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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.