Alasdair MacIntyre and Leo Strauss rank as two of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers. Although a generation apart, their philosophical concerns overlap. Troubled by the prevalence of relativism and the breakdown of rationalism in modern social science and broader sociopolitical life, both offer a trenchant critique of modern philosophy. To overcome the defects of modern philosophy, both demand a recovery of premodern philosophy, in which the interpretation of Aristotle plays a central role.
However, there has been little intellectual engagement between the philosophical themes of Strauss and those of MacIntyre. While those influenced by Strauss have criticized MacIntyre's understanding of politics, they have paid little attention to his other themes.Footnote 1 While followers of Strauss deserve credit for taking the first steps toward engaging with some of MacIntyre's central philosophical themes, they have prematurely dismissed him.Footnote 2 For his part, MacIntyre has observed that his conception of politics and of philosophy as political activity makes his conception of philosophical enquiry “very different from that of Leo Strauss.” Yet MacIntyre restricts himself to noting rather than explaining this difference, and the difference that preoccupies him concerns Strauss's understanding of politics rather than Strauss's understanding of philosophical enquiry per se.Footnote 3
My approach is to show how the apparent disagreements between MacIntyre and Strauss obscure deeper agreements. Articulating these deeper agreements allows us to be more precise about what their genuine disagreements are. I argue that there is an unappreciated symmetry in how each understands philosophy, with the focus here on theoretical activity. Pace MacIntyre's own judgment, he and Strauss understand philosophy as an activity primarily concerned with seeking timeless truth, assisted by historical study but not reducible to it. To counter modern dogmatism, whether it takes the form of pronouncing knowledge of self-evident principles or holding that no knowledge of reality is possible, both adopt a position between these extremes. They insist that philosophy can gain knowledge of reality, but that its gains are modest and always in need of refinement. Finally, both emphasize that philosophy aims at the discovery of truth about nature. Both hold that philosophy acknowledges the possibility of a higher authority beyond nature, but no authority beyond human reason must direct philosophy.
The basic obstacle to the case for an as of yet unappreciated symmetry between Strauss and MacIntyre is the problem of historicism. Two followers of Strauss, Aristide Tessitore and Robert Bartlett, have challenged MacIntyre's reconstruction of Aristotle. Because this reconstruction charges Aristotle with certain mistakes, they conclude that MacIntyre accepts historicist assumptions.Footnote 4 Though their views must not be equated with the views of Strauss himself, their charge merits examination because of Strauss's concern with historicism. My contention is that MacIntyre's considered views are further from historicism than they argue. But handling this problem first requires an abridged presentation of Strauss's views on the relationship between history and philosophy, followed by MacIntyre's. I provide this in sections 1 and 2.
Turning then to the substantive issues about which MacIntyre and Strauss appear to disagree, in sections 3 and 4 I outline how MacIntyre's concept of a tradition affects his conception of truth and how MacIntyre conceives of epistemic progress. In both these sections I show how MacIntyre and Strauss hold similar views. In section 5, I address MacIntyre's account of Aristotle's alleged mistakes. While MacIntyre's initial account does not conform to the views of Strauss, it does indicate MacIntyre's concern with philosophic truth—a concern that Strauss shares. In sections 6 and 7 I demonstrate how MacIntyre's most important later revisions of his account of Aristotle on naturalism and natural theology draw him closer to the views of Strauss.
1. The Mixture of History and Philosophy in Strauss
For Strauss, the problem of moral relativism that the breakdown of modern rationalism exacerbates has its roots in historicism, which challenges the very possibility of philosophy. Fusing philosophy and history, historicism is “the assertion that the fundamental distinction between philosophic and historical questions cannot in the last analysis be maintained.”Footnote 5 Historicism holds that “all human thought is historical and unable ever to grasp anything eternal.”Footnote 6 “An analysis of all comprehensive world views,” it is a theoretical insight that transcends history and concludes, despite self-contradiction, in favor of the relativity of all views.Footnote 7 It privileges a particular modern view as superior to past consciousness and becomes the dogmatism of the modern age, affecting “more or less all present-day thought.”Footnote 8
To counter historicism, Strauss's project is to recover the right understanding of philosophy. The possibility of philosophy requires a distinction between the historically contingent and the naturally permanent. Philosophy seeks an understanding of nature: it seeks what is permanent, also known as the “first things.”Footnote 9 Strauss defines philosophy as “the quest for universal knowledge, for knowledge of the whole,” or “the attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole.” The quest for “the whole” means the quest not for understanding the totality of all phenomena, contingent and permanent, but for the permanent natures or “first things.”Footnote 10 The quest is for “knowledge of the natures of all things: the natures in their totality are ‘the whole.’”Footnote 11 While Strauss argues that possessing the truth about the whole is the goal of philosophy, he qualifies philosophy as a “zetetic” activity, concerned with seeking the truth.Footnote 12 Philosophy is “essentially not possession of the truth, but the quest for the truth. The distinctive trait of the philosopher is that ‘he knows that he knows nothing.’”Footnote 13 For Strauss, philosophy is an activity involving awareness of one's ignorance about the nature of all things, and a subsequent effort to remedy this.
