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Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition
Alasdair MacIntyre―whom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"―here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris . The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges.
252 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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About the author
Alasdair MacIntyre
77 books495 followersAlasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was a British-American philosopher who contributed to moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology. MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) is one of the most important works of Anglophone moral and political philosophy in the 20th century. He was senior research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University, emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and permanent senior distinguished research fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. During his lengthy academic career, he also taught at Brandeis University, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and Boston University.
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January 5, 2020
10/10: MacIntyre's trilogy ('After Virtue', 'Whose Justice?', and this work) joins the ranks of those works necessary for fully and insightfully understanding, analyzing, and where possible expanding and refurbishing both the internal and external, trascendent and immanent worlds which we, as men and men of late modernity, inhabit.
A review of the entire trilogy (it can not be justly reviewed piecemeal) is forthcoming: until then this Trilogy is given without reservation my eighth perfect rating, reserved for works which fulfill the function of the first paragraph.
A review of the entire trilogy (it can not be justly reviewed piecemeal) is forthcoming: until then this Trilogy is given without reservation my eighth perfect rating, reserved for works which fulfill the function of the first paragraph.
July 4, 2024
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) represents the capstone of Alasdair MacIntyre’s whole project to revive a virtue ethics. For in After Virtue (originally published in 1981; our review here), he spells out why the Enlightenment project of a secular rational foundation to ethics had to misfire, thus bringing about our present Babel-like confusion, and recurs to virtue ethics without, however, adequately justifying why it would not likewise turn out to be but yet another voice in the pervasive cacaphony? Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (originally published in 1988; our review here) does shore up the author’s understanding of how to reason practically in the face of rival traditions of enquiry, but remains insufficient in that it examines in depth only one episode in intellectual history – a minor one, at that – viz., the early Scottish Enlightenment.
Thus, MacIntyre himself, when composing the Gifford lectures on which Three Rival Versions of Moral Equiry is based, must have felt the need to explain his views in a way that would speak more directly to current concerns. The structure of the work is simple: first, lay out what will be called the encyclopaedic tradition, so named because it was given a canonical embodiment in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published from 1873 onwards (around the time of Adam Gifford, sponsor of the esteemed lecture series to which MacIntyre has now been invited to contribute). The encyclopaedic tradition proves to be a perfect foil, for
What divides our culture from theirs is, as we have seen, at least threefold. They assumed the assent of all educated persons to a single substantive conception of rationality;….They understood the outcome of allegiance to the standards and methods of such a rationality to be the elaboration of a comprehensive, rationally incontestable scientific understanding of the whole, in which the architectonic of the sciences matched that of the cosmos….And finally they saw their whole mode of life, including their conceptions of rationality and of science, as part of a history of inevitable progress, judged by a standard of progress which had itself emerged from that history. [p. 23]
Yet, all was not as harmonious and rosy as perhaps the authors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica imagined, feeling themselves secure in a position of supposed moral superiority. There are two further characters to the cast, which MacIntyre styles as genealogy and tradition simpliciter:
Each of these two contending parties has its own foundation document. For the latter it is Zur Genealogie der Moral published by Nietzsche in 1887, the year of Adam Gifford’s death. What Zur Genealogie der Moral provided was not only an argument in favor of, but a paradigm for, the construction of a type of subversive narrative designed to undermine the central assumptions of the Encyclopaedia, both in content and in genre. Where the encyclopaedist aspired to displace the Bible as a canonical book, the genealogist intended to discredit the whole notion of a canon. For the other rival party its charter document is the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris published by Pope Leo XII in 1878, four years after the Ninth Edition commenced publication. Aeterni Patris summoned its readers to a renewal of an understanding of intellectual enquiry as the continuation of a specific type of tradition, that which achieved definitive expression in the writings of Aquinas, one the appropriation of which could not only provide the resources for radical criticism of the conception of rationality dominant in nineteenth-century modernity and in the Ninth Edition, but also preserve and justify the canonical status of the Bible as distinct from, yet hegemonic over, all secular enquiry. [p. 25]
MacIntyre’s project, thus, will be dialectical: to play off encyclopaedia against genealogy resp. encyclopaedia against tradition and show that, on both scores, it comes in wanting. This leaves the field to the two remaining contenders, genealogy and tradition. But, although nobody serious subscribes to the encyclopaedic project anymore, it continues to structure the debate in the sense that we still employ its concepts, abstracted from the context in which they made sense. Thus, MacIntyre will begin by discussing what morality was for Adam Gifford and, to this end, adopts Henry Sidgwick’s article on ‘Ethics’ in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as definitive. But, we are in for a surprise in that,
Nowhere does Sidgwick take notice, for example, of the fact that the word ‘morality’ as used by his contemporaries has no equivalent expression in biblical or medieval Hebrew or in either classical or koinē Greek, or in either classical or high medieval Latin….Sidgwick’s falsifying history thus projected back into the past the conceptual structuring of the author’s present and thereby suggested that Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Kant and Sidgwick himself were all offering accounts, albeit rival accounts, of the rational status of one and the same timeless subject matter. [p. 28]
The encyclopaedists, therefore, suffer from a blindness that exposes them to critique from the quarter of, respectively, the genealogist or the traditionalist. First, the former (in chapter two on Genealogies and Subversions, pp. 32-57). Suffice it to reproduce here MacIntyre’s paraphrase of the genealogist’s main charge against the encyclopaedist:
What emerged was the victory of a life-denying ascetic ideal which issues in those conceptions of sin, of duty, of conscience, and of the relationship of virtue to happiness which have perpetuated both resentment and rancor and the denial of life….Nietzsche thus presents his own narrative in Zur Genealogie der Moral as superior to those of the academic historians precisely in that it enabled him to identify limitations and defects in their writing of which they themselves were unable to become aware. [p. 40]
Next, the latter (in chapter three on Too Many Thomisms?, pp. 58-81). Here, our author delves into what must be for many readers the little-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic intellectual world, from Kleutgen and Rosmini to Cornoldi, Maritain, Marechal, Grabmann, Gilson etc. The goal is to characterize Thomist sapientia in terms of the hierarchy of crafts. MacIntyre’s main point is methodological, that is, that we must try to grasp the debate at the appropriate level of generality, namely:
It is then crucial, if Aquinas’ thought is to be restored and continued so that it may confront what have been the sovereign modes of moral and theological enquiry in the last hundred years, the encyclopaedic and the genealogical modes, that we recognize that it is not in respect of their individual theses, considered item by item, but only in respect of those theses understood in their relationship to each overall specific mode of enquiry, that the true nature of the conflict between Thomism and these modern standpoints can adequately be explored. [p. 77]
