In After Virtue, MacIntyre moves from the chapter “Nietzsche or Aristotle” to a consideration about what virtue meant in what he calls heroic societies—the societies represented in the Homeric epics, the Norse Edda, the Irish stories in the Ulster Cycle, etc. His point is one that I’ve often made—that Christian Europe was always as much pagan as it was Christian. Whatever was Christian about it was built on a pagan foundation, and that foundation constitutes a huge part of what made humans humans then, and is still part of the deep infrastructure of our souls now. That’s a good thing, and should be embraced.
The old Catholic mentality was to baptize that foundation and build on it. The Reformation mentality was to kick out the pagan foundation, and establish a purely Christian society, which was always unrealistic, if not fanatical.1 “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as Faulkner said. The more you repress it, the more nasty its demand to be acknowledged. Better to befriend it, and learn from it. In any event, this attitude toward the past is a key component in McIntyre’s broader effort to restore a teleological dimension to our metaphysical imagination.2
I know that last sentence might boringly technical and abstract for some readers, but for now it’s enough to understand it as his effort to restore to metaphysics—our sense of the big meaning picture of everything—a narrative framework that we lost somewhere along the way. We late moderns like stories so long as we don’t think of them as anything more than entertaining fictions, but we’re very uncomfortable with the idea that narrative might actually be the underlying structure of the cosmos. “Where’s the proof? Where’s the data? Where’s the science?” the modern worldview demands. Stories are just lies we tell ourselves to give meaning to an existence that has none. For those captured by this metaphysics of meaninglessness, the only arguments that have legitimacy are those that are supported by a very constrained concept concerning what is reasonable and fact-based.
So an expansive understanding of the reasonableness that is enacted in narrative is key to the argument that MacIntyre wants to make regarding virtue and eudaemonia, and he has very interesting things to say about narrative that align with my recent post “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins”.
One fundamental criterion for the broad acceptance of a big story is how robustly it works in the present to link the past to an imagined future. For MAGA that story is about destroying Liberal elite institutions they believe have robbed them of their past. For Secular Liberals, their story is about rejecting the past dominated by dead white men in order to create a future society where everyone is equal and no group is marginalized. The MAGA story is weak because it is divorced from where the actual future is headed. The secular Liberal story is weak because it rejects too much about the past and so now finds itself like Wile E. Coyote having sprinted of a cliff and now running in place in midair.
Neither has much to do with resisting the story that for now is winning by default—the Transhumanist story. Why? Not because most Americans on the Left or Right buy it, much less even know about it, but because it’s the story that the richest, most powerful humans on earth believe and have the power to enact with or without the rest of the world liking it. MAGA and secular Liberals are arguing in the dining room, while the transhumanists are cooking up the future in the kitchen. My concern is not with the argument the dining room, which from my pov is a complete waste of time and energy, but with working to change the menu.
So this connection between narrative and the metaphysical imagination is one that I want to take some time unpacking, but key to MacIntyre’s argument is that we must acknowledge that whatever ‘progress’ we think we are making, we never become something fundamentally different from our ancestors. We develop from the foundation that they have laid and generation by generation have built upon layer by layer.
For us to develop means that we grow, and to grow is to change, but no matter how much we change, we never stop being what we were, in the same way that a butterfly never stops being what was once a caterpillar. This is Aristotle 101. But not all beings become fully what they are. Not every caterpillar becomes a butterfly because some get eaten, others might meet other environmental obstacles. But humans, in addition to all the extrinsic factors that can cut a life short or deflect a life from its path, have intrinsic freedom, and that freedom can be, and often is, used to choose to become something other than what one is.3
This is the key to understanding what virtue and vice are. Virtue is not just following the rules; it is exercising one’s freedom to become who one is. Vice is to exercise one’s freedom to become something else. The drama lies in how over a lifetime one chooses either metaphysical life or metaphysical death. The stakes are huge. There are no more important human stories than the ones about how humans get lost and get found.
We see this lost and found structure in Shakespeare over and over again.Tragedy is to be lost and not found—as Othello, MacBeth, and Hamlet. Others, fools like King Lear, Orlando in As You Like It, or the aristos in Loves Labor Lost get found. They are all living in a delusional bubble, which, lucky for them gets popped, and then they see clearly: see where they went wrong, repent, and can move on. A tragic story is one that ends in metaphysical death, a comedy is one in which the protagonists moves from delusion toward wisdom, from a weak grip on reality to a much firmer one, i.e., toward metaphysical life.4
So the point here is that Shakespeare is not just about telling us entertaining stories; he’s telling us something about the moral structure of the cosmos. If you think that was then, and this is now, from my pov, you’re living in the tragic modern story, which is that we late moderns are at the cutting edge of history, and that everything we think and do has superseded whatever the ancestors thought and did. We’ve got science; they didn’t. Therefore everything the ancestors thought was ignorant and superstitious. This is a Wile E. Coyote story.
