Golfo Maggini
University of Ioannina
Department of Philosophy
Dourouti University Campus
GR - 451 10 Ιoannina
Greece
tel.: 00302651-0-05673, 05656, 05657
fax: 2651-0-05801
e-mail: gmaggini@uoi.gr
personal webpage:
www.golfomaggini.blogspot.com
International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry
8th Annual Conference
“Tradition, Modernity, and Beyond”
National and Capodistrian University of Athens &
University of Ioannina
Athens, 9-12 July 2014
MacIntyre’s Nietzschean Anti-Modernism
“From Nietzsche’s beginnings until now the genealogical project has been
to outwit and thereby to subvert the institutionalization of the gap between
theory and practice and the corresponding deformation of both by a kind
of intellectual and social guerilla warfare. Thomists by contrast have often
enough created […] alternative institutions […] in an attempt to integrate
intellectual, moral, and social formation in a way that would escape the
deformations of their age.”
(Alasdair MacIntyre, “Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Social
Practice: What Holds Them Apart?”, 1992, p. 122)
Quotation #1: “The notion of choosing one’s own morality makes no sense; what
makes sense is the much more radical notion of choosing to displace and overcome
morality. So A Short History of Ethics should perhaps have ended by giving Nietzsche
the final word, instead of leaving him behind two chapter earlier.” (“Nietzsche or
Aristotle? Alasdair MacIntyre” in: The American Philosopher. Interviews with
Giovanna Borradori, The University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 146).
Quotation #2: “…from a methodological viewpoint, it is today clear to me that while I
was writing A Short History, I should have taken as a central standpoint what I
learned from R. E. Collingwood: that morality is an essentially historical subject
matter and that philosophical inquiry, in ethics as elsewhere,
is defective insofar as it is not historical.” (ibid).
Quotation #3: “What worries us in Nietzsche is perhaps like what worries us in Kant
[…] the conscientious moral agent dominated by the form of the categorical
imperative is in fact licensed to do anything at all – provided he does it
conscientiously. What looked like a restrictive guide to conduct is in fact empty of
restriction. So likewise, and more crudely, with the notion of the Superman. In the
name of the Will to Power what might one not do?…” (Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short
History of Ethics. A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the
twentieth century, Routledge, London-New York 1998 (1967), p. 218).
Quotation #4: “To a remarkable extent Nietzsche offers us an inverted mirror-image
of the friendship required by the virtues of acknowledged dependence […] Nietzsche
thus confronts us with a radical alternative way of thinking about dependence and
independence in human relationships […] Yet, although we can learn from Nietzsche
we cannot learn from him as one who is able to participate with us in rational
conversation, criticism, and enquiry.” (Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational
Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Open Court, Chicago, 1999, p. 164165).
Quotation #5: “One might even claim that what MacIntyre has shown us thus far
really supports Nietzsche’s case; that MacIntyre decoded is the champion of
Nietzsche. Why? Because he not only shows that there are incompatible and
incommensurable lists and theories of virtue, but has failed thus far to show how we
can “rationally” adjudicate among rival claimants.” (Richard J. Bernstein, “Nietzsche
or Aristotle? Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue”, Soundings 67/1
(1984), p. 9).
Quotation #6: “Post-Enlightenment relativism and perspectivism are thus the negative
counterpart of the Enlightenment, its inverted mirror image. Where the Enlightenment
invoked the arguments of Kant or Bentham, such post-Enlightenment theorists invoke
Nietzsche’s attacks upon Kant and Bentham.” (Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice?
Which Rationality?, Duckworth, London, 1988, p. 353).
Quotation #7: “Perspectivism, in this once more like relativism, is a doctrine only
possible for those who regard themselves as outsiders, as uncommitted or rather
committed only to acting a succession of temporary parts. [..] from the standpoint
afforded by the rationality of tradition-constituted enquiry it is clear that such persons
are by their stance excluded from the possession of any concept of truth adequate for
systematic rational inquiry.” (MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 368).
Quotation #8: “Psychologically what is taken to be fixed and binding about truth –
Nietzsche would of course have said the same about knowledge and duty and right –
is an unrecognized motivation serving an unacknowledged purpose. To think and
speak of truth, knowledge, duty, and right in the late nineteenth-century mode, the
mode in fact of the Ninth Edition, is to give evidence of membership in a culture in
which lack of self-knowledge has been systematically institutionalized.” (Alasdair
MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. The Gifford Lectures, University
of Notre Dame Press, 1990, p. 35).
Quotation #9: “The transformation of the moral inquirer from the participant in an
encyclopaedic enterprise shared by all adequately reflective and informed human
beings into an engaged partisan of one such warring standpoint against its rivals is an
accomplished fact.” (MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 56).
