Alasdair MacIntyre & Charles Taylor Against Modern Epistemology

Alasdair MacIntyre’s Gifford Lectures were delivered between 1987 and 1988, and he published the lectures as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in 1990.[1]  The book shares the similar concern of Charles Taylor regarding epistemology; that the dominant model of knowing is Cartesian and encyclopedic (to use MacIntyre’s term) and does not do justice to the complexity of the world nor of the human knowing subject.

            MacIntyre charts the evolution of epistemology and moral enquiry from Thomas Aquinas to Friedrich Nietzsche.  Between these two termini comes the enlightenment.  Broadly speaking, the enlightenment set out to speak objectively and universally about objects in the world.  An exemplar of this quest was the 9^th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, leading MacIntyre’s to label this mode of enquiry 'encyclopedia.' MacIntyre’s specific interest in his book is on moral issues, for which the Encyclopedia sought to offer a universal statement “of moral rules and rational justification of obedience to them.”[2]  Just as the natural sciences were producing objective  and verifiable statements on natural phenomena, the authors of articles on moral subjects in the 9th edition sought to produce similarly objective statements which would obtain no matter the context.  

            Nietzsche, however, rejected the rationalist model in favor of what MacIntyre names the 'genealogical' mode.  Nietzsche wrote that “Truths [those very things sought out by encyclopedia authors] are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, worn-out metaphors now impotent to stir the senses, coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than currency.”[3]  He recognized the cultural and temporal limitations of every human knower, limitations which allow for a multiplicity of perspectives and idioms, the sum of which cannot exist in a single world of meaning.  To Nietzsche and his followers, the Encyclopedia and what it represented was a fallacious undertaking because it was blind to its own limitations and convinced of its fixity.  MacIntyre summarizes the task of Nietzsche’s school as

to write the history of those social and psychological formations in which the will to power is distorted into and concealed by the will to truth, and the specific task of the genealogist of morality was to trace both socially and conceptually how rancor and resentment on the part of the inferior destroyed the aristocratic nobility of archaic heroes and substituted a priestly set of values in which a concern for purity and impurity provided a disguise for malice and hate.[4]

The enquirer in the genealogical mode works to unmask the claims to objectivity of scholars as their own will to gain power over others.  In the quote above, MacIntyre particularly highlights how these claims relate to the past.  Whereas in the past those in power acknowledged power as good in its own right (the "aristocratic nobility of archaic heroes"), Nietzsche viewed those who claimed objectivity as the 'inferiors' whose priestly values masked their true intentions to power.

            MacIntyre acknowledges that the genealogist exposes valid flaws in the encyclopedic model.  Encyclopedia ignores its own historical and cultural location, ignoring how these limit and shape the human knowing subject.  With this being said, it suffers from its own weaknesses.  In writing the work of genealogy and exposing encyclopedia as a representation of particular interests, the genealogist never accounts for him or herself as a knower.  If we are merely products of will to power, how does the genealogist explain their own critique of others?  Is this not another form of will to power?  In undermining the other, genealogy is itself undermined.

            However, there is a third model of enquiry.  There is “the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested.”[5]  MacIntyre terms this alternative model 'tradition.'  In this mode, one understands oneself as historically situated within a craft of enquiry.  This way of framing enquiry is one that is active and continuous, contrary to encyclopedia, which seeks static and final knowledge.  Additionally, in tradition the knowing subject is an inheritor of the past, but not in any way which implies a simple mimicing of past formulations.  As a craft, the knower is called to interpret and reinterpret this tradition, bringing its resources and past formulations to bear on questions in the present so as to direct it toward the future.  As inheritor of the past, and as an active model of knowing, tradition necessitates teachers for its students, and these students must place an obedient trust in those teachers.  Teachers and trust function together to place the enquirer into the stream of history of the craft and make it part of the student’s own history.  The teacher passes on to the student the conversations and formulations of the past.  The trust allows the student to accept these as his or her own and then to move from this place to encounter present circumstances.  This trust is porblematized in a post-enlightenment and certainly post-Nietzschean environment.  Both rejected obedience and trust as blinding, in the one scheme to objective reality, and in the other to the will to power of the authorities.  But it is important to remember the real insight of Nietzsche: we are limited by our contexts.  There is no objective place from which to know, so we are always either intentionally or unconsciously in a stream of knowing of some sort.  Unlike Nietzsche, however, tradition does not understand this as always a negative.  It is only if one is seeking objective knowledge as in encyclopedia.  In tradition, knowledge is inherently limited and developing.  It is this form which MacIntyre advocates.  To make his case, MacIntyre engages in an exposition of the genius of Thomas Aquinas and then how his legacy led to the two modes of enquiry named above.