Political philosophy, the main theme of his recovery, has a multifaceted meaning for Strauss; as a branch of philosophy, it seeks knowledge of the “nature of political things.” Unlike historicism, it takes seriously the goal of political action, the good society, and seeks knowledge of the good society.Footnote 14 However, direct recovery of philosophy in the above sense—which is classical philosophy—is not possible, in Strauss's view. The challenge of historicism is very serious because modern political philosophy introduces the concept of history, fusing philosophical and historical questions so that this fusion appears inevitable. The historicized development of modern political philosophy obscures its basis as a modification of concepts of classical philosophy. Strauss concludes that philosophy requires an altered introduction to make a nonhistoricist recovery of classical philosophy possible. Though distinct from history, philosophy is now dependent upon history. Strauss does not call for a simple separation of the two, and does not advocate for a simple nonhistoricist philosophy.Footnote 15
To avoid fusing the two as historicism does, the right relationship between philosophy and history expresses itself in a series of interpretative steps. First, the interpreter must attain the experience of philosophical ignorance, abandoning the pretense of knowledge, before undertaking the study of the history of philosophy.Footnote 16 Second, the interpreter must have philosophical incentive to reject modern philosophy in favor of premodern philosophy. The interpreter acknowledges that a theme of the past is worthwhile, and maintains philosophical criticism of modern thought. The interpreter must have a philosophical concern with the claim to truth, and openness to rejecting modern dogmatism and changing one's views.Footnote 17 Third, the interpreter must engage in philosophic activity, considering whether the claims within a text in the history of philosophy are true.Footnote 18 For Strauss, though philosophy now requires the history of philosophy, the authentic interpretation of the history of philosophy requires philosophy.
2. The Mixture of History and Philosophy in MacIntyre
An account of MacIntyre's thought must pay attention to his intellectual biography, since his views have changed considerably since he began his career in the 1950s. As a mature philosopher, he describes himself as “engaged in a single project” since 1977, when after years of self-reflection, he developed an account of why the theory to which he was attached in his youth, Marxism, had failed.Footnote 19 MacIntyre's single philosophical project aims “to reconstruct the moral theory and communal practice of Aristotelianism in whatever version would provide the best theory so far, explaining the failure of the Enlightenment as part of the aftermath of the breakdown of a tradition.”Footnote 20 His project thus has two facets: a critical and a constructive argument. The critical argument explains the failure of the Enlightenment project to provide an adequate moral theory, or a theory of practical reasoning; the constructive argument explains why Aristotelianism, the Aristotelian tradition, is the best theory of practical reasoning so far to correct this failure. MacIntyre's interest in providing a rationally justifiable, true explanation for the Aristotelian theory of practical reason against the modern Enlightenment alternative invites consideration of how he conceives of the right mixture of philosophy and history.
Philosophic concerns orient MacIntyre's study of Aristotle. It is noteworthy that these concerns, when expressed as moments in MacIntyre's intellectual biography, parallel Strauss's own interpretative steps. The first step in MacIntyre's project is his experience of philosophic ignorance. In the late 1950s MacIntyre was stupefied by the inability of his contemporaries—including himself—to provide a rational justification for the moral critique of Stalinism. This brought him to reject the dominant theoretical positions of his contemporaries, who adhered to either Marxism or liberalism. As his former revolutionary Marxist colleagues drifted with the age closer to liberalism, MacIntyre refused to follow them.Footnote 21 This led to the second interpretative step. MacIntyre concluded that these preeminent modern positions culminated in Nietzschean irrationalism. This failure provided the philosophical incentive to consider whether the premodern Aristotle, scorned in modern moral philosophy, was right.Footnote 22 MacIntyre thus had a philosophic concern with the claim of past thinkers to truth, as well as openness for rejecting modern dogmatism and changing one's views.
At Strauss's third interpretative step, however, the problem of historicism confronts MacIntyre. The question is whether MacIntyre has sufficiently engaged in philosophic activity: considering whether the claims within a text in the history of philosophy are true, and dispensing with the dogmatism of historicism. A key theme in MacIntyre's philosophical project is a critique of nonhistorical philosophy. Influenced by R. G. Collingwood, MacIntyre makes a constructive argument for the mixture of philosophy and history.Footnote 23 Here, his principal target is nonhistorical analytical philosophy. As we have seen, Strauss does not subscribe to a simple nonhistoricist position, and though writing in a different context he likewise appreciates historicist correctives to the self-assertions of dominant philosophical schools.Footnote 24 But Collingwood's influence pulls MacIntyre's project in the direction of a potentially historicist mixture of philosophy and history. This raises the question of whether the dogmatism of historicism distorts MacIntyre's philosophic activity in such a way that it severs the symmetry between his thought and Strauss's thought. It is this question that informs the substantive issues about which MacIntyre and Strauss appear to disagree.
Addressing these substantive issues requires first resolving an interpretative one. Interpreting MacIntyre's project correctly requires acknowledging that while he has a single philosophic project, many of his arguments have been reformulated or revised. Befitting the scope of his project, MacIntyre sometimes stated positions schematically or in brief asides (as in his judgment about Strauss). Later, a further reconstruction or elaboration of these positions (sometimes undertaken by others) becomes his revised, considered conclusions.Footnote 25 These revisions are consonant with the way MacIntyre understands the philosophical project of After Virtue and his subsequent works. MacIntyre's works are part of a unified enquiry proceeding from his core theses. But his views have an open-ended character, subject to further revision and development, and some views remain open-ended.Footnote 26 While some of MacIntyre's initial formulations leaned in historicist directions, his revisions take him away from historicism and closer to positions that Strauss holds.
