Can we really understand?

Third, such “as if” academic practice both assumes and continues to transmit the encyclopedic “belief that every rationally defensible standpoint can engage with every other, the belief that, whatever may be thought about incommensurability in theory, in academic practice it can be safely neglected.” There is nothing the university curriculum cannot encompass or absorb into itself, no text or form of life that stands outside the comprehensive capabilities of scholarly study: “The universal translatability of texts from any and every culture into the language of teacher and student is taken for granted. And so is the universality of a capacity to make what was framed in the light of the canons of one culture intelligible to those who inhabit some other quite alien culture, provided only that the latter is our own, or one very like it” (171). The possibility of genuine obstacles to understanding that are endemic to the worlds of both genealogical and traditioned inquiry are completely ignored, treated as if they do not exist. The incomprehensible, the utterly strange to us and our way of knowing—these are systematically denied reality by the framework that prevents the confrontation they require.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 179 (quotations from Alasdair MacIntyre's 1988 Gifford Lectures)

<idle musing>
This chapter has been/is eye-opening to me. He is revealing the shaky foundations upon which the modern idea of knowledge rests. I would recommend this book for this chapter alone!
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