The Intrinsic Incoherence of the Secular University
God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of Catholic Philosophical Tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.
In Ex Corde Ecclesiae John Paul II reiterated the vital role that Catholic universities play within the life of the church as well as the larger culture. The Pontiff admonished the faithful to take seriously the search for truth in its totality, from within the various disciplines, and to connect this search to the mission of the Church “to preach the Gospel in such a way that a relationship between faith and life is established in each individual and in the socio-cultural context in which individuals live and act and communicate with one another.” The dual emphasis on seeing the truth in its totality and connecting the university’s mission with man’s transcendent purposes certainly distinguishes a Catholic university from the mainstream academy, which has been set adrift by disciplinary division, the instrumentalization of reason, and the narrow emphasis on technical mastery.
Indeed, the relentless politicization of the secular “multiversity”serves to mask the moral nihilism and confusion under which it otherwise operates.1 The “diversity” emphasis operates as an ideology which creates a semblance of moral unity on an otherwise disparate and dissipated nexus of intellectual activity. Secular schools will attempt to create a sense of larger purpose either by seeing themselves in service of the nation-state (citizen formation), or through the sublimation of universalist longings (serving a global society)–the idea of universal brotherhood without fatherhood.
The theory of the Catholic university is thus in marked contrast when juxtaposed with the reality of the secular multiversity, for the latter suffers from an intrinsic incoherence in its very foundations. Newman, in his classic The Idea of a University identified this as a crisis waiting to happen when he wrote at the time of the formation of the modern research university. He saw already that the emergent disciplines lacked any sort of spiritual foundation, and this situation would have disastrous consequences for both reason and faith, with the concomitant problems for full development of students. These schools could only occupy but not form young minds. The fracturing of knowledge into disciplinary shards would result in a loss of meaning and a diminution of the life of the spirit–an addling of man’s transcendent purposes. Anyone who has watched the film released in 2010, “The Social Network,” or read Tom Wolfe’s My Name is Charlotte Simmons needs no further confirmation concerning the soul-sucking nature of the modern academy.
This fracturing of knowledge with its resultant loss of coherence, moral justification, and meaning has been the leitmotiv of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre ever since his landmark work, After Virtue. There, MacIntyre argued that the Western tradition of moral thinking had exploded into pieces, leaving only fragments to which individuals could cling, but that such fragments lacked compelling force when operating outside their originating and justificatory context. Likewise, in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, MacIntyre sought to demonstrate the essential incommensurability of coexistent traditions, and that the inability to provide any overarching framework left us ineluctably in a state of “civil war carried on by other means.”
In God, Philosophy, Universities MacIntyre offers a brief, eclectic, individualized, but deeply considered account of the Catholic philosophical tradition as providing an alternative to the account of knowing which dominates the modern secular multiversity. While Newman stood at the beginning of an emerging academic crisis, MacIntyre surveys the wreckage after 150 years, and we see that Newman’s concerns were prescient. MacIntyre, in accordance with John Paul II’s dictum, uses his platform at the nation’s preeminent (for better or for worse) Catholic university, Notre Dame, to familiarize the faithful with the rich heritage of Catholic philosophical thinking.
The result is an examination of unfamiliar figures, and fresh insights into thinkers we think we know well. Throughout, MacIntyre is especially attendant to the social setting within which philosophical reflection typically takes place – namely, the academy – and thus investigates the forces that augur against further philosophical reflection, which brings us to the modern multiversity. Interestingly, MacIntyre does not begin his investigation by examining the crisis of the modern university. Instead, the book begins by examining some of the basic problems of theism, and in the process indicates that not only can belief in God no longer be assumed, as had been the case, but that such belief has become something of a curiosity. If polls are to be trusted, atheists preponderate in the academy, and against this MacIntyre wants to make the case that theism is, well . . . rational.
