AFTER VIRTUE by Alasdair MacIntyre (reviewed by W.E. Connoll)

General philosophy message board for Discussion and debate on other philosophical issues not directly related to veganism. Metaphysics, religion, theist vs. atheist debates, politics, general science discussion, etc.
Post Reply
User avatar
NonZeroSum
Master of the Forum
Posts: 1159
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 6:30 am
Diet: Vegan
Location: North Wales, UK

AFTER VIRTUE by Alasdair MacIntyre (reviewed by W.E. Connoll)

Post by NonZeroSum »

---

Reception

George Scialabba found After Virtue to be a strong critique of modernity, but claimed that MacIntyre "faltered" at the conclusion of the argument, when he sketched the features of what virtuous life should be like in the conditions of modernity.[3] In particular, Scialabba objected to MacIntyre's claim that the good life for human beings consists in contemplating the good life for human beings; Scialabba found this insufficient and anticlimactic. Scialabba also argued that, although he appreciated MacIntyre's insistence on participation in community life as the best defense against the perils of modernity, this insistence was not justified with any discussion of how community life can be reconciled with the critical spirit that Scialabba finds to be one of the great achievements of modernity and of the philosophical enterprise.

In a review for Political Theory, William E. Connolly argues that MacIntyre sees Nietzsche as "the adversary to be defeated, but Nietzsche's voice is not heard clearly". Connolly objects that MacIntyre's defense of virtue does not take into account Nietzsche's critique; MacIntyre also fails to build an account of telos that does not draw on biology in the way MacIntyre wanted to avoid—such a theory doesn't account for the fact that we are embodied.

---

BOOKS IN REVIEW

AFTER VIRTUE by Alasdair MacIntyre. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. P. 252.


Consider, Maclntrye suggests, a future society which has lost touch with the sciences of today. It retains textual fragments and miscellaneous monuments which allow its members to glimpse the majesty of the old days. But since the connections among theories, modes of justification, experiments, and technical applications have been broken at crucial junctures, the participants can make little sense of the world they have lost. The old sciences enter their lives as an incoherent jumble of doctrines and practices.

This hypothetical future with respect to science describes the actual condition of contemporary moral discourse. Our morality is a collection of fragments from disparate eras. And we moderns take this melange to represent the essential character of morality itself. When contemporary philosophers elucidate the conceptual structure of moral discourse they uncover heterogeneous standards which cannot be molded into a unified whole, and they conclude, in one way or another, that "emotivism" -in Maclntyre's broad sense of this term-represents the only rational position in ethics.

We must come to see this modern predicament, Maclntyre urges, as a condition which is both particular to our age and susceptible to transcendence. For if modernity persists without virtue-without a shared conception of natural human excellences, of a good we promote in common, of practices which allow expression of these excellences while fostering the good, and of character traits (virtues) which mesh with the natural ends, the practices and the common good-then it will be governed increasingly by austere modes of bureaucratic control. Weber's iron cage will envelope us and the sporadic eruptions of violence which accompany these impositions will provide new occasions for drawing the bars together more tightly. "ln our culture we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of no justifications for authority which are not Weberian in form."

