Nietzsche Or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue reads like a brief but extremely dense novel: its plot gradually unfolds; it has its moments of suspense and discovery; there are climaxes and anti-climaxes. Indeed, it is written in that very genre of dramatic narrative that MacIntyre tells us is so vital for understanding human life and action. This should not be mistaken for a criticism, for if MacIntyre is right, this is precisely the genre required for understanding moral philosophy, and for appreciating the tradition of the virtues which he seeks to defend. Like the English novels he so admires, it is crammed full with “characters” (who sometimes make rapid entrances and exits) and intricate “sub-plots,” but so much so, that it is easy to lose the thread of the main plot. Since MacIntyre's primary intention is to provide a rational vindication of “the moral tradition to which Aristotle's teaching about the virtues is central” (p. 238), it is essential to outline the main story line—even at the risk of neglecting the extraordinary richness of detail as his narrative unfolds.The book consists of eighteen chapters and reacheSoundings, Vol. 100, No. 4, 2017Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PAs its first major dramatic climax at its very center: Chapter 9, entitled “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” In his Prologue, MacIntyre introduces a “disquieting suggestion.” In our so-called moral practice and language, a “catastrophe” has occurred, a catastrophe that he likens to one of those science fiction tales where somehow the whole tradition of natural science is destroyed, and where we are left with incoherent fragments which are no longer genuine science but only the simulacra of science. He hypothesizes that a point is reached where no one (or hardly anyone) realizes the nature of the catastrophe which they have suffered. People act and talk as if what they were calling science still made sense, still is coherent and rational, but in fact their actions and talk are radically incoherent. Embellishing his tale, MacIntyre's hypothesis is that it is not a fiction, but precisely what has happened in the modern period with the language and practice of morality, both in regard to the way in which ordinary people talk, think, and act, and in regard to the way in which so-called moral philosophers talk about morality. The language of morality is no longer intelligible, coherent, or rational—even though almost everybody thinks it is.Like those novels which begin with the present and then work back into the narrative history of the present, MacIntyre begins by rehearsing some characteristics of contemporary moral disagreement, and by presenting certain claims embodied in contemporary emotivism. He maintains that contemporary moral disagreements have an interminable character and are based upon conceptually incommensurable premises. While MacIntyre argues that emotivism is false as a theory about the meaning of the sentences which are used to make moral judgments, he does allow that it can properly be understood as reflecting a correct sociological hypothesis about the way in which people now act, think, and talk.For one way of framing my contention that morality is not what it once was is just to say that to a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical stand-point may be. Emotivism has become embodied in our culture. But of course in saying this I am not merely contending that morality is not what it once was, but also and more importantly that what once was morality has to some large degree disappeared—and that this marks a degeneration, a grave cultural loss. (p. 21) What follows will strike many as both shocking and scandalous. For what MacIntyre seeks to show, in what may be called his genealogical unmasking, is that despite the “rationalistic pretentions” of post-Enlightenment moral philosophy, it is nothing but a disguised expression of the emotivism which has become embodied and well-entrenched in modern society and culture. The central “characters,” or ideal types, of this culture are the aesthete, the bureaucratic manager, and especially the therapist. The panorama MacIntyre portrays is extraordinarily rich in detail but this part of his story reaches its climax in Chapter 9. The “hero” of this part of the story is Nietzsche. Why Nietzsche? Because he is the one “moral philosopher” of the modern period who had the perspicacity to reveal the false pretentions of modern “moral” life and philosophy.For it was Nietzsche's historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher—certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism—not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy…. In a famous passage in The Gay Science (section 335) Nietzsche jeers at the notion of basing morality on inner moral sentiments, on conscience, on the one hand, or on the Kantian categorical imperative, on universalisability, on the other. (p. 107) But the point for MacIntyre is not to vindicate Nietzsche (except in the sense of endorsing his insight into the pretentions and self-deceptions of modernity), but to confront us with a dramatic, grand Either/Or.