            Taylor has a similar taxonomy of epistemology in his essay “Overcoming Epistemology.”[6]  In the position of MacIntyre’s 'encyclopedia' Taylor places Rene Descartes as the chief proponent.  Per the Cartesian understanding “knowledge is to be seen as correct representation of an independent reality.”[7]  Such a position is predicated on an anthropology of a disengaged (unaffected by the world of sense experience), punctual (able to punctuate or engage with an object to change it without the knower being changed), and atomist (isolated individual) self.  These three are required to conceive of a knowing subject able to know the world objectively.  

            Cartesian epistemology was dominant in the post-Enlightenment world, but experienced a disruption in the thought of Nietzsche.  Like MacIntyre, Taylor recognizes Nietzsche as being the founder of a new and radical mode of thought which makes the will primary and “attacks the very aspiration to truth.”[8]  Nietzsche shares with the Cartesians an atomistic and individualistic view of the human person, but it rejects the existence of critical reason as, in reality, a mask for hidden desires.  Taylor also sees a third possibility in the form of Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty.  This position shares with the Nietzschean an accounting of desire and intention in knowing, but it understands these intentions to be socially generated rather than individual assertions of atomistic will.  However, it also advocates for a role for reason, modifying this from the Cartesian position of objective knowing to a knowing which is always embedded in the world and is socially shared.  Reason is not the utterance of objective knowledge, but “articulating the background” or making sense of our shared being-in-the-world.[9] 

The third position in Taylor shares many similarities with ‘tradition’ in MacIntyre’s arguments.  By emphasizing an agents embeddedness in a culture, Taylor espouses an epistemological version of enquiry which has modest goals, not claiming universal knowledge but the ongoing working out of a received tradition as it encounters the contemporary world.  Where MacIntyre grounds this in the work of Thomas Aquinas, Taylor points to the philosophical work of Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty, and he places himself in this camp as well.

Another essay by Taylor, “To Follow a Rule,” demonstrates the resonance of this last position with MacIntyre.[10]  In the essay, Taylor argues that our understanding is carried primarily in our bodily practices, and this is regardless of our conscious framing of what we are doing.  To use MacIntyre’s terms, this background understanding is a culturally shared craft, a history which must be inhabited by student and teacher in the tradition version of moral enquiry.  The difference here that Taylor draws is that this is largely an unconscious indwelling, which only becomes conscious and articulated as it requires explanation.  In his example, Taylor illustrates how we don't carry around in our heads the verbal formulation for why we follow a rule, such as a street sign.  We simply know how to navigate the streets with the signs.  When asked by a completely stranger why we follow the sign, we are forced to articulate what is otherwise embodied.  Correctly understanding this articulation requires a sharing of the background, i.e., one would have to know what a collision is to understand our answer "to not have a collision with other vehicles," although even this fails to do justice to what is required.  There are a whole host of issues which an interrogator must 'get' in order to understand the logic of the answer. Taylor makes the case that embodied understanding is linked with others in dialogical action, such as conversation.  In my example explanation, following the street sign to avoid a collision requires that other drivers and pedestrians do the same.  Here Taylor's argument  supports MacIntyre’s assertion that “the possibility that reason can only move towards being genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested.”[11]  Because our knowledge is by nature social and conditioned by our context, the only chance it has of attaining anything approaching universality is through inviting others to participate in it with us.  As more are involved in the craft, the 'personality' of that knowledge is diffused.  It is always personal knowledge, but approaches less personality.  In Taylor’s words, “We can’t understand human life merely in terms of individual subjects, who frame representations about and respond to others, because a great deal of human action only happens insofar as the agent understands and constitutes himself as integrally part of a ‘we.’”[12]  Because articulations are the making explicit of what exists in embodied understanding, and not the positing of objective, universal knowledge, reason is always based upon shared embeddedness. 

Both Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor see rival versions of enquiry, models of knowing and discovering which are at odds with one another in fundamental ways.  Both MacIntyre and Taylor also argue for a version of enquiry which accounts for human contingency and social embeddedness, a form which MacIntyre sees epitomized by Thomas Aquinas and Taylor founds on the philosophical work of Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein.  Regardless of the different exemplars, tradition and emedded knowing have much in common.

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[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).

[2] MacIntyre, Rival, 29.

[3] Quoted in MacIntyre, Rival, 35.

[4] MacIntyre, Rival, 39-40.

[5] MacIntyre, Rival, 60.

[6] Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1-19.

[7] Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 3.

[8] Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 16.

[9] Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 12.

[10] Charles Taylor, “To Follow a Rule” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 165-180.

[11] MacIntyre, Rival, 60.

[12] Taylor, “Rule,” 173.