What is tradition? And why are we asking this again? Too many on the right, and especially on the dissident right, use the word “tradition” in an ambigious way that could mean almost anything. If “traditional values”, “a return to tradition” or “traditional society” are to mean anything, if they are to be more than mere words aimed to provoke emotion, then the root needs to be defined. Thus, this is the second of three posts tackling this question. In the last post we looked at how Hans-Georg Gadamer defined tradition, and today we will look Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition.
Concluding an account of the Enlightment project of rationality, MacIntyre says the following:
“What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational enquiry embodied in a tradtion, 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 their predecessors within the history of that same tradition.”1
This may sound slightly like Gadamer, and that is because MacIntyre was aware of Gadamer. How they differ will come through in the proceeding paragraphs.
MacIntyre is first critiquing the Enlightenment for being blind to the historicity of rational inquiry and of rationality itself. Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, Kant, etc. all believed themselves to be basing their arguments off premises no rational person could deny. It does not matter what country you are from, what religion you hold or at what time you are alive, so the argument goes, if you are rational you will agree with these basic premises and upon these commonly accepted premises rational enquiry can ensue. This conception of rationality is what MacIntyre is arguing against. Rational enquiry, so MacIntyre argues, always takes place within a tradition. What is a tradition? “A tradition is an argument extended through time” answers MacIntyre.2 Christianity, as a tradition, is an argument extended through time over questions pertaining to the divinity of Christ, the nature of the Holy Trinity, episcopal jurisdiction and salvation. The early Church argued against the Jews, pagans and gnostics over the question of Christ’s divinity. Later, with the emergence of Arius and the later Christological heretics, disputes within Christianity overtook external disputes. With the rise of Islam a new challenge came forth. Divisions between East and West emerged, and later came the Protestant Reformation. The history of Christianty, a traditon, is a history of a dispute over several theological points. To understand any point of theology well, MacIntyre would argue, means to understand its place within the story of Christianity. This extends to all traditions, not just Christianity. If you wanted to understand the beliefs Marxism, Deconstruction, NrX, German Idealism, etc. you would gleam very little by reading a bullet point summary. Why? Because the beliefs of all these traditions were formed though a historical argument that involves internal and external disputes. To understand Marxism properly, Hegelianism, Utopian Socialism and the challenges of the Industrial Revolution would need to be understood, because Marxism is a response to each of these phenomena and to understand the response you need to understand what it was that Marx was responding to. To think otherwise is like thinking you could understand the answer without understanding the question it was given to. Rational enquiry is historically embedded.
Rationality is inescapably tied to tradition, for an account of rationality will involve a myriad of claims about what the world is like, what the proper response to situation X would be and what the end (telos) of action is. These questions are shared by all traditions of rational enquiry and each tradition makes its own claims in response to these questions. To understand these claims, as said above, the tradition must be looked at in its historical context and its argument extended through time must be traced. Any account of rationality will involve certain claims that can only be understood in their historical context; these claims can only be understood in the context of their respective tradition. Although it may look like any given account of rationality “simply just is how things are”, that account has a genealogy, and the historian of ideas will be able to show you when and where those ideas originated and what they were in response to. An account of rationality, then, can only be understood within the context of a tradition.
After arguing that rational enquiry needs to be understood within the context of a tradition, MacIntyre tells us that traditions are vindicated “by the way in which they transcend their predecessors within the history of the same tradition.” To vindicate a tradition is to ask whether or not tradition A has been able to answer a certain question (or questions) better than tradition B. This is challenging, because tradition A and tradition B do not share the same first principles and, since they have histories of their own, the rational justification internal to those traditions will be at odds with each other. For example, the suggestion that it is possible to be virtuous as an individual would be irrational to Aristotle.3 For the likes of Max Stirner, or Ayn Rand, this suggestion is not in the least irrational. Both the Aristotelian and the Egoist has a conception of rationality that has grown out of their respective extended arguments across time, but because their arguments across time are different, they come to different conclusions about what rationality consists of. To adjudicate between the two traditions, and thus for one of these traditions to be vindicated, a rare gift of empathy is required.4 The adherents of both traditions must be empathetic enough to understand the rival tradition in its own terms and come to understand what questions it is trying to answer. When both sides are able to genuinely understand one another, one adherent may discover that the rival tradition answers a shared question better than his own tradition. The Egoist may come to discover that Virtue Ethics can explain what justice requires better than his own tradition. Vindication of a tradition, therefore, is the result of tradition A explaining a question better than tradition B. The vindication of a tradition, then, is always found within the tradition in question.
Rational inquiry, rationality as sch and rational vindication, then, are always found within a tradition and for this reason MacIntyre gives a second definition of tradition: “the home of rationality.” MacIntyre, though similar to Gadamer, develops a much stronger connection between tradition and rationality.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana. 2014. 7
MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? University Notre Dame Press. 12
Aristotle belived that the life of virtue is always the life in a community. To be just, for example, we need someone to be just to.
MacIntryre. 167