So the encyclopaedists’ narrative reduces the past to a mere prologue to the rational present, while the genealogist struggles in the construction of his or her narrative against the past, including of the past which is perceived as hidden within the alleged rationality of the present. The Thomists’ narrative, by contrast with both of these, treats the past neither as mere prologue nor as something to be struggled against, but as that from which we have to learn if we are to identify and move towards our telos more adequately and that which we have to put to the question if we are to know which questions we ourselves should next formulate and attempt to answer, both theoretically and practically. [p. 79]
The core of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry comprises chapters four through eight, in which MacIntyre reviews the history of traditional virtue ethics ever since Augustine. In fact, the Aristotelian and Augustinian conceptions themselves once stood in rivalry (chapters four and five) and it is Aquinas’ great accomplishment to have reconciled the two in his Summa theologiae (chapter six). This recensionist has always found it remarkable, in view of the magnitude of the achievement of the high medieval synthesis of the thirteenth century, how quickly it was destined to fall apart, beginning in the fourteenth century with the rise of nominalism. MacIntyre himself reviews the dissolution of the high medieval synthesis at the hands of John Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart in chapter seven, which represents something of a detour in that his main interest lies in the present day (late twentieth-century, that is), after the self-conscious revival of Thomism, to which he returns in chapter eight, Tradition against Encyclopaedia: Enlightened Morality as the Superstition of Modernity [pp. 170-195]. The crux of critique in this chapter centers on the encyclopaedists’ faulty understanding of the ethos of primitive peoples who were then becoming known in the early days of anthropology. For they misconstrued, for instance, the Hawaiian concept of taboo as strictly negative instead of placing in its proper context of a self-consistent ethical system (which MacIntyre reviews in detail, pp. 176-188, where he imagines how a knowledgeable Hawaiian might respond to the encyclopaedist’s critique of taboo); accordingly, the encyclopaedists could proclaim the alleged rational superiority of their own enlightened morality without having demonstrated it to be so by pitting it against the opposing thesis, as everyone who has even glanced at the Summa theologiae knows to be the medieval scholastics’ preferred argumentative technique:
Secondly, no claim to rational superiority, on the view which I am ascribing to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, can be made good except on the basis of a rationally justifiable rejection of the strongest claim to be made out from the opposing point of view, that it is able to afford at least as adequate and perhaps more adequate account and explanation of the failures and limitations of one’s own standpoint than that standpoint itself can provide….By contrast it never even occurred to the contributors to the Ninth Edition to enter imaginatively into the standpoint of those allegedly primitive and savage peoples whom they were studying. [pp. 181-182]
There is much more to say, but for the purpose of review let us turn to the last stage of MacIntyre’s dialectic, namely the confrontation between tradition and genealogy in chapter nine [pp. 196-215]. The gist of his thread of thought in this chapter is that the very concept of ethics entails a sense of obligation, that is, a recognition on the part of any rational agent that it owes an account of its conduct. What happens when the genealogist thrusts aside this sine qua non? Nothing less than the decomposition of the very self. Hence, Nietzsche involves himself in a self-contradiction: for how can he affirm the self and its vitality, as he most definitely wants to, while simultaneously pulling the carpet out from underneath it, as it were, leading to its decomposition into a mere Humean stream of consciousness in which there can be no bearer of self-identity? In MacIntyre’s assessment,
What I am suggesting, then, is that the genealogist faces grave difficulties in constructing a narrative of his or her own past which would allow any acknowledgment in that past of a failure, let alone a guilty failure, which is also the failure of the same still-present self. [p. 213]
Let us expand on this point for it gets to the heart of the matter. The predominant modern view of autonomy implies that one can never make an honest mistake or get past evil; one has to twist one’s interpretation of oneself so that any crime, no matter how base or thoughtless, can be retrospectively justified and seen as having been for the best after all (Nietzsche’s amor fati). The concert pianist, however, does not excuse his technical faults but practices until he has achieved a mastery of technique. It would be strange if the situation were entirely different in morals. The atheist, though, literally cannot correct himself because he does not acknowledge any standard outside of his own will by which to judge. Now the Torah proclaims to us the absolute standard (vide Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18).
It will be apposite to quote in this connection an extended theoretical passage from earlier in the book where MacIntyre reasons in a Socratic mode to the effect that –
That is, the apprentice has to learn, at first from his or her teachers and then in her or her continuing self-education, how to identify mistakes made by him or herself in applying the acknowledged standards, the standards recognized to be the best available so far in the history of that particular craft. A second key distinction is that between what it is good and best for me with my particular level of training and learning in my particular circumstances to do and what is good and best unqualifiedly. That is, the apprentice has to learn to distinguish between the kind of excellence which both others and he or she can expect of him or himself here and now and that ultimate excellence which furnishes both apprentices and master-craftsmen with their telos. What the correct and systematic application of these distinctions both by his or her teacher and by the apprentice him or herself results in initially is the identification of the defects and limitations of this particular person, as he or she is here and now, with respect to the achievement of that telos: defects and limitations in habits of judgment and habits of evaluation, rooted in corruptions and inadequacies of desire, taste, habit and judgment. So the apprentice learns what it is about him or herself that has to be transformed, that is, what vices need to be eradicated, what intellectual and moral virtues need to be cultivated. And this need to identify such virtues and to acquire them in order to learn whatever it is in which, in this particular craft, one needs to be instructed has particularly important consequences when the craft in question is, or includes, moral enquiry. The virtues of course are required for the practice of any technē if that technē is to be directed towards a genuine good. For although every good is the ergon of some technē, the skills of a technē may be exercised with the purpose of achieving what is not in fact a good. All rational powers, said Aristotle – and to possess a technē is to possess a rational power – can have contrary effects. So that the exercise of a technē does not of itself determine to what end that exercise will be directed. Something else is needed – orexis or prohairesis, felt desire alone or desire guided by reason (Metaphysics IX, 1048a1-11). And the judgment or right reason informing such a desire will always refer implicitly or explicitly to that telos the achievement of which is the genuine good to be achieved for that particular agent in his or her particular circumstances. The telos of moral enquiry, which is excellence in the achievement not only of adequate theoretical understanding of the specifically human good, but also practical embodiment of that understanding in the life of the particular enquirer, most of all requires therefore not just craft but a virtue-guided craft. [pp. 62-63]
Let, therefore, anyone who aspires to genuine excellence of character [aretē] take to heart MacIntyte’s prescriptions: for phronēsis derives from the diligent practice of the life of the virtues, and, as we have just seen, thus to practice rests upon a foundation, scarcely of Nietzschean self-exaltation, but of humility, the humility it takes to correct oneself when one knows oneself to be in the wrong. A self-education in the virtues is but the accrual of thousands of instances of self-correction, occurring as part of a determined pursuit of aretē over a span of many years. The expressivist orientation of today’s regnant secular liberal pedagogy, however, precludes the attainment of anything like aretē: to insist, automatically, that one is always in the right, at least at heart, stands at odds with humility and denies oneself any chance to learn from one’s missteps – thereby explaining the patchy character profile one commonly observes in young people, who will be zealously and unquestioningly observant of all politically correct niceties into which they have been indoctrinated while simultaneously being glaringly deficient in the old-time virtues governing self-conduct and interpersonal conduct.
