After Virtue book review (John Perry)
Catastrophe Averted Repeated?
A Theological Review of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
First published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is the first work of his "mature" period, at the age of 52. A beautifully crafted argument with clear transitions between individual claims (and chapters), its clarity certainly contributed to its wide readership and critical acclaim. Though it is not mentioned in the text, it can be broken into three distinct sections which I will follow in my review, breaking each segment into an initial summary followed by my own observations and criticisms. The finally chapter of the third edition, nineteen, is a postscript appearing only in the second edition of 1984. The third edition, in 2007, adds a prologue overviewing the book's reception over a quarter century. Neither of these contribute to or detract from to his overall argument, and will not be explored.
The first segment consists of chapters one through nine, in which he explains his diagnosis of advanced modernity attempting to recover from a state of near total collapse. Here he recapitulates several hundred years of moral philosophy weighted most heavily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which he broadly refers to as the Enlightenment Project. In this first segment, he defends his claim that following the medieval period there was a break down in the coherency of ethics and moral philosophy, in which advanced modernity has lost its moral coherency insofar as morality itself has become unmoored from its foundations.
A second segment, made up of chapters ten to fourteen, turns the reader's attention to the state of good order in which moral claims could be consistent before their breakdown by liberal philosophy. What gave morality its cogency, he proposes, was the tradition of virtue which hit its high water mark with Aquinas and was first articulated properly by Aristotle. There can be diversity in virtue concepts, however, and he traces their origins in Homer through Sophocles and Plato before it arrives at Aristotle. In Aristotle, virtue finds it's most coherent, albeit malleable, expression. His genealogy of virtue also includes identifiable virtue concepts in the New Testament which Aquinas articulates, and also explores theories of virtue implied by Jane Austen and proposed by Benjamin Franklin.
Chapters fifteen through eighteen drive these claims further by exploring the unity of the virtues across their various conceptions, some of which he finds more compelling than others. If there is to be any reliable definition of virtue, must not necessarily be universal across cultures, but there must be something of it discernible throughout its varying forms. The third and final segment, therefore, sees MacIntyre give his own conception of the virtues, embedded in practices, carried by the narrative unity of human lives, and encompassed by moral traditions.
I. Diagnosing Advanced Modernity (ch.1-9)
Chapters one through nine represent MacIntyre's criticism and exploration of advanced modernity, which he insists has become morally incoherent such that disagreements of many kinds have become totally interminable on their own terms. This is perhaps most represented, it seems, in American cultural breakdown along partisan political party lines. In other words, the culture war between self proclaimed "conservatives" and "progressives" is a symptom of a disease western culture contracted several centuries before the Revolutionary War.
What MacIntyre repeatedly calls "advanced modernity" has lost its moral coherency insofar as morality itself has become unmoored from its foundations. Those foundations, he claims, found their most mature expression in the medieval period under Thomas Aquinas, who MacIntyre suggests is "an uncharacteristic medieval thinker, even if the greatest of medieval theorists." (180) Starting sometime in the late medieval period following his writings, Western culture suffered a philosophical breakdown that the modern world sought to repair by wildly different means than had its predecessor culture. Whereas premodern cultures negotiated in terms of community and character, moderns began turning inward to the idea of an ethically (and biologically) autonomous individual, which was to the detriment of common bonds that had once held our culture together.
By the seventeenth century, philosophers began seeking to identify the generalized concept of a human action (rather than the specific concept and context of virtue) in order to make a science of humanity, a program it called "social science." A pivotal frontier in this regard was language, and MacIntyre laments often in his early chapters that the meaning and use of words were increasingly becoming unrelated, shifting the very ability of people to communicate rationally and thereby negotiate goods and settle disputes. The modern obsession with rights language, therefor, is problematic because there is no precedent for it's use, "there is no expression in ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression of 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages." (69) In other words, moderns have had to make it up as they went along, contributing to both a moral and linguistic relativism that persists to this day. Words and the rules that govern them, "lost any status that could secure their authority... [without which] both justification and interpretation become debatable." (112) The emerging context governing western culture was that every word, rule, and man would be for and by themselves.
