Gadamer, MacIntyre, Phronesis, and the Practice of Philosophical Education

Alasdair MacIntyre and Hans-Georg Gadamer are philosophical kindred spirits. They share the view that philosophical rationality can only be understood in the context of the history of philosophy. They see reason as essentially embedded in tradition, rather than as essentially opposed to tradition, and thus recognize that the effects of tradition do not displace a necessary role for reason. Both MacIntyre and Gadamer agree that a being thoroughly historically situated does not resign us to relativism. A number of books and articles have been written comparing and contrasting their views; rarely, however, has anyone noticed that each reviewed the other’s works. Most MacIntyre and Gadamer scholars are aware that Macintyre wrote an essay in 2002 on Gadamer’s hermeneutics: “On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer.”1 Fewer are aware he wrote a review in 1980 of Gadamer’s magnum opus, “Contexts of Interpretation: Reflections on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method;”2 even fewer know that Gadamer reviewed MacIntyre’s After Virtue in the first half of his 1985 essay “Ethos and Ethics.”3 The bulk of their reviews of each other’s books are spent marking their agreement with each other; what’s interesting is where they disagree. In this essay I will bring out the differences in their views by looking at their respective reviews of each other’s work. They fascinatingly parallel each other. MacIntyre argues that In Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald & Jens Kertscher eds., Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 157-172. MacIntyre also briefly discusses Gadamer in Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 2001). 2 Boston University Journal 26, (1980): 173-78. 3 “Ethos und Ethik (MacIntyre u. a.)” in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987), 350-374. Kelvin Knight, while arguing that MacIntyre was influenced by Gadamer, bemoans that “at the time of After Virtue … about Gadamer [MacIntyre had] said nothing” (“Aristotelianism versus Communitarianism” in Analyse & Kritik, 27 [2005]: 259-273). Yet MacIntyre’s review had come out one year earlier. Gadamer’s review of After Virtue is also not mentioned by Knight. Georgia Warnke, in Gadamer: Hermeneutic, Tradition, and Reason (Palo Alto, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1987), and P. Christopher Smith, in Hermeneutics and Human Finitude (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991) both discuss at length the philosophical relationship between MacIntyre and Gadamer, yet neither cite any of the reviews. 1

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Gadamer mistakenly concludes that “between practice…and the understanding of practice there is so clear a distinction to be drawn, that the understanding of practice is not itself part of the transformation of practice.”4 Gadamer has too strongly separated theory and practice and has failed to appreciate how theorizing transforms practice. Gadamer argues that Macintyre rightly diagnosed the Enlightenment’s failed attempt to ground moral reasoning on theoretical reasoning, but that he wrongly “reversed the dependencies.”5 MacIntyre has too strongly separated theory and practice and has failed to appreciate phronesis as unifying theory and practice. In MacIntyre’s later essay he echoes this criticism, claiming Gadamer “never confronts the question of whether the exercise of phronesis may not stand in some more complex relation to theoretical knowledge of the human good.”6 Thus they each criticize the other of failing to appreciate the interconnection of theory and practice. In addition, both also accuse each other of being historically parochial, and both accuse each other of not learning enough from Hegel—and neither seems aware of the other’s review of his work.

Where the Agreements Lie If the criterion for being a classic work of philosophy is that philosophers who have failed to read to work are at a professional disadvantage, then MacIntyre claims Gadamer has produced two classics: Truth and Method and The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotlean Philosophy. To give you a sense of their agreement it is enough to list what MacIntyre highlights of Gadamer’s views. In the review of Truth and Method MacIntyre presents a wide range of views that he is sympathetic with. I’ve already mentioned their agreement that the fundamental historicity of understanding does not render illegitimate claims to truth. Macintyre says that one 4

“Contexts of Interpretation,” 178. “Ethos und Ethik,” 353. 6 “On not Having the Last Word,” 168. 5

