bernstein's distorting mirrors: a rejoinder

BERNSTEIN'S DISTORTING MIRRORS: A RejoinderAuthor(s): ALASDAIR MACINTYRESource: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 30-41Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41178282 .Accessed: 05/10/2013 22:28

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BERNSTEIN'S DISTORTING MIRRORS: A Rejoinder

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE

is a large' compliment to have one's views expounded and criticized by Richard J. Bernstein. Bernstein's three books,

Praxis and Action (Philadelphia, 1971), The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York, 1976) and Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1983) constitute jointly a remarkable achievement, a trilogy which is no less than a narrative interpretation of the history of recent philosophy and social theory from the nineteenth century to the present. The epigraph to Bern- stein's this-worldly commedia might well be E. M. Forster's "Only connect." For one of Bernstein's singular talents is for seeing hitherto unnoticed or underemphasized connections between thinkers who, until he took them in hand, had appeared to have little in common. Bernstein uses this talent to extraordinary synthetic and reconciling effect. So within a single overall unify- ing argument in Praxis and Action such heterogeneous figures as Marx, Kierkegaard, Dewey, Carnap, and Strawson all play a part; and in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism Winch, Kuhn, Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt are almost as improba- bly recruited as cooperative dramatis personae in Bernstein's philosophical theatre.

The recurrent pattern in these dramas is one which Bernstein himself characterised aptly in the final paragraphs of The Re- structuring of Social and Political Theory as a movement towards a climax of theoretical reconciliation. Two or more of Bernstein's

Alasdair Maclntyre is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and President-Elect of the Eastern Division of the American Philo- sophical Association. After Virtue, the subject of his present exchange with Richard Bernstein, is his eighth book. In the Summer 1982 issue of Soundings, Maclntyre had the shoe on the other foot - there he was the energetic critic of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

30


Bernstein's distorting mirrors 31

philosophical characters are first brought on stage and the ap- parently incompatible character of their views is then exhibited with great clarity, so that we seem to be confronted with an unavoidable choice, an either/or. But then somehow or other a transformation occurs, a reconciliation is after all effected and instead of the either/or of conflict we have a both/and, a new harmony. How are these reconciliations effected? Is there a genuine overcoming of what was after all only apparent opposi- tion? Or is it the reconciliation that is illusory? "In the final analysis" claimed Bernstein "we are not confronted with exclusive choices" (Restructuring p. 223). How is such a final analysis to be arrived at and defended?

Bernstein's synthetic conclusions are always reached though the detail of his interpretative narration of particular theorists and theories. Two examples which illuminate that mode of interpretation are his accounts first of Kuhn and later of Habermas. For much in Bernstein one way or another is a response to Kuhn's thesis that in certain key episodes in the history of the natural sciences there occur not only moments of exclusive choice, but moments in which such choice is between alternative bodies of theory so different in their conceptual structures, in their characterisations of the relevant empirical data, and in their identifications of what problems are central that no theory-neutral standards can be found by which one can be shown to be superior to its rival or rivals. Indeed part of the disagreement between the contending parties in such cases con- cerns how the disagreement between them is to be resolved. And of course such radical disagreements occur in philosophy as well as in the sciences.

It does not follow that, whenever such incommensurability of rival bodies of theory is encountered, rationality is necessarily devoid of resources. Each of the two (or more) bodies of theory will bring to such encounters some history of progress and achievement in solving what each takes to be the key problems that have been identified from its own point of view, but also some history of bafflement in the face of its own problems - some greater or lesser degree of failure. And it may be that one of the contending bodies of theory will turn out to afford pos- sibilities of understanding both the achievements and the limitations of its rival(s) - achievements and limitations, that is, judged by the standards of that rival - which that rival body of


32 SOUNDINGS

theory cannot provide either concerning itself or concerning its theoretical opponents. So it was that the rational superiority of Galilean and then of Newtonian mechanics over medieval impetus theory was vindicated by their ability to identify and to explain the necessary limitations as well as the achievements of impetus theory; so it was that the rational superiority of quan- tum mechanics over Newtonian mechanics was vindicated by its ability to identify and to explain the necessary limitations as well as the achievements of Newtonian physics, as these emerged in the later nineteenth century. The mark of a rationally superior theory is, then, that it supplies the resources for writing a more adequate history both of its rivals and of itself than those rivals can supply. And philosophy is in this respect no different from the sciences.

