Alasdair Macintyre R.I.P.

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre — first After Virtue and then (more defining for me) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? — was one of the most important events of my intellectual life. (I also remember reading Dependent Rational Animals with some students, one of whom commented that she didn’t think that was a good title for a book but would definitely be a great name for a band.)

MacIntyre’s work helped me to understand the ways that Auden’s poetry in the Forties and Fifties anticipated movements later to become important. Auden’s anti-Constantinianism, his theology of the body, his communitarianism, all of them were ahead of the game, and MacIntyre helped me to understand the ways that Auden was both participating in and helping to form a “tradition of moral inquiry.”

In gratitude, I sent a copy of one of my early essays to MacIntyre and received this reply:

This was exceptionally encouraging to me, a response far more generous than I had expected. (I don’t think I expected any response at all.) It gave me confidence that I was thinking along potentially fruitful lines. The memory of it buoyed me when I was deflated, as I often was in those days.

And of course I continued to read and profit from MacIntyre’s work, which seemed as though it would never end. As Christopher Kaczor points out in this fine eulogy — which also describes the philosopher’s role in breaking up the Beatles — now you’ll have to read it, won’t you? — MacIntyre’s publishing career spanned more than seventy years.

Here is a quotation from one of his last pieces, a tracing of his intellectual development:

Two salient thoughts emerge from this narrative. The first concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of living on the margins, intellectually as well as politically, a necessary condition for being able to see things as they are. The two standpoints without which I would have been unable to understand either modern morality or twentieth-century moral philosophy are those of Thomism and of Marxism, and I therefore owe a large and unpayable debt of gratitude to those who sustained and enriched those marginal movements of thought in the inhospitable intellectual climate of capitalist modernity, including Thomists as various as Maritain, Garrigou-Lagrange, De Koninck, and McInerny, and Marxists as various as Lukacs, Goldmann, James, and Kidron. One way to make it highly improbable that you will enjoy outstanding academic success is to enter contemporary debates in moral philosophy as either a Thomist or a Marxist.

A second thought, perhaps in tension with the first, concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of nonetheless learning as much as she or he can from those at the academic center, those who have made definitive contributions to the ongoing debates of academic moral philosophy. For interestingly it is often they who supply the resources that one needs if one is to free oneself from the limitations of their standpoint. If one is to evaluate both the achievements and the defects of twentieth-century academic moral philosophy, it needs to be understood both from within and from a standpoint that is at once external and radically critical. It is such a standpoint that I have tried to define.

In my own extremely small way, I have tried to assume a similar standpoint in relation to my own discipline, and though our fields are different, MacIntyre has been vital to me as an intellectual model. I have quoted him many times over the years, in essays and books, but those quotations do not suggest the greatness of my debt to him.

He was in his way a great wizard, and like Prospero, he has now broken his staff and drowned his book. May light perpetual shine upon him.

P.S. Russell Arben Fox has also written a tribute that goes into more detail about Whose Justice? Which Rationality?