3. Tradition and Truth
One of the substantive issues that historicism raises is whether MacIntyre's concept of a tradition of rational enquiry makes truth subject to historical context. More interested in defending an Aristotelian tradition than Aristotle per se, MacIntyre places Aristotelian arguments into an Aristotelian tradition of enquiry, which is then compared to other traditions of enquiry.Footnote 27 For Tessitore, MacIntyre then appears to judge which tradition is truer based on a historically qualified understanding of truth: the Aristotelian tradition, culminating in Aquinas, is truer than other traditions because it survives the verdict of epistemological crises that emerge throughout history.Footnote 28
This account of MacIntyre, however, misunderstands the role traditions of enquiry and epistemological crises play in his thought. MacIntyre has always been incipiently committed to philosophical realism, and he revised his views to make this commitment explicit in his 1990 Aquinas Lecture.Footnote 29 Truth is the correspondence or adequacy of the intellect to an object. It is a relationship between the mind and reality, which is expressed in judgment. Philosophical enquiry aims at comprehensiveness or finality, achieved by gaining knowledge of the archai, the permanent first principles: the goal of judgment is the approximation to this final truth, in which the mind is fully adequate to its object. At this point the first principles are known.Footnote 30 To achieve this goal, judgments are subject to dialectical testing, wherein judgments are compared. Dialectical testing succeeds when one judgment better approximates a final truth than another judgment. In that way it is possible to claim that philosophical enquiry is achieving rational progress toward finality. Nevertheless, this process of dialectics is not the same as the demonstration from first principles that shows that a judgment is comprehensively true. This means that, on the basis of dialectical testing, one cannot know for certain when final truth has been achieved. Although rational progress is possible, philosophical enquiry is open-ended, and one's judgments must always be open to further dialectical testing.Footnote 31
Modern, primarily Cartesian, philosophy challenges how this realist yet provisional account upholds the open-ended character of knowledge claims. It develops an alternative epistemic account to meet a demand for confident self-awareness that one has achieved final truth. But this high standard for certainty comes up short.Footnote 32 It attempts to formulate a neutral and impartial ideal of rationality based on self-evident principles structuring the whole of reality. Yet it cannot secure agreement on what these self-evident principles are. For that reason, the modern ideal of rationality provides no reconciliation between alternative, incompatible, and incommensurate answers.Footnote 33 The agent engaged in rational enquiry will thus begin to doubt whether these philosophical questions can ever be resolved.Footnote 34 The neutral and impartial ideal of rationality, lacking the rational resources for resolving philosophical disagreements and successful dialectical testing, is responsible for the relativism pervasive in modern philosophy. It culminates in perspectivism, where one questions the significance of any truth claim, and moral relativism. Footnote 35
To understand dialectical testing properly, MacIntyre counters Cartesianism by placing the standards of rationality within historically developed traditions of rational enquiry. To avoid perspectivism and moral relativism, MacIntyre upholds that every tradition addresses a series of perennial questions: how we should best live, by what standards to evaluate our lives, and what norms we should support in our activities.Footnote 36 Philosophical debate about what is true proceeds from the standpoints of competing traditions of enquiry.Footnote 37
To make progress in dialectical testing and resolve these perennial questions, a tradition develops certain epistemological ideals or standards of rational justification: what constitutes “appropriate reasoning, decisive evidence, and conclusive proof” for resolving a problem.Footnote 38 These standards develop in response to challenges and epistemological crises, so that rational justification has a history.Footnote 39 A justifiable tradition of enquiry must be able to extend itself through history, predicting otherwise unexpected events and resolving new problems that present themselves in attempting to answer the perennial questions.Footnote 40 When one tradition has the resources for resolving these new problems that remain insoluble to a second tradition, and can provide a specific account as to where those problems occur in the second tradition and why those problems remain insoluble, this provides some confirmation of the truth of the central assertions advanced within the first tradition.Footnote 41
MacIntyre does not equate a tradition of enquiry's resolution of an epistemological crisis with the judgment that the tradition's conclusions are true. Epistemological crises are understood within the context of dialectically testing different judgments in order to advance philosophical enquiry toward the goal of final truth.Footnote 42 A tradition's capacity to resolve epistemological crises that perplex other traditions provides some evidence for claiming that one tradition better approximates final truth than another. Epistemological crises have some explanatory power for recounting why some theories are true and others false, but they do not replace judgment about what is true; a tradition's capacity to solve a crisis is not a demonstration that it has achieved final truth.Footnote 43 In short, a tradition of rational enquiry is unreservedly truth-seeking. MacIntyre is neither a perspectivist nor a radical historicist, because he grants that there are timeless truths and that the goal of philosophy is to discover and articulate them.Footnote 44
While Strauss only cursorily addresses the epistemic questions that MacIntyre explores at length, his position bears a strong symmetry to MacIntyre's. On one hand, both maintain that truth is eternal and that philosophical investigation seeks final truth or first principles, or knowledge of the first things or the whole. On the other hand, both acknowledge the limitations of human reasoning that make it difficult, if not impossible, to declare definitely that one possesses final truth or knowledge of the whole. For MacIntyre, enquiry is always open-ended, in need of further revision. For Strauss, “the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of all the problems.”Footnote 45 While MacIntyre emphasises the limits of philosophical enquiry by referring to a tradition of rational enquiry, Strauss emphasises the weakness of the human intellect alongside the mystery of the whole.Footnote 46
