Nietzsche or Aristotle?

Suspended between reminiscences of a past with very ancient roots, sunk deep into the Scottish world of Celtic tradition, and the global perspective of American pluralism, Alasdair MacIntyre has enriched contemporary moral debate to an unparalleled extent. Moving with a totally new agility between the meshes of historicism, his discourse points to the circumscription of a neo-Thomist horizon, understood not as a moment of categorical refoundation but, on the contrary, as the point of arrival of the "ethics of virtue", a line of secular reflection that traverses all of classical Greece and reaches full systematization in the thought of Aristotle.

Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1929, MacIntyre had to await immersion in the American melting pot, at the age of forty, before imposing some order on the crucible of traditions in which he was forged. A classicist reeducated by analytic philosophy, he spent these first forty years trying to unravel the strands of an intellectual ball of twine including an Anglo-Saxon liberalist heritage, a self-determined Marxist faith, and, finally, a Christian urgency disavowed and rehabilitated in various versions, as testified to by his book Marxism and Christianity (1982).

The confrontation with analytic philosophy is the one that has perhaps left the fewest traces on the body of MacIntyre's thought. He criticizes the thematic limitation, the focusing on logical detail and, most of all, the systematic dichotomy between method and historical perspective in this tradition, to which England has contributed with ordinary language philosophy, initiated by John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein and continued by the authors of the Oxford-Cambridge school.

In precisely this respect, the encounter with Marxism represented a point of crucial transformation that accompanied the Scottish philosopher during his solitary transatlantic flight. It was Marxism that resolved one of his foremost anxieties, connected to that sort of "innatism" that the Anglo-Saxon world tends to attribute to liberalistic thought. Through the lens of Marxist historicism, liberalism revealed itself to MacIntyre in its "ideological projectuality", based on the impoverishment of the traditional community and, consequently, on the progressive dissolution of the human links in the network of cultural and social relationships.

It was only a short step from the historicization of liberalism to a comprehensive rethinking of the entire Enlightenment project. Starting in 1966 with A Brief History of Ethics, this new phase of MacIntyre's thought was followed with the publication of the work on moral theory, After Virtue (1981), that was greeted with considerable international acclaim.

In contrast with the universalism of moral assumptions on which Enlightenment rationalism was nourished, a plurality of theses flourished in the post-Enlightenment epoch—Kantian, utilitarian, contractualist—revealing the fundamental bankruptcy of the ethics of Aufklärung, a defeat that projects its effects into the twentieth-century incapacity to appeal to any moral code whatever. Having denied morality its historical roots and its social context, the Enlightenment must bear the burden of having pushed Western culture from modernity toward Nietzsche: that is, toward the systematic refusal of morality expressed in the extremes of genius and nihilism.

But what are the reasons for the disastrous failure of the Enlightenment project? According to MacIntyre, the failure must be ascribed to the misunderstanding that late Renaissance and Baroque culture, long before the Enlightenment, perpetrated on the Greek tradition of "virtue", born during the transition from the most ancient forms of community to the Athenian polis of the fifth century B.C.

This transition, which has its principal reference points in Socrates, in Plato, and, above all, in Aristotle, frames morality in a specific historical context; that is, in the custom and the dynamic of communication internal to a specific community. Virtue is not a universal and metahistorical category, but a pluralist and shared value.

The line of classical thought followed by MacIntyre defines the pluralist concept of virtue according to at least three meanings. First, virtues represent qualities of mind and of character, to which are linked the success of a series of typically human activities, such as art, science, and agriculture. Second, without virtue the individual is prevented from attaining an “ordered” life. And, third, it is only thanks to these models of moral excellence that the individual is able to contribute to the ultimate value, the construction of the public good.

Articulated by Aristotle in an incomparable political and metaphysical network, into which MacIntyre delves deeply in his two most recent books, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Equity: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition (1990), the tradition of virtues survives through the existentially dense contribution of Augustinian subjectivism and flows on into Thomas Aquinas.

To the question “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” with which After Virtue concluded in 1981, the answer today is all too clear: Aristotle; including along with that ancient peripatetic philosopher and Saint Thomas, two other unexpected disciples—the master of Mediterranean historicism, Giambattista Vico, and the most recent voice of Atlantic neo-historicism, R. G. Collingwood.

