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PARTISAN REVIEW
His argument here is strikingly parallel to Heidegger's thesis in
Being
and Time
of
Dasein
as essentially temporal, because "beinit' is at the
same time "thrown" and "projecting"; the person has not "chosen" to
be born, and yet, one also seeks to "make one's self." We are con–
strained by our being; yet we seek to transcend it in time . MacIntyre
argues that an essential condition of our action is to be intelligible, as
much to ourselves as to others, that it be understood in the context of
a narrative. So he strongly rejects the view that narrative is
something we subject life to
ex post
in art. It is also something we live
by. "The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. "
Making sense of my life involves judging between different
practices, or at least fitting the different practices into which I am
drawn into some kind of coherent whole . As a human being, I can–
not be satisfied with the practices offered by my society, but have to
look further for a conception of the good life as a whole . And I thus
am led to a second niche for 'virtue' . I not only need those virtues
which will sustain practices and enable me to attain their internal
goods, but also those which will "sustain us in the relevant kind of
quest for good, by enabling us to overcome the harms , dangers,
temptations, and distractions which we encounter, and which will
furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge
of the good ."
To see life in this image of a quest is to admit the possibility of
tragedy as built into my predicament in a way Aristotle arguably
did not. To be pulled in opposite directions by undeniable goods can
constitute tragedy . But this predicament is not just an invitation to
choose . The real possibility of tragedy is that rival claims may be
both unrepudiable. But there are still, argues MacIntyre, better and
worse ways of facing this kind of dilemma, and it is to finding these
that reflection on the good is directed.
MacIntyre also sets out the context which made sense of the no–
tion of virtue and whose loss dislocates modern moral discourse .
This kind of background is at once intellectual and social- a back–
ground of ideas of virtues and of practices . The two are not separ–
able. The virtues attaching to a practice are understandable in terms
of its internal goods, and these in turn presuppose the practice, i.e .
not just a set of ideas, but socially established ways of acting. Hence
some virtues are unintelligible outside of certain social contexts.
All this should help to make clear MacIntyre's striking thesis of
the dislocation of contemporary moral thought and its relation to
