A Life Worth Living

Can philosophy help us attain it, even in a broken world?

Is Christianity maladapted to the modern world? Or is the modern world deeply fragmented such that any effort at a cohesive, meaningful life will necessarily be difficult?

Over the past few weeks, I have tried to show why I lean toward this second possibility, and why, acknowledging the challenges, I still think Christianity is in a strong position to surmount them and thrive. We have some distance to go. But the pieces are all there, and the project is already well underway. After some hard knocks in the early modern period, Christianity is again positioned to offer a satisfying philosophical synthesis of a sort that can ground a meaningful life.

Does it matter? I realize that to many people, my fixation on philosophical synthesis will seem highfalutin, blinkered, naive. A classic case of exaggerating the importance of the thing that happens to interest you. I’ve considered that possibility myself, and indeed, I could sit down and write myself into a Flannery O’Connor-esque caricature, who wandered into some fancy philosophical circles in a youthful phase and decades later still couldn’t quite rub those stars out of her eyes. A ridiculous person. The critique writes itself.

What are the Neo-Thomists doing for working-class families being dragged down by the “affordability crisis”? What’s Aristotle’s role in staunching “the great dechurching“ across the Western world? What percentage of the world’s population gives a fig about Catholic intellectuals and their little niche enthusiasms? Talk about insular and out-of-touch!

Well, I’m undeterred. I realize, obviously, that very few people—in a public opinion poll, say—will cite “a satisfying philosophical synthesis” as one of their top life priorities, but I still think it’s an immensely powerful thing. Let me finish this three-week series, then, by pulling the pieces together and explaining why I’m still a believer. In multiple senses of the word.

Looking back over my early adulthood, I would name three intellectual influences that defined my perspective in lasting ways. One is my father, legal theorist Steven D. Smith. (Though I… don’t call him that.) A prolific author and esteemed First Amendment scholar, he spent his career diagnosing the incoherence of legal positivism, secular neutrality, and other reductive modern postures, while also exploring the positive value of custom, tradition, natural law, and transcendent truth. I imagine his work will pop up here at some point.

The second is Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger—already mentioned on this Substack—a brilliant Catholic thinker originally involved in the Ressourcement movement of the early-to-mid 20th century. He was another of those intellectuals, like Newman, who was less-than-thrilled by the Thomists and yet in retrospect looks to most of us like an obvious fellow traveler. He “retranslated” many great Christian thinkers in ways that were conversant with modern philosophy, wrote rich texts on the value of liturgy, and helped keep the Church from going off the rails after Vatican II. And, for good measure, he became Pope Benedict XVI.

The third was Alasdair MacIntyre. He was probably the 20th century’s highest-profile philosophical convert to Aristotelian Thomism (Maritain is the only other serious contender), the man whose iconoclastic Aristotelianism gave analytic moral philosophy a good, brisk shake. Also, he was a professor of mine at Notre Dame.

Today I’m mainly talking about MacIntyre. But I mention the whole trio because it may give helpful perspective. All three of those thinkers were fairly severe critics of liberal modernity, but none descended into furniture-breaking revanchism, nor did they sit around all day wallowing in despair. The relationship between reflective philosophical synthesis and the well-lived life generally isn’t obvious or quick to explain; it’s easy to see how error can lead people to misery, but harder to grasp how cohesion leads to virtue or happiness. Sometimes one can get a glimpse of it though, by looking at particular people. If I have a strong confidence in the potential of a philosophically reflective traditionalism to overcome the errors of modernity, it surely has something to do with Smith, Ratzinger, MacIntyre.

I encountered MacIntyre at 20, in a heady moment of life when my mind was already on fire with both philosophy and Catholicism. He left a deep mark. From the start, I found his lectures absolutely riveting. He was brilliant and effortlessly erudite, turning the history of moral philosophy into an epic narrative with civilizational stakes. It wasn’t the sort of class where anyone asked whether a particular thing “will be on the test.” When MacIntyre unfolded a philosophical text, it sometimes felt like the fate of the entire world was hanging in the balance.

In some ways, perhaps, the fascination of MacIntyre’s approach had parallels to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, the 1969 BBC documentary series which told the story of the West through a history of its high art. Clark treated art as a kind of visual presentation of the soul of a culture. MacIntyre did something relevantly similar for moral philosophy, placing each philosophical text in full historical context and helping us think about what they reflected, how they in turn shaped history, and how the cultures they reflected and shaped were (or were not) able to sustain rich and meaningful human lives. The parallel to Clark isn’t perfect, because MacIntyre was more than an intellectual historian; he was also a practitioner of philosophy, and wanted to train us to be the same. To extend the analogy, you’d have to expand the 13 Civilisation episodes to include lessons in painting or sculpture. But both clearly thought in civilization-forming terms, and that was part of the fascination.

