After getting involved in another iteration of the Christian vs Vitalist debate on substack, I read a very interesting piece by Imperium Press. In their article, which I largely agreed with, took a few correct ideas too far, and whose excesses I would like to comment upon. Though this is not a defense of Christianity per se, if these excesses are identified, and corrected, I do think a defense would be more effective.
Morality and Truth
Something I found refreshing, and reminiscent of my college days, was the following account of morality,
“When you say something like “men should be brave”, you are uttering a proposition. But unlike the proposition “the earth revolves around the sun”, there’s something special about the moral proposition—there’s a “should” involved. This “should” conceals a whole grammatical substructure that we otherwise miss. The “should” is really an abstracted command, and a command is a very different kind of utterance.
A command is inherently agent-relative. For the command “do as you’re told”, who utters it, and to whom it is uttered, make all the difference. If my father says it to me, all is well. If I say it to my father, I’m liable to get the belt. Unlike propositions, commands traffic not in truth-value, but in aptness. They are very much valid “for me” but not “for you”. They are inherently particularist. They are inherently folkish. This is why liberals don’t like anything to do with command or authority. This is why Jesus told parables instead of giving orders.”1
Most of the time, morality is discussed in a “third-person” perspective, meaning that questions are viewed in a detached, non-situated, manner. From a third-person perspective, decisions are evaluated according to something like the Kantian categorical imperative. One of Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative, that is his way of deducing right or wrong from reason, is “act only according to that maxim wherby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”2 In other words, any action can, and should, be evaluated by if that action would be good if applied by all people, in all places. Lying, to use Kant’s famous example, if universalized would be disastrous. The object of consideration, on the third-person approach, is the act, considered in itself. I use Kant as one example, though there are other third-person approaches.
In contrast to the third-person approach, there are “second-person ethics”, whose category Imperium Press’ articulation falls in. Second-person ethics, to use the language of Martin Buber, is about the relationship between I and You. “When I confront a human being as my You and speak the basic word I-You to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things.”3 All of my actions are directed towards a You, someone who stands in front of me, who is not a thing, but a person, and who lays a particular demand upon me. My actions are directed towards you, not an abstract idea, or concept. Ethics are highly particular, then, because each I-You relationship is different. What would be moral in one relationship, would be immoral in another, though the act may be the same. The “do as you are told” example from Imperium Press fits very well here.
Emmanual Levinas, inspired by Martin Buber, talks about the importance of the face, and how the face of the other compels me to treat the other as a You. Rather than an abstracted principle, what draws me into an ethical relationship is me looking into your eyes. By seeing the face of the other, I recognize the other as person, and looking into her eyes I have to respond, I must speak, I must reciprocate…
In so far that Imperium Press is advocating a second-person ethics, I am in full agreement, and I am glad to see someone else popularizing this view. Yet, they seem to be saying that ethics is either unrelated to, or divorced from, knowledge, and truth. Quoting from the article,
“But for the purposes of apologetics, one key difference is that although religion is fundamentally moral in nature, morality is not a kind of knowledge. And not being knowledge, religion is non-universal.”4
And as quoted before,
“Unlike propositions, commands traffic not in truth-value, but in aptness. They are very much valid “for me” but not “for you”.”5
This is the point where I depart. The authors of this article assume a very modern view of truth, where if something is to be true it must be accessible to everyone, independent of experience, learning, culture, language, or tradition. Later in their article, since this view of truth is constraining, there is a proposed “folkish turn” that gets underneath, or behind this modern definition. Elsewhere I have critiqued this modern definition, and looked at two thinkers who entered into a certain kind of post-modernity, a post-modernity that embraces Aristotle’s phronesis, or practical knowledge. Quoting from one of these thinkers, Joseph Dunne, gives us a look at this kind of knowledge in a very concrete way. This is from the introduction to his book Back to the Rough Ground, which began as a project to justify his rejection of “objectives based learning”,
