Alasdair MacIntyre

Émile Perreau-Saussine, Nathan J. Pinkoski

Description

This award-winning biography, now available for the first time in English, presents an illuminating introduction to Alasdair MacIntyre and locates his thinking in the intellectual milieu of twentieth-century philosophy.

Winner of the prestigious 2005 Philippe Habert Prize, the late Émile Perreau-Saussine’s Alasdair MacIntyre: Une biographie intellectuelle stands as a definitive introduction to the life and work of one of today’s leading moral philosophers. With Nathan J. Pinkoski’s translation, this long-awaited, critical examination of MacIntyre’s thought is now available to English readers for the first time, including a foreword by renowned philosopher Pierre Manent.

Amid the confusions and contradictions of our present philosophical landscape, few have provided the clarity of thought and shrewdness of diagnosis like Alasdair MacIntyre. In this study, Perreau-Saussine guides his readers through MacIntyre’s lifelong project by tracking his responses to liberalism’s limitations in light of the human search for what is good and true in politics, philosophy, and theology. The portrait that emerges is one of an intellectual giant who comes to oppose modern liberal individualism’s arguably singular focus on averting evil at the expense of a concerted pursuit of human goods founded upon moral and practical reasoning. Although throughout his career MacIntyre would engage with a number of theoretical and practical standpoints in service of his critique of liberalism, not the least of which was his early and later abandoned dalliance with Marxism, Perreau-Saussine convincingly shows how the Scottish philosopher came to hold that Aristotelian Thomism provides the best resources to counter what he perceives as the failure of the liberal project. Readers of MacIntyre’s works, as well as scholars and students of moral philosophy, the history of philosophy, and theology, will find this translation to be an essential addition to their collection.

In the twentieth century, liberalism was the target of two successive waves of critique: communism and fascism. In the 1930s, caught in the grip of these two threats, liberal democracies seemed in the short term to be doomed. In the Second World War, the alliance of liberals and communists triumphed over fascism. Then private property’s adversaries lost the Cold War. Today, liberalism is the only one left in the arena. The conflicts of the twentieth century have demonstrated that the regime that was in its beginning denounced as the weakest proved to be the strongest. But the questions raised by fascists and communists remain. "What place does liberalism give to greatness, to beauty? "ask some. "What place is there for justice?" ask others. These questions still resonate. Beneath the apparent consensus, liberalism is undermined. In 1945 and in 1989, might liberalism have won only by default? The bodies are satisfied, because comfort and security reign supreme. The soul is troubled.

Today, in reaction to the Nazi and Soviet infamies, human rights triumph. We answer totalitarianism with a politics of individual rights. We counter modern tyrannies with a theory of freedom as the absence of coercion. Naturally, these solutions have their merits. But throughout these pages I have tried to explain that in the eyes of Alasdair MacIntyre, they cannot be enough. We must protect ourselves from evil and guard against tyranny, but we must also support the desire for the good and the true, nourish it, and make it bear fruit. Pascal concisely summarizes my conclusions: "It is dangerous to make man see too clearly how he equals the beasts without showing him his greatness.” The passion for taking away our innocence has its limits: the desire to open our eyes to the atrocities of which human beings are capable must not lead to denying that man desires the good and that he is capable of the good. By absolutizing individual rights, we run the risk of ruining the very meaning of freedom that we propose to cultivate, of favoring a deleterious moral relativism, and of losing any sense of worthwhile purpose. Liberalism needs the habits, customs, and mores that individualism tends to destroy. The arrangement of the laws and the balance of powers is not enough: representative democracy also demands a sense of what a fulfilled life can look like. For MacIntyre, the political response that the cruelty of the twentieth century requires does not merely involve techniques of government, a sort of constitutional engineering, and a systematic circumventing of a human nature deemed too unreliable and too dangerous. It also involves, no doubt on a deeper level, nature itself and man himself.