Yet both incline toward skepticism rather than the dogmatism ascendant within modern philosophy. Strauss shares MacIntyre's opposition to any neutral and impartial ideal of rationality that claims self-evident principles upholding the whole of reality. Like MacIntyre, Strauss attributes the error to Descartes, who thinks of the whole as a “mere object of man's knowledge,” as if it could be known self-evidently or necessarily in the manner of mathematical truths.Footnote 47 The principles of knowledge constituting the whole of reality cannot be self-evident. Strauss holds that knowledge of the whole is not immediately accessible to the human mind.Footnote 48 It is grasped only in pieces, by dialectically pursuing knowledge of the parts. But as knowledge of the parts requires knowledge of the whole, knowledge remains elusive: we only possess “partial knowledge of the parts.”Footnote 49
Strauss's emphasis on the tentative character of philosophic truth makes it seem as if he thinks all knowledge claims are impossible.Footnote 50 In fact, if one replaces “first things” or “the whole” with MacIntyre's “first principles,” one sees that Strauss is implicitly upholding an epistemic conception that MacIntyre, drawing from Aquinas, upholds explicitly against Descartes. Interpreting Aquinas, MacIntyre argues that knowledge claims do not have to meet the high standard of certain self-awareness that Descartes demands.Footnote 51 In acknowledging that genuine knowledge proceeds from the understanding of the first principles (in Strauss's terms, the first things or the whole), one can still affirm that one knows, without having direct awareness of those first principles. This kind of knowledge claim is tentative but ordered toward a more comprehensive understanding. MacIntyre concludes: “all knowledge even in the initial stages of enquiry is a partial achievement and completion of the mind, but it nonetheless points beyond itself to a more final achievement in ways that we may not as yet have grasped.”Footnote 52
This epistemic conception parallels Strauss's paradoxical emphasis on the limitations of philosophical activity, while still insisting that philosophy must pursue its highest goals: knowledge of “God, the world, and man.” Also interpreting Aquinas, Strauss acknowledges that despite the absence of final, confident certainty, some kind of knowledge of first things or the whole is possible and desirable.Footnote 53 This is the consolation that zetetic philosophy does not degenerate into play.Footnote 54
4. Tradition and Epistemic Progress
For Strauss, historicism holds to a concept of necessary progress and relativizes the beliefs of all ages, so there is no regress. This raises the substantive issue of whether MacIntyre's account of epistemic progress is historicist. Now, MacIntyre rejects the concept of necessary progress: the modern alternative to Aristotelian practical reasoning is regressive.Footnote 55 Yet because of MacIntyre's sympathy for a tradition of enquiry, he handles epistemic progress in a way that differs from Strauss. MacIntyre's arguments for a tradition of enquiry and the role of epistemological crises are an ambitious account of how epistemic progress takes place over time. Strauss's comments on the viability of a “tradition” are skeptical. Whereas MacIntyre thinks a tradition is constitutive for progress in philosophical enquiry, Strauss doubts that the concept of a tradition, if broadly understood as a “Western tradition,” withstands precise analysis. Moreover, Strauss thinks traditions inhibit philosophical enquiry; it is “the essence of traditions that they cover or conceal their humble foundations by erecting impressive edifices on them,” obscuring genuine phenomena.Footnote 56
But Strauss's suspicious remarks about traditions do not entail that he is opposed to MacIntyre outright. He must accept three of the premises that prompt MacIntyre to develop the concept of a tradition of enquiry. First, Strauss must think some epistemic progress is possible. For example, “The Socratic Turn” represents epistemic progress over the mistaken conception of the whole that the sophists and the pre-Socratics promulgate.Footnote 57 Second, Strauss must agree with MacIntyre's view that as philosophical enquiry proceeds, it encounters new philosophical positions and problems, which challenge old positions and transform how we must approach perennial philosophical problems. Traditions change the approach to philosophy. For Strauss, modern political philosophy fuses philosophical and historical questions and contends that it is simply better than earlier approaches. But this historicized development obscures its own status as a tradition, as a modification of the concepts of premodern political philosophy. Following from the development of this tradition, Strauss concludes that philosophy cannot be defended straightforwardly but requires its altered introduction: awareness of the traditional character of modern philosophy, then historical recovery of premodern philosophy. In this way, awareness of a tradition is for Strauss a requirement for philosophical understanding.Footnote 58
Third, Strauss agrees with MacIntyre that traditions are never to be valued for their own sake, and must be evaluated on their own philosophical merits.Footnote 59 This is evident in their critical treatments of the modern philosophical tradition. For both, the failure of the tradition of modern philosophy to solve its own predicaments requires a critique of its philosophical foundations. MacIntyre explicitly adopts genealogy as a subversive activity. He exposes the negative consequences of the Enlightenment's choice to reject teleology.Footnote 60 While Strauss does not explicitly use the language of genealogy, his approach is similar. He uses the history of modern political philosophy to expose the premises that, in successive waves, lead into radical historicism. This allows for the historical recovery of philosophy, as it was originally understood, to take place. But Strauss's “genealogy” is not as subversive as MacIntyre's. Strauss softens his criticisms of the architects of modernity, comparing them sympathetically with premodern philosophers.Footnote 61 In sympathizing with the modern project, Strauss considers its own philosophical merits and thus sympathizes with a philosophical tradition.
Ultimately, the major difference is that MacIntyre deploys his genealogy for subverting the liberal Enlightenment tradition of enquiry and vindicating another, the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition of enquiry.Footnote 62 By contrast, Strauss makes tradition itself problematic. As Nathan Tarcov points out, tradition is for Strauss “both an access and an obstacle to understanding.”Footnote 63 His recovery of philosophy is a phenomenological turn “to the things themselves” to get a genuine account of reality. Reflecting on the significance of “the Socratic turn,” Strauss looks for the prephilosophic and pretraditional foundations of reality, prioritizing the political things as the path to recover the genuine understanding of philosophy.Footnote 64 Unlike MacIntyre, who hopes to vindicate a tradition emerging from Aristotle, Strauss hopes to recover the Aristotle who preceded this tradition.Footnote 65 Aristotle makes an attempt to understand political things on their own terms, and so provides a direct relationship to political things that is not mediated by a tradition.Footnote 66 These are the contours of Strauss's path to recover genuine philosophy that can understand the whole.Footnote 67
5. The Interpreter's Philosophic Activity: MacIntyre on Aristotle's “Mistakes”
The substantive issue in After Virtue is that MacIntyre seems to use historicist presuppositions to fault Aristotle.
