I haven’t got into chapter one yet, but I think I see what Penner is doing. He has completely carried over MacIntyre’s historical analysis. It’s like a virtual presupposition for Penner.
Richard Bernstein may have one of the most noteworthy critiques of After Virtue. His article ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?’ sparked a debate between him and MacIntyre that generated journal articles all of its own.
Bernstein wrote, “In a little more than fifty pages, Maclntyre sweeps through his narrative of the history of the tradition of the virtues from Homer, to Classical Athens, to Aristotle, culminating in the medieval contribution to this tradition. Maclntyre’s historical sketch is so dazzling - and is so filled with illuminating and provocative insights - that it can divert us from the main point of his story.”
Maybe it’s just late. I do understand you have reservations about the trustworthiness of Penner’s employment of MacIntyre’s illustration.
Do keep in mind that Penner is borrowing the imagery (the disassembled and differently/partially reconstructed parts of a fictitious scientific “culture”) that MacIntyre used to help imagine in contemporary minds the change that morality went through in the evolution from premodern culture to modern culture. Penner is borrowing this imagery and applying it analogously to apologetics, no longer applying it to discussions of morality.
I’m not sure if that helps, or addresses your concern. But I hope it’s in the right direction.
As I wrapped up the introduction tonight and read through Penner’s chapter summaries, I thought this book could have been written without any reference to MacIntyre’s analogy.
It just doesn’t add up and feels more like alt history. What’s also confusing is reading MacIntyre’s essay After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century:
“When I wrote After Virtue, I was already an Aristotelian, but not yet a Thomist, something made plain in my account of Aquinas at the end of chapter 13. I became a Thomist after writing After Virtue in part because I became convinced that Aquinas was in some respects a better Aristotelian than Aristotle, that not only was he an excellent interpreter of Aristotle’s texts, but that he had been able to extend and deepen both Aristotle’s metaphysical and his moral enquiries.”
That’s an interesting point about the illustration being unnecessary. I liked it, but I also see it has caused confusion here and there in the discussion. You may be right. One of those challenging writer-decisions.
Sorry, I don’t have the bacground to understand the history of MacIntyre’s philosophical evolution. But thanks for your confidence.
Have a good night.
“MacIntyre’s controversial thesis is that the moral language of our actual world is in the same state of disorder and chaos that exists in regard to natural science in his imaginary world.”
If MacIntyre is writing as an Aristotelian, then his thesis would like saying we need to go back to being classical apologists.
But Penner seems to be saying we can’t go back but must go forward as Kierkegaardians.
And the reason we can’t go back is because a fundamental break has occurred.
“Enlightenment rationality has almost completely failed, MacIntyre believes, and it was always doomed to fail because people no longer share a common understanding of the world or the self.”
Interesting statement. Not sure if the second half is Penner or MacIntyre.
Did the Enlightenment cause the break, or did the break doom the Enlightenment?
Then entire sentence (both halves) you quoted there is attributed to MacIntyre. But Penner goes on to agree with it.
My reading of Penner is that he would say it was the former. He sees Modernity as the cause of apologetics “going down the rabbit hole” so-to-speak.
Here is a question of my own - in [some] defense of the attacked modernism and its style of Christian apologetics. Could the character of the “modern Christian apologetic” not also just be laid at the feet of its temporally greater distance from its founding events? The early church had direct access to witnesses, which will surely then make up the significant shape of its testimonies. Church father figures of subsequent centuries had their own distinct apologetic seasons, now shaped by the urgency of assembling the authentic papers and scraps from the now-gone direct witness testimonies for posterity, as it became apparent that this may be necessary for a longer haul than their forebears had initially imagined. And so the important projects of the day were to assemble and vet the various fragments of written testimony out there, and to canonize what was deemed authentic. But they were still much closer to those founding events than we are. Later centuries yet are now obliged to view those now yet more distant events through such historical telescopes as could be fashioned - now depending much more heavily on the faithful written recordings and translations (and interpretive commentary) of testimonies - and perhaps the necessity of accurately rendered and clarified human reason must now be appropriately brought to bear in its own turn for that modernist season.
