then leads to a cultural crisis of
knowledge, meaning, and normative values. The various schools of historicism
are concerned with primarily four issues: 1.) The concept of historical change,
2.) Historicism as a scientific methodology, 3.) Historicism understood
as a worldview 4.) Historicism as a moral crisis. My summaries of
historicism will take note of each school’s relevant position on these issues.
This analysis is based on the scholarly work of Phenomenologist Dr. Maurice Mandelbaum, Professor at Johns
Hopkins University, in fact an important original scholar in the United States
on this very issue of historicism.
The first scholar to know regarding
historicism is botanist Carl Prantl
(1849-1893) who described the work of historian Giambattista
Vico (1663-1744) as “historicism” as he attempted to
combine the humanities into a single science to explain the life and death
cycles of societies and cultures in his book, “New Science (1725).” Also economist, Carl
Menger (1840-1921) was the founder of the Austrian School of
Economics who complained that economic theory was becoming too dependent on the
study of economic history thereby introducing a negative view of historicism as
it was thought to be out of its realm of expertise without a clear
understanding of its use in the science of economics (Encycl. Vol. 4, p.
22). Marx’s first volume of Capital was
not published in German until 1867, and in English until 1887 in this timeline.
Mandelbaum
believes that after World War I the question of historical change became more
concerning as a method of evaluating cultural values. Protestant
theologian Ernst
Troeltsch (1865-1923) was concerned of historicism’s
usefulness for understanding the relationship between culture and historical
change. Troeltsch defined historicism not methodologically, but as an erroneous
presupposition “…to view all
knowledge and experience in the context of historical change (Ibid.,
p. 22).” He thought that natural science and historical science were distinct
fields of study and that historicism would cause widespread epistemological and
ethical skepticism. Troeltsch died before he could explain his religious views:
he thought the crisis was “inevitable,” but there was nothing to fear.
Sociologist
Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) defined
historicism as a “temporalistic view of the world (Ibid.,
p. 23).” Mannheim did not believe that historicism is a crisis, but instead
theorized that the Enlightenment has held over some theological beliefs from
the Middle Ages that presuppose an “atemporal character of judgments and
reason,” (Platonic Realism concerned with static being), and this
worldview (Weltanschauung) is
being replaced by a new concept of “temporalistic relativism.” He
proposed that modern skepticism does not necessarily have to result from this
new view of dynamic temporal change and accepted ethical pluralism positively
since all values are grounded in human existence, which could be reconciled
with other cultural norms through the study of critical sociology.
German
historian Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) did not view historicism
as some crisis, and accepted the new dynamic view of history; but unlike
Troeltsch and Mannheim, regarded as more important the concept of human individuality
and how persons fared in society during historical development. Meinecke was
an early Nazi supporter, and held life long anti-Semitic views.
Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was an idealistic philosopher critical of both
epistemological positivism, and materialist ontology. He defined historicism as the self-development of the human spirit and
“the whole of reality as encompassed within history: Life and reality were
nothing but the ever changing manifestations of the spirit (Encycl.
Vol. 4, p. 23).” Croce argued that materialistic naturalistic science is
inadequate as a methodological paradigm to interpret the unique histories
created by self-conscious human beings. Modern thought has failed to take
seriously Hegel’s philosophy of history. Croce’s anti-naturalism and
anti-positivism brings a “religious sense of mystery” to his concept of
historicism. Hegel’s secular understanding of history is in part taken from the
New Testament Christian notion of the eschatology of end times. Orthodox
Marxism is not a non-Christian heresy.
Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper on Historicism
There is some interesting background information about Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) who is difficult to summarize since nearly everything about him is fake; his credentials as an economist are completely fabricated including his sham Nobel Prize in Economics owned and awarded by a Swedish bank and has nothing to do with Alfred Nobel. The famous economist and lifelong professor of the at London School of Economics, Lionel Ribbons, was insanely anti-Keynesian and attempted to mentor von Hayek into the antithesis of Keynesian economic presented in his famous work “The General Theory Of Employment Interest And Money (1938 ).” The problem was no one could understand Hayek’s lectures, nor his writing of “The Pure Theory of Capital “ that even the Neo-liberal monetary economist Milton Friedman complained, “I am an enormous admirer of Hayek, but not for his economics. I think Prices and Production was a very flawed book. I think his capital theory book is unreadable (Wapshott, p. 183).”
“I’m sure that was wrong,
and yet I have done it. It was just an inner need to do it.”
