Chapter 7

Between Example and Doctrine

THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER invited Hauerwas to put an end to the controversy over his alleged sectarianism by giving up his antiliberal polemic and recasting his social criticism in somewhat different terms. I am not encouraging him to be less vehement or less theological in denouncing evil and vice. He is surely right in saying that American society has a lot to answer for given its conduct over the last several decades. And if he spoke less theologically, he wouldn’t be Hauerwas. My hope is that he will do much in the future to clarify the wrongs we have committed and the flaws in our character as a people. But there seems little chance of achieving this promise if he continues to lean as heavily on MacIntyre’s traditionalism as he has done over the last two decades. In the first two sections of the present chapter, I want to consider what has become of his early contrast between an ethics concerned with systematizing our intuitions about moral quandaries and an ethics of character centered in narratives about exemplary lives. In the final section, I will bring the argument of part 2 full circle by discussing the relationship between Hauerwas’s views and those of political theorist Seyla Benhabib.

THE ETHICS OF EXAMPLE

Hauerwas’s complaints about quandary ethics attempt to make room within ethical discourse for consideration of a person not as a locus of dignity or as a bearer of rights but as this particular human being, in all of his or her individuality. When ethical judgment is conceived simply as an attempt to subsume cases under principles, human beings can appear in ethical discourse only in relatively abstract and generalized terms. The project of subsumption requires thin description of selves and cases. In The Peaceable Kingdom, Hauerwas argues that an ethics of character need not do away with casuistry altogether, but that it does need to concern itself with better, richer examples than those upon which quandary ethics has focused. The narratives we reflect on critically need to be detailed enough in their description of situations and of the people involved in them to allow concrete traits of character, life histories, projects, and needs to come into view.

On this much Hauerwas and I are agreed. But when Hauerwas connects this thesis with MacIntyre’s story about modern ethical discourse, something goes seriously wrong. Like MacIntyre, Hauerwas thinks that the secular philosophical quest for rationally justified, highly general moral principles—the kind under which any rational agent could subsume examples—has failed. He also accepts the conclusion that MacIntyre infers from this premise, that modern ethical discourse as such is indefensible. This inference assumes, however, that the theoretical defenses of modern ethical discourse put forward by the ethical theorist are at least expressively accurate, that the ethical theorists adequately reflect the ethical discourse of the age. I want to suggest another possibility—that the ethical theorists have drastically oversimplified what modern ethical discourse has been like.

Consider that many ordinary people find the austere and often technical language of ethical theory ridiculous, pretentious, or unintelligible. They often take offense at having their thoughts recast in theoretical terms as “deontological” or “consequentialist.” Most people show no interest in having the benefits of ethical theory conferred upon them. They find many of the imaginary cases discussed by theorists to be absurd. More people seek their moral edification from poems, novels, essays, plays, and sermons than from moral treatises or philosophical articles. I take it that these facts are not really in dispute. Every college professor who teaches a “moral problems” course in the standard way is familiar with them. The temptation of the ethical theorist is to dismiss these responses to quandary ethics as signs of antiphilosophical, or anti-intellectual, prejudice. Prejudicial they may sometimes be, but they also show that ethicists are often moving against the grain of the attitudes and language they purport to analyze. I think they should give an ethical theorist pause. If it is the business of ethical theory to reflect critically on ethical discourse, and resistance to systematic theorizing is a recurring theme in modern ethical discourse, as it surely is, then ethical theory needs to take such resistance seriously.

When we turn to the written evidence, it becomes clear that there are patterns of reasoned suspicion here, not merely unthinking reactions. Some modern writers explicitly criticize ethical theory. There are parodies and satires of it, as well as straightforward arguments for avoiding it. There are also immanent critiques, which stand within theoretical constructions in order to undermine them. More numerous, perhaps, are the writers who, though familiar with ethical theory, self-consciously eschew it. Sometimes they leave their reasons for doing so unstated, but sometimes the reasons are stated as clearly as can be. There are at least three standard complaints that have been brought against systematic ethics repeatedly in the modern period. The first is that it represents a dangerously disruptive operation of power, in which intellectuals as a class assert privileged claims for themselves, as arbiters of universal reason, against the traditions and customs essential to the order and well-being of an established community. The second is that it is a misguided flight from the practical demands of the struggle against evil and injustice. The third is that it represents a temptation to engage in presumptuously dogmatic and excessively abstract thought.

In fact, all three of these complaints can often be paired with a specific discursive alternative to the theoretical style of quandary ethics. Edmund Burke, who directed the first complaint against the philosophers of the French Revolution, favored traditionalist narratives of declension, nostalgic appeals to hierarchical order, and sudden flashes of sublime poetic imagery. Gerrard Winstanley, who directed the second against contemplative university ministers, adopted a prophetic stance, claimed the divine inspiration of a “power within,” and employed the iconoclastic invective of the Puritan jeremiad to move his Digger readers to action. Michel de Montaigne, who directed the third against every variety of moral philosophy and theology known to him, invented the modern essay, with its conversational diction, its preference for particulars, and its questioning, independent, author.

