The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
made by the hands of men.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see;
they have ears, but cannot hear,
nor is there breath in their mouths.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
—Psalm 135:15-18
To a bibliophile, old-fashion bookstores can be dangerous.
Dangerous, that is, to the pocketbook.
Surrounded by shelves and shelves of the most marvelous and magnificent objects in the world, it can be terribly tempting to walk out with more than you intended, and the Siren call of some title or dustjacket is just waiting to make you take a second look until you succumb. Hence, I am confident that I am not alone in having more than one unread book occupying space on my own shelves at home.
However, courtesy of the pandemic, I have a lot fewer of them than I used to (what with libraries closed and other forms of social distancing), and while the habit of consuming the “unread” started as a time-killer during lockdown, it has become a type of quest on my part to have nothing on my bookshelves that has not also occupied my synapses. Since I’m also continuing to read new stuff as well and to keep up in my professional discipline, I am not accomplishing this quest very rapidly. But I am, so far, making progress.
And my most recent now-read book has made me realize that there are some books which you aren’t meant to read in your youth. Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue has occupied a spot on various shelves in my various domiciles since I was 21-years old, and though I have started it on two separate occasions that I can recall, I could never get past the opening chapters before my distain for all things Aristotelian caused me to exile it once more to gathering dust in my philosophy collection.
However, a quest is a quest, and so I approached reading it this time with a different type of determination and—as I discovered—with a different level of intellectual maturation. Because what I discovered was that there in McIntyre’s book was effectively a now nearly half-a-century old philosophical roadmap for how and why we, as a society, would end up with the utterly dysfunctional mess we find ourselves in today. The cognitive mess…the environmental mess…the political mess…. The intellectual roots of them all are analyzed and made available in those pages, providing fair warning to anyone willing and able to listen—which I couldn’t do back then because I was too busy being an unwitting part of those same roots.
I won’t recap everything McIntyre has to say (in part because some of it involves some very technical and formal philosophical writing), but if I can do him justice, I would summarize his core thinking like this:
when the Aristotelian thought paradigms employed for most of Middle Ages (and prior to that) were abandoned in favor of the scientific paradigms of the 1600s, it became necessary to discover new rational and secular foundations for defining moral behavior (i.e. what makes a good human). But this Enlightenment project failed “because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially by Kant, could not be sustained in the face of the rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount,” (p. 117) leaving us with a world where “good” is simply whatever passes for “good.”
Put simply, virtues (and therefore virtuous behavior) require a telos, an ultimate end or purpose, for what it means to be a good human, and when a teleological understanding of the world is tossed out, we are left with a world without virtues (hence—to state the obvious—the title).
Now, I have no desire go into the nitty-gritty of how McIntyre defends all of this or his reasoning for why his solution is to defend a variant of Aristotelian ethics and politics (it is a very dense and long book, and the reason why I have not written in quite a while). However, what I am going to suggest is that his arguments are strong enough to give this Kantian pause and that his analysis of the logical social consequences of the rejection of the Aristotelian paradigms for the scientific ones are so spot on that, as I said earlier, they are a road map to today. Hence, I am left wondering after finally reading this book whether the notion of a teleological vs. non-teleological approach to our understanding of ourselves may not explain a lot about the current world we live in and therefore might merit further exploration.
For starters, a teleological paradigm does not presuppose an Aristotelian version of one (the self-inflicted mental error in judgment which kept me from reading this book for so long). As a scientist, I understand well why the Aristotelian approach to studying the natural world was deposed (as does McIntyre). Without the fallibilism of the experimental method, it is not possible to determine the laws and rules governing our planet, our universe, and ourselves. That aspect of Aristotelianism had to be tossed to make any progress in our understanding of how the empirical world functions—something, again, that McIntyre does not dispute.
What makes me sympathetic to McIntyre’s general thesis, though, is his suggestion that maybe we didn’t have to throw the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater. That same scientific “progress” has also led to an overpopulated, over-polluted planet baking in our unrestrained individualism that McIntyre does a strong job of tracing back to the rejection of the political and ethics portion of Aristotelianism.
