Thaddeus Kozinski considers the recent debate between Hadley Arkes and Matthew O’Brien—which he views as presenting competing eudaimonistic and deontological theories of moral philosophy—and offers an alternate theological-traditionalist account of ethics:
As I said at the outset, theology, unlike in the ancient debates, has not been an interlocutor in this and virtually all other academic and public discussions of ethics and politics. Sure, the theologian is allowed to have his say, but he is barred from ever having an authoritative say, from being one of those insiders whose deliberations and speculations are to become an integral part of “public reason.” The theologians have a quite compelling story, the philosophers and public policy folks admit, but we need a story more appropriate, more “true,” for our pluralistic, secular, political culture. However, when dealing with the foundations of ethics, the Christian theologian’s story is not just one story among others—it is one that must be read by everyone, for it is meant for everyone. It is ultimately everyone’s story. Moreover, as Radical Orthodoxy has shown, the ostensibly a-theological, secular stories that automatically pass the muster of public reason are nothing if not theologically implicated, even if only implicitly. Now, although the Christian story is everyone’s story, only a very select audience has heard it in its entirety, believed it fully, and made it a model for their own life-stories. Yet, even for the unbeliever, the theologian’s story has clear and arguable logical, ethical, philosophical, legal and political ramifications and components, just as the “non-theological” stories have implicit yet robust theological moorings. Let those who have ears—that is, those who have taken out their old and decrepit, modernist, Enlightenment earplugs—hear: “We are all theologians now.”
(Via: Front Porch Republic)
March 24th, 2011 | 11:43 am
We all ARE–or can be–theologians. As Evagrius of Pontus wrote, “A theologian is one who prays truly, and if you truly pray, then you are a theologian”.
Somewhere along the way, the notion developed that theology is an academic discipline, with all that entails. It’s not. It has always been a prayerful discernment of “words appropriate to God”.
March 24th, 2011 | 4:17 pm
Actually, it is in fact Theology, and not Philosophy, that has revealed The Truth of Love from The Beginning. Love exists in relationship. The Perfect Communion Of Love, is The Blessed Trinity. It is because Love is not possessive, that our dignity as human beings can be found within our ordered, complementary nature as male or female that has been endowed to us from God at the moment of our creation, for we are, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters…, created to live in a relationship of Love, while being called to The Perfect Communion Of Love, simultaneously. When dealing with the foundation of ethics, we can not begin by denying who we are.
March 24th, 2011 | 8:11 pm
do we actually have access to truth or are we all left with “stories” and “life stories?”
reminds me of “life partners.”
March 24th, 2011 | 11:09 pm
Andrew:
I am using postmodern language deliberately to show its ultimate incoherence. It reduces all claims of truth to narrative and story except its own claims, while it marginalizes disproportionately the one story that claims to be more than a story, Christianity.
If you haven’t already, if you read the entire article, I think you will see that I am no euphemist.
March 25th, 2011 | 6:47 pm
dear professor kozinski,
thank you for your note. i had read your article, though evidently not carefully enough to ascertain your exact position from the paragraph in question. i apologize for imputing to you a position you don’t hold.
i suppose i should just read macintyre’s “whose justice?” but i have a few questions about his framework you might be able to answer. these questions are followed by two comments.
1. QUESTION: i am by nature drawn to arkes’ and aquinas’ and maritain’s models because i have always (unquestioningly) conceived of reason as universal. i therefore don’t know how “rationality” could only be a “particular practice.” does macintyre distinguish between rationality and reason?
2. QUESTION: if there is no rationality as such but only rationality through moral communities, and if membership in communities is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry, what of the thought experiment involving a human being bearing the image of god who grows up alone on an island after having been abandoned by his parents? does he have his own rationality? his own tradition? his own moral community? is he capable of “genuinely rational enquiry?”
i posit that he would, through reason, be able to discern that 2+2=4, that anally violating the monkey is wrong, etc….
3. COMMENT: c. s. lewis argues somewhere that in the final analysis, all experiences of “i ought” are instances of divine revelation. i agree with lewis and second your position that theology must be welcomed to the table as an interlocutor, particularly since i believe all true thought ultimately involves an encounter with the divine logos.
4. COMMENT: abstract principles might well be fleshless, bloodless, and dead. but abstract principles might be true. it seems clear to me that there is only one good reason for believing any proposition — that it is true. indeed, the dead proposition that “all principles of reason are expressions of the divine logos” is dead but true….
March 26th, 2011 | 2:44 pm
Andrew:
These are excellent questions and comments. I used to think more along your lines, until I read MacIntyre. Now I see that the way I used to think was more Enlightenment and Cartesian/Kantian/Lockean than Catholic and Thomistic.
Allow me to e-mail you an article I wrote on precisely these questions. Send me a note and I’ll send it: tjkozinski@gmail.com
For now, I’ll just say this:
The particular beliefs we hold to be true, as well as the ideas we consider indisputable, the facts we deem self-evident, the allegiances to which we are committed, the traditions we revere, the authorities we recognize, the customs we cherish, the attitudes we adopt, in short, the overall picture we embrace of God, man, and the world, although perhaps quite true in an absolute and universal objective sense, and perhaps known to be true by us, is, nevertheless, relative and particular in a subjective sense. Our beliefs, even though perhaps universally true beliefs, are still bound to a particular historical and cultural tradition in their genealogy, communicability, and intelligibility.
So, we do not discover the truth of our beliefs on our own as much as we inherit and receive them from and through others. We do not obtain knowledge autonomously, as mere individuals–on a deserted island–and in abstraction from that which is relative and particular in our lives, but in solidarity with others, as members of a community, and in virtue of our relative and particular histories and cultures, that is, our traditions. Contra the Enlightenment, there is no “view-from-nowhere” to which we can climb, no “tradition-independent” rationality we can exercise, no “universal reason” we can access to enable us fully to escape the relative and particular character of human knowledge.
Now, you might be thinking that this so-called “tradition-constituted rationality” sounds a lot like the theological, philosophical, and cultural relativism condemned unambiguously by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI. If we cannot know absolute truth in an absolute manner, what is the use of talking about truth anyway? But, to reiterate, it is not that human beings cannot recognize and possess absolute and universal truth about and God, the world, and man, but only that the mode or condition of such knowledge is ineluctably relative and particular, for we are historical and social, as well as rational and spiritual, beings. We are tradition-transcending in virtue of our spirit, yet we are tradition-bound in virtue of our body.
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