Emotivism is the name MacIntyre gives the overall problem facing us today, a product of the modernizing "Enlightenment Project," having reached full maturity in the last century. According to MacIntyre, emotivism is the reigning philosophical doctrine in which "all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling insofar as they are moral or evaluative in nature." (12) To the extent that preferences are subjective, every moral judgment is deemed by moderns to be valid... or invalid. Emotivism is irrational because any attempt to systematize "all value judgments," (12) while claiming them to be preferential and subjective, is self-contradictory. Though emotivism fails "as a theory of the meaning of moral expressions,"(20) at best it is helpful as a description about their use. Indeed, it renders moral disagreements interminable by their intensely subjective nature. Morality is reduced to intuition and feeling, moral facts replaced by therapy.
His argument is impressive not just for its scope, but its specificity. Major philosophical giants such as Hume, Diderot, Kant, Kierkegaard, Mill, and Weber are among those that MacIntyre summarizes and meticulously delegitimizes. The carefree reader, like myself, is left with the impression that each philosophical take down could be decisive in its own right. Surely experts of each philosophical thinker or school would leverage admirable rebuttals defending the enlightenment architects, but that isn't the concern of this review. What is our concern is the trajectory MacIntyre depicts from Hume onward as a failed project to justify morality by concepts foreign to it. Put another way, the enlightenment project dislocated the meaning and use of moral terms from their foundation in virtue concepts to a doomed-to-fail lexicon of liberal individualism. The logical conclusion drawn from the enlightenment debacle was that morality could be boiled down to expressions of personal preference, of individual will.
MacIntyre does, however, identify one philosopher among the cacophony as being noteworthy, not for helpfulness in correcting liberalism, but for its honesty in taking it to its logical conclusion. The ninth chapter concludes the introductory segment by setting up Nietzsche as "one of the two genuine theoretical alternatives confronting anyone trying to analyze the moral condition of our culture." (110) His notion of the übermensch, according to MacIntyre, takes the proposals of the enlightenment project, of preference, autonomous reason, and rights, as a given. Nietzsche's basic premise, firmly grounded in the assumptions of enlightenment emotivism, is concisely summarized by MacIntyre as follows: "If there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates." (114) Macintyre insists the only choice open to modern western culture is between emotivism and Aristotelianism, and it seems he might be right.
Critique
The philosophical history MacIntyre lays out in these early chapters is compelling and, quite frankly, wildly fascinating. However, it suffers from a lack of coherency itself, and a glaring one at that. For example, he doesn't even attempt an account of what happened between Aquinas in the thirteenth century and Hume in the eighteenth. The "catastrophe" he describes in his first chapter as befalling western culture is nowhere actually described, only alluded to. Readers should not have been left to speculate that it must have had something to do with the abuse of ecclesiastical authority against which Luther rebelled and which the rest of Europe was all too eager to follow. Nowhere does MacIntyre dare come near any explanation of how or why the Enlightenment was actually a product of the Reformation, how the stranglehold the Roman church had on the West was in fact fuel for the fire that followed.
His lack of inquiry, therefore, into the nature of the Protestant Reformation in terms of his argument is baffling and represents the single largest oversight in the entire book, especially in light of his admiration for Aquinas, who was not just a philosopher, but a theologian initially employed as an exegete in Cologne who began his illustrious writing career with commentaries on the Old Testament. MacIntyre does note (rather sparingly) that what happens in that gap, among other things, is the stratification of disciplines and the break up between philosophy and everyday social life. His reference is distressingly ambiguous that, sometime following the twelfth century, western culture encountered problems that left a schism between categories deemed "academic philosophical" and "practical social." (36) He relates this vaguely to monasteries (esp.171) and one could speculate that their relationship to modern universities is caught up in that question. Aquinas would have been intimately involved in the intersections between monasteries and early universities, and MacIntyre's omission of this critical period from his historical reflections only drives home my point.
