Critics of Rationalism: Contributors

Table of Contents

• Zoltan Balazs, "Rationalism and Irrationalism: Aurel Kolnai and Michael Oakeshott"
  
  Zoltan Balazs compares the moral thinking of the Hungarian philosopher and political theorist with that of Michael Oakeshott. Despite broad areas of agreement between the two -- both are, in some sense, conservative, and both are critical of the modern rationalist rejection of habit and custom -- Balazs finds that Kolnai provides something Oakeshott lacks: a robust, non-relativistic conception of the good, and a positive view of the role that a (non-rationalist) moral philosophy might provide in shoring up that conception.
• Nathanael Blake, "Between Rationalism and Relativism: Gadamer and MacIntyre on Truth and Finitude"
  
  Blake contends that the work of Gadamer and MacIntyre shows us how to avoid the complementary dangers of rigid moral certitude and spineless moral relativism. Both Gadamer and MacIntyre (who has drawn heavily on Gadamer in his own writing) argue that accepting the historically contingent nature of all of our moral reasoning does not imply that any old moral position is just as good as any other one. As Blake has it, "Presenting Enlightenment rationalism as the alternative to relativism is a false dichotomy... Rationality does not entail leaping outside of our historical existence, but develops within it."
  
  Both authors examined by Blake hold that tradition, far from being an obstacle to reason, is, in fact, its necessary ground: we can reason at all only by having become educated in a tradition that instructs us in how to do so. As Gadamer notes, pure inertia is never enough to sustain a tradition; instead, it must be "affirmed, embraced, cultivated," and the continuation of a tradition is every it as much a choice as is revolution against it.
  
  Furthermore, in moral reasoning the concrete is always more important than the abstract, or, as Blake writes, "Moral clarity arises from the realization that this is the right thing to do, here and now, in this particular circumstance."
  
  In the end, Blake finds MacIntyre's viewpoint more comprehensive than Gadamer's, in that the latter is dismissive of natural law theories of morality, while the former finds a place for them as the ground rules for any engagement in moral reasoning with others.
• Gene Callahan, "Hayek and Oakeshott on Rationalism"
  
  Callahan's central thesis is that, while Oakeshott's and Hayek's understanding of rationalism bear similarities, there are also important differences, differences that are, in the end, even more important than the similiarities. Furthermore, the differences are comprehensible when understood as arising from the two thinkers different philosophical outlooks: Hayek's emergent materialism and Oakeshott's idealism. Given his outlook, Hayek must understand rationalism as the attempt to handle, with reason, areas of human life that are inherently "nonrational." Oakeshott, on the other hand, conceives as rationalism as the attempt to apply abstract reason, and in particular scientific abstractions, to problems that can only be handled through practical reasoning.
• Colin Cordner, "The Diagnosis of Scientism: Eric Voegelin and Michael Polanyi on Science and Philosophy"
• David Corey, "Voegelin on Ideology"
• Timothy Fuller, "Oakeshott, Strauss and Voegelin on Hobbes"
  
  Strauss saw a fundamental continuity between Hobbes and the classical tradition of political philosophy in the following regard: "He pursued a philosophic understanding of politics which cannot be reduced merely to debate over policy preferences."
  
  Voegelin appreciated Hobbes's effort to dampen the fanaticism that the religious schisms of his time had produced. But he argued that Hobbes's attempt ultimately came up short, as questions of "ultimate meaning" cannot, in fact, be continually banished from politics, but will repeatedly arise in new political movements resisting the banishment of the sacred from political life.
  
  Oakeshott understood Hobbes as the first great thinker to seriously grapple with the modern condition of a polity composed of individuals with fundamentally divergent worldviews.
  