The opening chapters are properly philosophical, dealing with the “God question” at the level of its conceptual difficulties: how do we explain the existence and nature of finite beings and their status as free creatures? How is it possible to talk about a transcendent God using the immanent tool of language? How do we make sense of evil and suffering? MacIntyre covers no new ground on these questions, but neither is that his goal. Rather, his presentation aims to show philosophy’s limitations in these regards, and thus demonstrates what happens to reason if it is uncoupled from faith, and this opens the path for the unique contribution of the Catholic university, as well as providing Catholics reason to be suspicious of the secular multiversity. “Philosophical inquiry by itself cannot provide us with an adequate knowledge either of God or ourselves. What it can do is to give us sufficient reason to reject those philosophical conclusions that are at variance with the Catholic faith.” (25)
MacIntyre’s investigation of philosophical theism opens up two related realms of inquiry: it enables him to reject (secular) positions that would bar the way to further inquiry (reminiscent of Voegelin’s criticism of the ideological prohibitions on questions), and it allows him to criticize disciplinary fragmentation that has no mechanism for reconciliation, and thus enables him to show the fundamental weakness of the modern university. Like Newman, MacIntyre sees the exercise of spiritual authority as leading to the proper exercise of reason, and not antagonistic to it. Philosophy thus serves the Church by erecting a protective wall around the garden of faith. In a related vein, as he argues in his chapter on Pascal, philosophical skepticism may give me reasons to suspect that faith might be wrong, but gives me no reason to believe that faith is, in fact, wrong. That we might be in error is not the same as being in error, and until we are given compelling reasons to abandon our position there is no reason why we ought to do so.
The secular multiversity is addled by the lack of any overarching synthetic principle and a discipline which would accomplish such an accounting. MacIntyre thus seeks to restore theology, at least in its Catholic context, to its rightful place as queen of the sciences. Unfortunately, philosophy and theology have themselves become so specialized, and so remote from the best of their own traditions and subject-matter, that they are in no position to occupy the place that the modern university needs them to. The bulk of MacIntyre’s book, therefore, is an attempt to examine, reinterpret and unfold the richness and complexity of the Catholic philosophical tradition in the belief that it offers the academy its best hope for a proper and comprehensive accounting of human knowing and human purposes.
MacIntyre’s retelling of the history examines the debates concerning the nature of reason, how it functions, and its relationship to faith. MacIntyre demonstrates that early Catholic thinkers were especially interested in using philosophy negatively–that is, to give us reason to reject arguments that would bar the way to further inquiry. His history has a progressive quality wherein each subsequent group of thinkers builds on the insights of the previous ones, even if there are variations concerning how much or how little credence they give to philosophy.
The crux of MacIntyre’s story occurs between the 12th and 15th centuries. The idea of Catholic philosophy as a self-conscious project receives its impetus from the conviction that belief in God is the basis of rational inquiry, and the related belief that God has ordered the world in such a way that it is amenable to rational exploration. At the core of this profound shift, argues MacIntyre, was the conception of a need for and the legitimacy of genuinely secular institutions through which God is to be served, and of the existence of areas of human activity and enquiry in which the authoritative standards are independent of the authority either of the church or of secular rulers, and this in a way that is in accordance with God’s will. (62)
Asserting the intelligibility of the world does not mean that things are understood in their totality, but they are open to being understood in their totality, and science cannot by itself provide such understanding, for it cannot get at the origins, nature or purpose of existing things. Here MacIntyre cleverly employs his heuristic of rival modes of cognitive authority to demonstrate that the series of conflicts throughout those centuries is what led to the emergence of the legitimacy of the secular realm, so that this development (which in turn allowed for the development of the modern university and of modern science) resulted not in opposition to theology, but emerged from within theology. The tensions that developed within medieval theology from the 11th century forward occurred because of an increasing awareness of rival interpretations of scriptural meaning, the use of dialectic to attempt to resolve such disagreements, and the resultant efforts to systematize these dialectical attempts into a coherent and comprehensive philosophy, at the apogee of which stands Thomas Aquinas:
It was because thirteenth-century European universities, developing out of conjunctions of the academic ambitions of masters, the desire for increased power by rulers, and the striving for upward mobility by students, became scenes of intellectual conflict, places where the fundamental issues that divided and defined the age were articulated, that their history provides the setting for the emergence of the Catholic philosophical tradition. (65) If there is any significant break in this tradition, it occurs in the tumultuous period following Aquinas. Any achievement as significant as Aquinas’ is going to provide ample fodder for subsequent thinkers to pick through, and the immediate post-Thomist period witnessed the emergence of debates that would shape the subsequent history of philosophy.
