The Perils of Revolutionary Aristotelianism

Alasdair MacIntyre surely ranks among the great philosophers of our age. His book After Virtue breathed new life into our appreciation of virtue ethics; it showed how Western moral philosophy became dysfunctional after it set aside Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. MacIntyre is not only philosophically brilliant, he is also deeply learned: he makes points by extended analysis of Jane Austen’s novels; he can quote Homer in Greek from memory in his lectures. There is much to learn from such an extraordinary mind.

One thing that modern conservatives have learned from him, as Daniel Addison explored in a recent essay, is a deeper appreciation of the degree to which individuals depend on society. MacIntyre especially has reminded us how people have suffered amid modern economic and political changes, which upended centuries-old ways of life. By publicly challenging the assumptions of conservatives about markets and liberal democracy, MacIntyre has helped conservatives refine their ideas.

But I suggest that MacIntyre’s full diagnosis of the moral and political challenges of our time, as Dr. Addison has presented it, goes astray. In trying to correct the excessive individualism of much Enlightenment thought, MacIntyre, like the postliberal conservatives who admire him, errs in the other direction: the Marxist positions he adopts undermine key elements of the Christian morality he claims to hold.

Virtue Theory versus Atomistic Individualism

As Addison reminds us, MacIntyre, like all Aristotelians, understands human fulfillment to consist in actualizing well the potential of one’s nature: man’s happiness lies in realizing the goods, ends, or in Aristotle’s Greek, telē (singular telos), toward which our interior being aims. We are not born fulfilled; we must work toward fulfillment constantly by developing good habits of action, or virtues. Such is the moral life.

If you do not yet have virtue, you cannot pursue it only by taking direction from your desires: one person’s desire to eat leads him to health, another’s leads him to obesity. To know true from false virtue we need guidance from outside ourselves, such as the example of people who are already living well. Our parents are especially important, as are exemplary individuals who lived in the past. Philosophers, like Aristotle, Aquinas, and MacIntyre, reflect on those examples and distill the timeless moral principles of human nature. These reflections become a tradition that educates whole societies, across time, in what it means to be fully human.

MacIntyre contrasts his particular view of the moral life with that of many Enlightenment thinkers. The latter allegedly conceive individuals atomistically: each person, they say, enters society “already completed” (in Addison’s words) and already possessing a complete “conception of [his] good.” From this perspective, people’s needs for each other are relatively weak, because they can find fulfillment “prior to and independently of their relations to each other.”

MacIntyre, and other Aristotelians, fault this view for ignoring that we learn many virtues within “communal activity.” One cannot perform a symphony, play team sports, or do many other things, by oneself; one normally needs others to learn them and the virtues they require. Enlightenment philosophers’ view of man as largely self-sufficient lets them justify removing legal protections from certain communal activities (even the natural family, as we see today) in which society has an interest. Or they might relax restrictions on individual behaviors that can descend into selfishness: looser limitations on employment contracts may give employers more flexibility in starting a business, but they might also make it easier for employers to exploit workers. The Enlightenment’s appeals to universal individual “rights” can be used as “masks” for the self-assertion of the powerful.

Radical Teleology

But MacIntyre stresses the individual’s dependence on society more than other Aristotelians do.

Contemporary Aristotelians use the language of “the common good” to discuss how individuals need each other to seek goodness. One perspective defines the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life”—such as the rule of law, or widespread respect for religious freedom and other natural rights—“which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” In this view the common good is not exactly like the good or telos of an individual human nature. The latter exists in its own right as essential to the individual; a common good is a condition of social life, a set of relations between individuals. Such relations exist only in individuals, not independently, and not for their own sake but for the sake of the individuals. The common good is not arbitrary, because it flows from the objective order of human nature. Nor is it optional for human life: new human beings do not come to be except in the communal activity of their parents; they cannot learn human language unless they are taught by others; etc. And although the most spiritual activities—like choosing virtuously—belong to the individual person rather than society (indeed, spiritual life is the consummation of individuality), his social circumstances condition those activities, sometimes strongly.

MacIntyre’s view of the common good, however, is different. In Addison’s telling, MacIntyre stresses that the common good is “constituted by cooperative activity” (emphasis in the original); it just is individuals’ activity with each other. He also stresses that the good at which any activity or practice aims is “internal” to the practice itself. From these claims emerges the view that the “good” of the common good is not the conditions outside each individual, but one collective action itself perfecting individuals. But a single action requires a single agent; if the agent of social activity is not any individual person, as MacIntyre suggests, it seems to be society itself—existing in its own right, on a par with, and perhaps superior to, the existence of its individual members. MacIntyre and his followers strengthen this reading of their philosophy by the vivid language they repeatedly use to talk about social phenomena. The “order of capitalism” is not just a set of persons’ relations that are subordinate to their individual actions; it is itself a person on the stage of history, wreaking “destruction,” in Addison’s words, that one must “arm” people to “resist.” Together with “liberalism”—defined by Addison as “the political philosophy that attends and defends capitalism”—capitalism “disrupts” people’s lives and “tears” at their connections.