“Much of my skepticism concerned the quality of information that could be provided by these analytic activities for the actual conduct of teaching. A precise statement of objectives, it was claimed, can keep the teacher "on target." But how can a teacher know that the target set is a desirable or appropriate one? For all the exactness of its formulation, how can one avoid its being arbitrary? It seemed clear to me that one can do so only through a kind of judgment and good sense that neither depends on nor derives from a commitment to objectives formulation per se. Moreover, when advocates of the model suggest that objectives-based evaluation provides "empirical evidence" that either confirms that objectives have been well chosen or suggests a reorientation of the teacher's work, this claim seemed no less problematical. For whatever evidence is thrown up by an evaluation about the "learner's post-instructional behavior" will have to be interpreted for its significance with respect to the act of instruction; and guidance for such an interpretation is not forthcoming from this evidence itself. If the initial standards set for instruction were arbitrary, there is no way that subsequent empirical evidence, on its own, could exorcise this arbitrariness from them at a later stage. If, for instance, a teacher fails to achieve her objective, how is this to be interpreted or its significance for her activity to be judged? It could mean that the objective was too difficult for the class and that it should now be scaled down. Or it could mean that it was, in fact, an appropriate goal for the class- in which case her instruction may have been incompetent; and if so, we still have to find out in what respects. Or perhaps- for a complex set of reasons, maybe unknown to the teacher- members of the class were distracted on this particular day from their normal level of attention and achievement. Any number of factors may have intervened to produce the results that the evaluation gave back as empirical evidence. Accordingly, the teacher has to make a complex set of judgments, based on much more than the evidence of the learner's post-instructional behaviors, before she can rationally revise her decisions. Both the pre-specification of objectives, then, and subsequent evidence supplied by the approved form of evaluation would leave answers to the teacher's questions of the form "what shall I do?" massively underdetermined.”6
Teaching is not something that can be done abstractly or “objectively.” A good teacher, like a good doctor, figures out what a student needs, how they learn, what success looks like for them, and how to adapt teaching strategies to that particular student. This requires experience, and a practical knowledge much more refined than any “objective” Excel sheet. According to the definition of truth that Imperium Press accepts, a definition that is historically very new, none of the evaluations, or proscriptions, of the teacher can be true, because these judgments are not universal, and are likely inapplicable to another student. In spite of this constrained view of truth, it might very well be true that Timmy needs an exam to be administered orally opposed to a typical written test on account of dyslexia. Is this universal? Well, none of the other students need that accommodation, and it might harm their learning experience. Is the judgment “Timmy needs his exam to be orally” intelligible? Yes, in the same way that all the propositions Imperium Press gave are intelligible, but the intelligibility of a proposition does not equate to its universality. Teachers, like doctors, skilled athletes, or the moral person, possess a type of knowledge that is experiential, situational, and their judgments do traffic in truth. If they did not, then there could be no incorrect judgements. It is not true that a deaf child needs to be administered tests orally, in the same way that it is not true that a cancer patient only needs an Advil, or that I should treat the mailman the same way I treat my wife. If there can be incorrect judgments, then there can be correct ones, and when we are specking of “correct” and “incorrect” we are speaking of truth.
Tradition and Conversation
Following the discussion of morality, the importance of tradition comes up.
“The only way you can have propositions (thus, truth) is to have concepts. And the only resource from which to pull concepts is tradition. Concepts don’t exist independent of a folk. We don’t pull them out of nowhere either from experience or from some abstract realm. They are tools, handed to us by long usage, and are specially fitted to one folk or another. The Russian does not have “blue”, he has “goluboy” and “siniy”, which are metaphysically distinct for him as green and blue are for us. It is by our (traditional) concepts that we derive the (metaphysical) world. As folkish pagans, we understand that these are not merely conventional, but apt, fitted to one folk by way of its biology, by its biological imperatives, which are not different from the commands that its tradition hands down through the ages. Your tradition (commands) are not built out of metaphysics (propositions), but your metaphysics are built out of tradition. This is as true at the linguistic level as it is at the level of reality.”7
Again, I am in full agreement. This passage reminded me of Geoffery Bennington’s excellent book Jacque Derrida,
“Metaphysics lives only in what we have imprudently called an incoherence: we do not have the means to correct this incoherence, for it carries with it everything that gives us our measure of coherence. In following the sign through metaphysics, we have been obliged to borrow all our language and criteria of coherence—and we are attached to them—from the metaphysics of the sign: we are working in a milieu where possibility and impossibility imply one another, in a complexity that we are only beginning to glimpse.”8
In short, the discussion of truth is already loaded with certain concepts that we assume without thinking (like the concept of “concept” or “thinking”) whose veracity assume their own veracity, and when we being to unravel the basis of our own thought, we soon find ourselves with a way of thinking that has to be assumed, cannot be justified by its own criteria, yet internally assumes it can.