What does one want? To be self-justified but lacking in any moral greatness, or to hearken to Jesus when he declares:
You are light for the world. A city built on a hill-top cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house. In the same way your light must shine in people’s sight, so that, seeing your good works, they may give praise to your Father in heaven. [Matthew 5:14-16]?
If so, embrace the self-discipline of the apprentice about whom MacIntyre writes in the passage quoted above – harsh though it may seem to be, at the time, it builds character and character invariably produces good works. Maybe, just maybe, somebody of an intrepid and magnanimous temperament will take it upon himself to disregard the secular liberal pedagogy with which he will be brainwashed in the public schools, but which paradoxically does not educate, and train himself instead for phronēsis and aretē – someday to discover unto us the twenty-first-century avatar of the sixth-century Saint Benedict whom MacIntyre invokes in the closing paragraph of After Virtue, who we hope may, through an inventive combination of unforeseen elements of social conduct, show contemporary people of good will how to keep alive a culture of love amid the surrounding darkness (viz., the culture of death against which Pope John Paul II exhorts us in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae and the dictatorship of relativism so forcefully decried by Pope Benedict XVI).
Thus, MacIntyre himself, when composing the Gifford lectures on which Three Rival Versions of Moral Equiry is based, must have felt the need to explain his views in a way that would speak more directly to current concerns. The structure of the work is simple: first, lay out what will be called the encyclopaedic tradition, so named because it was given a canonical embodiment in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published from 1873 onwards (around the time of Adam Gifford, sponsor of the esteemed lecture series to which MacIntyre has now been invited to contribute). The encyclopaedic tradition proves to be a perfect foil, for
What divides our culture from theirs is, as we have seen, at least threefold. They assumed the assent of all educated persons to a single substantive conception of rationality;….They understood the outcome of allegiance to the standards and methods of such a rationality to be the elaboration of a comprehensive, rationally incontestable scientific understanding of the whole, in which the architectonic of the sciences matched that of the cosmos….And finally they saw their whole mode of life, including their conceptions of rationality and of science, as part of a history of inevitable progress, judged by a standard of progress which had itself emerged from that history. [p. 23]
Yet, all was not as harmonious and rosy as perhaps the authors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica imagined, feeling themselves secure in a position of supposed moral superiority. There are two further characters to the cast, which MacIntyre styles as genealogy and tradition simpliciter:
Each of these two contending parties has its own foundation document. For the latter it is Zur Genealogie der Moral published by Nietzsche in 1887, the year of Adam Gifford’s death. What Zur Genealogie der Moral provided was not only an argument in favor of, but a paradigm for, the construction of a type of subversive narrative designed to undermine the central assumptions of the Encyclopaedia, both in content and in genre. Where the encyclopaedist aspired to displace the Bible as a canonical book, the genealogist intended to discredit the whole notion of a canon. For the other rival party its charter document is the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris published by Pope Leo XII in 1878, four years after the Ninth Edition commenced publication. Aeterni Patris summoned its readers to a renewal of an understanding of intellectual enquiry as the continuation of a specific type of tradition, that which achieved definitive expression in the writings of Aquinas, one the appropriation of which could not only provide the resources for radical criticism of the conception of rationality dominant in nineteenth-century modernity and in the Ninth Edition, but also preserve and justify the canonical status of the Bible as distinct from, yet hegemonic over, all secular enquiry. [p. 25]
MacIntyre’s project, thus, will be dialectical: to play off encyclopaedia against genealogy resp. encyclopaedia against tradition and show that, on both scores, it comes in wanting. This leaves the field to the two remaining contenders, genealogy and tradition. But, although nobody serious subscribes to the encyclopaedic project anymore, it continues to structure the debate in the sense that we still employ its concepts, abstracted from the context in which they made sense. Thus, MacIntyre will begin by discussing what morality was for Adam Gifford and, to this end, adopts Henry Sidgwick’s article on ‘Ethics’ in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as definitive. But, we are in for a surprise in that,
Nowhere does Sidgwick take notice, for example, of the fact that the word ‘morality’ as used by his contemporaries has no equivalent expression in biblical or medieval Hebrew or in either classical or koinē Greek, or in either classical or high medieval Latin….Sidgwick’s falsifying history thus projected back into the past the conceptual structuring of the author’s present and thereby suggested that Plato and Aristotle, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Kant and Sidgwick himself were all offering accounts, albeit rival accounts, of the rational status of one and the same timeless subject matter. [p. 28]
The encyclopaedists, therefore, suffer from a blindness that exposes them to critique from the quarter of, respectively, the genealogist or the traditionalist. First, the former (in chapter two on Genealogies and Subversions, pp. 32-57). Suffice it to reproduce here MacIntyre’s paraphrase of the genealogist’s main charge against the encyclopaedist:
What emerged was the victory of a life-denying ascetic ideal which issues in those conceptions of sin, of duty, of conscience, and of the relationship of virtue to happiness which have perpetuated both resentment and rancor and the denial of life….Nietzsche thus presents his own narrative in Zur Genealogie der Moral as superior to those of the academic historians precisely in that it enabled him to identify limitations and defects in their writing of which they themselves were unable to become aware. [p. 40]
Next, the latter (in chapter three on Too Many Thomisms?, pp. 58-81). Here, our author delves into what must be for many readers the little-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic intellectual world, from Kleutgen and Rosmini to Cornoldi, Maritain, Marechal, Grabmann, Gilson etc. The goal is to characterize Thomist sapientia in terms of the hierarchy of crafts. MacIntyre’s main point is methodological, that is, that we must try to grasp the debate at the appropriate level of generality, namely:
It is then crucial, if Aquinas’ thought is to be restored and continued so that it may confront what have been the sovereign modes of moral and theological enquiry in the last hundred years, the encyclopaedic and the genealogical modes, that we recognize that it is not in respect of their individual theses, considered item by item, but only in respect of those theses understood in their relationship to each overall specific mode of enquiry, that the true nature of the conflict between Thomism and these modern standpoints can adequately be explored. [p. 77]
So the encyclopaedists’ narrative reduces the past to a mere prologue to the rational present, while the genealogist struggles in the construction of his or her narrative against the past, including of the past which is perceived as hidden within the alleged rationality of the present. The Thomists’ narrative, by contrast with both of these, treats the past neither as mere prologue nor as something to be struggled against, but as that from which we have to learn if we are to identify and move towards our telos more adequately and that which we have to put to the question if we are to know which questions we ourselves should next formulate and attempt to answer, both theoretically and practically. [p. 79]