Or more precisely, I want to argue, to the teleological nature of those political and ethical ideas. As an educator, a certain amount of teleology is built into my system. Lessons have goals; curricula have purposes; degrees have ends. Even the educational planning process known in the profession as “backward planning” has the “ideal graduate” of a given program as its navigational beacon. Furthermore, I remain convinced that education’s ultimate telos remains wisdom and to learn to be human well. Hence, I would argue that a teleological understanding—at least to some degree—infuses any and all teaching and learning.
But if a teleological understanding is part of something so central to our society as education, then why is it so absent from the rest of our cultural life? I suspect that it has to do with how we are asking the question, “what does it mean to be a good human?” We have externalized this ideal, assessing someone’s amount of consumption and productivity rather than the worthiness of their character, and we no longer cultivate a shared set of internalized qualities “because success is whatever passes for success [and therefore] it is [merely] in the regard of others that I prosper or fail to prosper” (p. 115). We have made what it means to be a good human independent of an individual’s integrity and so the notion of someone having a telos, a fundamental purpose or end, becomes a meaningless notion.
Furthermore, we see this problem not just in our culture at large but also even in our institutions for education as well. In public schools, the quality of learning is now judged almost exclusively by test scores and other external accountability measures, not by the kind of person we are producing; while in private schools, the focus is on college and university admissions, again not necessarily what sort of individuals we are sending out into the world. In practice, we have divorced our lofty ideals for learning from our actual measures of learning, and the results, I fear, speak for themselves in the abundantly evident dysfunctionality of our general society right now.
Which is not to claim that teachers and schools do not care about the moral character of their students or the graduates they produce. Nearly every educator I have ever met is deeply committed to nurturing worthy and worthwhile inner habits and qualities of mind in the children under their care. They simply do so frequently in antagonism to or in spite of the larger social constraints currently placed upon them. Attempts to cultivate good humans are alive and well in America’s classrooms; they’re just often being done undercover—and if you live in Florida, illegally.
Yet if all these efforts are underway as I claim, then a thoughtful reader might ask what exactly is being fostered? Haven’t I simply backed myself again into the problematic dilemma of what counts as “good” which is what McIntyre is arguing is the central issue for which the Modern (and now Postmodern) eras have no answers that don’t devolve to whim? Can I or anyone determine a purpose or end, a telos, to being human that is innate and not external, and if so, what good(s) does one need to possess to achieve it? And how might teaching and learning be involved?
I think the answers rest on how we want to define “determine.” In both psychological and moral development, every single one of us goes through the stage where we become aware of the relativity of everything and the absence of certainty—the fundamental fallibilism of all human knowledge. Much grist has been milled about this reality, and it has even caused some to declare that truth of any kind is impossible, that all human thought is simply about emotion and will. However, as psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg have pointed out, most of us move past the stage of relativity to the stage of commitment—to where we treat a body of knowledge as truthful and live our lives accordingly.
Which as Jonathan Rauch points out in The Constitution of Knowledge does not mean there is neither actual truth nor real knowledge; it just means that we have to find it in the crowd sourcing of the reality-based community. And that brings me back to “determine.” Do I think that we can rationally discover with absolute certainty for all time a telos for being human? No. David Hume dismantled that philosophical quest a long time ago. However, do I think there is a purpose to being human that can be determined and known, that can be committed to? Yes. Because literally billions of minds have been wrestling with this idea since minds first evolved, and after tens of thousands of millennia of crowd-sourcing this fallible proposition, I would argue that humanity has determined that our telos is to live a good life and that our understanding of good has some determinates that transcend culture, place, or time.
What those are and how they relate to teaching and learning I leave for next time.
References
Hume, D. (1977) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Kohlberg, L. (1981) The Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper & Row.
MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue, 2nd Ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Light a Candle 