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Not only are you one of the last European philosophers to have left the Old World for the New, but you are also one of the most enigmatic, because at the basis of this choice are neither racial nor political considerations. If you had to describe, in a few words, the cultural and existential baggage you carried with you on your first crossing, what would you include?

Long before I was old enough to study philosophy I had the philosophical good fortune to be educated in two antagonistic systems of belief and attitude. On the one hand, my early imagination was engrossed by a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and storytellers, a culture that was in large part already lost, but to which some of the older people I knew still belonged with pan of themselves. What mattered in this culture were particular loyalties and ties to kinship and land. To be just was to play one's assigned role in the life of one's local community. Each person's identity derived from the person's place in their community and in the conflicts and arguments that constituted its ongoing (or by the time of my childhood no longer ongoing) history. Its concepts were conveyed through its histories. On the other hand, I was taught by other older people that learning to speak or to read Gaelic was an idle, antiquarian pastime, a waste of time for someone whose education was designed to enable him to pass those examinations that are the threshold of bourgeois life in the modern world.

What were your perceptions of the “modern world” during a youth spent among these contrasting cultural realities?

The modern world was a culture of theories rather than stories. It also presented itself as the milieu of what purported to be “morality” as such; its claims upon us were allegedly not those of some particular social group, but those of universal rational humanity. So, part of my mind was occupied by stories about Saint Columba, Brian Boru, and Ian Lom, and part by inchoate theoretical ideas, which I did not as yet know derived from the liberalism of Kant and Mill.

Was it philosophy that suggested the way to reconcile these contrasting worlds?

Philosophy taught me the importance of not holding contradictory beliefs, partly by reading Plato and partly by coming across the proof, originally discovered by Thomas of Erfurt and then rediscovered by the pragmatist C. I. Lewis, that if you assert a contradiction, you are thereby committed to asserting anything whatsoever. So every contradiction within one's belief is a potential source of disaster. Yet in the same period in which I became aware of the importance of coherence and consistency in belief, the incoherence of my own mind was growing rather than diminishing. My school and undergraduate studies were in Latin and Greek—literature, philosophy, and history—and I became aware of the radical difference not only between classical Greek culture and liberal modernity, but also between the ancient Greeks and Irish tradition.

At that moment of your development, who were your guiding figures?

I began to read George Thomson, a professor of Greek first at Galway and then at Birmingham and a member of the Executive Committee of the British Communist Party. He played a part, I believe, in my joining the Communist Party for a short time. In 1941, he published “Aeschylus and Athens,” which came after a history of Greek philosophy up to Plato written in Irish, entitled Tosnù na Feallsùnachta, as well as the translation of some Platonic dialogues into Irish. It was through thinking about the problems of translation involved in rendering Greek philosophy into modern languages as different as English and Irish that I had my first inklings of two truths: that different languages as used by different societies may embody different and rival conceptual schemes, and that translation from one such language to some other such language may not always be possible. There are cultures and languages-in-use that one can only inhabit by learning how to live in them as a native does. And there are theories framed in different languages-in-use whose incommensurability arises from their partial untranslatability. These were thoughts that I only developed fully some thirty-five years later in Relativism, Power and Philosophy and in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

From what you say, one might suggest it was a matter of “hermeneutic glimmers”: of intuition about the incommensurability and untranslatability of language, tied to the Continental tradition stretching from German Romanticism to Heidegger and Gadamer.

Yes, that's true, though at the time I didn't know much about hermeneutics. The reading that first my undergraduate, and then my graduate studies required of me only accentuated the incoherence of my beliefs. I read Aquinas as well as Aristode. Sometimes I would find myself thinking about justice in an Aristotelian or Thomistic way, sometimes in a modern liberal way, without recognizing the full extent of my own incoherence. No wonder I found it increasingly difficult to discover adequate rational grounds for the belief in Christianity that I thought I had, and that faith came to look like arbitrariness.

In what sense was Christianity the disruptive element in all your contradictions?

For a time, I tried to fence off the area of religious belief and practice from the rest of my life, by treating it as a sui generis form of life, with its own standards internal to it, and by blending a particular interpretation of Wittgenstein's notion of a “form of life” with Karl Barth's theology. But I soon recognized that the claims embodied in the uses of religious language and practice are in crucial ways inseparable from a variety of nonreligious metaphysical, scientific, and moral claims, a conclusion I reached when reading Hans Urs von Balthasar's criticism of Barth. When I came to reject this strange philosophical mixture of a misunderstood Wittgenstein and an all-too-well understood Barth, I mistakenly rejected the Christian religion along with it. But parts of Thomism survived in my thought from those times, together with some more adequate reflections on Wittgenstein.

