"Begin with the principle of subsidiarity, always a good place to begin." --Alasdair MacIntyre
This morning I went to a small group discussion of Simone Weil and a little bit of Neitzche with a professor friend from Villanova.
In the afternoon, I heard Alasdair MacIntyre speak at CUA (he is oddly normal looking--in my imagination, he was very quirky). He spoke about ends and endings, in a lovely tribute to Msgr. Sokolowski that took Sokolowski's work as a starting point (which, I think, any good tribute should do). He took Sokolowski and Aristotle's side over Harry Frankfurt, who sees ends as legitimated by love. On MacIntyre's read, the good as our end is the measure by which we evaluate desires.
And, in my favorite MacIntyre move, he talked about narrative as indispensable in moral philosophy--it is the way in which generalizations are worked out in particulars. And so he talked about Quentin Tarantino films and Kafka stories as examples of 20th century literature, which is devoid of endings.
This made me think of the importance of a good death, which now seems to be ignored entirely or replaced with the idea that a good death is one in which you die fighting tooth and nail against death (I'm thinking here of the blond in Grey's Anatomy).
1 comment:
Goodness--I have a friend who is writing on Weil. I'll have to pick your brain about this.
Also, I will take Harry Frankfurt's side against virtually anyone.
Also also, as my namesake pointed out, Kafka's stories are best understood as parables, not stories per se. My former namesake will be sad to hear 20th century literature is devoid of endings.
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