I’ve made a point of meeting several of my heroes, but I never met Alasdair MacIntyre. The reviews were not encouraging. Back in 2011 when we were all fresh out of undergrad, some friends and I were starting Fare Forward, a magazine with Christian commitments and philosophical aspirations. Two of my colleagues arranged a meeting with MacIntyre, who was then recently emeritus at Notre Dame. They were exhausted from several long days and nights on the road, and they had thirty minutes to pitch MacIntyre on the project and solicit his advice—perhaps get him to agree to an interview or to contribute a small article.
They made it through the pitch, MacIntyre sitting back, fingers steepled. There was a long moment of silence while MacIntyre digested. Then he began, “There are at least three reasons why I will be of no help to you.” I no longer remember exactly what the three reasons were. The gist was that he thought the project was irredeemably wrongheaded, unattached as it was to any particular community of practice. Perhaps we should have seen that one coming. Then MacIntyre went on. “What did you study in college?” MacIntyre asked them. “Engineering and Philosophy,” said the first. “You should be an engineer,” he said. “Government and Philosophy,” said the other. “You should join the circus,” he said.
Years later, I would discover the method in this bit of curmudgeonliness. Reading Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre’s last major work, which was published in 2016, I was delighted to find this passage:
Someone may be satisfied with her present life only because she believes that there is no more pleasing alternative that is open to her. What she takes to be possible depends on her beliefs both about herself and about the relevant aspects of the social world. Imagination too has a part to play. It may never have occurred to her that she might run away and join the circus or learn to speak Japanese and take a job in Kyoto. Indeed, if someone were to suggest either of these courses of action to her, her response would be dismissive, because she would be unable to imagine herself as, say, a trapeze artist or an interpreter for tourists curious about Zen Buddhism. Her beliefs and her imagination combine to set limits to what she takes to be possible and so to her present desires. [Emphasis mine.]
This little parable illustrates one of the many ways that human lives can, in MacIntyre’s words, “go wrong on account of misdirected or frustrated desire.” And to my mind, it transforms MacIntyre’s off-hand gibe about joining the circus into a kind of motif. For MacIntyre, perhaps the chief failing of modern society and the modern self are their lack of imagination. The bumper-sticker version of MacIntyre’s worldview might read, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
This essential radicalism, this appreciation for the contingency and plasticity of human life, is in tension with MacIntyre’s reputation as a conservative. His own itinerant career, never staying in any place or post for long, is in tension with his reputation as a communitarian. His many conversions are in tension with his reputation as a traditionalist. (He was at various times and in various combinations: protestant, atheist, Catholic, Marxist, Aristotelian, and Thomist.) There are so many such tensions in his life and thought, that there are, in fact, rival versions of Alasdair MacIntyre. Against those who insisted on mythologizing medieval culture as unified, monolithic, and Christian, MacIntyre wrote that the Middle Ages were, rather, “a fragile and complex balance of a variety of disparate and conflicting elements… each of which imposed its own strains and tensions on the whole.” We might say the same about the man himself.
In the wake of MacIntyre’s death, many will be revisiting his work, and others will be inspired to embark upon a first reading. I would encourage both kinds of reader to pursue an encounter with a demythologized MacIntyre, and to this end, I would point them to three elements or strands in his thought. First, MacIntyre is a historical thinker—in at least two respects. On the one hand, the concept of narrative, especially historical narrative, is central to MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue and the works that followed it. He says both that “Every particular view of the virtues is linked to some particular notion of the narrative structure or structures of human life,” and “Narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.” It is crucial to MacIntyre that our choices and acts cannot be evaluated—cannot even be understood—without reference to a narrative that grounds the unity of a human life. The narrative mode of thought is, inevitably, more complex, less mechanical, more nuanced than its alternatives.
But MacIntyre is also a historical thinker in that he constantly excavates the contingency of the moral concepts that are his central concern. The imagination required to make “the disquieting suggestion” that begins After Virtue (i.e., What if moral debates are interminable because we have lost the framework from which our concepts were derived?) is a distinctly historical imagination. Or consider the introduction to his Short History of Ethics:
[H]istorians of morals are all too apt to allow that moral practices and the content of moral judgments may vary from society to society and from person to person, but at the same time these historians have subtly assimilated different moral concepts—and so they end up by suggesting that although what is held to be right or good is not always the same, roughly the same concepts of right and good are universal. In fact, of course, moral concepts change as social life changes.
This is a historical sensibility that points forward as well as back. While MacIntyre certainly believes in the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework, he recognizes that it is necessarily contextualized by the ancient polis on the one hand, and medieval feudalism on the other. That is why we are waiting for a “doubtless very different” St. Benedict, not the messianic return of the first.
This awareness of historical context is closely related to a second strand in MacIntyre’s thought, which is his interest in social theory. Continuing the quote above:
In fact, of course, moral concepts change as social life changes. I deliberately do not write “because social life changes,” for this might suggest that social life is one thing, morality another, and that there is merely an external, contingent causal relationship between them. This is obviously false. Moral concepts are embodied in and partially constitutive of forms of social life.
But this is a reciprocal relationship. It is impossible, for example, to disentangle After Virtue’s modern moral characters of the Rich Aesthete, the Manager, and the Therapist from their social context—industrialized, liberal, technocratic—and, particularly, from the role of modern social science in constructing “neutral” values like efficiency. In short, MacIntyre has an enduring interest—perhaps an artifact of his early Marxism—in the role of social forms (or even “material conditions”) in the constitution of moral concepts. Yes, argues MacIntyre in Short History, even Aristotle, with his repugnant views on slavery, was a product of his time and his economic context. Yes, even St. Benedict should be remembered not as “withdrawing” from society (strategically or otherwise) but as an architect of new “social forms” and “social institutions.”
Third, in addition to being a historian and a social theorist, MacInyre is a humanist. Surveying the field, contemporary and otherwise, ethics seems to be a magnet for perversity. (“This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.”) But MacIntyre always has everyday human flourishing in view. Which is not to say that Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is a self-help book. But while his work is rigorous and can be abstract, his retention of the practical in “practical wisdom” is a major reason why so many non-scholars like myself have been drawn to MacIntyre over the years. Indeed, I would argue that MacIntyre’s humanism is the interpretative key to his whole project, from his lengthy discussion of dolphins in Dependent Rational Animals to his enthusiasm for life on the flying trapeze. While his emphasis on the historical and socially constructed aspects of morality could attract charges of relativism from his own most passionate fans, MacIntyre has an unwavering commitment to a universal human stance: seeking the good, seeking an understanding of the good, and thus seeking an understanding of what it is to be human.
In his late work, God, Philosophy, Universities, MacIntyre offers a kind of apologia pro vita sua: "...that human beings need philosophy, that philosophy articulates and moves toward answering questions the asking of which is crucial for human flourishing." As rational animals, the effort to understand ourselves is not accidental but essential to a full human life. As always in the later MacIntyre, he couples our rationality with our dependence, which marks a turning point from philosophy to theology and back to ethics: "For it is only insofar as we understand the universe, including ourselves, as dependent on God for our existence that we are also able to understand ourselves as directed toward God and what our directedness toward God requires of us by way of caring." Of course, our overarching dependence on God is mediated by many lesser dependencies, not least upon those who have gone before us as practitioners and stewards of our traditions. It is, finally, in this way that Alasdair MacIntyre should be remembered. Requiescat in pace. May we be truly thankful.