These examples are suggestive because each of them stands at the head of a modern tradition in which distinctive ways of thinking, talking, and writing about ethical topics have been kept alive for many generations. Not everyone who contributes to these traditions repeats or endorses the original complaint about ethical theory. For example, some latter-day Burkeans try to combine a formalist ethical theory centered on the concept of natural law with other elements of Burke’s rhetoric. But each of these traditions continues to breed doubts about ethical theory by keeping old complaints in circulation and occasionally updating them or adding to them. More to the point, each of these traditions inculcates and exhibits patterns of ethical reasoning that differ significantly from those usually studied within ethical theory.

Let us reflect for a moment on the tradition of Montaigne. His descendants in Britain include essayists like William Hazlitt, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf. His American heirs include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Adrienne Rich. Together, these writers have done much to define for their respective political cultures what it means to have a moral imagination. Most of them have their prophetic moments, writing as if they were addressing the wayward people in ecstatic furor, but they usually prefer to address their readers as Montaigne addressed his—namely, as individuals. They model their essays on conversation and eschew all claims to privileged standing. They are not addressing a congregation from a pulpit. Nor are they theorizing systematically about ethical topics in the sense that Kant and Sidgwick are. They may take pride in being principled, like Hazlitt and Orwell, but they are not trying to arrange principles and intuitions into a set order. Neither are they endeavoring to give a complete account of the meaning, justification, or truth of their principles. They are not interested in closure. They are simply thinking something through, in light of experience and in the expectation that someone will answer back. They write in a style that invites the respondent to respond. All of them favor the essay over the treatise or the academic article. Some experiment with historiography, the novel, and iconoclastic invective. The essay is not the only mode in which they choose to discourse on ethical topics. But it is surely one of them, and its resources for resisting quandary ethics and the discourse of ethical theorists are ample.

Essays in this tradition aspire neither to system nor to story, though they often assess systems and tell stories in the course of their work. The essay inserts itself discretely between story and system, between the particular event and the general idea—in Robert Musil’s words, “between example and doctrine.”¹ For the systematic philosopher, as we have seen, the example becomes a case, something to be subsumed under a general law. Montaigne, however, often begins with examples, without being sure what they exemplify, and then invites readers into a movement of critical thought. He traces and retraces paths between abstract ideas and anecdotal details without seeking either doctrinal or narrative closure. The outcome of an essay, again in Musil’s words, is neither a system nor a story but “rather the unique and unalterable form assumed by [an individual’s] inner life in a decisive thought” (MWQ, 273). In contrast, here is what Musil has to say about the habits of mind displayed in the systematic style of philosophical theory: “Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought” (MWQ, 272). Musil counts it a good sign of the times that “epochs of progressive civilization and democracy fail to bring forth a convincing philosophy.” I take him to mean that the ethical life of democracy is too fluid and dialogical to be locked up in a formalistic system.

Montaigne was no democrat. Nor were most of the writers in Hume’s generation who held up Montaigne and Seneca as models for emulation. But it did not take long before essayists, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, began to write for, and expand, the public that came into existence to read Tom Paine’s prophetic tracts and William Cobbett’s Political Register. In the meantime, the essayistic discipline of thinking for oneself “between example and doctrine,” and of addressing readers of all classes as individuals capable of thinking for themselves and of answering back, has, I believe, contributed much to the development of democratic spiritual and ethical aspirations. Hazlitt and Orwell claimed that the conversational style of the familiar essay is the form of writing best suited to democratic thinking and the one most likely to create and sustain an audience disposed to democracy and suspicious of violence and privilege. Reading any good collection of modern essays should suffice to dispel the impression that traditional ethical topics, like character and the virtues, have been entirely eclipsed by talk of rights and utility in the modern period. There is a massive modern democratic literature on character and the virtues awaiting exploration outside of the philosophical canon. The essayists write character sketches, character typology in the style of Theophrastus, and advisory epistles to the young. They meditate on how to characterize groups in relation to supposedly representative traits or individuals. Each of these subgenres has its distinctive ways of relating abstractions to narratives and descriptive details.

Hauerwas has written many essays; nearly all of his books are anthologies of them. But he uses the genre to propose that Christian ethics should give pride of place to the genre that Peter Brown, the classical historian, has termed the classic life. Brown writes as follows:

The Greco-Roman world, in which the saints later appeared, was a civilization of paideia in the same way as our own is a civilization of advanced technology. It invariably tended to opt for the necessary self-delusion that all its major problems could be both articulated and resolved in terms of its one major resource—in this case, by the paradigmatic behavior of elites groomed by a paideia in which the role of ancient exemplars was overwhelming. The tendency to see exemplary persons as classics was reinforced by the intensely personal manner in which the culture of paideia was passed on from generation to generation. Intensive male bonding lay at the heart of the “Civilization of Paideia.”²

The goal of the education was to mold oneself into the form of true excellence. The medium of the education was direct exposure to an exemplar, the teacher, who would also place before you ancient and accepted models of eloquent speech, straight thinking, and virtuous living. Judaism and Christianity introduced their own distinctive emphases into this mode of moral education, not the least of which was the latter tradition’s conviction that the canonical Gospels reveal the character of the living God. For Christians, Jesus Christ, the exemplum par excellence, not only exemplifies virtue perfectly for his disciples, but also personifies divinity.