Notice however that where the outcome of a conflict between two or more incommensurable bodies of theory does result in the vindication of the rational superiority of one of the two contending parties, the either/or of conflict has not been re- placed by the both/and of synthesis; the conflict has been resolved in the exclusive favor of the victor. But this is something that Bernstein's perspective never allows him to recognize. In- deed he makes the claim, after a long discussion of incommensurability whose starting-point is Kuhn's work, that "different traditions or forms of life may be incommensurable, but can nevertheless be rationally compared" (Beyond Objectivism and Re- lativism, p. 107). Yet the conception of rational comparison which he employs is inadequate in at least two ways.

It is first of all a conception which is never provided with a sufficiently precise characterisation. And the examples of rational comparison that Bernstein provides, for instance in com- paring Habermas with Gadamer, are not persuasive. Moreover, even the work of rational comparison, specified as meagrely as Bernstein specifies it, can only be undertaken from some particular point of view, from the standing ground afforded by some particular tradition. For where we have two radically incommensurable bodies of theory, there will be two incompatible standards of judgment not only as to what it is in each that is both capable of and merits comparison, but also as to the outcome of such comparison. Hence the activity of rational comparison will provide no point of reconciliation for the otherwise irreconcila- ble. The either/or of incommensurability stubbornly resists dis-



solution into Bernstein's synthetic both/and. Indeed, as I shall argue at a later point in this paper, even in cases of important disagreement which are less fundamental than are those characterised by radical incommensurability the relationship of either/or to both/and is a good deal more complex than Bern- stein's synthesizing enterprise ever allows for.

What consequently is missing from his interpretations of the history of thought is any recognition of the importance of the distinction between two quite different kinds of extended argument and debate, that which can take place only within, and may indeed be partially constitutive of, a single tradition and that which gives expression to some fundamental conflict between rival traditions, conflict of a kind that may on occasion prove incapable of rational resolution. And perhaps this omission has some connection with another. Bernstein's history of movements of thought in which moments of apparent irreconcilability dis- solve into some further synthesis is a narrative almost entirely at the level of thought. This is not in itself a matter for reproach. Standard histories of philosophy are usually deeply sparing in their references to the social milieu of the philosophers whose writings provide their subject-matter, and while there are some splendid exceptions, such as A. W. Levi's Philosophy as Social Expression and the first volume of A History of Philosophy in Arnerica by Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, most ventures into this genre are intellectual disaster areas. Lukcs's Die Zerstrung der Vernunft is a case in point. But in moral, social, and political philosophy especially, to write the history of philosophy or theory in anything approaching complete independ- ence of social history is always to risk distortion. For the concepts articulated by philosophical theorists in those areas characteris- tically stand in some close relationship to the concepts actually embodied in human activity and social relationships. And sys- tematic moral philosophies always do articulate some moral and cultural standpoint.

Bernstein's narratives are of course deeply informed by a general awareness of this truth. How could they fail to be when he, like myself, writes with conscious awareness that we are living in the aftermath of Marxism? Nonetheless, one of the central features of Bernstein's own specific positions is that they are formulated at the level of concepts and theories, often enough indeed at the level of theories about theories, without more than


34 SOUNDINGS

occasional glances at those social realities about which theory is constructed and within which it finds its point and purpose. This emerges clearly in some of his criticisms of After Virtue, criticisms which also depend for their force upon the inadequacies of Bernstein's accounts of intellectual conflict and of tradition.

The conceptual analyses central to the argument o After Virtue both presuppose and are presupposed by its theses concerning the actual conflict of traditions. About that actual conflict and its social history After Virtue says a good deal less than I would have wished, as I acknowledged in Chapter 5; but perhaps within the scope afforded by the argument ofthat book it was not possible to say more. And it may well be the case that what I perceive as the misdirected character of Bernstein's criticism - for the disagreement between us extends, at least on my side, to disagreement over what our disagreements are and at what level they arise - is my own fault just because ofthat inadequacy. Wherein does that misdirection lie?

Bernstein treats my account of the relationship of the virtues to the practices in which they are rooted as though it is merely a piece of conceptual analysis. But my claim was not just that the concept of a virtue is partially to be explicated with reference to the concept of a practice; it was that the exercise of the virtues is and always has been actually rooted in practices. The conceptual relationship is only one aspect of a social relationship. And the history of the emergence and growth in complexity of the concept of the virtues and of the understanding of that concept is one aspect of the social history of the exercise of the virtues. It is perhaps Bernstein's failure to appreciate this and his insistence on moving not merely at the level of theory, but at that of the theory of theory, that leads him to misunderstand some crucial aspects of the different catalogues of the virtues that I describe. The incompatibilities in these catalogues are of two distinct kinds, those that exist within and are subordinated to the con- tinuities of an ongoing social tradition - the Homeric, the Peric- lean, the Sophoclean, the Aristotelian, and some medieval catalogues belong in this class - and those that arise between rival and fundamentally incompatible stances or traditions - that between Jane Austin's and Benjamin Franklin's catalogues would be an example.

