MacIntyre and the noble lie

Posted on | January 8, 2010 | 1 Comment

Universality lost its luster sometime ago. At the apex of liberal thought, the universal provided a conceptual framework for ethical and rational enquiry. But in a fractured ex-liberal world, there has been a perceived futility in appeals to idealized rationality or claims to universal justice. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Alasdair MacIntyre comments that we live in a context (not uniquely) that is unable “to arrive at agreed rationally justifiable conclusions” on matters of justice and reason (5). Without foundationalism, how can we avoid abject relativism? Is there a way to resolve competing claims to justice and reason?

MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism is largely assumed in this sequel to After Virtue. His project is to demonstrate how claims and definitions of justice and reason evolve within various cultural narratives of rationality. Such claims, he argues, are necessarily tradition-dependent; the validity of various ethical claims is sustained and advanced by the tradition in which they are situated and how those beliefs are formulated linguistically over time. Stated succinctly, “rationality itself … is a concept with a history” (9). This prompts the liberal objection: How can the diversity of traditions, each with attendant rationalities and moral formulations, lead to anything but irresolvable disagreements? For MacIntyre, the answer to this objection lies behind a proper understanding of the character and historical progressions of these rival narratives of enquiry (10).

In his discussion of the Greek tradition of rationality, MacIntyre presents the incipient Homeric imagination as one in which “all psychology … is physiology” (18). There is a certain unity of action in this early stage, rather than dichotomized inner and outer worlds. Similarly, the ends of the individual and the goods of society need not compete with each other. Moderns mistakenly read Enlightenment categories back into a Greek rational tradition with its own self-contained presuppositions.  We cannot make use of an uncomplicated , fully-functional rational foundationalism here. Internal motivations “may mirror, be responsive to, be compensating for, or be reactive against the constitutive elements of the public social world” (21). The very sense of an inner world is not part of the Homeric framework (21).

Likewise, justice is a construct of a particular narrative. MacIntyre’s proposal opposes a static notion of tradition, not only across specific cultures, but also within a single culture. Because every tradition is itself a narrative with an arc, progressing across a certain trajectory, it seems difficult to ever “pin down” a singular notion of justice, or any other virtuous ideal. (Interestingly, MacIntyre appears to conceive of rather paradigmatic – one might even say, common – “stages” of progression across multiple traditions.) Within the Greek tradition, MacIntyre’s narrative begins with the Homeric imagination. The inherent tensions within that framework, namely the competing goals of excellence and efficiency, gradually developed a new conception of inner reality disconnected from the public good (35, 42). The conflict of goods and ends is precisely what advanced the rational tradition and the conception of justice, politically and linguistically.

When MacIntyre returns briefly to the question of how to resolve rival enquiries into justice, he implies that non-rational persuasion is ultimately inescapable – the culmination of all preceding rhetoric (56). As in his example from Euripides, claims to rational justification can only transcend a particular narrative context with an intervention of the deus ex machina (62). This appears to be the only ultimate answer to rival notions of justice and good (e.g. the “ad hoc bidding of Heracles,” 63). Likewise, MacIntyre argues that Socrates is unable to answer the Sophists in any ultimate sense. The Sophists would not identify themselves as the targets of Socrates’ dialectic because the philosopher is not working within the Sophists’ tradition of rationality (75). Their narrative rebuffs the Socratic rhetoric precisely because the dialectic cannot offer arguments that are sustainable within the Sophists’ own concept of rationality.

So far, this presentation seems merely to bolster the liberal objection. MacIntyre suggests that within competing narratives, the presence of different arche provide conceptual grounds for ultimate explanations. While these arche direct competing traditions toward different theoretical goals (teloi), some commonality in cultural maturation is assumed. “If one begins with a society informed by the Homeric imagination … then  one is led inescapably to the problems posed by the Republic” (84).

Certainly, the eschatological dimension of MacIntyre’s arche is appealing in many ways. However, at times MacIntyre seems to be developing a teleological justification which contains elements similar to the Platonic noble lie. The arche is useful and, yes, it is extremely unlikely that any culture will ever self-consistently achieve its telos (80). But one wonders whether any completely non-transcendent arche will satisfy a community – unless, that is, the powerful tell a magnificent fiction in order to keep the tradition integrated, alive, and well.

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One Response to “MacIntyre and the noble lie”

  1. A question of interest. « Second Paradise
    January 11th, 2010 @ 7:32 pm

    [...] question of interest. Davey Henreckson at Theopolitical has a partial summary of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? which ends with an interesting [...]

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Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.

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