As someone interested in reading MacIntyre, I really appreciated this. I didn't know anything about him but after his death saw a few writers I liked mentioning him, and then I kept seeing his name pop up and maybe I read an article by him as well, I can't quite remember. But I had the feeling that his ideas would resonate a lot with me, and this confirms it. I will try to pick up one of his books.
I don't think I realize what MacIntyre has done to the field of ethics just because I'm a bit younger. Im about halfway through after virtue and his insights are incredible and go beyond just restarting Aristotle. Great scholar and cultural critic.
Only read parts of ‘Rational’ but thought the writing was somewhat convoluted. Think the idea that we’re fundamentally social/relational beings is hugely important (Tomasello is good on this as well).
Must a philosopher talk about practices and ‘the good' in the abstract? How are both related to his faith/theology? I never got a sense of the connection (or in AV).
For me Macİntyre is an important critic of liberal modernity but the problem is is that it's such an overwhelming ‘tradition’ and is deep-rooted in Western practices, institutions and mentalities. I think he may himself have realized that. İn a conversation with John Dunn: “The task of an educator is to stand against a tide that will probably overcome him” (from memory).
I think Ghazali once said, once you're out of tradition there's no going back to it. Perhaps by that he meant that tradition has to be lived and not merely philosophically endorsed?
Certainly tradition has to be lived rather than merely abstractly endorsed, though I'd reserve "philosophical endorsement" for more serious commitment, too. Do you know Polanyi's _Personal Knowledge_? I think it's one of the better widely accessible and explicit philosophical discussions of commitment in belief in modern Western scholarship.
I'd agree MacIntyre can be convoluted, but I also think the world is convoluted – my background in science has given me plenty of confidence that sometimes you actually just can't describe a real phenomenon simply. No mysticism required, just polymers or even just linear wave equations.
MacIntyre's connection of his practice to his theology is especially clear in _Whose Justice? Which Rationality?_.
Yes, the liberal tradition is very powerful and both broad and deep, and I didn't come away entirely convinced of MacIntyre's criticisms of it. If I had been evaluating MacIntyre's critique overall, here, I would have gone into Giambattista Vico's cyclical model of history and how many of MacIntyre's criticisms of liberalism seem to be effectively a complaint of "barbarism of reflection" with the "loss of a conceptual universal," which could also address Nussbaum's points in her review of _WJWR_ about the implausibility of MacIntyre's claims that Aristotelians really shared as much background meaning as MacIntyre thinks they did. I think that's better left for another letter!
No, only some Karl Polanyi but will keep an eye out for it. Thanks for the recommendation!
Yes, agreed- as long as it's only “sometimes”. Then again, who interprets the meaning or determined to scope of the equations? (İ.e. for which phenomena do the equations suffice?). Need to go back to it but…’God is not a mathematician' (Jonas). Feyerabend also has a nice discussion on whether the Church or Galileo/Science is the ultimate arbiter.
Only sometimes convoluted? I would agree experience is only sometimes convoluted, but the world seems typically convoluted between the creation (whether the void without form or the big bang) and the end (whether divine harmony or heat death). But also, yes, I'm not suggesting science to be an ultimate arbiter of meaning.
Have you ever read Christopher Lasch? Lasch and MacIntyre remind me of each other a lot, their political trajectory is kind of similar in so far as they moved to the right but never really repudiated the left. The Culture of Narcissism and After Virtue only came out a couple of years apart, you can almost read the former as being a social/psychological analysis of MacIntyre's "Dark Age". Lasch ended up endorsing an Aristotleian position in the final chapter of the follow up the Culture of Narcissism, the Minimal Self so you can see them trending towards the same ideas.
No, but I have it near my desk in a high priority pile! I’m generally a skeptic of “narcissism” and I had other priorities occupying me when it became popular, so I missed the trend, but I don’t intend to leave it unread forever. This’ll help motivate me to get to it, so thank you.
How did you decide to pick up Lasch, if you don’t mind me asking?
There was a great blog from a while back called Samzdat, it's most famous for this series of posts called the Uruk Series which is —kind of difficult to describe— but in general its about the connection between modernity and nihilism. I'm sure you'd enjoy it as though he doesn't mention MacIntyre there's a lot of similarity in so far as one of things Lou Keep argued was that modernity has deprived us of the intellectual or linguistic materials we even need to understand our condition. The whole thing was a revelation for me, the post on True Believer is particularly good.