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of the accomplishments of Truth and Method is to show that philosophy can be thoroughly historical without becoming relativistic. To have become aware of the historically conditioned character of our philosophical enquiries and interpretations is not to have escaped from it. …[nonetheless] we come to recognize that our historical situation is itself partially constituted by the possibility of appealing beyond and even against our situation.7 MacIntyre agrees with Gadamer that it is a mistake to think of the acquisition of truth as a matter of finding the right philosophical method. Prior to the application of any methodological rules there must have been acts of interpretation and understanding which rendered into appropriate form the materials to which the methodological rules were to be applied; and that these acts of interpretation and understanding already involve the use of criteria of truth.8 He highlights Gadamer’s example of a conversation as a vehicle for belief formation, for, he argues, we often only find out what we think in conversation with others. This type of open, collaborative dialogue is an entirely different model for philosophical engagement than one of defending considered views against adversarial challenges. MacIntyre agrees with Gadamer’s rehabilitation of mimesis where works us art, rather than merely representing something, teach us how to see something. A Rembrandt portrait tells us something more about the person than just how he or she looks; it is a revelatory event. As result “The history of art is the history of learning … just as much as the history of science.”9 Statements, too, are true as revelatory, not just true as representational. MacIntyre agrees that the process of interpreting of a work of art is of a piece with the process of interpreting a text and both are of a piece with the process of interpreting actions. All understanding is interpretive and “All understanding is inescapably

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“On not Having the Last Word,” 158. “Contexts of Interpretation,” 174. 9 “Contexts of Interpretation,” 177-78. 8

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historical.”10 MacIntyre agrees with Gadamer, furthermore, that any understand of something foreign will include self-understanding. Finally, the only way to become self-consciousness of ourselves as historical being is through historical investigation. Gadamer notoriously develops his views through interpretations of other philosophers; Macintyre claims this is how philosophy must be done: “the history of ideas turns out to be the queen of the sciences.”11 In his later essay, Macintyre adds his list of agreements with Gadamer that for philosophy to progress we “often have to make detours into and through past texts, theses and arguments that we may have mistakenly believed we had long ago put behind us.”12 These are the points of agreement presented by MacIntyre; we can let them stand with the acknowledgement that with a careful comparison of the full range of both of their writings we could come up with many more points of overlap.

MacIntyre’s Objections After many pages of summary and agreement Macintyre raises a central concern. If what Gadamer says is true about the holistic character of understanding, much of the structure of university education must be rethought, including those ideas like “interdisciplinarity” that are presented as roads to educational reform. Learning is not organized into disciplines; disciplines are not natural kinds. There is no answer to the question what is the nature of philosophy such that philosophical understanding is essentially different from, say, sociological understanding. The idea that each discipline takes up an epistemic point of view on the world, that each discipline is limited by its epistemic point of view, that the limits of a disciplinary point of view can only be understood from outside the discipline, that there are intellectual questions that fall 10

“Contexts of Interpretation,” 177. “Contexts of Interpretation,” 178. 12 “Contexts of Interpretation,” 167. 11

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through the gaps of disciplinary points of view, and that these questions can only be accessed through interdisciplinary research—that whole picture of disciplinary points of view must be mistaken, if Gadamer is correct. And MacIntyre thinks he is correct. But Gadamer embraces no such revolutionary ambitions. Gadamer draws no sweeping, critical conclusions. Instead, as he says in the “Forward to the Second Edition” of Truth and Method, “nor was it my aim … put my findings to practical end… My concern was and is philosophic: not what we do or what we ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.”13 According to MacIntyre, Gadamer fails to take seriously the radical implications of his views for how we conceive of knowledge. Gadamer partially misunderstands his own book… Philosophers who interpret the world with the acuteness with which Gadamer has interpreted it must learn that they cannot evade the accusation that they have thereby changed it. We inhabit an interpreted world in which reinterpretation is the most fundamental form of change.14 Gadamer has laid the intellectual foundation for changing the world, yet seems content to merely interpret it. The problem is not just one of right-Hegelian conservatism. Gadamer, according to Macintyre, seems to underestimate how theorizing about practice necessarily transforms practice. It is as if Gadamer believes “there is so clear a distinction [between a practice and its understanding]… that the understanding of practice is not itself part of the transformation of practice.”15 Such a gap between theory and practice, between episteme and phronesis, is evidence for “how much of Kant still inspires [Gadamer’s] thought—in this case the sharpest of distinctions between theory and practice.” Macintyre replies, “we have to learn from Hegel—and others—that this too is a false distinction.”16 When we come to reflect upon our inarticulate

