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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2019
Followers of Leo Strauss have criticized Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the activity of philosophy as historicist. MacIntyre himself has been dismissive of Strauss. I argue that these apparent disagreements obscure their deeper agreements about the activity of philosophy. Rather than holding to historicism, MacIntyre's account of philosophy has a strong symmetry with Strauss's. To counter modern dogmatism, both Strauss and MacIntyre argue for a balanced mixture of history and philosophy to contend that philosophy's task is to gain knowledge of natural reality. Yet both place similar epistemic limits on philosophy, arguing that philosophy's gains are modest and always open to revision. Moreover, both hold that no authority other than human reason can direct the activity of philosophy. Putting MacIntyre and Strauss in a more careful conversation enriches the account of the fundamental philosophical problems that each addresses.
I would like to thank Terence Marshall, Stephen Salkever, and Kevin Vance, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in preparing this paper. I also thank the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University for their support.
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8 Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 57; NRH, 22, 28–29. Radical historicism denies the transhistorical theoretical insight to adopt a “fateful dispensation” committing themselves to a particular world view (NRH, 25–28).
9 Strauss, NRH, 35, 88–90.
10 Ibid., 82.
11 Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 11.
12 Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero,” in WIPP, 114.
13 Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 11.
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22 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 109–20Google Scholar. Hereafter AV.
23 MacIntyre, AV, 3, 4. Note that MacIntyre's concern with rational justification shows that he cannot be characterized as a radical historicist who adopts his world view out of a “fateful dispensation.”
24 MacIntyre, AV, 265; Strauss, NRH, 21–22.
25 In the late 1980s and 1990s, MacIntyre's critics contended that his Aristotelianism was politically conservative. Kelvin Knight argued that this was a misreading of MacIntyre—an argument that MacIntyre later endorsed. See Alasdair MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good,” in The MacIntyre Reader, 235. In 2007, MacIntyre added a prologue to After Virtue sharpening his criticism of political conservatism (see AV, xv–xvi; cf. 222).
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27 MacIntyre, AV, 146–47; Bartlett, Idea of Enlightenment, 46.
28 Tessitore, “MacIntyre and Aristotle on Virtue,” 156.
29 As MacIntyre thinks philosophy's object of enquiry is the world external to a tradition, he is therefore committed to philosophical realism. See Lutz, Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, 43, 47, 113–60; D'Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, 410–14. MacIntyre's Aquinas Lecture is published in MacIntyre, Alasdair, Selected Essays, vol. 1, The Tasks of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hereafter TP.
30 MacIntyre, TP, 158–59.
31 Ibid., 166–67.
32 See, e.g., TP, 146–54.
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34 MacIntyre, AV, 11.
35 MacIntyre distinguishes between relativism, where one holds that rational debate between conflicting traditions is irresolvable, and perspectivism, where one questions the significance of any truth-claim. See WJWR, 352. See also Lutz, Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, 66–111 and Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's “After Virtue, ” (London: Continuum, 2012), 176–79Google Scholar; D'Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, 403–9.
36 MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” in Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics, ed. Cunningham, Lawrence (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2009), 32–33Google Scholar.
37 MacIntyre, WJWR, 363–66; “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” 32–34.
38 MacIntyre, TP, 11–12.
39 MacIntyre, WJWR, 8.
40 Lutz, Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, 48.
41 MacIntyre, “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” 34–35.
42 MacIntyre, TP, 163–64.
43 Ibid., 167–68.
44 Ibid., 5; AV, 270.
45 Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero,” 116.
46 E.g., “The classics were fully aware of the essential weakness of the mind of the individual” (ibid., 114). See also Velkley, , Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 54, 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which connects Strauss's account of the mystery of the whole with his aim to recover what metaphysics intended.
47 Strauss, Leo, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 144Google Scholar.
48 Smith, Gregory, “The Post-Modern Leo Strauss?,” History of European Ideas 19, no. 1 (1994): 193CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Smith observes that Strauss imitates Aristotle, for whom nous does not grasp first things or the whole directly. Importantly, this imitation allows Strauss to counter Heidegger. Heidegger's historicism claims to expose a single metaphysical tradition and its questionable Cartesian premise about the whole being immediately intelligible and knowledge as an object. For Strauss's description of this issue, see NRH, 30–31; see also Kennington, Richard, “Strauss's Natural Right and History,” Review of Metaphysics 35, no. 1 (1981): 57–86, esp. 67Google Scholar; Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 122.
