The first time I met Alasdair MacIntyre I was twenty-one, and he threatened to kill one of my classmates. Then told us all that our attention to his work was “profoundly misbegotten.” It was the spring semester of 1991, my senior year at Georgetown University, and my capstone seminar was dedicated to reading everything the Scottish-born philosopher had written up to that point. (It was a lot.) At the end of the semester, he came for a full day of discussion. To call it “vigorous” and “frank” would suggest we were auditioning for the State Department.
As I recall, he mocked those who did not like the Red Sox (or possibly those who did?). At another point, he suggested that, if we were in Ireland, he would have been entitled to kill one of my classmates. Undoubtedly, though, the most memorable moment for me came at lunch, when one of us asked him a question that was really a barely disguised invitation for him to congratulate us on our class's dedication to his writings. He was having none of it. "Oh, I think your class is profoundly misbegotten," he said. "If you had understood anything of what I have written, you would have immediately stopped reading my work and turned to an intensive study of Aristotle and Aquinas."
Today these sorts of things would, shall we say, not go well as pedagogically acceptable methods of interacting with students. But we knew how to take it—that is, not personally—and so instead of being offended or feeling threatened, we learned.
Learning is what I have always done with MacIntyre, because he always had more to teach than I could at any moment handle. That’s because he was, I think, more than one person. There were always multiple “Alasdair MacIntyres” out there, and the one that people seem to know about most is, in my view, the least interesting. That MacIntyre is the theorist of moral decline, the polemicist who studied how we all live “after virtue,” as his most widely recognized book is titled. He is someone who seemed, at least to an extent, to carry water for the reactionary movement of certain cultural forces in the United States since the 1960s. This declinist MacIntyre has been all too readily weaponized by partisans of resentment.
But there are at least three other Alasdair MacIntyres from whom we can learn as well, and the lessons they have to teach are to some degree orthogonal to the first. One is Alasdair MacIntyre the social theorist, a person deeply versed not just in Marx’s theory but in the larger question of the shape and order of society in general. As an anglophone philosopher, MacIntyre was unique in being profoundly learned in scholarship in sociology and anthropology. Other philosophers—even MacIntyre’s own students—tend not to be. Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum both come close, but the first was hampered by arrogance, the latter by earnestness. The only other anglophone philosopher since World War II who had anything like his catholicity of interest was Ernest Gellner, and Gellner differed from MacIntyre in eventually leaving philosophy behind. MacIntyre always understood himself to be a philosopher, despite his jeremiads against the field, but he remained profoundly interested in the Marxist analysis and critique of the modern social order as having at its center a deeply pathological relationship between status, meaning, and wealth. Many of the cultural conservatives currently heaping their obituarial praises of MacIntyre on social media are treating his multiple and vehemently anti-capitalist invectives with the kind of decorous silence that you normally reserve for Uncle Bob and his rants about Area 51 at family Thanksgiving get-togethers. But this MacIntyre is a conversation partner for a thinker like Jürgen Habermas.
Then there is the McIntyre the philosophical anthropologist. This thread in his work goes all the way back to his interest in psychoanalysis, but it also involves a positive picture of what a human might be that first appears in After Virtue. I still remember the surprise with which many people received MacIntyre’s 1999 “book on dolphins,” as some dubbed Dependent Rational Animals. “How,” one puzzled reader asked, “can the guy who was demanding we go back to Aquinas talk about Flipper?” But the surprise masked a deep confusion about his project, because he was always asking about the human good. Even as a Roman Catholic thinker, he was in some important ways a naturalist, though his was a capacious naturalism grounded in Aristotle, unafraid of discussing what it means to have a nature. The social theory was always anchored in an ongoing quest to figure out the best life for the human person, a project that drew him most deeply into conversation with thinkers such as Charles Taylor.