… either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative…. (p. 111) In short, “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” When we reach this climax, we realize just how high the stakes are. For the alternative posed by MacIntyre is not just one view of morality versus another—it is, rather, morality versus no morality.Like the good storyteller that MacIntyre is, he has dropped hints about what he means by the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues and what is required to defend it rationally, but he has done this in the sketchiest and most preliminary manner. What follows (Chapters 10 through 13) is a tour de force. In a little more than fifty pages, MacIntyre sweeps through his narrative of the history of the tradition of the virtues from Homer, to Classical Athens, to Aristotle, culminating in the medieval contribution to this tradition. MacIntyre's historical sketch is so dazzling—and is so filled with illuminating and provocative insights—that it can divert us from the main point of his story. For by using historical and philosophical arguments, MacIntyre intends—to use his own words—to argue “the rational case that can be made for a tradition in which the Aristotelian moral and political texts are canonical” (p. 289).Indeed, there is something troubling about MacIntyre's historical sketch of the virtues. He speaks of it as a “relatively coherent tradition of thought” but points out that “there are just too many different and incompatible conceptions of virtue for there to be any real unity to the concept or indeed to the history” (p. 169). One might even have the uneasy feeling that the differences within this tradition are as great, as incompatible, and as incommensurable as anything MacIntyre has located in “the Enlightenment project.” One might even claim that what MacIntyre has shown us thus far really supports Nietzsche's case; that MacIntyre decoded is the champion of Nietzsche. Why? because he not only shows that there are incompatible and incommensurable lists and theories of virtue, but has failed thus far to show how we can “rationally” adjudicate among rival claimants.It is important to appreciate the depth of these differences. For it is not just that we are confronted with different (and frequently incompatible) lists and descriptions of the virtues, and that each of these lists embodies “a different theory about what virtue is” (p. 171), but that each of these theories is itself deeply embedded in different and clashing theories about the nature of the human species (typically, man), our telos, and the essential moral character of the universe in which we live. As MacIntyre himself emphasizes again and again, what is essential in the tradition of the virtues is that moral and evaluative statements “can be called true or false in precisely the way in which all other factual statements can be so called” (p. 57). The truth or falsity of such judgments presupposes true beliefs about “the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function” (p. 56). But what MacIntyre has not yet done is to show us how rival and incompatible claims to truth about what we essentially are, what is our true nature, what are our genuine ends, what is the moral character of the universe in which we live are to be rationally evaluated.To claim as he does, for example, that medieval thinkers “marked a genuine advance” (p. 168) in the tradition of the virtues without confronting the question of whether their understanding of the virtues is based upon a true understanding of what we essentially are and the character of the universe in which we live our moral lives is at best ingenuous, and at worst downright inconsistent with what MacIntyre himself claims must be shown to justify any adequate theory of the virtues. The trouble and perplexity are even worse than this. Much of the polemical and rhetorical force of MacIntyre's critique of the Enlightenment project derives from his emphasis on how it leads to competing and irreconcilable concepts of what is right and just. But MacIntyre himself shows that we have a structurally analogous situation when we consider the virtues. Thus, for example, when he discusses the virtues in classical Athenian culture, emphasizing the competing conceptions of the virtues in the Sophists, Plato, Sophocles, and Aristotle, he portrays Sophocles' vision as one where the human situation is essentially tragic in the strong sense that “there is an objective moral order, but our perceptions of it are such that we cannot bring rival moral truths into complete harmony with each other …” (p. 134).1 But this is just the essential truth claim, which according to MacIntyre, both Plato and Aristotle categorically reject. Who is right? What are the standards or criteria for making a rational judgment about these rival and clashing claims to truth? It begins to look as if what MacIntyre's own narrative history of the virtues reveals is—contrary to his claim of the three stage model of moral decline—that it is a “fiction” to believe that there ever was “a first stage at which evaluative and more especially moral theory and practice embody genuinely objective and impersonal standards which provide rational justification for particular policies, actions and judgments and which themselves in turn are susceptible of rational justification” (p. 18). The major point I want to make does not concern the specific merits of MacIntyre's analysis of Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle (or any other exemplar of the tradition of the virtues). It is, rather, to underscore what is MacIntyre's fundamental point, i.e., any conception of the virtues (what they are, how they are to be described, what is one's theory of virtues) necessarily makes a claim to truth—to truth about what we really are, what are our ends, and what is the essential moral character of the universe in which we live. Unless we seek to clarify and justify these truth claims, we will find ourselves in a situation that