In The Peaceable Kingdom, Hauerwas prescribes exactly the kind of moral education that Brown associates with the culture of ethical aristocracy surrounding the cult of the saints. What Christians require, to be a faithful people, are “examples of people whose lives have been formed” by the memory of their community. “The authority of Scripture is mediated through the lives of the saints identified by our community as most nearly representing what we are about. Put more strongly, to know what Scripture means, finally, we must look to those who have most nearly learned to exemplify its demands through their lives.” By what criterion do we know them? It is not, Hauerwas says, “so much like a principle as it is like a story that the saints’ lives exhibit. Through the lives of the saints we begin to understand how the images of Scripture are best balanced so that we might tell and live the ongoing story of God’s unceasing purpose to bring the world to the peace of the Kingdom” (PK, 70–71).

More recently, in Resident Aliens, Hauerwas and his coauthor William Willimon introduce the concept of sainthood by saying that “a primary way of learning to be disciples is by being in contact with others who are disciples. So an essential role of the church is to put us in contact with those ethical aristocrats who are good at living the Christian faith.” Christian ethics takes the “antidemocratic,” Aristotelian view that there are “ethical aristocrats” and that the only way to become virtuous is to follow their example by becoming, as it were, their “apprentices.” Saints are the “significant examples,” the “ethical aristocrats,” of Christian faith. “Epistemologically, there is no substitute for ‘saints’—palpable, personal examples of the Christian faith—because … we cannot know the Kingdom unless our eyes are opened to see it.”³

I agree with Hauerwas’s claim that an ethical aristocracy is essential to the maintenance of a virtuous community, assuming that “aristocracy” is here being used metaphorically. But in that case, the claim is hardly antidemocratic—not, at any rate, if Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau qualify as paradigmatic democratic thinkers. Democracy, in their view, is not an attempt to level qualitative distinctions in the various domains of human life. They all believed that the excellence of “representative” individuals raises them above the mediocre mean, and confers on them a high vocation of awakening others to virtue.

Say, if you like, that these exemplars constitute an aristocracy. But surely Hauerwas does not suppose that they are to be found in a particular social class or that their spiritual gifts can be correlated with the titles, ranks, or offices of some existing institution, ecclesial or secular. The Bible says that such gifts might be found in any human being among us—old or young, male or female, free or enslaved (Joel 2:27–28, Acts 2:17–18). No idea is more central to modern democracy—or to “liberalism” in the best sense of the term—than this one. It is because Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau were suspicious of institutional arrangements that might prevent inspirited speech or true prophecy from being heard that they affirmed the democratic ideal of equal voice. In doing so, they were carrying forward a substantive spiritual concern that informed both the conciliar movement of fourteenth-century Catholicism and the Protestant radicalism of the English Civil War.⁴ The ideal justifies equal access to public discussion. Its motivating premise is that society must take care not to block the expression of thoughts that might prove to be inspired. It is therefore at odds with the silly notion that all speech will be equal in value. If there were no significant qualitative distinctions among the contributions that people make to public life, there would be no need to hear from or examine more than a few. Everyone knows that free speech increases the volume of mediocre ethical discourse—in both senses of “volume.” But this is the price we pay for democracy, not the reason we pay it.

If Hauerwas wishes to prosecute the case against modern democratic thinkers on theological grounds, the most plausible charge would be that of the Montanist heresy. Full-fledged Emersonians (like myself) resemble the Montanists theologically because we question the authority of the established church to decide the difference between truly inspired speech and false prophecy. This does mark a crucial departure from theological orthodoxy—while nonetheless putting me in remarkably close proximity to Barth. But anti-Montanist Christians can still consistently embrace the proposed rationale for insisting that public discussion be open to all voices, for this rationale is the common link between Emersonian dissent and the varieties of Christian orthodoxy that shaped the outlook of the framers of the Constitution. The rationale pertains to who gets to speak, not to who has the ultimate authority to judge some speech truly inspired. Freedom of speech, like freedom of religion, rests on a crucial point of spiritual concord between the forms of Protestantism that influenced Madison and the unchurched forms of Emersonian heterodoxy that emerged several decades later. Subsequently, most American Jews embraced this consensus. John Courtney Murray drew many Catholics into the consensus in the 1950s, and the Second Vatican Council ratified his theological reasoning a few years later. Some Muslims are now in the process of joining in, for theological reasons of their own. Hauerwas is the most important theologian to challenge this expanding democratic consensus in many years. I am questioning whether he has a clear notion of what he is opposing when he inveighs against “democracy.”