What Bernstein emphasizes is that it is true of the catalogues



in the first class that they presuppose rival and incompatible truth claims, just as it also is of the catalogues in the second class (p. 9 above). But it is at this point that the inadequacy of his own treatment of incommensurability is crucial to his critique of After Virtue. For what that inadequacy obscures from view are the two very different kinds of radical disagreement involved in the two different sets of incompatible accounts of the virtues. And Bernstein is consequently blind to the existence of a class of conflicts and disagreements in which, although one of the contending parties can vindicate its rational superiority, it can do so only by including within its own perspective a good deal of the substance of its opponents' claim; in this type of case often enough it is precisely in the ability of one of the contending parties to do this, in a way and to a degree that its opponent is unable to match, that the vindication of its claim to rational superiority lies. Here indeed there is an either/or in which one of the alternatives, but not the other, is a both/and.

This is the thesis presupposed in After Virtue concerning the asymmetrical relationship between the Aristotelian conception of the virtues and its Homeric and Sophoclean predecessors. From the Homeric or Sophoclean standpoint it is not possible to confront the Aristotelian conceptions except antagonistically; but from the Aristotelian standpoint it is possible to assimilate large parts of what Homer and Sophocles have to teach, a process of assimilation in the course of which the Aristotelian standpoint was itself modified. But this was not of course only or even primarily a matter of one theory assimilating others; it was a matter of a mode of life which was able to incorporate within its communal structures this kind of complexity in the exercise of the virtues. The actual set of social institutions within which this possibility was first achieved, even if very imperfectly, was of course that of the Athenian polis; but xhatpolis, understood by its citizens at least to some degree in the way that Aristotle understood it - the "we" to whom Aristotle affords a voice in the Ethics and Politics are the best of the Athenian citizens - was able to achieve this because it could integrate within itself a variety of practices; those of poetry, of dramatic art, of athletic and gym- nastic exercises, of oratory, and, of course, of - in Aristotle's sense - politics. What is it about practices that makes of them the primary context for learning and exhibiting the virtues? Here again there is misunderstanding on Bernstein's part: the types


36 SOUNDINGS

of activity that he claims fall under my account - spying, smug- gling, the art of the executioner, and torturing are examples (p. 13 above) - just do not, so it seems clearly to me, involve sys- tematic extension of our conceptions of the ends and goals which excellence may serve - one central characteristic of practices, understood as I understand them. I suspect that what may also have mislead Bernstein is that he has underestimated the extent to which my thesis is articulated in terms of a specific historical tradition. For when the conception of a practice is introduced in After Virtue, the concept of a virtue has already been presented. It is not originally constructed - by some sort of induction? - from shared features of the set of all possible practices. It is originally learnt from our predecessors - the "our" here is not that of the protagonists of post-Enlightenment culture, but that of the heirs of ancient and medieval Aristotelianism - and the problem is, as I have already noticed, that they present us with just too many different accounts of what a virtue is. What we then come to recognize is the connection, both conceptual and historical, between the shared virtues of that tradition and the shared practices of its adherents and reflection on the nature of practices enables us to specify more accurately the nature of the virtues, just as reflection on the virtues enables us to understand more adequately the nature of practices and more particularly the differences between practices and the types of activity cited by Bernstein, which are all - unlike practices - definable in terms of the use of a range of skills to reach a given type of end. Practices are not definable in terms of any given end. For they comprise precisely those ongoing modes of human activity within which new ends emerge, are revised, are lost from sight, are rediscovered, and so on; while new sets of means have to be devised and redevised accordingly. And the goods that are pursued within practices are not related to the exercise of the virtues in the way in which the ends that the successful exercise of some skill procures are related to the exercise ofthat skill. For the goods internal to practices which cannot be achieved without the exercise of the virtues are not the ends pursued by particular individuals on particular occasions, but the excellence specific to those particular types of practice which individuals achieve or move towards in the course of pursuing particular goals on particular occasions, excellences our conception of which



changes over time as the goals pursued within a particular practice change.

