Alasdair MacIntyre, George Lindbeck, and the Nature of Tradition

David Trenery

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625647054
  9781498227766
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877415
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

What should we believe, and why should we believe it? This book addresses these questions through a critical exposition of the work of the contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and of the theologian George Lindbeck, the father of postliberal theology. The book argues that MacIntyre's philosophical development can be seen as a response to the question of how belief in a comprehensive metaphysical system can be justified. Such a system provides its believers with an account of the nature of the universe and human nature, and a basis for their ethical reasoning and action. The book draws on Lindbeck's cultural-linguistic account of religion to argue that such a system is primarily a way of interpreting the world and the place of humanity within it, rather than a speculative theory. The justification of belief in such systems can be understood in terms of MacIntyre's account of tradition-constituted rationality, provided that this notion of rationality is made more specific by the incorporation of elements of Lindbeck's theology. Equally, the book argues that Lindbeck's theology can be strengthened by the incorporation of elements drawn from MacIntyre's work. This book will be of value to students of philosophy and theology and to the general reader who is interested in the question of the grounds of belief.

1

The Roots of After Virtue

1.1 Overview

This book considers how one might justify belief in a comprehensive metaphysical system, through an exposition and evaluation of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. What is meant by the phrase “a comprehensive metaphysical system” will become clearer as the book unfolds, but I will define it initially as a set of ontological and ethical presuppositions which are taken to encompass and explain the nature of the universe of which our species is a part, and which also provide a framework for human practical reasoning and action. On the basis of this definition secular philosophies such as Marxism and religions such as Christianity are comprehensive metaphysical systems. A comprehensive “theory of everything,” such as modern physics has tried to develop, would not be such a metaphysical system, unless it sought to encompass ethics and an understanding of humanity within its framework, as well as providing an account of ontology.

I need to qualify my description of Christianity and Marxism as metaphysical systems. This is not an attempt to characterize all aspects of their identity in a reductive fashion. It is, however, a way of pointing to some common features of these belief systems, which constitute them as “hermeneutic frameworks”: that is, all-encompassing ways of understanding the universe, humanity, and human action (see section 4.3). A comprehensive metaphysical system as defined above is, I shall argue, primarily a way of interpreting the world and our place within it, rather than a speculative theory. Whether it is legitimate to speak of the justification of such a hermeneutic framework remains part of the question I am exploring. The decline of Enlightenment epistemological foundationalism undermined notions of universal standards of argument and legitimacy, and emphasized the importance of the role of authority and faith in underpinning commitment to such comprehensive metaphysical systems. My exploration of MacIntyre’s philosophy, and my use of the work of the theologian George Lindbeck in the latter part of this book, is intended to deepen the understanding of the issues associated with the question of justification and commitment in a postmodern philosophical and theological context.1

My reasons for exploring these issues are personal as well as intellectual. Like MacIntyre I am a child of the intellectual and moral culture of the mid-twentieth century. My education emphasized the importance of intellectual rigor and objective justification as a pre-condition of belief, and rejected tradition as a foundation for rational investigation and knowledge. This education emphasized that the foundations of morality are indeterminable and encouraged tolerance of diversity and (less happily) moral relativism. It left me agnostic with respect to religion and the foundations of ethics, but it also left me with no choice but to act at a personal, community and political level, even though the principles that guided my actions appeared to be arbitrarily adopted. My education and upbringing therefore created a disconnection between my theoretical beliefs on the one hand, and the principles that underpinned my practical reasoning on the other. MacIntyre’s philosophy has sought to address such disconnection by developing an account of rationality as constructed and tested within a tradition of enquiry. The beliefs and principles that form the basis of such traditions are not demonstrable, but their adequacy can be evaluated as enquiry unfolds. It therefore provides an alternative to the Enlightenment perspective on the questions “what should I believe?” and “why should I believe it?”—questions to which I will return at the very end of this book.

This book, does not, of course, resolve the major and fundamental questions about the nature of knowledge and the meaning and legitimacy of the concept of justification. However, it makes a contribution to knowledge in four areas that are relevant to this debate. Firstly, it provides a contribution to MacIntyre studies by plotting the relationship between his early philosophy, and his mature position. It also argues that the later development of his position in Dependent Rational Animals2 (henceforth DRA) should be given a more central role in the interpretation of his philosophy than has been granted by some other commentators3 (chapter 2). The concepts of tradition and tradition-constituted rationality are central to MacIntyre’s mature philosophy, and the second contribution of the book is to provide a more precise definition of the concept of tradition, by interpreting the “fundamental agreements” that constitute the identity of a tradition in terms of Lindbeck’s regulative account of doctrine, as set out in his book The Nature of Doctrine (henceforth ND).4 This contribution provides greater clarity to the concepts of incommensurability, tradition-constituted rationality and epistemological crisis, which are central to MacIntyre’s account of the superiority of one tradition to another. It therefore strengthens MacIntyre’s overall position.

The notion of superiority that emerges from MacIntyre’s work provides a retrospective measure of the extent to which one tradition can be held to be (provisionally) justified or (absolutely) unjustified as a comprehensive metaphysical system. This notion of superiority therefore provides a means of reframing the question of justification in pragmatic and empirical terms. Lindbeck also seeks to provide an account of the superiority of one set of beliefs to another, and the third contribution of the book is an evaluation of Lindbeck’s account of superiority in ND. Lindbeck is concerned not only with the question of how one might conceptualize the superiority of different religions to each other, but also with the question of how one position may be judged to be superior within the same religion. I argue that neither of Lindbeck’s accounts of superiority can be applied in practice, but that his position can be strengthened by incorporating MacIntyre’s notion of tradition-constituted rationality into his perspective (section 4.7).

Without a persuasive account of the superiority of one comprehensive metaphysical perspective to another, any philosophical position appears to be open to the challenge of relativism or perspectivism. Both challenges are based on the assumption that a failure to establish some indubitable tradition-transcendent foundation for knowledge means that there can be no good reasons for preferring the claims of one tradition to another. The relativist makes this claim on the grounds that, if rational standards of justification only apply within each tradition, there can be no compelling basis for choosing between the competing claims to truth made by different traditions.5 The perspectivist agrees with this assertion but argues further that the incommensurability of rival traditions subverts the very notion of truth itself, and claims that different traditions should be understood as offering “very different, complementary perspectives for envisaging”6 the world i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: The Roots of After Virtue
• Chapter 2: MacIntyre’s Mature Position
• Chapter 3: Lindbeck and the Identity of the Christian Tradition
• Chapter 4: Lindbeck and MacIntyre as Complementary Thinkers
• Bibliography