five top things i’ve been reading (twenty-fifth edition!)

the latest in a regular 'top 5' series

• After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century, Alasdair MacIntyre

• My Interview With Galen Strawson, Part II, J.P. Andrew

• The Reenchanted World, Karl Ove Knausgaard

• Gravel, Alice Munro

• The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

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This is the twenty-fifth (!) in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.

1) Sadly, Alasdair MacIntyre died a few days ago. In response, I wanted to write here about Dependent Rational Animals (1999), which I read and enjoyed last year. But my copy, with my notes in it, is in a box somewhere on its way to America, having been held hostage for months by an annoying shipping company.

So instead, I thought I’d focus on the prologue to the third edition of After Virtue (2007; first edition, 1981). After Virtue is generally considered MacIntyre’s masterpiece. It’s certainly his best-known work, and one of the most influential philosophy books of the second half of the twentieth century. Alongside Philippa Foot, MacIntyre inspired the re-emergence of Aristotelian virtue ethics, and After Virtue — for all its title sounds like a repudiation, or at least a proposed replacement — played a big part in this.

The third-edition prologue, which is subtitled After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century, is useful for various reasons. First, it’s useful for getting an overview of the problem MacIntyre is addressing in After Virtue, which is: how should we go about trying to understand the “dominant moral culture of advanced modernity”? If this sounds quite meta, that’s because it is. MacIntyre contends that the flaws of the big post-Enlightenment moral theories — and the cultural problems that he believes arise from their irreconcilability — can only be addressed by someone who, somehow, can manage both to get inside those theories and to see them from the outside. The secret to doing this, he tells us, lies in embracing relevant Aristotelian concepts: concepts from a time in which moral judgements were underpinned by a “shared conception of the human good”. Or something like that.

On a more specific level, the prologue is useful for understanding why MacIntyre “became convinced that Aquinas was in some respects a better Aristotelian than Aristotle” — something you’ll know about if you’ve read Dependent Rational Animals. That is, as catalogued in the prologue, MacIntyre came over time to believe that the human good cannot be explained “purely in social terms”. Rather, that it needs grounding: that “it is only because human beings have an end towards which they are directed by reason of their specific nature, that practices, traditions, and the like are able to function as they do”. Now, as much as I agree that reason is deeply tied to the human good, I don’t like the teleological nature of Aristotelian ethical theories any more than I like the teleological nature of consequentialist ones. So this ends-directed talk doesn’t appeal to me. But I really like MacIntyre’s realism here, and his honesty.

Finally, on a less philosophically substantive level, the prologue is useful for the clarity it offers about MacIntyre’s political orientation. As you may have seen this week, he’s as eagerly claimed by political commentators for their tribes as he is by philosophers for their philosophical positions. Yet in the prologue, we see him explicitly denying that he’s a communitarian, denying that he’s a liberal, and denying that he’s a conservative. Of course, you might disagree with his definitions of those things. Or perhaps you want to claim him for a further tribe! Regardless, it’s probably smart to take MacIntyre at face value when, on the final page of the prologue, he strongly affirms his indebtedness to Marx’s “critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of capitalism, and to the development of that critique by later Marxists”. MacIntyre’s philosophical arguments are rarely easy to parse: my guess is he wanted it that way. But he’s easier to place politically than public debate might have it.

2) A few weeks ago, I wrote about the excellent first part of J.P. Andrew’s new interview with Galen Strawson. The second part has now been published on Andrew’s Substack, and I think it’s even better. I particularly liked Strawson’s neat answer to the question: “why couldn't we make the same sort of experiential argument for free will that you make for the reality of consciousness?”

Strawson explains in one short paragraph why it’s wrong to conflate conclusions about human epistemic access to the truths of consciousness with conclusions about our access to the truths of free will. “The claim that you could know the nature of experience [consciousness] is based on the fact that you're immediately acquainted with it,” Strawson says. “But you're not immediately acquainted with actual free will,” he continues. “You're immediately acquainted with the experience of having it; the feeling of it. And the feeling of it isn't the thing itself.”

Surely this is spot on, at least in the sense that (on a phenomenological conception of consciousness, which is the relevant conception if what you’re interested in is cool stuff like the hard problem) a sufficient condition of being conscious is experiencing consciousness. I mean, even if the taste of the strawberry you’re experiencing is actually just a shtrawberry-taste-simulacrum that the evil demon has secretly inserted into your dreams, then you’re still experiencing the sensation of taste! Whereas, feeling as though you acted upon the option that you felt you held ‘to do X or not to do X’ is surely insufficient to having actually made an open choice. This is because, regardless of how any of it felt or feels to you, perhaps whatever you ‘picked’ was simply how things had to be (as explained by whichever determinist theory turned out to be true).

I disagree with many of the other things Strawson says in this interview, and as it happens I’m one of those weirdo free-will libertarians, but I loved reading every word.

3) I decided to include this new essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard in today’s list, even though I only enjoyed a few bits of it. Back in January, I wrote here about Knausgaard’s great autobiographical novel A Death in the Family (2012), which is the first in his My Struggle sextet. I said then that I disliked some of its more explicitly philosophical parts: some of the ‘little essays’ that interrupt its wonderfully plain, dense, descriptive narrative. Sadly, most of this new big essay reminds me of what I didn’t like about those little ones, but more so.

If I’m being blunt, when Knausgaard tries to move beyond the descriptive, what he says can feel both superficial and try-hard. Sometimes, it descends to the greetings-card level of ‘mirror’ claims. You know what I mean: those look-at-me pseudo parallelisms, which often depend on linguistic sleight-of-hand, and which some contemporary essay writers (and many contemporary advert writers) try to get to do their work for them. One of my favourite recent examples, which wasn’t written by Knausgaard, is “thinking cyclically rather than cynically”! Anyway, I’m afraid Knausgaard edges into mirror territory in this new essay. Take the following passage:

“The statement “people are more alienated now than ever before in history” sounds false, like applying an old concept to a new condition. That is not really what we are, is it? If there is something that characterizes our time, isn’t it the exact opposite, that nothing feels alien?”

So clever! So profound! Such a tricksy mix of ‘alienated’ and ‘alien’. Such a self-defeating use of ‘exact’. Luckily, however, this essay also includes some hardcore descriptive sections. Some of these — the bit about Knausgaard’s garden, for instance, or the bit about watching Henry Marsh at work — remind me of why I loved A Death in the Family. They border on the novel’s achievements, while never quite reaching its heights. But they make trawling through the rest of the essay worthwhile — even the long interview section at the end, which really needed some editing. They also reminded me that I’ve got five sequels to A Death in the Family yet to read. Good times!

4) This week, I read some excellent Alice Munro stories. One of them, Gravel (2012), consists in a narrator recounting an eventful childhood period, trying to work out how to feel about it in retrospect. Another character advises, totalistically, that “The thing is to be happy”. Smart, at least at the practical level.

5) I’m in Philadelphia for the long weekend, and yesterday I went to the Barnes Foundation for the first time. I’ve been to few nicer galleries. The trees and the water outside. The fantastic French paintings inside. It has great art of various kinds from various other places, too, including Philadelphia itself: I liked some of the Glackens paintings. But it was Cézanne, and particularly Soutine, who stood out.