Philosophy: Freedom, Dialog

 I post about Two Ships Passing at High Noon: Alasdair MacIntyre & Raymond Geuss because my understanding of it feels so slippery. Against that feeling is another, that it treads on an important insight.

Both philosophers favor Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas over Immanuel Kant. I favor Aristotle's Nicomachean Essays and his Rhetoric. Aquinas has never loomed large in my thinking. 

The ideas in this paragraph are where I think the important insight resides:

This activity culminated in an essay on “Freedom and the Revolution,” in which MacIntyre framed the classless society as inextricably linked to human freedom. Freedom could not have just one, prescribed meaning, handed down as a dogma. Instead, the concept of freedom itself requires the freedom to evolve and change. Yet this emphasis on freedom must not be confused with an emphasis on liberal individualism. As MacIntyre put it, “freedom is not a problem of individual against society but the problem of what sort of society we want and what sort of individual we want to be.” For MacIntyre, “only within some organizational form can human freedom be embodied.” This led him to the idea that workers and intellectuals should join party organizations.

I am too American for joining party organizations; I also came of age in a place with a disdain for the Communist Party. However, the problem of freedom as described above seems far more fruitful than the traditional individual versus society question of freedom. Orthodox Christian writers explain how being a slave for Christ is actually a freedom - we have an ideal to form our lives. Too many choices leave us with no freedom. The restrictions of grammar, syntax and diction create literature.

Worlds we can now create for our own. Unfortunately, the internet culture has hived us off into tribes authoritarian in their thinking. In the light of the quote above, they do not let us have the freedom of defining what sort of person we want to be; we must fit in the hive mind. Current social media cults are interested in the accumulation of power that the essay later condemns.

This paragraph makes me think I am onto something with the idea of our own groups giving us the freedom to be the best we can be:

What was needed, for MacIntyre, was Aristotelian virtue ethics Christianized by Thomas Aquinas. For Aristotle, the good must be understood in relation to a techne, to an art, a craft, a social role, a practice. It is in and through the techne that we come to know what the good involves in the particular situations in which we find ourselves. This gives rise to many kinds of good lives, all emanating from a universal, but realizable via a plurality of routes.

With Guess, I share the doubt of a theory of all:

Geuss concludes that “if there is a future for theological ethics in the Roman Catholic tradition it will certainly not be Thomist.” And on this basis he expresses pessimism about theology in general—for Geuss, it is too mired in overly rigid, dogmatic categories, to appropriately connect with the vicissitudes of real life. Over the course of his career, Geuss adopted an aversion to what he called “the quest for certainty.” Those who would establish a single permanent, transhistorical account, of whatever kind, would draw his ire. For Geuss, those who pursue such quests are stricken with “the authoritarian personality.” It’s a critique he directed not just at the Thomists, but at Kantians, Lutherans, Cartesians, Rawlsians, and more.

This doubt I learned from Nietzsche.

But more potent is this idea of dialog:

So, both MacIntyre and Geuss think there is a need for more than mere dialogue. We need organizations that create the conditions for the right kind of dialectic. In both cases, the model for these organizations is Christian in character. And, for both men, we lack the relevant kind of organization. MacIntyre awaits a new St. Benedict—he is waiting for a new kind of intellectual environment in which his non-dogmatic variant of Thomism can be further developed together with others. Geuss also recognizes a need for something like the church, for something like the school he attended as a boy. But he can find no such organizations in this world. So, he has been forced to make his way in and through the liberal universities. These universities are, according to Geuss, overwhelmingly Kantian, often in only a half-conscious way. MacIntyre, too, has, despite everything, spent a life in the universities. In this sense, the two men have lived liberal lives, even as they have struggled not to think like liberals.

I admit to an affinity for dialog. The one great failure of this blog is its inability to generate any comments. We have abandoned dialog to spam and bots.

Now I am too old to do much except to leave these ideas for others. I hope that is enough to start us talking to one another, to doing our own thinking, and stop humanity from following one another over a cliff like lemmings.

sch 6/18