II. Varieties & Development of Virtue (ch.10-14)
What reached its zenith in the medieval period under Aquinas was a concept of virtue which MacIntyre is careful to explain was never universal or concrete. Rather, there have been conceptions of virtue by various communities who recognized the need to identify goods worth preserving within social practices that allowed human beings to thrive. Virtue therefore is something that has developed over time based on cultural circumstances that the later "empiricist" (79, 80) instincts in modern thinkers refused to acknowledge were determinative for morality. That is a complicated way to say that morality is conditioned by communities in particular contexts, that the enlightenment failed in part because it assumed general concepts for morality were normative. In his second segment, MacIntyre endeavors to provide another, earlier socio-ethical history that western culture was founded upon, namely that which was exemplified by the Greek city-states, but especially that of Athens and its philosophers. But before philosophy was related to the academy at Athens, western culture received its cues from a proto-Greek poet named Homer. It is here that MacIntyre grounds his history of virtue, in the genre of heroic epic poetry.
The differences between the comparably systematic conception of Aristotle and the poetic ruminations of Homer suggests a fundamental pedagogical divergence between the two. On the one hand, Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is praised as "the most brilliant set of lecture notes ever written" in which "we can almost hear... the tone of Aristotle's spoken voice." (147) On the other hand, Homer's poem-plays survive as fragments merely attributed to the (potentially legendary) original author. Nonetheless, the genesis of virtue rests in the military exploits described in the Iliad and Odyssey, and later conceptions of virtue must not be totally removed from such poetic foundations. It is to poetry's emphasis on tragedy that MacIntyre draws his readers attention, not just in Homer but also in Athen's own Sophocles. In poetry and epic, tragedy is a part of human life, the irresolvable nature of conflict is integral to understanding the virtuous life. Poetic moral protagonists frequently encounter tragic events for which there is no explanation and by which they suffer gravely, irrespective of their character. Conflict did not necessarily evince catastrophic dissolution of character for either the individual specifically or Athens generally. In fact, focal characters act as champion-representative for their community, who "is able to put [social] roles in question, [who] remains accountable to the point of death," (145) which explains Socrates willingly drinking the hemlock despite finding the verdict unjust. Narrative for Homer and Sophocles is therefore not simply an act of telling, but participative, indeed "the audience itself was a collective actor." (138) Epic narrative therefore achieves a certain transcendence by actor and audience alike that both expects and violates social roles. Embedding virtue in narrative in this way presupposes that certain social roles were central to human community.
For Aristotle, however, virtue did not require social roles, but a telos, a purpose and function determined by the community. This telos is carried in particular by the community such that Aristotle had to adapt the poetic notion of virtue such that tragedy and conflict became its antithesis; "the tragic hero on Aristotle's view fails because of his own flaw, not because the human situation is is sometimes irredeemably tragic." (157) The symbiotic nature between the citizen and the city are such that disharmony in one reflects disharmony in the other. Under this rubric, the greatest evil is civil war, which threatened political stability as well as the goods for which its citizens endeavored. What must be done to preserve harmony is the ultimate political question for Aristotle, which is mirrored onto the individual realm as that which must be done to achieve happiness (eudaimonia). Practicing virtue becomes an exercise in contemplative action that provides the synthesis for governing human life, for avoiding conflict, and finally securing eudaimonia. Homer and Sophocles highlighted social roles in ongoing conflict and saw tragic conflict as a site for growing in virtue by gaining insight into human being. But tragedy represented chaos, disharmony, and suffering to Aristotle, so he emphasized the teleological nature of the virtues for forming unified, fulfilled people actively engaged in political life.
