Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition

by Alasdair MacIntyre

So a Hobbesian shadow is cast by Aquinas’s revision of Aristotle, itself a foreshadowing of much else to come.

Take away the notion of essential nature, take away the corresponding notion of what is good and best for members of a specific kind who share such a nature, and the Aristotelian scheme of the self which is to achieve good, of good, and of pleasure necessarily collapses.

Thus inescapably from the Aristotelian point of view an understanding of oneself as having an essential nature and the discovery of what in one belongs to that nature and what is merely per accidens enters into the progress of the self, including the self of the plain person, even though that understanding and discovery may take place in a way that presupposes rather than explicitly formulates the

philosophical theses and arguments involved.

Rules and virtues are interrelated.

The rules which are the negative precepts of the natural law thus do no more than set limits to that type of life and in so doing only partially define the kind of goodness to be aimed at.

Central to that progress is the exercise of the virtue of prudentia, the virtue of being

able in particular situations to bring to bear the relevant universals and to act so that the universal is embodied in the particular.

a rooted tendency to disobedience in the will and distraction by passion, which causes obscuring of the reason and on occasion systematic cultural deformation.

existential despair which was completely unknown in the ancient world but which has been a recurrent malady of modernity.

The acknowledgment by oneself of radical defect is a necessary condition for one’s reception of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

Take away or reject the Aristotelianism in the Thomist account, but leave the despair of moral achievement and the gratuitousness of grace, and what is foreshadowed is Luther.

Bible and Augustine to transcend the limitations not only of Aristotle but also of Plato

always refers us back to a unified first cause from which flows all that is good and all that is true in what we encounter.

So a second crucial feature of Aquinas’s detailed treatment of the moral life is its political dimension.

Summa achieves is a definitive statement at the level of theory of the point reached by its moral and theological tradition so far. What its sequences portray are a set of possibilities awaiting further embodiment in particular persons, circumstances, times, and places.

The virtues which conjointly inform the actions of an integrated self are also the virtues of a well-integrated political community.

It was therefore notable that he always rejected any political role, refusing earlier the abbacy at Monte Cassino and later the archbishopric of Naples.

So hell is persistence in defection from the integrity both of a self and of its communities.

What Nietzsche praised in each of them was what he perceived as a ruthless affirmation of the self and its powers; what Dante saw as Frederick’s self-condemnation was, so it seems, the very same affirmation.

Dante’s affirmative answer embodies a challenge to his future readers: tell me your story and I will show you that it only becomes intelligible within the framework provided by the Commedia, or rather within some framework provided by that scriptural vision which the Commedia allegorizes. For Nietzsche all such stories, so understood, are misuses and abuses of the historical imagination, a misunderstood reification of masks.

It is, as we noticed earlier, the claim to provide a standpoint which suffers from less incoherence, is more comprehensive and more resourceful, but especially resourceful in one particular way.

Frederick Copleston’s Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher of Culture (London, 1942).

The answer is: with what Aquinas says about the roots of intellectual blindness in moral error, with the misdirection of the intellect by the will and with the corruption of the will by the sin of pride, both that pride which is an inordinate desire to be superior and that pride which is an inclination to contempt for God. Where Nietzsche saw the individual will as a fiction, as part of a mistaken psychology which conceals from view the impersonal will to power, the Thomist can elaborate out of materials provided in the Summa an account of the will to power as an intellectual fiction disguising the corruption of the will.

Show how Aquinas offered an integration of Augustine and Aristotle in am inquiry, a set of values and judgment by which to live a moral life. Update Aristotle, take seriously scripture and offer a narrative as a Dante had done. And also offer a critique of new enquirers like Nietzsche. Aristotle plus Augustine - from the latter the waeknesss of the human will, frailty and other vices, and the absolute good shown.

one of the marks of a science is that it exhibits more or less continuous progress in its enquiries.

But what is at first sight astonishing is that with Aquinas those histories not only merge but to a remarkable degree terminate, that the unity of system, craft, and tradition in philosophy, at its point of highest achievement, largely disappears from view.

the conception of enquiry as long-term cooperative activity in the construction of a systematic overall understanding of theory and practice no longer dominated.

What follows from this is that how the history of philosophy is written will depend in key part upon what are taken to be its achievements, what its frustrations and failures.

The notion of a single neutral nonpartisan history is one more illusion engendered by the academic standpoint of the encyclopaedist; it is the illusion that there is the past waiting to be discovered, wie es eigentlich gewesen, independent of characterization from some particular standpoint.

What defeated Aquinas was the power of the institutionalized curriculum.

The progenitor of, as well as the most distinguished contributor to, this late medieval anti-Thomistic mode was Duns Scotus.

The will therefore can only exhibit its obedience to God by not only obeying the natural law qua directive of our good but also qua divine commandment.

the distinctive ‘ought’ of moral obligation.

Scotus thus not only made possible but provoked a good deal of later moral philosophy, directly and indirectly, from Occam all the way to Kant.

so that the singular is intelligible–even if only somewhat so–in independence of the universal,

Paradoxically Scotus, whose philosophical enquiries were at every point controlled by his theological conclusions and whose primary interest was in protecting the autonomy of Augustinian theology from the inroads of either Averroist or Thomistic Aristotelianism, set the scene instead for the emergence of philosophy as an autonomous discipline or set of disciplines, with its own defining problematic.

whose boundaries are institutional boundaries, and ceases to be itself a tradition of enquiry.

Aquinas’s own reworking of the Aristotelian scheme violated the academic boundaries of the status quo–

theological and philosophical enquiry are at key points made inseparable–as radically as did the Averroist version.

The outcome

To the seven liberal arts were added the three philosophies: moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and metaphysics. And philosophy thus began a career in which it was gradually to become the dominant academic discipline within the university, while theology as a discipline was to preserv...

history which in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries academic philosophy in t...

Hugh of St. ...

fragmentation of the curriculum and the growing independence of the disciplines.

And within astronomy there were the first movements towards a recognition of the conflict between what had been inherited from Ptolemy and what had been more recently learned from Aristotle.

Hence fourteenth-and fifteenth-century physics and astronomy were completed in being defeated.

The story is one of the dissolution of unified enquiry into variety and heterogeneity; or to put the same point in another way, the story is that of the genesis of the institution of academic philosophy as an organized and professionalized university discipline.

The conception of philosophy as almost exclusively restricted to institutionalized activities within the university is in the modern world a social phenomenon with roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, Germany, and France which has achieved its fullest embodiment in the contemporary culture of the United States.