—von Hayek in "Keynes Hayek:The Clash that Defined Modern Economics,"
by Nicholas, 2011 by Wapshott, p. 215
And then one day in 1949, the self professed Catholic, von Hayek, walked out of his house abandoning his wife, Hella, and their two children Christine (17 year old), and Laurence (12) to marry his cousin Helena; then keeping true to his economic and political theories promptly signed up for Social Security benefits after Charles Koch sent him in a letter with a SSI brochure (Charles Koch to Friedrich Hayek: Use Social Security! by Yasha Levine and Mark Ames). Ribbon was so disgusted with von Hayek that he resigned from the Neo-liberal think tank formed in 1947 known as the “Mont Pelerin Society” in which von Hayek decided to impose their Neoliberal revolution covertly wherever they could. Philosopher G.E. Moore was a much better moral person than von Hayek. Nevertheless, von Hayek’s junk economics is taught uncritically in nearly all United States University economic departments that now require two economics departments Professor Michael Hudson has noted: one department teaches Austrian economic hokum that does not describe economic reality, and the other department is called the “business school” of economics to actually teach graduates how to manage a business that is in some cases structured never to earn a profit to avoid tax laws. Hayek’s Austrian Neoliberalism has resulted in a 40-year crime wave emanating all across America from the Wall Street Corporate Socialists. Von Hayek’s economic version of “Theranos-babble” has led to a violent revival of fascist movements all over the globe, and infiltrating every level of American institutions.
While in Great Britain, before he fled his family and poor academic reputation at the London School of Economics, von Hayek worked with philosopher Karl Popper (1920-1994) to fabricate a boutique custom-made version of historicism that could go along with the era of Cold War sociological propaganda that is still alive and well today in American and British academia in addition to internet social media. Hayek and Popper focused on historicism as a worldview, and not on the radical differences between the physical sciences and social science methodologies. They instead attacked four theses of historicism: 1.) They attacked the concept of the laws of development of social wholes (societies) 2.) They denied these laws of social development could be known 3.) Rejected the belief predictions based on these laws could be made about cultures and societies 4.) They added “holism” to their definition of historicism to include Hegel, Comet, and Marx’s views. Although these three philosophers had different viewpoints, they shared some common beliefs: 1.) The social whole is greater than the parts and not reducible to individuals 2.) These laws of the whole could be known 3.) Predictions could be made on the knowable laws of the whole. Popper and Hayek wrongly interpret Marx’s concept of historical materialism as “fate,” or “destiny.” Neither Marx, nor Engels ever used the term “dialectical materialism” in their writings. (See, “Open Society and its Enemies,” by Karl Popper, 1945)(pdf.).
Dr. Mandelbaum argues that historicist theses 3 (prediction), and 4 (holism) are not necessary to the concept of historicism: “…there seems to be no necessity for identifying historicism with holistic thought and with a belief in the possibility of prediction, as Popper and Hayek, tend to do…Popper, in his characterization…tends to separate his own use of…’historicism’ from other, more frequent uses (Encycl. Vol. 4, p. 24).” Mandelbaum formulates his own definition of historicism as a methodological principle of explanation and evaluation, and not as a worldview (Weltanschauung): “…the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of anything and an adequate assessment of its values are to be gained by considering it in terms of the place it occupied and the role it played with in a process of development (Ibid., p. 24).” Mandelbaum’s methodological historicism is analogous to Descartes’ methodological doubt that attempts to establish an epistemology based on absolute certainty; Descartes never doubted the world existed, or that knowledge existed—his methodological doubt is not a world view, nor a Life philosophy. Likewise, Mandelbaum’s historicism is methodological, and not a Weltanschauung, but rather a tool for analysis.
No Straw men, Please
One easy way to build a straw man argument is to simply interpret nearly any point of view as reductionist as possible--such as emotivism, logical positivism, materialism, and historicism—and make that the object of attack. All of these historicist theses have an element of truth, but they can easily be falsified by presenting a reductionist version of these insights. Mannheim argues that everything humans do is related, and influenced by our material existence, but it does not follow that material existence determines all that humans do. This is how we learn through deliberately lazy universities the old-saw of the materialist interpretation of Marxism because a reductionist stance is easier to falsify while no other explanations, or evaluations are needed. A second method for building a straw man is to take a viewpoint out of context so as to render it incomprehensible, or inconsistent; Moore’s emotivism is one example, and Kierkegaard’s definition of truth will be another example later in my fourth After Virtue counter-argument.