49 Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 39.
50 Cf. DeHart, Paul, “Political Philosophy after the Collapse of Classical, Epistemic Foundationalism,” in Reason, Revelation, and the Civic Order: Political Philosophy and the Claims of Faith, ed. DeHart, Paul and Holloway, Carson (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 39–40Google Scholar.
51 “It is difficult to discern whether we know from appropriate principles, which alone is genuinely scientific knowing, or do not know from appropriate principles” (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, bk. 1, lect. 18, cited in TP, 149).
52 MacIntyre, TP, 149.
53 “The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q1 a5, cited in “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 11). This refutes DeHart's charge that Strauss's conception of philosophy is epistemologically incoherent. See DeHart, “Political Philosophy after the Collapse,” 39.
54 Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon's Hiero,” 116.
55 Strauss, NRH, 22; “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History,” 576–77. Cf. MacIntyre, AV, 1–2.
56 Strauss, NRH, 31. See also Strauss, Leo, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Pangle, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 73Google Scholar (hereafter RCPR); CM, 9.
57 Strauss, CM, 13–17, 20–21. Strauss would describe epistemic progress as ascent out of the cave. He opposes positivism and radical historicism, which dogmatically insist that an improved understanding of the whole is impossible. See Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 73.
58 Tarcov, “Philosophy and History,” 15.
59 Hence it is a mistake to think that Strauss exalts the “Western tradition” for its own sake. See RCPR, 73. MacIntyre agrees: traditions are only properly traditions insofar as they seek rational understanding of reality, and cannot be contrasted to rationality. In that vein, both Strauss and MacIntyre are critical of Edmund Burke for emphasizing historical practices and disparaging theory. See NRH, 311, 318–19; AV, 221–22. See also Knight, Aristotelian Philosophy, 132–33.
60 MacIntyre, TP, 172–73.
61 See Michael and Zuckert, Catherine, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 167–72, 192–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Strauss also expresses admiration and sympathy for the philosophical stances of Martin Heidegger. See Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, esp. 41–61, 67–68, 126.
62 E.g., MacIntyre, “Replies,” 205.
63 Tarcov, “Philosophy and History,” 15.
64 Strauss's path is reminiscent of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but breaks with them on the decisive point of political things. See Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 31; NRH, 79; RCPR, 28–29; “A Giving of Accounts,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Green, Kenneth Hart (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 460–62Google Scholar. See also Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 66–68, 71–72; David O'Connor, “Leo Strauss's Aristotle and Martin Heidegger's Politics,” in Tessitore, ed., Aristotle and Modern Politics, esp. 166–67, 181–96.
65 Strauss, CM, 11–12.
66 See Nathan Tarcov, “Leo Strauss's ‘On Classical Political Philosophy,’” in Leo
Strauss's Defense of the Philosophic Life: Reading “What Is Political Philosophy?,” ed. Major, Rafael (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 66Google Scholar.
67 Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 46, 72.
68 MacIntyre, AV, 159–60.
69 Tessitore, “MacIntyre and Aristotle on Virtue,” 138. While I identify five, Tessitore focuses on three. Because MacIntyre has developed his views since After Virtue, I restate MacIntyre's position and criticisms of Aristotle with a view to his whole work. With that broader restatement, it is possible to see the strengths and defects of Bartlett's and Tessitore's interpretations of MacIntyre. A defect in their approach is that they base their judgment almost exclusively on the reading of After Virtue (despite the fact that both wrote after the publication of MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals, his most comprehensive restatement of his stance toward nature).
70 Variations of these three criticisms are found throughout MacIntyre's work. See AV, 157–60; WJWR, 104–5; Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999), 7–8, 127, 164–65Google Scholar (hereafter DRA); Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 85–86Google Scholar (hereafter ECM). See also D'Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, 258–59; Lutz, Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's “After Virtue,” 179–80.