SIGNIFICANT EXAMPLES IN MODERN LIFE

The Gospels and lives of the saints are the primary genres of Christian ethical discourse, as Hauerwas would have us conceive it. They both traffic in “significant examples”—examples of divinity, holiness, love, faith, forgiveness, nonviolence, examples for a disciple to follow. When Hauerwas defends an ethos of exemplary lives, he is offering it explicitly as an alternative to modern ethical discourse, which he declares bankrupt. But when he refers elsewhere to the novel as another narrative genre we should treasure as “a school of virtue,” he shows no awareness that he is praising a feature of modern culture.⁵ He reads modern novels and mines their ethical significance, yet they do not appear in his account of modernity. He writes essays and cultivates an authorial persona reminiscent of Cobbett and Chesterton, yet the tradition of modern essayists has no place in the historical narrative he borrows from MacIntyre. Nor does he ask what the historical relationship among these genres might be.

John Lyons’s Exemplum, a fascinating and learned study of the trope of example in early modern France and Italy, calls attention to a transition from characteristically medieval ethical genres, like the morality play, the novella, and the fable, to such works as the Heptameron and Montaigne’s essays:

The writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reacted to the changed horizon of belief by attempting to connect general statement with specific and purportedly convincing instances, calling attention to this gesture with frequent use of the term example. For many writers the rhetoric of example became less an illustrative technique, through which a general statement would be impressed upon an audience, than a process of discovery, in which the tension between instance and general statement forced modifications in that statement.⁶

As Lyons makes evident, example was a prominent topic for reflection in these centuries precisely because the relationship between examples and abstractions was becoming increasingly problematical.

I see the increasing tension between example and general statement as deeply indebted to two desires expressed repeatedly in Renaissance humanism. The first of these is the desire to take advantage of newly available scholarly means for learning more about the actual human beings whose lives have been heralded as exemplary. The second is the desire to employ newly fashioned literary means for rendering human character more fully in dramatic and narrative forms. Both of these desires are wholly in keeping with Hauerwas’s complaints about the use of examples in quandary ethics. But the more attention the humanists gave to the narrative or dramatic details of putatively exemplary lives, the more trouble they had relating them to the virtues and general truths the lives were supposed to exemplify. When the amount of detailed information about an individual’s character and situation contained in a story is drastically increased, it becomes harder to know what the story should be taken to exemplify. The now-richly described life or episode becomes more ambiguously related to the general ideas or abstractions it might otherwise have been taken to exemplify straightforwardly.

Lyons refers to the problem of excess that Renaissance authors identified in literary representation of exemplarity:

Example is excessive because any element of historical reality and even any fiction adduced to support a generalization will have characteristics that exceed what can be covered by the generalization. … To make an example of an object is to account for only one limited aspect of that object. … [R]ecall that the example is a dependent statement drawing its meaning from the controlling generality. As the dependent statements grow into complex narratives, however, the number of other concepts that can be illustrated by the narrative begins to threaten the control of the generality. The dependent statement may bring details that cast an entirely new light on the apparently simple generality being illustrated, or both writer and reader may be carried away by the richness of the concrete instance to the neglect of the concept to be illustrated. (Exemplum, 34)

The humanists wanted thick descriptions of the people their mentors taught them to admire. The thicker the descriptions became, however, the more ethically complicated they seemed. This is, clearly enough, the same logic Hauerwas and Burrell used to disrupt the systematic ambitions of ethical theory back in 1977. They proposed replacing the thin descriptions of a quandarist’s cases by enriched narrative depiction of character and circumstance. The rhetoric of detail in the thicker descriptions makes it harder for a thinker to take them as exemplifying something. The pragmatic significance of the example, as an inferential link between the particular and the general, becomes unclear.

To put this point somewhat more philosophically, enriching descriptive detail in one’s rendering of an example is a matter of adding assertions, and thus new commitments, to the ones already involved in the original rendering. But new commitments at the level of detailed description can have the effect of diminishing one’s entitlement to the general conclusion licensed by the example in its original form. The reason for this is that the inferential license granted in practice by the original version of the example is defeasible. The license expires if new commitments undermine its authority. The general assertion that had been licensed by the old version of the example turns out to be incompatible with the new version. What, then, shall we do with the general assertion? Reject it? Qualify it? Restrict its scope? Or should we turn back to the example itself and modify the set of assertions that constitute its descriptive content? To ask these questions is to stand, as it were, between the commitments embodied in assertion of the example and the commitments embodied in the general assertion, reflecting on each.⁷ It is, in Musil’s terms, to stand “between example and doctrine.” My historical claim is that certain genres of ethical discourse that arose in the early-modern period were designed to enable the pursuit of such questions. These genres turned out to be highly valued by the citizens of modern democracies.

An early-modern thinker once wrote an essay in which he qualified his admiration for his beloved Socrates. He did this because Socrates’s virtues, as real as they may be, are not the whole story of a life that also includes obedience to the voice of a daimonion. The essayist was responding to the problem of excess created by the fullness of his knowledge of Socrates from both Platonic and non-Platonic sources. Another author, working in another genre, might create a similar tension between exemplifier and exemplified by enriching the depiction of characters from a medieval play to the point that the heroes and villains alike become mixtures of vice and virtue. Yet another might transform the narrative of a novella by making the central characters seem more like living, breathing human beings and less like stick figures clothed in a didactic label. Such were the means by which the culture of paideia became the culture of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Marguerite de Navarre.