is analogous to the “interminable” conflicts that MacIntyre locates in the Enlightenment project. Or, we might say that if MacIntyre is really to answer Nietzsche and not play the role of his champion, he must face up to Nietzsche's own deep questioning of, and challenge to, the very idea of a “moral truth.”MacIntyre is well aware of what I have stated above. (He frequently raises the hard questions which arise in the reader's mind as one follows his dramatic narrative. This does not mean that he answers these questions.) He reviews just the sorts of difficulties and threats to his position that I have mentioned. Indeed he even lists further difficulties. (See pp. 169-74). So, we come to what I shall call the second dramatic climax of After Virtue, which is indicated by MacIntyre's own question: “… are we or are we not able to disentangle from these rival and various claims a unitary core concept of the virtues of which we can give a more compelling account than any of the other accounts so far?” (p. 174). And, we know what the failure to give such an account entails. Given MacIntyre's grand Either/Or, it means that Nietzsche “wins.” So, we come to Chapters 14 and 15, which, according to MacIntyre himself, contain “the rational case that can be made for a tradition in which the Aristotelian moral and political texts are canonical” (p. 239). Here we must slow down his narrative and closely scrutinize his “complex argument.”2MacIntyre's account of a “unitary core concept of the virtues” proceeds in three stages. He tells us: The first stage requires a background account of what I shall call a practice, the second an account of what I have already characterised as the narrative order of a single human life and the third an account a good deal fuller than I have given up to now of what constitutes a moral tradition. Each later stage presupposes the earlier, but not vice versa. (p. 174)3 Let us take up each of these stages in order.To appreciate why the concept of a practice is so important for MacIntyre, it is necessary to cite what he calls his “first, even if partial and tentative, definition of a virtue.”What then is a practice? What is meant by “goods which are internal to practices?” A practice is defined as: … any coherent and complex form of socially established coopera- tive human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (p. 175) Consider some of the activities that MacIntyre includes in the range of practices: chess, football, portrait painting, farming, architecture, “enquiries in physics, chemistry, biology,” “the work of the historian,” even the “making and sustaining of family life.”Practices are to be distinguished from technical skills which may be required for a specific practice, but do not constitute a practice. Throwing a football is a technical skill, but the game of football is not just a set of technical skills. Institutions may be required to sustain practices (and they can corrupt practices), but are not to be confused with practices. A chess club or a university is a social institution where certain practices may take place, but are not themselves practices. Practices always have a historical dimension, so of course there are histories of practices, histories which can relate their rise and fall.To illustrate what he means by internal goods, MacIntyre cites the example of teaching an intelligent child the game of chess. I may initially “bribe” the child to play with me by offering him or her candy (this is an external good), but there may come a time when the child “will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly peculiar kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons … for trying to excel in whatever ways the game of chess demands” (pp. 175-76). These are the internal goods of the practice of chess playing. They are internal because we can only identify them in terms of the game of chess and because they can only be “identified and recognized by the experience of participating in the practice in question. Those who lack the relevant experience are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods” (p. 176). Furthermore a “practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performances as judged by them” (p. 177).Now it is important to realize just how wide the range of practices is. For while not everything is a practice, there do not seem to be any a priori limitations on what may become a practice. Given his own “definition” of a practice, spying, smuggling, safecracking, the art of the executioner, and (despite MacIntyre's suggestion to the contrary) even torturing may become practices. (Indeed, the types of practices that Foucault analyzes in his own genealogical unmasking of modernity—and which he claims constitute the “disciplinary society” or the “caceral archipelago”—appear to satisfy MacIntyre's definition of a practice.)4 The fact that there may be external goods associated with these practices does not disqualify them as practices. In each case we can discriminate “internal goods” characteristic of these practices. They have histories. They require technical skills, but do not simply consist of sets of technical skills. And they are not institutions. Practitioners can justly claim that “those who lack the relevant experience are incompetent thereby as judges of internal goods.” If one is to excel in those practices, one must accept the authority of the standards of the “practice,” standards which may themselves be criticized and refined.Let us remember that the concept of a practice is introduced in order to give a tentative definition of a virtue. Considering