  Fuller concludes, "Oakeshott, Strauss and Voegelin, in setting out to do this each in his own way, attest to Hobbes’s significance by engaging him at the level of philosophic dialogue he invites."
• Grant Havers, "Wittgenstein and the Athens-Jerusalem Conflict"
  
  Grant Havers addresses the problem of the "two Wittgensteins": the young positivist who wrote the Tractatus, and the latter thinker who was skeptical about the power of abstract thought, and at times even seemed skeptical of the whole philosophical venture. Havers sets his examination of Wittgenstein in the context of the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem highlighted by Leo Strauss.
  
  In particular, Havers asked whether, by his later-life embrace of the "Jerusalem" side of the conflict with "Athens," Wittgenstein had not, in fact, abandoned philosophy completely in favor of faith. Havers seeks his answer chiefly in Wittgenstein's work Culture and Value, believing it "represents Wittgenstein's deepest reflections on the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem." In particular, Havers sees that work as containing Wittgenstein's "subtle defense of the ontological argument" for the existence of God. Havers believes that this argument, as understood by Wittgenstein, "helps us truly understand what is at stake in the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem."
  
  Havers provocatively suggests that Wittgenstein, in the end, finds the ontological argument to be one that shortcuts the dualism of religion versus philosophy, as it employs philosophical reasoning to demonstrate that God is not an empirical object that science could discover "out there" in the world, and that faith in God, once properly understood as an attitude towards life, is at least as "rational" as scientific materialism. And he goes on to suggest that true philosophy and genuine religious faith are actually allies, both opposed to "the idols of God and Man."
• Ferenc Hörcher, "Comparing Oakeshott's and MacIntyre's Concepts of Practical Knowledge"
• Kenneth McIntyre, "The Critique of Scientism: Ryle and Oakeshott on Tacit Knowledge"
  
  Kenneth McIntyre's paper examines the similar critiques of rationalism offered by Oakeshott and his English contemporary, Gilbert Ryle. Ryle's masterwork, The Concept of Mind, received a favorable review from Oakeshott, although he did criticize it for offering a somwhat shallow characterization of idealism. Neverthless, the reviewer clearly felt that Ryle's critique of contemporary doctrines of mind as a "ghost in the machine" were largely in agreement with his own work on rational conduct. Neither thinker thought that action could possibly come about as it should per the rationalist account: no one could "rationally," with an empty slate mind, simply think about some activity, prior to having engaged in it, and then go about it with mastery. Oakeshott's summary of Ryle (from his review) shows how close their ideas were:
  
  "In general [Ryle's] doctrine is that 'when we describe people is exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects: we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves.' Mental activity is not the activity of a 'mind,' or activity which takes place in the hidden recesses of a mind, in distinction from the activity of a body: it is doing and saying things in a particular manner."
  
  Neverthless, the two thinkers differed in some important ways. As McIntyre notes, Oakeshott had a much more robust conception of the "modes" in which thought might appear than did Ryle, who simply noted that we quite properly think about different areas of life employing different ways of proceeding. And the philosophical basis for Oakeshott's critique of rationalism is more explicit: it stems from his British Idealist roots. Ryle, a serious student of phenomenological philosophy, mentioned that his attack on the ghost in the machine might be understood as a work of phenomenology, but did not stress this connection, something that might be viewed as either a weakness or a strength in his approach, depending on one's view of the importance of philosophical grounding for an epistemology.
  
  Despite these differences, Oakeshott and Ryle can be seen as twin sons of different mothers, both working to undermine the same, prevalent misconception of the nature of the mental. As McIntyre sums it up:
  
  "The philosophical significance of Ryle's and Oakeshott's conclusions is quite far-reaching. The acceptance of the priority of tacit knowledge involves the rejection of philosophical accounts of morality, politics, and the law which reduce them to a set of rule-like statements and a similar rejection of the reductionist accounts of epistemology."
• Mark T. Mitchell, "Personal Participation: Michael Polanyi, Eric Voegelin, and the Indispensability of Faith"
  
  Mitchell compares the attitude of Eric Voegelin and Michael Polanyi to the problem of faith.
  