When Hauerwas and Burrell wrote in 1977 that they preferred a story “that does not issue in a determinate moral,” they were unwittingly expressing a sentiment that did much, in the early-modern period, to shape the distinctively modern genres in which we still conduct much of our ethical discourse. But when this sentiment became part of the ethical life of modern societies, it did much to disturb the culture of paideia that Hauerwas now hopes to revive. We may desire perfectly clear distinctions between good and evil and equally clear exemplifications of each—explifications of virtue to emulate or admire and exemplifications of vice to denounce or reject. But the essay, the Shakespearean play, and the novel represent forms of moral inquiry that constantly frustrate the desire for characters that straightforwardly personify abstractions, just as they frustrate the desire for stories that straightforwardly illustrate morals. Instead, these genres explore a world in which things are too complicated, morally speaking, for the culture of paideia to be sustained, at least in its original form.

The Gospels say to their readers: “Attend to the life of Jesus offered here and you will know the character of the living God.” Lives of the saints say to their readers: “In this story you will find a genuine personification of holiness.” Every classic life says to its audience: “In the life of this person lies a true exemplification of good character or virtue.” All of these genres can have their own rhetorical complications, and specific narrative reconstructions of the lives of figures of virtue can prove much more complicated on analysis than a reader initially takes them to be.⁸ But in none of these genres should we be surprised to discover a rhetoric of thin description, for that is the standard way for an author to keep the problem of excess under sufficient control to establish the desired relationship of exemplification. In contrast, as Milan Kundera writes, “Every novel says to the reader: ‘Things are not as simple as you think.’ ”⁹ That, I believe, is what Montaigne’s essays and Shakespeare’s plays are saying as well.

In this chapter, I have discussed Hauerwas’s complaints about how examples are handled in modern ethical theory. I have also discussed his endorsement of an ethics of character, which turns out to be an ethics of discipleship centered on exemplary lives. One reason for juxtaposing these two sets of claims about the ethical uses of example is to notice a tension between them. The same formal characteristic that Hauerwas finds troublesome in the way ethical theorists write about cases also turns up in official retelling of lives of the saints and in Hauerwas’s thinned-out versions of the Gospels. It happens, moreover, to be one of the main things that made the topic of example a major theme of Renaissance humanism—a theme of great concern to early-modern writers who helped create a moral culture in which novels, plays, and essays became prominent modes of ethical discourse. To recognize this, however, is to see that modern democratic culture contains resources of its own for resisting what the ethical theorists typically do with examples. Hauerwas’s critique of formalist ethical theory, far from lending support to his account of modern ethical discourse, actually helps one see how little historical warrant there is for that account’s assumptions about what modern ethical discourse has been like.

It is not my purpose to make essayists, novelists, and dramatists in general the heroes of modernity. I am simply trying to begin coming to terms honestly with the broader ethical culture they have helped create—a culture that neither formalist ethical theory nor the new traditionalism has bothered to study in its complexity. On the one hand, ours is a culture in which many people look upon ethical theory and the forms of ethical discourse it reflects as laughable or despicable or at least questionable enterprises. On the other hand, it is not any longer a culture in which moral education consists wholly in modeling oneself on a classic life. Modeling remains a crucial aspect of an individual’s moral development. We still become who we are largely by responding to models. But we do not generally suppose that our moral education requires the kind of docile relation to models that Brown finds among the Greco-Roman elites. Emerson’s famous dictum in “Self-Reliance,” that “imitation is suicide,” is a hyperbole.¹⁰ Wise democrats know how to use Emersonian tonic in the way that it was intended to be used—as compensation for the excesses of paideia. It is effective spiritual medicine for any model-emulator, any disciple, of whom it can truly be said, “If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.”¹¹

It is true that exemplary figures—saints, prophets, and other gifted spirits—are essential to education in virtue. Emersonian perfectionism insists on this truth no less than does Hauerwas’s updated Wesleyan perfectionism. Emulation of excellence is an indispensable aspect of becoming excellent in one’s own person. But emulation can easily become a form of slavish idolatry, in which we are dazzled and bound by the person we admire. We must therefore take care to emulate also the excellence of self-trust, which consists in freedom from such subservience. We struggle with our exemplars, so as to avoid being overwhelmed by them—as they were not in the long run overwhelmed by their exemplars, if they were truly worthy of our admiration in the first place. Those most worthy of emulation, according to Emerson’s “Uses of Great Men,” are those whose “genius seeks to defend us from itself.”¹² No mere underling has fully succeeded in emulating genuine excellence. This is Emerson’s democratic addition to the ethics of example.

