The duties of each moment are the shadows beneath which hides the divine operation.
(Jean-Pierre de Caussade)
To recover the practical ethical point of view, the first person is not enough to rediscover the importance of character, but we need to go more in-depth and investigate how the agent can be the author of his own conduct. G. Abbà
The prescription to this statement by Father Guiseppe Abbà places the first person within a moral system comprised of metaphysical realism. The first person has certainly benefitted in aligning to such a standard. Yet, today’s current focus on character is beholden to modern philosophical assumptions undermining the investigation. In ethics, at least, the attempt to sunder moral propositions with a descriptive narrative approach tends toward the destructive. This abounds in the work of Iris Murdoch, Alasdair Macintyre, and Stanley Hauerwas, as they all draw, but fall short of the full brilliance of the classics such as Plato and most notably St. Thomas Aquinas no matter how much they pursue a thinker who anticipated modernity and arguably helped provoke it. Bernard Lonergan affirmed that, When the classicist notion of culture prevails, theology is conceived as a permanent achievement, and then one discourses on its nature. When culture is conceived empirically, theology is known to be an ongoing process, and then one writes on its method. Method’s current relevance to philosophy provides the classic formulation of the very fragmentation these authors highlight. Ironically, Dame Iris Murdoch’s pursuit comes much closer to metaphysical realism than Macintyre and Hauerwas, having been the lifelong agnostic/atheist of the trio. In contrast, McIntyre and Hauerwas are beholden to an empirical method. Admirably, they have all presented well-intentioned and formidable responses contra the inadequate accounts of human agency offered in twentieth-century Kantian and utilitarian ethics in general. Their prescription stands as the recovery of the Platonic good and Aristotelian virtue ethic coupled with practice and narrative. Here, telos becomes reductionism for Macintyre, and theological method haunts Hauerwas, whereas Murdoch’s vision for the moral life flounders and yields as anti-theological for the reification of the good. When it comes to St. Thomas’ system, caricatures abound. Eric Voegelin’s attitude that it ‘‘ossifies into a propositional science of principles, universals, and substances, exemplifies the image rejected by the aesthetically motivated. Here, the narrative approach derived by theological developments and the perennial contribution of literature provides a means toward an ethical and moral discourse. This has found a widespread embrace for those weary of propositional dogma.
Such propositional fragments may have affected Murdoch out of her Church of Ireland context, moving her through Marxism toward a Platonic prescription in her Sovereignty of the Good. Possibly, influenced by her friend Phillipa Foot, she also wrote that in current moral philosophy, the moral life of the individual is seen as a series of overt choices which take place in a series of specifiable situations. She aptly stated that an elimination of metaphysics from ethics is at odds with our ordinary experience of the world. Why can morality not be thought of as attached to the substance of the world? Surely many people who are not philosophers and who cannot be accused of using faulty arguments since they use no arguments, do think of their morality in just this way? The individual is seen as held in a framework that transcends him, where what is important and valuable is the framework [...]. According to Murdoch, to discover what is morally good is to recognize that reality, and to become good is to integrate himself/herself with it. He/she is ruled by laws that he can only partly understand. He/she is not fully conscious of what they are. His/her freedom is not open freedom of choice in a precise situation; it lies rather in increasing knowledge of his/her own real being, and in the conduct which naturally springs from such experience. As Murdoch gestures in the direction of metaphysics from her Gifford lectures, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she resists to commit and never developing a specific metaphysic. Her own neo-Platonic pursuit became a reification of the good. Murdoch’s commitment to metaphysics seems beholden to aesthetic elements hardly rising above human longing. She writes at one point, We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with. We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality. Stanley Hauerwas states; I sometimes wonder if I have said anything of importance that was not stolen from Iris Murdoch. But in recent years, he has distanced himself from her. This exemplifies his perennial methodological orientation deeply engaged with twentieth-century philosophy and theology.