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Truth and Method (Continuum: London, 1989), xxv-xxvi. “Contexts of Interpretation,” 178. 15 “Contexts of Interpretation,” 178. 16 Contexts of Interpretation,” 178. 14

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actions, this reflection will transform our actions. When the action we are reflecting upon is philosophical thinking, it must change the way philosophy is done. When we come to think differently about how we think, this must change the way we think. Such is MacIntyre’s argument that Gadamer has not learned enough from Hegel about the full interconnectedness of theory and practice. MacInyre adds to this substantive criticism that Gadamer’s historical narrative in Truth and Method is too parochially Germanic.

Gadamer’s Criticisms of MacIntyre Gadamer’s 1985 review of After Virtue opens by pointing out how instructive it is to read someone working from a different tradition than the one German philosophers are familiar with. His summary of MacIntyre makes constant reference to the German philosophical tradition, for example MacIntyre’s discussion of Immanuel Kant is linked to Wilhelm Dilthey’s interpretation of Kant, Macintyre’s retrieval of an Aristotelian account of virtue is linked to Nicolai Hartmann and Max Scheler’s similar retrieval, and MacIntyre’s critique of the Enlightenment is linked with the critique of modernity found in the Frankfort School. As in his major works, Gadamer presumes his audience to be philosophically Germanic. Gadamer is sympathetic with much of After Virtue. He specifically mentions the critique of emotivism, the argument that the Enlightenment had to fail, and the idea that the Aristotelian tradition is a viable resource for moral insights which can resist the philosophical pressures of modernity. After pages of summary and praise he raises four concerns. First he criticizes MacIntyre’s Kant interpretation as being too inspired by the “AngloSaxon” tradition of Kant interpretation. That is, Kant is interpreted too heavily as a response to Hume and not enough as a development of “continental rationalism.” Gadamer argues that the

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Categorical Imperative is not best thought of as a response to the “the Enlightenment’s emphasis on eudaimonistic utilitarianism” but as something that “assumes the commonality of the moral law and the unconditionality of its validity.”17 According to Gadamer, the critique of British utilitarianism is a consequence of Kant’s moral theory, and perhaps a welcome one, but not a motivation for Kant’s moral theory Second Gadamer criticizes MacIntyre’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s stages of existence. While acknowledging the importance of stressing the “extreme way the concept of choice and the decisionism of modernity is presented in Kierkegaard’s Etiher/Or” MacIntyre misses that the religious leap builds upon and does not entirely reject the groundwork laid by Judge Wilhelm’s critique of A. That is, MacIntyre fails to appreciate the way Hegel’s criticisms of Kant are preserved in Kierkegaard’s account of the religious life. Instead MacIntyre mistakenly presents Kierkegaard as simply a critic of Hegel. This is a common debate among Kierkegaard scholars. Third, Gadamer raises a concern that MacIntyre’s account of narrative as the source of the unity of the self cannot “be fitted into the Aristotelian conceptual world.”18 Since Aristotle famously argues that poetry is a greater source of insight than history and since neither Plato nor Aristotle credit myth with having the kind of power to provide unity to the good, Gadamer is skeptical Aristotle would find the narrative self as plausible a solution as MacIntyre does. Of course Aristotle has the metaphysical biology, so he has no need for a narrative unity of selfhood, but Gadamer thinks it is a problem MacIntyre faces in After Virtue.

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“Ethos und Ethik”, 352. “Ethos und Ethik,” 354.

