The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died May 21 at 96, was among the most eminent living intellectuals. In the 1980s, when I was in grad school and he was publishing books such as After Virtue, he revived Aristotle's ethics, participated in a revolution in the way we view what human beings are, and swung “postmodernism” all the way around to the right, eventually combining pomo linguistic constructivism with Catholic conservatism as he moved into a long, distinguished professorial stint at Notre Dame University. Since his passing, many are busily acknowledging his excellence and his influence.
But I'd like to raise a few questions.
When I say that MacIntyre swung postmodernism around to the right, this is what I mean by “postmodernism”: the position that the world we experience is in some central or essential way textual, that interpreting the world and one another is a lot like interpreting a novel or a biography. There are many versions of this: left and right and center, sophisticated or touchingly naive, seemingly plausible and seemingly ridiculous. But it was a pervasive mood, with participants as various as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Judith Butler, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Alasdair MacIntyre.
I came to After Virtue circa 1985 by way of Rorty, who was my dissertation supervisor at the University of Virginia. He disagreed with a lot of it, in particular with the conservative political implications. But he had no doubt that MacIntyre was an extremely important figure and noted that they agreed on one central thing: we are, both men said, made to be what we are by the words we use and which use us. We are, as the commonplace phrase had it, the stories we tell.
Or, as MacIntyre said, we are characters in stories told by others: that is what it means to be a moral agent, a person: in short, oneself. The conservative part is that MacIntyre argued that the stories in which we live, historically provided by our religions and traditional moral teachings, have disintegrated in modernity, leaving us lost, and now we ought to try to recover them.
That was the biggest difference between Rorty and MacIntyre's "linguistic constructivism": whereas Rorty thought that all our stories were “contingent” and there was no putting them back together into a single world picture, MacIntyre thought that task was urgent and meant the difference between the survival and the suicide of our species. What we needed, he thought, was a more definitely singular and coherent story in which we could all find places as characters. Early in his career, this story was provided by Marxism. Later on, by Catholicism.
"I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death," MacIntyre wrote in After Virtue, formulating one of the most characteristic positions of the period. "When someone complains—as do some of those who attempt or commit suicide—that his or her life is meaningless, he or she is often or perhaps characteristically complaining that the narrative of their life has become unintelligible to them, that it lacks any point, any movement toward a climax or telos."
“Telos” (Greek for goal or end or purpose) is an index of MacIntyre's Aristotlianism: on MacIntyre's view, each of us is a character in a story, and the story is a quest narrative. Each of us is in pursuit of a particular goal that encompasses and shapes our whole life, in relation to which our lives are narrated.
"In what," MacIntyre asks, "does the unity of an individual life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a narrative quest." As I say, the idea that we consist of or live in stories was widely held in the period. But that each of us has a particular goal (happiness, perhaps) that shapes each whole life and in relation to which we may succeed or fail is distinctive to MacIntyre's version of narrative postmodernism.
I would’ve thought that McIntyre's reputation would’ve faded and frayed a bit as the decades have unfolded. The idea that we are textually-articulated characters in a world made of words hasn’t really survived from the 1980s until now, and looks at this point something like an artifact of extinct civilization. The concept of “happiness” or “well-being” has been revived in "positive psychology," for example, but has no more specific content now than it did in '85, or for that matter in 350 BC.
Rather than thinking of ourselves as narratives, whatever that might mean, we’re more likely today to emphasize again our status as organisms in a physical environment, both of which are endangered. To say that "Microplastics in human brains raise urgent health concerns", for example, is itself to issue a narrative, I suppose, although awfully thin in itself as a story. But what's described by the words is a particular physical situation of an organism in an environment. Stories are sweet. But physical facts are stubborn.
MacIntyre's "I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story," is a puzzling on numerous grounds. For example, a claim may be both justifiable and false, at least according to non-postmodernists and Aristotelian logicians. But I feel safe in saying that I’m not what I may be falsely taken by others to be. On the other hand, to say that I’m what I may be truly taken by others to be is merely to say that I am what I am. In that regard, I insist that what I am is an animal body, a particular organism.
Maybe MacIntyre and Rorty thought we were living in words; but no amount of mere yapping will help us ameliorate the microplastics situation or most of our other problems. For neither the microplastics nor the brains consist of words.
The position that "the human world" is composed fundamentally of the words we emit, and that the world can be transformed if we just talk a little differently, was a fad in academia: it even fueled the "PC" and "woke" eras (much to MacIntyre's dismay). But if, circa 2015, he was irritated listening to college administrators say things like "the words we use matter" as an excuse to silence people, he had himself (among others) to blame.
I hate to say it, but the view that we are the stories we tell, or that we are the stories that others may be telling about us, or that we are fictional characters living in a universe that resembles nothing so much as a novel, is childish.
It's great that you like stories! And have a lot of expertise about them. But that’s not our overall situation as humans. Insofar as words articulate alleged worlds, they can be true or delusional, real or fictional. Saying something doesn't make it true. Saying it again more beautifully or more loudly doesn't make it true. All of us saying it together just creates a collective pall of bullshit. And human lives don’t have singular or well-defined goals, much less one that we all share.
Even the quoted sentences are enough to suggest that Alasdair MacIntyre's writing could be extremely laborious. There sure is a lot of it, however.
Once we say that the universe is a story, we still face the question of which particular story it is, and we still have no decisive rational reasons to accept any one rather than another. I see why he wants the Catholic narrative, in other words, but it seems like an arbitrary choice, the sort of choice for which (as many a postmodernist might’ve pointed out) no valid criteria can be given. I'm sure MacIntyre repudiated postmodernism with its “radical” or “relativistic” or even “nihilistic” implications. But I'm also sure that his philosophy provided some of the central and least plausible examples of it.
At any rate, the story that ran from Alasdair MacIntyre's birth to his death has run its course and now he is, by his own account, whatever we may justifiably take him to be. Let that be a lesson to us all!
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
