MacIntyre on Philosophers and Fundamentalists

A philosopher can stand in two very different types of relationship to the larger society of which he is a part. He can be in certain types of social situation an active participant in the forums of public debate, criticizing the established, socially shared standards of rationality on occasion, but even on these occasions appealing to standards shared by or at least accessible to a generally educated public....But when professionalized academic philosophy makes the rational discussion of questions of fundamental import the prerogative of an academic elite with certified technical skills, using a vocabulary and writing in genres which are unavailable to those outside that elite, the excluded are apt to respond by repudiating the rationality of the philosophers. In the forums of popular life rhetorical effectiveness in persuasion and manipulation prevails against rational argument.

The content of the doctrines propounded by those who place effectiveness in persuasion above rationality of argument is from this point of view less important than their function. That function is to prevent any challenge to the effective rhetorical performer which might make him or her, or seem to make him or her, rationally accountable by appeal to some public standard. So the doctrines of such performers characteristically present some not to be questioned, scrutinized, or argued about fetish or talisman as exempting them from rational accountability.

Alasdair MacIntyre. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Duckworth (London: 1990) p. 168. MacIntyre argues that this has happened before; in the late medieval period, instead of trying to maintain and develop Aquinas's integration of the contending traditions of Augustinianism and Averroist Aristotelianism, there was a dual trend tending to the dissolution of it and anything like it: the fragmentation naturally resulting from the demands of mundane academic life (which quickly began to split up the synthesis into minute manageable units which were treated as virtually independent), which might be represented at its best and most impressive in people like Buridan and Occam; and a populist preaching that, in the name of rhetorical effectiveness, began to ignore the possibility of any external standard, which might be represented at its best and most impressive in someone like Eckhart (MacIntyre doesn't mention him, but Lull comes to mind as well). In the above passage he is arguing that the two actually go together: overspecialized, jargonistic philosophy in the name of knowledge sparks a dismissal, in the name of life, of its standards of rationality and, indeed, of any public standard of reason. This dismissal leads to an attempt to find a sure ground of rhetorical persuasion that will allow the orator or demagogue to avoid being rationally accountable in his arguments to some public standard; which leads to fetishistic appeals to some talisman whose authority is so great that those who associate it with themselves don't have to hold themselves rationally accountable; in one iteration, this leads to fundamentalism. There are many other possible iterations of the theme. Both moments in the movement can have good or even impressive results, of course; but the dangers of both, the blindness of both, remain. It's an interesting argument, worth mulling over.

Notes and Links

* An interesting paper on the question of whether the Assyrian Church of the East (see the Australian/New Zealand diocese website for further information about the ACE) is Nestorian in its Christology. The Church of the East is always associated with Nestorius, so that when, for instance, we talk about Nestorians in China what we really mean are members of the Assyrian Church of the East, not Nestorians in a strict and proper sense at all. There is no doubt that it is highly sympathetic to Nestorius, venerating him and several other prominent Nestorians in its liturgy and refusing to accept the Council of Ephesus. However, the official Christology of the Church, as found in Babai the Great and various synodal pronouncements, while influenced by Nestorius, has generally been more muted; and refusing to accept the Council of Ephesus is not precisely the same as rejecting the substance of its points. Some things the Church of the East has endorsed sound pretty close to Nestorianism; but, of course, 'sounding pretty close' to a heresy is not a mark of heresy when you are dealing with an entire culture of people who use terms in a different way than you do. (This is something that a great many people would do well to remember in discussing theological topics.) Since the paper in question is from the perspective of the Church of the East, and vehemently denies that it holds a Nestorian theology (as, indeed, most theologians in the Assyrian Church of the East do), it makes for interesting reading. See also the Common Christological Declaration Between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. While the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East are not in full communion, the Catholic Church allows, under restricted conditions, Chaldaean Catholics -- essentially that part of the Assyrian Church of the East which has entered into full communion with Rome -- to receive communion in the Church of the East, and vice versa. This means less than it might sound, since in emergency situations the Catholic Church allows Catholics to participate in the sacraments of non-Catholic Churches, if they are recognized to have apostolic succession and liturgies that meet certain basic criteria; likewise, in emergency situations it allows members of such Churches to participate in Catholic sacramental life. That's something most people don't know. It is not full communion, but as a sort of quasi-communion manifesting itself under emergency conditions it is a sign that the Catholic Church recognizes the other as a genuine sister Church, even if it has not worked out all the details needed for communion in the regular and proper sense. It's an intimation of a unity in root that remains even when that unity is not expressed as it should be in stem and shoot.