We are bound by language, which means we do inherent concepts from our tradition, and our culture like Imperium Press says. Unlike Derrida, who thinks this inhibits rational inquiry, I agree with Alasdair MacIntyre, who believes in,
“a conception of rational inquiry as embodied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend the limits of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition.”9
From what Imperium Press wrote in their article, while sharing some of the language of MacIntyre, they do not share his commitment to the possibility of a tradition being evaluated, and, depending upon their evaluation, conversion.
“Commands depend on authority, and since commands are the basic stuff of reality, it turns out that your every experience is a concretization of authority. When you make the simplest claim—unless true by definition like 2 + 2 = 4—you are leaning on authority at every turn. When you look out into the world and see blue, a tree, a marriage, or justice, you are looking at what authority has commanded you to take as blue, a tree, a marriage, or justice. It is authority all the way down. Tradition being embodied authority, there is no foundation that universalism or metaphysics can stand on to question the tradition of our folk.
This cuts universalism off at the knees and forestalls all empty logic-chopping of classical Christian apologetics. But it gets worse for universalists. Since authority is what’s at the bottom even of metaphysics and epistemology, their theology is invalidated. Anyone who arrogates to themselves the right to question the gods, our forefathers, or our customs, sets themselves up on Hlidskjalf itself. And woe betide them when Gangleri returns. By claiming the right to decide the ultimate authority, they have made themselves the ultimate authority. They are just liberals who haven’t got the memo yet.”10
Questioning your tradition does not seem to be possible according to the authors, let alone question someone else’s tradition, and there is a condemnatory voice in this rejection. While acknowledging the difficulty, MacIntrye gives us an account of how two rival traditions can confront each other, keeping in mind that any means for rational justification is necessarily tied to a particular tradition. If a block quote can be allowed,
“When two rival large-scale intellectual traditions confront one another, a central feature of the problem of deciding between their claims is characteristically that there is no neutral way of characterizing either the subject matter about which they give rival accounts or the standards by which their claims are to be evaluated. Each standpoint has its own account of truth and knowledge, its own mode of characterizing the relevant subject matter. And the attempt to discover a neutral, independent set of standards or mode of characterizing data which is both such as must be acceptable to all rational persons and is sufficient to determine the truth on the matters about which the two traditions are at variance has generally, and perhaps universally, proved to be a search for a chimera. How then can genuine controversy proceed? It does so characteristically in two stages.
The first is that in which each characterizes the contentions of its rival in its own terms, making explicitsthe grounds for rejecting what is incompatible with its own central theses, although sometimes allowing that from its own point of view and in the light of its own standards of judgment its rival has something to teach it on marginal and subordinate questions. A second stage is reached if and when the protagonists of each tradition, having considered in what ways their own tradition has by its own standards of achievement in enquiry found it difficult to develop its enquiries beyond a certain point, or has produced in some area insoluble antinomies, ask whether the alternative and rival tradition may not be able to provide resources to characterize and to explain the failings and defects of their own tradition more adequately than they, using the resources of that tradition, have been able to do.
Every such tradition, to some significant degree, stands or falls as See a mode of enquiry and has within itself at each stage a more or less well-defined problematic, that set of issues, difficulties, and problems which have emerged from its previous achievements in enquiry. Characteristically, therefore, such traditions possess measures to evaluate their own progress or lack of it, even if such measures necessarily are framed in terms of and presuppose the truth of those central theses to which the tradition gives its allegiance.
