September 15, 2009
Nietzsche or Aristotle?
A long interview that about seven people will care about in which Alasdair MacIntyre describes the trajectory of his intellectual life and philosophical career. I feel great affinity for his thinking since he finds himself straddling the ancient celtic (for me, biblical and, oddly, the postmodern return to) narrative tradition and the modern, Anglo-Saxon utilitarian tradition. This man is one of the most strikingly brilliant, level headed, and relevant thinkers I have ever encountered.
In effect, at least since your book After Virtue, you have concentrated on restoring political legitimacy to the so-called great questions. How did these efforts contrast with those of the analytical establishment?
What analytic philosophy gains in clarity and rigor, it loses in being unable to provide decisive answers to substantive philosophical questions. It enables us—at least it enabled me—to rule out certain possibilities. But while it can identify, for each alternative view that remains, what commitments one will be making by way of entailments and presuppositions, it is not capable in itself of producing any reason for asserting any one thing over any other. When analytic philosophers do reach substantive conclusions, as they often do, those conclusions only derive in pan from analytic philosophy. There is always some other agenda in the background, sometimes concealed, sometimes obvious. In moral philosophy it is usually a liberal political agenda.
I particular love this snippet, if you would forgive me my vanity, since it reminds me of something I noticed about historical memory in culture:
Do you believe you have complete control of the ”ideological” net that governs your thought?
It was in the latter part of my analytic stage, around the mid-sixties, that I developed a new agenda. I had come to recognize that a second weakness of analytic philosophy was the extent of the divorce between its inquiries and the study of the history of philosophy, and that analytic philosophy, and more especially its moral philosophy, could only itself be adequately understood if placed in historical context and thus understood as the intelligible outcome of extended argument and debate [emphasis added]. So I wrote A Short History of Ethics, a book from whose errors I learned a lot.
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6 Responses to “Nietzsche or Aristotle?”
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It’s also abundantly clear to me that I need to reread Vico.
I was going to ask: wasn’t Vico one of Joyce’s inspirations for Finnegans Wake, but your link gave the answer.
Vico is also one of those fellows who pops up in the damnest of places. He is that important thinker either people haven’t heard of or have but do not read.
See, also.
Analytic philosophy + Finnegans Wake = I’m turned on.
got into vico through jacques barzun and i must say that ‘new science’ is pretty wonderful. he prefigures comte in many ways. his conception of repeating history is one of the 1st, and he also has several things to say about bigfoot-like creatures. joyce actually uses him in portrait, ulysses and finnegan’s