Via Alan Jacobs, I’ve learned that Alasdair MacIntyre
passed away on Thursday, at the age of 96. Unlike other philosophers,
theologians,
and political
theorists I’ve written memorials to on my blog over the years, MacIntyre’s
work—which engaged deeply with issues of ethics, Aristoteliansim, and rationality—never
had a major impact on my own. Still, I don’t see how any English-speaking student
of politics or philosophy from the past half-century could have avoided being shaped
by After
Virtue, his short and explosive argument against the then-prevailing
assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, which was published in 1981; I was,
like everyone else, and in that sense I owe him as much a debt as any other
thinker I linked to above.
For a long time, my understanding of that debt was inextricable
from the liberal-communitarian debates which academic philosophers and
political theorists (including folks like me who were trained to become such, and
for whom even if it didn’t quite work out that way, still
can’t get that debate off my mind) who are today in their 50s were inundated
with in graduate school. MacIntyre always denied being a communitarian, though
he was lumped in with them anyway, and I think not inappropriately so. Beyond
all the sturm und drang which attend any kind of intellectual argument
over the drawing of disciplinary and ideological lines, there remains the
simple fact that MacIntyre self-professed “revolutionary
Aristotelianism” ultimately pointed to the local community, to the
centrality of tradition, and to the continuity of stories and language—in other
words, to things and phenomena very much beyond the ambit of the sovereign,
rights-bearing individual—as the starting point to any of kind rationally
defensible moral philosophy, to say nothing of any kind of actual civic health.
By making the—I still think highly persuasive—argument that liberal
individualism leaves us with what he called a mere “emotivism” as a basis for understanding,
interpreting, and judging our own and others’ actions, he absolutely add
significantly to a broad set of communitarian ideas which are still valid
today.
Of course, today it is the postliberals
who are most interested in claiming the communitarian MacIntyre for themselves.
As bizarre that MacIntyre
himself apparently found the prospect that his writings had somehow inspired
people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and others to embrace the goal of a
retreat from and an overturning of the current liberal order, MacIntyre’s
contempt for the conservative acceptance of capitalist inequality (when asked
in 1996 what he still retained from his pre-Aristotelian Marxist phase, MacIntyre
simply stated “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the
nearest lamp post”) probably isn’t enough to prevent that appropriation. Fred
Dallmayr—who, as
I’ve written, understood what it means to move beyond liberalism much
better than most of those who parade that label—noted in a
chapter from his book Post-Liberalism:
Recovering a Shared World that MacIntyre’s thinking, which he called “stellar,”
nonetheless evinces a certain “metaphysical realism” and “functionalism,”
thereby undermining ways of thinking about our situation which call for a more
immanent, more attendant, more patient approach. MacIntyre’s revolutionary
Aristotelianism absolutely does not call for a revolutionary communitarian
imposition, but it’s possible the way in which he formulated those ideas opened
up an interpretation of them that he firmly disagreed with.*
But it would be wrong to make any set of reflections
of MacIntyre’s immense philosophical achievements to rest entirely upon the
political contestation over his prioritization of community. Far better, I
think, would be to say something about how MacIntyre defined the
communities of tradition, locality, and story in question. Because that can
take us in an interesting direction.
In a book of MacIntyre’s that doesn’t appear to me to
get much critical praise, but which was very important to me once upon a time
(maybe even more so than After Virtue), he explored a fundamental, philosophical
challenge to communitarian ideas, though he didn’t use that language to set up
the problem. Essentially: if you’re not going to employ universalist concepts whose
rationality are available to all individuals equally, and rather are going to
insist upon the priority of concepts that have some communal, historical, or
cultural particularity, then how can you avoid relativism? In short (and as the
title of the book in questions asked): if you’re going to tie the possibility
of rational, moral judgment to particular communities, then Whose
Justice? Whose Rationality? should we employ? MacIntyre’s answer to
these questions is dense and rewarding, and pretty much impossible to briefly
summarize. But the first step is recognizing how forthright he is in accepting
the puzzle. There is no attempt to sideline what it means accept that
Aristotelian phronesis, or practical judgment, cannot be made logically
universal:
But since practical reasoning, as Aristotle
understands it, involves the capacity to bring the relevant premises concerning
good and virtues to bear on particular situations and since this capacity is
inseparable from, is indeed a part of, the virtues, including justice, it is
also the case that one cannot be practically rational without being just. And
for reasons which are in essentials the same as those which entailed the
conclusion that one cannot be just apart from membership in some particular
polis, one cannot be practically rational apart from membership in some
particular polis. That one’s rationality should be not merely supported by but
partly constituted by one’s membership in and integration into a social
institution of some particular type is a contention very much at odds with
characteristically modern views of rationality
(p. 123).
Philosophical liberals will, of course, tear their
hair out at that conclusion, but the rigor with which he makes this argument
has stood the test of time: we are not self-constructing, but rather socially constituted
beings, and thus mostly think, and judge, by and through those institutions and
histories and forms which characterized our constitution. Okay—but does that
mean all of them? Obviously not; some communal phenomena and constructions are
far more relevant to questions of justice and rationality than others. For
MacIntyre, the primary one—obviously so, given the importance he attaches to
stories—is language, and the structural forms by which language is conveyed.