* Colleen Keating has an interesting post on Pascal Boyer's theory of religion and what it suggests with regard to Unitarian Universalism.

* Insight Scoop has an summary of the life of Gianna Beretta Molla, the first married laywoman (and the first female physician) to be canonized a saint in the Catholic Church. Her process moved very quickly, and because of the circumstances of her death it's pretty clear she's going to be a controversial one, since she died in childbirth because she refused to abort.

* Tertium Quid of "From Burke to Kirk and Beyond" argues that Maria Montessori's view of education was heavily influenced by her Catholicism.

* Those of you with an interest in Russian Orthodoxy probably already know that this week was a very big week for the Russian Orthodox, because on Ascension Thursday there was a major reunification within the Russian Orthodox Church. Many members of the Church fled Russia to escape the Bolsheviks; they then broke from the Church in Russia when it was seen to be falling too far under the dominance of the Communist regime, forming ROCOR (also more rarely called ROCA), the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (sometimes called the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad), which now represents about a quarter of the Russian Orthodox outside of Russia. It was reconciled, so as to re-establish canonical fullness of communion, with the Church in Russia. This is big news -- Hallelujah-level news. So here are some links:

St. John Maximovich discusses the history of ROCOR
The ROCOR webpage has kept up with the news on the event. Note especially this summary of events.
Fr. John Whiteford, who will be in Russia for the occasion, has a set of links for further information.

* Justin Holcomb discusses what sort of thing counts as a metanarrative in Lyotard's sense.

* Darren at "Historical Theology" has for some time been posting on Protestant theology of the Lord's Supper. Some of his recent posts discuss Calvin's Short Treatise on the Lord's Supper, Garrish's discussion of Calvin's Eucharistic theology, and Torrance's view on the content of the eucharistic event.

* Rob Koons's A Lutheran's Case for Catholicism (PDF). (Ht: MP)

* In the Anglican calendar, today is the Feast of St. Dunstan, one of those saints whose tireless work astonishes more than any miracle attributed to them.

* A nice post on the chiastic structure of Augustine's Confessions at "Per caritatem".

Poem Draft

Baptism

The luster of these lustral waters
leads me ever onward;
they are flaming gold with glory
like the splendor of the sunrise sea
as light leaps from wave to wave.

Polemical Tactics

The recent posts on the 'two-step' and its occurrence in polemics (at The Weblog, here, and The Little Professor) has set me thinking about the various argumentative tactics used in polemics. They fall into various more-or-less clear groupings. Obviously the most straightforward such type of tactic is the refutation tactic: you answer a position with an objection, or an objection with a response, or evidence with contrary evidence, or what have you. There are other tactics, however.

Another kind of tactic, for instance, is the distraction tactic. I use the term 'distraction' expansively and non-pejoratively; for instance, if your opponent is talking about something irrelevant to the argument you might in this sense 'distract' them back to the point. In a distraction tactic you don't refute but put forward something not directly relevant to the immediate issue in order to change the character of the argument as a whole.

There is at least one more kind of tactic, for which we have no clear name. For lack of a better term, I will call these kind of tactics dissociation tactics. Whereas distraction tactics are a move into non-relevance in order to change the argument, dissociation tactics are an attempt to frame the dispute in such a way that the opponent's arguments are seen to be irrelevant. The most extreme example of such a tactic would be poisoning the wells. It's pretty clear that the 'two-step' approaches that have been discussed are dissociation tactics. In their strongest forms they are instances of poisoning the well; some of the instances Miriam points out are such cases. (In fact, we get the term 'poisoning the wells' from the same general sort controversial context she notes.)

Hume's View of Religion

From a recent New Yorker article:

Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists.

In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.

