Thursday, October 20, 2005
(2:08 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Reaching Back
I suppose that I am not the only young thinker at the weblog who has already taken up and left behind serious committments to more than one figure or school of thought. Has anyone else experienced the phenomenon of wanting to reach back and make use of one of those figures to ward off some challenge, but not quite knowing how vigorous such use can be given the problematics which led to abandonment?As those who have known me for some time (Discard, Jared W.) are aware, I was long a serious would-be champion of Alasdair MacIntyre. During my sophmore and junior years of college I cut my teeth philosophically on his major works from the 1980's, and I remained a serious MacIntyrean for a half decade or so. Somewhere along the line I found myself no longer committed to the Thomism into which MacIntrye finally settled. In all fairness, my current judaizing streak owes a good deal to ways of thinking I learned from MacIntyre. In short, I read MacIntyre as over and again concerned with advocating a particular way of creating real clash between competing intellectual schools, or to paraphrase a title from one of my papers of those days, reading rival narrative traditions against each other. In the end, my problem with MacIntyre is that while he is quite good when it comes to describing how this is best done and at noticing how dazzling a job Aquinas' accomplished in this regard with respect to Aristotle and Augustine, he is not all that great when he attempts to overcome a conflict of traditions himself. Liberal democracy gets nowhere near the fair shake in MacIntyre that Aristotle received from St. Thomas. MacIntyre is like a world class critic of poetry whose own verse is somewhat entrancing on first read, but finally quite forgettable.
Still, while I feel that I've left MacIntyre largely behind (now rarely citing his work or discussing his ideas), I've felt the urge to encourage Jodie to go MacIntryean in her Social Theory, Social History class. The prof. has set up a wonderful syllabus, but, it turns out, is seriously committed to Juergen Habermas. He likes Foucault a whole lot too, but apparently wants to bring the two together for the purpose of social history by reading some of Foucault's final work on governmentality back against his writings on prisons and sex. While I am quite interested to see how this reading works, I still can't imagine stomaching Habermas. My undergrad thesis adviser tried to make me incorporate Habermas into my project. I just didn't have the resources to do it at the time and still can't figure out a way to square Habermas' project (as I understand it) of recuperating liberal democracy via rational communicative practices with MacIntyre's persuasive argument that liberal democracy necessarily masks irreconcilable differences between competing rationalities.
Last week, Jodie went after Habermas, almost entirely on Foucauldian grounds. However, she'll be getting the professors unique take on how to bring Foucault and Habermas together this week. While Foucault is useful as a weapon against many forms of thought, the relationship between Foucault and Habermas is tricky for a variety reasons as briefly analyzed in the text and notes of James Millers' unsuperable biography of the former. It seems to me that it might be easier to dispense with the problems of Habermas by way of MacIntyre's more frank critique of enlightenment liberalism.
Anyone else ever want to go nostalgic in the course of a disagreement?