In the days of my adolescent sublime, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the hero of my humanitarian cause, and Jesus was one of three personifications of my loving divinity. Nowadays things have become more complicated, because I have come to know more about these figures of virtue than their hagiographers and publicists wanted me to know. Now that I am less innocent of the complexities, I am no less moved by love and justice, no less cognizant of the place such traits have in a virtuous character, and no less able to put these concepts to work discursively than I used to be. King and Jesus remain persons of ethical interest, as before. I still spend much of my time thinking about them. Love and justice remain virtues, as well; but now the relation between the persons and the virtues is more complicated. It requires a different, less doctrinal, more improvisational kind of explication. To the extent that King and Jesus exemplify virtues in my imaginative life, they now do so imperfectly and defeasibly. I therefore need an open-ended way to think the relation through: as it were, from both sides at once. Neither doctrine, nor principle, nor system, nor overarching plot, knowable in advance, constrains the course of the thinking. Between example and doctrine, with Montaigne and Musil, is where most of us now stand. We all have our examples, after all, and we all make something of them sooner of later. We do not, however, make the same thing of them. Neither do they make the same thing of us.

THE CRITICAL THEORIST AND HER OTHER

Some readers will have found my description of Hauerwas’s early critique of quandary ethics strangely reminiscent of arguments put forward independently by Seyla Benhabib. In this section, I want to consider the very different theoretical context in which Benhabib makes her Hauerwasian points. For Benhabib is not a theologian but a political theorist, and her primary concern is the ethics of democratic discussion. Brief consideration of her views will bring us back into the general vicinity of Rawls and Rorty, and help us frame the issues to be addressed in part 3.

When Benhabib refers, on the first page of Situating the Self, to the “fractured spirit of our times,” she sets the tone of her book with a theme that has had remarkable longevity in modern thought.¹³ Its roots can be traced back to the Romantic transformation of biblical prophecy into a secular vocation of social criticism. As the Romantics saw it, the critical task was to decipher the signs of the times in the hope of discerning the crisis or break from the past that defines both our present situation and the nature of the decisions modern individuals face as selves thus situated. The break from the past appeared in this sublime light as a result of the breakup or breakdown of an old spiritual coherence or as a rupture brought about when a new spirit breaks into history. The remarkable thing is how this cluster of Romantic ideas survived the passing of Romanticism. The imagery of fragmentation, fracture, and ruin and the concepts of critique, modernity, and crisis have been commonplaces in the rhetoric of social criticism ever since. One finds them in Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche; in turn-of-the-century debates over nihilism and historicism; in Pound and Eliot; in Heidegger, MacIntyre, and West; in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School; in the clichés of modern journalism.

Benhabib inherits this cluster of ideas from her predecessors in the Frankfurt School. In her first book, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, she reconstructed the dialectical progression of this tradition by showing how and why such concepts as critique, modernity, and crisis changed as they passed from Hegel, to Marx, to Horkheimer and Adorno, and finally to Habermas.¹⁴ As the argument moves from one thinker to another, subjecting each to rigorous questioning, it develops considerable momentum. It carries us initially to the claim that communicative interaction should serve as critical theory’s model for social action, but ultimately beyond the elaborate framework in which Habermas enshrines this notion, toward Benhabib’s modified version of communicative ethics.

The two most important charges Benhabib makes against Habermas’s theory, for our purposes, are these: first, that he does not go far enough in integrating questions of the good life into his ethical theory; and second, that his ethical theory, by focusing on formal reciprocity with the “generalized other” as a bearer of rights and locus of dignity, leaves little or no room for consideration of the “concrete other” as an individual with a life history of her own. As Benhabib explains in her second book, these charges are important in part because they echo challenges that communitarians and feminists, respectively, have posed to critical theory. She does not remark that both charges echo major themes in Hauerwas’s traditionalism. What, if anything, shall we make of this convergence? Does it offer any hope that the standoff between secularism and traditionalism can be overcome?

Benhabib says plainly that her communicative ethics “does privilege a secular, universalist, reflexive culture” (SS, 42). The juxtaposition of “secular” and “universalist” here suggests that a confrontation with Hauerwas may be in store. What do these notions mean in this context, and how do they fit together with her Hauerwasian points about the importance of focusing on the concrete other? We have seen that in Hauerwas’s view, all standpoints are conditioned. No point of view can plausibly claim universality in the Kantian sense. That is why ethics always needs a qualifier, according to Hauerwas. He suspects that those who claim to have achieved an unconditioned standpoint for “the moral point of view” are actually grinding an axe for secularism.

If Benhabib’s version of critical theory were “transcendental” in Kant’s sense, it would aim to justify the normative claims of the theory by showing them to be necessary (or necessary for us)—in the sense of already being presupposed by anyone who wishes to offer reasons to other people.¹⁵ This would give a clear sense to the universality she is claiming for her standpoint. But Benhabib is persuaded that no transcendental argument of this kind is available. She claims to have stripped away the transcendental scaffolding of Habermas’s theory. If she has done this, however, it is no longer clear why the elaborate model of communicative ethics should be thought to justify the normative claims of the theory. Even if one accepted those claims, one could still doubt the usefulness of feeding them into one end of a fancy theoretical machine only to watch them come out the other end decorated in technical terminology. As a justification, the normative theory appears to beg the question. But if it isn’t a justification, in what sense is it a normative theory?