If indeed one of the central problems of theism involves the nature of language we use to discuss God, or God’s intelligibility, Aquinas contends that such a problem cannot be solved through the use of either univocal or equivocal language, but must be analogical–that is, there is a relation between the ways we use words to connote different things (Voegelin refers to this as the paradox of language wherein we are forced to describe “It reality” with the categories of “thing reality”). This use of language becomes a central point of contention for thinkers subsequent to Aquinas, particularly Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.
These differences create even greater differences in understanding the relationship of the will to the intellect, in anthropology, and in how we understand the nature of particulars and universals. The rise of medieval nominalism thus creates an even deeper tension within the tradition that becomes increasingly difficult for subsequent thinkers to hold together. The key moment that opens up the division between faith and reason is Scotus’ assertion that teleology and reason are not of a piece, and that humans would have no reason to think of themselves as directed to a transcendent goal beyond this world were it not for the truth of revelation. The great synthesis of Aquinas could hardly withstand such a critique, and thus we cross the threshold into the modern world.
The dissociation between faith and reason led to a prolonged fallow period of Catholic philosophical engagement, and also led to an increased secularization, or a-theization, of philosophy itself. “Where philosophy flourished, Catholic faith was absent. Where the Catholic faith was sustained, philosophy failed to flourish.” (133) Such an arrangement worked to the disadvantage of philosophy and Catholicism both. The secularization of thought, or despiritualization of reason, led to a reorganization of the university where theology became ever more marginalized. As the range of disciplines increased and the role of theology decreased, the universities not only fragmented organizationally and epistemologically, but failed to find any role for philosophy to provide any kind of comprehensive accounting of human knowing. Like theology, philosophy became just one more specialized discipline practiced by narrow specialists whose findings were of interest only to like-minded specialists.
Which brings us back to the beginning and back to Newman. Under these circumstances a person as spiritually alert as Newman couldn’t help but see that this situation had reached crisis proportions, and that the crisis could only get deeper. I think even Newman would be shocked by how far adrift the contemporary university has gone, but that it would go further adrift he had no doubt. At the core of Newman’s musings was the insight that faith and reason were not independent enterprises, but integrally related to one another, which is why a university always operated with a spiritual foundation, whether wittingly or not. For Newman, unbelief as well as belief was an act of faith. (142)
One need not accept this claim to believe still that the modern university is in crisis not because of its unbelief, but because there is no agreed-upon conception of the whole of reality itself; or, worse still, because of the dismissal of the idea that there can be such a conception. To believe there is no whole of which the various disciplines can be parts is worse still than to operate unwittingly without a conception of the whole. Until the contemporary multiversity recognizes that it needs philosophy in a way it doesn’t need biology or sociology, the crisis will continue.
But then, MacIntyre isn’t that concerned with the secular multiversity. Inasmuch as he maintains his conviction that we live in a world of incommensurate and rival traditions, he isn’t offering Catholic ideas of faith and reason to the secular world. Instead, he is arguing that Catholics ought to take their heritage seriously and embolden and organize their universities in accordance with that heritage. Catholic universities will succeed to the degree they recognize their incommensurability and offer students (and their parents) and alternative to the cognitive mush that other schools serve up.
On this score, Catholics who take MacIntyre seriously have reason to be concerned. Catholic universities in particular and religious schools in general have done a poor job cherishing and working out of their rich heritages. I attended at Notre Dame last April MacIntyre’s 80th birthday celebration, which included a panel featuring MacIntyre and a few others discussing the meaning and purpose of the Catholic university. The most charitable word I can use to describe the presentation made by Notre Dame’s president, a trained philosopher no less, is “disconcerting.”
Having spent some time teaching at both state-based secular schools as well as religious private colleges (including The Catholic University of America), I can attest to the accuracy of MacIntyre’s claim that the secular model is a willful misunderstanding of what it means to be human, and thus necessarily involves omission, distortion, trivialization, and concealment in what is learned and what is taught, and that “in every case what has gone wrong will have resulted from some inability or refusal to understand human beings as directed toward God, both in their practical and their theoretical enquiries.” (179) Religious-based colleges and universities will be well-served and will be much better off if they remember this rather than attempting to ape their secular peers.
Related Posts