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Gadamer’s most significant criticism, though, is that Macintyre underappreciates Aristotle’s account of phronesis as both a moral and intellectual virtue, and thus as source of the unity of theory and practice. Gadamer writes, Here it seems to me the Aristotelian distinction between techne and phronesis as intellectual virtues … has been neglected… It is the inner unity of ethos and logos of ethical and intellectual Arete, which accounts for the distinctiveness of the question of the good in human life.19 Gadamer’s concern could be read as levied against the explicitly moral focus of After Virtue. MacIntyre’s emphasis is on moral deliberation, not all practical deliberation, and Gadamer wants to stress that phronesis is a much broader virtue than simply a moral virtue. It informs us in any situation where we recognize and take the proper action, not only the morally proper action stressed by MacIntyre. As is well known, MacIntyre extends his account of practical reason especially in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, as well as in Dependent Rational Animals, so this concern of Gadamer’s may only be relevant to the presentation of phronesis in After Virtue. But Gadamer goes further in arguing that MacIntyre has made a mistake in thinking that, for Aristotle, the ethical builds upon the teleological conception of nature. This, Gadamer thinks, is a modern prejudice of putting metaphysics before ethics. Instead, Gadamer argues that the teleological conception of nature comes as a result of the commitment to see the world as a site if moral agency. What Gadamer calls “Socrates’ Question” is, How can the cosmos be such that it is knowable by the virtuous? Just as it would be a mistake to try to ground the practical on the theoretical, as Aristotle tries to do on MacIntyre’s interpretation, it is a mistake to “reverse the dependence” and ground the theoretical on the practical. Macintyre underestimates the “role the

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“Ethos und Ethik,” 353.

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Kantian question can play in engaging this moment”20—the transcendental question of how the world must appear given the that we are called to act morally. We might say Gadamer is making a Heideggerian point against MacItyre. The world is theoretically intelligible because Dasein is being-in-the-world, because Dasein is always already is practically engaged with it. As Walter Brogan puts it, for Gadamer phronesis is neither derived form nor prior to theoria, but theoria is at the heart of phronesis.21 This emphasis on the “primacy of practical reason,” read through Kant back into the ancients is how Gadamer can lay claim to have a better sense of the unity of phronesis and can lay claim to be “defending Aristotle against MacIntyre.”22 Phronesis is a recurrent theme across Gadamer’s work. It is discussed in his earliest writings from the late 1920s; it is discussed at length in his 1960 Truth and Method; it becomes a focus of his 1970s interpretation of Plato and Aristotle; it is a central theme in his argument in the 1980s that the rationality of hermeneutics is the rationality of practical philosophy; and even shows up in his interviews from the 1990s—almost 70 years of writing about and discussing phronesis. It’s not surprising he would pick that theme in After Virtue upon which to raise concerns. What is most significant for Gadamer’s account of phronesis is that he considers it to be the model for all understanding. He argues that all understanding involves “application,” which is to say that there is no understanding that is not always at the same time a relation between universals and particulars. Gadamer’s conclusion is that all knowledge, even the most

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“Ethos und Ethik,” 354. Brogan defends Gadamer’s interpretation of Aristotle in “Gadamer’s Praise of Theory: Aristotle’s Friend and the Reciprocity between Theory and Practice” (Research in Phenomenology, 32/1 (2002): 131-155). Brogan mentions MacIntyre’s discussion of theory and practice in After Virtue, but claims it is the same as Gadamer’s, never citing their reviews of each others works. There is no way to go into all Gadamer has to say about phronesis in such a short essay, much less how it develops from, and diverges from, Heidegger’s discussion of phronesis. For agood discussion, see §11 of James Risser’s Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). 22 “Ethos und Ethik,” 354. 21