Hauerwas an ethicist and virtue theorist, most known for his Christian pacifism utilizes philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; Wittgenstein’s influence on him [is] of an entirely different order than that of other contemporary thinkers as Hauerwas can do ethics precisely because he has been enabled to think through Wittgenstein, utilizing the particular language of Christianity. Hauerwas, like Wittgenstein, rejects the high theory, and system-building. One of the prevailing charges against him is that it is difficult to find his system, his foundations, or the center of his thought. Hauerwas responds that this is because [Wittgenstein] slowly cured me of the notion that philosophy was primarily a matter of positions, ideas, and/or theories. Here, Hauerwas has developed a way of using vocabulary in his avoidance of high theory and aversion to system building to aid his own constructions and derivations from a narrative approach to theology. According to Hauerwas, through Protestant liberalism, Christian ethics became the central enterprise of Christian theology, but in the wrong way. As central Christian beliefs came under successful philosophical and historical challenges, an emphasis on the moral significance of those beliefs seemed to offer a strategy to save their meaningfulness. Therefore, Christian ethics resorted to the ethical implications of the cardinal doctrines [as] the nail where the viability of Christianity could hang. Hauerwas suggests the response was to substitute ethics for theology. This was the response endorsed by Kant, and at face value rejected by Hauerwas, however, Hauerwas does not entirely escape Kant’s influence. According to Hauerwas, the problem with the modern liberal project is that, when combined with a non-narrative view of moral rationality, it inevitably leads to a reductionist account of religious belief. It does so because the whole point of the standard account is to arrive at rules and principles that are universally applicable. Thus, any religious belief justified by an appeal to the canons of this account will necessarily be stripped of its distinctiveness. The moral kernel will not seem to require the religious claims associated with it. Enter, Karl Barth who claimed that Catholic neo-scholasticism, Protestant orthodoxy, and liberal Protestantism overused the tools of philosophical theology in speaking about God and about the Trinity. Thus, Barth decided to develop a doctrine of God extrapolated from biblical revelation alone. If we want to know who God is, the right response comes, not from philosophical metaphysics but rather, Barth says, from Scripture, and ‘‘in the form of narrating a story or series of stories. Actual narrative theology had its precursor in H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Meaning of Revelation (1941). Niebuhr sought to translate the experience of the community into relevant theological expressions. Hans Frei, the official founder of the movement, in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), was interested in a conceptual re-description rather than a theological translation. But Hauerwas, unlike Frei, is not concerned with recovering narrative as a function with a consequence for biblical hermeneutics. With Hauerwas, a story is an epistemological tool that helps us understand identity, reasoning, and the form in which we make claims to know something.
This pursuit continues to show its validity in Hauerwas’ extensive work. However, this work spins within Wittgenstein and having partial roots in the emergence of a decidedly modern conception of probability, as evidential criteria for assessing a ‘proposition’s truth,’ proving itself thoroughly Kantian in its limited epistemology. Because Kant recognized the seriousness of Hume’s challenge to the Deist attempt to make theism probable, Kant sought to avoid probabilistic arguments for theism. By doing so, he avoided the danger to which Deism succumbed, namely, lack of distinctiveness. Still, he could not make religious faith socially relevant. Kant could not maintain the relevance of Christian faith because he pursued a strategy of separation: by declaring religion to be an improper matter for theoretical speculation, Kant created a formidable wall between Christian belief and the intellectual life of the culture. It was a wall that ensured that religious life would be a mostly private rather than public affair. From Deism to Barth and progressive narrative theology, a dialectical tension exists between the two poles of probability and certainty. Therefore, Hauerwas suggests - substitute ethics for theology. This, as we have seen, was the response endorsed by Kant, and Hauerwas rejects this, yet his very own philosophical Kantian wall is formed out of the theological Barthian. What Hauerwas suggests ought to be done here is to abandon the standard account of moral realism and to reintroduce the category of narrative as central to Christian ethics. He says, that the nineteenth-century theologians were right to argue that the truthfulness of Christian convictions resides in their practical force but it's wrong to think that this meant justifying them by reinterpreting these beliefs in a way that made them universally acceptable and applicable. In fact, according to Hauerwas, attention to the narrative character of these convictions helps one to see that they do not need to be reformulated intelligibly to the modern world. If the reader thinks harder about the issues raised, from within the Christian language, then he/she will become more virtuous. Hauerwas understands the task of theology to be descriptive rather than speculative, therapeutic rather than theoretical.
The fact is that a myriad of philosophical problems arose only after and because of the modern philosophers’ abandonment of fundamental Aristotelian and correct scholastic notions. Here, Alasdair Macintyre seems to be bound by this resurgence as he thinks there are no theory-independent facts that can be known, for facts . . . were a seventeenth-century invention. For Macintyre, the plethora of competing for moral theories within modern philosophy is a consequence of the abandonment of a teleological conception of human life in particular and the natural world in general. Macintyre’s account of the virtues has to arise from and take place within a historical narrative because, according to him, there can be no such thing as moral theory as such. Accounts of human action are always accounts of specific historical practices that arise within and as a part of concrete political, economic, and social conditions. Action theory cannot fail to be part of such circumstances, and it is because of this that it is helpful at times to read his account of virtue as a particular narrative account of the self. He takes his statement to be a development of the rationality embodied in the classic tradition. This is another way of saying that the historical account he gives throughout his work is not an optional extra that could be added on to a purely theoretical and timeless account of the virtues. Because concepts such as virtue or human action cannot be given without reference to social action, one cannot tell a history of ideas without reference to the concrete account in which that history of ideas takes place. And of course, once you have said this, the notion of a history of ideas in the classic traditional sense has already been abandoned. This claim against the possibility of a true account of moral beliefs is for Macintyre merely another part of his claim that morality is not a sphere that can be theorized about apart from the lived practices of a specific society. It is instructive, however, that, since the widespread repudiation of metaphysical biology in After Virtue, Macintyre has been revising and updating, at least in affirming the need for metaphysical commitments. He replaces this with its own (partly Marxist-inspired) apparatus of practices, narratives, and traditions. Still, Macintyre’s core commitment is to a renewed Aristotelian ethics of virtue, slowly moving closer to Thomas’ synthesis. Macintyre and Aristotle follow the same procedure. Each gives human beings a specific nature, distinguished by action with logos, and then derives their understanding of the human telos from it. For Aristotle, it is the activity following ethical or intellectual virtue; for Macintyre, it is a life unified by enacted narrative, and this ends up being quite confining.