Your account of your development is saturated with existential inquietude. It is not clear to me how much of this is due to the friction between the ancient celtic narrative tradition and the modern, Anglo-Saxon utilitarian tradition, and how much to the imposing religious presence.

When I look back on my asserted beliefs in that period, I see my thinking as having been a clumsily patched together collection of fragments. And for years this vision was felt as a very disquieting one. Nonetheless, I was able to effect a reconciliation. The history of late-nineteenth-century physics and the problems that Maxwell and Boltzman faced when confronted by inconsistencies they could not know how to remove, convinced me that a premature regimentation of one's thought in the interest of total consistency may well lead to the rejection of important truths. However, I do remember my formation as being immersed in a painful state of mind, simultaneously drawn in a number of directions intellectually.

I imagine that this sense of disorientation was further exacerbated by the emergence of Marxism, to which tradition you were connected for a long time.

Certainly Marxism added another dimension of complexity. But it also represented a turning point. It was in thinking about Marxism that I began the work of resolving the conflicts in which I was trapped. Even if Marxist characterizations of advanced capitalism are inadequate, the Marxist understanding of liberalism as ideological, as a deceiving and self-deceiving mask for certain social interests, remains compelling. Liberalism in the name of freedom imposes a certain kind of unacknowledged domination, and one which in the long run tends to dissolve traditional human ties and to impoverish social and cultural relationships. Liberalism, while imposing through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by the way in which it attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human community within which this project has to be embodied.

The first result of your encounter with Marxism was therefore the refusal and criticism of liberalism in all its versions.

Yes, including the liberalism of contemporary American and English conservatives, as well as that of American and European radicals, and even the liberalism of the self-proclaimed liberals. Furthermore, it was Marxism which convinced me that every morality including that of modern liberalism, however universal its claims, is the morality of some particular social group, embodied and lived out in the life and history of that group. Indeed, a morality has no existence except in its actual and possible social embodiments, and what it amounts to is what it does or can amount to in its socially embodied forms. So that to study any morality by first abstracting its principles and then studying these in isolation from the social practice informed by them is necessarily to misunderstand them. Yet this is how almost all modern moral philosophy proceeds.

On this issue you are still, if not a Marxist, a materialist.

No. Because if I had gone on being a Marxist this lesson would not have been of much use to me. For Marxism is not just an inadequate, but a largely inept, instrument for social analysis. Most happily for me, when I was a student in London I met the anthropologist Franz Steiner, who pointed me toward ways of understanding moralities that avoided both the reductionism of presenting morality as a mere secondary expression of something else, and the abstractionism that detaches principles from socially embodied practice. Rival forms of such practice are in contention, a contention which is neither only a rational debate between rival principles nor a clash of rival social structures, but always inseparably both.

What is the role of dialogue in this contention? One of the errors of Marxism has often been its tendency to “canonize” and to dry up forms of social debate.

Personally, from the history of Marxism I learned how important it is for any theory to be formulated so that it is maximally open to the possibility of refutation. Only later on I realized that I could have learned the same lesson from a critic of Marxism such as Karl Popper, or from a pragmatist like Charles Peirce. If a standpoint is not able to be shown, by its own standards, to be discordant with reality, it cannot be shown to be concordant either. It becomes a scheme of thought within which those who give it their allegiance become imprisoned and also protected from the realities about which their beliefs were originally formulated.

Until now you have described the development of your thought in a negative key, trying to retrace the theoretical lines from which you have progressively detached yourself. What was the turning point toward the pars construens of your identity as a thinker? Your emigration to the United States, perhaps?

During the first twenty years of my philosophical career—from 1951 to 1971 when I had just emigrated to the United States—a good deal of what I did and thought was in the style of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy's strengths and weaknesses both derive from its exclusive focus on a rigorous treatment of detail, one that results in a piecemeal approach to philosophy, isolable problem by isolable problem. Its literary genres are the professional journal article and the short monograph.

In effect, at least since your book After Virtue, you have concentrated on restoring political legitimacy to the so-called great questions. How did these efforts contrast with those of the analytical establishment?

