By Thaddeus Kozinski, September 21, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
In Part I, I introduced a line of thinking that rejected Enlightenment-variety philosophical certainty in favor of MacIntyre's contextualized rationality. Now, the reader might be thinking that all this sounds suspiciously like a warmed over version of theological, philosophical, and cultural relativism. If we cannot know absolute truth in an absolute manner, what is the use of philosophizing anyway?
To reiterate, it is not that human beings cannot recognize and possess absolute and universal truth about God, the world, and man, but only that the mode or condition of such knowledge is ineluctably relative, particular, and partial, for we are historical and social, as well as rational and spiritual beings. We are tradition-transcending in virtue of our spirit, yet we are tradition-bound in virtue of our body, and our body and spirit are inextricably integrated and unified in one knowing person.
What does all this have to do with the good philosopher? It is in recognizing and embracing the tradition-constituted situation of the human person in relation to reality, in the relative absoluteness of truth, and in the inevitable partialness of our perspective that the philosopher can become a good philosopher. Although any Christian philosopher is in his rights to claim absolute and universal truth for any of his particular ideas and beliefs, by recognizing the tradition-constituted and tradition-bound character of these ideas and beliefs, he can no longer do so without referring to the particular tradition of rationality within which these ideas and beliefs reside and are derived, a tradition inevitably relative, particular, and partial because embodied historically in a particular place and time.
As soon as one’s tradition is acknowledged and brought out into the open, as it were, the ideas and beliefs he considers absolutely and universally true would become, in a subjective sense, non-absolute and non-universal. In other words, his ideas and beliefs would be rendered debatable and dubitable ideas and beliefs because now seen to derive from and find their intelligibility and justification in a historically particular and culturally relative tradition. Such ideas and beliefs, of course, might eventually and justifiably be judged absolutely and universally true, but at least they would have attained this status through a philosophically sound process and with the kind of humble and Socratic epistemological attitude appropriate for tradition-bound, dependent rational animals.
If we were to see the tradition-constituted nature of our ideas and beliefs, our hold on our particular picture of God, the world, and man would become weaker, but in a good sense, because now prompted by and characterized by intellectual humility. We would become more willing to let it go, perhaps just for a moment, in order to allow public inquiry about it. We would become very interested, perhaps for the first time, in knowing whether those from whom we inherited this picture of the universe were indeed trustworthy benefactors, whether the picture with which we have been interpreting reality for decades were indeed true. We would now be able to take a step back from our mind, as it were, without the fear that in doing so we would be embracing relativism or historicism and being disloyal to the Truth. We would then be in a better position to allow grace to convert us more fully to the Truth we love and for which we are committed to search.
Paradoxically, then, in becoming a "temporary relativist" with respect to the genealogy of our own ideas and beliefs, we enable these ideas and beliefs to become truly absolute with respect to their truth. For, if we only embrace the absolute absoluteness of truth, it seems philosophical suicide to do anything that might render our ideas and beliefs vulnerable to refutation; thus, we avoid those dialectically vulnerable discussions and arguments that might reveal to us any errors in those beliefs. On the other hand, if we embrace only the absolute relativity of truth, it appears pointless to even search for the truth at all. But as MacIntyre tells us, "It is only insofar as someone satisfies the conditions for rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical refutation that that person can come to know whether and what he or she knows."