Hauerwas’ use of narrative theology and Macintyre’s recovering of virtue places undue weight on the methodology itself. Any approach to theology or ethics that presents itself as the solution for all its problems promises more than it can deliver. Because of the excessive focus on methodology, its findings tend to be rather bland in the ultimate analysis, lacking explanatory power in interpreting specific biblical texts or history in a proper sense. In this context, it is important to realize that the hermeneutical enterprise is more significant than devising a theory of the meaning of texts or being focused on truth such as virtue. Scripture, tradition, reason, experience, the interpretive community, and other factors, adequately weighted, all combine in the hermeneutical task and must be fit into a holistic hermeneutical framework. Since people become virtuous acts, Somehow they can recognize which actions are so, without having first acquired the virtue in question. Thomas’ solution was his use of the law because the law is a kind of direction or measure for human activity. The standard by which all actions are judged to be either virtuous or vicious. Law in whichever of four forms, the eternal law, the divine or revealed law, the natural law, or human law, becomes necessary to show that the human will is disobedient to it, which is due to either a corruption or reason by force of a passion, bad habit or an undisciplined natural tendency. But the overarching purpose of the law is to rightly order our relationships, both with God and others and, most importantly, ourselves. According to Thomas, virtue is a disposition habitus, which is developed by the habituation of our passions in line with the requirements of reason. These requirements are never fundamentally in tension with our nature but actually fulfill it.
A real narrative independent of an unconstructed world exists apart from any human conceptualization either in its culture or history. Human beings, as well as other living things, have an essence of potentiality (i.e., the soul). That makes them what they are through time and change. Human beings can acquire various properties and dispositions toward becoming actuality. They can also develop capacities latent within them, or some capabilities may become corrupt. The virtues are such properties; human beings, due to their nature, should develop these virtues since they are appropriate for their nature qua human being or Dasein. Virtues are properties that exist before being actualized were latent (that is, only the capacities for them existed) within the soul. Importantly, virtues, as well as many other things, exist independently of any minds conceiving of them, or any linguistic community’s members speaking of them. Humans live as potential continuants, who remain the same mostly through change and yet can grow in capacities; virtues are such capacities, such that human selves may grow in good character and qualities toward an actual end or telos, that is the goal for social maturity. Both rational people and virtues are metaphysically real entities that exist as the mind-or language in independent entities.
This demands an absolute philosophical realism, epistemologically. That is, not only is there a real, unconstructed world, but we also can know it as such. Providing the agent and author of his own conduct much to draw from. Contrary to the received wisdom of today, we can understand these ontological realities in themselves. We can have access to an unconstructed fact. Aristotle’s metaphysics depends heavily upon observations of life reasoning to determine what logically is required to enable such things to be sustained in existence. Thomas, on the other hand, has an additional source - the revelation of scripture. He draws on scripture for its disclosure of the ultimate telos for human beings (the beatific vision), as well as the twin virtues (this is the moral and theological virtues).
Moral realism is closely related to metaphysical and epistemological realism. Here moral properties are not only actualized capacities found within persons and are irreducible, non-natural as the transcendental convertibles of being, truth, and the good. That is the nature of moral properties, which are mostly moral and virtuous. They are external standards, importantly, they are not human constructions, and they are not reducible to just behavior. The virtues are appropriate for us due to our human nature, while vices are inappropriate because they demean our nature.
Therefore, how can the agent be the author of his own conduct? Through practicing linguistic realism, this asserts that meaning transcends symbols. Narrative tools and linguistic conventions have taken control of current first-person approaches to ethics. But the real meaning is objective and absolute because there is an absolute Mind, God, who has communicated it to finite minds (human beings) through an ordinary but primarily analogous means of human language that utilizes transcendent principles of logic shared by both God and humans.