Deconstructing Kantian Idealism, and Hegelian Historicism
Hegel was in a sense the earliest Neo-Kantian:
he disagreed with Kant on some issues because he thought Kant did not go far
enough with his critical analysis of knowledge. I want to return to using
Braver’s cleaver and very useful scheme for comparing Kant to Hegel’s critique
of reason with a limited summary of the issues they have in contention. First,
Hegel did not like the epistemic distance between phenomenal knowledge and
noumenal reality; that is, between appearances and the thing-in-itself of which
we can say nothing determinate about since it is out of range of possible human
experience. Kantian transcendentalism is an ahistorical philosophy of epistemic
limitation that Hegel could not accept seeing it instead as Kant’s arbitrary
limitation of knowledge. A second point of contention is why Kant selected the
table of categories as the “necessary conditions for the possibility of
experience,” and not some other group of categories? Thirdly, Hegel
thought bivalence hindered holistic understanding by disintegrating an
otherwise necessary integrated pattern of the mind, or consciousness in human
history: “…truth is not a minted coin (Spirit, para. 39).”
Both Kant and Hegel were committed to what
Braver termed the Empirical Directive (ED) which he explains as “the strategy
of studying transcendental subjectivity—that aspect of ourselves that is
responsible for thinking and knowing—vicariously, through its activities in
experience (Ibid., p. 60).” By closely observing Geist
(meaning both mind or spirit) as it appears in time, Hegel believed the gap
could be closed between thought and reality. The ahistorical Kant only sees one
unified unchanging transcendental self of the logically a
priori “I think…” acting on experience, but Hegel instead
discovers a multiplicity of historical selves as “experience-organizers”
not fully aware of the meaning of these plurality of worldviews causing a
radical shift in the understanding of static selfhood and historical change.
"This historical proliferation of conceptual schemes seems to dissolve
reality into relativism. Hegel allows multiple schemes without giving up
knowledge altogether (Ibid., p. 62)."
In other words, Hegel does his own continuation of Kant’s unfinished transcendental deduction (i.e., to justify the table of 12 categories are the a priori conditions necessary for experience), but instead discovers the categories of historical Life (see Jean Hyppolite’s “Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,”(pdf.) trans. by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman, 1974, Northwestern Univ. Press, Evanston, p. 170) and describes their empirical manifestations in his work, “The Phenomenology of Spirit,”(pdf.). In this famous book, Hegel writes phenomenological descriptions of these historical forms of life, and demonstrates by reductio ad absurdum arguments how they ultimately end in seemingly irresolvable contradictions, and incoherence. While describing the phenomena of mind in this long “journey of despair” as experienced through multiple cultural-historical eras, Hegel finds patterns of universal necessity within the historical experiences of life, and then begins to speak of them as an absolute idealist of a single reality, and not realities. The phenomenological “we” referred to in the Phenomenology of Spirit are those readers that see this historical pattern: “The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss (Ibid., para. 8 ).”
“The introduction of movement into logic, is a sheer confusion of logical science…and to make movement explain logic, when as a matter of fact logic cannot explain movement.”-Kierkegaard (Postscript, p. 99-100).”
If MacIntyre borrows the same historicist solutions as Hegel, he will inherent the same historicist problems. MacIntyre is searching in a very Hegelian manner for the same kind of necessity (rationality) in history, or historical traditions to justify one normative ethical tradition over another writing “I have sketched in Chapters 14 and 15 the rational case that can be made for a tradition in which the Aristotelian moral and political texts are canonical (AV, p. 257).” MacIntyre’s answer to these questions can be found in an examination of historical traditions, "...a great part of modern morality is intelligible only as a set of fragmented survivals from that tradition (AV, p. 257)." Another paragraph states, “...it is the central thesis of After Virtue that the Aristotelian moral tradition is the best example we possess of a tradition whose adherents are rationally entitled to a high measure of confidence in its epistemological and moral resources (AV., p. 277).” In another book he writes, “We, whoever we are, can only begin enquiry from the vantage point afforded by our relationship to some specific social and intellectual past through which we have affiliated ourselves to some particular tradition of enquiry, extending the history of that enquiry into the present…(WJWR p. 401).” How can MacIntyre historically derive the imperative “oughts” of ethics from the indicative ‘is’ of contingent histories if they to lack any rationality with the rejection of any progress in the history of philosophy, “And I was to find that, by rejecting the conception of progress in philosophy that I had hitherto taken for granted, I had already taken a first step towards viewing the issues in which I was entangled in a new light (The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Vol. 1, Alasdair MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame (p.viii)(pdf.).” MacIntyre rejects the Enlightenment as a failure (AV, p. 276).
However, MacIntyre is walking into Hegelian historicism backwards; but yet, his historist methodology is still a sound strategy in the search for virtue. MacIntyre deserves no ad hominem for his traditionalist historicism, but he is completely in opposition to the anti-historist postmodern critics of today. Also, I would describe the political stance of After Virtue generally as what Karl Mannheim would call, “Historical Conservatism.” (“Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge,” Karl Mannheim, (1929/1936) Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1954, p. 120)(pdf.).
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