How successful, then, was our own world at grounding rich, meaningful human lives? Well… not very. MacIntyre was famously a harsh critic of modernity. He considered that our moral universe was chaotic and fragmented; it lacked the resources to understand itself, or to help us understand ourselves. (That’s generally a prerequisite to thriving, as the Oracle at Delphi warned.) He expended great energy diagnosing this grim situation, in the classroom and his published work. At the same time, MacIntyre never propelled us towards activism, political revolution, or a bitter rejection of modern life. The appropriate response to modernity’s chaos, he taught us, was not rage or violent disruption but doing philosophy well. Insofar as modernity had shattered the moral universe, we should work on putting it back together.

It all seemed very noble when he was lecturing, and I smile a little at that, but truthfully, even decades later, I can laugh at myself only a little. He meant everything he said. And he lived it, or tried to. I was young and naive, naturally, but knowing much more now about his life and work… I didn’t misjudge him, at least not by much.

“Living it” meant more than just thinking carefully and working to harmonize different kinds of truth. That was part of it, certainly, but it also meant working continually to live in accord with the conclusions that we drew. Be curious. Be intellectually honest and rigorous. And don’t be a phony; have the courage to live your convictions. MacIntyre combined the raw seriousness of a French existentialist with the rich traditionalism of a Thomist. It was potent stuff.

Earlier in this series I noted how, in graduate school, I encountered a more mainstream breed of analytic philosophers, who seemed largely content with their empty materialism despite its (to me glaring) inability to ground purposeful action or a meaningful life. My bewilderment perhaps makes more sense when one understands that the standard, for me, was MacIntyre, for whom “philosophy as puzzle-solving” was anathema. I thought philosophy should be more than that. Truthfully, I still do.

A few weeks ago, writing about What Philosophy Is For, I introduced Mary Midgley, who compared philosophers to plumbers, as people who help sort out civilizational problems when they arise. It’s rather a delightful analogy in some ways, taking philosophy out of the realm of the effete and making it into something down-to-earth, practical, even plebeian. I like thinking of philosophers as the sort of people who are supposed to roll up their sleeves and get down to it when they’re needed. And it’s true actually that “solving problems” sometimes requires a patient effort to sift through definitions, subtle distinctions, or logical connections that are fairly boring to the ordinary person but may nevertheless have important implications. Having said that, the analogy does have limits. I think most people are quite happy to leave their pipes entirely in the hands of trained experts. By contrast, everyone has reason to care about the big questions that are the proper province of philosophy. Maybe everyone does need a bit of philosophy, even if they think about it as something else.

MacIntyre delved deep into those questions, considering how ordinary people could, with the help of philosophy, overcome some of the fragmentation and alienation of modern life. He thought there was a real alternative to the unfortunate modern habit of lurching haphazardly this way and that, driven by the winds of commercialism, populist politics, raw appetite, empty entertainments. He thought we could learn to live lives of integrity. And I really think his top priority, with his undergraduate students, was to help us do that. Drafting us into a cause was secondary, but perhaps there was still a cause: the reconstruction of philosophy. Maybe some of us, over time, could add something to that effort. It didn’t necessarily need to happen in philosophy departments.

I do have disagreements with MacIntyre now, which I won’t get into here; among other reasons, I’m writing about some of them in a forthcoming review for Law & Liberty. If you’re curious, you can wait for that. He definitely wasn’t a fan of free markets, and his modest late-life forays into political theory don’t look terribly successful to me. But while it’s interesting to think about all that, those topics aren’t at all central to what I learned from him. He never wanted us to be acolytes, anyway.

If it seems hubristic to view my own chosen discipline as life-transforming, try viewing the question from another angle. Aren’t there really scores of people out there who clearly believe, “the world would all go swimmingly if other people would just agree with me and live the way I do?” Quite often, they pair that with harsh judgments of the bad sort of people, who refuse to get with the program (whatever that is). In my experience, even people who claim up-front to be tolerant and accepting (“live how you want, I don’t think there’s a right answer!”) usually do have some fairly hard lines that they blame people for crossing. Sometimes those people turn out to be the most judgmental of all.

So, I too think that the question of how we should live is an important one. I have some ideas about it. But I acknowledge that it’s very hard to get this right; when people mess up, there’s some excuse for them. I acknowledge that my own chosen tradition has only been partially successful thus far in filling the bill. In completing the picture, I welcome the cooperation and assistance of fellow travelers in parallel traditions. Is that stance so hubristic?

Either way, I’m keeping it, because here’s the thing. Truth does matter, but it’s also much stickier than people tend to suppose. That’s the other conviction that MacIntyre rooted in my soul. To err is clearly human, and yet, terrible ideas tend to collapse over time under their own weight. By contrast, some ideas that seemed outlandish when first proposed, centuries or millennia ago, are now widely taken for granted across the world. Why does that happen?

I think the answer is usually straightforward. It’s because they’re true. Only truth can ultimately ground a life worth living.

Thanks for coming with me on this three-week philosophy series. What a gift to get to revisit the ideas and convictions that laid the groundwork for my own life.