Saturday, February 11, 2006

  • review of
Deals and Ideals

James Daly has written a book of quite unusual interest and distinction, at once an original interpretation of some central strands in the history of Western thought and an incisive contribution to debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy. It is a deliberately contentious book, challenging some widely and deeply held preconceptions, and there are therefore those who will take him to be not just in error, but obviously in error. They will find materials to support their view in a number of bold and unqualified generalisations that Daly advances and in the brevity of his explanations of some of his key concepts. But, while it is true that some of his generalisations need qualification and some of his explanations need to be expanded, a critique that focused on these would badly miss the point.
The background to Daly's work is worth noting. I have to resist the temptation to think that Belfast is the centre of the world -- after all, nowhere is -- but it is, with Sarajevo, one of the best places for observing the world, not only because of its own conflicts, conflicts of a complexity that generally goes unnoticed, but also because of how, in their attitudes to those conflicts, the dominant powers of modernity reveal so much of themselves. Daly has been more than a mere observer of those attitudes and those conflicts. And the context of his academic life has been the Department of Scholastic philosophy in the Queen's University, a Department in which students and teachers have learned to a quite unusual extent what it is to engage in philosophy from a range of rival standpoints, from that of Aquinas and other mediaeval thinkers, certainly, but also from a variety of modern European perspectives. It is a milieu that makes it less surprising that it would otherwise be that one and the same philosopher should be committed to engage with Plato, with Aquinas, with Hegel, with Marx, and with Levinas. It is a milieu that partly explains why Daly's standpoint is so very different from that of the prevailing orthodoxies, both in the arenas of morals and politics and within academic philosophy.
Daly identifies what he calls "a transhistorical divide" (12) between two intellectual and moral traditions, each of which has its own ideal type of enlightenment. The protagonists of these rival traditions differ systematically in their understanding of value, of reason, of nature, and of freedom. They have in different periods employed different idioms, but the same fundamental opposition between the two can be identified in different periods.
The first of these two traditions is that exemplified by the eighteenth century Anglo-French Enlightenment. It counts Protagoras and other Sophists among its ancestors, and all those modern theorists who have reduced ideals to expressions of preference are its descendants. Counterposed to it is a line that runs from Socrates and Plato through Aristotle to Aquinas and beyond. Their most important modern heir is Marx. Following Daly, let us name these the materialist and the dialectical traditions. How are the key differences between them to be characterised?
The materialist tradition understands all value to be a matter of what happens to please or satisfy some individual or set of individuals and so all judgements of value are taken to be relative to the standpoint of some set of individuals. When individuals utter their judgement of value, they are in one form or another giving expression, often in disguised form, to their own particular attitudes of approval and disapproval, which can find no justification, so they believe, in how things are, in any set of facts about the workings of nature or of human nature. So this is a tradition generally committed to some version of Hume's thesis that "ought" conclusions cannot be derived from "is" premises.
The dialectical tradition, by contrast, understands human beings as directed by our nature towards the achievement of "our objective essential good," "our telos" (18), a good which is universal in that it is the good of all human beings. The achievement of that good requires the exercise of the cardinal virtues and conformity to the requirements of the natural law. To understand what human nature is, and the inclinations that belong to it essentially, is also to understand that it is directed towards such a good. What human beings ought to be follows from what they are and the is/ought dichotomy is a conceptual illusion, one that disguises the relationship of human nature to its good.
Closely related to these disagreements about value are disagreements about nature. For the materialist tradition nature is to be understood, following Galileo and Descartes, in mechanical determinist and sometimes reductionist terms. Human beings have through science and technology acquired the means "to dominate and direct a mechanical and quantifiable nature" (25). Nature so understood could not of course be a source of value and this way of understanding nature, just because it excludes Aristotelian essentialism in, makes those who embrace it unable to recognise the nature of the human intellect. That intellect is directed to its distinct good, truth: "knowing the truth is its function and its fulfilment" (34). By contrast on the dialectical view, nature is to be understood in terms of natural kinds and of the powers and inclinations natural to members of each species. In the "creative shaping of nature" (99) human needs are indeed met, but those needs include the need for truth and the need for beauty.
A further set of related disagreements concerns reason. For the materialist tradition practical reason is instrumental, calculative reason, a power that enables us to identify the most effective ways to satisfy our desires, while theoretical reason has as its goal a grasp of nature that can serve the same purpose. For the dialectical tradition reason has the task of discovering the place of human beings in a universe in which they can be satisfied only by the attainment of truth in understanding and of a good that is not only their own, but the good of every human being. Truth is not an instrumental good. "Dialectic" names the kind of reasoning that aims at achieving truth through overcoming the limitations and contradictions that it confronts at each stage in its development. Plato, Aquinas, and Marx are all in this sense dialectical thinkers.
