Alasdair MacIntyre : A Short Tribute

Alasdair MacIntyre engaged with Marxism, Liberalism and Christianity. He has written books on these subjects. As a learner and thinker he was open towards available forms of thought and has an unique capability to influence modern ideas and thought.

What a philosopher rejects, abandons or eschews should be read and discussed with what they profess and propound?

Students, learners and followers were struck by his diagnosis of modernity, and his presentation of predicaments that spawned the emergence and expansion of modernity. The individual and individuality is central to the modern project. The modern relies and rests on individuals who have social roots. The ‘eking and carving’ out of an individual through volition, self-determination and agency severs and loosens the social roots and ties of modern individuals.

There is no getting around or away from these modern predicaments.

The deficiencies of individual rationality and prevalence of in-commensurable theories a failure of the enlightenment project, or limits of rationality? Or territories and spaces that reason have not been conquered yet. Modernity an unfinished project? For MacIntyre it is the modern condition. A shared ethical framework eludes the modern.

Incompatible thoughts and inconsistencies are a feature of  modern thoughts and they do not necessarily arise out of the modern predicaments. These are not puzzles that can be solved or a project that will be completed in future. One has to wrestle and engage with them in these forms. For me this is the legacy MacIntyre has left for us.

The ‘three parables’ that appeared in After Virtue exhibited the incompatibility and inconsistency that underlies and informs the best contemporary theories of his time. MacIntyre showed us that modern knowledge and their formation is partial, fractured and fragmented. The three parables do not have the same premises, their implications are distinct. The three parables appeared again later in at least two of his books and is a testimony to his engagement with his contemporaries.

MacIntyre returned to Aristotle, thought virtues  are important and elaborated and presented the advantages of practices that are embedded in traditions. There is much to be learnt by his comparison of the extrinsic and external goods that act as baits versus the intrinsic and internal values that reside within practices. He did all this and much more. These were not an attempt to skirt, bypass or avoid the inescapable and irresolvable.

 

MacIntyre’s A Short History of Ethics is sharp, crisp and comprehensive. I believe he was the first who wrote a history of Ethics. And in doing so possibly started the trend of writing histories of concepts, traditions and knowledge systems that were hitherto considered as timeless and outside the bounds of spatial moorings.

MacIntyre inaugurated communitarian thought which was developed and refined by Taylor, Sandel and Kymlicka.