Aristotle did not understand the transience of the polis because he had little or no understanding of historicity in general. Thus a whole range of questions cannot arise for him including those which concern the ways in which men might pass from being slaves or barbarians to being citizens of a polis. Some men just are slaves “by nature,” on Aristotle's view.Footnote 68
Apparently on this basis, MacIntyre contends that Aristotle makes five mistakes.Footnote 69 First, Aristotle exalts the Greek polis as the only possible arena in which to pursue the good life. But, MacIntyre argues, this is incorrect: the good life can be realized in other social and political arenas with which Aristotle was not familiar. Second, his account of virtue and vice makes a false virtue of magnanimity based on a flawed emphasis on human self-sufficiency, elevating the life of the Greek aristocrat while denigrating the artisan classes and the virtues involved in manual skill and labor. Third, his understanding of human nature excludes non-Greeks, women, and slaves from the good life.Footnote 70 Fourth, Aristotle neglects to consider insoluble, sometimes tragic moral dilemmas.Footnote 71 Fifth, Aristotle holds to evidently mistaken views of metaphysical biology.Footnote 72 These five criticisms impel MacIntyre to reconstruct Aristotelian ethics free of these mistakes. According to Tessitore, MacIntyre comes close to establishing “historical consciousness as an unassailable, virtually a priori, basis for the activity of philosophic investigation itself.”Footnote 73
But none of the criticisms MacIntyre makes of Aristotle suggest that MacIntyre believes himself to have a superior historical consciousness. The first three criticisms stem from philosophical conclusions about the nature of political things: the kind of community in which the good life is possible, what constitutes virtuous activity, and the kind of human nature required to achieve the good life. MacIntyre is asking whether Aristotle's conclusions are true—a question distinct from whether modern historical consciousness prejudices us about his views. MacIntyre writes: “What is likely to affront us—and rightly—is Aristotle's writing off of non-Greeks, barbarians and slaves, as not merely not possessing political relationships, but as incapable of them.”Footnote 74 For MacIntyre, Aristotle's overly exclusive views about the polis, what qualifies as virtues, and who can achieve the good life, are all instances where a thinker has made mistakes in their own philosophical investigation into the nature of political things.
MacIntyre distinguishes between the truth and falsity of conclusions and an explanation as to why a thinker has made false conclusions. His comments on Aristotle's “historicity” are confusing, but they are about Aristotle's “historical context” and serve as an auxiliary sociological explanation for how he ended up with mistaken views. MacIntyre holds that Aristotle's blindness was not particular to him, but “was part of the general, although not universal, blindness of his culture.”Footnote 75 Noting these cultural deficiencies does not eliminate the responsibility agents have for making these mistakes, nor does it determine in advance that they will make mistakes.Footnote 76 There is a “general” tendency within the culture to believe some mistaken things, but it is not a “universal” necessity, as historicism holds. In making this distinction MacIntyre is subtler than Collingwood.Footnote 77 Whatever Aristotle's brilliance, he was not infallible.
Explaining, as MacIntyre does, why a thinker has made false conclusions requires knowledge of historical context. But it need not entail historicist presuppositions. In “Political Philosophy and History,” Strauss distinguishes between historical knowledge and historicist presuppositions. To use Strauss's language, MacIntyre's Aristotle has mistaken “the specific features of the political life of one's time and one's country for the nature of political things,” a mistake “only” remedied by “historical knowledge.”Footnote 78 For MacIntyre to judge that Aristotle has made mistakes, and to explain why, is for him to affirm, as Strauss does, that historical knowledge is important for political philosophy, in the sense that historical knowledge can help one achieve a better understanding of the nature of political things.
Nevertheless, MacIntyre acknowledges that he made mistakes in his interpretation of Aristotle; in Strauss's language, he “underestimated the difficulty of finding out ‘What Aristotle meant by his statements’ or ‘Whether what he thought was true.’”Footnote 79 In later works, MacIntyre retracts his fourth and fifth criticisms of Aristotle, the most explicitly historicist.Footnote 80 MacIntyre's self-corrections show that his abiding concern is with whether the positions of Aristotle are true or false.