71 MacIntyre, AV, 157–58, 163.
72 MacIntyre, AV, 158; cf. xi.
73 Tessitore, “MacIntyre and Aristotle on Virtue,” 158.
74 MacIntyre, AV, 159. Emphasis added.
75 MacIntyre, AV, 159. Emphasis added.
76 Aquinas's example is that the ancient Germans did not consider theft to be wrong (ST I-II q94 a4). Cf. “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” 7–8.
77 Cf. Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History,” 575.
78 Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” 56–57.
79 Strauss, “On Collingwood's Philosophy of History,” 585. Cf. MacIntyre, AV, x: “What I now understand much better than I did twenty-five years ago is the nature of the relevant Aristotelian commitments.”
80 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Selected Essays, vol. 2, Ethics and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), viii–ixCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 MacIntyre, AV, 148.
82 See EN 1097b22–1098a20; cf. MacIntyre, Alasdair, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 62–63Google Scholar.
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84 MacIntyre, AV, 217; D'Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, 277.
85 Bartlett, Idea of Enlightenment, 49, 51.
86 MacIntyre, DRA, x.
87 Ibid., 67–68.
88 Ibid., 71–77; Knight, Aristotelian Philosophy, 197–98.
89 MacIntyre, DRA, 81–98; D'Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, 378.
90 MacIntyre, DRA, 120.
91 Ibid., 121–23.
92 Ibid., 123–28; MacIntyre is interpreting ST II-II q30 a3, a4; q31 a3.
93 MacIntyre, DRA, 8.
94 MacIntyre, AV, xi; DRA, x–xi, 127, 164; Knight, Aristotelian Philosophy, 200.
95 Cf. Tessitore, “MacIntyre and Aristotle on Virtue,” 151. Rather than blurring the distinction between Aristotle and Aquinas, MacIntyre is clear he sides with Aquinas against Aristotle. In arguing that Aquinas and Aristotle share the same tradition, MacIntyre does not need to claim that they share the same answers to every set of problems.
96 Strauss, NRH, 7–8; WIPP, 39–40.
97 Tanguay, Daniel, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Nadon, Christopher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 129–30Google Scholar. There is a discrepancy between the argument Strauss makes in the main body of the text at NRH, 8, and the citations from Aristotle's Physics 196a30ff., 199a3–5. Strauss's lesson is to be wary of definitive accounts of the whole. See Salkever, Stephen, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 50Google Scholar; Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy, 128; Marshall, Terence, À la recherche de l'humanité: Science, poésie ou raison pratique dans la philosophie politique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss et James Madison (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 295–96Google Scholar.
98 For Strauss, the strategy of neo-Thomists is to concede the validity of the nonteleological cosmology but argue for a teleological conception of human nature. This strategy has two flaws. First, it breaks the link between cosmology and human nature, setting up a potential contradiction about the nature of the whole. Second, it gives up on providing a comprehensive presentation of the whole. This strategy “presupposes a break with the comprehensive view of Aristotle as well as that of Thomas Aquinas himself” (NRH, 8; WIPP, 285–86). If MacIntyre attempted this strategy in After Virtue, Dependent Rational Animals shows that he is more faithful to Aristotle and Aquinas on terms Strauss himself acknowledges.
99 Barlett and Tessitore touch this theme. Bartlett thinks that if MacIntyre affirms Christianity (with its “simply true” accounts of the world), then he must break with the historicism he allegedly holds. See Bartlett, Idea of Enlightenment, 53. For Tessitore, MacIntyre's embrace of Christianity is another kind of historicism: “Whereas Aristotle sought to ground his understanding by moving toward some biologically informed conception of nature, Aquinas anchored his appropriation of Aristotle on the authority of grace as it has been revealed in history” (Tessitore, “MacIntyre and Aristotle on Virtue,” 152). Since MacIntyre's argument is that Aquinas displays a superior understanding of nature to Aristotle's, Tessitore's conclusion does not apply to MacIntyre's Aquinas.
100 Leo Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes Politische Wissenschaft,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity, 453; See also Meier, Heinrich, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Brainard, Marcus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An Intellectual Biography, 4–5.
101 Strauss, NRH, 74.
102 Strauss, NRH, 144, 157–59, 163–64. Recognizing the same issue, MacIntyre writes that “the most cogent statement of the case against” the reconciliation of biblical theology and Aristotelianism lies in the “unduly neglected minor modern classic” of Harry Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism (AV, 278).
