Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity:
An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative
by alasdair macintyre
cambridge, 332 pages, $49.99
I
The dialogues of Plato provide the first sustained demonstration both of the depth and difficulty of philosophy, and of the fact that the beginnings of the most profound philosophical investigations lie in seeming shallows. What is truth? What is justice? What is beauty? are as brief as questions can be, but in attempting to answer them, one realizes that they float on a narrow ledge beyond which run treacherous waters full of deep-rooted and tangled weeds.
In consequence, philosophical inquiry is hard and exhausting work. It takes intelligence of a rather rarefied kind, and work that is hard to sustain across a range of topics or over a long period of time. This is why figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein are intellectual “venerables”: They exhibit sustained heroic intellectual virtues. But while serious philosophy requires analytical acuity and energy, these are not sufficient for achieving true insights. One also needs to have good sense and good judgment, an eye for the weeds, and an ability to distinguish between the significant and the trivial.
Most professional philosophers in the Anglophone academic world have highly trained analytical skills, but far fewer have cultural breadth and depth, and good sense and judgment, and fewer still are capable of sustained fruitful investigations. In face of the difficulties of the subject there are two temptations, though they represent themselves as virtuous options: to ascend to a high level of abstraction that disengages from detail and even from broader intellectual relevance, and to descend into the details of one field or another—physics, psychology, economics, medicine, or whatever else, either in a spirit of useful supplementary service, or one of subservience to these as the true sources of understanding and utility.
This means that a good philosopher is either ignorant of these pressures or virtuously resistant to them. But one who is ignorant is unlikely to arrive at insights that can respond to these forces, and one who knows and seeks to counter them is liable to be worn out by the effort. The upshot is that there are very few long-serving, seriously good philosophers.