What is at stake in the conflict between these two traditions becomes clear by comparing the attitudes that each warrants to the institutions of a technologically developing market society. For the materialist tradition technology is valued insofar as it emancipates us from the constraints imposed by nature, and the institutions of a market society are valued because they are thought to rid us of constraints upon achieving the satisfaction of our desires. The relationships through which individuals can achieve these ends are contractual and so the question of what norms should govern the making and fulfilling of contracts becomes a central preoccupation. The concern is with political and commercial deals rather than with ideals.
Yet this culture of deals and the economic structures that underlie it from the standpoint of the dialectical tradition are held to obstruct and to frustrate the potential of human beings for achieving their good, by alienating their labour, by disguising from them the realities of their social relationships, and by involving them in a system of unjust exchanges. The thinker who both enables us to understand this and who identifies what is needed to overcome these obstacles and frustrations is of course Marx. Readers of Daly's excellent Marx: Justice and Dialectic (London: Greenwich Exchange, 1996) will not be surprised by this portrait of Marx. Others may well be.
Three features of Daly's treatment of Marx are worth remarking. The first is his ascription to Marx of a conception of justice that informs all his major writings. Marx was not, on Daly's view, any kind of relativist. His accounts of class society presuppose a universal standpoint from which the inadequacies of conceptions of justice that express the standpoint of this or that dominant class can be evaluated. Secondly, Daly denies that Marx was a materialist. Here he could have drawn, although he does not, upon the compelling evidence provided by George L. Kline in " The Myth of Marx's Materialism" (Annals of Scholarship, vol. 3, no. 2, 1984) who demonstrates that "Marx himself neither developed nor defended a materialist ontology," something that was projected on to Marx's thought by Engels and Plekhanov.
Thirdly, Daly emphasises the Aristotelian elements in Marx's thought, following the pathbreaking work of Scott Meikle, especially in his Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Duckworth, 1985) and Aristotle's Economic Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), although Daly recognises, as does Meikle, that there are important respects in which Marx is certainly not an Aristotelian.
The portrait of Marx that emerges is a complex one. Daly sees him as both a severe critic of the Anglo-French Enlightenment -- his critique of Benthamism is highlighted -- but also as in various respects its heir. Nonetheless, Marx is most instructively read as a thinker who brought to nineteenth century debates concepts and standards that are at home within the moral and political philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas. And, on Daly's view, Marx's contribution to the dialectical tradition is of the first importance in confronting the contemporary defenders of the materialist tradition.
What divides these two traditions most notably in the present are their differing and incompatible conceptions of freedom. The core notion of freedom for the materialist tradition is that of negative freedom, of freedom as freedom from external constraint. Against this the dialectical tradition advances a notion of positive freedom and Daly provides his own account of what is needed in a much too short and compressed ten page outline. (Inside this thin book there is a fat book on freedom screaming to be let out.)
Some of Daly's key propositions are: that "[f]ree actions and their habitual patterns are... a structured response to a structured situation more or less truly and clearly perceived. Freedom arises from the ability to universalise, the ability to structure and restructure..." (101); that there are laws that hold of free human activity, but they are emergent from and not reducible to the laws of the natural sciences; that to be free is "to be the cause of one's actions under a definite description (i.e. intention)" (101); that one's actions to be free must be influenced by reasoning and be capable of being influenced by further reasoning; that free actions are exhibited in an agent's being empowered with others to control aspects of the environment; that to be free is to be free from the force of others' unreasonable wills.
Among the authors on whom Daly draws in constructing his account are Merleau-Ponty, Cassirer, Roy Bhaskar, and Kierkegaard. The reader of this review may well feel intolerably frustrated by the abbreviated account of my summary and the ten pages that Daly provides will still leave the reader frustrated, yet also, I hope, stimulated and excited. Far too much is left unargued, but what we have been given is a brilliantly suggestive programme for further philosophical work.
Finally, I have two questions to raise. The first concerns those passages in which Daly seems to allow that perhaps his narrative of the dialectical tradition has, or needs, some theological component. So he is unwilling to allow Levinas to define himself as wholly outside the tradition that Daly represents and he seems to denies that there is a polar opposition between Hebraic, that is, biblical thought, and the Greek thought which he acknowledges as originating the dialectical tradition. Moreover, he follows R.H.Tawney in taking a negative view of secularisation and of the subordination of the churches to the state in the sixteenth century. Yet everything that he says about religion is too brief and allusive and the word "spiritual", as Daly uses it, obscures rather than reveals Daly's point of view. We are left with ambiguity where we need clarity.
A second question arises from a paragraph on p.16 in which Daly asserts on the one hand that "[t]he two transhistorical rival claimants to the title of enlightenment are two wholly opposed views... of mind or reason," that "what will seem good reasons to Socrates will not seem good reasons to a Callicles," and that "[r]ationality requires a spiritual orientation," while on the other hand denying that what is presented is "a radical ungrounded decision between two incommensurable 'forms of life.' " Daly's all arguments however, and especially his most daring and controversial arguments, seem to appeal to standards and to make use of premises that are in very large part rejected by the adherents of the opposing view. So I ask: What more can Daly say that will persuade us that these two traditions do not represent incommensurable alternatives? Without an answer the argument of this excellent book is importantly incomplete.
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, University of Notre Dame.
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 75, Issue No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 629-33.


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