What analytic philosophy gains in clarity and rigor, it loses in being unable to provide decisive answers to substantive philosophical questions. It enables us—at least it enabled me—to rule out certain possibilities. But while it can identify, for each alternative view that remains, what commitments one will be making by way of entailments and presuppositions, it is not capable in itself of producing any reason for asserting any one thing over any other. When analytic philosophers do reach substantive conclusions, as they often do, those conclusions only derive in pan from analytic philosophy. There is always some other agenda in the background, sometimes concealed, sometimes obvious. In moral philosophy it is usually a liberal political agenda.

Do you believe you have complete control of the “ideological” net that governs your thought?

It was in the latter part of my analytic stage, around the mid-sixties, that I developed a new agenda. I had come to recognize that a second weakness of analytic philosophy was the extent of the divorce between its inquiries and the study of the history of philosophy, and that analytic philosophy, and more especially its moral philosophy, could only itself be adequately understood if placed in historical context and thus understood as the intelligible outcome of extended argument and debate. So I wrote A Short History of Ethics, a book from whose errors I learned a lot.

What kinds of errors are you thinking about?

First of all, a recurring lack of continuity at certain points in the narrative. There is an account of the development of a distinctively Greek debate about ethics, an account of the development of a very different set of distinctive Christian lines of thought, and an account of the variety of argumentative encounters and rival conclusions that emerged from Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral philosophy. But what goes unremarked are the discontinuities at the points of transition from each one of these to the next. The fundamental shifts in central concepts and in basic principles are reported, but they appear as pure facts, unscrutinized and not at all understood.

The error, then, was not having individuated the value of certain discontinuities or epistemological coupures in the historical development of moral philosophy—a subject which seems to me to be directly in tune with contemporary debate on both sides of the Atlantic, from Thomas S. Kuhn to Michel Foucault.

Up to that point I had at least tried to present each phase in the history of ethics as the expression of the rational moral claims of some specific type of society. In that book I decided to counterpose two forms of moral utterance: on the one hand, the morality of those who use morality to express their membership in some particular type of society; on the other, the morality of those who use it to express their individuality, or social diversity. In a genuine morality it is the rules that have authority, not the individuals. The notion of choosing one's own morality makes no sense. What does make sense is the much more radical notion of choosing to displace and overcome morality. So A Short History of Ethics should perhaps have ended by giving Nietzsche the final word, instead of leaving him behind two chapters earlier.

I presume you are referring to the mature Nietzsche, author of Beyond Good and Evil and hero of the systematic overcoming of any value, the anarchic and individualistic Übermensch.

Nietzsche occupies this position insofar as he represents the ultimate answer to the systematic inconclusiveness and irreconcilable disagreements that were the outcome of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral philosophy. The Enlightenment's central project had been to identify a set of moral rules, equally compelling to all rational persons. That project had failed and its heirs were a number of rival standpoints, Kantian, utilitarian, contractualist, and various blends of these, whose disagreements multiplied in such a way that twentieth-century culture has been deprived of any widely shared, rational morality, but has inherited instead an amalgam of fragments from past moral attitudes and theories. From a methodological point of view, it is today clear to me that while I was writing A Short History of Ethics I should have taken as a central standpoint what I learned from R. G. Collingwood: that morality is an essentially historical subject matter and that philosophical inquiry, in ethics as elsewhere, is defective insofar as it is not historical.

What do you mean by saying that morality is “an essentially historical subject matter”? Is it not possible that behind Collingwood and Marx, lector in fabula, peeps out Giambattista Vico?

Vico reminded us of what the Enlightenment had forgotten, that rational inquiry, whether about morality or about anything else, continues the work of, and remains rooted in, prerational myth and metaphor. Such inquiry does not begin from Cartesian first principles, but from some contingent historical starting point, some occasion that astonishes sufficiently to raise questions, to elicit rival answers and, hence, to lead on to contending argument. Such arguments, when developed systematically through time, become a salient feature of the social relationships they inform and to which they give expression. Prerational cultures of story telling are transformed into rational societies in which the stories are first put into question and then partially developed by theories, which are themselves in turn put to the question.

History would then coincide with pure cultural and narrative tradition. It is difficult to maintain that this argument does not entail a historicist conception of history.