The core of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry comprises chapters four through eight, in which MacIntyre reviews the history of traditional virtue ethics ever since Augustine. In fact, the Aristotelian and Augustinian conceptions themselves once stood in rivalry (chapters four and five) and it is Aquinas’ great accomplishment to have reconciled the two in his Summa theologiae (chapter six). This recensionist has always found it remarkable, in view of the magnitude of the achievement of the high medieval synthesis of the thirteenth century, how quickly it was destined to fall apart, beginning in the fourteenth century with the rise of nominalism. MacIntyre himself reviews the dissolution of the high medieval synthesis at the hands of John Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart in chapter seven, which represents something of a detour in that his main interest lies in the present day (late twentieth-century, that is), after the self-conscious revival of Thomism, to which he returns in chapter eight, Tradition against Encyclopaedia: Enlightened Morality as the Superstition of Modernity [pp. 170-195]. The crux of critique in this chapter centers on the encyclopaedists’ faulty understanding of the ethos of primitive peoples who were then becoming known in the early days of anthropology. For they misconstrued, for instance, the Hawaiian concept of taboo as strictly negative instead of placing in its proper context of a self-consistent ethical system (which MacIntyre reviews in detail, pp. 176-188, where he imagines how a knowledgeable Hawaiian might respond to the encyclopaedist’s critique of taboo); accordingly, the encyclopaedists could proclaim the alleged rational superiority of their own enlightened morality without having demonstrated it to be so by pitting it against the opposing thesis, as everyone who has even glanced at the Summa theologiae knows to be the medieval scholastics’ preferred argumentative technique:
Secondly, no claim to rational superiority, on the view which I am ascribing to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, can be made good except on the basis of a rationally justifiable rejection of the strongest claim to be made out from the opposing point of view, that it is able to afford at least as adequate and perhaps more adequate account and explanation of the failures and limitations of one’s own standpoint than that standpoint itself can provide….By contrast it never even occurred to the contributors to the Ninth Edition to enter imaginatively into the standpoint of those allegedly primitive and savage peoples whom they were studying. [pp. 181-182]
There is much more to say, but for the purpose of review let us turn to the last stage of MacIntyre’s dialectic, namely the confrontation between tradition and genealogy in chapter nine [pp. 196-215]. The gist of his thread of thought in this chapter is that the very concept of ethics entails a sense of obligation, that is, a recognition on the part of any rational agent that it owes an account of its conduct. What happens when the genealogist thrusts aside this sine qua non? Nothing less than the decomposition of the very self. Hence, Nietzsche involves himself in a self-contradiction: for how can he affirm the self and its vitality, as he most definitely wants to, while simultaneously pulling the carpet out from underneath it, as it were, leading to its decomposition into a mere Humean stream of consciousness in which there can be no bearer of self-identity? In MacIntyre’s assessment,
What I am suggesting, then, is that the genealogist faces grave difficulties in constructing a narrative of his or her own past which would allow any acknowledgment in that past of a failure, let alone a guilty failure, which is also the failure of the same still-present self. [p. 213]
Let us expand on this point for it gets to the heart of the matter. The predominant modern view of autonomy implies that one can never make an honest mistake or get past evil; one has to twist one’s interpretation of oneself so that any crime, no matter how base or thoughtless, can be retrospectively justified and seen as having been for the best after all (Nietzsche’s amor fati). The concert pianist, however, does not excuse his technical faults but practices until he has achieved a mastery of technique. It would be strange if the situation were entirely different in morals. The atheist, though, literally cannot correct himself because he does not acknowledge any standard outside of his own will by which to judge. Now the Torah proclaims to us the absolute standard (vide Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18).
It will be apposite to quote in this connection an extended theoretical passage from earlier in the book where MacIntyre reasons in a Socratic mode to the effect that –
That is, the apprentice has to learn, at first from his or her teachers and then in her or her continuing self-education, how to identify mistakes made by him or herself in applying the acknowledged standards, the standards recognized to be the best available so far in the history of that particular craft. A second key distinction is that between what it is good and best for me with my particular level of training and learning in my particular circumstances to do and what is good and best unqualifiedly. That is, the apprentice has to learn to distinguish between the kind of excellence which both others and he or she can expect of him or himself here and now and that ultimate excellence which furnishes both apprentices and master-craftsmen with their telos. What the correct and systematic application of these distinctions both by his or her teacher and by the apprentice him or herself results in initially is the identification of the defects and limitations of this particular person, as he or she is here and now, with respect to the achievement of that telos: defects and limitations in habits of judgment and habits of evaluation, rooted in corruptions and inadequacies of desire, taste, habit and judgment. So the apprentice learns what it is about him or herself that has to be transformed, that is, what vices need to be eradicated, what intellectual and moral virtues need to be cultivated. And this need to identify such virtues and to acquire them in order to learn whatever it is in which, in this particular craft, one needs to be instructed has particularly important consequences when the craft in question is, or includes, moral enquiry. The virtues of course are required for the practice of any technē if that technē is to be directed towards a genuine good. For although every good is the ergon of some technē, the skills of a technē may be exercised with the purpose of achieving what is not in fact a good. All rational powers, said Aristotle – and to possess a technē is to possess a rational power – can have contrary effects. So that the exercise of a technē does not of itself determine to what end that exercise will be directed. Something else is needed – orexis or prohairesis, felt desire alone or desire guided by reason (Metaphysics IX, 1048a1-11). And the judgment or right reason informing such a desire will always refer implicitly or explicitly to that telos the achievement of which is the genuine good to be achieved for that particular agent in his or her particular circumstances. The telos of moral enquiry, which is excellence in the achievement not only of adequate theoretical understanding of the specifically human good, but also practical embodiment of that understanding in the life of the particular enquirer, most of all requires therefore not just craft but a virtue-guided craft. [pp. 62-63]
Let, therefore, anyone who aspires to genuine excellence of character [aretē] take to heart MacIntyte’s prescriptions: for phronēsis derives from the diligent practice of the life of the virtues, and, as we have just seen, thus to practice rests upon a foundation, scarcely of Nietzschean self-exaltation, but of humility, the humility it takes to correct oneself when one knows oneself to be in the wrong. A self-education in the virtues is but the accrual of thousands of instances of self-correction, occurring as part of a determined pursuit of aretē over a span of many years. The expressivist orientation of today’s regnant secular liberal pedagogy, however, precludes the attainment of anything like aretē: to insist, automatically, that one is always in the right, at least at heart, stands at odds with humility and denies oneself any chance to learn from one’s missteps – thereby explaining the patchy character profile one commonly observes in young people, who will be zealously and unquestioningly observant of all politically correct niceties into which they have been indoctrinated while simultaneously being glaringly deficient in the old-time virtues governing self-conduct and interpersonal conduct.