On his reading of history, the boundaries of any shared, spoken, written language
are what give us linguistic communities, which in turn provide our social
communities. He never quotes Herder or Gadamer in Whose Justice? Whose
Rationality?, but he’s plainly working in the same vein as them: trying to
articulate, in Aristotelian terms, a philosophical hermeneutics, a way of
understanding the constituting power of language over time and through the
social bonds and interactions which define us.
The complaint about linguistic communities is, of
course, obvious: languages change! They change through translation, through
interpretation, through just the generational process by which stories that revealed
to one set of listeners one set of references upon which they could reason, end
up revealing to another, later, set of listeners an entirely different set of
references, because of geographic or technological or cultural change.
MacIntyre acknowledges this, insisting the every tradition is open--by
definition, as a spoken, written, particular thing—to evolution: “[T]he time
and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through
the language-in-use which gives expression to [their tradition] may encounter
another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use, and may
discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend
it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history,
and their own language-in-use, it [nonetheless] provides a standpoint from
which, once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second language, the
limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be
identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within
their own tradition” (pp. 387-388).
That’s a long sentence, and appropriately so, because
he’s talking about a long process. (Whether his own articulation of
Aristotelianism supported it or not, his work on thinking through the real
world process of phronesis absolutely had a patient, immanent character
to it.) MacIntyre is telling us that in encountering differences, and as we
learn about them and even embrace them, there will always be a constant need to
maintain our own received traditions, stories, and language—not to defend them
from some kind of pollution, but because it is through working through their
interaction with one another that we can see clearly what one story can teach which
another story cannot.
It's worth saying in conclusion that, dense as
MacIntyre’s work often was, he could be viciously funny (at least in an
academic sense). One of my favorite passages from Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? has stayed with me for decades, because it’s such a thorough
dumping on those who talk blithely about “the Western tradition” or “the
Christian tradition” as something to be defended. Building upon his own careful
philosophical consideration of linguistic communities and historical traditions,
he takes the time castigate the type of teaching every one of us who has ever
had to take on a survey course usually fall into, faulting both modernity, but
also a flawed conservatism that doesn’t understand what it’s about:
The type of translation characteristic of
modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original
locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or
Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges [guilty!],
in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the
complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student
moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues
of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else
as is possible if one is to reach Satre by the end of the semester. If one
fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a reintroduction
to the culture of past traditions, but is a tour through what is in effect a
museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its
original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to
suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the
reaching of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as
our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as “the
Judeo-Christian tradition” and sometimes “Western values.” The writing of
self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives, such as William J. Bennett, turn
out in fact to be one more stage in modernity’s cultural deformation of our
relationship to the past (pp. 385-386).
It’s not surprising that a man who could write a passage
like that was the kind of professor who insisted on referring to his students
as “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and once handed out a “B minus minus” as a grade.
Thinkers like this leave a profound legacy, and even if MacIntyre’s is, I fear,
fated to be misappropriated, his own arguments make it clear that, so long as
we speak our language and tell our stories, there are always practical
possibilities for some St. Benedict, like MacIntyre himself, to come along a
remind us of the immense gifts of connection and continuity we possess. Requiescat
in pace, sir.
*Update, 5/27/2025: Noah Millman’s tribute to MacIntyre is really superb, and in talking about his piece with our mutual friend Damon Linker, Damon made an observation which clarifies what I was gesturing at in this paragraph very well: “In the end, though, I’m not a MacIntyre admirer. I get my Aristotle from Strauss. And the problem Noah notes early on in his piece — of MacIntyre projecting Aristotelian theory onto the lived reality of the ancient and medieval worlds — is a big problem and the ultimate source of the influence he had on the ‘postliberal’ right. This influence made MacIntyre uncomfortable, but it was his own fault for eliding crucial distinctions in a way that made it sound like he was describing a lost world of moral wholeness and meaning that was banished by the Enlightenment, etc. That’s garden-variety reactionary romanticism, and it’s unfortunate MacIntyre gave it fuel.”
So the entire album is a work of therapy? Not quite; there are a couple of songs on it that could have been developed in any context. "Love" is a sweet, stripped-down tune, with Lennon's voice stretching to sing lyrics as sappy as anything Macca ever wrote (I mean, "Love is asking / To be loved"?), while "Look at Me" is a polished if rather plain ditty that had its roots in something Lennon was working on way back in India in 1968. But besides those, every song on Plastic Ono Band, to one degree or another, is an explicit expression or a reflection of John's resentments, his immaturities, his angers, his fears. "Working Class Hero" is a masterful political statement, a perfectly tight bit of quiet, controlled folky fury, which Lennon apparently obsessed over more than any other song on the album. "Hold On" is more an idea than a fleshed out song, but his use of tremolo, complemented by Ringo's superb drumming, makes it seem like genuine moment of hope in the midst of comprehensive despair. "I Found Out" and "Well Well Well" are both darkly bitter, pulsing, insistent songs of righteous indignation and John's shouting, all about making do and living life despite the betrayal of others. "Remember" and "Isolation" are both full of dissonances and rhythmic shifts; they're worth pairing together, though the sadness of the first is staccato and accusatory, and on the second its bluesy and reflective. I think they're all pretty solid tunes, however inseparable they are from the album's overall vibe. 