the extraordinary range of actual and possible practices, one might think that the next step would be to ask, in regard to a specific practice: what are the acquired human qualities the possession and exercise of which tend to enable us to achieve those goods internal to the relevant practice? Thus, in the case of chess, we may discover that in order to achieve its internal goods, one needs to cultivate one's powers of memory, concentration, ability to anticipate possible strategies, etc. These then would be, according to MacIntyre's definition, the virtues required to excel in chess. There is no reason to believe that the “acquired human qualities”—virtues—required for one practice will be the same as, or even relevant to, those required by other practices; and, indeed, what is a “virtue” for one practice may well be a defect or a vice for another practice.But this is not the “conclusion” that MacIntyre draws. He says: It belongs to the concept of a practice as I have outlined it … that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves to the best standard so far achieved, and that entails subordinating ourselves within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners. We have to learn to recognize what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to take whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way; and we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to reply with the same carefulness for the facts. (p. 178) So far, so good. This applies to anyone who aspires to excel in chess, safecracking, or spying. But MacIntyre immediately goes on to claim. “In other words we have to accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage and honesty” (p. 178, italics added). Now this seems to be a “leap of faith,” or less generously, a non sequitur. For MacIntyre has not shown or argued that these “virtues”—“these acquired human qualities”—are required for every (and any) practice. On the contrary, given his definition of a practice, this assumption is counterintuitive. A practitioner who seeks to excel in espionage may well need to cultivate the acquired human quality of lying, or feigning honesty in appropriate situations. MacIntyre's “leap” becomes even more dubious when we see how he immediately goes on to characterize justice: “justice requires that we treat others in respect to merit or desert according to uniform and impersonal standards” (p. 179). Where has MacIntyre shown that such an “acquired human quality” is required to excel in chess, poker, football, or portrait painting? Furthermore, even if we interpret what MacIntyre is saying in the most favorable way, do we have any reason to believe that the sort of “self-endangering risks” required to excel in chess, football, or spying have any relation to each other? They may well be very different human qualities. Indeed, MacIntyre seems to violate one of the conditions he has laid down for the virtues—the ability to “exercise” the appropriate human quality in a variety of novel contexts. Certainly a master chess player is one who knows when and where to take risks in playing chess, but may completely lack this “virtue” for any other practice.At times it seems that MacIntyre is developing a very different argument concerning the virtues and practices, i.e., that the virtues are required or presupposed in order to sustain practices. He tells us: “Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practices” (p. 119). Or again: “I take it then that from the standpoint of those types of relationships without which practices cannot be sustained, truthfulness, justice and courage—and perhaps some others—are genuine excellences, are virtues in the light of which we have to characterize ourselves and others, whatever our private moral standpoint or our society's particular codes may be” (p. 179). But there are several perplexing features about these claims. Presumably we are living in a time when there has been a “decline” in the virtues. Yet, many of the practices that MacIntyre specifies thrive. But if practices cannot be sustained without truthfulness, justice, and courage, then the very existence of practices such as chess, farming, architecture, and enquiries of physics, chemistry, and biology should count as evidence for the flourishing of the virtues. Furthermore, although practices are coherent and complex forms of socially established cooperative human activities, I can engage in some of these without the direct participation of other persons, while other practices require other participants. I paint portraits by myself. I can even go off and farm by myself. But I cannot play football by myself. There is some plausibility in claiming that without truthfulness, justice, and courage, the type of relationships among participants required in order to play football cannot be sustained. But it is extremely dubious to claim that these virtues are required to excel in portrait painting or farming. What MacIntyre characterizes as practices include what Aristotle calls poesis and praxis. But while MacIntyre can draw support from Aristotle in claiming that all praxis involves or requires the virtues, it is not clear how and why poesis (making) involves or requires the virtues.MacIntyre himself is aware of some of these difficulties—only he does not quite see them as difficulties. He admits that there may be practices “which simply are evil” and that “as a matter of contingent fact many types of practice may on particular occasions be productive of evil” (p. 186), (although he never tells us how evil is to be characterized or how we