Now consider the empirical component of the theory. Benhabib criticizes me for not making use of Habermas’s social theory of modernity. She speculates that a more serious engagement with Habermas’s sociological theory would give some of my views “a firmer basis in contemporary social theory” (SS, 147). I appreciate the offer and the friendly spirit in which it is made, but I have my own reasons for not wanting a firmer basis in a social theory like Habermas’s. I am especially wary of its assumptions about the effects of rationalization, in Weber’s sense, on religious worldviews.

Benhabib has a big Habermasian story to tell about the emergence of modern structures of consciousness—a story that includes the account of secularization criticized in chapter 4, above. My own model of secularization is a much more modest thing, and deliberately so. Its purpose is to explain how religious plurality can, under certain conditions, alter the presuppositions of discourse in specific institutional settings. What becomes secularized, according to my model, is a set of discursive presuppositions, not necessarily the worldview or state of consciousness of participants in the relevant form of discourse. Because my model does not predict increasingly generalized disenchantment, it does not break down in the face of facts to the contrary—such as the religious revivals of the last four decades.¹⁶

Benhabib makes clear that the “moral point of view,” as she understands it, is partly a product of what Weber calls “the ‘disenchantment’ of the world” (SS, 41). To adopt the moral point of view is thus to leave behind “a conventional morality” in favor of a fully “reflexive” one. Those “who adhere to a conventional morality have a cognitive barrier beyond which they will not argue.” They “invoke certain kinds of reasons which will divide the participants of the moral conversation into insiders and outsiders, into those who share their presuppositions and those who do not.”

Moral reflexivity and moral conventionalism then are not compatible; but in a disenchanted universe, to limit reflexivity is an indication of a rationality deficit. … In this sense, communicative ethics “trumps” other less reflexive “moral points of view.” It can co-exist with them and recognize their cognitive limits … but it is also aware of the historical conditions which made its own point of view possible. (SS, 43)

In a disenchanted world, in other words, those who reason about ethical questions as Hauerwas does, by arguing from religious presuppositions some others do not share, are displaying their own deficiency as rational agents. The putative universality of Benhabib’s standpoint, then, is intimately linked with a sort of secularism. Indeed, it presupposes a Weberian account of the historical conditions that made it possible.

This is an odd result, it seems to me, for a theorist who stands with Hauerwas on the need for a shift in our ethical thinking from the “generalized other” of quandary ethics to the “concrete other” of a narrative-centered normative theory. Hannah Arendt and the feminists have taught us, according to Benhabib, that we need to take seriously all of the dimensions of human lives that come to light when we tell rich stories about “situated selves.” The point of emphasizing the role of narrative in ethics, for Benhabib (as for the early Hauerwas), is to complicate our conception of rational agency by setting it in the context of individual human lives. But suppose rationality and irrationality are indeed traits of situated selves, whose life histories need to be reckoned with before we judge them. How, then, can Benhabib be so sure on the basis of highly general—and dubious—historical considerations that those who want to argue from religious premises exhibit a rationality deficit?

Hauerwas would argue that two individuals can be justified in holding different beliefs, on religious or other questions, given their different life histories. This seems correct. We have taken note of a distinction between being justified in believing something and being able to justify a claim to someone else. If one is unable to justify one’s beliefs to someone else—for example, in a public forum where no theological presuppositions are currently shared—this need not entail that one is unjustified in holding the belief. Must it, then, be “an indication of a rationality deficit” to go ahead and argue from one’s own point of view? As we learned in chapter 3, above, it is by no means clear that all important questions can be settled on a common basis of ideals and principles that no reasonable people would reasonably reject. Benhabib has not shown that democratic discussion must be secular in the sense of presupposing the disenchantment of the world. Her own reasons for placing situated selfhood at the center of her theory suggest why. If we are all situated selves, our reasons will not necessarily carry weight with someone differently situated—not, at any rate, unless the hypercontext called “modernity” is the only aspect of our situation that matters.

When discussing religion, Benhabib assumes just this. She situates the self by relating all of us to a single, ubiquitous, large-scale epistemic context. She neglects the possibility that there might be significant differences, with respect to what an individual is justified in believing, among modern people who are acculturated in different ways. She takes for granted that acculturation is not capable of rendering some individuals justified in holding beliefs not held by the majority of their neighbors. As I see it, however, it is precisely the coexistence of multiple subcultures, all of which succeed at some level in acculturating the young, that constitutes the all-important fact of pluralism in modern democratic societies. Such acculturation does, I think, often succeed in bringing it about that particular groups of individuals are justified in believing things that their neighbors either justifiably disbelieve or justifiably ignore. The relevant epistemic situation for such selves, in other words, turns out to be much more specific and variable than the hypercontext, modernity, allows us to account for.

