MacIntyres Enlightenment Project

Alasdair MacIntyre’s interpretation of the Enlightenment:

giving grounds for an inherited morality.

11venerdì 26 aprile 13

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Professor Alasdair MacIntyre, currently 84 years old, in 1981 published a book named A!er Virtue: a study in moral theory, which is arguably still considered his masterpiece and surely one of his

most controversial works.


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As previously remarked, this book had been labeled as extremely controversial for several reasons.

The starting point of the book is the observation that the moral language in the present days persists in a state of extreme disorder.

This description finds its strength from the typical features that moral debates present in contemporary days: interminability,

emotional thrust, and a relativistic flavour (in not very-specific terms).


For what will be discussed, it’s not really important to address the conclusions that MacIntyre is drawing out from his analysis, but in a nutshell, he believes that the moral confusion in western tradition started once moral philosophy tried to purge teleological elements from their pattern of explanations, or, as we could dare to say now, from their normative theory of ethics.He is thus recommending a comeback of clear teleological elements in the contemporary moral patterns, namely a reintroduction of virtue ethics of neo-Aristotelian-Thomistic flavour.

This is also the way in which his work has been interpreted by the vast majority of the philosophical panorama from the 80’s up to now (e.g. Evangeliou 1983, Haldane 1994, Horton and Mendus 1994, and many others). Even though A!er Virtue truly consists in such a defence of virtue ethics, it goes further than that, and involves some precious insight especially of historical and historiographical kind that still received few attention from both philosophers and historian.


My aims are:

I) Presenting (briefly) to You his understanding of the Enlightenment as a cultural and intellectual product as he addressed it in A!er Virtue.

II) Describing and contextualising his concept of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, again as it is presented in A!er Virtue.

III) Giving a very brief account of the three historiographical trends which has been involved, up to the present days, in the study of the Enlightenment culture.

IV) Eventually, trying to fit MacIntyre’s interpretation particularly in one of those historiographical trends, giving my reasons for the choice.


Aim 1:The Enlightenment as a culture, described in

A!er Virtue.


‘France is from the standpoint of that culture itself the most backward of the enlightened nations. The French themselves often avowedly looked to English models, but England in turn was overshadowed by the achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment. The greatest figures of all were certainly German: Kant and Mozart. But for intellectual variety as well as intellectual range not even the Germans can outmatch David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, Lord Kames and Lord Monboddo. What the French lacked was threefold: a secularized Protestant background, an educated class which linked the servants of government, the clergy and the lay thinkers in a single reading public, and a newly alive type of university exemplified in Königsberg in the east and Edinburgh and Glasgow in the west. The French eighteenth-century intellectuals constitute an intelligentsia, a group at once educated and alienated; while the eighteenth-century Scottish, English, Dutch, Danish and Prussian intellectuals are on the contrary at home in the social world, even when they are highly critical of it. Spaniards, Italians and the Gaelic and Slavonic-speaking peoples do not belong to itʼ. In other words, MacIntyre's Enlightenment is ʻa culture that is primarily Northern Europeanʼ, even though it has ʻof course outposts outside Northern Europe, most notably in New England and Switzerlandʼ, whereas is just seen as ʻinfluential in South Germany, Austria, Hungary and the kingdom of Naples’


France, or better, French intelligentsia, ʻhave the will to belong to it [the Enlightenment], in spite of the differences in their situation. Indeed at least the first phase of the French revolution can be understood as an attempt to enter by political means this North European culture and so to abolish the gap between French ideas and French social and political life’Secondly, the culture of the Enlightenment in MacIntyre's opinion was ʻa musical culture and there is perhaps a closer relationship between this fact and the central philosophical problems of the culture than has usually been recognizedʼ, i.e. we should look at the way our religious belief became intertwined with music, especially when ʻthe Catholic mass becomes a genre available for concert performance by Protestants, when we listen to the scripture because of what Bach wrote rather than because of what St. Matthew wroteʼ. The next observation made is of course that it is impossible to disconnect the music of ʻBach or even of Handel from the Christian religion. But a traditional distinction between the religious and the aesthetic has been blurredʼ.


Aim 2:The ‘Enlightenment Project’ in A!er Virtue.


The “Enlightenment Project” is, according to MacIntyre (A!er Virtue, 1981, Chapters 4 and 5), the quest for grounds capable of explaining the moral practice - as well as the moral claims - in reasonable terms.

Framed in this way, it could sound extremely obscure:any system of moral philosophy, eligible to deserve this designation, must provide some sort of sensible explanations or arguments to give grounds for its claims. So, why this project should be labeled as the “Enlightenment Project”?

