The Contemporary Aristotelian Museum: Exploring the Museum as a Site of MacIntyre's Tradition‐constituted Enquiry

Abstract

The connection is made between the Royal Museum of Scotland and encyclopaedia, one of MacIntyre's three rival versions of moral enquiry. It is then asked how MacIntyre's other two methods, genealogy and tradition‐constituted enquiry, would function within a museum. It is proposed that the museum fulfils Haldane's criterion for tradition‐constituted enquiry in that it combines the immanence and open‐endedness of the methods of enquiry with transcendence in the objects of enquiry. The ethical judgments of the visitors constitute transcendent truth in morality; hence one can see the museum as a site of Aristotelian enquiry.

To pursue this, the museum is explored as a site of Aristotelian study or theoria, and of MacIntyre's updated Aristotelianism. Therein we study the narratives written by historians and by individuals in a version of Aristotelian epag[otilde]gê, or the sifting of the opinions of the many and the wise. This process may also enhance civic friendship and our exercise of practical wisdom towards disadvantaged groups.

Finally, MacIntyre's three rival versions of moral enquiry are returned to, and a museum characterised for each. All three are found to involve seriousness in the purposes of enquiry. Attention is drawn to MacIntyre's criticism of the interaction of bureaucracy and social science. It is proposed that such interaction may, in the case of the museum, dilute its seriousness as a site of enquiry.

Acknowledgements

Much of this paper formed part of my dissertation for the taught philosophy MLitt at the University of Dundee, submitted September 2005. As such I should thank Dr Beth Lord, Dr Rachel Jones, Professor Timothy Chappell and Mr Lloyd Fields. I should also thank Professor Russell Keat for advice on its re‐submission for publication and an anonymous reviewer at the Journal for Cultural Research for further comments. The beginnings of this paper were presented at the Thinking About Museums Conference in Dundee in May 2005, at which I also benefited from hearing a talk by Mark O'Neill (of Glasgow City Council Museums Service) which linked debates on political theory to the museum.

Notes

1. An engineer and architect who also designed part of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

2. Bennett goes further and suggests that it was the display, within museums, of the cultural artefacts of prehistory, with its emphasis on the typical of a particular period rather than on objects of singular beauty, which facilitated the move from Enlightenment speculative histories of “rude societies” towards a unified history of man the “species” within a wider narrative of evolution (Bennett 2002, drawing on Marchand and others).

3. I should thank Dr Rachel Jones for the comment that it is doubtful that genealogists would describe themselves as relativists.

4. This is not to deny the existence of “burdens of judgement” which John Rawls argues are sources of disagreement even among fully reasonable persons (Mulhall and Swift 1992, p. 177). It should be remembered, however, that friendship, tolerance and even forgiveness are all methods by which ethical transcendence can be achieved and are all intimately connected with truth.

5. Though by the time of his writing TRV he has moved to the modified Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas.

6. Winchell, interestingly, thinks the search for truth was central to the Grecian museum and that its modern equivalent should move beyond education to research and have as an aim “conference with the writings of others” (Winchell 1891, p. 7). However, he has a modern emphasis on “individual” search for truth in “laboratories and recesses of these great museums unseen by the public” (Winchell 1891, p. 8).

7. There are parallels with this in debate over museums; for example, Lavine and Karp say that a museum can be either a temple or a forum (Lavine and Karp 1991, p. 3).

8. Sorabji says of the word ergon that it is “not very happily translated function…the ergon of a horse, or of one's eyes or of a pruning hook is that which one could only do by using these things, or that which could be done best by using one of these things” (Sorabji 1964, p. 302).

9. Practically wise individual.

10. The proponents of emotivism — the idea that “this is good” really means “I approve of this, do so as well” (AV, p. 12) put it forward as a theory of all morality at all time, but MacIntyre sees it as symptomatic of our culture.

11. Practically wise individuals.

12. It can be argued that such a move reverses the process, outlined by Bennett, in which Victorian museums used artefacts to allow the situating of human pre‐history within evolutionary history such that large museums became “centres of calculation” which received artefacts, flora and fauna from far flung places, but devalued knowledge of persons from such sites. Such museums “equated that which was distant from Europe with its pre‐history” (Bennett 2002, p. 35). The move is also in accord with earlier calls made by Bennett for control of the resources of museums to be in the hands of those previously only objects of study (Bennett 1995, pp. 104–5).

13. In Latin trado, tradere, tradidi, traditum is the verb for “to hand on”.

14. See, for example, MacIntyre (1979).