Alasdair MacIntyre, Teacher

Villanova honored Alasdair MacIntyre last week as the inaugural recipient of the Civitas Dei Medal. Video of the event, including MacIntyre's splendid address ("Catholic Rather than What?") will soon be available, but, in the meantime, here are some brief remarks I delivered for the occasion:

Remarks for Civitas Dei Medal Presentation to Alasdair MacIntyre
September 27, 2012
“MacIntyre as Teacher”

Michael P. Moreland
Vice Dean and Professor of Law
Villanova University School of Law

I hope each of you—and I am especially speaking to the undergraduates here—can someday look back upon your life and say that you had a truly great teacher, a teacher who changed your life. The greatest teacher I’ve ever had was Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre is among the most famous philosophers in the world. He is one of the towering intellectual figures of the age, persistently challenging well-settled views and assaulting pious platitudes. But MacIntyre has for sixty-some years been foremost a teacher—a teacher in classrooms, of course, at Notre Dame and elsewhere, but also a teacher through his many books and articles, through contributions to academic philosophy and contributions to the wider intellectual culture.

You never know what you will learn from encountering MacIntyre. I remember, for example, he once told our class—I think we were discussing Kant at the time—that we should make certain that anyone we might consider a prospect for marriage adequately appreciates Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. I was never sure—and didn’t ask—why any prospective fiancées should be scrutinized about their views on a novel about expatriates in Paris traveling to the running of the bulls in Pamplona. But a few years later, after I had left Notre Dame and was in graduate school in Boston, I started dating someone, and I was thinking about asking her to marry me. So one day I asked her—out of the blue—if she liked Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Fortunately, she said she did, and my wife and the mother of our four children is sitting right over there.

What has MacIntyre taught those of us who are his students? How can we learn how to learn what MacIntyre has to teach?[1]

MacIntyre teaches us that learning how to learn is in significant part coming to self-understanding. It is through asking questions about our good and, in the company of our friends, asking about the good of our communities that we come to learn about the good life for human beings—in families and neighborhoods, in fishing crews (to use a favorite example of his) and in universities (even in a law school). This emerges from the profound central claim of After Virtue, a book that dramatically and fundamentally altered the landscape of contemporary ethics. That claim is that it is only from a perspective alien to modern culture—Aristotelianism—that we can make sense of our moral lives. And to be an Aristotelian is in part to know that the role of teachers is to bring their students to self-understanding. As Jonathan Lear notes,

The point of [Aristotle’s] Nicomachean Ethics is not to persuade us to be good or to show us how to behave well in the various circumstances of life: it is to give people who are already leading a happy, virtuous life insight into the nature of their own souls. The aim of the Ethics is to offer its readers self-understanding, not persuasion or advice.[2]

We learn from our best teachers not merely information about this or that subject, but we come to recognize our own good and pursue it in its many forms. On account of our teachers, we come to know the truth about ourselves—we come to know the nature of our souls.

To this Aristotelian insight about self-understanding, MacIntyre teaches us to add—by way of correction and completion—Augustinian Christianity. We are honoring MacIntyre today at a university sponsored by the Augustinian Order and bestowing upon him an award named for one of Augustine’s most famous works. For Augustine, too, we learn from our teachers by way of self-understanding and by submitting ourselves to the authority of a teacher. As MacIntyre writes about Augustinian education:

By accepting authority…one acquires a teacher who both introduces one to certain texts and educates one into becoming the sort of person capable of reading those texts with understanding, texts in which such a person discovers the story of him or herself….[3]

And so it is especially fitting that we honor Alasdair MacIntyre today at a university in which such texts—preeminently Augustine’s Confessions—have a central place in the education of our students.

Furthermore, MacIntyre follows Augustine and Aquinas in teaching us that the end of our self-reflection and understanding, the culmination of our inquiry into our good, is God. In his book God, Philosophy, Universities, MacIntyre summarizes Augustine’s account:

To achieve self-understanding and self-knowledge—and also, it will turn out, knowledge of God—we therefore have to turn within….But we are only able to move within ourselves, so that we become aware of our true nature and transcend ourselves, if we receive from God by grace the means to do so. Otherwise, the path to self-knowledge is closed to us. Why so? What deprives us of the knowledge of God also deprives us of self-knowledge: an indefinite capacity for distraction by external trivialities and a craving for self-justification, so that we either do not attend to what is within or, if we do, disguise from ourselves our thoughts and motives….It is God alone who can rid us of the pride and the desire that is at work in these various agencies of self-deception.[4]

Learning how to learn about God and being in the presence of teachers who help us to come to know God can change your life. We are apt to suppose that believing in God is some additional piece of information we can be taught about, alongside, say, prime numbers, the composition of stars, the rules of civil procedure, or the historical causes of the First World War. To that we add “God.” But, to borrow from one of MacIntyre’s friends, the English Dominican Herbert McCabe, “We know of God not by understanding him but by recognising that there are questions which impose themselves on us to which we reach out to answer but cannot yet.”[5] Coming to know that God is—that we are part of stories not of our own making in a world created from nothing and redeemed—is not just another thing we happen to learn about.

When we come to believe in God, the characteristic response is gratitude—gratitude for the many blessings of our lives, gratitude for the strength to endure our trials, and gratitude for our teachers. We are grateful to teachers living and long dead, to teachers we encounter in life and to teachers we encounter only on the written page. We are most grateful to those teachers who helped us come to know ourselves and helped us come to know God. And so I join the many generations of his students in simply saying to Alasdair: thank you.

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[1] This phrase ("learn[ing[ how to learn" from a teacher) is from MacIntyre’s foreword to a collection of Herbert McCabe’s essays. Alasdair MacIntyre, foreword to God Still Matters by Herbert McCabe, O.P. (London: Continuum, 2002), vii.

[2] Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 157.

[3] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 92.

[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, God Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

[5] Herbert McCabe, “God,” in God Still Matters, 12.