After After Virtue:

For a scholar who professes a belief in that an innovative society is the most effective one, Alasdair MacIntyre seems extremely resistant to innovation in the defence of his own work, standing by his breakthrough publication After Virtue for nearly forty years. While he contends that any credible counterargument would have already been presented to him by now, there is nothing within his ethic which precludes the possibility of being sheltered from the Truth.

The simplest means by which to prove him wrong is to describe Life in three parts: fitting in, standing up, and standing out. We start our metamorphosis by attempting to “fit into” an established social order, in spite of personal moral scruples, hoping that by doing so successfully we might appropriate an appreciation for its norms, thereby bridging the gap between the inner and the outer.

Yet what we find is that social life is intrinsically Absurd, so all such ventures are Sisyphean. In the process, we learn one of Life’s few known constants: that we must “Stand Up for Ourselves”. It is by acquiring this virtue, upon which all other virtues are contingent, that we are able to retain our dignity when we inevitably fail.

The Third Stage is a reintegration, but not, as in the case of a bildungsroman, into a Society, but rather into Ourselves. Recognizing that we shall never “fit in”, yet that we cannot escape, we learn to exist within a Society which contradicts us while retaining our dignity in the contradiction. It is because the only constancy available to us is in this act of standing up on behalf of ourselves and our own views that the Individual comes to take precedence over all illusions of status and social value. Because courage is always necessary, the conscience becomes a Universal.

The examples corroborating this narrative are so multifarious that I might fill an entire book of my own with them. Suffice it to say that, of the few men whom MacIntyre references who articulated this intuition, his scholarship misrepresents them. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, in spite of doctrinal differences, arrive at one and the same conclusion. Yet in spite of citing many of Nietzsche’s own favourite sources MacIntyre dismisses Nietzsche, and MacIntyre’s philosophy might be considered symptomatic of Nietzsche’s first stage with very brief intimations of the second. Regarding Kierkegaard, conversely, the kinship MacIntyre seems to feel with his fellow Christian is overshadowed by a dubious negligence of the finer points of Kierkegaard’s work, especially regarding the Knight of Pure Faith and the inevitable disparity between internal and external life.

Ultimately, MacIntyre’s philosophy is a doctrine of conformism. While he is effective in disarming certain forms of conformism, exposing them for what they are, such as political “protest”, (which is, after all, no more than an attempt to adapt the external to the internal) he also propagates and reinforces various modes of conformity which are even more disastrous, simply because adapting the internal to the external is even more barbaric and demoralizing. (Even George Lucas, another great modern student of mythology, intuits the authoritarian consequences of forcing people to agree in spite of partisan reservations.) Both responses are failures to live with the inherent contradiction between the internal and the external worlds, which Albert Camus called the Absurd and which Carl Jung established as the imperative for psychological individuation.

MacIntyre’s scholarship is fundamentally typical; he forgets Camus in favour of Sartre, just as he forgets Jung in favour of Freud, shamelessly identifying each individual only as representative of his respective group, for that reduction lies at the heart of MacIntyre’s sociology. In demonstrating an unwavering allegiance to the Analytical School, professing its blessings openly, he does not avail himself of the blessings of its opposing school(s), and it comes as small surprise that no convincing antitheses to his admittedly partisan presumptions have yet reached his desk.

 

[({Dm.R.G.)}]