What does one want? To be self-justified but lacking in any moral greatness, or to hearken to Jesus when he declares:
You are light for the world. A city built on a hill-top cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp to put it under a tub; they put it on the lamp-stand where it shines for everyone in the house. In the same way your light must shine in people’s sight, so that, seeing your good works, they may give praise to your Father in heaven. [Matthew 5:14-16]?
If so, embrace the self-discipline of the apprentice about whom MacIntyre writes in the passage quoted above – harsh though it may seem to be, at the time, it builds character and character invariably produces good works. Maybe, just maybe, somebody of an intrepid and magnanimous temperament will take it upon himself to disregard the secular liberal pedagogy with which he will be brainwashed in the public schools, but which paradoxically does not educate, and train himself instead for phronēsis and aretē – someday to discover unto us the twenty-first-century avatar of the sixth-century Saint Benedict whom MacIntyre invokes in the closing paragraph of After Virtue, who we hope may, through an inventive combination of unforeseen elements of social conduct, show contemporary people of good will how to keep alive a culture of love amid the surrounding darkness (viz., the culture of death against which Pope John Paul II exhorts us in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae and the dictatorship of relativism so forcefully decried by Pope Benedict XVI).
August 11, 2011
A Brief Note on Nietzschean Genealogy and How it Relates to MacIntyre's Project
The thing that impressed me most with MacIntyre’s great work (the so-called 'Trilogy' of "After Virtue", then "Whose Justice?, Which Rationality?", and finally, this book, "Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition") is his discussion of the importance of ‘coherence’ in a Tradition. By ‘coherence’ I mean (and I believe he means something like this too) that those adept in the philosophical basis of any tradition, though they cannot answer everything, can agree on what the fundamental questions are and how one methodologically proceeds to attempt to answer them within a given tradition. ...Philosophical coherence, it seems, even in this limited methodological sense, demands that the modern world must (somehow) become one, that is to say, it must have only one Tradition. I would add that since MacIntyre maintains that there can be, and indeed must be, many differences of opinion between adherents of a tradition, that it follows that this 'Trilogy' must not be understood as a call for a single World State or society. A successfully universal world-tradition will have many different 'flavors' amongst many different peoples and polities.
The previous book in this Trilogy was titled "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" And oh God! Those are indeed the questions today since there are so many incommensurable philosophical and religious traditions... But if there can be no adequate understanding between rival theories, as MacIntyre is often in that earlier book at pains to show, then - what? Well, then one wonders exactly how we fragmented late moderns can choose the Aristotelian-Thomist Tradition (as MacIntyre certainly wants) except by a Nietzschean act of Will. It would still seem that one cannot initially base practical activity (or lived choices) upon mere theory. Just as Plato wrote a Prelude to the Law (I am, of course, alluding to the late dialogue, "The Laws") that was itself not merely a law, and Hegel wrote a Preface to his "Phenomenology" that was not, and could not possibly be, entirely phenomenological, - so too one suspects that MacIntyre is here forced to write a 'preamble' to a 'hegemonic' Thomist Tradition that is not fully Thomist.
I understand these remarks, btw, to be more a comment on the inability of philosophical theory, any philosophical theory, to radically ground itself than a specific criticism of the position of MacIntyre. No theory can ever radically ground itself; thus one always proceeds to theory 'X', certainly in the beginning, in a non-'X' manner. ...Always. And with those comments I perhaps reveal myself to be an adherent (I hope a very skeptical adherent) of the 'postmodern tradition' (a genuine existing Contradictio in terminis, if you can believe that there is such a thing!) that our author herein designates as Genealogy. And our postmodern genealogists have pitched their tents precisely here, - on the question of origins. At the beginning of anything one always finds something else...
The Traditions that our author delineates in this book ("Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry") are Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Each of these three traditions also, for purposes of explication, has a designated 'proof' text: they are, respectively, the fabled Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nietzsche's "Zur Genealogie der Moral", and Pope Leo XIII' encyclical 'Aeterni Patris'. I honestly found comparing these three specific positions a bit curious. What MacIntyre designates as Encyclopaedia (Liberalism) and Tradition (Catholicism) have produced societies in which one can live and they have also produced great civilizations. Genealogy can certainly never do either. It is, at bottom, only a critical method, a surgeons scalpel, a weapon. Encyclopaedia and Tradition can legitimately be judged 'good or bad' and 'true or false'. Regarding genealogy, like the scalpel or the weapon, one can only enquire whether or not it has been used appropriately...
Now, I do not mean to admit by this that Nietzsche is, or intends to be, merely a critic. What MacIntyre designates here as 'Genealogy' Nietzsche considered to be only part of the 'No-Saying' critical part of his work. Zarathustra was intended to be the 'Yes-Saying' affirmative part of his work. (Regarding that, see his "Ecce Homo", the section entitled 'Beyond Good and Evil'.) The 'Yes-Saying' part of Nietzsche's work MacIntyre entirely ignores. I suspect that our author found it both useful and pleasant to use genealogy as a stick to beat 'Encyclopaedia' about the head and then use 'Tradition' to show the glaring inadequacies of genealogy as a tradition that could successfully form a world in which we all could live. But again, for Nietzsche, genealogical critique was, and could only be, but half the story. In MacIntyre's defense one should add that since virtually all of postmodern criticism has almost entirely ignored Zarathustra (and its purport) that therefore MacIntyre was justified to do so too insofar as this book is intended as a critique of both our miserable postmodernity and its liberal pretensions.
Traditional Catholicism, modern Liberalism (and also its would-be transformative avatar, Socialism) are above all (or in the case of socialism, one day could be) societies that have both norms and ideals. One applies these norms to approach the ideal; and, when necessary, one revises norms in light of the ideal. This is progress within a tradition. But what happens when incommensurable traditions come into conflict? That is the question MacIntyre intends to answer in this book. 'Really-existing' Postmodernism has become, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, little more than a 'narrative system' (i.e., a way to speak about and navigate through) the several incommensurable traditions that in fact divide our secular world. Our author is admirably striving to put an end to that seemingly permanent division.
MacIntyre is, to his credit, entirely a Universalist. (As is every genuine philosopher.) There were ever only two possibilities for him: Socialism and Christianity. He eventually, after a a long process, decided upon Christianity. So why is the Gigantomachia (battle of the giants) that is enacted within this book engaged without the participation of Marxism (and its dialectic) as one of the antagonists? I suppose we will never know. Perhaps he feared that the Universalism of both the Church and Marxism would militate against his desired result? (Probably, he thinks that there is no Marxist moral tradition that is entirely distinct from liberalism and therefore it would be inappropriate in this study.) Yes, (for our author) Marxism and Christianity have many similarities. In his much earlier "Marxism and Christianity" we learn that both "Marxism and Christianity rescue individual lives from the insignificance of finitude" and this gives them reason to hope. He later says in this same early book that "Liberalism by contrast simply abandons the virtue of hope. For liberals the future has become the present enlarged."