The possibility that some of our neighbors might actually be justified in believing the strange (and perhaps unliberating) things they believe is one of the grounds of toleration in a democratic society. The respect we have for one another need not be a purely abstract regard for potential rational agency. It tends in fact to be much more specific than that. It is nourished by our recognition that much of what our neighbors believe is what any reasonable person would believe if situated in exactly the same way they are. One’s situation, in this sense, would include the particulars of acculturation in a specific family and as someone involved in particular social practices and communities. This is what respect for the concrete other is largely about. Substantive respect of this kind can still be in place (and can still support democratic habits) in cases where I, as a social critic, have strong reason to conclude that my neighbor believes something that is false, against his or her own true interests, or unliberating.

Only as a last resort, when I have taken all situational particulars into account and done my best to interpret them charitably, should I adopt the hypothesis that a given person or group suffers from a “rationality deficit.” Then and only then should I be prepared to explain away my neighbor’s expressed reasons for action and belief by invoking the special interpretive tools of critical theory. When I am pressed that far, however, I ought to be conscious of the cost that my critique exacts from the reservoir of substantive respect on which democratic discourse among neighbors can draw. Ideology critique is a hermeneutical ambulance. Calling upon it too often bankrupts the same democratic process it seeks to serve.

This, in the end, is the irony of critical theory as an across-the-board approach to modern democratic discourse. Critical theorists begin by embracing the hope that genuinely democratic discourse will flourish among us. They set out to serve this hope by systematically diagnosing the sources of distortion that arise within our discourse as it is. But they end by explaining away, instead of entering into conversation with, nearly everything that real people think, say, and feel. Even Benhabib’s version of critical theory tends in practice to pass over the connections between selves and the concrete situations and historical traditions in which they acquire their beliefs and identities. When it employs the notion of “rationality deficit” as it does, it addresses those selves as something more like patients than as fellow citizens. Benhabib obviously senses this problem more clearly than do most other critical theorists. She has begun to rework the concepts of situation and judgment in ways that would help resolve it. But she has not yet managed to get to the root of the trouble.

There is no point in recommending that social critics keep their mouths shut when they suspect their neighbors of wishful thinking and other forms of irrationality or delusion. I am saying simply that the standard of proof for justifying such suspicions is much higher than most critical theorists imagine. Democratic hopes would often be better served if we used more respectful modes of interpretation as our means of first resort. Our fellow citizens might well hold many false beliefs. We might well be justified in taking them to be in error. But in many cases we ought to be content to explain our differences with them by pointing to differences in context, allowing that they might be justified in believing what they do, and then beginning or continuing the exchange of reasons with them in a charitable and democratic spirit. If all goes well, the discussion will itself alter our respective epistemic contexts in such a way that we can overcome some of our differences, or at least learn to live with them respectfully.

Whether we ought to change our minds, at a given point in the democratic exchange of ideas, is something to be decided case by case—by situated selves, reflecting critically on their own experience and on the various traditions and sources of evidence their situation makes available to them. It is not generally true, however, that we are obliged to abandon beliefs that have not been certified as “justified” in public discussion. Many interesting questions arise here concerning the relationships that can obtain between what individuals are justified in believing and the justificatory arguments of which they have become aware in the relatively generalized context of public discussion. Yet these questions are hard to raise, let alone to resolve, in terms of a theory that does not distinguish between being justified in believing something and justifying a belief or proposition to an audience. When Benhabib ascribes a rationality deficit to those who differ with her religiously, she glosses over these questions entirely.

We can hardly claim at this point to have overcome the standoff between Benhabib’s secularism and Hauerwas’s traditionalism. But it seems clear that neither of these thinkers has imagined the possibility, let alone the desirability, of a loosely structured democratic conversation in which variously situated selves tell their own stories on their own terms. Neither accounts adequately for the complicated functions these stories can take on in ethical reflection. Both back away at a crucial moment from the full significance of their common insight that the different ways in which selves are situated in the world make a difference for ethics. Benhabib recognizes the difference one’s gender can make in situating a self in the world, and rightly highlights the value that narrative can have in making explicit what that involves for a particular man or woman. Hauerwas recognizes the difference one’s religious community can make in situating a self in the world, and rightly highlights the value that narrative can have in making explicit what that involves for a particular Christian or Jew. But Benhabib declares Hauerwas’s kind of story deficient, as if this could be known before the tale is told and subjected to criticism from various points of view. And Hauerwas makes democratic story-swapping seem useless, unless everyone agrees in advance on a canon of classic lives as a framework for discussion.

Two points of agreement keep the standoff from being resolved. First, both of these thinkers view democratic modernity as the result of a break with tradition, after which a process of disenchantment places the religious believer at a fundamental disadvantage in public discussion. Benhabib considers this development progress, whereas Hauerwas considers it a catastrophe. Second, they both assume that rational discourse must proceed within a framework that accords their own point of view legitimacy over against its competitors. For Benhabib, this is the moral point of view, with its explicit commitment to secularism. For Hauerwas, it is the perspective of the community of Christian virtue, with its biblical metanarrative and its canon of classic lives. In part 2, both of these shared assumptions—the one about modernity and the one about discursive rationality—have come to seem dubious. In part 3, I will explore the consequences of rejecting them and, in doing so, I will try to account for the possibility of rational discussion among differently situated selves.