It's a bit more complicated than this. We do know that Hume did not believe in an afterlife; and that he was disdainful of Christianity as an institution, particularly Scottish Presbyterianism. Near the end of his life he joked about not being able to complete his great work of ending the Christian superstition in Britain. But we also know that he represented himself to others as a theist and once said he didn't believe atheists existed because he had never met one (we know he said that because he said it at a dinner party full of atheists hosted by d'Holbach and Diderot noted it for posterity). He regularly contrasts true religion (good) with false religion (bad, if you hadn't guessed), and criticizes atheists not merely for "indiscretion and imprudence" (which phrase is actually attributed to Bacon, although the skeptic in the Dialogues explicitly claims to agree with it); but also has the same character remark that atheists can only be nominally so "and can never possibly be in earnest." We don't, in fact, know Hume's precise view of the matter; judgment of that point requires making guesses about how far his irony extends, and elaborate suppositions about the end he has in view in saying such things. All the limited evidence we have points to Hume's classifying himself as a theist (and none whatsoever to his classifying himself as an atheist); but all the evidence we have is scattered and difficult to place in a larger context, leaving obscure precisely what he took that to mean.

Likewise, the attack on the design argument, mentioned in the first paragraph, is considerably more ambiguous than it sounds; the last Part of the Dialogues contains a definite -- albeit convoluted, ambiguous, and difficult to interpret precisely -- affirmation of the design argument. Hume very explicitly and deliberately has the design argument survive, in some form, the attack made on it, even going so far as to have the skeptic deny that atheists can seriously reject its basic point. I have my own interpretation of this move, which will come out in the series of posts I'm doing on the subject. But there are quite a few complications in understanding Hume on this point, and no completely adequate interpretation has ever been found. (Good news for us Hume scholars, since it means there's plenty to uncover yet!)

UPDATE: Expanded a few overly concise points and corrected some of the more obscure phrasing.

Atheist Two-Step

I loved this bit from Adam Kotsko's post (ht: Ralph Luker) on Hitchens's recent book on religion:

I'm starting to think that writers of polemical doctrinaire atheism actually put in the errors on purpose. The goal is to produce a dynamic in conversation about the book that I'd call the Atheist Two-Step:

1. Someone points out that the particular religious belief disproven by the doctrinaire atheist is not really held by anyone as stated.

2. The doctrinaire atheist then says that religion is so obviously stupid and pernicious that one can't be held accountable for detailed knowledge of it.

This two-step, which really does occur and which I have had people do to me more than once, has indeed been a puzzling feature of the 'New Atheism' movement, at least to me. But I also wonder if the two-step is not so much intended to be directed against religion as it is against other atheists who hold that intelligent criticisms of religion do, indeed, require detailed knowledge of it. After all, the 'New Atheists' have no distinctive features as far as their critique of religion goes; it's difficult to find any feature of their approach that is not old and answered, and their approach is not very sophisticated -- the primary reason why other atheists keep criticizing them. What primarily distinguishes them as new is not that they've come up with a new or clever critical approach but that they go around loudly bashing atheists they think are too mild (namely, the atheists who are criticizing them for not being sufficiently sophisticated). So perhaps the two-step is less a response to religious critics and more a platform for mocking atheists who take religious topics seriously.

UPDATE: Miriam Burstein makes a good argument that this is a common polemical pattern, and neither particularly new or atheistic. The passage by Newman on the Prejudiced Man made for especially interesting reading.

UPDATE 2: In all fairness, as well, I was struck by this passage by Ophelia Benson (commenting on a claim by Smith that theists don't take atheism seriously enough to examine its arguments):

That would explain the way theists fail to engage with the arguments that atheists actually make, and it would explain the way they pretend atheists make silly futile claims that they don't actually make. That would be because theists aren't paying attention to what atheists say at all, they're just ignoring all of it and proceeding on their own pre-ordained track, like a runaway train ignoring all signals because the engineer has stepped outside for a sandwich.

It's noteworthy how easy it is to interchange 'theist' and 'atheist' here; indeed, I can even point to atheists who make much the same point with the two interchanged (i.e. atheists fail to engage with the arguments theists actually make), so you don't even have to take a theist's word for it. (To give just one example.) So perhaps, as well, what we are seeing is just a general feature of polemics (in whatever field) where emphasizing the wrongness of the opposing position becomes more important than knowing what that position is -- ultimately a self-defeating move, and, for that matter, poor polemical strategy, but one that the human mind apparently finds very tempting.

UPDATE 2: Ophelia Benson suggests a theist four-step; one which, I take it, is not a polemical tactic but a justificatory one, and certainly, where it is found, as dangerous as she suggests. [UPDATE 3: She clarifies here.]

OPC2 and PC

The second annual Online Philosophy Conference has begun.

The newest Philosophers' Carnival, on the subject of practical philosophy, is also up.