The last set of posts is on the Culture of Narcissism, "narcissism" in that context means something more like psychological nihilism than the everyday use. Part of Lasch's argument is that narcissism is actually a product of a bureaucratic society, you can kind of see that in a lot of MacIntyre's commentary on "the bureaucrat" and "the therapist" as archetypal figures.
Ah cool, yes, I read Sam[]zdat as the Uruk Series was coming out – definitely made an impression, as it was part of what I was reading on my way out of academia in 2017.
I found it interesting but I wanted to get well under and behind its sources before coming to a conclusion about it and what happened in my life in 2018 knocked me completely off that track. I haven’t gotten to Lasch, but I made a section by section commentary on The True Believer for myself and some close friends, for instance. 30k words in the end! I’ll reread the Samzdat post on it now that you’ve reminded me.
Thanks for the reminder and for the information on where you’re coming from!
Prophetic? "Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all they possess are fragments..." (After Virtue, 1983).
2. The comparison to memes is intriguing. I think you are right regarding the current way that term is taken. However, that current usage may show a disconnect from the broader evolutionary theory from which it came. If we think about the core Darwinian "algorithm," it includes variation, selection, and retention. The last is the basis of the notion of "descent with modification." Taking that simple idea and applying to mimetics could be a way to incorporate tradition, and there are some pursuing that line of thought in cultural evolution and related fields.
3. I'm not so sure that MacIntyre is any more demanding than Bourdieu, in terms of tracking down the claims. Yes, that claim about Smith is in a way technically correct but also misleading or at any rate more complex. I could see that right away as somebody who has read both of them. It would take a bit of time to explain it, but it could be worth it in some contexts.
By the same token, Bourdieu makes many statistical claims that are in some sense valid, but also a bit more complex if you dig deeper. The famous depiction of the capitals is not based on a statistical analysis, but it looks like it is. If one does analysis of similar data (I'm not sure if he ever made the raw results available), usually the variance explained is quite low. This does not make it wrong, but it can make drawing the sort of wider conclusions Bourdieu does a bit of a stretch. Though it would take a long time to explain all the details. Point is, scholarship is hard!
In any case, thanks again, looking forward to more.
1. I'll move _Tradition_ forward on my list. Shils seems impressive but I haven't found a clean case for prioritizing his work yet. I was thinking it might make sense to read him alongside Bellow, whenever Lillian Wang Selonick finally convinces me to make time for that.
2. I've scattered several of my objections to "memetics" across several letters so far and will eventually bring them together. I find the evolutionary analogies generally half-baked, and while I do think it will be possible to create theories of cultural evolution of what I call phyletic traditions, I think that much too often people accidentally look at "evolution of shells" rather than "evolution of genes" in theories of cultural evolution... and then even genes are not really properly replicators in themselves but rather also (like shells) instrumental inert objects replicated by replicators. I went into that most directly and at greatest length in "The Tissues of Tradition", https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/the-tissues-of-tradition
3. Agreed that MacIntyre is not more demanding than Bourdieu, just differently demanding! And yes, MacIntyre becomes easy to read if you do the background reading ahead of time, at least in my experience – whereas I find Bourdieu is often difficult even if I've done the background reading. This is part of what I was getting at in the contrast of gymnastics and deadlifts. Deadlifts are stupidly simple once you're strong enough, though it takes time and consistency to develop the strength; gymnastics may remain more complex and more attention-demanding even if you have the strength.
"The variance explained is low" is a persistent problem with PCA-family methods, no argument there, and yes, that threatens some of Bourdieu's conclusions. Good scholarship is definitely hard.
Thanks again for commenting! I hope this reply is clear, and I'm looking forward to writing the next "touchstone" letter.
I unhappily admit that much of this letter is beyond my brain capacity to understand. But, I support what I do understand. "In this world you will have trouble." (John 16:33) This agrees with the first paragraph from MacIntyre that you quoted about affliction. The story of "The Fall" and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden also supports that we will have pain and suffering in our lives. Next, I have been taught, and believe, that we, all humankind, were and are created for relationship and ultimately relationship with God, our Creator, Lord and Savior. This thought has challenged me because there is no Bible verse that states, "You were created for relationship." So, I have had to think back to how it is inferred in the Bible.