Someone may of course use the type of behavior enjoined by a particular virtue skillfully to procure certain ends; honesty - or rather the behavior which honesty would require - may on occasion be the best policy. It is perhaps in part Bernstein's failure to distinguish between the genuine exercise of a virtue and the skillful use of the behavior required by a virtue to achieve particular successes (as well as his failure to grasp the distinction between practices and types of activity defined in terms of specific ends) that leads him to accuse me of a "leap of faith" or "a non sequitur" (p. 14 above) when I say that justice, courage, and honesty are necessary components of practices. But he has also not understood - and I certainly bear a good deal of responsibil- ity for not making this clearer - the extent to which this claim, too, is an historical one, a claim about the conditions under which the virtues have actually flourished.

It is worth emphasizing at this point that it is no part of my position to deny that an individual lacking the virtues cannot by the development of a high degree of skill be immensely successful in achieving within a given practice. But just because such a person lacks the virtues, the goods thus pursued by him or her will not be the goods of those types of excellence-to-be-valued- for-its-own-sake which are internal to specific types of practice, but rather those external goods of prestige, fame, money, status, and power which are only incidentally related to excellence. Bernstein is right of course to impute to me the view that in the long run practices cannot be sustained without the exercise of the virtues. The activity of the skillful, but unvirtuous achiever is alway parasitic upon the activity of those who by the exercise of the virtues sustain the practice in which he or she participates.

A different kind of response to Bernstein's criticisms of my account of virtues in terms of practices was given by Paul Santilli in what I judge to have been a highly effective response to Bernstein's paper when it was first delivered (at a conference on practical philosophy at Duquesne University in 1983). Santilli pointed out that the account of the virtues in terms of practices is only a first stage in my account of the virtues; and that restric- tions upon what can count as a virtue are imposed by the second stage of that account in terms of the way relationships are em-


38 SOUNDINGS

bodied in the narrative form of a single human life, and by the third stage in terms of participation in those tradition-informed communities whose history provides individual lives with their context. So that even if qualities which are not in fact virtues satisfy the conditions of the first stage, they will be excluded by the later stages of the account. And since I do not deny that under certain conditions it may be possible for there to be such cases, it is important for me to accept Santilli's rejoinder grate- fully as a supplement to my own response.

Santilli has also put me in his debt on another point, stating my position in some ways more clearly than I had succeeded in doing. On the view of the human telos taken in After Virtue, although there is not one kind of life the living out of which is the telos for all human beings in all times and places, nonetheless for each individual and community in each time and place what the human telos consists in for them is a matter of discovery, not of choice. The objectivity of the moral order is a necessary presup- position both of our understanding of the virtues and of our understanding of the human telos. But this objectivity is not in the least incompatible with the need to make choices between the claims of incommensurable goods which at particular points in history are contingently incompatible, for the authority of these claims does not derive from my choices. Rather, it provides the context within which even in making such choices I am, in Santilli's words, "required to submit my will to a vision of the good" in a way quite incompatible with any Nietzschean account.

Bernstein seems to believe that ancient and medieval beliefs, including Aristotelian beliefs, in the objectivity of the moral order required as a "foundation" (p. 23 above) or were "based upon" theories about human nature and the nature of the universe. This is an important, although a common misreading of the structures of ancient and medieval thought which projects back on to that thought an essentially modern view of the order- ing of philosophical and scientific enquiries. On this modern view, ethics and politics are peripheral modes of enquiry, de- pendent in key part on what is independently established by epistemology and by the natural sciences (semantics has now to some degree usurped the place of epistemology). But in ancient and medieval thought, ethics and politics afford light to the



other disciplines as much as vice versa. Hence from that standpoint, which I share, it is not the case thatfirst I must decide whether some theory of human nature or cosmology is true and only secondly pass a verdict upon an account of the virtues which is "based" upon it. Rather, if we find compelling reasons for accepting a particular view of the virtues and the human telos, that in itself will place constraints on what kind of theory of human nature and what kind of cosmology are rationally ac- ceptable. Moreover, it is in key part insofar as a particular theory of human nature and a particular cosmology give an adequate explanation of why the structures of moral and political life are what they are that we have good reason at least to take seriously, and perhaps to accept, the claims to rational warrant of those particular theories. It is precisely in this respect that certain versions at least of medieval theistic Aristotelianism are rationally superior to Aristotle's Aristotelianism.