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theoretical—even mathematical knowledge—is informed by how the knowledge is applied. Phronesis is the queen of the intellectual virtues. By claiming phronesis as the modal of all knowledge, Gadamer can explain more easily than most the unity of the virtues on Plato and Aristotle. Gadamer can claim that all theorizing is guided by the rationality of practice and claim that all practice occurs with the at least latent intelligibility of theory. Put differently, there is no such thing as a purely pre-theoretical practice. We can only engage in rational practice as we are rational beings. A condition for rationality is the actualization of our conceptual capacities in our decision making, and language is a necessary condition for the possession of the relevant conceptual capacities. As linguistic beings the world is open to us as something potentially intelligible. That intelligibility need not be theoretical intelligibility, but theoretical intelligibility cannot be foreign to it. The result is the theoretical intelligibility of our actions is latent in the practical intelligibility of our actions. Making our actions theoretically perspicuous—explaining them, providing reasons for them, generating the self-understanding that comes form theoretical reflection—need not transform the activity, but may simply realize it in one specific way. Gadamer’s reading of Plato and Aristotle’s phronetic model of all understanding converges with Hegel’s ideas of self-reflection as the actualization, rather than distortion, of practice. Aristotle, according to Gadamer, has given us “an idea of knowledge that has taken the opposite path leading from practice towards making it aware of itself theoretically.”23 He can say this because theory itself does not leave practical rationality behind and, theorizing, as one possible activity among others, always is guided by the norms of phronesis. Gadamer’s arguments against Macintyre now make more sense, especially Gadamer’s claims that MacIntyre has underestimated Hegel (and Hegel’s legacy in Kierkegaard), that he is 23

“Hermeneutics as a Theoretical and Practical Task” in Reason in the Age of Science, p. 131.

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defending Aristotle against MacIntyre, and that MacIntyre has inverted the stereotypical relation between theory and practice rather than reconceiving them, or rather, recovering them along Platonic/Aristotelian lines. It is not as Macintyre argues that Gadamer has separated the theoretical from the practical so widely that the theoretical understanding cannot play a transformative role in our practical understanding, but instead Gadamer has so intertwined theoretical and practical understanding that theoretical understanding no longer is an entirely separate activity. Theorizing is the actualization of an essential feature of practice. If there is a debate here between Gadamer and MacIntyre that needs highlighting it is Gadamer’s intellectualization of practice (which connects to his Heideggarian conclusion that no non-human animals engage in practical reason). MacIntyre makes the further point against Gadamer that since hermeneutics, for Gadamer, is practical philosophy – is a practice— and“hermeneutic practice … involves Aristotelian theoretical commitments … It involves metaphysical commitments that it needs to make clear to itself.” 24 As an essentially Aristotelian philosophical outlook, it presupposes something like an Aristotelian conception of human nature and the virtues. But Gadamer does not draw such a conclusion. “He never confronts the question of whether the exercise of phronesis may not stand in some more complex relation to theoretical knowledge of the human good”25—a theoretical knowledge that commits one to an Aristotelian metaphysics. For Gadamer, the final word belongs not to metaphysics, but to language. Language is the occasion by which we have a world at all, and language is the only vehicle by which any critique can be made intelligible. Here MacIntyre claims he and Gadamer “are most profoundly

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“On Not Having the Last Word.” 169. “On Not Having the Last Word.” 168.

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at odds.”26 In Dependent Rational Animals Macintyre criticizes Gadamer (and Heidegger and McDowell in one fell swoop) for the way his understanding of language too strongly separates non-human animals from humans.27 MacIntyre thinks animals are capable of acting rationally, in response to reasons in their environment, even if they are not capable of reflecting on the good, and therefore not capable of phronesis. According to Gadamer, though, i is only because we have a natural language, that we have rationality and a world. Only a natural language enables us to be responsive to reasons; a natural language is the medium of reflective theorizing. Above all, as John McDowell says, citing Gadamer, “a natural language … serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what.”28 Gadamer is skeptical of any attempt to philosophically refashion natural language for the purposes of philosophical precision. MacIntyre thinks that poets and philosophers can work to reconfigure language usage, perhaps by violating the normal usages of language, for the sake of arriving at new understandings of a subject matter, ones otherwise occluded by everyday language use. Here perhaps the greatest difference lies in their different understanding the revolutionary potential in language use for reflecting on the limits of practice and in their different understanding of the place of language in the origin of practices. So I am arguing that MacIntyre has not properly interpreted Gadamer by failing to see the way theory is latent in any practice, for Gadamer. Gadamer argues that theory does not transform practice not because, as MacIntyre claims, he has strictly separated them, but because he has so interwoven them that theory does not come from outside practice. MacIntyre is right, however that Gadamer never draws the radical implications of his views of understanding, especially as 26