Iris Murdoch did not allow daily routines as a realm of the literal to be separated from metaphysics by the threshold of the analogical or metaphor. Consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. We are to do justice to the facts of the ordinary and every day, and good Metaphysics is just that, doing justice to the ordinary, not despite the use of imagery, but because of it. Metaphysical metaphor is a continuation of our common style of description, understanding, grasping, possessing. And when Murdoch does this sort of Metaphysics, Murdoch thinks she is doing no more and no less than Plato.
Plato introduced his concept of knowledge to explain his metaphysics. He maintained that we cannot know actual experience from objects of matter. They are changing and thus unreliable as a source of understanding. Knowledge can only be known of the eternal Idea / Form existing separately from the object itself. St. Thomas rejected this epistemology but had a moral dimension to such innatism as did Kant's moral law within. Yet their epistemology clearly demonstrated that knowledge is attained through the senses. This empirical dimension has informed both Catholic and Modern theology and converged in personhood out of Vatican II. Providing a system, and something these three thinkers avoid, yet cannot escape.
[1] To recover the practical ethical point of view, the first person is not enough to rediscover the importance of character, but we need to go more in-depth and investigate how the agent can be the author of his own conduct. (G. Abbà, Felicita: vita Buona e virtu; Chapter II [22] p.105)
[2] Lonergan, Bernard. Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman; Todd, 1972), p. xi.
[3] Voegelin, Eric. Anamnesis: On the Theory of History and Politics, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, trans. M. L. Hanak, ed. David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 392.
[4] A remark attributed to Philippa Foot: We were interested in moral language, she was interested in the moral life... She left us in the end. Conradi, P.J. Iris Murdoch: a Life. (London: Harper Collins, 2001)P. 302.
[5] Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 287-89. Her novels, in their attention and generosity to the inner lives of individuals, follow the tradition of novelists like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Proust, showing first-person calculation and action.
[6] ibid, p. 292.
[7] Murdoch, Iris. The sovereignty of the Good [New York: Schocken Books, 1971], p. 95.
[8] Ashford, Bruce, R.: Wittgenstein’s Theologians? A Survey of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Impact on Theology, JETS 50/2 (June 2007) 357–75
[9] Kallenberg, Brad, J. Ethics as Grammar (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001)
[9] Hauerwas, Stanley The Peaceable Kingdom (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) p. xxi.
[10] Hauerwas, Stanley. A Community of Character, (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 89. To this end, he has chosen to write essays rather than books: Without presuming that my work has anything like the power of Wittgenstein’s, it remains my intention that the essays, like his aphorisms, should make the reader think at least as hard, if not harder, than the author has about the issues raised.
[11] ibid.
[12] ibid.
[13] ibid.
[14] Ford, David. Barth and God’s Story: Biblical Narrative and the Theological Method of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics (Frankfurt, Bern, and New York: Peter Lang,1985). p.152.
[15] Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), pp. 21–44; and Hans W. Frei, Niebuhr’s Theological Background, in Faith and Ethics: The Theology of H. Richard Niebuhr, ed. Paul Ramsey (New York: Harper; Brothers, 1957), Other precursors include G. E. Wright and even C. S. Lewis.
[16] ibid., p. 7.
[17] As Hauerwas points out, the narrative is a tool to be used by theologians: ‘I hope it is clear, therefore, that it has never been, nor is it now, my intention to develop a narrative theology or a theology of narrative. I do not know what either would look like. Theology itself does not tell stories; rather, it is a critical reflection on a story’, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983), p. xxv. Narrative figures throughout his work. He gives a clear account of why it is useful in The Peaceable Kingdom (pp. 17–34) and in Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, eds. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1989).
[18] Macintyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. Pg 357.
[19] Macintyre, Alasdair. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1991), esp. pp. 170-215.
[20] Macintyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1981), 3rd Edition 2007. 129. Macintyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Carus Publishing, 1999. pp.83-7.
[21] A Short History of Ethics: A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric age to the twentieth century. New York: MacMillan, 1968. A detached account is impossible for several related reasons. Macintyre and Hauerwas both have learned from Wittgenstein that to understand a concept is not merely to have specific ideas about it; it also involves certain types of behavior and the ability to act in particular ways. So, to possess a concept involves behaving or being able to behave in certain ways in certain circumstances, to alter concepts, whether by modifying existing concepts or by making new concepts available or by destroying old ones, is to alter behavior.
[22] So, for example, in Dependent Rational Animals, he offers an anthropology of the virtues, and in his recently published book, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman; Littlefield, 2006), he speaks positively of Stein’s movement toward a ‘‘Thomist ontology.’’
[23] St. Thomas ST I-II, q. 90, a 1-4
[24] Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 40, 41.