To understand some particular philosophical position requires being able to locate it within such a tradition, always in relation to its successors. It is insofar as it transcends the limitations and corrects the mistakes of those predecessors, and insofar as it opens up new possibilities for those successors, that it achieves rational justification. It is insofar as it fails in these tasks that it fails as a philosophical theory. So the best theory, that to which we owe our rational allegiance, in moral philosophy as elsewhere, is always the best theory to be developed so far within the particular tradition in which we find ourselves at work.

However, from this point on it is easy to slide into a form of absolute relativism.

It can happen that a tradition of moral thought and practice fails to flourish. Its resources may not be adequate to solve the problems that are crucial to its rational inquiries. Its internal or external conflicts may undermine those agreements which made collaborative debate and inquiry possible. And its dissolution or rejection may leave a society without adequate resources for reconstructing its morality, while making the need for such reconstruction painfully evident.

And is this the case of the European Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century?

Precisely. In After Virtue I argued that the failure of the Enlightenment project is best understood as a sequel to the wrong-headed rejection, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of what I called “the tradition of the virtues.” That tradition had its birth first in the transition from older forms of Greek community to the fifth-century Athenian polis, and then in the criticism and construction of a theory and practice of the virtues in which Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the key names. It is a tradition with a shared core conception of virtues. Virtues are those qualities of mind and character without which the goods internal to such human practices as those of the arts and the sciences and such productive activities as those of farming, fishing, and architecture cannot be achieved. Second, virtues are those qualities without which an individual cannot achieve that life, ordered in terms of those goods, which is best for her or him to achieve; and third, those qualities without which a community cannot flourish, and there can be no adequate conception of overall human good.

From a textual point of view, your stand on the recovery of “virtues,” as opposed to the universalistic idea of “a virtue,” in the singular, is anchored in the philosophy of Aristotle.

True. This complex conception of virtues received its classical statement from Aristotle in a form that requires not only the justification of the central theses of his political and moral philosophy, but also that of the metaphysics which those theses presuppose. This latter connection between virtue and metaphysics I had not understood when I wrote After Virtue. What I had recognized was that the failure of the Enlightenment project left open two alternatives: to reconstruct the moral theory and communal practice of Aristotelianism in whatever version would provide the best theory so far, explaining the failure of the Enlightenment as part of the aftermath of the breakdown of a tradition; or, instead, to understand the failure of the Enlightenment as a symptom of the impossibility of discovering any rational justification for morality as hitherto understood, a sign of the truth of Nietzsche's diagnosis. So the choice posed by After Virtue was: Aristotle or Nietzsche?

Why not Nietzsche?

For two reasons. One concerns Nietzsche and the spelling out in detail of his genealogical project by recent followers such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. What they have quite unintentionally put in question is the possibility of making that project sufficiently intelligible in its own terms. The outcome of the unmasking of others by the genealogist seems to me to have been in the end the self-unmasking of the genealogists. A second reason for rejecting Nietzsche is an Aristotelian one. It reflects both a discovery that the narrative of my own uneven intellectual and moral development could only be both intelligibly and truthfully written in Aristotelian terms, and a recognition that in those medieval debates that reconstituted the Aristotelian tradition in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian milieus, Aristotelianism as a political and moral philosophy had both progressed by its own standards and withstood external criticism. It finally emerged in its Thomistic version as a more adequate account of the human good, of virtues, and of rules, than any other I have encountered.

Hence you try to reconcile two historically contrasting lines of thought: on one side, the historicist hypothesis, and on the other, the Aristotelian categorical instance. Your version of historicism emphasizes the idea that theories can be elaborated and criticized only in the context of specific historical-cultural traditions. Aristotelianism, in contrast, proceeds on the supposition that things are universally “based,” and it does not start from the historical context of a specific tradition.

The claims made from within all well-developed traditions of inquiry on behalf of their own best philosophical, moral, and scientific theories are indeed generally claims to truth, claims about what anyone in any tradition must recognize if those claims are to be counted as genuine knowledge. The activities of inquiry themselves presuppose a strong and substantive conception of truth. And even if it is inescapable that the relationship between truth and rationality is problematic, it does not seem to me to be peculiarly a problem for Aristotelianism. One reason why some have thought there is an insuperable difficulty here is that they have understood that if any set of assertions or theory claims truth, then it must be possible to compare the merits of that claim with the merits of rival claims to truth made on behalf of incompatible sets of assertions or theories about the same subject matter. But if there are no neutral standards of rational justification independent of tradition, so that rival theories stemming from different traditions are each evaluated by reference to the standards internal to its own tradition, then it seems impossible to provide the requisite kind of comparison. Such rival theories will be incommensurable. Hence any historicism that relativizes rational justification to the context of particular traditions of inquiry has seemed incompatible with any standpoint, such as that of Aristotelianism, which asserts the truth of its conclusions.