Quotation #10: “…so far as large-scale theoretical and conceptual structures are
concerned, each rival theoretical standpoint provides from within itself and in its own
terms the standards by which, so its adherents claim, it should be evaluated, rivalry
between such contending standpoints includes rivalry over standards. There is no
theoretically neutral, pre-theoretical ground from which the adjudication of competing
claims can proceed.” (MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 173).
Quotation #11: “…But it now turns out to be the case that in the end the Nietzschean
stance is only one more facet of the very moral culture of which Nietzsche took
himself to be an implacable critic.” (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, University of
Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 259).
Quotation #12: “Nietzsche’s final standpoint, that towards rather than from which he
speaks, cannot be expressed as a set of statements. Statements made only to be
discarded – and sometimes taken up again – in that movement from utterance to
utterance in which what is communicated is the movement. Nietzsche did not advance
a new theory against older theories, he proposed an abandonment of theory.”
(MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 49).
Quotation #13: “...Thinkers in this Nietzschean tradition have differed about which
Greeks they take to be the good Greeks – since usually it will be granted that reason
took over and killed off the good developments at some point […] for Alasdair
MacIntyre, it would seem that the good times persist at least through the lifetime of
Aristotle and his medieval successors, and do not get really awful until Hume and
Kant […] For MacIntyre and for Heidegger (and there are certainly elements of this
position in Williams also) the good thing is to suppose that in a well-ordered
community we execute our tasks without reflection; the bad thing is to suppose that
each political act needs and can have a rational justification.” (Martha C. Nussbaum,
“Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism”, The Journal of Political Philosophy 5/1 (1997),
p. 2).
Quotation #13: “Meaning and ostensible use are such that the use of moral concepts
and judgments purports to involve an appeal to some impersonal standards of right or
good, neutral between the interests, attitudes, preferences and will of persons. Actual
use is at the thereby unrecognized serviceof highly specific interests, attitudes,
preferences, and will […] To translate these postNietzschean claims into this idiom is
at once to recognize both the resemblances and the differences between such claims
and a type of theory in modern academic moral philosophy advanced in different
versions by C. L. Stevenson and by Simon Blackburn.” (Alasdair MacIntyre, “Moral
Philosophy and Contemporary Social Practice: What Holds Them Apart?”(1992), in:
The Tasks of Philosophy. Selected Essays, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2006, p. 110).
Quotation #14: “…contrary to what MacIntyre suggests, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is
not a version of emotivism; it does not involve subjectivity of individual moral
judgments […] In order words, Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not arise from his
observations of individuals’ moral judgments as expressions of subjective will nor
does it claim that moral judgments are individual preferences, which is the basic tenet
of emotivism.” (Buket Korkut, “MacIntyre’s Nietzsche or Nietzschean MacIntyre?”,
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 38/2, 2012, p. 205).
Quotation #15: “the Nietzschean stance turns out not to be a mode of escape from or
an alternative to the conceptual scheme of liberal individualist modernity, but rather
one more representative moment in itsd internal unfolding. And we may therefore
expect liberal individualist societies to breed “great men” from time to time. Alas!”
(MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 259).
Quotation #16: “[Nietzsche] takes there to be a multiplicity of perspectives within
each of which truth-from-a-point-of-view may be asserted, but no truth-as-such, an
empty notion, about the world, an equally empty notion. There are [for Nietzsche] no
rules of rationality as such to be appealed to, there are rather strategies of insight and
strategies of subversion.” (MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, p. 42).
Quotation #17: “…from the standpoint of the genealogist no tradition can be rational,
but in this case for reasons which equally undermine any claim that particular
methods or principles are ever as such rational.”? (MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of
Moral Inquiry, p. 117).
Quotation #18: “The genealogist […] subordinates philosophy in history. Because he
sees, rightly, that total historical detachment, or radical universalism, is impossible, he
swings violently in the opposite direction and concludes that every thought and idea is
the creature, and hence the instrument, of its time, to be used or abused in the power
struggles of social and political history. Whereas the encyclopaedist is unrealistically
ahistorical, the genealogist is an historical relativist.” (Gordon Graham, “MacIntyre
on History and Philosophy”, in: Alasdair MacIntyre, Mark C. Murphy (ed.),
Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 28).
Quotation #19: “…despite MacIntyre’s apparently tolerant claims in acknowledging
the “legitimacy” of radically incommensurable traditions of justice and practical
rationality, there is an implicit cultural imperialism in his view. For it is a necessary
consequence of his claims that a given tradition may contingently turn out to be
rationally superior to all its rivals.” (Richard J. Bernstein, The New Constellation. The
Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity, Polity Press, 1991, p. 64).
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