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is, after all, nothing different from a stream of arguments that still express the same quest for some reasonable justifications for moral behaviour, just in a different cultural context than ours, or the XVIII century one.

Why then summoning the issue as “The Enlightenment Project”?


First and the foremost we must understand that, according to MacIntyre, Aristotle’s moral theory could not be read properly as a search for reasons to justify some moral claims, as it is instead possible to do with Kant’s Second Critic, or Hume’s Treatise and probably also with Spinoza’s Ethics (even though MacIntyre did not mention the latter in his work...).

The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition should be read more as a training programme, which is meant to be translated in practical behaviour as soon as the pupil completed his/her first level of dianoethical education, being then ready to understand what virtues are and how to strive for them in everyday life. It is more similar to the moral codes of the courtiers of the Renaissance like Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, or Della Casa’s Galateo, overo de’ costumi, rather than a pure quest for reasonable arguments for justifying a stock of moral claims.


So, when did this project started according to MacIntyre?In A!er Virtue the narrative begins from the end of the process, i.e. with Kierkegaard, going back through Kant and eventually

stopping in front of Diderot and Hume.

Let’s reconstruct the order chronologically:

Hume: Treatise (1740), third book On Morals.

Diderot: Le Neveu de Rameau, (1762-73) published posthumous.

Kant: Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Kierkegaard: Either/or (1843).


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Hume, Royal Mile, Edimburgh. Diderot, Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris. Kant, Kaliningrad. Kierkegaard, Royal Library Garden, Copenhagen.


MacIntyre argued that these authors constituted a sort of thread, because once Hume and Diderot started (independently) the

process, Kant began his reflexions from the cul-de-sac in which Hume’s moral philosophy fell, providing a new answer to the

quest for reasons able to justifying their moral beliefs. In the same way, Kierkegaard’s reflexions started from Kant’s conclusions,

highlighting the inherent problems of that solutions and developing his answer to the question of grounding sensibly the

ethical beliefs somewhere.


We could very briefly summarise (in a way that definitely does not give justice to the authors’s wealth, perhaps...) the thread with the

model in the next slide:


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Author/Work/Date Solution offered Main argument in favour

Main inconsistency spotted in the answer,

by the next author.

Hume (Diderot)/ Treatise (Neveu)/ 1740

(1762-73)

Moral behaviour is the result of the work of the passions. The foundation of morals stays in

following the right desires and the right passions. If so, in the

long run, happiness is to be gained.

By the use of reason, we know that: ‘passions, and not reason,

move us to action’. Moral action then, is not the work of

the reason. It must be therefore the work of the

passions.

Passions are the stomping ground of morals. But some of them are right and some others

wrong. They usually conflict with each other and it’s

impossible for a passion to regulate another passion.

Kant/ Critique/ 1788

Morality is sensible. Is possible to build a test showing which

maxims should we consistently want people acting in respect

of them, and which maxims are instead self-defeating.

Why should a person follow a moral maxim when it is

contrary to her desires? If morality were merely the work of the passions, this would not be the case. But this is the case: then morality must be sensible.

A truly abstract rational test is vacuous. It is indeed not able to make us discern the difference between ethical maxims and

aesthetic maxims.

Kierkegaard/ Either/or/ 1843

Morality is a matter of radical choice. The answer must be

searched beyond reason, because choosing is the starting

point for understanding what can count as a reason for the

moral subject.

Both an aesthetic life of passion-chasing and an ethical life of commitment to duties can be taken seriously. The

choice between them must be taken a step behind.

(MacIntyre) If choice is to be addressed as the source of morality, how can moral

principles have authority on us? We could always choose to give up the previous choice without

any authority constraint.


Aim 3:Historiography of the Enlightenment.


In Richard Butterwick’s very words:

‘The first approach traditionally concentrated on France, and the philosophes: the quartet of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and the dissonant Rousseau to the fore, with a supporting orchestra led by D'Alembert, Holbach, Helvetius and Condorcet, and a variant played by physiocrats (or économistes) such as Quesnay and the elder Mirabeau.’

This melodic metaphor is intended to show that the traditional studies made on the Enlightenment, actually produced the idea of

Enlightenment as a French cultural product.Well-known names of historians who contributed in the development of

this historiography are Peter Gay, Ernst Cassirer, Norman Hampson.This is what we could call the ‘Traditional Historiography on

Enlightenment’, or THE for brevity.