For me, though, as for a few others who think about religious pluralism and difference, the most creative, innovative, and profound MacIntyre was the one who thought about moral rationality, about how traditions change, and how precisely we can talk to each other across our deepest differences. This is a MacIntyre who emerged gradually, slowly extricating himself from an understanding of dialogue as centrally apologetic—that is, as essentially defending one position against another—an understanding that he first formulated in Difficulties in Christian Belief, the title of one of his earliest books. But then he came to see that the question was not merely about re-asserting one’s prior point of view but about how we might learn from one another, thereby coming to disagree in more precise and profound ways. All of this was sparked by his recognition, coming largely from his learning in anthropology, that there is no single standard form of “reason,” that humans reason in many diverse ways, all of them in some sense tradition-based.
This could easily have curdled into a kind of shrugging Rortyan relativism, but he had read his R.G. Collingwood—hadreally read it—and he knew that the forms of truth-seeking are broadly universal: Everyone, more or less, tries to “track the truth,” but we do so in profoundly, though (perhaps not incommensurably) divergent modes of what he called “moral enquiry.” Reason is the word we use to describe how we narrate the world and ourselves to ourselves; we tell ourselves these stories as ways of understanding the world, and the resources we have to tell the stories are always drawn from distinct moral communities, ideally traditions of sufficient moral density and complexity to provide at least plausible narratives for how our lives have gone so far and what we should do next.
This work was decisively shaped by his exploration of the idea of “epistemological crises,” in which people find themselves in situations of radical vexation, when their moral and spiritual resources offer them no determinate answer to how to go on. And yet they must. These can be situations in which a tradition of moral enquiry simply fails you—some especially fraught encounter with the problem of evil, say—or situations in which your tradition encounters a rival mode of human life that it cannot easily incorporate in its own vision, in the way that MacIntyre thought Augustinian theology confronted Aristotelian naturalism in thirteenth-century Paris. And yet, as Samuel Beckett would say, you must go on: but how? The elucidation of a form of rationality as narrative intelligibility, manifest in quite different ways among quite different groups of humans—and MacIntyre’s several attempts to articulate this intuition, and explore its implications for human life going forward—truly came to fruition in his masterpieces of the 1980s, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and my personal favorite, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.
This was a MacIntyre who was not only attempting to describe what it meant for the human to be a rational animal but also trying to imagine the kinds of political and institutional conditions that would be hospitable to hosting multiple such “versions of moral enquiry.” His voluble scorn for universities masked his deep love for what they could do, if only they tried. His vehemence in dealing with peers and students was also a camouflaged way to acknowledge the kinds of people whom MacIntyre aspired to be and live among—indeed, aspired to help create in his students. This was in many ways a frankly utopian project.
And I believe it is where the utopian energies of MacIntyre’s early Marxism went. He was always a good hater. His animus against capitalism was evident early on, and it never left him. The word after in the title of most famous book, After Virtue, signals his opposition to the current situation. Even before that, his collection of essays from the 1960s was entitled Against the Self-Images of the Age, and his critique of Herbert Marcuse, who was in interesting ways a parallel thinker, was also a kind of auto-critique.
Yet if much of his energy was vigorously polemical, we are mistaken, I believe, if we think of MacIntyre as only, or even mainly, a hater. He was, in ways he might have found embarrassing to admit, a lover as well, a person who hoped for something better, something that would be a fit site for human flourishing. It is in his elaboration of how traditions learn and grow and develop, and how thinkers in one tradition can come to encounter and understand another tradition, indeed how traditions themselves can be understood to be braided together, learning from one another, then differentiating from one another, this almost Darwinian picture of the descent of multiple filiations and entanglements of human modes of moral inquiry, now blending, now separating across time, that I think we find his most durable and deepest work.
It is easy to complain about the universe. Many people on the left and the right mistake being intelligent with having a well-developed ability to sneer. MacIntyre was never such a person. To be sure, his standards were impossibly high. But if you want to know what it would be to take your life seriously and live in a way that makes you the richest possible person you can be, and with whom to talk about this effort, and how to talk with them: Well, then, MacIntyre will remain an invaluable guide.