MacIntyre then makes a broad jump across seventeen centuries from Athens to Italy, from Aristotle's account to Aquinas'. As with his account of Aristotle, MacIntyre sees Aquinas' context as being one which only recently emerged from poetic heroism. Rather then Homer and Sophocles, Aquinas' world is one which has recently moved past the sagas representative of the Celtic, Icelandic, and Germanic cultures. Apparently "the medieval order" like its Athenian predecessor, "cannot reject the heroic table of the virtues." (166) He describes the church in similar terms, whose early stories reached a crisis point when the specificity of its stories conflicted with the all encompassing and violent narrative Rome insisted upon spreading. It was a clash not just of cultures, but of entire cosmological narratives. What the Church has injected into virtue, and which Aquinas inherits, is an association with cosmology, an insistence that christian virtue "requires a conception not merely of defects of character, or vices" as Aristotle did in order to reprise Homer's tragic protagonist, "but of breaches of divine law, of sins." (168) For Aquinas, who was influenced by Augustine's monumental treatise The City of God, the Athenian polis had to be expanded exponentially to the Christian cosmos. Part and parcel to this question became the nature of the distinction between the sacred and the secular and the type of good that might be held in common by both. The virtues then had to provide a balance between "the particularist claims of the intense local rural community which threatens to absorb everything into custom and local power and the universal claims of the church." (171) A unique contribution of the Church to the table of the virtues was charity and forgiveness, of which the earlier Athenian model could not conceive, either in Aristotle's revulsion against flaws in virtuous character or in Homer's primitivist heroic notions of retribution (which were no different than the Hebraic law of lex talionis).
Critique
This chapter contains his most sustained attention to the Biblical tradition he went on to adopt, but which he fails to engage critically. In terms of narrative and poetry, for MacIntyre's account to remain coherent with his adoption of Christianity, he would need to delve more deeply into the place of Biblical narrative. He cites Judeo-Christian notions of historicity as providing the link between virtue and narrative ("The task of integrating what Aristotle has to say about the virtues [has to wait] for successors to Aristotle whose Biblical culture has educated them to think historically." 147), but the claim tumbles out clumsily in stark contrast to his otherwise impressively concise argumentation. Worse, it appears at a pivotal moment in his argument, right at the beginning of his account of Aristotelian virtue, a fundamental basis of his entire book. But the culture that produced the Bible were not successors if they were thinking (and writing) historically in the 6th century BCE, a full century before Aristotle. Genesis and Exodus are believed to have been compiled under the Babylonian exile and to have relied heavily on narrative forms and mythic stories borrowed from surrounding cultures like the Assyrians. It would have been initially completed in the fifth century, the same time Sophocles' plays were being received in Athens. The Biblical literature wold and should have fit quite well into the claims he makes of narrative and telos, but strong connections are never made. Those he does make are muddled and seem like afterthoughts.
Additionally, the Benedictine "intellectual vision of a total system which finds its supreme expression in Dante" (176; "The one will that resolves the many" cited by MacIntyre in Gardner, 1977) reproduced the same Constantinian theocratic authoritarianism that had laid the cornerstone for the Holy Roman Empire. It was this religiously based totalitarianism that triggered the Protestant Reformation and laid the groundwork for the secularization of Luther's theological concept of conscience to be reimagined as the individual will (to power). Why this critical juncture remains unexplored by the philosophical genealogy MacIntyre gives is not clear.
Finally, Biblical teleology cannot be reduced to merely a new virtue called charity. Besides being poorly defined, it is already in danger of the very divorce between meaning and use in which so much of advanced modernity's moral discourse is already enmeshed. The manifestations of this are played out by modern liberal Christians who confuse the Johannine epistle by assuming that some amorphous "love" conception is God. Rather, the claim in 1 John 4 that "God is love" names the framework of the Christian cosmos, which must underwrite the Thomistic virtue concept if it is to keep from betraying the tradition and community to which the theologian belongs. That cosmos, for any characteristically Biblical account, is embedded within a particularly eschatological perspective, not one about the temporal circumstances that constitute MacIntyre's recapitulation of Aristotle's politics. Politics, for the Bible, does not end at the city gates any more than they do at the upper stratosphere. Whatever MacIntyre possibly means by the word "cosmology" (142, 148, 166, 167, 179) or telos seems radically out of touch with Aquinas' own tradition in which the Bible is primary.
