Alasdair Macintyre on who we really are

Someone only in relation to others

Now 95, and an emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, Alasdair Macintyre moved from Marxism with its rejection of liberalism as a solvent of communities to a Thomism with its rejection of Marxism as ethically inadequate. His most influential, After Virtue, appeared in 1981 (and revised twice since), “diagnoses contemporary society as a ‘culture of emotivism’ in which moral language is used pragmatically to manipulate attitudes, choices, and decisions, so that contemporary moral culture is a theater of illusions in which objective moral rhetoric masks arbitrary choices,” as the item on him in the International Encylopedia of Philosophy puts it. This insight is taken from that book.

In many pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership of a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe.

These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover “the real me.” They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast.

To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress — or to fail to make progress — toward a given end.

Thus a completed and fulfilled life is an achievement and death is the point at which someone can be judged happy or unhappy. Hence the ancient Greek proverb: “Call no man happy until he is dead.”

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