In controversy between rival traditions the difficulty in passing from the first stage to the second is that it requires a rare gift of empathy as well as of intellectual insight for the protagonists of such a tradition to be able to understand the theses, arguments, and concepts of their rival in such a way that they are able to view themselves from such an alien standpoint and to recharacterize their own beliefs in an appropriate manner from the alien perspective of the rival tradition. Such rare gifts had not been evidenced in the earlier confrontations between the Augustinian and the Aristotelian traditions, and in the social and intellectual conditions of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries it would have been difficult for it to have been otherwise.”11
In these confrontations, it is not the liberal individual who claims for himself the ability to judge the world for himself, but a confrontation between two traditions. All rational inquiry is embedded in a tradition, as both Imperium Press and MacIntyre say, so there is no possibility for the lone ranger to judge a tradition, and claim himself to be the ultimate authority . This does not mean that traditions cannot speak to each other, however, no matter how hard it might be at a time. As an Orthodox Christian, I am Orthodox rather than pagan, Protestant, Muslim, etc., because (if we are speaking purely rationally) I believe Orthodoxy can explain more than these rival traditions, and when a rival tradition claims to explain something Orthodoxy also claims to explain, I believe Orthodoxy explains more deeply.
Whether you accept MacIntyre’s account of tradition, and the possibility of inter-tradition confrontation, a confrontation that sometime leads to conversion, is not the important part here. Imperium Press tells us that rationality is embedded in a tradition, which is true, but then assumes that this means that it is impossible, if not impious, to question a tradition. Like their writing on morality, they were right up until they made a hasty, and unjustified conclusion. MacIntyre agrees with everything they said, but he still maintains that it is possible to question a tradition.
Conclusion
The folks over at Imperium Press are very smart, and they tickled me by bringing up ideas I have not heard since college, which after seeing of old college friends and professors at a wedding, put a smile on my face. Most of what they said is true, which is likely why this “folkish turn” has helped them in debates, but they make unjustified, and rather hasty conclusions that do not follow from anything they said previously. If they are to be believed, and if I understood them rightly, the teacher and doctor do not possess knowledge, their particular, and non-universal, judgments do not traffic in truth, and MacIntyre’s project is impossible, either on a practical, or linguistic level.
Imperium Press. “How to Destroy Universalism.” Substack, July 2, 2024. https://substack.com/home/post/p-146150926.
Kant, Immanuel. Translated by James W. Ellington. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns. Hackett Publishing. Indianapolis, Indiana. 1993. 30
Buber, Martin. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. I and Thou. Charles Scribner’s Sons. New York, New York. 1970. 59
Imperium Press. “How to Destroy Universalism.” Substack, July 2, 2024. https://substack.com/home/post/p-146150926.
Imperium Press. “How to Destroy Universalism.”
Dunne, Joseph. Back to the Rough Ground. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame: Indiana. 1993. 4
Imperium Press.
Bennington, Geoffery. Jacque Derrida. University of Chicago Press. University of Chicago, Chicago. 1999. 38
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana. 2014. 6
Imperium Press
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana. 2014.167
This was a refreshingly on-point response, thank you for it. Our article has gotten a lot more attention than we thought, and most of the responses have been quite poor, critiquing postmodernism in general but leaving our claims untouched (and presumably unread). This was much better.
A few thoughts:
"This is the point where I depart. The authors of this article assume a very modern view of truth, where if something is to be true it must be accessible to everyone, independent of experience, learning, culture, language, or tradition."
Let's refine this — for something to be true it must be accessible to all in principle, though not necessarily in practice. It can be true that you solve a differential equation by doing X, Y, and Z, though this truth is inaccessible to my four-year old. But in principle, all truths are universal.
Take the example of "for the good of the student a teacher must XYZ" that you raised. XYZ will of course differ depending on the student but this statement can always be abstracted into a universal truth from which the particular can be deduced, e.g. "for the good of the student a teacher's method must be fitted to her abilities and with a view to her interests". On the "good is a kind of truth" view, even practical truths cash out to universals. This works, it just means that the practical truth is only partial and pragmatic expression of a universal truth. There's nothing wrong with that, but the folkish turn maintains objective good without reference to universalism.
"If I understood them rightly, the teacher and doctor do not possess knowledge, their particular, and non-universal, judgments do not traffic in truth, and MacIntyre’s project is impossible, either on a practical, or linguistic level."
To clarify, the teacher and doctor have knowledge, but knowledge is a subset of morality/command. And yes, MacIntyre's project is impossible in that even the evaluation of other traditions is ultimately only an evaluation of one's own tradition. This is why, even thousands of years after paganisms supposedly disappeared, they are experiencing a revival. Ultimately we can never escape our oldest traditions, only hold them inconsistently, because they furnish us with the resources with which to justify the new traditions.