  As Mitchell puts it: "the epistemological solution encompassed in Polanyi's personal knowledge fits well with Voegelin’s insistence that we must recover an awareness of human participation in transcendent reality... the solutions offered by both provide useful supports for the other: Polanyi's theory of knowledge adds an important dimension to Voegelin, while Voegelin's insistence on openness to the transcendent makes explicit what Polanyi only occasionally intimates."
• John von Heyking, "Was Hayek a Rationalist?"
• Daniel Sportiello, "Rationalism in Voegelin."

Contributor Biographies

Zoltan Balazs, is Professor of Political Science, Corvinus University of Budapest and Senior Research Fellow of the Center of Social Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His latest book is The Principle of the Separation of Powers: A Defense, by Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

Nathanael Blake has a PhD in political theory from the Catholic University of America. He lives in Missouri with his wife and a small pack of dogs.

Gene Callahan has a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Cardiff University, and is the author of Economics for Real People, Oakeshott on Rome and America, and hundreds of articles and papers in both popular and scholarly outlets.

Colin Cordner completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) in 2016, where he is an instructor and occasional poet. His recent research focuses upon the works of Plato, Michael Polanyi, and Eric Voegelin on scientism qua sophism, and on the spiritual crises and political disorders which such movements have helped engender. In his other lives, he is also quite focused upon pondering anamnesis as a meditative practice and its relationship with education, science, and philosophy.

David Corey is Professor of Political Science in the Honors Program and Department of Political Science at Baylor University. He is the author of The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (SUNY Press, 2015) and (with J. Daryl Charles) of The Just War Tradition (ISI Books, 2012).

Timothy Fuller is Professor of Political Science at Colorado College. Most recently he has edited a collection of essays, Machiavelli's Legacy: The Prince After 500 Years (UPenn Press 2016) and On Liberty and Its Enemies, Essays of Kenneth Minogue (Encounter Books 2017).

Grant Havers is Chair of the Department of Philosophy (with a cross-appointment in the Department of Political Studies) at Trinity Western University. He has published and lectured widely on political philosophy. His most recent book is Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique (Northern Illinois University Press, 2013).

Ferenc Hörcher is a political philosopher, historian of political thought and philosopher of art. He studied in Budapest, Oxford and Brussels-Leuven. He is professor of Philosophy at Pázmány Péter Catholic University and director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Science. He also taught at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków and the Babes-Bólyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár). He researched in Göttingen, Wassenaar, Cambridge, Edinburgh and at Notre Dame University,USA. His last book-length publication is an English-Hungarian bilingual volume entitled Of the Usefulness of the Humanities (L'Harmattan, 2014).

Kenneth B. McIntyre is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. He is the author of The Limits of Political Theory: Oakeshott’s Philosophy of Civil Association and Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics.

Mark T. Mitchell is Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of The Politics of Gratitude: Scale, Place and Community in a Global Age and Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing and co-editor of The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics: The Modest Republic and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto (forthcoming). He is the co-founder of Front Porch Republic and in 2008-9 he was a fellow at the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

John von Heyking is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge, where he teaches political philosophy and religion and politics. He is author of The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (2016) and Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001). He has coedited numerous volumes including two volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin and, most recently, Hunting and Weaving, Empiricism and Political Philosophy (2013). He has published scholarly articles on topics including friendship, cosmopolitanism, liberal education, empire, Islamic political thought, punishment, and religious liberty in Canada. His editorials have appeared in the Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, C2C: Canada's Journal of Ideas, Troy Media, and Convivium. His forthcoming book,"Comprehensive Judgment" and "Absolute Selflessness": Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship, will be published fall 2017.

Daniel Edward Young is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern College (Iowa). He is a political theorist with research interests in contemporary political thought, the political theory of international relations, and the intersection of theology and political theory. He has authored a number of articles, book chapters, book reviews, and conference presentations.