After MacIntyre's acceptance of Christianity the main targets of his mature work has been both liberalism and postmodernism, with Marxism (for our author, the only other possibility) usually (but not always) ignored. So then, is postmodernism to be considered merely the déjà vu of liberalism? I for one don't think this can be consistently maintained. For instance, Christianity, liberalism and marxism all promise a better future. Yes, it is certainly true that liberalism merely promises an improved liberalism while both Christianity and Marxism promise a transformative future. But postmodernity promises nothing (and delivers it too!). It is the decadence of a liberalism that can no longer even hope to meaningfully change itself. Now, genealogy counters this promise of a 'better future' with the supposed discovery of a 'different past'. That is to say, the genealogist knows that he can trump any promised future with a new vision (i.e., a new narrative) of the past. And, of course, this new vision (as mere story) is always immediately available to everyone.
This is what makes genealogy so insidious an enemy. The various progressive positions have to eventually make actual improvements in the world; even Christianity (which technically promises a better future only in the next life) had many apocalyptic movements demanding a better life now. But the genealogists can create different narratives regarding the origins of any religion, regime, or revolution, and eventually, in the midst of some crisis, a story will grow in popularity and then (perhaps) go forth and change the world. Of course, this is what Nietzsche expected of his 'Zarathustra'. The different pasts 'discovered' (or invented) by genealogy erode the master narrative(s) of the dominant tradition(s) and thereby allow his 'Zarathustrian' world to rise.
Or so Nietzsche hoped. But the genealogy of the overwhelming majority of postmoderns derives mostly from Foucault, not Nietzsche. The difference between them is the difference between psychology and history. Nietzschean 'Psychology' is based on what he considers to be the facts of human nature. Having understood (to his own satisfaction) the inevitabilities of human nature, Nietzsche can display that serene confidence in his 'Zarathustra' that has so amazed and mystified commentators of all stripes. But again, the present postmodern understanding of genealogy has actually become an amalgam of Foucault, deconstruction and triumphal constructivism. Like liberalism, this road only leads (at best) to supposedly improved versions of itself. So it is this 'really existing' genealogy that MacIntyre intends herein to show can never lead to a world in which all could live. And of course he does so quite successfully.
This is a brilliant conclusion to a magnificent trilogy. I recently found time to revisit them. It is easily one of the best philosophical performances written in my lifetime. MacIntyre should be very proud. This review intended to focus merely on his treatment of genealogy and how said treatment might relate to his overall project of writing a history of moral inquiry itself.
The thing that impressed me most with MacIntyre’s great work (the so-called 'Trilogy' of "After Virtue", then "Whose Justice?, Which Rationality?", and finally, this book, "Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition") is his discussion of the importance of ‘coherence’ in a Tradition. By ‘coherence’ I mean (and I believe he means something like this too) that those adept in the philosophical basis of any tradition, though they cannot answer everything, can agree on what the fundamental questions are and how one methodologically proceeds to attempt to answer them within a given tradition. ...Philosophical coherence, it seems, even in this limited methodological sense, demands that the modern world must (somehow) become one, that is to say, it must have only one Tradition. I would add that since MacIntyre maintains that there can be, and indeed must be, many differences of opinion between adherents of a tradition, that it follows that this 'Trilogy' must not be understood as a call for a single World State or society. A successfully universal world-tradition will have many different 'flavors' amongst many different peoples and polities.
The previous book in this Trilogy was titled "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" And oh God! Those are indeed the questions today since there are so many incommensurable philosophical and religious traditions... But if there can be no adequate understanding between rival theories, as MacIntyre is often in that earlier book at pains to show, then - what? Well, then one wonders exactly how we fragmented late moderns can choose the Aristotelian-Thomist Tradition (as MacIntyre certainly wants) except by a Nietzschean act of Will. It would still seem that one cannot initially base practical activity (or lived choices) upon mere theory. Just as Plato wrote a Prelude to the Law (I am, of course, alluding to the late dialogue, "The Laws") that was itself not merely a law, and Hegel wrote a Preface to his "Phenomenology" that was not, and could not possibly be, entirely phenomenological, - so too one suspects that MacIntyre is here forced to write a 'preamble' to a 'hegemonic' Thomist Tradition that is not fully Thomist.
I understand these remarks, btw, to be more a comment on the inability of philosophical theory, any philosophical theory, to radically ground itself than a specific criticism of the position of MacIntyre. No theory can ever radically ground itself; thus one always proceeds to theory 'X', certainly in the beginning, in a non-'X' manner. ...Always. And with those comments I perhaps reveal myself to be an adherent (I hope a very skeptical adherent) of the 'postmodern tradition' (a genuine existing Contradictio in terminis, if you can believe that there is such a thing!) that our author herein designates as Genealogy. And our postmodern genealogists have pitched their tents precisely here, - on the question of origins. At the beginning of anything one always finds something else...
The Traditions that our author delineates in this book ("Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry") are Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Each of these three traditions also, for purposes of explication, has a designated 'proof' text: they are, respectively, the fabled Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nietzsche's "Zur Genealogie der Moral", and Pope Leo XIII' encyclical 'Aeterni Patris'. I honestly found comparing these three specific positions a bit curious. What MacIntyre designates as Encyclopaedia (Liberalism) and Tradition (Catholicism) have produced societies in which one can live and they have also produced great civilizations. Genealogy can certainly never do either. It is, at bottom, only a critical method, a surgeons scalpel, a weapon. Encyclopaedia and Tradition can legitimately be judged 'good or bad' and 'true or false'. Regarding genealogy, like the scalpel or the weapon, one can only enquire whether or not it has been used appropriately...
Now, I do not mean to admit by this that Nietzsche is, or intends to be, merely a critic. What MacIntyre designates here as 'Genealogy' Nietzsche considered to be only part of the 'No-Saying' critical part of his work. Zarathustra was intended to be the 'Yes-Saying' affirmative part of his work. (Regarding that, see his "Ecce Homo", the section entitled 'Beyond Good and Evil'.) The 'Yes-Saying' part of Nietzsche's work MacIntyre entirely ignores. I suspect that our author found it both useful and pleasant to use genealogy as a stick to beat 'Encyclopaedia' about the head and then use 'Tradition' to show the glaring inadequacies of genealogy as a tradition that could successfully form a world in which we all could live. But again, for Nietzsche, genealogical critique was, and could only be, but half the story. In MacIntyre's defense one should add that since virtually all of postmodern criticism has almost entirely ignored Zarathustra (and its purport) that therefore MacIntyre was justified to do so too insofar as this book is intended as a critique of both our miserable postmodernity and its liberal pretensions.