Think about a bird. It is uniquely designed to fly. A person is uniquely designed for relationship.
Thank you, Mary Jane. It’s certainly a challenging letter in some ways, and I’m glad you still found some of MacIntyre’s core points accessible! We will have trouble, we will rely on others’ grace when in trouble (if we’re humble), and grace will prove those loving relationships if and when we accept it. I don’t tend to cite scripture directly in these letters, but I appreciate comments that do. I often recommend books that rely on it extensively, such as The Book of Pastoral Rule and The Mystery of Self-Deceiving, so hopefully that won’t be a surprise or unwelcome to my readers! I think it’s very worthwhile to keep making fresh connections to the Biblical literary tradition, and I should be writing something directly about that, and literary tradition more generally, soon.
Interesting analysis! I recently read “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” and had some similar thoughts about the way that MacIntyre tends to make strong claims that are a little bit twisty in the way that they rely on other sources. I ended up pausing in the middle to read Plato’s Republic in its entirety so I could judge for myself whether I agreed with his characterisation of it or not.
Thanks, and I think you probably did the right thing, there! In my experience MacIntyre rewards that extra work with extra layers of meaning, and he rarely relies on any prior sources that are not worth reading. I don't always end up agreeing with his twists, but I do usually end up happy I did the work to understand them.
There’s a Straussian (not from the man himself, who was dead by the time after virtue was published) critique of Macintyre that I’m forgetting the details of at the moment, but I remember finding interesting. I need to read more of him tbh
As someone interested in reading MacIntyre, I really appreciated this. I didn't know anything about him but after his death saw a few writers I liked mentioning him, and then I kept seeing his name pop up and maybe I read an article by him as well, I can't quite remember. But I had the feeling that his ideas would resonate a lot with me, and this confirms it. I will try to pick up one of his books.
I’m happy to hear that. Thanks for commenting to share it!
I don't think I realize what MacIntyre has done to the field of ethics just because I'm a bit younger. Im about halfway through after virtue and his insights are incredible and go beyond just restarting Aristotle. Great scholar and cultural critic.
Only read parts of ‘Rational’ but thought the writing was somewhat convoluted. Think the idea that we’re fundamentally social/relational beings is hugely important (Tomasello is good on this as well).
Must a philosopher talk about practices and ‘the good' in the abstract? How are both related to his faith/theology? I never got a sense of the connection (or in AV).
For me Macİntyre is an important critic of liberal modernity but the problem is is that it's such an overwhelming ‘tradition’ and is deep-rooted in Western practices, institutions and mentalities. I think he may himself have realized that. İn a conversation with John Dunn: “The task of an educator is to stand against a tide that will probably overcome him” (from memory).
I think Ghazali once said, once you're out of tradition there's no going back to it. Perhaps by that he meant that tradition has to be lived and not merely philosophically endorsed?
Thank you for commenting!
Certainly tradition has to be lived rather than merely abstractly endorsed, though I'd reserve "philosophical endorsement" for more serious commitment, too. Do you know Polanyi's _Personal Knowledge_? I think it's one of the better widely accessible and explicit philosophical discussions of commitment in belief in modern Western scholarship.
I'd agree MacIntyre can be convoluted, but I also think the world is convoluted – my background in science has given me plenty of confidence that sometimes you actually just can't describe a real phenomenon simply. No mysticism required, just polymers or even just linear wave equations.
MacIntyre's connection of his practice to his theology is especially clear in _Whose Justice? Which Rationality?_.
Yes, the liberal tradition is very powerful and both broad and deep, and I didn't come away entirely convinced of MacIntyre's criticisms of it. If I had been evaluating MacIntyre's critique overall, here, I would have gone into Giambattista Vico's cyclical model of history and how many of MacIntyre's criticisms of liberalism seem to be effectively a complaint of "barbarism of reflection" with the "loss of a conceptual universal," which could also address Nussbaum's points in her review of _WJWR_ about the implausibility of MacIntyre's claims that Aristotelians really shared as much background meaning as MacIntyre thinks they did. I think that's better left for another letter!
No, only some Karl Polanyi but will keep an eye out for it. Thanks for the recommendation!
Yes, agreed- as long as it's only “sometimes”. Then again, who interprets the meaning or determined to scope of the equations? (İ.e. for which phenomena do the equations suffice?). Need to go back to it but…’God is not a mathematician' (Jonas). Feyerabend also has a nice discussion on whether the Church or Galileo/Science is the ultimate arbiter.
Determined to scope? Crikey! *determines the scope. Curs-ed Chinese technology.
I hope you do find time for it and like it!
Only sometimes convoluted? I would agree experience is only sometimes convoluted, but the world seems typically convoluted between the creation (whether the void without form or the big bang) and the end (whether divine harmony or heat death). But also, yes, I'm not suggesting science to be an ultimate arbiter of meaning.
Have you ever read Christopher Lasch? Lasch and MacIntyre remind me of each other a lot, their political trajectory is kind of similar in so far as they moved to the right but never really repudiated the left. The Culture of Narcissism and After Virtue only came out a couple of years apart, you can almost read the former as being a social/psychological analysis of MacIntyre's "Dark Age". Lasch ended up endorsing an Aristotleian position in the final chapter of the follow up the Culture of Narcissism, the Minimal Self so you can see them trending towards the same ideas.
No, but I have it near my desk in a high priority pile! I’m generally a skeptic of “narcissism” and I had other priorities occupying me when it became popular, so I missed the trend, but I don’t intend to leave it unread forever. This’ll help motivate me to get to it, so thank you.
How did you decide to pick up Lasch, if you don’t mind me asking?
There was a great blog from a while back called Samzdat, it's most famous for this series of posts called the Uruk Series which is —kind of difficult to describe— but in general its about the connection between modernity and nihilism. I'm sure you'd enjoy it as though he doesn't mention MacIntyre there's a lot of similarity in so far as one of things Lou Keep argued was that modernity has deprived us of the intellectual or linguistic materials we even need to understand our condition. The whole thing was a revelation for me, the post on True Believer is particularly good.
https://samzdat.com/the-uruk-series/
The last set of posts is on the Culture of Narcissism, "narcissism" in that context means something more like psychological nihilism than the everyday use. Part of Lasch's argument is that narcissism is actually a product of a bureaucratic society, you can kind of see that in a lot of MacIntyre's commentary on "the bureaucrat" and "the therapist" as archetypal figures.
Ah cool, yes, I read Sam[]zdat as the Uruk Series was coming out – definitely made an impression, as it was part of what I was reading on my way out of academia in 2017.
I found it interesting but I wanted to get well under and behind its sources before coming to a conclusion about it and what happened in my life in 2018 knocked me completely off that track. I haven’t gotten to Lasch, but I made a section by section commentary on The True Believer for myself and some close friends, for instance. 30k words in the end! I’ll reread the Samzdat post on it now that you’ve reminded me.
Thanks for the reminder and for the information on where you’re coming from!
For an escapist version of the same, I recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller.
Who knows, MacIntyre may have even read it!
A classic! My English teachers also had me reading Riddley Walker, and for my generation of scientists Anathem was a big hit.
Prophetic? "Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all they possess are fragments..." (After Virtue, 1983).
We’ll see. I hope not, but it does seem to have happened before, per Russo’s book.
I greatly enjoyed this, and your "touchstone" series is terrific. Looking forward to the next. I have three thoughts:
1. I think you might enjoy Edward Shils' book, Tradition: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo5959433.html . Shils has a room named after him in Foster Hall.
2. The comparison to memes is intriguing. I think you are right regarding the current way that term is taken. However, that current usage may show a disconnect from the broader evolutionary theory from which it came. If we think about the core Darwinian "algorithm," it includes variation, selection, and retention. The last is the basis of the notion of "descent with modification." Taking that simple idea and applying to mimetics could be a way to incorporate tradition, and there are some pursuing that line of thought in cultural evolution and related fields.
3. I'm not so sure that MacIntyre is any more demanding than Bourdieu, in terms of tracking down the claims. Yes, that claim about Smith is in a way technically correct but also misleading or at any rate more complex. I could see that right away as somebody who has read both of them. It would take a bit of time to explain it, but it could be worth it in some contexts.
