"Opposition is true friendship." So wrote William Blake (most famous today as the man who penned the words for England's national song – "Jerusalem", naturally enough) in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Owen Barfield – lawyer, writer and friend of C S Lewis, who looked after, or tried to look after, the great man's financial affairs – used this epigram when dedicating his 1928 book Poetic Diction to his contemporary at Oxford.
Theirs was an unusual friendship. Lewis put his debt to Barfield on record by calling him the best of his unofficial teachers in his dedication to his 1936 Allegory of Love, while portraying him in his autobiography Surprised by Joy as a man "who disagrees with you about everything" and "has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one".
In his immensely enjoyable satirical romp Don Juan, Byron half seriously (was he ever entirely serious? like all the greatest wits, he was rarely purely flippant) seeks to justify the length of his poem by pointing out that opposition requires more words than flattery:
A modest hope – but modesty 's my forte,
And pride my feeble: – let us ramble on.
I meant to make this poem very short,
But now I can't tell where it may not run.
No doubt, if I had wish'd to pay my court
To critics, or to hail the setting sun
Of tyranny of all kinds, my concision
Were more; – but I was born for opposition.
Theirs was an unusual friendship. Lewis put his debt to Barfield on record by calling him the best of his unofficial teachers in his dedication to his 1936 Allegory of Love, while portraying him in his autobiography Surprised by Joy as a man "who disagrees with you about everything" and "has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one".
In his immensely enjoyable satirical romp Don Juan, Byron half seriously (was he ever entirely serious? like all the greatest wits, he was rarely purely flippant) seeks to justify the length of his poem by pointing out that opposition requires more words than flattery:
A modest hope – but modesty 's my forte,
And pride my feeble: – let us ramble on.
I meant to make this poem very short,
But now I can't tell where it may not run.
No doubt, if I had wish'd to pay my court
To critics, or to hail the setting sun
Of tyranny of all kinds, my concision
Were more; – but I was born for opposition.
(Canto 15, stanza XXII)
Opposition, or conflict, as he generally refers to it, is also a quality that Alasdair MacIntyre focuses on in After Virtue. He quotes fellow philosopher John Anderson as saying that we should not ask of a social institution "What end or purpose does it serve?" but rather "Of what conflicts is it the scene?", Anderson's insight being that "it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are". (163-4)
It is MacIntyre's contention that traditions, vital traditions, will embody conflict. He takes as an example an institution dear to his heart (he worked at enough of them) – the university:
"... when an institution is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be ... Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean*, it is always dying or dead." (222)
* Seen as an anti-rational, stale traditionalism that worships the past and seeks stability at the expense of human flourishing.
In a tantalising passage towards the end of After Virtue, MacIntyre appears to offer a re-evaluation of conflict; or at any rate to offer a scenario in which a type of conflict is depicted as its own worst enemy, allowing pluralism (and multiculturalism?) to render it invisible and thus, we may take it, impotent:
"... Marx was fundamentally right in seeing conflict and not consensus at the heart of modern social structure. It is not just that we live too much by a variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts." (253)
Opposition, or conflict, as he generally refers to it, is also a quality that Alasdair MacIntyre focuses on in After Virtue. He quotes fellow philosopher John Anderson as saying that we should not ask of a social institution "What end or purpose does it serve?" but rather "Of what conflicts is it the scene?", Anderson's insight being that "it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are". (163-4)
It is MacIntyre's contention that traditions, vital traditions, will embody conflict. He takes as an example an institution dear to his heart (he worked at enough of them) – the university:
"... when an institution is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be ... Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean*, it is always dying or dead." (222)
* Seen as an anti-rational, stale traditionalism that worships the past and seeks stability at the expense of human flourishing.
In a tantalising passage towards the end of After Virtue, MacIntyre appears to offer a re-evaluation of conflict; or at any rate to offer a scenario in which a type of conflict is depicted as its own worst enemy, allowing pluralism (and multiculturalism?) to render it invisible and thus, we may take it, impotent:
"... Marx was fundamentally right in seeing conflict and not consensus at the heart of modern social structure. It is not just that we live too much by a variety and multiplicity of fragmented concepts; it is that these are used at one and the same time to express rival and incompatible social ideals and policies and to furnish us with a pluralist political rhetoric whose function is to conceal the depth of our conflicts." (253)
4 comments:
I'm intrigued. Reading "After Virtue" now, "A Short History of Ethics" soon after that. Never having studied philosphy systematically there is a lot that I simply stumble across and now its MacIntyre's turn. Not unfamiliar with terms and concepts, having read the hell out of Kant many years ago plus some Hegel, some Marx.
Having always accepted the Enlightenment as "normal" it was a bit of a jolt to run into the extremely different view of the world once one just scratches the surface of both the very different mindset in China and one's own prejudices/biases. Oddly enough this makes one more open to MacIntyre than would be the case otherwise. Clearly that is a gross simplification of things.
You are probably familiar with it but there is a review of his "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" in an Islamic journal at
http://www.al-islam.org/al-tawhid/whosejustice/1.htm
The reviewer loves it.
Have you read Karl Popper on Hegel and Marx? Vol II of his Open Society and Its Enemies. Even better in my opinion is Vol I on Plato.
On the controversialist theme, CS Lewis liked to try and deny the Renaissance ever took place. (As a medievalist, he took the position that there was no clear division between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.)
Thanks for that link. Will check it anon.
I have read very little philosophy as such--the usual Aristotle and Plato plus the Germans I mentioned. Tried some more modern types--Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein but have never found the same sense of intellectual excitement that hit me when I first read "Critique of Practical Reason".
I wasn't reading it so much as philosophy as an end in itself but as a possible means in understanding/analyzing Shakespeare, poetry, etc.
Much of the "modern" German - and French - stuff is frankly unreadable. A good introduction to Popper - a terrific writer, especially when you consider English was his second language - is The Poverty of Historicism.
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