And since we reasoners are not infallible, as Penner rightly points out, the postmodern critique of modernism could be seen as our necessary season now - to acknowledge the epistemic humility that ought to have attended, and now increasingly does critique (without necessarily destroying, as currently defensive apologists fear) the work of our modernist season. The prophets of old regularly stood accused by their contemporaries of upsetting or attacking the status quo culture, and yet later, more detached posterity easily recognizes the necessarily provocative nature of those earlier prophetic callings. They weren’t destroying the religion of their countrymen - they were redeeming it! (or trying) – calling it back to faithfulness to its roots. So it continues now. Nobody who has spent their lifetime building up libraries and massive intellectual infrastructure in their own turn (as contemporary apologists have), will fail to feel attacked, and baton down their hatches accordingly when the necessary corrections come against their own excesses and misplaced confidences.
Perhaps that sequence of church seasons would be a less harsh alternate reading of modernism’s place in all this than Penner provides - and I would love to hear his reaction to the suggestion; and will let his book “react” to this as we continue to read through it. I hope to circle back to this as we go through the book to see how it might be answered - and see if this perspective can survive the challenge, which is formidable since Penner has a lot on his side historically. I don’t think anybody ever got rich with gambles that were optimistic about human reason and enterprise. So my more morbid impulses actually have me betting that Penner’s take prevails.
[Having now read ahead, I foresee that one unresolved objection I’ll have to Penner will be what he attempts to do with ‘secular’ space or the ‘public square’ - which interestingly enough, will make stakeholders from all sides simultaneously delighted but then also angry. But that will need to wait for future chapters.]
I don’t see it explicitly in the text and have my doubts as I am surveying MacIntyre. Macat Analysis has a helpful summary of After Virtue. The audio version is just under 2 hours so it may be of interest. I’m especially liking MacIntyre’s answer to Rawls and Novick. It was reading Cohen and Nozick that lead me to see in Paul coequal principles of justice.
That would be my understanding as well, but I don’t think MacIntyre would claim the latter either.
Hehe… maybe the break is the Reformation
The Alice in Wonderland analogy goes back to the fall (heavenly?) and continues to work through all the various seasons (dispensations) of history… but God.
Some notes from the Macat Analysis of After Virtue which were helpful for me:
MacIntyre’s historicist thesis: There is no universal timeless concept of justice and we can rationally decide between systems of moral philosophy.
Rawls modified his view of universal justice with respect to MacIntyre, so that it is not necessarily universal.
Nussbaum critical of the virtue ethics movement MacIntyre helped to begin, claims there is no such thing as a rival virtue ethics. The virtues have always been part of historical, deontological, utilitarian or Humean moral theories. To claim otherwise is to tell a confused story by some who see in the rejection of Enlightenment theories the best hope for an ethics that is realistic, historical grounded, perceptive, and worldly.
Nussbaum continues, thus the virtuous action for MacIntyre is a matter of authority and tradition, and he is seen as calling for a return to a tightly ordered social structure such as the ancient Greek city state.
Yet it can be argued MacIntyre has not called for a return to such a social structure where roles are assigned by those in authority.
The concluding thought is that MacIntyre is simply committed to the view that social roles, however we come by them, inevitably define our lives and require we possess the virtues.
Mike - your concluding sentences seem kind of straightforward there … but I’ll admit my eyes glaze over on the Nussbaum paragraph. I’d have to spend a lot of time with a dictionary to even pry into what you’re even talking about there. Do you have any summary thoughts about it you can share on a more informal (more accessible) way?
Mike, do you see a difference or none between what MacIntyre is doing and what Penner is doing with the fable of deconstructed scientific culture?
I see the fable as a tool, like a simple machine, that can be applied to a variety of situations.
I’d like to read MacIntyre, because I’m not getting any hits on Alice or Wonderland when searching the book. If pressed, I’d say I think Penner took the illustration too far, and what’s doubling perplexing is MacIntyre does not hold to universal moral laws. So what doesn’t exist, can’t be lost. And I thought universal law was something Christians hold to in some form, however we come by the context, of loving your neighbor and God.