MacIntyre also stresses how human knowledge is constituted by social interaction, embodied in tradition; the proper subject of knowledge, this view suggests, is tradition itself, not the person. Hence MacIntyre frequently seems to blame the ills of modern times less on individual sins than on the philosophical tradition he calls “modernism,” defined by Addison as the “rejection of Aristotelian teleology” and its end-oriented view of human nature. When Westerners imbibed modernism, they “lost their comprehension of moral principles as rationally grounded or objectively true.” Modernism took away people’s knowledge of objective moral standards and, in MacIntyre’s words, left “no established way” of making moral judgments in our society; “the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and then in part destroyed.”

This strong view of teleology—in which the person’s agency is apparently subsumed into social activity—encourages MacIntyre’s readers to put the onus of evil on social relations and to diminish individual responsibility. Disorder in society and the person becomes primarily the work of bad ideologies that structure human relations and thought: the blame for today’s ills falls on the capitalism that supposedly controls the actions of contemporary Westerners, and on the modernism that thinks for them.

Conscience and Collectivism

By contrast, stressing that the common good consists only of conditions—that originate from and end in individuals—better preserves the view of common sense and of traditional Western morality: agency properly resides in individuals, not in markets, philosophies, or any other human institution or tradition; the latter are conditions that can be used, or abused, by the human persons that act through them. Conditions can make certain ways of acting easier than others, hence we should order them well; but the doers of deeds, those who love their neighbor or hate him, are not the conditions of society but individual persons. In spite of their circumstances, persons retain individual agency, through their knowledge of the timeless truths of human nature that we always have in our conscience. All of us, even people brought up in the most morally corrupt environments, fundamentally “are without excuse” for our misdeeds, although circumstances can mitigate our guilt.

MacIntyre’s tradition-heavy account of moral knowledge diminishes the reality of individual conscience for the same reasons Karl Marx’s philosophy does, from which MacIntyre explicitly borrows. MacIntyre asserts that moderns have “lost . . . comprehension” of morality through corrupt traditions of thought; Marx similarly says oppressive institutional structures instill “false consciousness” in people, which cannot be overcome without eliminating those structures. Not even liberalism can be disproven by philosophical argument alone: “Only a nonliberal practice,” Addison says, “and the subsequent theory of that kind of practice, can do that.”

MacIntyre claims that his view fundamentally differs from Marx’s: he rejects Marx’s claim that, because knowledge originates in collective “practices,” one cannot “appeal to objective standards of goodness, rightness, and virtue, standards independent of the interests and attitudes of those engaged in such practices.” But if human knowledge is constituted by collective activity, that knowledge is not proper to the individual himself. Therefore knowledge is probably not of a spiritual nature, because spirituality, or personhood, is consummate individuality; the more collective human action is in itself, the more material it is (as in biological reproduction). Knowledge is, then, more probably proper to our material nature, an effluence of our sensual-emotional life—of our “attitudes,” as MacIntyre calls them. Because one cannot choose what one does not know, our choices, too, must be determined by our emotions, and individual freedom is probably an illusion. And if knowledge and will are material, what is left for the spirit to do? What interest could we have in loving an immaterial, spiritual God? It seems more likely that God and the soul are projections of our imagination. These were Marx’s positions, and they seem more consistent with MacIntyre’s premises than his Christian faith does.

The Revolution of Moral Conversion

In trying to turn back the excesses of individualism, MacIntyre slides into Marxist errors that undermine the Christian hope he professes. His “revolutionary Aristotelianism” rather encourages conservatives to view themselves as victims of the oppression of modernism; to oversimplify phenomena like markets, liberalism, and modernity that have provided great benefits to humanity, despite how they have been abused; and to oversimplify the motives and choices of postliberals’ political opponents, suggesting that they are unthinking or ill-willed.

Of course, MacIntyre’s philosophy will not necessarily make its adherents act in these ways, precisely because that philosophy is incorrect to suggest that intellectual traditions determine our actions and beliefs. MacIntyre himself, although he accepts much of Marxism, rejects the violence of Stalinism and accepts objective moral standards.

But others, with less goodwill than MacIntyre, can easily develop his philosophy to defend actions MacIntyre would condemn. Addison says today’s MacIntyreans of the Right already argue that “the only way” to get to MacIntyre’s mature Aristotelian-Thomistic view is to pass “through” a Marxist phase, although they acknowledge that that phase is erroneous. But this is to suggest, like Marx, that error and truth, evil and goodness, are not opposed and are never absolute; each is a necessary stage in the process of being liberated from false consciousness—of becoming “woke.” 

If such postliberals do not wise up, they may someday embark on a violent, Marxist-style revolution in pursuit of a pseudo-Christian utopia. If we cannot be good or know goodness until society and its “consciousness” change, we have little reason not to use whatever means will bring about that change. But if truth exists above society, and the person always knows it to some degree in the law written in his conscience, he is bound never to transgress it, even in the most oppressive circumstances.

If the times are bad, the reason must be that men’s love for truth has grown cold. The solution is that men overcome their disordered attachments to their worldly comforts, security, and egos, and live for their eternal end. That conversion doesn’t require a wholesale political revolution; it requires that you and I put our own loves in order and help our neighbors do the same. Then the change we seek will happen with no violence (except that which each of us willingly inflicts on his own pride), and with much less political effort than postliberals suggest. What conservatives need to learn—or relearn—is that deep, lasting social change starts not in changing social structures, as Marx and MacIntyre teach, but in the conversion of each individual soul.

Public Domain image available through Wikimedia Commons. Image cropped for scale.