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Nietzsche
“Why should we think about our modern uses of good, right and
obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late
eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo? And why should we not
think of Nietzsche as the Kamehameha II of the European
tradition?”
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 113.
Nietzsche or Aristotle?
Hence the defensibility of the Nietzschean position turns in the end on the answer to the
question: was it right in the first place to reject Aristotle? For if Aristotle’s position in ethics
and politics – or something very like it – could be sustained, the whole Nietzschean enterprise
would be pointless…
This is because the power of Nietzsche’s position depends upon the truth of one central
thesis: that all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail and that therefore belief in the
tenets of morality needs to be explained in terms of a set of rationalizations which conceal the
fundamentally non-rational phenomena of the will…
My own argument obliges me to agree with Nietzsche that the philosophers of the
Enlightenment never succeeded in providing grounds for doubting his central thesis; his
epigrams are even deadlier than his extended arguments. But, if my earlier argument is
correct, that failure itself was nothing other than an historical sequel to the rejection of the
Aristotelian tradition…
And thus the key question does indeed become: can Aristotle’s ethics, or something
very like it, after all be vindicated?
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 117-18.
The Aristotelian Tradition
“… it is clear that if we are to make a new start to the enquiry in order to put
Aristotelianism to the question all over again, it will be necessary to consider
Aristotle’s own moral philosophy not merely as it is expressed in key texts in his own
writings, but as an attempt to inherit and to sum up a good deal that had gone before
and in turn as a source of stimulus to much later thought. It will be necessary, that is,
to write a short history of conceptions of the virtues in which Aristotle provides a
central point of focus, but which yield the resources of a whole tradition of acting,
thinking and discourse of which Aristotle’s is only a part, a tradition of which I
spoke earlier as ‘the classical tradition’ and whose view of man I called ‘the classical
view of man’. To this task I now turn…”
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 119.