Traditional Catholicism, modern Liberalism (and also its would-be transformative avatar, Socialism) are above all (or in the case of socialism, one day could be) societies that have both norms and ideals. One applies these norms to approach the ideal; and, when necessary, one revises norms in light of the ideal. This is progress within a tradition. But what happens when incommensurable traditions come into conflict? That is the question MacIntyre intends to answer in this book. 'Really-existing' Postmodernism has become, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, little more than a 'narrative system' (i.e., a way to speak about and navigate through) the several incommensurable traditions that in fact divide our secular world. Our author is admirably striving to put an end to that seemingly permanent division.
MacIntyre is, to his credit, entirely a Universalist. (As is every genuine philosopher.) There were ever only two possibilities for him: Socialism and Christianity. He eventually, after a a long process, decided upon Christianity. So why is the Gigantomachia (battle of the giants) that is enacted within this book engaged without the participation of Marxism (and its dialectic) as one of the antagonists? I suppose we will never know. Perhaps he feared that the Universalism of both the Church and Marxism would militate against his desired result? (Probably, he thinks that there is no Marxist moral tradition that is entirely distinct from liberalism and therefore it would be inappropriate in this study.) Yes, (for our author) Marxism and Christianity have many similarities. In his much earlier "Marxism and Christianity" we learn that both "Marxism and Christianity rescue individual lives from the insignificance of finitude" and this gives them reason to hope. He later says in this same early book that "Liberalism by contrast simply abandons the virtue of hope. For liberals the future has become the present enlarged."
After MacIntyre's acceptance of Christianity the main targets of his mature work has been both liberalism and postmodernism, with Marxism (for our author, the only other possibility) usually (but not always) ignored. So then, is postmodernism to be considered merely the déjà vu of liberalism? I for one don't think this can be consistently maintained. For instance, Christianity, liberalism and marxism all promise a better future. Yes, it is certainly true that liberalism merely promises an improved liberalism while both Christianity and Marxism promise a transformative future. But postmodernity promises nothing (and delivers it too!). It is the decadence of a liberalism that can no longer even hope to meaningfully change itself. Now, genealogy counters this promise of a 'better future' with the supposed discovery of a 'different past'. That is to say, the genealogist knows that he can trump any promised future with a new vision (i.e., a new narrative) of the past. And, of course, this new vision (as mere story) is always immediately available to everyone.
This is what makes genealogy so insidious an enemy. The various progressive positions have to eventually make actual improvements in the world; even Christianity (which technically promises a better future only in the next life) had many apocalyptic movements demanding a better life now. But the genealogists can create different narratives regarding the origins of any religion, regime, or revolution, and eventually, in the midst of some crisis, a story will grow in popularity and then (perhaps) go forth and change the world. Of course, this is what Nietzsche expected of his 'Zarathustra'. The different pasts 'discovered' (or invented) by genealogy erode the master narrative(s) of the dominant tradition(s) and thereby allow his 'Zarathustrian' world to rise.
Or so Nietzsche hoped. But the genealogy of the overwhelming majority of postmoderns derives mostly from Foucault, not Nietzsche. The difference between them is the difference between psychology and history. Nietzschean 'Psychology' is based on what he considers to be the facts of human nature. Having understood (to his own satisfaction) the inevitabilities of human nature, Nietzsche can display that serene confidence in his 'Zarathustra' that has so amazed and mystified commentators of all stripes. But again, the present postmodern understanding of genealogy has actually become an amalgam of Foucault, deconstruction and triumphal constructivism. Like liberalism, this road only leads (at best) to supposedly improved versions of itself. So it is this 'really existing' genealogy that MacIntyre intends herein to show can never lead to a world in which all could live. And of course he does so quite successfully.
This is a brilliant conclusion to a magnificent trilogy. I recently found time to revisit them. It is easily one of the best philosophical performances written in my lifetime. MacIntyre should be very proud. This review intended to focus merely on his treatment of genealogy and how said treatment might relate to his overall project of writing a history of moral inquiry itself.
May 19, 2025
The writing is rough. The content is pretty cool. How do we deal with incommensurability? How do we read history? Why is there no growth in moral understanding, just endless debates in which no one can win? Why are universities a strange place? And why are Gifford lectures a not so helpful format for education?
McIntyre knows the answer. Or at least he proposes an interesting one!
McIntyre knows the answer. Or at least he proposes an interesting one!
November 12, 2021
This book, though incredibly inaccessible and impenetrable, had remarkably winsome and creative ideas. The cost exacted upon the reader to enter this amusement park is super high, but that’s because you get access to the most fun rides. Just because a book is incomprehensible to me in one sense does not mean that it does not contain wisdom for me to chew on. So, this book taught me that my frustrated bewilderment about any books’ subjects may be more due to my own insouciant lack of effort than to the books vapidness of meaning.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 28, 2023
This is a relevant defense of truth and Aristotelian ethics (Tradition) against Enlightenment/rationality (Encyclopaedia) and postmodernism (Genealogy). MacIntyre assigns a representative text (kind of like a mascot) to each of the three versions of moral inquiry to help describe and juxtapose them: Pope Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris represents Tradition, Encyclopaedia Britannica represents Encyclopaedia, and Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals represents Genealogy. As a Christian, I am grateful for MacIntyre's success in showing how there is still a firm foundation for truth and goodness in the 21st-century.
"Systematically conducted controversy would itself contribute to systematically conducted moral and theological enquiry"
"Systematically conducted controversy would itself contribute to systematically conducted moral and theological enquiry"
June 4, 2012
Imagine attending a lecture series and having the lecturer introduce his lecture with the statement that he will be unable to meet the guidelines of the donor who established the lecture series. This is what MacIntyre does in this text version of his Gifford Lectures and he does so to set up the premise of his lectures: that the aim of Gifford and the encyclopedists of his era to have a rationally established moral discourse is unattainable on Gifford's terms. He does this by contrasting this with two rival versions of moral enquiry that show the fallacy of this approach. The first is Nietzsche's genealogy of morals approach which shows that rationally established morality systems are just pretenses to a power game. The other, and more neglected system, is that of Thomist ethics. MacIntyre explores how these actually represent the engagement of two conflicting systems--Aristotelian and Augustinian systems and that the accomplishment of Aquinas was to deeply understand each and to see the places where each answered to problems in the other.
I think MacIntyre's most trenchant observations and proposals come in the final chapter where he deals with the genre of lecture, the lack of real moral discourse in the university world and what might be done going forward. Instead of the foreclosure of moral discourse which characterizes the contemporary university in his view, he argues for a twenty first century version of the University of Paris where conflicting versions of moral discourse are engaged in a form of constrained conflict, where advocates of each argue rigorously for their own version and against rival versions while using this give an take to constantly re-assess one's own position. It appears that what MacIntyre looks for is some form of new synthesis similar to Thomist ethics to arise out of this process.