After having for a long time explored human nature with a particular intensity, the West has bracketed off human nature, to the point of separating it from freedom. We must return to this separation. We must anchor freedom in human nature and relate existence to the two sources of the West, to the two desires by which the scholastic philosophers had understood humanity, and around which they had articulated practical reason: the desire to live in society and the desire to know the truth about God. If we believe the tradition with which MacIntyre aligns himself, freedom is not only the power to choose what pleases us. It is also the ability to act to achieve what is obviously good, in the pursuit of perfection. Yet the good is not always obvious. Knowledge of the good generally presupposes a moral authority. Liberalism delegates the search for the good to the individual alone; it affirms that it is up to the individual to find for himself his own idea of happiness. But it is possible that the good can only be discovered, lived, and deepened by a collective effort. It is not enough to say that political reasoning starts from the fact that men are capable of the worst and moral reasoning starts from the fact that men are capable of the best. For we cannot separate or even distinguish an essentially individual and private morality from an essentially amoral politics. Morality develops within a collective framework, which includes an important political dimension. As such, the individual could prove to be powerless to find the good. Often, moral authority is not so much the opposite of freedom as its necessary condition. According to MacIntyre, it is not true that the modern "individual", by freeing himself from moral authority, has won his independence and his title to reason. It is not true that it is only the being who is freed from the grip of tradition that is capable of rationality. That individual has in reality lost his reason. It was the moral authority embodied in a tradition that ensured a minimum of practical rationality.

Preface by Pierre Manent

Introduction

1. Politics

2. Philosophy

3. Theology

Epilogue

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Éthique et morale
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Moral Philosophy
• Philosophers
• Political
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Neo-Aristotelianism
• After Virtue
• Politics
• Ethics
• Catholic
• Christianity
• Aristotle

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268203245
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALASDAIR M AC INTYRE
ALASDAIR M AC INTYRE
An Intellectual Biography
ÉMILE PERREAU-SAUSSINE
Translated by Nathan J. Pinkoski
Foreword by Pierre Manent
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
English language edition copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
First published in France as Alasdaire MacIntyre: Une biographie intellectuelle
© Presses universitaires de France/Humensis, 2005.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935757
ISBN: 978-0-268-20325-2 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20327-6 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20324-5 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
Dilectissimae et vere amandae
Contents A Note on the Translation Foreword, by Pierre Manent Introduction ONE Politics: Impoverished Lives I. The Disappointments of Socialism and Communism II. From Marxism to Communitarianism? III. A New Conservatism TWO Philosophy: Collective Reasoning I. The Moral Critique of Stalinism II. Moral Life and Socially Established Practices III. The Philosophy of Tradition THREE Theology: The Community of Believers I. Are Wars of Religion as Dangerous as Secularization? II. The Absence of Liberal Spirituality III. The Theology of the Tradition Epilogue Notes Index of Names
A Note on the Translation
What follows is an English translation of Alasdair MacIntyre: Une biographie intellectuelle , and the foreword by Pierre Manent, as they were published in the original French edition. Perreau-Saussine published an edited and translated version of chapter 2, part I, under the title “The Moral Critique of Stalinism,” in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism , edited by Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). From this published article, we can discern that Perreau-Saussine’s intention was to provide a literal translation of his French work on MacIntyre into English—a task interrupted by his untimely death in 2010.
My goal has been to provide a translation that remains faithful to Perreau-Saussine’s efforts to translate this book into English. Using Perreau-Saussine’s published article as the template for the complete translation of the book, I aim for consistency with his published article and follow Perreau-Saussine’s choices for a more literal style and language. The footnotes and quotations cite the original French or English text. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are my own. In some cases I have added additional footnotes to clarify sources, as well as notes to explain French references that may be unfamiliar to Anglo-American readers. Sometimes Perreau-Saussine alludes to private correspondence or conversations with MacIntyre; I have left those allusions as they stand.

MacIntyre’s reply to some of the criticisms raised by Manent and Perreau-Saussine can be found in “Replies,” Revue international de philosophie 67, no. 2 (2013): 203–7. Readers should bear in mind that Perreau-Saussine did not cite or discuss the following books or collected essays by Alasdair MacIntyre: they were all published after this intellectual biography was written.
• Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006)
• The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays , vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays , vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• God, Philosophy, Universities (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009)
• Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)
I am grateful to the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, as well as the Witherspoon Institute, for supporting this translation project. I am also grateful to Ronald Beiner, Dan Hitchens, Pierre Manent, Jean-Baptiste Pateron, Molly Gurdon Pinkoski, and Cécile Varry for their comments and assistance in preparing this translation.
Foreword
Liberalism, that’s the enemy! Thus we could summarize the opinion that, in a diffuse and insistent way, inspires the works of those who offer their views on our political, social, and economic situation. At the same time, we agree to recognize that the alternatives to liberalism have lost all credibility. Never has a principle organizing human association been more criticized while triumphant, or more triumphant while discredited. What should we make of this enigma? We need not look for the answer either in the particularity of circumstances or in the universal character of human dissatisfaction. Surely it is liberalism itself that supplies the best explanation of its strange situation in opinion. But how do we conduct this enquiry into liberalism? Must we reconstitute liberalism’s intellectual history? Or its political history? Or that of its social and moral effects, direct and indirect? All these approaches can be legitimate and fruitful. In the fine book that follows, Émile Perreau-Saussine has chosen another. It is, in short, an application of what Charles Péguy called “the method of eminent cases.” Alasdair MacIntyre offers us the eminent case, or culminating case, of a long and complex intellectual trajectory, rich in variations and even in conversions. However, for more than fifty years, his steady core of antiliberal anger has supplied the energy and radiance for his singular and singularly revealing work. MacIntyre’s intellectual biography, which Perreau-Saussine conducts with the necessary sympathy but also without letting himself be intimidated by the philosopher’s often boastful tone, is not only “the story of a soul” (however endearing that may be). It is also the instrument to access a set of political, social, moral, and philosophical problems of pressing interest to us all.
One of the first results of Perreau-Saussine’s enquiry is that it helps us order our past. At first glance, it seems that in the second half of the twentieth century, political and philosophical problems unceasingly renewed themselves for each generation. They differentiated according to the circumstances—in particular, the national circumstances. Who does not know that in philosophy and in politics, an abyss separates France and the United Kingdom, or the French and the “Anglo-Americans”? Well, they are not so different! Through the distinctions and connections that our young guide Perreau-Saussine draws, we are made to revisit our past. Both the polemic between Sartre and Camus and the critique of Stalinism on the one hand, and the debate between liberals and communitarians on the other, fall within one large but circumscribed argument. MacIntyre’s work, surely better than any other, enables us to discern this. The existential subject, whether ceding to the prestige of History or stoically refusing to let itself be carried away, exhibits the same fragility as the liberal subject, which is responsible for managing the portfolio of its identities. Yet more essential than good action is action itself. Before “taking a stand” in society and in history, and in order to do it wisely, we need in the first place to recover the understanding of what it is to act. And good action will then appear in the first place as completed action, as that which best fulfills the nature of action. We should be grateful to MacIntyre for identifying the central lacuna in our approach to the human world—namely, our inadequate understanding of human action and our reason’s abandonment of its “practical” register. First, we must understand what acting means!
With the question having been asked in these terms, the answer, at least in its outline, is self-evident. We need to look from Aristotle’s perspective, simply because he is the only author, ancient or modern, to have completely clarified the realm of action on its own terms, with the corresponding notion of practical reason (what Kant calls by that name covers something else entirely). MacIntyre approaches Aristotle through the mediation of Elizabeth Anscombe in particular, who had herself rediscovered Aristotle through the mediation of Wittgenstein, and whose singular personality is well limned by Émile Perreau-Saussine. Here, however, the risk would be to allow oneself to be dazzled by such prestigious figures. On the contrary, Perreau-Saussine is very sensitive to the paradoxical particularity of the Aristotle who is here invoked: he is fundamentally apolitical! We find the strength and weakness of MacIntyre’s approach in his recourse to a philosophy of man as a “social animal,” disdaining real interest in man as a “political animal.”
We understand how this mutilated Aristotle comes to serve the oppositional political posture from which MacIntyre has never departed. MacIntyre is always “for” the subpolitical community threatened by the political community that rises in power, and “against” the latter. Very subtly, Perreau-Saussine shows how Andrew Fletcher, the Scottish patriot and enemy of the Act of Union with England, is MacIntyre’s hero and, so to speak, his model. Caught between the sovereignty of the individual and that of the nation-state, the local community—fishermen’s village, craftsmen’s guild, Benedictine monastery—always incorporates the sana pars of human practice, or is the place where this practice takes refuge. MacIntyre’s contribution to the analysis of the life of practice and his phenomenology of the good as “internal” to a practice (therefore incommensurable with the criteria of “money” or “rights”) are often highly incisive. But what is the ultimate validity of a conception of the human world that, in the name of practice, evacuates the human world of its political part?
Perreau-Saussine emphasizes that MacIntyre, in th