“On Not Having the Last Word.” 170. Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 2001). Sabina Lovibond responds to MacIntyre on Gadamer and McDowell’s behalf in “Practical Reason and its Animal Precursors” (European Journal of Philosophy 14:2 (2006): 262–273). 28 Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 126. 27

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they affect how we think about higher education. Gadamer has written extensively on education, most of it from the perspective of a rector and typically discussing both the importance of, and the limitations of, the sciences.29 To take up MacIntyre’s concerns, I will close with four conclusions about philosophical education that any Gadamerian should draw. First, the one MacIntyre already mentions. Since all understanding is by nature comparative, integrative, and cross-disciplinary, it is a mistake to think higher education first begins with the establishment of disciplinary knowledge, and then moves “beyond” the limits of the disciplines to fill in the interdisciplinary gaps. Learning is holistic from the start and it is incumbent on philosophers to stress that fact in our educational communities. Second, we should infer form the conclusion that all understanding is essentially historical, that to properly do philosophy we need to do it historically. Gadamer calls for a history of concepts as requirement for a reflectively informed use of concepts and MacIntyre says that the history of ideas is the queen of the sciences. MacIntyre rightly insists that even though our thinking is inextricably historically situated, a certain kind of awareness … can transform our relationship to that history. … It is not that we have been after all able to escape our particular historical situation…we come to recognize that our historical situation is itself partly constituted by the possibility of appealing beyond and even against that situation.30 Our philosophy courses and our philosophy curriculums need to be structured historically to give the students the resources both to understand their conceptual heritage, to understand how their conceptual heritage provides them the resources to critical evaluate their current philosophical

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See especially the first part of Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). One contrasting example is his “Education as Self-Education” (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 35/4 (2001): 529-38. 30 “On not Having the Last Word,” 158.

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situation, and to understand that the viability of various philosophical outlooks can evaluated by how well they open us up to access the insights of traditional philosophical texts. Third, since all understanding includes application, a certain approach to teaching applied ethics—first presenting a variety of rival theories, then showing how they would apply to different cases—is mistaken about how we understand ethical theories and about how ethical reasoning works. In his 1984 essay “Does Applied Ethics Rest upon a Mistake?” MacIntyre claims that “it cannot be the case that we can first and independently comprehend the rules of morality as such and then only secondly enquire as to their application in specialized social spheres.”31 Gadamer furthermore insists that the process studying ethical theories and their application does not mirror actual ethical decision making. “It is essential that ethical sciences… never usurp the place belonging to actual ethical consciousness.”32 If our ethics classes are going to teach ethics, they must educate an ethical consciousness, which can never be accomplished though an education in ethical theorizing, nor by separating ethical theory from its application. Finally, with this in mind, all intellectual education is intellectual character education In God, Philosophy, Universities MacIntyre pints out that the arguments we find compelling say as much about our intellectual character as they do about the strength of the argument. A proper philosophical education trains students to “become the kind of person who is open to just those arguments that direct us towards the truth.”33 Gadamer and MacIntyre are bound to disagree about what kind of person that is. MacIntyre’s view fits the distinctive mission of Catholic universities. Gadamer’s view is that we must educate students into the spirit of charity, seeking to engage others in the spirit of truth, with the humility and openness that comes with the

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“Does Applied Ethics Rest upon a Mistake?” (Monist 67:4, [1984]), 501. “The Problem of Historical Consciousness” in Rabinow and Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 137. 33 God, Philosophy, Universities (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 150. 32

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awareness of our finitude. Hermeneutics, according to MacIntyre, is a branch of ethics. Gadamer would certainly agree, to the extent hermeneutics acknowledges phronesis as not only the pivotal moral virtue, but the pivotal interpretive virtue as well.

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