There are the several antinomians, however. (I still construe the big Ten, all of them, as ‘laws of love’, that they have not been invalidated, and that they are expanded upon by Jesus and throughout the NT in great detail for us to test ourselves against.)
Universal Laws:
I had a hard time the last time I read Mere Christianity about 5 years ago. Lewis’ entire argument is built on universal morals. But throughout the book I kept seeing exceptions all over the place. Consciences can be scarred and manipulated. Moral thinking can have different grounds in different cultures. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” works in some places but not everywhere all the time. Those are more ground-level examples.
We can also start looking at large power relationships which involve cultural and political systems. These allow dominant groups in societies to maintain power within and over systems. I know this kind of analysis controversial now, but I am convinced of it. I bring up systems, because they are insideous in the way they allow us (Christians) not to see our own sinful complicity in harming others. It allows us to even feel good about charity we offer to people harmed by the systems we help maintain.
I don’t want these examples to derail the discussion about Penner’s thesis and support, but to show that it is possible even for (theologically conservative) Christians to view morals as not (entirely) universal.
Yes, Merv. I agree with you. I think Penner is clear about this.
This is a great question. I’ll try to keep coming back to it as I read. I’m glad you thought of it.
I wonder, if without the cultural shift from premodern to modern, particularly via the Enlightenment, the first part of your description would have followed a different course than “accurately rendered and clarified human reason.”
It can only be speculation. I look forward to more of the book.
I would, too. It seems he answers his correspondance. Maybe there will be a good opportunity to write him.
I had a wonderful and long visit with a long time friend and colleague this morning - sharing with him much of what Penner’s book is about (as best I could represent it to him). And in the course of our discussion he developed a bit of a different perspective that might also carry some (or a lot?) of the weight that Penner’s thesis puts on the back of modernism. I want to share my colleague’s perspective here for reaction because I wasn’t sure how (or if) Penner would answer it through the course of his book.
Here was my colleagues proposal as best I can reproduce it here. While Penner has modernism shaping and conditioning the apologist’s methods of apologetics - and doing so in problematic ways; my colleague was wondering if it is a mistake to ignore any/all responsibiity that the recipient might carry in that two-way communication process. Penner speaks of modernism causing an apologist to “objectify” any recipients of his argumentation - reducing them to hearers, analysts, and (the apologists hopes) eventually ratifiers of clever argumentation. It seems that all culpability and responsibility is laid on the side of any would-be apologist. And Penner may be right that then a lot is riding on the “recipient’s” ability to follow the argument (what if they aren’t smart enough)? And so forth. All this appears to be a good reason to share in Penner’s concern over trying to situate our ostensible conversions on the foundation of human intellect. But aren’t there other reasons a listener could reject an apologist’s advances? Sure - perhaps the apologist is a jerk, doesn’t care about the person he speaks to, or is not “being truth” to his neighbor in the Christ like sense even while he may be uttering accurate propositions. Those concerns of Penner’s all are valid. But isn’t it also possible that the listener in his own right has less-than-noble reasons for refusing to accept what is said? Are any of us going to deny that we haven’t sometimes refused to hear things we don’t want to hear? Might we have sinful or rebellious motivations causing us to “steer clear” or reject what is said? I told my friend that I would keep this question in mind while continuing our book discussion here - and perhaps somebody else here will (or maybe already does) have a good answer for this, or can show how it might still merge into Penner’s thesis in more of a supplemental way rather than a challenging way. I’m looking forward to beginning chapter 1 in this coming week.
Another great question, Merv. Actually, I have some ideas about this, but they are directly related to Chapter 1, so I have to wait until Monday.
Stopped in DeKalb, Illinois yesterday as a “sideways side trip” from our trip to Chicago. Scott and I spent our first year of marriage at NIU among the corn and delightful graduate students. Walked around the English department, where I had my first forced dive into PoMo and Lit Crit (Literary Criticism) in general. Ya’ll can blame Dr. Gorman. He’s still there.