It is well-recognized that at the core of Aristotle's moral and political philosophy there is a tension between what is local and particular and what is general and universal. Aristotle's ethics is concerned with the good for human beings as such, but the necessary milieu for the pursuit ofthat good is characterised in terms of the structures of the polis. What medieval theistic Aris- totelians achieved with varying degrees of success was an integra- tion and reconciliation of these two poles of Aristotle's thought within a scheme which both rescued Aristotle from the defects of his own parochialism and enables us to understand Aristotle's thought in the context of conceptions of history and tradition which are alien to all ancient Greek thought. Conceptions of the place of slaves, of women, and of barbarians all in consequence undergo radical transformation, although not always of course sufficiently so.

The explanatory power of medieval theistic Aristotelianism was not only retrospective, pointing us towards that which could not be accounted for in Aristotle's terms, even when it had to be obliquely acknowledged. It was also prospective. A central thesis of After Virtue is that such Aristotelianism provides the only standpoint from which in the end a true and adequate moral history of modernity can be written. I am well aware of how much more needs to be done both to spell out and to warrant that claim than is actually achieved in After Virtue. But that is the


40 SOUNDINGS

claim. And if it is correct the inadequacies of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought make a mockery of any hopes of human emancipation through that thought, a hope which adherents of post-Enlightenment thought, such as Bernstein, still seem to cling to, albeit more and more vestigially.

Bernstein exhorts me to "appreciate the extent to which [the Enlightenment] was a legitimate protest against hypocrisy and injustice" and how it indicted "moral and political ideologies that systematically excluded whole groups of human beings from participating in 'the good life' ..." (p. 24 above). He goes on to invite me to recognize my own indebtedness to Kant (p. 24-25 above) and, he might well have added, to Diderot and to Mill and to Hegel and to a significant number of others. But the thesis of After Virtue is not at all that the thinkers of the En- lightenment have nothing to teach us. It is that in order to learn from them what they genuinely have to teach us their insights have to be integrated into a quite different kind of intellectual framework and understood in terms of a quite different kind of intellectual perspective from those offered by what I called the Enlightenment project.

One of the crucial failures of Enlightenment ideology has been in respect of the kind of ground for protest and rebellion and the kind of hope that it offers to those systematically excluded from the practices and the institutions which make the good life possible. For it has fatally infected much of modern protest and rebellion with the idiom of abstract universality. And so it has not focused upon the tasks of creating practices and institutions which will actually enable the children of the hitherto deprived and the hitherto arbitrarily excluded to learn how to read Greek and to play baseball or cricket and to listen to and to play string quartets and to value excellence in all these areas. It has instead encouraged them to pursue fictions of rights and of equality so that everybody in the end will have equal right to an education that it is worth nobody's while to have. Marx of course had a good deal to teach us about the source of this kind of failure, which has proved to be something we have been unable to learn. And a contemporary Marxist, C. L. R. James, has had even more to teach. But I do not think that their lessons can be assimilated in any fruitful way by the Neo- Marxisms of the present which have failed so signally to transcend the limitations of post-Enlightenment thought.



I have argued in this rejoinder that Bernstein has misinter- preted some of the central claims advanced in After Virtue; but it has not of course been my contention that had he understood them correctly, he would have been able to accept them. The fundamental standpoint of After Virtue is, as Bernstein clearly recognizes, deeply incompatible with that of his own overall project and especially with its culmination to date in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. From the standpoint of After Virtue the syntheses and reconciliations of Bernstein's histories can appear only as blurred images reflected in a set of distorting mirrors.


Article Contentsp. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41

Issue Table of ContentsSoundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 1-121Front MatterEDITOR'S NOTES [pp. 1-5]NIETZSCHE OR ARISTOTLE?: Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre's "After Virtue" [pp. 6-29]BERNSTEIN'S DISTORTING MIRRORS: A Rejoinder [pp. 30-41]Of Stage and ScreenFINISHING SALIERI: Another Act to "Amadeus" [pp. 42-54]THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND "OEDIPUS THE KING": Two Tragic Visions [pp. 55-69]TO BIND AND LOOSE ON EARTH: Efficacious Religion "chez" Jean Genet and Bernard-Henri Lvy [pp. 70-90]EXPERIENCING THE WORLD AS HOME: Reflections on Dorothy's Quest in "The Wizard of Oz" [pp. 91-102]POST-STRUCTURALIST "READING" AND THE POST-MODERNIST TEXT: Godard's "Two or Three Things I Know About Her" [pp. 103-121]

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