6. Naturalism and Morality, Ancient and Modern
In After Virtue, MacIntyre's formulation of how Aristotle introduces the virtues is as the qualities which enable the human agent to achieve their telos of eudaimonia.Footnote 81 As MacIntyre knew, Aristotle went on to argue that nature determines the specific good that human beings seek. The ergon (function) argument in the Nicomachean Ethics tries to determine the specific good that human beings seek in terms of the specific ergon of the human being. Aristotle answers this in terms of the unique activity characteristic of the human being, stemming from a feature of the human nature, the rational part of the soul.Footnote 82
In After Virtue, MacIntyre was concerned that Aristotle's ethics presupposed this supposedly discredited metaphysical biology, so he looked for a completely different account.Footnote 83 MacIntyre thought that for the human telos to be defensible, one must abandon substantive, biological justifications and argue that the human telos is the historical direction of human life—the narrative unity of a human life.Footnote 84 History must replace nature. As Bartlett charges, MacIntyre's acceptance of an “essentially historical character of morality” accepts “a version of historicism” that could “collapse into relativism.”Footnote 85
Following After Virtue, MacIntyre acknowledged that this historicist account of the human telos lacked objectivity, and was therefore insufficient to refute moral relativism. To achieve objectivity, MacIntyre revised his account to ground teleology not on history but on nature. To elaborate on the specific human nature that supports the common deliberation about the good that achieves the specifically human telos, MacIntyre acknowledges that the account of the goods requires a natural, biological explanation, which he develops in Dependent Rational Animals.Footnote 86
MacIntyre follows Aristotle in identifying human flourishing as a specifically human activity, though he adds his own reflections on how human animals are similar to and different from nonhuman animals. Human beings need to understand themselves as practical reasoners about goods, and in order to achieve this understanding we must learn from and argue with other humans about human flourishing.Footnote 87 All this helps us judge truly for ourselves what is good. The specific activity that must be realized to achieve human flourishing is independent practical reasoning. “Independent” signifies that we humans evaluate our own social practices and the social practices of others. This enables us to judge and act on our own.Footnote 88
While MacIntyre follows Aristotle in arguing that we need the moral and intellectual virtues because of the kind of biological being we are, he emphasizes different virtues. He argues that we are rational animals whose biological vulnerability (susceptibility to disability and affliction) throughout life makes us mutually dependent on one another. To become independent practical reasoners, we require the constant aid and assistance of other independent practical reasoners.Footnote 89 The virtues that enable us to become independent practical reasoners foster these relationships of aid and assistance, the virtues of “acknowledged dependency.”Footnote 90 A key virtue of acknowledged dependency is “just generosity.”Footnote 91 Interpreting Aquinas's analysis of the virtue of misericordia (mercy or pity), MacIntyre argues that misericordia calls us to meet the urgent needs of our fellow human beings, notably when situations of vulnerability arise. Only when we can depend on others can the goods human beings seek in their social practices be realized.Footnote 92 While Dependent Rational Animals is in a significant way Aristotelian, MacIntyre turns “Aristotle against Aristotle” with “the aid of Aquinas.”Footnote 93 He acknowledges that the biological explanation he offers is “not an especially Aristotelian one,” because he grounds the human ergon in the human biological condition of mutual dependency, which Aristotle, placing too much emphasis on self-sufficiency, is reluctant to recognize.Footnote 94 It is Aquinas, not Aristotle, who provides a correct theory of the virtues.Footnote 95
Since Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre's project has been to vindicate a biological or naturalistic understanding of human teleology. He provides a naturalistic, not historicist, account of morality. This account is meant to combat modern philosophy's prejudice against a teleological understanding of nature, notably human biological nature—a prejudice initially held by MacIntyre. MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals is a head-on confrontation with this prejudice.
Strauss acknowledges that the same antiteleological prejudice exists in modernity, impeding the recovery of classical political philosophy. The Baconian investigation of nature has called into question the claim that the teleological conception of human nature can be grounded in biology. Baconian science thinks it is a mistake to understand the cosmos and biology in teleological rather than mechanistic terms. While the classical view attempts to fit a teleological conception of human nature into a teleological conception of the cosmos, the Baconian conception attacks the latter and undermines the former. In modernity, a new nonteleological cosmology reigns, which implies that a new nonteleological conception of human nature reigns.Footnote 96
But while MacIntyre and Strauss acknowledge the same modern prejudice, Strauss ultimately decides not to confront it directly. Strauss's path is to contend that one cannot know whether either the modern, nonteleological cosmology or the classical teleological cosmology is correct. Strauss sees the modern claim as another form of metaphysical dogmatism, about which he remains extremely wary.Footnote 97 Instead of committing himself to the ancient or modern account of “the whole” outright, Strauss bypasses this. By refusing to address directly whether one can philosophically justify the link between biological naturalism and teleology, Strauss departs from Aristotle. Instead, he follows the path of phenomenology, to recover the political things in themselves as a precursor to developing an account of the whole. Unlike MacIntyre, Strauss does not attempt to recover Aristotelian naturalism, and so makes no attempt to contest modern cosmology's ambition to dispel the application of teleology to living (including human) beings.Footnote 98
7. Natural Theology and the Theologico-Political Problem
A curious feature of MacIntyre's Aristotelian naturalism is that it is a defense of Aquinas's conclusions, rather than Aristotle's. This embrace of Aquinas poses difficulties for the claim of philosophic symmetry between Strauss and MacIntyre. For Strauss, Aquinas attempts an overly rigid synthesis between biblical theology and philosophy. Since MacIntyre sides with Aquinas against Aristotle, it is possible to charge MacIntyre with attempting a synthesis between biblical theology and philosophy.Footnote 99 For Strauss, this would be a serious charge: Aquinas's approach conceals the perennial theologico-political problem, of which Strauss aims to raise awareness throughout his works.Footnote 100 Strauss's theologico-political problem is “the fundamental question” as to which is the source for knowledge of reality: unassisted human reason or divine revelation.Footnote 101
In Strauss's view, Aquinas's theological synthesis makes it unclear whether conclusions about reality are coming from the source of unassisted human reason, as they often purport to be, or are in fact conclusions only achieved through divine, biblical revelation.Footnote 102 In critiquing Aquinas's synthesis, Strauss's strategy is to expose instances where seemingly philosophical enquiry is really driven by the authority of divine revelation. Strauss's aim is to show that the tension between unassisted human reason and divine revelation cannot be eluded.