III. MacIntyre's Virtue Conception (ch. 15-18)
The third and final segment focuses on MacIntyre's theory of virtue based on the trajectory he has set up. For his theory to hold water, he needs to display a unity in the virtues over time and context, a nature inherent to the virtues themselves. To do so, he tests his theory on the conceptions he sees in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, Benjamin Franklin, and Jane Austen. Whereas Homer (and Sophocles) prioritize social roles and Aristotle and the New Testament (i.e. Aquinas) do the same for teleology, Benjamin Franklin stands out from the crowd (and seems to act as something of a straw man), recapitulating Kantian utilitarianism through a particularly colonial American virtue conception. Jane Austen is presented as mixing Aristotelian teleological conception and a poetic one, borrowing from Homer an emphasis on social roles, such that her unifying virtue, constancy, seems to reside in being married to a particular English naval officer.
After providing the above samples of virtue conceptions, he claims that the concept of a virtue develops in a logical sequence with three stages, the later stages presupposing those before them. He is quite clear that as the stages emerge, each new stage is "both modified by and reinterpreted in light of, but also provides an essential constituent of each later stage." (187) Those stages are
1. "a background account of... a practice"
2. "the narrative order of a single human life"
3. "a moral tradition"
Although practices might stand alone, a narrative order requires a practice (but not a larger tradition), and a tradition requires both practices and a narrative order. A practice is "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity in which goods... are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and derivative of, [it]." (187) The narrative order of traditions is preserved in human lives, which has "a determinate form, the form of a certain kind of story." (124) Individual human stories embedded in narrative are important because they "provide the historical memory of the societies in which they were finally written down... background to contemporary debate... a moral order." (121)
As for virtues, MacIntyre finds their primary function to be found within practices, though he admits they might be identifiable on their own. It seems that he wants to insist that to be excellent at anything is to be excellent at some particular thing, some activity in which people can identify one another's particularly exemplary ability. Against someone suggesting a person could be generally virtuous (besides his anxiety about the universalizing instinct in liberalism), MacIntyre would respond "virtuous at what?" Virtue and excellence must always be for some purpose, making his account clearly teleological. Indeed, he insists "A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve the goods which are internal to practices." (p.191. emphasis in original)
An internal good "cannot be had in any way but by" (188) the practice/s which enables them. They can only be specified in terms of the practice itself and "they can only be identified and recognized by the experience of participating in the practice in question." (189) In contrast, external goods "are contingently attached to… practices by the accident of social circumstance... There are always alternative ways for achieving such goods, and their achievement is never to be had only by engaging in some particular practice." (188) In other words, an external good (he gives the example of money, status, and power) can be achieved by any number of ways whereas an external good can be acquired by means other than the practice in question.
An internal good might be like getting barreled - it only makes sense in terms of the practice of surfing and one can only accomplish it by surfing. External goods like celebrity status are possible through surfing, but getting barreled is only possible through the practice of surfing. Non surfers might recognize the act of getting barreled, but it will not be a good in the sense of the practice of surfing. This helps explain MacIntyre suggesting that the earliest translations of aretê were not "virtue" but "excellence." (122) It might not make sense to say virtues are necessary for surfing, but one's excellence at certain qualities make possible someone excelling at the sport as a practice.
This is precisely where excellence is contrasted with skill, when practice is distinct from an institution. For "a practice... is never just a set of technical skills" (193) Vicious people can be skilled, but they can never be excellent. They might be competent, but they can only acquire goods external to a practice. Getting barreled can be be pursued for the fame one might achieve, but the vicious surfer has not really excelled, they have only accumulated skills. Institutions furthermore, can only secure and distribute goods external to a practice. It is not that practices do not need institutions, but without the virtues, practices "could not resist the corrupting power of institutions." (194) Without the internality of the good that is getting barreled, the Association of Surfing Professionals is just another way to move money and prestige. But without the ASP, it would be harder (although not impossible) to recognize excellent surfing.