103 MacIntyre, DRA, 124. MacIntyre's naturalism exposes him to a theological critique for failing to consider the role grace must play in perfecting the human life. See Dunne, Joseph, “Ethics at the Limits: A Reading of Dependent Rational Animals,” in What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? Philosophical Essays in Honor of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. O'Rourke, Fran (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 68–76Google Scholar.
104 MacIntyre, TP, 182.
105 Strauss, NRH, 74.
106 Strauss, NRH, 75.
107 See Fortin, Ernest, “Rational Theologians and Irrational Philosophers: A Straussian Perspective,” in Classical Christianity and the Political Order: Reflections on the Theologico-Political Problem, ed. Benestad, Brian (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 294–95Google Scholar.
108 Strauss, RCPR, 270.
109 MacIntyre, TP, 197–98.
110 Ibid., 213–14.
111 “My philosophy … is secular in its content as any other” (MacIntyre, “Interview with Giovanna Borrado,” 266). See also MacIntyre's account of early twentieth-century Thomists at ECM, 106; D'Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, 392.
112 Cf. Strauss, CM, 240–41; MacIntyre, ECM, 314–15.
113 MacIntyre, Ethics and Politics, 62.
114 “It is in the end corrupting to suggest to [the purely secular] world that the only adequate grounds they can have for certain norms is that there is a revelation which declares there to be such” (MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Pastoral Concerns,” in The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Vatican II: A Look Back and Ahead, ed. Smith, Russell [Braintree, MA: The Pope John Center, 1990], 257Google Scholar).
115 MacIntyre, TP, 182, 213–14.
116 Strauss, RCPR, 259.
117 MacIntyre, TP, 180–82.
118 Cf. Benardete, Seth, “Socrates and Plato: The Dialectics of Eros,” in The Archaeology of the Soul: Platonic Readings of Ancient Poetry and Philosophy, ed. Burger, Ronna and Davis, Michael (South Bend, IN: St Augustine's, 2012), 245Google Scholar.
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121 See Ralph Hancock, “Leo Strauss's Profound and Fragile Critique of Christianity,” in Vaughan, ed., Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers, 316–19.
122 MacIntyre sketches some aspects of these origins in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1990), 152–54, 162Google Scholar.
123 Tessitore, “MacIntyre and Aristotle on Virtue,” 147.
124 See Catherine and Michael Zuckert, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy, 144–66.
125 For a comparison of two approaches to this ambiguity, see Peter Minowitz, “The Enduring Problem of Leo Strauss?,” Claremont Review of Books Online, October 21, 2014, https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-enduring-problem-of-leo-strauss, accessed Feb. 5, 2019.
126 Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 205–34; cf. 30–46, 373–78: MacIntyre is formed by the tradition that argues esotericism is a foolish legend.
127 Strauss, Leo, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 7–8Google Scholar. Because Strauss thinks that this sociology helps clarify the perennial character of philosophy's relationship to the city, he need not immediately discount as relativism MacIntyre's own acknowledgment of the importance of sociology for philosophy. Cf. Descombes, “Alasdair MacIntyre en France,” 140–41.
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129 MacIntyre, “Replies,” 207.
130 Strauss, NRH, 151.
131 Cf. Beiner, Political Philosophy, 188.
132 See Zuckert, Michael, “Straussians,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, ed. Smith, Steven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 263–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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134 Leora Batnitzky, “Leo Strauss and the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament,’” in Smith, ed., Cambridge Companion to Strauss, 45; MacIntyre, “Interview with Giovanna Borrado,” 257, 266; AV, 150; Perreau-Saussine, Alasdair MacIntyre, 88, 145–47; D'Andrea, Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue, 123–63, 230, 249, 389–93; Strauss, NRH, 162.
135 E.g., Marc Guerra, “Modernity, Creation, and Catholicism: Leo Strauss and Benedict XVI,” in Vaughan, ed., Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers, 111–13.
136 E.g., Geoffrey Vaughan, “Wisdom and Folly: Reconsidering Strauss on the Natural Law,” in Vaughan, ed., Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers, 77–93.