However, Strauss's critique would not rebut MacIntyre. MacIntyre's use of Aquinas against Aristotle is grounded in naturalism, not divine revelation. He argues that Aquinas's description of biological dependency is a better description of the human species than Aristotle's reliance on biological self-sufficiency. In light of this biology, misericordia is, as we saw in section 6, the most important moral or character virtue for human beings to cultivate. In MacIntyre's argument, it is a natural or secular virtue.Footnote 103
If the charge is not true of MacIntyre's specific Thomist arguments, perhaps it is true as to how MacIntyre conceives of the relationship between reason and revelation in his account of his own philosophic activity. As a self-professed Thomist and Catholic, MacIntyre grants that divine revelation is a source of knowledge.Footnote 104 Thus MacIntyre's conception of philosophy seems to provide the perspective of a “synthesis” between reason and revelation; evading the tension, he really yields to the authority of knowledge provided by divine revelation.Footnote 105
But MacIntyre is closer to Strauss's formulation than initially appears to be the case. First, they agree that philosophy and divine revelation are both ordered toward acquiring true knowledge of reality. They also agree that these sources are distinct. Since revelation must be in principle inaccessible to unassisted human reason, it is the authoritative source of knowledge in cases where unassisted human reason cannot achieve the requisite knowledge of reality.Footnote 106 As a Catholic believing in the role grace plays to perfect nature, it need not trouble MacIntyre to uphold this claim; stated more theologically, natural human reason cannot in principle access the supernatural. Divine revelation, not human reason, communicates knowledge of the supernatural.Footnote 107
As Strauss declares, the distinction between divine revelation and unassisted human reason produces a civilizational tension between the implications divine revelation has for understanding nature and the conclusions unassisted human reason is inclined to make about nature.Footnote 108 While MacIntyre does not speak in such grand terms, he acknowledges such a tension.Footnote 109 To navigate this, MacIntyre emphasizes that the goal of human reason is truth. Divine revelation is an additional source that human reason can use to acquire a greater understanding of what is true. Revelation does not put an end to the activity of human reason, but provides new resources and new direction for enquiry. It is from the commitment to continued rational enquiry that tensions between these theoretical claims and others will arise.Footnote 110 MacIntyre examines these tensions from the point of view of a secular philosopher, not a theologian. He brackets theology, inviting his reader to debate him on philosophical grounds.Footnote 111 On this path, he and Strauss are in agreement. As philosophers, they halt their enquiry at the same point, when pursuing the question of quid sit deus would take one beyond secular philosophy.Footnote 112
When tensions arise, MacIntyre freely debates whether theoretical claims about nature that draw from divine revelation stand up to the scrutiny of unassisted human reason. Like Strauss, when unassisted human reason and divine revelation appear to reach contradictory conclusions, MacIntyre sides with unassisted human reason. On these grounds, there are points where MacIntyre disagrees with Aquinas. For example, he disagrees that Christian rulers have a duty to punish heresy. His reason is that Aquinas misunderstands the nature of political things, confusing political and theological categories. Aquinas does not recognize “the possibility of a political common good shared by individuals and groups of differing religious belief.”Footnote 113 Aquinas appeals to theology and canon law to make these arguments, not to nature. MacIntyre's case against Aquinas vindicates nature over and above an interpretation of divine revelation: to be justified philosophically, morals must be grounded in nature, not theology.Footnote 114
MacIntyre is sensitive to the theologico-political problem, as Strauss understands it. To preserve the secular, unassisted character of his philosophic reasoning, MacIntyre avoids writing theologically. In cases where his philosophic activity conflicts with an interpretation of divine revelation, MacIntyre does not adopt either a rational or a pious silence.Footnote 115 Instead, he allows nature to serve as the arbiter. When contradiction arises, he defers to unassisted human reason. MacIntyre's enquiry may arrive at conclusions compatible with religious authority, but like Strauss's, his enquiry remains within the realm of philosophy, as he presupposes that no authoritative source for knowledge of nature is readily available and no authoritative source concludes enquiry.
Conclusion: Awareness of the Fundamental Problems
The apparent disagreements between Strauss and MacIntyre obscure deeper agreements. Nevertheless it remains true that Strauss and MacIntyre are not the same. To close, after summarizing their deeper agreement on the activity of philosophy, I sketch some important differences that I hope are made clearer by understanding their agreements. The goal here is to recognize that considering the perspective of the other thinker can sharpen the account of what their genuine disagreements are.
Starting from different points and using different vocabulary, Strauss and MacIntyre have a similar understanding about philosophy's goals and its limits or qualifications. Strauss and MacIntyre consider theoretical activity as a zetetic or provisional activity that raises awareness of the questions the tradition of metaphysical philosophy poses. For both, these questions are definitively posed and tentatively solved. To refute radical historicism, Strauss emphasizes how important it is for philosophy to raise definite awareness of the fundamental questions. To refute perspectivism and relativism, MacIntyre emphasizes how important it is for philosophy to raise definite awareness of the means by which the fundamental questions can be tentatively solved.
While Strauss and MacIntyre argue for the paramount importance of theoretical activity, they do not lose sight of the fact that theoretical activity is an activity, ordered toward the discovery of reality. For Strauss, philosophy is a “way of life” ordered toward knowledge about God, man, the world, and the nature of all things, but never reducible to a system about these things.Footnote 116 For MacIntyre, philosophy is a “practice” ordered to “a comprehensive vision of the good, the ends of life, and the order of things”; but philosophy's characteristics are not reducible to this system.Footnote 117 Their idea of philosophy is as a way of discovery.Footnote 118
While both thinkers argue that the present moment requires a mixture of philosophy and history to re-present this idea of philosophy, MacIntyre's greater sympathy for Collingwood could compromise his philosophic activity with historicist assumptions. But for MacIntyre—as for Straus—history, while necessary for philosophy, remains its auxiliary. The goal of philosophy is to gain final truth, understood as knowledge of what is eternal and permanent. In advancing toward final truth and evaluating epistemic progress, philosophy needs an account of how dialectical testing between competing judgments can take place. It is at this point that a tradition of rational enquiry assumes its role, as a way to provide evidence that epistemic progress is taking place, while emphasizing that theoretical judgments are fallible and in need of revision. MacIntyre's way of discovery discovers in turn that his own judgments are in need of revision, including the historicist criticisms of Aristotle he once made.