What I think MacIntyre has described are the intellectual and moral fault lines in our society. What troubles me is whether inside the university or outside, there are those with both the moral and intellectual virtues and motivations necessary for the kind of engagement he envisions.
I think MacIntyre's most trenchant observations and proposals come in the final chapter where he deals with the genre of lecture, the lack of real moral discourse in the university world and what might be done going forward. Instead of the foreclosure of moral discourse which characterizes the contemporary university in his view, he argues for a twenty first century version of the University of Paris where conflicting versions of moral discourse are engaged in a form of constrained conflict, where advocates of each argue rigorously for their own version and against rival versions while using this give an take to constantly re-assess one's own position. It appears that what MacIntyre looks for is some form of new synthesis similar to Thomist ethics to arise out of this process.
What I think MacIntyre has described are the intellectual and moral fault lines in our society. What troubles me is whether inside the university or outside, there are those with both the moral and intellectual virtues and motivations necessary for the kind of engagement he envisions.
January 24, 2008
I would only recommend reading this book if your Ethics professor assigns it to you. Like many philosophers, MacIntyre feels he has to present the whole history of philosophy before telling you what he thinks. So, by the time you get to the meat of his argument, you're practically overwhelmed with information. Also, like many philosophers, MacIntyre likes to use common words with his own quirky definitions, which doesn't help make things more clear.
Don't read this book before bed, and be prepared to reread large portions of it. Also, I'd recommend twelve-minute naps after each chapter to allow your brain to sort things out before moving on to the next chunk of philosophical dark matter.
That said, I actually found the ideas quite useful and somewhat interesting. I wouldn't read it again if given the option, but I'm not sorry I was forced to.
Don't read this book before bed, and be prepared to reread large portions of it. Also, I'd recommend twelve-minute naps after each chapter to allow your brain to sort things out before moving on to the next chunk of philosophical dark matter.
That said, I actually found the ideas quite useful and somewhat interesting. I wouldn't read it again if given the option, but I'm not sorry I was forced to.
May 22, 2019
MacIntyre makes his case for a new Thomism and while broadly successful, particular against his encyclopedic alternative, the book's assault on the genealogical approach (more popular now, I think, than it was when the book was written) is unlikely to shake the faith of its adherents or provide its critics with new avenues of attack. All in all, a worthy, if somewhat less fulfilling, sequel to After Virtue.
October 9, 2020
Macintyre is undefeated, and his diagnosis of the problem within the modern liberal university (and accompanying political implications) is astute. Just as the scholastics misunderstood Aquinas, we misunderstand the encyclopedists and the genealogists. We must return to a systematic manner of thinking, where we do not abstract ideas from their necessary background and place within a larger order.
March 10, 2024
Honestly, if I were able to read this at a higher level of comprehension than I currently have in my locker, I’d probably have rated this the full five stars — but man oh man is this a dense work. There is much here to consider and revisit once I’ve digested a statistically significant fraction of what MacIntyre himself has read in moral philosophy, theology, literature, etc. (It also probably didn’t help me that I have not read _Whose Justice?_)
July 24, 2021
I will need to re-read this for sure. Not only does MacIntyre write phenomenal (albeit dense) prose and deliver his message in a well-composed and dramatic structure, but his argument provokes deep thought and self-evaluation. Since I'm already on his "side," so to speak, I may be biased - but of course, if he is correct, then nobody else is any less biased either.
May 14, 2020
An exposition of Thomist moral philosophy contra 19th C. universalism and Nietzschean genealogy.
August 9, 2020
So thought provoking, but a very difficult read for a non-philosopher such as myself. I found it more challenging than After Virtue, but it was good to get to see those same ideas developed further.
February 20, 2024
MacIntyre viser nok en gang at liberalisme fuckings suger
March 13, 2017
This book is a phenomenal contribution not only to the comparative study of morality but also in envisioning the university as a place to expose rival standpoints in a way that creates less dogmatism and preconceptions. His critiques of modern education and his vision for a better alternative are amazing. A must-read!
August 21, 2021
I believed that MacIntyre did a good job explaining his theses on multiple systems of Moral Enquiry. He is very thorough in his argument and puts it together very thoughtfully. He seems at first glance to the side most with [[Aquinas]] and his system of thinking; and in the process, he almost defends the way study of the Bible as proceeded over time. I believe that he has some interesting thoughts upon reforming our educational system; however, I do not believe that these changes will be able to happen soon or in my lifetime. The changes that MacIntyre calls upon would require a massive overhaul that I don't think people would latch on to. Overall, I believe his idea that thinking should be treated as a craft that furthers what we know but encourages scrutiny is a way of thinking that should be greater used in our life.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 6, 2015
I have always had much admiration for the intellectual acuity and insight of Alasdair MacIntyre. But I thought this work was the best of his that I have so far read. The three rival versions at first seem like an odd choice: the intellectual and moral assumptions of the editors of the 9th edition of the Encylopedia Britannica, Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, and the papal encyclical establishing Thomism as a perennial philosophy in the Catholic Church. But the way MacIntyre reads through these very different traditions is absolutely intriguing. It gave me much to think about, especially reinforcing my conviction that a university or college education should make possible discussion between and among the various disciplines. That does not happen all that much, but it should. Without this, our education system produces utterly narrow minds, which are unsuited to address the difficult moral and political, not to mention intellectual, questions of our age.
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September 28, 2010کتاب عمیق دیگری از مکینتایر است که در آن درباره سه سنت دائره المعارف قرن 19، تبارشناسی نیچه ای و تومیسم اکوئیناس بحث و مقایسه می کند.به نظر وی از این میان تنها تومیسم می تواند مسیر قابل دفاعی برای حرکت به سوی صدق و حقیقت ارائه کند. دائره المعارف در پی صدق عام و عاری از زمان برای همه است. تبارشناسی هر گونه بحثی از صدق و حقیقت را به عنوان نقابی بر میل به قدرت می داند و تومیسم بر نقش سنت و شکل گیری و هدایت احساسات به عنوان مقدمه و راه شناخت تاکید دارد. متن کتاب پیچیده و خسته کننده و مشکل است
March 11, 2012
This easily is the most important book I have read. It made me so aware of how important epistemic humility is as we seek to follow Jesus, loving God with all my heart mind and soul. I wish it were required reading for every University student in every discipline and tradition.
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November 21, 2009Rebind
May 16, 2010
MacIntyre points out that there has never been an agreement on Metanarrative at any time in the history of Western Philosophy.
June 23, 2015
Lays out three different visions of scholarship which stem from three different visions of life; ties philosophical basic commitments to an ethic. Fantastic. Reading it was a peak moment of 2003.
September 3, 2015
If you like MacIntyre, this is a must-read.
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April 12, 2012Read chapter X- Reconceiving the University as an Institution and the Lecture as a Genre
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews