May 23, 2025
I’ve been living with Alasdair MacIntyre frequently in my head for the last couple of years. This recent lecture explores some of what’s been on my mind. I’m still making sense of the way my mind changed in mid-life, and I find it reassuring that MacIntyre also had several big intellectual and religious conversions (and, also like me, no PhD!). I’ll be trying to write more about him in coming months and years. This remembrance is lovely:
MacIntyre emphasized that the study of ethics cannot be separated from history, for it is an understanding of historically situated practices within communities that is needed to make sense of moral judgments. “We should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present day conceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in the face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done,” he wrote in A Short History of Ethics. “We have to steer between the danger of a dead antiquarianism, which enjoys the illusion that we can approach the past without preconceptions, and that other danger, so apparent in such philosophical historians as Aristotle and Hegel, of believing that the whole point of the past was that it should culminate with us. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.” Indeed, it is the telling of stories that makes us who we are: “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal.” Ethical questions presuppose narrative questions. As he put it, “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”