Butterwick also addressed another trend in the historiography of the Enlightenment during the XXth century, i.e. the

‘Philosophical Dissection of the Enlightenment’ or PDE.This trend is the one in which we should put, in Butterwick’s

opinion, Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic, Foucault’s Discipline and perhaps Habermas Structural transformation, even

though this last one is not holding a skeptic position on the Enlightenment but instead an optimistic one.Again in Butterwick’s words, those works are:

‘Dissection of the illusory optimism of Enlightenment reason and its indictment as a source of domination and oppression […provided by]

an inadequate knowledge of it in its historical context.’


The third kind of historiography could be called the ‘Nationally-Contextualised Historiography’ or NCH. This particular and contemporary method had been brought up by the last two

generations of historians, especially historians of ideas.The heart of this strategy is seeing the Enlightenment as a

European cultural product, with different features according to the different countries in which is possible to be spotted. One of the most prominent aspects of this historiography is the studying

of ‘communicative networks’ between people and ideas throughout different countries, to see how new ideas were shaped in different national contexts from quite the same starting point.

In Laszlo Kontler’s words:

‘Today the Enlightenment is more keenly studied as a multi-centred and multi-layered movement in which similar sets of questions about man and

the universe were answered in different ways.’


Aim 4:Which Enlightenment? Whose Historiography?


Which is the proper historiographical trend for MacIntyre’s interpretation of the Enlightenment given in A!er Virtue?

It’s apparently quite easy to discard THE, because he explicitly refused the very idea of a French-centred Enlightenment. But

could be replied that he is just moving the centre from France to Northern Europe (perhaps to his Scotland) and if so, his approach

would be nothing really new.This has been, even though framed in terms slightly different, the object of Robert Wokler’s criticism related both to MacIntyre’s

Enlightenment and his supposed ‘Enlightenment Project’.


MacIntyre’s interpretation of the Enlightenment seems also to have all the proper features to be addressed as part of the PDE tradition.It could be argued, (even though I would not defend this side) that

MacIntyre’s attitude toward the Enlightenment is somehow skeptic if not disappointed.

After all, his argument in A!er Virtue stated that if now our moral language is facing an extreme state of disorder, this is somehow due to

our intellectual and cultural history, and the Enlightenment surely played a pivotal role in this plot.

This sounds really close as blaming the Enlightenment for its results, and is not that far from the disappointed reconstruction typical of

the PDE tradition previously analysed. Even though it could be rather hard to claim that such a reconstruction is grounded in a poor

knowledge of the Enlightenment in its historical context.


My personal stance is that MacIntyre’s interpretation should be catalogued among the NCH tradition instead, with some due emendations. The

similarities between MacIntyre’s reconstruction and NCH tradition are too many:

The philosophers involved in the ‘Enlightenment Project’ answered in ‘different ways’ to a ‘similar set of question concerning man and the universe’ and MacIntyre made primarily this kind of study, without

bending the history of philosophy of the said authors to his purposes.And even though MacIntyre’s Enlightenment is not liable to be addressed as multi-centred, is definitely possible to be framed as multi-layered, for

the way he is presenting it.The communicative and geographic networks were carefully highlighted (Northern Europe and New England, Switzerland, et cetera), but we must

grant that he did not recognise the possibility of several Enlightenments in every country of Europe.

That is to say he has been too close-fisted in assigning the label of ‘Enlightened’ to the several corners of Europe, apart from Scotland,

Prussia and eventually Denmark.


In conclusion, I do believe that MacIntyre’s history of philosophy received less attention than the one it deserves on itself, and not just

for the arguments that MacIntyre’s built on it.

Specifically, A!er Virtue, received in my opinion too much attention as a book of moral theory, and basically no attention as the extensive history of moral philosophy it represents. I hope I managed to focus your attention more on this less-trodden side of the book, than the

stereotypical side of the cogency and feasibility of the moral arguments included in the book.

I also hope not to have bored you to death.


I want to express my gratefulness to Ainars Kamolins, Ben Dilworth, James Cairney and Marta Zampollo, for the precious

conversations we had on issues close to the one I tried to address here.

Another special and big ‘Thank You’ must go to Prof. Karin Friedrich and Dr. Michael Brown, who bore the first (long and

boring) version of this talk, and gave me extremely useful feedback during the course on the Enlightenment in

Comparison held this term.I will never be grateful enough to Dr. Guido Bacciagaluppi, for

being always and preciously at ours disposal, and to Dr. Francesco Berto for all the priceless advices given during this

charming course.Of course I am the only person responsible for the huge

amount of mistakes both in the contents and in the form of this presentation.


Sorry for the verbosity, and Thank You for

Your prized attention.


MacIntyres Enlightenment Project

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