Critique
The final segment presents a coherent and compelling account of virtue and it is the part with which I have the least objections. It remains unclear if MacIntyre has justified virtue in the same way liberalism has justified morality. Either he does not detect the irony or he feels he has adequately addressed it in his text, which he may very well have. His conception seems sound, but his massive first segment sets up conceptions per se as something to be viewed suspiciously. What makes concepts of virtue okay but not human action? It is possible that his response would be to insist that humanity is not formulaic in the way a phenomenon is, that it boils down to the inadequacy of something we would call "social science" as applied to morality. Perhaps a more overt way to avoid this seeming contradiction would be to acknowledge the particularity of his own account in the same way he briefly did that of Franklin and Austen, for example. Whether emphasizing its particularity would make his less reliable of an account would certainly be debatable, but given his criticisms of empiricism we can anticipate his rather critical response to that question.
Conclusion(s)
Overall, MacIntyre's After Virtue is monumental in its scope and precise in its argumentation. His recapitulation of the history of the enlightenment from the seventeenth century onward is ground breaking and illuminates the problem of justifying morality without a close association with its own history. Furthermore, his telling of the foundations of virtue and ethics makes important and often overlooked interdisciplinary connections. However, it is his otherwise great skill at seeing and connecting seemingly disparate ideas that make clear some of his most stark oversights. Reading the text in tandem with other sources about MacIntyre and his conversion to Christianity leaves the reader with a bit of confusion. After all, Christianity makes claims about more than mere morality, in fact a morality grounded in certain suppositions that MacIntyre leaves totally unaddressed.
His analogy of chess, for example, leaves out any exploration of the context within which chess is made possible. Certainly "checkmate" is unintelligible apart from chess, but it is within a reality that the practice of chess gains its own coherency, namely, that ensures pieces remain on the board rather than floating off into space. Likewise, Christianity makes fundamental claims about humanity's context within the cosmos, that humanity's very function and purpose is in fact oriented outside itself toward God. Christian virtue, practices, narrative, and traditions all require a view of all creation as subordinate to a Creator to whom the Church humbly witnesses. It is before this Creator that Aquinas' philosophy acquires any particular coherency whatsoever. The Christian telos, which is to say Aquinas' teleology, is always God. That is something more than a tradition, in MacIntrye's use of the word, could possibly aspire to.
MacIntyre seems unwilling or unable to wrestle with his own account's situatedness, leaving out crucial social history which could have vastly improved his argument. First, in comparing the heroic and Athenian concepts of virtue and their need of narrative, he neglects those gifts of the enlightenment that brought us the historical critical school. In so doing, he is unaware that "Biblical culture" in fact predates Aristotle and could have enhanced his argument about the transition from tragedy to telos. Second, by skipping three centuries of religious and moral upheaval that the Protestant Reformation brought to Europe, he weakens his own scathing critique of modernism by totally omitting any reference to the context within which it was produced. This renders his otherwise compelling history rather disjointed, sporadic, and selective.
Finally, It is unclear whether the Christian tradition MacIntyre has adopted serves any real epistemological or cosmological function. If it had, would he have kept such distance from theology as his final page suggests? Would a thoroughly Catholic account of virtue match his, or does the lack of theological engagement suggest a fundamental difference between his and that of Aquinas? I am not convinced that he and Aquinas would mean the same thing by the words they employ, like telos or cosmos. For Aquinas, virtue must stand before God just as everything else must. If virtue has in fact run the course MacIntyre suggests, from Aristotle to Aquinas, it is worth wondering if in fact the enlightenment's flight from religion is simply maintained by MacIntyre's account. Without that critical context, MacIntyre's account risks being just another surviving fragment of a tradition he has ultimately failed to recover.
