While reading today the final essay published by Alasdair MacIntyre, I was struck by the following two passages:
[J]ust as Aristotelian moral and political theory provides us with resources for interpreting and redirecting our practical lives, so too our practical experience provides us with reasons for criticizing and sometimes rejecting some of Aristotle’s own concepts, theses, and arguments. We learn to identify that in Aristotle which derives from the limitations and prejudices of Athenian and Macedonian elites. So we develop Aristotle beyond Aristotle and in so doing may find — as I found — that our Aristotelianism has had to become that of Aquinas.
and:
Two salient thoughts emerge from this narrative. The first concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of living on the margins, intellectually as well as politically, a necessary condition for being able to see things as they are. The two standpoints without which I would have been unable to understand either modern morality or twentieth-century moral philosophy are those of Thomism and of Marxism....
I agree that most of (what we perceive as) Aristotle's faults derive from the "limitations and prejudices of Athenian and Macedonian elites" - or, more broadly, from the significant differences betweeen classical Greece and the 21st-century Anglosphere, as well as the simple passage of time and advancement of science and history since then. Yet I find it curious to focus on the motes in the eyes of the ancient elites rather than the beams in the eyes of current elites. To my mind, two of those modern beams are Christianity and Marxism, the very foundations of MacIntyre's outsider perspective!
As previously noted, I plan to revisit MacIntyre's work in the years ahead, so I don't want to pre-judge what I might find there. However, I have to wonder if there might be more constructive "margins" from which to gain a clearer sense of the way things are today; aside from Aristotelianism itself, there certainly are plenty of vantage points to choose from, such as Buddhism and Pyrrhonism in philosophy, classical liberalism in political economy, and numerous strands of research in psychology such as evolutionary psychology, ecological psychology, and humanistic psychology.
More positively, I should add that I perceive much to like in this last essay of MacIntyre's, especially his dual emphases on learning principles of action from the practices of one's life and on looking at the problems of living from outside of academic or theoretic philosophy. I'll have more to say about both topics in the near future.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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