This post was going to be longer, but for now it’s enough to assert the essential connection between narrative and metaphysics, and I’ll argue it in future posts.
Let me end with a MacIntyre excerpt to underscore the point. He doesn’t talk much about Shakespeare but he does bring him up in his discussion of the narrative shift that takes place among the Greeks from the kind of story told in the Homeric Age to those told by Sophocles in Golden Age Athens:
…the Sophoclean protagonist has its own specific narrative form just as that of the epic hero had. I am not here making the trivial and obvious point that Sophoclean protagonists are characters in plays; I am rather ascribing to Sophocles a belief analogous to that which Anne Righter (1962) has ascribed to Shakespeare: that he portrayed human life in dramatic narratives because he took it that human life already had the form of dramatic narrative and indeed the form of one specific type of dramatic narrative. Hence I take it also that the difference between the heroic account of the virtues and the Sophoclean amounts precisely to a difference over what narrative form captures best the central characteristics of human life and agency [in a given society]. And this suggests an hypothesis: that generally to adopt a stance on the virtues will be to adopt a stance on the narrative character of human life. (pp. 143-144)
No virtues, no narrative; no narrative, no virtues. Because no narrative, no telos, and without a telos, no meaningful metaphysics. And without a meaningful metaphysics virtue make no sense. It’s performative non-sense.That might not make sense now, but hopefully I’ll be able to make the case that it does.
Notes
1. I’m not saying that there were never fanatical Catholics. Wherever there is religion, there is fanaticism, and the Reform Mentality didn’t come out of nowhere. Charles Taylor talks about this at length in A Secular Age. But at some point, maybe we have to take another look at the “corruption” of the Renaissance popes. Perhaps we see them too much through a Puritan lens.
In any event, those popes wore their paganism proudly. In the Catholic system, if you wanted to be a serious Christian, you went into a monastery. Among Catholics, there was no expectation that ordinary mortals, perhaps most especially popes, should be pure. The Reformers expected everybody to be pure, and so, of course, the whole project collapses because once you merge the profane into the sacred, the sacred collapses into the profane—and clears the way for Capitalism—and Marx’s description of the world it makes as a place where all that is holy becomes profaned. Without the Reformation, there is no space for Capitalism and its demon spawn, Transhumanism, to emerge.
Regarding the Renaissance popes, my tongue is partially in my cheek here. I’m not condoning what was often awful behavior. But purity is a Northern European thing, not a Mediterranean one. The problem, it could be argued, with the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church was that it over-reacted and became too Calvinized. I mentioned in a previous post the Jansenists, and Charles Taylor makes the point about St. Charles Borromeo who worked to make Milan into a Catholic Geneva.
2. Although many conservatives claim MacIntyre as one of their own, he’s someone who would have no truck with the conservatism of Bill Buckley. MacIntyre did not reject the Marxism of his youth so much as he integrated what is best in its critique with Christianity. He has interesting things to say about tradition and ancestors that do not align with conservative thinking. He’s no friend of so-called Burkean conservatives—
The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary notion; it therefore all too willingly abandoned it to the Burkeans, who, faithful to Burke’s own allegiance, tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition which would vindicate the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688 and adherence in economics to the doctrine and institutions of the free market. The theoretical incoherence of this mismatch did not deprive it of ideological usefulness. But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals. (p. 222).
This describes precisely the incoherence of Bill Buckley’s so-called conservatism.
3. A certain kind of French intellectual—Sartre, Deleuze, and Guatarri come to mind—tells us just the opposite. They tell us that there are no constraints on how we can define or reinvent ourselves. It is hard to overestimate how profoundly this idea has penetrated almost every nook and cranny of popular culture. Transhumanism is very much in alignment with them.
4. So it should be obvious that I’m arguing that the Transhumanist story is a tragic one that ends in metaphysical death. That if we’re to turn the story from tragedy to comedy, we need to retrace our steps, see where went wrong, repent, and move on. Hopefully, unlike Wile E. Coyote we can reach back and grab a root or grip a protruding rock to clamber up the cliff face. That’s what I see myself doing and perhaps with as much chance for success as Mr. Coyote.
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