Modernity, stripped to its essentials, faces a choice between the cultivation of Aristotelian virtue and the celebration of Nietzschean will. Each of the other alternatives, including liberal individualism, Marxism, and Weber with a human face, collapses under pressure from these opposing poles. Maclntyre, not too surprisingly, decides to go after virtue. If modernity is to curtail its twin tendencies toward arbitrary order and nihilistic resistance it must fit a premodern morality into its frame, and "if a premodern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all." Critics will insist that the plausibility of the case for Aristotle rests entirely on the case against the Nietzschean alternative and that the fundamental weakness of this text is its insistence on the reduction of historic options to these two extremes. Certainly there is something to this reaction. Surely any conception of the good life appropriate to modernity must contain more diversity, contestability, and uncertainty than Aristotle is ready to entertain, and Maclntyre does try to find space in his doctrine of virtue for contestability. Equally importantly, Maclntyre presents a challenging case for the thesis that we are now being pulled toward these opposing poles. His thesis contains the understanding, I think, that liberalism and Marxism have presupposed a set of virtues which many proponents of these doctrines do not (with notable exceptions unexplored by Maclntyre) fully recognize. There is, for instance a version of liberal theory today which pretends that liberal freedoms, rights, and justice can flourish with a minimum of public virtue. But there is no liberal practice unless the life of the society contains a large measure of virtue. Similarly, Marxist practice requires virtue among the vanguard now and the entire populace later. If there are processes which tend to dissolve virtue in modernity, if there are common understandings which drain virtue from modern practices, then liberalism and radicalism will be washed away too. They flourish during virtue, not after it. Maclntyre at his best is fascinating and instructive, and he is at his best in elucidating the failure of the enlightenment, criticizing the lawlike mode of social science (which does not coalesce with the idea of virtue), exhibiting the variable forms of virtue in the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods, and (although this theme is too briefly pursued) striving to infuse a Sophoclean sense of tragedy into Aristotelian virtue. But when he turns to a conception of virtue appropriate to modernity he tends, perhaps because he is so disturbed by the Nietzschean alternative, to slide around barriers to his theory. Nietzsche is the adversary to be defeated, but Nietzsche's voice is not heard clearly. The dangers in Nietzsche's affirmative doctrine are dramatized, but MacIntyre's own constructions are not inoculated against potential Nietzschean deconstructions. A couple of points are particularly pertinent here. First, virtue requires a good the participants share in common, which they can vindicate rationally and specify closely enough to guide practical judgment in a variety of concrete circumstances. Without this shared conception of the good life no society could achieve voluntary agreement on the virtues to be encouraged and the modes of conduct to be tolerated, discouraged, and prohibited. But what is the common good appropriate to our age? MacIntyre sees the need for a formulation but then leaves us at a level of abstraction which legalists and rationalists may find satisfactory but no theorist of virtue could applaud. We are left in fact roughly where Nietzsche says the theorist of virtue must be in the modern age: Any concrete articulation will represent either a forceful imposition by some on the will of others or it will be scrambled by a deconstruction which exposes the antinomies it artificially binds together. Every abstract defense of virtue acknowledges in its failure to achieve specificity its inability to evade the trap set by Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the correct adversary for Maclntyre because they both discern the emptiness inside formal theories of ethics, and because Nietzsche contends that the attempt to install virtue in the modern world necessarily fosters "passive nihilism." The adversary has not been met and defeated, though, until a viable doctrine of the common good has been articulated and vindicated. Second, we need, says Maclntyre, something like Aristotle's conception of a "'telos which transcends the limited good of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, . . . a human life conceived as a unity." Unless a theory of excellence for the self can be vindicated, the attempt to foster the virtue needed by a particular set of practices will be experienced by many as an arbitrary imposition of limits on the self, and a "certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life." The need is clear enough, but Maclntyre then suggests that it can be filled without drawing on the discredited, teleological biology advanced by Aristotle. How? We are essentially enmbodied selves, and the body must be incorporated into any theory of the virtuous self. The Aristotelian philosophy of purpose in nature (thus of purpose inscribed in the body) allows its proponents to claim that some socially constituted This content downloaded from virtues express the natural ends toward which human beings tend. We would be at one with ourselves in expressing those virtues. But Maclntyre, trying to formulate a vision of the good life without this conception of natural human ends, is forced to pitch his formulation at a very high level of abstraction. The good life for "man" as such includes the virtues of integrity and constancy; it is additionally "the life spent in seeking the good life for man and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for men is." A Nietzschean would object not only to the abstract character of this statement-it assumes the appearance of those abstract universals which Nietzsche and MacIntyre both condemn as empty--but would also charge that because telos has been drained from the modern conception of nature, any effort to mold the self into a coherent, integrated, virtuous self must be seen as the imposition of an artificial unity upon an accidental phenomenon. And, as the contemporary Nietzschean Michel Foucault insists, the struggle to keep tiliS artificial production intact will entail the denial, confinement, and treatment of "the other" which does not fit into its frame. The modern theorist of virtue becomes, on this reading, the unwitting agent of the bureaucratic, "disciplinary" society he condemns. And the bifurcated structure of the contemporary human sciences expresses (still on this reading) the gap between the mode of explanation available to modernity to explain bodily processes and the mode it requires to interpret action or determine responsibility. I am not saying that the Nietzschean must triumph in this debate. I am saying both that the response becomes treacherous after Aristotelian telos and Hegelian Geist have been lost and that Maclntyre has not pursued this part of his assignment very far in the text submitted to us. Until the gap between the modern conception of the body and its conception of the subject has been reduced, the Nietzschean will have space to deconstruct any theory of a "telos... constituting the good" of the embodied human self. If one combines these two central objections to Maclntyre's theory one can hear the message inside the words of Zarathustra: "It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many have gone into the desert and taken their lives because they had wearied of being the battle and the battlefield of the virtues." The disturbance created by this message is exacerbated when we consult Maclntyre's own conclusion, formulated in the last paragraph of the text, that modernity is sinking into a new dark age. Because modernity is now inhospitable to virtue and barbaric without it MacIntyre urges us to follow the example of men and women of good will at the onset of an earlier period of darkness; we must construct "local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us." I do not know whether the horizon of modernity is as dark as Maclntyre portrays it, although surely it has passed high noon. But it does seem clear that Maclntyre's vision of local forms of community and civility will be impossible to sustain this time around if we are indeed on the horizon of a new dark age. Embattled by the battle of the virtues, Maclntyre has been driven into the desert, although one suspects he will return one day. And After Virtue, pursuing the spirit of Aristotle, is haunted by the presence of Nietzsche. Only those floating in a capsule of theory sealed from the more ominous currents of modernity will take comfort in this result.

- William E. Connoll / University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Unofficial librarian of vegan and socialist movement media.
PhiloVegan Wiki: https://tinyurl.com/y7jc6kh6
Vegan Video Library: https://tinyurl.com/yb3udm8x
Ishkah YouTube: https://youtube.com/Ishkah
Post Reply