And how do you counterattack this apparently flawless argument?

As I argued in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? the mistake is to suppose that if two or more rival bodies of theory have satisfied a condition of being formulated so as to be maximally open to refutation, each by the best standards available within its own tradition, then it is always possible that one of those rivals succeeds by its own standards in meeting all the critical challenges offered to it, while the other or others fail. That they fail by the standards of their own tradition does not make this any less a failure in achieving rational justification. It is in these terms that Aristotelianism failed with respect to key parts of its physics and biology, but succeeded in vindicating itself rationally as metaphysics, as politics and morals, and as a theory of inquiry. If this is so, then Aristotelianism has been shown in at least these areas to be not only the best theory so far, but the best theory so far about what makes a particular theory the best one. At this point, it is rational to proceed in philosophy as an Aristotelian, until and unless reasons are provided for doing otherwise.

I think you are the only one on the contemporary philosophical scene, and most of all on this side of the Atlantic, to repropose Aristotelianism as an epistemological perspective. How does it feel to be in this unique position?

Let's begin with our disagreements. Unlike Davidson, I hold that there are rival and alternative conceptual schemes, in some respect untranslatable into each other, and that alternative and rival conceptions of rationality are at home in different conceptual schemes. Unlike Rorty, I believe that there are strong and substantive conceptions of truth and rational justification—Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions—that remain unscathed by his critique of epistemological foundationalism. From Gadamer I have learned a great deal about intellectual and moral tradition. I am very close to all in Gadamer that comes from Aristotle; that which comes from Heidegger I reject. I think that Heidegger was not at all in error when he discerned a close relationship between his own views and the philosophical politics of National Socialism. Although Lukács's critique of Heidegger was deformed by the crudities of his conformity to Stalinism, in his central contentions he was right.

Then even in this you assume a Marxist voice.

An Aristotelian critique of contemporary society has to recognize that the costs of economic development are generally paid by those least able to afford them; the benefits are appropriated in a way that has no regard to one's merits. At the same time, large-scale politics has become barren. Attempts to reform the political systems of modernity from within are always transformed into collaborations with them. Attempts to overthrow them always degenerate into terrorism or quasi-terrorism. What is not thus barren is the politics involved in constructing and sustaining small-scale local communities, at the level of the family, the neighborhood, the workplace, the parish, the school, or clinic, communities within which the needs of the hungry and the homeless can be met. I am not a communitarian. I do not believe in ideals or forms of community as a nostrum for contemporary social ills. I give my political loyalty to no program.

Some critics suspect that your more recent philosophical positions conceal a reassertion of Christianity, that they are a new version of Catholic theology. Is there a basis of truth in all this?

It is false, both biographically and with respect to the structure of my beliefs. What I now believe philosophically I came to believe very largely before I reacknowledged the truth of Catholic Christianity. And I was only able to respond to the teachings of the Church because I had already learned from Aristotelianism both the nature of the mistakes involved in my earlier rejection of Christianity, and how to understand aright the relation of philosophical argument to theological inquiry. My philosophy, like that of many other Aristotelians, is theistic; but it is as secular in its content as any other.

Your training and intellectual growth, as well as your present philosophical views seem to be solidly anchored in a European hinterland, tied to the age-old traditions and values of the Continent. Your love for classicism, your “hermeneutical” approach to tradition, your experience of the old celtic oral tradition handed down for hundreds of generations: what do those things have to do with the “impermeability” and the postmodernism of this country? Has your American naturalization involved a rupture with the past?

On the contrary, one of the great advantages of North America is that it is a place where different cultures meet and different histories intersect. It is the place where, in perspectives afforded by a variety of European pasts, of African and Asian pasts, and of course of native American ones, the conflicts between tradition and liberal modernity have had to be recognized as inescapable. The issues in moral philosophy that I am most concerned with necessarily have a kind of importance for the cultures of North America that they are not always accorded elsewhere. I have learned a good deal about the importance they have only because of living and working here.