ABSTRACT
Human salvation can be found instead only in philosophy, where reason shows how self-estrangement has dominated the past and how a coming-to-one’s-own can obtain in the future through an interiorizing of the truths of religion. In opposing utilitarianism, Alasdair MacIntyre thinks analysts should be promoting, especially in and through education, a ‘democratic culture of critical inquiry’ – a culture in which individuals are educated to see inquiry as an activity valuable for its own sake. The link which Scottish eighteenth-century culture forged between the particular responsibilities of particular social roles and the ability to appeal to principles about the general good and to participate in debate about these principles has been broken. Conversely, Marxists, Christians, and the devotees of psychoanalysis often go their own way and shield their respective tenets from rational criticism. In the Hegelian-Marxist view, conceptual contradictions and mystifications express the incoherences of a whole form of social life.