By the same token, Bourdieu makes many statistical claims that are in some sense valid, but also a bit more complex if you dig deeper. The famous depiction of the capitals is not based on a statistical analysis, but it looks like it is. If one does analysis of similar data (I'm not sure if he ever made the raw results available), usually the variance explained is quite low. This does not make it wrong, but it can make drawing the sort of wider conclusions Bourdieu does a bit of a stretch. Though it would take a long time to explain all the details. Point is, scholarship is hard!
In any case, thanks again, looking forward to more.
Thank you! It's great to have you reading.
1. I'll move _Tradition_ forward on my list. Shils seems impressive but I haven't found a clean case for prioritizing his work yet. I was thinking it might make sense to read him alongside Bellow, whenever Lillian Wang Selonick finally convinces me to make time for that.
2. I've scattered several of my objections to "memetics" across several letters so far and will eventually bring them together. I find the evolutionary analogies generally half-baked, and while I do think it will be possible to create theories of cultural evolution of what I call phyletic traditions, I think that much too often people accidentally look at "evolution of shells" rather than "evolution of genes" in theories of cultural evolution... and then even genes are not really properly replicators in themselves but rather also (like shells) instrumental inert objects replicated by replicators. I went into that most directly and at greatest length in "The Tissues of Tradition", https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/the-tissues-of-tradition
3. Agreed that MacIntyre is not more demanding than Bourdieu, just differently demanding! And yes, MacIntyre becomes easy to read if you do the background reading ahead of time, at least in my experience – whereas I find Bourdieu is often difficult even if I've done the background reading. This is part of what I was getting at in the contrast of gymnastics and deadlifts. Deadlifts are stupidly simple once you're strong enough, though it takes time and consistency to develop the strength; gymnastics may remain more complex and more attention-demanding even if you have the strength.
"The variance explained is low" is a persistent problem with PCA-family methods, no argument there, and yes, that threatens some of Bourdieu's conclusions. Good scholarship is definitely hard.
Thanks again for commenting! I hope this reply is clear, and I'm looking forward to writing the next "touchstone" letter.
I unhappily admit that much of this letter is beyond my brain capacity to understand. But, I support what I do understand. "In this world you will have trouble." (John 16:33) This agrees with the first paragraph from MacIntyre that you quoted about affliction. The story of "The Fall" and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden also supports that we will have pain and suffering in our lives. Next, I have been taught, and believe, that we, all humankind, were and are created for relationship and ultimately relationship with God, our Creator, Lord and Savior. This thought has challenged me because there is no Bible verse that states, "You were created for relationship." So, I have had to think back to how it is inferred in the Bible.
Think about a bird. It is uniquely designed to fly. A person is uniquely designed for relationship.
Thank you, Mary Jane. It’s certainly a challenging letter in some ways, and I’m glad you still found some of MacIntyre’s core points accessible! We will have trouble, we will rely on others’ grace when in trouble (if we’re humble), and grace will prove those loving relationships if and when we accept it. I don’t tend to cite scripture directly in these letters, but I appreciate comments that do. I often recommend books that rely on it extensively, such as The Book of Pastoral Rule and The Mystery of Self-Deceiving, so hopefully that won’t be a surprise or unwelcome to my readers! I think it’s very worthwhile to keep making fresh connections to the Biblical literary tradition, and I should be writing something directly about that, and literary tradition more generally, soon.
Interesting analysis! I recently read “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” and had some similar thoughts about the way that MacIntyre tends to make strong claims that are a little bit twisty in the way that they rely on other sources. I ended up pausing in the middle to read Plato’s Republic in its entirety so I could judge for myself whether I agreed with his characterisation of it or not.
Thanks, and I think you probably did the right thing, there! In my experience MacIntyre rewards that extra work with extra layers of meaning, and he rarely relies on any prior sources that are not worth reading. I don't always end up agreeing with his twists, but I do usually end up happy I did the work to understand them.
There’s a Straussian (not from the man himself, who was dead by the time after virtue was published) critique of Macintyre that I’m forgetting the details of at the moment, but I remember finding interesting. I need to read more of him tbh
I would be interested to have the details there, whenever you remember them!