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Hermeneutical Analysis of Narrative Approach in MacIntyre’s Moral Enquiry



Author(s)

Song Wei, Qin Mingli

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2016.06.002

Alasdair MacIntyre identifies three types of moral research programs in a narrative approach in his works. In the view of hermeneutics, each of the three research programs has a narrative structure: Encyclopedia is a narrative structure with the belief in rational progress; Genealogy constructs its own narrative through the struggle with the past; Thomism tradition is a middle way of the previous two by pursuing truth from the history and particularity, thus avoiding the once-and-for-all rationality of Encyclopedia and the once-and-for-all relativism of genealogy. Narrative, as a living tradition, comprises of tradition-constituted one and tradition-constitutive one. The former is the given narrative we inherit from our predecessors, and the latter is the hermeneutical reinterpretation or reassessment of a tradition, thus showing the continuity among past, present, and future. Through the dialogical narrative especially according to Gadamer’s I-Thou encounter, MacIntyre achieves a kind of traditional consensus between two traditions through a “common language” and “fusion of horizons.” MacIntyre’s theory is an account of the subjective condition of narrative quest for the truth, which is a good way to keep the integrity of thought in the modern alienation and deconstruction.

MacIntyre, hermeneutics, narrative, moral enquiry