This week I finished a first reading of Alasdair MacIntyre's Three Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Encyclopedia is the late 19th Century liberal consensus, as embodied in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Genealogy is Nietzche's and the Nietzcheans' project of subverting that consensus, unmasking its claims as expressions of the will to power, in The Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere. Tradition is preeminently Aquinas's synthesis of the Augustinian and Aristotelian/Averroist traditions in the 13th Century.
The sub-subtitle of the book is "being Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1988." I found the book slow going: the sentences are long, and often punctuated more lightly than I am used to. I wonder whether those who heard them, with the lecturer's spoken emphases and rhythms, would have followed them more readily. The prose is very clear, but to careful reading.
(I believe that the only other set of Gifford Lectures I have read are those that make up Whitehead's Process and Reality. Those made slow reading for very different reasons.)
MacIntyre's prescription for the university is to make it a place of encouraged and lightly controlled confrontations, so that radically different understandings can confront each other rather than talking past each other as they now do. He does address the improbability of this:
.... The charge of utopianism, so it must appear, cannot be evaded.
This I am not disposed to deny but only if it is understood that the charge of utopianism, sometimes at least, has a very different import from that which is conventionally ascribed to it. Those most prone to accuse others of utopianism are generally those men and women of affairs who pride themselves upon their pragmatic realism, who look for immediate results, who want the relationship between present input and future output to be predictable and measurable, and that is to say, a matter of the shorter, indeed the shortest run. They are the enemies of the incalculable, the skeptics of all expectations which outrun what they take to be hard evidence, the deliberately shortsighted who congratulate themselves upon the limits of their vision.
Who were their predecessors? They included the fourth-century magistrates of the disordered city which Plato described in Book VIII of the Republic, ....
Projects of academic reform have come and gone since 1988. None that I remember has had much effect, and none that I remember was in the direction that MacIntyre had in mind.
I will read the book again, but probably will re-read his Whose Justice? Which Rationality first.
MacIntyre died this May. The New York Times published an obituary.