Considering their disagreements provides complementary resources for better understanding philosophy's fundamental problems. First, both raise awareness of the “Cartesian” problem which provides a starting point for the goal of better understanding the problem of modernity. For Strauss, Descartes mistakenly contends that the “whole” is an object of knowledge; for MacIntyre, Descartes mistakenly sets too high a standard of self-awareness and certainty for knowledge claims. Though MacIntyre and Strauss do not emphasize this in their work, they share a common sympathy with the epistemological critique of modernity associated with mid-twentieth-century Thomism.Footnote 119 Followers of Strauss should explore this aspect of modernity in more detail, as modernity's epistemology is the means by which historicism spreads.Footnote 120 They should also draw attention to Strauss's veiled critique of Christianity, which is complicit in preparing the modern project.Footnote 121 Followers of MacIntyre should acknowledge that MacIntyre's account of modernity is vague on its conceptual roots in premodernity, which suggests that he must provide a better statement on modernity's origins.Footnote 122 Second, conversation between Strauss and MacIntyre shows the interpretive strengths and weaknesses of each's reading of Aristotle. Both acknowledge the “open-ended, unresolved character” of Aristotle's texts.Footnote 123 MacIntyre sees this as an expression of philosophic activity itself, and thinks this requires critical philosophic engagement with the arguments in the text to articulate their reasonability or soundness. MacIntyre thus confronts Aristotle's arguments directly. Yet Strauss's Aristotle ultimately points not to Aristotle's arguments, but back to Plato's dialogues.Footnote 124 The goal here is to use textual interpretation to give a better account of philosophy, against the modern challenge. MacIntyre's approach can more directly challenge modern metaphysical assumptions. He seeks to answer the question whether Aristotelian biological naturalism can be vindicated in the face of modern prejudice against it, and looks to later thinkers who reconstruct this argument in justifiable ways. In a de facto concession to the moderns, Strauss avoids this question. He does not challenge the modern project's basic assumptions about nature as boldly as does MacIntyre, and this casts doubt upon the character of his project.Footnote 125 But Strauss's approach can better capture the pedagogy informing the philosophic life. Strauss is more attentive than MacIntyre to the intention behind the “open-ended, unresolved character” of Aristotle's writings. Unlike MacIntyre, Strauss considers the esoteric thesis, the contention that some philosophers do not make their true teaching explicit in their texts. An important aspect of esotericism is that it can help transmit philosophical understanding.Footnote 126
Third, conversation between the two can pursue the goal of understanding the social question of how and indeed whether to distinguish between philosophers and nonphilosophers. Strauss's “sociology” strongly demarcates between philosophers and nonphilosophers.Footnote 127 MacIntyre, by contrast, places philosophers and nonphilosophers on a continuum of lesser to greater deliberation, but marked by a common capacity to live well. While Strauss writes that “philosophy must beware of wishing to be edifying,” but is “of necessity edifying,” MacIntyre pushes the second clause more strongly.Footnote 128 He argues that a task of philosophy is to make nonphilosophers or “plain persons” more capable of critical self-deliberation. Plain persons can become more philosophical, but they need not become philosophers to achieve the human good. On this point MacIntyre is correct: his “conception of philosophical enquiry is … so very different from that of Leo Strauss.”Footnote 129 Strauss's challenge to MacIntyre is that the “plain person” who is “merely just or moral without being a philosopher appears as a mutilated being.”Footnote 130 If MacIntyre's “plain persons” are genuinely seeking the human good, they must overcome modern liberalism's pervasive distortions to practical reasoning. Consequently, they must be more rare—and more philosophic—than MacIntyre seems to think. This obliges a more direct confrontation with Strauss's demarcation of society.Footnote 131
Fourth, conversation between Strauss and MacIntyre can provide a more complete presentation of the theologico-political problem. Strauss avoids a comprehensive definition of this theme, enabling a variety of “Straussian” interpretations with differing theoretical assumptions about theology, philosophy, and politics.Footnote 132 Putting Strauss and MacIntyre in conversation draws attention to the theoretical assumptions at play in philosophy, especially in terms of the questions of natural theology and philosophy of religion. Attending to these themes makes it clear that Strauss has disputable theoretical assumptions that require interpretative and critical clarification.Footnote 133 For example, the character of divine causation and the separation between revelation and philosophy are controversies in the philosophy of religion. Strauss inclines toward Karl Barth's strict separation; MacIntyre, despite early sympathies, is finally critical of Barth's strict separation. Strauss inclines toward voluntarism; MacIntyre concludes voluntarism is untenable. Strauss is skeptical of any natural account of moral absolutes; MacIntyre concludes that natural reason identifies moral absolutes.Footnote 134
Given the provisional character of philosophy that both Strauss and MacIntyre defend, these debates, on their own terms, are hardly settled. Followers of Strauss can learn from the extended philosophical treatments of natural religion, developing or challenging some of the points on which Strauss was elusive.Footnote 135 Followers of MacIntyre and other Thomists can learn from Strauss's insights on the flexibility of natural law in the face of political challenges.Footnote 136 Because Strauss and MacIntyre are not in agreement about how to confront the theologico-political problem, they bring home for us that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Starting a productive conversation between the two invites, therefore, a heightened awareness that philosophy's fundamental problems persist.
