Tradition

[Phenomenology] is absolutely distinct from the idealist return to consciousness, and the [phenomenological] demand for a pure description excludes equally the procedure of analytical reflection on the one hand, and that of scientific explanation on the other. Descartes and particularly Kant detached the subject, or consciousness, by showing that I could not possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of all experienced myself as existing in the act of apprehending it. They presented consciousness, the absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the condition of there being anything at all…; the unity of consciousness in Kant is achieved simultaneously with that of the world. And in Descartes methodical doubt does not deprive us of anything, since the whole world, at least in so far as we experience it, is reinstated in the Cogito, enjoying equal certainty, and simply labeled ‘thought of’ … But the relations between subject and world are not strictly bilateral…” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: ixf.)

In Mark Bevir’s terminology, this position is especially prevalent among ‘strong empiricists’:

“Empiricists generally argue that people arrive at webs of belief as a result of pure experiences. This would suggest that the historian can explain why people held the beliefs they did by reference to their experiences alone: the historian needs to consider only the circumstances in which people find themselves, not the ways in which they construct or interpret their circumstances through the traditions they inherit” (2000: 30).

Such as the dialogue on tradition between Mark Bevir and Bruce Frohnen (a debate instigated by Bevir’s work on the history of ideas): Bevir 2000; Frohnen 2001; Bevir 1999.

The literature here is immense, and cannot be captured in a footnote. Two of the more recent contributions to the field offer an overview of the vastness and heterogeneity of the arguments commonly put under the title of ‘post-secularism,’ and can function as a gateway to the wider field (Mendieta and VanAntwerpen 2011; Calhoun et al. 2011).

Cookery has been one of the oft-used examples in the ongoing intellectual discourse on tradition, mainly because it manages to capture nicely both the superiority of practice over intellectual knowledge (think of the cook who has learned to cook by standing next to—and accepting the authority of- an experienced master, versus the inexperienced ‘cook’ who is trying to follow a cookbook’s instructions). In a similar vein, cookery can also exemplify my point here: think of all the ways in which a certain cook, who is immersed in a certain culinary culture and practice—i.e., tradition -- would never even think of cooking a certain dish, while those very same ways are the most obvious ways in which another cook, coming from another culinary tradition, would handle the same dish (preparing and serving raw meet dishes in certain kitchens versus the practical impossibility of doing the same in others is just one example that springs to mind in this regard). Needless to say, this is not limited to culinary traditions.

Interestingly, some of the more vehement opponents of such a codification of tradition into a doctrine – a constitution, in this case – are religious scholars of the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Egypt. As a recent report notes, leading scholars in Al-Azhar, the most authoritative religious institution in Suni Islam, prefer Egypt’s new constitution to preserve phrasing from the state’s former constitution, which placed the ‘principles’ of sharia as the main source of legislation. This, while hard-line ‘Salafists,’ want the new constitution to declare either ‘the rules of sharia,’ or simply sharia, as the main source of legislation: “Al-Azhar has even blocked a push by Salafists, a puritan strand of Islam that won a quarter of votes in last year’s parliamentary elections, to enshrine al-Azhar itself as the sole authority for interpreting sharia. Secular critics fear that al-Azhar’s current, relatively liberal tendency could change, and see this push as a dangerous step towards creating an Iranian-style theocracy. Many of the university’s own clerics agree, noting that Sunni Islam accepts four rival traditions of law, so denying the notion of a single reference” (The Economist, 6 October, 2012).

As MacIntyre (1988: 12) puts it:

A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.

I am indebted to the anonymous readers of my original manuscript for this rendition of the Gadamerian argument.

At least according to MacIntyre’s critical reading of Burke and Kuhn and to Gadamer’s criticism of romanticism (MacIntyre 2006: 2–23; MacIntyre 1984: 221–2; Gadamer 1989: 282).