determine whether or not a practice is or may be productive of evil).What is the basic problem here? Once again MacIntyre concisely states it himself. The range of actual and possible practices is so broad that if we limited ourselves to the conception of virtue sketched so far, “there are too many conflicts and too much arbitrariness” (p. 187). “The claims of one practice may be incompatible with another in such a way that one may find oneself oscillating in an arbitrary way …” (p. 188). It may even seem “that the goods internal to practices do after all derive their authority from our individual choices” (p. 188). It looks as if this account of practices and virtues suffers from many of the same defects that MacIntyre takes to be characteristic of modernity. Certainly there is nothing he has shown thus far which would present any serious obstacles to Nietzsche. On the contrary, MacIntyre and Nietzsche look like close companions. For Nietzsche himself portrays for us a variety of practices, their internal goods, and what is required to excel in these practices. And Nietzsche might well endorse MacIntyre's suggestion that there is “too much arbitrariness” and that the goods internal to practices “derive their authority from our individual choices.”So we must move to the second stage of MacIntyre's analysis. For “without an overriding conception of the telos of a whole human life, conceived as a unity, our conception of certain individual virtues has to remain partial and incomplete” (p. 188). “Partial and incomplete” is a gross understatement. For the account thus far is in danger of being at once empty and completely relativistic—empty because it does not set any limits on what “acquired human qualities” are required to achieve the internal goods of specific practices; relativistic because there is no reason to believe that the “acquired human qualities” required to excel in one practice are the same as, or even similar to, those required for other, incompatible practices. What is lacking is any standard or principle for ordering and evaluating the confusing array of practices. Or to quote MacIntyre again, “unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately” (p. 189).So we now have to face the crucial claim that there is a “telos of a whole human life” which transcends the limited goods of practices. At first it might seem that MacIntyre is leading himself (and us) into a cul-de-sac. For MacIntyre deprives himself of the types of considerations which enabled Aristotle to confront this question. Earlier MacIntyre succinctly identified the three elements required for an Aristotelian moral scheme: “untutored human nature, man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos and the moral precepts which enable him to pass from one state to the other” (p. 52). Without the second element the entire scheme falls apart; to use MacIntyre's own expression, it becomes “unintelligible.” But how did Aristotle himself attempt to justify the second element? By an appeal to what MacIntyre calls his “metaphysical biology.” Aristotle's Ethics and Politics cannot be excised from his metaphysics, his understanding of living organisms, his psychology, and indeed from his cosmology. The human species has a determinate nature (which, of course, allows for rational choice) and it has a telos.5 But MacIntyre thinks we can give an account of the virtues that “does not require any identification of any teleology in nature, and hence it does not require any allegiance to Aristotle's metaphysical biology” (p. 183). I suspect that both Aristotle and Nietzsche would agree that if one calls into question what MacIntyre labels Aristotle's “metaphysical biology,” then the entire traditional moral scheme of the virtues falls apart—and Nietzsche “wins.” But MacIntyre does not think this follows, so let us turn to his understanding of, and argument for, a human telos.The considerations that enter in the second stage of MacIntyre's analysis are so intricate, complex, and challenging that one can easily lose sight of the main point. In order to clarify, explain, and justify what he wants to say, he needs to explore the concepts of selfhood, action, intelligible action, personal identity, the character of a narrative history and why this is the basic and essential genre for characterizing human actions, what is meant by a “genre,” accountability, and a good deal more. For these concepts form a network within which they mutually support and presuppose each other. But to facilitate a grasp of what is going on here, let me turn directly to the denouement, which comes swiftly in three paragraphs (pp. 203-204); then I can discuss what is required to make sense of it. MacIntyre writes: It is now possible to return to the question from which this enquiry into the nature of human action and identity started: In what does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative embodied in a single life. To ask “What is the good for me?” is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it to completion. To ask “What is the good for man?” is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common. But now it is important to emphasize that it is the systematic asking of these two questions and the attempt to answer them in deed as well as in word which provide the moral life with its unity. The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest. A quest for what? (p. 203)Let us provisionally bracket this last question and grant what this passage presupposes—that it makes sense to speak of the unity of an individual life, that its unity is the unity